The Ice Princess (28 page)

Mellberg scratched his crotch meditatively without noticing the expression of disgust that this gesture aroused in the faces of the people who sat gathered before him. In honour of the day he had put on a suit, even though it was a bit too tight, but he blamed that on the dry-cleaners, who must have screwed up and run it at too high a temperature. He didn’t have to weigh himself to know that he’d put on an ounce or two since he was a young recruit, but he thought that buying a new suit was a waste of money. Good quality was timeless. He couldn’t help it if the idiots at the dry-cleaners couldn’t do their job properly.

He cleared his throat to get everyone’s full attention. The chatter and scraping of chairs ceased, and all eyes turned towards him as he sat behind his desk. Chairs had been gathered and arranged in a semicircle in front of him. Mellberg looked at everyone in silence with a solemn expression. This was a moment he intended to milk as much as possible. He noticed with a frown that Patrik looked exhausted. Naturally the staff did what they liked in their free time, but considering it was the middle of the work week one ought to expect that they observe moderation in the form of partying and alcohol. Mellberg effectively repressed the memory of the half-bottle he himself had downed yesterday evening. He made a mental note to have a talk with Patrik in private about the station’s alcohol policy.

‘As you all know, at this time another murder has occurred in Fjällbacka. The probability that there are two killers is very low, so I think we can proceed from the assumption that the same person who murdered Alexandra Wijkner also murdered Anders Nilsson.’

He enjoyed the sound of his own voice and the zeal and interest he saw in the faces before him. He was in his true element. He was born to do this.

Mellberg went on. ‘Anders Nilsson was found this morning by Bengt Larsson, one of the victim’s drinking buddies. He had been hanged, and according to preliminary information from Göteborg, he’d been there at least since yesterday. Until we have more precise information this will be the hypothesis from which we’ll be working.’

He liked the feel of the word ‘hypothesis’ rolling off his tongue. The group before him was not particularly large, but in his mind it was many times bigger and the interest was impossible to misconstrue. It was his words and orders they were all waiting for. He looked about with pleasure. Annika was typing eagerly on a laptop computer, with a pair of reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose. Her ample feminine curves were clothed in a well-tailored yellow jacket with matching skirt; he gave her a wink. That would have to do. Best not to scare her off. Next to her sat Patrik, who looked as if he were going to fall apart at any moment. His eyelids were heavy and his eyes clearly bloodshot. Mellberg decided he would really have to have a talk with him at the earliest opportunity. After all, one had the right to demand a certain semblance of professionalism from one’s subordinates.

Besides Patrik and Annika, there were another three employees from the Tanumshede police station. Gösta Flygare was the eldest at the station. He devoted all his energy to doing as little as possible until retirement, which was now only a couple of years off. After that he would devote all his time to his grand passion—golf. He had started playing ten years ago when his wife died of cancer, and weekends suddenly felt much too long and desolate. Sport had soon become like a poison in his blood. He now regarded his job, in which he had never been terribly interested in the first place, only as a disruptive element that prevented him from being out on the golf course.

Despite the fact that his salary was meagre, he had managed to save enough to buy a flat on the Costa del Sol in Spain. Soon he’d be able to devote the summer months to playing golf in Sweden and the rest of the year he could spend on the courses in Spain. Although, he had to admit, these murders had succeeded in arousing his interest for the first time in ages. But not so much that he wouldn’t rather play eighteen holes right now if the season had permitted it.

Next to him sat the station’s youngest member. Martin Molin elicited varying degrees of parental instincts in all of them. They took turns acting as invisible crutches for him at work, although they were careful that he never notice anything. They only gave him assignments that a child could do, and they went over and corrected everything he wrote before his reports reached Mellberg’s desk.

He had graduated from the Police Academy no more than a year ago. Everyone was astonished that he’d been able, first of all, to immerse himself in the difficult booking procedures and second, complete his training and pass the exam. But Martin was pleasant and good-natured, and despite his naïveté, which made him totally unsuitable for police work, they all reckoned that he couldn’t do any great damage here in Tanumshede. So they gladly helped him over all obstacles. Annika in particular had taken him under her wing and sometimes, to everyone’s great amusement, she showed her feelings by spontaneously pressing him to her large bosom in a bear hug.

