The Gingerbread House

by Carin Gerhardsen

  ‘Your suffering is too short,’ I say. ‘Mine has lasted for thirty-eight years. But my arms are getting tired. Bye-bye, Lise-Lott.’

  I press her head down into the footbath for the last time, but she has already given up. She struggles involuntarily a little and then she is quiet. I leave her where she is, on her knees, bent over the basin, but I can’t resist putting the burned-out cigarette back between her fingers before I get up.

  On the TV they are arguing and someone rushes out of a room and slams the door. I leave calmly and carefully close the door on Lise-Lott.

  Tuesday

  As usual Petra Westman tackled the work assigned to her energetically, but for once she didn’t take on any new initiatives of her own. Instead, she devoted the downtime between her allotted tasks to digging for information regarding a certain Peder Fryhk.

  Peder Fryhk was fifty-three years old and originally from Hudiksvall. He qualified for college with high scores in 1972, then did his military service as a commando at KA1 on Rindö in 1972 and 1973. In 1973 he started his medical training at the university in Lund and got married. In 1974 a daughter was born, but for the years between 1975 and 1980 information was lacking. His wife and child were in Hudiksvall during this period, where they were both still registered today. In 1980 he showed up again, resumed his studies in the autumn and got a divorce. In 1984 he received his medical degree, after which he worked at various hospitals in the Stockholm area and he was now a senior anaesthetist at Karolinska.

  A colleague in the economic crimes unit helped her to gather information on Fryhk’s financial dealings. There were no irregularities here. He was single with a good income and living expenses to match. Nothing strange. Petra confirmed that he had no criminal record with a search in the register. Searches in ISP – the police department’s internal register of descriptions – produced nothing. Nor was there any information to be found in ASP – another of the police department’s internal registers, where you could search for individual names among comments entered in connection with crimes. He seemed to have a blemish-free past.

  From a telephone call to Doctors Without Borders, Petra discovered that the organization had done work in Lebanon only during 1975. Peder Fryhk was twenty-two years old then and had finished only two years of pre-clinical studies. So he could not have worked as a doctor in Lebanon in 1975. He was not found on any of their lists. At the very least, she had caught him in a lie.

  But how could she go further? Under no circumstances did she want Fryhk to find out about her investigations. For that reason she could not contact his mother, who was still alive, his neighbours, colleagues or employer. Nor did she dare contact his daughter. But the ex-wife seemed like a fairly safe bet. He had left her and his newborn daughter for a five-year stay abroad and then divorced her as soon as he came home. Presumably she did not speak to him very often, if at all.

  After repeated attempts, she managed to reach the ex-wife at work late that evening. She was an operating-room nurse at Hudiksvall Hospital.

  ‘I’m looking for Peder Fryhk,’ Petra lied.

  There was total silence on the line and she hoped this was a good sign.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘I haven’t had any contact with him for years. You’ll have to look elsewhere. Who’s asking?’

  Petra had deliberately avoided introducing herself. After careful consideration, she had decided not to lie about her identity to this woman. Conversely, she had considered ending the conversation at this point – without introducing herself – if the answer had been different.

  ‘My name is Westman and I’m a police officer,’ said Petra. ‘He appears in an investigation I’m working on.’

  ‘Then you know you won’t be able to find him through me,’ said the woman, whose name was Mona Friberg.

  She obviously had her head on straight.

  ‘Actually you’re the one I wanted to talk to,’ Petra admitted, quickly trying to regain control of the conversation. ‘When did you last speak to him?’

  ‘In 1980,’ the woman replied curtly.

  ‘In connection with the divorce?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So you’ve had no contact with him whatsoever since then?’

  ‘As I said.’

  ‘And your daughter?’

  ‘Not her either, as far as I know.’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  Mona Friberg hesitated for a few seconds before answering.

  ‘His involvement with his daughter has been non-existent. Neither she nor I have the slightest interest in having any contact.’

  ‘Please forgive me if I seem a bit forward,’ Petra said, ‘but why did you marry him in the first place?’

