The Glass Devil: A Detective Inspector Huss Investigation, Vol. 3

by Helen Tursten

  WAS KRISTINA Olsson mentally ill? The answer would have to be no, but with the reservation that she appeared to be near a nervous breakdown—if she hadn’t already had one, which was difficult for a layman to decide.

  Was she hiding something? Irene was almost convinced that that was the case. But what was she hiding? And why? What was she afraid of?

  Irene realized that she had forgotten to ask Kristina if she had been threatened. How could she forget such an obvious question? Maybe not so entirely obvious, though, since Kristina hadn’t had any contact with either Jacob or his parents in more than nine months.

  Was there something in Kristina’s past that was frightening her? As members of a fundamentalist religious sect, she and her siblings would have had a strict religious upbringing, but it seemed that both Kristina and her sister had freed themselves from the faith of their childhoods. Even so, they might be deeply spiritual. The decor of Kristina’s apartment bore the stamp of Christian faith with ascetic elements. Except, of course, that she had curtains.

  IRENE PROMISED herself that she would look up Laestadianism in an encyclopedia. Personally, she wasn’t very interested in religious questions. The Huss family was about as religious as most of the other people in Sweden. They went to church for baptisms, weddings, and funerals; never otherwise. But she had realized several times, in the course of this investigation, how annoyingly ignorant she was.

  And Satanism had popped up as a counterweight to all this Christian faith with Laestadians, synods, and goodness knows what else. How relevant was this negativity toward Christianity? The clues were there, but did they mean anything?

  The questions whirled around in her mind; she had no answers.

  WHEN SHE got off at the Göteborg Central Station, she was met with the latest edition of the Götesborg Times, usually referred to by its initials, GT: “Extra! Extra! Satanic leads in the triple homicide!”

  Chapter 8

  ”SOME IDIOT LEAKED!”

  Superintendent Andersson was in a terrible mood. He stared grimly at the group during Friday’s morning prayers. None of those present looked guilty, and he hadn’t really suspected any of them. But it was enormously irritating not to have a specific person to pounce on.

  Svante Malm, just joining the meeting with a lab report in his hand, said, “The strange thing is that no one did it earlier.”

  The superintendent turned around on his heel and hissed, “What do you mean?”

  “Spectacular! Pastor’s family murdered by Satanists! Candy for the evening papers. Whoever leaked the information was probably well paid.”

  Still red in the face, Andersson mumbled something unintelligible. After taking a few deep breaths, he asked Svante to review the new information the lab had come up with.

  Svante took a seat and looked down at the papers he had set in front of him on the table. “The analysis of the pentagrams is finished. The one on the computer screen in the cottage was, as expected, made with Jacob Schyttelius’s blood. We’ve found the tool that the murderer used: A bloody pastry brush was lying in the wastebasket under the desk.”

  He paused briefly and took out some new papers, which he laid on top of the pile.

  “The analysis of the pentagram in the rectory is a bit surprising. The star itself was made with Sten Schyttelius’s blood, but the ring around it was made with Elsa’s. The murderer used a pastry brush there as well. We found it inside one of the desk drawers.”

  “Did the murderer leave any clues?” Irene asked.

  “Not that we’ve found yet. Naturally, there are a lot of hairs and fibers at both crime scenes, but nothing seems suspicious so far. We’ve found a little bit of soil from the yard on the floor of the bedroom at the rectory. It doesn’t have to be the murderer who dragged it in. It could just as easily have been Mr. or Mrs. Schyttelius, or one of you.”

  “No footprints, or anything like that?” Andersson asked hopefully.

  “No. Nor are there any signs of bodily fluids or other foreign substances—”

  “What do you mean by ‘foreign substances’?” Fredrik Stridh interrupted.

  “Substances that are used during Satanic rituals. For example, smoke, different types of narcotics, alcohol, blood from sacrificial animals. There was a lot of blood, but all the blood at the crime scenes came from the victims.”

