Wednesday Evening

The mood in the investigation team was subdued. It was already Wednesday and there had been no new developments in the case. The fingerprints from the chair in Ingrid Olsson’s kitchen had been run against the register of known criminals, with no match. They did not belong to anyone else who figured in the investigation either. Nothing new had come up in the extended questioning of Vannerberg’s family and business partner.

The medical examiner Zetterström’s report was complete, but contained no information that led anywhere. The death had occurred between four o’clock and eight o’clock on Monday evening, which is what they had assumed all along. The cause of death was also as expected: cerebral haemorrhage caused by blows with a blunt instrument to the head and face.

Questioning the neighbours in the area had produced the following information: Lennart Josefsson, living in a house across from Olsson’s, saw two men pass by outside his window a short interval apart about the time of the murder. Because it had been dark he could not provide a description, but he could not rule out that Vannerberg had been one of them. A family on another street had had their garage broken into during the summer holiday. Several families in the area had been visited by a female Polish picture-seller during the month of November. Several times an older couple had noticed an unknown woman with a ‘Swedish appearance’ walking on Åkerbärsvägen. Some of the neighbours had noticed a male jogger in a light-blue tracksuit passing by on the street. He proved to be a resident of Olvonbacken, a cross-street to Åkerbärsvägen. A male cyclist in his thirties or forties, presumably drunk, had been seen wobbling around the streets on the Saturday evening before the murder. Finally, nine families in the area had been visited by a shifty-looking twenty-something with a Swedish appearance selling toilet paper emblazoned with the badge of the local tennis club. Three individuals in the immediate neighbourhood had witnessed Ingrid Olsson being picked up by ambulance after she broke her hip.

The team was working along several lines of enquiry, but agreed on the main hypothesis that Hans Vannerberg, intending to visit the new family at Åkerbärsvägen number 13, had left home on Monday evening and by mistake ended up at number 31, where he met his killer, who had followed him there for reasons so far unknown.

The prosecutor, the long-limbed Hadar Rosén, was starting to get impatient and proposed that they investigate whether there were any similar cases in Stockholm or elsewhere. Einar Eriksson had researched this and found no direct parallels anywhere, in terms of the murder method or crime scene. After all, most murders were the result of either family tragedies or drunkenness.

When Sjöberg went home that evening it was pouring with rain and, as usual, he had no umbrella. If he brought an umbrella with him to work, he left it there and didn’t need it until he got home, but if he left the umbrella at home, it rained just as he was leaving work. He made a snap decision to go a few blocks in the opposite direction to a shop that sold handbags, hoping they would have umbrellas, which proved to be the case. This didn’t help, however, for the shop had just closed and he had to trudge those three blocks back.

On the way home he passed a stationery shop, which he entered without really knowing why. He had a definite feeling that there was something he needed in there, but he came out a little later with a pencil case for each of the girls, wrapped in Christmas paper, and a sense of dissatisfaction at not being able to remember what it was he really should have bought.

Finally at home, he was showered with sympathy for his soaked appearance and as he lay down on the couch to keep the children company in front of the TV, it suddenly occurred to him what his errand in the stationery shop had really been. Christoffer and Jonathan had teamed up and managed to throw fifty or so magazines on the floor, of which at least three were completely shredded.

When the four youngest children were in bed, and Simon was sitting in front of the computer playing games, Sjöberg sat down at the kitchen table to eat the warmed-up leftovers from the children’s dinner. Åsa had eaten with them earlier in the evening but she kept him company anyway. She asked about the murder investigation and, between bites of hot dog, he recounted the developments of the last few days.

‘One thing strikes me,’ said Åsa. ‘They seemed to have a good relationship, the Vannerbergs, didn’t they?’

‘Seems like it,’ answered Sjöberg.

‘More or less like you and me?’

‘Yes, maybe.’

‘Two reasonable people who talk to each other?’

‘Apparently.’

‘Say you have an appointment this evening and have to go out. Suppose you have to question a witness. Then you’d say to me, “I have to leave for a while and question a witness,” wouldn’t you?’

‘Something like that.’

‘You wouldn’t say you were going to question a suspect. Later on, I wouldn’t recall that you said “a suspect”, although you actually said “a witness”.’

‘I think you’re on to something.’

‘Besides – and I’m not sure about this – I don’t think you’d come home first to be with the family, and then “have to” leave and meet someone you hadn’t set up a meeting with. Vannerberg could have gone there first, straight from work.’

