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

by Helen Tursten

  As they sat stabbing at the salad with their forks, Birgitta said, “I found something really interesting this afternoon. Bobo Torsson and Hoffa Strömberg were in the same prison. At the same time, that is. There’s the contact between Bobo and the Hell’s Angels.”

  “What does Shorty say about that?”

  “Naturally he doesn’t know a thing about it, according to him. He did seven years inside, after all. But at a different prison.”

  “What was Hoffa in for?”

  “Aggravated assault. The victim will never be a human being again. It was a fight between rival motorcycle gangs. We don’t have any evidence against Shorty. He’ll probably be released tomorrow. Andersson is frantic.”

  Irene and Tommy told her about their discoveries that afternoon. Birgitta didn’t interrupt the story. She stared at them steadily, not wanting to miss a word. There was an intense gleam in her eyes when she leaned over her piping hot goulash and said in a low voice, “The beautiful people and their glamorous life. It’s so enticing and enviable when you see it from a distance. But if you start to scratch the surface, the gold soon turns to dust.”

  AT NINE o’clock Irene called Mona Söder at home and left a message on her answering machine.

  “Hi, Mona. This is Irene Huss in Göteborg. I want to thank you for telling me everything and letting me meet Jonas. It was a big help in the investigation that we didn’t have to keep checking on you two. You’ve been completely eliminated from the suspect list. I’ve . . . been thinking about Jonas. Please give him my fondest regards. Tell him that the butterfly painting is the most wonderful I’ve ever seen. Talk to you later, Mona. I . . . we’ll talk.” Quickly she hung up. Then she drove home.

  Chapter Sixteen

  IT SMELLED LIKE COFFEE and gingersnaps at “morning prayers.” Everyone had come, except for Hans Borg and Superintendent Andersson. The secretary had set up an Advent wreath, and the first candle was lit. In the windows stood the electric ones, spreading a soft, cozy glow. Irene was already into her fourth cup of coffee of the morning when the boss’s steps were heard approaching down the corridor. They sounded determined. There was a sense of foreboding when the door was flung open and Andersson’s bright red face appeared in the doorway.

  Angrily he shouted, “Damn, it’s dark in here. Turn on the lights!”

  He stepped inside and poured himself some coffee, looked down into the steaming cup, and took a deep whiff.

  “You’ll have to excuse me. Happy Advent, or whatever it’s called. But everything is going to hell! Shorty is going to be released this morning. And that God damned standalone has fallen into the cellar!”

  Borg appeared in the doorway just in time to hear the boss’s words. He nodded and said, “That’s right. They called me when the standalone broke through. It’s going to be salvaged later today. We decided to start digging for those pipes instead. Now there’s a hole anyway. They have to redo the support work over the weekend. We won’t have another chance to lift out the safe until Monday morning at the earliest.”

  Jonny Blom looked annoyed and urged, “Why don’t we just knock down the walls with one of those big balls on the end of a crane? Quick and easy!”

  Borg dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “Too rough. The whole building could come crashing down and then it would be hard to locate the safe.”

  “How are we going to open it?”

  “We’ve checked it out with binoculars. It’s a Swedish safe with a combination lock. A guy from Rosengren’s is coming to help us. There’s probably no bomb inside, but we’re going to take safety precautions when we open it.”

  Andersson gave the group a grim look and said, “We’re not getting anywhere. This is going too slow! Damn!”

  The last had to be interpreted as a general comment on the state of things. No one ventured an opposing point of view.

  Irene reported on her interview with Charlotte von Knecht and the conversation with her young lover. Tommy took over and told about Robert Skytter’s revelations. By the time Irene presented Chong’s story from the ’89 raid, they had quite a different image of the charming Charlotte von Knecht, née Croona.

  Andersson’s face was beginning to return to normal, but his voice was strident. “That filly doesn’t have clean oats in her feed bag. Or to put it more precisely, clean snow! Ha ha! Ahem. What did that guy from Narcotics call the stuff he found in her pendant?”

