The Man Who Watched Women

by Michael Hjorth

  The printer had finished its work. He picked up the pictures, leafed through them and counted. All thirty-six were there. He took out a large bulldog clip and attached it to the top of the pictures. He walked across to the other side of the room where a sheet of hardboard had been nailed to the wall, and hooked the bulldog clip onto a nail in the top right-hand corner. Above the nail was the number three, ringed in black ink. He glanced at the topmost pictures below numbers ‘1’ and ‘2’. Women. In their bedrooms. Half-naked. Weeping. Terrified. The bulldog clip on the far left held only thirty-four pictures. He had failed with two of them. Before the act. He had been too eager. Deviated from the ritual. It would never happen again. The second bundle was complete. He picked up the camera again and took a photograph of the board with its macabre display. The first phase had been completed. He put the camera down on the desk, picked up the black sports bag from the floor just inside the door.

  Into the kitchen.

  The man placed the bag on the kitchen table, unzipped it and removed the packaging from the nylon stockings he had used. Philippe Matignon Noblesse 50 Cammello.

  As usual.

  As always.

  He opened the cupboard under the sink and threw away the packaging. Went back, took out the knife in its plastic bag, removed it and placed it in the sink. He then opened the cupboard under the sink again and threw away the bloodstained plastic bag. He closed the cupboard door and turned on the tap. Warm water cascaded down over the broad blade. The congealed blood began to loosen from the metal, and disappeared down the sink with the water, swirling gently clockwise. He picked up the knife by the handle and turned it over. When no more blood was coming off by itself, he used washing-up liquid and a brush to clean off the rest. Afterwards he dried the weapon carefully before replacing it in the bag. He opened the third drawer from the top in the unit next to the oven and took out a roll of three-litre freezer bags. He tore off one bag, put the roll back, closed the drawer and placed the bag next to the knife. Then he left the kitchen.

  Billy found Vanja on the lawn. She was standing with her back to the patio and the big windows. A beautifully mown lawn lay in front of her, ending in two flowerbeds full of colour. Billy didn’t know the names of any plants, and assumed Vanja wasn’t fascinated by the pretty flowers either.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  Vanja gave a start. She hadn’t heard him coming.

  ‘He didn’t leave a visitor’s card, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Okay …’ Billy took a step backwards.

  Vanja realised she had sounded somewhat harsh. Billy’s question might not even have been work-related. He knew her. Knew her well. Knew how much she hated this type of crime. Not because of the blood and the sexual violence. She had seen far worse. But it was a woman.

  Dead.

  In her own home.

  Women shouldn’t end up raped and murdered in their own homes. They were constantly vulnerable anyway, everywhere they went. They really ought to get changed before they walked home from a club or a bar. They should avoid subways, parks and lonely streets. They shouldn’t be listening to their iPod. Their freedom of movement was restricted, their opportunities were limited. They should at least be able to feel at peace in their own homes.

  Relaxed.

  Safe.

  ‘I found this,’ Vanja said as she turned and walked back towards the patio. Billy followed her. They stepped up onto the decking and walked past the four wicker chairs and the table with a closed green sun umbrella in the middle, which made Billy think of a seating area outside a restaurant rather than ordinary garden furniture. They went over to two white wooden deck chairs, where they could just imagine the Granlunds enjoying the evening sun over a drink.

  ‘There.’ Vanja pointed at a window on the left. Billy looked. Inside he could see most of the ground floor; Torkel was sitting chatting to Richard Granlund while the crime-scene team went through the rest of the house, but that couldn’t be what Vanja wanted to show him.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘There,’ she said again, pointing. She was more precise this time, and now he saw what she meant. It was more or less right in front of him: an impression on the window pane. There was an almost rectangular mark measuring a few square centimetres, with a smaller dot below it, flanked by two half-moon shapes. The one on the left curved slightly to the right, the one on the right slightly to the left, like a pair of brackets enclosing the other marks. Billy immediately knew what they were. Someone – probably the murderer – had looked in through the window, with his forehead and nose resting on the glass as he cupped his hands to shut out the light, leaving secretions from his sebaceous glands on the window pane.

  ‘He’s tall,’ Billy stated, leaning forward. ‘Taller than me.’

  ‘If he’s the one who did this,’ Vanja nodded towards the marks, ‘then that means he was visible from those houses over there.’ She pointed to the neighbouring houses beyond the flowerbeds. ‘Somebody might have seen him.’

  Billy was doubtful. The middle of a weekday in July. The nearby houses looked as if the occupants might be away on holiday. Very few curious souls had gathered on the street or discovered they had important things to do in the garden when the police turned up. This was the kind of area that more or less emptied in the summer. The residents had the time and money to go off to their summer cottages, to go sailing, or even abroad. Had the perpetrator been aware of this? Counted on it?