  The investigators contemplated the surprising lack of evidence left by the murderer. Irene couldn’t explain how he had managed, as so much blood and tissue had to have splashed around the victims. Instead, she asked the technician another question. “Do you know for certain that the same weapon was used in all three murders?”

  “Yes. All three were shot with the rifle which was lying under Mr. and Mrs. Schyttelius’s bed; and with the same type of ammunition, Norma 30-06. There are no fingerprints on the murder weapon.”

  Svante gathered his papers together and returned them to his worn canvas bag. He rose, nodded, and disappeared through the door. The superintendent reclaimed his position in front of the audience.

  “A man who lives a little farther down the road, right after the turnoff to the Schytteliuses’ cottage, phoned. When he was out walking his dog just before eleven on Monday night, he saw a dark-colored car parked on a forest road a little way off.”

  Andersson turned on the overhead projector but didn’t bother pulling down the screen. A hand-drawn map in blue ink was projected onto the wall.

  “Here’s the gravel road down to the Schytteliuses’ cottage. Here’s the cottage. The car was parked a little way down the next road. There aren’t any cottages along it, because it’s an old logging road. The technicians found some blurred tire tracks, but the sleet and rain the last few days washed away most of it. Footprints have been washed away by now as well.”

  “Does he know what make the car was?” Hannu asked.

  “No. He never went up to the car, just stopped on a path forty or fifty meters away from it. The dog was probably taking care of business. The man had a flashlight with him so he could see where he was walking, but the car was too far away for the flashlight to illuminate it enough to make out any details.”

  Andersson pointed at the dotted line that wound its way in the opposite direction from the cottage.

  “This is where the path goes. And the car was here. The witness thinks it was a smaller model car, possibly a small Mazda or something similar. It was either black, dark blue, or dark green. He thinks it had Swedish license plates.”

  “But he isn’t completely certain?” said Irene.

  “No. He saw the car at an angle from behind, and apparently it was parked next to a grove of spruce trees. According to him, it wasn’t visible from the main road. The car was impossible to see unless you walked in a short distance on the forest path.”

  “So someone wanted to hide the car,” Irene concluded.

  “Looks that way, yeah. I’ve measured on a real map and if you keep to the roads, it’s almost exactly a kilometer to walk from the car to the Schytteliuses’s cottage. The question about the shortest distance, as opposed to staying on the roads, is whether the undergrowth is too thick to allow someone to walk through the woods. If it’s possible, then it’s barely two hundred meters as the crow flies from the car to the cottage. Someone should take a closer look.”

  Fredrik held up his hand and Irene slowly followed his lead. It was the thought of the reports that needed to be written and the piles of paper that. . . . She held her hand a little higher so the superintendent wouldn’t miss how interested she was in the navigable aspects of the terrain around Norssjön.

  There was a knock at the door, and a head could be glimpsed through the opening. A female voice said, “Telephone for Huss. It’s about the pastors’ murders.”

  The door closed again and Irene got up and went to her office. The call was put through, and to her surprise Louise Måårdh was on the other end of the line. Louise went straight to the point: “I’ve read the papers about the symbols that were written in bl
ood. What are they called . . . ? Pentagrams! It struck me that I’ve actually seen one of those symbols recently. Namely, in Eva Möller’s car.”

  If she listened for Irene’s reaction, she was probably disappointed. Even if Irene was surprised, her voice didn’t reveal anything. “In Eva Möller’s car? Where?” was all she said.

  “The gearshift. She has one of those pentagrams on the knob.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’ve ridden with her several times to church choir rehearsals. She drives past our house, and I usually catch a ride with her when the weather is bad. After Christmas, I noticed that knob, and I asked her why she had traded the old one in for this strange one and she laughed and said it was a Christmas present.”

  “What does this knob look like?”

  “The knob itself is black, and the pentagram is silver.”

  “Thanks a lot. I’ll speak with her.”

