The Ice Princess

by Camilla Lackberg

  The air was so clear and clean and the light so delicate on this early Wednesday morning that Bengt had a feeling in his breast that he hadn’t had in a long time. It was alarmingly like a sense of peace, and he wondered what it was about a normal Wednesday morning that could call forth such a peculiar sensation. He stopped and breathed in the morning air with his eyes closed. Imagine if his life could be full of mornings like this.

  It was clear to him when he had come to the fork in the road. He knew precisely what day his life had taken its unhappy turn. He could even tell you what time it was. Actually he’d had all the usual excuses. There was no abuse to blame it on. No poverty, hunger or emotional deficiencies either. The only thing he had to blame was his own stupidity and an excessive faith in himself. Naturally there was a girl involved too.

  He was seventeen years old, and back then there was nothing he did that didn’t involve a girl. But this girl was special. Maud, with her exuberant blondeness and feigned modesty, who played on his ego like a well-tuned violin. ‘Dear Bengt, I just have to have…’ ‘Dear Bengt, couldn’t you get me a…’ She had held the leash and he had obediently let himself be led by the nose. Nothing was ever enough for her. He saved all the money he earned and bought her fine clothes, perfumes, everything she wanted. But as soon as she got whatever it was she’d been so eagerly begging for, she tossed it aside and begged for something else, which was the only thing that could make her happy.

  Maud had been like a fever in his blood. Without noticing it the wheels had gradually begun to turn faster and faster until he no longer knew what was up or down. When he turned eighteen, Maud had decided that she wanted to ride around with him in no less than a Cadillac convertible. It cost more than he made in a whole year, and he lay awake night after night as he wracked his brain, trying to figure out how to get the money. While he was going through this agony Maud would pout and hint in more and more obvious terms that if he didn’t get the car, there were certainly other guys who could treat her the way she deserved to be treated. Then jealousy was added to the torment of those sleepless, anxious nights, and finally he couldn’t stand it any longer.

  On 10 September 1954, at precisely two o’clock in the afternoon, he went into the bank in Tanumshede, armed with an old army pistol his father had kept at home for years, and wearing a nylon stocking over his head. Nothing had gone right. The bank tellers had tossed banknotes into the bag he brought with him, but not nearly as much as he had hoped. Then one of the customers, the father of a classmate of his, recognized Bengt despite the nylon stocking. Within an hour the police were at his parents’ flat and found the bag of money under the bed in his room. Bengt never forgot the expression on his mother’s face. She had been dead now for many years, but her eyes still haunted him whenever the alcoholic gloom kicked in.

  Three years in prison had killed all hope of a future. When he got out Maud was long gone. He didn’t know where, and he didn’t care. All his old friends had gone on to secure jobs and family life and didn’t want anything to do with him. His father had been killed in an accident while Bengt was inside, so he moved in with his mother. With cap in hand he tried to find work, but was met by rejection everywhere he went. No one wanted to hire him. What finally drove him to seek his future in the bottom of a bottle were all the looks that kept following him.

  For someone who had grown up in the close-knit confines of a small town where everyone says hello to each other on the street, the feeling of being frozen out was just as painful as physical torture. He had thought about moving away from Fjällbacka, but where would he go? It was easier to stay and let himself sink into a blissful alcoholic torpor.

  He and Anders had found each other at once. Two poor fucks, they used to say, laughing bitterly. Bengt harboured an almost fatherly affection for Anders and felt greater sorrow over his fate than over his own. He often wished that he could have done something to turn Anders’s life in a different direction. But because he also knew the seductive siren song of alcohol, he knew how impossible it was to tear yourself away from the demanding lover that booze had become over the years. She demanded everything and gave nothing back. All he and Anders could do was give each other a little consolation and companionship.

  The path up to the front door of Anders’s building had been carefully sanded. So Bengt didn’t have to tread cautiously because of the bottle in his inside pocket, as he had done many times during the hard winter just past, when the ice lay shiny and slick all the way to the stairs.

