Stone Coffin Part 9

She smiled. "Now you're curious, aren't you?"

Magnusson was impatient and did not notice how beautiful she was when she smiled.

"Yes, I am," he said in a controlled voice.

"Earlier I worked part-time for the elder-care services. Johansson-Holger is his name-was one of the clients, and he had just been widowed."

She fell silent. Magnusson looked at her with something close to grat.i.tude.

"He was so sad. Mostly he just sat at the kitchen table. We helped him with food and laundry. He wasn't in such a bad way, just depressed. Then a neighbor woman started to help out and then we weren't needed anymore."

"Did you meet the son-in-law?"

"Yes, a couple of times."

"And you've seen him at the Wermlands Cellar?"

"Yes, one time. It was about a month ago. He came in with some girl who wasn't his wife."

"You've met her too?"

"The wife, yes, several times."

"Can you describe the woman?"

"Blonde, attractive, probably someone with money."

"What makes you think that?"

"Her clothes."

"Did Sven-Erik recognize you?"

"Yes, he looked really embarra.s.sed, so I knew it probably wasn't his sister."

"Did he say anything?"

"Just some general things. I asked a little about Holger. But you don't intrude on the guests."

Magnusson took out the photo of Josefin. "Do you recognize her?"

"That's his wife," she said immediately.

He took out the shots of the other women from MedForsk.

"None of these," she said. "What is it that's happened?"

"We don't really know yet, but we're looking for him."

"And his lover."

Magnusson nodded.

"I want you to sit down and think about this properly. Try to remember everything about that woman even if it doesn't seem important. Write it all down. May I call you tonight?"

"Are you hitting on me?" she said in a serious voice but smiled at the same time.

"You bet," Magnusson said.

Eight.

Kbo was a part of the city she rarely visited. There was no bustle here, the clientele that caused trouble on the streets and squares, stabbing each other, drinking, dealing drugs. How many violent offenders had been seized in this area the past ten years? From what Lindell could recall, there had been only one such incident. A retired physician had thrown his wife through a gla.s.s door in a drunken haze but had been sober enough to stem the flow of blood. Otherwise she would probably have died.

He had been released on probation and probably still lived there with his frightened wife.

Behind the exteriors of these million-dollar houses there were probably other things that happened that the Violent Crimes unit never heard of. Lindell studied the houses as she slowly drove through the neighborhood. Beautiful gardens with lilacs on the corners, hedges of privet or spruce, rosebushes, expensive paving, buxbom spheres, and rhododendron in the shade.

The upper cla.s.ses lived behind these hedges, fences, and walls-in part the old upper crust, those with n.o.ble names or weighed down by generations of academic merit, but increasingly the new, successful elite from the worlds of data, consulting, and pharmaceuticals, as well as physicians, lawyers, and pilots. In short, people with money. Friends of the police, who with their votes demanded law and order, more police, and harsher action.

One thing they had in common was that they all complained about their taxes, but they did not appear to be suffering. Often along Kbovagen, Rudbecksgatan, and Gotavagen, there were a couple of parked cars in the driveway, and neither was exactly a rust bucket.

On all of these streets carpenters and workmen of all kinds were engaged in frenetic activity. Houses were demolished, rebuilt, and renovated. Diggers created ponds, containers were filled with old kitchen materials, while small trucks backed in bringing new equipment and landscaping companies carted in bricks, land stone, cobblestones, stone meal, and soil. The women who could be seen were either housecleaners or the kind that hung curtains and discussed interior design with the woman of the house, who was often harried, in a professional career, and active.

There were exceptions, of course: those who had lived here for a long time, perhaps happened upon a dilapidated house for a cheap sum, before the party days of the nineties when taxes were lowered and home prices rose like a shot. These houses were transformed more slowly and often by the homeowners themselves.

"Would it be nice to live here?" Lindell wondered to herself as she crawled along Villavagen. A couple of women were loading cleaning equipment into a Mazda."Probably under the table." Lindell had heard talk of Polish cleaning women who went from mansion to mansion at lower-than-market wages.

It's beautiful, but I wouldn't want to live here even one day, she thought and kept an eye out for the street she was looking for. She took a couple more turns; then Jack Mortensen's house appeared.

The house was a strange mixture of Jugendstil and functionalism. Ugly, Lindell decided, who preferred old Victorian-style houses with intricate details, turrets, and spires. A not-too-ostentatious Volvo was in the driveway. Lindell parked on the street.