  She was aware that she had now given the woman a reason to end the conversation, but something told her she would not.

  ‘The classic. I got pregnant.’

  ‘And he took responsibility?’

  After a moment’s hesitation she replied, ‘On the surface. In reality, we never saw each other for the most part. He moved to Lund and then he went abroad and was gone for several years.’

  ‘And when he came home he asked for a divorce?’

  ‘Yes. Without seeing me. I haven’t seen him in person since 1975.’

  Mona Friberg’s voice revealed no bitterness. She gave brief, factual answers to the questions she was asked. Nonetheless, Petra seemed to detect some ambiguity in her attitude to it all. What she was saying was anything but flattering to Fryhk, yet she had her guard up. While the conversation was going on, Petra could not put her finger on it, but afterwards she decided that Mona Friberg was holding back part of the truth about Peder Fryhk.

  ‘Has he paid child support?’ asked Petra, even though she already knew the answer.

  ‘No, and I never asked for any either. My finances are good.’

  ‘That might also be interpreted as you having strong reasons not to want to have anything to do with Peder Fryhk,’ Petra attempted.

  ‘I prefer to be independent,’ replied Mona Friberg without so much as a quiver in her voice to show that this might be untrue.

  ‘Have you any idea where he was during that stay abroad between 1975 and 1980?’ Petra enquired.

  ‘No. And no one else does either, that I know of.’

  ‘What is he like as a person?’ Petra ventured to ask.

  ‘Intelligent and goal-oriented. Selfish. Extroverted.’

  In the midst of the positive judgements she had slipped in a negative one. She supplied facts and appeared to be completely objective. But what was it she wasn’t saying? She said extroverted, not pleasant. And goal-oriented, was that necessarily positive? No, not when it was followed by selfish. Petra did not have time to complete the thought.

  ‘Interested in war,’ said Mona Friberg. ‘Extremely interested in war. I must get back to work now.’

  That ended the conversation.

  Wednesday Evening

  The mood in the investigation team was subdued. It was already Wednesday and there had been no new developments in the case. The fingerprints from the chair in Ingrid Olsson’s kitchen had been run against the register of known criminals, with no match. They did not belong to anyone else who figured in the investigation either. Nothing new had come up in the extended questioning of Vannerberg’s family and business partner.

  The medical examiner Zetterström’s report was complete, but contained no information that led anywhere. The death had occurred between four o’clock and eight o’clock on Monday evening, which is what they had assumed all along. The cause of death was also as expected: cerebral haemorrhage caused by blows with a blunt instrument to the head and face.

  Questioning the neighbours in the area had produced the following information: Lennart Josefsson, living in a house across from Olsson’s, saw two men pass by outside his window a short interval apart about the time of the murder. Because it had been dark he could not provide a description, but he could not rule out that Vannerberg had be
en one of them. A family on another street had had their garage broken into during the summer holiday. Several families in the area had been visited by a female Polish picture-seller during the month of November. Several times an older couple had noticed an unknown woman with a ‘Swedish appearance’ walking on Åkerbärsvägen. Some of the neighbours had noticed a male jogger in a light-blue tracksuit passing by on the street. He proved to be a resident of Olvonbacken, a cross-street to Åkerbärsvägen. A male cyclist in his thirties or forties, presumably drunk, had been seen wobbling around the streets on the Saturday evening before the murder. Finally, nine families in the area had been visited by a shifty-looking twenty-something with a Swedish appearance selling toilet paper emblazoned with the badge of the local tennis club. Three individuals in the immediate neighbourhood had witnessed Ingrid Olsson being picked up by ambulance after she broke her hip.

  The team was working along several lines of enquiry, but agreed on the main hypothesis that Hans Vannerberg, intending to visit the new family at Åkerbärsvägen number 13, had left home on Monday evening and by mistake ended up at number 31, where he met his killer, who had followed him there for reasons so far unknown.

