Stone Coffin Part 37

"I appreciate it. Thanks for calling."

"Have a good one," Frenke said, feeling a little better after these parting words.

In this abrupt way, Lindell was returned to life without Edvard. She checked her watch. Mortensen is at the end of his rope, she thought. Sits in an interrogation all day and then goes home to dig up his yard at night. What had he said? "You have to get your money's worth."

The way back to Uppsala was long. The brief moment with Edvard had frozen her movements and thoughts. She drove past Borstil and it occurred to her that perhaps it was the last time for a long while that she would drive by the white church. It had always been a journey marker for her. Once past it, she was in Roslagen. The church for her marked the entrance to Edvard's kingdom, and she remembered all the times that she drove past it with a tingle of excitement.

Now her insides were tingling from other reasons. Deep inside she despised herself, but she always repressed this feeling. In time her self-disgust would grow even greater. Instead she managed to distract herself so she would feel some relief. It was cowardly, but she swallowed it out of pure self-preservation. She had to keep herself together. She had to solve the case.

Through Gimo she kept to the speed limit for the first time. Skafthammars church. Next it'll be Alunda, she thought. Then Stavby and then Rasbo. From the cathedral in Mlaga to this parade of country churches in Uppland.

The guilt she felt at hurting another person threatened to overwhelm her, but she forced herself to think of the investigation. What was it that Teresia Wall had said? Granted it had been social conversation, but Lindell could not come up with what it was that had caught her attention. It could have been a single word, but what?

At the exit to Tuna she finally remembered. It was Teresia's comment about her husband, who worked as a veterinarian at Ultuna. Adrian Mrd had a degree in agricultural science and had most likely also gone there. Maybe they had met? Maybe they knew each other? Maybe it was Teresia's husband who had supplied Mrd with the information about the illegal animal experiments?

A lot of maybes, but Lindell had followed her intuition before, and this lead wasn't any worse than the others. She checked the time. Edvard, what are you doing? A sense of loss and sadness came over her. She fumbled for her phone, which had slid down between the front seats, and dialed Beatrice's number.

It rang five times before she answered.

"Were you sleeping?"

"No, we're playing Kubb in the garden," Beatrice said cheerfully. "I had a feeling that it was you."

"I had an idea..." Lindell began.

"Teresia Wall," Beatrice filled in.

"Exactly."

"I realized when you said that part about the start of the interrogation, when we were chatting to get her to relax a little."

"Her husband works at Ultuna and most likely got his education there. Adrian Mrd did too."

She didn't need to say anymore. Beatrice understood.

"Should we bring her in again tomorrow?"

"Can you arrange it?" Lindell asked.

Karl-Goran Wall had received his degree from Ultuna in 1982, the same year as Adrian Mrd. Lindell had uncovered this fact with the help of a cooperative staff member at the university.

Granted, the two men had different specializations, but the probability that they knew each other was still fairly high.

"Do you remember a man by the name of Adrian Mrd?" Beatrice asked.

Teresia Wall answered in the negative, but her eyes gave her away.

"Maybe your husband does?" Lindell suggested. "We can call him and ask."

Teresia pushed out her lower lip in an expression that was hard to read. Perhaps it was anger. She said nothing, and both Lindell and Beatrice knew they were on the right track. Teresia was smart enough to realize that their questions were part of a series. They were weaving a net in which she was gradually becoming snared. Some reacted with relief, others with pa.s.sivity, and still others with anger when they realized that they were like a fly in a spiderweb. But however hard they struggled, it was in vain. The conclusion was a given.

"Okay," she conceded, "I know Adrian Mrd. What about it?"

"He has shared certain information with us," Lindell said.

Teresia started to cry, the tears slowly trickling down her cheeks.

Beatrice gave her a tissue. Teresia blew her nose loudly and then started talking. Lindell made sure that the tape recorder was on. Now, De Soto, now we've got something for you.

"It was last fall," Teresia said. "Sven-Erik had been down in Mlaga and had come back very upset. He wasn't like himself at all. He was curt and off-kilter, and the atmosphere was strained. He and Mortensen were fighting more and more. They slammed doors and there was just a bad feeling. Everything had been so good before. The business was going well, we were on top. Everything got turned upside down."

"What did they fight about?" Beatrice asked.

"We didn't know. Sofi confronted Mortensen and asked him, but he wouldn't say. We thought that it was money at first. That's often why people fall out, but it was something else. I went into Sven-Erik's office once to get some doc.u.ments. I couldn't find them and started to look through the files stacked on his desk."

She paused for a moment and looked at Lindell.

"I wasn't snooping," she said. "It was important to get a copy of the report I was looking for."

Lindell nodded.

"In the middle of the stack there was a doc.u.ment that caught my eye. It looked like all the others, but at the very bottom Sven-Erik had written 'Jesus Christ' in capital letters. Of course I would be curious. And then it said that he recommended against something and that it could cause great suffering. It was those words 'great suffering' that had the biggest impact on me."

"Was he the one who had written this comment?"

"Yes, I recognized the handwriting," Teresia said. "It was about a clinical trial that was going to be undertaken. We had been running primate trials for a couple of years. Liiv and Sodergren had been responsible for them, and they had been moderately successful."

