Text © by Joakim Palmkvist, 2017
English translation © by Agnes Broomé, 2018
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as Hur man löser ett spaningsmord: Therese Tangs berättelse by Albert Bonniers Förlag in Sweden in 2017. Translated from Swedish by Agnes Broomé. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2018, by arrangement with Bonnier Rights, Sweden.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
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ISBN-13: 9781503904804 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1503904806 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781503904798 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1503904792 (paperback)
Cover design by Rex Bonomelli
First edition
To my wife, Cecilia.
Without you, there would be nothing.
CONTENTS
PEOPLE
PART ONE MISSING WITHOUT A TRACE
1 THE END
2 POLICE REPORT
3 GONE MISSING
4 VOLUNTEERS
5 GOLD RUSH
6 THE SECURITY GUARD
7 GOOD ENOUGH
8 THE HEIR
9 BLOOD
PART TWO CORPUS DELICTI
10 REASONABLE SUSPICION
11 THE MONEY TRAIL
12 LOST AND FOUND
13 ALONE TOGETHER
14 SABOTAGE
15 A SINGLE CASE
16 REWIND AND RESTART
17 THE POND
18 SCENT
19 NO ONE MAY KNOW
20 THE TRUTH
21 SELF-DEFENSE
22 CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE
23 THE INHERITANCE
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
PEOPLE
Therese Tang: Chief operating officer of Kalmar’s branch of Missing People Sweden, 2012–2014. Security officer, hairdresser, model, stylist, mother of three.
Göran Lundblad: Multimillionaire, farmer, and property owner in Norra Förlösa. Reported missing in September 2012.
Sara Lundblad: Göran Lundblad’s oldest daughter. In a relationship with Martin Törnblad.
Maria Lundblad: Göran Lundblad’s youngest daughter.
Knut Lundblad: Göran Lundblad’s grandfather, gold miner, and adventurer. Established the family fortune in the early twentieth century.
Gustav Lundblad: Göran Lundblad’s father, engineer. Invented the Dollar Pipe. Added to the family fortune.
Irina Lundblad: Göran’s ex-wife, Maria’s mother.
Åke Törnblad: Farmer, Göran Lundblad’s neighbor in Norra Förlösa.
Martin Törnblad: Son of Åke Törnblad, boyfriend of Sara Lundblad.
Anders Lindfors: Security officer, Therese Tang’s colleague at Missing People Sweden.
Marie-Louice Strannemark: Therese Tang’s colleague at Missing People Sweden.
Mats Råberg: Second-generation tenant farmer in Norra Förlösa. Rents land from the Lundblad family.
Britt-Marie Einarsson: Partner of Mats Råberg. Owns a house in Norra Förlösa, next to a forest pond.
Ulf Martinsson: Detective and lead investigator in the Göran Lundblad case.
Jonas Blomgren: Police officer, dog handler. Prepared the initial report regarding Göran Lundblad’s disappearance.
PART ONE
MISSING WITHOUT A TRACE
1
THE END
June 19, 2014
Gamleby, Sweden
It is the beginning of the end.
Therese’s stomach tightens into a knot as she peeks out the kitchen window at the car turning into the yard. A champagne-colored Saab 9-5 with a young man behind the wheel inches toward the garage. Her mind is racing. She keeps back from the window so he won’t catch her watching. This is it.
The car’s paintwork sparkles in the sun. The man looks straight ahead through the windshield while the car slows down, then stops. It is eight in the morning on this chilly June day, and everything is happening much too quickly.
Over the past few days, she has been playing a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with this man in the car. Hours-long phone calls, text after text in the middle of the night. She has been waiting for him to tip his hand, for him to confess what she already thinks she knows but has yet to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
This man has kept a dark secret for almost two years, resisting police interrogations and somehow holding up under intense psychological pressure. He clearly can’t be forced to confess. But she believes she can break through his silence by making him feel safe, by inviting him into her life. She has to play along, to appear vulnerable and just a bit lost herself.
He must believe he is the one in charge.
The previous night, at twenty to midnight, she sent him a carefully worded text:
Can I trust you? I just don’t know what your agenda is. What if you’re just lying to me? You have to understand . . . I am drawn to the thrill, but how do I really know I can trust you?
It was all part of her game. But in this moment, with him sitting outside in his car, about to walk into the house, she is no longer pretending to be vulnerable. She is alone in the house, and he will soon be at the door.
Their meeting this morning is essential. She has grown tired of feeling that she is not in control of the situation; she wants to reclaim the initiative. She has come to accept that she is never going to be able to coax the decisive words out of him over the phone, so she has finally agreed to meet him in person.
