by Leif Persson
The clothes Linda was wearing on the night she was murdered had also helped the forensics experts to map the course of events.
‘According to witnesses who met her in the club, she was wearing the following,’ Enoksson said. ‘A pair of leather sandals with a slight heel and leather straps fastened above the ankle. A pair of low-cut and fairly loose dark blue linen trousers. An untucked linen blouse of the same colour, collarless and with five buttons. Over the blouse a black velvet waistcoat with black embroidery and blue pearls and sequins. She was also carrying a small rucksack made of blue velvet, with straps and detailing in blue suede, which could also be used as an ordinary handbag by adjusting the straps. Okay, so where have I got to? Ah, yes.’ He scratched his head. ‘Underneath she was wearing a pair of black pants and a black bra. So, a pair of shoes, a rucksack, and a total of five items of clothing. And now I’m getting to the real point.’
Linda seemed to have taken off her shoes and bag as soon as she got through the door. The shoes were kicked off and left on the floor beside the doormat, and her bag was leaning against the wall half a metre away. The velvet waistcoat, linen trousers and blouse were found in the living room, neatly folded in a pile on the arm of one of the armchairs. The waistcoat at the bottom, then the trousers, with the blouse on top.
Her pants and bra were on the floor of the bedroom. The pants were intact, albeit turned partly inside out, and were found on the floor on the side of the bed closest to the living room. Her bra was on the other side of the bed. The catch at the back had been undone, but the shoulder-straps were both broken.
‘The probable explanation is that the perpetrator took it off after tying her hands behind her back,’ Enoksson said.
The next item on Enoksson’s agenda was Linda’s jewellery. According to various witnesses questioned by the police, she was wearing a wristwatch on her left arm, a thin gold bracelet on the same arm, three different rings on her left hand, and one on the little finger of her right hand.
‘The watch plus five items of jewellery makes six in total,’ Enoksson said. ‘All six items were found in the big ceramic bowl on the coffee table in the living room.’ He clicked to bring up an image on the overhead projector showing the coffee table and the ceramic bowl. ‘Our interpretation is that she probably took her watch and jewellery off herself. Exactly as we think she did with the waistcoat, trousers and blouse.
‘If you look a bit closer at the ceramic bowl on the table,’ Enoksson went on, clicking to bring a close-up on to the screen, ‘you’ll see her mobile phone as well. Which leads us to my next point: the contents of her bag.’
Inside Linda’s bag they had found everything that might be expected to be in a bag like that. A total of one hundred and seven different objects. Her pocket diary, a leather wallet containing her ID card from police college, her driving licence, four small photographs of her father, mother and two of her female friends, her own visiting cards and four from other people, a bank card and various other plastic cards: membership cards, a VIP card for Grace, and another one for Café Opera in Stockholm.
The wallet also contained money: six hundred kronor in Swedish notes, thirty-two kronor and fifty öre in coins, and sixty-five Euros, making a total equivalent to approximately one thousand, two hundred kronor. There was also a small bag containing lipstick, eyeshadow and other items of makeup, a bag of mint throat sweets, a lip salve, a small plastic container of dental floss, a toothpick in a plastic sleeve, a small matchbox containing twelve matches, and various till and credit card receipts from different bars and shops. As well as the usual bits of fluff and other fragments that a careful forensics officer always finds at the bottom of any bag, no matter how fastidious its owner might have been.
‘Talking of makeup, she didn’t take hers off, which could be of some interest in terms of the sequence of events. She was still wearing it when she was found later that morning. Lipstick, eyeshadow and something I’ve forgotten the name of. Seems to have been her own. The thing I’ve forgotten is in the report. Nothing unusual.’
Finally, the bag also contained a key ring with a number of keys that matched the front door and various other locks at her father’s house. A car key, to a two-year-old Volvo S40 that Linda had been given as a graduation present from her father. Neatly parked in one of the private spaces right in front of the building. It was currently in the compound of the police station, but a forensic examination hadn’t come up with anything.
