Linda, As in the Linda Murder

2

The witness who had found the victim and called the police was interviewed for the first time at about ten o’clock in the morning by two detective inspectors. The interview was recorded and typed up the same day. Approximately twenty pages of print: Margareta Eriksson, fifty-five years old, widow, no children, lived on the top floor of the building where the victim and her mother lived.

The final page of the transcript noted that the witness had been informed that she was being issued with a disclosure ban according to paragraph 10, chapter 23 of the Judicial Procedure Act. There was nothing, however, about her reaction to the fact that she was not, ‘on pain of punishment’, allowed to tell anyone about the contents of the interview. In itself this wasn’t so strange. It wasn’t the sort of thing that was usually recorded, and besides, she had reacted just as most people did when they received the same notification: she certainly wasn’t the sort of person who’d go about gossiping about that sort of thing.

The building, consisting of a basement, four floors and an attic, was owned by a residents’ association of which the witness was also the chairperson. Two flats on each of the lower three floors, and one double-size one at the top where the witness lived. In total seven properties, all owned by people in middle age or older, single people and couples with grown-up children who’d moved out. The majority of them were away on holiday at the time of the crime.

The flat in which the murder took place was owned by the victim’s mother, and according to the witness the victim sometimes lived there too. Recently the witness had seen the daughter fairly often, but the mother herself was on holiday, spending most of her time at her country place on Sirkön, an island twenty kilometres south of Växjö.

The flat, four rooms and a kitchen, was on the ground floor when seen from the street entrance; but because the building was on a slope the flat was actually one floor up at the back looking on to the yard, which itself led into a small area of woodland surrounded by detached houses and a few blocks of flats.

The witness was a dog-owner and, according to what she said during her interview, dogs had been her main interest for many years. In recent times she had had two, a Labrador and a spaniel, which she walked four times a day. At seven in the morning she usually took them on a long walk lasting at least an hour.

‘I’m a morning person. I’ve never had any trouble getting up early — I hate lying around once I’m awake.’

When they got home she usually had breakfast and read the morning paper while the dogs got their ‘morning feed’. At twelve o’clock it was time for another walk with the dogs, again lasting about an hour, and when she returned she usually ate lunch while her two four-legged friends were rewarded with ‘a dried pig’s ear or something nice to chew on’.

At five o’clock she would go out again, but not for so long this time. About half an hour, so she would have time to eat dinner and ‘give Peppe and Pigge their evening feed’ in peace and quiet before it was time to switch on the television for the evening news. That left ‘the evening pee’ some time between ten and twelve in the evening, depending on what else the television had to offer.

In other words, she followed a fixed routine that largely seemed to be dictated by her dogs. She usually spent the free hours in between either running various errands in town, meeting friends — ‘mostly women like me and other dog-people, really’ — or working from home in her flat.

Her husband, who had died ten years ago, had been an accountant with his own business, and she had worked for him part time. After he died she had carried on helping some of their old customers with their accounts. But her main source of income was the pension left by her husband.

‘Ragnar was always careful with things like that, so I really don’t have anything to worry about.’

The interview had been conducted in her flat. The officers who interviewed her could see with their own eyes that there was no reason to disbelieve her on that last point. Everything they could see indicated that Ragnar had been careful to provide for his wife after his death.

At eleven o’clock the previous evening, while she was busy with the so-called ‘evening pee’, she had seen the victim emerge from the front door and set off in the direction of the town centre.

‘It looked as though she was going to a party, although I tend to think that most youngsters look like that now no matter what time of day it is.’

She herself had been standing some thirty metres away up the road and they hadn’t exchanged greetings, but she was quite sure it was the victim she had seen.

‘I don’t think she saw me. She was probably in a hurry, otherwise I’m sure she’d have said hello.’

Five minutes later she was up in her own flat and, following her usual routine, she had gone to bed and fallen asleep more or less at once, and that was pretty much all she could remember from the previous evening.

This incredible summer had begun as early as May, and did not seem to want to come to an end. Day after day without the slightest puff of wind, the sun hot as a barbecue, the sky bleached blue, merciless, with no clouds, no shadow. Day after day with the temperature setting new records, and the following morning she had gone out with the dogs very early, at half past six.

