‘Besides, he hasn’t exactly been running around leaving prints everywhere,’ Molander said. ‘Only in the laundry room and at Evert Jonsson’s. If you don’t want to leave any DNA behind, you basically have to walk around in a diving suit.’
‘And another thing,’ Lilja continued. ‘If there’s no underlying motive, then why do it at all? And why the disparate methods and victims?’
‘If I had to guess, I’d say it’s part of a game.’
‘A game?’ Tuvesson turned to Molander.
‘Sure, why not?’ Molander shrugged.
‘But I don’t understand. What do you mean, a game?’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s just in it for the kicks, and the more varied the murders, the more thrilling. Right? For him, I mean.’ Molander was met by querying looks. ‘Whatever, I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘It was just a thought. I have nothing to back it up.’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘So, let’s move on.’
‘Yes, we have quite a few things left on the agenda,’ Klippan said. ‘And who knows. Maybe we’ll find some answers in here.’ He opened his laptop.
Fabian was surprised to find himself nodding. Not at Klippan, but at Molander, of all people. He’d managed to hit the nail on the head, but had almost immediately tried to back-pedal. As though he’d just realized he was the only member of the team who truly understood the perpetrator. Maybe he could even relate to him.
‘Klippan, what are you showing us?’ Tuvesson checked her watch.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?’ Klippan said, without attempting to hide his annoyance.
‘I’m sorry, forgotten what?’ Tuvesson said.
Klippan sighed. ‘That I’ve been going through every single CCTV tape from Ica Maxi from the week before the murder of Lennart Andersson and that I’m supposed to share my findings. You know this. I was supposed to do it yesterday, but Evert Jonsson got in the way, so I think we should get it over with right now.’
‘I understand, but I would still prefer if we could hold off until tomorrow, or at least later this afternoon. Because we have a few other things to discuss. Then I have to go see Högsell and let her know the charges against Eric Jacobsén and Assar Skanås need to be completely reconsidered.’
‘No, I’ve waited long enough. I think we should just get this done.’
‘Klippan, all due respect to you and your hard work, but I’ve decided that—’ Tuvesson was cut off by her phone. ‘This is Astrid, in the middle of a meeting. What’s this about?’
Fabian and the others watched Tuvesson grow increasingly pale as seconds turned to minutes. She said almost nothing at all until it was time to hang up.
‘He has struck again.’ She swallowed hard in an effort to maintain her calm. ‘The bastard has done it again.’
‘Oh my God.’ Lilja heaved a sigh. ‘Who’s the victim?’
‘Ester Landgren, the little girl you saved from Assar Skanås just a few days ago.’ Tuvesson was unable to hold back her tears.
‘What? What are you talking about?’ Lilja shook her head as though to convince herself she’d misheard. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes. I don’t know what to say.’
‘But why would he… What had she done to… I don’t understand.’
‘When did she die?’ Molander asked. ‘And how?’
‘From what I’m told, she’s been dead for hours.’ Tuvesson wiped away her tears and took a deep breath to compose herself. ‘Her parents only realized about an hour ago that she wasn’t asleep, she had drowned.’
‘Drowned?’ Lilja exclaimed. ‘What the fuck? She can’t have drowned in her own bed, can she?’
‘I know, but we have to wait and see what Flätan has to say. According to her parents, water came out of her mouth when they tried to wake her. And like you were saying, Fabian, this is too spectacular and different from the other murders for there not to be a connection.’
‘But? I don’t understand,’ Lilja said, fighting down her feelings. ‘Can someone tell me what Ester Landgren, an innocent little girl, has to do with our killer?’
‘Irene, I don’t know. That’s what we have to find out,’ Tuvesson replied. ‘All I know is that we have to catch this sick bastard before he kills anyone else. Ingvar, I want you to go over there and process the scene, and this time I assume I don’t have to remind you to cross-match whatever you find with what we already have.’
‘Of course.’ Molander immediately started to gather up his folders.