Therese wanted the meeting to happen in a location of her choosing, at a time she requested, and in a context where she could have the upper hand, insofar as that is possible. She did not want to meet him back home in Oskarshamn, where her children live. This is better; Gamleby, fifty miles north from her home, where she sometimes uses the spare room in her colleague Anders Lindfors’s house after her long and often late shifts at the detention center in Västervik.
Gamleby is neutral ground for a meeting with a murderer.
She would have preferred meeting in a public space, at the café in Gamleby, next to the supermarket, at the pharmacy or the corner shop. Or by the local liquor store—there would certainly be a crowd there today, stocking up on booze for the traditional Midsummer festivities that weekend. They could have found a quiet spot and spoken in private, yet with people around. The waitress at the café could, for example, have sounded the alarm if something were to happen. Meeting in public is always safer.
But it was not even seven in the morning when he called, already in his car, on his way to see her, and at that hour, everything in town is closed. The café she’d had in mind didn’t open until nine.
Suddenly everything is on fast-forward. Instead of getting mentally prepared for the most important conversation of her life, the one that might finally bring everything to a close, Therese starts running around the unfamiliar house, collecting anything that can be used as a weapon, hiding every sharp thing she finds—kitchen knives, pairs of scissors—in case things spiral out of control.
The meeting will take place here, in this house. It must. She has run out of excuses. If she backs away now, it
will raise his suspicions. Failing is not an option at this point. Especially not now, when he seems more ready to talk than ever before.
On the second floor, in the spare room she uses, she places one of Anders’s pocketknives under the crime novel she is reading, The True Story of Pinocchio’s Nose by Leif G. W. Persson. She double-checks to make sure the handle is hidden. She goes back downstairs to slip a second knife into the right-hand pocket of the jacket in the hallway.
She doesn’t have a firm grip on what might happen, nor how a fight or an attack would play out. Therese has no experience with lethal force. All she knows is that it is better to have the means to defend yourself than to find yourself in need of a weapon and have nothing at hand. She is putting her life on the line in doing what she is doing. If you wield a weapon, you must be prepared to use it. You must be willing to follow through, otherwise you might lose the knife and be stabbed with your own blade.
While she moves quickly about the house, she gives a brief thought to Anders’s firearms. He keeps several weapons in a locked cabinet down in the basement. She knows the code and has even used the guns, under supervision. She could probably hit a target.
But she has enough to worry about. Just keeping her breathing steady takes serious effort.
When Therese looks out the kitchen window, her colleague Anders’s garage is to her left. Beyond it, his boat sits on a trailer, draped in a green tarpaulin on which drops of dew glisten like pearls in the morning sun. It is a damp morning here, in this house perched a quarter of a mile up from Gamleby Bay.
The man in the car has stopped in the yard midway between her black BMW and the front steps of the house. He stays in his seat for a while after killing the engine. She watches as he pulls the sun visor down and studies himself in the mirror. He fixes his hair and makes sure he is looking his best, preening, as if preparing for a romantic encounter. Something that might go his way, if only he plays his cards right.
At the same time, his fussing is an obvious sign of nerves on his part, which Therese chooses to believe might give her an edge.
He is young—not far off from the childishly rounded features of adolescence. Brown hair, cropped for practical reasons as any country boy would tell you. A lanky but strong young man with a wide forehead and deep-set eyes, also brown. They glow and blacken at the same time when he gets angry. But now, his gaze settles far off in the distance for a couple of seconds before he seems to pull himself together.
He climbs out of the car. She can see that he is not only younger but also stronger than she is. The kind of strength you get from working with farm animals and in the forest and fields. He is also impulsive, self-absorbed. Unreliable. What happens if everything goes wrong when they meet? Would she be able to outrun him? How far would she get?
The road is fifty yards away, and it is only another couple of hundred yards to the local technical college. There might be people there, but what if she trips, slips on the wet grass, falls over?
It takes about three minutes to die of asphyxiation, though it is only a matter of seconds before the circulation is affected. The brain’s oxygen supply is cut off. The world goes dark. You kick and convulse while your life is slowly extinguished. Perhaps it feels like drowning, but with another person on top of you, fingers wrapped around your throat.
She brings her mind back to the present. She has to stay focused. He mustn’t stop trusting her or start thinking twice about things. He has to stay trapped in his fantasies, lost in the world of his own creation, where everything is as it should be. Where he is going to get off scot-free, even if the police find the body. Where everything he has worried about will be fine, the money will roll in, his future will be secure. He mustn’t stop believing. She must make him believe.
The top step of Anders’s front stairs is loose. When the man outside walks up, she hears the slight wobble. Therese has been waiting for that signal, and now she pushes the door open and takes half a step out, smiling as brightly as she can.
“Not too hard to find, was it?”
She gives him a warm hug and gestures him inside, pulling the door shut, but not locking it. Getting out will be quicker if the door is unlocked. She averts her eyes from the jacket with its hidden knife.
