Linda, As in the Linda Murder

3

The duty officer had certainly done his bit. Within less than two hours everyone who should have been at the crime scene was actually there. Unfortunately there were also a whole load of other people that they could happily have done without, but there was nothing he could do about that, and the area around the building had been cordoned off, as had the road in front of it, in both directions.

Uniformed officers had systematically begun to search through the neighbouring properties and the immediate locality, while a dog patrol was trying to pick up the trail they assumed the perpetrator must have left when he jumped from the open window at the back of the building. Without success, however, but considering the downpour a couple of hours earlier that was hardly surprising.

Forensics had started searching the flat; the medical officer had been contacted and was on his way in from his house in the country. Officers from the county crime unit had already conducted a first interview with the witness who had found the body, and both the victim’s parents had been informed of what had happened and had been taken to the police station. Soon the uniforms would start going door-to-door in the area, and all the points on the duty officer’s list — with the exception of the last one — had been actioned and ticked off.

When he was sure that all the pieces were in place, or at least on their way, he got to grips with the final point on the list and called the county police commissioner. Astonishingly, even though it was a Friday during this endless summer and the man was supposed to be on holiday, he wasn’t at his place in the country, on the coast outside Oskarshamn, some hundred kilometres from Växjö, but behind his desk a few floors above in the same building as the duty officer. They spent almost fifteen minutes talking on the phone. Mostly they talked about the victim, and when the conversation was over, regardless of how experienced and hardened he might have been, the duty officer suddenly felt inexplicably depressed.

It was odd, really, because he usually felt strangely elated when he thought back to what had happened the last time he had needed to consult his handwritten list. He had been on a lengthy secondment to the neighbouring force in Kalmar, and two of the town’s worst hooligans had started shooting madly, in the middle of the day, in the middle of town, in the midst of all the decent, law-abiding citizens, firing off a couple of dozen shots in every possible direction. As if by some miracle, they had only succeeded in hitting each other, and a thing like that could only happen in Småland, the duty officer had thought at the time.

The county police commissioner wasn’t happy either. Admittedly, he wasn’t a murder detective, and one of his maxims in life was never to meet trouble halfway, but this case really didn’t look good. It had all the signs of a classic murder inquiry, and if things turned out badly — which wasn’t improbable, considering who the victim was — there was a serious possibility that he would be left feeling the way people like him always felt when things at work went as unfairly as they possibly could.

During an after-dinner speech he had given the previous week he had spent a long time talking about the limited resources of the police, and had concluded by comparing his force to ‘an inadequate and poorly maintained fence trying to hold growing levels of criminality at bay’.

It had been a much appreciated speech, and he himself had been particularly pleased with the metaphor of the fence, which he thought both ingenious and well phrased. Nor was he alone in this: the editor-in-chief of the largest local paper had been at the same dinner and had congratulated him over coffee and cognac. But that was then, and the county police commissioner would rather not imagine what direction the editor-in-chief’s thoughts would be taking over the next few hours.

Worst of all were his personal, entirely private, feelings. He was acquainted with the victim’s father, and he had met the daughter — the murder victim — on a number of occasions. He remembered her as a delightful young woman, and if he had had a daughter he would have been happy if she could have looked and behaved like her. What’s going on, he thought. And why the hell was it happening in Växjö, where there hadn’t been a murder case during all the years he’d worked there. In my patch. And in the middle of summer, to top it all.

That was when he made up his mind. No matter how stretched his fence was right now, and regardless of the fact that holidays and other investigations were hardly helping, it was high time for him to prepare himself for the worst that could happen. So he picked up the phone and called his old friend from their student days, HNC, to ask for help. Whom else could he possibly turn to in a situation like this?

After the conversation, which lasted less than ten minutes, the county police commissioner felt noticeably relieved, almost liberated. Help was on its way, the best possible help, from the murder squad of the legendary National Crime Unit, and their head had promised that it would arrive that very day.

He too had managed to acquit himself with honour during the early stages of the task. No gold star, admittedly, nor even a silver star, but probably a little bronze one because he had managed to think about a not inconsiderable practical detail. Straight away he had his secretary call the Town Hotel and book six single rooms for the foreseeable future, and had requested that the rooms be close together, and preferably separate from the rest of the hotel.

The people at the Town Hotel were happy, because it was the middle of the summer lull and there were plenty of vacancies, which wasn’t the case just a few hours later that same day, when there wasn’t a single hotel room to be had anywhere in the centre of Växjö.