‘Yes,’ Jarnebring said with a grin. ‘Now I’m starting to recognize the old Lars. Nice to know you haven’t lost it completely.’
‘So she was lying there in the reeds?’ Johansson said. ‘She hadn’t been buried?’
‘No,’ Jarnebring said. ‘He’d dragged her out a few metres, to where the reeds were at their thickest, and then pushed or trod her down into the mud. There was loads of sludge down there. If the dog hadn’t found her, she’d have been there for quite some time.’
‘So where did the girl go?’ Johansson asked. ‘When she ran away from her mum’s, I mean.’
‘I’m getting to that – all in good time,’ Jarnebring said, running his forefinger down his closely written notes.
18
Friday evening, 14 June 1985
Just before seven o’clock on Friday evening, Yasmine had run away from her mother’s flat. When she got outside the front door she – in all likelihood – turned right and walked, or ran, the fifty metres from the building on Hannebergsgatan to the first junction with Skytteholmsvägen. There she turned right again and walked the hundred metres to the entrance to the underground. Twenty metres before she disappeared into the station she was spotted by the first witness, Police Inspector Peter Sundman.
They passed each other ten metres apart. He said hello to Yasmine, but she didn’t appear to have seen him. She was marching determinedly towards the doors of the underground station, disappeared through the swing doors and out of his sight. Back straight, nose in the air, her jacket tied round her waist, holding her little rucksack in her hand, her whole body radiating anger and urgency.
She’s had another row with her mother, Sundman thought, and for a moment he considered running after her and at least having a word with her. But he just shook his head instead, smiled to himself and, only a few minutes later, when he walked in through the front door, her agitated mother had run straight into his arms.
During the months and years that followed he had thought a lot about all this. If only I’d tried to talk to her, he usually thought, and the only consolation to be had in this context was that he was at least a far better witness than the ones who usually cropped up in similar circumstances, and that he had done all he could to help his colleagues try to find the perpetrator.
The police – that’s to say, Bo Jarnebring and his five colleagues from the crime unit in Stockholm – found another four witnesses who had seen Yasmine. None of them was a particularly poor witness. At least three of them were considerably better than witnesses usually were. That was scant comfort, though, given what went on to happen.
The second witness was the guard sitting in the ticket office in Solna Centrum underground station. Like Yasmine, he was originally from Iran. He had seen her on numerous previous occasions when he had been in that particular booth. He had noticed the way she looked and had once asked her if she was from Iran, even asking in Farsi, but Yasmine hadn’t replied, just shook her head and carried on towards the platform.
Jarnebring obviously looked into him thoroughly, and he even checked out his colleague, Sundman. The guard’s alibi was even better than Sundman’s. He had been in his booth until the station closed for the night, and there were plenty of people who could confirm that. There was also all the electronic evidence he left the whole time he was simply doing his job.
Yasmine took the underground from Solna Centrum to Fridhemsplan, then changed lines and travelled out to Alvik. There she got on the Nockeby tram line, where she encountered witnesses three and four.
Witness number three was the driver of the tram between Alvik and Nockeby. Just as he was about to close the doors and set off, Yasmine came running up. The driver was an immigrant from Turkey; he had arrived in Sweden in the sixties and had been driving the tram for almost ten years. He recognized Yasmine because she had been travelling to and from school on his tram for the past couple of years. Also inside the tram was witness number four, a female pensioner, seventy-five, who lived in the same district as Yasmine and recognized her.
The driver of the tram spoke to Yasmine, saying she was lucky to have got there just in time. Yasmine thanked him for waiting. The pensioner said hello to her – ‘Hello, my little friend. I hope you’re well?’ – and Yasmine had smiled, curtsied politely and replied, ‘Thank you, I’m very well.’ Neither of the two witnesses noticed anything to suggest otherwise.