‘Well,’ Enoksson said. ‘Some of you are probably wondering about the key to her mother’s flat? That’s in the bowl on the coffee table as well.’
He showed another close-up of the ceramic bowl, and he had added a little red arrow pointing to an ordinary door key on a white metal key ring. The simple explanation for this – according to Enoksson – was that she usually kept the key to her mother’s flat in her pocket, whereas the bulkier key ring with the keys to her father’s house was kept in the bag.
‘To round off the story of the bag,’ Enoksson said, ‘there doesn’t seem to be anything missing from it. And it doesn’t look like anyone went through her things. So theft doesn’t seem to have been a motive. Money in her wallet, jewellery in the ceramic bowl, and her watch – one of those gold and steel Rolexes that her father apparently gave her on her birthday when she came of age, supposed to be worth about sixty thousand.’
After finishing with the contents of Linda’s bag, Enoksson went on to account for the various items the perpetrator used while he was raping, torturing and murdering his victim. This meant a Stanley knife and five different men’s neckties. There were pictures of each of these, and it looked like the perpetrator had been fortunate enough to find all of them in the flat after he got there.
The forensics team had found the knife on the floor of the bedroom, but before it got there it had been in a red plastic bucket on the draining board in the kitchen, along with other decorating tools. An ordinary Stanley knife, used for cutting wallpaper, fabric or floor tiles. A single-sided knife with a slanted and adjustable blade, capable of cutting to a depth of approximately one centimetre, and with a sharp point at the end of the blade.
‘This is what he used to cut her,’ Enoksson said. ‘Her blood is on the blade and handle, but the perpetrator’s prints aren’t. It looks like he wiped it on the sheet he used to cover her.’
The five neckties had been at the top of a box out in the hall. Linda’s mother was clearing out some old bedclothes, towels and clothes that were going to be thrown away.
The five men’s neckties were of the older, slimmer design, originally bought by the victim’s father. For some unexplained reason they had ended up with her mother after the divorce and were about to be disposed off, until the perpetrator decided to use them to bind and strangle their daughter.
Three of them were still on Linda’s body when she was found. The first was wound tightly round her neck, with the knot at the back to make things easier for the perpetrator, who seemed to have sat astride her thighs when he strangled her. The second had been used to tie her hands behind her back. The third was tied round her right ankle. A fourth was crumpled up on the floor. It held traces of Linda’s saliva and marks from her teeth. That was the one he had used to gag her, and presumably removed after he had strangled her. The fifth tie was fastened round the bottom end of the bed frame, and to judge from the evidence it had been used to secure Linda’s left ankle.
‘A very sad story,’ Enoksson concluded, shutting off the projector.
‘How are we doing with other evidence?’ Bäckström asked. ‘Hair, fingerprints, other remnants and fibres, all the stuff you lot usually find in places like this?’
There was a fair amount, according to Enoksson. They had found ten different strands of hair that had been sent to the National Forensics Lab. Various sorts: ordinary head hair, body hair and pubic hair.
‘Some of that’s bound to come from our perpetrator,’ Enoksson said. ‘But they haven’t finished the analysis yet. We took
the easiest bits first.’
Same thing with fingerprints, other traces and fibres. Assuming that they found the right person, a considerable quantity of the evidence could be tied specifically to him.
‘Considering what we’ve already got, that’s almost overkill,’ Enoksson said. ‘But better too much than too little. Mind you, sometimes I think we suffer from a sort of evidential hysteria in this country. Probably thanks to all those programmes people see on television.’
You’re a proper little philosopher you are, Enok, Bäckström thought. ‘Have you got anything else for us?’
Enoksson looked hesitant. Shook his head.
‘Don’t sit there holding anything back,’ Bäckström said. ‘Out with it, Enok. Unburden your heart. Help your hardworking colleagues slaving away on the factory floor.’
‘Well,’ Enoksson said, ‘as far as that goes, I think I and my colleagues in forensics have done our bit. When I spoke to the National Lab about our DNA . . . but this is a long way from being certain, because research in this area is still in its . . . well, in its infancy, really, so there’s a serious risk that this could be wrong, but . . .’
