The Gingerbread House

by Carin Gerhardsen

  A little blood was trickling out of the nostrils of the lifeless man on the floor, and in the silence I could hear my own pulse booming in my ears. The fury had already run out of me, and my thoughts now were primarily about how fast it had all happened. In my newly won madness, I did not regret having killed someone, only that I hadn’t let him suffer longer. I should have told him about all the injustices he subjected me to. I should have held him accountable for his actions and forced him to beg for forgiveness on his bare knees. Above all, I should have let him suffer a slow, painful death.

  Here I sit now – a murderer – studying an old black-and-white photograph from a dark time. The children are looking at me with toothless smiles. The teacher stands furthest back, to the right, with Carina Ahonen beside her. She’s wearing a flowered housedress and her hair is pulled up in a massive bun on top of her head. She looks solemnly into the camera as if to show that she takes her work as a preschool teacher extremely seriously. In the very front, in the middle, Hans is on one knee, grinning. He who laughs last …

  I wish Councillor Göran Meijer luck in his hopeful advances among Katrineholm’s insufferable kids, and I truly mean that. But I think he will need a little help getting started.

  It already feels much better.

  Wednesday Morning

  After a few hours of restless sleep, Conny Sjöberg was leafing through the morning paper, not really taking in what he was reading. His thoughts were on what he would say to the new widow. He had a lump in his throat that would not go away. He was also thinking that if Åsa died, he would never be happy again. He would have to keep on living for the sake of the children, but life would be empty and meaningless. Tears welled up in his eyes, and he wondered whether he would be able to get a word out once he was standing there in front of Mrs Vannerberg. Stop, he said to himself, stop thinking about that and concentrate on what has to be said.

  Suddenly Åsa was standing there in the doorway. She had slipped in quietly so as to not waken the twins, and stood there watching him. She cried at the same movies as he did, and just hearing about a poignant bit in a book he was reading would bring tears to her eyes. She knew what he was feeling right now, and what he was thinking. She went up to him and gave him a long hug while the tears welled up and ran down his cheeks, dampening the sleeve of her bathrobe.

  He finished his cheese sandwich, brushed his teeth, got dressed and went down to the car. Even though it was six-thirty, it was still black as night outside. A lone jogger crossed the playground at Nytorget and went over towards Sofiagatan. Once Sjöberg had eased the car out of the narrow parking spot, he called Sandén to confirm that nothing unforeseen had happened during the night, waking him up.

  ‘I’m on my way to inform the widow,’ he said apologetically. ‘I just wanted to double-check that it really was Vannerberg.’

  ‘Oh, it’s him all right,’ Sandén growled.

  ‘He was reported missing by his wife yesterday afternoon, but apparently he disappeared on Monday evening.’

  ‘That sounds right, because the footprints around the house were made in damp soil, and it rained on Monday. Yesterday the weather was clear.’

  ‘That’s good, then we have something to go on anyway.’

  ‘Pathology will allow viewing of the body after four o’clock and the technicians should be ready with the contents of his pockets for the eleven o’clock meeting. Hansson will be there.’

  ‘Good. See you then. Excuse me for waking you. Wish me luck.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  Twenty minutes later he found himself, still in darkness, at the edge of the townhouse complex in Enskede where the Vannerberg family lived. He parked the car in a visitor’s space and made his way to the house. There was a light on in the kitchen window and to his relief he could see that, besides the children, there were also several adults inside. Sjöberg took a deep breath and tried to look amiable and serious at the same time. He struck the doorknocker twice against the brass plate. The door was opened by an older man.

  ‘My name is Conny Sjöberg. I’m a chief inspector with the Hammarby police and would like to speak with Pia Vannerberg.’

  ‘I’m her father. Come in,’ said the man, taking a few steps back.

  Sjöberg stepped into the hallway and took off his shoes. An older woman nodded politely at him from the kitchen, where she was apparently feeding the three children, but he saw the worry in her eyes. He followed the man into the living room. At one end of a large couch sat Pia Vannerberg, stiff as a board, shaking as if with cold and looking at him with a terrified expression. He sat down carefully in an armchair close to her and her father sat alongside his daughter and placed his arm around her shoulders. No one said anything. Then Sjöberg started talking.

