The Viper by Hakan Ostlundh Page B

easier for someone from Stockholm to feel at home in Amsterdam, Berlin, or Copenhagen than in Visby. Here there were so many old bonds between people. It was as if everything was written in stone and to make so much as a single scratch on your own was almost impossible. Younger people were a little easier to deal with, but she was thirty-four now and couldn’t run around like some overage groupie among twenty-seven-year-olds forever.
    She couldn’t claim that life in the big city was better than in a small town, but life in Stockholm was different from life in Visby, and it was the kind of different that she was used to. Maybe it was too late to learn new tricks.
    She was woken from her thoughts by Fredrik suddenly mumbling off a long string of words.
    “What?” said Sara without thinking.
    The words were disjointed, didn’t make any sense. Was it even an attempt to say anything coherent?
    She got no answer to her “What?”
    Just a moment ago it had felt so natural to sit down beside the bed and speak to him, but now that it was just the two of them in the room she felt unsure. The situation had become so intimate all of a sudden.
    For a moment she had almost regretted offering to sit alone with Fredrik for a while so Ninni could go down and get a cup of coffee in the cafeteria or a breath of fresh air, or whatever she wanted to do. After Fredrik’s, well, what would you even call it … fling … with Eva Karlén, it wouldn’t be strange if Ninni felt a little uncomfortable with his female colleagues. But apparently Ninni could tell the difference between apples and oranges, because she had just nodded and smiled gratefully.
    Sara had of course been forced to lie to her, but it was the same white lie that she had told everyone else, except for Göran Eide, and wasn’t something that weighed on her conscience.

 
    10.
    Gustav drove while Fredrik sat in the backseat next to the previously raving man whom they had by now managed to identify as Rune Traneus. They were on their way over to see one of Rune’s grandchildren, Sofia Traneus-Helin. She lived in town, Visby that is, in an apartment in Gråbo.
    Rune Traneus sat silently next to Fredrik in the backseat hanging his head and staring at his hands that lay cupped in each other in his lap. He was as glum and inert now as he had been out of control just a short time ago.
    Fredrik felt a sense of panic rising within him as he thought about what he would say to Sofia Traneus. Almost worse than having to notify someone of the death of a loved one, was having to inform someone that their father might be dead, but that they didn’t know for sure.
    Of course he couldn’t do that. He would have to proceed on the basis of Rune’s reaction. They had found a dead man that her grandfather for some reason suspected was his son, Sofia’s father. No, that was no good, either. And then there was the car, of course. They had run a check on the plates and it was true, it belonged to Anders Traneus.
    “What was it that made you go out there?” Fredrik tried asking him.
    Rune Traneus didn’t respond.
    “I mean, how could you be so sure that you would find your son there?”
    Silence. Had he even heard the question? He seemed to be somewhere else entirely.
    They reached Visby, turned off toward Gråbo between the ICA supermarket and the Sibylla hamburger grill and stopped outside one of the pastel-checkered fifties row houses on Allégatan. Across the street stood a long string of redbrick houses, all identical.
    Fredrik had heard Visby residents say that “once you end up in Gråbo, you never get out” and then complain about how far away it was from the center. It was true that it was a neighborhood you never went to unless you had a reason to go there, but it wasn’t more than a few extra minutes’ walk into town compared to Öster, for example, and as far as Fredrik could tell it looked pretty nice.
    But presumably it wasn’t the charming houses from the fifties, but