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

by Andy Maslen

  He hasn’t put her address into his satnav or phone. He’s not stupid. But he has memorised it.

  He’s been sitting at a pavement cafe opposite her apartment block all afternoon. He’s read literally every word in Svenska Dagbladet, including the obituaries.

  And his patience has just paid off. She entered the building five minutes ago, clutching a couple of bulging ICA carrier bags. So she’s just done her weekly supermarket shop and now she’ll be inside, putting everything away.

  He leaves a bill and some coins on the table under his coffee cup, signals to the waitress that he’s leaving and calls a cheerful, ‘Tack, tack!’ and crosses the road. As he does, he shrugs on the black raincoat and belts it around his waist. It draws a couple of looks from people crossing in the other direction, but he doesn’t care.

  He hangs back from the front door, waiting for another resident to appear. Coming or going, either works.

  It’s a ten-minute wait. He’s just starting to get nervous when a young woman with a baby in a stroller approaches from the direction of the shops. She fishes out a key from her pocket and opens the door.

  ‘Here,’ he says, stepping forward with a smile, ‘let me hold it for you.’

  She smiles with gratitude. He’s pulled the peak of his cap down low over his eyes but he further obscures his face by the simple move of leaning over to smile at the baby. The baby smiles back and curls its pudgy hand into an approximation of a wave.

  She pushes the stroller into the hall, and straight into a ground-floor apartment. While she’s occupied opening her own front door, he inches the toe of his right boot forward to prevent the outer door from locking. Now she’s gone, he slips inside and waits for the door to click shut behind him.

  Lift or stairs? No contest. He takes the lift. He’s getting on, and, although fit, wants to conserve his strength for what lies ahead.

  Ascending to the third floor, he readies himself. He had to think hard how best to kill Ivarsson. The rifle was out. Urban shootings would draw a full-on armed counter-terrorist squad and he really felt he could do without that.

  No, this one had to be close-in, like Brömly. It was a shame he had to dump the pistol in the Thames. With a silencer he could have fabricated in his workshop, it would have been perfect.

  In the end the idea came to him while he was polishing the car.

  The lift pings and the doors part. He steps out onto the landing, turns left and walks down the hallway to her apartment. Rings the bell.

  He strains to hear her and is relieved when he detects her footsteps approaching the door from the other side. He assumes an expression he feels appropriate for the role he’s chosen to play.

  She opens the door.

  ‘Yes?’ she says.

  ‘Annika Ivarsson?’

  ‘Yes. Who are you?’

  ‘I have some information that you will find extremely interesting. It relates to certain events in Umeå in 1973. Can I come in, please?’

  The bait works perfectly. He’d thought it would. Picking the mid-point date guaranteed she’d nibble at it. But she’s cautious. Rightly so.

  ‘What kind of events?’

  ‘Events that would spell disaster for some extremely well-respected members of the community here. I work at police headquarters in the data department. It’s how I know what you’re working on.’

  Her eyes flick past his left shoulder. She moistens her lips with her tongue. He waits, breathing slowly and evenly. The lie is both vague and, perhaps as a result, convincing.

  ‘Come in,’ she says, finally.

  From then on, things happen more or less as he planned. He sticks the stun gun’s twin terminals against the nape of her neck and presses the button. She convulses like a fish and flops to the floor, giving her skull a hefty smack against the skirting board on the way down.

  He closes the door with his heel and pulls the rest of the stuff he needs out of his backpack. Swimming cap, mask, decorator’s overalls and gloves first. Then the plastic bag. He stoops beside her in the narrow hallway and slips it over her head, cinching it round her neck with a cable tie, zipping it tight.

  While she’s suffocating, he moves past her and looks for her laptop. Finds it on the kitchen table. It goes into his bag. Maybe she’s uploaded her work to the cloud. But it’ll be passworded, and once she’s dead nobody will be able to find it anyway.

  It takes him ten minutes to find her wallet. He takes the credit cards and the notes, some six hundred kronor in all. It was a mistake not to do this with Brömly. But that was before he’d really thought about what he was doing.

