Stone Coffin

by Kjell Eriksson

  “I’d like to take the Wermlands Cellar,” said Valdemar Andersson, who was from Surveillance. “It’s so expensive I’d never get there otherwise.”

  They parceled out the other establishments, each equipped with photos of Sven-Erik Cederén, Josefin, and the three women at MedForsk.

  “First we’ll show the photo of Cederén and see if any of the staff recognizes him. If they do, we’ll ask about any female companions. Try to get them to remember some detail—appearance, clothing, anything—and whether they appeared intimate with each other. Try to get them to describe the woman first and show the pictures later. Okay?”

  Two of the investigators exchanged a glance, which Haver caught.

  “Old hat, I know,” he said with a smile. “I’ll give you each my card in case any of the restaurant staff thinks of something later on and wants to call.”

  * * *

  Soon the seven-person group fanned out across the city. The sun was shining brightly, the sky was blue, and the streets were bathed in light. They walked quickly. All of them were thinking of having a beer—at least a light beer.

  In many ways it was a task that corresponded to what the public thought was police work: going around to businesses, showing a photo and trying to evaluate people’s reactions, watching memories surface, seeing doubt and also distrust. It was the fictional version, underscored by American police movies and television series, but it was also their own dream of how their work could be: clean, sharp, smart, and relatively straightforward.

  For once they had a chance to leave their paperwork and move among the people. They also had the possibility of exercising real skill or just having the kind of luck that led to the unraveling of a knot or even the whole case. In spite of the restructuring that they preemptively dismissed, they wanted to do a good job. They wanted to have breakthroughs. Quick, perceptive insights. Luck, a lot of luck.

  All of them walked with light steps except Magnusson, who was on his way to Svensson’s. He turned his head nervously side to side when he reached Sankt Petersgatan, looking up toward the center of town. As he passed Dragarbrunnsgatan, his senses grew even more alert. This was the part of town his son tended to hang out in.

  He desperately wanted to avoid running into him. Erik suffered from several varieties of drug dependency, and Magnusson suspected he was also HIV positive. There was nothing left of the Erik he had loved.

  Once he had gone down to the intake area and observed his son. He had hardly recognized him. The colleague who had tipped him off about his son being brought in had stood a couple of meters away. When Magnusson turned away from the two-way glass, they looked at each other. The odds weren’t good. Both of them knew it. “I’m sorry,” the other had said.

  Relieved, Magnusson passed the Domkyrka Bridge. Erik didn’t usually go west of the Fyris River.

  Svensson’s was closed. Magnusson gave the door a couple of shakes and pressed his face against the glass. It was supposed to open in half an hour and he was convinced that the staff was already there, so he banged on the door one more time.

  A man appeared, pointing meaningfully at the sign. Magnusson took out his ID badge, pressed it against the glass, and was let inside.

  Three waiters studied the photo, no trace of the initial nonchalance in their faces.

  “I recognize him,” one of the men said. “He’s been here several times.”

  Magnusson watched him strain to remember more.

  “He’s been here several times, is always complimentary about the food.”

  “What about you?”

  The other two shook their heads.

  “He was here with a group of people once. I remember it because one of the women spilled a bottle of wine.”

  Magnusson took out the shots of the women from MedForsk.

  “Was it any of these?”

  “Her,” the waiter said quickly and pointed to Teresia Wall. “Maybe,” he added.

  “Has he ever been here with only one woman?”

  “It’s possible. I’m not sure.”

  Magnusson held up a snapshot of Josefin. “Do you recognize her?”

  The man looked at the five photos on the table and let his gaze wander from one to the next.

  “I have a memory for people,” he said. “I think he was here at the end of May, but not with any of these women.”

  “Do you remember anything?”

  The man stood quietly.

  “What did they eat? How were they dressed?”

  “I think the woman had something like sushi. Not meat, at any rate.”

  “Was she a vegetarian?”

  “No, she ate fish.”

  Magnusson waited, letting the waiter try to coax the images from his mind.

  “She was blonde, I remember that much. Long blonde hair. Something blue as well. Maybe a wide headband or her dress.”

  He looked unsurely at Magnusson, who nodded. The waiter smiled.

  “This is hard,” he said. “What is this about?”

  “How old?”

  “Maybe thirty or thirty-five. Fresh-faced. If I saw her again, I think I would recognize her. I do have a memory for people,” he repeated.

  “Could it have been the fifteenth of May?” Magnusson asked after peeking at the list of Cederén’s credit card purchases.

  “It’s possible.”

  * * *

  Sven-Erik Cederén was known at two other establishments, Akropolis and Trattoria Commedia. It turned out that he frequented these places several times a week for lunch, something that many MedForsk employees corroborated. Often many of them accompanied him there. No one, however, was able to identify Josefin or recall an unknown woman at Cederén’s side.

  When Haver considered the information, it was only the visit to Svensson’s that had yielded anything, even if this was regrettably thin: a blonde woman in her thirties who ate fish but not meat, fresh-faced, perhaps with a blue dress.

