by C S Duffy
I clicked on the news alert.
Minutes later, I'd picked my way through the dozens of articles about the murder. It just an opportunity to practice my Swedish. The guy behind the counter shouted over to me at one point, and I'd vaguely discerned from context and mime that my pizza was going to take a bit longer than five minutes.
Anna Essen had been one of those people whose career makes me feel old. She was a social media star, an influencer who seemed to earn a pretty hefty living simply by existing as a fabulous person and taking pictures of it. I had a peek at her Instagram, and there she was nibbling croissants in Paris, raising a champagne glass in a VIP tent at Coachella, attending a formal wedding of some minor royalty in Denmark.
Despite the ostentatious lifestyle on display, there seemed to be something genuine about her, I thought sadly, scrolling through her feed. She had an impish grin, in contrast with that weird cheekbones-sucked-in expression that minor celebs of her ilk seem to favour, and in loads of her photos she was crossing her eyes, caught mid giggle, squishing her face close to a friend’s in a way that suggested genuine affection. I felt a wave of unbearable sadness as I watched a boomerang video of her twirling in a sparkly party dress, making a funny face at the camera.
She would have moved in similar circles as Mia and also Sanna, Johan’s ex and one of Mia’s most recent victims. Stockholm wasn’t a big city and all the fancy people seemed to cross one another’s paths sooner or later. The pizza place door opened, letting in a blast of freezing air, as I thought this over.
One of the reasons that Mia’s trail of horror had gone undetected for so long was that the majority of her victims were people whose deaths rated a mention on page three or five at most. That sounds horrendous and I make no excuses for it, but the business of selling papers is what it is. Mia knew how it worked, and I believe she took advantage of it. Choosing a victim with a high profile, posing her like that in the middle of a busy square, it screamed for attention.
'Hallå där? Din pizza?'
I looked up and realised that my pizza had been sitting on the counter for goodness knows how long. I grabbed it with an apologetic smile and braced myself for the cold, my mind racing.
It wasn't until I got home and tucked into my stone-cold pizza, liberally strewn with parmesan, that I remembered. Utan parmesan. Bugger.
7
Mattias Eklund looked at himself in the mirror and immediately took his shirt off. The blue and white check was all wrong, he decided, he looked like a high school maths teacher. Not that there was anything wrong with being a high school maths teacher, it just wasn’t the ideal look for a date.
Date. A wave of nerves rose up in Mattias’s stomach and for a moment he thought he was going to be sick. He sat on the toilet seat and took a few deep breaths with his eyes closed. The nausea passed, but the nerves didn’t. He was going on a date. His first date in Stockholm.
The plain dark blue shirt, he decided, pulling out of his closet. Mamma always said it brought out the colour of his eyes and made him look very handsome. He wasn’t entirely sure that handsome by his mum’s standards would cut it in Stockholm, but as it was the best he could realistically hope for at the present time, it would have to do.
The shirt collar was a bit crumpled, so he plugged in the iron and wondered if he should have got a haircut this afternoon. It wouldn’t have made all that much difference. Mattias often looked at the Stockholm men on the bus on his way to work, and wondered how they got their hair to be so slick and neatly combed. Mattias’s hair was thick and poker straight yet always stuck stubbornly in a hundred different directions in a sort of fluffy mess.
He guessed there must be some sort of product that would control it, but he didn’t know how to find out which one. In the tiny town he came from, in the middle of nowhere not far from the Norwegian border, if he ever saw a man with tidy, glossy hair, he would just go up to him and ask how he'd manage it. But he had never seen a tidy, glossy man at home, and he suspected it wasn’t the done thing in Stockholm to tap somebody on the shoulder on the bus and ask them how they did their hair.