‘Maybe they weren’t home until after six, maybe he knew that.’

‘Then check that out. If that was the case, he should have called first, because he really wasn’t just passing by. Maybe they weren’t at home.’

‘But they were.’

‘He couldn’t know that, because he hadn’t called and asked.’

‘You’re right. And that puts us –’

‘That puts us in a situation where Vannerberg was lured to a deserted house by someone who planned to murder him there,’ Åsa interrupted.

‘Someone who knew that Ingrid Olsson wasn’t at home,’ Sjöberg filled in. ‘Someone who either wanted to get at her too, or simply chose her house because it was empty.’

‘So, someone with a connection to both Ingrid Olsson and Hans Vannerberg. Find that connection and the mystery is solved,’ Åsa declared contentedly, putting her hands behind her neck.

‘You’re damn right about that,’ said Sjöberg with a preoccupied expression. ‘I’ll go call that buyer.’

He got up from the table, leaving the dirty dish behind for his proudly humming wife.

He started by calling Petra Westman, who had been in contact with the buyer previously. She was still at work and, with some surprise, gave him the telephone number for the family at Åkerbärsvägen 13.

‘I’ll tell you tomorrow if I get anywhere,’ Sjöberg said mysteriously, thanking Westman for her help and ending the call.

Then he called the buyers, and the husband answered. He was the one who’d had contact with the estate agent regarding the complaints about the seller.

‘Excuse me for calling so late. This is Conny Sjöberg, chief inspector with the Violent Crimes Unit, Hammarby Police Department. I’m leading the investigation regarding the murder of Hans Vannerberg.’

‘No problem. How can I help you?’ the man asked readily.

‘I wonder if you ever spoke to Hans Vannerberg in person.’

‘No, I didn’t. I only talked to Molin.’

‘Did you ever talk to Molin about suitable times for Vannerberg to come over and look at those things you were unhappy about?’ asked Sjöberg.

‘I said that any time was fine. My wife is home with the children.’

‘Wouldn’t Vannerberg have called first? Perhaps your wife isn’t home all day?’

‘Sure, of course that would have been reasonable. If he hadn’t just been passing by …’

‘Thanks very much,’ said Sjöberg, ‘and I beg your pardon once again.’

Åsa smiled triumphantly at him. He hugged her and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

‘Where would I be without you, darling?’ he laughed. ‘Now it’s time for Simon to go to bed, I think.’

Åsa was reading a book and Sjöberg watched the TV news distractedly, while his brain worked over what might be a new direction for the investigation. He decided to contact Ingrid Olsson tomorrow and go through the house himself, in pursuit of something – but he didn’t quite know what. Hopefully he would recognize it if he saw it, but he felt by no means sure of that.

The reporter went on and on about Hamas, suicide bombings in Iraq and the poisoning of the Russian exspy Litvinenko, but Sjöberg was having a hard time concentrating on the news. One story, though, caught his interest. Some uniformed policemen were shown conversing with one another on the screen while the TV anchor summarized the event:

‘In Katrineholm a forty-four-year-old mother of two was found yesterday, murdered in her apartment. The woman was discovered by her seventeen-year-old son at lunchtime and is believed to have been drowned in a washtub some time in the morning. The police do not yet have a suspect.’

This has truly not been a good week for forty-four-year-olds, thought Sjöberg. Three murders in nine days, this just doesn’t make sense. A colleague from the Katrineholm Police Department was interviewed about the murder by a female reporter, while the camera swept across a muddy play area and a group of people crowding at the barricade around a basement stairway.

‘The forensic investigation is not finished, but all indications are that the woman’s life was taken by one or more unknown assailants,’ said the police commissioner.

‘We have information that she was drowned,’ coaxed the reporter.

‘Is that so?’ asked the police officer. Suddenly something clicked in Sjöberg’s head, though he couldn’t immediately pinpoint what it was he had reacted to.

‘Yes, this much I guess I can say,’ the police officer admitted after a moment’s hesitation, ‘drowning is a probable scenario we are working on. I can’t say more than that right now, but we expect the forensic investigation to be finished over the weekend and then we will know more.’

‘Weekend,’ Sjöberg muttered to himself. ‘Funny pronunciation, very different from ours. “Is that so,” ’ he mused, in an affected, whining tone of voice. ‘Meaning “I see.” ’

There was something familiar about those dialect expressions and the whining tone, but he could not for the life of him think where he had heard them before. At last he reluctantly pushed the thought away and turned his attention back to the report on the consequences of the major snowstorm at the beginning of November.