Yasmine travelled just one stop, as she usually did. Half a kilometre, taking about a minute. There she said goodbye to the old lady and got off, and walked the last of the way home, a distance of less than five hundred metres.
Halfway there, she was seen by the fifth and last witness. He lived in a villa on Äppelviksgatan, just a few hundred metres from the house on Majblommestigen where Yasmine lived with her father and his new partner. The witness was on his way out to his wife and children in the country, because it was ‘the weekend, at last’. He saw her as he pulled out of his drive, when she was heading towards her home and had some hundred metres left to walk. He, too, recognized her: his youngest son went to the same school as Yasmine.
He drove off in the other direction. He was stressed, and a couple of hours late. His wife had already called and shouted at him. From then on, he kept checking the time. When he saw Yasmine it was ‘quarter to eight, give or take’. Another reason for him looking at the time was that she was walking on her own and there had been a couple of break-ins in the area during the summer. Considering what went on to happen, not a day had passed since without him ‘cursing’ himself for not driving after her and ‘at least making sure she got home okay’.
So, Yasmine left her mother’s flat just before seven o’clock. She vanished into the underground at Solna Centrum a few minutes later. In all likelihood, she caught the train that left for Fridhemsplan at ten minutes past seven. There she caught another one to Alvik, at twenty-five minutes to eight. She got off at Alvik six minutes later and jumped on to the tram heading to Nockeby, which left on time at fifteen minutes to eight. She got off at the next stop a minute or so later and continued on foot for a few minutes. She was seen about a hundred metres from her home by the last person to have seen her alive: at ‘quarter to eight, give or take’.
19
Wednesday afternoon, 14 July 2010
‘We were basically able to track her from start to finish,’ Jarnebring concluded, with some satisfaction. ‘Apart from the last stretch along the road where she lived. Majblommestigen, that’s what it’s called. A little side street off Äppelviksgatan. The lads and I were actually pretty pleased with ourselves.’
‘Hang on, hang on,’ Johansson said. ‘That last witness. What sort of clown was he?’
‘Interesting character,’ Jarnebring said with a smile. ‘Good to see you getting back to your old self, Lars. That your thinking skills haven’t vanished, I mean.’
‘The last witness,’ Johansson repeated. ‘I’m still listening.’
The last witness was forty-two years old. Married fifteen years. He and his wife, who was a teacher, had three children, aged seventeen, fifteen and ten. He worked as a claims adjuster for an insurance company. He and his wife had bought the house where the family lived ten years earlier. No bad debts, no criminal record, not even a speeding ticket.
‘And?’ Johansson glared suspiciously at his best friend.
‘His main hobby was swimming,’ Jarnebring said. ‘When he was younger he was one of the best in Sweden, and after he stopped competing he carried on as a youth coach and official. He held a number of posts in the national association, as well as the club he belonged to. He did quite a lot of work with sponsorship.’
‘Youth coach. So what’s a youth coach?’
‘Quite. That’s where it starts to get interesting. In this particular instance, it means training the young girls in the club, seven to ten years old. The same age as Yasmine, more or less.’
‘Who’d have thought it?’ Johansson said. ‘Now where have I heard something like this bef
ore?’
‘That’s what I thought, too,’ Jarnebring said. ‘Especially once I’d spoken to his wife, who said that she didn’t know what time it was when he eventually showed up at their summer cottage outside Trosa, and the normal driving time was one hour. She’d fallen asleep at nine o’clock that evening. According to her, she had a terrible headache, took two tablets, went to bed and fell asleep. Their kids had already gone off to spend the night with various friends. She didn’t wake up before morning, by which time her husband was there. Lying next to her in bed. But, if you ask me, I reckon she’d consumed rather more than just a couple of headache pills.’
‘Such as?’
‘If we’re to believe the neighbours, she drank pretty heavily. I’m inclined to agree with them. I actually met her, interviewed her again when the question marks started to pile up. The warning signs of alcoholism were pretty strong with that little lady, if I can put it like that.’