"Was there any truth to the animal activists' claims?" Beatrice asked. "They maintain that the animal trials were illegal."

Teresia hesitated.

"I think they did parallel trials," she said. "One series was approved. Every trial has to be reviewed. The other was probably not official."

"Probably? You think that they conducted two series of trials, one of which was illegal?"

Teresia nodded.

"You think this or you know it?"

"I know," she said quietly.

"Why didn't you raise any alarms?" Lindell asked.

Teresia Wall took a long time to answer.

"The company's future was hanging on the Parkinson's project," she said finally.

"You knew it, but you kept quiet," Beatrice said grimly.

"Did Cederen know about it too?"

"Of course. He was the head of research."

"What was the difference between those trials and the new ones, the ones that Cederen was so upset about?"

Lindell's question brought Teresia to tears again. She stared down at the floor, her hands folded on her large belly.

"What were the results?" Lindell asked.

"They weren't so good," Teresia said. "Something went wrong. The trials were stopped because there were too many side effects."

"And those trials were conducted in the Dominican Republic?"

Teresia nodded.

"Why there?"

"I don't know. Maybe the controls aren't as strict."

Teresia told them how she had first been beset by doubt and then disgust. She had also been afraid and nervous and did not know what to do. Her husband had noticed the change in her. At first he thought it had to do with her pregnancy, but finally she hadn't been able to keep the information from him anymore. She told him about her discovery.

Together they had then reached out to Adrian Mrd, who they had known for fifteen years. They trusted him. They knew that he would be able to get the word out without involving Teresia and her husband.

She a.s.sured them that she had not talked to anyone else at the company about the doc.u.ment that she had found. She had been planning to discuss it with Cederen but had not done so in time.

Lindell left the room and immediately walked over to Ottosson's office. He noticed her look of agitation and gazed back at her with concern but was interrupted by Lindell, who told him what Teresia had said.

Ottosson listened without interrupting and sat quietly for a while with a look that Lindell could characterize only as abstracted.

"What pigs," he said finally.

He stared at her as if he thought that she had come to him with a fictionalized story.

"Can it be true?"

"I am sure that Wall is telling the truth," Lindell said. "Why would she be making this up?"

Ottosson left the desk and started to walk to and fro across the floor, only to stop, grab the telephone receiver, and dial a number.

"This is Ottosson. Can you come here?"

He listened to the answer before he went on impatiently.

"No, it can't wait," he said and hung up.

"Fritzen?" Lindell asked.

Ottosson nodded. A great calm came over her. It was as if Ottosson drained away the anger. She sat heavily in the chair and couldn't really think straight. Ottosson said something that she didn't quite catch before he left the room and set off down the corridor.

When he returned, Lindell saw that he had rinsed his face. His hairline and beard were still damp.

"How do we proceed?" he asked in a tired voice and sat back down at the desk.

"We bring in Mortensen," Lindell said.

She walked back to her room. The exhaustion was starting to get to her as well, but she forced herself to reach out to Adrian Mrd. He seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth. He did not answer at any of the telephone numbers that he had given her and had not returned any of Lindell's earlier messages.

She ended up sitting with the phone in her hand. How cruel I was to Edvard, she thought. Barge into his sickroom and let drop that I am carrying someone else's child. If I had just approached this in a different way, maybe I could have reasoned with him.

Did she love him? She believed she did. She didn't dare let herself test this fully. Since she was denied the joy of living with him, it didn't matter in the end. The sense of having thrown away all possibilities of a future with Edvard only stoked her self-disgust. A single night's thoughtless escapade ruins everything, she thought bitterly. But what do I know about what Edvard might have been up to during the six months that we didn't see each other? He may have taken the opportunity to spread his wild oats. But if this thought was meant to comfort her, it failed. Her intuition told her that he had not been with anyone else, and anyway, what would it have meant? Nothing. This was about her and Edvard.

She leaned over the desk. Should she call him? He would hang up immediately. Driving out to Graso was senseless. Viola was caring for Edvard, and his head was most likely filled with hatred and a sense of betrayal.

The phone rang and she automatically reached for the receiver, saying her name mechanically.

"My name is Eilert Jancker and I live in Kbo, right next to Jack Mortensen, if that rings a bell."

"Of course," Lindell said and recalled Frenke's call from the night before. "What can I a.s.sist you with?"

"I am completely fed up with the noise level in the neighborhood, and Mortensen is the one who causes most of the disturbances."

"I see. Go on," Lindell said when Jancker made no attempt to elaborate on this statement.

"I've registered a complaint about this before, but now I'm at my wit's end. There has been no improvement-in fact, quite the opposite."

"Can you tell me in concrete terms what this is about?" Lindell said and felt a growing sense of impatience.

"Work machinery noise," he said.

"I'm in the Violent Crimes division, so this isn't really my turf."

"I was connected to this number," Jancker insisted.

"Then let me hear it."

"A couple of days ago, Mortensen operated a digger long into the night. As my neighbors and I understand it, digging should be undertaken during business hours only. I believe I speak for all of us."

Why do they have to be so long-winded? Lindell thought tiredly.

"What I would like to know is what you are planning to do about it?"

"Have you tried to speak to Mortensen directly about this? That's often a good first step..."