  Birgitta hurried to his rescue and said pedantically, “Freebase. Cocaine mixed with bicarbonate of soda. That’s what’s sold on the street. Pure cocaine is too strong and too dangerous. And who can check how much baking soda they put in?”

  Now that she had started, she told them about her visit to Vänersborg to see Bobo’s mother. It had produced nothing of value. Mother and son seemed not to have had any contact in recent years. It had been almost two years since they last saw each other. But she had brought up the question again about the insurance payment in the event of death. Birgitta had referred her to the claims office of the current insurance company. The mother hadn’t seen Bobo’s father in more than twenty years, but she knew that he was a total outcast. She herself had remarried, lived in a house outside of Vänersborg, and worked in a candy store. Birgitta’s final tidbit was the discovery that Bobo Torsson and Glenn “Hoffa” Strömberg had done time in the same prison, but she had been unable to find any connection between Shorty and the two Hell’s Angels, except for Shorty and Paul Svensson’s abortive participation in the bank robbery in Kungsbacka in the early eighties.

  Andersson sighed heavily. “And today we have to release that son-of-a-bitch! Jonny and I have both grilled him, but it didn’t produce a thing. Except that we suspect he knows who killed Bobo. That’s why I want surveillance on him. Jonny? Hans? Fredrik? Birgitta?”

  They all nodded. Only Fredrik looked enthusiastic. Andersson went on, “And how’s it going with Bobo’s drunken father? Did you get hold of him, Hannu?”

  “Yes. At Lillhagen.”

  “He’s been admitted to Lillhagen Hospital?”

  “Right. He can’t walk or talk. He’s dying of liver cancer.”

  “But Lillhagen is a mental hospital. He shouldn’t be there if he has liver cancer.”

  “Nobody would take him. He was admitted this summer. They found him passed out in a stairwell on the north side of town.”

  There was a brief pause as they poured more coffee and reached their hands into the plastic container to grab some gingersnaps. Andersson stacked up three cookies and bit into all of them at once. The result was a shower of crumbs. With his mouth full of gingersnaps he said, “Fredrik, did you find out anything new yesterday?”

  Fredrik’s face lit up, and he began energetically leafing through his notebook full of scribblings. “You bet! Two interesting new observations on Molinsgatan. I did another round with the tenants yesterday and asked if anyone had seen or heard anything at midnight on Friday, a week ago. Especially if anyone had seen or heard the Porsche. It’s not a car you can sneak around in. A guy whose baby had a stomachache was up with the kid at that time. His living room window faces Molinsgatan, two floors above von Knecht’s garage. He remembers that he heard a car braking hard outside the garage, then someone fussing with the garage doors. They’re old and stiff and creak like crazy. Next he heard a car start up and drive out of the garage. After a while another car started and was driven into the garage. By then the guy was curious and went over to the window to take a look. There stood the Porsche parked on the street. He stood there almost fifteen minutes, rocking the kid by the window. The baby fell asleep and he put him to bed. Then he went to the john, and when he got back he heard the Porsche starting up. When he got to the window and looked out, it was gone.”

  “This is great! Did he see anybody?”

  “No.”

  “Does he know exactly what time it was?”

  “No. But he thinks the Porsche drove off sometime between twelve-thirty and a quarter to one.”

  A
ndersson rubbed his nose excitedly, so it shone Christmas-red. Irene spontaneously thought of a certain Rudolph with the red nose, but she kept her associations to herself. Pondering, the superintendent said, “Someone parks a car outside. Someone opens the garage door. Someone drives out the Porsche. Someone drives his car into the garage. Someone drives off in the Porsche.”

  Everyone nodded to show that they were following along.

  “Someone also came back in the morning and drove out his own car and put back the Porsche. It wasn’t on Berzeliigatan on Saturday morning, because then the man with the bedroom window facing the parking places would have seen it. It’s those damned keys to the car and the garage that are haunting us again!”

  Hannu nodded and said, “Which Pirjo had.”

  They all remembered the sooty key rings in plastic bags that the arson tech had shown them. Andersson began to rub his nose again.

  “Why did Pirjo have these two key rings? She couldn’t drive. She didn’t have her own car. She had never been given her own key to von Knecht’s apartment.”

