Patrik Hedstrom 01 - The Ice Princess

by Camilla Lackberg

  He made a move to lift Erica’s feet, but she got up quickly and brushed herself off.

  ‘No, Patrik, I refuse to go along with that. I’ve already got enough bruises for one day. And I’m not getting in that bathtub where Alex was found, that’s one thing for damn sure!’

  He reluctantly accepted her protests and they left the bathroom and went back to the living room.

  ‘After the killer got Alex into the tub it was a simple matter to run the water and then slit her wrists with a razor blade from a bag in the medicine cabinet. Then all the killer had to do was clean up after himself. Rinse out the glasses and wipe off the fingerprints from one of them. Meanwhile Alex slowly bled to death in the bathroom. Terribly, terribly cold-hearted.’

  ‘And the furnace? Was it already off when she arrived in Fjällbacka?’

  ‘Yes, it seems so. Which was lucky for us. It would have been much harder to gather any evidence from the body if it had been in room temperature for a whole week. For example, it would probably have been impossible to distinguish Anders’s fingerprints.’

  Erica shuddered. The thought of taking fingerprints off a corpse was a little too macabre for her taste.

  Together they searched the rest of the house. Erica took time to go through Alex and Henrik’s bedroom more thoroughly, since her previous visit had been so rudely interrupted. But she found nothing else. The feeling that something was missing lingered, and it irritated her that she couldn’t think of what it was. She decided to tell Patrik; he was just as frustrated as she was. To her satisfaction she also saw that he looked quite uneasy when she told him about the intruder and how she had been forced to hide in the wardrobe.

  Patrik heaved a sigh and sat down on the edge of the big four-poster bed, trying to help her figure out what it was she was searching for in her memory.

  ‘Was it something small or something big?’

  ‘I don’t know, Patrik, probably something small, otherwise I would have noticed it, don’t you think? If the four-poster bed was gone, for instance, I would probably have noticed it.’ She smiled and sat down next to him.

  ‘But where in the room was it? By the door? Over by the bed? On the bureau?’

  Patrik fingered a little scrap of leather he found on Alex’s nightstand. It looked like some sort of club insignia, with an inscription burned into the leather in a childish hand: ‘T.T.M. 1976.’ When he turned it over he saw some indistinct spots of what looked like old dried blood. He wondered where it had come from.

  ‘I don’t know what it was, Patrik. If I did I wouldn’t be sitting here tearing out my hair.’

  She glanced at him in profile. He had wonderfully long, dark eyelashes. His beard stubble was perfect. Just long enough to be felt as light sandpaper against the skin, but short enough not to scratch uncomfortably. She wondered how it would feel against her skin.

  ‘What is it? Have I got something on my face?’

  Patrik wiped his mouth nervously. She quickly looked away, embarrassed that he had caught her out staring at him.

  ‘It’s nothing. A little crumb of chocolate. It’s gone now.’

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘Well, what do you say—we’re not going to get any farther now, do you think?’ Erica said at last.

  ‘No, probably not. But listen, ring me as soon as you think of what’s missing. If it’s important enough for someone to come here to find, it must be important to the investigation as well.’

  They locked up carefully, and Erica placed the key back under the mat.

  ‘Would you like a ride back?’

  ‘No thanks, Patrik. I’ll enjoy the walk.’

  ‘See you tomorrow night then.’ Patrik shifted from one foot to the other, feeling like an awkward fifteen-year-old.

  ‘Okay, I’ll see you at eight. Come hungry,’ Erica said.

  ‘I’ll try. But I can’t promise anything. Right now it doesn’t feel like I’ll ever be hungry again.’ Patrik laughed as he patted his stomach and nodded at Dagmar Petren’s house across the street.

  Erica smiled and waved as he drove off in his Volvo. She could already feel anticipation churning inside of her, mixed with insecurity, anxiety and outright fear.

  She started for home but hadn’t gone more than a few yards before she stopped short. An idea had come out of nowhere, and it had to be tested before she could let it go. With determined steps she went back to the house, took the key from under the mat, and entered the house again, after first carefully kicking the snow off her shoes.

