Unseen

SATURDAY, JUNE 16

Stefan Lindh reported his wife missing on Saturday morning. He was awakened at eight o’clock when their youngest child came into the bedroom. Frida’s side of the bed was empty. His first thought was that she must be in the bathroom, but it didn’t take him long to discover that his wife wasn’t in the house at all. He called her girlfriends, but she wasn’t with any of them. Then he tried the hospital and the police, with no results. The officer on duty told him to wait a few more hours.

When Frida hadn’t come back by lunchtime, he put the kids in the car and drove down to the Monk’s Cellar. He drove the same route that he thought Frida would have taken on her bike. By two o’clock in the afternoon, he couldn’t wait any longer; he called the police, sick with worry. Knutas was informed, and, considering that a woman had been murdered less than two weeks ago, he decided to call a meeting of the investigative team. While he waited for the others, he phoned the worried husband, who was desperate and begged the police for help. His wife had never disappeared like this before.

“Take it easy,” murmured Knutas. “We’re going to have a short meeting here at headquarters in a moment, and right after that either I or one of my colleagues will come over to see you. Shall we say in an hour?”

He hung up the phone. The others came in, one by one, and sat down around his little table: Karin Jacobsson, Thomas Wittberg, and Lars Norrby.

“So what we have is a missing woman,” Knutas began. “Her name is Frida Lindh, thirty-four years old, married and the mother of three. The family lives in Sodervarn, on Apelgatan, to be more precise. She disappeared last night after spending the evening in town with three women friends. They went to the Monk to have dinner and then sat in one of the bars at the inn and drank beer until closing time. According to what her friends told the husband, they said goodbye to each other outside the place. By that time it was a little past 1:00 A.M. Frida is the only one of them who lives south of downtown, so she left the group and headed off alone to bicycle home. No one has seen her since. This is the information we have from her husband. Because Frida Lindh appears to be a conscientious mother to her young children, it doesn’t seem right to me that she’s missing. Her husband says that she has never disappeared like this before.”

“Couldn’t she have just gone home with someone?” asked Norrby with a smirk. “Someone who’s more exciting than her husband?”

“Of course that’s a possibility, but then she should have come back home by now, don’t you think? It’s almost four thirty, and the woman has three small children, for God’s sake.”

“You would think so, although in this job you never stop being surprised,” said Norrby.

“You don’t think that you’re overreacting about this?” asked Wittberg, turning to Knutas. “Isn’t it a little melodramatic to start sounding all the alarms just because a woman who went out drinking doesn’t come straight home?”

Thomas ran one hand through his thick, dark, curly hair and then rubbed it along the stubble that covered his chin and cheeks. In front of him he had placed a bottle of Coca-Cola that was half empty.

“Are you grumpy just because you’re hungover? Is that it?” Karin teased him, poking him in the ribs.

“Not at all,” said Thomas.

Knutas gave him an annoyed look. “Considering that we recently had the homicide of a woman on our hands, I think we need to give this our immediate attention. We’ll start by finding out what her girlfriends have to say. Karin, could you talk to the woman who lives on Bogegatan? The other two live on Tjelvarvagen. You can deal with them,” he said, turning to Wittberg and Norrby. “I’ll go see the husband. Then we’ll meet back here. Shall we say around eight o’clock?”

The chairs scraped the floor as they all got up from the table. Norrby and Wittberg muttered to each other. “Hell, this is stupid. Bringing us in on a weekend for something like this. A woman who’s cheating on her husband.” They both shook their heads and sighed.

