The Hand that Trembles

TWENTY-SEVEN

The forensic investigation of Tobias Frisk’s house was exhaustive, and only completed late Sunday afternoon.

When Ann Lindell read the preliminary report on Monday morning she was convinced that the eagle theory had turned out to be true, or at least led them to the unknown woman’s killer.

They had found a photograph of the woman who presumably was the victim, the owner of the foot. It had been slipped in between two books in the minimal bookcase in Frisk’s TV room, the room in which he had died. The picture showed a woman with Asian ancestry, between twenty and thirty years old. She smiled into the camera, a somewhat hesitant smile. She had long, dark hair tied back with what appeared to be a white bow. Her evident shyness made her seem almost seductive, though surely unconsciously so – Lindell was convinced of this. There was no pretence about her. Sammy Nilsson had studied the picture closely and declared that ‘confident women are rarely beautiful.’

They had samples of strands of hair and skin fragments recovered from Frisk’s house as well as – perhaps the most spectacular find – traces of blood on the chainsaw in the back shed.

There was much that suggested that the DNA they would uncover – according to Morgensson in Forensics it would take a couple of days – would match that of the foot. Lindell thought so, too.

She called Marksson on his mobile phone and told him what Forensics had come up with. He did not sound surprised, just tired. During Saturday and part of Sunday he had been struggling to accept the image of Tobias Frisk as a hatchet killer, but had capitulated under the increasing quantity of forensic evidence.

‘But we still can’t be one hundred per cent sure,’ he said with his familiar hoarseness. ‘I mean, until we have all the answers.’

‘Not completely sure, but confident,’ Lindell said, well aware that her colleague wanted to leave the door to an alternative explanation open as long as possible.

Perhaps it was in part because on Saturday afternoon he had gone to see Frisk’s mother, a woman in her seventies, in order to tell her in person that her son had died by his own hand. She had received the news silently and thereafter collapsed. Marksson had managed to catch her as she fell. Now she was hospitalised, dumb and sedated in a half-daze. Not a word had passed over her lips.

They decided that Marksson and a colleague would continue the rounds of questioning with the remaining inhabitants on the point. It was clear that the woman had lived with Frisk for a considerable time, shared his bed, and moved freely around the house. There were many traces. Someone must surely have heard or seen something. Bultudden was a relatively isolated outpost by the sea where the inhabitants knew each other’s ways and habitual movements very well. A new, unfamiliar element would surely have been noticed.

There was no reason for Lindell to remain engaged, at least not on site. She promised to forward all forensic information.

‘She’s unknown,’ Marksson said. ‘I think that’s shit.’

It was true. They had hair, blood, and skin, even a photograph, but no identity. They had a foot but no name.

She read through Morgansson’s report on the saw one more time. It was in good condition, purchased at Såma in Uppsala, as evidenced by a small sticker. The blade and chain were basically new, the teeth only slightly worn. The oil on the chain was of vegetable origin, probably originating in a twenty-litre container in the tractor garage. Analysis would show if it matched the traces of oil recovered from the foot. There had not been any traces of blood on the blade, but some under the hood where the chain wound around a cog. Lindell had no idea what the interior mechanism of a chainsaw looked like but tried to imagine it.

There was also sawdust inside the hood, most likely from a pine tree. Lindell had immediately been struck by the macabre fact that Frisk had presumably continued to use the saw after he had finished chopping up his girlfriend. Wouldn’t a natural reaction have been to want to get rid of the tool? Morgansson believed that after the deed Frisk had at least changed out the blade and chain. She would check if Frisk had been a customer at Såma recently.

In the southern end of the shed there were large quantities of firewood – some fifteen or twenty cubic metres, Marksson estimated. Frisk had needed his chainsaw.

In the northern end of the shed there was a cordwood saw with a hydrolic piston. Marksson had explained how it worked. Lindell had shiveringly imagined Frisk first cutting the woman in two before he completed his work with the chainsaw.

Tobias Frisk had cleared away all of her belongings. There was not a single feminine item of clothing, no make-up or forgotten tampon in the bathroom, no extra toothbrush, no notes, not even doodles in the pads of paper they found in the bookshelf, no newspapers or books that looked out of place. There were several old scorecards in a Yahtzee box but only two sets of initials: TF and LM. Frisk’s neighbour confirmed that they had had a habit of playing a game of Yahtzee from time to time, most recently a couple of years ago.

