Authors: Hakan Ostlundh
“No, you do have a point there, but if you want to conceal your identity maybe it would be worth it anyway.”
Fredrik slowed down and stopped completely. A dozen lambs had lain down in the middle of the road. He honked at them, without result.
“That usually doesn’t work,” said Sara.
Fredrik rolled down the window.
“Usually?” he said. “Does this happen to you often?”
He stuck his head out the window and hollered at the lambs.
“Not anymore. But when I was little we had a summer place in Hälsingland. They had a lot of sheep there.”
Sara unbuckled her seat belt.
“I’ll take care of it,” she said, getting out of the car.
She only needed to take a few steps toward the lambs before they quickly got to their feet and toddled away from the road. Sara got back in the car.
“So you don’t think it’s one of the tenants?” she said when they were on their way again.
“No, not if it really is a threat. If it is one of the renters who’s behind this it’s some teenager who did it.”
“Sure,” said Sara. “Maybe it is some adolescents after all.”
* * *
They continued out on the eastern part of the island where Elisabet Vogler lived. She ran a farm along with her husband and they hoped to find her there. Her sister, Alma, on the other hand, worked at the technical college in Visby as an IT technician. They would have to question her when they were back in town.
After fifteen or twenty minutes, they turned right and stopped in front of a big white stone house with a pantile roof and pink corners. It was an archetypal Gotland farmhouse with a low ceiling on the bottom floor, and an upper floor with more space, added on much later. It would not surprise Fredrik if a Vogler had hauled the first cornerstone there sometime in the fifteen hundreds.
Right on the boundary between the yard and the garden two stately maple trees were growing. The house had dense forest at its back and a smaller, ochre-colored detached wing on the right side. On the left side, but farther away than the wing, was a big barn. In front of the two buildings, the landscape opened up in an expansive meadow where two horses stood completely still in the sun like bronze statues.
The main building lacked a back addition and did not appear to have any other kitchen entrance, either, so Fredrik and Sara went up to the double door and knocked. There was a pair of child-size red rubber boots tossed in the gravel alongside the steps.
There was movement behind a curtain, and shortly after one half of the door was opened by a man in his thirties dressed in gray work pants and green T-shirt. Probably Elisabet Vogler’s husband. He was shorter than Fredrik, broad and sturdy like a wrestler. His face under the sun-bleached hair was also broad and square. Fredrik asked for Elisabet and hoped that he could avoid further explanations, but that was obviously naïve. The man looked at him suspiciously.
“What’s this about?”
“It concerns her half brother, Henrik Kjellander,” said Fredrik.
The man stood silently and looked at him a little longer than was completely natural.
“One moment, I’ll go see,” he mumbled, shutting the door in Fredrik’s face.
It did not sound obvious that they would get to see his wife. Fredrik stepped down from the big piece of limestone that served as a landing and looked out over the well-tended yard. A short distance away was a machine shop. The door stood open and you could make out the outlines of a tractor.
The farm was too big to be on Fårö. The majority of the island’s farms were small, part-time operations.
After more than a minute the door opened and Elisabet Vogler came out accompanied by her husband. Elisabet was not at all like Henrik. She was blond and a good bit taller. Her eyes were beautiful but cold, her cheekbones high.
Elisabet came down and took a couple of steps in the direction of Fredrik and Sara. Her husband remained standing, right by the door. Fredrik heard a sound behind them and glanced over his shoulder. An older man had come out from the detached wing, leaving the door ajar behind him. He stood looking at them, but made no attempt to come closer. Fredrik assumed that it was Ernst Vogler. Father and daughter each lived in their own house on the same property.
“Yes?” said Elisabet when Fredrik and Sara had introduced themselves.
She had crossed her arms, all claws out.
“We need to ask a few questions in connection with an investigation that concerns your half brother Henrik Kjellander,” said Fredrik.
Elisabet Vogler looked at Fredrik without saying anything. He assumed this meant that the ball was in his court.
“What did you do last Saturday?”
She made a surprised face and glanced over toward the older man outside the other building.