‘Enoksson,’ Bäckström said sternly. ‘What did the bloke at the lab say?’
‘It was a she, actually,’ Enoksson said. ‘Well, in her opinion there are certain things that suggest that our DNA isn’t typical Nordic DNA. There’s some evidence to suggest that it comes from a perpetrator with a different background, if I can put it like that.’
Surprise, surprise, Bäckström thought, but he contented himself with a nod.
After a break for coffee and a bit of leg-stretching – Enoksson’s presentation had taken almost two hours – the medical officer took over. Nothing he had to say in any way contradicted what the police had managed to work out on their own, although he stressed that these were just his preliminary findings. His final report wouldn’t be with them for another couple of weeks, when all the analysis would be complete and he had had time to reflect on the results.
‘But what I can tell you at this stage,’ the medical officer said punctiliously as he leafed through his papers, ‘is that the victim died of asphyxiation through strangulation. Evidence from the post-mortem indicates that she was strangled with the tie round her neck, and that death occurred some time between three o’clock and seven o’clock, in the early hours of Friday morning.’
Sigh, Bäckström thought.
‘And the knife-wounds found on her left and right buttocks, according to the post-mortem results, are a good match for the knife in question.’
Sigh and groan, Bäckström thought.
‘Similar wounds have become more common in recent years in connection to this sort of crime. The popular description of them as torture wounds isn’t entirely misleading, even if people in my profession ought to refrain from speculating about a perpetrator’s possible motivations. There are a number of previous cases in which the perpetrators have used knives or other similar weapons, or lit cigarettes. We’ve also had a couple of cases where a taser has been used . . .’
And nobody cares about that right now, Bäckström thought.
‘The fact that there was considerable bleeding from the wounds, considering their nature, I mean, suggests that the victim was alive when the injuries were inflicted, and she probably put up considerable resistance. The body pumps adrenalin, and the blood pressure goes up significantly.’
Well, that’s always something, Bäckström thought. Our perpetrator isn’t crazy enough to torture a corpse.
‘The marks on her wrists and ankles are a good match with the ties secured in the forensic examination . . .’
Who’d have thought it? Bäckström thought, glancing at his watch.
‘Well,’ he said quarter of an hour later as he gazed imperiously round his troops. ‘What are you sitting here for? Get out there and find the bastard.’
22
THAT EVENING, AFTER dinner in the hotel, Bäckström gathered his core team in his room to discuss the case in peace and quiet without a load of rural sheriffs trying to impose their cretinous opinions.
‘If we take this point by point, maybe you could take notes, Eva?’ Bäckström said, turning to the only woman in the group. What the hell’s the point of scrawny women? he thought.
‘Ready, boss,’ Svanström twittered, holding up her notepad and pen.
‘Okay, point by point,’ Bäckström said. ‘How did he get in?’ And she’s ingratiating, he thought.
‘She let him in,’ Rogersson sighed. His mind seemed to be elsewhere. ‘Just after she got home he rang on the door, and she let him in. It’s not just someone she knows, it’s someone she likes.’
‘Or trusts, at any rate,’ Thorén said. ‘Or at least isn’t scared about letting in.’
‘Mind you, he might well have tricked her,’ Knutsson said.
‘Are you completely stupid, Erik?’ Rogersson said, glaring at Knutsson. ‘You too, Thorén,’ he said, glowering at him as well. ‘She’s planning to go to bed. It’s three o’clock in the morning. The first thing he does is take off his shoes and put them in the rack. I don’t think we’re talking about dear little Gross wanting to borrow a bit of Nescafé.’
‘On an entirely different subject,’ said Bäckström, who had been struck by the same thought that was probably troubling Rogersson, ‘how about a little evening beer?’ If it comes to the crunch, I can always put it on expenses, he thought.
For once they all seemed to be in agreement. The age of miracles didn’t seem to be quite at an end either, because Thorén and Knutsson offered to get some of the supplies they had in their rooms.
‘We bought a whole case on Friday, but haven’t had time to drink any,’ Thorén explained.
