‘So far, a blank. No one heard or saw anything suspicious. But we have tapes from a couple of CCTV cameras – one from the bus station and the other for the Systembolag. Unfortunately, there’s nothing covering the entrance to the apartment block, but at least we’ve got something from either side of the road so our killer may be on there somewhere.’
‘That’s something.’ Moberg hitched up his trousers, which were constantly under pressure from his overhanging stomach. ‘That leaves this H character. Might just be a love-sick loon but we have to try and identify him.’
‘Unless H is the same person as Crabo,’ suggested Olander.
‘That’s a point. Tell Westermark to get Stockholm to send down a photo of Crabo. He may have come down here but kept out of sight.’
Olander went off after Westermark. Moberg watched him leave the room. ‘Smart boy, that one. Better watch your arse, Anita.’
‘I thought that’s what you did.’
Moberg was temporarily taken off guard by Anita’s retort. Nordlund smirked. Before Moberg could come back with a sarcastic remark, Anita said, ‘If H was dropping off his letters at the apartment then he may have been hanging around the area for some time. It’s probably worth looking at CCTV footage going back a few weeks.’
Nordlund sighed heavily. ‘Thanks.’
‘No, fru Sundström’s right.’ He emphasized the ‘Mrs’, making her sound like a hundred and three. ‘I want someone looking through that stuff tonight. This H is the only real suspect we’ve got so far – so let’s find him!’
Ewan was restless. He couldn’t get Malin Lovgren out of his head. He kept seeing the blue of her jumper. Not the face, just this blur of blue. He found himself shaking and he automatically teased out a cigarette from a packet he wasn’t really aware he was holding. He was about to light it, when he stopped. He’d got away with lighting a cigarette the day before in the bathroom, but decided he wouldn’t push his luck. He didn’t want the Swedish health police battering down the door the moment his first puff set off some hidden smoke alarm. He left the cigarette unlit in his mouth. At least it felt comforting in there.
He pulled back the curtain and gazed into a cold Scandinavian night, the lights of Malmö spread out in front of him. He hadn’t had the heart to go out and socialize with Alex and David as promised. He’d rung David to say he couldn’t make it. ‘God, what a shitter,’ David had sympathized on hearing the reason. But they’d arranged to meet next day for David to show him around.
He had had one drink in the hotel bar but hadn’t been able to finish it. And he certainly couldn’t eat anything. He knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it down. He tugged at the curtains roughly and shut out the Swedish city. It was no good; he couldn’t banish thoughts of Malin Lovgren’s dead body.
He looked up at the apartment. The fourth floor was in darkness. There would be no one there tonight. Malin Lovgren would never return. What was he going to do now? The bitter wind off the sea was bringing flurries of snow with it. He stamped his feet in an attempt to warm them up but nothing could stop him shivering at the chill and the thought of what had happened up there in that room. What he knew.
He pulled his coat collar tight to the neck and turned away for the last time. His cold vigil was at an end.
Anita stared at the contents of her fridge – two eggs, a half-eaten pack of Danish salami, a nearly squeezed-out tube of caviar, a tub of Turkish yogurt and a small lump of Kloster cheese. Nothing looked that appetizing. She had expected to be in Simrishamn, so hadn’t stocked up. She half-heartedly took out the cheese and dumped it on the small kitchen table. The opened bottle of red wine had already taken centre stage. She was on her second glass. She glanced around for the knäckebröd. She knew she had put it somewhere yesterday. She wasn’t actually that hungry, despite not eating since a late, leisurely breakfast. It was well after midnight and she was tired.
They were no closer to any new leads by the time Moberg called it a night. It would be an early start. She would talk to the journalist again on the way into the polishus. Then Malin Lovgren’s mother. She wasn’t sure whether Roslyn had been completely honest with her. Just a feeling, nothing more. Strachan might throw more light on the charismatic director. He was certainly that, which meant he was capable of manipulation. Strachan might offer a few clues as to Roslyn’s character. Yet all it would amount to was background. It was Malin Lovgren’s background that really needed looking into. Anita hoped that her mother would paint a broader picture than the one they got through the usual media coverage and cinematic hype: the real person behind the public persona.
