by Leif Persson
‘Precisely,’ Nylander said. ‘When the arrest is imminent, I think it would be best if you hand the task over to our National Rapid-Response Unit here. To avoid any unnecessary bloodshed. I’ve already alerted them. We can usually be in place within three hours of the order’s being given. We’re trying to reduce that time, and assuming that we get the same good flying conditions that we’ve had all summer, the head of the unit thinks we can do it in two. We’ve already raised the state of alert from blue to orange for three of the rapid-response teams.’
‘Bloody hell,’ the commissioner said. Bloody hell, he thought. And exactly what sort of numbers are we talking about, as far as necessary bloodshed goes?
Quarter of an hour later the county police commissioner – in spite of the fact that it was still very early – called Olsson, the head of the preliminary investigation, and informed him that he and the Head of National Crime had unanimously and in complete agreement decided to reinforce the investigation with the experts from the CP group and the VICLAS unit, and that any potential arrest would be handled by the NRRU. Olsson himself, oddly enough, had been thinking along the same lines, and thought that this was an excellent proposal.
‘I was actually thinking of calling you later today to suggest that, boss. The only reason I decided to wait was because I know you’re enjoying a well-deserved holiday.’
Bäckström was stressed, tired and hungover. The previous evening he and Rogersson had done their best to compensate for the lengthy period of abstinence that their duties had imposed upon them. Bäckström had collapsed on his bed just before midnight, had overslept, and had had to wolf down breakfast without so much as a glance at the morning papers. They were also forced to stop at a petrol station shop on the way to buy some mints and high-energy drinks to get their breath and hydration levels into some sort of order.
Things hadn’t got any better when he was hurrying down the corridor to the morning meeting of the investigative team, because that idiot Olsson had jumped out on him and started going on about different worst-case scenarios that he and the county police commissioner had considered themselves obliged to deal with without Bäckström’s knowledge.
‘What do you think about that, Bäckström?’ Olsson asked. ‘Asking for the involvement of your colleagues at the CP group and VICLAS?’
‘Sounds like an absolutely excellent idea,’ Bäckström said. He had no intention of wasting any of his valuable time being lectured over the phone by his ultimate superior, Sten ‘the Chin’ Nylander.
At last, he had found his way to his place at the end of the table. Admittedly, he didn’t have a Höganäs pot hanging round his neck to stop him from dying of thirst, but he did have a large mug of coffee with plenty of milk and sugar, and the whole of his team was in place.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s get going.’
First Police Constable Sandberg told them about the surveillance cameras along the victim’s route home. The one by the cashpoint where she withdrew money hadn’t given them anything, presumably because the victim had been outside the range of the camera when she left the Town Hotel.
‘The camera only covers the pavement and a bit of the street in front of the cashpoint,’ she explained. ‘But we did find something much better, and I think the credit for that should go entirely to you, boss,’ she went on, nodding and smiling at Bäckström.
‘I’m listening,’ Bäckström said, smiling back. You’re already halfway in there, lad, he thought.
Sandberg and her colleagues had found another, much better camera, albeit one lacking the requisite permits. It was above the counter of a corner shop at the start of Pär Lagerkvists väg, just five hundred metres from the victim’s home, and at night it also covered the road in front of the shop. At four minutes to three on Friday night Linda Wallin had been picked up on camera when she was on her way home. But there had been no one else in the next thirty minutes, so it didn’t look like she was being followed.
‘The shop’s open until eleven o’clock in the evening. The camera normally covers the interior and the tills, but before the shopkeeper goes home, just before midnight, he changes the angle so that it picks up people going past outside. He comes from Iran, and he’s had trouble with vandalism, people spraying racist slogans on the windows and so on,’ Sandberg explained.
‘And we’re absolutely certain it’s Linda?’ Bäckström asked, not about to let go of this encouraging little detail in the work of the investigation.
