The Preacher (11 page)

Her anger seemed to be ebbing away, and in its place came tears. Gabriel didn’t know which was worse. For a moment he had seen in her wrath a brief glimpse of the old Solveig. The lovely beauty queen that he had been proud to have as his fiancée, before his brother came and took her, precisely the way he had taken everything else he wanted. When her anger was replaced by tears, Solveig deflated like a punctured balloon, and he once again saw the fat, slovenly wreck who spent her days wallowing in self-pity.

‘May you burn in hell, Gabriel Hult, along with your father.’ She whispered the words and left as abruptly as she’d come. Then Gabriel and Laine were alone. Gabriel felt shell-shocked. He sat down heavily on his desk chair and stared mutely at his wife. They exchanged a complicit look. They both knew what it meant that old bones had resurfaced.

With great zeal and confidence Martin took on the task of finding out all about Tanja Schmidt, which was the full name in her passport. Liese had turned in all of Tanja’s things at their request, and he had gone through her backpack with a fine-toothed comb. At the very bottom he had found her passport looking practically unused. There was actually only one stamp from when she entered Sweden from Germany. Either she had never been outside Germany before, or the passport was new.

The photo was surprisingly good, and he decided that she had been nice-looking though a bit plain. Brown eyes and brown hair, a little longer than to her shoulders. Height five foot five, normal build, whatever that meant.

Otherwise her backpack had produced nothing of interest. Changes of clothes, some worn paperbacks, toiletries, and some wrappers from sweets. Nothing personal, which he found rather odd. Wouldn’t she at least have a photo of her family or boyfriend with her, or an address book? Although they had found a handbag near the body. Liese had confirmed that Tanja owned a red handbag. Apparently that’s where she had kept her personal belongings. Now they were gone, in any case. Could it have been a robbery? Or had the killer taken her personal items as souvenirs? Martin had seen a programme on the Discovery Channel about serial killers, that apparently it was common for them to save things from their victims, as part of the ritual.

Martin checked himself. There was nothing to indicate that they were looking for a serial killer, not yet. He did his best not to get stuck in that line of thinking.

He began writing down notes about how he was going to handle the investigation into the Tanja case. First, contact the German police authorities, which he had been about to do when he was interrupted by the call from Tord Pedersen. Then he had to talk with Liese again, and finally he thought he’d get Gösta to drive out to the campground with him and ask around. See whether Tanja might have spoken to anyone there. Or perhaps it would be better to ask Patrik to assign that task to Gösta. In this investigation Patrik, not Martin, had the authority to give orders to Gösta. And things had a tendency to go much more smoothly if protocol was followed to the letter.

Once again he began to dial the number of the German police, and this time he got through. It would have been an exaggeration to say that the conversation flowed smoothly, but by the time he hung up he was relatively sure he had succeeded in laying out the relevant details correctly. They promised to get back to him as soon as they had more information. At least that’s what he thought the person on the other end had said. If there was going to be a lot of contact with their German colleagues they would have to bring in an interpreter.

Considering the time it might take to get information from abroad, he sincerely wished that he had an internet connection in front of him that was as good as the one he had at home. But because of the risk of being hacked, the police station didn’t even have a lousy dial-up modem. He made a mental note to do a search for Tanja Schmidt in the German telephone directory, if it was accessible on the Net. Although if he remembered correctly, Schmidt was one of the most common German surnames, so there was little chance that it would produce anything.

Since he couldn’t do much else than wait for information from Germany, he decided to get started on the next task. He had got hold of Liese’s mobile number, and he rang her first to make sure that she was still in town. Actually she had no obligation to stay, but she had promised not to leave for another couple of days so that they would have a chance to talk to her again.

Her trip must have lost all of its charm by now. According to her testimony to Patrik, the two girls had grown very close in a short time. Now she sat alone in a tent at the Sälvik campground in Fjällbacka knowing her travelling companion had been murdered. Maybe she was in danger too. That was a scenario that Martin hadn’t thought of earlier. Maybe it would be best to talk to Patrik about it as soon as he came back to the station. It could be that the murderer had seen the girls at the campground together and had then focused on the two of them for some reason. But how did Mona and Siv’s bones fit into the picture? Mona and possibly Siv, he corrected himself at once. One should never regard anything as certain if it was merely almost certain, as an instructor at the police academy had once said. It was a maxim that Martin tried to live by in his police work.

