‘Not at all! Come in!’
The kitchen is warm like an incubator and smells strongly of cumin, linseed oil paint and freshly baked bread. I’d bet this room’s seen a lentil stew or two, Karen muses and takes her jacket off while glancing over at Brandon. If she’d any preconceived notions about what an old commune member from the seventies should look like, he confirms them and then some. Brandon Connor is, just like his wife, remarkably tall, probably over six feet three. He looks to be in good shape, though she notes his shoulders are slightly hunched when he gets milk and cheese out of the fridge. His thin, wide trousers might be pyjama bottoms, but something tells her they, like his washed-out Frank Zappa T-shirt, could just as easily be Brandon’s regular clothes. Like Janet, he’s wearing some kind of rag socks, but while hers are knitted from regular grey wool, probably on the island, Brandon’s look like they were made by a Peruvian lady with a passion for zany colours. His sparse hair is gathered in a thin ponytail and his chin adorned with a long, narrow beard.
‘There’s walnuts in the bread,’ he says. ‘I hope you’re not allergic?’
‘Not that I know,’ Karen replies. ‘It looks amazing, did you bake it yourselves?’
Brandon looks up from his breadknife with an expression of genuine surprise.
‘Yes . . .’ he says slowly. ‘We’re not going to waste our money on the crap they sell down at Kvik. Do you?’
‘Sometimes,’ she admits. ‘Or I buy bread from one of the bakeries,’ she adds in an attempt to redeem herself a little.
After some small talk about baking and the quality of the island’s supermarket chains, Karen directs the conversation toward the reason she’s there.
‘I assume you’ve heard about the murder in Langevik. And I believe you must be aware of your connection to Susanne Smeed?’ she adds with a querying look.
‘Sure,’ Brandon says, ‘the murder’s been pretty much impossible to miss. But we don’t read the evening papers and the morning papers didn’t publish the name until a few days after the fact, so it was a while before we realised it was their girl. Per and Anne-Marie’s, I mean.’
‘That’s right. Susanne Smeed was born Lindgren. And that is, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, the reason I’m here. Am I right to think you lived with Per and Anne-Marie Lindgren and some others in a commune during a period in the early seventies?’
‘We did. From March 1970 to the end of February 1971, to be precise. Almost exactly a year.’
‘Have you lived on the island since then?’
‘Not the entire time. We moved to Copenhagen at first – everyone did back then – but we only stayed for a couple of months before we relocated to Sweden. We lived in another commune there, in Huddinge outside Stockholm, for a couple of years. We didn’t move back here until . . . when was it, do you remember?’
Brandon consults his wife with a look.
‘May of seventy-six,’ she says. ‘Since then, we’ve stayed put.’
‘Did you stay in touch with Per and Anne-Marie after you moved back? Or with anyone else from your time at Lothorp Farm?’
‘Only with Theo Rep. At least if you mean regular contact. Everyone scattered and with no mobile phones or Facebook, it wasn’t easy. We did run into Per and Anne-Marie in Dunker, of course, after we moved back.’
‘But you didn’t socialise?’
‘It was my impression they didn’t want to. At least she didn’t,’ Janet says. ‘Anne-Marie was a bit . . . how do I put it? Fragile, perhaps.’
‘Don’t pussyfoot around; she was weird,’ Brandon breaks in brusquely; Janet gives him something that looks like a cautionary look.
‘In what way was she weird?’
‘Pardon me,’ Janet says, ‘but I don’t understand what all this has to do with Susanne’s murder. Both Anne-Marie and Per have been dead for years.’
Karen hesitates for a moment. Then she decides to tell them the truth.
‘To be honest, I’m not sure myself. The thing is that we’re trying to form a picture of Susanne’s life and what kind of person she was. It’s a kind of jigsaw puzzle, in which the first piece seems to be found up at Lothorp Farm. What can you tell me about your time there? How did you end up there in the first place?’
Mr and Mrs Connor exchange another look, as though trying to reach some kind of unspoken agreement.
‘Well,’ Brandon says at length. ‘I suppose it started with me deciding Uncle Sam could do without my help in ’Nam.’