  What should a woman do who was waiting for a man who never showed up for a romantic dinner? She should ring him, of course! Erica said a prayer that Alex had a modern telephone and hadn’t fallen for the trendiness of a ’50s Cobra phone or still had some old Bakelite model. She was in luck. A brand-new Doro hung on the wall in the kitchen. With trembling fingers she pushed the button for the last number called and crossed her fingers that nobody had used the phone since Alex’s death.

  The phone rang and rang. After seven rings she was about to hang up, but then the voicemail switched on. She listened to the message but hung up before the beep. Her face pale. Erica slowly replaced the receiver. She could almost hear the clatter in her head as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Suddenly she knew precisely what it was that was missing from the bedroom upstairs.

  Mellberg was seething with rage. He strode through the station in a fury. If they could have, the employees at Tanumshede police station would have taken cover under their desks. But grown-ups didn’t do that, so they had to suffer through a whole day of fiery oaths, reprimands and general abuse. And Annika had to bear the brunt of it. Even though she’d developed a tough hide during the months since Mellberg had become boss, for the first time in a long time she felt on the verge of tears. By four o’clock she’d had enough. She left work and stopped at Konsum to buy a large tub of ice cream. Then she went home, turned on Glamour TV and let the tears run down into the chocolate ice cream. It was just one of those days.

  It drove Mellberg crazy that he’d been forced to release Anders Nilsson from gaol. He felt in every bone of his body that Anders was Alex Wijkner’s killer, and if he’d only had more time alone with him he would have wrung the truth out of him. Instead he’d been forced to release Anders because of a fucking witness who said she saw him come home just before Separate Worlds started on TV. That placed him at home in his flat by seven o’clock, and Alex had talked with Birgit at a quarter past. Bloody hell.

  Then there was that young cop, Patrik Hedström. Kept spouting a bunch of wild ideas that it was somebody other than Anders Nilsson who murdered the woman. No, if there was anything he’d learned in all his years in the police, it was that everything was most often exactly what it appeared to be. No hidden motives, no complicated plots. Just riff-raff that made life unsafe for honest citizens. Find the riff-raff and you find the perpetrator, that was his motto.

  He hit the number of Patrik’s mobile.

  ‘Where the hell are you?’ No pleasantries needed here. ‘Are you sitting around gathering navel lint somewhere, or what? Down here at the station we’re working. Overtime. I don’t know if that’s a phenomenon you’re familiar with. If not, I can fix it so you no longer have to worry about that either. Not here, at any rate.’

  He felt a bit better in the pit of his stomach when he’d had a chance to put some pressure on that young whippersnapper. You had to keep them on a short leash, or those young cocks would get too full of themselves.

  ‘I want you to drive down and talk to a witness who places Anders Nilsson at home at seven o’clock. Press her, twist her arm a little and see what you can find out…yes, NOW, damn it.’

  He slammed down the receiver, grateful for the circumstances in life that put him in a position to make other people do the dirty work. Suddenly, life seemed considerably brighter. Mellberg leaned back in his chair, pulled open the top drawer, and took out a packet of chocolate balls. With his short sausage-like fingers he
took one out of the packet and blissfully stuffed the whole thing in his mouth. When he finished chewing it he took another. Hard-working men like himself needed fuel.

  Patrik had already turned off towards Tanumshede via Grebbestad when Mellberg rang. He pulled into the entrance to the Fjällbacka golf course and turned the car around. He gave a deep sigh. It was getting to be late afternoon and he had plenty to do back at the station. He shouldn’t have stayed so long in Fjällbacka, but being with Erica exerted a particularly strong attraction on him. It felt like being sucked into a magnetic field; he had to use both strength and will power to pull himself free. Another deep sigh. This could only end one way. Badly. It wasn’t so long ago that he finally got over the break-up with Karin, and now he was already going full speed ahead towards new pain. Talk about self-destructive. The divorce had taken over a year to process. He had spent many nights in front of the TV staring blankly at high-quality shows like Walker, Texas Ranger and Mission Impossible. Even TV Shopping had felt like a better alternative than lying alone in the double bed, tossing and turning, while images of Karin in bed with another man flickered past like a bad soap opera. And yet the attraction he felt for Karin in the beginning was nothing compared to the attraction he now felt for Erica. Logic whispered malevolently in his ear: won’t the fall be that much greater?

