Linda, As in the Linda Murder

7

in marked contrast to Bäckström’s imaginings, Detective Superintendent Jan Lewin had sought the tranquillity of his own room immediately after dinner, so that he could read the file on the case in peace and quiet. He had summarized everything that was good and everything that was bad, and even though most of it was little more than preliminary information, there seemed to be quite a lot working in his and his colleagues’ favour.

They had a victim whose identity was known, a crime scene, an approximate idea of how it had all happened and when the crime was committed. He and his colleagues were on the scene less than twenty-four hours after the murder, and that wasn’t always the case if you worked for the murder squad. The crime had been committed indoors, which — all things considered — was better than outdoors, and their victim seemed to be a perfectly normal young person without any extravagant habits or contacts.

In spite of all this, he hadn’t been able to shake off the usual sense of gnawing unease. First he had considered going to visit the crime scene on Pär Lagerkvists väg, to get an impression of what had happened with his own eyes, but because every indication suggested that their colleagues from forensics were still busy there he had decided not to disturb them unnecessarily.

In the absence of anything else and largely to give himself something to do, he had hooked up his computer and gone on to the internet to read about the author and Nobel Prize-winner Pär Lagerkvist, who had lent his name to the road where their victim had lost her life. Whatever he might have to do with anything, Lewin thought. He’d been dead for the past thirty years.

Not entirely unexpectedly, it turned out that Pär Lagerkvist came from Växjö. Born in 1891, the youngest of a clutch of seven children. Meagre financial circumstances, father a foreman of the goods yard at Växjö railway station, the highly talented youngest son who, in contrast to his older siblings, had the opportunity to study and graduated from high school in Växjö.

Then he had left his childhood behind and gone away to become a writer. At the age of twenty-five, in 1916, he made his literary breakthrough with a collection of poetry, Angst. Eventually he was elected to the Swedish Academy, and in 1951 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He was evidently held in high regard by his hometown, because just a few months later a road was named after him in the town where he had been born and grew up. And this more than twenty years before he died, which tended to be when such accolades were bestowed upon people like him. And at the time the buildings which would eventually be constructed along the road bearing his name only existed in the designs of the town planning office.

Now one of them had become Jan Lewin’s latest crime scene, and as soon as he had time and it seemed appropriate, he planned to pay it a visit. But not tonight, he thought. Not tonight, when their colleagues in forensics needed to get on in peace.

Instead he had taken a walk through the town. Night-empty streets that led him, after just four hundred metres, to the new police station that would be his workplace for the immediate future.

The building was situated on Sandgärdsgatan, on one of the town’s squares, Oxtorget. It had been put up at the start of the new millennium, and was a temple to justice typical of its time. A boxlike building of four or five floors, depending how you counted, with a pale yellow façade, where the police shared premises with the prosecutor’s office, a courtroom for custody proceedings, a jail and the probation office. A justice factory, arranged in such a practical way that it covered the entire judicial chain. A clear message, of scant solace to those who ended up there, and poor support for the theory that every suspect should be treated as if he were innocent until the opposite had been proved beyond all reasonable doubt.

To the left of the entrance Lewin had found a small copper plaque which told him that back in Pär Lagerkvist’s day, and even long after he had won the Nobel Prize, this had been the site of Växjö’s old dairy, with pens for the local cattle market. For some reason Lewin suddenly felt depressed. He turned on his heel and headed back to the hotel, to try to get a few hours’ sleep before the serious work began.

Before he fell asleep he found himself thinking about angst for some reason. Presumably not an unusual subject for a young poet, regardless of when he had been alive. And presumably a common subject for authors no matter how old they were, in the middle of a world war with the whole of Europe in flames.

Jan Lewin knew a fair amount about angst. Private and personal experience of the emotion that had been his lot ever since he was a child. Admittedly, it visited him less often the older he got, but it was still lurking out there, constantly present, always ready to attack if he wasn’t strong enough to resist. Suddenly, unexpectedly, every time from a different source. Its consequences abundantly clear even if its message and origins were always shrouded in darkness.

Added to this was the angst he encountered in the course of his work, when it prompted violent attacks that he ended up investigating. Dates that had gone wrong, relationships that had gone off the rails, providing fruitful territory for fear and hatred. And sometimes ended up on his desk in the National Crime Unit in Stockholm.

And finally there was the angst that could afflict even the most hardened and ruthless criminal when he realized the enormity of what he had done. Always assuming that the police were going to catch him, of course, so it was best to hide in the darkness. Constantly aware that people like Jan Lewin were searching the same darkness, trying to find him.

If nothing else, then to ease my own angst, Jan Lewin thought, before finally falling asleep.