Linda - As In The Linda Murder

by Leif Persson

  ‘So who is he, then?’ Bäckström asked his team. ‘Who are we looking for?’

  ‘The perpetrator is probably a man,’ Thorén said solemnly. ‘I’m joking, of course,’ he added. ‘I was thinking of our colleagues in the CP group. Isn’t that what they usually put in their profiles? “The perpetrator is probably a man. In all likelihood he already knew the victim, but we can’t rule out that he had no previous connection to the victim and met her in conjunction with the offence in question,” ’ he went on in a sombre voice.

  ‘Are you thinking of changing jobs?’ Bäckström said. ‘A young man who already knew Linda,’ he went on, looking at the others encouragingly.

  ‘Young? Peter didn’t actually say young,’ Knutsson said.

  ‘So how old is he, then?’ Christ, they’re just like stroppy teenagers, Bäckström thought.

  ‘Well,’ Knutsson said, ‘between twenty and twenty-five, something like that, a few years older than Linda.’

  ‘Fine,’ Bäckström said. ‘I thought that’s what I said?’ Idiots. ‘So how well does he know her?’

  ‘This is what I think,’ Lewin said, sounding as though he’d given the matter some thought. ‘Eva and I were actually discussing this before dinner.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ Bäckström said. So you talk to each other as well?

  ‘A young man, twenty-five, thirty or so. He knows Linda well, although they don’t meet very often. But she’s still very fond of him even though it’s been a while since they met. Someone she’s had sex with at least once before. Probably perfectly ordinary sex, because I get the impression that’s what she likes. I don’t think she’s particularly sexually experienced either. I actually asked the medical officer after the meeting, and according to him there’s nothing to suggest that she had ever engaged in anal sex or any of the more violent sadomasochistic practices before. No healed wounds or old scar tissue, nothing like that. And I think she trusts him. And they haven’t seen each other for a while. Then he suddenly shows up again. In the middle of the night.’

  ‘She’s still fond enough of him to let him in,’ Svanström said. ‘I don’t think he’s necessarily that young, either. He could easily be a bit older.’

  I didn’t expect that of Lewin, Bäckström thought. That he’s still got that much going on. ‘He still manages to come four times in not much more than an hour,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, that was a while ago,’ Rogersson said. It sounded as if he were thinking out loud.

  ‘I get the impression that he was high on something,’ Lewin said. ‘That he’d taken amphetamines or something like that.’

  ‘Yes, or maybe a slightly older man who’s been at the Viagra,’ Thorén added.

  ‘Someone who uses drugs?’ Rogersson said hesitantly. ‘I can’t quite get that to fit with our victim. Especially not if I buy the bit about her trusting him. I think she trusts him more or less unconditionally. Would she really have that sort of trust for someone with a drug problem?’

  ‘Not a drug problem.’ Lewin shook his head. ‘It doesn’t work if that’s the case. Someone who’s tried it a few times. Maybe just uses it for sex.’

  ‘Someone that Linda knows and trusts,’ Bäckström said slowly. ‘So where does he live, then?’ Makes sense to change track, he thought.

  ‘Here in town,’ Knutsson said. ‘In Växjö.’

  ‘Or close to the town, Växjö and the surrounding area,’ Thorén elaborated.

  ‘A man of twenty-five or slightly older, someone she knows already, likes, and trusts completely. Who lives in town or at least nearby. Who isn’t an addict but occasionally takes amphetamines because he knows the way they work, which is to help him lose his inhibitions and make his cock go like an electric toothbrush,’ Bäckström summarized. ‘You don’t think things could be so bad that we’re looking for a fellow officer? Some crazy bastard who manages to hold it together apart from one fateful day?’

  ‘That thought has been at the back of my mind ever since I got here,’ Rogersson said. ‘All the crazy fuckers you meet in the force. All the stories you hear. They can’t all be made up, sadly.’

  Lewin was shaking his head dubiously. ‘Admittedly, worse things have happened in the force,’ he said slowly. ‘The thought’s occurred to me as well. But I still don’t quite believe it.’

