The Axe Woman, page 1
HÅKAN NESSER
THE AXE WOMAN
Translated from the Swedish
by Sarah Death
Contents
ONE
1
TWO
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
THREE
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
FOUR
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
FIVE
48
49
50
51
52
53
Thank You
The town of Kymlinge exists on the map to roughly the same extent as Burma, Ragnhild’s Mountain Guest House and Our Lord.
ONE
29 April 2012
1
Just another morning.
He woke up, and even if there could possibly have been any discernible change in the room itself, he did not discern it.
The stillness was as usual. The grey light of dawn cautiously filtering through the thin curtains was as usual. Everything was as usual – or seemed to be: the low stone seat running along under the window and the wicker chair in the darkest corner, the clothes on hangers, the sparse leaves of the potted palm, the photographs of the children in a row on the wall beside the door; everything the same as it had been when they moved in, four years ago.
And within him: the fragment of a dream – an interview room with a table and a faceless elderly man who had just said something important; it faded away, vanishing into its own secret landscape.
And the heaviness and fatigue in every joint and limb: that, too, the same as usual, and gradually worsening; he was in his fifty-first year, after all, no cause for concern, merely something to register and live with. He turned his head and looked at the clock. Twenty past six. The alarm would go in ten minutes. He stretched out a reluctant hand and switched it off. With some effort he turned over and then reached out to put his right arm over Marianne. He burrowed under the covers, too, to make contact with her skin. It didn’t matter where.
For one second more, it was the most ordinary of mornings.
Then he was jolted awake by something like an electric shock, running from his hand via his arm and his whole body. It exploded in his head like a flash of ice-cold lightning.
The chill. The absence.
The utter lack of sound and movement. Every atom of every cell in him knew what had happened, before the viscous membrane of his consciousness was ripped apart by a silent scream and a No.
It had happened.
It has happened. For a whole series of moments it was only those three words that presented themselves. Nothing else.
It has happened. It has happened.
And after a while, something more.
This is real. It’s not a fear. Not something I’m imagining. It’s really happened.
I’m lying here.
Marianne’s lying there.
It’s morning.
We’re lying here after a night like any other.
But I’m the only one here.
She isn’t lying by my side. She will never lie by my side again.
It has happened.
It has actually happened.
Once more he let his hand rest on her body. It didn’t matter where.
Her body, yes, possibly. But not her. No one is that cold.
Dead.
It was 6.26 in the morning. It was 29 April 2012. Marianne was dead. That was how it was, there was no escaping it.
No escaping it.
Her eyes were not quite closed. Or her mouth. As if she had somehow taken one last sight with her. As if she had intended telling him something in that final second.
Perhaps she actually had. Told him something; uttered a few words that might conceivably have found their way through the heavy carapace of his sleep. Or not.
Or perhaps death had caught her unawares. He would never know. He would never stop wondering.
So far it’s just me, lying here, he thought. So far, I’m the only one who knows. It’s still just about possible to convince myself everything’s normal. Maybe I’m actually asleep and this is merely a dream. It makes no sense for it to have happened so fast. It’s absurd. From one second to the next. It simply isn’t . . .
But all these thoughts were flimsier than the surface of a soap bubble as it bursts.
And they burst. Everything burst apart.
Marianne? he whispered.
Marianne?
And somewhere inside him, her voice answered.
I’m not here.
I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry for you, but I have moved on.
Sorry for you and the children.
Look after the children. I love you all. It’s hardest for you and them, but we shall be reunited one day. I know that.
He took her hand and even though it didn’t belong to her any more, he held it. He felt its rigid chill, held it close and closed his eyes.
At a quarter to seven he got up. He had heard one of the children moving about, and it was time to tell them their mother was dead.
That she had died in her bed during the night.
An aneurysm, presumably, like the last time. A little blood vessel in her brain that had burst. Eighteen months ago. He had not been unprepared. The possibility of it happening had been embedded in him like a poisoned barb. Now that barb had gone.
Before he even reached the door, grief felled him with a single blow. It came from behind with the force of a hurricane and hurled him to the floor. He lay there as if trapped in some kind of spasm until he finally managed to put his hands together and ask God for strength.
Strength to get himself down to the kitchen, gather the children round the table and tell them.
TWO
May 2012
June 1989
2
Eva Backman knocked and came in.
She stopped just inside the door and scanned the room. Asunander was standing at the window with his back to her, talking on the phone. Behind the desk there were cardboard boxes piled against the wall – she estimated there were eight or ten of them. She wondered if he really needed that many. When the time came for her to vacate her office, she would probably be able to make do with one. At some distant future date.