On closer reflection he did not believe that Liese was in any danger. Once again they were dealing with probabilities, and the odds were that she had been drawn into something simply because of an unfortunate choice of travelling companion.

Despite his previous misgivings, Martin decided to do some fast talking to rope Gösta into a little concrete police work. He walked down the hall to his office.

‘Gösta, may I interrupt?’

Still waxing poetic about his hole-in-one, Gösta was talking on the phone. He hung up guiltily when Martin stuck his head in the door.

‘Yes?’

‘Patrik has asked us to drive down to Sälvik campground. I have to meet with the victim’s travelling companion, and you’re supposed to ask questions around the campground.’

Gösta uttered a grunt but didn’t question the validity of Martin’s statement as to how Patrik had assigned the tasks. He grabbed his jacket and followed Martin out to the car. The downpour had changed to a light drizzle, but the air was clear and fresh to breathe. It felt as though weeks of dust and heat had been flushed away, and everything looked cleaner than usual.

‘Let’s hope that this rain isn’t here to stay, or else my golf game is going to go to hell,’ Gösta muttered crossly as they sat in the car. Martin thought that he was the only person who didn’t think it was good to have a little break from the summer heat.

‘Well, I think it’s quite nice. That sweltering heat was about to kill me. And just imagine Patrik’s wife. It must be rough to be eight months pregnant in the middle of summer. I could never handle it, that’s for sure.’

Martin chattered on, well aware that Gösta had a tendency to be a bit taciturn when there was talk of anything other than golf. And since Martin’s knowledge of golf was limited to the fact that the ball was round and white and that golfers were usually identified by checked clown trousers, he decided to carry on the conversation all by himself. That’s why he hardly heard Gösta’s muttered comment.

‘Our boy was born in early August, one hot summer like this.’

‘Do you have a son, Gösta? I didn’t know that.’

Martin searched his memory for comments about Gösta’s family. He knew that his wife had died a couple of years ago, but he couldn’t recall hearing anything about a child. In surprise he turned to look at Gösta seated next to him.

His colleague did not meet his gaze, but kept staring at his hands in his lap. Without seeming to be aware of it, he was twisting the gold wedding band that he still wore. He didn’t seem to have heard Martin’s question. Instead he went on in a monotone: ‘Majbritt put on sixty-five pounds. She was as big as a house. She could hardly move in the heat either. Towards the end she just sat in the shade, panting. I brought her one pitcher of water after another, but it was like watering a camel. Her thirst never seemed to quit.’

He laughed, a strange, introspective, slightly tender laugh. Martin realized that Gösta was so far down memory lane that he was no longer talking to anyone else.

‘The boy was perfect when he arrived,’ Gösta went on. ‘Plump and splendid he was. The spitting image of me, everyone said. But then it all happened so fast.’ Gösta turned his wedding ring faster and faster. ‘I was visiting their hospital room when he suddenly stopped breathing. There was a terrific commotion. People came running from every direction, and they took him away from us. We never saw him again until he lay in his coffin. But it was a fine funeral. After that we just didn’t feel like trying to have any more kids. What if things went wrong again? Majbritt wouldn’t have been able to stand it, and neither would I. So we had to make do with each other.’

Gösta gave a start as if waking from a trance. He gave Martin a reproachful look, as if it were his fault that all those words had poured out.

‘It’s not something I talk about any more, of course. And it’s not something any of you need to sit and babble about during coffee breaks, for that matter. It’s forty years ago now, and nobody else needs to know.’

Martin nodded. But he couldn’t stop himself from giving Gösta a light pat on the shoulder. The old man grunted, but Martin still felt that at that moment a fragile bond had formed between them, whereas before there had been only a mutual lack of respect. Gösta still might not be the finest example of a police officer that the corps could produce, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have experience and knowledge, and Martin could learn something from him.

