Detective Inspector Huss: A Huss Investigation set in Sweden, Vol. 1

by Helen Tursten

  Irene began to feel the churning sense of emptiness that always appears in a case that isn’t solved quickly. Check and double-check all the witness statements. And check again, if you don’t find anything new. A routine job. But that’s the way you solve crimes.

  Fredrik started preparing for his presentation. He opened his notebook and coughed lightly before he began. “No one in the neighborhood says they noticed anyone suspicious on Tuesday evening. It was rainy and dark, of course, but it was only around five-thirty. No reports that anyone saw Shorty. He would have looked pretty disreputable in that neighborhood. Two meters tall and just as wide! Of course he looks disreputable wherever he is. But maybe we should ask around in the building one more time. Plus we can check up on whether Bobo was seen. He was almost as tall, but thin. Also somebody that people ought to remember.”

  The superintendent nodded absentmindedly and sighed. “All right, go ahead and ask. Although I don’t think it’ll produce anything. But we should check. Maybe Bobo or Shorty threw von Knecht off the balcony. But there’s not a shred of evidence that Shorty had any contact with Richard von Knecht, or that they had ever met. And not a single rumor about drug deals around von Knecht. I find it hard to believe that Shorty and Bobo had started speculating in stocks!”

  “You’ve got a point, Chief. But maybe we can pick up some new leads on Friday. Now that they’ve cleaned up the site, they can go into the building and start drilling von Knecht’s safe out of the wall. It’s hard because there’s a cellar under the building that they have to prop up from below. Otherwise they can’t bring in the telescopic boom and the standalone forklift. That’s heavy equipment and they don’t want it to fall into the cellar. It’ll probably take a day or two,” Fredrik concluded his report.

  “Okay. Tommy, Fredrik, and Jonny will have to plan a strategy and question Shorty. Grill him! Skip the von Knecht stuff for now and concentrate on drugs and the Hell’s Angels. Birgitta, you haven’t found any connection between Shorty and that vice president . . . what the hell kind of titles do these idiots give each other?”

  “Vice President Glenn ‘Hoffa’ Strömberg. No, I haven’t found anything yet. As for titles, they have all sorts of different ranks. There’s one who’s responsible for weapons, another who makes sure that there’s always food and booze in the clubhouse, and so forth. Lowest in the hierarchy are the girls. They have no rank at all,” Birgitta said dryly.

  Jonny sniggered and said, “A well-ordered society, where the chicks know their proper place and function!”

  Andersson shot him a dark look, so he didn’t continue his exegesis of the social structure within the Hell’s Angels. Somewhere inside the superintendent a vague uneasiness arose that the old lady in Birgitta’s building could just as well have seen Jonny’s Volvo as Bobo’s Toyota. He firmly pushed those thoughts aside.

  Birgitta clenched her jaws but ignored Jonny’s comment and continued unfazed, “We’ll find out more from the Narcs tomorrow. But I have to see if I can find the link between Shorty and Hoffa.”

  Resolutely Andersson slapped his palm on the table. “All right, now we’re moving! If you find anything of interest, I’ll be here until this evening.”

  They got up and went off to their respective tasks. Irene drew Tommy aside.

  “Please come to dinner at six. Jenny will be home. And it’s perfectly safe since Krister’s in charge of the grub.”

  IRENE WAS surprised that Sylvia von Knecht was home and answered the telephone. But Ivan Viktors had said that he was going back to Copenhagen on Sunday evening. Sylvia must not have wanted to stay alone out in Särö. Without any great enthusiasm, Sylvia agreed to let her come over and ask some questions at eleven.

  Irene tried to start her report on what had happened in Billdal, but it was slow going. She called Krister and agreed to pick him up after she visited Jimmy. She drank the rest of the coffee in the thermos and looked outside. There was a break in the rain, and a pale sun seeped through the clouds. Six degrees Celsius. A regular heat wave, compared to the temperatures in recent weeks. She quickly decided to take a walk up to Molinsgatan. It would take exactly the half hour that was left until eleven if she walked slowly. She put on her leather jacket and went out.

