The Dark Heart: A True Story of Greed, Murder, and an Unlikely Investigator

by Joakim Palmkvist

  On this day, May 18, 2014, it was raining in that way you never see coming. The damp rises inexplicably up your pant legs while finding its way in from above at the same time, as though the atmosphere has been laden with something for far too long and suddenly decides to let it all out at once. It’s like being in a shower.

  Two cars drove up toward the house by the pond and stopped. The house had been extended with a conservatory; from inside that room, sheltered from the rain and damp, a handful of people watched as the car doors opened.

  Three men climbed out of the nearest vehicle; first out was Detective Martinsson from the Kalmar police, inappropriately dressed for the weather. He wore a jacket and brogue-style shoes instead of a raincoat and rubber boots. The detective used a small umbrella to shield himself minimally as he scanned the scene to take it all in.

  From down by the pond, two people in waders were looking up at Martinsson and his colleagues, Ulf Einarsson, also an investigator, and Anders Elmqvist, the county’s chief forensic technician.

  It was just after lunch that Sunday afternoon when two of the three dogs participating in the search indicated in the same spot by the edge of the pond. At least one of the two dogs was specially trained to find dead bodies. In other words, this was likely real. There could be a body, or body parts, submerged in this shallow pool.

  As far as graves go, the pond was perhaps a little too close to the house. A person would have run a high risk of being seen if they were trying to bury a corpse here. At the same time, the location was ideal for a murderer who might want to cast suspicion on, for example, the owner of the house. As it happened, that owner was Britt-Marie Einarsson, the partner of Mats Råberg. Both Mats and Britt-Marie were sitting in the conservatory with friends and acquaintances, watching the scene outside unfold.

  Although Britt-Marie was not suspected of any involvement in Göran’s disappearance in any formal sense, having civilians with their own agendas and motivations near a crime scene was not something any detective would consider desirable.

  The Missing People management team climbed out of the other car with Therese in the lead. They had guided the police to the scene. She summarized the situation for the investigators: the forest had been searched with specially trained dogs, and two of them had reacted.

  After that, Therese had called in a couple of members to search the small pool, without immediate results. They had raked and cleared out leaves, branches, and other junk. They had also found a pump to drain the pool of water but then decided to pause to await further orders from the police.

  It would be enough to give a forensic technician a heart attack. Trampling around a potential crime scene, where a body might be buried? Jumbling potential tracks and clues? This was a job for professionals, the archaeologists of crime with their brushes and trowels, who sift and sieve every grain of soil, sand, and clay before moving on to the next patch. But what was done was done.

  Martinsson wanted Missing People to repeat the search with one of the dogs. Forensic technician Anders Elmqvist filmed Wilma the cadaver dog doing another lap around the pond with her handler. The dog indicated again.

  Martinsson exchanged a few words with his colleagues. There was only one thing to do before this got even messier and more insurmountable: take charge. He would call in more staff and follow the checklist.

  “You’re going to have to move back, everyone. Clear the scene. We are cordoning it off,” he said.

  Formally speaking, a police officer’s word carries as much weight as blue-and-white tape around a location. Martinsson’s decision was time-stamped 2:30 p.m. that Sunday.

  Shortly thereafter, actual police tape was put up around the pond and the house. The police also called in a security officer to guard the scene at night while they waited for a group of technicians with the appropriate equipment to pump the pond dry and go through it with a fine-toothed comb.

  Anders Lindfors had gnashed his teeth, at least inwardly, when Therese told him that they had been guided to the area by supernatural forces. Missing People had their own experiences of such things, like in the case of the young woman whose body was found, at a troublingly opportune time, by a relative, supposedly thanks to a medium.

  “I don’t believe in stuff like that,” Anders said. “So I was very skeptical when Therese told me. I wouldn’t have come if I had known. But then we released one of the dogs and it started right away. Ran over to the water and barked. It was incredible. A pool no more than three feet deep at most, and there was supposed to be a corpse in it.”

  They sent out the other dog, which walked past the pond at first but then turned back and barked as well.

  “If the dogs had come there and indicated, without any talk of a medium, I wouldn’t have said anything,” Anders said. “But this all seemed very suspicious. When someone identifies a spot like this, it’s because they know something or have overheard something; this nonsense about mediums seeing things is just that—nonsense.”

  But the result of the nonsense was undeniable: two dogs had indicated for possible cadaver scent in the same spot. This was not going to turn out to be a dead animal in the pond. The dogs are trained to sniff out humans, using, among other things, materials from morgues. Besides, both dogs had been tested next to a dunghill with several dead calves in the vicinity, and neither had reacted.

  Missing People rooted about the pond for clues for a while before Therese contacted the police to ask for advice and was told to immediately cease activity and wait for the police.

  “It must have been an absurd situation for them, arriving at the house,” Anders said. “Dragged out there by civilians who had in turn been guided by a medium, as far from proper procedure as you can get as a detective. And you’re told Göran Lundblad is supposed to be at the bottom of that damn puddle.”

