by Karin Nordin
He shifted his weight to allow him a closer look at the victim’s face. His thoughts turned to the last time he’d found someone in that cellar. A young woman on the brink of death. Emaciated and beaten, but alive.
Kjeld wasn’t a religious man, but he silently prayed this wasn’t what it looked like.
‘This reminds me of Louisa Karlsson.’
‘Who?’ It was clear from her tone that Esme didn’t recognise the name.
Sixten’s attention perked up. ‘What? You’re kidding.’
A pit of dread tightened in Kjeld’s stomach. ‘Unfortunately not.’
Kjeld motioned to the technician waiting in the doorway to reposition the lamp that had been set up near the body. The technician hurried over and adjusted the light to shine more directly on the victim’s face. Kjeld hoped it might reveal something that could identify the body. Some sign to confirm or deny his fears, but the body was too damaged. He couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman, young or old.
‘Who’s Louisa Karlsson?’ Esme asked.
Sixten frowned. ‘She was from that case a few years back, wasn’t she? The one with the serial murderer? I don’t remember the details. Must have been – what? Five? Six years ago, now?’
‘Eight.’ Kjeld stood up, but kept his gaze on the body. The corners of his eyes burned a little and he rubbed them against the inside of his shoulder.
‘I didn’t know you were on that case. Was that when you were partnered with—?’
‘Yes,’ Kjeld cut him off.
‘Okay. Can somebody please catch me up to speed here?’ There was an impatient edge to Esme’s voice. The same tone she got when she felt like she was being ignored in a crowd of their male colleagues.
‘Louisa Karlsson was the only surviving victim of Gjur Hägglund,’ Kjeld said.
‘Why does that name sound familiar?’
‘I remember now!’ Sixten said. ‘The newspapers called him the Cellar Sadist. He’d pick up young women, usually first-year college students, and lock them in his cellar. Claimed he was searching for his soulmate. It was all over the news for months. I remember my cousin refusing to leave the house on her own for almost a year. The press had a field day with the whole thing when the bodies were found. How many were there?’
‘Five that we uncovered in the backyard.’ Kjeld pursed his lips. ‘Two in a chest in the den.’
‘They used to talk about that case at police college. Hägglund’s house was basically a torture chamber. He starved a few of the women. Brutally beat the others. The media referred to them as his Basement Brides. It was disgusting. Louisa was the last one he took, wasn’t she? It was lucky she was found.’
‘There was no luck about it,’ Kjeld said. ‘He messed up. Made a mistake. And we caught it.’
Well, actually, Nils had been the one to catch it. But Kjeld was the one who followed through. He’d been the first one on the scene.
‘And it wasn’t just a house,’ Kjeld said. ‘It was this house. I knew the address was familiar when I saw it, but I wasn’t certain. But this is definitely Gjur Hägglund’s house.’
‘Damn,’ Sixten muttered. ‘That’s a creepy coincidence …’
‘I don’t believe in coincidences.’
Esme turned her gaze towards Kjeld. ‘You’re the one who found her the first time around?’
Kjeld didn’t look back at her. He could sense the concern on her face from where he stood and didn’t want to let her see that it was warranted. He nodded. ‘I wasn’t the only one there, but I was the first to see her. And this was exactly how he’d planned to kill Louisa. He even said so in his statement to the police afterwards. Murder-suicide by fire. Purifying them both for the afterlife together or some such bullshit. Fortunately, he didn’t get that far in his plans.’
Kjeld tried not to think about his old cases. Some of the images were too painful to recall. Too gruesome. Louisa was one of those images, burned into his memory. He’d never forget the way she looked at him when he entered that damp cubicle of space. He remembered the smell first. The rank odour of urine and faeces. The uncleanliness. The sharp stench of fear. Louisa had been so small then. Eighteen years old and half-starved. Eyes sunken, cheekbones jutting against thin sallow skin. She’d looked like a living skeleton. But it was that glimmer in her eyes that he remembered most. A poignant plea. If you’re not here to save me then kill me, it seemed to say.
