by Leif Persson
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Leif G.W. Persson
Copyright
Linda – As in the Linda Murder
Leif G.W. Persson
Translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith
For Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö –
who did it better than almost anyone
1
Växjö, Friday 4 July
IT WAS A neighbour who found Linda, and, all things considered, that was far better than her mother finding her. It also prevented the police from losing a great deal of time. Her mother hadn’t planned to come back from the country until Sunday evening, and she and her daughter were the only ones living in the flat. The earlier the better, as far as the police were concerned, especially regarding a murder investigation.
The alarm had reached the regional communication centre of Växjö Police at five minutes past eight in the morning, and a patrol car in the vicinity had responded. Just three minutes later they had reported back. They were at the scene, the woman who had sounded the alarm was safely installed in the rear seat of the patrol car, and they were about to enter the building to check the situation.
The duty officer himself had taken the call. The two younger men who had picked up the request had already managed to acquire something of a reputation in the local force. Sadly it was not a wholly positive one, and, since the duty officer was twice their age, had thirty years in the force, and reckoned that he spent far too much time up to his neck in elk-shit, his first instinct had been to send reinforcements. However, while he was considering this they had reported back once more. After just eight minutes, and on his mobile, so that none of what they had to say would be overheard by anyone listening in. It was now quarter past eight.
Remarkably, for once, regardless of their age, experience and reputation, they had got everything right. They had done all that could have been expected of them, and one of them had even done more. Got himself a little gold star in his service record, in a way that had previously been unheard of in the records of the Växjö Police Authority.
In the bedroom of the flat they had found a dead woman. Everything indicated that she had been murdered, and that this had only happened a few hours before. There were no signs of the perpetrator, apart from an open bedroom window at the back of the building, which at least gave some indication of how he had left the scene of the crime.
Unfortunately there was a complication. The young officer who spoke to the duty officer was convinced that he recognized the victim. And if she was who he thought she was, it meant that the duty officer had met her on numerous occasions over the summer, most recently on the previous day.
‘Not good, not good,’ the duty officer muttered, apparently largely to himself. Then he had pulled out the little reminder list of what he should do if the worst happened to him at work. A laminated sheet of A4 with ten things to remember, and the thought-provoking heading If the stuff hits the fan at work. He put it under the blotter on his desk at the start of each shift, and it was almost four years since the last time he had any reason to take it out.
‘Okay, boys,’ the duty officer said. ‘This is what we’re going to do . . .’
Then he too had done everything that could reasonably have been expected of him. But no more than that, because you don’t want that sort of excitement at his age.
The patrol car that had arrived at the crime scene first contained two young police officers from Växjö. One was Acting Police Inspector Gustaf von Essen, thirty years old and known in the force as the Count because of his name, even though he was always careful to point out that he was actually just ‘a perfectly ordinary baron’. The other officer in the car was four years younger: Police Constable Patrik Adolfsson, known as Adolf for reasons which were sadly not limited to his family name alone.
When they responded to the call, they were a couple of kilometres from the reported address, on their way back to the police station. Because there was practically no traffic at all in the area at that time of the morning, Adolf had done a 180-degree turn, put his foot down and headed back the quickest way without lights or siren, while the Count kept a sharp eye out for any suspicious movement in the opposite direction.
Together they made up almost two hundred kilos of prime Swedish police officer. Mainly muscle and bone, with all their senses and motor-functions in the best possible shape, taken as a whole they were the dream response for any terrified citizen calling to say that he or she had three unknown hooligans out in the porch, trying to break the front door in.
When they pulled up in front of the building on Pär Lagerkvists väg where the alleged crime was supposed to have been committed, an agitated middle-aged woman came running out into the road towards them. She was waving her arms and stumbling over her words and Adolf, who was first out of the car, had gently put his arm round her and ushered her into the back seat, and reassured her that ‘everything’s a
ll right now’. And while the Count had taken up position at the rear of the building, weapon drawn, in case the culprit was still on the premises and intended to make his escape that way, Adolf had quickly checked out the entrance to the property and then gone into the flat. Easy enough, seeing as the front door was wide open.
