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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  It was clear from their conversation that Göran was buried somewhere higher up in that drainage system that trickled down to the searched pond. One of Martin’s fears was that Missing People would eventually reach the spot just by continuing to search their grid, area by area. Which meant he might as well confess. And with Therese’s help, perhaps he could get off scot-free.

  He might have to spend a while in jail, a few days, a week or so. But there wouldn’t be any fingerprints on the plastic tarp after two years, she had assured him of that. And there was no way of telling which gun the bird shot had been fired from.

  He would be a major suspect. But he would not be convicted, that much she could promise him. As long as he and Sara acted in unison, despite the wobbles in their relationship, things would work out.

  “Of course,” Martin said. They had agreed on what to say years ago.

  There were a few loose ends left to deal with. There was the small metal chip from Göran’s passport that had been left over after the rest was burned. And the boots Martin had been wearing when he fired the rifle were still in the barn back home.

  “I explained to him that he had to get rid of those things,” Therese said. “It all had to go. He had to go home and clear things out after we finished talking. Burn the boots. Get rid of everything.”

  Her ulterior motive for this piece of advice was of course to continue to build on their shared secret, to play along even more. Pretend to be useful to him. She felt it was needed. So far, he had shown that he believed every word she said. Now it was time to test that trust and demand an answer to the pivotal question.

  “I told him the only thing left to do was the worst part,” Therese said. “I have to know where Göran is to help you. Otherwise he will never be found, and it will never end.”

  She used her most neutral voice, as though what she had found out was completely natural, and only confirmed what she already knew. She was the woman who could see around corners, read everyone, who knew everything about everything. Who could solve all his problems.

  There were maps in the office downstairs, she told him. She asked him to show her where the body was buried, then it would all be over. Then they could go and get something to eat.

  Martin’s stomach was rumbling—either from stress or hunger—so Therese took a chance that her plan might work. She made a point not to lead the way down the stairs. She didn’t want a foot between her shoulder blades to be the last thing she felt in this life. Landing face-first on the floor downstairs, him on top of her, fingers tightening around her throat. Helpless.

  The steps creaked under his weight. Therese pulled out her phone and managed to start recording without him noticing. The knife was still hidden under the crime novel by her bed. Martin went to the bathroom one more time as Therese walked over to the office with a determined stride. Her back was straight, her shoulders pulled back. Just one more thing. The last thing.

  She found detailed maps of Norra Förlösa and spread them out on the desk. It was only at that point that she noticed what was hanging on the wall. Two gleaming green metallic ice axes, at perfect grabbing height. Serrated with tapered points and razor-sharp. As if made to hack someone to death with.

  Fuck.

  She heard Martin unlock the bathroom door.

  21

  SELF-DEFENSE

  Anders Lindfors instinctively crouched low as he entered his own house. Not that it would help much, but at least it would make him a smaller target. It was early evening on June 19, 2014, and he wasn’t exactly sure what awaited him inside. He moved extremely cautiously. He had no desire to be killed with one of his own guns.

  He had loaded the 9 mm rounds in his guns himself. The bullets were the same model as the police standard, Gold Dot, but half a gram or so heavier. Hollow-point ammunition. Banned for use in war by The Hague Convention. The kind of bullet that expands and tears a hole of at least half an inch in diameter through whatever body it hits.

  The objective: maximum stopping power, as well as controlled penetration and a decreased risk of collateral damage. A straight hit on target, in the chest, is instantly lethal, as confirmed by the Swedish Defense Research Agency.

  Anders couldn’t be sure that Therese had done what he had told her to do when he gave her the code to his weapon cabinet in the basement. In it, he kept a veritable arsenal. A shotgun and two revolvers of .357 and .44 caliber, respectively, both magnum. Like cannons, to an untrained hand. There were also two semiautomatic pistols, a CZ and a Glock.

  The Glock was easiest to handle for someone who was scared and stressed: less of a kick, fewer stoppages, and no safety to fumble with. The security mechanism, designed to prevent misfiring, was built into the trigger. You just had to push the magazine in, pump the slide once to feed a round into the barrel, then pull the trigger. Simple. Painless. At least for the person holding the gun.

  He had told her to put three rounds into the magazine, no more, for her own safety. If she was unable to eliminate the threat with three bullets, the enemy might still be alive and powerful enough to take the weapon and aim it at her. If that happened, it had better be empty.

  Anders couldn’t smell any lingering gunpowder scent in his house, but there were no sounds, no signs of life. The living room was empty. He called out to identify himself, then quickly popped his head into the next room and scanned it. Therese was crouched on the floor by the bed with the Glock in her hands.

  “It’s just me,” he said. “Put the gun down.”

  When Therese finally put the gun down, she let out a deep and shaky breath. Several hours had passed since Martin had confessed to the murder of Göran Lundblad and gone downstairs with Therese to point out the grave on a map.

  When faced with the potential murder weapons, the ice axes on the wall, Therese had decided to deliberately draw attention to them when Martin came out of the bathroom. That seemed a safer option than him starting to furtively contemplate what he could do with them.

