The owner of the house, David Sandler, who had decided to spend one final weekend in his summer cottage to harvest an unusually rich crop of chanterelles, had been on his way to the shops in Thorsvik town centre to pick up butter and cream when the burglary took place. Having been gone no more than thirty minutes, he returned to find his kitchen floor flooded and his house filled with an acrid smoke from the torched kitchen curtains that would take weeks to air out. His newly purchased laptop and his father’s old Rolex, which had been sitting on the bedside table, were gone, and he was now in his cantankerous neighbour’s debt, to boot. David Sandler hadn’t been best pleased, that much was crystal clear from the report.
‘On the other hand, he might have had his head bashed in with a poker if he’d been home,’ Karl Björken remarks, speaking out loud what everyone’s thinking.
Karen has called an extra meeting; the information about the burglary seems to have made the whole team sense a shift in their fortune. Now they’re all sitting bolt upright, their eyes on her, ready to take notes.
‘We don’t want to get our hopes up, but this does mean we’re going to refocus on finding more potential connections. Let’s all work on going over every last detail of every single reported burglary. We’ll start with today’s reports and move backward from there. I’ll put together a list of search terms to help guide our work.’
Normally, assigning them this kind of grunt work would have prompted groans and sighs, but this time, Karen barely has time to end the meeting before everyone’s dashing to their desks to log into the database.
*
Astrid waves the others over after ninety minutes. At first, no one understands what’s prompted her reaction. Yet another burglary, this time up on Noorö, just north of the ferry port sometime between 17 and 20 September; the owner was away. But there had been no attempt to set fire to the house. Among the stolen items were, aside from two laptops and a – likely grossly exaggerated – amount of gold jewellery. There are a lot of burglaries on Noorö and few are ever solved. There’s nothing remarkable about this report either. Aside from one small detail.
On the list of stolen items is a yellow Honda, model CRF 1000L Africa Twin.
Once again, Karl Björken is the one who states the obvious:
‘Same bloke. He made off with the bike on Noorö and used it for the heist in Thorsvik. Are there cameras on the ferry?’
Like an invisible gas, impossible to contain, a notion begins to spread through the team; maybe the murder of Susanne Smeed was simply a burglary gone awry. Maybe the bloke who set fire to the house in Thorsvik did the same thing in Langevik the following week. Maybe he’d scoped out his targets and knew Susanne was usually out of town during Oistra. Maybe he killed her in sheer desperation when it turned out she was home. Maybe they now know how and why Susanne Smeed was murdered. If so, it’s only a matter of time before they catch the man who did it.
One person who’s definitely convinced the tide is turning is Viggo Haugen. That much is clear to Karen when she leaves his office half an hour later.
‘Wonderful news,’ he repeats, slapping his desk.
The last thing she hears before closing the door behind her is the sound of him picking up the receiver to make a call.
47
The air conditioning in the conference room turns off at 8 p.m.; Karen feels her shoulders drop as the whirring sound dies down. The brown paper cup of whiskey she has swiped from Jounas Smeed’s office feels like a small but remarkably effective revenge on this, her last day as interim head of the CID. On Monday, Smeed will resume his duties after a week’s gardening leave.
Any second now, she’s going to get up and fetch the two carrier bags full of mussels she’s managed to shove into the fridge in the kitchenette. It had, once again, slipped her mind that she’d invited people over when she received a text from Eirik a few hours earlier, asking if she wanted them to bring anything tomorrow. ‘Nothing. Just relax!’ she’d replied, before frantically racing down to the harbour before the shops closed for the day. Then she’d returned to the office.
She’s the only one left; she’s put her feet up on her desk and is studying the big board by the wall from a distance. Along the top are pictures of Susanne Smeed. On the left, a relatively recent portrait picture provided by Eira Care Homes; all their employees are required to wear photo ID; it had taken Gunilla Moen less than four minutes to provide them with a printout. To the right of a grave-looking Susanne looking straight into the camera is a selection of pictures showing her beaten to death in her kitchen, alongside photographs of the kitchen itself from different angles.
