Still Waters (Sandhamn Murders Book 1)

by Viveca Sten

  Margit was staring at the house as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. Thomas, who had known what to expect, grinned at her.

  The house was bright green.

  In the middle of the idyllic archipelago, where virtually every single house was painted Falu red, someone had decided to paint the whole place bright green. Apart from the white eaves and steps, every last piece of timber was nauseatingly green. Without the eaves and steps you could easily have imagined you were standing in front of a giant marzipan cake. Only the rose was missing.

  Margit looked at Thomas, who merely gave a resigned shake of his head.

  “To each his own. It’s looked like this for a long time.”

  “But why on earth would anyone even think of doing that? In a place like this,” Margit said in disbelief.

  “Perhaps they thought it looked nice. Or else they’re color blind.”

  “Don’t you have to get permission to do something like this? Surely it must be against building regulations?”

  Thomas shrugged. “I expect the council tried, but they can’t be bothered to follow up. People get away with quite a lot out here. You can’t imagine how many houses have gone up without anybody paying much attention to building regulations.”

  Margit reached out and touched the wall, as if she weren’t sure if the color were real or if it might come off on her hand. “Good grief. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  A “Welcome” sign was hanging on the front door; fortunately it was painted in more traditional colors—blue and white. One of the windows was ajar, but no one answered when they knocked. They walked around the back of the house and saw that the doors leading to the patio were closed. There were no signs of life.

  An enormous wooden deck ran along the back wall. It was dominated by a huge teak table and an unusually large gas barbecue on wheels. A short distance away several striped sun loungers were arranged, while through the wide panorama window they could see a dining table and chairs and a plasma TV on the wall. Bang & Olufsen speakers stood in each corner.

  “You could certainly relax and recuperate here on a summer evening,” Margit said.

  She looked at the hot tub, from which a white plastic pipe ran into the sea. Presumably seawater was used to fill it. A wooden tray with three glasses and a bottle of whisky was floating on the surface. Evidently the owner wasn’t worried about strangers wandering in and drinking his booze.

  The expression on Margit’s face was a mixture of fascination and horror as she contemplated the comfortable lifestyle. “I wonder how you come to afford something like this. It doesn’t look particularly cheap. Either the owner must have won the lottery, or he must have his own business at the very least. What do you think?”

  “I think he runs his own business. I imagine quite a lot of this stuff has been billed to the company,” Thomas said. “Of course they’ll go down as essential materials rather than a hot tub for his place in the country.”

  Margit gave a wry smile.

  “Of course it depends on your conscience,” Thomas said with a wink. “But I can’t imagine someone’s normal income paid for all this.”

  Margit looked around. There wasn’t a soul in sight. “What now?” she asked. “There’s no one home, and it could be a while before the Fahléns turn up.”

  “If they’re out at sea they’ll probably be back before too long; if they were going to stay away overnight, they’d have taken the Bayliner. They probably left in a smaller boat.” He pointed to some ropes lying on the jetty that appeared to belong to another boat. “One you can use to lay nets,” he said, mostly to himself.

  “Do you want to wait?”

  “We can come back later. I don’t really want to call and warn them in advance. It’s better to turn up unannounced with questions like this.” He looked at his watch. “Let’s get something to eat, then we can see Nora. I don’t see the point of giving up now that we’re here.”

  He set off toward the gate, then turned and smiled at Margit.

  “And you’ll get to meet my godson, too.”

  CHAPTER 50

  “Thomas!” Simon came barreling through the gate and hurled himself into Thomas’s arms. “Did you bring me a present?” He looked expectantly at Thomas, his eyes bright.

  “Simon, you don’t ask people for presents!” Nora gave him a reproachful look. “It’s good to see Thomas with or without a present.”

  Thomas introduced Margit, and they gratefully accepted the offer of a cold beer—preferably low alcohol, as they were still on duty.

  They sat in the garden, enjoying the scent of the roses drifting across from Signe’s garden next door. The swallows were flying high, a sure sign of good weather.

  “How’s the investigation going?” Henrik asked as he poured their drinks.

  Nora placed a bowl of potato chips on the table; Simon immediately grabbed a handful before she could stop him. Then he beamed, showing the gap in his bottom teeth. It was impossible not to smile back.

  Thomas turned to Margit, who grimaced.

  “It depends on how you look at things,” Thomas said. “We know what killed Kicki Berggren, but we don’t know how or why.”

  “So what killed her?” Henrik asked.

  “Rat poison.” It sounded more dramatic than Thomas had intended, and the effect was immediate. Both Nora and Henrik stared at him in surprise.

  “I didn’t think you could kill a person with rat poison,” Henrik said.

  “You can kill most people with virtually every kind of poison, if they ingest enough of it,” Thomas said.

  Henrik frowned. “If I remember correctly from med school, there are a number of notorious cases where people have tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison, or warfarin, but they haven’t been very successful. They’ve just caused themselves a great deal of pain. You have to take enormous quantities in order for it to be fatal.”