On those occasions Martin’s fiery red hair, which always stood on end, and his equally red freckles competed with the colour of his face. But he worshipped Annika and had spent many evenings visiting her and her husband when he needed to ask advice about being unlucky in love—which he always was. His innocence and amiability seemed to make him an irresistible magnet for women who ate men for breakfast and then spat out the remains. But Annika was always there to listen, patch up the shreds of his self-confidence, and then send him back out into the world, in the hope that one day he would find a woman who could appreciate this gem of a man, hiding beneath the freckled exterior.

The last member of the group was also the least popular. Ernst Lundgren was a big-time arse-kisser who never missed a chance to promote himself, preferably at the expense of others. No one was surprised that he was still single. He was a far from attractive man. Even though uglier men than he had found a partner thanks to a helpfully pleasant personality, Ernst lacked this attribute completely. That’s why he was now living with his old mother on a farm six miles south of Tanumshede. Rumour had it that his father, who was notorious in the area as an alcoholic and highly aggressive man, had received a helping hand from his wife when he fell from the hayloft and landed on a pitchfork. That was many years ago now, but the rumour was revived whenever people had nothing more exciting to talk about. In any case, it was true that only a mother could love Ernst, since his buck teeth, straggly hair and big ears were accompanied by a choleric disposition and a self-promoting manner. Right now he was hanging on Mellberg’s every syllable as though his words were pearls, and he took every opportunity to shush the others testily if they dared make the slightest noise to distract attention from Mellberg’s speech. He eagerly raised his hand like a schoolboy to ask a question.

‘How do we know that Anders wasn’t murdered by the drunk, who later merely pretended to discover him this morning?’

Mellberg gave Lundgren an appreciative nod.

‘A very good question, Ernst, very good. But as I said, we’re going on the assumption that it’s the same person who killed Alex Wijkner. Just to be safe, though, we’ll check out Bengt Larsson’s alibi for yesterday.’

Mellberg pointed with his pen to Lundgren as he scanned the rest of the group.

‘This is the sort of alert thinking we need to solve this case. I hope you will all listen and learn from Ernst. You have a long way to go before you reach his level.’

Ernst modestly lowered his eyes, but as soon as Mellberg turned his attention elsewhere, he couldn’t resist casting a triumphant look at his colleagues. Annika snorted loudly and stared back without blinking in response to the angry look Lundgren gave her.

‘Now where was I?’

Mellberg hooked his thumbs under the braces he was wearing under his jacket and spun round on his chair. He ended up facing the whiteboard that had been set up on the wall behind him to track the case of Alex Wijkner. A similar whiteboard had now been put up next to it, but the only thing on it was a Polaroid photo taken of Anders before the ambulance attendants cut down his body.

‘So, what do we know so far? The body of Anders Nilsson was found this morning, and according to the preliminary report, he’d been dead since sometime yesterday. He was hanged by one or more persons unknown, presumably more than one because it would take considerable strength to lift up a full-grown man high enough to hang him from the ceiling. What we don’t know is how they went about it. There are no signs of a struggle, either in the flat or on Anders’s body. No bruises to indicate rough handling of the body, either before or after death occurred. These are only preliminary data, as I said, but we expect confirmation as soon as the autopsy is complete.’

Patrik waved his pen. ‘How soon do we expect to get the autopsy results?’

‘Apparently they have a whole pile of bodies waiting, so unfortunately I haven’t been able to get any information as to when the report will be ready.’

Nobody looked surprised.

‘We also know that there’s a clear connection between Anders Nilsson and our first murder victim, Alexandra Wijkner.’

Now Mellberg stood up and pointed at the photo of Alexandra that was in the middle of the first whiteboard. They had received the picture from her mother, and once again they were all struck by how beautiful she had been in life. It made the picture next to it, of Alexandra in the bathtub with a bluish, pale face and frost in her hair and eyelashes, look even more horrible.