  The two flights up to Anders’s flat were always a challenge. There was no lift. Several times he had to stop to catch his breath, and twice he made sure to take a bracing swig from the bottle in his inside pocket. When he finally stood outside the door to Anders’s flat he was panting hard. He leaned against the door jamb for a moment before he opened the door, which he knew Anders never locked.

  It was quiet in the flat. Maybe Anders wasn’t home. If he was sleeping it off, his deep breathing and snuffling snores could usually be heard all the way out in the hall. Bengt looked in the kitchen. Nobody there, except for the normal colonies of bacteria. The bathroom door stood wide open, and there too it was empty. When he turned the corner he had a horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach. The sight in the living room made Bengt stop short. The bottle he was holding in his hand fell to the floor with a heavy clunk, but it didn’t break.

  The first thing he saw was the feet dangling freely a bit above the floor. The naked feet swung slightly, swaying back and forth. Anders had trousers on but nothing on his upper body. His head hung at an odd angle. His face was swollen and discoloured, and his tongue looked too big for his mouth as it stuck out between his lips. It was the saddest sight Bengt had ever seen. He turned and quietly left the flat, but not before he picked up the bottle from the floor. He tried to find something inside himself to grab hold of, but found only emptiness. Instead he grasped at the only lifeline he knew. He sat down on the threshold of Anders’s flat, put the bottle to his mouth, and cried.

  It was doubtful whether he had a legal blood alcohol content, but Patrik wasn’t worrying about that right now. He drove a little slower than usual for safety’s sake, but since he was dialling numbers on his mobile and talking on the phone, it was debatable how much help that was to traffic safety.

  His first call was to TV4, which confirmed that Separate Worlds had been cancelled on Friday the twenty-second because of the hockey match. Then he rang Mellberg, who not unexpectedly was overjoyed to hear the news. He demanded that Anders immediately be brought back in. With his third call, Patrik got the backup he requested and drove straight towards the residential complex where Anders lived. Jenny Rosén must have simply mixed up the days. Not an uncommon occurrence among witnesses.

  Despite his excitement at a possible break in the case, Patrik couldn’t really focus on the task. His thoughts kept returning to Erica and the night they had just spent together. He caught himself grinning like a fool from ear to ear, and his hands involuntarily drummed little rhythms on the steering wheel. He turned on the radio to an oldies station and got Aretha Franklin with ‘Respect’. The upbeat Atlantic sound fit his mood perfectly and he turned up the volume. At the refrain he sang along at the top of his lungs and danced as best he could from a sitting position. He thought he sounded damned good, at least until the radio cut out and he heard only his own voice roaring ‘R-E-S-P-E-C-T’. His eardrums reverberated, but not in a good way.

  The entire past night felt like an intoxicated dream, and it wasn’t only because of the amount of wine they had drunk. It was as though a veil or hazy curtain of emotion, love, and sex had settled over those night-time hours.

  He was reluctantly forced to put aside his thoughts of yesterday as he turned into the car park at the residential complex. The backup patrol cars had arrived unusually fast. They must have been in the vicinity. He saw two cars with blue lights flashing and frowned slightly. Typical that they would misconstrue the instructions. He’d asked for one car
, not two. As he approached he saw that there was an ambulance behind the police cars. Something wasn’t right.

  He recognized Lena, the blonde policewoman from Uddevalla, and went over to her. She was talking on a mobile phone, but as he approached she signed off. He heard ‘Bye’ and she stuffed the phone into a holder she wore on her belt.

  ‘Hi, Patrik.’

  ‘Hi, Lena. What’s going on?’

  ‘One of the winos found Anders Nilssori hanged in his flat.’ She nodded in the direction of the main door. Patrik got an ice-cold feeling in his stomach.

  ‘You haven’t touched anything?’

  ‘No, what do you think we are? I just talked to dispatch in Uddevalla and they’re sending over a team to examine the crime scene. We also talked to Mellberg so I assumed you came because he rang you.’

  ‘No, I was on the way over here anyway to bring Anders in for more questioning.’

  ‘But I heard he had an alibi?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what we thought, but it just fell apart so we were going to bring him back in.’

