Authors: Hakan Ostlundh
On the side toward the sea the house had a veranda where the owner had stacked garden furniture and a couple of large plastic tubs. Eva stepped up on the veranda and rested her heavy bag against the railing.
“And the Stockholm family?” she said.
“Kalle and Sofia Larsson. They have two children. It’s probably a little cramped for them here, but there are other things that compensate.”
“What do they do?”
“He works for some newspaper, but now I’m not sure whether it was
Aftonbladet
or
Expressen
.”
What a surprise, thought Fredrik. Storsudret, a refuge for the media elite.
Markus Bergvall unlocked the green, flaking front door and let them in.
“You’ll have to wait outside,” said Eva when Bergvall was about to follow them.
Fredrik stopped in the doorway and looked around. The cottage consisted of a sleeping loft, a little workroom, and a main room with an open red-brick fireplace in the middle. Besides a flat-screen TV over which someone had hung a linen cloth as dust protection, nothing in the house was more modern than the seventies. It must be the former owner’s things that were still there.
“I’ll start with the kitchen,” said Eva.
She took out a flashlight and shone it on the counter.
“Nothing on the counter.”
She investigated the cupboards and searched the floor in front of the counter.
“There’s some hair here. Pretty long,” she said. “Not so easy to clean without running water.”
She studied the finding more closely with the help of an ordinary magnifying glass.
“It adds up that someone has cut their hair. The question is, where did the rest of the hair go?”
“Incinerated?” Fredrik guessed.
“Maybe. Doesn’t matter too much. There’s enough hair to compare with the find from Kalbjerga, but you can check the garbage.”
She looked up toward Markus Bergvall, who was standing right behind Fredrik.
“Is there a garbage can?”
“Two of them. They’re behind the garden shed.”
“We’ll go out and look, so Eva can work in peace in here,” said Fredrik.
He closed the door behind them and looked south along the shore. It could not be more than a couple of miles to Gotland’s southernmost point where Henrik Kjellander had been taking photographs only an hour or so before the murders. If those strands of hair turned out to come from the murderer that would be a strange coincidence. In that case, the murderer and Henrik Kjellander had driven in opposite directions across the island and in a way changed places. It was very possible that Henrik encountered the murderer on his way home.
“That was the one that was broken,” said Markus Bergvall.
He pointed to one of the windows on the veranda.
“It’s barely visible now, but I closed it and wedged a twig so that it wouldn’t glide up.”
Fredrik went closer. There were break marks by the lower hasp, both on the window casement and sill, but as Bergvall pointed out it was not something you would notice at a distance.
“So when you came here was the window standing open?”
“Yes, but no more than a hand’s width.”
They continued over to the garden shed.
“Do they really have waste collection down here?” Fredrik asked.
“No,” Bergvall smiled. “They don’t drive down here. You have to take the garbage to the crossroads where you turned off the last stretch. They usually leave them up there in the summer, but now they’ve shut down for the season.”
There was a black and a brown can behind the shed, one for compost and one for incineration. Both were empty.
Fredrik asked a few more questions about the Larsson family, got their home address and telephone number, then excused himself and went back into the house.
Eva was done in the kitchen. She had spread out a plastic cover in front of the fireplace and was scooping the ashes into a plastic bag.
“How’s it going?”
“Someone burned clothing here,” she said without interrupting her work.
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure. There are cloth fibers in the ash. And look in there.”
She turned around and pointed toward a smaller bag of brown paper that was on the floor behind her back.
Fredrik went over and picked up the bag after having removed his shoes. He carefully opened it. At the bottom of the bag were several sooty, small metal objects.
“What are they?”
“I’m quite sure they’re rivets, the kind that sit around the pockets on jeans. And the larger ring-shaped objects are two eyelets.”
“Eyelets?”
“That are used in clothes to reinforce holes. For example, where a cord runs in a hooded sweatshirt.”
“Was there a cord on Maria Andersson’s sweatshirt?”