They were both relieved when they reached the campground. The silence that followed the sharing of confidences could be oppressive, as the last five minutes had been.

Gösta slouched off with his hands in his pockets and a downhearted expression on his face, in search of campers who might answer his questions. Martin asked for directions to Liese’s tent and was surprised to find that it was scarcely bigger than a handkerchief. It was jammed between two larger tents, which made it look even smaller in comparison. In the tent to the right of hers some children were playing noisy games; in the tent to the left a beefy bloke about twenty-five years old was drinking beer beneath an awning that stuck out from the tent. All of them gave Martin inquisitive looks as he approached Liese’s tent.

Knocking was not an option, so he called her name a bit hesitantly. The tent zipper opened and Liese’s blonde head appeared in the opening.

Two hours later the two police officers drove off without having found out anything new. Liese had nothing more to contribute than what she had already told Patrik at the station, and none of the other campers had noticed anything of interest regarding Tanja or Liese.

But something else had caught Martin’s attention and was hovering at the back of his mind. He feverishly searched through the sensory impressions from his visit to the campground but remained puzzled. There was something he’d seen that should have registered. Annoyed, he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, but he finally had to give up trying to pin down the elusive memory.

They rode home in silence.

Patrik hoped that he would be like Albert Thernblad when he got old. Not as alone, of course, but just as stylish. Albert hadn’t let himself go after his wife’s death, as so many older men did who ended up living alone. Instead he was well-dressed in both shirt and vest, and his white hair and beard were well-groomed. Despite his difficulties walking, he moved with dignity, with his head held high, and from the little Patrik got to see of the house it seemed that it was kept neat and tidy. He was also impressed by the way Albert handled the news that his daughter had been found. He seemed to have made peace with his fate and was living his life as best he could under the circumstances.

Patrik had been deeply moved by the photographs of Mona that Albert had shown him. Like so many times before, he had realized that it was all too easy to view the crime victims as just another statistic, or to label them ‘the plaintiff’ or ‘the victim’. It didn’t matter whether the person had been robbed or, as in this case, murdered. Albert had done the right thing by showing him the photographs. He’d seen Mona progress from the maternity ward to chubby baby, from schoolgirl to student. Then he’d seen her as the happy, healthy girl she was just before she disappeared.

But there was another girl that he needed to find out more about. Besides, he knew the town well enough to realize that rumours were already flying with the speed of lightning through the community. It would be best to head them off and have a talk with Siv Lantin’s mother, even though they had no confirmation of Siv’s identity as yet. For safety’s sake he had checked on her address before he left the station. It had been a little harder to locate Siv’s mother, since Gun was no longer called Lantin. She must have married, or re married, as the case may be. After a little detective work he had discovered that her surname was now Struwer and that there was a summer house registered to Gun and Lars Struwer in Norra Hamngatan in Fjällbacka. The name Struwer sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.

He was in luck and found a parking place on Planarna down from the Badrestaurant, and he walked the last hundred metres. There was one-way traffic along Norra Hamngatan in the summertime, but in the short stretch he walked he saw three idiot drivers fail to read the road signs. He had to press himself up against the stone wall as they tried to squeeze past the oncoming traffic. The terrain was apparently so rugged where they lived that they felt the need to drive a big four-wheel-drive Jeep. That type of vehicle was far too common among the summer visitors. Patrik surmised that in this case the Stockholm region was considered rugged terrain.

He had a good mind to whip out his badge and read them the riot act but refrained. If the police spent their time trying to teach all beachgoers common sense they wouldn’t get much else done.

Patrik finally reached the right residence, a white house with blue trim on the left side of the street, across from the red boat-houses that gave Fjällbacka its characteristic silhouette. The owners of the house were busy unloading a couple of huge suitcases from a gold-coloured Volvo V70. To be more precise, an older gentleman in a double-breasted suit was lifting the suitcases out with a groan, while a short, heavily made-up woman stood by and gesticulated. They were both tanned, verging on sunburned, and if the Swedish summer hadn’t been so sunny Patrik would have guessed that they’d been on holiday abroad. This year the rocky skerries of Fjällbacka could have served as a tanning parlour.