  ‘Well, this is fucking bad luck then. What the hell do you think it means? I mean, the probability that there would suddenly be two murderers here in Fjällbacka must be almost zero. He must have been killed by the same person who killed Alex Wijkner. Do you have any other suspects besides Anders?’

  Patrik pulled himself together. It was true that this changed everything, but he still wasn’t ready to draw the same conclusions as Lena, that Anders had been killed by the same person who murdered Alex. Of course it was almost statistically impossible. There hadn’t been a murder here in decades, and suddenly two separate killers were on the loose. But he wasn’t prepared to rule out the impossible either.

  ‘Well, let’s go up so I can have a look. Then you can tell me what you’ve found out so far. How did the call come in, for instance?’

  Lena led the way, entering the stairwell ahead of him.

  ‘Well, as I said it was one of Anders’s alky pals who found him, Bengt Larsson. He came over this morning so they could start drinking and get a head start on the day. He usually just walks right in, and that’s what he did today. When he entered the flat he found Anders hanging by a rope tied to the hook for the ceiling lamp in the living room.’

  ‘Did he call it in right away?’

  ‘Actually no. He sat on the threshold of the flat and drowned his sorrows in a bottle of Explorer vodka. But then a neighbour happened to come out of his flat and in passing asked Bengt how things were going. That’s when he blurted out what he had seen. Then the neighbour rang us. Bengt Larsson is too drunk to be questioned in more detail, so I just sent him off to your drunk tank.’

  Patrik silently wondered why Mellberg hadn’t rung to tell him about all the action, but resigned himself to the fact that the ways of the superintendent were most often utterly inscrutable.

  Patrik took the stairs two at a time and passed Lena. When they reached the second floor the door was wide open and he saw people moving about inside the flat. Jenny was standing in the doorway to her flat with Max in her arms. When Patrik went over to them, Max waved his chubby little hands in delight and showed his gap-toothed smile.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Jenny took a firmer grip on Max, who was doing his best to wriggle out of her arms.

  ‘We’re not sure yet. Anders Nilsson is dead, but we don’t know much more. Did you see or hear anything unusual?’

  ‘No, I can’t recall anything special. The first I heard was when my next-door neighbour started talking to somebody here in the stairwell. After a while the police cars arrived and an ambulance, and there was a hell of a commotion out here.’

  ‘But nothing special earlier today, or last night?’ Patrik was still fishing.

  ‘No, not a thing.’

  Patrik let it drop for the time being. ‘Okay, thanks for your help, Jenny.’

  He smiled at Max and let him grab hold of his finger, something that was apparently hysterically funny because Max laughed so hard he looked like he might choke. Reluctantly Patrik tore himself loose and backed slowly in the direction of Anders’s flat while he kept waving at Max and saying bye-bye.

  Lena stood in the doorway of the flat with a mocking smile on her lips. ‘Need one of your own, don’t you?’

  To his dismay Patrik felt himself blush, something that only made Lena smile even more. He muttered something unintelligible in reply.

  She preceded him into the flat, saying over her shoulder, ‘Well, you know, all you have to do is ask. I’m free and single and I’ve got a biological clock ticking so loud I can hardly sleep at night.’

  Patrik knew she was joking, that was Lena’s usual flirty banter, but he still couldn’t help blushing even more. He didn’t reply, and when they entered the living room they both lost any urge to smile.

  Someone had cut Anders’s body down from the rope it had been hanging from, and now he lay on the living-room floor. Right above him hung the stub of the rope, sliced off about four inches from the hook. The rest of the rope was around Anders’s neck in a noose, and Patrik could see the deep, angry red wound on his neck where the rope had bit into the skin. What always bothered him the most about dead people was the unnatural facial colour. Strangulation caused a nasty bluish-purple hue which gave the victim a very odd look. Patrik also recognized the thick, swollen tongue sticking out between Anders’s lips as normal for victims who were strangled or suffocated. Even though his experience with murder victims was limited, to say the least, the police got their share of suicides each year, and he’d helped cut down three of them during his career.

  But when Patrik looked around the living room there was one thing that quite clearly distinguished this scene from the suicides by hanging that he’d seen. There was no possibility that Anders could have climbed up and put his head through the noose tied to the ceiling. No chairs or tables were anywhere near. Anders had swung freely in the middle of the room like a macabre human mobile.

