Detective Inspector Huss: A Huss Investigation set in Sweden, Vol. 1

by Helen Tursten

  “What hotel did you stay at?” The fact that Inspector Blom didn’t give a damn about all the flying Dutchmen in the world was clear from his tone of voice.

  “Hotel? Oh yes, the Admiral.”

  “And in Stockholm?”

  For a split second Viktors lost his worldly self-assurance. But it passed so quickly that afterward Andersson wasn’t sure if he had seen correctly.

  “Stockholm? My brother’s apartment, of course. He has a wonderful place on Strandvägen. The penthouse.”

  Jonny Blom fired off his questions in an angry staccato. “Does he live alone?”

  “Yes. And no. He’s divorced, but now is keeping company with a judge from Sunne district court. She commutes back and forth every week. My brother has a son from his marriage who has three charming little girls whom I call my grandchildren. Unfortunately my wife and I never had children. So I won’t be having any grandchildren of my own.”

  The superintendent gave a start. He was all too familiar with that situation. Strangely enough it wasn’t until recent years that he had felt any longing for children and grandchildren. But he did have his niece’s children as surrogate grandkids. It was a good situation, since he only had to meet them three times a year at most. Maybe Ivan Viktors felt the same way.

  Jonny looked really pissed off. At first Andersson couldn’t figure out why. After a while he understood that it wasn’t just Viktors’s annoying attitude, but also his own presence that was bothering Jonny. The superintendent admitted to himself that maybe the man had a point. Despite his blunt and insensitive manner, Jonny was actually very good at questioning people. Especially the tougher hoodlums. Right now the inspector was glowering at Ivan Viktors, while his brain was running at high speed. Finally he decided where to strike the next blow. Brusquely he said, “Were you alone in the apartment?”

  Viktors was quite clearly shaken out of his complacency. His face turned red and he looked close to having a pulmonary hemorrhage. Quickly he pulled himself together and made a brave attempt to feign indignation.

  “What do you mean? That must be obvious,” he said superciliously.

  Jonny sensed the presence of a lie. He had an idea and leaned across the desk. His voice was hard edged and insinuating when he said, “So it’s not true that your brother’s girlfriend was also staying overnight at the apartment?”

  Boom! Andersson saw at once how Viktors regained his confidence. It had wavered for a second, but now he was obviously again on solid ground. With his best patronizing and theatrical tone of voice and looking deeply insulted, he said, “My good inspector! My brother is sixty-nine years old and his partner is sixty-three! She is a highly respected lawyer and serves as a judge. The reason she commutes is because she will be retiring in two years and likes living in Sunne so much that she doesn’t want to leave her job there. Now she’s working Monday through Thursday. She comes home late Thursday evening and drives back on Sunday night. No, you know what? We didn’t see each other at all that night.”

  “Do you have a key to the apartment?”

  Viktors took a deep breath. His look said, What an idiot!

  “Naturally my brother gave me a key. He’s still in the hospital; all you have to do is call and check. Please do, here’s the number.”

  He pulled out his wallet from the breast pocket of his suit coat and took out a little yellow note, which he handed to Jonny Blom. Without thanking him or looking at the note, Jonny stared him straight in the eye.

  “Was there anyone else at the apartment on Sunday night?”

  “No. And if there were, I can’t see what business it is of yours. You’re investigating what happened to Richard, aren’t you? Not what I was doing in Stockholm last Sunday night. And at that time Richard was alive and in the best of health. He died on Tuesday, after all. And I was in Copenhagen at the time.”

  Sulkily Jonny looked down at his papers. He felt that he had missed something, but didn’t know if it was of any importance to the investigation. Andersson agreed with him, but also wasn’t sure what it was that had passed through the room. Just a hunch. Jonny continued persistently, “What were you doing Tuesday night?”

  Again a light sigh from Viktors. His gaze held a trace of pity. “At six-thirty I ate dinner at one of the best restaurants in Copenhagen, St. Gertrud’s Cloister.”

