Linda, As in the Linda Murder

23 Växjö, Thursday 10 July

On Thursday Lewis decided to stop reading the evening papers. His decision was final and irrevocable, and encompassed Aftonbladet, Expressen and the latter’s two smaller and, if possible, even nastier siblings, Göteborgs-Tidningen and Kvällsposten.

The double-spread article that had particularly attracted his disgust was in that day’s copy of Kvällsposten and taken alongside everything else the Swedish evening papers had already printed about the Linda murder it looked almost innocuous. Shipwrecked-Micke had come forward and revealed that ‘I met Linda the night she was murdered’.

Shipwrecked-Micke, in his capacity as a reality television celebrity with local connections, had accepted a small job at the Town Hotel on the evening of Thursday 3 July. The same evening that Linda went to the hotel’s club, just a few hours before she was murdered. He had been accompanied by two fellow celebs — Farm-Frasse and Big Brother-Nina — and their shared duties involved helping out in the bar, mingling with the guests and generally contributing to raising the atmosphere in the venue.

Around ten o’clock in the evening, about an hour before Linda arrived at the nightclub, Micke, severely intoxicated, bare-chested and with nothing on his feet, had been dancing up on the bar, but tumbled off and broke a load of glasses, and ended up flailing about in the shattered fragments. At quarter past ten he was taken by ambulance to hospital in Växjö to be sewn up. His colleague, Frasse, had gone with him, and had called a journalist he knew while they were in the ambulance. The interview with Micke and Frasse had been conducted while they were waiting in A&E, and the next morning, the same morning that Linda was found murdered and before news of the killing reached the papers, Kvällsposten had led with a big report about the fact that Shipwrecked-Micke — famous from The Bar and ordinary Shipwrecked, and because of the double accolade of having also appeared in Celebrity Shipwrecked — had been attacked and beaten up in the Town Hotel in Växjö the previous evening, even though he was born and raised there, and was now one of the town’s most famous inhabitants.

After the conclusion of the interview and a further hour of waiting for the doctors to take care of his colleague, Farm-Frasse had got fed up and gone back to the Town Hotel. There the bouncer had refused to let him back in and a fight had broken out, the police had been called, and shortly after midnight Farm-Frasse had found himself in the holding cells of Växjö police station on Sandgärdsgatan, where he was left to sober up.

A couple of hours later he was joined by Shipwrecked-Micke, who had kicked up a fuss in A&E, been picked up by the police and thrown into another cell in the same police station. At six o’clock the following morning they had both been allowed to leave the station, and, leaning on his friend Frasse, a limping Micke had crossed Oxtorget and disappeared from any sort of police interest, destination unknown.

What Shipwrecked-Micke was now telling the paper a week after the murder was a pack of lies from beginning to end. He couldn’t have spoken to Linda during the evening before the murder, and she hadn’t ‘told him in confidence that she had often felt threatened recently, because of her job with the police in Växjö’.

Being in the same predicament as Shipwrecked-Micke, in the same corridor of cells mainly used for drunks, Farm-Frasse couldn’t have met Linda the night she was murdered either. Which left the third member of their company, Big Brother-Nina, who at least had been in the nightclub until it closed at four o’clock the next morning.

Nina had been questioned by the police as early as Friday afternoon, and it had taken some time before she realized that the police didn’t want to talk to her about the alleged attack on her friend Micke. She didn’t have a clue about the fact that Linda had been murdered. She didn’t know her. Had never met her, still less spoken to her, not on any previous occasion, and not on the night of the murder.

The reporter who had written both articles could hardly have been quite as ignorant, but what irritated the usually sanguine Lewin was the fact that the reporter had the bad taste to drag him into the lies he had woven together. The day before the second article appeared he had called Lewin to give him the opportunity to respond to the serious allegations that Shipwrecked-Micke was now directing at the police. What had they done to investigate the threats that Linda had told Shipwrecked-Micke about, which Micke claimed he had informed the police in Växjö about at the earliest opportunity?

Lewin had declined to comment, and referred the reporter to the press officer. Whether he followed that advice was unclear. The only thing revealed in the article was that the paper had contacted the detective in charge of the case, Superintendent Jan Lewin from the National Crime Unit, but he had ‘refused to address the serious allegations directed at his and his colleagues’ work’.

And that was when Lewin had made up his mind. He was never going to read another Swedish evening paper as long as he lived.