  “You’re right,” said Thomas. “According to forensics the rat poison alone wouldn’t have been enough, but she suffered a blow to the head, which caused a fatal hemorrhage.”

  “That explains it,” Henrik said. “If there was a bleed and the clotting mechanism was impaired by the warfarin, then it would have been nearly impossible to save her. It wouldn’t have taken many hours for her to die in that case.” He took a few chips and went on. “Did she have any other symptoms to indicate that her blood wasn’t clotting?”

  “She’d also suffered a blow to the temple that apparently looked much worse than it should have.”

  Henrik nodded. “That fits with the effects one would expect. When the blood isn’t clotting, any bleeding becomes much worse than usual, and it can look pretty serious.”

  Nora tried to save the bowl of chips from Simon’s repeated onslaughts. “Rat poison,” she said. “That’s an unusual method.”

  Henrik nodded. “On the other hand, it’s very easy to get. If you don’t have access to medical resources where you can get the more common poisons, then perhaps you might think it would work, if you don’t really know what you’re doing. If you ask most people I think they’d expect it to do the job.”

  Thomas was all ears. “What do you mean by common poisons?” he asked, leaning forward.

  “Arsenic, for example, or digitalis, which comes from ordinary foxgloves. A lot of people with heart problems take digitalis, but if you take too much, it’s fatal. The monks used it in the old days when they wanted to do away with someone secretly because the substance was so difficult to trace.” Henrik paused. He took another handful of chips, then continued, “Morphine works in the same way. A small amount eases pain; an overdose will kill. There are many pharmaceutical drugs that become a deadly poison if the wrong dosage is used.”

  “So the use of rat poison would suggest that the murderer wasn’t familiar with its effects,” Margit said. “An amateur, in other words.”


  “Absolutely. Rat poison is easy to find, and it looks dangerous. But it’s far from effective if you want to be sure of success, so to speak.”

  Thomas considered Henrik’s theory. “So if you’re right, we’re dealing with a perpetrator who acted deliberately but didn’t really know how to go about it,” he said.

  Henrik shook his head. “Not necessarily. It could also be a murderer who wasn’t prepared and simply used what was at hand.”

  “You mean he used the first poison that came to mind?” Thomas said, with a trace of doubt in his voice.

  “That’s right. If you haven’t planned in advance to murder someone, but suddenly find yourself in a situation where you feel you have no alternative, then wouldn’t you use whatever you had in the house?”

  “Can you buy rat poison on the island?” Margit asked, directing her question to Nora.

  Nora looked dubious. “I don’t know, but you can certainly bring it over from town.”

  “Hang on. It’s not that easy to fool someone into taking rat poison,” Thomas said. “How do you get someone to polish off a plate of blue granules without making them suspicious? That’s just not possible.”

  Nora picked a long blade of grass and wound it around her finger. She frowned as if she were trying to remember something. “I remember some kind of liquid rat poison from when I was a kid,” she said. “My mother used it while we were here, because she used to keep the bottle on the top shelf, and she threatened us with no Saturday sweets if we so much as touched it. It was a dark-brown bottle, as I recall, and there was a skull and crossbones on the label.”

  Margit straightened up and looked at Nora. “Liquid rat poison. We should have thought of that. That has to be the explanation. You could just add it to a drink, and it would be easy to fool somebody who wasn’t on guard.” She turned to Thomas. “We’ll give Carina a call; she can look into what’s available. We need a fresh approach.” She patted Nora on the shoulder. “Good thinking.”

  Nora looked embarrassed but graciously accepted the praise. Then she frowned again. “Why would the murder of Kicki Berggren be spontaneous, if the murderer had already killed Krister Berggren?”

  The question hung in the air.

  “We still don’t actually know whether Krister Berggren was murdered,” Thomas said.

  “No,” Margit said, “but if he was, no one was supposed to know that. The murderer probably thought he would never be found. That loop of rope around his body was almost certainly attached to a weight, so it would sink to the bottom of the sea. If the rope hadn’t broken, and the temperature of the water hadn’t brought the body to the surface so it was washed ashore on Sandhamn, nobody would ever have found out a murder had been committed.”

  Thomas nodded. “If Kicki Berggren hadn’t been killed, her cousin’s death would probably have been dismissed as an accident.”

  Margit said, “The discovery of Krister Berggren’s body was unfortunate for the murderer. Then Kicki turns up. Somehow she knows, or thinks she knows, who killed her cousin. So she comes over to Sandhamn and confronts him.”

  “He panics,” Thomas said, “and decides to get rid of her, too.”

  “Exactly,” Margit said.

  “And since the murderer wasn’t expecting Kicki to turn up, he uses whatever he happens to have in the house, namely rat poison,” Thomas said.

  Margit leaned back in her chair, looking pleased with herself. The more they understood about the murderer, the better their chances of solving the case. Thomas knew from experience that an unplanned crime usually left a fair amount of evidence behind, and they needed all the help they could get in this investigation.

  They didn’t have to wait long for Carina to call back. Thomas could hear from the unmistakable excitement in her voice that she had something to tell them.