  “Alone?”

  “No. There were at least ten of us. All from the theater. I’d be happy to give you their names.”

  “Thank you, two would be sufficient.”

  Andersson felt that it was high time for him to break in for a while. If nothing else, it would give Jonny a chance to figure out what it was that had fluttered past them. Viktors wrote two names on the back of the yellow note with his brother’s phone number on it. Andersson cleared his throat softly before he said, “Going a little farther back in time, what did you think of the von Knechts’ party last Saturday?”

  Surprised, Viktors looked up from the note he was writing. He looked like he was thinking it over.

  “Well . . . what can I say? As a matter of principle I don’t believe that people should wage war. The Thirty Years’ War, you know. Ha ha. It was fun to see old friends. I hadn’t seen Gustav and Louise in at least ten years.”

  “Was the mood good?”

  “It certainly was! Top-notch, as they say. Excellent food and drink. Although the young people seemed a little subdued.”

  “The young people? Do you mean Henrik and Charlotte?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Richard and the rest were the same as usual?”

  “Yes. Richard, Valle Reuter, and Peder Wahl sat and talked about wine for half the evening. They reminded me of druids, sitting and trumping each other with exciting decoctions. ‘Taste this one, my good man! You’ll be in seventh heaven!’ And then we sang a bunch of wine-drinking songs.”

  “You’re not a wine connoisseur?”

  “Ha! Next you’ll be writing down in the minutes of the interview, ‘V. not a wine connoisseur’! No, not like those other three. For them it’s almost a sport. Actually borders on religion. What country, what valley did the grapes grow in? What type of grape? What vintage? I’ve never had time for that. Sven Tosse and I like to joke about it and say that at least we can tell the difference between a forty-five-krona wine and a two-hundred-krona wine. Then Valle cringes so hard he starts shaking. ‘Fie on you two! That’s blasphemy!’ he says.”

  His imitation of the fat little Valle Reuter was extraordinarily skillful. Andersson caught himself laughing out loud. Jonny looked even grumpier, if possible, and said sourly, “There’s nothing more you have to say about the murder of Richard von Knecht?”

  Both Viktors and Andersson were stopped short in their merriment. Viktors gave Jonny a chilly look.

  “No,” he said curtly.

  “Will you be home in Särö in case we need to contact you again?”

  “Up until Sunday evening. Then I have to go to Copenhagen again. I’ll be back next Wednesday.”

  Andersson thought that Viktors was pleasant, but he realized that he had let himself be entranced by the man’s charm. There was something there, but it slipped away like quicksilver as soon as he tried to get a grip on it. Ivan Viktors headed for the door, turned around, and made a deep bow.

  “Good-bye, gentlemen!”

  “Good-bye.”

  Andersson tried to ingratiate himself with Viktors as the stately man vanished out the door. When he had closed the door, Andersson turned to Jonny and said, “You noticed it too, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. That devil weaseled out of it. What kind of hanky-panky was he up to on Sunday night?”

  “Maybe it’s like he said, of no importance to the case. But it doesn’t seem that way. Maybe he was with some hooker.”

  “Quite possible.”

  Suddenly Andersson froze and his eyes took on a glassy, faraway stare. Jonny sat quietly. He knew that when the chief looked like that, he was getting an idea. Anyone who didn’t know this
might think he was about to have an epileptic fit. Excitedly Andersson said, “Maybe he met Sylvia von Knecht! She was in Stockholm last Sunday night!”

  “But not alone. Her mother and sister were with her. They were at the theater,” Jonny reminded them.

  “Yes, that’s what she said. Check that out with the sister and mother. Ask them what they did in Stockholm on Sunday evening. It’s a shot in the dark, but they’ve paid off before.”

  Jonny’s resigned sigh revealed what he thought about the possibility. But since he didn’t have any better idea, he started searching for the addresses on his computer.

  “When are you supposed to relieve Borg at the parking garage?” Andersson asked.

