‘Yes,’ Joseph replied with a heavy accent, while he studied Sjöberg’s notice. ‘Many Filipinos come here, although most of them don’t know a word of Spanish. The Philippines is of course an old Spanish colony.’
‘You don’t recognize either of the women?’ Sjöberg attempted.
‘No, not immediately. A whole family murdered? That’s a dreadful story. How old were the children?’
‘Two and four.’
‘How will the funeral be arranged?’
‘To be honest, I don’t know,’ Sjöberg answered. ‘We’ll have to speak to the woman’s family about that.’
‘Well, if you need our services, you’re very welcome. I’ll ask around, see if any of our parishioners recognize these women.’
‘I would be very grateful for that,’ said Sjöberg. ‘It’s really important that we get hold of her friend here.’
He pointed at the circled smiling face on the photograph.
‘Her name is Vida apparently,’ he added.
‘Vida? Then I’m sure we’ll find her,’ the little man said cryptically.
Forty-five minutes after his call to Telia Sjöberg was back at his desk and the fax had still not arrived. By phone he muddled his way back to the man he had spoken to before and ten minutes later he had the list in his hand. He wondered to himself how long it would have taken if he hadn’t called and exerted pressure. This is what it’s like for Einar all the time, he thought. It’s Telia’s fault that Einar’s always so damned grumpy.
He sat down at the desk and scanned through the list of telephone calls. It was not long. He imagined what the Sjöberg family’s list would look like: two adults and five children constantly gabbing into that receiver. Well, you could blame a lot on his twin sons, Christoffer and Jonathan, who were almost three, but not the high telephone bills.
From the employee at Telia he found out that Catherine Larsson did not have a mobile phone account with them. No mobile had been found in the apartment either, but Sjöberg made a note to ask the other providers too. It took him over an hour to make a list of all subscribers who had called or been called by Catherine Larsson. None of them was named Vida. He printed out the list on the laser printer, attached a yellow Post-it note with the text ‘Check what relationship these people have to Catherine Larsson’ to it and set it on Einar Eriksson’s desk.
* * *
Only a small number of children were left at the preschool when Sandén made his entry. The teacher, a charming woman in her sixties, appeared to belong in a very different workplace. She was dressed in a pair of tight jeans and a patterned blouse that looked expensive, with an elegant scarf around her neck. She was heavily made up and draped with baubles – rings, necklace, bracelets and earrings – but Sandén was not the right person to determine whether the jewels were genuine or not. She had a cheerful, warm voice that reached Sandén even out in the cloakroom, and he recognized the story she was reading. It was the one about the little rabbit Spotty. He had read it many times to his own children when they were small. She was sitting on a heap of soft pillows on the floor and had a child on each knee. A third child lay with a thumb in her mouth right alongside. As he stepped into the room, the teacher broke off and looked up at him with a surprised smile.
‘Jens Sandén, police detective,’ he said, suddenly realizing that he had barged into the children’s cosy corner in his wet winter shoes. ‘I need to speak to you, but finish reading the story, while I take off my shoes.’
She had a worried look on her face and followed him with her eyes as he left the room.
‘I’ll clean up after myself,’ Sandén called from the cloakroom before she had managed to resume the storytelling.
He put his shoes inside the front door, searched for the staff toilet and tore off a long piece of toilet paper from the roll. Then he carefully wiped up his wet footprints, flushed the paper away and tiptoed in his stockinged feet back to the children and their teacher.
‘So, we’ll read the rest tomorrow!’ the teacher said, closing the book with a bang that suggested the continuation of the story would be unbearably exciting. ‘I have to talk to the nice policeman who has come to visit us. Can you help me pick up the pens on the table? Then we can divide up the last banana.’
The children obediently did as she said, which Sandén presumed they would not have done if it had been their parents who asked them.
He did not feel like an especially nice policeman, with the business he had. Only now did it occur to him that he was not just there to snoop for information, but that he actually had been sent to break the awful news of the deaths of the two children, to one of the people who perhaps had been closest to them.
‘Margareta Norlander,’ she said, extending a hand in greeting, while with the other she ushered him out of the room. ‘We’ll go a little further away, so we can talk undisturbed. What’s this about?’
He followed her through the cloakroom and into the kitchen without answering her question.
‘Let’s sit down,’ said Sandén, gesturing towards some chairs around a table.
Obviously worried, she watched his face as she sat down across from him, her fingers laced in front of her mouth.
‘I don’t think I want to be part of this,’ she said anxiously.
‘Well, this has nothing to do with you personally.’ Sandén tried to calm her. ‘This is work-related.’ He could hear how bureaucratic he sounded, but continued seriously, ‘Tom and Linn Larsson – is it correct that they come to the preschool here?’
‘Yes, but they’ve been absent this week and we haven’t heard anything.’
She put her hands to her cheeks and her eyes filled with tears before he had even started.
‘Kate is always so careful …’
‘Is it Catherine you call Kate?’
She nodded in response.
‘All three of them were found dead this morning,’ said Sandén in as neutral a voice as he could muster. ‘We found them at home in bed, beside each other. They died together and the children do not seem to have been aware of what happened.’