  In the bedroom, he opens a wooden jewellery box and takes a few of the more expensive-looking pieces, stuffing them in the bag alongside the laptop. He has no idea if they’re valuable. It doesn’t matter. They’re all going in the lake.

  He rifles through her chest of drawers. The top-left drawer is full of surprisingly feminine lingerie. Soft, silky, lacy stuff in pink, cream and black. It doesn’t interest him in the slightest, but he strews it around on the bed anyway.

  She has a painting by a famous Swedish artist on the wall. He can’t remember the name, but he specialises in winter scenes with a birch tree and a Falun-red farmhouse. This one has a grouse in it. He picks up the half-empty jewellery box and hurls it at the picture. A sharp corner pierces the canvas just above the bird’s eye.

  Has he forgotten anything? He pauses for a moment. Of course! Phone! How could he have missed that? He goes back to the kitchen. The phone’s plugged into a charger beside a bowl of apples. Into the bag it goes.

  He stands still, closes his eyes and runs through what he’s calling his pre-flight checks. The joke amused him when he thought of it, and now, in the adrenaline-soaked excitement of the moment, he barks out a short laugh then claps his gloved hand to his mouth.

  He hasn’t spilled any blood. The mask will have soaked up any saliva. His hair is contained inside the swimming cap. If he has left any trace of his presence in the flat, he doubts the dullards who pass for detectives in Umeå are clever enough to find it.

  A final piece of false-trail laying. He returns to the hall, drags the corpse into the bedroom and dumps it on the bed. He pulls the skirt up and drags off the knickers.

  He opens her legs. It’s a shame he can’t leave any semen. But that would run counter to the hygiene measures he’s adopted. He clips off the cable tie around her neck and stuffs it, and the plastic bag, into a pocket.

  Still, it’s not a bad piece of deception. Now it’s a robbery-turned-sexual assault that ended in murder.

  He checks his watch. Twenty-three minutes, start to finish.

  He leaves the flat, closing the door quietly behind him and is strolling down Dressyrgatan five minutes later.

  38

  Umeå

  Stella spent half the night sitting at the desk in her hotel room, reading and re-reading all her notes on the investigation.

  The combined feelings of fatigue and caffeine-induced hyper-alertness were playing havoc with her heart rate. It sped along one minute as if she were having a panic attack, then seemed to disappear altogether the next.

  That the sun didn’t even start setting until way after ten didn’t help matters.

  She’d called Johanna in Stockholm and asked her to find out if Kerstin had taken a flight to London in the last month. Then she’d taken Josef Dahl’s rifles to the forensics department and asked them to determine if either had been fired recently.

  The trouble was, in the absence of the slugs from the Hedlunds’ murders, that wouldn’t prove anything. Or not beyond the obvious fact, of zero evidential value, that someone had recently fired a hunting rifle in a hunting area of Sweden.

  The couple Kerstin had named, the Söderströms, had confirmed on the phone that they had indeed shouted to the Dahls from their boat at around 8.30 a.m. on the day of the Hedlunds’ murders.

  The evidence was all pointing to Mattsson as the killer.

  Unless.

>   Annika Ivarsson had been quite open that she was writing an article that would expose the men and women who’d sterilised her on her sixteenth birthday.

  Stella had seen murders committed on slenderer motives than that. And what better cover for a murderer than to research your intended victims while pretending to write about them?

  She checked the time. It was now after one, and she still felt wide awake. Knowing she was closing in on the killer, she knew she should at least try to get some sleep. She had a bath then slid between the cool cotton sheets and closed her eyes.

  It felt ridiculous. Lying there absolutely wide awake as if it were the middle of the day not the middle of the night.

  Thoughts chased each other round her head, too fast to catch them, powered by planet-sized caffeine molecules.

  And then, suddenly, as if the accumulated chemicals keeping her in a state of permanent hyper-alertness had all been metabolised at once, they vanished.