  TRAFFIC WAS heavy and the air thick with exhaust. The big soccer fields at Heden lay soggy and abandoned. She crossed Södra Vägen and strolled up Kristinelundsgatan. A glance in the display windows of the exclusive boutiques reminded her that she had to buy a new jacket. She had already thrown out the one that had been pissed on in Billdal without even trying to have it cleaned. The leather one she had on now was too worn. Up on Kungsportsavenyn she stopped and looked in the window of KappAhl while she discreetly buttoned up her jacket. The last part of the way she cut across Vasaparken. Behind the university she saw a gang of youths. The tall boy in the middle of the group was black. Thick Rasta dreadlocks stuck out all around his head. Her heart skipped a beat. Was there some kind of abuse going on? But all was total harmony. Coolly and completely openly, the Rasta-man handed over small plastic bags in exchange for wrinkled and sweaty bills from the youths. Ecstasy for the weekend’s rave, no doubt.

  What was the difference between Bobo Torsson’s and the Rastaman’s dope dealing? The environment, she decided. Smoky nightclubs and trendy, hip spots don’t change the fact that it’s dope being bought and sold. And that the buyers are drug-dependent, though they all vehemently deny it. She looked at the kids with sorrow. Some tried it out of curiosity, got scared, and stopped. But many of them would end up addicted. Some would manage despite great pressure to break loose from their dependence. But all of them would be forced to live with the consequences of their addiction.

  She memorized the appearance of the tall dealer so she could report him when she returned to headquarters. The Narcs’ street-dealer squad probably knew who he was.

  SYLVIA VON Knecht was haggard. For the first time she looked her age. She was walking around in an enormous gray wool sweater, knit in a pretty cable pattern, and actually wearing blue jeans, which greatly surprised Irene. Apparently she still hadn’t managed to clean up after the technical examination of the apartment. Everything looked the same as it had when Irene was there before. Big flower bouquets with cards of condolence were placed randomly in the apartment. The heavy floral scent seemed to presage the upcoming funeral. The pleasant fragrance had a rank undertone; the water needed to be changed.

  They went upstairs to the airy library and sat down on the leather sofa. Sylvia nervously bit a torn nail. She raised her face, which bore no makeup, and looking at Irene said in a thin voice, “Can you imagine? I miss him so much! Every time the phone rings or someone laughs down on the street, I think it’s him. Sometimes I imagine he’s going to walk through the door and laugh, pleased that he was able to fool everyone. I’m wearing his sweater. It smells like . . . him.”

  She sobbed and her curtain of hair fell across her face. Irene didn’t quite know how to approach the whole subject. How did things actually stand with Ivan Viktors? She decided to start with the keys.

  “We found the key ring. And Pirjo,” she said by way of introduction.

  The newspapers would be informed at the press conference later that afternoon that the victim on Berzeliigatan was Pirjo. They hadn’t mentioned it earlier, for “technical investigative reasons.”

  Sylvia started and said sharply, “You found the key ring? Who had it?”

  “It was sitting in the door at Berzeliigatan. The door to the office apartment.”

  “Well, I never! Here I changed the lock on the apartment and spent more than two thousand kronor for nothing! Why couldn’t you have told me about this earlier? Thank God I didn’t bother changing them up at Kärringnäset!”

  “We weren’t completely sure that they were the right keys . . . for technical investigative reasons.”

  “And Pirjo! Where has that slob been hiding? I want her to come over here right away!”

  “Sorry. She’s dead. She was blow
n up in the explosion on Berzeliigatan a week ago.”

  It was cruel and brutally frank, but Irene wanted to see how Sylvia would react.

  “You . . . you’re lying . . . it can’t be . . .”

  The effect was not pretty. Sylvia shrank, shriveling up right before her eyes. Once again Sylvia’s hot-tempered and slightly hysterical manner had provoked Irene to venture too far out on thin ice. Trying to smooth things over, she said, “It took several days for the identification. She was so badly burned. We got hold of the dental X rays and thanks to—”

  “What was she doing at Berzeliigatan?”

  Sylvia’s voice sounded slightly hollow and her eyes reflected outright terror. She was scared. That hadn’t been evident when her husband was murdered. But now she was scared to death, on the verge of panic. Irene tried to sound calm but still authoritative.

  “We don’t know. It’s one of the questions I was thinking of asking you. First and foremost, we’d like to know where she got hold of the spare keys. If I understood you correctly, you didn’t know about this spare-key ring?”