  “Twelve-thirty. He’ll take an hour for lunch, then come back and take over until four. Then I’ll go over there again, and both of us will stay until seven.”

  “Okay. If anything comes up, call me on my direct line. Tomorrow I’ll be here. Eight o’clock Monday morning we’ll have a big meeting to go over everything. Hopefully by then we’ll know more about the fire on Berzeliigatan. And where Shorty fits into the picture. Maybe he didn’t have anything to do with it. Although if there’s mischief going on in Shorty’s turf, he’s probably mixed up in it!”

  “That’s not really his thing, though. Drug abuse, firearms, bank robbery, yes. Arson homicide, hit men, bombs—I doubt it. It takes planning and intelligence, and that’s not typical for Shorty,” Jonny offered.

  The superintendent pouted a little and screwed up his eyebrows, but it was no use. He had to agree with Jonny. Irritated, he exclaimed, “There’s some shit in here stinking up the place! I know the smell, but I can’t find the source. And I don’t know who’s responsible. But someone’s walking around with shit on his shoes, that’s for sure!”

  Amazingly poetic for Andersson. Jonny knew what he meant and agreed. He’d been a cop long enough to recognize something unpleasant when it popped up. This whole case was unpleasant. Like the superintendent said—it stank.

  EXACTLY FORTY-EIGHT hours earlier Andersson had walked through the doors to Pathology, just as he was doing now. Yvonne Stridner didn’t know he was coming in person this time either. She expected him simply to call her. But the pale sunshine had prompted an impulse to get outside for a while. It seems reasonable to ask why someone who longs for a little sunshine gets into a car and drives through downtown Göteborg breathing nothing but exhaust. But he knew the answer. He wanted to get out of the four walls of police headquarters. Sometimes they stifled him. Not that the walls at Pathology were any less stifling, but they would do as a change of scene.

  Stridner wasn’t in her office. No matter how much he hated the idea, he was going to have to go into the autopsy room. With a gurgling feeling of discomfort in his stomach region, he was already regretting his little outing.

  She stood dressed in a green paper smock and something that looked like a shower cap of the same material, talking to a young man who was also dressed in scrubs. Slowly she pulled off her rubber gloves as she coldly observed the graduate student.

  “If you don’t finish up the course on forensic medicine I don’t comprehend how your previous autopsies could be approved. You’re a typical slacker. Others have to do the job, while you stand next to them and ‘assist.’ That means handing them instruments and looking the other way. Leaving the room when it starts getting disgusting. Don’t you understand that pathology is the basis of all medicine? If you don’t know what it looks like both inside and outside a person who’s been struck by a particular illness or trauma, you’ll never be able to figure out what’s happening! What stage is the illness in? How is it developing? What’s happening to the patient? And if the patient is dead, what happened, and why did it happen? If this doesn’t interest you, I think you ought to seriously consider whether you’re at all suited for the medical profession! I’m flunking you!”

  The young man hadn’t said a word during the dressing-down. Without a word he turned on his heel and rushed out. He apparently didn’t notice the superintendent, who saw the expression in the student’s eyes. An experienced detective can read murder in someone’s eyes when he sees it.

  Stridner noticed Andersson and nodded curtly. She gave him a stern look, and the superintendent had the strong feeling that he had also flunked.

  “The standards for graduates are getting worse and worse. They’re slackers. They think all they have to do is read a few pages in a textbook to make it! No desire whatsoever to do a little extra,” fumed the professor.

  She snorted audibly and fixed Andersson with her gaze. The feeling that The Last Judgment was approaching grew stronger.

  “And you police officers! Can’t even tell the difference between girls and boys.”

  Astonished, he stared at the angry redheaded pathologist. Lamely he stammered, “That . . . that’s something we can usually handle.”

  “Not this time.”

  With determined steps she strode across the room to an autopsy table. His stomach turned over when he realized what she was about to do. She whipped off the sheet. The body was severely charred. Arms and legs were bent in the typical defensive position since the intense heat had contracted the musculature. A faint smell of roasted meat penetrated the other odors in the autopsy room.