Knutas pretended not to notice. He was standing up to his waist in the cold water. It was numbingly cold; he was enjoying it. It reminded him of his childhood when he would go swimming with his father and sister near their summer cottage. The first plunge into the sea water that hadn’t yet warmed up. How they laughed and shrieked. It was one of the few happy childhood memories he had. His mother, of course, didn’t come along. She never went swimming. She was always busy with something else. Washing dishes, doing the laundry, cooking, making the beds, tidying up. He remembered wondering why all that always took such a long time. There were only four of them in the family, and his father did a lot of the chores at home, too. But somehow she always seemed to have her hands full. She never had any time to spend with them. To play. If she had any free time, she would do crossword puzzles. Always those damn crosswords. Occasionally he would try to help her. Sit down next to her and give her suggestions for solving the puzzle. Then she would snap that he was ruining all the fun of it. She didn’t want anyone to help. And he was pushed away. As usual. He looked out across the sea. It was gray and motionless. Exactly like the sky. He had an almost spiritual feeling. Everything was calm. As if time and space had stopped. And here he was. By now he was starting to get used to the coldness of the water. He gathered his courage and dove in. Afterward he sat naked on the lid of the old kitchen bench and spent a long time drying himself off. He felt cleansed. The space in the seat underneath him had been refilled. He exhaled everything that had weighed on him all these years. It seemed as if the more blood he spilled, the more purified he felt.

Sodervarn is located about three-quarters of a mile from the ring wall. That part of town consists mostly of single-family homes from the early twentieth century, but here and there are a few recently built houses. The Lindh family lived in one of them. It was a one-story structure with a white-brick facade, a neat driveway, and an American-style mailbox. On the street several little boys were playing with field hockey sticks. They were taking turns shooting the ball toward a goal that had been set up on the sidewalk. Knutas parked his old Mercedes outside the white-painted wooden fence. He noticed little decals in the windows indicating that the house had an alarm system installed by one of the largest security companies. That was quite unusual on Gotland.

He pushed the doorbell and heard it ring inside the house.

Stefan Lindh opened the door almost at once. His eyes were red rimmed and unhappy.

“Where could she be? Have you heard anything?” He asked the questions even before saying hello.

“I think the first thing we should do is sit down and have a talk,” said Knutas, and he walked right into the living room and sat down on the sofa with the floral upholstery without taking off either his shoes or his jacket. He pulled out his notebook.

“When did you discover that Frida hadn’t come home?”

“This morning around eight o’clock when Svante woke me up. He’s our two-year-old.”

He sat down on a wicker chair next to the superintendent.

“I took the kids over to my parents’ house. I didn’t want them to be here at home while I’m so worried. We have two more, a girl who’s five and a boy who’s four.”

“What did you do when you discovered that Frida wasn’t in the house?”

“I tried calling her cell phone but didn’t get an answer. Then I called around to her girlfriends. No one knew anything. So I alerted the police. A little later I drove over to the Monk’s Cellar, taking the same route that she should have taken home, but I didn’t see anything.”

“Have you talked to her parents or other family members?”

“She’s from Stockholm. Her parents and her brothers and sister all live there, but we hardly ever hear from them. They don’t have much contact with each other. Frida and her parents, I mean. That’s why I haven’t talked to them. I didn’t call her sister because I didn’t want to upset her for no reason.”

“Where do your parents live?”

“They live in Slite, on the east side of the island. They came over to pick up the children about an hour ago.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Just about a year. We used to live in Stockholm. Last summer we moved to the island. I was born and raised here, and all of my family is here on Gotland.”

“How was Frida when she left home yesterday? I mean, what was her mood like?”

“Same as always. Cheerful, looking forward to the evening. She had really spiffed herself up. She’s so happy about making friends with those women. Well, I am, too, of course. It wasn’t easy for her to move here in the beginning.”

“I understand. You have to excuse me for asking, but how are things between you and Frida? What’s your relationship like, I mean?”

Stefan Lindh squirmed a bit. He had one leg crossed over the other. Now he switched legs and blushed slightly.

“Um, well, it’s fine. Of course there’s a lot of work to do. The three kids take up almost all our time. There isn’t much time left over for anything else. Things are about the same for us as for most people, I suppose. No real problems, but we’re not exactly floating on cloud nine, either.”

“Have you had a fight or any kind of crisis recently?”

“No, just the opposite. I think things have been unusually good between us lately. It was tough when we first moved here, but now Frida seems to be thriving. The kids are doing well. They think the daycare center is fun.”