‘And what was it that happened?’
Margareta Norlander could not keep from crying; the tears ran in torrential streams down her cheeks and her voice broke.
‘This is terribly difficult for me too,’ Sandén excused himself. He was also having a hard time holding the tears back. He took her hands in his and continued, ‘They were murdered. Someone cut their throats.’
‘Did you see them?’ she wanted to know between sobs.
‘Yes,’ answered Sandén. ‘But I promise you that the children did not feel anything, the whole scene looked quite peaceful. And at least they were all together.’
‘And poor Kate?’
‘The crime scene investigation is not yet finished, but unfortunately most signs indicate that she was conscious when it happened. But in all likelihood she didn’t see her children die.’
Sandén sat quietly for a while and let Margareta Norlander take in what he had said. She pulled her hands out of his and reached across the table towards a roll of paper towel. He anticipated her and tore off a piece which he handed over.
‘How in the world will I be able to explain this to the children?’ she asked while she dried her cheeks.
The front door banged outside and she made a half-hearted effort to get up from her chair. Sandén stopped her with a gesture, stood up and asked, ‘Is that a parent coming now?’
She nodded.
‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘Stay here. I’ll ask them to mind the children for a short while. I need to talk to you a little more.’
He left the kitchen and went out into the cloakroom, where the three remaining children had come out to meet a rain-soaked mother. He pulled out his police ID from the inside pocket of his jacket and showed it to the mother, who already had her own child in her arms.
‘I’m afraid I’ve come with bad news, so I would like to ask you to stay here for a while and take care of the childre
n who are left. Margareta and I are sitting out in the kitchen talking, and it would be nice if we could be undisturbed. What’s your name?’
‘My name is Anna,’ she answered with a serious expression. ‘Anna Åkesson. I’m the mother of Isa here.’
‘Good, Anna,’ Sandén said authoritatively, putting his ID back in his pocket. ‘Then that’s what we’ll do for the time being. Margareta will be in touch later. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ she said, puzzled, but asked no questions.
Sandén went back into the kitchen where Margareta Norlander was still sitting exactly as he had left her. She was still crying and staring listlessly at the refrigerator door. He sat down again in the chair across from her.
‘And Erik?’ she asked quietly.
‘Erik?’ Sandén asked in turn. ‘Who is that?’
‘He helps her with pick-up and drop-off sometimes.’
‘I must ask you to tell me what you know about Erik,’ said Sandén. ‘Do you know what his last name is?’
‘No, I’ve never asked. He’s about my age. We never really understood what kind of relationship he and Kate had. They may of course have been a couple and perhaps that’s most likely, but they never showed any physical intimacy in front of us in any event. He must be at least twenty years older than her … He was amazingly good with the children and they were crazy about him. But he isn’t their father, as far as I know.’
‘Have you met the father?’
‘No, he’s never appeared. Kate said they were divorced.’
‘Separated anyway,’ Sandén interjected.
‘Yes, it’s possible that’s how it was. Have you told him … ?’
‘Yes, but according to him he no longer saw either Catherine or the children. He must not have known about this Erik. We are extremely interested in getting in touch with him.’
The front door closed again and then several adult voices were heard outside.
‘Perhaps we have his telephone number in the office,’ said Margareta Norlander. ‘The parents have to provide phone numbers for someone who can step in if anything happens and they themselves can’t be reached. But I don’t want –’
She gestured towards the voices and Sandén calmed her.
‘We’ll do that later, when everyone has left. Anna Åkesson is running the show out there for now. Perhaps you could call the parents and your colleagues this evening …’
‘Yes, of course, I’ll have to do that.’
Then the preschool teacher broke down and the tears were now running unchecked down her cheeks.
‘Who could have done something so terrible –’
‘I wanted to ask you about that,’ said Sandén. ‘You here at the preschool perhaps know the family better than anyone else. Who did Catherine socialize with? Did the children have any friends outside preschool? I want to find out everything you know about Catherine Larsson. Could she have had any enemies?’
‘She was friendliness itself. Always happy and positive. And Erik likewise. He wasn’t here that often, once or twice a week perhaps.’
‘Since when?’
‘Ever since the children started here. It must have been in August 2006. They were so small then: little Linn had just learned to walk when they started. I’m not aware that Kate socialized with any of the other parents. And the children are so little in this group, it’s seldom they go home with each other and play. Tom and Linn didn’t do that anyway, as far as I know. It was always Kate or Erik who picked up and dropped off.’
‘What was Catherine like as a person?’
Margareta Norlander thought for a moment before she answered.
‘Sweet and friendly, as I said. A little shy, I think you could say. Rather quiet. Her Swedish was not all that great.’
‘What kind of work did she do, do you have any idea about that?’
‘She cleaned, she said; more than that I don’t know.’
She tore off another piece of paper towel from the roll and tried with little success to wipe off some mascara that had run.
‘How were the children doing?’ asked Sandén.
‘They were very happy and harmonious; there were never any worries with them. They were clean and well looked after. Kate was organised and careful about being on time and all that kind of thing.’
‘Did the children ever talk about their father?’