‘Entirely sure,’ Sandberg said. ‘I’ve been through the recording with forensics. After all, a number of us know . . . knew . . . her.’
After that things rolled on in the usual efficient way they did whenever he was the one holding the tiller. And thank God for that, Bäckström thought, now that half the police force didn’t have to waste time introducing themselves to the other half.
‘What about the door-to-door and search of the area?’ he asked. ‘Have we found anything interesting since yesterday?’
Unfortunately not, according to the officer who was responsible for that part of the investigation. The last known traces of the perpetrator were the blood and skin found on the windowsill of the bedroom in the flat where the murder took place.
‘Then we expand the area of the search,’ Bäckström said gruffly. ‘Anything odd that happened anywhere in town during the day in question. The whole lot, from the usual troublemakers, burglaries, criminal damage, stolen cars and parking fines to any mysterious vehicles, events and people. I want to see lists before lunch.’ Lazy fuckers. If you want something doing you have to do it yourself.
‘So has anyone been in touch to tell us anything interesting, then?’ he went on, looking at Lewin. If you’ve managed to tear yourself away from Svanström, you randy bastard, he thought.
‘We’ve received hundreds of tip-offs,’ Lewin said. ‘By phone, by email, even by text to some members of the team whose numbers are evidently known to various informants. But perhaps that isn’t so odd, seeing as the officers who’ve received tip-offs that way usually work in surveillance or drugs, where you do sometimes have to give out mobile numbers. If anyone’s sent us anything in the mail, it probably won’t turn up until tomorrow at the earliest. Seems to be par for the course with the post these days.’
‘So?’ Bäckström asked. ‘Is there anything juicy for us to get our teeth into?’
Unfortunately not, according to Lewin. Just the usual. Agitated citizens lamenting the general decline of society, and crime in particular. The usual know-alls wanting to tell the police what to do, their expertise usually acquired from watching crime series on television. And obviously a fair number of clairvoyants, visionaries and mystics wanting to share their visions, premonitions, general predictions, intuitions and vibrations.
‘Nothing specific, nothing at all for us to get our teeth into?’ Bäckström persisted.
‘Some of them were extremely specific,’ Lewin said. ‘The only problem is that they seem to have got everything mixed up.’
‘Give us some examples,’ Bäckström said.
‘Certainly,’ Lewin said, looking down at his papers. ‘We’ve got someone who was friends with Linda in high school. She’s one hundred per cent sure, in her words, that she talked to Linda at a concert in Borgholm on Öland that evening. Some group called Gyllene Tider were apparently playing there on their summer tour.’
Borgholm, Bäckström thought. That must be a good hundred and fifty kilometres from Växjö.
‘The only problem is that the concert was on Friday night, and by then the victim was already at the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Lund,’ Lewin sighed. ‘So that witness hadn’t even read the evening papers. And then there’s this one.’ He was leafing through the bundle of tip-offs in front of him. ‘One of Växjö’s young talents has been in touch with one of the uniformed officers here to say that he saw Linda five hundred metres west of the Town Hotel early on Friday morning. On Norra Esplanaden, close to the council offices, if I’ve u
nderstood it correctly.’
‘So what’s wrong with that, then?’ Bäckström wondered.
‘The problem with him,’ Lewin replied, ‘apart from his general credibility, is that this is supposed to have been at around four o’clock in the morning, on a road in completely the wrong direction from where she was going, and in the company of – and these words are the witness’s and not my own – a fucking big nigger.’
‘In that case I think I know who the witness is,’ one of the local officers towards the end of the table said. ‘There are a lot of evil dark-skinned people in that young man’s world.’
‘I realized as much when I read his criminal record,’ Lewin said with a half-smile.