  ‘Why not?’ Bäckström said. Because he isn’t like you, he thought.

  ‘He seems a bit too uninhibited for my taste,’ Lewin said. ‘All the evidence he left behind. Wouldn’t a police officer have tidied up after him?’

  ‘Looks like he wiped the knife,’ Bäckström said. ‘Maybe he didn’t have time to clean up if he thought someone was coming.’

  ‘There’s something about this that just doesn’t feel right.’ Lewin shrugged. ‘But of course I’ve been wrong before.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Bäckström said, looking round the room. Or am I going to have the good fortune finally to be able to collapse in bed with a bit of liquid assistance before I fall asleep?

  ‘I think he’s good-looking,’ Svanström said suddenly. ‘Our perpetrator, I mean. Linda was very attractive,’ she went on. ‘And she seems to have taken a lot of trouble over her appearance, not least her clothes. Have you any idea how much clothes like that cost? The things she was wearing. I think he’s the same. Birds of a feather. Isn’t that what people say?’

  Yep, and you and Lewin are both fucking scrawny, Bäckström thought.

  Before Bäckström fell asleep he called his little reporter from local radio. To help keep her on the boil, if nothing else.

  ‘I understand you’ve had the results of your DNA samples,’ Carin said. ‘I don’t suppose that’s something you’d like to tell me about?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Bäckström said sternly. ‘You got home okay the other night?’

  Evidently she had, without going into detail. Then she suggested that they ought to meet again soon. And they still didn’t have to talk about work.

  ‘Sure,’ Bäckström said. ‘That sounds good. But things are pretty busy, so it might not be for a day or two,’ he added. Way too easy, he thought.

  ‘Should I interpret that to mean that things are coming together?’ Carin said, her voice suddenly sounding eager.

  ‘You will be the first to know,’ Bäckström said, in his best television American.

  23

  Växjö, Thursday 10 July

  ON THURSDAY LEWIS decided to stop reading the evening papers. His decision was final and irrevocable, and encompassed Aftonbladet, Expressen and the latter’s two smaller and, if possible, even nastier siblings, Göteborgs-Tidningen and Kvällsposten.

  The double-spread article that had particularly attracted his disgust was in that day’s copy of Kvällsposten and taken alongside everything else the Swedish evening papers had already printed about the Linda murder it looked almost innocuous. Shipwrecked-Micke had come forward and revealed that ‘I met Linda the night she was murdered’.

  Shipwrecked-Micke, in his capacity as a reality television celebrity with local connections, had accepted a small job at the Town Hotel on the evening of Thursday 3 July. The same evening that Linda went to the hotel’s club, just a few hours before she was murdered. He had been accompanied by two fellow celebs – Farm-Frasse and Big Brother-Nina – and their shared duties involved helping out in the bar, mingling with the guests and generally contributing to raising the atmosphere in the venue.

  Around ten o’clock in the evening, about an hour before Linda arrived at the nightclub, Micke, severely intoxicated, bare-chested and with nothing on his feet, had been dancing up on the bar, but tumbled off and broke a load of glasses, and ended up flailing about in the shattered fragments. At quarter past ten he was taken by ambulance to hospital in Växjö to be sewn up. His colleague, Frasse, had gone with him, and had called a journalist he knew while they were in the ambulance. The interview with Micke and Frasse had been conducted while they were waiting in A&E, and the next
morning, the same morning that Linda was found murdered and before news of the killing reached the papers, Kvällsposten had led with a big report about the fact that Shipwrecked-Micke – famous from The Bar and ordinary Shipwrecked, and because of the double accolade of having also appeared in Celebrity Shipwrecked – had been attacked and beaten up in the Town Hotel in Växjö the previous evening, even though he was born and raised there, and was now one of the town’s most famous inhabitants.

  After the conclusion of the interview and a further hour of waiting for the doctors to take care of his colleague, Farm-Frasse had got fed up and gone back to the Town Hotel. There the bouncer had refused to let him back in and a fight had broken out, the police had been called, and shortly after midnight Farm-Frasse had found himself in the holding cells of Växjö police station on Sandgärdsgatan, where he was left to sober up.

