HILLEVI STUBBS LAY on her back on the cabin sole in Elvin’s boat. She was only just five foot tall, and yet there was barely room for her, what with all the things her old friend Hugo Elvin had managed to cram into the small cabin.
Transporting the boat had been unexpectedly easy. The cradle had had enough air in its tyres, and she hadn’t found anything remotely close to a tracker on it or her Jeep. Even Mona-Jill, who was usually extremely curious, had accepted her explanation that an old friend’s boat was going to sit in the garden for a few weeks without too many nosy questions.
And now she was lying in the cabin, imbibing the clues, thoughts, evidence and ideas Elvin had collected. That was what she always did first when she arrived at a new crime scene. On the floor, in the middle of the room, flat on her back with her eyes closed or staring up at the ceiling. That way she could breathe the air and let the atmosphere and mood, which resided in the walls as much as in the furniture and knick-knacks, suffuse her senses.
Elvin’s boat was like a crime-scene concentrate, even though no crime had been committed on board. She had never seen so many clues, samples and notes in such a small space. There was probably more than enough evidence in here. The question was how they were going to find it among the white noise of irrelevant details before time ran out.
Molander was probably already plotting his next move against Fabian and they had to find enough to arrest him before he could act. Only Molander knew exactly how much time they had. A week, a few days or maybe just a few hours.
She got up and waited until she no longer felt dizzy, then slowly started to turn, round and round, letting her eyes rove up and down, scanning as much of the crowded cabin as possible.
Fabian had hypothesized that the Berlin boarding passes had been what pushed Molander into killing Elvin. She, for her part, wasn’t sure that would have been enough. Granted, it blew up Molander’s alibi. But it was hardly proof that he was guilty of murdering Inga Dahlberg. In the harsh light of a courtroom, it was very far from it indeed.
So Elvin must have found something else. Something absolutely watertight. It should be one of the last things he discovered before his death, since he hadn’t had time to show it to anyone else on the team or make sure Molander was arrested. It should follow that whatever it was would be sitting on top of one of the countless piles.
After turning around one last time, her eyes fell on a rolled-up sheet of paper next to a half-empty bottle of Explorer vodka. She pulled off the rubber band holding it together and unrolled it.
It was a printout of a map, clearly downloaded from the Land Registry’s website. There were no names on it, only a handful of symbols showing the positions of various buildings, property lines and a few indecipherable scribbles à la Elvin.
She decided to hold off on taking a closer look and instead turned her attention to the open shoebox next to her. In it lay a number of transparent plastic owls that Elvin, according to Fabian, had used to bug Molander’s home.
She picked up one of the owls and studied the hollow base Elvin had enlarged to fit a microphone, transmitter and battery. She recognized the Chinese surveillance equipment. It was the smallest on the market and had a range of a hundred feet, which meant there was a receiver with a SIM card somewhere near the house.
She put the owl back and pulled out some of the photographs piled next to the shoebox.
They all looked like they were from the same crime scene. A living room with watercolours on the wall, painted by someone who had taken one or at most two teach-yourself-to-paint courses, long rows of souvenirs on the mantelpiece and an old CRT TV in front of a leaded light window. Along one wall there was an oversized beige leather sofa, and on the floor next to the smoked-glass coffee table lay the victim, a woman.
Again, a woman.
Stubbs sighed and shook her head. As a younger woman, she hadn’t reflected much on that particular aspect; a victim was a victim. She was there to interpret the crime scene so her colleagues could identify and arrest the perpetrator. Who was almost always a man.
That the victims were almost always women whenever there was a close relationship between killer and victim was something she’d only woken up to in the past few years. The fact of the matter was that, in Sweden, every three weeks a woman was murdered by a close relative.
This particular woman looked about sixty years old. She was slightly overweight, and except for socks that covered her thick calves, she was naked. Next to her lay a ripped floral-print blouse, a denim skirt that had been cut open and a pair of torn knickers.
The insides of her thighs were dark from the blood that had gushed out onto the carpet beneath her, and protruding from her vagina was something that had to be a fire poker.
In a plastic folder marked The Vodka Murder sitting underneath the stack of photographs, she found the case file from back in April. The lead investigators had been Sverker ‘Klippan’ Holm and Irene Lilja and it didn’t seem related to any of the cases Fabian had mentioned.
The victim was Kerstin Öhman, who lived on Östra Storgatan in Munka-Ljungby, just outside Ängelholm, together with her husband, Conny Öhman.
According to the investigation, she had reported her husband to the police for assault several times and each time she had later changed her mind and retracted the accusation. But on the night of 5 April, things had clearly gone so far she hadn’t had time to report or retract.
Instead, Conny Öhman himself had called the police after he’d slept off his intoxication on the sofa. The forensic investigation found her blood on his hands and secretions from her vagina on his penis. On the whole, a fairly open-and-shut case that in today’s media world didn’t attract much attention.
Even so, Elvin had taken an interest for some reason, and unless she was mistaken about him, he’d based that on something more substantial than mere intuition.
Granted, Molander had been the one to conduct the crime scene investigation, but that was not to say he had committed the murder. Maybe his behaviour had made Elvin react.
That gave her an idea and she walked over to the box containing the contents of Elvin’s desk at work, found his diary for the present year and flipped to the first week of April.
The fifth had been a Thursday, and Elvin had tersely noted two times, 8.12 a.m. and 4.18 p.m., which, according to Fabian, corresponded to when Molander arrived at the station and when he left again.
The next day contained more information. He hadn’t arrived until 9.17 a.m., over an hour later than the day before. No second time had been logged, probably because Molander had been at the crime scene, working late. Instead, there was a single line of Elvin’s characteristic abbreviations.
Kerstin Ö, assau, rape, vodka murder, husb. Conny (?), Klipp, Lilj & M on it.
Nothing about the note stood out to her. But the smiley next to it did. There were other smileys here and there in the diary; they were one of the things Fabian had been unable to figure out. But the moment she lay eyes on it, she knew what it symbolized.
The smiley the day after the murder was so happy its mouth literally extended beyond its head.
Molander had, in other words, been in a good mood.
A remarkably good mood.