Linda, As in the Linda Murder

9

‘Okay, let’s get going,’ Bäckström said. He leaned forward over the head of the long table where he was sitting, resting on his elbows and jutting out his chin almost as far as if he were head of the entire National Crime Unit.

‘I thought we could start by outlining the current position,’ he went on. ‘What we know about the victim, and what she got up to. Everything we know so far.’

Their murder victim was called Linda Wallin. She was twenty years old and would have been celebrating her twenty-first birthday exactly one week after she was murdered. That autumn she had been due to start the third term of the police course in Växjö. She was 172 centimetres tall and weighed 52 kilos. Natural blonde, short hair, blue eyes. An attractive girl, if you happened to like the skinny type that does a lot of exercise, Bäckström thought as he looked at a photograph of her. It was an enlarged version of the picture on her ID card from police college, and showed an openly smiling Linda looking straight into the camera, absorbed in the moment and full of expectation about the life ahead of her. Like this summer, for instance, when she had been working as a civilian employee for the police in Växjö, where she seemed to spend most of her time behind the reception desk, a job she had handled with great efficiency. Not just good to look at, but good at her job, competent and appreciated by visitors and colleagues alike.

She was described by people who knew her as talented, charming, sociable, clever and keen on sport. Possibly not too surprising considering the circumstances, but for once there was documentary evidence to back it up. Top grades from school and police college in both practical and academic subjects. She was also the fastest female student in her year round the assault course, and the second-best shot in her school’s female football team. And she still appeared to have been socially and politically active, in the approved way. At school she had written a project on Crime, racism and xenophobia. Not your typical female murder victim, but probably the sort of girl who could take home anyone she liked, and it was probably no more complicated than that, Bäckström thought.

Like all children, Linda had two parents, and, like many children in her generation, those parents were divorced. In her case, for the past ten years. Linda was the only child of the marriage, and the parents had shared custody after the divorce. Just before they split up, the family had spent a couple of years living in the USA, because her father had started his own business in New York. When her parents’ relationship broke down, her mother had brought Linda back to Sweden with her.

The mother was forty-five years old and had spent the past fifteen years working as a teacher in a secondary school in Växjö. The father was twenty years older, a successful businessman who had started to take things a bit easier now. He had returned to his roots in Småland a few years after Linda and her mother, and now lived in a large manor house by Lake Rottnen, a short distance south-east of Växjö.

He had two sons from a previous marriage, approximately twice the age of the daughter he had just lost. According to their information, Linda had very little contact with her two older half-brothers. But she got on well with both parents even though the parents themselves didn’t appear to have met each other since the divorce. Sounds like the usual marital mess, Bäckström thought. It was high time for a question.

‘So she lived with her mother in the flat where she was murdered?’ he asked.

‘She seems to have lived with both parents. But recently mostly with her mother,’ replied the female officer from Växjö Police who was putting together the profile of the victim.

‘So what was she doing before she met her tragic fate?’ Bäckström said, sounding both friendly and interested. That’s what they should look like if they have to be in the police, he thought. Dyed blonde hair, a nicely pulled out top drawer, happy and friendly and in good shape for thirty. The only problem was that she was doubtless seeing some idiot country sheriff who might even be in that very room. Approach with extreme caution.

‘You’ve asked the right person,’ the policewoman said with a smile. ‘We were actually in the same place, the victim and I. We were at Grace, the nightclub at the Town Hotel, because there was a big club night there on Thursday evening. But Linda left before I did. I was there until they closed. You have to make the most of it when your husband and kids are safely out of the way in the country,’ she clarified, apparently not feeling the slightest bit embarrassed. Nor did anyone else either, judging by the suppressed smiles that suddenly spread through the team.

‘Really?’ Bäckström said, still sounding just as friendly and interested. Maybe this town is a bit desperate after all, he thought. Especially if he was going to make a move on someone in his own team. Like, for instance, officer Anna Sandberg, 33, of the Växjö Police. That was evidently her name, according to the list of team members he had on the table in front of him.

‘We’re making progress,’ Sandberg declared. ‘Gyllene Tider were playing on Öland yesterday, so there were considerably more people in town than usual, and I certainly wasn’t the only member of the force, or future member, at Grace... well... I think we’re starting to get a grip on who was there. If you’d like me to run through it briefly?’ She glanced questioningly at Bäckström, and was rewarded with a friendly and interested nod.

Go ahead, my dear, he thought. We can deal with the details when we’re on our own.

On Thursday, the day before she was murdered, Linda had spent the day working in reception in the police station. She had left the building with a friend who was also employed in a civilian capacity by the police just after five o’clock in the afternoon. They had spent some time looking in a couple of shops, then at half past six they went into a pizza restaurant in the centre of town, where they each had pizza, salad and mineral water. That was also where they decided to meet later that evening at the Town Hotel.

