Linda - As In The Linda Murder

by Leif Persson

  ‘I understand what you mean, Bäckström. I take that back,’ Olsson said with a faint smile.

  And you’re humble as well, you little poof, Bäckström thought.

  The first part of the search for the exclusive sweater was done by phone. First Rogersson called Linda’s mother and asked her. She was entirely sure. She had certainly never owned a top like that. Pale blue just wasn’t her colour.

  What about her daughter? Had Linda ever owned a pale blue cashmere top? Her mother couldn’t recall ever having seen anything like that, although Linda had loads of clothes. To be on the safe side, she suggested that Rogersson talk to Linda’s father. If she’d been given it as a present, it was bound to have been from him.

  ‘A pale blue cashmere top?’ Henning Wallin said. ‘Not something I’ve ever given her. Not that I can remember, anyway. Blue was certainly her colour, but not light blue, exactly.’

  The conversation ended with Henning Wallin suggesting that he would talk to his housekeeper about it. She ought to be able to say, and whether the answer was positive or negative he promised to get in touch as soon as he had spoken to her. ‘Is it important?’ he asked.

  ‘Could be,’ Rogersson said. ‘At this stage, most things are important.’

  ‘That sweater,’ Rogersson said to Bäckström an hour later.

  ‘I’m listening,’ Bäckström said. Right now a cold beer would be great. Who the hell could bear to talk about sweaters in this sort of heat, he thought.

  ‘It doesn’t look like it was Linda’s. I spoke to her dad, who spoke to his housekeeper, who called me and went on about how she’s sewn and mended and washed and ironed and folded and hung up and brushed and rubbed and scrubbed everything for Linda and her dad for the past ten years.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She can’t recall any pale blue cashmere top ruining her life with its presence,’ Rogersson said. ‘But their household martyr does seem to have had a lot of valuable stuff to look after.’

  ‘What about her mum, then?’

  ‘Wrong colour. Completely the wrong colour for her. Not a chance,’ Rogersson said. ‘So we can forget her.’

  Wrong colour? Bäckström thought. Women are completely mad. Personally he had a favourite sweater that had blue, red and green horizontal stripes. He had found it when he had been on a murder case up in Östersund a few years ago; some lazy rich bastard had left it in the hotel restaurant, and Bäckström had taken pity on it. Besides, it had been cold enough to freeze the arse off an Eskimo when he was there, even though it was only the beginning of August.

  Detective Superintendent Lewin didn’t waste a thought on the presumed pale blue sweater. He was too old to run around trying to find things that way. Everyone who knew what it was really about knew that you had to differentiate between big and small, and that you had to look very carefully in order to be able to tell which was which. This business about where Linda’s mother had lived, for instance. Besides, he had the best possible help for that sort of practical search.

  ‘I understand exactly what you mean, Janne,’ Eva Svanström said. ‘I don’t understand why Bäckström and the others all assume this is just about Linda. I’ve thought that all along. Maybe he wanted to see the mother? I pulled up her passport photo just out of curiosity, and if she looks the way she does on the picture, I find it hard to believe she had any shortage of men in her life.’

  ‘Don’t let’s get carried away now . . . Eva,’ Lewin said, seeing as they were alone. Personally, he would rather she called him Jan than Janne regardless of whether they were alone or in company.

  Most of the evidence suggested that this was about Linda, according to Lewin. Linda was the victim, and the hideous abuse that had been directed at her seemed to be aimed at her specifically. It was extremely personal, and extremely private. That her killer covered her with the sheet at the end, careful to cover her face and body, was an expression of severe guilt, angst, and the fact that he couldn’t bear to look at her.

  In the world Lewin lived in, that was also a clear sign. It was the sort of thing the usual sex maniacs he had investigated never bothered with. There it was all about exposing the victim in a sexually pro-vocative way, to the limits of what was physically possible. To violate her even more after death, to shock the people who found her, and the people who would be looking for him. But mostly to give succour to their own fantasies as events unfolded, and to store memories for future use. And the pattern of behaviour shown here didn’t fit the married men, ex-husbands, and all the various categories of boyfriends who, in a fit of jealousy, drunkenness or simple rage, had attacked their girlfriends and wives, hitting and beating them to death, because then the crime scene was usually transformed into a slaughterhouse.

