The Gallows Bird

by Camilla Lackberg

  ‘Why haven’t we heard about this earlier?’ asked Martin. ‘Was this before she moved here?’

  ‘No, she and Ola were twenty years old and had lived here for a year when it happened. But it was a long time ago; people forget, and there was probably some sympathy for Marit as well. Her blood alcohol was just over the legal limit. She had got into the car after having dinner at a friend’s house and drinking a few glasses of wine. I know this because I found the documents about the accident. We had them down in the archives.’

  ‘So we had a file on this the whole time?’ said Gösta incredulously.

  Patrik nodded. ‘Yes, I know, but it’s not so strange that we didn’t find it. It happened so long ago that it wasn’t entered into any database, and there was no reason to go through the documents down there willy-nilly. And definitely no reason to go through all the archived boxes of DWI convictions.’

  ‘And yet . . .’ Gösta muttered, looking subdued.

  ‘I’ve checked with Lund, Nyköping and Borås. Rasmus Olsson became disabled when he wrapped his car around a tree, and his passenger, a friend the same age, died. Rasmus was drunk when the accident occurred. Börje Knudsen has a rap sheet as long as my arm. One of the items is the report of an accident fifteen years ago, when he caused a head-on crash in which a five-year-old girl died. So this is the common denominator in three cases out of the four; they all drove drunk and killed someone because of it.’

  ‘And Elsa Forsell?’ asked Hanna, staring at Patrik. He threw out his hands.

  ‘That’s the only case I couldn’t get any confirmation about yet. There are no records of a conviction against her in Nyköping, but the priest of her congregation talked a lot about Elsa’s “guilt”. I think there’s something there, but we haven’t found it yet. I’m going to ring Father Silvio after our meeting and see if I can get anything more out of him.’

  ‘Good work, Hedström,’ said Mellberg from his seat at the kitchen table. Everyone turned their gaze to him.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Patrik in astonishment. A compliment from Mellberg was like . . . no, he couldn’t even think of anything to compare it with. One simply didn’t get compliments from Mellberg. Ever. Slightly bewildered by this comment out of the blue, Patrik went on, ‘What we have to do now is to start working from this new assumption. Find out as much as you can about the accidents. Gösta, you take Marit; Martin, you can have Borås; Hanna, you take Lund, and I’ll try to find out more about Elsa Forsell in Nyköping. Any questions?’

  Nobody said anything, so Patrik adjourned the meeting. Then he went to ring Nyköping. There was a sort of frenzy, a tense energy, filling the air at the station. It was so palpable that Patrik felt as if he could reach out and touch it. He stopped in the corridor, took a deep breath and then went to make his calls.

  Whenever Father Silvio took a trip home to visit his family and friends in Italy, he often got the same question. How could he stand it up in the cold North? Weren’t the Swedes odd? From what they had heard, Swedes most often stayed at home and hardly talked to each other. And they couldn’t handle alcohol at all. They drank like sponges and always overdid it. Why would he want to live there?

  Silvio usually sipped on a glass of good red wine, looked out over his brother’s olive groves, and replied, ‘The Swedes need me.’ And that was how he felt. It had seemed like an adventure when he first went to Sweden almost thirty years earlier. An offer of a temporary position in the Catholic congregation in Stockholm had presented the opportunity he’d always wanted, a chance to move to the country which had always seemed so mythical and strange. Maybe it wasn’t all that strange. And he almost froze to death that first winter until he learned that three layers of clothing were a must if he wanted to go outdoors in January. But it was still love at first sight. He loved the light, the food, the Swedes’ cold exterior but glowing interior. He had learned to appreciate and understand the small gestures, the discreet comments, the muted friendliness he found with the fair-haired northerners. And that was another stereotype that had turned out to be false. He had been amazed when he landed on Swedish soil and saw that not all Swedes were blond and blue-eyed.

  In any case, he had stayed. After ten years assisting with the congregation in Stockholm, he took an opportunity to lead his own church in Nyköping. Over the years a certain Sörmland accent had crept into his Italian-Swedish, and he enjoyed the merriment that this odd mixture sometimes aroused. If there was anything that Swedes did far too seldom, it was laugh. People in general might not associate Catholicism with joy and laughter, but for him the religion was precisely that. If love for God was not something bright and enjoyable, what else would be?