  Probably.

  They would knock on doors, of course. Lots of doors. If the murderer had been let in, as Billy believed, it was likely that he had approached the house from the front. Knocking on the patio door was peculiar and frightening, and his chances of getting in would be considerably reduced. In which case he must have walked up the garden path. He would have been in full view there, too. But the same thing had applied in the two previous cases, and it hadn’t helped them at all. No one had seen anything or anyone. No car, no one behaving oddly in the area, no one who had asked the way, been creeping around, cycled past, turned up with a message.

  Nothing and no one.

  Everything had been perfectly normal in the neighbourhood, with the minor exception that a woman had been brutally murdered.

  ‘Torkel wants us to head back,’ Billy said. ‘If we’re lucky we’ll find a common denominator this time.’

  ‘It feels as if we need some luck. He’s picking up the pace.’

  Billy nodded. Three weeks had elapsed between the first and second murders, but only eight days between the second and third. Together they set off across the lawn, which almost resembled the green on a golf course; in spite of a long spell of hot, dry weather, there was not a single patch of yellow to be seen. Vanja glanced at her colleague as he loped along beside her in his dark blue hoodie, carrying the laptop in one hand.

  ‘Sorry if I sounded a bit pissed off before.’

  ‘It’s cool – I expect you were pissed off.’

  Vanja smiled to herself. It was so easy to work with Billy.

  The bedroom.

  With the bag in his hand the tall man went straight over to the chest of drawers by the window. He placed the bag on the piece of furniture and opened the top drawer. From the right-hand side he picked up a neatly folded nightdress and put it in the bag. From the left-hand side he picked up a pack of Philippe Matignon Noblesse 50 Cammello Light Brown nylon stockings, and put it in the black sports bag. He zipped the bag shut and put it in the drawer between the remaining clothes. It fitted perfectly.

  Of course.

  He closed the drawer.

  Back to the kitchen.

  He took a carefully folded paper bag from the cleaning cupboard and opened it as he walked over to the fridge. On the shelf inside the door of the fridge was a soft drink in a glass bottle and a packet of Marie biscuits. The drawer at the bottom of the fridge contained bananas. He took out two and placed them in the paper bag along with the fizzy drink, the biscuits and a bar of chocolate from th
e top shelf. For the third time he opened the door of the cupboard under the sink and took out a plastic bottle which had once contained chlorine. He was aware of the faint smell of disinfectant as he slipped the bottle into the paper bag, then took it into the hallway and put it down on the floor to the right of the front door.

  He turned around and looked back at the apartment. All quiet. For the first time in several hours. The ritual had been carried out. He had finished. But he was also ready.

  For the next one.

  For number four.

  All he had to do now was to wait.

  It was a few minutes past midnight when Vanja walked into the room that was never referred to as anything other than ‘the Room’. Six chairs arranged around an oval conference table on a pale green carpet. A control panel for group discussions, video conferencing and the projector on the ceiling above the table, which was bare apart from four glasses and several bottles of mineral water. No glass walls facing the rest of the department, which meant that nobody could see into the Room. On one long wall hung the whiteboard, where Billy made sure that all the information relating to the case they were currently working on was displayed. He was just putting up a picture of Katharina Granlund when Vanja came in, sat down and placed three folders in front of her on the table.

  ‘What would you have been doing tonight?’

  Billy was a little surprised by the question; he had expected her to ask about the case. Whether he had found a connection between the three dead women. Whether any progress had been made. It wasn’t that Vanja had no interest in her colleagues, but she was the most focused police officer Billy knew, and rarely bothered with small talk or brought up personal matters when she was working.

  ‘I was at the open-air theatre,’ Billy replied, sitting down. ‘I had to leave straight after the interval.’

  Vanja looked at him with a mixture of surprise and disbelief. ‘But you don’t go to the theatre!’

  It was true. On a number of occasions when they weren’t talking about work, Billy had referred to the theatre as a ‘dead art form’, expressing the view that just as we had abandoned the horse and cart when the motor car came along, the theatre should have been allowed to die a quiet and dignified death when film was born.

  ‘I’ve met a girl – she wanted to go.’

  Vanja smiled; of course it was a girl.

  ‘So what did she say when you had to sneak off?’

  ‘I’m not sure if she believed me. She’d already had to wake me up once during the first act … So what were you doing?’

  ‘Nothing really; I was at home reading about Hinde.’

  Which led them to the reason why they were sitting in the virtually empty building at Kungsholmen when the new day was no more than a few minutes old.

