Linda, As in the Linda Murder

81

Between Monday 25 August and Friday 12 September, Acting Detective Superintendent Anna Holt conducted a total of twelve interviews with Bengt Månsson, some long, some shorter. Deputy Chief District Prosecutor Katarina Wibom and Acting Detective Inspector Lisa Mattei took turns to sit in as the official witness. The first interview was the shortest, and Anna Holt was on her own with Bengt Månsson.

‘My name is Anna Holt, and I’m a superintendent in the National Crime Unit,’ Anna Holt said. And I’m forty-three years old, Holt thought. Single mother of Nicke, now twenty-one, fairly happy with life in general, even if a few things could be better, and the future will no doubt reveal whether there’s any need to get into any of that.

‘Then maybe you can explain to me how I come to be sitting here?’ Månsson said.

‘You’re here because you’re suspected of having murdered Linda Wallin.’

‘Yes, that woman Wibom already told me that. That’s what’s so grotesque. I’ve got no idea what you’re even talking about.’

‘You don’t remember?’

‘Surely I ought to remember? If I’d murdered someone? Surely that’s not the sort of thing that you can just forget?’

‘I’m sure such things have happened,’ Anna Holt said. ‘Do you know what? I suggest we leave that bit for now.’

‘So why else would we be sitting here?’

‘Perhaps you could tell me how you got to know Linda,’ Holt said. ‘Start with the very first time you met her.’

‘Sure,’ Månsson said. ‘If that will help. I’m happy to tell you how I got to know Linda. It’s certainly not a secret.’

The interview was suspended after forty-three minutes, according to the protocol, and just half an hour later a curious Katarina Wibom just happened to be passing Holt’s office.

‘How’s it going?’ she asked.

‘It’s going exactly as I planned and completely according to my expectations,’ Anna Holt said. ‘He doesn’t remember anything of the event itself, but considering what happened anything else would have been something of a surprise, to put it mildly. He’s told me how he got to know Linda’s mother and Linda. And he talks to me. He’s even pleasant. Accommodating, considering the circumstances. Which is considerably more than one might usually expect. Perhaps you’d like to hear what he said?’

‘If you’ve got time,’ the prosecutor said.

The first time Månsson met Linda’s mother was at a conference in May about three years ago. The subject of the meeting had been various projects with a social and cultural focus, managed by the local council and aimed primarily at young people from an immigrant background. Lotta Ericson was there in her capacity as a high-school teacher with a lot of non-Swedish pupils. He himself had been project manager on behalf of the cultural department of the council. They had evidently taken a liking to each other during the first coffee break. They went out for dinner together a couple of days later, and the evening had ended in Månsson’s bed in his flat on Frövägen. Things had carried on in the usual way, and the first time he met Linda was at the midsummer celebrations out at her father’s manor house outside Växjö about a month later.

‘What happened after that?’ the prosecutor asked eagerly.

‘I don’t actually know,’ Anna Holt said. ‘I suggested we might take a break there and continue tomorrow, and because he didn’t object that’s what we did.’

‘That was smart.’

‘I’m not so sure. I got the distinct impression that he prefers women who play hard to get. So I’m trying to appear slightly distant.’

‘Is he hitting on you?’

‘Well, he’s certainly trying to make a case for himself. I dare say the future will reveal how our relationship develops.’

‘Goodness, how exciting,’ the prosecutor said, shivering in anticipation.

‘Yes, it’s always rather exciting,’ Anna Holt agreed.

The day Anna Holt began her interviews with Månsson there was a press conference, one which turned out to be the most well attended in Växjö’s history. At the centre of the platform sat the legal head of the preliminary investigation, Deputy Chief District Prosecutor Katarina Wibom, flanked by Detective Superintendent Bengt Olsson and the press officer of the Växjö Police. On the far left sat a reluctant Jan Lewin, who wasn’t asked a single question but still ended up on television because of his expressive body language. He had been edited into a lengthy item on the main television news. Lewin had twisted his neck in a very odd way which suggested that he was extremely uncomfortable, and for some reason he had been used to illustrate Detective Superintendent Olsson’s response to the only straight question Olsson had been asked.

First there had been a torrent of questions about their perpetrator, most of which the prosecutor had handled while the press officer did her best to maintain some sort of order among the journalists, and to pick questions as fairly as possible from the ones shouting loudest. Without going into any detail, the prosecutor anticipated that she would be able to charge him formally on grounds of reasonable suspicion the following day, or on Wednesday at the latest. They were still awaiting the results of certain forensic analysis, and beyond that she had no comment. And certainly not about the person who had been remanded in custody as a suspect.

