Killer's Island

by Anna Jansson

  “That’s off my radar. I’m an infection specialist. If you want to know more I can contact a colleague, Sam Wettergren, one of the country’s leading specialists on sleep, who works here at the hospital.”

  “Sam Wettergren!”

  “So you’ve heard of him? He’s been working on smoking prevention and sleep dysfunction but he’s basically a lung specialist. Recently he presented a study on plant steroids. I haven’t had time to read it yet, but I know it caused a stir at the medical convention in Gothenburg last autumn. I think he also published an article on it in ‘The Lancet’.”

  “Sounds very eminent.” Maria was having difficulties containing her excitement, and Jonatan read her like an open book. The flame of the candle flickered in the draft as more guests walked in.

  “You saw him, didn’t you? Questioned him about Linn, who was murdered. I mean, she worked with him.” Suddenly Jonatan realized where the questions were leading.

  “Did you know her?”

  “I ran into her sometimes when I was on duty at the hospital. We all miss her.” Jonatan was lost in his own thoughts for a while. “Surely he’s not a suspect?”

  “I can’t tell you. You if anyone should understand that. As a doctor you have to respect your patient’s right to confidentiality.”

  “Can we meet again?” asked Jonatan when Maria made a move to stand up.

  She hesitated. Wanted to. But couldn’t promise anything.

  “You’re someone I’m very fond of, Jonatan, of course we have to meet up.”

  CHAPTER 34

  PER ARVIDSSON SAT AT the prow of the old rowing boat, looking down into the sparkling green water. The churning of the outboard drowned out the rushing sound of the water against the hull and the screeching of gulls. Ahead in the haze he saw the high, rocky coast of Lilla Karlsö and, further in the distance, could just make out the flatter profile of Stora Karlsö. Jesper Ek cut the motor and took up the oars.

  “What a fantastic day. Can you see how lovely it is?” He couldn’t stop himself from saying it, though Arvidsson looked just about as miserable as the semi-dehydrated earthworms in the old coffee tin.

  Arvidsson squinted at the horizon and pretended not to hear him. They prepared their rods and cast. They should at least get a little perch or two. In his first summer on Gotland, Arvidsson had gone with Hartman to catch cod. The zinc barrel had been overflowing in just over an hour, and the boat lay so low in the water that they didn’t dare fish any more. Now the cod had disappeared and before that the salmon, and the last few summers the sea had been full of algae.

  “It’s like the Baltic is vomiting,” he mumbled sadly. “If you want to catch something now you have to put out nets. And even then you only get a couple of plaice. Possibly.”

  Ek laughed without a care in the world. “You’re incredible. Come on. You’re not the only person in the world who’s blown the love of your life. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. Happens to me all the time. You think you’re going to die, that life will never be worth living again. Then someone buys you a cold beer and you realize it might just be worth hanging in there a little bit longer.”

  Arvidsson shook his head. What Ek had just blurted out was as dumb as it was true. His affairs were superficial, short-lived flames, in no way comparable to what he felt for Maria.

  “Hartman said you were in Märsta the day before yesterday. Anything come out of it?”

  “Yes, I have to go back again on Monday. When I tried to find the file we’re looking for, the one about the man who was killed with a lawn mower blade, it wasn’t there. I didn’t believe my colleague, so I actually went there to help him find it. They can’t explain where it’s gone. The place in the archive where it should be is empty, and there’s no way of checking if it’s been lent to someone.”

  “Damned careless!” Ek spat on his worm and threw out the line again.

  “Or theft. With the help of this colleague who was in charge of the investigation, I sketched out the main events as well as I could. If we’re talking about the same man responsible for the lethal assault, we might get some more clues here to help us track him down.” Suddenly, Arvidsson’s float was pulled under.

  “You’ve got a bite.” Ek helped him haul in the line.

  “Only seaweed,” said Arvidsson, disappointed, as he untangled the green mess from his hook.

