Closed Circles (Sandhamn Murders Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

doing?”
    Thomas looked up to find one of his neighbors from Harö. Hasse Pettersson was seventy years old, a weather-beaten man who spent most of his postretirement time on Harö, where he’d been born and raised. His worn jeans were oil stained on one thigh. Pettersson knew everything worth knowing about engines. He was the man to turn to in any emergency and a neighborhood guru any time something needed fixing. All work done under the table, of course.
    “Hey, there, Pettersson. How are you doing?” Thomas stood up to shake hands.
    “Just fine. Won’t you be going on vacation soon? I ran into your father a few days ago, and he said you were planning to come out.”
    “Not yet.” Thomas shook his head. “I’m on my way to Sandhamn right now. On the job. You probably heard about the shooting yesterday? We’re heading out to talk to some of the people there.”
    “The great lawyer, Oscar Juliander.” Pettersson practically spat out the name. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s no great loss. He was an ugly bastard, that Juliander.”
    Pettersson nodded emphatically as he packed some snuff under his lip and sat down at their table, holding his cup of coffee.
    “You’ve met him?” Margit asked.
    “Many times. He tried to cheat me out of a lot of money once.”
    As he put his snuff tin into his back pocket, Pettersson snorted to show his displeasure. His right forefinger was stained from nicotine, and a black half-moon of snuff lined his fingernail.
    “How’d he try to do that?” said Margit.
    “He wanted to buy a piece of property of mine on Runmarö. There were building restrictions on it because of beach protection, so it wasn’t that valuable. He got in touch and offered next to nothing.”
    “Did he say why?”
    “He said he wanted it for timber.”
    “What’s that? A tree farm?” Margit asked.
    “No, it’s a piece of property where you can haul away fallen trees and stuff,” Thomas explained. “But you can’t build any kind of structure on it, not even a shed.”
    “So what happened?” Margit asked.
    “Let me tell you! It turned out that the district was thinking of redesignating some property as buildable after all because somebody complained to the European Union. If I understand correctly, some stubborn devil wasn’t content to own beachfront property if he couldn’t build on it.”
    “The district office probably wasn’t expecting that,” Thomas said.
    Pettersson dried his mouth with the back of his hand as he shook his head.
    “With permission to build, that property would be worth a few million, not the measly one hundred and fifty thousand Juliander offered.”
    He turned in his seat and spit the wad of snuff into a nearby garbage can. Without blinking, he pulled out his tin and stuffed another wad behind his lip, then slurped down the last of his coffee.
    “So, did you sell it to him?” asked Thomas.
    A smile of contentment spread over Pettersson’s face.
    “I had intended to, but my boy thought there was something fishy about the whole deal.”
    “I can see why,” said Margit.
    “Yep.” Pettersson chuckled. “Why in the world would a city lawyer want to pick up fallen wood? My boy was suspicious, so he checked with a friend down at the district office, who clued him in. After that I lost interest in selling to Mr. Big Shot Lawyer.”
    “Did he give up?”
    Pettersson shook his head.
    “Oh, no, he tried all kinds of tricks. He said we shook hands on it and claimed we had an oral agreement just as binding as a written contract. Finally he upped his offer to half a million. But I told him to stick his offer where the sun don’t shine. I didn’t hear from him again.”
    “And then he was shot,” Margit said.
    The old man flinched.
    “Perhaps he tried to cheat somebody else, somebody who wasn’t as forgiving as me.”
    “Well, here we are again,” Margit said. They’d arrived at Sandhamn and were walking down the gangway at the Steam Boat Dock. “Perhaps we