Unseen ak-1

by Mari Jungstedt

  On her way back he tapped her on the shoulder and asked if he might buy her a drink. She happily said yes and sat down next to him at the bar.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Frida. And you?”

  “Henrik.”

  “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “Is it that obvious?” he said with a smile. “I live in Stockholm.”

  “Are you here on vacation?”

  “No. I own several restaurants with my father, and we’re thinking about opening a place in Visby. We’re scouting out the territory a bit.”

  He had almost unnaturally green eyes that gleamed at her in the dim light.

  “That’s great. Have you been to Gotland before?”

  “This is my first time. Pappa comes here often. He’s thinking of opening an inn with good Swedish food and live music in the evenings. For people who want to eat well and enjoy a little entertainment without having to go to a club. And not just a summertime inn, but one that’s open all year round. What do you think of that idea?”

  “Oh, I think that sounds wonderful. It’s not really as dead around here in the wintertime as many people think.”

  By now her girlfriends had discovered what was going on. They eyed the pair sitting at the bar. Their expressions were by turns inquisitive, gleeful, and envious.

  Frida straightened her skirt and sipped the wine that had been placed on the bar in front of her. She stole a glance at the man next to her. He had a cleft in his chin and looked even better close up.

  “And what do you do?” he asked.

  “I’m a hairdresser.”

  Involuntarily he ran his hand through his hair. “Here in town?”

  “Yes, at a salon over at Ostercentrum. It’s called the Hairline. Drop by if you ever need a haircut.”

  “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind. I notice you don’t have a Gotland accent.”

  “No, I moved here about a year ago. How long are you staying?”

  She had quickly changed the subject to avoid having to explain why she had moved here or to mention her husband and children and all that. Frida was aware of her power to attract men. She liked to flirt, and she wanted to keep this tasty morsel interested. At least for a little while. Just because it was fun.

  “I don’t know. It depends on how things go,” he said. “Maybe a week. If we find a place I’ll probably be here most of the summer.”

  “I see. How nice. I hope you find something.”

  She sipped her wine again. What an exciting man.

  He looked around the room, and when he turned his head, she was positive: He was wearing a hairpiece. I wonder why, she thought. Maybe he has really thin hair. He didn’t look particularly old. About her own age. There are plenty of people who lose their hair early on. Good Lord, guys should be able to look good, too. Her thoughts were interrupted when he asked a question.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing.” She could feel the color rising in her face.

  “How sweet you are,” he said, squeezing her knee.

  “Do you think so?” she said foolishly and removed his hand.

  After about an hour her girlfriends called to her, and she decided to go back to their table. Henrik was leaving, anyway. He had asked for her phone number. That’s when she decided to break the spell. She told him that she was married and that it wouldn’t be a good idea for him to call.

  Around one o’clock the bar closed, and the group of women broke up. They said goodbye outside with hugs and reassurances that they’d get together again soon. Frida was the only one who lived in the section of town called Sodervarn, about three-quarters of a mile south of the ring wall. She got on her bike and pedaled off alone in that direction.

  When she went through Soderport, a cold wind greeted her. It was always windier outside the wall. How nice that it’s still so light out, at least, she thought. She kept on pedaling, but her foot slipped on the pedal and she scraped her leg so that it started to bleed. It stung.

  Shit. She realized she was drunker than she thought. But she kept on going, wanting to get home as fast as possible now.

  She turned left at the parking lot and rode past the Gutavallen sports center. She crossed the street and headed up the long, steep slope near the water tower. Halfway up the hill she had to stop and get off her bike. She was too worn out.

  On the left side of the road was the cemetery. The headstones were lined up as if for some sort of dreary parade inside the low stone wall. Even though she was practically numb from all the alcohol, she felt a sense of uneasiness creep over her. Why had she insisted on taking her bike? Stefan had tried to persuade her to take a cab home, especially because of Helena Hillerstrom’s murder less than two weeks ago. She had dismissed the idea by saying it was too expensive. They needed to save their money. Their finances were shaky after buying the house. Besides, the killer had been caught. It turned out to be the boyfriend.

  Now she was regretting her decision. Damn, how stupid she was. A cab ride home wouldn’t have cost more than a hundred kronor. It would have been worth it.

  She was all alone on the road. Not another person in sight. The only sound was her own footsteps in her high-heeled shoes. They were hurting her feet terribly.

  The cemetery continued for another hundred yards. She had to walk past it.

  When Frida had gone half the distance, she heard foot-steps behind her. Heavy and firm. She listened. She had a strong urge to turn around but didn’t dare. She picked up her pace.

  The footsteps were louder now. She had the distinct feeling that she was being followed. Or was she just imagining things? She tried stopping for a moment. The footsteps stopped. All of a sudden her brain was crystal clear. The road was still climbing uphill, so there was no sense in getting on her bike. On one side of the road was the cemetery. The other side was lined with houses with big shady yards. All the windows were dark.

  She walked as fast as she could, no longer feeling the cold. Damn her short skirt and these shoes that hurt her feet.

