“You have to take this more seriously,” he said. “You were the last people to see Peter Visser and Nienke van Mourik alive. You were caught on the security cameras in the corridor. Don’t you realize what that means?”
Jacob leaned forward, inspecting the bored young man: Was the little shit just sitting there
“We can’t have been the last people to see them alive,” Malcolm Rudolph said. “Because they were still alive when we left. Someone else killed them. Obviously. You can’t have looked at the recordings long enough.”
Sara and Mats glanced at each other, and their faces showed signs of alarm.
Had anyone actually watched the security recordings in their entirety?
One would hope so, but it had been so chaotic. Sometimes things were missed or got messed up when a case was really hot.
They broke off the interrogation and ordered all of the security recordings from the Grand Hotel to be taken out once more.
Chapter 78
NO ONE HAD WATCHED THE
Now they were watching the tapes, though.
Tuesday afternoons in the middle of June weren’t exactly rush hour in the corridor on the fourth floor of the Grand Hotel.
During the forty-three minutes that Sylvia and Malcolm Rudolph were inside room 418, two cleaners and a plumber went along the corridor outside. A woman who had evidently forgotten something in her room ran in and then out again and back to the elevators.
At 3:02 the door to room 418 opened.
A triangle of light from inside the room fell on the floor and the wall opposite. The door stood open for a few seconds before Malcolm Rudolph stepped out onto the thick carpet.
He turned and smiled back into the room, said something, laughed. Then Sylvia Rudolph came out into the corridor. She stopped, half hidden by the open door, and seemed to be talking to someone as well. The brother and sister stood by the door for another fourteen seconds, facing back at the room, talking and laughing.
Finally they leaned through the door to exchange kisses with someone. The door closed and they headed for the elevators.
“The Dutch couple were alive when they left the room,” Sara Hцglund said. “It’s obvious.
“And they didn’t hang a sign on the door,” Gabriella said.
“What?” Dessie asked.
“‘Do not disturb,’” Jacob said through clenched teeth. “The sign was hanging on the door when the bodies were found.”
The hotel corridor shown on the recording lay empty and dark once more. Jacob could feel the adrenaline tearing through his veins.
“Can we fast-forward a bit?” he asked.
Gabriella sped up the playback.
At 3:21 an elderly couple came out of the lift, walked slowly along the corridor, and opened a door on the rear side of the hotel. A few minutes later a cleaner passed through the whole length of the corridor with her trolley and disappeared into a stairwell.
“Will it play any faster?”
Jacob couldn’t hide the impatience in his voice. Or the anger at whoever was responsible for this bungle.
A middle-aged couple went past.
A man in a suit carrying a briefcase.
A family with three children, a tired mother, and a very irritated-looking father.
And then he came.
Midlength coat, light shoes, brown hair, cap, and sunglasses.
“Shit,” Jacob said.
The man knocked on the door of the Dutch couple’s room, waited a few seconds, stepped into the room, and shut the door behind him.
“They let him in,” Sara Hцglund said. “At least it looks that way. Impossible to tell from this angle.”
“Make a note of the time,” said Mats Duvall.
4:35.
The corridor was deserted once more.
The seconds crept past.
Jacob had to make an effort to stop himself from screaming. Twenty-one minutes later the goddamn door opened.
The man in the coat stepped into the corridor. He hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the handle, closed the door after him, and walked quickly toward the lifts. He kept his eyes on the floor, his face hidden from the camera.
“I’ve been holding the wrong people,” Evert Ridderwall said with despair in his voice.
Chapter 79
THEY WERE SITTING IN MATS Duvall’s room when the press spokesman of the Criminal Investigation Department contacted them and confirmed that the situation with the media was chaotic, almost completely out of control. This sort of thing just didn’t happen in Sweden. And imagine if they discovered the police had made mistakes.
Stockholm was besieged by foreign newspapers and television crews -
especially American ones. The Postcard Killers saga had all the ingredients of a really juicy criminal scandal.
“We’ll have to hold a press conference,” Sara Hцglund said. “We have no choice.”
“And say what?” Jacob wondered. “That we haven’t found a thing that connects them to the crime? That the prosecutor thinks we’ve been holding the wrong people?”
“Well,” Mats Duvall said. “We’ve got something. They’ve been traveling throughout Europe all the while these murders have been going on.”
“And can come up with alibis for several of them,” Jacob said. “When the Athens murders were committed, they were definitely in Madrid. They were in the south of Spain when the couple was found in Salzburg. And in the countries where they withdrew cash, Norway and Belgium, there haven’t been any murders at all.”
“So, now you think they’re innocent?” Gabriella said.
“Not for a second,” Jacob said. “We just haven’t got the evidence yet, that’s all. They’re clever and they’ve covered their tracks pretty good.”
“We’ve still got to handle the press,” Sara Hцglund said. “Several of the main channels have already done their own vignettes on the Rudolphs, with music and everything.”
Jacob stood up.
“We’ve got to knock a hole in their defense,” he said. “We’ve got to continue to provoke them into making
