Stone Coffin Part 23

Lindell ate breakfast with reluctance. The cereal caught in her throat. Coffee was out of the question. She leafed through the newspaper without noting more than the headlines.

It was now fifteen days since Josefin and Emily had died. There had been no breakthrough. If Sven-Erik Cederen really was innocent, then their chances of catching the real perpetrator were rapidly diminis.h.i.+ng. Each day that pa.s.sed was also drawing her closer to having to make a decision about whether to have an abortion or give birth.

In some way it felt immoral to get an abortion. Emily had died, and Lindell had a feeling that her child would be a sort of replacement for a lost life, that the fact that she had become pregnant meant something.

"Ridiculous," she said to herself and folded the newspaper. She was late but could not bring herself to hurry. He wanted to see her. Would she tell him? It would mean the end for them. He would never be able to take this. Never.

Lindell walked into her office at nine o'clock. She had run into Sammy Nilsson in the corridor, who had said h.e.l.lo and looked inquisitively at her. Is it written on my face? she wondered as she brought her notepad onto the desk.

The phone rang. It was Haver.

"Are you heading out to see Mark?"

"In about an hour."

"I'll bring you directions."

They had agreed that Lindell would go alone to see Gabriella Mark.

Lindell could visualize her, waiting. Most likely in the garden, to judge from Haver and Nilsson's accounts of her substantial gardening efforts.

The slow start to the morning was starting to give way to a curiosity about how Mark was going to behave, what information she would be able to provide. How did she know that Cederen had consumed gin?

Lindell felt in her bones that this was a significant lead. If Cederen never drank gin, then this meant that someone else was involved. It meant that he had been forced to consume what was to him a distasteful drink.

Only now did Lindell absorb the full implications of this. Someone else had murdered Josefin and Emily. Somewhere out there was an unknown murderer. A merciless killer.

Maybe I'll catch sight of Edvard, she thought as she pa.s.sed Jalla. But he had said he was coming in the afternoon. He had not mentioned an errand. He did not visit Uppsala very often, so perhaps he was coming in only to see her?

From Rasbo church to Gabriella Mark's house, she tried to focus her thoughts on the investigation and the woman she would soon meet.

Haver's directions were precise, so she had no trouble finding the place. The first thing she thought about when she arrived was the enormous contrast between this home and Uppsala-Nas and the house that Cederen had lived in.

She did not see anyone in the garden or among the vegetable beds. Lindell knocked on the door, looked around, and waited. She felt observed. She repeated her knocking, more forcefully this time.

Her cell phone rang, but she turned it off without answering. The door was unlocked. She peered in and called Gabriella's name. The house was quiet. Lindell went in. There was a small vestibule and front hall leading to a kitchen. A cup of coffee stood on the table. It was an orderly kitchen, sparingly furnished. Gabriella Mark had good taste.

Lindell glanced into the only other room on the ground floor and then walked up the stairs. "Gabriella," she called, but no one replied. She became convinced that the house was empty as she walked up the creaking stairs to the two rooms on the upper floor.

The car was parked in the yard and the door was unlocked, but there was no sign of life. I must have missed her, Lindell thought, and decided to leave the empty house. She stood on the front steps and carefully examined the surroundings.

She searched the outbuildings and sheds. No sign of the woman. She was starting to feel disheartened. Had Gabriella Mark lost her courage when she saw Lindell? Maybe she was hiding out in the woods?

Lindell paused at the vegetable beds. Her colleagues had not been exaggerating. This was a substantial effort. Lindell was no gardening enthusiast, but she realized that there lay a great deal of work behind the well-ordered beds.

She sat down on the edge of one of the plots. Maybe Gabriella Mark was running an errand nearby. Lindell looked around again. The woods lay quiet and there was complete stillness at the cottage. Lindell had pa.s.sed another house about a kilometer away before she got to Mark's cottage, but if she had an errand there, wouldn't she have taken the car? That's what Lindell would have done. Maybe she was out walking a dog. Lindell thought of Cederen's pointer.

She lingered for half an hour before she understood that Mark was not returning any time soon. If she was hiding in the vegetation, it meant she was unwilling to meet with Lindell and that she was not going to come out until Lindell left.

She took out her phone and called Haver.

"I don't like this," she said, and he agreed.

"Do you think something has happened?"

"I don't know," Lindell said. "But she's lying low. She must have heard me and taken off into the woods. I think I'll pretend to leave and return on foot. Then she may come out."