This was the point where he won his gold star, before doing, for the very first time, all the other things that he had been taught to do at Police Academy up in Stockholm. With his pistol drawn he had looked through the flat, padding along the walls so as not to mess things up unnecessarily for their colleagues in forensics, nor to present the perpetrator with an easy target if he was still around and crazy enough to have a go. But the only person there was the victim. She was lying on the bed in the bedroom, motionless, beneath a bloodstained sheet that covered her head and torso and half her thighs.
Adolf called to the Count through the open bedroom window that the coast was clear for him to check the stairwell, then holstered his pistol and pulled out the little digital camera he had under his left armpit. Then he quickly took three different pictures of the covered body before he carefully folded back the sheet to check if she was alive or dead.
With his right index finger he had managed to locate her carotid artery, even though this was actually entirely unnecessary considering the noose around her neck and the look in her eyes. Then he had carefully felt her cheeks and temples. In contrast to the living women he had touched in the same way, her skin felt merely mute and stiff under his fingertips.
She looks pretty dead, even if she hasn’t been dead for long, he thought.
But he had also recognized her. Not as someone he had merely seen before, but as someone he was actually acquainted with, had spoken to and fantasized about afterwards. Strangest of all, although he had no intention of ever telling anyone about this, he had never felt so present as he did just then. Completely present, yet at the same time as if he were standing outside what was happening and watching himself. As if this really wasn’t anything to do with him, still less with the woman lying dead in her bed, even though just a few hours before she must have been every bit as alive as he was.
2
THE WITNESS WHO had found the victim and called the police was interviewed for the first time at about ten o’clock in the morning by two detective inspectors. The interview was recorded and typed up the same day. Approximately twenty pages of print: Margareta Eriksson, fifty-five years old, widow, no children, lived on the top floor of the building where the victim and her mother lived.
The final page of the transcript noted that the witness had been informed that she was being issued with a disclosure ban according to paragraph 10, chapter 23 of the Judicial Procedure Act. There was nothing, however, about her reaction to the fact that she was not, ‘on pain of punishment’, allowed to tell anyone about the contents of the interview. In itself this wasn’t so strange. It wasn’t the sort of thing that was usually recorded, and besides, she had reacted just as most people did when they received the same notification: she certainly wasn’t the sort of person who’d go about gossiping about that sort of thing.
The building, consisting of a basement, four floors and an attic, was owned by a residents’ association of which the witness was also the chairperson. Two flats on each of the lower three floors, and one double-size one at the top where the witness lived. In total seven properties, all owned by people in middle age or older, single people and couples with grown-up children who’d moved out. The majority of them were away on holiday at the time of the crime.
The flat in which the murder took place was owned by the victim’s mother, and according to the witness the victim sometimes lived there too. Recently the witness had seen the daughter fairly often, but the mother herself was on holiday, spending most of her time at her country place on Sirkön, an island twenty kilometres south of Växjö.
The flat, four rooms and a kitchen, was on the ground floor when seen from the street entrance; but because the building was on a slope the flat was actually one floor up at the back looking on to the yard, which itself led into a small area of woodland surrounded by detached houses and a few blocks of flats.
The witness was a dog-owner and, according to what she said during her interview, dogs had been her main interest for many years. In recent times she had had two, a Labrador and a spaniel, which she walked four times a day. At seven in the morning she usually took them on a long walk lasting at least an hour.
‘I’m a morning person. I’ve never had any trouble getting up early – I hate lying around once I’m awake.’
When they got home she usually had breakfast and read the morning paper while the dogs got their ‘morning feed’. At twelve o’clock it was time for another walk with the dogs, again lasting about an hour, and when she returned she usually ate lunch while her two four-legged friends were rewarded with ‘a dried pig’s ear or something nice to chew on’.
At five o’clock she would go out again, but not for so long this time. About half an hour, so she would have time to eat dinner and ‘give Peppe and Pigge their evening feed’ in peace and quiet before it was time to switch on the television for the evening news. That left ‘the evening pee’ some time between ten and twelve in the evening, depending on what else the television had to offer.