Or even a couple of paper carrier bags.
But then Asunander was a chief inspector and the boss, so of course there was a difference. He had presided over this spacious office for more than fifteen years and had accumulated a lot of stuff in the process. He kept quite a well-stocked bookshelf, for example; presumably most of the books were his own private collection. She had noted the fact before and, as she ran her eyes along the shelf while waiting for him to finish his call, she noted it again. A policeman who read books. History mostly, both general and of the criminal variety. Dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Half a metre of fiction.
And who could say: perhaps he kept fine whisky and other such things behind the rows of books? Or in his desk drawers? There were sides to Asunander that she had never really been able to explore and, now that he had barely two months left in post, he must presumably be allowed to take his secrets with him.
So thought DI Backman, taking a seat in the visitor’s armchair.
Asunander ended his call, turned and nodded to her. He rocked from his heels to his toes and back again a few times before he sat down at his desk.
‘You’ve started packing up?’
She indicated the boxes. He glowered at her. She reflected that she had never got close to him in all those years, and that she wouldn’t be doing so in these final weeks, either. She was in good company. Asunander was as he was: a lone wolf.
‘Toivonen had some spare boxes. He moved house in March, you’ll recall. He brought them in this morning.’
Backman nodded.
‘But it wasn’t my departure for the hereafter I wanted to discuss.’ He cleared his throat and rummaged among the pile of papers on his desk. ‘It was Barbarotti. How in heaven’s name is he doing, honestly? Is there any improvement to speak of?’
Eva Backman sighed and wondered what she ought to answer.
Improvement? She contemplated Asunander’s heavy face for a few seconds. Was there some understanding behind the frown lines and elephant-like folds of skin? Was there a drop of warmth and humanity, or had the years, the tedium and the solitude worn away the last traces of empathy?
It was hard to say.
It was three weeks since Marianne’s death, and just over a week since the funeral. Backman had spoken to Barbarotti more or less every day. Often twice or three times. Well, tried to speak to him. Most recently that very morning. She didn’t know if the word ‘improvement’ was in any way appropriate, in the circumstances. She couldn’t detect any herself, but she
Like dark water under the crust of ice on a lake in the forest: that was the image that had come to her that morning, and it seemed a reasonable description.
‘He’s coming in this afternoon.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Asunander. ‘The question is, what can we use him for?’
‘Use?’
‘Don’t pick me up on my choice of words. You know what I’m talking about.’
‘I think it’s important for him to get back into his work,’ said Eva Backman.
‘We can’t set ourselves up as therapists here,’ said Asunander. ‘Not even in a case like this. Don’t misunderstand me; even I have a heart, you know.’
‘I’ve never doubted it,’ said Backman. Though I have, actually, she thought. On several occasions.
‘Well?’ said Asunander.
Eva Backman thought for a moment. ‘I don’t really know how he is,’ she admitted. ‘Or how much use he’ll be at the moment.’
‘He’s a damn good police officer,’ said Asunander. ‘An odd customer, but good.’
And you’re pretty damn odd as a boss, Backman continued her inner monologue. Good perhaps, but definitely odd.
‘You’re right there,’ she said.
‘And having your wife drop dead on you doesn’t make you any better, of course. In fact it’s likely to make you even odder.’
He leant back, clasped his hands behind his neck and stared up at the ceiling, apparently weighing his next pronouncement.
No better, but even odder?
Eva Backman just sat there in silence for a while, wondering what Asunander really wanted from her. Whether he did in fact expect her to make an assessment of Barbarotti or had simply called her in because the situation called for some sounding out.
But Asunander rarely contented himself with sounding things out for the sake of it and he didn’t care for small talk. She decided that behind all this, he was really seeking some advice on the matter. He wanted her considered opinion on what sort of task could be put in the hands of a good, if odd, detective inspector whose wife had died at the age of only forty-seven and left him alone with five children, mostly still adolescent, and a . . . a burden of grief so all-encompassing that it was simply impossible to imagine. Yes, she assumed that was the nut he was hoping she could crack for him.
‘Maybe we shouldn’t expect him to jump straight into Fängström,’ she said. ‘That wouldn’t be right.’
Asunander gave a curt nod but kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling. Eva Backman involuntarily found the Fängström case forging its way up to the surface of her mind. It was hardly surprising, of course; it was only two days old and she had been in on it from the word go.
Raymond Fängström, twenty-nine and single, had been found dead on his kitchen floor on Sunday morning by his loving mother when she came round to lend a hand with the housework. Cleaning and ironing, and so on. She had found him lying on his stomach with his arms trapped beneath him in the space between the cooker and sink on one side and the refrigerator and freezer on the other, and it didn’t take long to establish that he had been lying there since late the previous evening. He had thrown up quite extensively and his head was resting in a patch of his vomit. On the table were the remains of a meal; by the look of it, two people had dined on spaghetti with bolognese sauce and had shared a bottle of red wine.
