The concern that Knutas felt was mixed with tenderness. She always had to be so tough and strong. Now she’d finally been forced to give in. He felt like going home himself and pulling the covers over his head. The disappointing results of the search irked him. He cursed himself for allowing the Norrströms to get away.
He turned to his colleagues as he ran his hand through his hair and said wearily, ‘The Norrströms’ car was apparently just found at the airport car park. They checked in for the last flight to Stockholm this evening. Our efforts here seem to have been in vain.’
Maybe the couple’s phone call to Destination Gotland was just a diversionary tactic. Maybe they’d been checking all the possible ways to flee when they realized that the police were on Stefan Norrström’s trail. It was a bitter feeling to have been so close to catching them; now the police would have to leave the boat empty-handed. After a two-hour delay, it would now depart for Nynäshamn.
Somehow, the story had leaked out, and the usual band of journalists was waiting on the dock. They were hoping to get pictures of the arrested couple, but that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, the reporters showered the police with questions about the failed action. Knutas pushed his way through the crowd without even glancing at the journalists.
He couldn’t help thinking about what had gone wrong. Of course, he shouldn’t have staked everything on one effort; he should have had half the police officers go out to the airport, since that was the most likely escape option. The patrol officers had discovered too late that Stefan Norrström’s car was there and then sounded the alarm. Now Knutas could only hope that the police at Arlanda airport in Stockholm would confirm that they’d taken the couple into custody.
When Knutas got back to his office at police headquarters, his mobile rang. His pulse quickened.
‘Yes?’
His colleagues out at the airport reported, to his surprise, that Vera and Stefan Norrström never boarded the plane to Stockholm. After checking in, they had vanished without a trace.
Knutas swore, cursing himself again. Thoughts whirled through his head, but nothing made sense. Should he have stopped the ferry from leaving? Every nook and cranny had been searched, and yet maybe… At any rate, it was too late now to call the boat back. But to be on the safe side, he was thinking of contacting the Stockholm police, who could take in the Norrströms if, against all odds, it turned out that they were actually on board.
The possibility that they were still on Gotland sparked new hope in Knutas. His energy revived. He ordered a continued search of all ferries leaving Gotland the following morning and sent officers over to Visby airport. In co-operation with the NCP, the other Swedish airports and border stations were also alerted. An all-points bulletin was sent out to the entire country for Vera and Stefan Norrström, and the police also made a point of contacting taxi and bus drivers. Since Vera was in her ninth month of pregnancy, all the hospital emergency rooms and maternity clinics were contacted as well. Extreme stress might send her into labour.
Maybe there was still a chance of catching Stefan Norrström. As long as there were actions to take and information to collect, Knutas had no intention of going home. Fatigue washed over him in waves, but he managed to keep it at bay with coffee and an occasional puff on his pipe.
He opened the window. Stood there, exhaling smoke. Stared out into the Visby night, pondering his failure. Had he been blind? Karin had discovered how everything fitted together during her visit to Gotska Sandön. Shouldn’t he have been able to work things out earlier? The police had made a list of all the Russians living on Gotland. On the other hand, it hadn’t been easy to discover Vera Norrström’s Russian heritage. She was from Germany, after all, and she had a Swedish surname.
He should go home. They could just as easily reach him there if anything happened, but he didn’t want to leave. Something was bothering him. He put out his pipe and went back to his desk, where he randomly picked up a document from the investigation and began wracking his brain, trying to work out what he had missed.
At two in the morning, he sat up with a jolt. He must have dozed off in his chair, but he was suddenly wide awake when he realized that the phone was ringing. His heart pounded as he reached for the receiver.
‘Hi, this is Eva Dahlberg, the reception manager for Destination Gotland. We met earlier when you were over here searching the ship.’
‘Yes?’
‘I apologize for ringing in the middle of the night like this, but you gave me your card, and I think I may have something important to tell you. Weren’t you looking for a pregnant woman?’
‘Yes, that’s correct.’
‘Well, the cleaners have found something that looks like a placenta in a waste basket near one of the exits on the ship. It was wrapped in a plastic bag.’
Knutas felt his blood turn cold.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Well, I’ve had seven children, and I really think it does look like a placenta.’
‘OK.’
Knutas quickly considered what to do next. He had to come up with a new plan.
‘The ship needs to be evacuated, and it will have to stay docked in Nynäshamn.’
‘But…’
‘Don’t argue!’ he shouted. ‘And for God’s sake, don’t throw away the placenta. Put it in a plastic bag in the refrigerator for the time being.’
Shit, he thought as he put down the phone. They were on the ship after all.
The search shifted immediately to Nynäshamn and the Stockholm area. The couple now had a newborn child, but presumably no car, so they were going to have a hard time fleeing.
All fatigue was gone. Disappointment had now changed to hope.
Erik Sohlman rang from the house in Kyllaj, which had been cordoned off and vacuum-cleaned for evidence. He reported that they’d found a gun in a hatch under the basement floor. Just as they’d suspected, it was a Russian army pistol, a Korovin from the 1920s, and they could confirm that the gun had been used recently.
