Linda’s mother was at her summer cottage out on Sirkön, in the middle of Lake Åsnen, some twenty kilometres south of Växjö. She had a female friend staying with her, and according to her Linda’s mother was concentrating on surviving from one day to the next. However, she understood that the police were keen to talk to her, and was willing to oblige as best she could.
‘Thank her from me,’ Rogersson said. ‘I’ll be there with one of my colleagues in about an hour.’
‘Do you need any directions?’ the friend asked.
‘I think we’ll be okay,’ Rogersson said. ‘If we get lost I can always call again. Do tell her how grateful I am that she’s prepared to talk to us.’
Bäckström had decided to keep his friend Rogersson company. He felt like getting out of town for a bit. Preferably in a comfortable, air-conditioned car, where he and Rogersson could talk crap in peace and quiet about all the non-present idiots who were otherwise ruining his life. Besides, he was also a bit curious about Linda’s mother.
‘Down there on the left is the lake,’ Rogersson said half an hour later, nodding towards the blue water shimmering between the birch trees in the sun. ‘It’s only another ten kilometres or so to Sirkön. Classic territory for people like you and me, Bäckström.’
‘I thought all the strong spirits were made in Skåne?’ Bäckström said, already feeling much brighter in spite of the undeserved slings and arrows that had struck him recently.
‘Swedish criminal history,’ Rogersson explained. ‘One of our most notorious disappearances of the past century. Up there with Viola Widegren from 1948. This was where little Alvar Larsson disappeared from his parents’ home on a cold and windy April morning in 1967.’ He sounded almost ceremonial. ‘I read an interesting article about the case in the Nordic Crime Chronicle a few years ago. Didn’t sound like a murder. He probably just tumbled into the lake and drowned while he was outside playing.’
‘I don’t believe that for a minute,’ Bäckström said. ‘Of course he was murdered. By one of those paedophiles. There must be loads of them down here. Sitting in their little red cottages downloading kiddie porn from the internet.’
‘But hardly in 1967,’ Rogersson said. ‘From the internet, I mean.’
‘Well, they’d have got up to some other shit back then,’ Bäckström said. ‘Sitting in their outside toilets wanking over a pile of old newspapers with pictures of Scouts skinny-dipping. How the fuck should I know?’
‘You seem to know almost everything, Bäckström,’ Rogersson said. ‘But I think what I appreciate most about you is your view of humanity. You’re a truly warm person, if I can put it like that.’
What the fuck’s got into Rogersson? Bäckström thought. He’s acting seriously hungover. I just hope Linda’s mum’s as generous with the beer as her dad was.
A little red cottage with white woodwork, an old guardian tree shading the little patch of gravel in front of the house where they parked the car, flagpole, lilac arbour, outside lavatory at one end, jetty, boathouse and sauna, and its own little strip of beach down by the lake. Neatly raked paths through the large garden, where two carefully placed boulders marked the edges of the trimmed lawn.
In short, the very picture of the Swedish summer idyll, and obviously they all sat outside, round the table in the lilac arbour. No beer, of course, but an equally unquestionable jug of homemade blackcurrant cordial with plenty of ice and tall stemmed glasses, probably from some local glassworks for a price that would buy several crates of ordinary export-strength lager. And if you and your eyes weren’t somewhere else entirely, you’d be a damn fine woman, Lotta Ericson, Bäckström thought. Forty-five years old, but under normal circumstances I’m sure you look considerably younger than that.
‘Just say if you find this is getting the least bit difficult for you,’ he said in his very gentlest voice.
‘I don’t think it’ll be a problem,’ Linda’s mother said, and if it hadn’t been for her eyes, he’d almost have said she sounded chirpy.
I wonder how much Valium they’ve stuffed into you since you woke up, you poor thing, Bäckström thought.
During the following three hours Detective Inspector Jan Rogersson gave convincing proof of the thoroughness that his colleague Lewin had attested to. First he had asked her about Linda. About her childhood and upbringing. About the years in the US, about the divorce and what it had been like when the two of them returned on their own to Sweden.
‘A happy, carefree little girl, who liked everyone, and everyone liked her, and I suppose it was always like that with Linda, even when she was older...
‘A difficult period in our lives...’, ‘getting used to a new environment...’, ‘Linda made new friends, started a new school...’, ‘I got a new job as a teacher while I was still studying...’, ‘when I met my husband I was working as a secretary... that’s how we met...’, ‘then, once we were married and I had Linda and we moved to the US, I was mostly just a trophy wife...’, ‘I was terribly bored, although Henning took to it like a fish to water. The person Linda and I saw least of was probably her dad... in fact, we hardly ever saw him...