‘Could Hägglund be behind this?’
Kjeld shook his head. ‘No, he’s been dead going on at least seven years now. He killed himself two weeks into his life sentence at Saltvik Prison.’
‘And he didn’t have any accomplices?’
‘No, he was a loner.’ Kjeld sighed. He turned his gaze back down to the body. A cold chill travelled down his spine.
He hoped like hell this wasn’t Louisa. There weren’t many moments in his career when Kjeld had been the bearer of good news for a family. Louisa had been one of them. But if this was her, he’d have to visit them again and deliver the news they’d expected to hear from him eight years ago. The thought of it made his stomach churn.
The sputtering sound of raindrops against the thin walls of the ground floor weakened. The storm was letting up, for now.
An awkward silence fell between them and while Kjeld still refused to look at Esme he knew she was watching him. She hadn’t been there for Louisa’s case, but she knew him well enough to worry. Despite his stubborn insistence that he always put his old cases behind him when they were over, he had the tendency to personalise some of them. Particularly the ones involving young women and children. Even before he was a father, those cases hit him hard.
‘If it is her it’s not fair,’ Sixten said, breaking the breathless lull in the cellar. ‘That’s not how it’s supposed to be. If you survive one horrific crime then you should be spared another. It’s like getting struck by lightning twice.’
‘Karma sometimes gets its fucking wires crossed,’ Kjeld mumbled to himself.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ Kjeld slipped off the gloves. ‘Have the technicians send all the evidence down to the station. I’ll call Axel and let him know to look out for it. Where’s Frisk? He should be here by now.’
‘He called just before you got here. Said he’d be on his way as soon as he finished up at an accident off the forty-five. Driver took an exit too fast and collided with a guardrail. You’d think with all this rain we’ve had that people would remember to brake.’ Sixten rubbed the side of his mask to scratch his nose.
Kjeld cast one last glance down to the body. Louisa had fallen off his radar after Hägglund’s trial. Part of that was Kjeld’s own doing. He couldn’t allow a case like that to ruminate in the back of his mind by keeping tabs on the people involved. If it was in his thoughts then he would obsess over it, tear it down bit by bit, second-guessing all of his actions and his decisions. If this was her it would bring all of that back. All of those internal questions. Could he have done more? Could he have done better?
Kjeld felt a twinge of guilt at not having kept in contact with her. Surely he could have spared a few minutes over the years to call on her and make certain she was doing well. He could have checked in on her. Asked her what she was doing with her life. And a dark voice at the back of his mind chastised him for his own selfishness. He’d saved her life, after all. Didn’t that make him responsible for ensuring her continued safety?
Not for the first time a cold recognition gripped his conscience. The groundless thought that this person, whoever it was, might not have been there, dead in the same grungy cellar that had forever stained Louisa’s life, if he’d picked up the phone and made a call.
Chapter 4
Kjeld couldn’t get out of that house fast enough. The scene itself, while gruesome, wasn’t what bothered him. It was the memory of his old case that made him ill at ease. And the fear that the victim might be someone he knew. Someone else who’d been there before. Standing in that confined space, seeing another
body tortured and chained to that grimy slab, had been suffocating. It was as though the walls were closing in on him. He had to swallow back a gag reflex from the combination of it all – the choking odour of burnt flesh, the nail marks in the concrete, the memory of the day he carried Louisa out of the darkness and into the light. The second Kjeld stepped outside he tore off the protective forensics suit and gasped for fresh air.
He trudged through the wet grass on the overgrown lawn and ducked under the blue and white cordon tape, which had been pushed out further onto the small neighbourhood street to keep away onlookers. The rain had stopped, but there was still a misty wetness in the air and the dark clouds overhead warned of another impending shower. He pinched the bridge of his nose. A dull migraine was forming near his sinuses and he craved a cigarette. Just thinking about it left a tickle in the back of his throat. An itch he’d been trying to ignore since he’d decided to give up his nicotine addiction three months ago.