After that, only silence. Nothing new was heard for several hours regarding the couple wanted by the police. At five o’clock, Knutas gave up and went home. His head felt completely empty. He went straight to bed, slipping under the covers next to his slumbering wife and putting his arm around her.
It was a while before he finally fell asleep.
SATURDAY, 19 AUGUST
KYRKVIKEN IN THE middle of Fårö was bathed in reddish-yellow afternoon light. The meadows and pastures shimmered. Johan arrived at the church along with his best friend, Andreas Eklund, who was also a journalist for Swedish TV.
He was going to be Johan’s best man, and they had spent the past hour having a few beers in the garden of Fåröhus restaurant, philosophizing about the fact that Johan’s bachelor days had now definitely come to an end. Emma hadn’t wanted him to see her before the wedding. If they were going to get married in a church, she said, they might as well do it properly.
Previously when they’d talked about getting married, Emma had completely rejected the idea of a big church wedding, as she’d already done that once before. But this time she hadn’t offered the slightest objection. They were going to be married in Fårö church and then have the celebration at Fåröhus. There would be wine and grilled lamb and dancing all night long. The next day, they would leave for a honeymoon on the Italian Riviera.
When they arrived at the church, Johan saw all the guests dressed in their finest, and he was suddenly seized by a feeling of unreality. There stood his mother in a dove-blue silk dress, laughing with Emma’s parents. His brothers, decked out in morning suits, were conversing with Emma’s Gotland relatives. Pia Lilja’s coal-black hair was sticking up, as usual, and she was wearing a bright-red, tight-fitting dress and patent-leather shoes with stiletto heels. She was talking to Peter Bylund, and Johan wondered with amusement whether something was going on between the two. Elin, wearing a pink dress with a silk ribbon, and Emma’s daughter, Sara, in a matching dress, were the bridesmaids
.
Filip was running around, getting into mischief with some other boys, throwing pebbles that they’d picked up from the ground. Johan let his gaze rest on Sara and Filip for a moment. His ‘bonus children’, or whatever he should call them. He reflected that his relationship with them had been good so far, especially with Sara; everything was going to be all right. Or rather, he would make sure that it was all right. He refused to let anything get in the way.
Together with Andreas, he slipped past the guests standing in front of the church and went into the sacristy. He said hello to the pastor, a pleasant woman in her fifties. The sexton patted him on the shoulder.
‘By the way, there’s a cameraman here.’
‘What? From where?’
‘From Swedish TV. He wants to know whether it’s OK for him to videotape the ceremony.’
Johan went into the church to have a look. There stood Peter Bylund, holding a camera on his shoulder.
‘Is this OK?’ he asked. ‘It was Grenfors who thought we should document such a major event. It’ll be a great souvenir, right?’
‘I’ll take care of the camera, so it’s done properly.’ Pia was standing next to Peter, grinning.
Johan was touched by their thoughtfulness. Now he regretted not inviting the editor-in-chief to the wedding.
‘Sure, that’s great. Of course.’
The guests had started streaming in, taking their places in the pews. Anders Knutas came walking up the aisle, arm in arm with his wife Lina. Johan went over to say hello.
‘Hi, how nice of you to come.’
‘We’re glad to be here.’
Knutas didn’t look entirely comfortable. The last time they’d met, they had stood on the dock at Slite yelling at each other. Johan was glad the superintendent had decided to come. He wondered how Knutas, as the head of the investigation, was feeling about the fact that they hadn’t caught the Norrströms. Maybe they would eventually. There was a hunt on for both Stefan and Vera Norrström through Interpol, but so far they seemed to have vanished without a trace.
Ten minutes remained before the bells would chime four o’clock, the time for Johan and Emma to enter the church. He started to feel nervous. Andreas steered him outside and handed over a pocket flask of whisky.
‘Here, have some.’
‘Thanks. I’m feeling really shaky.’
‘That’s not so strange. You’re about to get married. That’s major.’
For the hundredth time in the past hour, Johan glanced at his watch. Five minutes left. She should be here by now.
No car in sight.
‘Where the hell are they?’
Johan took out a cigarette and lit it. The area in front of the church was now deserted. Only a few minutes left.
Now even Andreas was looking worried.
‘Should you try and ring her? Maybe something happened.’
He punched in Emma’s mobile number. No answer.
The church bells began ringing. It was four o’clock. Why wasn’t she here?
The pastor came outside and smiled with satisfaction.
‘It’s time.’
At that moment a car came driving along Fårövägen.
Johan breathed a sigh of relief.
EPILOGUE
KARIN JACOBSSON WALKED along the deserted beach alone. The tourist season was over. She was wearing jeans with the cuffs rolled up and a light shirt. A sweater was draped over her shoulders. She walked barefoot, carrying her sandals in one hand, feeling the lukewarm water between her toes. The long hot summer had warmed up the sea to an unbelievable 79 degrees. The temperature was posted on a solitary sign in the middle of the beach. Who’s measuring the temperature now? she thought. And who would bother to post it on that sign? There’s nobody here to read it.