  Seemingly seconds later, she opened her eyes. The room was suffused with a pale light from behind the curtains. She felt rested, despite not being able to remember dreaming and therefore whether she had actually slept or not.

  She resolved to visit Mattsson and Ivarsson in the morning. If Oskar was busy, she’d drag along one of the other detectives. She frowned, and turned to check the clock-radio by the bedside. The green digits read 4.31 a.m. OK, later that morning.

  Realising she wasn’t going to get any more sleep, she pulled on her running gear and was outside, slipping into a familiar rhythm as she turned towards the river.

  She turned left and jogged along a wide tarmac path – Strandpromenaden – that tracked just to the south of Västra Strandgatan, the wide highway separating north Umeå from its southern half.

  As she ran, and her heart and lungs came on song, pumping oxygen-rich blood to her muscles, she nodded and smiled to other early morning runners.

  They smiled back, cheerfully shouting ‘Morgon’ back.

  When a young guy in all-black running gear shouted out ‘Hur är läget?’ she was delighted to realise she understood him directly, without translating his question.

  How was she?

  She was fine. Far from London. Far from Jamie. Far from Roisin. Far from all the shit life had evidently decided to throw at her all at once. Free to focus on the one thing she was good at. Catching murderers.

  She smiled back and called, ‘Jag mår bra, hur mår du?’ ‘I’m good, how are you?’

  She ran on, picking up speed, crossing a piece of ground covered with a boardwalk and dodging a couple of dog walkers before turning back for the hotel.

  Feeling a little more human after her run, and a breakfast of ham, cheese, hot rolls and tea, rather than coffee, Stella was at the station by 8.04 a.m.

  She called Annika’s mobile. After ten rings, it switched to voicemail.

  ‘Hej. Det här är Annika Ivarsson, frilansjournalist. Lämna ett meddelande. Tack.’

  Even with her limited, though growing, Swedish, Stella understood the first part of the voicemail greeting well enough. ‘Hi. This is Annika Ivarsson, freelance journalist.’ The second half she could translate by context. ‘Leave a message. Thanks.’

  ‘Annika, this is DCI Cole. I need to speak to you about the case. Please call me as soon as you can. Tack.’

  Next she tried Annika’s home number. It, too, rang out before playing an identical voicemail greeting. Stella left the same message.

  Annika would have answered one of her phones, surely? Freelancers of any kind, but especially journalists, wouldn’t want to miss a call, would they? She knew Vicky wouldn’t.

  Stella frowned. She ought to cut the poor woman a little slack. Maybe she was on the loo. Or putting her makeup on. There could be all sorts of reasons why she hadn’t picked up.

  As the office filled up with detectives, her restlessness got the better of her and she made her way down to the forensics department.

  Compared to Lucian’s little empire in Paddington Green, the forensics department here was small-scale. But they’d said they’d fast-track Dahl’s rifles for her as the case was so important.

  She went over to the female CSI who’d booked in the rifle the previous day. Her name was Alicia, a plain, plump girl in her late twenties. She wore a discreet silver nose-ring and had a tattoo peeping out from under the cuff of her white coat. Something in black and pink that might have been cherry blossom.

  Alicia smiled as Stella approached her workstation.

  ‘Hej, Stella! We tested the rifles first thing for you. Both have been thoroughly cleaned but I would say not recently. We didn’t find any GSR and only the faintest traces of cleaning agents.’

  Later that morning, Johanna called her. None of the airlines running flights between Sweden and the UK had any record of a Kerstin Dahl checking in on the dates in question. Of course, that didn’t exclude the possibility she’d travelled on false documentation, but really, could Stella see it? No, came the instant answer. She could not.

  The ballistics evidence, or lack of it, and the flight records confirmed Kerstin’s account and Stella’s gut feel. Kerstin was innocent.

  She tried Annika again, on both numbers. And got both voicemail greetings again. She didn’t leave messages this time.

  Something was wrong. She looked around. Most of the detectives were out in the field, knocking on doors. No sign of Oskar. She approached a youngish male detective busy on the phone. He frowned as she approached, and pointed at the handset. The meaning was clear. I’m stuck with this. Find somebody else.