Anita sipped her wine. Was this really the life she wanted for herself? She had had such expectations, both personal and professional. It was sad to reflect that her professional male relationships had been more successful than her personal ones. Except Lasse. He was the one joy to have come out of her increasingly joyless marriage. He dutifully phoned every week. She wasn’t sure what she would do if she hadn’t got him.
And why had Malin Lovgren not had children? Would a family have interfered with her career? On first acquaintance, Roslyn hadn’t struck her as being a family man. Was it even relevant to the inquiry? Yet she couldn’t get out of her mind his final outburst: ‘We were happily married. End of story.’ The protest was too strong. What was he hiding?
CHAPTER 10
The blue body lay crumpled on the floor. The blond hair kept flapping up and down as though blowing in the wind. But there was no wind because he was inside a windowless room. And standing over him was the big fat detective who kept shouting, ‘You’ve murdered her, you’ve murdered her!’ And he was trying to explain what he was doing there in the first place but the fat man wouldn’t listen. He was now cowering in front of the policeman who yanked him up roughly from the floor. As he was held in a vicious grip he looked down. The dead blonde opened her eyes and slowly raised her arm; a thin finger unrolled in his direction. She was about to speak when…
Ewan sat up bolt upright. He was covered in sweat. He rubbed his eyes, trying to become accustomed to his strange surroundings. Yes, he was in his hotel room, but it didn’t make him feel any better. He dragged himself out of his bed and without turning a light on he walked to the window. He drew back the curtain. Snow was falling. All was quiet outside. He gathered his scattered thoughts. He tried to order them but they still added up to one thing – he had stepped into a nightmare.
Anita saw him sitting by himself in the corner, toying with some cold meat. As she approached he looked up in surprise as though taken aback to see her in the hotel dining room – and at that time in the morning.
‘I am sorry to disturb your breakfast, Mr Strachan.’
His bloodshot eyes surveyed her suspiciously before he forced a smile. ‘Saves me eating this stuff. Not my idea of breakfast.’ She could see he was nervous. Her presence seemed to be intimidating him.
‘You look tired.’
‘Couldn’t sleep. Given the circumstances…Sorry, please take a seat.’
He even stood up as she slipped into the chair opposite.
‘Would you like a coffee?’ She nodded. Ewan filled a spare cup from the coffee pot. She watched him carefully. Compared with his friend Roslyn, he wasn’t much to look at, though he had a pleasant face when he smiled. He obviously didn’t take much care of himself. Too much English beer?
‘I’m afraid the coffee is not as strong as you probably like it. I asked for it to be weaker this morning.’
‘I thought the British always had tea for breakfast.’
‘Coffee wakes me up in the morning. I take tea at night to send me to sleep, if the booze doesn’t do the trick.’
Anita tried not to betray the fact the coffee was far too insipid for her liking. After her first sip she pushed the cup gently away. Though she had Moberg’s natural dislike of journalists, she thought the aggressive approach would be counter-productive. She preferred to wheedle information out of suspects. She left the heavy-handed treatment
to Moberg and Westermark.
‘Are you ok? It’s been difficult for you.’
She could see him visibly relax.
‘Yes. It’s all been a bit of shock.’
‘I understand. We will need you to come down to the polishus…the police headquarters…for you to make an official statement.’ Ewan produced another weak smile. ‘Then you might be able to go back to England in the next day or two.’
To her surprise he grinned at her. ‘That is no longer a problem. My idiot editor thinks it’s a great idea if I cover the murder story for my magazine. I’m an official reporter. I’ve got a real crime to report. So, if you’re not careful, it’ll be me who’ll be interviewing you.’
The twinkle in his eye was mischievous and oddly appealing.
‘Well, the sooner we discount you as a suspect, the sooner you can start reporting.’
‘Suspect?’
‘Everybody connected with the case is until we decide they are not.’
Ewan made another stab at his cold collation before giving up.
‘I was talking to your friend Mr Roslyn last night.’
‘Poor guy must be in state.’
