Sidetracked

by Unknown

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “He took a blow to the back of the head,” said the doctor.

  “Here in the kitchen?”

  “No, upstairs,” said Birgersson, standing behind him.

  Sjösten straightened up.

  “Take him out of the oven,” he said. “Has the photographer finished?”

  Birgersson nodded. Sjösten followed him upstairs, avoiding the traces of blood. Birgersson stopped outside the bathroom door.

  “As you saw, he was wearing pyjamas,” said Birgersson. “Here’s how it probably happened: Liljegren was in the bathroom. The killer was waiting for him. He struck Liljegren with an axe in the back of the head and then dragged the body to the kitchen. That could explain why the pyjama bottoms were hanging from one leg. Then he put the body in front of the oven, turned it on, and left. We don’t know yet how he got into the house and out again. I thought you might be able to take care of that.”

  Sjösten said nothing. He was thinking. He went back down to the kitchen. The body was on a plastic sheet on the floor.

  “Is it him?” asked Sjösten.

  “It’s Liljegren,” said the doctor. “Even though he doesn’t have much face left.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Is it the man who takes scalps?”

  The doctor pulled back the plastic sheet covering the blackened face.

  “I’m convinced that he cut or tore off the hair at the front of his head,” said the doctor.

  Sjösten nodded. Then he turned to Birgersson.

  “I want you to call the Ystad police. Get hold of Kurt Wallander. I want to talk to him. Now.”

  For once Wallander had fixed a proper breakfast. He had fried some eggs and was just sitting down at the table with his newspaper when the telephone rang. The caller introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Sture Birgersson of the Helsingborg police. What he had feared had finally happened. The killer had struck again. He swore under his breath, an oath that contained equal parts rage and horror. Waldemar Sjösten came to the phone. In the early 1980s they had collaborated on the investigation of a drugs ring extending all over Skåne. Although they were very different people, they had had an easy time working together and had formed the beginnings of a friendship.

  “Kurt?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “It’s been a long time.”

  “So what’s happened? Is what I hear true?”

  “Unfortunately it is. Your killer has turned up here in Helsingborg.”

  “Is it confirmed?”

  “There’s nothing to indicate otherwise. An axe blow to the head. Then he cut off the victim’s scalp.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Åke Liljegren. Does that name ring a bell?”

  Wallander thought for a moment. “The one they call ‘the Auditor’?”

  “Precisely. A former minister of justice, an art dealer and now a white-collar criminal.”

  “And a fence too,” said Wallander. “Don’t forget him.”

  “You should come up here. Our superiors can sort out the red tape so that we can cross into each other’s jurisdictions.”

  “I’ll come right away,” said Wallander. “It might be a good idea if I bring Sven Nyberg, our head forensic technician.”

  “Bring whoever you want. I won’t stand in your way. I just don’t like it that the killer has shown up here.”

  “I’ll be in Helsingborg in two hours,” said Wallander. “If you can tell me whether there’s some connection between Liljegren and the others who were killed, we’ll be ahead of the game. Did the killer leave any clues?”

  “Not directly, although we can see how it happened. This time he didn’t pour acid into his victim’s eyes. He roasted him. His head and half his neck, at least.”

  “Roasted?”

  “In an oven. Be glad you won’t have to look at it.”

  “What else?”

  “I just got here, so nothing really.”

  After Wallander hung up he looked at his watch. It was very early. He called Nyberg, who answered at once. Wallander told him what had happened, and Nyberg promised to be outside Wallander’s building in 15 minutes. Then Wallander dialled Hansson’s number, but changed his mind and called Martinsson instead. As always, Martinsson’s wife answered. It took a couple of minutes before her husband came to the phone.

  “He’s killed again,” said Wallander. “This time in Helsingborg. A crook named Åke Liljegren. They call him ‘the Auditor’.”

  “The corporate raider?” asked Martinsson.

  “That’s him.”

  “The murderer has taste.”

  “Bullshit,” Wallander said. “I’m driving up there with Nyberg. They’ve asked us to come. I want you to tell Hansson. I’ll give you a call as soon as I know more.”

  “This means that the National Criminal Bureau will be called in,” Martinsson said. “Maybe it’s the best thing.”

  “The best thing would be if we caught this killer,” Wallander replied. “I’ll call you later.”

  He was outside when Nyberg drove up in his old Amazon. It was a beautiful morning. Nyberg drove fast. At Sturup they turned off towards Lund and reached the motorway to Helsingborg. Wallander told him what he knew. After they had passed Lund, Hansson called. He was out of breath. He’s been even more afraid of this than I have, Wallander thought.

  “It’s terrible,” said Hansson. “This changes everything.”

  “For the time being it doesn’t change a thing,” Wallander replied. “It depends entirely on what actually happened.”

  “It’s time for the National Criminal Bureau to take over,” said Hansson. Wallander could tell from Hansson’s voice that to be relieved of his responsibility was what he wanted most of all. Wallander was annoyed. He couldn’t ignore the hint of disparagement of the work of the investigative team.