  She considered flinging the bicycle to the ground and trying to head across someone’s yard. Instead she started to run. That made the person behind her start running, too. Terrified, she ran as fast as she could. The road leveled out and started sloping downward.

  She was just about to jump onto her bike when two strong hands grabbed her by the neck from behind and pressed their fingers into her throat. She couldn’t breathe and let go of the bicycle. It fell over with a crash.

  SATURDAY, JUNE 16

  Stefan Lindh reported his wife missing on Saturday morning. He was awakened at eight o’clock when their youngest child came into the bedroom. Frida’s side of the bed was empty. His first thought was that she must be in the bathroom, but it didn’t take him long to discover that his wife wasn’t in the house at all. He called her girlfriends, but she wasn’t with any of them. Then he tried the hospital and the police, with no results. The officer on duty told him to wait a few more hours.

  When Frida hadn’t come back by lunchtime, he put the kids in the car and drove down to the Monk’s Cellar. He drove the same route that he thought Frida would have taken on her bike. By two o’clock in the afternoon, he couldn’t wait any longer; he called the police, sick with worry. Knutas was informed, and, considering that a woman had been murdered less than two weeks ago, he decided to call a meeting of the investigative team. While he waited for the others, he phoned the worried husband, who was desperate and begged the police for help. His wife had never disappeared like this before.

  “Take it easy,” murmured Knutas. “We’re going to have a short meeting here at headquarters in a moment, and right after that either I or one of my colleagues will come over to see you. Shall we say in an hour?”

  He hung up the phone. The others came in, one by one, and sat down around his little table: Karin Jacobsson, Thomas Wittberg, and Lars Norrby.

  “So what we have is a missing woman,” K
nutas began. “Her name is Frida Lindh, thirty-four years old, married and the mother of three. The family lives in Sodervarn, on Apelgatan, to be more precise. She disappeared last night after spending the evening in town with three women friends. They went to the Monk to have dinner and then sat in one of the bars at the inn and drank beer until closing time. According to what her friends told the husband, they said goodbye to each other outside the place. By that time it was a little past 1:00 A.M. Frida is the only one of them who lives south of downtown, so she left the group and headed off alone to bicycle home. No one has seen her since. This is the information we have from her husband. Because Frida Lindh appears to be a conscientious mother to her young children, it doesn’t seem right to me that she’s missing. Her husband says that she has never disappeared like this before.”

  “Couldn’t she have just gone home with someone?” asked Norrby with a smirk. “Someone who’s more exciting than her husband?”

  “Of course that’s a possibility, but then she should have come back home by now, don’t you think? It’s almost four thirty, and the woman has three small children, for God’s sake.”

  “You would think so, although in this job you never stop being surprised,” said Norrby.

  “You don’t think that you’re overreacting about this?” asked Wittberg, turning to Knutas. “Isn’t it a little melodramatic to start sounding all the alarms just because a woman who went out drinking doesn’t come straight home?”

  Thomas ran one hand through his thick, dark, curly hair and then rubbed it along the stubble that covered his chin and cheeks. In front of him he had placed a bottle of Coca-Cola that was half empty.

  “Are you grumpy just because you’re hungover? Is that it?” Karin teased him, poking him in the ribs.

  “Not at all,” said Thomas.

  Knutas gave him an annoyed look. “Considering that we recently had the homicide of a woman on our hands, I think we need to give this our immediate attention. We’ll start by finding out what her girlfriends have to say. Karin, could you talk to the woman who lives on Bogegatan? The other two live on Tjelvarvagen. You can deal with them,” he said, turning to Wittberg and Norrby. “I’ll go see the husband. Then we’ll meet back here. Shall we say around eight o’clock?”

  The chairs scraped the floor as they all got up from the table. Norrby and Wittberg muttered to each other. “Hell, this is stupid. Bringing us in on a weekend for something like this. A woman who’s cheating on her husband.” They both shook their heads and sighed.

  Knutas pretended not to notice. He was standing up to his waist in the cold water. It was numbingly cold; he was enjoying it. It reminded him of his childhood when he would go swimming with his father and sister near their summer cottage. The first plunge into the sea water that hadn’t yet warmed up. How they laughed and shrieked. It was one of the few happy childhood memories he had. His mother, of course, didn’t come along. She never went swimming. She was always busy with something else. Washing dishes, doing the laundry, cooking, making the beds, tidying up. He remembered wondering why all that always took such a long time. There were only four of them in the family, and his father did a lot of the chores at home, too. But somehow she always seemed to have her hands full. She never had any time to spend with them. To play. If she had any free time, she would do crossword puzzles. Always those damn crosswords. Occasionally he would try to help her. Sit down next to her and give her suggestions for solving the puzzle. Then she would snap that he was ruining all the fun of it. She didn’t want anyone to help. And he was pushed away. As usual. He looked out across the sea. It was gray and motionless. Exactly like the sky. He had an almost spiritual feeling. Everything was calm. As if time and space had stopped. And here he was. By now he was starting to get used to the coldness of the water. He gathered his courage and dove in. Afterward he sat naked on the lid of the old kitchen bench and spent a long time drying himself off. He felt cleansed. The space in the seat underneath him had been refilled. He exhaled everything that had weighed on him all these years. It seemed as if the more blood he spilled, the more purified he felt.

