Linda, As in the Linda Murder

77

Månsson and his guest didn’t appear to have had any trouble sleeping. It wasn’t until almost ten o’clock in the morning that von Essen had reason to make any new notes in the surveillance log. First a naked Månsson appeared in his hallway and then disappeared into his bathroom. A couple of minutes later his similarly naked guest followed him, and evidently they were both very careful with their hygiene seeing as it was almost an hour before they emerged, Månsson with a towel wrapped round his waist and his female guest wearing a dressing-gown, and went into the kitchen to have breakfast.

By then even Adolfsson was up on his feet, freshly showered and busy making coffee and boiling eggs, mixing juice and making sandwiches. Then Bäckström called once more to hear how things were going.

‘Well? Is she alive?’ he said.

‘In the peak of health, apparently,’ von Essen asserted. ‘Right now she and her host are having coffee, oatflakes with yoghurt, a crispbread sandwich with a lot of salad and a slice of low-fat cheese.’

‘Fucking hell,’ Bäckström said with distaste. ‘Sick bastards. Let me know if he makes a move for her throat.’

Von Essen promised they would. Then he took the chance to grab a quick shower while Adolfsson took over the surveillance and note-taking. Activities in the flat opposite seemed to suggest that their subject was thinking of leaving it and heading somewhere unknown.

Lewin and his colleagues had spent a day and a half trying to find a connection between Bengt Månsson on the one hand and Linda or her mother on the other. And they hadn’t succeeded. Even though they had combed every accessible database with all the care, thoroughness and inventiveness they had picked up over the years, they hadn’t found anything.

The most likely conclusion was usually depressing. There were no straightforward connections which had anything to do with their family circumstances, working lives, upbringing, education or accommodation. Nor any mutual networks, interests, hobbies, friends and acquaintances that could link them. Which left only more coincidental encounters, and what little consolation there was to be had from the fact that they all seemed to be ordinary, decent, normal people, and that Växjö was a small enough town for them to have been bound to bump into each other sooner or later.

Yet this was meagre consolation, and a nagging doubt was growing inside Lewin that everything he had believed would turn out to be wrong. Where would someone like Månsson have learned to hotwire cars and break a steering lock? Where would someone like him have picked up any druggie contacts? And how common were people like him, when it came to what this was ultimately all about? Raping, torturing and strangling a woman fifteen years younger than himself? The only real consolation so far was von Essen and Adolfsson’s reports about his substantial sexual appetite, albeit a need that he appeared to satisfy within the frame of conventional sexual behaviour. On the one hand, on the other hand, Lewin reasoned, mainly to subdue his own anxieties.

At five o’clock that afternoon Bäckström rang Adolfsson and von Essen again, and his first question was why they hadn’t contacted him. According to von Essen, the reason was that they had nothing to report that was important enough for them to trouble their esteemed boss, who was bound to be occupied with more important matters.

‘Don’t talk crap, Essen,’ Bäckström interrupted. ‘Just tell me what the bastard’s doing.’

After they had finished breakfast, Månsson and his female guest had got dressed and packed a few things in a bag, which, suggested that they were planning to go on a short excursion, if nothing else then to enjoy this fantastic summer. When they reached the hall, however, something must have arisen, since they had suddenly pulled off all their clothes again and conducted various sexual activities on the hall carpet. The details of these were, however, unclear, as the surveillance team had only been able to observe the participants’ naked legs and feet.

This somewhat unexpected interlude had been concluded relatively quickly, and just quarter of an hour later Månsson and his female guest had set off in her car. To judge by their behaviour, they were both in a very good mood. Adolfsson and von Essen had followed at a safe distance, and after ten kilometres or so the subjects had stopped at a beach on the northern shore of nearby Lake Helgasjön. There they had spent the whole afternoon lying on a blanket, chatting to each other, sunbathing and swimming. They had also enjoyed a simple picnic. Twenty-seven degrees, twenty-four in the water, and even von Essen and Adolfsson had taken turns cooling off as best they could with a few discreet swims at a safe distance from their quarry.

Then they had returned to Månsson’s flat, stopping to buy some groceries on the way. They took farewell of each other in the road outside Månsson’s block, and the guest had left. Månsson had returned to his flat, where he threw off his clothes and disappeared into the bathroom, emerging after half an hour with the same blue towel wrapped round his waist. After that he lay on the sofa in the living room reading the evening papers.

