The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [86]
The photo album was an old-fashioned model with a gray linen cover and stiff pages with glued photographs. The first one was of the house. An older couple was posing in front of the entrance, a couple that she guessed was Petrus’s parents. Then a large number of snapshots followed where the farm appeared to be the center. There were only a few pictures that she thought were taken outside Vilsne village. Quite a few people appeared in them, the parents regularly and a young Petrus also, stacking hay, standing at the gate or outside the barn in a pose that was supposed to be humorous.
The photographs seemed to be taken during a fairly narrow time frame. She guessed from the middle of the forties and about twenty years forward.
Ann flipped through the pages, as she believed Fredriksson had also done, but there was nothing that could reasonably have any meaning for the murder and the investigation.
A few captions had been written. One that Ann found slightly touching was written in pencil under a picture. “Me and mother” was written in spiky handwriting. Petrus, who in the shot looked to be in his thirties had his arm around his mother in a slightly awkward way. You could see that the old woman was smiling behind the hand that covered half of her mouth.
The last three pages were empty. Ann closed the album with a feeling of disappointment. She should have known better. If there had been anything to find here, Fredriksson would have spotted it.
She pushed the album back into place and was about to close the cabinet when her eyes slid to the book next to it. It was a thick volume from the Uppland Horse Breeder’s Association. She pulled it out and looked at the cover, which depicted a farmer plowing. The horse was struggling on an imagined field.
On the flyleaf, on a dotted line, it was written that the book belonged to Arthur Blomgren. She opened it and absently turned the pages. It was mostly text with statistical tables, but also several pictures of horses, among them one from a plowing competition in Rasbo, 1938.
When Lindell shut the book she caught sight of a white corner that stuck out in the back. She opened to that page and a snapshot tumbled out. In the brief moment when it swooped to the floor she knew she had found something valuable. It landed facedown so the first thing she saw was the inscription on the back: “To my beloved Petrus.”
She waited a second or so, then bent down to pick it up and turned it over. It was a picture of a woman. What else? she thought with a pleased smile. It was clearly a studio portrait but without identifying business markers.
The woman was in her forties, a brunette. The most eye-catching aspect to her was the beautiful hair pulled back into a ponytail. A girlish touch. She smiled, not an exaggerated grin, rather tentatively.
Ann thought she was beautiful and the first thing that struck her was the contrast to Petrus. But she immediately corrected herself. She had seen him dead, brutally slain, at seventy years of age. She pulled the photo album back out and looked up the picture of Petrus with his mother. Sure enough, he had been a handsome man, a little angular perhaps but that may have been the result of the circumstances. Styled in a photographer’s studio he may very well have been able to hold his own next to this woman.
Lindell turned the card over and read the dedication again, perhaps written by the companion to Mallorca and the reason he had gone to the doctor and gotten a prescription for sleeping pills. This was the tear in Petrus Blomgren’s life.
But was she also the reason he was murdered? Undoubtedly this photogenic woman was the absolute best thing, not to say the only thing, that they had found so far and that Fredriksson had missed. How would she tackle the fact that he had been sloppy? The photo had to be brought forward and the woman’s identity established. Should she lie and say that Dorotea had produced it? But why on earth would she be hoarding the picture of someone who