The man nodded and walked away towards the house, seemingly unperturbed by the fact that he was stark naked.
‘So? What’s this about?’ Flätan said, tying his robe and patting down his shoulder-length grey hair.
‘Molly Wessman,’ Fabian said. ‘What was the cause of death?’
Flätan gave Fabian a look as though the question surprised him. ‘Just so I’ve got this right. You come to my home. Uninvited. Possibly you ring the doorbell, but I don’t know. Either way, you don’t care that no one answers, you get in anyway. You don’t give a toss that it’s my birthday. That I was in the middle of my meditation. That I expressly told Tuvesson that it would have to wait until Monday. You didn’t care about any of those things. The only thing you can think about is the cause of death. As though the entire case hinges on you finding out right now, instead of, say, eighteen hours from now.’
Fabian tried to find a reasonable objection, but could only nod, which made Flätan chuckle and move towards a pair of sofas littered with brightly coloured cushions.
‘Annoying as it is, I have to admit that’s what I like about you. Now, don’t jump to conclusions. I still think you’re pretty much as incompetent as most of the homicide detectives in this country. But at least you care. Which is more than can be said for some of your lethargic colleagues. Can I offer you some tea?’
‘No, thank you.’ Fabian sat down on one of the sofas, which was so deep it was downright impossible to sit upright.
‘Severe dehydration.’ Flätan picked up the thermos on the table and poured tea into one of the paper-thin cups until surface tension was the only thing keeping it from overflowing. ‘The cause of death. Wasn’t that what you were after?’ He stepped up on to the other sofa and sank down into lotus position without spilling so much as a drop.
‘Dehydration?’
Flätan nodded and sipped his tea. ‘She’d probably been running a high fever beforehand, had the sweats, not to mention violent vomiting and diarrhoea.’
‘So in other words, she was sick.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘So if I’m understanding you right, there were no signs of wrongdoing?’
‘Oh, she was murdered, all right.’ Flätan drank his tea. ‘Remember Georgi Markov? You know, the Bulgarian defector who was murdered in 1978 on Waterloo Bridge in London?’
‘Wasn’t he poisoned with ricin?’
‘Exactly, and Molly Wessman got more or less the same treatment. Except without the James Bond umbrella with a poison pellet in its tip. No, in this case, whoever did it kept it simple and just injected the poison with a syringe.’
The fit young man, who was now wearing an apron, returned with a briefcase, which he handed to Flätan before returning to the house.
‘And when was this done to her?’
‘Hard to say exactly. But probably twenty-four to thirty-six hours before she died.’ Flätan opened his briefcase and pulled out a file. ‘So, sometime Friday.’
The picture of Molly Wessman on her phone had been taken in the early hours of Wednesday, clearly a perfect opportunity to poison her. Instead, the perpetrator had, for unknown reasons, waited another two days.
‘This is the pinprick.’ Flätan handed him a close-up of Molly Wessman’s right buttock, where a small red bump was visible.
‘It must have hurt,’ Fabian said. ‘I mean, shouldn’t she have reacted and gone to A&E as soon as she got sick?’
‘That’s assuming she was aware of what had happened to her. That someone had pricked her with a syringe. But if she was outside at the time, she might just as easily have figured it was a bee sting or some such. Then, when she fell ill, she didn’t see the connection to the needle prick. Probably just thought she had the stomach flu or food poisoning, and nearer the end, she was too weak to get out of her flat.’ Flätan drank the last of his tea and put the cup down. ‘Are we done here?’
Fabian nodded and stood up. ‘Thank you. I can show myself out.’ He would probably have been welcome to exit through the house, but something told him there were things in there he shouldn’t see, so he turned back towards the garage.
‘So you’re not going to ask if I found anything out of the ordinary?’
Fabian stopped and turned to Flätan, who was smiling and pouring himself another cup of tea. ‘Such as?’
