On the other hand, Stockholm in its autumn finery can be incredibly beautiful. The houseboats lining S?der M?larstrand, bobbing in the waves and lurching stoically in the wake of vulgar motorboats, jet skis, Skeppsholmen’s sophisticated motor yachts, and the white ferries on their way to Drottningholm and the Viking town on Bj?rk?. The clear, pure water embraces the steep grey and rust-red cliffs of the islands at the heart of the city, and the trees spill out in colourful patterns of yellow, red and green.
As Jeanette Kihlberg drives in to work the sky is high and clear blue for the first time in weeks, and she takes a long detour via the quaysides that line Lake M?laren’s shores.
She feels intoxicated.
A single kiss. Five seconds that struck her right in the heart.
When Jeanette walks into Jens Hurtig’s office, he’s sitting cleaning his service pistol. A Sig Sauer, nine millimetre. He doesn’t look happy.
‘Weapons maintenance?’ Jeanette grins. ‘You can do mine as well.’ She goes off to her office and gets her pistol out of the desk drawer.
‘So what do we know about Fredrika Grünewald?’ Jeanette asks as she hands him the gun.
‘She was born here in Stockholm,’ he says nonchalantly, undoing the holster and removing the pistol. ‘Her parents live out in Stocksund, and haven’t had any contact with her for the past nine years. Apparently she lost most of the family fortune on bad investments.’
‘How?’
‘Without her parents’ knowledge, she pumped everything they had, almost forty million, into a number of new businesses. Do you remember Wardrobe.com?’
Jeanette thinks. ‘Only vaguely. Wasn’t that one of those dot-com companies that was supposed to be invaluable, then crashed on the stock market?’
Hurtig nods as he puts a bit of gun grease on a cloth and begins to polish the pistol. ‘Exactly. The idea was to sell clothes online, but it collapsed with hundreds of millions in debt. The Grünewald family were among the worst affected.’
‘And it was all Fredrika’s fault?’
‘According to her parents, but I don’t know. They don’t seem to be going short of anything. They still live in their villa, and the cars parked in the drive must be worth about a million each.’
‘Did they have any reason to want to be rid of Fredrika?’
‘Don’t think so. After the dot-com crash she dropped all contact with her parents. They think it was because she felt ashamed.’
‘What did she live on? I mean, even if she was homeless, she seemed to have money.’
‘Her dad said that he felt sorry for her, in spite of everything, and every month he used to pay fifteen thousand into her account. Which probably explains things.’
‘Nothing funny there, then.’
‘No, not as far as I can see. Secure childhood. Good grades in junior school, then boarding school.’
‘No husband or children?’
‘No children,’ he goes on. ‘And according to her parents she wasn’t in a relationship. None that they knew about, anyway.’ He puts the last parts of the pistol back in place, then puts it down on the desk.
‘Maybe I’m just being conservative, but that seems a bit odd to me. I mean, there ought to have been a man of some sort over the years.’
Jeanette studies Hurtig, and catches a fleeting glimpse of the roguish look he gets when he’s got an ace up his sleeve.
‘Guess who was in the same class as Fredrika Grünewald?’
‘I have my suspicions. Who?’
He hands her some sheets of paper. ‘These are the class registers for everyone who attended Sigtuna College at the same time as Fredrika.’
‘OK, so who is it, then?’ She takes the lists and begins to leaf through them.
‘Annette Lundstr?m.’
‘Annette Lundstr?m?’ Jeanette Kihlberg looks at Hurtig, who smiles at her surprise.
It’s as if someone has opened a window and let in some new, fresh air.
The sun is shining outside Jeanette’s window as she settles down to read the material Hurtig has given her.
Class registers from Sigtuna College covering the years that Charlotte Silfverberg, Annette Lundstr?m, Henrietta Nordlund, Fredrika Grünewald and Victoria Bergman were there. So, Annette and Fredrika had been in the same class.
Annette has fair hair, and several of the people in the cavern under St Johannes Church had said they saw a fair-haired woman in the vicinity of Fredrika’s tent.
But B?rje, the man who had shown the woman the way and who could hopefully identify her, is still missing.
Should she bring Annette Lundstr?m in for questioning? Check her alibi and maybe even arrange a line-up? But that would reveal her suspicions to Annette, and make the ongoing inquiry harder. Any lawyer would get her released in the time it took to say the word ‘homeless’.
No, better to hold off and leave Annette in ignorance, at least until B?rje shows up. But she could call Annette in for a meeting on the grounds that it’s about Linnea’s abuse.
She could lie, and say that Lars Mikkelsen had asked her to. That might work.
That’s what I’ll do, she thinks, unaware that her enthusiasm is going to delay the resolution of the case rather than speed it up, and will indirectly cause a number of people unnecessary suffering.
Klara Sj? – Public Prosecution Authority
KENNETH VON KWIST runs his hands over his face. A small problem has become a big one. Possibly even insoluble.
At last he has realised that he was an idiot for helping P-O Silfverberg and Karl Lundstr?m. He has also been an idiot for being so focused on his career all these years, doing the bidding of others. What had he got for it?
Fate caught up with Dürer, the lawyer, but what if Karl Lundstr?m and P-O Silfverberg were actually guilty? He’s starting to suspect that they might have been.
Under the leadership of the previous police commissioner, Gert Berglind, everything had been so simple. Everybody knew everyone else and you just had to socialise with the right people to climb the hierarchical ladder.
Lundstr?m and Silfverberg had been close friends of both Gert Berglind’s and Viggo Dürer’s.
Since Dennis Billing had taken over, collaboration with the police hadn’t been quite so smooth.
Where Kihlberg is concerned, at least he has a well-formulated plan for how their relationship could be improved, while simultaneously drawing her attention in a different direction, at least temporarily, thus giving him time to sort out the problem of the Lundstr?m family.
Two birds with one stone, he thinks. Time to start putting things right.
It’s no longer a secret in police headquarters that Jeanette Kihlberg, trailing her sergeant Jens Hurtig behind her, is conducting a private investigation into the dropped cases of the murdered immigrant boys, and the rumour has also reached Prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist.
He also knows that an unofficial search is under way for Bengt Bergman’s daughter, that all documents relating to Victoria Bergman have been declared confidential, and that Kihlberg drew a blank from Nacka District Court.
He dials the number of a colleague at the court in Nacka.