The killer's art

37

All of the officers from the NCP had gone back to Stockholm for the weekend, except for Martin Kihlgard. Sometimes Knutas wondered whether Kihlgard had a life outside of his police work. At any rate, he knew very little about his colleague. Kihlgard never talked about his family, and he didn’t wear a wedding ring, so Knutas assumed he wasn’t married. But he had no idea what his colleague did in his free time, except eat, of course. Even today, when Knutas dropped by the office temporarily assigned to Kihlgard, he found him munching on a baguette with salami and brie. ‘How are things going?’

‘Great. I’ve checked up on that mysterious code. I started by asking myself a very simple question.’

As usual, Kihlgard was talking with food in his mouth. Knutas waited for him to finish chewing.

‘You see, I wondered how the killer happened to know that Wallin was going to leave the house again.’

Knutas shrugged. ‘It’s possible that it was pure chance. Maybe he was tailing Wallin and waited outside his house until the lights were turned off.’

‘Or maybe he knew that Wallin was going out to meet somebody!’

Kihlgard sounded triumphant, as if he’d come up with something new and revolutionary.

‘Yes, well, we’ve already discussed that possibility at least a hundred times,’ said Knutas impatiently. He had no intention of standing there, wasting valuable time on such drivel.

‘The perp must have known that Wallin was planning to go out later in the evening to meet someone,’ Kihlgard went on, unperturbed. ‘He probably also knew that the person was staying at the Wisby Hotel.’

‘At the Wisby?’ Knutas raised his eyebrows. ‘How do you know that the woman he went out to meet was staying there?’

Kihlgard held out the code that Knutas had copied from the Post-it note earlier in the morning. ‘Why else would he be walking around with the hotel’s night-time code in his wallet?’

‘How did you figure that out?’

‘First I checked the bank to see if it might be his credit-card PIN number. Then I asked his wife if it was a code for the security alarm at their house. They have lots of valuable stuff, after all. But both were dead ends. So I started thinking about the fact that he was on his way to meet someone, possibly at a hotel. I checked to see which hotels had receptionists on duty at night. It so happens that after the female night manager at the Wisby was murdered, the hotel changed their system. If you arrive at the hotel after midnight and before six in the morning, you have to ring the bell and the receptionist will unlock the door for you. So anybody who doesn’t belong there can’t just come in. But if a hotel guest doesn’t want to call the receptionist, possibly because he or she wants to smuggle someone up to their room…’ Kihlgard winked at Knutas with a you-know-what-I-mean look on his face, ‘… all of the guests are given a code they can use instead of ringing the bell. I checked the hotel code, and it turned out to be a match. For security reasons, they change the number every day, and this was the code that was valid between Saturday the nineteenth and Sunday the twentieth of February.’

Knutas whistled. ‘Not bad,’ he said with admiration. ‘Very impressive. So now we’ve narrowed it down to the Wisby Hotel. There can’t be many guests to choose from. Brilliant, Martin.’

He gave his colleague a friendly pat on the back.

‘Thank you.’

They were interrupted by Karin Jacobsson, who poked her head in the door. ‘Lunch, anybody?’

Kihlgard’s face lit up. ‘That sounds like a splendid idea,’ he said, stuffing the last bit of baguette into his mouth. ‘There’s just one more thing. I compared the list of hotel guests on the night in question to the list of the people invited to the gallery opening.’ ‘Yes?’

‘Not a single woman is on both lists. All of the individuals who went to the opening and also stayed at the hotel are men.’