‘Okay,’ Bäckström said. ‘Questions? Opinions? Suggestions?’ Not a single one with anything sensible to say, he thought as he saw the headshakes round the table. ‘Let’s get going, then,’ he said, standing up with a jolt. ‘What are you waiting for? Don’t just sit there. Go and do some work. I want the name of the man who did this by lunchtime at the latest. If you give me something good I’ll get cake to go with the afternoon coffee.’ Happy faces round the table. They’re like children, Bäckström thought. There was no way he was going to waste his hard-earned money on any damn cake.
Equipped with paper and pen, he sought out the seclusion of an empty interview room to think in peace and quiet. He switched on the red sign, closed the door and dropped the massive fart he had been nursing throughout the meeting. Finally alone, he thought, waving the worst of the previous evening’s fug away from him.
Okay, so she gets home to her flat just after three o’clock. Doesn’t look like anyone followed her, or had arranged to meet her at the flat. But the perpetrator shows up in the story shortly thereafter. Things go rapidly downhill and, considering the way the crime scene looked, the little psychopath must have had his hands full for at least an hour and a half. So in all likelihood she died some time between half past four and just before five, he thought.
He goes out into the bathroom to shower the worst of it off. Then the newspaper gets delivered at about five o’clock and he imagines someone’s on their way into the flat. So he throws on the essentials and jumps out of the bedroom window, and by then it’s just after five o’clock. So where does that get us? he thought. Bäckström looked at his watch and started to count forward from early Friday morning to Sunday morning. It would soon be two and a half days since she died. The bastard could be on the moon by now, he thought crossly. He gathered his papers and decided to go back out and give the members of the team a bit of a kick.
On the other hand, he thought when he emerged into the corridor, it would be pretty stupid to do that on an empty stomach, and seeing as the staff canteen was open even though it was Sunday, because of what had happened, it probably made sense to get a bite to eat.
Småland stuffed potato dumplings, he thought greedily as he inspected the menu. That would do nicely. He rounded the meal off with a large cup of coffee and an almond bun, quietly reading the evening papers he had pinched from the hotel but hadn’t yet had a chance to look at. No new facts, Bäckström thought as he sipped the hot coffee. Mostly speculation, making a lot of waves.
One of the papers had launched a new variation on the classic police angle. The perpetrator was probably a violent criminal who hated the police and ‘harboured an irrational hatred of the victim because she worked for the police’, as one of the members of the paper’s own panel of experts put it. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, they were always quick to put together a fine selection of the most confused minds in the country.
Yeah, yeah, Bäckström thought, chewing on the almond bun. Must be some lecturer she had at police college in Växjö. Maybe that crazy woman in charge of debriefing. The semen didn’t necessarily rule her out: it could be a cunningly laid plan to mislead them.
According to the other main evening paper and their experts, the case was entirely different. It was actually about a serial killer with an obsessive hatred of women and an almost ritualistic method of carrying out his crimes. This sounded pretty much like his dear colleague Olsson, Bäckström thought. Where the hell do they get it all from?
There were also some elements common to both of the papers’ accounts. It was a thin connection, but it was there. Another expert, one who espoused the police angle in the first paper, didn’t think it impossible that they were dealing with a specific type of serial killer who was targeting police officers in particular, because uniforms were what turned him on sexually. His special ‘trigger’, according to the paper.
They must all have access to the same insane website where they could recharge their stock of cretinous ideas, Bäckström thought. He was about to put the papers down when he caught sight of an article that made him pause: an interview with yet another expert, professor of something called forensic psychiatry at Sankt Sigfrid’s psychiatric hospital in Växjö, with a big picture of him. He gave a long description of the torture wounds that the police had discovered on the body. Either he had seen the same pictures that the core members of the investigative team had received the previous evening, Bäckström thought, or one of the people who had seen them had described them to him in exhaustive detail.
Even the professor with the remarkable insight into the workings of the investigation appeared to subscribe to what could probably be called the main thread in the case. They were dealing with a serial killer. Considering the brutality of this case, he must have committed similarly brutal crimes in the past, and there was a high probability of his doing so again within the near future. In fact it was almost certain.