“Has anything out of the ordinary happened lately? Have there been any strange phone conversations, or has your wife met anyone new that she’s told you about? Maybe at work?”

“I don’t think so,” Lindh replied hesitantly, with a frown. “Not that I can recall offhand.”

“What kind of work does she do?”

“She’s a hairdresser. She works at the salon across from the Obs supermarket at Ostercentrum.”

“So she must meet lots of different people. Has she mentioned any particular customer lately? Anyone special?”

“No. Of course she talks about plenty of crazy customers, but there hasn’t been anyone in particular lately.”

“I noticed that you have a security system on your house. Why is that?”

“Frida wanted to have it installed when we moved in. She’s afraid of the dark and doesn’t feel safe without it. I travel quite a lot for my job, and sometimes I’m gone for several days at a time. Things are much better now that we have the security alarm.”

Knutas handed Stefan Lindh his card. “If Frida comes home or contacts you, call me on my direct line. You can also reach me on my cell phone. It’s always on.”

“What are you going to do now?” asked Lindh.

“We’ll start looking,” replied Knutas, and stood up.

Knutas took the direct route back to headquarters. The others gradually came in, one after the other. It was past 9:00 p.m. by the time everyone had gathered in Knutas’s office. They had all heard approximately the same story: that Frida had met a man and had talked to him for over an hour. None of the girlfriends had ever seen him before. They described him as tall and good-looking, with thick medium-blond hair, about thirty-five. One of the women noticed that he hadn’t shaved that day. Frida and the stranger had flirted quite openly, and for a while he had held her hand.

The girlfriends thought she was out of her mind. Married and the mother of three. What would people say? Visby was a small town, and they had seen plenty of familiar faces at the inn.

The others had walked home together because they lived in the same direction, but Frida had bicycled off alone. Even though Frida liked to flirt, they didn’t think she would go home with some strange man. They all agreed about that.

Knutas’s cell phone rang. During the conversation, which for Knutas’s part consisted of solemn grunts and uhhuhs, the superintendent’s face took on a grayish hue.

Everyone’s eyes were fixed on Knutas when he hung up. The silence in the room was palpable.

“A woman was found dead in the cemetery,” he said grimly, and reached for his jacket. “All indications point to murder.”

The young man who found the body had been taking his dog for a walk without a leash. When they passed the churchyard, the dog dashed into the cemetery, heading straight for some shrubbery.

When the investigative team arrived, a cluster of people had already gathered at the cemetery. Several police officers were in the process of putting up crime scene tape to prevent the curiosity seekers from coming closer.

One of the officers led the group to the murder scene. The woman’s body had been hidden under branches that were arranged to make it seem natural. Knutas looked with horror at the slender figure on the ground. She was naked, lying on her back. Her throat was covered with blood that had run down over her breasts. There were gashes, some several inches long, on her stomach, her thighs, and one of her shoulders. Her arms were at her sides, splotched with dirt. Scratch marks were clearly visible on her legs. Her face was horribly pale. She looked like a wax doll, Knutas thought. As if she had been emptied of blood. Her skin was a yellowish white with no luster at all, her eyes wide open and dull. When Knutas leaned down to look at her head, an ice-cold band began pressing into his forehead. He shut his eyes, then opened them again. A scrap of lacy black fabric was sticking out of the victim’s mouth.

“Do you see it?” he asked Jacobsson.

“Yes, I see it.” His colleague was holding one hand over her mouth.

Sohlman appeared behind them. “The ME is on his way. He happened to be in Visby for the weekend. Sometimes we’re in luck. We haven’t yet confirmed the identity of the victim. She has no purse, no wallet, or any kind of ID, but it’s most likely Frida Lindh. The age and description match, and a woman’s bicycle was found in some bushes across the road.”

“This is too awful,” said Knutas. “Just a few hundred yards from home.”

