Stone Coffin Part 12

"I'd prefer roses," she said.

"Did he ever have anyone with him?"

It was the decisive question and she answered immediately.

"Yes, the time after that, he was with a girl. Blonde, around thirty, fairly pretty. Not beautiful, not a lady, if you know what I mean."

Haver nodded.

"I recognized her. She sometimes comes in."

Haver knew now that he was close.

"Does she live around here?"

"I don't know."

"When was the last time she was in?"

The young woman reflected for a few moments before she spoke.

"Last week. She bought some bags of seeds."

"Seeds?"

"Carrots and stuff like that."

Haver paused. He looked out of the window, watched the cars flying past.

"If she comes in again, would you write down her license plate? Could you do that?"

"Sure. Sounds exciting."

"I'll give you my number and you can call me right away."

"Is she dangerous?"

Haver shook his head and handed her his card. She studied it.

"Is she wanted?"

"No, we just want to talk to her."

"Do I get a reward?"

"Seventy tulips."

Ola Haver left the store in a good mood. He was almost certain that the young clerk would lead him to the woman, who was potentially hiding Cederen or at the very least would be able to shed some light on his disappearance.

As he unlocked the car, the phone rang. He checked the display and saw that it was Ottosson.

"We've found him," Ottosson said curtly.

"Where?"

"The Rasbo area. He's dead."

"f.u.c.king h.e.l.l. Suicide?"

"Looks like it. Where are you?"

"In Rasbo, or almost there."

Ottosson chuckled contentedly. Haver saw him in his mind's eye, his gla.s.ses pushed up onto his head and his hand in his beard, which was growing more and more gray and bushy.

Haver was given some hasty directions. Lindell, Sammy, Beatrice, and Ryde, the forensic specialist, were on their way.

The forest road was almost impossible to spot. It was partially concealed behind a thicket of willow. It was clear that it had not been used for a long time, because vegetation had almost completely taken over the entrance. Lindell's and Ryde's cars were already parked on the gravel road. Otherwise Haver would probably have missed it completely. He looked around attentively.

The many branches of a willow brushed Haver's head. A black woodp.e.c.k.e.r was frenetically working the heavily ridged bark. It hardly even looked up as he pa.s.sed, simply casting him a glance as if to say: I was here first.

Fredriksson should have been here, Haver thought. He loved a.s.signments in the country, especially in wooded terrain, and would take the opportunity to show off his knowledge of birds.

The overgrown tractor road lay in shadow. Logs strewn over the trail tracks, which were very likely sodden in fall and spring, lay like rotting cadavers. When Haver stepped on them, they collapsed in on themselves with a m.u.f.fled crunch of decay.

To the left was an expanse of exposed rock laced with peat moss and decorated with the occasional twisted pine tree. Large blocks of stone had been heaved to the side and resembled mossy forest animals. The area had the feeling of a graveyard.

To the right was a bog, and Haver perceived a faintly sweet smell that he suspected came from the vigorous brushwood interspersed with emerald-green tufts.

Some thirty meters away, there was a clearing. On the far side of that was Cederen's BMW. The sporty car looked completely out of place, with the large spruce trees as a backdrop. Four police officers were hunched around the driver's side. Haver glimpsed a body in the car, draped over the steering wheel.

The clearing was around two hundred square meters, a little wooded area in which Sven-Erik Cederen had ended his life. There are worse places, Haver thought as he walked closer.

"That was quick," Lindell said and looked up.

"I was in the neighborhood," Haver said.

Lindell hardly registered his answer. She leaned back over the corpse.

"Oh, G.o.d, how he stinks," Beatrice said.

"Things go fast in a car," Ryde commented.

He was already wearing gloves. Haver saw that he was impatient. Lindell reached in and gently picked up a small piece of paper that lay on the dashboard. She straightened up.

"'Sorry,'" she read.

It was no example of fine penmanship. The five letters, written in capital letters, had been dashed down in a childishly uneven line.

"What an idiot," Beatrice said.

The ignition was on, but the engine was dead. A yellow plastic tube ran from the exhaust in through a narrow crack in the back window on the driver's side. A brightly colored piece of fabric had been stuffed around the tube in the crack to prevent the fumes from escaping.

Cederen's face rested on the steering wheel. One side of his mouth was pulled up so that it looked as if he were grinning. A sneer. "So long, I'm out of here," it seemed to say. He was tan, but an unmistakable gray patina completely destroyed the impression of health. He had been a handsome man, Lindell thought.

