Linda - As In The Linda Murder

by Leif Persson

  Living somewhere like this would do nicely, Enoksson thought as they walked into the entrance hall of the manor house where Linda lived with her father. Or used to live, he thought. When she wasn’t in town staying with her mother because she was working late or wanted to go out and have fun in the centre of Växjö.

  ‘Henning Wallin,’ Linda’s father said as he came to meet them. He merely nodded at them, and didn’t seem to notice Olsson’s outstretched hand. ‘Linda’s father. But you know that already.’

  She took after her father, Enoksson thought. Tall, thin build, blond, and in spite of the drawn look to his face he looked considerably younger than his sixty-five years.

  ‘Thanks for letting us come,’ Olsson said.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t understand what you’re doing here,’ Henning Wallin said.

  ‘It’s a purely routine procedure, you understand,’ Olsson explained.

  ‘Of course,’ Henning Wallin said. ‘I realize that, and if I want to know anything else I suppose I can always read the evening papers. You wanted to see Linda’s room? Here’s the key.’ He handed it to Enoksson. ‘The last door on the lake side of the corridor down there,’ he said, tilting his head in that direction. ‘Lock up when you leave, and I want the key back.’

  ‘You haven’t—’ Olsson began.

  ‘If you need me, I’ll be in my office,’ Henning Wallin said.

  ‘Just what I was going to ask,’ Olsson said. ‘You haven’t got a couple of minutes?’

  ‘Two minutes,’ Wallin said. Then for some reason he looked at his watch, before heading upstairs to the first floor, without looking back, and with Olsson two steps behind him.

  The door to Linda’s room was closed and locked. Probably by her father, who had given them the key. The curtains over the two windows facing the lake were closed, and the room was in semi-darkness.

  ‘What do you think about drawing the curtains?’ Enoksson’s colleague said.

  ‘Okay, there’s not much point us bothering with the electrics,’ Enoksson declared. Because someone’s already been here and cleaned up, he thought.

  ‘Linda had quite a bit more space than all my kids put together,’ his colleague said as he opened the curtains and light flooded the room. ‘And it looks like she kept it tidy too,’ he added. ‘My eldest daughter’s room doesn’t usually look like this.’

  ‘Yes,’ Enoksson said. ‘Her father’s supposed to have some old housekeeper, so we’ll need to talk to her.’ Not just tidy, he thought. The wide bed could well have been made up with fresh sheets, and Linda’s desk was almost pedantically neat. The cushions on the sofa were arranged exactly like the photographs in interior design magazines. This is no longer Linda’s room, Enoksson thought. It’s a mausoleum to her memory.

  ‘Well, did you find anything interesting?’ Olsson asked in the car two hours later, on the way back to the police station.

  ‘How do you mean?’ Enoksson asked.

  ‘Well, anything personal, I suppose,’ Olsson said vaguely. ‘She doesn’t seem to have had a journal, according to her dad. At least not that he knew of,’ he added.

  ‘No, not that he knew of,’ Enoksson said. ‘I realize that.’

  ‘And I find it very hard to believe that he’d lie about something like that,’ Olsson said. ‘I dare say the simple answer is that she didn’t. I’ve got two kids, and neither of them keeps a journal. Did you check her computer, by the way?’

  How does he keep it up? Enoksson thought.

  ‘Actually we did,’ his colleague replied, since Enoksson didn’t seem to have heard the question. ‘We did check her computer. We’ve checked for prints and looked at the hard drive, so that’s done.’

  ‘So did you find anything interesting?’ Olsson persisted.

  ‘In the computer, you mean, boss?’ Enoksson’s colleague said with a smirk, seeing as Olsson was safely hidden in the back seat.

  ‘Yes, I mean in her computer.’

  ‘No,’ Enoksson said. ‘Nothing interesting there either. Will you excuse me for a moment, Bengt,’ he said, pulling out his mobile to call his wife, but mainly to shut his boss up.

  ‘Well, Enok,’ Bäckström said, nodding encouragingly at Enoksson. ‘Did you find a journal?’

  ‘Nooo,’ Enoksson replied with a thin smile.

