Linda, As in the Linda Murder

87

Hard graft, conscientiousness and ingenuity were not only Lewin’s defining characteristics, but also those of his closest colleagues. As a result, they had finished their preliminary profile of Bengt Månsson less than five days after he had been caught.

Thirty-five years old. Born in the General Hospital in Malmö on a fine Sunday morning in May, when summer had just arrived in Skåne for the first time that year. The first child of a single mother, thirty years old, father unknown. It was possible that he might have been able to explain the vague ethnic assumptions about the unknown perpetrator’s DNA which had caused such problems for them, and were still lurking at the back of Lewin’s mind.

There didn’t seem to be much wrong with the mother. She came from a farming family near Ängelholm, and the relatives they had spoken to described her as beautiful and cheerful, a solid character, and enterprising with it. When she turned twenty she had moved to Malmö, and just ten years later she was a successful businesswoman with her own hair and beauty salon in the centre of town, in a prime location and with a growing number of employees. According to her older sister, she had met the unknown father on holiday to the Canary Islands, but Bengt Månsson’s aunt was unable to provide any more precise details.

But she had shown a collection of photographs to the officers in Malmö who had questioned her. Of Bengt Månsson, from when he was a small and utterly enchanting little lad to when he graduated from high school some nineteen years later, by which time he had turned into an extremely handsome young man. More or less the way film stars used to look, only without the moustache. The aunt found everything that was happening quite incomprehensible, and her only consolation was that she was convinced the police would realize they had made a terrible mistake.

When Bengt was five years old his mum had met a new man. Fifteen years older than her. A relatively successful businessman and, oddly enough, still single. One year later the mother was married, and Bengt gained a half-brother, while his new dad had formally adopted him. The family had moved to a smart, expensive villa in Bellevue on the outskirts of Malmö. His mum had sold the salon for a healthy profit and switched to being a housewife, working part time from home as a representative for a German company selling hair-care products and cosmetics.

They seemed like decent, hard-working people. Respectably middle class. No negative comments from neighbours, schools, social services or the police. Neither against Bengt nor about anyone else in the family. Bengt had done well in primary school, and was just above average when he left high school. He had been physically fit, although not particularly interested in sport, and had been popular among his male classmates without having any close friends. And all the girls at school had started asking if they could go out with him back in primary school.

He hadn’t had to do military service, being let off without having to take recourse to any bizarre medical excuses. After a year’s sabbatical, which he seemed to have spent partying with his contemporaries, whilst earning a small monthly wage doing odd jobs in his dad’s office, he had moved to Lund and started university. Four years later he graduated with a fairly soft degree in a combination of subjects. Film and theatre studies, philosophy, literature. He had been active within the university drama society and the student union, and various other of the less demanding clubs and societies on offer to students in Lund. And all the female students in his vicinity seemed to have fallen in love with him at first glance.

In the autumn of the year he graduated his mother died from cancer. In contrast to most cancer sufferers, she died within a month of receiving the diagnosis. The day before Christmas Eve that same year his adoptive father dropped dead of a massive heart attack somewhere between the twelfth and thirteenth holes on the still snow-free grass of Ljunghusen golf course.

He and his half-brother sold the villa and other assets. They buried their father, paid off any debts and divided what was left over. This was actually substantially less than they had evidently been expecting, and possibly a contributing factor to the reasons why the two half-brothers appeared to have had little contact with each other afterwards. As soon as the half-brother graduated as an economist he moved to Germany. For the past five years he had been working as the head of finance for a subsidiary of a Swedish forestry company. Married to a German woman, and living outside Stuttgart. He had refused to talk to the police when they called to ask him about his brother Bengt. Everyone in Bengt Månsson’s family had either died or abandoned him.

At the age of twenty-five he got a job as administrator and project assistant at the cultural division of Malmö Council. That summer he had met the pilot’s daughter, who was spending the summer working in customer relations at Sturup Airport. He applied for a new job as project manager within the cultural division of Växjö Council, and as soon as he got it he moved in with his girlfriend in a flat that his prospective father-in-law had arranged for them. About a year later their daughter had been born. And a year after that they had separated. He had got hold of a new flat on Frövägen, where he still lived.

Single, with access rights to a seven-year-old daughter whom he had seen less and less often over the years. A monthly income before tax of 25,000 kronor. A driving licence, but no car. No credit defaults or unpaid taxes. No notes in social service or police records. Not so much as a parking ticket, in fact. And all the young women who came near him seemed to fall in love with him.

At the age of thirty-five years and three months, he had raped and strangled Linda Wallin at home in her mother’s flat in the centre of Växjö. And had thereby given the police a reason to summarize his known life up to his arrest and to compose the report known in police language and among officers of Jan Lewin’s generation as the perpetrator’s little biography.

Anna Sandberg had interviewed the pilot’s daughter, who testified to Bengt Månsson’s astonishing sexual appetite. But only at the start, when they used to spend pretty much every waking minute having sex. After they moved in together and she got pregnant, he had hardly touched her. Instead he had slept with everyone else, and as soon as she realized this she had ended the relationship.

In answer to a direct question: no, he had never been violent towards her. Apart from the frequency, they had indulged in ordinary, normal sex. Bengt Månsson was the ‘most handsome man and the most charming slacker’ that she’d met in her whole life, and she simply couldn’t comprehend what he had done eight weeks ago. But she was primarily concerned about their seven-year-old daughter. They had already decided not to let her start school yet, and only the previous day she and her husband had made up their minds to move away from Växjö.