‘But of course, in a financial sense I was very privileged. We might have had a prenuptial agreement, but the first thing he did before Linda and I moved back to Sweden was give me the building where... where it all happened... and we lived there until Linda suddenly... that was when she was already in high school... decided that now that her father had deigned to come home, she wanted to live with him out in the country... although as soon as she wanted to be back in town she’d live with me again...’
Boyfriends?
‘The first one was probably a little black boy who was in the same class as Linda when we lived in the States... Linda was only seven, the same as him... his name was Leroy, and he was so sweet you just wanted to eat him all up... that was probably the first time Linda fell in love...’
After that? Boyfriends that she had a sexual relationship with?
Not many, according to her mother, albeit with the proviso that Linda always kept very quiet about things like that. The longest relationship Linda had been in had lasted about a year, and came to an end about six months ago.
‘The son of some family friends. One of the few families that I still see since I divorced my ex-husband. Another very nice boy, went by the name Noppe, although his real name’s Carl-Fredrik. I think Linda simply got fed up with him. It got too much for her once she’d started at police college.’
Was Linda ever difficult, did she ever argue, did she have any enemies, could there even be anyone who wished her harm?
Not in her mother’s world. Not when it came to her beloved daughter, because when she was at her worst she was probably like most teenage girls were most of the time — Lotta had realized that from friends with daughters the same age — but Linda wasn’t often like that. Bad sides? Linda could be very stubborn. And she could be a bit naïve. A bit too trusting, believing people were better than they really deserved.
During his twenty years as a murder detective, Rogersson had conducted hundreds of interviews with close relatives of murder victims. So it was no surprise that Linda’s mother herself was the last point on his list of questions, and no surprise at all that she reacted the same way all the others before her had. Why did he want to talk about her? She didn’t have anything to do with Linda’s murder. She was a victim as well. Someone had snatched her only daughter from her, and she was expected to live on with nothing but her grief to cling to.
Rogersson gave her the usual answers. That this was about finding Linda’s murderer. That he had absolutely no suspicion that Linda’s mother might have had anything to do with the crime, but that the actual point of someone like him and his questions was that he sometimes uncovered things that the mother of a murdered daughter might not notice, precisely because her grief stopped her from seeing them. She took it better than most of them did.
Had she seen any new men since the divorce from her husband? Had any of them ever shown any interest in her daughter? Had she ever met anyone who could possibly want to harm her by attacking her only child?
Naturally, she had seen other men since the divorce. Several, in fact, but they had mostly been short or even fleeting relationships, and the most recent of them had been several years ago now. Someone she worked with, someone one of her friends worked with, someone else she met through work, even the divorced father of one of her former pupils. And several brief encounters with other men, mostly when she was on holiday abroad. She had actually fallen for one of those, and had kept in touch for a while. But it hadn’t led to anything, and had dwindled to phone calls, then emails, with increasingly large gaps between them, before finally silence.
Must have been gay, Bäckström thought. Blind and gay.
The thought that one of these men could have murdered her daughter was completely impossible to imagine. They just didn’t belong in that context, that wasn’t the sort of man she ever met, most of them had never met Linda, and at least a couple of them didn’t even know that she had a daughter.
‘She must have been attacked by a complete maniac,’ Linda’s mother said. ‘As I said, Linda thought the best of everyone. She could actually be very naïve at times.’
‘What the hell were we doing out there?’ Bäckström asked in the car on their way back to the police station. ‘That didn’t give us anything at all.’ Suck on that, you pedantic bastard, he thought.
‘There was nothing wrong with that cordial, considering that it was just cordial,’ Rogersson retorted. ‘For a while I got the impression that there was something she suspected, or was still trying to work out. Something on her mind.’
‘And what the hell would that have been?’ So Rogge isn’t just an alcoholic, Bäckström thought, he’s got second sight as well.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ Rogersson replied. ‘Just a feeling, really. I’ve been wrong before.’ He shrugged. ‘Right now her head must be complete chaos. I wonder how many tranquillizers they’re pushing into her.’
‘If you ask me, she was completely gone,’ Bäckström said. Like most women, just considerably better looking, he thought.
‘And that might well be a good enough reason to go back and talk to her again,’ Rogersson said.
‘Well, if nothing else, she’s a damn fine woman,’ Bäckström declared. ‘Once she’s back to normal, I mean. Let me know when you’re going again and I’ll tag along.’