In other words, she followed a fixed routine that largely seemed to be dictated by her dogs. She usually spent the free hours in between either running various errands in town, meeting friends – ‘mostly women like me and other dog-people, really’ – or working from home in her flat.
Her husband, who had died ten years ago, had been an accountant with his own business, and she had worked for him part time. After he died she had carried on helping some of their old customers with their accounts. But her main source of income was the pension left by her husband.
‘Ragnar was always careful with things like that, so I really don’t have anything to worry about.’
The interview had been conducted in her flat. The officers who interviewed her could see with their own eyes that there was no reason to disbelieve her on that last point. Everything they could see indicated that Ragnar had been careful to provide for his wife after his death.
At eleven o’clock the previous evening, while she was busy with the so-called ‘evening pee’, she had seen the victim emerge from the front door and set off in the direction of the town centre.
‘It looked as though she was going to a party, although I tend to think that most youngsters look like that now no matter what time of day it is.’
She herself had been standing some thirty metres away up the road and they hadn’t exchanged greetings, but she was quite sure it was the victim she had seen.
‘I don’t think she saw me. She was probably in a hurry, otherwise I’m sure she’d have said hello.’
Five minutes later she was up in her own flat and, following her usual routine, she had gone to bed and fallen asleep more or less at once, and that was pretty much all she could remember from the previous evening.
This incredible summer had begun as early as May, and did not seem to want to come to an end. Day after day without the slightest puff of wind, the sun hot as a barbecue, the sky bleached blue, merciless, with no clouds, no shadow. Day after day with the temperature setting new records, and the following morning she had gone out with the dogs very early, at half past six.
That was earlier than usual, but considering the ‘absolutely incredible summer . . . I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that . . . I wanted to avoid the worst of it’. And every responsible dog-owner knows that dogs don’t cope well with too much exertion when it’s hot.
She had followed the same route she always took. Turned left when she came out of the front door and walked up the road past the neighbouring properties, then down the path off to the right towards the larger patch of woodland that spread out just a few hundred metres behind the building she lived in. Half an hour later, by which time it was already unbearabl
y hot even though it wasn’t much after seven o’clock, she had decided to turn back and go home. Peppe and Pigge were both panting heavily and even their owner was longing for the shade at home in the flat, and something cool to drink.
More or less at the same time as she decided to turn back and go home, the sky had suddenly clouded over and turned black, a wind started whipping at the bushes and trees, and she could hear thunder not far off. When the first few heavy drops started to fall she was just a couple of hundred metres from home, and she had started to jog even though there really wasn’t any point, seeing as the shower had already turned into a downpour and she was soaked through by the time she got back to the apartment block through the yard at the back.
That was when she noticed that her neighbour’s bedroom window was open and blowing in the wind, and that the curtains inside the room were already soaked.
As soon as she got into the entrance hall – ‘it must have been about half past seven, if I’ve got that right’ – she had rung her neighbour’s doorbell several times, but no one had come to the door.
‘I thought she must have come home late and opened the window. For all the good that would have done, because it’s far warmer outside than it is indoors. When we were out for the evening pee it was shut, at any rate, because I usually notice things like that.’
Because no one had come to the door she had taken the lift up to her floor. She had dried the worst of the rain off the dogs, and changed into dry clothes. She had also been in a bad mood.
‘This is actually a shared property, and water damage isn’t to be taken lightly. And then there’s the risk of burglary. Admittedly, it’s a few metres up to the windowsill, but it seems to me that hardly a day goes by without there being something in the paper about burglars stealing everything people have, and even if they’re off their heads on drugs, it can’t be that difficult to borrow a ladder from one of their friends, can it?’
But what should she do? Talk to the daughter next time she bumped into her? Call her mother and tell tales? A fortnight ago there had been a similar cloudburst, but that one had only lasted ten minutes before it stopped as abruptly as it had started, and the sun started shining in a blue, cloudless sky once more, and it had actually been good for the lawns and other plants. But not this time, and after quarter of an hour, while she sorted out the dogs’ food bowls and made herself some coffee, it was still raining just as heavily, and she suddenly came to a decision.