  He drove much too fast, as usual, in the last tight curves before Fjällbacka. This case was starting to get on his nerves. He took out his frustration on the car and was in real mortal danger when he sped round the last curve before the hill down to the place where the old silo once stood. Now it was torn down and instead there were houses and boat-houses built in the old-fashioned style. Prices were around a couple of million kronor per house; he never ceased to be amazed at how much money people must have to be able to buy a summer house at those prices.

  A motorcyclist appeared out of nowhere in the curve and Patrik had to swerve in panic. His heart was pounding fast and he braked to a bit below the posted speed limit. That was a close call. A check in the rear-view mirror assured him that the biker was still on his machine and could continue his journey.

  He kept going straight ahead, past the minigolf course and up to the intersection by the petrol station. There he turned left to the blocks of flats. He reflected one more time over how horribly ugly the buildings were. Brown and white constructions from the Sixties, like big square blocks tossed near the southern entrance to Fjällbacka. He wondered about the rationale of the architect who designed them. Had he gone in for making the buildings as ugly as possible, as an experiment? Or did he just not care? Apparently, they were the result of the frenzy to build a million housing units in the Sixties. ‘Homes for all.’ Too bad they didn’t say: ‘Beautiful homes for all.’

  He parked in the lot and went into the first entrance. Number five. The stairwell to Anders’s flat, but also the flat of the witness Jenny Rosén. They lived two flights up. He was puffing hard when he reached the right landing, reminded that he’d been getting far too little exercise and way too much coffee cake lately. Not that he’d ever been a paragon of physical training, but it had never been this bad before.

  Patrik stopped for a second outside Anders’s door and listened. Not a sound to be heard. Either he wasn’t home or he was passed out.

  Jenny’s door was on the right, and directly opposite from Anders. She had exchanged the standard name-plate for her own made out of wood, with the names Jenny and Max Rosén in ornate script with decorative roses winding round the plate. So she was married.

  She had rung the police station with her testimony early this morning, and he hoped she would still be at home. She hadn’t been when they knocked on all the doors in the stairwell yesterday, but they had left a card and asked her to ring the police station. That’s why it wasn’t until today that they got the information about Anders’s return home on the Friday evening when Alex died.

  The doorbell echoed in the flat, followed at once by a loud shriek from a child. Footsteps could be heard in the hall, and Patrik felt rather than saw someone looking at him through the peephole in the door. A safety chain was unhooked and the door opened.

  ‘Yes?’

  A woman with a one-year-old child was standing there. She was very thin with bleached blonde hair. From the colour of her roots, her natural hair colour must have been somewhere between dark brown and black, which was confirmed by a pair of nut-brown eyes. She wore no make-up and looked tired. She had on a pair of worn jogging trousers with baggy knees, and a T-shirt with a big Adidas logo on the front.

  ‘Jenny Rosén?’

  ‘Yes, that’s me. What’s this about?’

  ‘My name is Patrik Hedström and I’m from the police. You put in a call to us this morning, and I’d like to talk with you a little about the information you gave.’

  He spoke in a low voice so he wouldn’t be heard in the flat across the landing.

  ‘Come in.’ She stepped aside to let him in.

  The flat was small, a bedsit, and there was definitely no man living there. None older than one year at any rate. The flat was an explosion in pink. Everything was pink. Rugs, tablecloths, curtains, lamps, everything. Rosettes were once again a popular motif, and they were on lamps and candlesticks in a profusion that was both lavish and superfluous. On the walls were pictures that further emphasized the romantic disposition of the occupant. Soft-focus female faces with birds fluttering past. Even a picture of a crying child hung over the bed.

  They sat down on a white leather sofa, and thank goodness she didn’t offer him coffee. He’d had plenty of that today. She set the child on her lap, but he squirmed out of her grasp. So she put him on the floor, where he toddled about on his still unsteady legs.