  A couple of hours later he was joined by Shipwrecked-Micke, who had kicked up a fuss in A&E, been picked up by the police and thrown into another cell in the same police station. At six o’clock the following morning they had both been allowed to leave the station, and, leaning on his friend Frasse, a limping Micke had crossed Oxtorget and disappeared from any sort of police interest, destination unknown.

  What Shipwrecked-Micke was now telling the paper a week after the murder was a pack of lies from beginning to end. He couldn’t have spoken to Linda during the evening before the murder, and she hadn’t ‘told him in confidence that she had often felt threatened recently, because of her job with the police in Växjö’.

  Being in the same predicament as Shipwrecked-Micke, in the same corridor of cells mainly used for drunks, Farm-Frasse couldn’t have met Linda the night she was murdered either. Which left the third member of their company, Big Brother-Nina, who at least had been in the nightclub until it closed at four o’clock the next morning.

  Nina had been questioned by the police as early as Friday afternoon, and it had taken some time before she realized that the police didn’t want to talk to her about the alleged attack on her friend Micke. She didn’t have a clue about the fact that Linda had been murdered. She didn’t know her. Had never met her, still less spoken to her, not on any previous occasion, and not on the night of the murder.

  The reporter who had written both articles could hardly have been quite as ignorant, but what irritated the usually sanguine Lewin was the fact that the reporter had the bad taste to drag him into the lies he had woven together. The day before the second article appeared he had called Lewin to give him the opportunity to respond to the serious allegations that Shipwrecked-Micke was now directing at the police. What had they done to investigate the threats that Linda had told Shipwrecked-Micke about, which Micke claimed he had informed the police in Växjö about at the earliest opportunity?

  Lewin had declined to comment, and referred the reporter to the press officer. Whether he followed that advice was unclear. The only thing revealed in the article was that the paper had contacted the detective in charge of the case, Superintendent Jan Lewin from the National Crime Unit, but he had ‘refused to address the serious allegations directed at his and his colleagues’ work’.

  And that was when Lewin had made up his mind. He was never going to read another Swedish evening paper as long as he lived.

  24

  AT THE MORNING meeting that day, Enoksson was able to report the first concrete surveillance results.

  With the help of the perpetrator’s DNA, they had already been able to discount ten people from the inquiry. First in and first out was Linda’s former boyfriend, along with a couple of Linda’s fellow students who had met her at the club on the night of the murder, as well as half a dozen serious sexual offenders whose DNA profiles were already in the police database. Including Leo Baranski.

  ‘It’s like going out into the fields with a good sharp scythe,’ Enoksson said happily. ‘You take a couple of good swings and get rid of anything that’s got no business being there.’

  ‘Okay,’ Bäckström said. ‘You hear what Enok’s saying. Let’s swing that scythe. We need samples, samples, and more samples. Anyone with a clear conscience has nothing to fear, and every decent citizen wants to help the police, so there shouldn’t be any problems getting people to volunteer.’

  ‘What about if anyone doesn’t want to?’ one of the younger local officers said from the far end of the table.

  ‘Then things get really interesting,’ Bäckström said, smiling as warmly as the big bad wolf in the tale of the three little pigs. What the hell are they letting into the force these days?

  Later that morning the head of the National Crime Unit, Sten Nylander, arrived in Växjö. Nylander came by helicopter together with his chief of staff and staff officer. The simpler members of the rapid-response unit, who would be responsible for the practical details, had travelled down in advance in two of the large American Hummer jeeps that the force had at its disposal.

  When Nylander landed at Småland Airport, some ten kilometres outside Växjö, the welcoming committee was already in place, and the NRRU was making sure that the area was kept clear of anyone who shouldn’t be there. The county police commissioner had driven in from his place in the country, and had even changed out of his shorts and Hawaiian shirt into a grey suit and tie, even though it was almost thirty degrees outside. By his side stood Superintendent Bengt Olsson, in full uniform, and they were both sweating profusely already.

