“If I could, I’d head back right away. But I’ll be here for a few more days.”
“Can’t you tell me you miss me, at least?”
“You know I do.”
He gave her the hotel telephone number, and hung up. Neither of them liked talking on the phone. Their conversations were often short. Even so, Lindman had the feeling she was close by his side.
He was tired. It had been a long day. He untied his laces and kicked his shoes away from the side of the bed. Then he lay down and stared at the ceiling. I must make up my mind what I’m doing here, he thought. I came here to try to understand what had happened, to understand what Molin had been so frightened of. Now I’ve seen the house where he was murdered, and I’ve found a camping site that might have been a hiding place.
He wondered what to do next. The obvious thing would be to drive up to Ostersund and meet this Larsson.
But then what?
Maybe the journey here was pointless. He should have gone to Mallorca. The Jämtland police would do what they had to do. One day he would find out what had happened. Somewhere out there was a murderer waiting to be arrested.
He lay on his side and looked at the blank television screen. He could hear some young people laughing in the street below. Had he laughed at all during the day that had just passed? He searched his memory, but couldn’t even remember a smile. Just at this moment I’m not the person I usually am, he thought. A man who’s always laughing. At the moment I’m a man with a malignant lump on his tongue who’s scared to death about what’s going to happen next.
Then he looked at his shoes. Something had stuck to one of the soles, he discovered, trapped in the pattern of the rubber sole. A stone from the gravel path, he thought. He reached to extract it.
But it wasn’t a stone. It was part of a jigsaw puzzle piece. He sat up and adjusted the bedside lamp. The piece was soft and discolored by soil. He was certain he hadn’t stepped on any pieces inside the house. It might have been outside the house. Nevertheless, his intuition told him that the jigsaw piece had stuck to the sole of his shoe at the place where the tent had been pitched. Whoever killed Herbert Molin had been camping at the lakeside.
Chapter Six
The discovery of the broken jigsaw puzzle piece livened him up somewhat. He sat at the table and started making notes about everything that had happened in the course of the day. It took the form of a letter. At first, he couldn’t think to whom it should be addressed. It occurred to him that it should go to the doctor who was expecting to see him in Borås on the morning of November 19. Was there nobody else to write to? Perhaps it was that Elena wouldn’t understand what he was talking about? At the top of the page he wrote: The fear of Herbert Molin, and underlined the words with forceful strokes of his pen. Then he noted one by one the observations he’d made in and around the house, and where the tent had been. He tried to draw some conclusions, but the only thing that seemed to him definite was that Molin’s murder had long been planned.
It was 10 P.M. He hesitated, but decided to phone Larsson at home and tell him he would come and see him in Ostersund the following day. He looked for the number in the phone book. There were a lot of Larssons, but predictably only one Giuseppe, a police officer. His wife answered. Lindman explained who he was. She sounded friendly. While he was waiting, he wondered what Larsson’s hobby might be. Why didn’t he have a hobby himself, apart from football? He hadn’t managed to find an answer before Larsson came to the phone.
“Stefan Lindman,” he said. “From Borås. I hope this isn’t too late.”
“Not quite. Another half hour and I’d have been asleep. Where are you?”
“In Sveg.”
“Just down the road, then.” Larsson roared with laughter. “A couple of hundred kilometers is nothing to us up here. Where do you get to if you drive two hundred kilometres from Borås?”
“Almost to Malmö.”
“There you go, you see.”
“I thought I might visit you in Ostersund tomorrow.”
“You’re welcome to come. I’ll be there quite early in the morning. The police station is behind the National Rural Agency building. It’s a small town. You’ll have no trouble in finding it. When had you thought of coming?”
“I can fit into your schedule. Whenever you’ve got time.”
“How about eleven? We have a nine o’clock meeting of our little murder squad.”
“Have you got a suspect?”
“We’ve got nothing at all,” said Larsson, cheerfully. “But we’ll solve this one in the end, we hope. We’ll be discussing tomorrow if we need any help from Stockholm. Somebody who can draw up a profile of the person we’re looking for would be useful. Could be interesting. Up here, we’ve never been faced with anything like this before.”