Killer's Island

by Anna Jansson

  “You wanted to question Malin Karlsson? She refuses to come in,” he said, his speech slightly slurred. “She doesn’t want to speak to us at all. But I managed to get her to agree to see you if you’re out of uniform. She’s also a health freak who does sixteen classes a week at Fitness First and only drinks green tea produced on uninhabited islands. She felt she could squeeze in a meeting between the body pump and aerobics.”

  “So… a fitness addict.”

  “It’s probably hard to stay off kicks when you’ve been on drugs for so many years. The ones who manage to go clean either end up working with addicts twenty-four hours a day, or turn into workaholics, or go all out for some religion. This is her address. It’s a stone’s throw from here if you’re good at throwing.”

  “Is it appropriate for a policeman to go to her on his own, if she’s been subjected to rape and lived off prostitution? I know it’s more than eleven years since she started her new life, but wouldn’t it be better to meet her on neutral ground.”

  “She doesn’t think of the police station as neutral ground,” he replied drily. “If you want her to talk to you it’s going to have to be one-on-one, even though I do understand your reservations about it.” In her exterior, at any rate,

  Malin Karlsson seemed to have left her past far behind. Her sports bag was packed and ready in the hall. She wore a pinstripe suit and a white turtleneck sweater. Her hair was cut in a short, severe style, she wore a long pearl necklace, and her makeup was discreet and well harmonized with her suntan. Her shoes were low-heeled and elegant. Possibly her unrevealing clothes hid a tattoo or two. She showed him into the kitchen and put away a crossword magazine and a book of advanced Sudoku. Per Arvidsson had bought it himself a month ago and given up. Malin was on the last page.

  “They don’t last me long but it’s a nice way to make the time go by,” she said. “Can I offer you something? Tea, coffee? There’s decaffeinated coffee and I have a selection of green teas.”

  “Tea, if it’s not too much bother. I’ve been having a few stomach problems.”

  “Gastritis? You’re not having love problems, are you?” She seemed to be able to read him like an open book. Per had thought of Maria all night, agonizing and regretting. When morning came, his coffee had made his stomach cramp up.

  “It’s possible,” he said, noticing to his own vexation that he was blushing. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t completely wrong to open up a bit and create an understanding.

  “Love and guilt, right?” There was nothing teasing about her question, just a plain statement of fact. If the situation had been different it would have been good to confide in someone who might be able to understand.

  “Something like that,” he said.

  “There’s probably nothing that creates so much guilt as love. Love and a debt of gratitude, love and deception, love and everything one is prepared to do so the other party does not leave.”

  “It’s true.” Per felt more and more empathy. This was a woman of experience and worldly wisdom. But something held him back, thank goodness. One could be personal, but not private. Right now they were heading toward the most private thing in his world – his love for Maria.

  “I won’t press you,” she said with a little smile. “I just wanted to see if there was some common ground where we could meet and both agree that life’s not always as simple and uncomplicated as in a police report. We all have our private infernos. You’ve probably read about what I’ve been through and I can guess what your life looks like. Is she worth all the agony?”

  “Yes, she is. And the guilt is all mine.”

  Malin smiled inwardly and poured the tea. “You’ve come to dig in the past. And I’m doing everything I can to forget it. You’ve come from Gotland and I’ve read about the murders in Visby. What do you want from me?”

  Per watched her for a moment and made an assessment of the situation. Malin Karlsson seemed to be an intelligent and psychologically stable woman. It wasn’t how he’d imagined this woman who’d been a drug abuser for fifteen years, he was perfectly willing to admit that. How could things have gone so wrong in her life?”

  “There’s a rumor in the criminal fraternity that the same man who assaulted and killed a boy, Linus Johansson, earlier butchered a man with the blade of a lawn mower. You featured in that investigation, but you were discounted from the list of suspects because you were in a rehab clinic.”

  “You’re wasting your time. I’ve already told you everything I know.” She leaned back and crossed her arms over her chest.

  Their understanding was broken. He had to recreate it.

  “You seem to have beaten your drug dependency in an amazing way. How did you end up there? What happened?” He shifted focus from the essential question without dropping the subject. The conversation was right on the edge of what she was willing to discuss. There was a risk that she’d ask him to leave.

  Malin Karlsson closed her eyes. Her face was expressionless.

  “I was studying law in Lund. My studies were a piece of cake, I have a photographic memory, never needed to try very hard. There were parties and I always wanted to be the center of attention. I was good-looking in those days.… Sex appeal can be a curse, it can put you in trouble. Suddenly I was pregnant. I really loved him, but he wanted nothing to do with me and not the child, either. I didn’t want the child by that time, either, but I was too far gone. I met another man who took care of me and the child, and consoled me with drugs. I didn’t have the energy for the kid, who made demands on me night and day. Always had colic. My studies went to hell. Life went to hell. The child was taken into care. I was allowed to have him sometimes, when I said I was feeling better, but I failed again and again. They should have realized at the social services that it’s no good for a child to be his mother’s therapist and get ferried back and forth. He never had a chance to develop an emotional bond with anyone. Already by the time he was five he grew uncontrollable, he was moved from home to home. He was devilishly manipulative, played his foster parents against the social services and the social services against me. I never coped with him. It’s my greatest sorrow.”