‘Brandon was a deserter,’ Janet explains.
‘Oh, so you’re American?’ Karen says, surprised.
For some reason, she has assumed both he and Janet are from the UK. Both speak fluent Doggerian and it’s hard to tell an American accent from a British one.
‘What about you? Where did you grow up?’
‘Southampton,’ Janet replies. ‘We met on the Isle of Wight on 31 August 1969. I was there against my parents’ express wishes.’
‘I was there illegally, had come over from Amsterdam on a private boat, with Theo and a bunch of hippies. Since I’d missed Woodstock a few weeks before, for obvious reasons, we decided to go to the Isle of Wight Festival instead. Not as epic, but I did get to see Dylan and I met Janet, so I shouldn’t complain.’
Brandon reaches for the teapot and inquiringly cocks an eyebrow at Karen, who shakes her head. She feels torn; on the one hand, she wants to spend the whole day here, eating walnut bread and listening to stories from a bygone era when she herself was in nappies. On the other hand, she has to stay rational and move things along.
‘And then you came here the following year.’
‘Yes, Theo had met Disa somewhere I can’t remember, and she knew Tomas and Ingela already. I think they met when Disa was studying midwifery in Copenhagen. Tomas was half Danish on his mother’s side. And he and Per were childhood friends. Well, either way, word got around that Anne-Marie had inherited a place on Doggerland and that they were considering starting a commune.’
‘And am I right in thinking there were children in the picture, too? From the start, I mean?’
‘Yes, Ingela had two boys just a couple of years apart, Orian and Love. And Disa had girl of five, I think. Her name was Mette.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘Yes, a son, but we had him much later. Dylan’s a stock trader in London,’ Brandon says with a look of dejection that reveals he would have wished his son had pursued a different career. ‘We did what we could,’ he adds with a crooked smile.
‘And Susanne was only born the year after?’
‘Yes, but that was after we moved away, so we don’t know anything about all that.’
Karen’s eyebrows shoot up.
‘All that?’
Janet puts a hand on her husband’s arm.
‘What Brandon means to say is that things turned sour at the farm and we felt it was time to move on. We’d heard a lot of exciting things were happening in Copenhagen, so we decided to go there.’
Janet is talking quickly; Karen half listens while she explains that they joined the squatters in the former military area of Christiania but that they’d only lasted a few months before deciding to head to Sweden. And she senses an inward oath from the other woman when she realises Karen’s going to keep the focus on Lothorp Farm.
‘Turned sour, you said? Why was that?’
Janet gets up, looking annoyed.
‘That’s private,’ she says. ‘I really don’t see how that could be relevant.’
‘You’re probably right, but I’d like to be the judge of that, if you don’t mind,’ Karen replies levelly. ‘It happened almost fifty years ago and the Lindgrens have all passed away, so at least whatever you tell me can’t hurt any of them.’
‘He was unfaithful,’ Brandon says tersely. ‘Per and Ingela had an affair while Tomas was away. Per was devastated that he had betrayed both his wife and his best friend and Anne-Marie lost her mind.’
Janet Connor has returned to the tab
le with a topped-up teapot and sits down with a heavy sigh.
‘She didn’t lose her mind, Brandon. She slipped into what would these days likely be described as a deep depression. No wonder, really; Lothorp Farm belonged to her and she probably felt both used and betrayed by all of us.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘Late that summer, the same year we moved in. It was wonderful until then, but everything changed when Anne-Marie fell ill.’
‘August, maybe September 1970, it must have been while Anne-Marie was pregnant with Susanne,’ Karen thinks. ‘Finding out your husband cheated while you were expecting could knock anyone off balance. Especially if you have to share a home with the other woman. The home you own.’
‘It’s like Brandon said, things turned sour and none of us knew how to handle Anne-Marie’s depression or Per’s desperate attempts to make her better. And besides, I’m sure several of us felt it wasn’t such a big deal at the end of the day. A lot of people viewed fidelity as a bourgeoise invention.’
‘How did Tomas and Ingela react?’
