She showed them into the living room. It had a dark hardwood floor, white plastered walls, and big windows looking out on the garden. There wasn’t much furniture. Along one wall stood two grayish-blue sofas facing each other. They sat down on one of them. Emma sat on the other and looked at them. Pale, with a red nose.
“I don’t know that there’s much I can say.”
“We want to hear about your relationship with Helena,” said Johan. “How well did you know her?”
“She was my best friend, although we haven’t spent much time together over the past few years,” she said in her soft Gotland accent. “We went through all the school years together, and we’ve known each other since kindergarten. After the ninth grade we ended up in different classrooms, but that didn’t stop us from spending just as much time with each other as before. During that period we lived in the same row-house neighborhood in Visby, on Rutegatan near the Ericsson company. Or rather, Flextronics nowadays.”
“Did you still spend time together when you got older?”
“Helena’s family moved to Stockholm about a year after high school. That was the summer she turned twenty, by the way. I remember because she had a big party here on Gotland for her twentieth birthday. They moved to Danderyd. But we still kept in touch and called each other several times a week, and I used to go to Stockholm to visit her. She always came back here in the summer. They still had their summer house near Gustavs.”
“What was Helena like as a person?”
“She was almost always happy. Lively, you might say. Extremely extroverted. It was always easy for her to meet new people. She was an optimist. She saw the bright side of everything.”
Emma stood up hastily and left the room. She came back at once with a glass of water and a roll of paper towels.
“What about Helena’s boyfriend?” asked Johan.
“Per? He’s really great. Sweet, considerate, and he adored Helena. I’m positive that he’s not guilty.”
“How long have they been together?”
Emma took a gulp of water. She’s amazing, thought Johan.
“It must be almost six years now, because they started seeing each other the same summer that I got married.”
“So things were good between them?” Johan went on, at the same time that he felt a touch of disappointment when she mentioned her marriage. Of course she was married. Big house and a sandbox and little tricycles in the yard. You idiot, he told himself. Stop thinking about her as your next conquest!
“Yes, I think so. Of course, now and then she would get tired of him, and she’d wonder whether she was really in love. I guess most people feel that way after they’ve lived together for a long time. But I think she had made up her mind that he was the one. I know that several times she said that if she ever had children, it would be with Per. He made her feel secure.”
“Could we ask you a few questions in front of the camera? We’ll only use the parts that you think are okay.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”
“How about if we give it a try? If you think it’s too uncomfortable, then we can stop.”
“All right.”
Peter brought in his camera. He didn’t bother with a tripod or extra lighting. The situation was touchy enough as it was. Johan moved over to sit on the sofa next to Emma. He could smell the scent of her newly washed hair.
The interview went well. Emma talked about Helena and their friendship, about her own fear and about how her life had been shaken as a consequence of the murder.
“Let me give you my card in case you happen to think of anything else you want to say, or if you just want to call me about something,” said Johan before they left.
“Thank you.”
She put his card on a chest of drawers without looking at it.
When they reached the stretch of gravel outside the house, Johan took a deep breath.
“What a woman,” he groaned, and turned around to look at Peter, who was walking right behind him with the camera on his shoulder.
“The prettiest one I’ve seen in a long time,” his colleague agreed. “What a charming accent. And those eyes. And what a body. I’m a goner.”
“You, too? Too bad she’s married and has kids.”
“That’s just my luck,” said Peter with a grin. “We need some shots of the outside, too. Give me a few minutes.” He disappeared around the corner of the house.
The parking lot outside Obs supermarket in the Ostercentrum shopping center was almost empty. In a couple of weeks it’ll be nearly impossible to move, thought Knutas as he sat at the desk in his office. He had talked to his wife on the phone. With the greatest enthusiasm she had described bringing a pair of twins into the world that day. She waxed poetic, since she herself was the mother of twins. Her positive attitude rubbed off on him, but it only lasted a little while. The warmth he had felt during their conversation was quickly replaced by a nagging uneasiness over Helena Hillerstrom’s murder.
Up until now, Gotland had been relatively murder free. Since 1950 only twenty murders had been committed on the island, and ten of them occurred during the nineties. The increase disturbed him. Almost all the murders had to do with internal disputes, usually within a family. Jealousy and drunken fights, for the most part. Two murder cases remained unsolved. One involved an elderly woman who was killed with a cane in her own home in Frojel in 1954, and one at the Visby Hotel in December 1996, when a female night clerk was murdered, presumably in connection with a break-in. That killing had taken place during Knutas’s time as head of the criminal department. In spite of the fact that the NCP were brought in at an early stage and three of their detectives stayed in Gotland for six months after the murder, they never managed to crack the case.
It still rankled inside him, like a thorn, but he tried not to think too much about it. The hotel murder had already given him enough sleepless nights.
He pulled out his pipe and carefully began filling it.
And now this. But this is something completely different, he thought. A young woman killed in a bestial way and with her panties stuffed in her mouth.
Two inspectors from the NCP had arrived in the morning, and that’s when they had their first meeting. The jovial Detective Superintendent Martin Kihlgard, convivial and loud, seemed almost a little too hearty. Previously Knutas had only heard people talk about him, and he knew that the man was quite competent. Even so, he didn’t really feel comfortable with him. No doubt things would get better with time. Kihlgard’s assistant, Detective Inspector Bjorn Hansson, made a more formal and precise impression, and that suited Knutas better.
Helena Hillerstrom’s body had been sent to the forensic medicine division in Solna, but first the medical team had examined the body at the scene. He was grateful for that. Experience told him that the chance of solving this murder increased significantly if the body was examined at the scene of the crime itself by the ME. In addition, a large area had been immediately cordoned off after the body was found. That was something else he had learned over the years. The bigger the area that was off limits, the better.
One problem was the lack of witnesses. No one had seen or heard anything. There were no buildings in close proximity to the beach. The only houses in the area stood some distance up the slope.
No murder weapon had been found, and no other clues of major significance. The only concrete evidence they had was several cigarette butts, which could just as well have been discarded there at some previous time, and a couple of shoe prints. The only thing they thought they knew about the killer was that he had big feet.
Everyone who had been at the party, except for Kristian Nordstrom, had now been interviewed. Nothing useful had come out. Knutas was almost positive that Per Bergdal was innocent. He had conducted enough interrogations in his years with the police that he could depend on his gut feeling. There was something straightforward and sincere about Bergdal’s manner of responding. By all accounts the scratches had been made by Helena, and the ME had found bruises on Helena’s cheek and behind her ear, indicating that she had been struck before she died. On the other hand, they knew that there had been a fight. The fact that Bergdal had not immediately admitted as much might be understandable. Now they needed to find something new, and quickly.
Knutas turned halfway around in his chair and looked out the window. It was a dreary gray day. This early