  The prosecutor, the long-limbed Hadar Rosén, was starting to get impatient and proposed that they investigate whether there were any similar cases in Stockholm or elsewhere. Einar Eriksson had researched this and found no direct parallels anywhere, in terms of the murder method or crime scene. After all, most murders were the result of either family tragedies or drunkenness.

  When Sjöberg went home that evening it was pouring with rain and, as usual, he had no umbrella. If he brought an umbrella with him to work, he left it there and didn’t need it until he got home, but if he left the umbrella at home, it rained just as he was leaving work. He made a snap decision to go a few blocks in the opposite direction to a shop that sold handbags, hoping they would have umbrellas, which proved to be the case. This didn’t help, however, for the shop had just closed and he had to trudge those three blocks back.

  On the way home he passed a stationery shop, which he entered without really knowing why. He had a definite feeling that there was something he needed in there, but he came out a little later with a pencil case for each of the girls, wrapped in Christmas paper, and a sense of dissatisfaction at not being able to remember what it was he really should have bought.

  Finally at home, he was showered with sympathy for his soaked appearance and as he lay down on the couch to keep the children company in front of the TV, it suddenly occurred to him what his errand in the stationery shop had really been. Christoffer and Jonathan had teamed up and managed to throw fifty or so magazines on the floor, of which at least three were completely shredded.

  When the four youngest children were in bed, and Simon was sitting in front of the computer playing games, Sjöberg sat down at the kitchen table to eat the warmed-up leftovers from the children’s dinner. Åsa had eaten with them earlier in the evening but she kept him company anyway. She asked about the murder investigation and, between bites of hot dog, he recounted the developments of the last few days.

  ‘One thing strikes me,’ said Åsa. ‘They seemed to have a good relationship, the Vannerbergs, didn’t they?’

  ‘Seems like it,’ answered Sjöberg.

  ‘More or less like you and me?’

  ‘Yes, maybe.’

  ‘Two reasonable people who talk to each other?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘Say you have an appointment this evening and have to go out. Suppose you have to question a witness. Then you’d say to me, “I have to leave for a while and question a witness,” wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘You wouldn’t say you were going to question a suspect. Later on, I wouldn’t recall that you said “a suspect”, although you actually said “a witness”.’

  ‘I think you’re on to something.’

  ‘Besides – and I’m not sure about this – I don’t think you’d come home first to be with the family, and then “have to” leave and meet someone you hadn’t set up a meeting with. Vannerberg could have gone there first, straight from work.’

  ‘Maybe they weren’t home until after six, maybe he knew that.’

  ‘Then check that out. If that was the case, he should have called first, because he really wasn’t just passing by. Maybe they weren’t at home.’

  ‘But they were.’

  ‘He couldn’t know that, because he hadn’t called and asked.’

  ‘You’re right. And that puts us –’

  ‘That puts us in a situation where Vannerberg was lured to a deserted house by someone who planned to murder him there,’ Åsa interrupted.

  ‘Someone who knew that Ingrid Olsson wasn’t at home,’ Sjöberg filled in. ‘Someone who either wanted to get at her too, or simply chose her house because it was empty.’

  ‘So, someone with a connection to both Ingrid Olsson and Hans Vannerberg. Find that connection and the mystery is solved,’ Åsa declared contentedly, putting her hands behind her neck.

  ‘You’re damn right about that,’ said Sjöberg with a preoccupied expression. ‘I’ll go call that buyer.’

  He got up from the table, leaving the dirty dish behind for his proudly humming wife.

  He started by calling Petra Westman, who had been in contact with the buyer previously. She was still at work and, with some surprise, gave him the telephone number for the family at Åkerbärsvägen 13.

  ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow if I get anywhere,’ Sjöberg said mysteriously, thanking Westman for her help and ending the call.

  Then he called the buyers, and the husband answered. He was the one who’d had contact with the estate agent regarding the complaints about the seller.

  ‘Excuse me for calling so late. This is Conny Sjöberg, chief inspector with the Violent Crimes Unit, Hammarby Police Department. I’m leading the investigation regarding the murder of Hans Vannerberg.’

