A Beautiful Breed of Evil (The DI Stella Cole Thrillers Book 5)

by Andy Maslen

  ‘Tack, Oskar,’ she said to him, then turned to address the room more generally. ‘God morgon. I hope I can repay your hospitality with some helpful insights while I’m a guest in your country. And work with you all to catch Ambassador Brömly’s murderer.’

  Her semi-prepared speech went down well, earning her a few more nods and grunts of appreciation. She was experienced enough to know that a senior officer flying in from not just another force but another country, was as welcome as a boil on the bum.

  After all, she’d hardly behaved herself when Oskar had turned up in London. She had no intention of provoking rivalry or worse before she’d even reached her first coffee.

  Oskar spent twenty minutes outlining the evidence they’d gathered in London, and, more importantly, the gaps he wanted filling. Once the meeting dispersed, he turned to Stella.

  ‘Time to introduce you to my boss.’

  He led her through the bustling CID room to a wall of glassed-in offices. On the way he informed her that there was nothing in Anna Brömly’s medical history about infertility treatment. She nodded her thanks. Maybe the couple had remained child-free by choice. In which case, why was he so bothered about the issue?

  Oskar knocked at the door of the leftmost of the glassed-in offices and entered. She followed him in.

  Sitting behind the desk was a woman in her late forties or early fifties. She smiled and rounded the immaculate desk to shake Stella warmly by the hand.

  ‘You must be DCI Cole. Welcome to Sweden and Stockholm Region Murder Squad,’ she said. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector, Malin Holm. Call me Malin, please.’

  ‘And you must call me Stella.’

  ‘Please, sit,’ Malin said.

  Stella took in Oskar’s boss in a quick, appraising glance. Her auburn hair was cut short in a pixie crop, not a million miles from the look Stella had adopted on her trip to kill Collier. She wore no or little makeup and the overall effect, from intelligent gaze to strong jawline, was of a determined woman who put professionalism ahead of everything else.

  ‘Why don’t you fill in Malin on where we got to in England,’ Norgrim said.

  Stella nodded, deciding in the moment to use Brömly’s former title as Oskar had at the team briefing. When she finished, Malin acknowledged the concise summary with a quick nod.

  ‘You said “she” just then. This wasn’t in Oskar’s report. Has there been a new development?’

  Stella explained how her interview with the cafe server had yielded the new piece of intelligence. Malin narrowed her eyes, throwing them into shadow. ‘Does the MO sound like a woman to you, Stella?’ she asked.

  ‘I think, in the right circumstances, a woman could commit any type of injury on another person,’ Stella said carefully.

  Malin nodded. ‘But statistically, isn’t it more likely to be a man?’

  ‘Yes. But that doesn’t mean this one was.’

  ‘Tell me again why you feel this individual is your prime suspect.’

  Feeling more like a rookie than she had for any number of years, Stella pushed on with her explanation.

  ‘That is a bit thin,’ Malin said, when Stella finished.

  Feeling defensive, Stella pushed back. ‘It’s the best lead we have. Everything points to the killer living in Sweden. It’s why I’m here.’

  Malin nodded, pursing her lips. She blew out, flapping them like a horse, an incongruous sound in the small office.

  ‘Please don’t be offended. I’m just testing the evidence underlying your assumptions.’

  Stella smiled. ‘I get it. And I agree, it doesn’t fit what I would think of as the normal profile of a female killer.’

  ‘So. What is the plan?’

  Oskar touched Stella lightly on the arm. ‘May I?’ he asked her.

  ‘Sure, go ahead. It’s your show now.’

  ‘Man or woman,’ he glanced at Stella, ‘the killer is here. On that Stella and I agree. We think if we find the motive, we’ll find the killer. That means digging into Brömly’s past.’

  Malin steepled her fingers together in front of her face.

  ‘We should discuss operational protocols.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You are here on a letter of introduction. You are strictly limited to interviewing witnesses. If there are any arrests to be made, Swedish law requires they be made by an officer of the SPA.’

  Stella smiled. ‘I understand.’