The huge corridor in TV headquarters in the Gardet district of Stockholm was packed with people. It was the evening of Swedish TV’s annual summer party, and all the employees in Stockholm were invited. More than fifteen hundred guests had arrived, mingling in the enormous studios lining the corridor. They were normally used for taping entertainment shows and soap operas, but now they had been turned over to the dancing and partying. The corridor itself had been transformed into a gigantic cocktail lounge in which several different types of bars had been set up.

Over there the confident meteorologist was snickering with the most ruthless of the reporters. An anchorman was swaggering around with a bleary gaze, as if searching incessantly for a smooth-skinned, curvaceous intern to sink his teeth into. The cool crowd from the entertainment division was cavorting around on the dance floor, sticking close together and apparently oblivious to the rest of the people around them.

Johan and Peter were standing with their colleagues from Regional News at one of the bars, drinking Mexican screwdrivers: tequila with sparkling lemonade, lime juice, fresh squeezed limes and lemons, and plenty of ice.

Johan took a big gulp of his cold drink. He’d been busting his butt the past few days, working on the report about the gangster war in Stockholm. It had taken longer than he anticipated, and he’d put in many late nights all week long. He had finished the report fifteen minutes before it was broadcast.

The assignment had worn him out, so it was great to relax now and wash away all the hard work of the past week. Even though there had been a lot for him to do, he had still thought about Emma-and cursed himself for doing so. He had no right to approach her and maybe screw up her life, but she had provoked a sense of agitation inside him that wouldn’t go away.

Now that the case of the murdered woman had pretty much been solved, there wouldn’t be any more trips to Gotland for him. At least not in the near future. It would be just as well to forget about her. That’s what he had thought a hundred times over the past week. He knew her phone number by heart and several times had been on the verge of calling, but he stopped himself at the last second. He knew what a mistake that would be. The odds couldn’t be worse.

He took another drink and let his gaze slide over the sea of partygoers. A short distance away, he caught sight of Madeleine Haga. She was talking to several reporters from the central desk. Petite, dark, and sweet, wearing black jeans and a glittery lavender top. He decided to go over to her.

“Hi, how’s it going?” he asked.

“Good.” She smiled up at him. “Just a little tired. I’ve been editing all day long. I’m in the middle of a big job. How about you?”

“I’m fine. Want to dance?”

Ever since Madeleine started as a reporter on the central desk, he’d been slightly interested in her. She was attractive, in a tough sort of way, with short hair and big brown eyes. It annoyed him that they always seemed to miss each other. They often worked at different hours of the day, and when they finally did run into each other, she always seemed to be busy. Sometimes she didn’t even have time to say hello.

At the moment he was enjoying having her right in front of him. She danced rhythmically to the music, her eyes half closed, swaying her hips. Now and then she would give him a long look. They decided to get a beer and sit down somewhere. Somewhere secluded, Johan hoped.

As he picked up two cold bottles of beer from the bar, his cell phone rang. He hesitated about answering it but did anyway. He recognized the raspy voice at once.

“They’ve found another dead woman on Gotland. In the cemetery in Visby. She was murdered.”

“When?” he asked, casting a glance at Madeleine. She was standing with her back to him, already talking to someone else.

“This evening, around nine,” rasped his source. “All I know is that she was found murdered and that she couldn’t have been there long. And get this: She had a pair of panties in her mouth, too.”

“Are you positive?”

“One hundred percent. The police are already talking about a serial killer.”

“Do you know how she was murdered?”

“No, but I would guess it’s similar to the murder of the broad in Frojel.”

“Okay. Thanks a lot,” said Johan.

As far as he was concerned, the party was over.

Emma sat at the kitchen table, slurping up the kefir. Slurping was the word. She lifted the spoon up to her mouth, opened it automatically, tipped in the kefir, and then dropped the spoon down in her bowl. Tiny little specks of kefir splashed onto the round kitchen table. Up to her mouth and down to the bowl, up and down. Over and over again, mechanically, and always at the same pace. She stared down at the bowl without seeing a thing. The children were asleep. Olle had gone out to have a beer with some of his buddies. He was tired of her and the way she kept shunning him. That’s what he had told her earlier in the day. It was Saturday evening, and she had no desire to turn on the TV.