  Three-quarters of an hour later they were forced to acknowledge that they had made no progress whatsoever. There was no common denominator between the three victims. Different ages, two married, one divorced, one had children; they hadn’t grown up in the same place, hadn’t attended the same schools, hadn’t worked in the same field; they weren’t members of the same clubs or organisations, had no mutual hobbies; their husbands and ex-husband had no obvious links; they didn’t appear to be friends on Facebook or other social networks.

  They didn’t know each other.

  They had nothing in common.

  At least nothing Billy and Vanja could come up with. Billy closed his computer and leaned back wearily in his chair. Vanja got up and went over to the whiteboard. She gazed at the photographs of the three women. One picture of each of them alive, several of them dead. On the far right a number of photographs had been arranged in a vertical line. Photographs from the nineties. Terrifyingly similar to the new pictures.

  ‘He’s copying them exactly.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been wondering about that. How can he?’ Billy stood up and went to join her. ‘Do you think they know one another?’

  ‘Not necessarily; the old pictures have been published.’

  ‘Where?’ Billy asked in surprise. He found it difficult to imagine any newspaper printing the gruesome photographs, and in 1996 the internet was far from the inexhaustible well of information it was today.

  ‘In Sebastian’s two books, among other places.’ Vanja turned to face him. ‘Have you read them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should. They’re actually pretty good.’

  Billy merely nodded without saying anything. Given Vanja’s opinion of Sebastian, that was probably the only positive comment she was likely to make about him. Billy hesitated; it was very late and Vanja had already shown signs of irritation, but he heard himself saying: ‘Do you think we’ll be bringing him in?’

  ‘Sebastian?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I certainly hope not.’

  Vanja went back to the table, gathered up her folders and headed for the door. ‘However, we do need to visit Hinde in Lövhaga. I thought you and I could go.’ She opened the door. ‘See you tomorrow. Can you ring Torkel and tell him how little we’ve found?’

  Without waiting for a reply she turned away, leaving Billy alone. So it was his job to call Torkel and pass on the bad news. As usual. He glanced at the clock. Just before one. With a sigh he picked up his mobile.

  Sebastian was woken by someone touching his face. He opened his eyes, quickly orientated himself in the unfamiliar bedroom and turned his head to the left as he ran through the evening that had led him here. He had followed Vanja home. Watched her go inside. He had been on the point of moving to his usual vantage point when she suddenly came out again. Seconds later a patrol car pulled up and she jumped in. Something had happened.

  Vanja was needed at the scene of a crime.

  He wasn’t needed anywhere.

  Wearily he had headed back to his apartment, which was far too big, but had felt restless almost at once. There was only one way to get rid of the sense of unease and dissatisfaction. He had scanned the morning paper and settled on a lecture at ABF-huset: ‘An Evening with Jussi Björling’. The subject didn’t interest him in the slightest, but as usual at cultural events, the majority of the audience was made up of women, and after a brief assessment of the possibilities he had sat down next to a woman in her forties in the third row. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. He had started a conversation during the interval. Had an alcohol-free drink with her afterwards. They decided to go for something to eat. Walked the short distance to her apartment in Vasastan. Had sex. And now she had woken him up. Ellinor Bergkvist. Shop assistant at Åhléns department store. Household goods. What time was it, anyway? It was light outside, but that meant nothing. It was high summer, after all. Ellinor was lying on her side facing him, her elbow on the pillow, head resting on her hand as she traced the contours of his face with the index finger of the other hand. A pose she might have seen in some romantic comedy. Charming in a film, incredibly irritating in reality. A lock of strawberry-blonde hair had fallen down over one eye, and she was wearing a smile which Sebastian assumed was meant to be ‘mischievous’ as her finger stopped on the tip of his nose and gave a little extra push.

  ‘Good morning, sleepyhead.’

  Sebastian sighed. He couldn’t decide which was worse: being spoken to as if he was a baby or the aura of romantic togetherness emanating from her. It was probably the latter. He had already sensed that things might turn out this way during the short walk back to her apartment last night.

  She had taken his hand.

  Held his hand.

  All the way. Like a clichéd image of a couple in love, strolling through the Stockholm summer night. Five hours after they had met. It was appalling. Sebastian had considered putting an end to the whole thing there and then, making his excuses and leaving, but he had invested far too much time and energy to give up before he got what he came for. What he needed.

  The sex had been boring and detached on his part, but at least it had enabled him to sleep for a few hours, which was something.
r />   Sebastian cleared his throat. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Half past six. Almost. What would you like to do today?’

  Sebastian sighed again. ‘I have to work, unfortunately.’

  A lie. He didn’t work. He hadn’t worked for many years, unless you counted his brief stint with Riksmord in Västerås a few months ago. These days he did nothing, and he intended to carry on doing nothing. There wasn’t actually anything he wanted to do, and he certainly didn’t want to do anything with Ellinor Bergkvist.

  ‘How long do you think you would have slept if I hadn’t woken you?’