  It had surprised Elsa at first. She had come to him, perhaps in the hope of finding a scourge and a hair shirt. Instead she found a warm handshake and a friendly gaze. They had spoken so much about this. Her feeling of guilt, her need to be punished. Over the years he had gently guided her through all the different concepts of guilt and forgiveness. The most important part of forgiveness was remorse. True remorse. And that was something Elsa had in abundance. For over thirty-five years she had felt remorse every second of every day. It was a long time to bear such a burden. He was glad that he’d been able to lighten her load a bit, so that she could breathe more freely, at least for a few years. Up until she died.

  Father Silvio frowned. He had thought a lot about Elsa’s life – and her death – ever since the police had come to call. He had thought a lot about it before as well. But their questions had let loose a flood of emotions and memories. Yet the sacrament of confession was holy. The trust between a priest and a parishioner must not be broken. Still, the thoughts whirled round in his head, making him long to break a promise that God had bound him to. But he knew it was impossible.

  When the telephone rang on his desk, he knew instinctively what it was about. He answered half in anticipation, half in dread: ‘Father Silvio Mancini.’

  He smiled when he heard the officer from Tanumshede introduce himself. He listened a long while to what Patrik Hedström had to say and then shook his head.

  ‘Unfortunately I cannot talk about what Elsa confided in me.

  ‘No, that is included in the vow of confidentiality.’

  His heart was pounding. For a moment he thought he saw Elsa sitting in the chair in front of him. Elsa with the erect posture, the short white hair and the thin figure. He had tried to fatten her up with pasta and pastry, but nothing seemed to stick to her. She gave him a kindly look.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I simply can’t. You’ll have to find another way to . . .’

  Elsa nodded urgently to him from her place in the chair, and he tried to understand what she meant. Did she want him to speak? But that didn’t help; he still couldn’t. She continued to watch him, and then he had an idea. Softly he said, ‘I can’t reveal what Elsa told me. But I can tell you things that were generally known. Elsa was from your part of the country. She was from Uddevalla.’

  From her place facing him Elsa smiled. Then she was gone. He knew that she hadn’t been real, that she was only a figment of his imagination. But it had still been lovely to see her.

  When he hung up he felt at peace. He hadn’t betrayed God, nor had he betrayed Elsa. Now the rest was up to the police.

  Erica could see that something had happened as soon as Patrik walked in the front door. There was a lightness to his step, and he seemed more relaxed than he had in a long time.

  ‘Did things go well today?’ she asked cautiously, carrying Maja as she went to meet him. Beaming with happiness, Maja held out her arms to her pappa, and he swept her up in his embrace.

  ‘Things went fantastic,’ he said, taking a few dance steps with his daughter. She laughed so hard that she almost choked. Pappa was hysterically funny. She had obviously already decided that.

  ‘Tell me more,’ said Erica, heading for the kitchen to finish cooking dinner. Patrik and Maja followed her. Anna, Emma and Adrian were watching the Bolibompa show and ga
ve Patrik a distracted wave when he came in. On the TV Björne was demanding all their attention.

  ‘We found the connection,’ he said, setting Maja on the floor. She sat there a while, torn between Pappa on one side and Björne on the other, but decided at last to take the furrier of the two and crawled over to the TV.

  ‘Always rejected, always number two,’ Patrik sighed as he watched Maja go.

  ‘Mmm, but for me you’re always number one,’ said Erica and gave him a big hug before she went back to cooking. Patrik sat down to watch.

  Erica cleared her throat and looked pointedly at the vegetables lying on the worktop.

  Patrik promptly jumped up from his chair and started chopping cucumbers for the salad. ‘If you say “hop”, I ask “how high”,’ he said with a laugh, taking a step to one side to avoid the kick she playfully aimed at his shin.

  ‘You just wait, after Saturday I’ll be wielding the whip with renewed vigour,’ said Erica, trying to look stern. She was happy he was even thinking about the wedding.

