The effect was not pretty. Sylvia shrank, shriveling up right before her eyes. Once again Sylvia’s hot-tempered and slightly hysterical manner had provoked Irene to venture too far out on thin ice. Trying to smooth things over, she said, “It took several days for the identification. She was so badly burned. We got hold of the dental X rays and thanks to-”
“What was she doing at Berzeliigatan?”
Sylvia’s voice sounded slightly hollow and her eyes reflected outright terror. She was scared. That hadn’t been evident when her husband was murdered. But now she was scared to death, on the verge of panic. Irene tried to sound calm but still authoritative.
“We don’t know. It’s one of the questions I was thinking of asking you. First and foremost, we’d like to know where she got hold of the spare keys. If I understood you correctly, you didn’t know about this spare-key ring?”
“No, I didn’t know about any spare-key ring. Except for the one we have here.”
“We’ve discovered that the keys were made late this summer. Richard went to Mister Minit on Avenyn to have them made.”
Sylvia was breathing heavily. Her eyes glistened. She avoided looking at Irene now. Irene was even more convinced that Sylvia knew something or had her suspicions.
“I don’t know anything about those keys,” said Sylvia firmly. Her voice sounded steadier, but she had to press her hands together hard to prevent them from shaking.
Irene felt that she couldn’t let Sylvia go yet. There was something here. She decided to press her a little more and reformulated her question. “So you don’t have any idea what he wanted the keys for, or if he gave them to anyone else?”
“No.”
She was lying. She was lying! But Irene didn’t dare go out on the ice again. Not yet.
“The bomb that blew up the building detonated when Pirjo opened the outer door to your husband’s office. She opened the door using the key ring. We found her behind the door,” she said in a neutral tone.
“But the papers talked about a missing young man!”
“That’s correct. He was found yesterday, a little farther up in the remains of the building. Two people died in the fire.”
Sylvia got up from the sofa and started pacing aimlessly around the room. She wrung her hands and sighed quietly. She was incredibly shaken, Irene could see that. But why? If she knew who had the keys, why wouldn’t she speak? Irene tried again.
“You don’t have the slightest suspicion who might have received those keys?”
“No, I told you that!”
The ice was creaking and cracking. Best to look for less dangerous areas.
“Did you know any of the other tenants in the building on Berzeliigatan?”
She shook her head in reply.
“Do you recognize the name Bo-Ivar, or Bobo, Torsson?”
Sylvia frowned and actually seemed to think about it.
“The name sounds familiar. Wait. . he was the photographer who rented the apartment above Richard’s. He’s one of Charlotte’s old acquaintances.”
Irene was so dumbfounded that she almost lost her composure. But she managed to assume a nearly neutral tone of voice when she asked, “An old acquaintance? What do you mean?”
“She worked for him as a photo model. It didn’t amount to much, that modeling. Nothing Charlotte undertakes is ever successful.”
“Did Torsson already have his photo studio on Berzeliigatan when Charlotte was working for him?”
“No. She recommended him to Richard. Richard thought it would be practical to have the same tenant in both apartments.”
“When was this?”
“Don’t know. Maybe three years ago.” Sylvia wrapped her arms around herself, hunching up her shoulders as if she were freezing. But she seemed distracted when the topic of Bobo Torsson was discussed. Her thoughts were already moving in some other direction.
Irene tried again. “Does the name Lasse ‘Shorty’ Johannesson mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“A huge guy around thirty-five.”
“No.”
Absentmindedly, Sylvia gathered up some fallen petals from a purple chrysanthemum that had dropped onto the dusty coffee table. Irritated, she swept the pile up and then seemed to forget both the petals and Irene at the same moment. Her shining eyes didn’t seem to notice her surroundings as she sat gazing into her own abysses. Irene would have given a lot to know what she saw. But a glance at Sylvia’s face made her less sure that she wanted to see it herself. The discussion about the key ring had made Sylvia retreat within herself. Irene had to get her to come out again. What might tempt her to start talking? A vague hunch told Irene that money could always get Sylvia to talk. Wasn’t that what Valle Reuter had said?
“Well, Sylvia, that insurance you once told me about. .”
She left the sentence unfinished on purpose to see if Sylvia would bite. At first she seemed not to have heard, but after a while she turned her head and gave Irene an unexpectedly sharp look.
“Insurance? Did I mention the insurance to you?”
“Yes, when we spoke on the telephone the first time. When you were in the psychiatric ward.”
“I don’t remember that. Maybe I did. They put me on a lot of medication, and I have very dim memories of those first few days.”
She took a deep breath and to Irene’s relief sat down in one corner of the angular sofa. She kicked off her Birkenstocks and, tucking her legs beneath her, started chewing on her chipped nail again. In a normal tone she said, “The insurance. That was probably the only thing Richard ever did for Henrik’s and my benefit. He explained to me that it’s a sort of retirement annuity. After he turned sixty, he could retire anytime he wanted and draw an annual income of a million kronor for ten years. But it’s also life insurance. If Richard died, Henrik and I would receive the same sum over ten years, to be divided between us.”
“So the insurance falls due with a survivors’ benefit?”
“The same as most retirement annuities.”
Henrik and Sylvia would each receive half a million per year over the next ten years. People have been murdered for less. Added to the rest of the fortune, maybe Valle Reuter was on the right track. If only mother and son hadn’t been down on the street, surrounded by witnesses, when Richard fell. Irene decided to proceed cautiously.
“But the rest of your husband’s assets and fortune, who inherits all of that?”
Now Sylvia was utterly calm. She looked a bit like a small Siamese cat that has just swallowed a goldfish.
“I do. But it’s extremely complicated. The lawyers are busy making sense of it all. They say it could take a long time. But the insurance money will start being paid out next month, with this month’s payment retroactive.”
It had to be a hallucination, but Irene thought she heard a whirring sound as the wheels turned in her brain. The key ring was forbidden territory, but the money and Bobo Torsson had gone well. Should she continue with Bobo?
“Bobo Torsson is also dead. You may have read in today’s paper that he was murdered early Monday morning. He was blown up in his car.”
Sylvia gave her an uninterested look. “Blown up? No. I’m not reading the papers very carefully right now. I can’t face it. I have enough to think about with everything that’s happened.”
“Do you know if Bobo and Charlotte were still seeing each other?”
“No idea. Charlotte likes to go out and be part of the hip scene.”
“Does Henrik accompany her when she goes out and gets into the swing of things?”
Uh-oh, the ice was cracking again. Sylvia put her feet down on the carpet and gave Irene a measured look. Abruptly she said, “Henrik does not enjoy going out. Not after his illness, which I told you about.”