‘Irene, you talk to the parents, and Fabian, you keep on Flätan, even if he’s not done yet. Klippan, you’re in charge of knocking on doors and taking statements from the—’
‘No.’ Klippan shook his head.
‘What do you mean, no?’
‘I’m not going door to door. At least, not right this minute.’
‘Why not? What’s the matter with you?’
‘And the same goes for the rest of you. You’re all staying here until I’m—’
‘Bloody hell, Klippan!’ Tuvesson walked up to him and fixed him with a level gaze. ‘I’m in charge of this investigation!’
‘That may well be,’ retorted Klippan, his face bright red and his voice strained. ‘But right now, I don’t give a shit and I’m telling you and everyone else that you are going to stay seated for another fifteen minutes and you’re going to listen to what I have to say.’
15
HILLEVI STUBBS LAY on her back on the cabin sole in Elvin’s boat. She was only just five foot tall, and yet there was barely room for her, what with all the things her old friend Hugo Elvin had managed to cram into the small cabin.
Transporting the boat had been unexpectedly easy. The cradle had had enough air in its tyres, and she hadn’t found anything remotely close to a tracker on it or her Jeep. Even Mona-Jill, who was usually extremely curious, had accepted her explanation that an old friend’s boat was going to sit in the garden for a few weeks without too many nosy questions.
And now she was lying in the cabin, imbibing the clues, thoughts, evidence and ideas Elvin had collected. That was what she always did first when she arrived at a new crime scene. On the floor, in the middle of the room, flat on her back with her eyes closed or staring up at the ceiling. That way she could breathe the air and let the atmosphere and mood, which resided in the walls as much as in the furniture and knick-knacks, suffuse her senses.
Elvin’s boat was like a crime-scene concentrate, even though no crime had been committed on board. She had never seen so many clues, samples and notes in such a small space. There was probably more than enough evidence in here. The question was how they were going to find it among the white noise of irrelevant details before time ran out.
Molander was probably already plotting his next move against Fabian and they had to find enough to arrest him before he could act. Only Molander knew exactly how much time they had. A week, a few days or maybe just a few hours.
She got up and waited until she no longer felt dizzy, then slowly started to turn, round and round, letting her eyes rove up and down, scanning as much of the crowded cabin as possible.
Fabian had hypothesized that the Berlin boarding passes had been what pushed Molander into killing Elvin. She, for her part, wasn’t sure that would have been enough. Granted, it blew up Molander’s alibi. But it was hardly proof that he was guilty of murdering Inga Dahlberg. In the harsh light of a courtroom, it was very far from it indeed.
So Elvin must have found something else. Something absolutely watertight. It should be one of the last things he discovered before his death, since he hadn’t had time to show it to anyone else on the team or make sure Molander was arrested. It should follow that whatever it was would be sitting on top of one of the countless piles.
After turning around one last time, her eyes fell on a rolled-up sheet of paper next to a half-empty bottle of Explorer vodka. She pulled off the rubber band holding it together and unrolled it.
It was a printout of a map, clearly downlo
aded from the Land Registry’s website. There were no names on it, only a handful of symbols showing the positions of various buildings, property lines and a few indecipherable scribbles à la Elvin.
She decided to hold off on taking a closer look and instead turned her attention to the open shoebox next to her. In it lay a number of transparent plastic owls that Elvin, according to Fabian, had used to bug Molander’s home.
She picked up one of the owls and studied the hollow base Elvin had enlarged to fit a microphone, transmitter and battery. She recognized the Chinese surveillance equipment. It was the smallest on the market and had a range of a hundred feet, which meant there was a receiver with a SIM card somewhere near the house.
She put the owl back and pulled out some of the photographs piled next to the shoebox.
They all looked like they were from the same crime scene. A living room with watercolours on the wall, painted by someone who had taken one or at most two teach-yourself-to-paint courses, long rows of souvenirs on the mantelpiece and an old CRT TV in front of a leaded light window. Along one wall there was an oversized beige leather sofa, and on the floor next to the smoked-glass coffee table lay the victim, a woman.
