Still Waters (Sandhamn Murders Book 1)

by Viveca Sten

  He looked down at his papers again. “The report only describes the injuries; it doesn’t suggest how they might have happened or what caused them.”

  Margit raised her eyebrows. “It seems as if our friends in pathology have taken the easy way out this time. I think we should call and ask if they have some kind of theory we could work with.” She leaned back with an expression that made it clear she expected more substance from the medical profession. She was making no attempt to hide her bad mood.

  Persson was also unhappy. He sighed and turned to Margit and Thomas. “So what’s the next step?”

  “We’ve had a call about Almhult,” Thomas said. “It seems someone saw him on the ferry to Stockholm just over a week ago. We’ll check that out right away. We’ve also put up posters all over Sandhamn, asking anyone who spoke to Kicki Berggren to contact us. That might help.”

  He looked at Margit, who nodded.

  “We’re also going to look into any possible connections between the house owners and Systemet, anything that might link one of them to Krister Berggren,” Thomas said.

  “Right,” said Persson. “As you know, I was intending to take my vacation next week, so if you could solve the case by Saturday, that would be great.” His feeble attempt at humor didn’t go down very well. He stood up and wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief that looked well used.

  The meeting was over.

  CHAPTER 45

  The woman who opened the door the third time the bell rang had blobs of something that looked like vegetable puree all over her T-shirt. She looked stressed and was clutching a dish towel in one hand. The sound of children screaming emanated from the house.

  “Are you the person who called from the police?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder where the piercing screams had turned into something more like a furious roar.

  Thomas nodded. “My name is Thomas Andreasson, and this is my colleague, Margit Grankvist. May we come in for a few minutes? We’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s OK.”

  The roaring continued, and the woman looked even more stressed.

  “Come in. I’ve left my daughter on her own in the kitchen, and I need to get back to her.”

  She disappeared down a narrow hallway to the right of the entry, and Margit and Thomas followed.

  It was a pleasant house, cozy and well cared for, in the middle of Enskede, one of Stockholm’s older suburbs. A typical old-style house with a yellow wooden façade, white eaves, and a small south-facing garden. Thomas counted four apple trees and one plum tree.

  A gray cat slid past, uninterested in the visitors.

  In the kitchen a very cross little girl was sitting in a high chair, banging her spoon on the table. The remains of something orange were strewn across the floor; it was the same color as the blobs on her mother’s T-shirt.

  The hard-pressed mother pushed a strand of hair from her face with the back of her hand. She wiped her hands on the dish towel and extended her right hand. “Malin. Sorry about the mess. My daughter seems to have woken up in something of a temper today. Please, sit down.”

  Margit tried to discreetly check whether there was anything orange on the kitchen chair before she sat down.

  “You wanted to talk to me about my journey home from Sandhamn?”

  Margit nodded. “We heard that you and your family were on the same ferry as the man who was found dead on the island just a few days later,” she said.

  “I think so.” A fleeting expression of uncertainty passed over the woman’s face. “There was a man sitting just a few seats away from us who looked exactly like the picture in the paper.”

  “Could you describe him?”

  Malin thought for a moment; she wiped a blob of carrot puree off the table before she answered. “He was a real mess. Kind of shabby and run-down, you know? He was wearing a hoodie with the hood pulled tight, so I didn’t see him very clearly. But he certainly stank. Sorry. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead. But he smelled gross—like stale booze or something. That’s why my eldest daughter, Astrid, asked about him. She’s four.”

  “Did he do anything in particular during the crossing?”

  “Not that I can remember, but I wasn’t really paying attention.” She smiled and pointed to the little girl, who had calmed down and was now clutching her sippy cup. “They keep you busy when they’re that age.”

  “Could you tell us if you noticed anything else?”

  “I’m sorry. There isn’t really much I can say. He sat there during the whole trip, as far as I can remember. It takes about two hours.”

  “So he went all the way into Stockholm? He didn’t get off beforehand?”

  “No, we were quite late getting off. It took forever to pack up all our stuff. He got off about the same time; I remember that quite clearly.”

  She glanced at her daughter, who was now fully occupied in trying to remove the lid of her sippy cup so she could pour water all over the table.

  Thomas thought for a moment. If Jonny Almhult had been sitting there with his hood pulled down, it was hardly surprising that no one from the ferry company remembered him, in spite of the fact that they had shown his photograph and questioned the crews of all the ferries serving Sandhamn.

  He bent down and picked up the sippy cup, which the little girl had dropped. She took it and immediately threw it on the floor again, beaming at him.

  An entertaining new game.

  “And you didn’t see him after that?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” She seemed hesitant. “Or did I? I’m not absolutely certain; I might have seen him on Skeppsbron. My husband picked us up in the car, and as we were waiting under the lights outside the Grand Hotel, I thought I saw him walking toward Skeppsbron.” She picked up the cup her daughter had just dropped for the fifth time. “But I can’t swear it was him. I mean, it could have been anybody wearing a gray hoodie.”