When they had finished their meal they split up and Linda walked home. On the way she made three phone calls on her mobile. The first of these, just after half past seven, was to her mother, who was at her summer cottage south of Växjö. A short, chatty conversation during which she told her mother about her plans for the evening.

The second and third calls were to a female friend and classmate from police college, to see if she ‘wanted to come along to the club’. The classmate asked for time to think about it, but when Linda called back ten minutes later and said that she had just got home and was about to have a shower — in case her friend called and wondered why she wasn’t answering — the friend had decided to go along. At quarter past eleven they had met outside the Town Hotel on the central square and gone into the nightclub together.

What she was doing between quarter to eight and just before eleven o’clock that evening was as yet unclear, but it seemed likely that she had remained in the flat the whole time. She hadn’t made or received any calls on her mobile in that time. But she did call her father just before nine o’clock on the landline in the flat, and that conversation lasted about quarter of an hour. According to her father they had talked about everyday matters, things that had happened at work, and his daughter’s plans for the rest of the evening. And from what Linda told her friends in the bar later that night, she had watched a music programme on MTV that had started at half past nine, and had then changed channel to watch the ten o’clock news on TV4.

Approximately an hour later the neighbour saw her as she left the house on foot and went off down Pär Lagerkvists väg, heading south towards the town centre. This information was reinforced by the fact that she withdrew five hundred kronor at fourteen minutes past eleven from the cashpoint outside the SE-Bank on the corner of the main square and Storgatan, just fifty metres from the entrance to the Town Hotel nightclub.

‘I think it all fits together fairly well,’ Sandberg finished. ‘Any girl knows it takes a while to get ready if you’re going out partying. That’s probably all she was doing when she wasn’t talking to her dad or watching television or just taking it easy. She was simply getting ready for a night out,’ she concluded, and suddenly looked rather down in the mouth.

‘What happened inside the club?’ Bäckström asked. Women are all the bloody same. If things carry on like this, that psychologist bitch is going to have her hands full.

What had happened there wasn’t yet entirely clear either, for quite natural reasons. It was crowded, as usual in a nightclub, and there were a lot of people that they hadn’t yet had time to question. The evening was also more chaotic than usual because they had hired the services of some local celebrities who had appeared in various reality shows on television and now made a living from public appearances in nightclubs.

Nothing dramatic or even particularly interesting seemed to have occurred, in light of what happened to Linda a few hours later. She had drifted about like most of the others, the way people do in clubs. She sat down with two different groups of people. She chatted and danced and seemed to be in good spirits. She hadn’t argued or even disagreed with anyone, and no one had tried it on with her. She hadn’t been particularly drunk either. She drank one beer, possibly a raspberry shot, and after that a couple of glasses of wine at most, which a female colleague from the police station had bought for her.

Some time between half past two and three in the morning she had found her classmate from police college and told her that she was thinking of going home and getting some sleep. The bouncer on the door had seen her when she left — ‘just before three if you ask me’ — and according to him she was both sober and alone, and neither happy nor sad, when he saw her head off diagonally across the square, past the district governor’s residence, towards her home on Pär Lagerkvists väg.

In the worst-case scenario, that would be where she disappeared into the mist for the police. No witnesses had seen her walk the kilometre or so between the club and her home. Or at least none that had contacted them. No calls to or from her mobile. And a quiet night in the town, and especially on the streets that Linda had probably walked down.

‘Okay,’ Bäckström said, looking round his investigating team. ‘This bit’s pretty damn important, as I’m sure you realize. I want to know in detail what happened inside that club. Every bastard who set foot in there needs to be questioned, all the staff, and not least those reality TV people. Especially them. The same thing with her walk home. No witnesses have contacted us, then?’ He looked enquiringly at Police Constable Sandberg, who looked almost guilty as she shook her head.

‘Surveillance cameras,’ he said emphatically. ‘You mentioned a cash-point. There must be some sort of camera there?’ Fucking amateurs, he thought.

‘We’ve pulled in the recording. I’m afraid we haven’t had time to look at it yet. We simply haven’t had a chance.’

‘What other cameras are there on her route home?’ Bäckström rocked on his elbows and looked fierce.

‘We’re looking into that,’ Sandberg said. ‘I’ve thought about it, but we haven’t had a moment to check it out yet.’

‘Well, we’ll just have to make that a priority,’ Bäckström countered. ‘Before the bloke in the corner shop and anyone else thinking along the same lines realizes that he forgot to get permission to set up his little camera and decides to hide it away and delete the recordings from Friday night.’

‘I see what you mean,’ Sandberg said.

‘Excellent,’ Bäckström said. ‘Then it’s high time we started knocking on doors along the route between the club and her home. Get the officers who’ve been going door-to-door around where she lives to move on to that.’

She contented herself with a mere nod this time and made a note in her little book.