‘So her husband didn’t have an alibi,’ Johansson said.
‘Actually, no. That’s precisely what he did have. He had a quite remarkable stroke of good luck, actually.’
‘Go on.’
‘At twenty past eight he was caught speeding on the motorway some ten kilometres south of Södertälje. About half an hour after he left home in Äppelviken.’
‘I thought you said he didn’t have any points on his licence?’
‘He didn’t. The officers who caught him – I talked to them as well – let him off with a caution.’
‘What the hell did they do that for?’
‘One of them used to be a swimmer, apparently.’ Jarnebring chuckled. ‘It took a while before that came out.’
‘He could have put the kid in the boot,’ Johansson said. ‘Yasmine, I mean. Not very likely, perhaps, but, according to his wife, he could have been out all night.’
‘We’re dealing with a very rare man here. He had the most incredible luck, all the way through. When he turned up out in the country half an hour later, his closest neighbour had driven into a ditch. His summer cottage is roughly one hundred kilometres south of Stockholm, so the distance matches the time it took pretty well.’
‘Who’d have thought it?’ Johansson said. ‘Drove into a ditch. In the middle of nowhere on an ordinary Friday night.’
‘I know. And despite the fact that he was stone-cold sober, according to him.’ Jarnebring grinned. ‘We talked to him as well. To cut a long story short, first our witness helps his neighbour get his car out of the ditch. Then he drives home to see his wife. She’s already asleep, alone in the house. So he returns to the neighbour, who is no longer in the ditch, and ends up sitting there drinking half the night away with half a dozen like-minded souls, all of them neighbours, before staggering home and falling asleep. So I bought his alibi. What would you have done?’
‘Bought his alibi,’ Johansson said. ‘So what happened after that, then? With the investigation, I mean?’
‘We did all the usual. Poked about in Yasmine and her family’s backgrounds. Checked everyone in her vicinity. Other family members, friends, acquaintances, neighbours, schoolmates, friends and their elder siblings. We went door to door in the neighbourhood, checked everyone who lived there, plus the guy who delivered the papers, the postman, workmen and anyone else who just happened to be in the area. We checked to see if any taxis had been in the vicinity at the time she disappeared. Went through the usual sex-obsessed nutters. Looked into any other crimes that might be connected to Yasmine’s case. Asked for tip-offs from the public. My lads and I, and a couple of female colleagues, too, for that matter, did all the things we were supposed to do. Everything by the book. And we pretty much came up with nothing. We never found a crime scene but, considering the state her body and clothes were in, most of the evidence seemed to suggest that it must have happened indoors. There were far too few of us. We were far too slow getting going. No crime scene, and whenever that’s the case everything usually goes to hell. And no perpetrator either.’
‘She was wearing her clothes?’
‘No,’ Jarnebring said, shaking his head. ‘The body was naked, completely naked. No clothes, no jewellery, nothing. He’d dumped them in the same stretch of reeds, a couple of hundred metres away from the body. One of our dog-handlers found them the next day, on Saturday, 22 June, when they were searching the area where she was found. Her clothes, shoes, rucksack, watch, the rings she’d been wearing – two, if I remember rightly – were all stuffed into a couple more of those bin-bags that her body was wrapped in. According to Forensics, they came from the same roll, one of those ones with ten bags, the sort you can buy at any garage or supermarket. He’d just tied the bags containing the clothes – ordinary granny knots, in case you’re wondering.’
‘From the same roll,’ Johansson said. ‘How do you know that?’
‘It was one of our colleagues in Forensics who figured that out. Clever bloke, really smart. Yasmine’s body and her clothes were wrapped in a total of six bags. The first five, and then the last one on the roll. The four in between were missing. He must have used them for something else when he was cleaning up after himself. We don’t know what, seeing as we never found them.’
‘Bloody sheets and the usual,’ Johansson said. ‘What about Bäckström, then? What was he doing?’