  “But something came out of it? It must have or you wouldn’t be going back.”

  “There’s a woman I want to talk to. Malin Karlsson. An ex-heroin addict. One of the lucky ones who got herself out of the shit and managed to find a job at the register in a DIY superstore. She’s in Greece and coming back on Monday. I’ve already spoken to the others who figured in the investigation. It’s a long shot but we might get lucky.…”

  “What’s her relationship to the dead man?”

  “She accused him of repeatedly raping her, according to a girlfriend of hers. It was never possible to prove anything. She never reported it. I suppose she was afraid she wouldn’t be believed. And then he was butchered with the blade of a lawn mower and thrown in a ditch. She had an alibi. She was in a rehab clinic at the time of the murder.”

  “Damn. Someone must have been pretty angry.” Ek put on his sunglasses. The light breaking against the still surface of the water was blinding.

  “Precisely. Here you can really talk about excessive violence. Every bone in his body was broken. The head was severed from the body. He was unrecognizable. They had to identify him using dental records.”

  “But Malin Karlsson had an alibi?” Ek repeated.

  “She’d taken an overdose but miraculously survived it. For a couple of days she hovered between life and death on a life-support machine; then she was sent to Bredgården.”

  “And the girlfriend who talked to the police?”

  “She was also in rehab at the time.” Arvidsson tossed out his bait again, wedged his rod between his knees, and reached for the cooler. “A beer, you said. It won’t help a lot, just dilutes the misery, you know.”

  “And if that trail doesn’t lead anywhere, what then? Time is not on our side here.” Ek took the sandwich and beer being handed to him.

  “You’re telling me. I’ve been working night and day on this. We have the murderer’s DNA because Maria had the presence of mind to scratch him where his skin was exposed. If we find him we’ve got him. But the only tip we have right now is what I got from your kid at Svartsjö Prison. There are no witnesses. Weird, isn’t it? Two people are assaulted in the street and no one sees anything of any value. Local residents hear some shouting and then three men leaving the scene, but none of them are capable of giving a description. What are people doing with their spare time? Getting drunk and watching TV?”

  “Maria described a man in an overcoat and cap who walked past while the assault was in progress.”

  Arvidsson remembered. But the witness had never come forward.

  Ek continued: “We had a tip. A woman living in Ryska Gränd saw the witness walking up toward the Cathedral. She’s almost sure she recognized him. He used to work for the Tax Department but he’s retired; the woman used to be an accountant, and often met him through her work. She wasn’t sure of his name and didn’t have a record of it in her papers, but she says she could identify him. I’m seeing her on Monday at eight o’clock.”

  “It’s pretty weak. It’s unlikely he’ll be able to say much more than Maria did. Someone must know who these guys are. If they were boasting about what they’d done, someone must have overheard them. And this assault can’t be the only crime they’ve committed.” Arvidsson thought about Ek’s son, Joakim. He could get hold of more information, Per was sure of that. But the lad would probably have to pay for it with his life. They couldn’t take that risk.

  “The DNA we took under Maria’s fingernails didn’t match what we found at Linn Bogren’s. Even so, there are parallels. Linn was also harassed by a gang of young men. Harry Molin told his doctor. It would be nice
if there was a connection here. To make something understandable out of all this.”

  “Maria only got a skin scrape from one of them, the one she thought was their leader. What if it was one of the others who murdered Linn and left signs of his presence there?” Per had tested that thought before, yet he continued to focus on the leader.

  “In which case one has to ask why would one of them go back for Linn, and then Harry?”

  They ate their picnic in silence. Arvidsson didn’t enjoy what he was eating, it was as if the food expanded in his mouth. For Maria’s sake, for the murdered boy’s sake, they had to catch the perpetrators. Every day the trail grew colder. Witnesses started forgetting. The criminals had the chance to destroy evidence. And yet the disappearance of the files on the lawn mower murder was good news, somehow. One had to assume it was a case of theft. This had not been risk-free, far from it. But someone had weighed up the risks and benefits and deemed it necessary to go in. It gave one hope that this was something important.