Again, a woman.
Stubbs sighed and shook her head. As a younger woman, she hadn’t reflected much on that particular aspect; a victim was a victim. She was there to interpret the crime scene so her colleagues could identify and arrest the perpetrator. Who was almost always a man.
That the victims were almost always women whenever there was a close relationship between killer and victim was something she’d only woken up to in the past few years. The fact of the matter was that, in Sweden, every three weeks a woman was murdered by a close relative.
This particular woman looked about sixty years old. She was slightly overweight, and except for socks that covered her thick calves, she was naked. Next to her lay a ripped floral-print blouse, a denim skirt that had been cut open and a pair of torn knickers.
The insides of her thighs were dark from the blood that had gushed out onto the carpet beneath her, and protruding from her vagina was something that had to be a fire poker.
In a plastic folder marked The Vodka Murder sitting underneath the stack of photographs, she found the case file from back in April. The lead investigators had been Sverker ‘Klippan’ Holm and Irene Lilja and it didn’t seem related to any of the cases Fabian had mentioned.
The victim was Kerstin Öhman, who lived on Östra Storgatan in Munka-Ljungby, just outside Ängelholm, together with her husband, Conny Öhman.
According to the investigation, she had reported her husband to the police for assault several times and each time she had later changed her mind and retracted the accusation. But on the night of 5 April, things had clearly gone so far she hadn’t had time to report or retract.
Instead, Conny Öhman himself had called the police after he’d slept off his intoxication on the sofa. The forensic investigation found her blood on his hands and secretions from her vagina on his penis. On the whole, a fairly open-and-shut case that in today’s media world didn’t attract much attention.
Even so, Elvin had taken an interest for some reason, and unless she was mistaken about him, he’d based that on something more substantial than mere intuition.
Granted, Molander had been the one to conduct the crime scene investigation, but that was not to say he had committed the murder. Maybe his behaviour had made Elvin react.
That gave her an idea and she walked over to the box containing the contents of Elvin’s desk at work, found his diary for the present year and flipped to the first week of April.
The fifth had been a Thursday, and Elvin had tersely noted two times, 8.12 a.m. and 4.18 p.m., which, according to Fabian, corresponded to when Molander arrived at the station and when he left again.
The next day contained more information. He hadn’t arrived until 9.17 a.m., over an hour later than the day before. No second time had been logged, probably because Molander had been at the crime scene, working late. Instead, there was a single line of Elvin’s characteristic abbreviations.
Kerstin Ö, assau, rape, vodka murder, husb. Conny (?), Klipp, Lilj & M on it.
Nothing about the note stood out to her. But the smiley next to it did. There were other smileys here and there in the diary; they were one of the things Fabian had been unable to figure out. But the moment she lay eyes on it, she knew what it symbolized.
The smiley the day after the murder was so happy its mouth literally extended beyond its head.
Molander had, in other words, been in a good mood.
A remarkably good mood.
16
ESTER LANDGREN’S MURDER had changed everything. Having felt numb to and almost blasé about the evil they were dealing with, they were now once again in the same boat. The other murders notwithstanding, the killer had now crossed a line that had left even Molander shaken.
The atmosphere was tense and subdued at the same time, and everyone except Klippan looked like they wanted to leave so they could start the investigation. But no one said anything. They just sat there with their heads bowed, anaesthetizing themselves with their phones while Klippan worked on making his laptop communicate with the overhead projector.
No one counted the minutes, but everyone knew it took far too long for the device to finally flicker to life and project Klippan’s wallpaper – a picture of his dog, Einstein, chasing a tennis ball – on the wall.
‘Finally,’ Klippan said, wiping sweat from his brow. ‘Let’s go.’