‘What is he like?’
‘Mick? He’s a good guy. Full of himself, of course. Certainly used to be and I doubt his success has made him any humbler.’
‘And you know him from…?’
‘University. We were at Durham together in the early eighties.’
Anita couldn’t help the smile that formed. ‘Durham. I know Durham.’
‘You do?’
‘I lived there when I was younger. We went there when I was about ten. My father was chief designer at Electrolux. At the factory in Spennymoor. But we lived in the city. I went to school there.’
‘That explains your English. It is incredible.’
‘I also had a year seconded to the Met in London a few years ago. That helped, too.’
‘God, how did you survive that sexist mob? An attractive blonde like…’ He spluttered to a halt and stared down at the table. He began fiddling with his fork. She noticed, with amusement, that his face had gone red from embarrassment.
‘Mr Roslyn. Did you know him well at university? Or was he just someone you came across occasionally?’
He tore his eyes away from the fork. ‘Oh, no. I knew Mick very well. We shared a room in our first year. Did everything together. Inseparable. He was a laugh.’
‘As you knew him so well, would you say that he is an honest person?’
Ewan took a sip of coffee before answering. ‘I suppose so.’
‘You would trust him?’
There was a pause before he answered. ‘Yes.’ Then he added as an afterthought. ‘Except with your girlfriend.’
‘Ah, as you say in England, a ladies’ man.’
He laughed. ‘A ladies’ man. He was always that. At Durham, anyhow. I can’t tell what he’s like now. He must have settled down because he’s been with Malin Lovgren quite a number of years, I believe.’
‘Thirteen years.’
‘There you are. He’s changed his ways. In the old days he was never short of female admirers. Funnily enough, I always thought that he’d never settle down and I would.’ A momentary sadness flickered across his face.
‘No wife?’ she asked.
‘A couple of near misses.’
‘Maybe you didn’t meet the right women.’
‘Oh, I met the right women, but I think the problem was that I was crap in bed.’ Anita screwed up her face, almost as though she hadn’t heard him correctly. Then she saw his amusement at her response and she found herself laughing. ‘You see, that’s exactly the reaction I kept getting.’
Anita remembered why she had felt at home in Britain. She always loved their self-deprecating sense of humour. She would never have heard such a confession from a Swedish man, even in jest.
She asked a few more questions about Roslyn but his answers were of little use. He hadn’t seen him for over twenty years since they left university, so there was no fresh light he could shed on the Roslyn of recent times – nor on his relationship with Lovgren. She checked her watch and stood up.
‘I need you to come to police headquarters. Porslinsgatan. The big modern building by the canal. At about three?’
‘I have nothing else to do. Will you be taking my statement?’
‘No. My colleague, Mats Olander, will.’ He actually looked slightly disappointed at the news. She was about to go when she stopped. ‘One last thing. You say you hadn’t seen Mr Roslyn until you met him in Edinburgh. When you saw him for the last time before that, did you part as friends?’
‘That’s a strange question.’
‘I still ask it.’
‘Yes. Why shouldn’t we? We just went in different directions after we left university. He went off to London. I stayed in the north-east. Didn’t keep in touch. One of those things.’
Outside the hotel, Anita stepped into the thin layer of snow. She was convinced that Ewan Strachan wasn’t telling the whole truth – just like Roslyn.
CHAPTER 11
Olander came into the office bearing two cups of coffee. Anita drank it greedily. Black and strong. It made her feel better. Without coffee she didn’t think that Sweden would be able to function in the mornings.
‘Get anything new out of the journalist?’
‘Not much. Except he was a bit too keen to let me know that he and Roslyn were great friends. Just seems strange that such great firends hadn’t been in touch since university days until a few weeks ago?’
‘Is it relevant?’
She took another long sip of coffee and let it glide down her throat. She sighed. ‘Probably not.’
‘Neither can be serious suspects. Strachan has no reason to kill Lovgren. He had never even met her. And Roslyn was in Stockholm.’