  “There must be tens of thousands who would fit the bill,” Haver said.

  “That many fresh-faced ones?” Magnusson said.

  Haver realized that he had overlooked something important.

  “How stupid,” he said. “We should have asked for an account of any temporary staff. There must be extra hands at a place like that.”

  “And most likely paid under the table,” Magnusson said.

  “Can you look into it?”

  Magnusson made a face that Haver interpreted as a yes.

  * * *

  Sören Magnusson tackled it immediately. As he had imagined, most places denied having any temporary employees. You’re lying, he thought bitterly as he received his fourth negative answer in a row.

  The last one on the list, however, the Wermlands Cellar, came up affirmative. Certain evenings and sometimes on the weekends they had a young woman come in. She was studying French at the university, the kitchen manager said, and worked as much as she could. She was good, so he called her in any time they were short. She had worked some ten or twenty evenings during the spring, he believed.

  “Can you see if she was working on the twenty-second of May?”

  It took a while before he returned to the phone.

  “Yes, she was here from six o’clock until we closed.”

  “Do you pay taxes for her?”

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  “Just joking,” Magnusson said and explained the reason for his question.

  Afterward, Magnusson looked down at what he had written down: Maria Lundberg. He dialed the number that the kitchen manager had given him and wished desperately that she would pick up. He was really hoping to have something to come back with.

  She answered immediately, at first clearly taken aback. She sounded very hesitant.

  “Did you get my number from the Wermlands Cellar?”

  “Yes, and I’m from the police.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “You don’t, but we can hang up, you can call the station, ask for me, and th
en we’ll see where you end up.”

  It struck him that he lived in a society full of suspicion.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “If all you want is to show me a couple of pictures, that’s okay.”

  * * *

  He came by the student apartment area some twenty minutes later. Maria Lundberg was outside her front entrance, waiting.

  “Are you Magnusson?”

  “The one and only. Sören Edvin Magnusson,” he said and smiled. “Here’s my badge.”

  The young woman examined it and he examined her. Twenty-five, short hair, and a bit of an underbite. Magnusson had a weakness for underbites. His first love had had one.

  “That’s okay,” she said.

  “What have you been through that you don’t trust people who call and want to see you?”

  She looked at him and he sensed something like fear.

  “I was raped three years ago,” she said. “Where are the photos?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Magnusson said.

  “No, you can’t tell on the outside.”

  He took out the snapshots, showing her the one of Cederén first. Maria nodded at once.

  “Him, I know,” she said firmly.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Completely. His name is Sven-Erik. I don’t know his last name, but his father-in-law’s name is Johansson.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  She smiled. “Now you’re curious, aren’t you?”

  Magnusson was impatient and did not notice how beautiful she was when she smiled.

  “Yes, I am,” he said in a controlled voice.

  “Earlier I worked part-time for the elder-care services. Johansson—Holger is his name—was one of the clients, and he had just been widowed.”

  She fell silent. Magnusson looked at her with something close to gratitude.

  “He was so sad. Mostly he just sat at the kitchen table. We helped him with food and laundry. He wasn’t in such a bad way, just depressed. Then a neighbor woman started to help out and then we weren’t needed anymore.”

  “Did you meet the son-in-law?”

  “Yes, a couple of times.”

  “And you’ve seen him at the Wermlands Cellar?”

  “Yes, one time. It was about a month ago. He came in with some girl who wasn’t his wife.”

  “You’ve met her too?”

  “The wife, yes, several times.”

  “Can you describe the woman?”

  “Blonde, attractive, probably someone with money.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Her clothes.”

  “Did Sven-Erik recognize you?”

  “Yes, he looked really embarrassed, so I knew it probably wasn’t his sister.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Just some general things. I asked a little about Holger. But you don’t intrude on the guests.”

  Magnusson took out the photo of Josefin. “Do you recognize her?”

  “That’s his wife,” she said immediately.

  He took out the shots of the other women from MedForsk.

  “None of these,” she said. “What is it that’s happened?”

  “We don’t really know yet, but we’re looking for him.”

  “And his lover.”

  Magnusson nodded.

  “I want you to sit down and think about this properly. Try to remember everything about that woman even if it doesn’t seem important. Write it all down. May I call you tonight?”

  “Are you hitting on me?” she said in a serious voice but smiled at the same time.

  “You bet,” Magnusson said.

  Eight

  Kåbo was a part of the city she rarely visited. There was no bustle here, the clientele that caused trouble on the streets and squares, stabbing each other, drinking, dealing drugs. How many violent offenders had been seized in this area the past ten years? From what Lindell could recall, there had been only one such incident. A retired physician had thrown his wife through a glass door in a drunken haze but had been sober enough to stem the flow of blood. Otherwise she would probably have died.

  He had been released on probation and probably still lived there with his frightened wife.

  Behind the exteriors of these million-dollar houses there were probably other things that happened that the Violent Crimes unit never heard of. Lindell studied the houses as she slowly drove through the neighborhood. Beautiful gardens with lilacs on the corners, hedges of privet or spruce, rosebushes, expensive paving, buxbom spheres, and rhododendron in the shade.