‘I don’t know. Anything.’ Flätan shrugged. ‘Isn’t that your go-to question when you’re flying blind with no idea of where to go next?’
‘So what did you find?’ Fabian walked back to the sofas.
‘A small tattoo. And yes, I know exactly what you’re thinking. Doesn’t everyone have a tattoo these days? And you’re right. In my profession, it’s rare to come across a body completely free of ghastly butterflies, pathetic skulls and tribal patterns.’ Flätan fell silent and leisurely sipped his tea. ‘But this one stood out.’ He put his cup down and handed over another close-up.
It was instantly clear to Fabian why Flätan had reacted. The tattoo looked like nothing he’d ever seen. No brightly coloured flowers, Asian characters or sage quotes here. In a way, it was bland and boring. And yet he struggled to tear his eyes away.
It was a classic shade of blueish-grey and consisted of two parts. The upper one was some kind of symbol, with a line penetrated by a downward-pointing arrow. The lower consisted of two numbers: 28. Nothing was straight or centred, and the whole thing gave an amateurish, unplanned impression.
‘Where on her body was it?’
‘Smack dab in the middle of her pubic mound, hidden underneath her, if I may say so, well-groomed pubic hair. I actually didn’t notice it until I shaved her.’
47
When Lilja slowed down and turned off towards Perstorp, she had covered the distance from southern Helsingborg in just over twenty-two minutes. It wasn’t just a personal best for her and the Ducati. It was also so far above the speed limit no police badge in the world would have saved her if she’d been caught.
But the call from Hampus had been ominous, to say the least. He’d worked hard to hide it, but there had been no doubt he was genuinely afraid. Normally, he’d prattle on like a machine gun, but this time he hadn’t wanted to tell her what was wrong or why it was so important for her to hurry home.
On her way out of the city, she’d had her suspicions, but she’d tried to dismiss them as exaggerated and hysterical and to think about other things instead.
But she was getting increasingly worried about what she would find when she got home, and she wasn’t able to relax until she turned down Jeans Väg and looked up at the house behind the juniper bushes.
Both the house and the garage looked the same as ever. The red brick and whitewash were as blandly boring as when she’d left.
Maybe it was that the second-hand dishwasher he’d insisted on buying had given up and started leaking. That wouldn’t surprise her in the slightest. She’d thought it was a bad idea all along, especially since they’d just had their floors sanded. Or maybe it was just a— That was as far as she got before she rode up on to the driveway, put down her kickstand and saw the garden.
Someone had skidded around it on motorcycles in what could only be described as a rape of their lawn. In their wake, they’d left open wounds of torn-up tussocks of grass, puddles and tyre tracks that in places were so deep, they’d dug right through the soil to the layer of clay underneath. It hadn’t rained much in the past couple of weeks, which meant they must have used the hose to do as much damage as possible. In other words, they knew what they were doing. Maybe she should be afraid. Maybe she should tell her colleagues, file a report and request police protection. Which was exactly what they wanted.
A frightened police officer.
She could already see the headlines. First pages with pictures of her devastated lawn. Reporters shouting over each other, trying to make out like they were on the side of good when all they wanted was a headline to sell more copies. Never mind if it stoked the hatred even more.
> She was bloody well not going to play along, act the victim. Her best option was to counter it with silence and pretend like nothing had happened.
The problem was Hampus. He hadn’t just been afraid. He’d been out of his wits terrified.
She opened the front door and stuck her head in. ‘I’m here now!’
‘Up here,’ she heard a voice say somewhere behind her.
She went back out into the garden and looked around. ‘Where are you?’
‘Up here.’
She looked up and only now noticed him on the roof, sitting with his arms around his pulled-up knees, rocking back and forth as though trying to soothe himself. ‘But what are you doing? Why are you up there?’
‘Come up and see for yourself.’