  Her cell phone was lying screen-side down on the nightstand, recording. There was always a risk of Martin wanting to check it. She had to make sure his focus remained on something else. He had to stay inside his bubble of fantasies, in the world where everything would work out, so long as he tells Therese everything.

  Next to the ice axes was an archery bow and an enlarged photograph of the Troll Wall, a 5,500-foot rock face in the Trolltindene massif in Norway, every climber’s fever dream, the kind of thing Anders Lindfors got up to in his spare time. Adventures.

  When Martin came into the room, she pointed at the axes and started talking.

  Therese: Yeah, so those are ice axes. Because he has . . . I think he might even have won the ice climbing national championships . . .

  Martin: That’s his?

  T: It’s pretty cool.

  M: It’s heavy.

  T: Mm. What is he . . . One of fourteen Swedes to have scaled the Troll Wall, I think. And he did one of the hardest routes too. You’d almost have to be an idiot to go to places like that to climb.

  Therese chitchatted as casually as she was able. The message: We are in this together. We are on the same side.

  She spread the maps open on the desk, as far away from the ice axes and compound bow as possible. Side by side, they leaned over the map and pointed, finding their way from the slightly larger town of Läckeby to Norra Förlösa, the Törnblad farm, and then the road where he had stopped his tractor and they’d had their first long talk, not even a month ago. But at first, they had a hard time picking their way through the patchwork of properties that had been sold, subdivided, and leased over the years.

  Martin also had his own names for the landmarks, different from the ones on the map. They tried digital maps on his phone, but the screen was too small and it was difficult to zoom in.

  So they started over with the paper maps, following the road from the slurry pit, the barn, and on toward Skyttelund. Once Martin understood the compass directions, he finally located the spot
.

  M: The ditch is there.

  T: The ditch is there. Is there water in it?

  M: Well. I think so.

  T: Yes.

  M: And then over there . . .

  T: Yes.

  M: That’s the boundary.

  T: Yes.

  M: And this is just a fence . . . like barbed wire.

  T: Okay.

  M: But that barbed wire is up against a bunch of . . . trees and rocks and whatever . . .

  T: Over there it’s like . . . Yeah . . .

  M: So it’s fifteen to twenty yards out.

  T: And how deep did you say?

  M: Yes. Five . . . maybe six and a half feet.

  It was done. The final piece of the puzzle, just like that. And a depth as well. Five or six and a half feet down. All the straws Therese had been reaching for, cajoling loose, and collecting over the past few months now formed a respectable pile. Enough to build a straw man. One wearing a prison jumpsuit.

  Martin had pointed out a spot on his own father’s land, at the tip of the triangular field. Next to it, the map read Skyttelund. The tip of his finger was resting on the map, some distance from the boundary line marking the next property, at a right angle from where an overgrown stone wall met barbed wire. More precisely: 56 degrees, 46 minutes, and 5.5 seconds north and 16 degrees, 6 minutes, and 30.5 seconds east.

  “That’s when I circled the spot on my map,” Therese said. “Martin wanted to know why; I told him it was for me. I said we had dogs out that very day and that they were on their way to that field. Martin retorted that it was lucky he had told me today, because maybe he would have been caught regardless.”

  It should be okay for Missing People to go to the location and start digging, Martin said. But they had to hold off a little longer, he insisted. One or two weeks, because the grass was tall over there at the moment. His dad had to have a chance to harvest it. It was worth money.

  In this situation, it is difficult to understand how Martin, who had kept silent for over a year and a half, had suddenly gotten the idea that it was okay to reveal, so openly and naively, exactly where he had buried the victim of the murder he had committed. Corpus delicti. Given what he had said about firing the killing shot and how they had gone about covering their tracks, Martin had just put the final nail in his own coffin, and very likely in Sara’s too.

  How could anyone be so stupid?

  But that would be the wrong question to ask, as anyone able to put themselves in Martin’s shoes must realize. He seemed, under the influence of sustained wheedling, to have decided to completely trust one person with the most important secret he had ever kept. He had tricked himself into believing that he could get away with it, now that Therese was on his side.

  If, and only if, what he said was true, of course—totally, unambiguously true—Therese could kick up a fuss and point to the recording. She could recount Martin’s story down to the smallest detail and get Missing People colleagues, the police, diggers, and everyone she could think of to this small field in the middle of nowhere.

  But if she does all that, and it all turns out to be another one of Martin’s delusions, if all they find in the ground is rocks and dirt, if everything is in order in the bedroom at Ställe Farm, sanded, painted, neat, and blood-free, then she is finished. Both as a professional and as a person. Her credibility will be shot, on a level with Martin’s.

  But she could hear his stomach rumbling and twisting, not only from hunger, but from fear. She was sure of it. His entire body language, his pupillary responses, his constant bathroom visits, the whimpering in her arms—he seemed to be a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. And what he had told her about his relationship and his feelings for her. It must all be true. Or was it really all an act?

  Criminologist Leif G. W. Persson talks about three main rules for a successful murder investigation. They are quite simple:

  Go with it.

  Nothing happens by chance.

  Don’t complicate things.

  Therese had complicated things, for both herself and others, quite severely. But considering the results so far, she thought it might well have been worth it.