  “No, I didn’t know about any spare-key ring. Except for the one we have here.”

  “We’ve discovered that the keys were made late this summer. Richard went to Mister Minit on Avenyn to have them made.”

  Sylvia was breathing heavily. Her eyes glistened. She avoided looking at Irene now. Irene was even more convinced that Sylvia knew something or had her suspicions.

  “I don’t know anything about those keys,” said Sylvia firmly. Her voice sounded steadier, but she had to press her hands together hard to prevent them from shaking.

  Irene felt that she couldn’t let Sylvia go yet. There was something here. She decided to press her a little more and reformulated her question. “So you don’t have any idea what he wanted the keys for, or if he gave them to anyone else?”

  “No.”

  She was lying. She was lying! But Irene didn’t dare go out on the ice again. Not yet.

  “The bomb that blew up the building detonated when Pirjo opened the outer door to your husband’s office. She opened the door using the key ring. We found her behind the door,” she said in a neutral tone.

  “But the papers talked about a missing young man!”

  “That’s correct. He was found yesterday, a little farther up in the remains of the building. Two people died in the fire.”

  Sylvia got up from the sofa and started pacing aimlessly around the room. She wrung her hands and sighed quietly. She was incredibly shaken, Irene could see that. But why? If she knew who had the keys, why wouldn’t she speak? Irene tried again.

  “You don’t have the slightest suspicion who might have received those keys?”

  “No, I told you that!”

  The ice was creaking and cracking. Best to look for less dangerous areas.

  “Did you know any of the other tenants in the building on Berzeliigatan?”

  She shook her head in reply.

  “Do you recognize the name Bo-Ivar, or Bobo, Torsson?”

  Sylvia frowned and actually seemed to think about it.

  “The name sounds familiar. Wait . . . he was the photographer who rented the apartment above Richard’s. He’s one of Charlotte’s old acquaintances.”

  Irene was so dumbfounded that she almost lost her composure. But she managed to assume a nearly neutral tone of voice when she asked, “An old acquaintance? What do you mean?”

  “She worked for him as a photo model. It didn’t amount to much, that modeling. Nothing Charlotte undertakes is ever successful.”

  “Did Torsson already have his photo studio on Berzeliigatan when Charlotte was working for him?”

  “No. She recommended him to Richard. Richard thought it would be practical to have the same tenant in both apartments.”

  “When was this?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe three years ago.” Sylvia wrapped her arms around herself, hunching up her shoulders as if she were freezing. But she seemed distracted when the topic of Bobo Torsson was discussed. Her thoughts were already moving in some other direction.

  Irene tried again. “Does the name Lasse ‘Shorty’ Johannesson mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “A huge guy around thirty-five.”

  “No.”

  Absentmindedly, Sylvia gathered up some fallen petals from a purple chrysanthemum that had dropped onto the dusty coffee table. Irritated, she swept the pile up and then seemed to forget both the petals and Irene at the same moment. Her shining eyes didn’t seem to notice her surroundings as she sat gazing into her own abysses. Irene would have given a lot to know what she saw. But a glance at Sylvia’s face made her less sure that she wanted to see it herself. The discussion about the key ring had made Sylvia retreat within herself. Irene had to get her to come out again. What might tempt her to start talking? A vague hunch told Irene that money could always get Sylvia to talk. Wasn’t that what Valle Reuter had said?

  “Well, Sylvia, that insurance you once told me about . . .”

  She left the sentence unfinished on purpose to see if Sylvia would bite. At first she seemed not to have heard, but after a while she turned her head and gave Irene an unexpectedly sharp look.

  “Insurance? Did I mention the insurance to you?”

  “Yes, when we spoke on the telephone the first time. When you were in the psychiatric ward.”

  “I don’t remember that. Maybe I did. They put me on a lot of medication, and I have very dim memories of those first few days.”

  She took a deep breath and to Irene’s relief sat down in one corner of the angular sofa. She kicked off her Birkenstocks and, tucking her legs beneath her, started chewing on her chipped nail again. In a normal tone she said, “The insurance. That was probably the only thing Richard ever did for Henrik’s and my benefit. He explained to me that it’s a sort of retirement annuity. After he turned sixty, he could retire anytime he wanted and draw an annual income of a million kronor for ten years. But it’s also life insurance. If Richard died, Henrik and I would receive the same sum over ten years, to be divided between us.”