  Malin nodded. ‘Good. Brömly grew up in Umeå, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. That’s where we need to begin.’

  ‘You’ll like Umeå. It is sometimes called the capital of the north. You know, they call it Björkarnas Stad. It means City of Birches. Oskar can explain why on your trip.’

  After the meeting with Malin, Oskar led Stella to a spare desk.

  ‘You can work here. I hope it’s OK. The PC isn’t new but it’s not too slow, I checked,’ he said with a lopsided grin.

  Then he left her to it, explaining he had a court appearance to prepare for. Stella settled into the chair, which was far more comfortable than the ratty old things they had to put up with in SIU.

  She fished around in the desk drawers and came up with an A4 pad and a pen. Ignoring the PC for the moment, she began making notes of the lines of enquiry she wanted to pursue in Sweden.

  She got out Brömly’s CV, opened a browser and started searching for phone numbers.

  Stella worked the phone solidly for two hours. During a break, a text arrived from Cam. The translations were back from the interpreters. Neither added anything to the versions they’d put together from Google, and Malmaeus the priest. But at least she now had evidential-quality renderings into English.

  A quiet cough made her turn round. A young female detective stood by her desk. Her long blonde hair was held back in a black scrunchie. She had a perfect heart-shaped face and lightly tanned skin, tinged over the cheekbones with pink.

  Her eye colour was hard to describe until Stella remembered a semi-precious stone she’d once coveted called moss agate. Like the wet green stuff fringing river banks, it was somewhere between green, blue and grey. Her lips were full and curved upwards in a smile.

  ‘Hi, I’m Johanna Carlsson. I just transferred in from Financial Crime. I saw you in the briefing this morning.’

  Stella stood and smiled as they shook hands. ‘Wow! That’s a strong grip for someone who chases white-collar criminals.’

  Johanna grinned. ‘I work out. I can bench press thirty-five kilos.’

  Stella nodded her appreciation. ‘Not bad.’

  Johanna cast an appraising glance over Stella’s body. ‘How about you? You work out, too?’

  Stella laughed and shook her head. ‘No. But I like running.’

  ‘Oh, yes? What distance?’

  ‘My personal best for a 10K is fifty-six thirty.’

  Now it was Johanna’s turn to nod. ‘Cool. So, you want to go for a run with me? Maybe tonight after work?’

  ‘Sure, I’d like that.’

  Johanna’s smile broadened. She looked genuinely pleased.

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘Hotel Kungsträdgården on Vasträ Trädgårdgatan. Sorry about my pronunciation.’

  ‘That’s a great hotel. And your pronunciation is fine. It’s cute in your English accent. So, my apartment’s not too far from there. I’ll drive over to meet you outside. Say seven?’

  Most of the day passed the way it had started, with Stella calling Brömly’s old schools, researching his early years in Umeå and arranging to meet people who knew him there when he was younger. Without exception, everyone she spoke to could say nothing but good things about Brömly. She was beginning to wonder whether it had been a random killing after all.

  Needing to get out and do some old-fashioned coppering, she researched the national agency responsible for coordinating volunteering in Sweden. It was called Volontärbyrån, the National Volunteering Agency.

  She called and made an appointment to s
ee the Executive Director that afternoon.

  Anna Strömgren, fortyish, stout and with half-moon glasses on a thin gold chain, welcomed Stella warmly and led her to her ground-floor office. With its profusion of indoor plants, it resembled a hothouse rather than a place of business. Stella realised she’d left home without arranging for anyone to water her house plants.

  ‘How can I help you, DCI Cole?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m investigating a murder. A former Swedish ambassador was killed in his London flat.’

  Strömgren’s expression changed. Her smile disappeared, replaced by a look of sadness.

  ‘I read about it. You know, Tomas was a good friend to Volontärbyrån.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He sent money every year. Quite a large amount.’

  ‘Can I ask how much?’

  ‘One hundred thousand kronor.’

  Stella frowned. Almost nine thousand pounds. That was a lot of money for a yearly donation to a charity.

  ‘Did he ever say why?’