  Unused to homicide scenes as he was, Patrik cautiously moved in a wide circle around the body. Anders’s eyes were open, staring rigidly into space. Patrik couldn’t help leaning forward and closing the dead man’s eyes. He knew that he shouldn’t have any sort of contact with the body before the M.E. arrived—actually the body shouldn’t even have been cut down—but something in those staring eyes set all his nerves on edge. It felt as though the eyes were following him round the room.

  The room seemed unusually desolate. Then he noticed that all the paintings had been taken down from the walls. Only big ugly marks were left where the paintings had once hung. Otherwise the room was just as shabby as he remembered it from the last time he was here, but then the paintings had somehow lighted up the room. They had given Anders’s home a certain air of decadence by combining filth with beauty. Now the place just looked dirty and disgusting.

  Lena was talking non-stop on her mobile. After one conversation in which Patrik only heard her swearing in single syllables, she slapped shut the lid of her little Ericsson phone and turned to him.

  ‘We’re getting reinforcements from Forensic Medicine for crime scene investigation. They’re leaving Göteborg now. We can’t touch anything. I suggest we wait outside for safety’s sake.’

  They went out on the landing and Lena carefully closed and locked the door. The cold was piercing when they stepped outside the main door; Lena and Patrik stamped their feet in place.

  ‘Where’s Janne right now?’ Patrik was asking about Lena’s partner, who should have been with her in the car.

  ‘He’s TCC’ing today.’

  ‘TCC’ing?’ Patrik looked quizzical.

  ‘Taking care of a sick child. TCC. Thanks to all the cutbacks there was nobody who could step in on short notice, so I had to come alone when we got the call.’

  Patrik nodded, not really paying attention. He was inclined to side with Lena. There was a lot to suggest that it was one and the same killer they were searching for. Drawing hasty conclusions was
definitely one of the riskiest things a cop could do, but the odds of there being two different murderers in this little town were infinitesimally low. Add to that the fact that there were strong connections between the two victims and the odds were even lower.

  Lena and Patrik knew that the trip from Göteborg would take at least an hour and a half, maybe two, so they sat in his car and turned on the heat. They also turned on the radio, and for a long time they sat listening to happy-go-lucky pop music. It was a welcome distraction from the reason for their long wait. After an hour and forty minutes they saw two police cars drive into the car park, and they got out to meet their reinforcements.

  ‘Please, Jan, can’t we get our own house? I saw that one of the houses at Badholmen is for sale. Couldn’t we drive down and take a look at it? It has the most fantastic view, and there’s a little boathouse too. Please?’

  Lisa’s whining voice made his sense of irritation grow. Her voice almost always did these days. Being married to her would be a lot more pleasant if she had the sense to shut up and just look pretty. Lately not even her big, firm breasts and round arse had managed to convince him that she was worth all the trouble. Her babbling had only accelerated, and in moments like this he bitterly regretted giving in to her nagging about getting married.

  Lisa was working as a waitress at Röde Orm in Grebbestad when he first laid eyes on her. All his friends had practically drooled when they saw her plunging neckline and long legs, and he decided on the spot that he had to have her. He usually got what he wanted, and Lisa proved to be no exception. He wasn’t bad-looking, but what usually nailed the final decision was when he introduced himself as Jan Lorentz. Mentioning his last name normally brought a gleam to a woman’s eyes, and from then on it was all systems go.

  He had been obsessed with Lisa’s body in the beginning. He couldn’t get enough of her, and he effectively closed his ears to all the stupid comments she kept making in her shrill voice. The envious looks from other men when he showed up with Lisa on his arm also increased her attractiveness in his eyes. At first her little hints that he should make an honest woman out of her fell on deaf ears. To be quite frank, her stupidity had begun to chip away at her appeal. But what finally clinched his decision to make her his wife was Nelly’s vehement opposition to the whole idea. She loathed Lisa from the first moment she saw her and never missed an opportunity to make her views known. A childish wish to rebel had put Jan in his present predicament, and he cursed his own stupidity.