Free The Viper by Hakan Ostlundh Page A

their visit, the sensitive version, but was spared the trouble of having to try and make it incomprehensible to a three-year-old.
    They were sitting crammed into an office at the Department of Childcare and Education at Söderport. Fredrik had seen that office innumerable times before, both at public agencies as well as in the private sector: about seventy square feet, a desk in birch veneer, a glass wall hung with thin cotton curtains looking out on the corridor. It could have been his own office at the police station.
    “Rune Traneus seems convinced that Anders is the dead man in the house. Do you have any idea why he might think that?”
    Inger Traneus lowered her head and looked down at her lap. Fredrik thought he glimpsed a vague smile. She shook her head, then looked up at them with a gaze that was somewhere else, tired, guarded.
    “Why don’t you ask him?”
    “We already have,” said Fredrik, “but now we’re asking what you think?”
    His natural impulse was to be more open and forthright, show more empathy, but if things were as Gustav had suggested, that the answers were to be found within the family, it was better not to reveal more than was necessary.
    “I was together with Anders for twenty-two years. We were married and lived under the same roof for twenty of those. But I never got to know him especially well. I thought I knew him, but then I discovered that I didn’t know him at all.”
    There was that smile again, only it wasn’t so much a smile as a strained grimace.
    “I’m not sure I understand,” said Fredrik honestly.
    “Well, what is there to understand?” said Inger Traneus inwardly and stretched her neck. “I don’t understand myself.”
    Fredrik decided to wait her out. The hard drive under the table started whirring. The sound was drowned out a moment later by a loud laugh out in the corridor, Inger’s colleagues on their way out to lunch.
    “If it is Anders lying … If it is him, then it’s only logical that Kristina became the death of him. And he of her. Romantic, huh?” she said and moved her gaze back and forth between Fredrik and Gustav.
    That didn’t make things any clearer for Fredrik, and he was just about to ask what there was between Kristina Traneus and Anders when Inger’s head fell forward again, and she started weeping.
    She held her thumb and forefinger above her eyebrows as if she wanted to press back her tears. The long ponytail slid slowly down the front of her shoulder, strands of hair getting caught in her woolen sweater along the way.
    “We don’t know for certain,” said Fredrik. “It’s very possible that we’ve upset you completely unnecessarily.”
    They could just as well do this later, just concentrate on what was most important: finding out who it was lying sliced to pieces on the living room floor at Kristina and Arvid Traneus’s house.
    “We’re heading back south. If you’d like we can give you a ride home?”
    She shook her head.
    “It’s not Anders I’m crying about. It’s all those wasted years. How you can waste your life so single-mindedly on someone who doesn’t want you?”
    They fell silent. What can you say? Fredrik wished that he could say something. Instead it was Gustav who broke through the gloom.
    “It’s better at least than single-mindedly staying together with someone you don’t want.”
    Fredrik glanced at his colleague out of the corner of his eye. Sometimes he could surprise you. Inger Traneus also looked at Gustav and gave a little smile, a real one this time. Then she got up, turned her back to them, and wiped her tears.
    “God how pathetic,” she mumbled. “Me, that is,” she added over her shoulder, in Gustav’s direction.
    “Our main reason for coming here was actually to ask you whether Anders has any distinguishing marks or scars, that could help us to identify him. If it is him.”
    She needed to think about it for a moment.
    “He’s got a brownish-red birthmark just above his right knee,