“Don’t know, but there usually are on that kind of sweatshirt. We’ll have to check that.”
Fredrik silently observed the small objects in the bag, then closed it and set it down.
“Let’s say this is the perpetrator. Isn’t it a bit strange to go to this place in particular?”
Eva finished her work in the fireplace by vacuuming up the last remnants of soot.
“No, why is that?” she said. “It’s isolated, it’s a long way to the nearest neighbor.”
“Sure, in that way it’s perfect. But to take off here … You saw yourself what the road looks like. To even expect to find a house out here…”
“You mean she must have known that it was here?”
“Yes.”
Eva turned off the vacuum cleaner. The muffled roar from the motor turned into a brief growl before it became silent.
“If you’re right, perhaps it’s possible to find her by way of the owner of the cabin, or one of the neighbors.”
Fredrik nodded toward the kitchen.
“How long will it take to get an answer to the strands of hair?”
“A microscopic comparison won’t take long. But even if it matches it won’t hold up in court.”
“Right now I don’t care about the law. I just want to know if this may be what we think it is.”
When Fredrik woke up on Thursday only a quick glance at the blind was needed to see that the fog was gone. The sun drew a shadow image of the window bars on the stiff, pale yellow fabric.
He pulled on his bathrobe, went into the kitchen, and filled the coffeemaker. He could not help thinking about the cabin by the sea. What would have happened if Bergvall had not been so curious, and imaginative besides, to connect the break-in and the strands of hair with the murders? Presumably nothing. He would have cleaned away the traces without thinking any more about it.
Fredrik took a quick shower, shaved, and got dressed. In the short distance to the mailbox and back he thought about whether it had all been planned from the start: driving to the cabin to burn the clothes and dye her hair. Or if the perpetrator had panicked, suddenly felt that she had to change her appearance, happened to think of the cabin, bought hair dye, and drove there.
He called Kalle Larsson, took a chance on
Expressen,
but it turned out that he worked at
Aftonbladet.
There were many people, of course, who knew about the family’s summer place, but none that Kalle Larsson could connect with Henrik Kjellander or Malin Andersson.
If it hadn’t been for the burned-up clothes Fredrik could have imagined other explanations, but now he had a hard time seeing that it wouldn’t have a connection with the murders. Someone breaks into a cabin roughly three-and-a-half hours after the murders, burns clothes, including a garment that could be Maria Andersson’s sweatshirt, cuts her hair, and presumably dyes it. Eva had found traces of chemicals in one of the tubs that indicated the latter. That could not be a coincidence.
When he came in with the newspaper, Ninni was standing by the counter pouring a cup of coffee. He tossed the newspaper onto the table, aware that he would not have time to read it. He had browsed through the day’s article on the Fårö murders on the way back from the mailbox. That would have to do.
“You haven’t forgotten that Joakim is coming tomorrow, have you?” said Ninni.
“Not now that you’ve reminded me.”
“But I assume we aren’t going to see much of you?”
“Probably not, but I’ll find time to see him. If he’s not going into Visby and partying every night.”
“There is that risk.”
He looked disappointed.
“Murder is murder,” said Ninni, sitting down at the table.
Fredrik looked at the kitchen clock. The one that was always five minutes slow, even though he moved it ahead every Saturday.
“I have to leave.”
* * *
Fredrik had just made it back to his office after the morning’s review when they were called to a meeting again. The forensic lab had sent a report: The strands of hair that were found in the summer cabin could come from the same head as the wad of hair that Malin Andersson had held in a firm grasp even after death.
“Because Eva has found fingerprints on the broken window, this may be the technical evidence we’ve been missing,” said Peter Klint.
“Although now we no longer have a suspect,” said Fredrik.
“No, the fingerprints are not Stina Hansson’s of course. We probably shouldn’t completely rule her out, but it’s no longer defensible to keep her in custody.”
“Pity,” said Ove, who stood with his arms crossed inside the door. “She seemed like the perfect perpetrator for this case.”