  ‘No problem. How can I help you?’ the man asked readily.

  ‘I wonder if you ever spoke to Hans Vannerberg in person.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I only talked to Molin.’

  ‘Did you ever talk to Molin about suitable times for Vannerberg to come over and look at those things you were unhappy about?’ asked Sjöberg.

  ‘I said that any time was fine. My wife is home with the children.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Vannerberg have called first? Perhaps your wife isn’t home all day?’

  ‘Sure, of course that would have been reasonable. If he hadn’t just been passing by …’

  ‘Thanks very much,’ said Sjöberg, ‘and I beg your pardon once again.’

  Åsa smiled triumphantly at him. He hugged her and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

  ‘Where would I be without you, darling?’ he laughed. ‘Now it’s time for Simon to go to bed, I think.’

  Åsa was reading a book and Sjöberg watched the TV news distractedly, while his brain worked over what might be a new direction for the investigation. He decided to contact Ingrid Olsson tomorrow and go through the house himself, in pursuit of something – but he didn’t quite know what. Hopefully he would recognize it if he saw it, but he felt by no means sure of that.

  The reporter went on and on about Hamas, suicide bombings in Iraq and the poisoning of the Russian exspy Litvinenko, but Sjöberg was having a hard time concentrating on the news. One story, though, caught his interest. Some uniformed policemen were shown conversing with one another on the screen while the TV anchor summarized the event:

  ‘In Katrineholm a forty-four-year-old mother of two was found yesterday, murdered in her apartment. The woman was discovered by her seventeen-year-old son at lunchtime and is believed to have been drowned in a washtub some time in the morning. The police do not yet have a suspect.’

  This has truly not been a good week for forty-four-year-olds, thought Sjöberg. Three murders in nine days, this just doesn’t make sense. A colleague from the Katrineholm P
olice Department was interviewed about the murder by a female reporter, while the camera swept across a muddy play area and a group of people crowding at the barricade around a basement stairway.

  ‘The forensic investigation is not finished, but all indications are that the woman’s life was taken by one or more unknown assailants,’ said the police commissioner.

  ‘We have information that she was drowned,’ coaxed the reporter.

  ‘Is that so?’ asked the police officer. Suddenly something clicked in Sjöberg’s head, though he couldn’t immediately pinpoint what it was he had reacted to.

  ‘Yes, this much I guess I can say,’ the police officer admitted after a moment’s hesitation, ‘drowning is a probable scenario we are working on. I can’t say more than that right now, but we expect the forensic investigation to be finished over the weekend and then we will know more.’

  ‘Weekend,’ Sjöberg muttered to himself. ‘Funny pronunciation, very different from ours. “Is that so,” ’ he mused, in an affected, whining tone of voice. ‘Meaning “I see.” ’

  There was something familiar about those dialect expressions and the whining tone, but he could not for the life of him think where he had heard them before. At last he reluctantly pushed the thought away and turned his attention back to the report on the consequences of the major snowstorm at the beginning of November.

  * * *

  Thomas shuddered when he opened the jar of lingonberry jam and saw that the surface was covered with greyish, furry mould. He quickly screwed the lid back on and threw the jar in the bin bag hanging on the knob of the cupboard under the kitchen sink. He sat down at the table and attacked the black pudding, not without a certain disappointment.

  The kitchen window still gaped vacantly, except for the old transistor radio that had been there since the days of Uncle Gunnar. But the kitchen curtains were ordered. Last Monday after work he had ventured into the fabric shop down at the corner. There was a sign in the window offering to sew curtains for free, if you bought the material there. The fabric he decided on was warm yellow with a thin, blue check that would probably go well in a kitchen. Actually, it was the woman in the shop who finally got impatient and firmly recommended that he choose it. Thomas gratefully accepted the suggestion and overlooked her irritated facial expression and angrily exaggerated motions. He left it up to her to decide on the type of curtain; they had not even discussed the different options. The workmanship on the curtains would have to be a surprise and he had not dared ask what it would all cost either. He could pick them up next week.