  Then there were the details as well. Small but not uninteresting, and they all pointed to Linda rather than her mother. The mother hadn’t lived in her flat for the past month. As soon as her summer holiday began, she moved out to her cottage in the country. On the few occasions when she had been in town, she had had errands to run. Instead, Linda had lived alone in her flat. For almost three weeks in a row, with all the possibilities this opened up for meetings, contacts and ordinary coincidental encounters.

  ‘You just want to make absolutely sure this isn’t anything to do with the mother,’ Eva Svanström said, smiling at him in the way his mother sometimes had when he was a young boy and needed comforting.

  ‘Yes,’ Lewin said. ‘That would be good, actually.’

  ‘Okay,’ Eva said. ‘So, this is how it looks.’

  Around ten years ago, at the time of her parents’ separation, Linda and her mother had left the USA and moved back to Växjö. Linda’s mother had been born and raised in Växjö, and, with the exception of the four years in the States, had lived there all her life. The same thing with her daughter. She was born in the maternity unit in Växjö Hospital. When she was six years old, she moved to the USA with her parents. Four years later, just in time for the start of the autumn school term, she moved back to Växjö with her mother and moved into the house on Pär Lagerkvists väg that her mother had received in the divorce.

  Linda’s mother had been registered at that address ever since. Nor was there anything to suggest that she might have lived anywhere else, with the exception of the time she spent in her summer house out on Sirkön, which she bought the year after she returned to Sweden, and where she spent her summer holidays, weekends and other breaks.

  Linda had also been registered at the same address until she reached the age of seventeen, and she attended Växjö High School. Then her father had moved back home as well, bought a large manor house south of Växjö, and just a few months later was joined there by his only daughter. During the first year Linda seemed to have lived a fairly nomadic existence, and had a room both in her mother’s flat in town and with her father out in the country, where she was registered as living. After she left school, learned to drive and got her own car, given to her by her father, she seemed to have preferred the countryside to the town, and spent less and less time staying at her mother’s.

  Svanström had found no trace of ‘men’ connected to the flat, at least not in the official sense. Only Linda and her mother had ever been registered at the address in question.

  ‘I see,’ Lewin sighed.

  ‘You don’t seem very happy,’ Svanström said. ‘It would be good if you could explain why. It would make things easier for me. If I knew what you were looking for, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t actually know,’ Lewin said. ‘What about the others registered in the building? What about their living arrangements?’

  According to Svanström, they all seemed to have lived there just as long as, or even longer than, Linda’s mother, with one exception. The only occupant who had arrived in the past ten years seemed to be Marian Gross the librarian, who had bought his flat and moved in at roughly the time the building was transferred from rented to private flats a few years ago.

  ‘But you’ve alr
eady turned him inside out by now,’ Svanström said. ‘Anyway, didn’t his DNA mean that he’s been eliminated from the investigation?’

  ‘If Gross bought his flat, that must mean that someone else sold it to him,’ Lewin said. ‘And moved out.’

  ‘Not on this occasion,’ Eva Svanström said. ‘Believe it or not, I’ve checked that as well, even though it took quite a while. He actually bought it from another occupant who lived there when Linda and her mother moved in, and still lives there, so the simple explanation is that she had two tenancies. I noticed that she ran some sort of accountancy business, so I’d guess that she used the flat that Gross bought as an office. It seems to be quite tricky, in purely legal terms, to use a domestic flat as an office. Especially if it’s managed by a small housing association. She must have made quite a bit of money from it as well.’

  ‘Margareta Eriksson,’ Lewin said suddenly.

  ‘That’s her name,’ Svanström said. ‘Do you know what, Janne? Sometimes I wonder what you need me for. That’s the same Margareta Eriksson who came forward in the papers, isn’t it? That story about the perpetrator trying to break into her flat the same night Linda was murdered?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the one,’ Lewin said. He was finally starting to feel that he was beginning to make sense of his thoughts. A bit of structure to his world.