  Strömgren nodded. ‘He told me once. He said he believed Sweden needed to be more compassionate. That it could save the country’s soul.’

  Stella made a note. Because it jarred with her own impression of the country. Back in the UK, people were always holding up Sweden as an example of an enlightened democracy, caring for its immigrants and with a welfare system second to none. What was wrong with its soul?

  ‘Tomas was a volunteer himself, in the seventies,’ Stella said.

  ‘Yes, he told me. In Africa.’

  ‘Do you have records stretching back that far?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. We were only established in 2002. Before that, volunteering in Sweden was coordinated through hundreds of smaller organisations. Charities. Churches. Social clubs. I doubt, even if the one Tomas worked through still exists, that they would have records from that far back.’

  Stella nodded. She hadn’t really been expecting anything else. But at least she’d learned that Brömly gave a sizeable annual donation. Of course people, especially wealthy people, often gave large sums to charity. But Brömly’s reasons sounded very much like those of a man trying to escape some moral failing of his own.

  Towards the end of the day, during which she’d largely managed to avoid checking her phone, Lucian emailed her with a new piece of evidence.

  We got a match off the shoe sole pattern database for the print on Brömly’s face. It’s a Swedish brand, which you may find interesting: Icebug. I narrowed it down to two models then spoke to a *very* nice product manager in their marketing department, and he told me it’s their Spirit8.

  I measured the spacing between the studs (which I learned are carbide-tipped btw – they’re designed for running on icy trails, who knew!).

  From my measurements, he thought they were probably a 42 or a 43. The 42 is the largest women’s size they do, then you have to buy from the men’s range.

  Stella made a note, smiling at Lucian’s evident delight in acquiring a Swedish contact for whom, she had no doubt, he’d fallen. She wondered whether he’d tell his partner, Gareth, a primary school teacher with a wicked sense of humour and a beautiful tenor voice.

  She thought it was careless of the killer to wear such distinctively patterned shoes to a hit. But then maybe she hadn’t reckoned on the need to pinion Brömly to the floor before wrenching out his tongue.

  She? Or he? Was Malin right? Were the statistics against it?

  Bugger the statistics! If you believed numbers over evidence and, yes, your copper’s instincts, you’d do what most cops did and solve the majority of murders using the commonest assumptions and the most probable lines of enquiry.

  Which was fine in the Murder Squad, where on a good day you’d have a suspect in custody before the body was cold.

  But in SIU, where they dealt only with the weird ones, the off-menu ones, the ones that, statistically, shouldn’t have happened at all, stats were about as much use as a Taser with a flat battery.

  She’d ask Johanna what she thought. Coming from an outside discipline she’d hopefully have fewer preconceptions about what women were, or weren’t capable of doing. When pushed too far.

  16

  Chicago

  Simone led Roisin to an unused conference room. On the way, she explained she’d transferred in from Oakland in California a month earlier. She’d read the files but little more than that.

  Inside she gestured for her to close the door as she set the box down on the rectangular wooden table.

  In one corner stood a whiteboard on a tripod. Unlike those Roisin was used to, this was pristine. Its glossy surface appeared never to have been used. Or if it had, someone had used an industrial solvent to remove the blue, green and red smears that marred every single whiteboard back in Paddington Green.

  God, that seemed like another world away. Did the FBI have to deal with cuts? It didn’t look like it to her. Everywhere she saw new-looking office equipment, gleaming, undented vehicles, and people going about their business with the quiet confidence that came from being part of a well-resourced machine.

  ‘Give me a hand with this, would you?’ Simone asked, standing to one side of the whiteboard.

  Roisin joined her and together they lifted it up and laid it flat on the table. Simone went to a side table positioned under a window and brought a white box to the table. It was full of drywipe markers, felt erasers, Post-It pads, a couple of notepads and some FBI-branded ball points.

  Simone took out a blue marker and sketched in a sweeping curve down the centre of the board.

  ‘That’s the lakeshore,’ she said.

  With a few swirls of a green marker, she added some rough circles to the left of the shore. ‘Trees.’