  “I couldn’t reach any of the pest-control people at this time of day, but I checked online. I found seven types of rat poison containing warfarin, all in the form of blue granules; the usual stuff, in other words.”

  “Was that all?” Thomas couldn’t hide his disappointment.

  “Don’t be so impatient,” said Carina. “I found something else. Something very interesting. There used to be a product called Warfarin Liquid Rat Poison. It was banned on December 31, 1990, but it was on sale until that date.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.” A big smile spread across Thomas’s face.

  “And another thing: it was far more concentrated than the rat poison you can buy today. It was almost fourteen times as strong as anything on the market now. Significantly more effective, in other words.”

  Thomas whistled. Carina was good. He pictured her face, and to his surprise an unexpected feeling of happiness suffused his entire body. “Terrific work, Carina,” he said, feeling slightly confused as he ended the call. He sat there holding the receiver, startled by his reaction.

  A comment from Margit brought him back to reality. “That explains everything. If the murderer had access to liquid rat poison, then obviously it would be much easier to dupe Kicki Berggren into taking a dose that was high enough to kill her.”

  “It would have been pretty straightforward,” Thomas said. “All he had to do was mix it with something else she was going to drink.” He finished off his beer and got to his feet.

  “Time for a chat with Philip Fahlén, I think. We can always ask if he has any rat poison in the house. Liquid rat poison.” He winked at Nora.

  Carina sat for a while lost in thought after her conversation with Thomas. She had blushed with pleasure when he’d praised her over the phone. Over the past few weeks he seemed to have noticed her more than he had in the past. They had also spoken quite a lot. He often asked her to sort something out or to contact people involved in the investigation. And there had been a fair amount of small talk, too.

  She felt as if she had gotten closer to him.

  He had sounded delighted when she told him what she had discovered on the Internet. As soon as she found the information about the liquid rat poison, she knew he would be pleased. Really pleased. She could hardly wait to call and tell him.

  When she heard his voice on the other end of the line, it made her tingle all over. She was sure he had felt it, too. It couldn’t just be her imagination, could it?

  She decided to suggest going out for lunch one day soon when he was back at the station. After all, everybody had to have lunch, and it wasn’t quite as big a step as dinner.

  She didn’t dare ask him on a date, not yet.

  She was humming to herself as she picked up her bag, ready to set off for the gym. You needed a high level of fitness to get into the police training academy, and by now even six miles on the exercise bike felt like a pleasant way to spend the evening. She smiled at her reflection as she passed the mirror in the foyer on her way out of the building.

  CHAPTER 51

  The shore at Fläskberget was almost deserted. Calm had descended after the invasion earlier in the day. A forgotten red plastic spade down by the water’s edge was almost the only evidence of the hordes of families who had been there; a child’s blue shoe was sticking up out of the sand.

  Margit and Thomas crossed the small beach and turned onto the road leading toward Västerudd and the Fahlén house. As they approached, they saw a blue boat with an outboard motor moored alongside the day cruiser. A woman in shorts and a top that left most of her stomach bare was looking out a window. The large sunglasses pushed up onto her forehead made her look like a giant fly. She emerged from the house and came up to the gate when they were still a few yards away.

  “Are you looking for someone?”

  “We’re with the police. We’d like to speak to Philip Fahlén, if he’s home.” Thomas took out his ID and held it out so she could see he was telling the truth.

  “Phil, there’s two police officers here—they want to talk to you.�
�� She looked anxious. “Has something happened? Are we in any danger?”

  “We just want to ask a few questions. It won’t take long.” Thomas gave her a reassuring smile; Margit said nothing.

  Philip Fahlén appeared in the doorway with a glass in his hand. He was a plump man, aged about sixty-five. He was very tan, and what little hair he had was cut extremely short, which drew attention to his slightly protruding ears. He was wearing blue pants and an open white shirt, with a blue-and-red scarf knotted around his neck.

  Thomas thought with a certain amount of amusement that all Fahlén needed was a captain’s hat to complete the impression that he was the captain of a luxury liner cruising the Mediterranean.

  Fahlén showed them into the huge living room that overlooked the sea. He offered them a seat on the plush sofa, where there was hardly room to sit down with all the cushions. It was like sitting outdoors, and yet it wasn’t. The view through the panorama window was astonishing: an endless series of islets against the backdrop of a glittering sea.

  Glossy foreign magazines and several books featuring topics relating to the archipelago were arranged on the glass coffee table. Thomas recognized a book on lighthouses by the photographer Magnus Rietz, well known for his work on the islands. The entire room had a nautical theme. Pictures of various ships adorned the walls, and the cushions on the royal-blue sofa were patterned with international signal flags. Fabric made to look like maritime charts had been used for the shades of the floor lamps in each corner, and a blue-and-white-striped square rug completed the decor, along with a huge electrified kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling.

  It looked as if someone had gone crazy in a marine interior design store.

  As Margit sat down on one sofa and contemplated the decor with a stunned expression, Thomas introduced himself and explained why they were there. He summarized the course of events that had led them to Fahlén and started by asking whether he’d had any kind of relationship with either Krister or Kicki Berggren.