There was no computer in the house. Lasse Malm claimed there had never been one. Tobias Frisk hardly even watched television. The only program he tried to catch was the evening news at seven-thirty.

What did the man do all evening, Lindell wondered. He hardly watched any TV, he didn’t surf the Web, his entire book collection consisted of some twenty books, there were no magazines testifying to any special interest, and he did not appear to have had much of a social life. According to one source he visited his mother once a week, always on a Sunday. He had no siblings.

According to the neighbours along the Avenue, he seldom or rarely received any visitors. Lindell’s impression of an exceptionally isolated existence, dominated by routine, was growing ever more vivid.

‘He liked to fish’ and ‘Fishing was his thing’ were the two comments from his neighbours that indicated any interest. They had also uncovered a sizeable collection of fishing tools. Marksson had deemed the collection ‘above average for an amateur’.

They had a photograph. Either he had overlooked it in his sorting or kept it as a memento. One fact that Morgansson had noted in his report was that there was no camera in the house. Had the woman brought the photograph with her?

Frisk’s passport lay in a kitchen drawer along with some insurance documents, old bills, and the latest statement about how much in retirement funds he had managed to accumulate. The passport, which had been issued in April 2002, had two stamps. Frisk had entered Turkey on June 12th of the same year, and left a week later.

On the wall above the telephone in the kitchen, there was a list of telephone numbers. It consisted of thirteen names, of which five were work-related. All six neighbours were represented, as well as ‘Mum’ and ‘Mum’s property manager’. They called the latter. He was a property manager in the area where Frisk’s mother lived and he explained that Frisk had called him a couple of times to do small jobs in Frisk’s mother’s flat.

Thirteen names. Thirteen numbers. Nothing that so much as whispered a way to proceed. Lindell had never seen anything like it.

The wage stubs from Ahlén’s Bakery were neatly filed in a folder, where the past five tax returns appeared in order. He did not make a particularly good salary – barely 250,000 in 2004 – but on the other hand the house was his and very likely paid off. He did not appear to have lived a particularly extravagant life and could probably put away a couple of kronor every month.

Marksson had already called Frisk’s employer on Saturday and told him what happened to Frisk, but had not said anything about him being a suspected killer. Conny Ahlén was quite naturally shocked. The news was completely unexpected. According to Ahlén there was nothing in Frisk’s behaviour to account for suicide. Quite the opposite; Frisk had been in good spirits all autumn. He had not been sick a single day since his holiday in July. He had been given a raise in September, ‘for everyone who works five years.’ Ahlén and Frisk had gone out for a bite to eat together in connection with this event. Everything had been hunky-dory, at least on the surface.

When asked if Frisk had had any girlfriends, Conny Ahlén had at first given a vague answer that there may have been some lady friends in his life a couple of years ago, but then changed his mind and said that he could not recall Frisk ever mentioning women. ‘To be perfectly honest, we actually used to joke about Tobias. We called him “the island hermit”.’

All of the bakery employees had bank accounts at the Föreningssparbanken in Östhammar, and Marksson would check the dead man’s balance and potential debts as soon as the bank opened in the morning.

Lindell and Marksson were naturally focused on the unknown woman. All signs pointed to the fact that Frisk had blown his own brains out. Now what remained was trying to establish if he had also taken another person’s life. They would never be able to charge him, and Lindell felt almost relieved. He had meted out his own punishment and in this he had made the same assessment as Torsten Andersson: the ultimate punishment.

They had blood, hair, and skin, and a Stihl. That was all, and it would probably last them a long time.

Lindell took out a fresh composition book and wrote ‘Bultudden’ in large letters on the front.

At the top of the first page she wrote a question. It read: ‘How did they meet?’ The answer was not self-evident. Frisk had most likely not visited the area – south-east Asia – which they believed the woman was from. All neighbours shook their heads, all equally certain and not a little astonished at the question of whether Frisk had ever travelled to Thailand, Malaysia, or Bali. ‘When he was in Turkey, he was homesick every minute,’ Thomas B. Sunesson told Marksson.