  ‘And her dad didn’t even think she had one?’

  ‘His very words,’ Enoksson agreed. ‘He suggested that we ask Linda’s mother. He had no intention of doing so. He’s hardly said a word to her since the divorce ten years ago, and before that they seem to have done little but argue.’

  ‘Yes,’ Bäckström said with feeling. ‘Women can be remarkably difficult.’

  ‘Not my wife,’ Enoksson said with a smile. ‘So you’re speaking for yourself, Bäckström.’

  Well, who else is going to, Bäckström thought.

  In the afternoon the personnel office up in Stockholm called Bäckström. Considering that the weekend was upon them, they wanted to point out that both Bäckström and Rogersson were close to the ceiling for overtime.

  ‘Just thought we should let you know before the weekend,’ the personnel assistant said. ‘So you don’t end up working without getting paid if all hell breaks loose.’

  ‘Believe it or not, we arrest people whether it’s a weekday or the weekend,’ Bäckström said. Unlike you and all the other lazy bureaucratic fuckers.

  ‘Surely nothing happens at the weekend? And it’s summer, the sun’s shining,’ the personnel woman persisted. ‘So take some time off, Bäckström. Why don’t you go swimming?’

  ‘Thanks for the tip,’ Bäckström said, and hung up. Swimming, he thought. I can’t even remember how to swim.

  Rogersson, on the other hand, had no objections.

  ‘I was thinking of taking a couple of days off anyway,’ he explained. ‘Thought I might take the car and head back to Stockholm. Come along – we can go out on the town. I suspect the lager tastes a fuck of a lot better in Stockholm than it does in this shithole.’

  That’s because you’re not getting it for nothing any more, Bäckström thought. ‘I think I’ll stay,’ he said. ‘Mind you, you could do me a favour.’

  ‘What do you mean, a favour?’ Rogersson said, glaring at him suspiciously.

  ‘Here are the keys to my flat,’ Bäckström said, handing them over before Rogersson had time to raise serious objections. ‘If you could pop in and take care of Egon. Give him a bit of food and so on. It’s all on the side of the pot. It’s important that you follow the instructions.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Rogersson said. ‘Do you want me to give him your love, sit down and have a chat with him, maybe take him out for a change of scenery?’

  ‘A bit of food will do fine,’ Bäckström said.

  Once he had got back to his hotel room and restored his hydration levels, he called Carin. Strangely enough she didn’t answer, even though she had called him several times during the day, and he wasn’t the sort who left messages on people’s answer machines. Instead he had a couple more beers, interspersed with a few crafty shorts, to help him think things through. In the absence of any better ideas, he eventually made his way down to the bar. Even his colleagues were notable by their absence. Hans and Fritz were probably sitting in one of their rooms discussing the case, while little Svanström probably had her legs wrapped round Lewin’s waist, thinking about other matters entirely. All the things they have in their little heads, Bäckström thought, then ordered a large cognac to help him think even better.

  At roughly the same time as Bäckström was trying to improve his thinking with the help of fermented and distilled grapes, a memorial event in memory of Linda Wallin took place. A week after her death, the day she would have turned twenty-one if she had still been alive. A couple of hundred citizens of Växjö walked from the Town Hotel to the building where she was murdered, the route that had been the end of her earthly wandering. It wasn’t the season for torches, but they had created a memorial garden o
utside the door to the building, with candles and flowers and a large portrait of the victim. The district governor made a short speech. Her parents were far too upset to attend, but a number of police officers who were working on the case took part in the procession, and considerably more were making sure that they and the other mourners weren’t disturbed. Bäckström and his colleagues had declined to take part, purely as a result of a policy decision that had been taken some years before. Members of the National Crime Unit should restrict themselves solely to activity motivated by their work. More or less as the short ceremony came to an end, Bäckström left the hotel bar.

  He returned to his room and called Carin again – still her answer machine – and just as he was putting the phone down he had the first constructive idea of the evening. It’ll just have to be a standard porno, he thought, and how the fuck am I going to manage that in the best and most discreet way, so it doesn’t end up on the bill for my room?