  Fredrik interrupted him excitedly. “I think Birgitta was right the other day, when she said that somebody lured Pirjo to Berzeliigatan. The techs say that Pirjo never crossed the threshold to the apartment on Molinsgatan on Wednesday morning. First she had a hard time understanding when they tried to explain to her that Richard von Knecht was dead. She spoke very poor Swedish. When she finally grasped what they were telling her, she was utterly distraught. But she was never allowed in, because they had just started on the lower floor when she arrived. On the other hand, I got to hear something interesting from the guy who has that nice-looking clothing store on the corner. His name is . . . let me see . . .”

  He feverishly leafed through his papers.

  Jonny rolled his eyes and flapped his hands affectedly as he chirped in falsetto, “His name is Carl-Johan Quist. Q-u-i-s-t. I had the pleasure of questioning him on Wednesday, after von Knecht’s aerial escapade. He said he didn’t know a thing. He just heard someone screaming outside his store and then ‘. . . ugh . . . oooh, so horrible . . . the poor wretch lay in a big nasty heap! I couldn’t look, but I called the police at once!’ I can see why he’d want to make himself interesting to you. But I guess you’re probably his type.”

  Fredrik froze. A fiery blush instantly appeared on his cheeks, and the look he gave Jonny was annihilating. Then he slowly collected his wits and said with restrained rage, “Unlike you, I can talk to people without having to step on them. That’s how I get results. You just strut off and think you’ve been damned witty when you’ve squashed someone! But all you’ve really done is boost your own rotten ego!”

  That’s when Birgitta did it. Right in front of her astonished colleagues she went over and planted a big kiss on Fredrik’s mouth.

  His blush deepened and his ears turned almost fluorescent. But his expression had brightened considerably. The same could not be said for Jonny.

  Andersson felt he was about to lose all control of the situation. To take the initiative, he burst out, “What the hell are you doing? Stop taunting each other and . . . kissing! This isn’t some playground, it’s a homicide investigation! Colleagues and ladies . . . let’s keep our work separate!”

  After this, the group made a real effort to get serious. Fredrik smoothed out his paper again. He had wadded it up during the emotional confrontation. As if nothing had happened, he continued, “I have his name here. Carl-Johan Quist. He recognized Pirjo and knew that she cleaned for the von Knechts. She used to arrive at the same time he opened the store. That’s why he reacted when he saw her on Wednesday morning. He thought no one would have missed the news that Richard von Knecht was dead! So he kept an eye out for Pirjo that morning. She came out about fifteen minutes later. Just then two reporters walked into the store. Not to buy clothes, but to interview one of the eyewitnesses to von Knecht’s fall. Quist said that he hadn’t seen much more than von Knecht hitting the ground almost on his doorstep. When he had to show the vultures exactly where von Knecht had landed, he happened to cast a glance toward the streetcar stop. He saw Pirjo leaning toward a rolled-down side window of a large light-colored car. She was talking to someone inside the car. He says that the image is etched on his retina, because in his wildest imagination he could never believe that someone would want to pick up that fat little woman! The memory reappeared as soon as Quist read in the paper that Pirjo had died in the fire on Berzeliigatan.”

  Excitedly Andersson leaned toward Fredrik and said, “What make of car was it?”

  Fredrik shook his head regretfully. “Unfortunately Quist is useless when it comes to makes of cars. He doesn’t know a thing. He has no driver’s license and has never owned a car himself. But he thinks it was a BMW or Mercedes. I subscribe to Birgitta’s theory from the other day: Somebody gave Pirjo the keys so she could go and trigger the bomb. And it was the person in the car.”

  The keys. The keys were flashing . . . what was it about those keys? Irene tried to capture the vague mental image, but it slipped away like soap between her fingers.

  As if hearing her thoughts, Andersson echoed, “The keys. Always these keys! I understand that the killer gave her the keys so she could go and trip the bomb. But why the garage and car keys?”

  Hannu squinted under his eyelids and said softly, “To get rid of them.”