‘First Aftonbladet, then Expressen,’ von Essen stated in a neutral voice.

‘And nothing else in all that time?’ Bäckström asked suspiciously. ‘No alfresco fucking while they were at the beach?’

Nothing like that, von Essen said, with a possible reservation for anything Månsson might have got up to while he was on his own in the bathroom.

What the fuck’s the fucker really up to? Bäckström thought, glancing angrily at his wristwatch. Already six o’clock, and he hadn’t had a single beer all day. But at least that was something he could put right fairly soon. Thorough as always, that morning he had sent Rogersson to restock their supplies in advance of what would probably be his last night in Växjö. Although if the lazy bastards up at the National Forensics Lab didn’t manage to live up to their own promises, there would be nothing for it but to stay another night, he thought. Surrounded by cretins and mere incompetents as he was, it took a hell of a time to get the smallest thing done. The bastard Lapp that the socialists had put in charge of him and his fellow unfortunates would just have to console himself by shoving the party manifesto up his fat Norrland arse. No one could say that Bäckström was the sort who left a job half done, Bäckström thought, already feeling considerably brighter.

Bengt A. Månsson, A. as in Axel, seemed to be a man of fixed habits and regular routines. And a man with a fundamentally liberal attitude and a good deal of flexibility when it came to his choice of partner. Saturday evening had begun exactly like the day before. First he lay on the sofa watching television for a couple of hours. Then he made a couple of phone calls, after which he went out into the kitchen and prepared the usual tray at half past nine or so. Bread and various toppings, side plates, two wine glasses, and the three-litre wine box that his guest the previous night had evidently left behind. Wise man, trying to keep costs down. I wonder who gave him the bottle he shared with the blonde? Patrik Adolfsson thought. Born and bred in Småland as he was.

Half an hour later a woman appeared along the road outside his door. In contrast to the blonde, this one was brunette and considerably younger, which might explain why she arrived on foot rather than by car. Whatever, five minutes later she was sitting on the sofa in the living room together with her host, and after that things proceeded as per usual.

‘Anything interesting to report?’ von Essen asked from his seat at the kitchen table, where he was reading that morning’s Svenska Dagbladet while Adolfsson covered the surveillance.

‘Brunette, about twenty, much bigger tits than the blonde,’ Adolfsson summarized. ‘And it looks like she’s shaved down below, maybe because of the heat.’

‘Let’s see,’ von Essen said, getting up from the kitchen table and taking the binoculars from Adolfsson without further ado. ‘Looks less sophisticated,’ he said.

‘Maybe Månsson’s tired of getting hairs in his mouth,’ Adolfsson suggested.

‘You’re a true romantic, aren’t you?’ Von Essen handed back the binoculars and went back to reading the financial pages of Svenska Dagbladet in the hope that his investments might give him the chance to repair all the leaking roofs that he’d inherited from his parents.

‘How are things?’ Bäckström asked over the telephone an hour later.

‘Same as last night,’ von Essen summarized.

‘Same woman?’ Bäckström asked. What’s happened to the check on her background? he wondered. He hadn’t heard a peep from Lewin and his so-called colleagues all day, even though he’d asked them for both pictures and background of the woman in question.

‘Different woman, brunette, about twenty, seems less sophisticated,’ von Essen said, trying not to go into the sorts of details that might get a man like Bäckström excited.

‘How many times has he been at her, then?’

‘Three times in two hours,’ von Essen said after a quick glance at the log. ‘Mind you, they’re at it again now, so there’s every chance of more.’

‘Fucking hell, what a sick bastard,’ Bäckström groaned. ‘And in this sort of heat as well.’

Von Essen and Adolfsson spent the rest of the night taking turns to rest on their colleague’s bed. At seven o’clock in the morning Månsson’s most recent female company left him. Alert and well, apparently, and probably because the poor thing worked as a nursing assistant or something, the baron in von Essen thought, while the acting police inspector made a note in the log. Månsson, on the other hand, seemed to be sleeping the sleep of the just, and he didn’t even seem to have seen his lady friend out. By this point von Essen was starting to feel rather weary, and more than a little irritated by the sound of his partner’s snoring that was issuing from the bedroom. High time something happened, he thought with a deep yawn, glancing at his watch just as their mobile phone began to ring.

‘Has something happened?’ von Essen said as he answered it.