  Sodervarn is located about three-quarters of a mile from the ring wall. That part of town consists mostly of single-family homes from the early twentieth century, but here and there are a few recently built houses. The Lindh family lived in one of them. It was a one-story structure with a white-brick facade, a neat driveway, and an American-style mailbox. On the street several little boys were playing with field hockey sticks. They were taking turns shooting the ball toward a goal that had been set up on the sidewalk. Knutas parked his old Mercedes outside the white-painted wooden fence. He noticed little decals in the windows indicating that the house had an alarm system installed by one of the largest security companies. That was quite unusual on Gotland.

  He pushed the doorbell and heard it ring inside the house.

  Stefan Lindh opened the door almost at once. His eyes were red rimmed and unhappy.

  “Where could she be? Have you heard anything?” He asked the questions even before saying hello.

  “I think the first thing we should do is sit down and have a talk,” said Knutas, and he walked right into the living room and sat down on the sofa with the floral upholstery without taking off either his shoes or his jacket. He pulled out his notebook.

  “When did you discover that Frida hadn’t come home?”

  “This morning around eight o’clock when Svante woke me up. He’s our two-year-old.”

  He sat down on a wicker chair next to the superintendent.

  “I took the kids over to my parents’ house. I didn’t want them to be here at home while I’m so worried. We have two more, a girl who’s five and a boy who’s four.”

  “What did you do when you discovered that Frida wasn’t in the house?”

  “I tried calling her cell phone but didn’t get an answer. Then I called around to her girlfriends. No one knew anything. So I alerted the police. A little later I drove over to the Monk’s Cellar, taking the same route that she should have taken home, but I didn’t see anything.”

  “Have you talked to her parents or other family members?”

  “She’s from Stockholm. Her parents and her brothers and sister all live there, but we hardly ever hear from them. They don’t have much contact with each other. Frida and her parents, I mean. That’s why I haven’t talked to them. I didn’t call her sister because I didn’t want to upset her for no reason.”

  “Where do your parents live?”

  “They live in Slite, on the east side of the island. They came over to pick up the children about an hour ago.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Just about a year. We used to live in Stockholm. Last summer we moved to the island. I was born and raised here, and all of my family is here on Gotland.”

  “How was Frida when she left home yesterday? I mean, what was her mood like?”

  “Same as always. Cheerful, looking forward to the evening. She had really spiffed herself up. She’s so happy about making friends with those women. Well, I am, too, of course. It wasn’t easy for her to move here in the beginning.”

  “I understand. You have to excuse me for asking, but how are things between you and Frida? What’s your relationship like, I mean?”

  Stefan Lindh squirmed a bit. He had one leg crossed over the other. Now he switched legs and blushed slightly.

  “Um, well, it’s fine. Of course there’s a lot of work to do. The three kids take up almost all our time. There isn’t much time left over for anything else. Things are about the same for us as for most people, I suppose. No real problems, but we’re not exactly floating on cloud nine, either.”

  “Have you had a fight or any kind of crisis recently?”

  “No, just the opposite. I think things have been unusually good between us lately. It was tough when we first moved here, but now Frida seems to be thriving. The kids are doing well. They think the daycare center is fun.”

  “H
as anything out of the ordinary happened lately? Have there been any strange phone conversations, or has your wife met anyone new that she’s told you about? Maybe at work?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lindh replied hesitantly, with a frown. “Not that I can recall offhand.”

  “What kind of work does she do?”

  “She’s a hairdresser. She works at the salon across from the Obs supermarket at Ostercentrum.”

  “So she must meet lots of different people. Has she mentioned any particular customer lately? Anyone special?”

  “No. Of course she talks about plenty of crazy customers, but there hasn’t been anyone in particular lately.”

  “I noticed that you have a security system on your house. Why is that?”

  “Frida wanted to have it installed when we moved in. She’s afraid of the dark and doesn’t feel safe without it. I travel quite a lot for my job, and sometimes I’m gone for several days at a time. Things are much better now that we have the security alarm.”

  Knutas handed Stefan Lindh his card. “If Frida comes home or contacts you, call me on my direct line. You can also reach me on my cell phone. It’s always on.”

  “What are you going to do now?” asked Lindh.

  “We’ll start looking,” replied Knutas, and stood up.

  Knutas took the direct route back to headquarters. The others gradually came in, one after the other. It was past 9:00 p.m. by the time everyone had gathered in Knutas’s office. They had all heard approximately the same story: that Frida had met a man and had talked to him for over an hour. None of the girlfriends had ever seen him before. They described him as tall and good-looking, with thick medium-blond hair, about thirty-five. One of the women noticed that he hadn’t shaved that day. Frida and the stranger had flirted quite openly, and for a while he had held her hand.

  The girlfriends thought she was out of her mind. Married and the mother of three. What would people say? Visby was a small town, and they had seen plenty of familiar faces at the inn.

  The others had walked home together because they lived in the same direction, but Frida had bicycled off alone. Even though Frida liked to flirt, they didn’t think she would go home with some strange man. They all agreed about that.