The evening papers had already offered her money and celebrity if she was willing to come forward and talk about her life with the murderer, and what it was like to be the mother of his only child, a little girl of seven. The bestial rapist and murderer who had a little daughter. What had finally persuaded her to leave Växjö, however, wasn’t the male headline-hunters of the big evening papers, but the female editor of Dagens Nyheter’s family section. She had wanted to run a large, factual and sensitive article about that very subject. How she, her new husband and her daughter had become the victims of the media’s news frenzy. About the daughter’s postponed schooling, how it had influenced her emotionally when she had found out that her ‘real daddy’ was a murderer, their rumoured plans to move, maybe even change their names and apply for a protected identity. That was when she and her husband had made up their minds to go. They had turned the offer of an interview down flat.

On Friday Anna Sandberg and a female colleague from the Växjö Police went to question Linda’s mother out at her summer house by Lake Åsnen.

It was a largely futile interview. Linda’s mother was in crisis. The shock she had experienced when she found out that Linda had been murdered the previous month had developed into post-traumatic stress disorder just in time for the next shock, when the police had arrested her daughter’s murderer and she had realized her own role in events. Now she was on open-ended sick leave, taking strong tranquillizers, seeing her psychiatrist pretty much every day, and under the constant supervision of her best friend.

She never wanted to set foot in the flat in Växjö again, but hadn’t felt up to considering what on earth she was going to do with it. It wouldn’t be particularly easy to sell, after all. It was now notorious as the ‘murder flat’ to anyone who read the papers, listened to the radio or watched television. The neighbours in the area where she was still registered were divided into two camps: those who tried to sneak a glance through the windows when they went past, and those who took detours to avoid the building altogether. She had already received one anonymous letter from a neighbour who was worried about the value of her own flat, and blaming her for it. But this was the very least of her worries.

It was more than three years since she had last spoken to Bengt Månsson. They hadn’t had any contact since then. Basically, she didn’t want to have any contact with him, and he hadn’t made any attempt to contact her. She had stopped seeing him as soon as she realized that they didn’t have much in common, and that he wasn’t particularly interested in her. Her version of the story was the same as his. How they had met, how long they had seen each other, where they had rendezvoused. Anna Sandberg hadn’t asked any intimate questions about their sexual relationship. She hadn’t even considered doing so.

Linda herself had told her mother that she was also seeing Bengt Månsson. A year or so later, during the difficult period in their lives when Linda had moved back to ‘the father she idolized’, Linda had thrown it at her during one of their recurring arguments. Not that they had slept together, which her mum had suspected anyway, but just that she had met him. The following day Linda had phoned to apologize. According to Linda, it was the sort of thing you said when you were angry, and not meant seriously. Lotta had tried to put it out of her mind. Now she bitterly regretted not going straight round and beating him to death.

‘It’s my fault it happened,’ she said, staring blankly ahead of her, nodding to underline what she had just said.

Anna Sandberg leaned over the table. Took a firm grip on her arms to get her attention.

‘Listen to me, Lotta,’ she said. ‘Are you listening?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ Sandberg said, still looking into her eyes. ‘What you just said is as stupid as if you had said it was Linda’s fault that he murdered her. Do you hear what I’m saying?’

‘Yes, I hear you. I hear you,’ she repeated as Anna tightened her grasp.

‘It was Bengt Månsson who murdered Linda. No one else, just him. It’s his fault. And only his. No one else’s. You and Linda are his victims.’

‘I hear you,’ Lotta Ericson repeated.

‘Good,’ Sandberg said. ‘Make sure you understand it as well. Because it’s true. That’s what happened, and that’s why it happened.’

After that Anna Sandberg and her colleague drove back to the police station in Växjö. Neither of them was feeling great. But compared to the woman they left behind, their lives were a dream.

‘I could kill that bastard,’ Sandberg said as she drove down into the garage.

‘Let me know if you need any help,’ her colleague said.

Knutsson and Thorén had continued the fruitless hunt for the journal and other similar details about the victim. They started by talking to her friends again, and got a bit of new information that way. Finally they went to see her father out in his manor house, and they managed pretty much as well as their colleagues had when they had spoken to him before on the same subject.

Henning Wallin had no knowledge of any journal. Naturally he had given the matter some thought — how could he avoid it when the police kept going on about it all the time — so the only thing he could offer were his own thoughts on the subject.

‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ Knutsson said.

In Henning Wallin’s opinion, a person’s journal was the most private thing in that person’s life. This was particularly true of young people, and even more so of young women. Like his daughter, for instance. If there had been a journal in her life, it would have been the place where she conducted the dialogue with herself that every sentient human being conducted with themselves about their own life, their feelings, their conscience. That would be where she would have confided her most private thoughts, and the only reason she would have done that was if she knew it would remain her private business.

‘Can you understand that?’ he asked, looking in turn at Knutsson and Thorén.

‘I understand,’ Knutsson said.

‘Yes,’ Thorén said.

‘Good,’ Wallin said. ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen.’

‘I wonder if he’s got rid of it, or just hidden it?’ Thorén said in the car on their way back to the police station on Oxtorget.

‘Either way, he’s read it,’ Knutsson said.

‘To make sure there was nothing that identified the perpetrator,’ Thorén said.

‘And when he didn’t find anything, he probably got rid of it. Or maybe burned it,’ Knutsson said.

‘I reckon he would have burned it,’ Thorén said. ‘He’s not the sort to just throw something away. But I’m still inclined to think he’s just hidden it somewhere safe.’

‘Why do you think that?’ Knutsson said.

‘Because he’s not the sort to get rid of things,’ Thorén said. ‘Although...’

‘...we can’t be sure,’ Knutsson concluded.