  She had ignored chance since the first moment she became involved in the Göran Lundblad case. There had been too many strange coincidences she could not ignore, like the purported threats that he only received when Sara was in Stigtomta. The termination notice for Mats Råberg’s lease, which hadn’t turned up until after Göran’s disappearance. The cadaver molecules in the pond. It all had to mean something.

  Sheer instinct told her how it had happened, from conversations with witnesses and residents, supported by Sara’s and Martin’s odd behavior, as well as the fact that the police had also settled on the two of them as their main suspects based on experience alone.

  Instinct and gut feeling are not, as we are well aware, enough, but now she had a detailed confession that was coherent and fit into the theories that had already been put forward regarding the course of events. Given this, the time had come to stop vacillating. Go with it. And make sure that body gets dug up.

  But first: she had to get out of the house. She had to get rid of Martin as quickly as possible. This was far too big for her to handle on her own.

  “Hey. Let’s get out of here,” she said. “We need something to eat.”

  Lina’s Pantry was a perfectly ordinary lunch café in the middle of Gamleby town center, next to the supermarket. The daily specials were things like beef stew or house-made stuffed cabbage, and there was always a fish of the day. Salad, bread, and coffee were included, and regulars always got a discount.

  The Gamleby town center had everything the average person would need. In addition to the supermarket, there was a liquor store, clothing retailer, a pizzeria, the pharmacy, a store for electrical supplies, and a corner store.

  No one recognized Martin, who was sitting alone at one of the tables with a black coffee and an untouched cheese sandwich in front of him, staring vacantly at the passersby. Next to him was a crumb-covered plate with the remains of a curry chicken salad baguette and a half-empty cup of cold cappuccino. Therese was in the bathroom.

  The chilling story he had told her was just starting to sink in. Her fear was creeping up again, now that her curiosity had been satisfied. During the ride from the house to the town center, no more than about a mile, Martin had changed.

  “The mood was almost jolly in the car when we set off,” Therese said. “He seemed happy about having told me, about us ‘getting through this together.’ He had already found a farm he thought we should live on and where we would raise our children. He thought I would make a great mother for Vince.”

  This was hardly what she had expected after the long hours of self-pity and anxiety. He had somehow shoved down all the bad feelings and was now playing the role of first lover, a real man. True, she had only met him a handful of times, but they had talked for over twenty-four hours in all. She should have had a decent sense for how he worked by now, but she could not figure out how or why his mood had changed so abruptly.

  When they got to the café, he changed the subject and started boasting. He told her how inept the police had been, bringing him and Sara in for questioning but failing to see through them. He also told her he had a police contact, a mole, who had helped him acquire a couple of handguns, three pistols. Ready to use, stashed away back home on the farm. For self-defense. He had fired them several times and knew they worked.

  A confabulation? Maybe he did in fact have a gun. Was it in his car? Was it on his person right now? Nothing seemed entirely inconceivable with this man who seemed comfortable talking about things like this here, surrounded by regular people doing their weekend shopping.

  “Before we headed downtown, I felt like I had the upper hand, because he was in such a terrible state,” Therese said. “But then his mood changed, and things started to feel awfully unpleasant. So I went to the bathroom and called Marie-Louice, asking her to contact Anders so h
e could go get my family somewhere safe straight away. It needed to happen now, not later.”

  Anders was at work at the nuclear plant that day and couldn’t use his cell phone. Instead, Marie-Louice had to chase down central operations, who in turn had to chase him down via radio. It was a process that took a while, but at least it had been set in motion.

  Therese went to the bathroom three times in just a short while. It would be suspicious in most contexts, but not compared to Martin’s many visits back at the house. Therese’s final call from the stall was to her husband, Richard. She had already tried him several times without getting through.

  “I told him to just listen to me and trust me. He was to take the children someplace safe and stay there until the police or I called. I didn’t want Martin to pass by my house with my family in it. Richard was livid, but that was going to have to wait.”

  Back at the table, the boasting continued. Martin, who had been in such a bad state before, was now beating his chest over what he had done and how dangerous he was.

  “It was like he was expecting a medal,” Therese said. “Like, we’re so damn clever and no one can catch us. He asked what I thought about him now, now that I knew everything. I was quiet for a bit. I couldn’t tell him he was an idiot, even though that was my first thought. Then I said ‘crazy.’ But that there’s good crazy and bad crazy. And that I supposed women were always drawn to dangerous men.”

  In a way, his phone saved the situation. More specifically: Sara did, by continually trying to reach Martin. In just over ten minutes, she called him seven times; he didn’t answer. But the repeated calls made him restless, stressed, defensive again.

  Therese stood up.

  “Anders is going to be back any minute; you have to leave, like I told you. And I promised the guys at the station I would bring a Midsummer cake to work. I have to bake. Let’s go.”

  In the car, Martin went on and on about tarps. He wouldn’t stop talking; he wanted them to go to the nearest hardware store so he could show her exactly what kind of tarp he and Sara had wrapped Göran in. Could the body have decomposed, or would it still be there? Therese refused to go to the store with him. It was time to break up this powwow.