  It only took him four seconds to come up with the answer. Must be the cognac, he thought as he went back down to reception, borrowed the key to Rogersson’s room, threw himself on his colleague’s neatly made bed and tuned in to one of the two adult channels that seemed most promising according to the screensaver. Then he drank one of the beers he had brought with him, as well as the last of the bottle of Baltic vodka he had also brought along, plus two half-bottles of wine which for some unknown reason were cluttering up Rogersson’s minibar. This is the life, he thought, now so far gone that he had to put his hand over one eye to be able to focus on the frantic motion of the female lead’s backside on the television screen. And round about then he must have simply passed out, because when he woke up a merciless sun was beating down on his stomach, since he’d forgotten to draw the curtains. It was almost ten o’clock in the morning, and on the television screen the same backside was still bouncing about, just as it had been when he had lost consciousness the previous evening.

  After a quick shower and a change of clothes he went down to the restaurant to get some breakfast. The room was practically empty. The only people in there, at the back in their usual corner, were his colleagues Lewin and little Svanström. Where the fuck have the vultures gone? Bäckström thought as he piled up a serious helping of scrambled egg and sausages. Bearing in mind the previous evening’s events, he complemented this with a few anchovy fillets and a handful of headache pills that the obliging hotelier had put out beside the salty fish.

  ‘Is this seat free?’ Bäckström asked, sitting down. ‘Is it just my vain hope, or did someone put out some rat poison last night?’ He gestured to all the empty tables.

  ‘If you mean the journalists, I presume you haven’t seen the news,’ Lewin said.

  ‘What?’ Bäckström speared two anchovy fillets on his fork and folllowed them with three headache pills which he rinsed down with several deep gulps of orange juice. He sighed audibly.

  ‘There was evidently some big wedding banquet last night down in Dalby outside Lund, and just as the newlyweds were about to take their first dance the bride’s ex-boyfriend showed up with an AK4. He emptied the whole magazine,’ Lewin explained.

  ‘So what happened?’ Bäckström said. Brilliant sausages they have here, he thought. The moment he put his knife in them, big pearls of fat practically leapt into his mouth.

  ‘The usual,’ Lewin said. ‘I called our colleagues in Malmö, and according to them the bride, bridegroom and bride’s mother are dead, with twenty more guests taken to hospital to be patched up. Stray bullets, shrapnel, ricochets, and various bits of flying decoration.’

  ‘Gypsies,’ Bäckström said, more as an optimistic statement than a question.

  ‘Sorry to have to disappoint you,’ Lewin said, suddenly sounding very tired. ‘Pretty much everyone involved seems to have been local. Including the gunman, who was a section leader in the territorial army. He’s still on the loose, by the way.’

  Ah well, you can’t have everything. Anyway, whatever happened to good old Swedish humour?

  ‘Anything else you’re wondering?’ Lewin added.

  ‘Where are Hans and Fritz?’

  ‘Probably at the station.’ Lewin got up and put his napkin down. ‘Eva and I have both got the day off, so we thought we’d head off to the coast for a swim.’

  ‘Good luck. Both of you,’ Bäckström said. And don’t forget to let your wife and husband and kids know how you get on, he thought.

  In the absence of anything better to do, Bäckström looked in at the office after lunch. The atmosphere was flat, but what else could he expect seeing as he wasn’t there? Knutsson and Thorén were in position in front of their computers, tapping away like two overexcited woodpeckers.

  ‘How’s it going, boys?’ he asked. After all, I’m still their boss, he thought.

  According to Knutsson, things had gone quiet for the weekend, but the DNA programme was proceeding according to plan. In total they had now taken samples from about fifty people. They had all volunteered, no one had made any fuss, and half of them had already been discounted. The experts were hard at work at the National Forensics Lab, and Linda’s murder was top of the priority list.

  ‘We’ll get the rest of the results next week,’ Thorén said. ‘And we’re gathering more all the time. We’re going to get him, especially if you’re right, Bäckström.’

  What? Bäckström thought. Of course I am. What’s the problem? ‘What are you thinking of doing this evening?’ he said. I haven’t got much fucking choice, after all, he thought.

