The Return of the Dancing Master(117)
She stubbed out her cigarette and immediately lit another. All the smoke was making Lindman feel sick.
“It was in the afternoon,” she said. “It must have been about three. And he wasn’t dressed yet.”
“Was he naked?” Larsson asked.
“I said he wasn’t dressed. Not that he was naked. I’d have said if he had been. Do you want me to tell you what happened, or are you going to interrupt all the time?”
“I’ll take another bun and keep quiet,” Larsson said. “Continue.”
“He was wearing pants, but no shirt. And barefoot. I asked him if he knew where Mr. Molin was. He said he didn’t. Then he shut the door. He didn’t want to let me in. And I knew why, of course.”
“He wasn’t alone?”
“Exactly.”
“How did you know? Did you see anybody?”
“Not then. But I realized even so. I went back to the car. I had parked some way before the driveway. I was just about to leave when I noticed a car parked behind the garage. It wasn’t Abraham’s.”
“How did you know that?”
“I don’t know. I just get the feeling sometimes. Doesn’t it happen to you too?”
“What did you do next?”
“I was going to start the engine and drive away when I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw somebody coming out of the house. It was a woman. When she realized that I was still there she went back inside.”
Larsson picked up the plastic bag with the photograph of Katrin Andersson. He handed it over. She spilled ash on it.
“No,” she said. “That wasn’t her. I was quite a long way away, and it’s not easy to remember somebody you’ve only seen in the rearview mirror. But I’m sure it wasn’t her.”
“Who do you think it was, then?”
She hesitated. Larsson repeated his question.
“Who do you think it was?”
“Mrs. Berggren. But I can’t be sure.”
“Why not?”
“It all happened so quickly.”
“But you had seen her before, hadn’t you? And yet you couldn’t identify her for sure?”
“I’m telling you the truth. It happened so quickly. I only saw her for a few seconds. She came out, saw the car, and went back inside.”
“So she didn’t want anybody to see her?”
Hanna Tunberg looked at him in surprise.
“Is that so strange? If she’d come out of a house where there was a half-naked man who wasn’t her husband?”
“The memory works like a camera.” Larsson said. “You see something and the image is stored inside your head. You don’t need to see a thing for long in order to remember it clearly.”
“Some photographs are blurred, though, aren’t they?”
“Why are you only telling us this now?”
“I didn’t remember until today. My memory’s not very good. I thought it might be important. If it was Elsa Berggren. I mean, she had contact with both Herbert and Abraham. Anyway, if it wasn’t her, it was certainly not his wife.”
“You’re not sure that it was Elsa Berggren, but you are sure that it wasn’t Katrin Andersson?”
“Yes.”
Hanna Tunberg started coughing again, that rattling, scraping cough. She stubbed out her cigarette in irritation. Then she gasped for breath, stood halfway up, and slumped forward over the table. The coffeepot fell over. Larsson stood up as she fell. He turned her over onto her back.
“She’s not breathing,” he said. “Call for an ambulance.”
Larsson started giving her CPR as Lindman took out his cell phone.
Looking back, he would remember the events as if in slow motion. Larsson trying to breathe some life back into the woman lying on the floor, and the thin wisp of smoke rising up to the ceiling from the ashtray.
It took the ambulance half an hour to get there. Larsson had given up by then. Hanna Tunberg was dead. He went to the kitchen and rinsed his mouth. Lindman had seen a lot of dead people—after road accidents, suicides, murders—but only now did he grasp how close death actually is. One moment she’d had a cigarette in her hand and answered “yes” to a question, the next she was dead.
Larsson went out to meet the ambulance.
“It was all over in a second,” he said to the man who examined Hanna Tunberg to make sure she was dead.
“We’re not really supposed to put dead bodies in an ambulance, but we can’t really leave her here.”
“Two police officers are witnesses to the fact that she died a natural death. I’ll make sure that goes into the report.”
The ambulance left. Larsson looked at Lindman and shook his head.