‘Ingela always had a fairly uncomplicated approach to life. Well, I suppose we’d all come to the farm with naïve expectations of sharing everything and liberating ourselves from bourgeoise conventions, but when it came down to it, none of us was able to handle it. Not even Ingela. She felt bad about Anne-Marie being sick, but I don’t think she ever thought she and Per had done anything wrong.’
‘I think Tomas handled it best, even though Per was his best friend,’ Brandon says. ‘He was really the one person there who practised what he preached. Live and let live, what’s mine is yours, you know. He and Ingela were the most hard-core hippies, if you know what I mean. They were all in, while the rest of us . . . well . . .’
Brandon trails off and reaches for his teacup.
‘They clung on for longer than the rest us, certainly,’ Janet takes over. ‘I think they stayed for a few more months before deciding to move to Sweden. Them and Disa. But we haven’t had any real contact with any of them since.’
‘Nor with Per and Anne-Marie, even though you all lived on Heimö?’
‘Like I said, we would run into each other in Dunker sometimes and I’m sure we talked about visiting Langevik at some point, but it never happened. Again, they weren’t happy memories.’
‘Do you know what happened to Ingela and Tomas after they moved?’
‘They parted ways. She kept doing the hippie thing, but he did a one-eighty and pulled on a suit and tie. Took over his father’s company eventually. And just like that, Tomas Ekman, the dyed-in-the-wool hippie, had turned into a die-hard capitalist. Sadly, he passed away just a few months ago.’
‘He did? How did you find out? I thought you said you weren’t in touch?’
‘Our son Dylan told us when he came home last summer. He’d heard it at work. Tomas was apparently well-known in the business world and Dylan was obviously aware we knew each other when we were young. He found Tomas Ekman considerably more impressive than his old dad,’ Brandon says with a wry smile. ‘Sometimes the apple falls a long way from the tree.’
‘And what about Ingela, is she still alive?’
‘No idea,’ Janet replies curtly. ‘Like I said, we’re not in touch.’
‘And Disa?’
‘I’m sorry, but all of this is a closed chapter to us.’
And as though to underline that they have nothing more to say, Janet gets up and starts clearing the table.
*
Karen knows she’s going to have to give up, as she merges onto the motorway with her course set for the Dunker police headquarters. It’s time to forget about that old hippie commune and start focusing on the burglary connection instead.
A faint, haze sunlight has broken through the overcast sky and the road is already dry in spots. After a glance at her watch, Karen speeds up and does her best to shake a feeling Brandon and Janet Connor didn’t tell her the whole truth.
61
She straightens up her stack of documents, leans forward and turns the audio recorder on.
‘Interview with Linus Kvanne regarding suspected burglary, attempted arson and murder, alternatively manslaughter. Also present are, aside from Linus Kvanne, lawyer Gary Brataas and Detective Inspectors Karl Björken and Karen Eiken Hornby.’
‘I haven’t fucking murdered anybody. I’m not going to be framed for something I didn’t do.’
His voice is unexpectedly deep, in stark contrast to his boyishly slender build. Karen thinks about the images from the ferry’s CCTV camera; both she and Karl had guessed sixteen, seventeen years old. But Linus Kvanne has already had time to both turn twenty-four and serve out three sentences at Kabare Prison. The first one for manslaughter.
The incident in which Lars Hayden, a twenty-eight-year-old junkie known by the police, had lost his life six years ago had been described as an act of heroism by Linus Kvanne’s lawyer. A New Year’s Eve party that had gone off the rails early on had come to a definitive end when Kvanne discovered his then-girlfriend in one of the bedrooms. Hayden had been lying on top of her with his trousers down and a knife pressed against her throat. The court deemed that the first time Linus Kvanne stabbed Lars Hayden could be considered self-defence, as he was trying to disarm Hayden. It was the following four times that had been considered ‘excessive force’. But Kvanne’s youth and lack of prior offences had been considered mitigating circumstances. After serving five of the nine months he’d been sentenced to, Kvanne had been released for good behaviour; a unanimous parole board had assessed the risk of re-offending as low.