  “But he had a father as well.”

  “I had a tiny bit of self-respect left in spite of all. We managed without any help from him. Without maintenance. I didn’t want anything to do with that bastard.” Malin’s face changed, her eyes became hard. She straightened up in her chair and leaned forward. “I hated him so much.…”

  “Did the boy never ask about his father? At some point in one’s teens, one usually wants to know where one comes from. Didn’t he demand to know who his father was?” Per drank a last sip of his bitter tea, which had grown cold.

  “When he was thirteen he managed to find out for himself by threatening my mother. He found information about him on the Internet, found out everything there was to know. Found newspaper articles. He made a scrapbook and interrogated me. He wanted to know everything, and he found it especially interesting that Anders, his father, used to sleepwalk. Just after his fourteenth birthday Roy went to see his father. He found out that he had a little six-month-old sister. Anders had met the love of his life, Isabel, and he was getting married. I think Roy felt mostly in the way. He came back fairly quickly and never wanted to see his father again.”

  Roy! Anders Ahlström and Isabel! Per Arvidsson did his best to hide the fact that the insight made his skin crawl. Had Roy used a lawn mower blade to kill the man who raped his mother? Presumably she stayed silent to protect her son.

  “When did you decide to start a drug-free life?”

  “Eleven years ago. I was in rehab and then I came home. Suddenly I had to make a choice.” Malin stood up and started slamming around with some cups and saucers. Clearly, the turn the conversation had taken was upsetting her.

  “Directly after the murder?”

  “Yes,” she said, her face averted.

  “It was Roy who did it, wasn’t it? He was taking his revenge on you, and the shoc
k made you stop.” He waited for an answer. But she was silent and her face was inscrutable. “When you read about the murders in Visby you must have known it could be him, because the anger in him would never run out. Are you afraid of him, Malin?”

  She nodded mutely, and her eyes grew big and shiny.

  “The best thing you can do for Roy now is help me catch him before he kills more innocent people. He needs professional care. Do you know where he is now?”

  Malin sank down on the chair. Her face, so tanned a moment ago, now looked gray and pale. She swallowed repeatedly, but she didn’t answer now, either. Per assumed there was a battle going on inside her; a battle between her wanting to talk and at the same time not – or did she not dare give her son away?

  “Do you have a photograph of him?”

  Malin showed no sign of wanting to get up to fetch what he was asking for. Her whole body seemed to express a deep anguish. It pained him to see it, but he had to get hold of Roy.

  “Is it all right if I look around?”

  Malin still didn’t react.

  Per found what he was looking for in the living room. A photograph of a boy in his early teens, with a soccer ball pressed to his chest.

  “Was it Roy who killed that man with a lawn mower blade?” He held out the photograph in front of Malin’s eyes. “You’re not letting him down, you’re helping him if you answer the question. Was that what happened?”

  Malin shook her head.

  “I’m going to tell you about the people who’ve been killed in Visby. I want you to listen carefully. All three people were patients of Anders Ahlström. Curious coincidence, isn’t it? The first was a young boy of thirteen, he was kicked to death. His head was crushed, but he was alive until he arrived at the emergency room. At the same time a woman police officer was stabbed in the leg with a blood-filled syringe. He welcomed her to hell, he said. And then there are two more unsolved murders, which he could easily have committed. A woman was dressed up as a bride and then had her head cut off. The bridal bouquet consisted of lilies of the valley, just like in Isabel’s bouquet. A sick elderly man was very pointedly strung up in the home of a police officer soon after being beaten unconscious. He used to visit Anders daily. I suspect it’s Roy who’s behind all this.”

  “Stop, I can’t hear any more.… I want you to stop him. I am so devastated, so very devastated. Yes, it was him who murdered that man. I kept quiet because I thought we’d be able to live with it and move on. But when he came back from Gotland and at the same time I read about that woman who disappeared on her wedding night and I understood it was Anders’s wife, I realized it was him who’d killed Isabel, to defend his family. The thing he wanted was me and Anders to be there for him. I’m not sure he knew at all what a family was. I suppose it was what he had dreamed up in his scrapbook.”

  “Do you know where he is now?”

  “No, but he knows where you are. He’s a computer genius. There’s no information he can’t find and get his hands on. Roy is abnormally gifted. I don’t know if it’s an asset or a handicap. He only went to school sporadically. His classmates were scared of him, the teachers, too. He took his high school examination when he was seventeen, highest possible grades. And since then he’s devoted himself to correspondence courses. How he makes money I don’t know, but I think he makes a living playing online poker.”

  “Think again. Is there anywhere on Gotland where he can hide out, has he said anything about his whereabouts?”

  “He lives above a car repair shop. Some company that fixes trucks. It’s a ten-minute walk from an ICA store. I don’t have an address but I have a cell phone number.”

  “One last question. Is there any risk that he’s a carrier of a blood infection of some kind?”