She was about to argue, out of sheer habit, and ask him to come down instead. But something told her it would be better to oblige him. He looked like the slightest resistance might break him. In all their years together, she’d never seen him as pale and fragile as he was right now.
‘All right, sit tight. I’m coming up.’ She started climbing the ladder. ‘And hey, I’m sure the lawn can be fixed.’ When she reached the roof, she trod gingerly across the roof tiles towards Hampus. ‘You’ve been talking about redoing it anyway, to get rid of the moss.’
Hampus didn’t respond, just rocked back and forth with his arms around his legs and his eyes on the vandalized lawn.
‘Hey… It’s going to be okay.’ She sat down next to him and was just about to put her arm around him when she realized what he was looking at. Suddenly, everything made sense. His violent reaction, which she’d found a bit over the top after getting back. The silence, which was so unlike him. His insistence that she see it for herself. Even why he was sitting on the roof became clear.
Down on the ground, she had interpreted the mayhem in their garden as exactly that, mayhem. The work of a couple of knuckleheads who had skidded around at random, trying to wreak as much havoc as they could as quickly as they could.
She couldn’t have been more wrong.
Whoever it was who had roared around their garden, they’d known exactly what they were doing. Where to let their tyres dig extra deep into the mud; where they were supposed to destroy the lawn utterly and where they should leave a few patches. It was only now, looking down from above, that she could see what they had really done.
The entire expanse, from the stepping stones by the front door to the juniper bushes lining the street, was now filled with the biggest swastika she’d ever seen.
48
Someone had told him once that the buildings lined up in a row in the North Harbour were inspired by old ships. Fabian, for his part, thought they looked more like square grey lumps built out of Lego. At least from the outside.
After finding the entrance code among his notes, he discovered that the inside better reflected the poshness of the address. As Klippan and the others had intimated, it suggested Molly Wessman had, despite her relative youth, risen through the company ranks unusually quickly and may have stepped on a few toes on her way up.
But an embittered co-worker breaking in to her home in the middle of the night and hacking her phone to snap a background picture of her sleeping before lethally poisoning her two days later, it seemed too unlikely. The strange tattoo was a much more promising clue.
Granted, that downward arrow could have been nothing more than a vulgar sexual invitation. But that didn’t explain the horizontal line or the two-digit number. Nor why the tattoo had been concealed underneath her pubic hair.
When he reached the third floor, he pulled out the keys Molander had given him, unlocked the door to her flat and entered.
Molander…
Over the past few hours, he’d done his best not to think about his colleague so he could give Molly Wessman his undivided attention. But the question of how he should handle the situation now that Gertrud knew the case had been reopened gnawed at him; when he stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him, it was as though comprehension finally broke through his last barrier of denial.
What if Molander had already puzzled out that he’d taken over Elvin’s investigation, Gertrud and the pictures in his phone notwithstanding? What if he was already planning his death? A death that, like Elvin’s, would be made to look like suicide.
It wouldn’t be hard to fabricate a motive, considering that his family was on the verge of imploding. Or was he planning an accident? If anyone could mess with brake cables without anyone ever finding out, it was Molander. Especially since he would be the one to conduct the technical investigation.
He decided to seize the bull by the horns and sound Molander out, so he pulled out his phone and dialled his colleague’s number.
‘Hey Fabian. How are you getting on?’ The reply came before he’d heard a single ring. As though his colleague had been sitting poised to answer when he called.
‘Hi, it’s me, Fabian.’
‘Yes, I can see that and I was asking how you’re getting on? Are you done in Wessman’s flat?’
‘Almost,’ he said, looking around to find something at least slightly relevant to bring up.
‘Almost? What have you been doing all morning?’
Was the question genuine or was Molander toying with him? Judging from his tone, he sounded like he always did, whatever that meant. Molander was a master of irony. He never made much of a distinction between when he was joking and being serious, and it wasn’t unusual for people to realize too late that they’d read him wrong.