Outside a west wind was blowing. She didn’t notice the slender birch trees outside the window bending and swaying.

Right now she wasn’t noticing anything. For the past week she had gone around wrapped up in her own world. She felt so remote. She held the children, hugged them and kissed them, without really feeling anything at all. She looked at their happy faces and touched their soft arms. She cooked, cleaned up, wiped their noses, packed their book bags, made the beds, folded the laundry, read stories, and kissed them goodnight, but she wasn’t really paying attention. She wasn’t there.

She was even less present with Olle. He had tried to talk to her, comfort her, hug her. Everything he said sounded stupid and meaningless and had no effect on her. He had even tried to make love to her. She felt offended and pushed him away. Practically light-years away. How could she be interested in sex right now?

She thought about Helena all the time. The things they had done together. Things Helena used to say. The way she tossed back her hair. Her way of slurping her coffee. How they had grown apart after Helena moved away from the island, in spite of the fact that they kept in contact. She didn’t know as much about Helena as she used to. What did her friend think about? What did she feel? How was her relationship with Per? How was it really? In spite of all her speculating, Emma was convinced that he was innocent.

They had argued about that, too, she and Olle. He thought the fingerprints were conclusive evidence, especially considering the fight at the party. The guy was a loose cannon, Olle had snorted, giving her a look of pity when she claimed that Per could never have done anything like that.

As if she didn’t have enough problems, that journalist kept haunting her thoughts. Johan.

Emma couldn’t understand what had come over her at the cafe. Those eyes. Lethal. Those hands. Dry and warm. He had kissed her. It was just a fleeting kiss, but that was enough to make her whole body tingle. A feeling from the past. Of what might have been.

She had experienced this before. Until she met Olle, she had gone through a large number of boyfriends. She was always the one who got bored. As soon as things started getting serious and she felt herself growing dependent, she would break up with the guy.

Olle had been a friend, one of the old gang. At first, when he made a few clumsy attempts to ask her out, she was totally uninterested, but then they started dating, and before she knew it, a whole year had passed. It felt comfortable and relaxing to be with him. Just the two of them.

She had grown tired of falling in love. Either waiting by the phone or making the call herself with her heart pounding, meeting at cozy little restaurants, going to bed together, feeling the wet of sex between her legs. What is he thinking? Am I good enough? Are my breasts too small?

Then the next phase, with the brief periods of happiness, the demands, the disappointments, and finally the indifference before the whole thing more or less fizzled out.

With Olle she had fun, and she felt secure. Over time she fell deeply in love, and things were good between them for many years. Lately her feelings had cooled. She felt no desire for him anymore. She thought of him more as a friend. Johan had made her feel something else.

Emma turned on the radio, and the soulful tones of Aretha Franklin streamed out. She wanted a cigarette but didn’t feel like going outside to stand on the stairs to smoke. Her thoughts went back to Johan. A Stockholm boy who would presumably never make an appearance on the island again. Just as well. Maybe she had been extra susceptible that day because she was so exhausted. Her first day back at school after the murder, and almost her last. She had gone back to work for a couple of days to take care of everything she still needed to do before she could start her summer vacation.

Right now she just wanted some time to herself, an opportunity to regain some sort of balance and collect her thoughts. Luckily the children would be spending a couple of weeks at camp.

She was plagued by a feeling of listlessness. This time of year would normally be so glorious, but she was now a shadow of her former self. She had no energy. Just taking out the trash made her tired.

Emma raised her eyes to look at the clock on the wall. Almost eleven. Maybe I should put in a load of wash before going to bed. Pull yourself together, goddamn it, she thought angrily.

With her arms full of dirty laundry, she leaned down to put the clothes in the machine, then abruptly stopped what she was doing. The newscaster on the radio was reporting that a woman had been found murdered in the Visby cemetery.