The Princess of Burundi - Kjell Eriksson [126]
He stepped out onto the snowy street, sober as a god and cleansed from his past life. He felt a great calm and strangely enough thought of his father. Was it the short interlude of working with Micke that had brought back these more frequent thoughts of his father? Albin had been good, not only as a welder but as a father. This conviction had grown in Lennart over the years, not least when he saw John with Justus.
He sighed heavily. He was back on Brantings square again. No tractor, no noisy teenagers, just mounds of snow and him. His need for alcohol made his innards contract as if he had a steel wire rigged up inside, a steel wire that was slowly being turned tighter, a fragile center of despair. It could break at any moment. He could run home and have a swig of something, but that would essentially mean giving up on the search for John’s killer forever.
He tramped on with gritted teeth. Christmas stars and blinking colored lights on the balconies lit up his way over Skomakar hill. “Albin and John,” he mumbled quietly. He felt as if Albin were with him, as if his father had stepped down from his roof and his heaven in order to support him. His father walked beside him in wordless sympathy. Occasionally he pointed up and Lennart understood that Albin had once been up there on those rooftops.
Forty-one
Lindell drove slowly, in part because she was not used to the car, in part because the driving conditions were less than ideal. The wind had driven snow from the fields into tightly packed drifts, and when she made it into the forest the road was deceptively slippery underneath this white cover.
When she spotted the bell tower of Bälinge church she knew that she had made it. She had marked on Haver’s map the street where Erki Karjalainen lived. After winding her way down small roads in the densely built suburb she eventually came to a dead end. She had to turn the car around and realized that despite the map she had taken a wrong turn.
A rising sense of irritation increased her nervousness. She recognized these symptoms. It was the feeling of creeping danger. Admittedly Justus was in safety, but something else was casting a dark shadow over her. She guessed it was the fact that a murderer was on the loose. It suddenly hit her that it was her concern for her colleagues that made her extra jumpy. Ruben Sagander could be out there somewhere in the dark December night. He had borrowed ammunition from Agne and perhaps he was still armed. Haver and Berglund would wait until their backup arrived, then they would put on bulletproof vests and approach Sagander’s house with the greatest care. She knew all this, but she also knew that violence and perpetrators of violence had their own logic.
When she finally arrived at Karjalainen’s house and stepped out of the car she paused and pricked up her ears, as if she would have been able to hear any resulting noise from the Börje area, over ten kilometers away. Haver hated weapons, not least after the events at Biskops Arnö when he—without acceptable provocation—had opened fire against a serial killer whom he erroneously believed to be threatening Lindell with a pistol. Lindell had reacted by also opening fire and the man had died.
Haver and Lindell had never talked seriously about that event. Now Haver found himself in the presence of another assumed murderer. Before she left the house, Lindell had asked Haver if he had his gun. He had nodded but not said anything. Lindell was certain that he was thinking of the fateful chain of events at the hut that summer night not so long ago but shoved away into a distant corner in both their minds.
She took out her cell phone and called home. This time her father answered, which surprised but pleased her. Erik had been up for an hour and his grandmother was with him.
“He’s a plucky little boy,” her father said.
Lindell smiled and they ended the conversation soon after.
Erki Karjalainen opened the door, a slight smile