Who Watcheth
Page 4
After the divorce Irene had tried to keep their friendship going on a personal as well as a professional level, but Tommy had withdrawn. Neither Irene nor Krister had any idea why. Over the past year Irene thought she could guess at the reason behind the change: Superintendent Efva Thylqvist. Tommy wasn’t stupid and knew Irene well, so naturally he was aware of her views on their new chief. Most men found Thylqvist sexy, with her neat figure, curves in all the right places, her pretty face and her thick auburn hair. She could be immensely charming when it suited her. If there was a man around she made every effort to appear competent, attractive and pleasant. When she was dealing with women, however, she didn’t try as hard to keep up the façade. If Tommy was having an affair with Thylqvist, it was hardly surprising that he preferred not to have personal conversations with Irene. He was probably afraid of giving himself away, so he had chosen to keep his distance. Irene suspected that Tommy had put himself in a very tricky situation.
She mourned the loss of their close friendship, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. Tommy’s withdrawal made her feel much more lonely, both at work and privately.
Her thoughts were interrupted as the superintendent began to debrief the staff, a practice they had come to refer to as “morning prayer” over the years.
“Good morning. Does everyone have a cup of coffee? I understand you’ve had a busy weekend with what the press is calling the Package Killing. Fredrik and Jonny were on duty; Fredrik has returned to the Organized Crime Unit, so perhaps you could run us through the key points, Jonny?”
Efva Thylqvist smiled encouragingly at Jonny Blom, who had to admit that he had been sick all weekend and that Irene had stepped in. Thylqvist gave Irene no more than a brief nod.
Irene ran through the information she already had, ending with, “Matti Berggren at the lab has promised to get in touch as soon as he has time to summarize his findings. We can probably check with Morten Jensen to see if he’s taken a closer look at the body yet, though he did say it could be several days before he gets around to the autopsy. I’ll give him a call later.”
“What about Leif Karlberg’s alibi?” Thylqvist asked.
“I’ve already spoken to our colleagues in Borås, and they’ve promised to help out.”
“Door-to-door inquiries in Ingela Svensson’s apartment block?”
“Already organized—they’re starting this morning.”
“The garbage cans? And the containers at the recycling center?”
“Forensics is on it. We’re lucky—nothing has been emptied since Tuesday,” Irene replied.
The superintendent made no further comment on Irene’s report; instead she said, “Okay—Jonny, I’d like you to take this investigation, working alongside Irene. The rest of you carry on with your current cases for the time being.”
Everyone in the room looked very surprised. They might have been short-staffed as usual, but two investigators on a fresh homicide was cutting things to the bone. It also seemed unusually stupid to put the person who knew nothing about the case in charge.
“As soon as we have more to go on, we’ll invest more resources,” Tommy said quickly.
He’s covering her back, Irene thought angrily.
As if he could read her mind, Tommy continued, “I suggest we meet again later this afternoon, see where we are.”
“I’m in a meeting from three to five, but you’re more than capable of dealing with this,” Efva Thylqvist said.
There was an acidity in her tone that escaped no one. Irene was well aware that Thylqvist couldn’t bear it when someone said or did something that could be interpreted as questioning her authority. Self-esteem issues, Irene thought spitefully.
When she called pathology she was informed that Morten Jensen was away until Wednesday, and was scheduled to carry out the autopsy on Ingela Svensson on that day. Which meant they wouldn’t get his report until the end of the week at the earliest.
Matti Berggren looked to be in top form when Irene visited the lab just before lunch.
“Anything interesting for me?” she asked.
“Are you kidding? I’ve got plenty!” he said with a smile.
“Seriously?” Once again, Irene was impressed.
“Absolutely. I’m coming up for a meeting this afternoon, so we can go through everything then.”
“Great! Come around three, and I’ll provide coffee and cake.”
“Wow! Is it your birthday or something?” Jonny said, rubbing his hands when he saw the plate of delicious-smelling pastries on the table.
“No, I’ve invited Matti in to give us his report on what he’s found. Plus I think we could do with something to cheer us up on a miserable Monday,” Irene said.
“Do you know if we got anywhere with the door-to-door?” asked Tommy, who was already sitting down with a steaming cup of coffee in front of him.
“Yes—a girl met Ingela Svensson on her way out with the trash can. They live in the same part of the block, so she’s sure it was Ingela. The girl parked her bicycle in the passageway and went up to her apartment. She can’t remember seeing anyone else standing near the door. We’ll talk to her again,” Irene said.
“Good. So if he was watching the main door, he must have been hiding,” Tommy said.
Sara Persson walked into the room; she was a classic beautiful blonde, slim and toned with blue eyes. Matti Berggren halted in the doorway and stared at her. A faint smile spread across his face, and his brown eyes began to sparkle. Sara said hi but didn’t appear to notice his reaction. Perhaps Irene was the only one who had detected it.
When the pastries had been picked over, Matti began his report.