Underneath the neatly lined-up pictures, Karl has drawn a vertical timeline listing the few facts they’ve been able to verify.
Friday 20 Sept. 4.30 p.m. Susanne leaves her place of work, Solgården.
Monday 23 Sept. 7.45 a.m. Susanne calls in sick to work.
Friday 27 Sept. 7.15 a.m. Incoming phone call to Susanne’s work phone, from Copenhagen.
Saturday 28 Sept. No data.
Sunday 29 Sept. 8.30 a.m. – 10 a.m. possible window for murder, according to Kneought Brodal.
Sunday 29 Sept. Approx. 9.45 a.m. Angela Novak arrives at Harald Steen’s house.
Sunday 29 Sept. Approx. 9.55 a.m. – 10 a.m. Harald and Angela hear a car drive away from Susanne’s house.
Sunday 29 Sept. 11.49 a.m. Harald Steen calls emergency services.
Sunday 29 Sept. 12.25 p.m. Sara Inguldsen and Björn Lange arrive at the house.
For the sake of doing things by the book, they’ve also listed the names of anyone who had a less than cursory relationship with Susanne: Jounas Smeed, her daughter Sigrid and her boyfriend Samuel Nesbö, Wenche and Magnus Hellevik, Gunilla Moen. There is a question mark after Disa Brinckmann’s name. Other than that, the board is empty, which is probably why someone’s pushed it further away from the table.
And now, they can cross two of those names off the list of suspects.
New information brought by Karl Björken earlier in the evening had revealed that Sigrid Smeed had not been entirely honest in her interview. In this case, however, telling the truth would have served her better.
After some persistent door knocking in Sigrid Smeed’s apartment building in Gaarda, Karl had finally managed to talk to a – still very upset – next-door neighbour, who had been woken up just before eight on Sunday morning by commotion in the stairwell. According to the neighbour, a man in his fifties, whose breath reeked of alcohol and smoked fish, Samuel Nesbö had come home at that point, only to discover the chain was on the door.
Sigrid’s boyfriend – the neighbour had recognised him through his peephole – had rung the doorbell very persistently before proceeding to first call and then shout for Sigrid to open the door.
Eventually, she’d apparently let him in, because after that, they had, according to the neighbour, yelled and screamed at each other inside the flat until the boyfriend had left again in a rage about an hour later.
‘Did it seem like they were getting physical?’ Karl had asked, quietly wondering to himself why no one had called the police. On the other hand, he knew exactly why: domestic disturbances were an everyday occurrence in Gaarda and the calling the authorities was to be avoided at all costs.
‘I don’t bloody know, but I know she was alive when he left, because she was bawling at the top of her lungs.’
*
Karen had certainly never considered Susanne’s daughter a likely suspect, but now both she and her boyfriend could be definitively ruled out. There were two straws to grasp at: the successful identification of the driver of the yellow Honda and getting hold of Disa Brinckmann. Maybe one of them would lead to something, but nothing would happen before Smeed was back at work. A week without tangible progress; he’s not going to let me forget that, she thinks grimly to herself as she gazes out the rain streaked window. People have already tired of discussing the sudden change in weather, from the late-summer heat of Oistra to the pr
emature arrival of freezing temperatures and this never-ending drizzle. The meteorologists have no words of comfort to give: more low-pressure systems are impatiently queuing up out over the Atlantic, waiting to sweep in across Doggerland and unleash their fury on the islands.
Karen studies the kaleidoscope of greys on the window pane while she goes over the case file in her mind. She knows it by heart by now so there’s no reason to consult the black binders.
In her mind, she flips to the section on Susanne’s personal life, where the word ‘conflict’ is found in the description of virtually every relationship she had: several conflicts with Jounas, both during and after their marriage, primarily regarding money and land. A conflict with the daughter caused by Susanne’s endless fights with her father and Susanne’s disappointment at her tulle-wearing ballerina turning into a young woman with a pierced nose and tattooed arms. A conflict with her employer regarding the private use of work phones and an unsuccessful job application. A conflict with wind-power company Pegasus regarding land rights and disruptive noise from the turbine park built close to her house. A conflict with Wenche Hellevik caused by Susanne feeling snubbed and neglected.
