The Demon of Dakar - Kjell Eriksson [41]
Viola had a private room. Her face was turned to the window and she had apparently not heard Ann open the door. Ann was unable to determine if she was sleeping or not.
The old woman looked more frail than usual. Her slender arms rested on the blanket. Her hair, which Viola mostly kept under a cap when she was on the island, was chalk white and in need of combing. She was completely still, but then Ann saw her bony fingers moving, pulling threads on the blanket. The thin tendons on the back of her hand, which was covered in brown age spots, tensed and relaxed with a regularity that convinced Ann that Viola was awake.
What was the old woman thinking about? Ann turned on her heels and left the room, the door shut with a sigh and she hurried along the corridor toward the exit.
A nurse was standing outside the nurses’ station. Ann walked over to her and introduced herself.
“I know who you are,” the nurse said. “I worked in the intensive care unit last year.”
“Oh, I see,” Ann replied sheepishly, suddenly ashamed as she always was when she was reminded of that event. “I wanted to visit Viola but I think she’s sleeping and I don’t want to disturb her. Can you tell her I was here?”
The nurse looked at her before nodding.
“Of course I can, but I’m sure Viola would appreciate it if you—”
“I don’t want to wake her,” Ann repeated more forcefully. “I’m in a hurry,” she added in a gentler voice and felt even more embarrassed.
“Are you related?”
“No, not at all. How is she?”
“She is …” the nurse searched for the right word, “a real bitch. No, I was only joking! She is quite brusque, if you know what I mean, but a wonderful old lady. There’s no screw loose in her head. She was telling me how the first thing she will do when she goes home is slaughter the hens.”
“Viola has said that for as long as I’ve known her. But wish her all the best,” Ann said.
The nurse looked as if she was going to say something, but only nodded, gave a professional smile, and then walked into the office area.
Ann started walking toward the elevators, but turned almost immediately.
“One more thing, does she have any visitors?”
“Yes, her son has been here a few times, I think he is her son. And an older man.”
“I’ll come back another time,” Ann said.
“You do that. She rarely sleeps during the day, so you were unlucky.”
Lindell returned to the police station, poured herself a cup of coffee in the lunchroom, and leafed through an issue of Upsala Nya Tidning. The murder was a large item on the front page. There was a picture of the river that, if it weren’t for its connection to a murder, could have been lifted from a county tourist publication. The picture had been snapped in the evening. The sun had disappeared behind the Sunnersta ridge and the remaining light cast a dreamy glow onto the meadow, the lead-gray water and the light golden brown stalks of the reeds.
Lindell had experienced this so many times before, how the apparent idyll concealed a streak of unexpected eruptions of violence and grief. The landscape itself was innocent, it was only a stage for human failings, a backdrop against which people acted in all their foulness.
From her professional perspective, Lindell felt that it was worse to investigate a crime in the countryside where nature, in its inconceivable diversity, concealed man. She often thought about the last homicide case when two farmers had been murdered in their homes. It was as if nature was tripping up her thoughts. How could something so horrible happen here? There was not only a crime victim to contend with, it was as if the whole area had been raped. The crime, to deprive someone of his life, appeared even more monstrous against the backdrop of a peaceful forest.
A murder in an apartment, by contrast, appeared more natural. No one was surprised that someone killed someone else in a kitchen filled with the items that people accumulated. It was rather the opposite: how could it be that more people didn’t fall victim to violence?