  ‘Mind you, I still don’t understand what you’re looking for,’ Svanström declared.

  ‘Nor me, frankly,’ Lewin said. ‘Do you know what, Eva? Could you call Margareta Eriksson and ask her about it?’

  ‘But you still don’t know why?’ Svanström asked.

  ‘A complete shot in the dark,’ Lewin said with a weak smile. ‘A shot in the dark at an unknown target,’ he added.

  ‘Well, if it will make you happy,’ Eva said with a shrug.

  47

  THE PEACE AND tranquillity came to an abrupt end just after lunchtime, and the gentle search for meaningful structures and a pale blue sweater suddenly transformed into something completely different. Raised voices, people running down corridors, doors slamming, von Essen and Adolfsson suddenly showing up in the investigation’s office with holsters, weapons and tense faces, taking Sandberg and Salomonson away with them, getting an unmarked police car out of the garage and putting the blue light on top as soon as they emerged on to the street, heading towards Kalmar as fast as they could.

  Two hours earlier a rape had taken place on an island called Björnö, ten kilometres north of Kalmar, and unlike their own week-old attempted rape case there wasn’t the slightest doubt that this one was the real thing, and the very worst sort. The victim was a fourteen-year-old girl. Together with her sister, who was two years older, and a friend of her sister’s of the same age, after breakfast she had gone down to the beach to sunbathe and swim.

  After an hour or so on the beach the fourteen-year-old victim had set off to buy ice-cream and soft drinks from a nearby kiosk. Hardly a surprise, seeing as she was youngest. When she was heading through the strip of woodland along the shore, the perpetrator had suddenly attacked her from behind, pulled her into the undergrowth, beaten her half unconscious, and raped her. When she didn’t come back after half an hour her older sister and her friend started to get worried and set off to find her. Hardly a surprise either, after the Linda murder and all the coverage in the media. After just one hundred metres they had found the younger sister. The perpetrator was sitting astride her. They had started screaming and the perpetrator had run off.

  Half an hour later the victim was on her way to hospital in Kalmar, the police had arrived, the crime scene had been cordoned off and they had started questioning the first witnesses. A dog patrol was on its way, expected to be there within fifteen minutes. In short, there was a great deal of activity, and the police patrols that were heading into the area also had a decent description to go on. According to both the older sister and her friend, the man they were looking for was remarkably similar to the man described by the girl in Växjö just a week before. They had noticed his tattoos in particular. Thick blue swirls, which might be snakes or possibly dragons, on both arms, from his shoulders down to his hands.

  ‘This doesn’t feel right at all,’ Anna Sandberg said when she and her colleagues stepped inside Kalmar police station, thinking mainly about her own case in Växjö, which she had decided to write off as a fictitious report as recently as that morning.

  ‘You mean the tattoos?’ Salomonson said.

  ‘Yes,’ Anna said. ‘It doesn’t feel right at all.’

  ‘Don’t get hung up on that,’ Adolfsson said consolingly. ‘Every self-respecting thug has tattoos like that these days. Their bodies usually look like old Oriental rugs.’

  ‘It’s all sorted now, so you can relax, Janne,’ Svanström said, waving a bundle of papers encouragingly at Lewin as he sat slumped in his chair behind a desk groaning with piles of entirely different papers.

  ‘I’m all ears,’ Lewin said, leaning back in his chair.

  ‘It wasn’t quite as straightforward as I thought,’ Eva Svanström said. ‘According to what Margareta Eriksson told me a short while ago, this is what happened, and she seems to know what she’s talking about. Besides, she’s also chair of the management committee.’