  “That’s your responsibility – yours and Åkeson’s,” Wallander said tersely. “What occurred in Helsingborg is their problem. But they’ve asked me to go up there. We’ll talk about what we’re going to do later.”

  Wallander hung up. Nyberg didn’t say a word. But Wallander knew he had been listening carefully.

  They were met by a squad car at the exit to Helsingborg. Wallander realised that it must have been somewhere nearby that Sven Andersson had stopped to give Dolores María Santana a lift on her last journey. They followed the car up to Tågaborg and stopped outside Liljegren’s villa. Wallander and Nyberg passed through the police cordon and were met by Sjösten at the bottom of the steps to the villa, which Wallander guessed had been built around the turn of the century. They said hello and exchanged a few words. Sjösten introduced Nyberg to the forensic technician from Helsingborg. The two of them went inside.

  Sjösten put out his cigarette and buried the butt in the gravel with his heel.

  “It’s your man who did this,” he said.

  “What do you know about the victim?”

  “Åke Liljegren was famous.”

  “Infamous, you mean.”

  Sjösten nodded. “There are probably plenty of people who have dreamt of killing him,” he said. “With a criminal justice system that worked better, with fewer loopholes in the laws on financial fraud, he would have been locked up.”

  Sjösten took Wallander into the house. The air was thick with the stench of burnt flesh. Sjösten gave Wallander a mask, which he put on reluctantly. They went into the kitchen where the body still lay under the plastic sheet. Wallander nodded to Sjösten to let him see, thinking that he might as well get it over with. He didn’t know what he had expected, but he flinched involuntarily. Liljegren’s face was gone. The skin was burnt away and large sections of the skull were clearly visible. There were just two holes where the eyes had been. The hair and ears were also burnt off. Wallander nodded to Sjösten to put back the sheet. Sjösten quickly described how Liljegren had been found leaning into the oven. Wallander got some Polaroids from the photographer. It was almost worse to see th
e pictures. Wallander shook his head with a grimace and handed them back. Sjösten took him upstairs, pointing out the blood, and describing the apparent sequence of events. Wallander occasionally asked a question about a detail, but Sjösten’s scenario seemed convincing.

  “Were there any witnesses?” asked Wallander. “Clues left by the murderer? How did he get into the house?”

  “Through a basement window.”

  They returned to the kitchen and went down to the basement that extended under the whole house. A little window stood ajar in a room where Wallander smelt the faint aroma of apples stored for the winter.

  “We think he got in this way,” said Sjösten. “And left that way too. Even though he could have walked straight out the front door. Liljegren lived alone.”

  “Did he leave anything behind?” Wallander wondered. “So far he has been careful to leave no clues. On the other hand, he hasn’t been excessively meticulous. We have a whole set of fingerprints. According to Nyberg, we’re missing only the left little finger.”

  “Fingerprints he knows the police don’t have on file,” said Sjösten.

  Wallander nodded. Sjösten was right.

  “We found a footprint in the kitchen next to the stove,” said Sjösten.

  “So he was barefoot again,” said Wallander.

  “Barefoot?”

  Wallander told him about the footprint they had found in the blood in Fredman’s van. He would have to provide Sjösten and his colleagues with all the material they had on the first three murders.

  Wallander inspected the basement window. He thought he could see faint scrape marks near one of the latches, which had been broken off. When he bent down he found it, although it was hard to see against the dark floor. He didn’t touch it.

  “It looks as though it might have been loosened in advance,” he said.

  “You think he prepared for his visit?”

  “It’s conceivable. It fits with his pattern. He puts his victims under surveillance. He stakes them out. Why, and for how long, we have no idea. Our psychologist from Stockholm, Mats Ekholm, claims this is characteristic of serial killers.”

  They went into the next room. The windows were the same. The latches were intact.

  “We should probably search for footprints in the grass outside that window,” Wallander said. He regretted his words immediately. He had no right to tell an experienced investigator like Sjösten what to do. They returned to the kitchen. Liljegren’s body was being removed.

  “What I’ve been looking for the whole time is the connection,” said Wallander. “First I looked for one between Gustaf Wetterstedt and Arne Carlman. I finally found it. Then I looked for one between Björn Fredman and the two others. We haven’t been able to find a link yet, but I’m convinced there is one. Perhaps this is one of the first things we should do here. Is it possible to find some connection between Åke Liljegren and the other three? Preferably to all of them, but at least to any one of them.”

  “In a way we already have a very clear connection,” said Sjösten quietly.

  Wallander gave him a questioning glance.

  “What I mean is, the killer is an identifiable link,” Sjösten went on. “Even if we don’t know who he is.”

  Sjösten nodded towards the door to the garden. Wallander realised that Sjösten wanted to speak privately. Outside in the garden, they both squinted in the bright light. It was going to be another hot day. Sjösten lit a cigarette and led Wallander over to a table and chairs a little way from the house. They moved the chairs into the shade.