‘This ill-matched pair had a sexual relationship. Anders himself admitted it and we also have certain evidence, as you know, to support his claim. What we don’t know is how long it lasted, how they got involved with each other, and above all why a beautiful society woman would choose as her bed partner a filthy and generally repulsive alcoholic. Something is fishy here, I can smell it.’

Mellberg tapped his index finger a couple of times on the side of his bulbous red nose.

‘Martin, you’re assigned to dig deeper into this. Above all you need to press Henrik Wijkner a lot harder than we’ve done so far. That guy knows more than he’s admitting, I’m sure of it.’

Martin nodded eagerly, taking notes for dear life. Annika gave him a tender, motherly look over the tops of her reading glasses.

‘Unfortunately, this brings us back to square one as far as suspects in the first murder are concerned. Anders seemed very promising in that role, but now the case has taken a whole different turn. Patrik, you’ll have to review all the material that we have on the Wijkner murder. Check and double-check every detail. Somewhere in that material there’s a lead we missed.’

Mellberg had heard that line on a TV cop show and memorized it for future use.

Gösta was now the only one who hadn’t been given an assignment. Mellberg looked at his list and thought for a moment.

‘Gösta, you go and talk with Alex Wijkner’s family. Maybe they know something else they haven’t told us about. Ask them about her friends and enemies, her childhood, her personality, everything. Whatever you can think of. Talk to both parents and the sister, but make sure you talk to them one at a time. You get the most out of people that way, in my experience. Just co-ordinate with Molin, who’ll be talking to the husband.’

Gösta winced under the burden of a concrete assignment and sighed in resignation. Not because it would take time away from golf in the middle of this bitter cold winter, but in the past few years he’d almost got used to not needing to do any real work. He had perfected the art of looking busy while he played solitaire on his computer to kill time. The burden of having to produce some concrete results weighed on him. His peace and quiet were over. He probably wouldn’t even be paid overtime. He’d be happy if he even got reimbursed for the petrol back and forth to Göteborg.

Mellberg clapped his hands and shooed them off.

‘All right, let’s get going. We can’t sit on our backsides if we want to solve this thing. I reckon you’re going to work harder than you’ve ever worked before, and as far as days off are concerned, you can forget about that until this is over. Until then your time belongs to me. Get moving.’

If any of them had anything against being shooed off like little children, nobody said a word. They got up, took the chairs they’d been sitting on in one hand and their notebooks and pens in the other. Only Ernst Lundgren stayed behind, but Mellberg uncharacteristically was in no mood for flattery, so he shooed him off as well.

It had been a very productive day. Certainly it was a big disappointment that his prime suspect for the Wijkner murder had turned out to be a blind alley. But at least one plus one was considerably more than two. One murder was an event, two murders were a sensation for such a small district. If before he was reasonably sure of getting a one-way ticket to the centre of the action when he solved the Wijkner case, he was now dead certain that if he wrapped up both murders in a neat package, they would beg and plead for him to come back to Göteborg.

With these bright prospects within reach, Bertil Mellberg leaned back in his chair, stuck his hand into the third drawer, took out a Mums-Mums chocolate-dipped meringue biscuit and popped the whole thing blissfully into his mouth. Then he clasped his hands behind his head, closed his eyes and decided to take a little nap. After all, it was almost lunchtime.

After Patrik left, Erica had tried to sleep for a couple of hours without success. All the feelings jostling inside her made her toss back and forth in bed. A smile kept sneaking over her lips. There ought to be a law against being this happy. The feeling of well-being was so strong that she hardly knew what to do with herself. She lay on her side and rested her right cheek on her hands.

Everything felt brighter today. Everything felt easier to deal with. Alex’s murder, the book that her publisher was impatiently waiting for and that wasn’t really flowing properly, her grief for her parents, and not least the sale of her childhood home. All felt easier to bear today. The problems hadn’t gone away, but for the first time she felt truly convinced that her world wasn’t about to collapse and that she could handle any difficulties that came her way.