  Thomas reversed the Volvo out of the little cul-de-sac and drove back the way they had come. Enskede was really charming, with old wooden houses surrounded by a variety of fruit trees. Just the kind of place you would want to live if you had a family.

  Children.

  Margit broke the silence. “It was well worth coming out here to speak to her, don’t you agree?”

  “Absolutely. Now we know Almhult came into town four days before his body was found. But where did he go after he got off the ferry?”

  Margit thought for a moment, then opened the glove compartment and started rummaging around.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “A street map of Stockholm. Every police officer has one in the car, right?”

  Thomas laughed.

  “Really? Have you got one in your car?”

  Margit pretended not to hear and kept on looking.

  Thomas glanced at her. “Try the door pocket instead.”

  Margit fished out a well-thumbed wad of pages edged in red and held together with a paper clip. “You’ve torn out the map section from the Yellow Pages!” she said, shaking her head.

  “Pernilla took the A–Z when we split up. I’m going to buy a new one as soon as I get around to it. Stop complaining. That works perfectly well. What do you want it for?”

  Margit didn’t answer. She ran a hand through her short, spiky hair as she studied the index of street names. When she found what she was looking for, she turned to the relevant page and placed her finger on the map. “Stop the car and I’ll show you.”

  “What?”

  “Stop the car. You can’t drive and look at the same time. You’re a police officer. You have to obey the law.”

  Thomas looked at her dubiously, then gave in and pulled over at the nearest bus stop. There was no point in arguing with her.

  “What have you come up with?”

  “Look at the map.” Margit held out th
e page that showed the area of Stockholm around Skeppsbron. “If you go straight on from Skeppsbron, where do you end up?”

  Thomas thought about it. He pictured the Grand Hotel, the ferries to the archipelago, and Skeppsbron. If you walked across Skeppsbron, where would you end up? “Gamla Stan—the old town? Slussen?”

  He shrugged and looked at Margit.

  “Keep going. You live in Stockholm, don’t you? Where’s your local knowledge? If you carry on past Slussen and walk along the water, where will you end up?”

  “Stadsgården, down at the bottom of Fjällgatan.”

  “Exactly. And what will you find there?”

  Suddenly it hit him. “The terminal for the ferries to and from Finland!”

  “Bingo, Einstein!”

  Thomas smiled sheepishly. He ought to have worked that out for himself. Margit was sharp.

  “If you’re on the run from the law—or from someone you work for who isn’t too happy with you—and you want to disappear for a while, and aren’t the type to hop on a plane to Brazil, where do you go?”

  “To Finland, on the ferry.” Thomas could have kicked himself. It was such a simple explanation.

  “And if someone follows you and pushes you overboard as you’re taking a last look at your home on Sandhamn,” Margit went on, “what are you going to look like?”

  “Bruised and battered, with broken bones that will be discovered postmortem.”

  “Exactly. If you fall from the top deck of a ship that size, it’s like jumping off a tall building. The surface of the water is rock hard when you fall from a real height.”

  Thomas nodded.

  “And where are you likely to be found?”

  “On the beach at Trouville, a few days later.”

  “Exactly.”

  “We need to speak to the staff at the departure terminal. And we need to see their passenger lists for the crossings between the Sunday when Almhult arrived in Stockholm and the Thursday when he was found.”

  “Correct.”

  “Presumably we now know how Jonny Almhult lost his life.”

  “Correct.”

  With a triumphant smile Margit sank back into the warm car seat.

  Thomas felt like a schoolboy having his homework corrected.

  TUESDAY, THE FOURTH WEEK

  CHAPTER 46

  There was a thick mist lying in the Sandhamn Gap. Between Telegrafholmen in the north and Sandön in the south lay a sound that formed the natural passage into Sandhamn from the mainland. The sound was extremely deep, but barely sixty yards across at its narrowest point. It was only just wide enough for the ships that passed during the day.

  The fog had rolled in overnight, transforming the beautiful evening sky of the previous day to a billowing mass of cloud. When Nora woke she could hear the faint sound of the foghorn at Revengegrundet lighthouse in the distance, a sure sign of poor visibility. Its mournful echo gave sailors a fixed point by which to navigate. Each lighthouse used the first letter of its name in Morse code as its signal. A for Almagrundet, R for Revengegrundet, and so on, helping those at sea to find their way if they had gone astray in the fog.

  Ever since Nora had gotten lost many years ago in an evening mist just off Sandhamn, she had held a deep respect for the weather. She had been heading over to Skanskobb, a little island opposite the Trouville jetty that was the finish line for some of the sailing races. It was only about one nautical mile from the Yacht Club marina, if that. She was supposed to be helping out for a few hours in the Round Gotland Race, a major annual event.

  In spite of the fact that she knew the waters around Sandhamn like the back of her hand and had sailed out to Skanskobb countless times in the past, she missed the island completely and suddenly saw a lighthouse looming ahead of her. She had passed Skanskobb and was about to crash into Svängen, the caisson lighthouse to the south of Korsö. If she hadn’t ended up there, she could well have carried on out into the Baltic. After that she had never underestimated the difficulty of navigating in fog.