On the other side of the closed door, the neighborhood is dead silent; even the birdsong from the birch trees at the end of the garden sounds muted. As if the world is holding its breath.
2
POLICE REPORT
Police report 0400-K35804-12 [excerpt]
Södermanland Police Authority
Criminal code: 9011
Missing person
Reporting party: Maria Lundblad
INCIDENT
The missing person, Göran Lundblad, has been missing since August 31, 2012.
On August 30, Göran was involved in a serious quarrel with his daughter Sara about Sara wanting access to and responsibility for land owned by Göran.
According to the reporting party’s information, Göran’s disappearance has been reported to the Kalmar police, who now suspect Göran might be the victim of a crime.
Göran resides in both Kalmar and Nyköping.
The reporting party wants the Nyköping police to investigate Göran’s disappearance because the Kalmar police have not been in touch with her and because she feels the Kalmar police are too inactive.
It was a little after 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 23, 2012, when Maria Lundblad, eighteen, called the Swedish police’s nonemergency number. Since she was calling about an existing missing-person report, rather than a confirmed crime, she was put through to the K9 unit, which normally deals with disappearances involving potential terrain searches.
But Maria’s concerns went beyond the missing person himself. She suspected her sister, Sara Lundblad, of foul play:
“I’m not sure Sara is being entirely truthful,” she told the police. “I’m worried the Kalmar police are trusting too much in her version of events.”
Maria didn’t have anything concrete to point to, more a feeling that something was awry. A gut feeling. Not enough, in her opinion, to go to the police. Until now.
Before acting on her hunch, she had spoken to her mother, her older half sister Eleonora, and her school counselor, all of whom had advised her to report her suspicions. The counselor had also recommended contacting a new volunteer organization called Missing People Sweden, a group that assists the police in searching for people who have been reported missing.
The officer who took her call that afternoon, Daniel Augustsson of the Södermanland police, asked a number of routine questions. He learned that Göran Lundblad was wealthy, good for tens of millions of kronor, and that he made his living from, among other things, renting out arable land and housing property, both in Norra Förlösa, outside Kalmar, and in Stigtomta, located some 180 miles farther north, near Nyköping. Göran also ran a business that manufactured a certain kind of smoking pipe for which he had a patent.
The interview quickly zeroed in on two circumstances that appeared particularly interesting, at least from the police’s point of view, two specific details that could potentially lead to a reclassification of the disappearance as something altogether more serious.
One was that Maria’s older sister Sara had gotten into a big fight with her father before the disappearance. Sara wanted to get her hands on some land and properties, but her father resisted, in part due to his disapproval of her relationship with her boyfriend, Martin Törnblad. Göran felt certain he was only after Sara’s money, as Martin’s family had significant debt.
The other circumstance was more concrete. Less than a week after Göran’s disappearance, Sara and Martin started renovating Göran’s studio apartment in Kalmar. Maria was clearly concerned about this fact.
Shortly after Sara’s fight with her father and his disappearance, she and Martin drove into Kalmar to start renovating Göran’s apartment on Vasallgatan. Just a few days after Göran’s disappearance, on September 5, 2012, th
ey headed over with a tractor and trailer. Sara had called ahead to the housing company and had been given the go-ahead to throw things out the window, straight into the trailer, and to move new building material with their tractor bucket.
This started, in other words, only a few days after Sara called her half sister and stepmother in tears, asking for their advice and help because Göran was missing, and several days before she reported the disappearance to the police on September 10.
Their actions struck many people, including Maria, as insensitive and contradictory. When Sara was asked about this in police interviews, she said she and Martin were meant to move into the apartment together.
“Göran had approved the renovation,” she said.
Martin, for his part, said they started working on the apartment because they didn’t want to stay with his father.
“Sara talked to Irina a lot after Göran disappeared and she figured we should start making it homier. It was nice for both of us to have something to distract ourselves with,” he said, referring to Göran’s ex-wife, Irina.
During September and October, they cleared out the apartment, put up new wallpaper, laid down new floors, and moved all Göran’s papers and accounting over from the farm.
Ställe Farm was, after all, empty and could potentially be broken into, or something else could happen to make all the important paperwork disappear. But Martin and Sara remained in Martin’s family’s home, and the renovation of the apartment on Vasallgatan was never completed.
According to Maria when she reported this to the police, there was no way the two of them could have obtained approval for the renovation. Göran would have been furious to find out Martin was even there and would have kicked him out immediately.
The officer could not help but raise his eyebrows at this statement. Renovating an apartment is hardly something you would do without the approval of the actual owner, unless, perhaps, you are completely sure he isn’t coming back. Circumstantial evidence that raises eyebrows, though, is simply that: circumstantial. They would need much more to proceed with a criminal investigation.
The Dark Heart: A True Story of Greed, Murder, and an Unlikely Investigator Page 1