  “Late yesterday afternoon this body was brought in. Your guys told our duty officer that it was the body of a young man, just over twenty years old,” Stridner said.

  “Yes, that’s right. Mattias Karlsson—”

  “Wrong! The body I just finished the postmortem on this morning belongs to a middle-aged woman. Apparently thirty-five to forty-five years old. Height about one-point-five-five meters. Weight is hard to determine, but she was stocky. Bad teeth. She has had a child. European.”

  The superintendent stared at the charred corpse. For a moment he felt dizzy, but it quickly passed.

  “Finnish,” he managed to say.

  Andersson heard his voice croaking. Stridner gave him a sharp look and snapped, “Finnish? That’s possible. Are you missing someone Finnish?”

  “You can say that again! Pirjo Larsson, thirty-two years old. The description matches so far. She was von Knecht’s cleaning woman. What the hell is she doing here?”

  “Well, she didn’t come here herself. You should be asking what she was doing there!”

  There was no answer to that. He glared, but he had to agree with her. What was Pirjo doing in von Knecht’s office when the bomb went off?

  She pulled up the sheet and said, “I’m going to wash up. You can wait in my office.”

  He obediently slouched off.

  “FINISHING UP Richard first, I can say that the identification is quite clear. The forensic odontologists didn’t doubt it for a second. The teeth matched perfectly. I’ve also checked the fracture of the right tibia. I managed to dig up thirty-five-year-old X rays taken after a skiing accident in St. Anton. Uncomplicated healing.”

  She waved some large X rays in the air. Andersson had a hard time trying to look interested when his thoughts were hovering around another body. How was he going to get hold of Hannu? He’d have to borrow a phone.

  “Excuse me. May I borrow your phone? I have two inspectors running all over town looking for the woman lying under the sheet out there.”

  She nodded and gestured to the phone on her desk. Andersson got hold of a secretary who promised to track down Hannu Rauhala and Birgitta Moberg. She would call them back to headquarters at once for an urgent meeting with him.

  Now he could pay better attention to Stridner’s continuing report. It had been proven beyond all doubt that it really was von Knecht who was crushed on the sidewalk on Tuesday evening. Seventy-two hours ago. Since then, he felt like he had aged three years.

  Stridner’s pedagogical voice snapped him out of his reverie. “There were no other signs of violence other than the contusion on the back of his neck and the cut across the back of his hand. Other injuries resulted from the height of the fall. Oh, tha
t’s right—I did do one slightly unnecessary thing. Just to satisfy my curiosity. Today I got preliminary results on the PAD I requested. There is a clear fat buildup in the liver. Our good Richard had apparently been drinking quite a bit lately.”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “Yes. He was always careful of his appearance and stayed in good shape. He was precise about how much food and drink he consumed. I never saw or heard that he was highly intoxicated at any party during the years we knew each other. But of course, that was fifteen years ago.”

  “What does that indicate?”

  She sucked in her lower lip and seemed to ponder this a long time before she replied. “Hard to say. Most commonly people take to the bottle when they have problems they can’t solve. Especially men.”

  Andersson guiltily thought of the strong beer he drank every evening, but decided quickly that he wasn’t an alcoholic. At his age it was good to relax in the evening with a beer or two. Or three. And it helped him sleep well. Although it did have some side effects. Unconsciously, he tried to suck in his stomach. Glumly, he looked at the pathologist and summarized the situation.

  “So we have a healthy sixty-year-old man fresh out of the sauna. Physically in good shape, but with recent signs of increased alcohol intake. Blood alcohol content one-point-one. In his stomach a good lunch is being digested. At five-thirty one rainy and blustery November evening he goes out on his balcony, despite his great fear of heights. There he is struck on the back of the head, cut on the hand, and shoved over the balcony railing. And not a trace of the murderer! And you found nothing else on his body?”

  The last sounded like a reproach. And it was. She shook her head, but stopped and cocked it to one side. She had a mischievous gleam in her eye.