  ‘I’m extremely sorry to have to tell you this, but we have found your husband, and unfortunately he is dead.’

  He was squeezing his hands together so tightly that they had turned completely white.

  The woman’s expression did not change, but a tear ran down her dad’s cheek.

  ‘I knew it,’ she said in a surprisingly clear voice. ‘I knew it all along. He would never just disappear like that.’

  ‘I must also tell you that all indications are that he was murdered.’

  Her response to this surprised him, but he would later be struck by the obviousness of what she said, obvious when you really love someone.

  ‘Do you think he suffered?’

  ‘I can’t say,’ he said calmly, ‘because I’m not a doctor. But based on what I saw, it seemed to have happened very quickly, and he looked peaceful.’

  ‘So how did he die?’ Pia Vannerberg asked matter-of-factly.

  ‘We’re still waiting for the medical examiner’s report. It’s hard to answer that.’

  ‘Well then, where did he die?’ she continued stubbornly.

  ‘He died in a house not far from here. Do you know anything about what he was doing there?’

  ‘He was looking at a property that was for sale. It was somewhere in the vicinity, I don’t know exactly where. He walked there anyway.’

  Sjöberg felt a sting of bad conscience because he was exploiting the woman’s state of shock to ask questions, but it was important to quickly clarify certain details and get the investigation moving.

  ‘What time did he leave home?’

  ‘He left at a quarter to six and said he would be back about an hour later. We were going to have dinner together …’

  Her eyes left him for the first time and she looked down at her hands, which were trembling in her lap.

  ‘I’ll leave you in peace soon. I just have to ask a few more questions,’ Sjöberg said apologetically, without waiting for a response. ‘When did you report his disappearance to the police?’

  ‘I called the police about ten o’clock that evening, but they weren’t aware that anything had happened and they advised me to wait until the next day. I went to the police station yesterday afternoon, when my parents came here.’

  ‘Did your husband ever feel threatened? Did he have any enemies?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. He is a very respected person. Everyone likes him. Liked …’

  ‘Finally, is there anyone I can talk to at his work? Someone who might know who he was going to meet?’

  ‘He runs … ran the company along with his partner, Jorma Molin.’

  She reached for Sjöberg’s pad and paper and quickly wrote down the associate’s name and telephone number.

  ‘We would also like you to help us formally establish the victim’s identity as soon as possible. This means that a family member has to come and look at the deceased. Can any of you help us with that? Preferably today or tomorrow.’

  Pia Vannerberg nodded, hid her face in her hands and disappeared in her father’s embrace. Sjöberg got up from the chair, once again expressed his sympathy, and asked if he could come back in a few days with more questions. The father nodded politely in response, even though the tears now had a fi
rm grip on him.

  It was getting light when Sjöberg got back in his car and he turned on Radio Stockholm to distract him.

  After parking the car in the garage below the police station, he took the lift up to the reception area.

  ‘Good morning, Chief Inspector!’ Lotten called before the lift door had closed behind him.

  ‘Good morning, Reception Manager!’ Sjöberg replied.

  Lotten’s cheerful expression could get anyone to forget their worries for a while.

  ‘Any messages for me today?’

  ‘Yes, several reporters have called for you to comment on last night’s murder. I don’t know what to say to them.’

  ‘That they can call back after four o’clock.’

  He went up the stairs and poured himself a cup of coffee on the way to his office, then sat down to call Vannerberg’s partner.

  ‘VM Property, Molin.’

  The voice sounded courteously welcoming. Sjöberg introduced himself.

  ‘I’m calling about your partner, Hans Vannerberg.’

  ‘Yes, do you know where he is?’

  ‘Unfortunately I have bad news. I’m sorry to say that he’s dead.’

  ‘But what the hell –’ his voice broke off and there was silence on the line.

  ‘I’m very sorry, but I need to see you. Can I come to your office at once?’