“The plastic in which the body was wrapped is ordinary builders’ plastic; it can be bought everywhere. The same applies to the brown tape. I found some stains on the back of the plastic; they seem to be some kind of thin oil. Not cooking oil—it’s more like a fine-grade engine oil.”
Jonny interrupted him:
“So it could well be that the body was lying on its back on the ground after it had been packaged.”
He made quotation marks in the air around the final word.
“Exactly. The killer washed the victim with some kind of soap, then rinsed the body with water. So Ingela Svensson was lying on the plastic when he sluiced away all traces from the body. No blood or semen is visible on the plastic, only water, but we’ve taken samples to find out what kind of soap we’re looking at, and whether there are any microscopic traces of our perp.”
“So you didn’t get much from the inside of the packaging,” Jonny clarified.
“Not so far; we’ll see what the samples tell us. But the tape was a lot more useful. People don’t think about the fact that just about everything sticks to tape.”
He looked very pleased with himself; Irene remembered he had said something similar when they unwrapped the body.
“So what did you find?” Jonny said impatiently.
Matti refused to let himself be pressured, and continued calmly, “Gravel. Grit. Dust. Grease. Cat hairs. From a short-haired domestic cat. Black. At least the hairs we found were black.”
“So we’ve got plenty of evidence against the cat if we can just track it down,” Jonny quipped.
“That’s your job,” Matti said with a smile.
“Did you find anything at the recycling center?” Tommy asked.
“Yes. The keys belonged to Ingela Svensson. We also found several strands of blonde hair that came from her, right next to the igloos. We found her fingerprints on the paper carrier bag that was lying there, and footprints on the edge of the grass, right next to where the bucket of empty bottles was hidden under the bushes. The footprints aren’t very clear, but it’s obvious that they were made by a heavy boot or shoe. Although of course we don’t know if they’re connected to the murder.”
Irene off
ered him the last remaining pastry, which he accepted with enthusiasm. She had bought one for the superintendent just to be on the safe side, in case her meeting had been postponed. It was unlikely that she would have taken it, but she would have been annoyed if there hadn’t been one for her.
The witness who had bumped into Ingela Svensson on the night of the murder was a young woman with a sallow complexion. A lilac woolen hat was pulled down on her greasy, dyed-black hair. She sported large silver rings in her lower lip and in one nostril. Her face was completely free of makeup, apart from a slash of bright red lipstick on the small mouth. She reminded Irene of a geisha, apart from the piercings. However, her clothing was as far from a geisha’s as possible: a chunky knit black cardigan, black harem pants, a man’s shirt in pale lilac and worn sandals. A brief association with the hippie fashion of her childhood flitted through Irene’s mind, possibly evoked by the guitar hanging on the wall and the fact that they were sitting on mattresses on the floor. The coffee table was made up of a wooden pallet and a thick sheet of glass. On top of the table stood a large ceramic dish with a dark, silver-grey glaze with small flashes of bright red and yellow. In one corner of the room stood a statue in various shades of blue; it was almost the height of a man, but Irene wasn’t sure what it was meant to be.
The young woman’s name was Ida Bernth. The creation in the corner made more sense when Ida explained that she was studying ceramics at the School of Design and Crafts at the university. She sat there twisting her thin fingers as Irene wondered how such graceful hands could produce such alarmingly large works of art.
“Tell me what happened on Thursday evening when you bumped into Ingela Svensson,” Irene began.
“I was just about to park my bike, so I was standing outside with my key in my hand when she . . . when Ingela opened the door.”
“Did she say anything?”
“We both said hi, then she said it was time to get rid of the body.”
A macabre comment, to say the least, from someone who would be murdered just minutes later.
“She said ‘it’s time to get rid of the body’?”
“Yes—she meant all the empty bottles. She had a bucket full, and a paper carrier bag.”
That was why Ingela had taken the bucket to the recycling center. She must have been collecting empty bottles for a long time; they couldn’t all have come from the weekend. Unless she was a big drinker. An alcoholic, even?
“Did Ingela seem the same as usual, as far as you could tell?”
“Yes . . . she laughed. She seemed a little embarrassed.”
“Why do you think she was embarrassed?”
“I guess she thought it didn’t look so good, having so many empty bottles!”
Irene felt a pang of guilt as she remembered all the bags full of empty beer cans sitting in the laundry room back home. Krister would sometimes point at them and say: “Our retirement plan.” Given the state of world economics right now, he could well be right. Then again, maybe it was high time to take the cans in and reclaim the deposit. She couldn’t possibly deal with them all at once, though; people would think she and Krister were alcoholics. Maybe that was how Ingela Svensson had felt when she met Ida in the doorway.
“Did you and Ingela know each other well?”
“No. I’ve only been living here since July. We usually just say hi.”
“Did you notice anyone standing near the door, or out on the street?”
Ida shook her head. “I didn’t see anyone. I’ve thought about it over and over again, but I don’t remember seeing anyone nearby.”
“Could there have been a car you didn’t recognize parked somewhere close to the apartment block?”
“I wouldn’t have noticed. Cars aren’t really my thing.”
The last sentence provoked the shadow of a smile around the little red geisha mouth.