  When the police arrived, no one mentioned the medium. After Missing People dog Wilma had shown what she could do, and Martinsson had ordered the area be cordoned off and got back in his car, the deluge finally stopped in Norra Förlösa. There was a drizzle in the air, but the skies slowly cleared as Therese and her colleagues packed up.

  They had done their part now. No point sending volunteers out on a grid search or running around the woods with the dogs, because there were no locations of particular interest to search.

  Or—wait. There was actually one place left Therese wished to search.

  Martin Törnblad looked surprised, almost like he had just woken up, when he opened the door to Ställe Farm, the house where he didn’t really belong, not if Göran Lundblad could have anything to say about it. But now he lived there, together with Sara and their son, Vince, unless they were away in Stigtomta.

  Now a beautiful blonde in jeans and a windbreaker was standing before him on the steps. She was wearing a name tag and had a determined look on her face. She was nine years older than Martin, who was turning twenty-three that summer.

  The woman shook his hand politely and introduced herself as the chief operating officer of Missing People Kalmar. She said she would like to come inside with her colleague Agneta, who was standing next to her with a leashed forensic dog.

  Martin knew something had been going on that day over at the neighbor’s house. Just a few hours earlier, one of Missing People’s cars had been here at Ställe Farm, meeting up with another car that it then led over that way.

  Three people had been in the car—maybe they were police, maybe other volunteers. He couldn’t be sure, but he was aware that something had been going on, and that was not usually good news. The police had been around several times with dogs and technicians and interviews and accusations over the past many months. And now these two. With a dog.

  Therese and her colleague had decided to drive over to try their luck after talking to the police by the pond. When they rolled up toward Ställe Farm, they had noticed a pickup truck parked outside and decided to check if anyone was in. If Sara was home, it was a done deal—she had already promised on the phone to let
them in, dog and all, as long as she was home.

  On the way to the front door, they passed the double doors to the basement garage and Wilma the dog stopped by the crack under the door, pulled on her lead, and sniffed. She had to be yanked away from the scent she seemed to have picked up.

  On the other side of the house, they knocked on the front door.

  “Martin was skeptical and curt throughout our conversation,” Therese said. “Uncomfortable is probably the right word. At first, he didn’t want to let us in because he said the police dogs had broken things when they were there, his stereo and several other things. He hadn’t been compensated for any of it.”

  Therese promised to accompany the dog at all times and pay for any damages out of her own pocket. She also asked him to contact Sara, who had given her halfhearted promises the day before. But Martin first claimed not to have Sara’s number, then that his phone needed charging, and finally that he didn’t want to bother her.

  “Between questions, I offered to let him use my phone,” Therese said. “I had her number and everything, after all. But he just said no, and we left. As we got back in the car, we suddenly exclaimed at the same time: ‘What a liar!’ We should have called Sara’s cell phone to see how he would have reacted if it suddenly started ringing in the living room behind him. We had a feeling she was in the house all along.”

  Feelings don’t solve crimes, but they can guide an investigation. And things were crystal clear, as far as Therese was concerned, regardless of what the police may find in the shallow pond in the forest: Martin and Sara murdered Göran, probably at Ställe Farm. Her gut and her intuition were sure of it, and Therese had long since learned to listen to them.

  What remained was to prove it. And the best way to do so was to find Göran Lundblad’s body.

  18

  SCENT

  “Isn’t that Martin?”

  “That’s Sara!”

  Therese Tang and Anders Lindfors shouted over each other when they spotted two people walking along the gravel road up ahead of them. Her colleague’s exclamation made Therese jump, but she kept the car on the road and continued to roll slowly northward.

  She was driving her black BMW with detachable magnetic signs along the car’s sides reading “Team Organizer.” Only a blind person could miss who was coming. Anders Lindfors was in the passenger seat, and another member of the management team, Maria Nilsson, was in the back.

  Martin and Sara were walking side by side along the shoulder, the very couple that everything revolved around. The rumors and half-truths, but also the cold, hard facts in the puzzle, swirled around Therese’s head.

  “All our eyes met as we passed them, as if in slow motion,” she said.

  “I smiled and gave them a friendly wave,” Therese said. “It was the first time I’d seen Sara in real life. She looked nothing like the pictures I’d seen. We obviously wondered what she and Martin were doing there. And they had to be asking themselves why we were there.”

  Sara and Martin were walking south, in the direction of the pond. Even if they were every bit as guilty as people thought, they would hardly be on their way to cover their tracks. But it was nevertheless interesting that they were here, the three people in the car agreed.

  Hours earlier, Therese and her colleagues had left their hotel in central Kalmar to make their way back to the red house. They knew the police had pumped the water out of the pond, and they wanted to see what it looked like dry.

  “I knew straight away that his body wouldn’t be there,” Therese said, “but I wanted to keep focusing on the pond and its surroundings.” The extensive drainage system that had been put in place in the surrounding land meant that there were likely many other wells up among the trees where the water might be draining from.