"I can't say I'm not disappointed," she said. "I would have wanted to have a few words with him."

"Who found him?"

"A farmer who lives in the house that you drove by," Sammy Nilsson said. "He was making preparations for the winter logging."

"Lucky us," Beatrice said. "Think how he would have smelled in another week or so."

"Yes, it is lucky for us. Now we don't have to keep looking," Ryde said.

"That's what I mean. It was a lucky break," Beatrice said.

"No one ever died of a bad smell," Ryde observed dryly.

The a.s.sembled officers fell silent. Haver suspected that the others were also thinking of Josefin and Emily. Somehow he wasn't able to feel upset. Not yet. He knew it would come. Maybe Cederen was a murderer, but the sight of his body, with his mouth wide open and his eyes closed, was so awful that it derailed his anger.

Suicide always affected police officers. All of them had toyed with the idea of taking their own life. Being confronted with the corpse from a suicide roused a heavy melancholy as well as a rare mixture of anxiety, disgust, and rage.

Haver walked to the front of the car. The right-hand headlight had a diagonal crack across the gla.s.s, but apart from that, the BMW looked undamaged.

He peered in through the windshield. Cederen was starting to go bald. There was a bare patch on the top of his head.

"Why here?" Sammy asked.

Lindell looked around, as if the answer were to be found in the clearing.

"You can hardly see the turnoff, and the road itself is rugged, to say the least. He must have been familiar with it," Sammy said, continuing along this line of reasoning.

"Maybe he's been mushroom picking here," Ryde said. "This is prime mushroom territory."

An image of Edvard picking mushrooms shot through Ann's head.

"Why were you nearby?" she asked and turned to Haver.

"I had dug up a lead on his mistress," he said humbly.

"Around here?"

"It's possible, but I'm not sure. We may be able to find her by talking to a girl who works in a store in Vallby."

"Why Vallby?" Sammy asked.

"The Hydro gas station. Cederen stopped there regularly."

Lindell gave him a smile and an appreciative look.

"All right then," Ryde said. "You done with your look-see?"

He bent over and fished out a bottle partially concealed under the seat.

"Gordon's," he said. "Five centiliters left, give or take."

He held the bottle aloft and smiled.

"Didn't you smell the alcohol?"

Ryde was triumphant.

"You think he downed an entire bottle?" Sammy asked in disbelief. "Seven hundred centiliters? d.a.m.n."

"This is a one-liter bottle," Ryde said, "but no one said he drank the whole thing. It is open and was resting on its side, so most likely some of it has run out onto the floor. We'll see."

He walked around the car, opened the back door, and picked up a briefcase.

"You can have this for now," he said and gave it to Haver. "Ask Jonsson to secure any fingerprints before you handle it too much."

He began by taking out his camera. Ryde was a highly skilled forensic technician, but he was also an excellent photographer. From time to time he put up small exhibitions in the conference room. The photos were usually extras from police investigations, but sometimes he surprised his colleagues by including scenes from his family life, of grandchildren and vacations. This humanized the otherwise gruff man. The Technical division voted on the best picture. The winning composition was always something from work. It was as if the officers couldn't bring themselves to vote for anything of a more personal nature.

Ryde's four colleagues left him to his work on the car. They walked slowly across the clearing. The sun peeked through the spruce trees.

"This is a beautiful place," Sammy said.

"Who is going to inform the parents?" Lindell asked.

The technicians had enough to keep themselves busy with for at least a couple of hours. The car, clearing, surrounding forest, and road all had to be combed for clues. Even though all signs pointed to suicide, this was a crime scene.

Lindell headed back to town in Haver's car in order to find out about the Vallby lead. Now that Cederen had been found, the search for his lover appeared most pressing. Perhaps she would even be able to shed some light on the motive for Cederen's final car ride and subsequent suicide.

Had he been to see his lover after his initial disappearance and taken his life sometime afterward? This was a question that gnawed at Lindell. If this was the case, what had been said? Had they quarreled? Had he told her what had happened? Why hadn't she called the police?

There was something murky in all of this, something that Lindell had to clarify. After Haver's report from the convenience store, it no longer appeared impossible that they would find her.

"If we a.s.sume that she lived in the vicinity, somewhere along the regrundsvagen, and that he has visited her, there must have been many people who would have noticed his car," Haver said. "It stands out, and in the country it's the kind of thing people notice."

Lindell nodded. If this woman didn't come forward, should they publish a photo of the car to get some leads?

"What kind of person is she?"