‘I saw to something else that couldn’t wait first.’ He squatted down to have a closer look at the shelf that lay in the middle of the floor among the shoes, with screws dangling from its brackets. The holes in the wall above gaped empty, indicating that Wessman had probably pulled it down on herself in her struggle to get to her feet.
‘Really, and what was that, if you don’t mind me asking? Nothing serious, I hope?’
The problem was that the shelf was already mentioned in the neighbour’s statement. He needed something less obvious. Something that hadn’t been discussed yet.
‘Depends on how you see it.’ He stood back up and deliberately paused to try to coax out a reaction. But the only response he got was a watchful silence. ‘I stopped by Flätan’s house, and it turned out he was practically done with—’
‘Seriously,’ Molander broke in. ‘You went to Flätan’s house today?’
‘Yes,’ he said, and he heard Molander burst out laughing.
‘That’s outstanding, Fabian. You really are the only one who could get away with something like that. Talk about wanting to be a fly on that wall. But since you’re still alive, I assume he received you without overly strenuous remonstrations. Had he found anything of interest?’
‘He had, a tattoo hidden under her pubic hair,’ he said and concluded that Molander was either a world-class actor giving the performance of a lifetime, or Gertrud hadn’t said anything yet. ‘It consisted of a horizontal line intersected by a down arrow and a two-digit number underneath.’
‘So we’re talking a symbol with an associated number.’ He could virtually hear Molander lean back in his chair to think. ‘The closest I have is a line intersected by two arrows pointing in opposite directions, which is the generally accepted symbol for crossing a border. The Physical Barrier Border Crossing icon, I think it’s called. But that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with anything. What was the number?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘Twenty-eight… No, apart from that it follows twenty-seven and precedes twenty-nine, it means nothing to me.’
‘Don’t worry about it. I just wanted to see if it made you think of anything.’
‘But that’s not why you called, is it?’
‘Pardon?’ He’d been about to end the call, pleased to have been able to convince himself Gertrud hadn’t said anything yet. Now, instead, he was back to square one.
‘If that were the case, you would’ve ca
lled the moment you left Flätan’s. Now, as far as I can make out, you’re almost done with Wessman’s flat, which implies you’ve been there a while, so logically, you should be calling about something related to that. Correct me if I’m wrong.’
‘I wouldn’t necessarily say wrong,’ he said, trying to buy time. Of course Molander was right. Of course he was calling to talk about something in Wessman’s flat. The question was what. A white plastic card was sticking out of one of the shoes. It had probably fallen off the noticeboard when the shelf came off the wall. ‘I did want to talk to you about the tattoo. But it didn’t seem so urgent it couldn’t wait until I saw you.’ He picked up and studied the bone-white card, which simply read Spades in gold lettering. ‘But you’re right, that wasn’t the only thing,’ he continued and spotted a key deposit cylinder fastened to the top corner of the front door. ‘When do you think you’ll get here for the crime scene investigation?’
‘Tomorrow morning.’
‘All right, I just wanted to plant a seed in your mind for when you come.’ It was more or less nothing. But right now, more or less nothing was better than nothing.
‘Okay,’ Molander said, waiting.
‘Her front door has a key deposit cylinder. You know, a lockable tube where you can leave keys for your handyman or cleaning lady if you’re not going to be in.’
‘Fabian, I know what a key deposit is.’
‘Okay, sorry. I just meant that someone could have been here to fix something and made a copy of her keys.’
‘Sure. But what do you want me to do about that when I’m there tomorrow?’
Of course. What was Molander supposed to do about that? ‘I just wanted to remind you to keep your eyes open when you’re here,’ he said, feeling himself sinking ever deeper into the quicksand.
‘Fabian, keeping my eyes open is my job.’
‘I know, I was thinking more about… about…’ He swallowed and wiped the sweat off his brow with his sleeve. ‘You know this thing about handymen and other people who shouldn’t really have keys to her flat.’
Motive X Page 24