‘I’ve probably heard Tom brag a few times about how strong his dad is and such like, but children do that. I don’t think I’ve ever heard them tell anything about their father.’
‘And this Erik, what does he look like, what kind of work does he do?’
‘Average height, ash-blond hair, glasses. Swedish appearance. He looks rather ordinary with ordinary clothes. Trousers and jumper.’
‘So not a suit and not labourer’s clothing,’ Sandén filled in. ‘White-collar worker?’
‘Yes, something along those lines. I don’t know what kind of work he does.’
‘Green jumper?’ Sandén suggested.
‘Yes, now that you mention it … He often had a dark-green jumper on. He’s very fond of children, Erik,’ she continued. ‘Not just Tom and Linn, he always had a word to say to the other children too. He would play ball with them, throw them up in the air, you know, the kind of things kids like.’
The voices outside got louder and then stopped completely. The front door closed again with a slam. Margareta Norlander cast a glance at her watch. It was just past five.
‘The last ones probably just left,’ she observed with a sigh.
‘Can you help me check on those telephone numbers?’ Sandén asked.
Of course,’ she answered tiredly.
She got up from the chair laboriously, looking suddenly much older. He had not noticed the feebleness in her gait as she walked ahead of him through the corridor earlier. She had been transformed from a preschool teacher to a woman who had lost two children.
A young man in washed-out jeans and a discoloured tank top that nicely set off a pair of sturdy upper arms stood leaning on a mop behind the glass door to the adjacent section of the preschool. Sandén nodded a greeting, but Margareta Norlander took no notice of the indolent cleaner and instead searched out a key she had on a ring in her jeans pocket and unlocked the office door. From a row of binders on the desk she pulled out one with a grey spine and flicked to the Larsson children’s paperwork. There were two telephone numbers listed, one of which was a mobile number. The landline was Catherine Larsson’s home number, but whose mobile number was it? Erik’s?
Tuesday Evening
‘But you could do this, da– You could do it last week and last year and … You can’t simply have lost all your knowledge of subtraction!’
‘You were going to swear.’
‘No, I was going to – Yes, I was going to, but I didn’t.’
‘You were going to lie.’
‘You can think what you want, it’s a free country, Simon. Stop being silly, and let’s try again.’
‘There’s freedom of speech too, you can say what you want.’
‘Shall we drop the law and devote ourselves to mathematics instead? If I draw this on an axis … Oh, what the he– Åsa!’
‘You were going to swear.’
Conny Sjöberg looked in distress at his ten-year-old son and got up with such haste that the kitchen chair almost fell over behind him.
‘Åsa!’ he shouted again.
He heard a door being carefully closed in another part of the apartment and then Åsa’s feet on the parquet floor, first tiptoeing and then almost stomping, carrying her into the kitchen.
‘I was just putting the boys to bed!’ she hissed. ‘They just fell asleep!’
‘So are they awake now?’
‘No, but they could have been.’
‘But what kind of pseudo-discussion is this!’
Then Simon started giggling and it rubbed off on Åsa and finally all three of them were laughing.
‘Is it maths?’ asked Åsa.
‘Yes, the law, which is my field, he has no problem with,’ said Sjöberg. ‘But maths … And since we already have a trained maths teacher in the family, I don’t see why I should have to sit here –’
‘Because the two of you are on the same level, darling. It’s easier for you to understand what’s difficult.’
Åsa winked teasingly at him and gestured with her hand as if to wave him away from the kitchen table. Sjöberg was rescued by his mobile ringing somewhere in the apartment. He rushed out of the kitchen and finally found the phone in the inside pocket of his jacket in the hall.
‘This is Vida,’ said the woman on the phone, with an obvious accent. ‘You were looking for me.’
It took Sjöberg a few seconds to switch into the role of detective chief inspector, but once he’d gathered his wits he said in a firm and definite voice, ‘Yes, it’s good that you called. We would really like to speak to you.’
‘I was at work and my phone battery was dead. A friend saw at the church that I should call this number. The police have also left me a message.’
The police? Shit. So the mobile number Sandén got hold of at the preschool was not Erik’s.
‘What is this about?’ Vida asked.
‘Are you aware of what has happened?’
‘Happened? No, I’m not.’
‘Then it’s best that we meet.’
‘Can it wait until tomorrow? I’m tired.’
‘No,’ said Sjöberg. ‘Unfortunately it can’t wait. Are you at home?’
‘Yes …’ the woman said hesitantly.
‘I’ll bring another officer with me and come over in about half an hour. Is that okay? It’s very important.’
‘Okay. I live at Rusthållarvägen 31 in Bagarmossen. The entry code is 5110.’
After some hesitation he called Sandén, who immediately got in the car to drive from Bromma in the direction of Skånegatan to pick him up. Then Sjöberg went into the room that their two daughters, Sara and Maja, shared to kiss them good night. They were sitting on the floor, diligently making up questions for the nature-trail board game to which they would soon subject their mother and big brother. In the kitchen, to his mother’s delight, Simon was spitting out solutions to one subtraction problem after another at a furious pace. Sjöberg kissed his son on the head and gave him a commending pat on the shoulder.
The Last Lullaby (Hammarby Book 3) Page 4