Lindell tossed a couple of sentences onto the page, paused for a few seconds, staring unseeing at the wall before her where she had a map of Uppland, smiled to herself, and then wrote intensively, turning the page and continuing.

The telephone rang. She glanced at the display and ignored the signals.

After filling two entire sides with what many would regard as hieroglyphics, Lindell put her pen down and read through what she had written. Her conclusion was that if Tobias Frisk had not travelled abroad and met the woman there, the situation must have been reversed: She was already in Sweden when they met.

Two scenarios struck her as most plausible. Either she had come to this country in the company of another Swedish man or else she had worked in Sweden and thus encountered her future slayer.

For a murderer was what he was, she was convinced of it. No one parted willingly with a foot. She chose to disregard the fact that he would perhaps never have been found guilty in a court of law, that his defence could always have claimed she had left the house as well as Frisk and that someone had thereafter murdered and butchered her.

‘WORK’ was written in her notebook in all caps. The first thing she thought of was restaurants. She was familiar with a handful of Asian establishments in Uppsala alone – Japanese, Thai and Chinese. There were probably others. She fixed on Thai, reached for the telephone book and looked in the Yellow Pages under the heading ‘Restaurants’. Her eye immediately fell on the name ‘Sukothai’. She had eaten there once, with a journalist from TV4. A quick lunch, a couple of months ago.

At that moment it occurred to her that she had two chainsaws in her trunk. Instead of calling the restaurant, she called Marksson.

He picked up right away and Lindell told him about the power tools and that she would try to make time to drive out to Bultudden the following day.

Bosse Marksson was out on the point and he promised to leave a note for Sunesson and Malm to this effect in their respective mailboxes.

‘How is it going?’

‘No one has seen or heard a thing,’ Marksson answered. ‘And I don’t get it. How can a person live in a place like this without anyone finding out?’

‘She may have been locked away,’ Lindell said. ‘It’s happened before.’

‘But where?’

‘Maybe she was scared and stayed inside of her own accord.’

‘But when anyone visited Frisk?’

‘There is the upstairs,’ Lindell said.

Marksson pondered this.

‘Perhaps, but what a life.’

‘What a life,’ Lindell agreed.

She took out the snapshot of the woman one more time. It had been taken outside, in daylight. She was smiling at the photographer. Her dark hair was combed back and the bow peeped out like a white butterfly. She was wearing a short-sleeved yellow T-shirt and something was printed on the left side of it, at the bottom of the picture. They had discussed what this might be, perhaps a logo. The forensic photographer had made an enlargement of the area, but it told them nothing.

She took the photo, slid it into a plastic folder, and decided to drive around to the eateries she knew about.

First she headed to an Indian restaurant in Bäverns Gränd. It was lunchtime and the dining room was full. None of the staff members recognised the woman. Next stop was at Amazing Thai on Bredgränd. Same depressing result. Every staff member shook their heads. She was greeted with smiles at the two Chinese places on Kungsgatan, but no one who worked there could identify the face in the photo.

At Sukothai the lunch rush was over. A woman was gathering up plates and glasses in the dining area. She came over to Lindell with her tray piled high with dishes, smiling as if in recognition, but Lindell interpreted this more as an old habit and not because she truly recognised her.

‘Hungry?’ she asked.

Lindell explained that she was from the police.

‘Anything wrong?’

‘No, not at all,’ Lindell assured her, ‘I just need you to look at this picture.’

She held it up. The woman put down her tray, walked over to a table, and held the photo under the lamp.

‘From Thailand,’ she said at once.

‘So you’ve seen her before?’

‘No, but her blouse. It is yellow. This was taken on a Monday,’ the woman said, nodding firmly. ‘A Monday.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘The colour of the king, yellow. Everyone has a yellow top then. Because they like the king. Always on Monday. All Mondays. The king is good. Yellow is the colour of the king.’

The woman’s face broke into a huge smile and Lindell found herself smiling almost as widely. They studied the photograph together in silence. The woman grew serious.

‘Not a good thing,’ she said.

At first Lindell did not understand what she meant. ‘No, not a good thing,’ she said, and took the picture back. ‘What is this?’ She pointed to the logo on the shirt.

‘The mark of the king,’ the woman said quickly.

‘Do you have any idea where this picture was taken?’