  Ek pulled the outboard’s starter cord and they headed back toward Djupvik. The sun was boiling over the shore meadows and the fishing harbor. The land was parched and there were radio warnings about possible forest fires. Arvidsson fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone and realized he must have left it at Ek’s place, where he was sleeping on the sofa nowadays. He’d already started looking around for a new apartment – moving back to the house where Harry Molin had been hanged seemed impossible. Ek hadn’t brought his cell phone, either.

  They spent the rest of the day at Tofta Beach, playing miniature golf and eating pizza while Ek kept his eyes peeled for red-headed sirens. Some of his pickup techniques made Arvidsson gag. He kept in the background as much as he could, so he wouldn’t be associated with his colleague. Even as a temporary roommate, Ek was a goddamn trial sometimes.

  Only in the evening did Per see that Maria had called. He went out on the balcony to get away from Ek’s curious eyes. His heart raced, and the pulse thundered against his eardrums. Had she changed her mind, did she want to see him after all? He hoped it could be so, more than he had ever hoped for anything. His hands grew sweaty as he pressed the call-back button and waited.

  “Maria Wern!” She sounded tense. Not a god sign.

  “You called.” It sounded silly, as if he had to make an excuse the first thing he did.

  “It’s about work.”

  “Right,” he said, dragging out his answer. She didn’t want to give him cause for optimism, that much was clear. Probably he should be glad she wanted to talk to him at all.

  “Linus Johansson’s friend, a little lad called Oliver, sought me out today. He had a visit from a policeman who never showed his ID. I suspect he was bogus.”

  “None of us have spoken to him, I can promise you that. We waited for a child psychologist, but when we questioned him he didn’t want to say anything. According to his mother he’s refusing to see the psychologist again. We were hoping she’d be able to get him talking about what he knew.” Arvidsson stopped, waiting for Maria to continue. “So Oliver got in touch with you?” he prompted, when she didn’t say anything.

  “He told me Linus was afraid because he’d seen a man in a dark cape waiting outside his bedroom window, both when he was staying with his father and his mother. They had him every other week.”

  “Sounds very serious, someone impersonating a police officer. Where’s Hartman?”

  “At a party in Martebo. But on his way in. You have to decide how to move on this. If Oliver wants me involved, you know where I am.”

  “That’s good.”

  She was just about to hang up, but something in his voice stopped her.

  “Maria.…” Everything he wanted to say got caught in an echoing vacuum.

  “Listen, you really do have to respect the fact that I don’t want anything to do with you any more, not outside of work. It’s over.” As soon as she’d spoken the words she regretted them. She wanted to add something to make them less harsh, but by then he’d already hung up.

  CHAPTER 35

  IT WAS MONDAY MORNING. A sharp sun was shining in, accentuating the dust particles dancing in the air over the officiously brown sofa from the seventies and the stained, grayish armchairs. The fabric was indestructible, timeless and nondescript. The table in front of the sofa was scratched and rickety, and the picture on the wall belonged to the County Council’s art collection which neither caused offense nor made anyone happy. The Midsummer weekend was over and the waiting room was full of patients.

  Anders Ahlström got to thinking about Harry Molin. After a long weekend he would usually be there, checking appointments with Agneta in the reception and loyally pacing back and forth in the waiting room. He remembered how Linn Bogren had sat curled up behind a newspaper, over by the window, to shield herself from curious glances. It hadn’t been so easy suddenly being a patient in a clinic where she had only just started working. The same sun had illuminated her brown curls, making them seem almost purple. In that moment she’d been almost preternaturally beautiful. Could he have helped her more? If he had listened more carefully could he have helped avert the danger? The very thing she feared most had actually taken place. If only he’d been aware of her terror of an unknown male intruder at night. What at first sounded like a fantasy had later had a natural explanation, when he heard Harry’s story. But by the time Harry Molin admitted that he’d pressed his face against Linn’s window to see if she were in, the problem no longer seemed very pressing. Anders hadn’t seen any reason to contact the police.

