Lindman decided not to ask any questions about Molin’s interest in dancing. Larsson was the man to ask those questions, nobody else.
A telephone rang somewhere in the house. She excused herself and left the room. Lindman stood up and made a rapid choice between the balcony door and a window, then unfastened the catch on a window, making sure it held tight and didn’t open. Then he sat down again. She returned a minute later.
“I won’t impose on you any longer,” Lindman said, getting to his feet. “Thank you for the coffee. It’s not often you get coffee as strong as that.”
“Why should everything have to be weak?” she said. “Everything is weak nowadays. Coffee, and people as well.”
Lindman had left his jacket in the hall. As he put it on, he looked around to see if the house had a burglar alarm. He could see no sign of one.
He drove back to the hotel, thinking over what Berggren had said about weak coffee and weak people. The receptionist seemed to be her cheerful self again. There was a signboard next to the desk. On it was a yellow poster advertising an organ concert in the church that evening, starting at 7:30. The program consisted exclusively of music by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Shortly after 7:00 that evening Lindman went to the church. He took up a position beyond the church wall. He could hear the organist rehearsing. At 7:25, Berggren arrived and walked into the church.
Lindman hurried back to the hotel and got into his car. He drove to the river and parked on the other side of the bridge. Then he approached Berggren’s house from the back. He was counting on the concert lasting for at least an hour. He checked his watch: 7:41. There was a narrow path around the back of the white house. He had no flashlight with him, but he felt his way cautiously forward in the dark. There was a light on in the room where he had had his coffee. He paused when he came to the garden fence and listened. Then he jumped over and ran to the house wall, crouching low. He stood up and felt the underside of the window. Berggren had failed to notice that he had unhooked the catch. He opened it carefully, hoisted himself up, and, taking careful stock of its position, lifted down the vase of flowers on the window ledge.
Here he was, breaking into Berggren’s house just as he had broken into Molin’s house a few days earlier.
He wiped the soles of his shoes with a handkerchief. It was 7:45. He looked around the room. He had no idea what he was looking for. Perhaps some indication that he had been right, that Berggren hadn’t been telling the truth. He knew that a lie could be exposed by an object. He left the living room, glanced into the kitchen, and then continued into what appeared to be a study. This is the last place I’ll search, he decided. First he wanted to look on the upper floor. He ran up the stairs. The first room seemed to be a guest room. He walked into Berggren’s bedroom. She slept in a large double bed. There was a pale blue fitted carpet. He looked into the bathroom. Bottles were lined up in neat rows in front of the mirror.
He was about to go downstairs to the study when he had the idea of opening the double doors of the closet. The hangers were tightly packed. He ran his hand over the clothes. They all seemed to be of high quality. At the furthest left of the hangers, something caught his eye. He pulled some dresses to one side to get a closer look.
A uniform. It was several seconds before he realized what it was—a German army uniform. On the shelf above was an army hat. He took it down and saw the skull. Hanging in Berggren’s wardrobe was an SS officer’s uniform.
Chapter Eleven
Lindman didn’t bother to search Berggren’s study. He left the house in Ulvkalla as he’d entered it, replacing the vase exactly as it had been, closing the window carefully behind him. It had started snowing—heavy wet flakes. He drove back to the hotel, poured himself a glass of wine, and tried to make up his mind whether or not to call Larsson right away. He hesitated to do so. He’d promised not to contact Berggren. Now he’d not only spoken to her, he’d broken into her house. This was not the kind of thing to discuss on the telephone, he thought. Larsson will understand that. We need to be sitting face-toface, with plenty of time.
He turned on the television and zapped his way through the channels. Eventually he opted for an old Western with faded colors. A man with a rifle was crawling around among some rocks in a studio landscape, trying to avoid some other men coming towards him on horseback. Lindman turned the sound down and took out his notepad. He tried to make a summary of what had happened since he came to Sveg. What did he know now that he hadn’t known before? He tried to construct a plausible hypothesis of the reason for Molin’s death. He made it simple, as if he were reading a story to himself.