That was earlier than usual, but considering the ‘absolutely incredible summer... I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that... I wanted to avoid the worst of it’. And every responsible dog-owner knows that dogs don’t cope well with too much exertion when it’s hot.

She had followed the same route she always took. Turned left when she came out of the front door and walked up the road past the neighbouring properties, then down the path off to the right towards the larger patch of woodland that spread out just a few hundred metres behind the building she lived in. Half an hour later, by which time it was already unbearably hot even though it wasn’t much after seven o’clock, she had decided to turn back and go home. Peppe and Pigge were both panting heavily and even their owner was longing for the shade at home in the flat, and something cool to drink.

More or less at the same time as she decided to turn back and go home, the sky had suddenly clouded over and turned black, a wind started whipping at the bushes and trees, and she could hear thunder not far off. When the first few heavy drops started to fall she was just a couple of hundred metres from home, and she had started to jog even though there really wasn’t any point, seeing as the shower had already turned into a downpour and she was soaked through by the time she got back to the apartment block through the yard at the back.

That was when she noticed that her neighbour’s bedroom window was open and blowing in the wind, and that the curtains inside the room were already soaked.

As soon as she got into the entrance hall — ‘it must have been about half past seven, if I’ve got that right’ — she had rung her neighbour’s doorbell several times, but no one had come to the door.

‘I thought she must have come home late and opened the window. For all the good that would have done, because it’s far warmer outside than it is indoors. When we were out for the evening pee it was shut, at any rate, because I usually notice things like that.’

Because no one had come to the door she had taken the lift up to her floor. She had dried the worst of the rain off the dogs, and changed into dry clothes. She had also been in a bad mood.

‘This is actually a shared property, and water damage isn’t to be taken lightly. And then there’s the risk of burglary. Admittedly, it’s a few metres up to the windowsill, but it seems to me that hardly a day goes by without there being something in the paper about burglars stealing everything people have, and even if they’re off their heads on drugs, it can’t be that difficult to borrow a ladder from one of their friends, can it?’

But what should she do? Talk to the daughter next time she bumped into her? Call her mother and tell tales? A fortnight ago there had been a similar cloudburst, but that one had only lasted ten minutes before it stopped as abruptly as it had started, and the sun started shining in a blue, cloudless sky once more, and it had actually been good for the lawns and other plants. But not this time, and after quarter of an hour, while she sorted out the dogs’ food bowls and made herself some coffee, it was still raining just as heavily, and she suddenly came to a decision.

‘As I said, I’m chair of the residents’ association, and we usually look out for each other here. Especially during the summer when so many people are on holiday. So I’ve got spare keys to most of the flats in the building.’

So she had fetched the key that the victim’s mother had given her, taken the lift down to the ground floor, rung on the bell a few more times, ‘just in case she was home after all’, then unlocked the door and gone into the flat.

‘I suppose it looked the way you’d expect when youngsters are left at home alone, so I didn’t really think anything of it. I think I called out to see if anyone was home, but no one answered so I went in... into the bedroom... yes... and then I saw what had happened. I realized straight away. So I... I turned and ran right out into the road. I was terrified — I thought that he might still have been there. Fortunately I had my mobile with me so that’s when I called... called the emergency number... you know, one one two. And they actually answered at once, even though you read in the paper that there are never any police.’

She never did get round to closing the open bedroom window, which didn’t really matter because it had stopped raining by the time the first patrol car arrived on the scene, and any eventual water damage was by then completely irrelevant. Police Constable Adolfsson naturally had no intention of closing it. He had actually noticed that there were extensive traces of diluted blood on the windowsill outside, but he decided to leave that particular detail to his colleagues in the forensics division.

The hottest summer in living memory, a neighbour who took the same walk with her dogs every morning, and also happened to have spare keys to the victim’s flat, a sudden downpour, an open window. Circumstances working together, the hand of fate if you like, but, whatever you called it, this was why the police were able to work out that things had happened one way and not another. And, considering the alternatives, that was far from being the worst possible outcome.