6.
As usual it was impossible to find a parking space near police HQ. The entire area was one gigantic construction site. And of course Irene had left her umbrella at home. She ran from the car to the main door, but she still got soaked. As she traveled up in the elevator, she started to shiver in her wet clothes. A big cup of hot coffee was exactly what she needed to bring her body temperature back up, but she would have to hurry if she was going to have time to take off her coat and dash to the coffee machine before morning prayer. As she rounded the corner of the corridor leading to her office, she almost collided with Hannu Rauhala.
“Hi—don’t be long!” he said, carrying on past her.
Before she had time to ask what was so urgent, she heard him say over his shoulder:
“They’ve found another one.”
Another one? Another body wrapped in plastic? Another homicide? Irene felt an icy chill crawl across her scalp and down the back of her neck. This wasn’t good news. In the worst-case scenario they could be dealing with a serial killer, or a copycat. If it was a copycat who had been inspired by Ingela’s murder, they would soon know. The way the body had been wrapped was very particular, and no details had been released to the press. Irene headed to the meeting room with a heavy heart and no coffee.
“Last man on board is a woman. Nice of you to join us,” Superintendent Thylqvist said in a voice dripping with sarcasm.
Irene merely nodded to the others, barely looking at her chief. She couldn’t deal with Thylqvist today.
“A paperboy called at six thirty-two this morning. He had found a package wrapped in plastic and thought it looked as if it contained a body. Apparently he had cut through Frölunda churchyard on his way home. So the body was discovered just under an hour ago. I’d like Jonny and Irene to get over there right away, and keep in touch with Hannu. Hannu—you stay here and deal with any calls about missing persons, and check on anyone who’s been reported missing over the past few days. We don’t know how long this person has been dead; the body could have been dumped before Ingela Svensson’s.”
Thylqvist had a point. What if this body had been lying there for some time? The icy chill over Irene’s neck and shoulders wouldn’t go away.
Frölunda churchyard was at the top of a hill. It was comparatively small, and they could see the crime scene from some distance away, in spite of the fact that it was still pouring. The CSIs had rigged up floodlights, and several patrol cars were parked nearby, their blue lights flashing. The churchyard looked far from well tended, and gave the impression that it was no longer used.
The body, wrapped in plastic, was lying on top of an old grave that was surrounded by a sparse, unclipped coniferous hedge. Decades of wind and rain had made the inscription on the headstone nearly illegible, but Irene could just about make out the name Johan and the year 1893.
The killer tried to hide the body we found on Saturday, but he hasn’t bothered this time. This is a later murder, Irene thought, if it’s the same perp.
Judging by the packaging, it was. The thick builders’ plastic was tightly wound around the body several times, firmly secured with wide brown tape.
“We’ll do the same as last time and take the whole package over to the lab,” Jonny said.
Everyone’s luck runs out at some point. The chances of avoiding Yvonne Stridner had been slim. Even though Irene knew that Morten Jensen would be away until the following day, she had nurtured a faint hope that they might be dealing with another pathologist rather than his boss. But no—it was the distinguished professor herself who met them when they arrived.
“Another victim within three days! Now you really do have to bring in all available resources,” she said, fixing Jonny with a beady stare.
Even he shrank in the face of an onslaught from Stridner, but he did manage to say:
“Five days. Ingela Svensson was murdered last Thursday, but we didn’t find her until Saturday, so that’s five—”
Yvonne Stridner interrupted him with a loud snort.
For once Jonny had the sense not to respond. Or perhaps he couldn’t think of anything to say. Irene didn’t really care, as long as he kept quiet.
“I’ll look at the body right away. After lunch I have a part-time forensic medicine course with a group of surgeons.”
The final sentence was almost drowned out by the tip-tap of Stridner’s high-heeled pumps as she marched away from them. She certainly knows how to walk in heels, Irene thought with a stab of envy. Personally she had never mastered the art, since she measured six feet without shoes.
Yvonne Stridner stopped and glanced at her diamond-encrusted Rolex. “I shall be starting in exactly fifteen minutes. You need to have taken all external samples by then.”
At that moment the outside door opened and a rain-sodden figure appeared. Irene was just about to say hello when Stridner’s harsh tones got there first:
“You’re too early. The course doesn’t start until after lunch.”
Matti Berggren looked a little confused, but after a couple of seconds he broke into a warm smile.
“Forgive me—I’m new, and I haven’t had time to introduce myself yet, Professor Stridner. Of course I know who you are, but there’s no reason why you should know me.”
He strode forward, holding out his hand. Small puddles formed on the floor behind him, and his shoes squelched with every step. There was no mistaking the fact that his feet were soaking wet. Stridner’s body language softened a fraction as they shook hands.
“Mattias Berggren, forensic technician,” Matti said, still smiling.
Stridner capitulated and returned the smile. “How nice to meet a polite technician.”
Matti kept that smile in place, gazing at her with his brown eyes, but as the professor turned to lead the way into the autopsy suite, he winked at Irene and Jonny.