‘A quick question before you get started.’ Molander checked his watch. ‘How long is this going to take? Don’t get worked up. I’m not leaving. But we’ve been here a while already, and I just want to let the lads know since they’re waiting in the van.’
‘It’ll take as long as it takes. So I would suggest we stop wasting everyone’s time.’ Klippan flashed Molander a smile and turned to the others. ‘As you all know, Lennart Andersson was stabbed to death in broad daylight on Saturday 16 June while he was working behind the meat counter at Ica Maxi out in Hyllinge.’
‘Please, there’s no need to cover things we all know,’ Lilja said.
‘I need to do what I need to do. No more, no less. So for everyone’s sake, why don’t you just let me finish. And I promise I’ll tell you when I’m done. Okay?’ Klippan looked at each one of them in turn and was met by stony silence. ‘Great, then maybe we can move on.’ He downed the last of his now-cold coffee. ‘Where was I?’
‘Andersson was stabbed to death at the meat counter,’ Lilja said, rolling her eyes.
‘Right, and we’ve all seen the CCTV footage showing that event once or twice. So what I’ve done is, I’ve gone through all the tapes from a week before, up until the murder itself. I’ve edited together a number of sequences showing people I feel are behaving suspiciously. But since we’re short on time, I’m happy to go straight to my main suspect.’
It took Fabian a second to realize where the vibration in his pocket was coming from, since his iPhone was sitting on the table in front of him. It was his old Nokia.
Klippan scrolled down to the file labelled Friday 15 June 2012 and started a video clip that showed a short man sauntering in through the entrance to Ica Maxi, from the simultaneous perspective of several CCTV cameras. He was wearing ragged jeans, dirty white trainers, a maroon zip-up hoodie with an Adidas logo and a baseball cap from Biltema pulled down over his eyes.
While Molander and the others watched as the man picked up a basket and moved further into the supermarket, Fabian pulled out the Nokia under the table and opened the text, which turned out to be from Gertrud Molander.
‘And what’s so suspicious about him?’ Tuvesson said, and instantly found herself on the receiving end of a glare from Klippan. ‘Seriously, what’s the matter with you? We have to be able to ask questions and discuss things. Otherwise this is completely pointless.’
‘I was under the impression we were in a hurry. But all rig
ht, far be it from me to be difficult. Let me explain.’
Hej Hjalmar! Thank you for remembering my birthday and I’m sorry for not getting back to you sooner. It would have been nice to meet for a cup of coffee and a catch-up. Do let me know the next time you’re braving the big city ;)
Gertrud
‘What first stood out to me was the way he moves through the shop,’ Klippan said.
‘What about it?’ Lilja studied the man, who was walking through the kitchen utensil aisle. ‘It looks normal to me.’
Was it an invitation or a no, thank you? Fabian didn’t know how to interpret Gertrud’s message, but still typed out a short reply under the table.
I’m actually going back to Helsingborg today, too, and I would be happy to renew the invitation for this afternoon instead. How does that sound?
‘I would say virtually every aspect of it,’ Klippan told Lilja. ‘Just look at the way he moves through the aisles. Then compare it to what other people do, and you’ll see that it’s completely unnatural.’
Thanks, but I’m afraid I’ve come down with a proper summer cold and I’m in bed with a fever, so I’ll have to take a rain check. But let’s talk again soon.
Gertrud was at the house. So he could pop over and try to persuade her to testify and offer her a hotel room until all of this was over.
‘Note the way he keeps his face hidden by continually looking down and turning his back,’ Klippan went on, as the video showed the man standing by the Tex-Mex aisle with his back to the camera. ‘See? It doesn’t matter where the camera is.’
‘Klippan, I think we get your point,’ Molander said. ‘Or what do you say, Fabian?’
‘Absolutely. I have no questions.’ He allowed himself a smile as he pushed the Nokia back into his pocket.
‘You don’t? That’s odd,’ Tuvesson said, ‘because I certainly do. Like, for instance, what makes you so sure this is our guy?’
X Ways to Die Page 8