“What was I doing? Do you want me to tell you what I did?”
“Yes, just very briefly,” said Fredrik politely.
“Why is that?” She laughed. It sounded scornful, or possibly nervous.
“Unfortunately I can’t go into that right now.”
“I see.”
She shook her head almost imperceptibly, but then at last she answered.
“I worked in the morning. We had lunch together, all three of us. In the afternoon I was at home with the kids.”
“And in the evening?”
“Yes, then, too. We watched TV with the kids.”
“During the morning, when you were working, did you leave the farm then?” asked Fredrik.
“No, I was here the whole time.”
Both the younger and the older man nodded in agreement from their respective front steps, but said nothing.
“Henrik Kjellander moved here to the island two years ago,” Fredrik continued.
“Yes, I’m aware of that,” said Elisabet Vogler.
“What did you think about that? That he settled down here with his family?”
Elisabet looked at Fredrik, her mouth like a narrow streak.
“I don’t understand what business he had here and I didn’t like it. But I’m not getting involved in that. This is a free world.”
Fredrik took notes. Elisabet impatiently followed the movements of the pen across the paper.
“Your mother died two years ago,” he said. “As I’ve understood it, there were a number of questions about the inheritance.”
Elisabet shook her head firmly.
“No, there were no questions. All that was arranged long ago. There was a prenuptial agreement.”
“But isn’t it the case that Henrik has questioned the distribution of the estate?” asked Fredrik.
“He does have certain ideas and that’s his business, but as I said, everything was arranged long ago. If you want to know exactly how, it’s best that you read it yourself.”
“So the fact that Henrik has filed a lawsuit is not something that worries you?”
Her eyes narrowed when the lawsuit came up.
“No, not in the slightest. He doesn’t frighten me. If he wants to fight about that, it’s fine with me. I’m the one who has the law on my side.”
The high cheekbones became even clearer when she angrily clenched her jaws hard.
Fredrik and Sara stopped in Fårösund and had lunch at a place with solid pine furniture, blue drinking glasses in a display case, and a little opening where you ordered your food. Fredrik’s stomach was growling. It was past one o’clock. There was fried herring with mashed potatoes. Good and well-prepared, not too much butter in the potatoes, just the way he liked it.
“What do you say about the evil stepsister?” he asked Sara.
She looked at him with amusement.
“Eyes poked out, yes,” she said quietly. “Poop in the toy box, doubtful.”
“People can do the strangest things.”
Fredrik took the last bit of herring and set aside his utensils.
“Dad and her husband give her an alibi,” Sara pointed out.
“Yes, but she had just shouted that alibi out over all of Fårö, so I don’t think much of it.”
Sara folded up the napkin.
“Are you done?” she asked.
“I’m done.”
They said thanks to the woman behind the opening and went out into the sharp sunlight.
“Maybe Alma Vogler is the toy box type,” he said.
Sara squinted toward the sun.
“Can we go back to the station before we do the interview with Alma? There are a few things I want to check.”
Fredrik had no objections. It might be worth digging a little before they spent more time on an intractable half sister.
* * *
Back at the office Fredrik pulled out the rental contract they had received from Henrik Kjellander. The last tenant was Inger Kvarnbäck from Gothenburg. Fredrik made a few quick registry searches. Inger was sixty-seven years old and married to Thomas Kvarnbäck, born the same year as she was. They were registered at Prinsgatan 8.
Fredrik tried calling their home number, but got no answer, not even an answering machine. There were two cell phone numbers, one for Inger and one for Thomas. He tried both. Thomas’s cell seemed stone dead, and when he called Inger’s the voice mail started immediately.
He decided to continue with the two other tenants. Even if it was unlikely, it could not be completely ruled out that it might have been one of them who slipped the picture into the linen closet and pooped in the toy box, while the last ones were simply unusually messy and inconsiderate.
The first tenant was Jörgen Malmqvist from Bromma in Stockholm. He was thirty-seven years old, married to Eva Maria Malmqvist. They had two children, age seven and nine.