After the routine follow-up questions about him and who he was, they had soon given up. There wasn’t a journalist in the room who didn’t already know his name, where he lived, and where he worked. His photograph, name and address had already been made public on the internet, and Dagens Nyheter and the four biggest evening papers would all be following suit the next day. The hunt was on for relatives, friends, acquaintances, neighbours and anyone and everyone who had anything at all to contribute, true or not, and no matter what.

So they had let go of the prosecutor and moved on to the police, going back to the beginning again. To start with, Bengt Olsson was asked to comment on the introductory phase of the investigation, but for some reason he had chosen to reply about something else. The question concerned the criticism that the Chancellor of Justice and the Justice Ombudsman had levelled at the decision to collect DNA samples from almost a thousand innocent Växjö citizens. According to Olsson, the recent reduction in the number of officers working on the case from approximately thirty to about a dozen illustrated that they had moved on to an entirely new phase of the investigation.

Was it the DNA samples that had led them to the perpetrator, the reporter from the main television news asked. No details there, either, but Detective Superintendent Olsson was at least able to say that DNA technology had played a decisive role in the final stages of their detective work. And it was here, for some reason, that Lewin and his skinny neck had made their appearance on television.

As soon as the press conference was over, Lewin returned to his office to try to forget what had just happened, and instead carry on with the hitherto fruitless search for the exclusive sweater that was the probable source of their blue fibres. Sandberg’s idea of asking the retired pilot hadn’t been entirely useless. Some years before he had actually bought just such a sweater in an airport terminal. A special offer, reduced price, and to top it all in Hong Kong of all places, where you could sometimes come across the most exclusive brands for next to nothing.

‘If I remember rightly, it was reduced from nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars to ninety-nine,’ he said.

Then he had been shown pictures of various sweaters, and had immediately picked out the pale blue one, V-necked and long-sleeved.

‘It was just like that one. Brilliant quality. Cool in the summer, warm in the winter, my favourite sweater all year round,’ the pilot said.

What had happened to it? One day he just couldn’t find it, and that remained the case to this day.

Might he by any chance have given it to his younger daughter’s boyfriend at the time? Definitely not, according to the pilot. The only thing he would have given him was a kick up the backside. And if he’d known then what he knew now, he’d have made a good job of it. As far as the rest of Bengt Månsson’s dealings were concerned, he referred Sandberg to his daughter, although he would appreciate it if she could leave her alone for a couple of days, until she’d come to terms with what had happened. During the period they were talking about, he had tried to limit his own dealings with Månsson to the absolute minimum required by politeness. The great mystery, in the pilot’s opinion, was that certain women, no matter how talented, beautiful or delightful they might be — like his younger daughter, for instance — still didn’t seem to understand the first thing about certain men.

‘Might Månsson have borrowed, or even... well, stolen your sweater?’ Sandberg had asked. She was already looking forward to meeting the pilot’s daughter for a really long conversation about unfathomable men.

‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised,’ the pilot snorted. ‘I always thought he was capable of all manner of things.’

‘How do you mean?’ Anna Sandberg asked.

Well, not murder, exactly. When he and his family had been informed about the matter late the previous evening they had all been extremely shocked, and still were, but he had worked out what sort of person Månsson was fairly early on.

‘Do you have anything in particular in mind?’ Sandberg asked.

The first time he had realized what sort of man his daughter was living with was when she was seven months pregnant and he had bumped into Bengt Månsson with another woman in a restaurant in Växjö. Månsson had actually had the nerve to come over and introduce her as a colleague from work.

Utterly unreliable, notoriously unfaithful, told lies about absolutely everything, useless with money, made no distinction between what was his and what was other people’s, was incapable of looking after his own child and showed no desire to do so, and seemed largely to use the pilot’s daughter as an excuse to borrow her father’s old Saab. The great mystery was still the fact that it had taken her two years to realize what he himself had started to suspect from day one.

‘I’m sure he stole my sweater,’ the pilot said. ‘I’ve suspected him all along. And that was probably the least of it.’

However, the search of Bengt Månsson’s flat that was currently under way had failed to find the sweater. If it had ever been there, then it wasn’t there any more. Nor had they found much else that was of interest. Månsson’s flat was surprisingly tidy. Considering the neighbours’ unanimous testimony about the stream of young women that had passed through during the years he had been living there, they had left surprisingly few traces behind them. Most interesting were the things that weren’t there. For instance, a month ago Månsson had thrown away the old hard drive in his computer and bought a new one.

‘He must have got rid of the sweater already,’ Enoksson said to Lewin. ‘If you ask me, I reckon he ditched it when he was getting shot of the car.’

After the conversation Lewin made a note about the pay-as-you-go mobile phone that Månsson had called on the morning Linda was murdered. ‘Who was the last call made to?’ Lewin wrote on the to-do list on his computer.