  And Linus Johansson, that little toughie with asthma, he was no longer in this world either. His infectious laugh would never again be heard in the corridor, when he drew his imaginary pistols and won the duel. His mother Katarina, her anxious face lighting up in a wonderful smile, had not been seen again.

  He would never see them again. Three of his patients had died terrible deaths in the course of a month, all in the same part of the city. It really was terrifying. These were Anders Ahlström’s thoughts as he fetched in his next patient. A small, straight-backed lady in her eighties whose name, according to the journal, was Agnes Isomäki.

  “What can I do for you?” he said, offering her a seat. He hadn’t had time to read her file yet, and it seemed impolite to do so before the very eyes of this old lady, who seemed perfectly lucid. Better to listen to what she had to say for herself.

  “My granddaughter’s getting married and I don’t want to go to the party wearing slippers.”

  Anders leaned across the desk to see what she meant. Sure enough. The lady wore slippers in a checkered brown pattern, with a frontal zip.

  “Can I see your feet? Are they swollen?”

  Agnes made a face as she took them off.

  “Just look at the state of them! I don’t know what I did. I don’t think I’ve been bitten by an insect, not in both feet, and I haven’t twisted my ankles, either.”

  Anders squatted beside her and squeezed her ankles and feet. His finger left an indentation in the swelling.

  “I’d like to listen to your heart and then we’ll do an ECG and run a couple of tests. Have you had any pain round your heart or felt out of breath?”

  “That’s not the problem. It’s the slippers,” she corrected patiently, as if talking to a child. “I have a pair of lovely shoes with a heel, I’d wear them if my legs weren’t so swollen.”

  “Typical girl, you only think about the way you look,” he joked, adding in a more serious tone. “I think the swelling may be because of your heart. Once it starts playing up, you start retaining water in your legs.”

  “I’ve always been a bit proud of my legs. When you get older and your decent legs are the only thing left of whatever looks you once had, you end up feeling even more particular about them. I want to look my best at my granddaughter’s wedding. We’ve only had misery in the family. This wedding is the first good thing that’s happened for a long time.” She looked at him, expecting him to ask what had
gone wrong in the family.

  “My husband.…”

  Anders Ahlström glanced at his watch. One couldn’t just dismiss people when they started talking about their disappointments.

  “… my husband’s gone senile and I can’t manage him at home any more. It’s so terrible. He leaves the house and gets lost. We’ve lived together for fifty years through good and bad times. I love him, but I can’t cope with having him wandering round the house at night, and turning on the oven. He gets so unaccountably angry when I tell him he’s doing something wrong.…” Agnes Isomäki burst into tears and all Anders could think of doing was to take her in his arms. Over her shoulder he could see, through the window, a tall, thin man standing there, with a hat pulled over his face even though they were in the middle of summer. Only for a split second – then he was gone. Something about the appearance of the young man stirred memories and a strong feeling of unease – he’d looked like a younger version of himself, twenty-five years ago. Anders forced himself back into the here and now.

  “Is there anyone helping you or do you want me to contact the social welfare officer? I can understand the problem’s too much for you.”

  Agnes Isomäki let go of him and looked embarrassed. Her face was red and her nose running. “Sorry doctor, it just came over me. I’m alone. My daughter lives on the mainland. The wedding will be in Gnisvärd Church. I don’t know if I can bring Gösta.… What if he becomes agitated and ruins everything? At the same time it’s awful excluding him, and who’d keep an eye on him if he’s left at home?” Agnes started crying again, and Anders carefully patted her arm. It would probably take a week at least to get an appointment with the social welfare officer, then an unknown quantity of days and weeks before a short-term bed could be arranged at a care home. It would be quicker if the husband were admitted to a hospital for some other reason, and the wife then found herself unable to take him back into the home.