Authors: Hakan Ostlundh
“It’s only a couple of thousand,” she said quickly. “Maybe five or six if you want something more advanced.”
“Boy,” said Henrik, rubbing his chin.
“I know that we have to keep track of money, but it’s not really that much and it will be paid for by the business anyway.”
“You’ve got to take in money, too. It’s not enough to just deduct.”
Henrik’s favorite objection when Malin pointed out that something was deductible. She sat silently looking at him.
“I guess I’ll have to check on that,” he said at last with a little sigh.
“A camera can be installed, or several, and they can be connected to the alarm’s motion detector. Then we can know if someone is sneaking around outside the house, even who is driving past on the road.”
“Really?”
Malin saw a curious gleam in Henrik’s eyes. She knew that the camera monitoring feature would do the trick.
“The alarm can even send pictures to your cell phone. Or you can call the alarm and ask it to send pictures.”
“But you have to be extremely polite.” Henrik grinned.
Malin grimaced.
Henrik laughed. “It sounds like
Mission Impossible
.”
“I know,” she said. “But it only costs a few thousand.”
“How many of these just-a-few-thousand-kronor bills are we up to now?”
“I mean in total. And you can install it yourself.”
“Hm, sure.”
She was starting to get tired of arguing, wanted him to just say yes. This was on a completely different level than a new appliance for the home, whatever it was. It was about safety, theirs and the children’s, being able to feel secure. Her eyes were drawn to the two windows where the evening sun was shining in on the red plastic Pastil chair. The children loved to play on it. Malin was just as afraid every time that they would get hurt when they transformed it into a seesaw.
Henrik had also fallen silent, sitting with a clenched fist against his mouth and pondering what Malin had said. She could easily imagine that he was thinking about how pictures from the house would show up on his cell phone. How he might show customers and associates.
If he didn’t go along with buying an alarm she would order one anyway and take the money from her own business. Maybe that wasn’t quite fair. Somehow he should also be included and pay because her contribution to the household would be less. But in just this case she didn’t care about that. She had to have that alarm. The sooner the better and definitely before Henrik went to Barcelona.
“Who installs that sort of thing?” he asked. “Is it a locksmith, or what?”
“Locksmiths and security companies, but I don’t know what there is in Visby.”
“We’ll have to check that out and then we’ll drive into town and talk with them.”
He smiled at her and she smiled back. She felt a warm, pleasant feeling spreading from her abdomen and out into her body. It was bizarre, but the thought of installing an advanced alarm and monitoring system made her happy and calm.
Malin coasted down the hill to the mailboxes and the big pile of logs. An early morning with an intense blue sky over the green meadows always made her feel that life was a lot easier. It was as if the world was smiling at her. The headwind was blowing nicely as she rode her bicycle, bare-legged under the dress she had put on, to retrieve the newspaper.
She thought about the work she had neglected the past week. She had written her posts, but thought they had turned out dry and unimaginative. Boring food. But today felt different. She was inspired and eager to get started and work. Perhaps it was because they had decided to buy the alarm? It made her feel active. She hated being a victim of circumstances. There was almost always something you could do so that things would get better. It wasn’t enough to sit and wait for someone else to do it for you.
The hill leveled out and Malin pedaled the last stretch over to the mailboxes. It was a motley collection of mailboxes, sheet metal, and plastic in various sizes. She braked in front of the carmine metal mailbox they had inherited from the former owner.
With both feet on the ground and the bicycle leaned against her leg, she stuck her hand down in the dark interior of the mailbox. The newspapers from Stockholm and Gotland were lukewarm against her hand from the sun shining on the metal. Before she got the newspapers all the way out of the mailbox something glided away under her fingers. It fell back down into the mailbox. Malin squeezed the newspapers under her left arm and fished again with her right hand. She was certain that it was an advertising brochure that came with one of the newspapers.
She saw with surprise that it was a letter. No mail should have come this early in the day. When she turned over the brown envelope she saw that it lacked stamps as well as an address.
