by Leif Persson
The second and third calls were to a female friend and classmate from police college, to see if she ‘wanted to come along to the club’. The classmate asked for time to think about it, but when Linda called back ten minutes later and said that she had just got home and was about to have a shower – in case her friend called and wondered why she wasn’t answering – the friend had decided to go along. At quarter past eleven they had met outside the Town Hotel on the central square and gone into the nightclub together.
What she was doing between quarter to eight and just before eleven o’clock that evening was as yet unclear, but it seemed likely that she had remained in the flat the whole time. She hadn’t made or received any calls on her mobile in that time. But she did call her father just before nine o’clock on the landline in the flat, and that conversation lasted about quarter of an hour. According to her father they had talked about everyday matters, things that had happened at work, and his daughter’s plans for the rest of the evening. And from what Linda told her friends in the bar later that night, she had watched a music programme on MTV that had started at half past nine, and had then changed channel to watch the ten o’clock news on TV4.
Approximately an hour later the neighbour saw her as she left the house on foot and went off down Pär Lagerkvists väg, heading south towards the town centre. This information was reinforced by the fact that she withdrew five hundred kronor at fourteen minutes past eleven from the cashpoint outside the SE-Bank on the corner of the main square and Storgatan, just fifty metres from the entrance to the Town Hotel nightclub.
‘I think it all fits together fairly well,’ Sandberg finished. ‘Any girl knows it takes a while to get ready if you’re going out partying. That’s probably all she was doing when she wasn’t talking to her dad or watching television or just taking it easy. She was simply getting ready for a night out,’ she concluded, and suddenly looked rather down in the mouth.
‘What happened inside the club?’ Bäckström asked. Women are all the bloody same. If things carry on like this, that psychologist bitch is going to have her hands full.
What had happened there wasn’t yet entirely clear either, for quite natural reasons. It was crowded, as usual in a nightclub, and there were a lot of people that they hadn’t yet had time to question. The evening was also more chaotic than usual because they had hired the services of some local celebrities who had appeared in various reality shows on television and now made a living from public appearances in nightclubs.
Nothing dramatic or even particularly interesting seemed to have occurred, in light of what happened to Linda a few hours later. She had drifted about like most of the others, the way people do in clubs. She sat down with two different groups of people. She chatted and danced and seemed to be in good spirits. She hadn’t argued or even disagreed with anyone, and no one had tried it on with her. She hadn’t been particularly drunk either. She drank one beer, possibly a raspberry shot, and after that a couple of glasses of wine at most, which a female colleague from the police station had bought for her.
Some time between half past two and three in the morning she had found her classmate from police college and told her that she was thinking of going home and getting some sleep. The bouncer on the door had seen her when she left – ‘just before three if you ask me’ – and according to him she was both sober and alone, and neither happy nor sad, when he saw her head off diagonally across the square, past the district governor’s residence, towards her home on Pär Lagerkvists väg.
In the worst-case scenario, that would be where she disappeared into the mist for the police. No witnesses had seen her walk the kilometre or so between the club and her home. Or at least none that had contacted them. No calls to or from her mobile. And a quiet night in the town, and especially on the streets that Linda had probably walked down.
‘Okay,’ Bäckström said, looking round his investigating team. ‘This bit’s pretty damn important, as I’m sure you realize. I want to know in detail what happened inside that club. Every bastard who set foot in there needs to be questioned, all the staff, and not least those reality TV people. Especially them. The same thing with her walk home. No witnesses have contacted us, then?’ He looked enquiringly at Police Constable Sandberg, who looked almost guilty as she shook her head.
‘Surveillance cameras,’ he said emphatically. ‘You mentioned a cash-point. There must be some sort of camera there?’ Fucking amateurs, he thought.
‘We’ve pulled in the recording. I’m afraid we haven’t had time to look at it yet. We simply haven’t had a chance.’
‘What other cameras are there on her route home?’ Bäckström rocked on his elbows and looked fierce.