Since then, Linus Kvanne has worked on refining his brand, doing a couple of brief stints in the nick for possession and one for fairly large-scale police theft. His most recent stay at Kabare only ended in July.
He looks relaxed, slouched in his chair with one foot casually resting on the knee of the other leg.
Gary Brataas puts a soothing hand on his client’s arm.
‘Of course not. Let’s just listen calmly to what the police have to say. I’m looking forward to it,’ he says and smiles out of the corner of his mouth.
‘All right, Linus,’ Karen says. ‘You were arrested today at 10.45. a.m. in your flat on Tallvägen in Lemdal. At the time of your arrest, your flat was searched and aside from a substantial amount of narcotics, the police also found several items reported stolen in a number of break-ins on Noorö and Heimö. Can you explain that?’
Linus Kvanne pretends to stifle a yawn, stretches and folds his hands behind his head.
‘Explanation? As to why the fuzz broke down my front door and stormed in while I was sleeping, you mean? Don’t have one.’
Karen shoots Karl a quick glance. He has puffed up his cheeks, his eyebrows raised inquiringly, and now he lets the air out in a sigh that clearly illustrates what they’re both thinking: I see, you’re one of those; this is going to take a while.
Karen repeats the question, ignoring Kvanne’s attempts to rile her.
‘I mean, how do you explain the stolen items found in your living room and under your bed?’
Linus Kvanne shrugs and smiles so widely the chewing tobacco under his top lip threatens to fall onto his lap.
‘Well, I guess someone must’ve planted it there. Seems like the most likely explanation, no?’
‘And who would that be, do you think?’
This time, Linus Kvanne laughs and spreads his hands.
‘I don’t know. A lot of people come and go. My home is open to one and all.’
‘You know what I think?’ Karen says calmly. ‘I think you stole those things in a series of burglaries. I think that up on Noorö, you also stole an Africa Twin model motorcycle and that you used that to go to Thorsvik and from there to Grunder.’
‘Is that right, darlin’?’
‘And after the break-in in Grunder, you got rid of the motorcycle, probably deliberately because you were worried there might be an alert out for it, or maybe you actually just cr
ashed. Which one was it?’
Linus Kvanne shakes his head slowly, trying to catch Karl Björken’s eyes, hoping for some male understanding.
‘I’ve no idea what she’s on about. Do you have anything to say before I walk out of here?’
‘Sorry, kid,’ Karl replies evenly. ‘We have pictures of you and the bike on the ferry from Noorö. We also know you were bragging about it at The Cave last night.’
Kvanne quickly puts his arms down and leans across the table.
‘Who the fuck told you that?’
‘My client is not obliged to . . .’
Gary Brataas is cut off by Karen.
‘Isn’t bragging about your crimes just a bit daft?’ she says. ‘Especially when you’re drunk and in a crowded public place. There’s always a risk someone might rat you out. But,’ she adds, ‘maybe you are in fact a bit daft, Linus. What do you reckon, are you?’
He quickly pushes his face forward until its inches from Karen’s.
‘Fucking cunt.’
If he’d chosen a different word, she wouldn’t have had to deal with that little droplet of spit. Without letting on how revolted she is, Karen waits until Linus Kvanne withdraws and leans back in his chair once more before wiping away the saliva that landed on her lower lip and chin.
Her voice is completely calm when she presses on.
‘Was that why you decided to burn the houses down? Got a bit anxious, realising you might have left clues behind, despite wearing gloves? A hair or a flake of skin the technicians could use to tie you to the scene? Well, that’s actually good thinking, isn’t it?’
Karen turns to Karl, who’s nodding pensively.
‘Pretty smart, yeah,’ he agrees. ‘It’s just a shame he didn’t stay to make sure the fire caught properly before he scarpered. After all, now the technicians have all the time in the world to comb the houses for his DNA. Since we know what to look for now.’
Karen nods agreement while studying Linus Kvanne, who’s now drumming his fingers on his armrests. His smile has been replaced by a clenched jaw; his tongue darts in under his top lip to squeeze out some extra nicotine.
Fatal Isles Page 31