The woman shook her head.

‘She maybe works at a restaurant. You see,’ she said, and pointed to something in the background, a detail partly concealed behind some trees, that Lindell had looked at closely but not understood what it was. It looked like the roof of an old-fashioned well.

‘For fish,’ the woman said. ‘The guests are looking at fish.’

Lindell took another look and understood. Restaurant, she thought. That sounded reasonable. A Swedish man comes in, eats, sees this woman and they start to talk, maybe see each other. He is there for a couple of weeks. Once he has left, she follows. Maybe he sends her money for the trip. He buys himself a girl, maybe with promises about work and riches, maybe love and family. Then the whole thing ends out on a windy point.

‘Thank you, you’ve been a pearl,’ she said, and spontaneously placed her hand on the woman’s arm.

She fired off another smile, showing gleaming white teeth.

‘Coffee?’

There was something in the woman’s face that made it impossible for Lindell to decline, even though she had already had her daily ration.

She sat down at a table with the photo in front of her. This was no gigantic breakthrough in trying to establish the butchered woman’s identity, but at least it was a step in the right direction. Now it seemed even more important to find out who she was.

Edvard had been in Thailand, it occurred to her. Had he bought himself love there? She did not think so, but the very thought of it was enough to make her dejected. All these charter-flying men who took liberties, they were nothing but slave traders. Ola Haver had visited Thailand and said how revolted he was by the fat, middle-aged tourists going around with trim Thai women young enough to be their daughters or granddaughters.

The proprietor came over to her table again, sat down, pulled the picture over and studied it thoroughly, as if imitating Lindell.

She looked up.

‘Advertise in the papers,’ she said. ‘On the coast, that is enough. Everyone can see the picture and they will say if they know her.’

She rattled off a number of place names. Lindell recognised at least two of the names: Phuket and Hua Hin. These she had heard of; she thought Haver had been in Phuket. She asked the woman to write down the names of the main tourist towns. It amounted to a good handful.

She left Sukothai with mixed feelings. The dimly lit interior had served as an escape for a few minutes, where she could reflect on the ongoing investigation in peace. In the stairs out to the alley, where her car was parked, it struck her that her role was not set in stone. She ought to drop Bultudden. With Fredriksson’s lucky guess of the eagle, she had played her part. Marksson and the other colleagues in Östhammar could take it from here. But something in the young woman’s gaze drove her on. Or else was it as simple as the fact that now, when Lindell could place her in a country, the need to know everything appeared even more necessary? No one wants to be anonymous, she thought, and no one wants to die anonymous.

She drove back to the police station. If she had not had coffee at the restaurant she would have gone past Savoy Café, in an attempt to stretch her time of solitary reflection.

At headquarters a whole group was drinking coffee together. It was almost like a morning meeting. Riis was holding forth. Ottosson held up a cup but Lindell shook her head.

‘Thailand,’ Haver said, as Riis finished.

Lindell wondered how in the world he knew, but tried not to show her surprise.

‘And you tell us this now?’

‘I didn’t think of it at first, but then I thought of it with that T-shirt.’

‘Because it’s yellow.’

Haver nodded.

‘Everybody was wearing one on a particular day, I don’t know why, but it looked like a chicken farm.’

‘Mondays,’ Lindell said. ‘Yellow is the colour of their king.’

Even Riis looked impressed.

‘Inner and outer investigating,’ said Sammy Nilsson, ‘and for once with the same result.’

Lindell started to tell them about her visit to Sukothai. Ottosson’s smile widened.

‘Good work,’ he said, and Lindell sensed that he enjoyed Haver’s somewhat sulky look. The two of them had not been getting along lately. Lindell did not know why, and did not really care.

‘I think we should put an ad in the Thai newspapers,’ she said. ‘We can get in touch with our colleagues there and they can place the photograph. It should be enough with five locations, places where many Swedes go.’

‘What the hell?’ Riis exclaimed.

Lindell turned to him.

‘Isn’t that a bit much?’ he went on. ‘She is dead.’

‘But who was she?’

‘What does that matter?’ Riis said. ‘Her killer is also dead. Nothing can be made undone. We have the motive and how it happened, we have the forensic evidence.’

‘What is the motive?’