‘We’re looking into that,’ Sandberg said. ‘I’ve thought about it, but we haven’t had a moment to check it out yet.’
‘Well, we’ll just have to make that a priority,’ Bäckström countered. ‘Before the bloke in the corner shop and anyone else thinking along the same lines realizes that he forgot to get permission to set up his little camera and decides to hide it away and delete the recordings from Friday night.’
‘I see what you mean,’ Sandberg said.
‘Excellent,’ Bäckström said. ‘Then it’s high time we started knocking on doors along the route between the club and her home. Get the officers who’ve been going door-to-door around where she lives to move on to that.’
She contented herself with a mere nod this time and made a note in her little book.
Shiiit, Bäckström thought, glancing at his watch. Into the third hour already. His stomach had started to rumble from lack of food and they hadn’t even got to the crime scene yet. And if he wasn’t going to end up having to spend all day listening to this, he’d just have to take over, speed up the whole process and make sure his investigative team did a decent job.
‘Okay,’ he said, nodding to the forensics expert, Enoksson, known as Enok, a superintendent and head of the unit. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Enoksson. The crime scene is the flat where she lived with her mother, and it happened some time in the early hours of Friday morning, between approximately three o’clock and five o’clock. And in your opinion and that of your colleagues, she was strangled and raped, and we’re probably talking about a single perpetrator.’
‘I’m not about to correct you,’ Enoksson said, looking like he could do with both a bit of food and some sleep. ‘That’s exactly what we think. And we’re also pretty sure that he escaped through the window. We’ve found traces of blood and skin on the windowsill.’
‘So why didn’t he just leave through the door?’ Bäckström wondered.
‘If what the neighbour who found her says is true, it was locked from the inside. It’s the sort of lock that doesn’t click into place if you just close the door from the outside. My colleagues and I are wondering if he didn’t make his escape when the newspaper was pushed through the letterbox. We think he got the impression that someone was on their way into the flat, and because the bedroom was furthest away from the door he jumped out of that window.’
‘So when was the paper delivered?’ Long-winded bastard, Bäckström thought.
‘Just after five in the morning, and that seems fairly definite.’ Enoksson nodded to underline what he’d just said.
‘Do we know anything more?’
‘The coded lock on the main door to the building was deactivated. It had been playing up, and the bloke delivering the papers had complained. So the building’s been unlocked since Wednesday. The locksmiths promised to fix it on Thursday but evidently didn’t get round to it.’ Enoksson sighed and shrugged his shoulders.
‘What about the door to the flat, Enoksson? Anything about that?’
‘No marks to indicate a break-in,’ the forensics expert said. ‘And no other signs of a struggle out in the hall. So either she let him in of her own volition or she forgot to lock the door behind her when she came home.’
‘Or he put a knife to her throat when she walked in the front do
or and forced her to open the door to the flat. Or he took her keys,’ Bäckström countered. ‘Remember the door was locked when he left.’
‘Can’t be ruled out,’ Enoksson said. ‘Definitely not. We’ll need a couple more days inside the flat to get a clearer picture. The analysis from the National Forensics Lab will take a while, as usual, but the medical officer promised to let us know his preliminary findings by tomorrow at the latest, so presumably he’s already got going on the post-mortem.’
‘So there’s a bit of good news after all,’ Bäckström said, suddenly quite jovial. You have to mix things up, he thought. A lot of stick, with the occasional bit of carrot.
‘We’ve got blood, semen and probably his fingerprints as well, so it’s far from desperate,’ Enoksson said.
‘But you’d rather wait with the details?’ Bäckström was still smiling.
‘Yes, we’d rather do that, me and my colleagues in forensics.’ He nodded as if to confirm that there was a right time for everything, and Bäckström joined in. ‘I might be able to give you a couple of pointers on the way, though.’
‘I’m listening,’ Bäckström said. But ideally not all day, he thought. Because by now there was a full-scale rebellion going on beneath his belt.