Shiiit, Bäckström thought, glancing at his watch. Into the third hour already. His stomach had started to rumble from lack of food and they hadn’t even got to the crime scene yet. And if he wasn’t going to end up having to spend all day listening to this, he’d just have to take over, speed up the whole process and make sure his investigative team did a decent job.

‘Okay,’ he said, nodding to the forensics expert, Enoksson, known as Enok, a superintendent and head of the unit. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Enoksson. The crime scene is the flat where she lived with her mother, and it happened some time in the early hours of Friday morning, between approximately three o’clock and five o’clock. And in your opinion and that of your colleagues, she was strangled and raped, and we’re probably talking about a single perpetrator.’

‘I’m not about to correct you,’ Enoksson said, looking like he could do with both a bit of food and some sleep. ‘That’s exactly what we think. And we’re also pretty sure that he escaped through the window. We’ve found traces of blood and skin on the windowsill.’

‘So why didn’t he just leave through the door?’ Bäckström wondered.

‘If what the neighbour who found her says is true, it was locked from the inside. It’s the sort of lock that doesn’t click into place if you just close the door from the outside. My colleagues and I are wondering if he didn’t make his escape when the newspaper was pushed through the letterbox. We think he got the impression that someone was on their way into the flat, and because the bedroom was furthest away from the door he jumped out of that window.’

‘So when was the paper delivered?’ Long-winded bastard, Bäckström thought.

‘Just after five in the morning, and that seems fairly definite.’ Enoksson nodded to underline what he’d just said.

‘Do we know anything more?’

‘The coded lock on the main door to the building was deactivated. It had been playing up, and the bloke delivering the papers had complained. So the building’s been unlocked since Wednesday. The locksmiths promised to fix it on Thursday but evidently didn’t get round to it.’ Enoksson sighed and shrugged his shoulders.

‘What about the door to the flat, Enoksson? Anything about that?’

‘No marks to indicate a break-in,’ the forensics expert said. ‘And no other signs of a struggle out in the hall. So either she let him in of her own volition or she forgot to lock the door behind her when she came home.’

‘Or he put a knife to her throat when she walked in the front door and forced her to open the door to the flat. Or he took her keys,’ Bäckström countered. ‘Remember the door was locked when he left.’

‘Can’t be ruled out,’ Enoksson said. ‘Definitely not. We’ll need a couple more days inside the flat to get a clearer picture. The analysis from the National Forensics Lab will take a while, as usual, but the medical officer promised to let us know his preliminary findings by tomorrow at the latest, so presumably he’s already got going on the post-mortem.’

‘So there’s a bit of good news after all,’ Bäckström said, suddenly quite jovial. You have to mix things up, he thought. A lot of stick, with the occasional bit of carrot.

‘We’ve got blood, semen and probably his fingerprints as well, so it’s far from desperate,’ Enoksson said.

‘But you’d rather wait with the details?’ Bäckström was still smiling.

‘Yes, we’d rather do that, me and my colleagues in forensics.’ He nodded as if to confirm that there was a right time for everything, and Bäckström joined in. ‘I might be able to give you a couple of pointers on the way, though.’

‘I’m listening,’ Bäckström said. But ideally not all day, he thought. Because by now there was a full-scale rebellion going on beneath his belt.

‘To start with, I think she let him in of her own accord. Or else she met him en route and took him home with her. Or had arranged to meet him earlier. The way things look inside the flat, things seem to have started off fairly amicably, at least.’

‘Really?’ Bäckström said slowly. The sort of person who could imagine letting just anyone in, he thought.

‘And secondly, and with all due respect for what our colleague Anna said a while back, I don’t think she’s been living there to any great extent. I’ve read the interview with her mother and I appreciate that that’s what she’s saying.’

‘Why don’t you believe it, then?’ Bäckström asked.

‘She was sleeping in her mother’s bed,’ Enoksson replied. ‘And that’s almost certainly where he killed her. The only bed in the flat. Of course, she might have been sleeping on the sofa out in the living room, it’s big enough, but there’s nothing to suggest that she’d been doing so for any length of time, if I can put it like that.’

‘But the mother’s a teacher,’ officer Sandberg said, evidently feeling picked upon. ‘She’s had almost a month off now, and has probably spent most of that time in the country. I mean... what with this weather we’ve been having.’

Why don’t they ever give up? Bäckström thought. They’ve always got to argue. Always.

‘I hear what you’re saying, Anna,’ Enoksson said. ‘It just doesn’t look like she was planning on moving in for good, at any rate. The only thing we’ve found in the flat that seems to belong to Linda is a sponge-bag in the bathroom, containing the usual things, and one of those fabric sports bags on the top shelf in a wardrobe in what looks like her mum’s workroom. It contains a clean change of underwear and a blouse. So I get the impression that she was staying there while her mum was away, or when she wanted to stay in town so she could go out, for instance. Like on Thursday, when she went to the nightclub.’

‘We’ll have to dig deeper,’ Bäckström concluded, smiling amiably. ‘Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I at least need a bite to eat.’