He searched his pockets for the pack of peppermint chewing gum he’d been using to help him overcome his need for a smoke. Empty. He must have left it in the car.
Kjeld was halfway to his vehicle when Henny Engström and her cameraman swooped in like buzzards. They seemed to come out of nowhere, rushing towards his blindside from the neighbourhood playground across the street. It gave Kjeld the impression Henny had materialised out of thin air or, knowing her, possibly the gloomy mist itself.
Henny was an amateur crime blogger with delusions of being an actual journalist. Her online blog, The Chatterbox, was started in protest after she survived a violent attack by a stalker that left most of her body scarred. After the incident she blamed the local police for not doing a better job of protecting her when she tried to file a restraining order against him before the attack. This brought her and her cause some attention, but it wasn’t until she broke the news that Nils Hedin was the Kattegat Killer that she gained her true following.
But, in truth, her blog was little more than tabloid gossip. It was her YouTube channel, however, where she often reported live from active crime scenes, portraying the police as incompetent fools who preferred covering up the horrors of their colleagues to doing actual police work, which had earned her a popular following. And even though she was a nobody to the professional community, she made waves. Waves that had brought a fair amount of scrutiny on Gothenburg City Police and its administration.
And for reasons Kjeld still hadn’t fully uncovered, she’d decided to take out a personal vendetta against him. Since Nils’s arrest Henny had not only smeared Kjeld’s name and reputation, but had begun posting about his family as well. And while being a police detective did make him a public figure, open to media criticism, it didn’t give her the right to impose herself upon his crime scenes. Nor did it warrant the pervasive interference into his personal life. Kjeld could deal with people speaking badly about him, but her callous disregard for how her words affected Bengt and his daughter put her on his proverbial shit list.
‘Kjeld Nygaard, is it true that you’re off suspension and back to working cases in the field?’ Henny shoved a microphone in his face.
‘Turn the camera off, Henny.’
Karl the cameraman moved around so he could get both Kjeld and Henny in frame.
Kjeld turned to the side so as not to be looking directly down the lens.
‘Nils Hedin’s much anticipated trial is said to be starting in a few weeks. Do you have anything to say about that?’
‘No comment.’
‘But he was your best friend. Could you explain to our viewers how it’s possible that you didn’t realise your best friend was the Kattegat Killer?’
Kjeld turned his back on them and continued walking towards his car.
Henny followed along after him. ‘Or is it possible that you did know and were protecting him instead?’
Kjeld stopped and pivoted on his heel to face her. Henny wasn’t quite as tall as him, at least three inches shorter in fact, but she had a formidable presence about her. She was a confident woman who knew her own strengths. And she refused to back down.
‘I’m not talking to you about Nils,’ Kjeld said, biting back the urge to say more.
‘What about Varsund?’
Kjeld flinched.
‘Is it true that your sister was arrested on suspicion of murder?’
‘No comment.’
‘Was there a body in the house? Has the person been identified?’
Kjeld glared into the camera. ‘Get that thing off me.’
‘Freedom of the press,’ Henny said.
‘You’re not the press,’ Kjeld scoffed, returning his focus to Henny. ‘You’re a tabloid gossip columnist with a YouTube channel and your stories are nothing more than trash talk and hearsay.’
‘Can I quote you on that?’
‘I don’t care what the fuck you say about me, but leave my family out of your garbage blog.’
‘Vlog.’
‘Whatever.’
‘The people have a right to know about those who have sworn to protect them. They have a right to know if other members of the police are involved in the Kattegat murders.’
Kjeld refrained from flinching at mention of his previous case, but the tenseness in his posture was enough to show that Henny’s insinuation hit hard. ‘I know that you’ve been following my ex and my daughter. They have nothing to do with Nils or the police or anything.’
‘I beg to differ,’ Henny replied. She squared off her shoulders and stared at him directly in the eyes. ‘They have to do with you and you’re directly related to Nils.’