For some reason, she raised her eyes and looked over toward their home. The house, the studio, and the guest wing. Then her hands started shaking. Soon she was shaking all over. She held the anonymous envelope with both hands. The morning papers fell to the ground. She hardly noticed. She only cared about the taped envelope that she did not want to open, but that she had to open. She took a deep breath and tried to force back the presentiment of what the letter contained. There was a good chance it was only a mailing from the local historical society or the parish or another one of the languishing but stubbornly struggling small associations on the island.
Malin stuck her thumbnail in the opening and tore open a bit of the flap, then got her thumb in and tore open the rest, quickly and carelessly.
She immediately recognized the photograph that was in the envelope. Only she and Henrik were in that picture. It was an amateur photo taken one morning at Kakan three and a half years ago. Malin had on a black apron and striped sweater, the same uniform as all the employees. She was sitting with Henrik at one of the round mosaic tables in the corner in the back. Henrik often stopped by in the mornings when he had left the day care, if he had time. They sat with their heads close together over the table. A slightly silly, but nevertheless romantic gesture.
Even before Malin pulled out the photograph into the light with trembling fingers she knew what she expected. Even so she could not stop herself when she finally saw it. She screamed. Right out loud.
“Henrik!”
Loud and cutting. Over and over again.
“Henrik … Henrik.”
He did not hear her. No one heard her.
The sun was shining right through the four holes that had replaced their eyes.
Fredrik left the car in the parking lot facing Birkagatan and took the opportunity to slip in through the garage as a patrol car rolled out. One of his colleagues in the car shouted something through the open side window, but he could not make out what. He was about to turn around but at the same moment felt his cell phone vibrate in his back pocket. He continued into the garage. It was a Fårö number.
“Yes, Fredrik Broman.”
He pressed his key card against the reader, entered the code, and put away the keys to get one hand free to open the door.
“Hello,” said a voice in the phone. “This is Henrik Kjellander. We’ve received another photo with eyes poked out.”
Fredrik felt a chill run from his temples down over his neck. This changed the situation. They could completely erase the possibility that this concerned an ill-willed tenant or someone with a strange sense of humor.
“Received?” he said.
“Yes, it came with the mail. Or not with the mail. It was in the mailbox. Malin found it when she went to get the newspaper.”
Henrik’s voice sounded calm and collected, but the almost panting intake of breath in the pauses told of something else.
“Just one moment.”
Fredrik had to use the key card again to get from the corridor to the cloakroom. When he reached the patrol officers’ debriefing stations he sat down on a vacant chair.
“You mean that someone other than the mailman put it there?” he asked Henrik.
“Yes. There was no address, no sender, nothing.”
“Is this also one of the photographs that was gone when you came back?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t noticed anything else? No one driving past yesterday evening or during the night?”
“No.”
The newspaper carrier, thought Fredrik. It might be worth checking with the newspaper carrier. As a witness, that is.
He looked up toward Göran Eide’s window, which faced the glass-covered courtyard where he was sitting. One of the building’s nodes with a stairway up to investigation, administration, and the prosecutors. Right behind the curved staircase the on-duty commander and the radio communications operator were moving soundlessly in the bulletproof aquarium.
“Where are you now?” he asked. “Are you still at home?”
“Yes. We’re going to drop off the kids, then we’re going into town to … Yes, we have an errand.”
“It would be good to be able to see this photograph. Can you come by the police station? Then I’ll talk with my boss in the meantime.”
“We can be there around eleven.”
“Good. Ask for me in reception.”
He heard Henrik breathing into the receiver.
“Are you still there?” asked Fredrik when there was no answer.
“Yes, excuse me. It was Malin. We were wondering about something.…”
“What?”
“No, nothing like…”
Henrik fell silent and Fredrik heard a faint mumbling in the background. Something about the children.
“At eleven then,” Henrik’s voice was heard again.