On her way to the car she opened the lid of the garbage can and took a look. Empty. Her irritation over Gabriella Mark's behavior grew stronger. She didn't have time for this cat-and-mouse behavior. Clearly Mark possessed some information. It made no sense for her to be so eager for Lindell to believe her and then hide away when Lindell came to see her.

She drove down the road a kilometer or so, pa.s.sing the neighboring house and turning onto a small forest road, where she parked. The walk back to the cottage took at least twenty minutes. It was a while since she had taken a walk through the forest. It must have been last year with Edvard.

The smells brought back memories, and when she returned to the cottage, she was in a melancholy mood. She felt almost unseeing. The cottage with its beautiful garden gave an impression of unreality. Was there really a person here who had something to do with the killings? It seemed preposterous.

But Lindell had the feeling that Gabriella Mark's life was anything but peaceful. She was consumed by grief and anguish-that much had been clear from her voice.

Lindell did not want to wait any longer. She was afraid of losing herself in her own thoughts. She did not want to become enchanted by the forest; she wanted to think clearly and act like an investigating detective. But still she stayed. If there was anything she was good at, it was waiting.

For almost an hour she stayed hidden before she once again walked up to the house, which was as silent and deserted as before.

Lindell stood indecisively in the middle of the yard. She called Haver again and they decided to put out an alert for her.

After she hung up, she decided to check out the earth cellar. There was a large key in the keyhole, and with some effort Lindell managed to force the door open. She was greeted by the raw smell of earth and old potatoes.

Shelves filled with jars and bottles bore witness to Mark's gardening. Lindell felt guilty because she was holding the door open and letting the warm air inside. There was no Gabriella Mark inside, nothing except juice and jam.

To the right of the earth cellar there was an old, half-collapsed barn. Through a large hole in the wall she could see the rotten feeding troughs. Nettles had made their way inside and were growing through the roughhewn floorboards.

She walked behind the barn. One wall held a large number of horseshoes. Behind the back of the building was a heap of stones. It looked like an ancient monument. This was where the original cottagers had tossed stones from the fields.

"Edvard," she muttered. "You would feel right at home here."

She thought of him and the stone coffin dock that he had built over the winter. Here he had ample building material.

The monumental nature of the pile of stones appealed to her. There was also something slightly mournful in this testament to the cotters' labor and the ma.s.sive weight of the stones, overgrown with moss and lichen. She knew her reflection was a result of Edvard's influence. He had talked about the landscape and the traces left by humans, all the labor behind the beauty.

As she rounded the mound, she saw at once that something was wrong. Many of the boulders had been s.h.i.+fted out of place. The moss had been peeled away and the meadow gra.s.ses in front of the pile had been trampled. Something had happened here only recently.

Lindell stiffened, her gaze flitting over the area. She didn't want to take in what she saw. Someone had moved the stones and replaced them but had not been able to restore the scene exactly.

Why? There were only two alternatives. Either someone had removed something from behind the stones or else they had hidden something there.

She called Haver for a third time. The fact that she called him was most likely due to the fact that Gabriella Mark had been his lead.

"We should probably bring Forensics out here before I start to root around," she said. Haver agreed, perhaps mainly because he would then be able to join them.

Gabriella Mark had been strangled. Ryde and Haver had removed stone after stone and eventually uncovered her body. A little moss had fallen onto her face. Her hands were curled into fists. There was bruising around her throat. She had suffered a nosebleed.

"A stone coffin," Lindell said.

"What?" Ryde asked.

"A stone coffin," Lindell repeated and checked the time: 12:32, Thursday, June 29.

Haver watched her.

"What made you come back here?" he asked.

"Because of Edvard," she said.

She felt their puzzled looks but said nothing to clarify this statement. She looked down at the woman. Yesterday she had been alive; today she was dead. They should have been sitting together talking at this moment. Someone else had gotten here first.

"She isn't wearing very much."

Haver found it hard to tear his gaze away from her almost bare body.

"What did she know?" he asked.

"She believed that Cederen had been forced to drink the gin," Lindell said.

Ryde looked up, interested. Lindell told them about her conversations with Gabriella.

"Why would someone force him to drink alcohol?"

Lindell hesitated. "To make a murder look like a suicide. I think it was homicide," she said finally.

Ryde and Haver stared at her. Something hung in the air. Lindell could see fatigue in Ryde's face. Behind his usual tough att.i.tude were helplessness and despair.

He saw her gaze and turned back to the body.

"Murdered?" Haver said. "You mean that someone filled Cederen with that revolting gin and then ga.s.sed him to death?"

Lindell nodded.

"How do you explain the traces of Josefin's clothing on Cederen's car?"