‘I shot the son of a bitch. I didn’t have anything else to do with him or what he did.’
‘That remains to be seen.’
Karl moved in closer and the blinking red light on top of the mount flickered in the corner of Kjeld’s eye.
Kjeld reached out and shoved the camera away. ‘I told you to get that thing out of my face.’
‘Hey!’ Esme’s voice called out.
Kjeld turned away from Henny in time to catch Esme storming past the cordon tape, heading directly for them. Just barely over five foot three Esme wasn’t anywhere near as physically intimidating as Henny, but she had a seriousness in her tone that was unmatched by anyone else in the Violent Crimes Division. She also played by the book, which made her practically untouchable to reputation-destroying amateurs like Henny.
More importantly, Esme could always be counted on to save Kjeld’s arse.
‘You’re not allowed to be here,’ Esme said. ‘This is an active crime scene.’
‘Could you give us a comment on what happened here, Detective Jansson?’ Henny’s tone softened to a more polite and professional one than she’d used with Kjeld.
‘Not at this time. Once we have more information I’m sure there will be a press conference. But until then you can’t be here.’
‘Isn’t this the former residence of Gjur Hägglund, the Cellar Sadist?’
‘No comment at this time.’
‘Of course. My apologies. You know how it is. Always looking for that next big story. Gotta keep the people informed.’ Henny cast Kjeld a sidelong glance and smirked. ‘I’ll be seeing you, Kjeld.’
‘Not if I can help it,’ he grumbled.
Henny nodded to Karl, who stepped off the road and back into the grass that lined the edge of the playground. He turned off the camera. Henny began making her way back across the park towards her car.
‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ Esme called out after her.
Henny turned, glancing back with a single raised brow.
‘The camera footage,’ Esme said, holding out her hand. ‘You know how it is.’
Chapter 5
Once Henny and her cameraman were out of earshot, Kjeld gave an exasperated sigh. Then he tugged open the passenger-side door of his car and dug through his glove compartment for that packet of chewing gum. After he popped one of the pieces out of the packet and into his mouth, he slammed
the door shut.
‘You need to learn to control your temper,’ Esme said. She wasn’t being condescending. It was simply a reminder. Esme had learned a long time ago that demanding things of Kjeld only resulted in his stubborn refusal to listen.
‘I know. But she really gets on my nerves.’
‘Is the gum helping?’
‘With Henny?’ Kjeld scoffed. ‘No.’
‘With the smoking then?’
‘Three months smoke-free but two kilos heavier. Win one battle, lose another.’
Esme gave him a quick once-over, her lips turning upward in a sarcastic smile. ‘It’s barely noticeable.’
Kjeld jokingly rolled his eyes. ‘Thanks.’
‘Frisk just called. Said he’d be here in about ten minutes. I was about to check in with the crime-scene manager and see what she’s collected so far. I’m worried that we won’t be able to get much from the body, but maybe we’ll get lucky with trace and find something on the doorknobs.’
‘Fingers crossed.’ After a pause he continued, ‘There’s something unsettling about this murder, Esme. I’m worried about this one.’
‘It’s been a while since we’ve had a scene this violent.’
Esme didn’t say which scene she was referring to, but Kjeld already knew. The Aubuchon case. The murders committed by his friend, Nils. The Kattegat Killer.
A high-pitched whistle cut through the air and they both turned back towards the house. Sixten waved at them from the side of the yard where the grass bumped up against the neighbour’s driveway. In one hand he held up a tote bag, partly covered in mud.
‘Found this in the neighbour’s bin,’ Sixten called out to them. ‘It’s got a wallet.’
Kjeld made his way back to the house, each step heavier than the last. Esme followed after him, double-stepping her pace to keep up. She handed Kjeld a pair of gloves from her pocket and he slipped them on just as Sixten removed a long magenta-coloured wallet from the bag. Kjeld took it tentatively, preparing himself for the name he might find.