Wikman’s message was brief but informative: “Print on the pine branch belongs to Sam Rothe. Blood and tissue fragments have been sent for analysis.”
Sammy was divided. In a way a dead perpetrator was nice. There’s less paperwork was his immediate, frivolous thought, but at the same time it was a shame that Sam Rothe’s posthumous reputation was that of a murderer. It also gave support to the village’s perception that he’d been a failed person, and also reduced Rönn’s and Sanberg’s crime of hanging the rabbit man from a beam. They only demanded just revenge, some would surely think.
Tilltorp would become a bit poorer without the rabbit man, it struck Sammy, a quality lost. There should always be eccentrics, those who deviated, walked to the side, who asserted their right to live a different life. They could be called village idiots or fools, but they gave the lives of the well-adjusted a necessary thorn. Wasn’t Bertil Efraimsson also a village idiot in his own way? Both had also shown their generosity by giving the laughing Hazara a sanctuary.
Perhaps Andreas Mattsson would get his passport back and in two weeks be sitting on a plane to Southeast Asia, if he would not now be indicted for obstructing a homicide investigation. He had actually kept his mouth shut about his brother’s killer. That in itself that was such strange behavior that with the help of capable lawyering maybe he could wriggle out of an indictment.
Hamra Farm & Contracting AB would never be what it had been. What would Waldemar Mattsson do? To an outsider his striving now stood out as meaningless, something that Allan Sanberg had mentioned in passing. “Like my life,” he’d added.
It’s hate that grinds down all efforts; to get to breed rabbits and other small animals in peace on an isolated smallholding in a backwater, or build a prosperous farm and haulage company, or as in Allan Sanberg’s case be a small cog in the construction of society that assumes a kind of baton passed on by one generation to the next.
Hate crushes both the one who hates and the one who is rejected, scorned and despised.
Sammy sat in his office, which was a sanctuary in the chaos that had erupted, even if he kept the door open in order to catch some of what was happening.
The bombers were in the city! The siege of Molngatan and Gränby had started. Once again Ann Lindell had submitted the decisive information. How the hell did she manage? He could picture her rocking in her hammock in her rural idyll.
From there his thoughts went to Angelika. It’s over, he’d repeated however many times the past few days, and nothing had happened to refute that assertion. On the contrary, Angelika had sounded even harsher the last time they talked. She was in no hurry to come back. Does she have someone else? The thought struck Sammy again, but he immediately dismissed it. She would have told him; she was that honest.
“Okay,” Sammy said out loud. “Let it be that way.” He’d gotten used to the idea. In any event during the day. At night she rode him like before. It felt like mockery. For the first time since his teens he’d had emission in his sleep. That made him furious in the night. “Danish bitch!”
The cautious knocking on the doorpost made him start. It was Bodin. “Stolpe is worse,” he said. “Complications, they say.”
“What kind of complications?”
Bodin shrugged.
“Is he dying?”
“I’m sure he will, but the question is when.”
Bodin’s comment brought Sammy to his feet. He rounded the desk and had time to perceive his colleague’s terrified expression before Sammy slammed the door right in his nose. It was simply the case that at that moment he didn’t want to have any colleagues at all, either living or dead.