  ‘Get a bite to eat,’ Thorén said.

  ‘Somewhere quiet,’ Knutsson clarified.

  ‘Then we were actually thinking of going to the cinema,’ Thorén said.

  ‘They’re showing a really good classic at the screen here in town,’ Knutsson explained.

  ‘Bertolucci, 1900,’ Thorén said.

  ‘Part one,’ Knutsson clarified. ‘That’s by far the best one. Part two feels a bit slow in places. What do you think, Peter?’

  They’ve got to be poofs, Bäckström thought. In spite of what they and everyone else says about all the women they’ve had, they must be poofs. Who the fuck else would come all the way to Växjö and go to the cinema?

  When Bäckström returned to the hotel, after a short stop at a terrace bar on Storgatan for two large glasses of beer, he called Rogersson on his mobile.

  ‘How’s things?’ he said.

  ‘Damn fine, if you’re asking me,’ Rogersson said. ‘But little Egon isn’t so great. Do you want the long or the short version?’

  ‘The short,’ Bäckström said. What the hell does he mean?

  ‘In that case, he’s turned up his toes. No more swimming for him.’

  ‘What the hell do you mean?’ Egon!

  ‘He was floating belly up, and when I poked him he didn’t move a fin,’ Rogersson said.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I flushed him down the toilet,’ Rogersson said. ‘What would you have done? Sent him for a post-mortem?’

  ‘But what the hell did he die of ?’ Bäckström said. He had more than enough food, after all, he thought.

  ‘Maybe he was depressed,’ Rogersson said with a chuckle.

  Bäckström spent Saturday evening holding a wake for Egon, and on Sunday he slept through breakfast and devoted his remaining energy to a late lunch. The worst of his grief had subsided, and that afternoon he made a fresh attempt to contact Carin, but all he got was the same cheerful message on her answer machine.

  What the hell’s going on, Bäckström thought, as he opened yet another of the cans of beer that he had brought with him. It’s like people don’t care about anything any more, and definitely not about a simple policeman. And that was the last can.

  26

  EARLY ON MONDAY morning, France’s national day, 14 July, the head of the National Crime Unit called the county police commissioner in Växjö.

  The county police commissioner himself had got up early, eaten breakfast and then sought o
ut the restful shade at the back of his beautiful summer house. He had unfolded a comfortable chair beside the solid stone foundations and settled down to read the morning paper in peace and quiet as he sipped on a glass of homemade raspberry cordial with plenty of ice. Down on the jetty his wife lay sunbathing, flat as a Dover sole. They’re not the same as us, the county police commissioner thought affectionately, and at that moment his mobile rang.

  ‘Nylander,’ Nylander said abruptly. ‘Have you found him yet?’

  ‘The investigation is progressing rapidly,’ the commissioner replied. ‘But when I last spoke to my colleagues, they hadn’t found him yet, no.’

  ‘There’s a maniac on the loose in Skåne armed with an automatic rifle,’ the Head of National Crime said. ‘I’ve sent all my forces down to catch him. Without any warning, we’ve hit red alert, and because you and your colleagues haven’t managed to get your arses into gear I’m going to have to redeploy them when they’re needed in Växjö.’

  ‘Yes, I hear what you’re saying,’ the commissioner said, ‘but right now it’s actually—’

  ‘Have you even bothered to check whether it could be the same man?’ HNC interrupted.

  ‘I’m not sure I quite understand what you mean.’

  ‘It’s not that bloody difficult to understand,’ Nylander growled. ‘It’s not that bloody far between Växjö and Lund, and in the world I live in, this is undeniably a remarkable coincidence.’

  ‘I’m sure someone here will have checked to see if there was any connection,’ the commissioner said. ‘But if you like—’

  ‘Is Åström there?’

  ‘Here?’ He must mean Bäckström, the commissioner thought. Although goodness knows what he’d be doing at my place in the country. ‘No, Bäckström isn’t here. I’m out in the country. I’m on my mobile.’

  ‘In the country,’ HNC said. ‘You’re out in the country?’

  ‘Yes,’ the county police commissioner began, but before he could say anything more Nylander had hung up.