As he ironed, the familiar task soothing the nerves still churning in his stomach, he comforted himself with the thought that Camilla had already seen pictures of him with his hair on the dating app and had agreed to meet him. Against the advice of his more worldly cousin Jonas, Mattias had decided to upload a profile picture of his hair at its fluffiest — Jonas said it looked like a broom and a baby chicken had had a baby on his head — so that women would know what they were letting themselves in for. He didn’t see the point in fooling anyone.
He wanted to meet a woman who knew exactly what he looked like, funny nose that was too big, oddly pointy shoulders and ridiculous hair, and for her to want him anyway. Jonas had rolled his eyes and predicted that Mattias wouldn’t get any matches, but he was wrong. Camilla had matched him the first day — Mattias had almost dropped his phone in shock — and even though she was nothing less than breathtakingly beautiful in Mattias's opinion, she replied to his message. They had texted back and forth for more than three weeks now, sometimes late in to the night, sharing childhood stories and secret fears.
A small part of Mattias was afraid it would turn out to be a prank, that he would arrive for the date to meet a bunch of the hockey guys from his school, all doubled over with laughter that broom-head Mattias thought a girl liked him. That was the reason he refused the first time Camilla suggested meeting. He’d claimed he just wanted to get to know her through text a bit better first, though in truth he thought he might explode if he existed another minute without seeing her in real life. Every night, he fell asleep imagining the sound of her laugh, the smell of her hair, the softness of her skin he would discover if he got to touch her hand.
Even though she had agreed to keep texting for a bit longer, Mattias had worried and worried that she was hurt, so after a sleepless night he had texted her at five the next morning confessing the truth. She had replied with three whole lines of laughing emojis and promised she was not a hockey team. Then she suggested she phone him so that he could hear her voice and know that she was at least a woman.
They had talked for three hours and when they hung up, Mattias admitted to himself that he was in love,
Now, he was going to meet her for the very first time and if he didn’t put his shirt on and go, he would be late. He nearly dropped the iron in horror as he pictured her sitting at the pub alone, anxiously watching the door and thinking he hadn’t shown up. Over the phone, she had confessed that she had been stood up by the first date she arranged through the app, and would never know whether the guy had decided not to come, or if he had taken one look at her and left. Cold chills cascaded over Mattias at the thought he might make her think that.
He laced up his snow boots so quickly that he got the laces in all the wrong holes, and after checking three times he had unplugged the iron, he stepped out into the night. The chill hit his face and he dug his hands deep into his pockets as sheer thrill exploded in his stomach like a firework and pins and needles zapped through his whole body. He was about to meet her. Maybe, just a couple of short hours from now, he would get to kiss her. His whole life was about to start.
8
A murder victim had been found posed, standing, frozen, in a park in Boston six years ago. My mind was whirring as I ran alongside the canal that separates Söder from Hammarby to the south. The temperature was about minus a billion and every time I breathed in I got an ice cream headache.The snow that had fallen all afternoon lay soft and innocent looking on top of treacherous layers of ice.
I could hear the big ice breaker machine working a few blocks away. It’s a bit like a normal street cleaner, except with this gigantic hammer-thing at the front which smashes up the several-inches thick layers of ice that cover roads and pavements, then sweeps them towards the gutter. During a heavy winter like this, every street is bordered by high piles of snow and ice, so that crossing the road can necessitate hopping
over a muddy igloo wall.
Remind me why I'd chosen this bloody city to take up running in?
After wolfing down the parmesan-pizza the night before I'd given up pretending I wasn't interested and had been up most of night searching and scribbling and cross referencing. Sometime around four, I'd stumbled across this American case.
Posed like a statue, standing in the snow. It was too similar. Too weird and unique to be a coincidence.
The victim, Jason Winslow, had been a student at Boston University. He walked a date home to her dorm at Harvard and was never seen again. He was a young, handsome guy from what they referred to as an old Boston family, and he had played basketball for his college, so his murder had caused quite a media splash. The investigation had dominated the Massachusetts news for months on end, featuring breathless daily updates as more and more students were questioned, including even a minor Kennedy. Months went by, the case hit a few national papers, but absolutely zero leads were ever found and six years later it remained unsolved. Much was made of the sheer weirdness of the victim being found posed in a park alongside the Charles River, standing up in the snow, arms waving as though he were a politician addressing a rally or something.