  CHAPTER 45

  ERIKA LUND KNEW NOTHING about Per Arvidsson’s trip to Märsta when she picked up Anders Ahlström late on the Friday night. He was in a bad way after his lynching and might not have survived, even, had there not been a police patrol car in the vicinity. Erika had tried to make him go with the ambulance to the emergency room for a head X-ray, but he refused. Like a wounded animal he curled up and wanted nothing else to do with the clamoring interest of the media and the general public. The police had logged his report and told him to stay within reach on the cell phone. Linus’s father and the other more active members of the vigilance committee had been brought in for questioning. Anders only wanted to go far, far away, to a quiet place where he could be left in peace to think. Erika had called Fridhem Pension and booked Sjöstugan. All of Sjöstugan, so no other guests would be able to disturb them. During her time off she had done a great deal of thinking. If they were ever to have a chance of living together he had to tell her about Isabel and then let go of the past. In her state of despair, it seemed if they were back in the same place where Isabel disappeared, it might help him remember and talk about it.

  Outside Visby it suddenly felt as if life were taking on a different, slower rhythm. They drove past Fridhem’s coffee shop at a crawl and then up the slope, passing an old stable with a Celtic cross in the stable yard and a flowering acacia with a honeysuckle clambering along the bole, a twinned bloom. On the other side of the gravel track was a garden pavilion so enmeshed with branches that it was impossible to say where it began or finished. Beside it lay a fallen tree that was still growing, although it had snapped against the ground. Erika took it all in with a resigned feeling of life always being wasted. She wanted to stop time and experience everything. They parked outside the large yellow main building of the pension and listened to a blackbird mimicking the telephone at the reception desk, accompanied by two wood pigeons. They caught the aroma of a nearby bakery. On long lines behind the laundry, white sheets flapped in the evening breeze. The friendly lady at reception gave them their keys. She showed them the dining room and the drawing room, where the furnishings still breathed the atmosphere of Oscar II’s social life from the turn of the century.

  “How are you doing?” Erika gripped Anders’s hand as they walked out onto the upper floor veranda.

  “Why are we here?” He looked at her with resignation.

  “I think you know why we’re here.” They gazed in silence over the park and the sea. The smell of jasmine reached them even up here, the cherry trees were already ripe with fruit and in a month or so the roses would bloom overwhelmingly. He took her hand and asked to her to turn round. Behind them was a large glass window divided into a multitude of leaded panes. The room was screened off by a thin white curtain.

  “You want to know the truth and you’re going to have what you want. I only hope you know what you are asking for.” He turned to the main building and pointed at the window. “That’s the wedding suite. The party was over. Isabel took off her bridal gown, we made an inept attempt to make love. Suddenly Isabel wanted to have a swim, and I didn’t have the energy to go with her. A couple of the guys were having drinks in the reception hall. I joined them. When I woke up at five o’clock Isabel was still gone. I went down the stairs just as we’re doing now and hurried down to the beach.”

  They continued out of the door facing the park, while he continued his narrative. The painful memories made his eyes fill up with tears. He’d tried to call the police but the reception was very poor. The best places were either at the flag-pole or down by the sea.

  “When I saw her dead body on the beach I tried to call the police again. But the sea was coming in hard and we couldn’t hear each other.” Erika didn’t interrupt him. Two calls had come in to the police on that night, Maria had told her. The second call twenty-five minutes after the first. He had told the police that Isabel had disappeared and probably drowned. He’d only found the pile of clothes. Now he was going to tell her the truth: that he’d seen her dead on the morning after the wedding.

  They went down the wooden steps to the beach. The sun was sinking into the sea, and the silhouette of Stora Karlsö och Lilla Karlsö grew increasingly dark while the sea was colored red and
golden.

  “There she lay and when I looked up at the bridge over the waterfall I saw my son standing there. “What have you done!” I shouted at him. I was out of my mind, in despair, burning with anger and shock. I realized he had killed Isabel. He was fourteen years old. My son had destroyed his own life and mine. Isabel was dead. I couldn’t get her back.” Anders picked up a stone from the place where she lay. Absentmindedly he stroked it. “Without any time to think about it, I had to make the decision whether to report my own son or cover up what had happened. At that moment I was even willing to take the blame myself. Because I owed him such a huge unpaid debt. His determination was so strong, I had no will of my own, I followed his commands. He’d already planned how we should get rid of the body. We carried her back and hid her in the cellar under Sjöstugan for a couple of days. There was a trap door in the floor. Then one night we fetched her and buried her on Galgberget where no one would ever think of looking for her among all the bodies. She would still be lying there, had it not been for that archaeologist.” Anders looked at her, frightened. “I just obeyed him. I can’t explain it. He had a way of making decisions, an absolute sense of authority. He stayed with us for a month before the wedding. He made Isabel’s life a living hell. Played us against each other. Time and time again I had to work things out, take the blame myself. He wanted to live with us. Isabel said no. She said I had to make a choice. And I did. I thought I did.” They sat down on the beach. When Anders put his arm around Erika she felt he was shaking.

  “I love you,” she said. “Whatever happens I love you and want to be with you, but you must never lie to me again.”