The first thing that struck her was the beauty of the garden. A small path that led from the gravel driveway was bordered with roses, not yet in bloom but covered in small buds. A sea of perennials encircled a seating area where a pergola, coated with vitriol so it looked antique, rose almost threateningly over the greenery. But its appearance was deceiving; it served only to support a variety of vines, among them a fragrant flowering jasmine. The main entrance had stone steps lined with evergreens on either side, like soldiers in neat rows. The porch in front of the door was as big as Lindell's bedroom and inlaid with black slate, with terra-cotta planters filled with summer flowers that had not yet reached their full zenith. And yet it made a magnificent impression. Lindell simply stood and took it in.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" she heard a voice from above.

MedForsk's Jack Mortensen leaned over the wrought-iron railing of the balcony above the entrance.

"Very," Lindell said. "You must be Jack Mortensen."

"I'll be right out. Go ahead and have a seat on the patio," he said and pointed. "I've already put the coffee on."

Mortensen soon emerged carrying a tray laden with cups, saucers, a coffeepot-all of fine china, Lindell noted to her astonishment-two folded napkins, a plate of scones, and a pot of jam.

"I thought you might be hungry."

The pastries were golden-brown and warm.

"The jam is made from cornelian cherry. I get it from my brother in Denmark."

"You're from Denmark?"

"Yes, but I have lived in Sweden since I was ten. My parents divorced and my mother and I moved to Sweden. She's from here."

The jam was delicious. Despite the robust serving of cabbage rolls, Lindell would have been able to finish all the scones on the plate.

"Do you have any more information on Sven-Erik?" he asked, and the almost honey-smooth voice with which he had begun the conversation was replaced with a more businesslike tone.

"No, unfortunately. We're trying to establish his social network," Lindell said and wondered exactly what she meant by that.

"Social network?" Mortensen said thoughtfully. "I don't think he had much of one. Sven-Erik was by and large a solitary figure. There's the golf course, of course. That was a case of mutual affection. The greens become extra velvety when Sven-Erik swings his three-iron. The golf b.a.l.l.s just love to be hit and putted by Sven-Erik. They go where he wants them to. He had a low handicap, in other words."

Why the ironic tone? Lindell wondered. She had trouble following his artful formulations.

"Do you play?"

"No, that's why I have employees," Mortensen said with a half smile. "Well, yes. I've tried it, but it's not my thing."

"Then what is your thing?"

He smiled again. Lindell wished he would stop smiling.

"I'm partial to gardening," he said and waved his hand toward the greenery.

Lindell nodded.

"I also collect textiles. My mother is the driving force in that enterprise, but we have become united on that front."

"Textiles?"

If Mortensen picked up on the faintly mocking tone in Lindell's question, he ignored it.

"Particularly from South America and Southeast Asia."

Lindell knew nothing of these matters but tried to look interested.

"Do you know where Cederen is?" she asked after a brief pause.

"The G.o.ds only know."

"Has he gone abroad?"

"Hard to believe. Where would he go?"

"What about the Dominican Republic?"

Mortensen picked up his coffee cup, took a sip of the now-cool drink, and put the cup down again in a slow movement. He shot Lindell a glance before he replied.

"You've learned of Sven-Erik's purchase of a piece of Caribbean paradise. Honestly I have no idea why he did it."

"Have you asked him?"

"Yes, we have discussed it, and he could not give me a satisfying answer."

"Golf, perhaps?"

Mortensen tilted his head as if to say: Why would anyone be stupid enough to buy land for golf?

"It's a riddle," he said. "Have another scone."

Lindell obeyed his command. The crystallized sweetness of the jam reminded her of her mother's gooseberry pie. A faint puff of wind brought with it a whiff of jasmine and something that Lindell thought was mock orange. She took a bite.

"He paid with company funds," she observed and put down the pastry.

"That's what worries me."

"Did you ask him why?"

"He said he didn't have enough in his account at the time, but that he would transfer the funds at once."

"And has he?"

"No," Mortensen said.

"Worried?"

"Of course. Sven-Erik is a brilliant researcher and also, for some years now, my friend. We started the company together, but he appears to have lost his footing recently. Buying the land was an expression of that."

"Do you believe he killed his family?"

It took a while for Mortensen to reply. He looked out over the garden as if the answer could be spotted between flowering bushes, over the top of the fluttering white b.u.t.terflies and the industrious pecking of the small birds. Lindell watched him, how his expressions changed during his inner dialogue.

"Yes," he said finally. He turned back to her and leaned forward. "Unfortunately I believe that something terrible has happened to Sven-Erik."

Lindell felt his breath across the little patio table. She grabbed her coffee cup and leaned back, drank some coffee, then put the cup down as carefully as he had done earlier.

"Terrible?"

Mortensen nodded.

"In recent days he's been quite confused. I and several others have tried to talk with him. I even called Josefin a couple of days ago to talk."

"What did she say?"