  Patrik was struck by how young the woman was. She couldn’t be out of her teens, he guessed about eighteen. But he knew that it wasn’t unusual for girls in small towns to have one or two children before the age of twenty. Since she called the boy Max, he concluded that the father didn’t live with them. That wasn’t unusual either. Teenage relationships often couldn’t survive the stress of a baby.

  He pulled out his notebook.

  ‘So it was Friday the week before last, the twenty-second, that you saw Anders Nilsson come home at seven o’clock? How is it that you’re so sure of the time?’

  ‘I never miss Separate Worlds on TV. It starts at seven and it was just before that when I heard a lot of commotion outside. Nothing unusual, I must say. It’s always rather lively over at Anders’s place. His drinking buddies come and go at all hours, and sometimes the police show up as well. But I still went to check through the peephole in the door, and that’s when I saw him. Drunk as a lord, he was trying to unlock his door, but the keyhole would have had to be a metre wide for him to find it. He finally got the door open and went inside, and that’s when I heard the theme song for Separate Worlds and hurried back to the TV.’

  She was chewing nervously on a lock of her long hair. Patrik saw that her nails were bitten down to the quick. There were traces of hot pink nail polish on what was left of her nails.

  Max had steadily worked his way round the coffee table in the direction of Patrik and now took triumphant possession of his trouser leg.

  ‘Up, up, up,’ he chanted, and Patrik gave Jenny a questioning look.

  ‘Sure, pick him up. He obviously likes you.’

  Patrik awkwardly lifted the boy onto his knee and gave him his bunch of keys to play with. The child beamed like the sun. He gave Patrik a big smile and showed two front teeth that looked like little grains of rice. Patrik gave him a big smile back. He felt a quavering in his chest. If things had turned out differently he could have had a boy of his own on his knee by this time. He cautiously stroked Max’s downy head.

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Eleven months. He keeps me busy, you’d better believe.’

  Her face lit up with tenderness when she looked at her son, and Patrik saw at once how sweet she was behind the tired exterior. He
couldn’t even imagine how much work it must take to be a single parent at her age. She should be out partying and living life with her friends. Instead she spent her evenings changing diapers and keeping house. As if to illustrate the tensions within her, she took a cigarette out of a packet lying on the table and lit it. She took a deep, pleasurable drag and then held out the packet to Patrik. He shook his head. He had definite views about smoking in the same room as a baby, but it was her business, not his. Personally he couldn’t understand how anyone could sit and suck on something that smelled as bad as a cigarette.

  ‘So couldn’t he have come home and then gone out again?’

  ‘The walls are so thin in this building that you can hear a pin drop out on the landing. Everyone who lives here knows exactly who comes and goes—and when. I’m quite sure that Anders didn’t go out again.’

  Patrik realized that he wouldn’t get much further. Out of curiosity he asked, ‘What was your reaction when you heard that Anders was suspected of murder?’

  ‘I thought it was bullshit.’

  She took another deep drag and blew the smoke out in rings. Patrik had to restrain himself from saying anything about the dangers of second-hand smoke. On his knee Max was fully occupied with sucking on his key-ring. He held it between his chubby little fingers and occasionally looked up at Patrik as if to thank him for lending him this fantastic toy.

  Jenny went on, ‘Sure, Anders is a fucking wreck, but he could never kill anyone. He’s a decent guy. He rings my bell and asks to bum a cigarette now and then, and whether he’s sober or pissed he’s always decent. I’ve even let him babysit Max a few times when I had to run out to the market. But only when he was completely sober. Never otherwise.’

  She stubbed out the cigarette in an overflowing ashtray.

  ‘Actually there’s nothing bad about any of the winos here. They’re just unfortunate devils, drinking away their lives together. The only people they’re hurting is themselves.’

  She tossed her head to get the hair out of her face and reached for the cigarette packet again. Her fingers were yellow from nicotine, and this cigarette obviously tasted as good to her as the first one. Patrik was starting to feel smoked out and didn’t think he’d get any more useful information from Jenny. Max protested at being lifted down and handed back to his mother.