‘You’re right. What lies behind their relationship is between them and doesn’t affect Lovgren’s death. However, I wanted to get some background on Roslyn because there may be something in his relationship with Lovgren that throws up a motive for someone else. Did she have a lover? Did he? Was their marriage as wonderful as we are led to believe? That would change the picture.’
‘Could be nothing to do with any of those things. Just some mad fan.’
Further speculation was curtailed by the arrival of Eva Thulin. She had a file under one arm. She flashed a tired smile.
‘Working all night, Eva? Coffee?’
‘I’ve had enough to keep me up for the next week.’ She dropped the thin file on the desk in front of Anita.
‘Pathology report and preliminary findings. Malin Lovgren was strangled. But we can rule out any sexual motive. No sign of sexual assault or activity.’
‘That’s something. We needn’t follow up the usual list of perverts. So, man or woman?’
‘Probably a man, but it could be a woman if they had done something like judo. Whoever killed her used a chokehold. Normally it’s a restraint hold in martial arts. The arm goes round the neck…look, I’ll show you on Olander.’
Thulin stood behind Olander, who bent down slightly because he was taller than she was. She wrapped her right arm round his neck and locked his neck in the crook of her elbow, both hands clasped just above Olander’s left ear for leverage. ‘If I’ve got the strength, or right technique, I can then apply real pressure. I can cut off the supply of blood to the brain as a result of the compression on the sides of the neck. The airway is blocked at the front of the neck. In martial arts and combat sports it’s a self-defence system. Normally it doesn’t go as far as strangulation, but it has in this case. The person who did this knew what they were doing.’ Thulin let go of Olander, who felt his neck gingerly. ‘Sorry,’ she said smiling apologetically.
‘Malin Lovgren was small, so, as long as the killer was taller, a man or a woman, with the right knowledge, could have done it?’ pondered Anita.
‘I think so.’
‘So we’re looking at…?’
&
nbsp; ‘Could be someone with a military background or maybe a person who was into martial arts. Certainly combat sports.’
‘Then she was moved?’ asked Olander.
‘Definitely. As well as discernible scrape marks on the wooden flooring there was bruising under her upper arms that is consistent with the body being dragged. I’m pretty sure the murder was committed in the kitchen. Forensics found a single link from a chain under a unit.’
‘From the pendant?’ Anita asked
‘Could be.’ Thulin paused and pursed her lips. ‘I went back to the scene of crime first thing this morning to have another look. That’s when it really got interesting.’
The avenue of high trees opened out into a massive grassy arena. It was circular in shape with more trees all the way round. It was an awe-inspiring space to find in the middle of a city. It was known locally as talriken, the plate. Ewan was soon discovering that Malmö was a city of parks. ‘It’s gorgeous in the summer,’ David enthused. Pildammsparken was the biggest, an easy walk south of the old centre of the city. David explained that the park had been built for the Baltic Expo in 1914, but hadn’t been completed until the 1920s. Now they held a huge bonfire and party here every 30 April. Known as Walpurgis Night, it is the celebration of the arrival of spring.
They took another tree-lined path out of the green arena and came to a large man-made lake. The water’s edge was covered with geese and ducks, happily immune to the extreme chill. Some were being fed by a couple of hardy, well-wrapped-up souls. David mentioned that the goose was the symbol of Skåne, Sweden’s southernmost province of which Malmö was the main city. That was probably why Mick’s film was called The Geese. But Ewan didn’t really take in what David was saying as his mind kept replaying his breakfast chat with Inspector Sundström.
Her appearance at the hotel had disconcerted him. Caught him off guard. Had he been too effusive about his old friendship with Mick? Had she read things into it that weren’t there? He was having difficulty enough coping with the situation without a suspicious policewomen adding to his troubles. He just wanted to get back to the relative safety of North Shields. Yet, if he was to cover this case, Sundström might be a useful contact. She was more approachable than her bully-boy boss. Be pleasant and co-operative and she might slip him some usable information. He also found her a rather good-looking woman. When she had left his breakfast table he had noticed her arse. That was attractive, too.
Meet me in Malmö: The first Inspector Anita Sundström mystery (Inspector Anita Sundström mysteries) Page 7