There were fresh tire marks in the gravel. Perhaps Veronica Molin had changed her mind? He got out of the car and filled his lungs with crisp, chilly air. A wind was gusting through the treetops. This is what Sweden’s all about, he thought. Trees, wind, cold. Grass and moss. A lonely person in the middle of a forest. Only that person doesn’t usually have cancer of the tongue.
He walked slowly around the house and made a list of all he now knew about the death of Herbert Molin. There was the campsite, the place to which somebody had rowed across the lake, pitched a tent, and then abandoned it. Larsson’s news about the bullet wounds. Lindman stopped in his tracks. What had Larsson said? Two wounds in the chest and one in the left arm. So Molin had been hit from the front. Three shots. He tried to imagine what could have happened but failed.
Then there was Berggren, an invisible shadow behind a curtain. If his suspicions were correct, she was on guard. Against what? Johansson had described her as a friendly person who gave dancing lessons for children. That was another link: dancing. But what did it mean? Did it mean anything at all? He continued his circuit around the smashedup house. Wondered why the police hadn’t done a better job of boarding up the broken windows. Bits of torn plastic flapped in front of the gaping holes. Veronica Molin had turned up unexpectedly. A beautiful woman who’d heard the news of her father’s death in a hotel room in Cologne, while on her travels around the world. Lindman, who had been all around the house by now, thought back to the time he’d been chasing, with Molin, the escaped murderer from Tidaholm. His fear. “I thought it was somebody else.” Lindman paused again. Unless Molin had been the victim of a madman, there must have been a crucial starting point. Fear. The flight to the forests of Härjedalen. A hiding place at the end of a side road that Lindman had great difficulty in finding.
That was as far as he got. Molin’s death was a riddle: he’d managed to find a few loose threads that led to a center that was still a vacuum. He went back to his car. The wind was getting stronger. He was about to open his car door when he had the feeling he was being watched. He spun around. The forest was empty. The dog pen was abandoned. The torn plastic was flapping against the window frames. He got into his car and drove away, certain that he would never return.
He parked outside the community center and went in. The bear was still glaring at him. He found his way to the police office and bumped into Johansson, who was on his way out.
“I was going to have coffee with the library staff,” he said. “But that can wait. I have news for you.”
They went to his office. Lindman sat in the visitor’s chair. Johansson had cheered up the decor with a devil mask hanging on the wall.
“I bought it in New Orleans ages ago. I was drunk at the time and no doubt paid far too much for it. I thought it would look good hanging here. A reminder of the forces of evil that conspire to make things difficult for the police.”
“Are you the only one on duty today?”
“Yes,” said Johansson cheerfully. “There should really be four or five of us, but people are out sick or on educational leave or maternity leave. I’m the only one left. It’s impossible to get standby staff.”
“How do you manage?”
“I don’t. But at least people who call here during working hours don’t get fobbed off with an answering machine.”
“But Berggren called you in the evening, didn’t she?”
“There’s a special emergency number. Lots of people in town know it.”
“Town?”
“I call Sveg a town. It makes it a bit bigger that way.”
The telephone rang. Lindman looked at the mask and wondered what the news was that Johansson had promised him. The call was from someone who had found a tractor tire on a road. Johansson seemed to be a man blessed with a fund of patience. He eventually replaced the receiver.
“Elsa Berggren called this morning. I tried to reach you at the hotel.”
“What did she want?”
“She wanted to invite you over for coffee.”
“That sounds odd.”
“No more odd than you staking out her house.”
Johansson stood up. “She’ll be at home now,” he said. “Go there right away. She’s going shopping later. By all means come back here and tell me what she said if it’s of any interest. But not this afternoon or this evening. I’m going to Funasdalen. I have some police business to take care of, and then I’m going to play poker with some buddies. We may be in the middle of a murder investigation, but that doesn’t prevent us from leading as normal a life as possible.”