"He may have been driving or it may have been someone else," Lindell said.

"You mean that the killings in Uppsala-Nas were staged to look as if they were perpetrated by Cederen," Ryde said.

Lindell nodded again. She was getting tired of their pedantic questions.

"I don't know, but I think this is more complicated than we believed."

Together with Haver and Berglund, who had joined them, Lindell searched the cottage. As usual, Lindell started with the kitchen. Haver focused on the bedroom, and the veteran Berglund started with the living room.

The cupboards in the kitchen were of that old-fas.h.i.+oned variety that had been in Lindell's childhood home as long as she still lived in deshog. Now her parents had replaced them with dark oak paneling and bra.s.s hardware, but Lindell preferred the old ones with their wooden k.n.o.bs and roughhewn shelves covered in oiled paper, attached with tacks.

She searched through the stacks of plates and serving bowls, peered into every cup and pot. Parts of the china were old, early Gustavsberg, the remnants of a full service. Gabriella Mark had not been status driven. This was functional china without any finesse. Nothing newly purchased from the expensive shops. Most likely purchases from Ikea filled in where the old set was incomplete.

Every item had to be lifted and inspected. She had the feeling that this was pointless labor, but it had to be done. Perhaps something in a mug or behind a frying pan would set the investigative machinery in motion. Lindell felt a rising irritation over the routine procedure. She was convinced that the solution was somewhere outside of the cottage, that important time was being lost, and she wanted to leave the interior search to her colleagues. But what would she do instead? Where would she search?

The feeling of uselessness and wasted time had its roots in the fact that she should have come out to see Gabriella last night. She had been alive then. Lindell knew that she had known something important. She had talked with someone and learned the detail about the gin. Who else knew this?

As she continued her search in the cleaning closet, Lindell decided to try to map the spread of information.

After some thirty minutes of searching, she had uncovered nothing of interest-no notes, receipts, or letters that would help with the investigation. She heard Berglund pad around the living room. She a.s.sumed that he was leafing through books and checking the drawers in the secretary desk.

The only item of any interest was an empty bottle of oxazepam with the physician's name on the label.

The cell phone rang. It was Beatrice, who had checked into Gabriella Mark's personal information. She was thirty-three years old, born in sterlen, just outside of Simrishamn. Beatrice did not yet know if there was a next of kin. Gabriella had been a project manager at a consulting firm that had finally gone out of business. She had been on disability several times in the past couple of years. The consulting company had declared bankruptcy eight months ago.

She was not registered as having any debts or defaults on payments. She had a current pa.s.sport. This was as far as the internal investigation had gone.

Lindell asked Beatrice to check with the telephone carrier to see if they could provide an account of the incoming and outgoing calls from the cottage as well as confirm if Gabriella had had a cell phone account. Beatrice also made a note of Gabriella's physician and said that she would look into whether she could get ahold of him.

She may have been on disability, Lindell thought, but she certainly worked in her vegetable garden. Which definitely qualified as work, she reflected as she gazed out the window. She saw some of her colleagues securing evidence. A wave of fatigue washed over her, not so much for herself as for her entire unit. They were engaged in a constant battle, a Sisyphean task in that the boulder always rolled back down.

Lindell looked in on Berglund and asked if he had found anything of interest, but he simply shook his head without answering or even glancing up. She continued to the second floor. Ola Haver was halfway into a large closet. Heaped on the bed was a mound of dresses and skirts, and he was clearly working his way deeper into the closet full of clothes and shoes.

"Women" was all he said as he heard Lindell enter the room.

She knew he meant the ma.s.ses of clothing. She looked around. The bedroom was also spa.r.s.ely furnished, with sharply sloped ceiling, light-colored wallpaper with a design of small red roses, and a large bed, tidily made up with a brightly colored coverlet. There was a bookshelf along one wall, a small table, and a peasant chair. That was all. She walked over to the bookshelf: gardening books and novels. Lindell read the t.i.tles. She never had time to read herself and was somehow suspicious of those who read a lot. She imagined it was something that she had inherited from her father, who disapproved of those who wanted to stick their nose in a book at any opportunity.

There was a slender book on the nightstand: Asian-Style Gardens. Lindell picked it up and leafed through it. One chapter was called "j.a.panese Leafy Greens."

Haver extracted himself from the closet.

"Find anything?" Lindell asked.

"No, just a lot of clothes."

"Anything that stands out?"

Haver shook his head. He sat down on the edge of the bed.

"It's a blur," he said, and Lindell realized that he was suffering from the same feeling she was.

"What do you think?" she asked and sat down in the chair.