‘To start with, I think she let him in of her own accord. Or else she met him en route and took him home with her. Or had arranged to meet him earlier. The way things look inside the flat, things seem to have started off fairly amicably, at least.’
‘Really?’ Bäckström said slowly. The sort of person who could imagine letting just anyone in, he thought.
‘And secondly, and with all due respect for what our colleague Anna said a while back, I don’t think she’s been living there to any great extent. I’ve read the interview with her mother and I appreciate that that’s what she’s saying.’
‘Why don’t you believe it, then?’ Bäckström asked.
‘She was sleeping in her mother’s bed,’ Enoksson replied. ‘And that’s almost certainly where he killed her. The only bed in the flat. Of course, she might have been sleeping on the sofa out in the living room, it’s big enough, but there’s nothing to suggest that she’d been doing so for any length of time, if I can put it like that.’
‘But the mother’s a teacher,’ officer Sandberg said, evidently feeling picked upon. ‘She’s had almost a month off now, and has probably spent most of that time in the country. I mean . . . what with this weather we’ve been having.’
Why don’t they ever give up? Bäckström thought. They’ve always got to argue. Always.
‘I hear what you’re saying, Anna,’ Enoksson said. ‘It just doesn’t look like she was planning on moving in for good, at any rate. The only thing we’ve found in the flat that seems to belong to Linda is a sponge-bag in the bathroom, containing the usual things, and one of those fabric sports bags on the top shelf in a wardrobe in what looks like her mum’s workroom. It contains a clean change of underwear and a blouse. So I get the impression that she was staying there while her mum was away, or when she wanted to stay in town so she could go out, for instance. Like on Thursday, when she went to the nightclub.’
‘We’ll have to dig deeper,’ Bäckström concluded, smiling amiably. ‘Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I at least need a bite to eat.’
10
TO BEGIN WITH Bäckström and Rogersson had planned to escape into town and eat lunch at some discreet place where they could have the beer that they so richly deserved. But when they caught sight of the crowd of journalists outside the entrance to the police station they rapidly changed their minds and turned on their heels, and went and sat down in the staff canteen. They found an empty table at the back, and each ordered special of the day and a low-alcohol beer.
‘What the hell’s going on inside these people’s heads, serving fried sausages, macaroni bake and Småland cheesecake with jam as dessert when it’s almost thirty degrees outside? It looks like worms,’ Rogersson said, poking his fork suspiciously at the macaroni.
‘Don’t ask me. I’ve never eaten worms,’ Bäckström said. ‘I think it’s okay.’
‘Sure, Bäckström,’ Rogersson said tiredly. ‘But if you’re a normal person like me . . .’
‘If you’re worried about worms, maybe you should have a word with Egon.’ And good luck with that, Bäckström thought, because Egon was even less talkative than his colleague Rogersson.
‘What fucking Egon?’ Rogersson asked.
‘My Egon,’ Bäckström said.
‘You give him worms?’ Rogersson was looking at him suspiciously.
‘Maggots, fly larvae, same thing. But only on special occasions. Have you got any idea how much a tub of fly larvae costs?’ There have to be some limits, even for Egon, Bäckström thought. After all, we both have to survive on an ordinary police salary.
‘Do you want coffee?’ Rogersson sighed, standing up.
‘Large, milk and sugar,’ Bäckström said. Best cheesecake I’ve eaten for ages, he thought.
After lunch Bäckström set about organizing things with renewed energy, making sure that his investigative team did a decent job. Their senior colleague Olsson showed up, took a turn about the room and tried to ingratiate himself with as many people as possible as he did so, but as he was approaching Bäckström to waste his valuable time Bäckström pulled the telephone trick, picking up the receiver and humming in concentration as he listened to the dialling tone on the line and waved his right hand in a holding gesture. For safety’s sake he had a pad and pen clearly visible on the table in front of him. So Olsson returned to his room and shut the door while Bäckström called officer Sandberg over and took the opportunity to rest his weary eyes on the person who would be doing the actual work.