‘Well, that she might have wanted to go home-’

‘Maybe,’ Lindell interrupted. ‘Maybe she wanted to return to Thailand, maybe she… No, Riis, that’s not good enough. And besides, her relatives must want to know what happened to her.’

‘For them she is most likely dead already,’ Riis said. ‘And as for the ad. She is probably from the north of Thailand. That’s where most of the whores-’

‘You’ve been there and checked it out?’

Ottosson coughed, his usual signal when he felt a discussion was going awry. Lindell shot him a quick glance but continued.

‘If it had been a Swedish girl we would have left no stone unturned in order to secure an identity, would we?’

She let her gaze wander over the assembled group in order to get their assent. No one said anything.

‘And think of the tsunami. We sure as hell made sure every scrap of bone could be connected to the right person. We sent people over there from Federal Homicide and many others besides. You remember that, don’t you? That time it was Swedes. I don’t think we told their relatives back in Sweden that we already knew they were dead and so it didn’t really matter. No, we DNA-tested every single scrap of tissue. So shape up, Riis!’

‘That was quite a salvo,’ Sammy Nilsson said.

‘You want us to send a foot to Thailand?’ Riis said sardonically.

‘And you remember the Thais? How they helped the tourists?’

When she finished the whole group was completely quiet. Without thinking about it she poured herself a cup of coffee, but remained standing. Her hand was trembling.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Ottosson said, and broke the silence, ‘but the question is, will it help to place the ad?’

‘Oh, you too!’ Lindell exclaimed, but regretted it immediately.

‘And we don’t actually know if she’s the woman in the picture. It could be anyone.’

Beatrice’s comment made Lindell slam her cup onto the table.

‘And?’ she said, and her growing animosity toward Beatrice almost made her kick her in the shins, but she controlled herself enough to just stare at her.

‘What do you mean, “and”?’ Beatrice answered calmly.

‘The photograph is the only thing we have, isn’t it? The only thing we have, and that’s what we’re going to work with, as long as it holds up.’

Ottosson took out a napkin, reached over, and wiped up the spilt liquid around Lindell’s cup.

Lindell and Ottosson had only clashed once before. That had been in the context of an investigation of a young Peruvian’s death. That had been eight years ago and Lindell was not proud of her reaction. She sensed that Ottosson agreed with Riis and Beatrice, otherwise he would immediately have jumped to her defence, and that made her almost more chagrined. She felt betrayed but knew that there had to be limits and that they had now reached that point. A continued exchange could only end badly. She was not afraid of the battle, nor of Riis, whom she regarded as a genuine pile of shit, or even to quarrel with Ottosson as she knew she could make amends, but in a strange kind of way she was afraid of Beatrice. To become even more angry and throw out accusations would only play to the advantage of her colleague who had the ability to always keep her cool.

‘Okay,’ she said, taking a sip of coffee and giving Ottosson a look of thanks for wiping up the spill. ‘I’ll suggest that Marksson in Östhammar takes the initiative.’

She felt Ottosson’s immediate relief.

‘Yes, then it will be up to him,’ he said in a tranquil tone.

Lindell turned, coffee cup in hand, and walked off. She felt the gazes of her colleagues burn in her back.

Back in her office she sank down in the visitor’s chair. She had not exactly expected a standing ovation for her discovery that the woman was from Thailand, but this general absence of interest was shocking to her. She could not understand their reaction. Riis – that was one thing. He was uninterested in most things, and Beatrice now had a habit of taking the opposite viewpoint – either quietly or with a tone of mild superiority – of anything Lindell suggested, but Haver and Ottosson? And Sammy Nilsson, the one who was closest to her when it came to a question of values? Incomprehensible. She re-examined the arguments she had used and found that they held up.

The reason for their indifference must stem from the fact that they viewed their prospects of success as minimal. They probably thought that she would get bogged down in the Thai woman’s fate and forget everything else. It had happened before – according to her colleagues – that she had lost her sense of perspective and ended up out of synch with the others in the unit.

She was aware of this undeniable weakness but in this particular case it was a no-brainer. All they had to do was get in touch with a police authority on the other side of the world and let them do the work.

She called Bosse Marksson again and told him she would drive out again the next day. They agreed to meet outside Torsten Andersson’s house at half past nine.