  At last, she opened the flaps of the cardboard carton. Roisin peered inside and laughed. The box contained toys. She looked more closely. Not just toys, action figures in a variety of uniforms and civilian outfits, plus motorbikes, cars, trucks, furniture, road cones, traffic barriers – in short, everything you might need to recreate a crime scene.

  ‘We’ve played this out a couple dozen different ways, but you knew the Colliers. Maybe you’ll come up with something we missed,’ Simone said.

  Roisin bit back the answer that she hadn’t known the dead couple at all. Instead, she pulled out a black SUV. Twelve inches from bumper to bumper, it had opening doors and bonnet – hood, she corrected herself. She placed it in the centre of the area designated lake by Simone’s curving shoreline. Next she pulled out a male character in a grey suit. She manoeuvred him into the SUV’s driver’s seat.

  Simone pulled out a female character wearing a blue skirt and, incongruously, a shocking-pink halter top.

  ‘Minnesota in winter’s a bit cold for this, really, but, hey, she’s gonna die in a minute, anyway,’ Simone said, shocking Roisin with the crudeness of her humour. Just for a second.

  She lay the figure on its side about a foot from the front of the SUV. Roisin looked into the box and pulled out a male figure. She pursed her lips. Something made her want to put the male figure back in the box. She rooted around among the hard plastic figures until she found a second female. This one wore a navy bomber jacket with a bright-yellow FBI on the back. She placed it equidistant from the two others, to form a triangle.

  Simone looked at Roisin.

  ‘You don’t think it was one of us, do you?’

  Roisin smiled and shook her head. ‘I don’t know why I did that. I suppose it’s too easy to assume the other shooter was a guy.’

  ‘Good thinking. Maybe this’ll help us stay unbiased. OK, so what happened? Go.’

  Roisin looked down at the diorama in front of her. Adam Collier’s handsome face swam into view. She closed her eyes for a second and pictured the file photos she’d studied since Rachel Fairhill had assigned her to the case.

  Collier had what she thought of as movie-star good looks. Dark, heavy eyebrows above penetrating brown eyes. A regular face, cl
ean-shaven. The hint of a sardonic smile. Lynne, by contrast, was unremarkable. Nondescript, she thought. Mousey. The kind of person witnesses would always describe as average-looking.

  She opened her eyes again.

  Lynne had been shot with Adam’s service weapon. The odds were that he’d been the one to shoot her. It was possible the mystery person had got his gun off him and used it to murder his wife. But then, why not use it on Adam as well? Why switch to the little revolver?

  Roisin scratched around under the bulkier items in the box and came up with a fistful of tiny pieces of plastic. Among the oddly detailed food items and household doodads, she saw a couple of black pistols. She picked one out with thumb and forefinger and placed it inside the SUV on the passenger seat.

  She had another go but came up with chicken drumsticks, sandwiches and an orange coffee mug.

  ‘Here, let me,’ Simone said.

  She picked up the box by its sides and emptied it out with a rush and rattle of hard plastics onto the table beside the whiteboard. Fifty or sixty bits of multicoloured plastic skittered across the polished surface.

  Roisin spotted what she wanted. A cowboy figure complete with lariat in one hand and silver revolver in the other. She prised the revolver from his hand – his cold, dead hand, a voice intoned between her ears – and laid it beside the female figure on the ice standing, well, lying, in for Lynne Collier.

  She took the FBI figure away and stood it up on the land side of the shoreline.

  ‘This is how the Colliers were found, yes?’ she asked Simone as she pointed to the two victim figures.

  ‘Under the water, but yes. Preston PD pulled them out of the lake in roughly those positions relative to the bank and each other.’

  If the Glock was Adam’s then the mystery shooter must have brought the Airweight. Roisin clipped the little revolver into the FBI character’s right hand. She moved the figures around on the schematic landscape, looking for a setup that fitted the evidence.

  Roisin stared at the female figure, lying on its side on the ice. She realised that was how she’d begun to think of the whiteboard – as an expanse of thinning ice on a lake deep in the Minnesota countryside where two expat Brits had been murdered.