  ‘Yes. Fleminggatan 68.’

  ‘I’m on my way,’ said Sjöberg, hanging up.

  The man sounded sincerely shaken and his voice had changed during the brief conversation from deferential to anxious and then alarmed. As he put down the receiver, Sjöberg thought he heard a muffled sob. Yet another broken-hearted near and dear one to confront with the devastating news, he thought dejectedly.

  It was now nine o’clock and he decided to take the metro to the estate agent’s to avoid the frustrating traffic in the inner city. He pulled on his jacket again and gulped down the rest of his coffee standing up.

  ‘I’m going to the victim’s office to question his partner,’ he called to Lotten as he passed the reception area. ‘Tell Sandén when he arrives.’

  He raised his hand in farewell and stepped out on to the street.

  He used the time on the metro to contemplate the situation – or rather, the little he knew about it. So, Vannerberg left home at a quarter to six on Monday evening to meet a seller at Åkerbärsvägen 31 in Enskede, a fifteen-minute walk from his home. There lives a woman named Ingrid Olsson, who at that time had been in the hospital for three weeks. Had they arranged a meeting that day, or was he lured there by someone who knew that the house stood empty? He went into the house and was beaten to death with a chair in the kitchen, leaving no visible signs of a struggle. Was he let into the house, and if so by whom? Or was the door open? Did someone follow him there? There were footprints of two men in the garden; one of them was presumably Vannerberg. When he did not come home, his wife got worried and phoned the police, but did not make a formal report until Tuesday afternoon. At approximately the same time, Ingrid Olsson came home, found the corpse, went back to the hospital and fetched Margit Olofsson, who went home with her and called the police from there.

  He took the notebook from his inside pocket, wrote down his questions and added one more: ‘Connection between Hans Vannerberg and Ingrid Olsson?’

  The estate agent’s office was on the ground floor of a 1920s building, and in the window were letter-sized sheets of paper with descriptions and pictures of apartments and houses for sale, mainly located on Kungsholmen and in the south suburbs – Vannerberg’s own surroundings – plus a few summer cottages south of the city. A handmade ‘CLOSED’ sign was posted inside the glass door, but Sjöberg knocked anyway. Molin opened the door at once and Sjöberg stepped into a small but well-organized office, with two desks and a kitchenette. He extended his hand to a man in his forties with scarred skin and short, dark-brown hair, and got a limp handshake in return.

  ‘Please sit down,’ he said, showing Sjöberg to one of the visitor’s chairs.

  The man himself sat down behind his desk and clasped his hands in front of him.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ he said tiredly, looking at the chief inspector with large, brown sorrowful eyes.

  Sjöberg briefly related what he knew, and Molin followed the story without comment, his gaze fluttering between Sjöberg, the window and the desktop.

  ‘Do you know anything about that meeting at Åkerbärsvägen 31?’ Sjöberg asked.

  ‘He said he was going to meet a client on Monday evening, but that he was going home first. That’s all I know.’

  ‘Perhaps he had a diary where he wrote down scheduled meetings?’ Sjöberg suggested.

  ‘Of course he did,’ Molin answered, getting up.

  Sjöberg followed him over to Vannerberg’s desk, trying to avoid the eyes of the children in a framed photograph right next to the large desk diary.

  ‘Let’s see now, day before yesterday …’

  Molin followed Monday’s scheduled activities with his index finger and stopped at the last line.

  ‘Åkerbärsvägen 31,’ he said. ‘That’s all it says.’

  ‘Were you close?’ asked Sjöberg.

  ‘Yes, we met at college. We were classmates and hung out together even after we graduated. Then we started the firm and we’ve been here, side by side, for fifteen years. We don’t socialize that often any more, we see each other all day anyway and we both have families, but we have a beer sometimes and talk about things.’

  ‘Do you know whether he had any enemies?’

  ‘No, I can’t imagine that. He was very kind to everyone. And the ladies were especially fond of him.’

  ‘Which ladies do you mean?’