“Well, that’s how it is, anyway,” said Göran. “Now we’ll have to start over.”
He took off his glasses with a sudden movement and turned to Fredrik.
“Do we have the guest lists from the hotels?”
“Yes, they arrived yesterday. But they weren’t that urgent before Bergvall and the cabin turned up.”
“And then we have Kjellander’s other contacts. The ones you got from his agent in Stockholm. There must be quite a few?”
Göran did not wait for the answer. He squeezed his glasses back over his nose and looked around among his associates.
“We’ll have to divide this up so we pick up the pace. It may be worth questioning the journalist who owns the cabin about who has been there to visit.”
“The accountant,” said Fredrik.
“What?”
“He’s an accountant, not a journalist. Although he does work at
Aftonbladet
.”
“Okay,” said Göran. “The accountant. Whatever, even if he couldn’t connect any of his guests to Henrik Kjellander or Malin Andersson we can’t miss that possibility.”
“There is another person I think we might be able to get something out of,” said Fredrik. “Thomas Bark. He’s known Henrik since student days and they are still close friends.”
“But haven’t you already questioned him? That didn’t produce very much, as I recall.”
Göran sounded uninterested.
“No, but I got a sense that he was holding back something.”
“Yes?”
“I asked if he knew whether Kjellander had any relationships on the side. He maintained that was not the case, but I got a feeling that he knew something that he didn’t want to tell. I pressured him about Stina Hansson, but now, of course, we’re searching for someone else.”
“You mean you want to question him in person?”
“Yes, I think it might produce something,” said Fredrik.
Göran rubbed the top of his bald head. He looked moderately enthusiastic, turned questioningly to Klint.
“I say go,” said Klint. “But go at him properly. Don’t give up.”
Malin and Maria’s older brother, Staffan, was surprisingly his usual self. The quick movement with his hand as he brushed aside the dark, shoulder-length hair from his face, the quick, slightly nervous way of moving. It was only the gaze that was different. It did not move around curiously like it usually did, but instead was lost in something else beyond the room.
“We could have stayed at the same hotel, but I didn’t think about that when I made the reservation,” he said, adjusting his jeans shirt, which had mother-of-pearl snap fasteners.
Staffan had reserved a room for his mother and himself at Wisby Hotel, a ten-minute walk from the hotel where Henrik, Maria, and Ellen were staying.
Ewy was like a different person. This happy, talkative, almost professionally pleasant woman was silent and resolute. The summer tan had taken on a grayish tone and she moved stiffly and slowly as if she had aged twenty years overnight. She hugged them, hard but somehow absent.
Henrik had a hard time meeting her eyes. Staffan’s were easier, but that was because they had been such good friends. Somehow that got the upper hand.
He found himself thinking they
had been
friends. As if it was over now. Henrik knew that, but not Staffan. It was not because Malin and Axel were dead, but instead because of that other thing. What would tear what was left of this family apart if it ever came out.
Ewy took a few hesitant steps up to the desk. She put her hands on the back of the chair and tried to turn the chair out toward the room, struggled and failed. Staffan hurried over and helped her. Henrik stood where he was as if paralyzed. He ought to have been more attentive, should have … Ewy sat down stiffly. She set her bag on the floor and looked around the room.
“How long are they thinking the three of you should stay here?” she said in a voice emptied of all joy.
Henrik turned completely cold. He felt a scratching in his throat. He coughed a couple of times with a croaking sound. It was something about the words “the three of you.” That he and Maria were a unit. It sounded so revealing. But perhaps she didn’t mean that.
“I don’t know.”
When he heard his own feeble voice he realized how tired he was of being in the dreary, impersonal hotel room. All he and Ellen had brought with them from home were a few items of clothing. Things they hadn’t even packed themselves. It was as if his world was dissolved into different time axes that were moving at completely different rates. It was ten seconds since he had opened the outside door to the bloody hall in Kalbjerga. It was a month ago, at least, since the police placed them at the hotel by the harbor.
“I’ll go home with you tomorrow,” said Maria.