Postcard killers

Chapter 77

Thursday, June 17

Malcolm Rudolph had draped his body so that he was half lying in his chair in the interrogation room. His legs were wide apart and one arm was hooked around the back of the chair.

His tousled hair had fallen across his forehead, and the top two buttons of his shirt were undone.

"It was cool. We were traveling around, studying art and life," he said over the sound coming from the television monitor.

And death, Jacob thought as he sat in the control room, listening to the murderer talk.

Above al, you studied death, you bastard.

"It was real y great to begin with," the fair-haired man said and yawned.

"Although it's gotten a bit boring in recent weeks, actual y."

So, to start with, they thought it was fun kil ing people, Jacob thought.

Then that became routine as wel. How would you like an axe through your skul? Would that be cool, or just half cool?

Mats Duval and Sara Hoglund were going through the log of the Rudolphs' movements in Europe over the past six months.

Their passports showed that Malcolm and Sylvia Rudolph had landed at Frankfurt airport eight and a half months ago, October 1.

Since then, according to Malcolm, they had been traveling around, looking at paintings and enjoying life. They had kept within the part of the European Union governed by the Schengen Agreement – in other words the countries that no longer insisted you show a passport when you crossed between them. So they had no stamps to show where they had been.

The investigating team therefore had to look for that information elsewhere, which was more easily said than done.

Apparently neither of them owned a cel phone, so there were no cal s that could be traced.

They each had a credit card, both Visa, which they very rarely used.

They had withdrawn cash with a credit card on two occasions – in Brussels on December 3, and in Oslo on May 6. A credit card had also been used to pay for Malcolm's medical treatment in Madrid in February. On March 14 a hotel bil in Marbel a in the south of Spain had been paid with Sylvia's card, and on May 2 Malcolm had bought four theater tickets in Berlin with his.

The cruise to Finland over the coming weekend was the last time the cards had been used.

Jacob fol owed the questioning out in the control room with his jaw clenched. Dessie was sitting next to him, just as absorbed in the interrogation as he was.

"The murders in Berlin took place on May second. Did they real y go to the theater afterward?" she whispered, but he shushed her.

"To go back to our discussion about Stockholm," Sara Hoglund said on the screen. "Why did you decide to come here?"

Malcolm Rudolph gave a nonchalant shrug.

"It was Sylvia who insisted we come," he said. "She's interested in form and design, in the whole Scandinavian simplicity thing. Personal y, I think it's seriously overrated. I find it cold and impersonal and rather a bore."

He yawned again. His grief at the death of his Dutch friends had evidently faded.

Mats Duval adjusted his tie.

"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 smiling? What did he know that the police clearly didn't?

"We can't have been the last people to see them alive," Malcolm Rudolph said. "Because they were stil alive when we left. Someone else kil ed 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 actual y 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 real y hot.

They broke off the interrogation and ordered al of the security recordings from the Grand Hotel to be taken out once more.