Linda, As in the Linda Murder

54 Växjö, Monday 11 August

When the investigating team gathered around the big table for the first morning meeting of the week, they had no idea of the dark clouds that were gathering above their investigation. On the contrary, they all seemed to feel that a merciful sun was finally shining down on them. A minute after they began Enoksson suddenly appeared and asked Bäckström if he could start. He said he had a number of interesting things to tell them, and because it was Enoksson rather than Olsson — who had made Bäckström very happy by not being there — Bäckström suddenly felt a hint of the familiar tingling somewhere nearby.

‘Our colleagues in Kalmar have found a match for the Linda murderer’s DNA,’ Enoksson began, and observed with satisfaction the way everybody immediately sat up and took notice. ‘Unfortunately they can’t provide us with an identity, but I still think it’s pretty encouraging.’ Is this what it feels like to have an audience spellbound? he wondered.

Because Enoksson was a thorough and pedagogical man, he tried to make things easier for his audience by summarizing, with bullet points, what he was about to tell them, and just to make sure he handed round some photocopied notes that they could look at as he explained. The first point was about Linda’s murder. The last was about the report he had received from the National Forensics Lab in Linköping just an hour ago.

Linda had been murdered between four and five o’clock in the morning of Friday 4 July, at home in her mother’s flat on Pär Lagerkvists väg in Växjö. On the afternoon of Monday 7 July the Växjö Police received a report that a ten-year-old Saab had been stolen a couple of kilometres from the crime scene on the morning of the day it was reported missing. The same car had appeared in their investigation on Friday 11 July, when, as part of the investigation into Linda’s murder, they had checked other interesting crimes in the area. Because it had been deemed to be of little interest, it had been set to one side. But now there were good reasons to take another look.

‘If I remember rightly, we thought at the time that if it had been stolen three days after the murder, then it was pushing the boundaries of anything that could have any connection with Linda,’ Enoksson said.

No matter. It had been found on the Sunday, so it couldn’t have been stolen on the Monday. It was hidden in the forest near a side road off route 25 between Växjö and Kalmar, about ten kilometres from Kalmar. It was found by the landowner early that morning when he was inspecting his property. The car’s registration plates had been removed, and someone appeared to have made a half-hearted attempt to set light to it. Considering the state it was in, it looked pretty much like the usual easy way for the owner to avoid one last journey to the scrapyard, and this wasn’t the first time the landowner had experienced this particular form of private initiative. In short, he wasn’t remotely amused.

That afternoon he had called the police in Kalmar, but because they were short of staff it wasn’t until Wednesday 9 July that a patrol from the neighbourhood police unit in Nybro was able to take a look at the problem. After checking the car and taking a quick look round the surrounding area, they found a pair of number plates in a ditch some fifty metres from the vehicle, back towards route 25. They had checked them out over police radio, and were told that the plates matched the car, and this was where things began to get really interesting.

The crime reduction division of the county police authority in Kalmar had taken to heart the Justice Minister’s proposals to deal more firmly with everyday offences, and they were participating in a national trial to use modern forensic techniques in an attempt to raise the clear-up rate for car thefts.

There were also several indications to suggest that this particular vehicle had been stolen. The car had been started by someone ramming a screwdriver into the ignition, and the steering lock had been broken the usual way, by locking the car’s wheels and then wrenching the steering wheel as hard as possible.

In the ashtray between the front seats their colleagues from Nybro had found a hand-rolled cigarette with a promising smell of Cannabis sativa, so they put the butt in an evidence bag and sent it off to the National Forensics Lab for DNA analysis, and had the car moved to the police compound in Kalmar in case any further forensic tests were required within the framework of the national trial.

After that, both car and cigarette butt had got lost in the police computer system. The police in Kalmar had no idea that the same car had been discussed in the country’s highest-priority murder investigation for a whole minute. They had made do with sending a letter to the car’s owner saying that they had found it, but he hadn’t got in touch, and no one appeared to have given it another thought.

At the National Forensics Lab the submitted marijuana butt ended up at the bottom of the ever-expanding list of pending DNA samples. Regardless of the Justice Minister’s political manoeuvrings, and regardless of the priorities of the crime reduction division of the county police authority in Kalmar, and with no intentional disrespect to a national trial, it had been set to one side and had to wait its turn, and only after a whole month did anyone have any time to deal with it.

Late in the afternoon of Friday 8 August the analysis was finished, and when the results were compared with other cases in the database the warning lights began to flash. Unfortunately all of those most closely involved, from both the Växjö and Kalmar forces, had already gone home, and out of respect for confidentiality and various other reasons of the usual personal variety it wasn’t until Monday morning that Enoksson and his colleagues were given the happy news over the phone by an expert at the National Lab.

‘That’s pretty much it,’ Enoksson concluded. ‘We’ve got officers on their way to Kalmar to bring the car back here. We thought that would be the easiest option. What else? Oh yes, a message from our colleagues in Kalmar.’

‘What do they want?’ Bäckström asked, although he already knew the answer.

‘The usual,’ Enoksson said. ‘That if we need any more help solving Linda’s murder, we only have to ask.’

‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ Bäckström said. ‘Okay, comrades,’ he went on. ‘Now we’ve something to get our teeth into, and if there’s ever been a car theft that’s ever been more thoroughly investigated anywhere in the kingdom of Sweden than this one, then I promise to throw in the towel.’ Dream on, losers, he thought.