No known conflict with Samuel Nesbö had been uncovered, though it could be assumed that Sigrid’s frosty relationship with her mother meant her boyfriend had no warm feelings for Susanne either. Whether there had been any kind of conflict between Susanne Smeed and Disa Brinckmann was still unknown.
In the margin were footnotes outlining a series of more minor conflicts with co-workers, bus companies and various suppliers of goods and services, all of whom Susanne had been unhappy with for one reason or another. Susanne Smeed seemed to have had a problem with practically everyone she ever came into contact with.
With me, as well. Karen recalls their awkward meeting at the tills of the plant nursery. Susanne had definitely had it in for Karen Eiken Hornby, long before there was any reason for it. And now she would never know what had happened in room 507 at the Hotel Strand.
The question is whether any of it is serious enough for someone to want Susanne dead. Had she made life so miserable for someone he or she had lost control? Or had she known something that constituted a threat to someone? Without any evidence to back it up, Karen has the distinct feeling Susanne had been exactly the type to stoop that low. Had Susanne Smeed engaged in blackmail?
On the other hand, she thinks to herself, sipping her whiskey, all this pondering is patently pointless. Judging by Viggo Haugen’s excited voice a few hours earlier, the murder of Susanne Smeed has been solved.
‘Not even you can deny this puts everything in a whole new light,’ he’d said. ‘A highly plausible explanation for this sad affair.’
Oh well, why not? Karen takes another sip; be that as it may, the Noorö and Thorsvik break-ins had in all likelihood been committed by the same bloke. For some reason he’d decided to up the ante by attempting to set the second house on fire. It’s not at all impossible to imagine him continuing his crime spree in Langevik. Maybe Susanne surprised him or maybe he felt a need to dial up the thrill level even further. From burglary, via arson to murder. A classic case of desensitisation, particularly common among criminals with psychopathic tendencies. But that kind of escalation usually takes a lot longer than a week.
‘All right, have a good weekend.’
The voice from the doorway makes Karen jump so high the last drops of whiskey slosh up over the edge of the paper cup.
‘You’re still here? I thought I was the last one,’ she mumbles, wiping her hand on her jeans.
‘I didn’t mean to startle you,’ Astrid Nielsen replies and starts zipping up her parka.
She really does look tired, Karen notes again with a pang of guilt. Following up on the new burglary lead entails going over CCTV footage from all ferry routes and running an expanded search for any crime connected to the two burglaries. Given the local police’s unwillingness to use the new internal database PIR, which according to IT still suffers from ‘teething problems’, almost eleven months after being introduced, that means calling all local stations to make sure nothing is missed. Astrid Nielsen has been tasked with keeping a running tally of the results.
‘I hope it’s not my slave-driving tendencies that are keeping you away from your husband and children this late on a Friday night,’ Karen says with a smile.
Astrid hesitates for a moment, then seems to steel herself.
‘No, it’s not your fault. The children are with my parents and Ingemar is . . . well, I might as well tell you, you’re going to find out anyway. Ingemar and I are getting divorced.’
Karen takes her feet off her desk and leans forward.
‘Come in,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you have a seat?’
Astrid seems to hesitate again, but then slowly unzips her parka. She sinks down onto a chair without a word; Karen can see her lips quivering.
‘Tell me what happened,’ she says.
*
And over the next thirty minutes, Karen learns that Astrid Nielsen isn’t as suffocatingly wholesome nor her husband as angelic as she’d thought.
48
Not every seat is filled, but Karen’s still surprised at how many people have made heir way to Langevik Church this Saturday morning for Susanne Smeed’s funeral.
Sigrid and Jounas are in the front pew with Wenche and Magnus Hellevik. As though out of respect for the loved ones, the row immediately behind them is empty, but elsewhere, Karen spots Gunilla Moen and another woman, presumably one of Susanne’s co-workers at Solgården. Several townspeople are in attendance; even Harald Steen has come, as have Odd Marklund, Jaap Kloes and Egil Jenssen and his wife. Who has come to pay their respects and who is driven primarily by morbid curiosity is anyone’s guess. Karen has slipped into a pew in the back; neither Sigrid nor Jounas seems to have spotted her. Wenche Hellevik, on the other hand, has given her a nod of recognition and a small smile.