  Nylander himself, in contrast, was both immaculately dressed and not showing the slightest sign of bodily fluids. In spite of the weather, he was wearing the same outfit as when he met Bäckström the previous week, plus a neatly peaked uniform cap that he put on the moment he stepped out of the helicopter. The ensemble was completed by a pair of dark frameless sunglasses, with reflecting glass, and a riding crop. This latter detail aroused a certain amount of local surprise, since no one had seen any trace of Brandklipparen.

  First they ‘reconnoitred the operational terrain’ – Växjö and the surrounding area – in advance of the impending operation, partly to ‘get a feel’ for the district, partly to identify suitable locations where they could ‘disembark’ their forces, and partly to determine the ‘optimal point’ for the actual seizure of the perpetrator.

  ‘But can you really work all that out in advance?’ the county police commissioner said, as he sat squashed into the rear seat of the jeep surrounded by half a dozen silent figures in camouflage uniforms. ‘I mean . . . we don’t actually know who he is. Not yet, I mean,’ he added quickly.

  ‘Affirmative,’ Nylander said from his seat at the front, without even turning his head. ‘It’s all a question of planning.’

  A couple of hours later they were finished. Nylander had declined a meeting in the county police commissioner’s office, the planned lunch, and other formalities. He had to fly on to Gothenburg on a similar mission, and his colleagues could sort out the practical details in Växjö with Olsson.

  ‘But I would like to say hello to my officers,’ HNC had said, and quarter of an hour later he was marching into the investigation’s main premises.

  What the fuck’s going on, Bäckström had thought when he heard the commotion out in the corridor and caught a glimpse of the first camouflaged figure. Has war broken out, or what?

  Nylander had stopped in the doorway and nodded towards everyone, like an oil tanker rising between two waves. Then he had taken Bäckström aside and even patted him on the shoulder.

  ‘I’m relying on you, Åström,’ HNC said. ‘Make sure you get him as soon as possible.’

  ‘Of course, boss,’ Bäckström said, nodding back towards his own reflection in his superior’s sunglasses. Cheers, Chinny.

  ‘You can go ahead and arrest him this weekend,’ Nylander said, when he and the county police commissioner were back at the airport. ‘The lads who are going to do the job are confined to barracks already.’

  ‘I’m afraid it may take a little longer than that,’ the county police commissioner yelled, because t
he helicopter’s engines were warming up and he could hardly hear his own voice. Why do they live in barracks, he wondered. Don’t they have homes of their own?

  ‘You got his DNA,’ Nylander said. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  After lunch Bäckström wandered into Olsson’s office. It was high time someone knocked a bit of sense into the little cretin’s head. The red lamp was on, but Bäckström wasn’t in the mood and just knocked and went in.

  Olsson had company in the form of three officers of the NRRU, with whom he didn’t seem entirely at ease. Wearing camouflage, and so similar that they were almost interchangeable, given that two of them were completely bald and the third clearly cropped his hair as closely as he could, none of the three moved a muscle when Bäckström walked in.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Bäckström,’ Olsson said, getting up quickly. ‘Excuse us a moment,’ he said, and pulled Bäckström out into the corridor.

  ‘What on earth have they sent us?’ Olsson said, shaking his head nervously as soon as he closed the door behind them. ‘What’s happening to the Swedish Police?’

  ‘The search,’ Bäckström said sternly. ‘High time to search her room at her father’s place.’

  ‘Of course,’ Olsson said with a pale smile. ‘I just haven’t got round to it, as I’m sure you understand, but if you could ask Enoksson to come and see me at once, we’ll get it sorted out.’

  ‘And I want us to interview her mother and father as well,’ said Bäckström, who wasn’t about to miss an open goal.

  ‘Of course,’ Olsson said again. ‘They should have got over the worst of the shock by now. Well, enough for there to be some point to it, I mean,’ he added in clarification. ‘So you’ve given up the idea that she was killed by a completely unknown madman?’

  ‘She was killed by someone she knew,’ Bäckström said curtly. ‘It remains to be seen just how mad he was.’

  Olsson merely nodded. ‘Ask Enoksson to come and see me at once,’ he repeated, sounding almost imploring.