Linda, As in the Linda Murder

18

A remarkable summer. The most remarkable both in living memory and in perfectly ordinary memory as well, assuming people were old enough, of course. It had started as early as May, day after day of scorching hot sun with new record temperatures being set all over the country, fairly evenly distributed.

And on Tuesday 8 July it was time for a new national record. The previous Swedish record had actually been set in Småland almost sixty years before. On 29 June 1947, a temperature of 38 degrees was reached in Målilla, and if our Lord was actually in charge of the weather, then he was certainly taking care of his own. What other explanation could there be for the fact that at three o’clock in the afternoon of Tuesday 8 July, the pious village of Väckelsång, a short distance south of Växjö, recorded a temperature of 38.3 degrees Celsius? In the shade, naturally.

In Växjö it was relatively cool. When Jan Lewin and Eva Svanström left the police station just after one o’clock for a late lunch out in town, Oxtorget was quivering with heat haze, even though it was only a modest 32 degrees outside. Lewin had spent most of his waking hours in his air-conditioned office inside the police station, so he wasn’t exactly prepared.

‘Maybe we should stay inside?’ he suggested, smiling hesitantly at Eva Svanström. What’s going on, he wondered. In Sweden, in the middle of the summer?

‘I think it’s lovely,’ Eva replied with a happy smile, throwing out her arms in an extremely un-Swedish gesture. ‘Come on, Janne, let’s go. I promise you can sit in the shade.’

The news the previous evening and that morning had focused largely on the weather, and in the local media there had been a fair degree of local pride. The warmest part of Sweden was still in the Småland of our Lord. The Barometer in Kalmar had even seen fit to declare Småland the Riviera of northern Europe, although the Småland Post was, as so often, more restrained: after all, every right-thinking Småland resident knew the penalty for false pride.

Just as in the bigger papers, various experts had been asked for an opinion, both those who warned of the greenhouse effect and those who dismissed it, referring to historical and long-term variations in temperature, such as the fact that grapevines had been grown way up in Norrland during the Bronze Age. And of course there was plenty of medical advice. People should stay in the shade, avoid unnecessary physical exertion, drink a lot and cover their heads with a cap or a hat. This was particularly important for the elderly and the very young, and for people with high blood pressure or heart problems. And obviously under no circumstances should dogs or small children be left inside locked cars, even for a short while.

The evening papers had followed their usual tradition. After doing their duty and getting the meteorological details out of the way, they had focused on the really important aspects, such as the link between the unbearable heat and the increase in violent crime — not forgetting the Linda murder, of course.

One of the experts consulted by the largest of the evening papers had detailed the clear connection between the emergence of serial killers and the temperature at the time of the crimes. According to his own research, the likelihood of multiple murders increased along with the temperature. The summer months were far more critical than winter, whether you were an Eskimo or an African. And it was no coincidence that the majority of known serial killers, in the US for instance, preferred to work in the southern states of California or Florida than in the mid-western or northern states. His conclusion: heat triggers violence, particularly in mentally ill, unstable or fragile criminals.