The air was warm, even though clouds were gathering over the sea. The little turquoise ice-cream stand was closed, shut down for the season, and it wouldn’t open again until next year. She paused with her back to the water and studied the sand dunes and the woods higher up. Peter Bovide’s caravan had been parked at the edge of the campsite. He’d jogged along this beach on that fateful morning barely two months earlier. And this was where he had met his killer.
It all seemed so long ago. She felt as if she had aged, changed. She was carrying a secret, and she didn’t know if she’d be able to continue to do so, much less share it with anyone else.
Vera had given birth to a baby girl in the cabin on the ship. Everything had gone well. The birth was over in less than ten minutes.
Before Karin left the cabin and the new parents with their baby, she had demanded to know the truth.
The killer that the police had been searching for the whole time was a woman. And a very pregnant woman. Who would ever have imagined that?
In the cramped cabin, with her blood-smeared newborn child at her breast, Vera had confessed to shooting both Peter Bovide and Morgan Larsson. Before they died, she’d forced them to their knees and then demanded to hear their remorse. Peter Bovide had pleaded and begged. He claimed that the murder was a mistake. That Tanya had started screaming when she was raped, and Morgan had hit her on the head with a rock to make her shut up. He hadn’t meant to hit her so hard. Tanya died instantly, both young men were seized with panic, and without even thinking, they had tossed her body overboard. By then it was too late, and they fled back to Nynäshamn as fast as they could go.
His explanation made no difference. Vera carried out what she had intended to do.
She’d smuggled into Sweden her father’s old army pistol in the moving van from Germany, keeping it as a memento. Then she had put it to use. In all these years, she had been convinced that the two men on Gotska Sandön were Stockholmers she would never see again, but by chance she’d recognized Peter Bovide in the ICA supermarket in Slite. And after that it didn’t take long before she located Morgan Larsson. She guessed that he too was from Slite, and she started looking for him at the big work sites in the area. She found him in a personnel catalogue from the Cementa factory. He hadn’t changed.
Without telling her husband, Vera had carried out her plan. But after Morgan Larsson was killed, Stefan had discovered that the gun was missing from the locked cabinet in the living room. He had confronted her, understood why she’d done it, and forgiven her. He loved her, and they were about to become parents.
Together they’d decided that there was little chance the police would ever figure out that the pregnant woman from Kyllaj was the murderer. So they could just go on living their lives.
But if Vera should come under suspicion for the murders, they’d devised an escape plan. When Karin Jacobsson had come on board the boat from Gotska Sandön with the old newspaper clippings, Stefan had realized that the jig was up. He rang Vera, who came to pick him up in Fårösund when the boat docked. She had packed their bags and brought along cash, passports and everything else they needed. To confuse the police, they went out to the airport and bought tickets on the last plane to Stockholm that evening. They parked the car, and even checked in for the flight. But instead of proceeding through security, they left the airport and took a cab to the ferry that was due to depart at eight o’clock for Nynäshamn. From there they planned to go out to Arlanda to catch a flight. Karin hadn’t wanted to know where they were headed.
She sat down on the sand and looked out at the sea. She wondered how they’d managed to evade the police and what they were doing at this very moment.
Presumably, she ought to run away too. She’d helped a double murderer go free. She couldn’t explain why she’d made that decision. Maybe it was because of the whole tragic story about the two young girls who had just wanted to sleep on the beach under the open sky on that hot July night twenty years ago – the night that shattered the entire family. The father had taken his own life, the mother became addicted to painkillers and lost all contact with Vera. Leaving her alone with the guilt.
Maybe, in her heart, Karin thought that it was a matter of justice. May
be it had been easier to make the decision because she’d helped bring Vera’s baby into the world, and most of all because of her own life-long trauma. She would probably never see her own child again, unless her daughter decided to look for her biological mother. And so far she hadn’t. She would be twenty-five this year. Karin knew nothing about the people who had adopted her or where she had ended up, except that she was not living on Gotland.
She wondered how much her daughter knew about her birth. She hoped that no one would tell her the truth.
Karin thought of her as Lydia, the name she had secretly given the baby in that dimly lit maternity room at Visby hospital. The happiest hour of her life.
In all these years, she had never forgiven her parents. When she changed her mind and wanted to keep the baby, they told her it was impossible. They said all the papers had already been signed. During the whole pregnancy, they had actually never asked her what she wanted or how she felt. They’d just taken it for granted that the child had to be given away.
It was a Thursday afternoon when Karin went out riding in the woods alone. Her horse fell and ended up lame, so she had to lead him home. On the way back, she passed the riding teacher’s remote farm, and she went in to borrow the phone to ring for help.
The riding teacher was home alone. He explained that his wife and children were away. They put the horse in the stable and went back to the house.
He invited her to sit in the living room and offered her a glass of juice before she used the phone.
The next second, he was on her, tearing off her sweater and riding breeches, raping her right there on the burgundy carpet. She could still remember how the rug scratched against her bare back.
The Dead Of Summer Page 23
