The Hidden Child

Chapter 11

Gosta sighed deeply. Summer was about to be replaced by autumn, and in practical terms this meant that his rounds of golf would soon be drastically curtailed. It was still quite warm, and in theory he had about a month’s worth of playing. But he knew from bitter experience how it would go. A couple of games would be rained out. Another couple would be cancelled due to thunderstorms. And then from one day to the next the temperature would plunge from pleasant to intolerable. That was the disadvantage of living in Sweden. And he couldn’t see too many advantages that made up for it, aside from the availability of surstromming, the fermented Baltic herring that was his favourite delicacy. But if he moved abroad he could just take a couple of jars in his suitcase. Then he’d have the best of both worlds.

At least things were calm at the police station. Mellberg was out taking Ernst for a walk, and Martin and Paula had gone to Grebbestad to interview Frans Ringholm. Gosta wondered again why the name seemed so familiar, and to his great relief, something clicked in his brain. He snatched up that day’s edition of Bohuslaningen from his desk and looked through it until he triumphantly set his finger on the name – Kjell Ringholm. The newspaper’s irascible columnist was the scourge of local politicians and anyone else in power. Could be a coincidence, but it wasn’t a common surname. Frans’s son perhaps? Gosta filed away the information in his mind, in case it might prove useful later on.

For the moment, he had more pressing things to deal with. He sighed again. Over the years he’d made sighing into an art form. Maybe he should wait until Martin came back, that way he’d be able to share the workload. Better still, it would give him an hour to himself, maybe two if Martin and Paula decided to stop for lunch before heading back to the station.

But on second thought he decided it might be better to get it out of the way instead of having it hanging over him. Gosta grabbed his jacket, told Annika where he was off to, took one of the cars from the garage, and headed for Fjallbacka.

Not until he rang the doorbell did it occur to him what a stupid decision he’d made. It was just past noon: the boys would be in school. He was just about to leave when the door opened and a snuffling Adam appeared, his nose red and his eyes glazed.

‘Are you sick?’ Gosta asked.

The boy nodded, and as if corroboration were necessary, he sneezed loudly and then blew his nose on the handkerchief he was holding. ‘I’ve got a cold,’ he said, in a voice that clearly demonstrated how stuffed up his nose was.

‘May I come in?’

Adam stepped aside. ‘Okay, but it’s at your own risk,’ he said, sneezing again.

Gosta felt a light shower of virus-bearing saliva strike his hand, which he calmly wiped on the sleeve of his shirt. A couple of days sick leave wouldn’t be so bad. He’d gladly suffer a runny nose if he could stretch out on the sofa at home and watch a DVD of the latest Masters tournament. He had been waiting for a chance to study Tiger’s swing in slow motion.

‘Babba isn’t ’obe,’ Adam snuffled.

Gosta frowned as he followed the boy into the kitchen. Then he worked it out. Adam must have meant to say ‘Mamma isn’t home.’ It crossed Gosta’s mind that he shouldn’t really be interviewing a minor without a legal guardian present, but he quickly dismissed the thought. Had Ernst been here, he would have given Gosta his full support – as in Ernst his former colleague, rather than the dog. Gosta chuckled at that, drawing a puzzled look from Adam.

They sat down at the kitchen table, which still bore traces of that morning’s breakfast: breadcrumbs, dabs of butter, and a little puddle of O’Boy chocolate drink.

‘So,’ said Gosta, drumming his fingers on the table and instantly regretting it when his fingers came away covered in sticky crumbs. He wiped them on his trousers and started again.

‘So. How… are you taking this whole thing?’ The question sounded odd even to him. He wasn’t particularly good at talking with kids or with so-called traumatized people. Not that he really went along with any of that nonsense. Good Lord, the old man was dead when they found him, so how bad could it have been? He’d seen a few stiffs in his years on the force, and it had never made him feel traumatized.

Adam blew his nose and then straightened his shoulders. ‘Er, okay, I suppose. Everybody at school thinks it’s cool.’

‘How did the two of you happen to go there in the first place?’

‘It was Mattias’s idea.’ Adam mumbled the name, but by now Gosta was used to the way the boy’s cold was affecting his speech, and he could decipher what he said.

‘Everybody around here knows that those old guys are weirdos who are obsessed with World War II and stuff like that, and somebody at school said they had a load of cool stuff at their house, so Mattias thought we should go in and check it out…’ His torrent of words was suddenly cut off by such a big sneeze that Gosta actually jumped.

‘So it was Mattias who thought you should break in?’ said Gosta, giving Adam a stern look.

‘I don’t know if I’d call it “breaking in”…’ Adam squirmed. ‘We weren’t going to steal anything, we just wanted to take a look. And we thought they were both away, so they probably wouldn’t even notice that we’d been there.’

‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it,’ said Gosta. ‘Had you ever been inside their house before?’

‘No, word of honour,’ said Adam earnestly. ‘That was the first time we went there.’

‘I’m going to need to take your fingerprints so I can verify what you’re telling me. And so we can rule out your prints. Do you have a problem with that?’

‘No, not at all,’ said Adam, his eyes shining. ‘I always watch CSI. I know how important that is – to rule someone out. And then they put all the fingerprints in the computer to find out who else has been inside.’

‘Exactly. That’s exactly how we work,’ said Gosta with a solemn expression. Inside, he was having a good laugh. Put all the fingerprints in the computer. Oh, sure.

He got out the equipment he needed to take Adam’s fingerprints: an ink pad and a card with ten squares in which he carefully pressed the boy’s fingers, one after the other.

‘That’s it,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘We’re done.’

‘Do you scan them in, or how do you do it?’ asked Adam.

‘Right, we scan them in,’ said Gosta, ‘and then we run them through the database you were talking about. We have every Swedish citizen over eighteen in the database. And a number of foreigners too. Via Interpol, you know. We’re connected with them. Interpol, I mean. Via a direct link. And with the FBI and CIA, too.’

‘Awesome!’ said Adam, looking at Gosta with admiration.

Gosta laughed all the way back to Tanumshede.

He set the table with great care, using the yellow tablecloth that he knew Britta liked so much. The white china with the raised pattern. The candleholders they’d received as a wedding gift. And a few flowers in a vase. No matter what the time of year, Britta had always had flowers in the house. She was a regular customer at the florist’s, or at least she used to be. These days it was usually Herman who bought the flowers. He wanted everything to be the way it had always been. Maybe if everything around her remained unchanged the downward spiral might at least be slowed, even if it couldn’t be stopped altogether.

The worst was in the beginning. Before they received the diagnosis. Britta had always been so meticulous about things. None of the family could understand why she suddenly couldn’t find her car keys, or why she would call a grandchild by the wrong name, or find it impossible to remember the phone numbers of friends she’d known most of her life. They’d blamed it on fatigue and stress. She’d started taking multivitamins and drinking Blutsaft, thinking it would combat whatever nutritional deficiency she was suffering from. But there came a point when they could no longer close their eyes to the fact that something was seriously wrong.