  When Irene had hung up the phone, she stared blankly in front of her as the thoughts swirled around in her head. A gearshift knob with a pentagram on it? Maybe Eva Möller didn’t know what kind of symbol she was driving around with? But the chances of her not knowing were slight. For the first time, they had gotten a lead on a possible Satanic link to the Schyttelius family but this lead had led to a most unexpected place.

  TOMMY SWEPT by in the corridor with a cheerful “Things are starting to move in the Speedy murder case!”

  Irene vaguely wondered why he had a video camera in tow but when Fredrik came steaming in with the car keys jingling in his hand, she lost her train of thought. She would have to get going if she was going to keep up with Inspector Stridh.

  They drove out toward Boråsvägen. Irene said, “Eva Möller can’t meet with us until one o’clock. Apparently she’s also a music teacher and has lessons until then.”

  “Should we eat lunch before, or after?”

  “Before. It will buy us some time.”

  Irene had the directions to Eva Möller’s cottage in her pocket. She had been surprised when she realized that the cantor lived alone in a house in the middle of the woods. To get there, one had to drive toward Landvetter Church and then wind one’s way on some smaller roads. “I’m right out in the middle of nowhere,” Eva had said.

  They turned off what was now the familiar road to Norssjön, but this time they didn’t turn at the little wooden sign with the faded text “Luck Cottage”; they continued a few hundred meters further until they came to the forest road. There was no sign here. Fredrik slowed down and drove onto a narrow road, more like a wide lane. The car lurched over the deep ruts and holes.

  “It wouldn’t be easy to drive in here, even with a small car,” Fredrik noted after the Saab’s chassis had bottomed out on the rough road.

  The forest stood thick around them on both sides. Tall pines, planted several decades ago at a disciplined distance, now had a tangle of undergrowth between them. Whoever owned the forest hadn’t been looking after it properly. Yet a bit farther on, Irene could see that the trees opened up, revealing some deforestation.

  The beautiful weather of yesterday still held. When the wind was still, the silence was almost overwhelming. The sun rays fell through the tree trunks at an angle. There was a heavy scent of damp earth and of vegetation that had started coming to life in the first of the spring warmth.

  “This must be it,” said Fredrik. He stopped a few meters in front of a group of spruce trees growing in a clump, creating an impassable wall.

  Irene and Fredrik walked toward the spruces with their gazes fixed on the ground, tracing several old tire tracks from heavy vehicles but also a few barely noticeable ones from regular cars.

  “Now we know why he parked here. It’s not possible to go any farther.” Fredrik pointed at the continuation of the road behind the spruce grove. There it descended into a deep hollow filled with water at the bottom. It was obvious that any car that drove down there would get stuck in the mud.

  Irene started walking back to their car. When she reached the path that the witness with the dog had been on, she turned and looked around her. Their Saab could be seen at an angle from behind, since the forest road curved around the spruce grove. The small car that the witness had seen had been parked closer to the spruces. With a sigh, Irene had to agree with him: It was impossible to see the license plate and doubtless difficult to determine a particular make, since all compact cars seemed to look alike these days.

  She walked back to Fredrik, who was standing near the waterfilled hole, deep in thought. “I think I would try to reach the clearing, rather than force my way through this mass of undergrowth. It must be easier to make one’s way along the edge of it,” he said.

  “If it stretches far enough in the direction of the cottage, then I agree. Let’s take a look.”

  They made a circuit around the mud hollow and trudged forward toward the clearing, stopping at the edge of the woods to look around. The clearing was narrow and relatively long.

  “You could walk at least a hundred meters here. Then you’d have to get out your machete,” Fredrik concluded.

  It was still quite difficult to make their way. The earth’s surface was damp and porous, and they sank into it at each step. Irene’s suede boots would need to be both washed and brushed before she could show herself in public in them again. Fredrik, who went around in boat shoes, was even worse off. The best footwear would have been rain boots.