  ‘All the ladies. Customers, women in bars, waitresses. My wife,’ he added, smiling for the first time.

  ‘Did he have anyone on the side, do you think?’ asked Sjöberg.

  ‘Not a chance. He had Pia. He didn’t need anyone on the side. He was extremely devoted to his family,’ Molin said, taking a distressed look at the photograph.

  ‘Nothing from the past that may have haunted him?’ Sjöberg suggested.

  Molin sat quietly and thought for a few moments, but then shook his head.

  ‘We’ve known each other since we were in our twenties, and he was never in bother. His mother caused trouble sometimes, but he could handle her.’

  ‘What kind of trouble, for example?’

  ‘She would show up here at the office drunk sometimes and swear and carry on, but he always managed to calm her down. She has problems with alcohol, you might say. And financial problems and emotional problems and every imaginable problem in the world, seems like. But he helped her as much as he could, with money and so on. His upbringing was maybe not the happiest.’

  ‘What do you think it was like?’

  ‘There didn’t seem to be any dad in the picture. Hans didn’t know who he was anyway. His mum drank a lot and brought home a lot of men. Some stayed for a while and played stepfather, but Hans didn’t like them and they probably didn’t like him either – or didn’t care about him anyway. They drank too, I suppose. They moved a lot and Hans was probably pretty unruly as a child. Skipped school, got into fights, and even broke a classmate’s arm once. Finally he decided to stay in Norrköping and get a high-school education, while his mother moved to Malmö. Then he had to take care of himself, and he did too. I think his life went in a different direction then.’

  ‘I’d like to go through his desk,’ said Sjöberg. ‘Would you mind giving it a little more thought anyway, and see whether you can come up with anything that might cast a little light on this investigation?’

  ‘Sure, of course,’ Molin replied, going back to his seat and looking out over his cluttered desk with a resigned expression.

  Sjöberg systematically examined the contents of Vannerberg’s desk drawers, but found only various office supplies. He leafed uninspired through a few binders of properties for sale,
without finding anything of interest either for the murder investigation or personally. Finally he looked through the whole diary, trying to interpret the dead man’s scribbling. It was clear that this diary covered only things that had to do with work, or at least working hours. Sometimes an entry read ‘showing’, followed by an address, sometimes there were only an address and a name. A few times he found a dental appointment, haircut or car service, but what his eyes seized on at last was an appointment for a showing three months earlier: ‘Showing, Åkerbärsvägen 13.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Sjöberg. ‘What’s this? A showing on 15 August at Åkerbärsvägen 13?’

  Molin looked perplexed, twirled his chair halfway around and took a binder from the shelf behind him.

  ‘Let’s take a look here …’ he murmured, leafing purposefully through the binder. ‘Here it is.’

  He stood up with the binder open and took the few steps over to Sjöberg, setting it down on the desk in front of him.

  ‘This is a property that I sold,’ he said, still hesitant. ‘I wonder why that showing was in Hans’s diary?’

  He looked from the listing to the diary.

  ‘Now I know!’ he exclaimed in relief, pointing at the line below. ‘Hans was going to look at a summer cottage in Nynäshamn later that afternoon, along with an inspector and a buyer, and he realized he couldn’t make it there in time if he took this showing. Normally he takes all the properties in this area, because he lives so close, but I took this one instead.’

  ‘But isn’t it a little strange –’ said Sjöberg, but was interrupted by Molin.

  ‘Of course, that’s what happened. I sold the house at Åkerbärsvägen 13 to a family who moved in a few weeks later. The deal was closed, but the buyer called last week because the seller had taken various fixtures with him, as the buyer saw it: microwave, wall-mounted lamps leaving bare, torn-off cords on the walls, and a large urn that had been in the garden during the showing. He said only a large cement base was left that ruined the view. Whatever, Hans promised to take a look when he was in the neighbourhood to get a sense of the whole thing. That’s where he was going on Monday evening, but he evidently had the wrong house number. He couldn’t know … It was my sale, and he had never seen the property.’ Molin fell silent, looking distressed.