The Dark Heart: A True Story of Greed, Murder, and an Unlikely Investigator by Joakim Palmkvist

Author:Joakim Palmkvist
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781503904804
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Published: 2018-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

14

SABOTAGE

The dog took off without warning from where Annika Karlsson was standing outside her garage. It made a beeline for the mailbox, where a car was just rolling away. The man behind the wheel had stopped to put a note of some kind into her mailbox. He was wearing gloves, which wouldn’t have been odd if he were out walking in the middle of winter. But it was early April 2014, and he was in a car.

Annika ran after the dog, primarily so it wouldn’t get lost in the woods or get injured attacking the car. The dog actually belonged to her sister; she was dog-sitting. The driver stopped when he noticed both dog and woman were chasing him.

The man behind the wheel was Martin Törnblad, who had been a neighbor of Annika’s for a long time. The Törnblad farm was several hundred yards away as the crow flies, but that was still next door in the countryside sense. Ställe Farm, where Martin was registered as residing at that point, was only about five hundred yards away.

Annika, for her part, lived at the end of a three-hundred-foot spur road off the road that led past both Ställe Farm and Mats Råberg’s farm, beyond which it wound through the fields on its way to Melby, Förlösa proper, and eventually, the city of Kalmar.

Martin’s seven-month-old son, Vince, was asleep in the passenger seat. For unknown reasons, Martin seemed noticeably discomfited by the unexpected meeting.

“I have welding burns on my hands, that’s why I’m wearing gloves,” he said, even though Annika hadn’t asked.

He came across as shamefaced, unfocused, and unsure of how to handle the situation, as though he had been caught red-handed at something. He then told her he had been out putting notes in several local mailboxes. Not everyone’s, but some people’s. He didn’t say what for, or what the notes were about.

Instead, Martin quickly launched into a tirade about how badly Sara and he were being treated by the world at large. Then he composed himself and reeled off what sounded like a well-rehearsed spiel, basically that everything was Mats Råberg’s fault and that the man had it out for Martin and Sara.

He told Annika that the Lundblad properties in Stigtomta had been burgled, for example. Mats’s farmhand was probably behind it, at his boss’s behest, Martin claimed. He continued to slander Mats, who up until Göran’s disappearance had rented land from the Lundblads for decades without a hitch.

Supposedly, Mats had deliberately knocked Martin and Sara’s mailbox over when he plowed the road last winter. On another occasion, Martin said, he filled their mailbox with manure. He had also reported the Törnblads for cruelty to animals and fed Sara’s horses some sort of concentrate to harm them. Moreover, he was secretly colluding with Göran’s guardian to secure unfair advantages. Or at least he had been until last autumn, when the most recent guardian had been appointed. This one, Martin noted, was less hostile and more accommodating and willing to compromise than the previous ones.

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