  ‘I think you’re doing a pretty good job of it already,’ he said, bending over to kiss her.

  ‘Lay off out there,’ Anna shouted from the living room. ‘I can hear you smooching. There are children present.’ She laughed.

  ‘Mmm, maybe we’ll have to save this till later,’ said Erica with a wink at Patrik. ‘Now tell me more about what happened.’

  Patrik gave her a brief rundown of what they’d found out, and the smile vanished from Erica’s face. There was so much tragedy, so much death mixed up in the case, and despite the fact that the investigation had now taken a big step forward she understood that things were going to be difficult in future as well.

  ‘So the victim in Nyköping had also killed someone in an accident?’

  ‘Yes,’ Patrik said, cutting tomato wedges. ‘Although not in Nyköping, but in Uddevalla.’

  ‘Who was it she killed?’ said Erica, stirring her pork filet stew.

  ‘We don’t know the details yet. That accident was much longer ago than the others, so it will take a while to find out more. But I talked with our colleagues in Uddevalla today, and they’re sending over all the material as soon as they dig it up. Some poor soul will have to crawl around among dusty boxes for a while.’

  ‘So somebody is murdering drunk drivers who killed someone. And the first accident occurred thirty-five years ago, while the last one was . . . when was the last one?’

  ‘Seventeen years ago. Rasmus Olsson.’

  ‘And the locations are spread all over Sweden,’ said Erica pensively as she kept stirring. ‘From Lund all the way up here. When did the first murder take place?’

  ‘Ten years ago,’ Patrik answered obediently, watching his future wife. Erica was used to handling facts and analysing them, and he welcomed help from her sharp mind.

  ‘So the killer moves over a large geographical area, has a great time spread for his deeds, and the only thing the victims have in common is that they were killed because of a fatal accident they caused by driving drunk.’

  ‘Yep, that’s about it,’ said Patrik with a sigh. It sounded utterly hopeless when Erica summed up the situation. He poured the veggies into a big bowl, mixed them up, and placed the salad on the kitchen table.

  ‘Don’t forget that we’re most likely missing one victim,’ he said quietly as he sat down. ‘In all likelihood it’s victim number two that we haven’t found yet. But I’m sure there is another victim. Somebody we missed.’

  ‘Isn’t it possible to get more out of those book pages?’ Erica asked, setting the steaming pot of stew on a trivet on the table.

  ‘It doesn’t seem so. What I’m pinning my best hopes on now is that we can develop something that will take us further once we get all the details about Elsa Forsell’s accident. She was the first victim, and something tells me she’s the most important one.’

  ‘Mmm, you may be right,’ said Erica and then called Anna and the children for dinner. They could talk more later.

  Two days had passed since they had worked out what the serial killer’s victims had in common. The initial euphoria had subsided, and discouragement had taken its place. They still didn’t understand why the geographic territory was so large. Did the murderer travel about in his hunt for victims, or had he actually lived in all these towns? There were just too many questions. They had pored over all the available material on the accidents involving the murder victims, but nowhere did they find anything to connect them. Patrik was leaning more and more towards the idea that there was no personal connection among the victims, but that the killer was a person filled with hate who randomly chose his victims based on their actions. In that case it seemed that the murderer took no notice of the fact that several of his victims had shown real remorse after the events. Elsa had struggled with guilt and sought redemption in religion; Marit had never touched alcohol again; the same was true of Rasmus, but he couldn’t drink anyway for physiological reasons because of the injuries he had suffered in the car crash. Börje was the exception. He had continued to drink, continued to drive drunk, and didn’t seem to have worried about the girl whose death he had caused.

  But it was impossible to draw any conclusions when one victim was missing. When the phone rang at nine o’clock on Wednesday morning, Patrik had no idea that the call would give him the last piece of the puzzle.

  ‘Patrik Hedström,’ he answered, placing his hand over the receiver so that the person calling wouldn’t hear that he was yawning. Consequently he didn’t catch the name of the caller.

  ‘Excuse me, what was your name?’