* * *

Thomas shuddered when he opened the jar of lingonberry jam and saw that the surface was covered with greyish, furry mould. He quickly screwed the lid back on and threw the jar in the bin bag hanging on the knob of the cupboard under the kitchen sink. He sat down at the table and attacked the black pudding, not without a certain disappointment.

The kitchen window still gaped vacantly, except for the old transistor radio that had been there since the days of Uncle Gunnar. But the kitchen curtains were ordered. Last Monday after work he had ventured into the fabric shop down at the corner. There was a sign in the window offering to sew curtains for free, if you bought the material there. The fabric he decided on was warm yellow with a thin, blue check that would probably go well in a kitchen. Actually, it was the woman in the shop who finally got impatient and firmly recommended that he choose it. Thomas gratefully accepted the suggestion and overlooked her irritated facial expression and angrily exaggerated motions. He left it up to her to decide on the type of curtain; they had not even discussed the different options. The workmanship on the curtains would have to be a surprise and he had not dared ask what it would all cost either. He could pick them up next week.

His gaze landed on the old radio and in his mind he saw Uncle Gunnar, his grandmother’s brother, sitting at the same kitchen table where he was sitting now. On weekdays he listened to ‘Let’s Celebrate’ with his morning coffee, and on Saturdays they would try to solve the melody crossword together. Thomas did not make much of a contribution, but they were together and had a nice time and Uncle Gunnar was quite good at it.

Uncle Gunnar had not been a man for grand gestures. He was somewhat taciturn, and they did not exchange many words during the course of a day, but it was a companionable silence. He accepted Thomas as he was and neither criticized nor was irritated by him. Thomas, for his part, overlooked the old man’s lack of personal hygiene and felt relieved at finally having left the narrow-mindedness of the small town for the anonymity of the big city.

He thought about his last days in Katrineholm and working with the old couple in the haberdasher’s. They had assumed he was basically a delinquent – reasonably, perhaps, since he had dropped out of school – and treated him with great suspicion the whole time. They never dared leave him alone in the shop, and one of them always kept the cash register in sight when he was there. This meant that, instead of trying to learn something from his traineeship, he spent the time trying to get free from under their sullen, watchful gazes.

The proximity to the secondary school did not make matters better. His former classmates, who often passed by during free periods and lunch breaks, could not keep from looking into the shop and making cracks about him when the opportunity arose. The primary theme of their harassment was his presumed homosexuality, and as he thought about it, he suddenly recalled an episode from that time that he had not thought about since it happened, some thirty years before.

This incident had not affected him personally, but rather a brother in misfortune by the name of Sören, who was in a parallel class. He recognized the pattern. Sören, along with the rest of the football team, had been at a training camp in Finland. On the trip home, on the Finland ferry, they had apparently been drinking heavily and many of the boys got very drunk. One boy – a bully who for some reason went by the name Lasse Golare – got so drunk he let himself be lured into the toilet by the boy at the bottom of the pecking order, Sören. There, Sören subjected the poor, intoxicated Lasse Golare to a blow job, after which the deeply offended Lasse Golare marched out of the gent’s and told all his teammates about the terrible thing he had experienced. The teammates reacted with great consternation, as did the coach who was along on the trip – to the extent that Sören was summarily kicked off the team ‘for the boys’ sake’. Lasse Golare – who, of course, was not the least bit homosexual – was praised as a hero and emerged with his honour intact.

Thomas smiled at this absurd story as he swallowed the last slab of black pudding and rinsed it down with half a glass of milk. He reached for the tabloid that lay unread on the kitchen table, and leafed through it to the spread with news from around Sweden.

Lise-Lott’s gaze met his, and for a moment he thought that for the first time she was smiling at him in a friendly way. Then reality caught up with him and his heart began beating faster. He suddenly felt extremely thirsty, but could not force himself to stand up to get something to drink. He read through the article carefully, twice, and then jerked the pile of the past week’s newspapers still lying on the table towards him. Further down in the pile he found the Sunday paper and leafed through it to the short item about the murder of the prostitute in Skärholmen. After reading this too a few times, he remained sitting, back straight, hands clasped around his knees, and stared vacantly ahead.

‘What have I done?’ he whispered to himself. ‘What do I do now?’