The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [83]
He stopped but everyone saw that there was more and waited from him to finish.
“I believe in an irrational motive,” Fredriksson said, “something we won’t think of in the first instance. This could be the work of a sick mind with an idée fixe, something that doesn’t have anything directly to do with the victims.”
“Give me an example,” Sammy Nilsson said.
Fredriksson pinched his nose.
“Someone who doesn’t like seventy-year-old men,” he said. “I’m thinking like this: it could be a woman who in her childhood was abused by dirty old men. At that time, perhaps twenty, thirty years ago, she was quiet, but now she’s taking her revenge.”
“Do you mean that all of the victims are pedophiles?” Bea asked.
“No, not necessarily. Perhaps none of them are. But they are seventy-year-old men and represent their gender and age group. Perhaps the real pedophile is dead but would today have been seventy.”
“I see you’ve really thought about this,” Ottosson said. “That’s good! We need to consider this from all possible angles.”
“We’re completely in the dark, in other words,” Haver said.
The discussion continued for another hour. Berglund reported on all of the telephone calls that Blomgren and Andersson had made over the last while but so far there was nothing that looked out of the ordinary. It was a short list, in Blomgren’s case sixteen outgoing calls a month, and none made to any numbers that could be considered surprising.
Beatrice had checked out the alarm company, whose phone number they had found in Blomgren’s kitchen, but it had not led to any discoveries. The only thing that was somewhat noteworthy was the fact that he had declared bankruptcy four years earlier and that eight years ago he had been charged with unlawful threat. That case was laid down.
Fredriksson made an overview of the murdered Carl-Henrik Palm-blad’s career. Born and raised in Härnösand, his father a pastor, his mother a deaconess, moved to Uppsala in order to attend the university, studied history of religion, French, and Nordic languages, later taught at the university, and the last ten years before his retirement worked as a bureaucrat in the university administration.
He had two children, his daughter Ann-Charlotte who was a grammar school teacher and had lived in Erikslund for twenty-five years, and a son, Magnus, who sold cash registers and other equipment in a retail business and lived in Täby, north of Stockholm.
Palmblad did not appear to have had any financial difficulties, at least not according to his daughter. After his divorce fifteen years ago he had not sought out any regular female companionship, as far as she knew, and certainly not in the past five, six years. Palmblad seemed to have spent most of his time in the stables.
That was the outer picture of Palmblad’s life. Now Beatrice and the two investigators brought in from Criminal Investigations continued to work on filling in the details.
Lindell felt as if she was sitting on pins and needles, even though she knew it was important to hear all of the thoughts of the group. But Haver was right when he said they were fumbling in the dark, without having a single true lead.
The first thing she did when she came back to her office was to open the chess folder.
Ander began with a look back at the history, describing the two combatants from the tournament in Barcelona. He had apparently dug down properly in his sources, because the background was substantial, with the Spanish civil war as a backdrop and the feeling of euphoria that apparently characterized Catalonia and Barcelona during the beginning phases of the war. To arrange a chess tournament was a way of upholding