  Nora looked at the digital clock. The red numbers told her it was six fifteen. Too early to get up, too late to go back to sleep. She had slept poorly over the past few nights. The atmosphere at home was still tense, though not quite as bad as it had been.

  After a great deal of thought, she had decided to go to the meeting at the recruitment agency the following day. She had concluded that there was no point in discussing the matter with Henrik again; it would be better to have the meeting before she brought it up once more.

  She slid out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and a top, along with a pair of old sailing boots she’d had since she was a teenager. The rubber had begun to crack up the sides, but they were easy to slip into. Then she put on an old sailing jacket that someone had once left behind and grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl.

  The air was fresh, and a fine damp mist immediately covered her face. The silence was absolute, every sound deadened by the thick fog. She couldn’t even hear the cry of a single gull. When she looked out over the sea, she couldn’t see a thing.

  The familiar contours of the islands off Sandhamn had been swallowed up by the gray dampness. Beyond the edge of the jetty the world became nothing but mist, a ghostly horizon with neither a beginning nor an end. Nora pulled up her hood and pushed her hands deep into her pockets, then strode off across the sand and into the forest.

  The soft moss and heather combined to form a springy mat that gave as she walked. Only her footprints in the drifts of pine needles covering the path bore witness to her progress. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  There wasn’t a soul in sight.

  Total peace and quiet.

  After a long walk through the forest she emerged on the northwestern side of the island. There were only a few isolated houses, set in large tracts of land covered in pine trees and blueberry bushes. This was in sharp contrast to the tiny plots in the village, where most of the space was given over to flower beds.

  The wind soughed gently in the tops of the tall pines. The fog seemed to have lifted slightly; visibility was better, and she could just see the water’s edge.

  Nora turned to the right and followed the narrow forest track leading back to the village. As she passed the little churchyard surrounded by a simple white fence, she impulsively opened the gate and stepped inside. She stood there contemplating this tranquil place.

  Sandhamn’s churchyard had been established during the great cholera epidemic in the 1830s. Many of the graves were beautiful and elaborate, made of marble and granite. Some were overgrown with lichen, the inscriptions eroded to the point where it was almost impossible to read them. The gravestones could provide a great deal of information about the population in years gone by and about how people had made a living in those days. Every stone carried the name and occupation of the person who was buried there. Many master pilots and customs officers had been laid to rest here, often beside a faithful wife, whose name was always below that of her husband.

  Nora recognized many of the surnames; they were families who still owned property on the island, houses that had been passed down from one generation to the next. They were often made up of sections of older houses that had been transported to Sandhamn from other islands.

  There was an air of peace about this place, which lay just behind the beach at Fläskberget. The graves were surrounded by sand, its surface covered in needles and cones. Here and there the ground was crisscrossed by the gnarled roots of the pine trees, which gave the impression of an irregular pattern laid out at random, like a skewed chessboard.

  A beautiful laburnum tree had been planted next to the modest grave belonging to Avén, the former lighthouse keeper who had been responsible for the lighthouse on Korsö for the latter part of the nineteenth century. People said he was a real gardener, who created an unparalleled display of flowers during his time o
n the island, with rose bushes and flower beds wherever you looked.

  Nora wandered slowly among the graves. She had always loved the atmosphere in this churchyard and the feeling of stillness that came over her whenever she visited.

  Up in the left-hand corner there was a memorial grove to commemorate those who had not been laid to rest in a grave of their own. A heavy black chain fenced off the area, and beside the great anchor in the sand there were fresh flowers and candles. For a moment she wondered who had put them there; perhaps it was some kind soul thinking of poor Kicki Berggren, who had recently lost her life on Sandhamn, or a resident wishing to honor the memory of a relative lost long ago.

  Nora stopped at the Brand family grave, the resting place of every member of Signe’s family who had passed away since the churchyard was established. The last name on the large gravestone was Helge Brand, Signe’s brother, who had died of cancer at the beginning of the nineties.

  Nora didn’t have very clear memories of Helge. He had left the family and spent many years abroad and at sea. By the time he returned home to Sandhamn, he was already marked by the illness that would take his life. Signe cared for him in their childhood home until the end. She had refused to let him go to the hospital, insisting that she could care for him better than strangers.

  Nora bowed her head as a mark of respect and slowly walked away, lost in thought.

  People’s lives could turn out so differently. One minute out on the seven seas, the next marked by death. Helge Brand had returned to Sandhamn as his life neared its end, while Kicki Berggren had been on the island for such a short time when she died. And Krister Berggren was already dead when he reached the island. None of them could have foreseen what a short time they had left to live.

  Would they have done anything different if they had known what was coming? Nora wondered. Would they have appreciated life more if they had sensed how quickly their time was running out?

  In a moment of ice-cold clarity Nora realized she wasn’t prepared to compromise simply to appease Henrik. The injustice of the way in which her own wishes had been casually waved aside caused her physical pain. The anger at not being taken seriously felt like a solid lump in her chest. Never before had Henrik spelled out so clearly what really mattered.