Tenant number two was Emma Dahlberg, age twenty-nine. She was registered at an address in Vasastan in Stockholm and was neither married nor living with anyone. Her income suggested that she was a student. It was not probable that she rented the house for two weeks to stay there by herself. She must have been one of the five or six thirty-year-olds that the neighbor noticed. This meant then that there were three or four individuals about whom it was hard to find out anything unless he called Emma Dahlberg and asked.
Fredrik picked up the receiver and called the agency that had arranged the rental of the house.
“Maj-Lis Eriksson, GotlandsResor,” a cheerful voice answered.
“Hello, my name is Fredrik Broman and I’m calling from the Visby police—”
“I see, oh my. I haven’t done anything crazy, have I?” came out of the telephone.
“No, no,” he assured her, and explained why he was calling.
Maj-Lis promised energetically to do what she could to help out.
“I was wondering if you have more personal information in your system than appears on the contract.”
“You mean whether they rented through us before?”
“I actually would like to know that,” said Fredrik, “but I was thinking about whether there are more names. If, for example, several people are renting, do you enter all the names in the system?”
“No,” answered Maj-Lis. “We don’t usually do that. Sometimes, if there are two families who will share a house, it happens that both want to be on the contract. To share the liability. If they want to that’s fine, but it’s not that common. The majority book on the Internet and there it’s not possible to have more than one name on the contract.”
“And you can see after the fact what bookings have been made on the Internet and which ones you’ve taken over the phone?”
“Of course.”
Fredrik went through the three tenants with Maj-Lis. Malmqvist, the family with children, had rented through GotlandsResor before. Two years in Hellvi, but this time Malin and Henrik’s house on Fårö. Emma Dahlberg rented for the first time. Maj-Lis could see that she requested a house for at least four people. The Kvarnbäck couple were also renting for the first time. It did not show how many people they were applying for, only that they requested lodging on Fårö and north Gotland, which was a single region in the company’s system.
“How do they get the keys to the house? Do they pick them up from you?”
“If you haven’t arranged otherwise with the landlord, you pick up the keys here at the office, that’s right,” said Maj-Lis.
“How about with this particular house, can you see that?”
“Well, now, let’s see here,” she said. “All of them picked up here.”
“Can you see who gave out the keys, too?”
“Just one moment, then I have to go in…”
Maj-Lis fell silent and Fredrik could hear her fingers against the keys like faint whispers.
“Indeed. I must have been the one who handed out the keys to the first ones, Malmqvist. Elin did the other two. She’s not still here. She was a summer temp.”
“Do you remember anything about the Malmqvist family?”
Fredrik could easily picture Maj-Lis’s broad smile.
“No,” she laughed. “July is when we’re busiest. The majority change on Saturdays and then it’s on the verge of chaos. People stand in line out the door. You barely have time to look them in the eyes.”
“I understand,” said Fredrik, but asked for a telephone number for Elin anyway.
“Nothing else that you recall about these customers?”
“No, I can’t think of anything,” said Maj-Lis after thinking a moment.
“The last ones, Kvarnbäck, must have turned in their keys as recently as Saturday. Nothing in connection with that?”
“There’s nothing noted.”
Fredrik thanked her for the help and hung up. Then she called both Jörgen Malmqvist and Emma Dahlberg. He asked for the names of everyone who had stayed in the house or visited them during the rental period. Had anything out of the ordinary happened? Did they possibly leave the house earlier than planned so that it stood empty a few days?
Both Jörgen Malmqvist and Emma Dahlberg had used all of their rental days, and they gave an honest impression when they said that nothing special had happened. Emma was accompanied by three persons. Two men and a woman. They had also had a visit from a fifth person for three nights, a woman. He took down all their names.
At last he tried calling the Kvarnbäck couple again, all three numbers, but without result. Why didn’t they answer?
The Gotland police shared a building with the public prosecutor’s office, and the investigation department was next door, so it was almost simpler to look up a prosecutor in person than to call. Especially if the line was always busy for the prosecutor you wanted to get hold of.