  “The car keys? To get rid of them?”

  Andersson paused and looked with increasing respect at his borrowed resource. “Of course! To get rid of the evidence he gives the keys to Pirjo! Maybe also to screw with our heads. And he certainly succeeded there. But not anymore! Now we know how it all happened! At least we have a good theory.”

  Birgitta looked angry and snapped, “What a horrifying person! Sending off a mother of three to a certain death! I can almost hear this monster saying, ‘Dear Pirjo, will you be an angel and clean up Richard von Knecht’s office apartment? He doesn’t need it any longer, but it has to look nice when people come to look at it. And by the way, while you’re there, could you please put back these keys? Thank you, I’ll pay you double time if you do this for me.’ And the murderer drives off with the secure knowledge that he will never have to pay that double time.”

  There was a silence as everyone played out the imagined scene in their minds. It was quite conceivable that it had happened exactly that way.

  Irene spoke. “If this was what the murderer did, we know three things. First, the murderer had access to both key rings that were found with Pirjo after the fire. Second, Pirjo knew the murderer and trusted him. Or her. Third, the murderer had access to a light-colored car. Quite large, according to Quist. The teacher at Ascheberg High School also saw a light-colored car on the evening of the murder. Sylvia’s BMW is red. As is the Porsche. The light-colored cars we know about in this case are Henrik von Knecht’s Mercedes and Charlotte’s light yellow Golf. Although a Golf isn’t very big. And wouldn’t a teacher have noticed that it was yellow?”

  “Not necessarily. It’s pale yellow. He was running toward the parking garage. Imagine that it was dark, pouring rain, and he saw it at a distance,” said Birgitta.

  Andersson gave Fredrik an urgent look. “You have to bring in Quist at once for an interview. He works with clothes and might be able to say something about the color, for God’s sake! And try to get him to decide what make of car it was!”

  “Will do. Although one thing occurs to me. Shorty has a white Ford Mondeo. Brand new, with dark tinted windows. Totally luscious,” said Fredrik.

  “All right, you might as well check out his car too. Although Quist probably can’t tell the difference between a Golf and a Mondeo. Did he happen to see who was sitting in the car?”

  “No. But he did say that the car windows were dark.”

  Irene remembered something. “The windows on Henrik’s Benz are, too.”

  Andersson frowned and thought for a moment. “Okay. Fredrik, you work on that little ho . . . shopowner today. Jonny, Hans, and Birgitta wil
l follow Shorty when he gets out after lunch. Like leeches! If we’re lucky he might lead us to the killer. To Bobo’s killer, in any case. You four will also take the weekend shift. The others who were on duty last weekend will have this one off. But today we’ll keep checking and double-checking everything we’ve developed so far. Irene and Tommy, you can run up to Molinsgatan and find out if anyone else saw Pirjo talking to the driver of that light-colored Golf or Mercedes, or whatever kind of car it was. Speaking of cars: Ask if anybody saw the cars outside the garage on Molinsgatan on Friday night. It would be especially interesting to find out what kind of car was driven into the garage instead of the Porsche! Hannu, I want you to lean on Pirjo’s daughter a little more. I have a feeling she might be hiding quite a bit. To protect her mamma’s reputation or something. It sounds damned funny that she didn’t say what place she was going off to clean.”

  Hannu nodded, but Irene saw him shrug at the same time. Apparently he didn’t think he would get much farther with Marjatta.

  The superintendent adjourned the meeting. “I’ll be here all day and maybe part of the weekend. Otherwise you can reach me at home.”

  They all stood up. Birgitta and Fredrik slipped out to the corridor first, and the superintendent could hear their laughter sweep into the room like a warm and promising breeze. He felt a sudden pang. Was she going to start going out with Fredrik? How would that affect her trip to Australia? All her talk about independence and freedom from men’s demands! Although they said the beer was good in Australia. But that’s not somewhere he would ever go.

  THE TEMPERATURE was just below freezing, and there was black ice on the roads. People were taking careful little baby steps on the sidewalks. The ambulances were making shuttle trips to the emergency rooms with broken arms and legs.