Unspoken by Mari Jungstedt Page B

by the way. I think he just moved here recently. Bengt has been talking about him lately. I think he lives on Styrmansgatan.”
    They said good-bye to Doris Johnsson, who promised to call as soon as she heard anything from her son.
    With the information about the track winnings, they now had a clear motive for the murder.
    Knutas had brought along a packet of Danish open-faced sandwiches for lunch. His father-in-law had recently paid them a visit and delighted the whole family with the delicacies he had brought from Denmark. The three slices of dark rye bread each had a different kind of lunch meat: liver sausage topped with a piece of pickled squash; sliced meatballs with pickled beets; and his favorite, Danish sausage roll. And an ice-cold beer to go with this glorious repast.
    He was interrupted by a knock on the door. Norrby stuck his head inside.
    “Do you have a minute?”
    “Of course.”
    Norrby folded his nearly six-foot-two frame into one of the visitor chairs in Knutas’s office.
    “I’ve been talking to one of the neighbors, who had something interesting to say.”
    “Let’s hear it.”
    “Anna Larsson is an elderly woman who lives in the apartment above Dahlström’s. On Monday night around ten thirty she heard Flash go out. He was wearing his old slippers, which made a special sound when he walked.”
    Knutas frowned. “How could she hear that from inside her apartment?”
    “I know, that’s something you might well ask, but it so happened that her cat was suffering from diarrhea.”
    “So?”
    “Anna Larsson lives alone, and she doesn’t have a balcony. She was just about to go to bed when her cat shit on the floor. It smelled so bad that she didn’t want to have the garbage bag containing the shit in her apartment. She had already put on her nightgown and didn’t want to go downstairs to the trash cans, for fear of running into one of her neighbors. So she put the bag on the landing outside her door for the time being. She thought that nobody would notice if she tossed it out first thing in the morning.”
    “Get to the point,” said Knutas impatiently. Norrby’s tendency to present too many details was sometimes annoying.
    “Well, at the very moment that she opens her door, she hears Dahlström coming out wearing his slippers. He locks his door and goes downstairs to the basement.”
    “Okay,” said Knutas, tapping his pipe on the table.
    “Mrs Larsson doesn’t think any more about it. She goes to bed and falls asleep. In the middle of the night she’s awakened by her cat meowing. This time the cat has made a mess on the floor of her bedroom. That animal had a really bad stomachache.”
    “Hmm.”
    “She gets out of bed and cleans up everything. She now has another bag of cat shit that has to be put outside on the landing. When she opens the door, someone comes in the entrance one floor down and stops at Dahlström’s door. But this time she doesn’t hear Dahlström’s shuffling slippers; this person is wearing real shoes. She’s curious, so she stands there listening. The stranger doesn’t ring the doorbell but the door opens and the person goes inside, and she doesn’t hear any voices.”
    Now Knutas’s interest was aroused. His pipe froze in midair.
    “Then what happened?”
    “Then everything was quiet. Not a sound.”
    “Did she have the impression that someone had opened Dahlström’s door from the inside? Or did the person outside open it?”
    “She thinks that the person outside opened it.”
    “Why didn’t she tell us about this earlier?”
    “She was interviewed on the evening when Dahlström’s body was found. She says that she felt stressed and upset, so she mentioned only that she had heard him go down to the basement. Afterward I got to wondering how she could be so sure about it. That’s why I went back to talk to her again.”
    “Good job,” Knutas said. “It might have been the killer that she heard, but it could just as well have been Dahlström