At the same time, he was ‘no ordinary sexual sadist with highly developed sexual fantasies’, as the professor’s incompetent colleagues appeared to believe. Still less was he someone who got turned on by trainee female police officers, either in or out of uniform. No, this was a case of a ‘severely mentally disturbed’, possibly even a ‘chaotic’, perpetrator. He was also ‘a young man from an immigrant background who had been exposed to violent and traumatic experiences in his childhood or youth’. For instance, he might himself have been tortured or subjected to serious sexual abuse. When he reached this point in his reading, Bäckström quickly drank the last of his coffee, put the paper in his pocket and went to find the investigation’s press spokeswoman.
Five minutes later he was sitting in her office. He passed her the paper, open at the article. ‘Have you seen this?’
‘I understand what you mean,’ she said. ‘I read it this morning, and my reaction was the same as yours. This little boat’s got a serious leak. Mind you, trying to look on the positive side, perhaps it isn’t so odd that this particular expert is involved. I take it you’re aware of Sankt Sigfrid’s? It’s the big psychiatric hospital here in town and it houses some of the very worst offenders, who’ve been sentenced to secure treatment. Our friend the professor is a regular lecturer both at the police college and here at the station. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard him speak.’
‘Really,’ Bäckström said. ‘Is he worth listening to, then?’ ‘I’d say so,’ she said. ‘He gets things right pretty often, in my opinion.’
Maybe it would be worth having a word with the bastard, Bäckström thought. That business about a young, foreign perpetrator didn’t sound so crazy. Besides, the victim probably had a bit of a weakness for that sort of bloke. Maybe to the extent that she let him in when he knocked on her door.
When Bäckström returned to the large room where the investigation was based, he adopted his field-marshal expression and surveyed his troops.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what are you waiting for? I’ve had my lunch, and now I want a good solid name.’ To underline his point, he patted his bulging stomach without even thinking about it.
‘You can have some names from me. We’ve just finished putting together the first list of door-to-door enquiries,’ Knutsson said, waving a bundle of printouts.
‘Anything good, then?’
Bäckström took the papers and went to sit in his usual chair.
‘Well, there are a lot of names, at any rate,’ Knutsson said, sitting down beside him. ‘Seventy-nine, to be precise, and that’s just the neighbours in the immediate vicinity, people who knew the victim and the likely suspects here in Växjö.’
‘Tell me,’ Bäckström said. ‘Give me something to work on.’
‘Take it easy,’ Knutsson said. ‘I was getting to that.’
13
KNUTSSON AND HIS team had begun by going through the victim’s family, friends and acquaintances to see if any of the many registers that the police had at their disposal had anything interesting to say about any of them. The fact that they didn’t hardly came as a surprise. About a third of the twenty or so names were Linda’s colleagues from police college, and you didn’t get accepted there if you had a criminal record.
‘As unimpeachable as our victim,’ Bäckström declared happily, leaning back in his chair with his hands clasped over his stomach.
‘In terms of the registers, at least,’ Knutsson said judiciously.
‘Seeing as we’re going to be getting the perpetrator’s DNA profile, I want samples from the lot of them. Preferably voluntarily, and mainly to get them out of our investigation as quickly as possible.’
‘That shouldn’t be a problem,’ Knutsson said.
‘No, it certainly shouldn’t,’ Bäckström agreed. Honest people had nothing to fear from their DNA, he thought.
The second category was the opposite of the first, in that its members all had comprehensive files in the police registers. With the help of their computers, Knutsson and his team had managed to dredge up about a hundred misogynists, street-fighters, rapists and other madmen with connections to Växjö and the surrounding area. Then they had written off the ones who were already in prison or had other reasonable alibis. That left eighty people lined up for a more thorough and time-consuming examination. Ten of these were of particular interest, because they were receiving treatment or had been treated in the past at Sankt Sigfrid’s hospital for serious sexual offences.