They’re both completely mad, Bäckström thought.
‘Okay,’ he said five minutes later, licking the froth from his top lip. ‘So what do you think, Jan?’ He nodded at Lewin, who also seemed to have his mind elsewhere. Pull yourself together, you randy bastard, Bäckström thought.
‘I agree with Rogersson,’ Lewin said. ‘It was someone she knew and liked. I don’t think they planned to meet, either. He just turned up unannounced.’
‘I agree with Janne,’ Svanström said. ‘Someone she really likes just turns up out of the blue.’
And who the fuck asked you? Bäckström thought.
‘So how did he know she was at home?’ Thorén said.
‘Her car was parked outside, maybe he saw lights on inside the flat, maybe he was just trying his luck.’ Lewin shrugged.
‘Okay,’ Thorén said, apparently prepared to negotiate. ‘But I still think he tricked her.’
‘Considering the way it ended, you mean?’ Rogersson said, now sounding more ironic than annoyed. ‘In that case, I agree with you entirely. I don’t think Linda reckoned it was going to end the way it did when she let him in.’
‘So what happens in the living room?’ Bäckström said. They’re like children, he thought. Squabble, squabble, squabble.
‘She takes her clothes off, he takes his off. Then they get started,’ Rogersson said. ‘Entirely voluntarily, if you ask me. She starts with a basic handjob. He comes all over the sofa, after all, and it doesn’t look like they found any of her saliva.’
‘Hang on,’ Thorén said, stopping the flow by holding up his hands. ‘We don’t know that. Maybe she just wanted to sit down and talk for a while.’
‘Exactly,’ Knutsson said. ‘He says he wants a glass of water, goes out to the kitchen, and sees the knife. He goes back and says he’s had enough of talking.’
‘Fuck, that’s complicated,’ Rogersson sighed. ‘What’s wrong with a bit of voluntary sex?’
‘I’m inclined to agree with Rogersson again,’ Lewin said. ‘Neatly folded clothes, the fact that she probably took the key to the flat out of her trouser or waistcoat pocket before folding them over the edge of the armchair. That’s not the sort of thing our perpetrator would have done, or something she’d ha
ve thought of doing if she had a knife at her throat.’
‘I agree with you, Janne,’ Svanström said.
‘But he does seem to have been in more of a hurry than her,’ Knutsson said. ‘We can agree on that, can’t we? He pulls off his trousers, drops his pants on the floor. But the girl, Linda, takes it much more slowly.’
‘Maybe she was trying to get him excited,’ Rogersson said with a shrug. ‘Considering what happened when they ended up in her mum’s bed, I’d say she succeeded beyond all expectation.’
None of the others said anything. Knutsson and Thorén contented themselves with just looking sceptical. Lewin seemed mainly interested in the ceiling of Bäckström’s room, while Svanström was busy making notes.
‘Do you mean she went along with that as well?’ Bäckström asked. ‘That it was some sort of sex game that got out of hand?’ Even though she seems so straitlaced, he thought.
‘The first thing that happens in the bedroom could easily be normal intercourse,’ Rogersson said. ‘According to our esteemed medical colleague, she didn’t have any significant injuries in or around her vagina. I don’t think it’s out of the question that he tricked her into putting on a couple of the ties without her objecting. Either then or later.’
‘Then what happens?’ Bäckström asked. Rogge’s good, he thought. Even though he drinks like he worked for our colleagues in Tallinn.
‘Then I think things get way out of hand,’ Rogersson said. ‘When he decides to take her up the arse. But by then it’s too late. Properly tied up, gagged so she can’t scream, then out with the knife to get her to do what he says. And that’s when she gets the injuries that our esteemed medical colleague described in such detail. Small tears to the anus, scratches round her neck, on her upper arms, wrists and ankles. When he’s pulling her about and she’s struggling to get free.’
‘The inhibitor in our perpetrator’s brain has gone,’ Bäckström said.
‘Every single fucking fuse in that bastard has blown,’ Rogersson said with feeling. ‘By the way, is there any more beer?’