Linda, As in the Linda Murder

11 Växjö, Sunday 6 July

Detective Superintendent Jan Lewin had never been to Växjö before on duty. Considering that in the almost twenty years that he’d been a murder detective at National Crime he’d visited almost all the towns in Sweden that were as large or larger, and some that were considerably smaller, this wasn’t an entirely irrelevant fact. Whatever. Now he was here. Finally Växjö, Lewin thought with a wry smile. Of all the places on the planet, he thought, shaking his head.

As soon as the initial meeting was over he had eaten a quick lunch and then sat down behind his desk to try to get some order in his growing piles of papers. He had sat there for almost twelve hours, all of Saturday, and when he was finally able to leave the police station on Sandgärdsgatan to take the short walk home to the hotel, it was already past midnight. And the piles on his desk were, if anything, even larger than when he started on them just after lunchtime.

In the hotel corridor where he and his colleagues were staying everything was quiet and shut up. Lewin had opened the locked door to the landing carefully so as not to disturb his sleeping colleagues. He had stopped for a moment outside Eva Svanström’s door, wondering if he should knock on it — a very light knock — to see if she was still awake and maybe wanted company. Not tonight, he thought. Some other night, one that was better than this.

Then he had crept into his room and washed in the basin with the help of a wet flannel. Face, armpits, crotch. Just the necessary, in that order, and even though he wanted nothing more right then than to stand under the shower and just let the water run. Early tomorrow morning, he thought. Not half past midnight when the others were already asleep.

Then he had got into bed. As usual at the start of a new case, he had trouble getting to sleep, and when he finally managed it he had been tormented by dreams, as he often was when beginning an investigation, or when he just felt anxious or miserable for reasons that he never quite understood. Dreams that were based on real events, but always assumed new meaning, new expression. And this time the dreams were about the summer just after his seventh birthday, when he got his first proper bicycle. A red Crescent Valiant.

He woke up for the third time at half past five in the morning, and that was when he made up his mind. He put on his shorts and a short-sleeved blue top with the National Crime emblem on the front, pulled on his jogging shoes, put the pass card for his hotel room in his pocket, grabbed the tourist map of Växjö, and quickly and silently went out of the door. Just as well to get it over and done with, he thought as he waited for the lift. Considering the state of his desk, it was bound to be some time until he was able to visit the crime scene while he was on duty, and in the world he lived in he should really have been out there before now.

Outside the sun was shining in a pale blue sky and it was almost twenty degrees, even though it was only quarter to six. The main square lay empty and deserted. No one in sight. Not even a solitary abandoned beer can to indicate any traces of earlier human life. He stopped in front of the entrance to the nightclub, and with the help of the map plotted the most direct route to Linda’s home. First he checked the time, so that he would be able to see how long it took, and then he started off at the pace he imagined she would have walked at, hopefully following the same route, even though that was still highly unclear.

Heading north-east. Diagonally across the main square, past the east wing of the district governor’s residence, on to Kronobergsgatan, heading due north. So far, this matched the bouncer’s statement.

But what next, Lewin wondered. He stopped and checked the time again. The quickest way home, he thought. Wasn’t that what she had said to her friend before she left the club, that she was going to go home and sleep? In the absence of any better ideas, he took the first turning on the right and emerged on to Linnégatan just a hundred metres further on. He turned north and after another four minutes he turned right once again and found himself on Pär Lagerkvists väg. He stopped to get his bearings and sum up his impressions.

Approximately six hundred metres from the nightclub, a six-minute walk for a young, fit and sober woman walking quickly in an area that she’d known since she was a child. Broad, quiet streets in the centre, still very light: only a madman would attempt to attack anyone on that stretch. Not to mention the fact that this was Växjö.

And on Pär Lagerkvists väg itself the chances of an undisturbed night-time walk were, if anything, even better. It was approximately seven hundred metres to the door of Linda’s building, and the whole length was a broad, straight road lined with small blocks of flats of three or four floors. Plastered façades, shiny HSB housing association signs that suggested careful, middle-aged, middle-class occupants, well-ordered lives and good neighbours. No undergrowth, no narrow alleyways, not even a little side road where anyone with evil intentions could potentially lie in wait for an unsuspecting victim.

His own victim lived at the end of the road, in a building that was as neat as all the others, although it lacked the HSB sign, as it was owned by a private association whose members all lived in the building. So this was where it happened, Jan Lewin thought, stopping at the blue and white cordon tape which still surrounded the scene of the murder. As the venue for a standard sexually motivated murder of a young woman, it seemed highly unlikely.

There’s only one explanation, he thought as he got back to his hotel room half an hour later. That was where Linda lived. That’s why the killer went there. Specifically to see her. Someone she knew, someone she trusted, someone she liked. Someone like her. Then Lewin took off his clothes, got straight in the shower and let the water stream over him for five minutes. And for the first time in a day and a half he felt completely calm and completely happy with the work that remained to be done.