THE PRINTER FINALLY whirred to life. Stubbs, who was already in a foul mood, could only hope it wouldn’t take as long to print a page as it had taken to start up. One thing she really didn’t enjoy was waiting. Sluggish printers that refused to connect to her computer were another.
A third one, since she was on a roll now, was musicals. She’d never been able to understand why actors should suddenly break into mediocre song and attempt to dance. And the songs were hardly ever good enough. No, if she wanted to see a film, she went to the cinema or watched TV. If she felt like listening to music, she put on a record. Mixing the two was like mixing ketchup and trivets.
Rocket wasn’t a favourite of hers either. She honestly couldn’t fathom how something as bad and foul-tasting as rocket could still be in vogue. It had come out of nowhere, and suddenly every little café with pretensions had to put rocket in everything. In their burgers, on their sandwiches and, of course, in all their salads. For a while, she’d felt like she couldn’t even order a cup of coffee without it being garnished with that unappetizing weed.
But working late was unquestionably number one on the list of things she never wanted to have to endure, and yet here she was, doing just that for the second night in a row. That had soured her mood more than anything, and as she waited for the printer, she mused that Mona-Jill was in fact directly to blame for introducing all of those evils into her life that night.
Her plan had been to scan the map she’d found in Elvin’s boat using the multifunction printer, immediately after dinner. But when she’d discovered the meatballs on her plate were full of finely chopped rocket, she’d asked Mona-Jill how she could possibly have forgotten that the diabolical little leaves were definitely not her thing.
During the discussion that followed, it turned out Mona-Jill hadn’t forgotten. On the contrary, she’d deliberately chopped up the spiky abominations and mixed them into the mince in an attempt to trick her into realizing how tasty rocket actually was. At that point, the fight had been unavoidable, and she’d said a number of things she’d wanted to take back and for which she’d apologized as soon as the dust had settled.
But the mood had still been tense when they cleared the table after dinner and when Mona-Jill had suggested they watch Mamma Mia! – because it was a feel-good film that made people happy – she’d felt too guilty to say no. After all, Mona-Jill had opened up her home to her, not the other way around.
Two hideous hours later, she’d finally been able to lay a blanket over Mona-Jill, who had fallen asleep on the sofa, and sit down in front of her computer to try to get the bloody printer started. She preferred not to think about how much time she’d lost. But at least the map had been scanned and was filling the screen in front of her.
That it was a plot of land had been clear from the first. The question was where it was located. There were no names or property details to guide her. The only hint was a handful of numbers on the various buildings and Elvin’s virtually indecipherable notes. But she wasn’t going to give up until she’d zoomed in and scrutinized every millimetre as though it were a melanoma.
Whether the plot was in any way connected to Molander was anyone’s guess. But why else would Elvin have been interested in it? A search of the Property Register had only returned one hit – for his house in Ramlösa – and repeating the search with Gertrud’s name hadn’t returned any hits at all, so whoever was listed as the owner, it wasn’t Molander.
It was a very unusual plot of land, that much she could tell. A number of blue patches indicated some kind of water reservoirs. Or maybe ponds, which was peculiar in itself, and judging from the rectangular shapes, they seemed man-made, to boot. As though they were part of a water treatment plant, or maybe some kind of fishery…
She had an idea and to check that she’d remembered correctly, she took out the set of keys Fabian had given her. It contained seven keys, and on one of the two marked with white tape, there was a hand-drawn fish. Maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe she was on to something.
A blue line meandered along the bottom of the map. It was probably some kind of river or stream, and according to the map it formed the southern boundary of the property. A red four-lane road ran along the top of the map, cut through in the upper right corner by a grey and white line that looked like railroad tracks.
The plot was, in other words, bordered by a stream, train tracks and a motorway. There must be a thousand plots of land of that description, and she could spend the rest of her professional life searching for the right one without any guarantee she’d ever find it.
Her only chance was to make some educated guesses. Like, for example, that it was in Skåne. Molander was a dyed-in-the-wool Scanian and had even, as a young man, talked about Skåne seceding from Sweden.
There were quite a lot of streams and rivers in Skåne, Kävlinge and Helge rivers being the major ones. But if it was in the vicinity of Helsingborg, it had to be Rå river. It was eighteen and a half miles long and emptied into the Råå Marina.
She went to Google Maps, zoomed in on Rå river and started following it as it wound its way east through Skåne.
She had always felt that Stockholm, with its archipelago of thousands of islands, was by far the most beautiful part of Sweden, and she probably still did. But north-west Skåne was a close…
She sat up with a start, her eyes fixed on a number of green patches on Google’s satellite image. It would have been easy to dismiss them as vegetation and keep scrolling east. But the rectangular green formations had caught her eye, and when she zoomed in, she could clearly see that they were, indeed, ponds. Algae green, overgrown ponds near enough identical to the ones marked in blue on Elvin’s map.
What’s more, they were located on a plot of land that, according to Google Maps, was wedged in between a four-lane motorway by the name of Rausvägen, Rå river and the tracks of the local commuter train.