‘Same as always. When he wasn’t keeping out of the way, he mostly just sat and went on about Yasmine’s father. He wouldn’t let it go.’
‘I can’t help wondering how a man like Bäckström ever got to be a police officer.’ Johansson’s mind was suddenly wandering.
‘His dad was in the force.’ Jarnebring grinned. ‘He’s supposed to have been even worse than his son. His uncle was an officer as well. And his cousin – used to ride a motorbike, a complete cretin, so an obvious choice to be secretary general of the union. So perhaps it’s not so strange. The force is crawling with them. The best thing about Bäckström is that at least he’s had the good sense not to have had a load of kids who’ve gone on to join the force.’
‘So the investigation was crawling along,’ Johansson said.
‘Everything went wrong, right from the start. By the time we were brought in it was already too late. Like I said. We didn’t find out anything of any real use. Nothing we could pull on or even give a tentative little tug. We kept going through the autumn, until one of our many bosses decided to put the case on the backburner. That happened just after New Year, by the way. And then, of course, our prime minister was murdered a couple of months later, and that was the end of it. Everyone in Crime and Surveillance was switched to the Palme case.’
‘I know,’ Johansson said with a nod. Better than most, and better than you, my friend, he thought.
‘Who’d have thought it?’ Jarnebring grinned.
‘Even so, there must have been a few question marks?’
‘As I remember it, that’s more or less all we had. The question mark I remember best was a car that was supposed to have been seen near the house where Yasmine lived on the evening in question. A red Golf, latest model. Good condition, definitely didn’t belong to low-lifes. You know, the usual tip-off about a car that shows up in practically every murder investigation,’ he said with a wry smile.
‘Tell me.’
‘We never got to the bottom of that either,’ Jarnebring said.
‘Tell me,’ Johansson repeated. ‘Tell me, anyway.’
20
Wednesday afternoon, 14 July
According to an elderly witness living in the area, there was a red Volkswagen Golf parked on Majblommestigen, where Yasmine lived. Just a few houses further down the road, right next to the junction with Äppelviksgatan.
Like so many similar witnesses before him, he had been out to walk his dog on the evening Yasmine disappeared and had observed the car ‘some time between nine and ten o’clock in the evening’.
Everything had followed the usual routine after that. First, they checked to make sure that it didn’t belong to anyone who l
ived on the road, on adjoining roads or in the immediate vicinity. It didn’t, which instantly rendered it more interesting. Everyone who lived in the area or had some connection to it and who owned a Golf was written off, even though there were several of them, including two that had cars the right colour.
The next step was to get a list of all red Golfs in the Stockholm area from the vehicle registration database, whether they were owned privately or by companies, leasing firms or rental businesses. Even though they restricted the search to the latest model, they still ended up with hundreds of them.
While this was going on, their witness, like so many similar witnesses before him, had begun to have doubts. First, he wasn’t sure about the day, then the model, because ‘of course he wasn’t an expert’, and, finally, even the colour.
By that time Jarnebring and his colleagues already had an overflowing box full of files from the vehicle register just waiting for one of them to find the time to go through the mass of documents. Because of the other demands on their time, however, they ended up doing what so often happens. They started to check registered owners living in the area between Solna and Bromma who might possibly have come across Yasmine somewhere between her mum’s and her dad’s, as well as those with a criminal record for previous offences, particularly crimes that bore some resemblance to what had happened to Yasmine.
They didn’t find anything of interest – the little that had initially looked promising was soon dismissed, and at that point the search was stopped, or at least put on hold.
‘I regret not chucking that bastard car into the Palme investigation six months later,’ Jarnebring said. ‘Then no stone would have been left unturned.’
You shouldn’t be too sure of that, Johansson thought, seeing as he knew better, but he didn’t say anything because at that same moment he was struck by a thought. An obvious thought in circumstances such as these.
The Dying Detective Page 7