“No.”
“Did you kill his brother, Mikael Söderström?”
“No.”
“Did you cause the landslide on Christmas Day of 1999?”
“Christ! No!” Jakob was breathing hard. “No,” he said again, his voice fainter this time.
“So what is going on here? If you want to go home,” he added, more as a statement of fact than part of any particular strategy, “you need to help me out first.”
Jakob looked helpless.
“It wasn’t me. None of that was me. I haven’t seen that spade in, I don’t know, ages. I didn’t even recognize it at first, that it used to belong to us. And as for the shirt,” he continued, “I just didn’t know what to do with it.”
“Why didn’t you hand it over to us?”
“Because I didn’t know what to say. That I found it? And what would have happened if you didn’t believe me? Everyone knows Killian killed Mikael. The landslide, that was Sten. I thought that was all pretty well settled. So what did the shirt matter? It was all so chaotic afterwards, it took a long time before I even thought about it again.”
“What?”
Jakob looked confused. “What, which part?”
“It took a long time before you thought about what again?”
“The shirt. It was like everything else blocked it out.”
“But you still had it?”
“I found it in the basement. So, yeah, I still had it.”
“I’ve been told that Filip didn’t wear flannels very often,” Vidar said slowly. “Isn’t that true?”
“I don’t remember.”
“But if it is true, then isn’t it unlikely for the shirt to be his?”
Jakob shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he borrowed it from someone.”
“But you wore flannels like this one. Right?”
Jakob sat up straighter.
“Sometimes,” he said, and then, each word growing heavier, as if he wanted to make them mean more than they did: “And so did tons of other people.”
“But this one’s not yours?”
Jakob’s eyes bored into him. “No. It’s not mine.”
Vidar observed him for a long moment.
“I’m going to ask a colleague to go home with you and pick up the shirt.”
For the first time, Vidar’s voice was cold as ice.
82
After his walk with Felicia, Sander visited his parents. They were old now, over seventy, and they’d been retired for several years. They still lived in his childhood home.