  The upper classes lived behind these hedges, fences, and walls—in part the old upper crust, those with noble names or weighed down by generations of academic merit, but increasingly the new, successful elite from the worlds of data, consulting, and pharmaceuticals, as well as physicians, lawyers, and pilots. In short, people with money. Friends of the police, who with their votes demanded law and order, more police, and harsher action.

  One thing they had in common was that they all complained about their taxes, but they did not appear to be suffering. Often along Kåbovägen, Rudbecksgatan, and Götavägen, there were a couple of parked cars in the driveway, and neither was exactly a rust bucket.

  On all of these streets carpenters and workmen of all kinds were engaged in frenetic activity. Houses were demolished, rebuilt, and renovated. Diggers created ponds, containers were filled with old kitchen materials, while small trucks backed in bringing new equipment and landscaping companies carted in bricks, Öland stone, cobblestones, stone meal, and soil. The women who could be seen were either housecleaners or the kind that hung curtains and discussed interior design with the woman of the house, who was often harried, in a professional career, and active.

  There were exceptions, of course: those who had lived here for a long time, perhaps happened upon a dilapidated house for a cheap sum, before the party days of the nineties when taxes were lowered and home prices rose like a shot. These houses were transformed more slowly and often by the homeowners themselves.

  “Would it be nice to live here?” Lindell wondered to herself as she crawled along Villavägen. A couple of women were loading cleaning equipment into a Mazda.”Probably under the table.” Lindell had heard talk of Polish cleaning women who went from mansion to mansion at lower-than-market wages.

  It’s beautiful, but I wouldn’t want to live here even one day, she thought and kept an eye out for the street she was looking for. She took a couple more turns; then Jack Mortensen’s house appeared.

  The house was a strange mixture of Jugendstil and functionalism. Ugly, Lindell decided, who preferred old Victorian-style houses with intricate details, turrets, and spires. A not-too-ostentatious Volvo was in the driveway. Lindell parked on the street.

  The first thing that struck her was the beauty of the garden. A small path that led from the gravel driveway was bordered with roses, not yet in bloom but covered in small buds. A sea of perennials encircled a seating area where a pergola, coated with vitriol so it looked antique, rose almost threateningly over the greenery. But its appearance was deceiving; it served only to support a variety of vines, among them a fragrant flowering jasmine. The main entrance had stone steps lined with evergreens on either side, like soldiers in neat rows. The porch in front of the door was as big as Lindell’s bedroom and inlaid with black slate, with terra-cotta planters filled with summer flowers that had not yet reached their full zenith. And yet it made a magnificent impression. Lindell simply stood and took it in.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she heard a voice from above.

  MedForsk’s Jack Mortensen leaned over the wrought-iron railing of the balcony above the entrance.

  “Very,” Lindell said. “You must be Jack Mortensen.”

  “I’ll be right out. Go ahead and have a seat on the patio,” he said and pointed. “I’ve already put the coffee on.”

  Mortensen soon emerged carrying a tray laden with cups, saucers, a coffeepot—all of f
ine china, Lindell noted to her astonishment—two folded napkins, a plate of scones, and a pot of jam.

  “I thought you might be hungry.”

  The pastries were golden-brown and warm.

  “The jam is made from cornelian cherry. I get it from my brother in Denmark.”

  “You’re from Denmark?”

  “Yes, but I have lived in Sweden since I was ten. My parents divorced and my mother and I moved to Sweden. She’s from here.”

  The jam was delicious. Despite the robust serving of cabbage rolls, Lindell would have been able to finish all the scones on the plate.

  “Do you have any more information on Sven-Erik?” he asked, and the almost honey-smooth voice with which he had begun the conversation was replaced with a more businesslike tone.

  “No, unfortunately. We’re trying to establish his social network,” Lindell said and wondered exactly what she meant by that.

  “Social network?” Mortensen said thoughtfully. “I don’t think he had much of one. Sven-Erik was by and large a solitary figure. There’s the golf course, of course. That was a case of mutual affection. The greens become extra velvety when Sven-Erik swings his three-iron. The golf balls just love to be hit and putted by Sven-Erik. They go where he wants them to. He had a low handicap, in other words.”

  Why the ironic tone? Lindell wondered. She had trouble following his artful formulations.

  “Do you play?”

  “No, that’s why I have employees,” Mortensen said with a half smile. “Well, yes. I’ve tried it, but it’s not my thing.”

  “Then what is your thing?”

  He smiled again. Lindell wished he would stop smiling.

  “I’m partial to gardening,” he said and waved his hand toward the greenery.

  Lindell nodded.

  “I also collect textiles. My mother is the driving force in that enterprise, but we have become united on that front.”

  “Textiles?”

  If Mortensen picked up on the faintly mocking tone in Lindell’s question, he ignored it.

  “Particularly from South America and Southeast Asia.”

  Lindell knew nothing of these matters but tried to look interested.