  “So the insurance falls due with a survivors’ benefit?”

  “The same as most retirement annuities.”

  Henrik and Sylvia would each receive half a million per year over the next ten years. People have been murdered for less. Added to the rest of the fortune, maybe Valle Reuter was on the right track. If only mother and son hadn’t been down on the street, surrounded by witnesses, when Richard fell. Irene decided to proceed cautiously.

  “But the rest of your husband’s assets and fortune, who inherits all of that?”

  Now Sylvia was utterly calm. She looked a bit like a small Siamese cat that has just swallowed a goldfish.

  “I do. But it’s extremely complicated. The lawyers are busy making sense of it all. They say it could take a long time. But the insurance money will start being paid out next month, with this month’s payment retroactive.”

  It had to be a hallucination, but Irene thought she heard a whirring sound as the wheels turned in her brain. The key ring was forbidden territory, but the money and Bobo Torsson had gone well. Should she continue with Bobo?

  “Bobo Torsson is also dead. You may have read in today’s paper that he was murdered early Monday morning. He was blown up in his car.”

  Sylvia gave her an uninterested look. “Blown up? No. I’m not reading the papers very carefully right now. I can’t face it. I have enough to think about with everything that’s happened.”

  “Do you know if Bobo and Charlotte were still seeing each other?”

  “No idea. Charlotte likes to go out and be part of the hip scene.”

  “Does Henrik accompany her when she goes out and gets into the swing of things?”

  Uh-oh, the ice was cracking again. Sylvia put her feet down on the carpet and gave Irene a measured look. Abruptly she said, “Henrik does not enjoy going out. Not after his illness, which I told you about.”

&nb
sp; Suddenly Irene was struck by an idea. “It was meningitis that Henrik suffered as a result, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “As a result of what?”

  “A childhood illness.”

  “Which childhood illness?”

  “The mumps.”

  There was nothing left of the little contented kitten, only a sorrowful mother huddled in the corner of the sofa. Something clicked in Irene’s mind. One of her male colleagues at the police academy got the mumps while they were attending Ulriksdal. Both his testicles were also affected, and they swelled up so grotesquely that he couldn’t walk. Unfortunately his name was Paul, and he was always called “Paul Fig-Ball” after that. At a party he later confided to Irene and Tommy that there was a great risk that he was now sterile. Apparently it wasn’t an unusual complication in adult men who got the mumps. Had this also happened to Henrik? It was a long shot, but she decided to try.

  “It’s common for adult males to become sterile after having the mumps. Were Henrik’s testicles affected?”

  Sylvia’s eyes widened with terror. With a horrible crash the ice shattered and she fell through. She hid her face in her hands and began to cry hysterically.

  It took twenty minutes before she calmed down enough for Irene to consider her somewhat stable. But Sylvia refused to answer any more questions and stubbornly repeated, “You have to go now! I’m due at the seamstress at one o’clock to try on my dress for the funeral. Go! Go!”

  IRENE HAD a lot to think about as she sat in a mediocre pizzeria a few blocks down the street gnawing on the “daily special.” It consisted of a serving of tough lasagne, along with some pitiful cabbage strips in vinegar. The ice water was lukewarm and the coffee looked like Sammie’s bathwater. Not even Irene could manage to drink it. But it didn’t really matter, because questions and facts were tumbling through her head. Sylvia was scared stiff when the spare keys were mentioned. She knew, or had an idea, who might have taken them. Or had they been given to someone? Why wouldn’t Sylvia talk about it? Charlotte von Knecht and Bobo Torsson were old friends and had worked together. She initiated the contact between him and her father-in-law, and then Torsson was able to rent the two apartments. Did they still see each other? Did it have any significance for the investigation? Was this the point of contact they had been looking for? Irene had a hard time believing it. Not in her wildest fantasy could she picture Bobo Torsson knocking down Richard von Knecht and throwing him off the balcony, fabricating the bomb on Berzeliigatan, and then blowing himself to kingdom come. The last maybe by mistake. It wasn’t even logical, since it didn’t answer the question of why.