I'd looked that up, wondering how it was even possible. I knew that bodies stiffened after death, but surely they would have to be posed while still pliable, and then — what? The killer stood there holding them still while rigor mortis set in? It put me in mind of gluing together crafty projects copied from kids' TV when I was little. I never had the patience to hold the lollipop sticks, or whatever it was, together long enough for the glue to set so as soon as I let go the whole thing would collapse.
It turned out that there was a thing known as extreme embalming. It was even a minor trend in the States. The body of a loved one would be injected with a chemical that froze their body like a statue, then posed in a chair in pride of place at the wake. I'd come across several deeply disturbing photos of families gathered around a suspiciously pale looking Granny, which looked to me the stuff of nightmares, but you know, whatever floats your boat.
No other signs of fatal injury had been found on Jason Winslow's body. The medical examiner had concluded it was impossible to tell whether or not he had been dead prior to the embalming process.
The sheer thought of being embalmed alive was so horrifying it took my breath away. He couldn't have been conscious, surely, when the blood was drained from his body and replaced with a chemical? It made me think of the old black and white vampire films I loved, except instead of fangs a clinical needle. When I'd come to the end of that article, about twenty minutes ago, I'd slammed shut my laptop and grabbed my running shoes.
It was quiet down by the canal, and the rhythm of my feet lulled me into an almost pleasant mindlessness. The lights of Hammarby twinkled in the distance and the thin sheet of ice covering the canal shimmered in the moonlight. Every morning the commuter ferry smashed its way through the ice and every evening the ice froze again, so there were layers of cracks and jagged edges that glittered when the sun finally rose mid morning, reminding me of a kaleidoscope I’d had as a child.
I should have skipped my evening run tonight, I thought as my throat burned with every breath. I hadn’t felt my toes in several minutes. Being outdoors in this temperature was reckless, I chided myself as I slowed to a walk, rubbing the stitch in my side with a grimace.
If it hadn’t been quite so painfully cold I would have walked right past him.
He was sitting on one of the benches that overlooked the canal, hands clasped in his lap, head bent. If it had been a reasonable temperature I’d have assumed he was having a little think, or a snooze. Heaven knew I’d sat right where he was, catching my breath, many a time. But surely no one could sit still in this weather, I thought, hesitating a few metres away.
The bench was situated in between two street lamps, not quite close enough to either to benefit from the light, so I could barely make him out in the gloom. He was wearing a dark winter coat with a fur lined collar, a thickly knitted hat pulled low over his forehead and snow boots that reached half way up his shins. He was certainly dressed for the cold.
‘Excuse me? Ursäkta? Are you okay?’ I called, my voice thin and reedy in the glacial air. I glanced around, suddenly acutely conscious of the silence, the darkness. A bus rumbled in the distance, laughter pealed from a nearby balcony. I wasn’t alone, I reminded myself as pins and needles nipped at my fingertips. If I screamed, I would be heard.
The moon slipped out from behind a cloud, bathing the figure in a silvery glow and I saw the blue sheen of his skin. Oh he's dead, I thought with a curious dullness. I probably should have noticed that in the first place.
He was one of them. Extreme embalmed to sit upright on the bench, watching boats chug along the canal for all eternity. My breath caught in my throat and I fumbled for my phone and dialled 112.
He was practically a boy, early twenties or so. Sadness seeped through me as I waited for the police. I couldn’t get too close to him or risk contaminating the scene, but I wanted to be nearby. I wanted to keep him company. He was so young. Handsome, in a sweet, boy next door kind of way. His mum probably whispered loudly in delight every time she saw a girl checking him out. He would blush furiously and hiss at her to be quiet but secretly be thrilled and terrified.