  About three years previously, more or less at the same time as the transfer from rented flats to a residents’ association was being concluded, Margareta Eriksson had sold her flat on the first floor to Marian Gross, who moved into the building. At the same time she bought the flat at the top of the building where she now lived from her neighbour, Lotta Ericson, Linda’s mother. And finally Linda’s mother had moved down to the ground floor into the flat that she had lived in ever since, the flat where her daughter was murdered almost a month ago. That flat had originally been office premises, then had been sublet, and in the end had stood empty while the transfer to a residents’ association was going on. And it was owned by Linda’s mother and not the association.

  ‘Margareta Eriksson evidently wanted more space, even though she’s single,’ Svanström said. ‘She wanted a couple of rooms as an office for her accountancy business, and she had also sold her house in the country and had quite a bit of antique furniture that she wanted to keep, and needed more space for.’

  ‘While Lotta Ericson was happy with a smaller flat because her daughter had moved out,’ Lewin said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Svanström said. ‘So what do you need me for, then?’ she said with a smile.

  ‘There are actually a couple more things,’ Lewin said.

  ‘I might have guessed,’ Svanström said. ‘If we take it from the beginning: if you’re wondering whether Margareta Eriksson with a k and two s’s and Lotta Ericson with a c and one s are related, the answer’s no.’

  ‘So you’ve worked that out?’ Lewin said.

  ‘It wasn’t exactly difficult,’ Eva Svanström said. ‘I realized that when I looked into the details of the way they had moved flats. Margareta Eriksson spells Eriksson with a k and two s’s, the normal spelling, or at least the most common, and that’s been her name since she got married. Lotta Ericson, on the other hand, was originally called Liselotte Eriksson, with a k and two s’s. Full name Liselotte Jeanette Eriksson. When she married she became Liselotte Wallin Eriksson, and when she moved to the USA she changed the spelling to Ericson with a c and one s. She’s always been known as Lotta, ever since she was a child. When she got divorced and moved back home she got rid of the Wallin, then a year or so later she applied to change her name. For the past eight years her full name, according to the official register, is Lotta Liselotte Jeanette Ericson.’

  ‘I see,’ Lewin said.

  ‘You think the perpetrator rang on the wrong door at first?’ Svanström said.

  ‘Yes, I was starting to wonder. Because of what Margareta Eriksson said in the paper, and the fact that she and Linda’s mother have the same surname. But it’s actually thanks to you. You were the one who said it could have been an old flame popping up again.
’

  ‘To meet Linda,’ Svanström said. ‘And he got it wrong and rang on the door of the flat they used to live in. Are you sure about that? She wasn’t exactly eighteen years old then, was she? When her mum lived on the top floor, I mean.’

  ‘To meet Linda, or Linda’s mother, or both of them. I really don’t know any more,’ Lewin said, shuffling in his chair. ‘But it probably doesn’t matter.’

  ‘If I was going to show up at the home of an old flame . . . in the middle of the night after three years . . . I think I’d probably try to call first,’ Eva Svanström said.

  ‘Telephones. That’s actually the next thing I was going to ask you to do,’ Lewin said. ‘I think we should find out if Lotta Ericson has changed her number.’

  ‘Now that we’ve already got started.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Lewin said. ‘Exactly.’ What’s wrong with another shot in the dark? he thought.

  ‘What do you think about that rape in Kalmar?’ Bäckström asked as he stuck his nose into Rogersson’s office.

  ‘Bloody awful business,’ Rogersson said.

  ‘Has it got anything to do with us, or with Linda, I mean?’

  ‘Not the slightest.’

  ‘Then you think exactly the same as me.’

  ‘I’ll just have to try to live with that,’ Rogersson said with a grin.

  ‘I asked Hans and Fritz as well. Separately, just to make sure.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Hans didn’t think there was a connection but still thought it sounded interesting. He suggested that we ought to talk to our colleagues in the VICLAS unit.’

  ‘And what about Fritz?’ Rogersson asked.

  ‘He didn’t think there was a connection, but we should probably follow it up, and maybe have a word with our colleagues in VICLAS.’

  ‘How exciting. Where do they get it all from?’

  ‘Then I asked Lewin too,’ Bäckström said.

  ‘And what did he think?’

  ‘Do you want his exact words?’