  That same morning, several news outlets reported on the potential success of the search. On Barometern’s front page:

  Missing People may have made a pivotal discovery. Two forensic dogs have indicated in an area the police deem interesting in the search for missing local man Göran Lundblad.

  Therese was quoted in the article: “We contacted the police, who have now cordoned off an area, so we discontinued our search.” She didn’t reveal any details—that was for the police to cover, if and when it became appropriate.

  There wasn’t a lot to see among the trees. The police had indeed been back to pump the water out. A rocky bottom could be glimpsed beyond the police tape, with old leaves, branches, and litter scattered about. A security officer was posted out by the road to make sure no unauthorized people got in and rummaged around, not until the dogs had done their jobs.

  Two cadaver dogs that had been requisitioned from the Skåne police would arrive the next day, Tuesday. Scents indicated that Göran’s body could be nearby, perhaps farther up the drainage system, stuffed into a well, a basin, or a dunghill. Or he might have been, through sheer coincidence, buried next to one of the area’s drainage pipes.

  The three members of Missing People chatted for a while with the security officer, whom they knew. He wasn’t sure what he was guarding, so they filled him in on what was going on. Just after 5:00 p.m. they headed out for one last drive around the neighborhood to look for potential search sites for next time.

  They had to do something. This was going to be solved, as Therese had already made clear. She was sure the body was somewhere nearby. Whether it was her strong desire to succeed that had tipped over into conviction, or whether gut feelings and intuition really did exist, she didn’t know. But Therese was sure that Göran Lundblad was close at hand. It was at this point, on their drive away from the pond, that they met Sara and Martin walking down the side of the road.

  The gravel road was too narrow to turn around on. It was only when they got to the next bend, near a dilapidated barn full of hay bales, next to a concrete slurry pit several yards tall, that they were able to turn back, the dust from the gravel road billowing around them.

  When the Missing People car passed the young couple on its way back, Sara and Martin were standing in the middle of a field.

  “It was like they were posing, to have an excuse to be in that exact location and seem unperturbed,” Therese said. “Sara was looking up at Martin, who had picked up stalks or blades of grass and was releasing them. As though he was checking the direction of the wind or what the harvest would be like or some such.”

  When they got back to the security officer at the pond, they informed him that two people of great interest to the investigation were on their way. Then they took up a post next to the car out on the gravel road and waited.

  The members of the management team had an established division of labor: Therese did the talking while Anders and Maria stayed in the background, listening, observing, and thinking, preparing the craftiest possible interventions should Therese lose her train of thought or the conversation slow.

  Maria’s role was to focus entirely on body language, noting what people react to, how they react. It was similar to what the police do during their more structured interviews, except that Missing People was not allowed to detain the two people who were, at that moment, walking toward them. They were not allowed to put them in separate interview rooms and bombard them with all sorts of questions. They were not allowed to overwhelm them with anything but words.

  Because for all intents and purposes, Missing People was nothing but a congregation of interested—some would say nosy—private citizens with no further jurisdiction than any other stranger on the street. They didn’t have police rights; they didn’t even have the powers of a security guard. Only the good name of MPS, built up by several successful searches during its short existence, gave them authority, paired with the official benevolence that police chiefs in several parts of the country had bestowed upon the organization. But still, fundamentally, MPS had no particular authority or jurisdiction. They were just a bunch of ordinary citizens with yellow vests.

  The birds were singing among the trees around Britt-Marie�
��s red house. It was an early summer’s evening in the Swedish countryside, idyllic. Sara and Martin were walking toward the car where the three Missing People organizers were pretending to be engaged in casual conversation. Therese hit the record button on her phone.

  She knew she would have only a few fractions of a second to establish trust, to lure them in with something to make them open up, if only ever so little.

  “You weren’t wearing glasses yesterday.”

  It was as much a question as a statement from Martin, who had just shaken Therese’s hand. Good recall for someone who claimed not to be able to remember his partner’s phone number, or at least hadn’t been able to the day before when Therese had tried to get into Ställe Farm with Wilma the forensic dog.

  Therese had stepped across the road, hand outstretched, to introduce herself to Sara. They shook hands as Anders and Maria joined them. Sara and Martin seemed nervous about the meeting at first, uncomfortable.

  There could be many explanations for that—one being that the couple was in deep conflict with practically the whole world and didn’t trust anyone. They might also have been in deep conflict with each other. The first problem was obvious to Therese and her colleagues. The second was not.

  A conversation slowly got under way.

  “Martin kept tapping his foot,” said Maria. “He was talking about the area and pointing to the interesting parts of the fields. Sara mostly just stood there glaring; my impression was that she was trying to catch Martin’s eye to make him stop talking. But Therese managed to get him going again and again. This seemed to annoy Sara.”

  Therese was taking the lead. She kept circling back to the topic of the dogs indicating by the pond and talked up Wilma—the corpse expert—as much as she could.

  “If she indicates, there is something to be found,” she declared. “But there’s nothing to say it happened here; it could be farther away, upstream. If the police don’t find anything here, we’ll have to look for the other location. We have to figure out what the indication means.”