Just as I heard the siren approaching in the distance I noticed a tiny cut on his neck where he had nicked himself shaving, and I burst into tears.
9
‘Mattias Eklund,’ said Henrik, the detective I always thought looked as though he fancied himself a retired rockstar. His hair was reached his shoulders and and was scraggly, peppered generously with grey and his leathery tan was more than a little suspicious in Sweden at this time of year. I hadn’t exactly warmed to him when he and his partner Nadja questioned me with regards to a murder Mia had committed last summer, but now it was strangely comforting to see a familiar face.
He had just joined me in the backseat of the patrol car that was parked haphazardly across the tram tracks at the edge of the canal. He rubbed his hands together and blew on them to try to get some feeling back in them as I stared out the window at the Crime Scene in front of us.
A young uniformed officer, a woman with a long plait that reached down her back, had ushered me into the car as her partner stared at the victim, aghast. He looked green and I guessed he was regretting being the closest patrol car when I called. The female officer was tall and had a reassuringly no-nonsense air about her. I’d gratefully allowed her to march me across the ice to the car as my body shuddered with empty sobs.
‘I’ve no idea why I’m crying,’ I’d muttered as she covered my knees with a blanket from the boot. ‘I didn’t know him or anything. It’s just so sad, he is so young.’
She nodded with that sharp intake of breath Swedes seem to think is a response, and closed the car door behind me. I'd sat there trapped until Henrik joined me a few moments ago. Though I was grateful for the warmth of the car — my skin tingled as feeling rushed back into it — I couldn’t help but feel strangely guilty, locked in the back seat of a police car like a criminal.
The crime scene was buzzing with action, a white tent set up around the young man’s body, Scene of Crime Officers in their white suits swarming, collecting, processing, analysing. Powerful floodlights illuminated the scene, punctuated every once in a while by a camera flash. The blue lights from several police cars rotated lazily, making the whole scene seem alien and surreal.
‘Have you ever heard that name before?’ Henrik asked me. 'Mattias Eklund. Did you recognise him?’
I shook my head. I’d never seen the young man's face before tonight, though now I couldn't get it out my head. They way he frowned as though in deep thought. Was that his own expression or had the killer arranged his face to suit their purpose?
'There is a thing called extreme embalming,' I said. I felt bone tired all of a sudden, as though I could happily slip in to a deep sleep then a
nd there and never wake up.
'Yes we know.'
'Is that what happened to Anna Essen?'
'I am unable to share the details of the investigation with you.'
'There was a serial killer operating on this island for nearly fifteen years and you wouldn't even know she existed if it wasn't for me,' I snapped. 'Then you let her sail off into the night right under your bloody noses. And now here we are again. Two bodies in a couple of weeks. How many more before you catch this one?'
'None, we hope.'
I sighed. The door of the medical examiner's van was slammed shut and it began to crunch slowly over the snow. Someone shut down the crime scene lights and we were plunged into darkness.
'There was a body found in Boston six years ago,' I said. Henrik didn't respond, but opened his notebook and started to write. 'Standing up in a park, frozen. Extreme embalmed. They never found the killer.'
'Boston is a long way from Stockholm,' he murmured.
'Yeah they have these things called planes these days.'
'Do you think it's a coincidence that you found this victim?' Henrik asked.
A little chill trickled down my spine. 'Yes. Of course. It must be. What do you mean, what else could it be?'
'It is not the first dead body you have found in Stockholm.'
'Some of us have all the luck.'
'Do you run along this canal often?'
'Most nights,' I admitted.
'At about the same time?'
I shrugged.
'So anyone who was familiar with your routine might expect you to be here this evening?'
'Someone like Mia do you mean?' I asked, icicles slithering into my guts. The darkness beyond the lights of the crime scene suddenly seemed deeper. I pictured Mia standing there, shrouded in shadows, watching the commotion with a satisfied smirk.