  ‘My name is Vilgot Runberg, and I’m superintendent of the Ortboda police station.’

  ‘Ortboda?’ said Patrik, feverishly searching his geographic memory.

  ‘Outside Eskilstuna,’ Superintendent Runberg said impatiently. ‘But it’s a small station, only three of us work here.’ He coughed, turned away from the receiver, but then went on, ‘The thing is, I just came back from a two-week holiday in Thailand.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Patrik, wondering where this was leading. ‘Yes, that’s why I hadn’t seen the query you sent out. Until now.’

  ‘I see,’ said Patrik with much greater interest. He felt his fingers starting to tingle from anticipation at what might come next.

  ‘Yes, my younger colleagues here are relatively new to the region, so they didn’t know anything about it. But I recognize the case. Without a doubt. I was the one who investigated it eight years ago.’

  ‘What case?’ said Patrik, his breathing turning short and shallow. He pressed the receiver hard against his ear, afraid of missing a single word.

  ‘We had a man here eight years ago who . . . well, I thought there was something strange about the whole thing. But he had a history of alcohol abuse, and . . .’ Runberg paused with embarrassment, apparently reluctant to admit the mistake he’d made. ‘Well, we all just thought that he’d had a relapse and then drank himself to death. But the injuries you mention, I have to admit in hindsight that I wondered about them.’ The line went silent and Patrik understood how much it was costing the superintendent to have this conversation.

  ‘What was the man’s name?’ said Patrik to break the silence.

  ‘Jan-Olov Persson,’ said Superintendent Runberg. ‘He was forty-two years old, worked as a cabinetmaker. Widower.’

  ‘And he was an alcoholic?’

  ‘Yes, he had a big problem for a while. When his wife died, then, well, he went to pieces. It all turned into a very sad story. One evening he got into his car drunk and ran into a young couple who were out walking. The man died, and Jan-Olov spent some time in jail. But after he got out he never touched alcohol again. Behaved himself, did his job, took care of his daughter.’

  ‘And then he was suddenly found dead of alcohol poisoning?’

  ‘Yes,’ Runberg sighed. ‘As I said, we thought he’d had a relapse and things got out of control. His ten-year-old daughter found him. She claimed that she had met
a stranger, a man, in the doorway, but we didn’t really believe her. Thought it must have been the shock, or that she wanted to protect her pappa . . .’ His voice died out and the shame hung heavy in his silence.

  ‘Was there a book page next to him? From a children’s book?’

  ‘I tried to remember when I read your query. But I can’t recall anything like that,’ Runberg said. ‘At least if there was a book page we didn’t give it any thought. We probably assumed it belonged to the girl.’

  ‘So there’s nothing like that left?’ Patrik could hear how disappointed he sounded.

  ‘No, we don’t have much left from the investigation. As I said, we thought the guy had drunk himself to death. But I can send you what we do have.’

  ‘Do you have a fax? Could you fax it over? It would be good to have it ASAP.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Runberg. Then he added, ‘Poor girl. What a life. First her mamma died when she was little and her pappa went to prison. Then he dies and leaves her all alone. And now I read in the papers that the girl was murdered over in your town. I think she was in some reality show. I never would have recognized her from the photos. Lillemor didn’t look at all like herself. As a ten-year-old she was small, dark, and thin, and now . . . well, a lot has happened over the years.’

  Patrik could feel the walls whirling around him. At first he couldn’t process the information. Then he suddenly realized what Vilgot Runberg was saying. Lillemor, Barbie, was the daughter of the second victim. And eight years earlier she had seen the killer.

  When Mellberg walked into the bank he felt happier and more secure than he had felt in many, many years. He who hated to spend money was now going to spend two hundred thousand – and he felt not the slightest hesitation. He was buying himself a future, a future with Rose-Marie. Whenever he closed his eyes, which actually occurred rather often during working hours, he could smell the scent of hibiscus, of sunshine, of salt water, and of Rose-Marie. He could hardly fathom what luck he’d had and how much his life had changed in only a few weeks. In June they would fly down to see the condo for the first time, and then stay there for four weeks. He was already counting the days.