‘The victim’s sex life, Anna. Are we starting to get any idea of that?’ he began, nodding towards her. The ponderous, professorial nod that he usually employed when he had to talk about difficult subjects. Decent tits on this little lady, he thought.
‘We’ve found out a few things,’ Anna said neutrally.
‘Anything interesting?’ Bäckström said. ‘In terms of the investigation, I mean.’ Walking on very thin ice. Got to watch my words carefully if I don’t want to fall through.
Up until spring that year Linda had had a boyfriend, whom she had met a year earlier when he was studying economics at Lund University. As soon as he finished his exams, just before Christmas last year, he got a job in a company based up in Stockholm. He had moved there and before too long his relationship with Linda had run into the sand.
They hadn’t managed to find out anything negative about either him or his relationship with Linda, and for once it turned out that he seemed to have a cast-iron alibi for the time of the murder. He had been at a party together with his new girlfriend and a few other friends. He had contacted the Växjö Police himself as soon as he heard what had happened to Linda, and then, on his own initiative, he had contacted the Stockholm Police, who had already interviewed him. He was shocked, naturally, but simultaneously more willing to cooperate than anyone had any right to expect. For instance, he had volunteered to give them a DNA sample to stop the police wasting any unnecessary time on him.
‘What an accommodating young man,’ Bäckström said. ‘So how did he find out about it so quickly? That Linda had been murdered, I mean,’
‘His mum lives here and knows Linda’s family, and she called him yesterday afternoon, as soon as she found out. Her son was somewhere in Sandhamn. Way out in the Stockholm archipelago, apparently. Well, you know that, of course. Where it is, I mean. Evidently she knows the family in Sandhamn as well, so that’s where she called, in case you were wondering. I’ve just spoken to the officer who interviewed him. He’s convinced the boy didn’t have anything to do with the murder. But he still took the DNA sample, and he’s sending it to the National Forensics Lab,’ Anna concluded.
‘Well, then,’ Bäckström said. ‘I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see. Have you
found any other boyfriends since she broke up with the economist?’
‘Nothing,’ Anna said, shaking her head. ‘And we’ve spoken to her three best friends and a number of her classmates at police college. We’re thinking of talking to her parents as soon as they’re in a fit state.’
‘No short flings, nothing peculiar about her sexual preferences and so on?’ Bäckström persisted.
‘No.’ Anna shook her head firmly. ‘At least nothing that anyone we’ve spoken to knew about. According to what they’ve said, Linda seems to have been a completely ordinary girl. Ordinary boys, ordinary sex. Nothing odd.’
‘Six months without a boyfriend, or even a fling.’ Bäckström shook his head doubtfully. How likely is that, he thought. A pretty young girl of twenty. Even if she was too skinny for his taste.
‘It’s probably much more common than people think,’ Anna replied, giving the impression that she knew what she was talking about. ‘I think she was attacked by a madman. If you ask me, I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that.’
‘Really?’ Bäckström said slowly. ‘It’ll sort itself out,’ he added, and smiled at her. And they all have something hidden away somewhere, he thought.
Officer Sandberg didn’t say anything. Merely nodded and looked rather surprised.
That gave you something to think about, didn’t it, dear? Bäckström thought, watching her as she went back to her desk. He sighed. All work and no play. He went and got a cup of coffee, then pulled Knutsson and Thorén into an empty office so that he could see how they were getting on with the surveillance in peace and quiet.
‘So, tell an old man.’ He had decided to adopt a relaxed and lofty posture. ‘Have we found anything interesting?’
‘You mean at the crime scene?’ Thorén asked. ‘They seem to be finding things there all the time.’
‘I don’t mean the crime scene,’ Bäckström said, just as calmly and pedagogically. ‘I mean everywhere apart from the crime scene. Along the route the victim walked home that night. In the vicinity of the crime scene. Along the presumed escape route of the perpetrator. Or anywhere else in Växjö. Or Sweden . . . or the rest of the world.’