Linda, As in the Linda Murder

72

As time passed, the murder of Linda Wallin was occupying less and less space in the columns of the Småland Post, and over the course of the past week they had made do with merely saying that there wasn’t much to report about the actual investigation. No particular progress, and definitely no breakthrough. Yet it still didn’t look as though the investigation had ground to a halt, or even noticeably slowed down. It was more like it had entered a ‘calmer and more systematic phase’, where the police were working ‘on a broad front, with no pre-conceived ideas’, all of this courtesy of the unnamed sources inside the investigation to whom the paper had spoken.

On Wednesday, however, local crime was back on the front page of the paper, with the tantalizing headline ARGUMENT OVER MUSKRAT SLIPPERS LED TO VIOLENCE.

The incident in question had actually taken place in January, six months before the murder of Linda Wallin, but because the investigation had been complex and protracted, the case had only just reached the district court in Växjö, where the previous day a 45-year-old man had been fined and given a suspended sentence for the physical abuse of his former partner, forty-two.

Jan Lewin read the article with interest. It was both entertaining and thought-provoking, and, having a professional interest and being able to read between the lines, he worked out what had happened.

At some point after New Year the accused and his partner decided to split up, and, because the flat was registered in her name, he was the one who had to move out. The Småland Post skimmed over the reasons for their separation, but Lewin none the less got the impression that she had got fed up and simply thrown him out.

In any case, it seemed to have been she who packed his things so that she finally had the run of her own flat, and when the accused had unpacked them in his new temporary abode, shared with a female work colleague, 33, who had evidently taken pity on him, he had discovered that his most treasured possessions were missing. A pair of sixty-year-old muskrat slippers that he had inherited from his father, who in turn had inherited them from the accused’s grandfather.

The accused had gone to see his former girlfriend at once to ask her about them. When she told him she had thrown them out he had become violent, grabbing her by the arm, knocking her to the floor, slapping her face several times, and attempting to kick her as she lay on the floor. The neighbours had called the police, who had broken things up, hauled the man off to the police station, and taken the woman to hospital so that she could be patched up and her injuries documented. Then things had followed their usual course, and the reason it had all dragged on so long was that the stories of those involved had been different, there were no witnesses to the attack itself, and several accusations and counter-accusations had been made during the course of the investigation.

The accused worked as a salesman for a large car company in Växjö. His father had worked for the same company, from the mid-fifties until he retired forty years later, and his grandfather had sold agricultural machinery for a firm outside Hultsfred until he died just after the end of the war.

Apart from their interest in cars and tractors, the accused, his father and his grandfather also shared a common passion: hunting. A relatively large proportion of the trial in the district court had been devoted to exploring this, and amongst other things the accused and his defence lawyer had called two character witnesses to explain what the discarded muskrat slippers really meant to their friend and hunting partner. This certainly wasn’t a matter of just any old slippers.

According to the story that was told in the accused’s family, during the long years of the war his grandfather had shot some dozen muskrats in the ditches and wetlands around Hultsfred. He had skinned his prey himself, prepared the skins and then taken them to a local shoemaker, who made a pair of very comfortable, warm slippers out of them. They had been greatly appreciated by their owner, and were invaluable during the cold winters towards the end of the war.

The muskrat, Ondatra zibethicus, was very rare in the Hultsfred region. It was also very timid, very difficult to hunt, and no larger than a small rabbit. So it had been several years before the grandfather had killed a sufficient number to produce a pair of slippers. After his death they had been passed down to his eldest son, and then to his son. The story of how the slippers came to be made had been told countless times for more than half a century, in front of blazing fires in the snow-covered, masculine space of the hunting lodge. The tale certainly hadn’t got any worse with the years, and now formed part of the oral hunting tradition in Småland. The slippers had even become part of our local cultural inheritance, according to the defence lawyer, who also concluded his cross-examination of the plaintiff with a remark about their fundamental significance for his client’s mental wellbeing.

‘And now you have the stomach to sit here and claim that these were just an ordinary pair of slippers!’ the lawyer declared indignantly, fixing his eyes on the plaintiff.

It was actually considerably worse than that, it turned out, according to the unusually comprehensive report of the trial which the crime reporter of the Småland Post had chosen to share with her readers. The plaintiff was not only the former girlfriend of the accused. She had also spent many years working as a veterinary assistant, and even though she had never had any professional dealings with Ondatra zibethicus — fortunately — she none the less appeared to be in possession of considerable knowledge about muskrats.

The whole story was a typical male fabrication, she explained to the members of the court. If the grandfather really had told the stories that she had been forced to listen to so many times during the far too many years she had spent with his grandson, then he was as much of a liar as his descendant was.

The muskrat had migrated into Sweden, and Norrland in particular, from Finland, but this hadn’t happened until 1944, in other words a couple of years after her ex-boyfriend’s grandfather, thirteen hundred kilometres further south, was supposed to have shot enough of them to make a pair of slippers, so the whole damn story was nothing but a pack of lies. For the sake of domestic harmony she had chosen to keep quiet about that fact for a good many years. But if anyone wanted her opinion, the most likely explanation was that the slippers had been made from perfectly ordinary rats, and certainly not muskrats, since the latter had only been sighted in Småland in recent years.

In short, according to the plaintiff, this was a pair of badly worn, fifty-year-old rat-fur slippers, impregnated with the sweat of three generations of male feet, and if anyone really wanted to talk about emotional symbolism, then that was her opinion of her ex-boyfriend’s so-called muskrat slippers.

It was a shame she never applied to join the police, Jan Lewin thought as he pulled out his scissors to add the article to his scrapbook from Växjö.