“Was the photograph lying loose in the mailbox?” Fredrik asked.
“No, it was in an envelope. What about it?”
“Bring the envelope, too.”
“If we find it,” said Henrik. “I don’t really know where it went.”
Fredrik felt his irritation rising. It wasn’t fair, he realized. You could not make police-related demands on someone who wasn’t a policeman. But still.
“Malin was extremely upset,” Henrik added.
“Take time to search. It may be important.”
* * *
Henrik Kjellander handed over a plastic folder with the picture and the envelope to Fredrik.
“We found the envelope,” he said. “Malin put it back in the mailbox without thinking about it.”
“Good,” said Fredrik. “I’ll take it down to tech as soon we’re through here.”
He looked at the photograph. In contrast to the picture they found in the linen cupboard, it depicted only Henrik and Malin. Whoever it was who wanted to frighten them, the person in question had chosen an effective way to do it. Seeing yourself with eyes poked out, that went straight to your emotions. It was considerably stronger than threatening letters or telephone calls. And the eyes in particular …
The photograph in the transparent folder changed form when he looked at it. Malin and Henrik became Ninni and himself. They stood in the yard outside their big Gotland house, smiled at the camera, with their eye sockets gaping empty, paper chads and pencil remnants around the edges. Then a third picture that was not only an image but reality, admittedly created by an out-of-control imagination, but still so real. He and Ninni without eyes, not smiling and black-and-white, but bloody, dead, and with terrified, distorted facial features.
Fredrik pushed away the images, tried to forget the fantasies by treating them drily and professionally. Who would he suspect if he had received a similar picture of Ninni and himself in the mailbox? Presumably someone he had put away.
He looked up from the photograph, met their worried gazes. Malin leaned quickly over the table.
“It feels damned unpleasant,” she said. “It feels as if anything at all might happen.”
“Someone obviously wants to frighten you or threaten you,” Fredrik said carefully.
That anything at all might happen was perhaps going too far, but this was not the right moment to argue.
“Have you talked with Henrik’s sisters?” asked Malin.
“We have,” answered Fredrik. “And it does not seem as if they would have had an opportunity to get into the house on Saturday.”
He did not go into the fact that Elisabet’s alibi was solely based on the testimony of her immediate family members and therefore naturally could be perceived as less credible than if it had been confirmed by an outsider. It was nonetheless an alibi.
“So then it must have been one of the tenants?” said Henrik.
“Yes and no,” said Fredrik, pausing.
Henrik and Malin looked at each other, perplexed.
“It appears as if the person who rented your house last week gave a false name and address.”
Malin clenched her fists and moved them down to her lap.
“The persons who are on the contract exist,” Fredrik clarified, “but they were not the ones who were in the house the last week it was rented out. They were not even in Sweden.”
Malin stared at Fredrik with her eyes wide and mouth half open. She turned toward Henrik.
“Henrik,” was all she could get out.
“This means, obviously, that we have to look a bit more seriously at this, but I still don’t think—”
“It’s just—” Malin started but stopped short.
She sighed deeply.
“This is so damned unpleasant. This person, whoever it is, was standing down by our mailbox last night. The one who put that in there,” she said, reaching out and pointing at the picture, “must still be here on Gotland. Perhaps on Fårö.”
“Yes. It is very possible, but not completely certain,” said Fredrik.
“Are there any leads to who it might be?” said Henrik. “I mean, to who really rented the house.”
“Not directly, but for some reason the one who rented the house gave Inger Kvarnbäck at Prinsgatan 8 in Gothenburg as the name and address. It’s not altogether unusual that someone who uses a false address chooses an address from a place or an area to which he or she has some type of relationship. If you think along those lines, does that address say anything to you?”
They sat quietly a long time but then shook their heads.
“Think about it some more. It doesn’t have to concern just Prinsgatan. Is there anyone in Gothenburg, an old acquaintance, colleague, or whatever that might be worth taking a closer look at?”