  There wasn’t time. Bugger protocol.

  She headed downstairs to her car. A fizz of nerves in her belly was more than she needed to know she should get herself over to Annika’s place urgently.

  The apartment block had an entryphone system. Stella buzzed Annika’s flat and waited. Nothing. She buzzed again, for longer this time.

  After ten seconds, she pulled out her phone called Annika’s mobile again. At the first syllable of the voicemail greeting, she ended the call. She tried the landline. It rang ten times then switched to voicemail.

  Something felt off and she wasn’t about to hang about. Pulse elevated, and this time not from coffee, she pressed every single button on the front panel in sequence, top to bottom on both rows.

  In answer, a handful of voices spoke over each other in a cacophony of Swedish. When they died down, waiting for her to answer, Stella recited a phrase she’d looked up earlier.

  ‘Det här är polis. Öppna dörren, tack.’

  The latch buzzed immediately. She pushed through and headed straight for the stairs, running up two at a time. On each half-landing a large plate-glass window gave onto the city. Stella had time as she made each turn to look out over the rooftops and wide, straight roads, and the river, sliding sinuously through the middle of it all.

  Outside Annika’s flat she pushed the door buzzer hard, simultaneously hammering with her fist. She waited for five seconds, hammered again. Another five. Nothing. Shit! This felt bad. Somewhere in her detective’s brain, Stella was reassigning Annika from the category of ‘suspect’ to ‘victim’.

  ‘Annika!’ she shouted, cupping her hand against the door. ‘Annika? It’s Stella Cole. Are you there? Can you hear me?’

  The door to the next flat along opened and a young, mixed-race guy ambled out into the corridor. A loose grey singlet and flower-printed yoga pants clad his skinny but muscular frame. His wiry ginger hair was teased into an afro and his skin was a pale brown, spattered with copper-coloured freckles. His eyes were pink and she caught the distinctive, herby, sweetish aroma of marijuana.

  ‘I don’t think she’s in,’ he said in a soft voice. ‘I haven’t heard her at all since last night. Normally she goes out for coffee and she always knocks to ask if I want anything.’

  Stella nodded, forcing herself to smile.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Is everything OK?’ he asked, moving as if to come towards her.

 
She held her hand up, palm outwards. ‘It’s fine. Go back inside, please. This is police business.’

  He shrugged. ‘Whatever. Namaste,’ he added, pressing his palms together over his breastbone.

  Stella thought for a moment. She could call William and request a method of entry team, or whatever they called the beefy cops with the big red key in Sweden. But that would take too long. And she really, really needed to get inside Annika’s apartment.

  Muttering, ‘exigent circumstances’ to herself, and hoping the Swedes looked kindly on foreign cops destroying private property, she reared back and kicked out at the door, just above the lock.

  The door held, and all she achieved was to send an electric shock of pain from her heel to her groin. Swearing, she prepared to try again, when the young guy next door reappeared.

  He was holding up a key. ‘Annika’s spare,’ he said, laconically, looking at her upper thigh, which she realise she was rubbing.

  ‘Oh. Yes, thanks,’ she said, berating herself for not having asked him in the first place. A neighbour who offered to bring you coffee would trust you with their spare front door key.

  He stood behind her as she put the key in the lock and turned it. She smelled it as soon as she stepped over the threshold. Faint, but unmistakeable.

  A body in the early stages of putrefaction. In time it would deepen and ripen into a stomach-churning odour, like sewage combined with rotting meat. Mistaken by a member of the public, but not an experienced police officer.

  She turned to the neighbour. ‘I need you to go back to your flat, please. Stay there until I come to talk to you.’

  He frowned and scratched at his left shoulder, wrinkling his nose.

  ‘Why, what’s happened? Is Annika all right?’

  ‘Just go. Please. I’ll handle things from here.’

  He nodded, still scratching and left her alone to enter the flat. Her first job was to locate the body. Because she knew that Annika was dead. And her suspect pool had just shrunk to one.