They still had not established who his dinner guest had been, but the pathologist, one Herbert Lindman, who tended to be right three times out of four, had examined the body for a few minutes and then declared that it looked more than likely to be a poisoning. Samples of the wine, pasta and bolognese sauce, and of the contents of Fängström’s stomach – both the vomit and what he had retained – had been sent off to SKL, the National Forensic Laboratory in Linköping, and the answer would no doubt be with them before long. In the course of the coming week, hopefully.
The problem was not only that Raymond Fängström had died in murky circumstances. The problem was also that he was who he was: a local councillor in Kymlinge, elected in 2010 for the Sweden Democrats. Voices had already been raised to claim that it was a case of politically motivated murder. That Fängström had fallen prey to malicious forces from the political left. Maybe an immigrant, maybe a homosexual; there was no shortage of opponents to the policies and xenophobic opinions that Fängström represented and was attempting to ram through the local council, where he had to some degree held the balance of power.
The fact that these voices were greater in volume than in number seemed less important; the media had made a big splash of the story, both nationally and locally. Sweden was rather short of political murders and more than fifty journalists had turned up to the press conference at Kymlinge police station.
Eva Backman had so far interviewed six people who had all had dealings with the dead Sweden Democrat; she had a further twelve on her notepad and she was not looking forward to those conversations. Late the previous day she had sat eye-to-eye with Sigmund Stiller, second on the party’s list for the local elections and the man expected to take over Fängström’s council seat. She was still clenching her jaw at the very thought of it.
Stiller had not asked to have a lawyer present, but he had insisted on a bodyguard. He considered himself under threat from left-wing terrorists, and had made the fact very public in every possible media outlet. He also demanded that each and every Sweden Democrat in the country be allocated a bodyguard, a proposal that had immediately been toned down by the party leadership in Stockholm or Skåne, or wherever it was. After just a few hours on the case, Eva Backman had started feeling that she would gladly be a traffic cop or a narcotics investigator, or virtually anything else. Anything but a DI embroiled in the fate of a dead racist.
Admittedly the Sweden Democrats had stopped calling themselves racists once they started wearing ties and getting elected to parliament, but at the local council level – at least in Kymlinge – no one was left in any doubt about their views on that score. In his barely two years in post, Raymond Fängström had successfully shown the electorate two things: he hated every individual born south of the Alps, and he did not have the sharpest brain in the land.
And Sigmund Stiller (Eva Backman had uncovered the fact that his real name was Jan Johansson, but that he had changed it after being bullied at school) had soon proved that he was more than a match for his party leader in both respects.
‘What makes you think Fängström’s death has a political dimension?’ Backman had asked.
‘It’s bleeding obvious,’ Stiller had replied. ‘They’re after us.’
‘And who are they?’
‘Them, of course. The Islamers. The immigrants. Raymond was murdered; this is the beginning of the big race war, geddit?’
‘Dead right,’ added the bodyguard, who was called Hank and looked as if he weighed about 150 kilos. In English he added, ‘The hit has shit the fan.’
No, it didn’t seem fair to let Barbarotti anywhere near Fängström.
‘We’ll have to keep Barbarotti well away from all that,’ said Asunander. ‘Hot air really isn’t what he needs, eh?’
‘Not in overly large doses,’ said Backman.
Asunander lowered his hands onto his desk and rummaged some more. Then he seemed to change his mind and extracted a brown folder from his top right-hand desk drawer.
‘What do you think of this?’
He did not let go of the folder, but turned it round so that she could read what was written on the front:
Arnold Morinder
It was just a name and she did not immediately recall the circumstances. It certainly rang a bell, but she had not been involved. Except perhaps in a very peripheral way. Asunander opened the folder and muttered something she could not catch.
‘I don’t entirely remember,’ she admitted. ‘He was the one with the blue moped, wasn’t he?’
‘Spot on,’ said Asunander. ‘Coming up for five years ago. We didn’t ever really get to the bottom of it.’
‘No, I remember,’ said Backman. ‘Though I wasn’t actually on the case. It was abandoned fairly quickly, wasn’t it?’
‘It was,’ confirmed Asunander, a look of dissatisfaction settling around his mouth. ‘Uninvestigable. It proved impossible to draw any conclusions. But the wretched fellow never turned up.’
‘Disappearances,’ observed Backman. ‘Always difficult to get anywhere.’