  They stopped at the edge of the clearing. The vegetation looked impassable.

  “What do we do now? I wish we really had a machete,” Fredrik groaned.

  “I suggest we do what my dog would do.”

  “And what does your dog do?”

  “Follow the game trail.”

  A short distance away, she had noticed a narrow opening between some spruce trees, a game trail. A large pile of moose dung was lying in the middle of it.

  “It probably leads down to the lake, because the animals want to drink after they’ve grazed. Let’s follow the path and see how close to the cottage we can get,” said Irene.

  They had to bend down and push away hanging branches, at the same time as watching where they put their feet. Irene slipped several times on the slimy roots.

  “Good thing it’s not tick season yet,” Fredrik puffed.

  Irene was about to answer, when she felt a thread across her mouth. She spit and sputtered, thinking it was a sturdy spider-web. Disgusted, she wiped her mouth with her hand and got ahold of the filament. She instinctively glanced at it before she shook it from her fingers. She stopped and held it up to the sunlight that filtered down through the spruce trees.

  A spider hadn’t produced this thread, but a sheep probably had. A thin forest-green-colored woolen thread, about three or four centimeters long, dangled from Irene’s fingers, pinched between her thumb and index finger.

  “What is it? Why are you stopping?” Fredrik asked, irritated.

  He was busy picking things out of his hair. The hair gel he always used in the morning to get his bangs to stand straight up turned out to be the ideal surface for twigs and pine needles to attach themselves to.

  “A thread. Someone has been on this path before us. It hasn’t been here very long, because it isn’t faded or dirty.”

  She showed Fredrik her find. He whistled softly. “We’ll have to keep an eye out for more fibers.”

  Irene found a new thread only twenty meters farther up, but this one was bright red. It hung on the outer branch in a patch of thick shrubbery. Irene stopped and pointed. “It’s at shoulder height for me. This piece is about as long as the green one. Where could these threads have come from?”

  “I think we’re looking for a short murderer, max one hundred and sixty centimeters tall, wearing a hat with a tassel or pompom made of green and red yarn.”

  Irene laughed and took a doggie poop bag from her pocket. She carefully placed the two woolen threads inside. Maybe the technicians could get something out of them.

  The path led
down to the lake. They estimated that if they walked fifty meters along the edge of the lake and then turned their backs to it and walked into the vegetation, they should arrive at the cottage.

  To their relief, the lake shore widened into a small sandy beach, and a narrow gravel path led into the woods from the beach. The path ended about ten meters from the Schyttelius cottage’s gate.

  “It’s probably a community path to the beach for all of the cottage owners in the area,” Irene suggested.

  “Maybe. But there’s nothing keeping someone from turning off the path earlier and climbing over the Schytteliuses’ fence at the back of the property. No one would see. Should we check?”

  Fredrik had already turned on his heel and was on his way back in the same direction they had just come. Thirty meters away, he stopped and pointed.

  Irene could also see a barely noticeable walkway between some raspberry bushes. It followed the rotten wooden fence along the lake side of the Schytteliuses’ property. The fence sagged to the ground in the middle from age and poor maintenance.

  “We can step right onto the property,” Fredrik determined. They did so, taking a good look at where they put their feet.

  “If the murderer went this way on Monday, the ground would still have been frozen. It has rained since then, and the frost has started rising out of the topsoil. The murderer didn’t have as much trouble getting here as we did,” said Irene.

  “Think about the position of the car and the trails. He knew he was going to get here without risking being seen. Everything points to familiarity with the area.”

  Fredrik was right. The murders had been planned, and the murderer had known how to make his way to and from the cottage without being seen.

  They walked toward the back of the cottage. The Schyttelius family had built a large glassed-in veranda running the length of the wall. So this was where the superintendent had sat at the crayfish party seventeen years ago. Irene turned her back to the veranda and looked down at the lake. She could glimpse water through the thicket.