Sigrid looked pale and determined when she walked into the church ahead of her father. While the priest speaks, she’s sitting with her head bowed; Karen notices that Jounas tries to say something to his daughter, but she resolutely turns her head away.
It’s the usual hymns and the priest keeps things brief, saying only what’s absolutely necessary. But at the sound of earth hitting the coffin lid, Karen hears a muffled sob from the front. Sigrid has disappeared from view; it takes Karen a few seconds to realise Susanne’s daughter has bent over double. Jounas Smeed is shifting uncomfortably in his seat and Wenche Hellevik puts a hand on Sigrid’s back, but removes it again just as quickly.
*
The whole thing is over in thirty minutes. When Karen, among the last to leave the church, steps out through the front doors, she notices that Jounas and Sigrid have already reached the car park, while Wenche and her husband have lingered in front of the church, talking to the priest. Jounas and Sigrid are clearly arguing about something. He opens the door of his car and looks like he’s trying to persuade her to get in, but she shakes her head. He gestures toward the car, annoyed this time, but she stubbornly stays where she is, arms crossed. Then she abruptly turns around and starts walking towards the cemetery while Jounas calls after her.
Soon after, Jounas is in the car, pulling the door shut with a bang so loud everyone turns to look; Wenche Hellevik glances over anxiously. She then quickly concludes her conversation with the priest and hurries toward the car park with her husband on her heels.
But before they can make it there, Jounas roars out of the car park in a shower of gravel.
For a few seconds, Wenche seems indecisive, looking from Jounas’s car to her niece cutting across the cemetery in the opposite direction. Then she shakes her head in exasperation, says something to her husband and they get into their car. Calmly, without any theatrics, Magnus Hellevik backs his metallic blue Volvo out and drives away from the church.
The last thing Karen sees before she gets into her own car is Sigrid’s slight figure disappearing behind a t
angle of yew trees.
49
The rattling of mussels pouring out of the bucket into the metal sink makes Rufus beat a swift retreat from the kitchen to the living room sofa, but he’ll be back. Slowly, like a surgeon before a crucial operation, she pulls on latex gloves and studies the shiny black shells. Then she picks up the shucking knife and gets to work. Eleven-odd pounds of mussels need to be cleaned of dirt and beards; it’s going to take a while, but her guests won’t be arriving for another couple of hours. It’s going to be eight or nine people: Kore and Eirik and Marike, of course; Aylin had been unsure if they would be able to find a babysitter at first, but had then let her know both she and Bo were coming. Too bad, Karen had thought to herself. Bo will definitely not be best pleased when he realises he’s spending the evening with a gaggle of women and two gay men. Out of concern for Aylin and the general atmosphere, rather than Bo’s enjoyment, she’d therefore also invited her cousin Torbjörn and his wife Veronica. That is bound to lift Bo’s spirits considerably. As a prominent lawyer with nascent political ambitions, he already has an extensive social network, but he and Veronica belong to the same party and Bo has big plans. It’s for Aylin, she tells herself.
If she wants to see her friend, she simply has to invite her husband, too, and make sure he’s happy. So long as Marike keeps her mouth shut, everything’s going to be fine. According to her, Aylin’s husband’s a ‘bloody prick’ with a ‘pathological need for control’.
‘I’ll bet you anything he beats her. Why is she always wearing long sleeves?’ she’d said last summer.
Karen had actually asked. Stopped by their house when she was sure Bo wouldn’t be there. And after two cups of coffee, she had finally voiced her concerns and had been rewarded with a hearty laugh. Granted, Bo had his failings, but he didn’t hit her. Of course not.
The memory still stings.
*
Her phone dings on the kitchen table; Karen dries her hands. It’s a text from Astrid:
Fatal Isles Page 25