  “There are plenty of rumours about Åke Liljegren,” Sjösten began. “His shell companies are only a part of his operations. Here in Helsingborg we’ve heard about a lot of other things. Low-flying Cessnas making drops of cocaine, heroin and marijuana. Pretty hard to prove, and I have difficulty associating this type of activity with Liljegren. It may just be my limited imagination, of course. I go on thinking that it’s possible to sort crimes into categories. Criminals are supposed to stay within those boundaries and not encroach on other people’s territory, which messes up our classifications.”

  “I’ve sometimes thought along those same lines,” Wallander admitted. “But those days are gone. The world we live in is becoming more comprehensible and more chaotic at the same time.”

  Sjösten waved his cigarette at the huge villa.

  “There have been other rumours too,” he said. “These ones more concrete. About wild parties in this house. Women, prostitution.”

  “Wild?” asked Wallander. “Have you ever had to get involved?”

  “Never,” said Sjösten. “Actually I don’t know why I called the parties wild. But people used to come here a lot. And disappear just as quickly as they came.”

  Wallander didn’t answer. A dizzying image flitted through his mind. He saw Dolores María Santana standing at the southern motorway entrance from Helsingborg. Could there be a connection? Prostitution? But he pushed the thought away. There was no evidence for this, he was confusing two different investigations.

  “We’re going to have to work together,” Sjösten said. “You and your colleagues have several weeks on us. Now that we add Liljegren to the picture, how does it look? What’s changed? What seems clearer?”

  “The National Criminal Bureau will certainly get involved now,” Wallander answered. “That’s good, of course. But I’m afraid that we’ll have problems working together, that information won’t get to the right person.”

  “I have the same concern,” Sjösten agreed. “That’s why I want to suggest something. That you and I become an informal team, so we can step aside for discussion when we need to.”

  “That’s fine by me,” Wallander said.

  “We both remember the days of the old national homicide commission,” Sjösten said. “Something that worked very efficiently was dismantled. And things have never really been the same since.”

  “Times were different. Violence had a different face, and there were fewer murders. Criminals operated in patterns that were recognisable in a way that they aren’t today. I’m not sure that the commission would have been as effective now.”

  Sjösten stood up. “But we’re in agreement?”

  “Of course,” Wallander replied. “Whenever we think it’s necessary, we’ll talk.”

  “You can stay with me,” Sjösten said, “if you have to be here overnight. It’s no pleasure to have to stay at a hotel.”

  “I’d like that,” Wallander thanked him. But he didn’t mind staying at a hotel when he was away. He needed to have at least a few hours to himself every day.

  They walked back to the house. To the left was a large garage with two doors. While Sjösten went inside, Wallander decided to take a look in the garage. With difficulty he lifted one of the doors. Inside was a black Mercedes. The windows were tinted. He stood there thinking.

  Then he went into the house, called Ystad, and asked to speak with Höglund. He told her briefly what had happened.

  “I want you to contact Sara Björklund,” he said. “Do you remember her?”

  “Wetterstedt’s housekeeper?”

  “Right. I want you to bring her here to Helsingborg. As soon as you can.”

  “Why?”

  “I want her to take a look at a car. And I’ll be standing next to her hoping that she recognises it.”

  Höglund asked no more questions.

  CHAPTER 30

  Sara Björklund stood for a long time looking at the black car. Wallander stayed in the background. He wanted his presence to give her confidence, but didn’t want to stand so close to her that he would be a disturbing factor. He could tell that she was doing her best to be absolutely certain. Was this the car she had seen on the Friday morning that she’d come to Wetterstedt’s house, thinking it was a Thursday? Had it looked like this one, could it even be the very same car she had seen drive away from the house where the old minister of justice lived?

  Sjösten agreed with Wallander when he
explained his idea. Even if the “charwoman” held in such contempt by Wetterstedt said that it could have been a car of the same make, that wouldn’t prove a thing. All they would get was an indication, a possibility. But it was important even so; they both realised that.

  Sara Björklund hesitated. Since there were keys in the ignition, Wallander asked Sjösten to drive it once round the block. If she closed her eyes and listened, did she recognise the sound of the engine? Cars had different sounds. She listened.

  “Maybe,” she said afterwards. “It looks like the car I saw that morning. But whether it was the same one I can’t say. I didn’t see the number plate.”

  Wallander nodded.

  “I didn’t expect you to,” he said. “I’m sorry I had to ask you to come all the way here.”

  Höglund had brought Norén with her, who would now drive Sara Björklund back to Ystad. Höglund wanted to stay. It was barely midday, yet the whole country seemed to know already what had happened. Sjösten held an impromptu press conference out on the street, while Wallander and Höglund drove down to the ferry terminal and had lunch. He told her all that he had learned.

  “Åke Liljegren appeared in our investigative material on Alfred Harderberg,” she said when he’d finished. “Do you remember?”

  Wallander let his mind travel back to the year before. He remembered the businessman and art patron who lived behind the walls of Farnholm Castle with distaste. The man they had eventually prevented from leaving the country in a dramatic scene at Sturup Airport. Liljegren’s name had indeed come up in the investigation, but he had been on the periphery. They had never considered questioning him.