Midnight In Malmö: The Fourth Inspector Anita Sundström Mystery (The Malmö Mysteries Book 4) (7 page)

‘Your guess…’

‘Right; we’d better get back to headquarters and tell Moberg what we’ve got. At least we know where she was going to and where she probably lives. Or certainly where she has a bank account.’

‘That’s all we seem to know. The neighbours I talked to had no idea who she was. In fact, the one next door had never seen her, though he had heard her through the wall. He reckoned that she was hardly ever there, and he’s lived in the block since before Akerman arrived.’

‘She should be easy enough to trace now we have her passport.’

Given what he had seen and heard in the last couple of hours, Hakim wasn’t so sure.

They sat listening to the sea and watching the sun go down. They sipped their wine quietly. Anita was disappointed that such a wonderful day up at Stenshuvud should have been spoiled by Rylander’s death. She knew it was an awful, selfish thing to think. But he was an old man, racked with cancer, who was going to die anyway. He had just brought the day of reckoning forward by a few months. In a similar position, she would probably do the same thing. And in Rylander’s case, he didn’t have any family to live for. Maybe he wanted to die with his dignity intact instead of physically wasting away further. Her limited experience of Albin Rylander led her to the conclusion that he was a proud man who always took great care of his appearance, whether being seen in public, or in the sanctuary of his own home. He was vain. And why not?

‘I hope Klas will be OK,’ she said at last.

‘I feel sorry for him. This was his moment of glory. Can you imagine the fuss that would have been made over his book if Rylander did have some saucy secrets to reveal? Radio, telly, magazines; all doing interviews. He’d be the centre of attention. And that’s not even taking into account the money he might make from such a book.’

‘I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ Anita confessed. ‘I was thinking more about his relationship with Albin. They got on so well. It was like he’d lost his best friend. But, as you say, he’s had the golden goose snatched from his grasp.’

‘Maybe you should go round and see him tomorrow,’ Kevin suggested.

‘Yes, I think I will. And you can come, too. I want to show you Simrishamn.’

They went quiet again. It was an awkward hush where they were searching frantically for something to say to break it. They didn’t know each other well enough to relax in those silent moments. That’s why Kevin found himself asking, ‘Do you know the inspector Klas mentioned?’

‘Huh! Alice Zetterberg. Oh, I know her.’ Kevin immediately wished he hadn’t asked. ‘We were at the police academy together in Stockholm. We have, as you say in England, “history”.’

‘Want a top up?’ Kevin asked to quickly change what was obviously a touchy subject.

Anita smiled. ‘Yes, sorry. It’s just I can’t stand that woman. Or, to be more precise, she can’t stand me. She thought I’d slept with the guy who ended up as her husband. He was at the academy, too. We were friendly, but never
that
friendly. But being a typically boastful man, he obviously intimated that we were. Suddenly, Alice was being a bitch to me, and I ended up being ostracised by some of my new so-called friends.’

‘If she married him, then what’s the problem?’

‘The problem is that after a couple of years, he ran off with another female cop. I’m sure she blamed me for supposedly leading him astray in the first place.’

‘She sounds the bitter sort.’

‘Oh, yes; a very bitter woman. Or she certainly was the last time I came across her, which was at a police conference in Germany a few years ago. She was in Jönköping then. I’d heard through the police grapevine that she’d ended up in Ystad. They oversee the police station in Simrishamn, but I’m surprised she should turn up here. A local suicide would usually just involve the team on the spot.’

‘But he was a famous person. Politically, I mean.’

‘I suppose. Anyhow, not our problem.’

Kevin raised a glass. ‘Let’s hope we don’t run into your Zetter-whatever woman then. I don’t want to see any more fights. I’ve come to Sweden to get away from punch-ups in Penrith.’

Klas Lennartsson’s house was in Stenbocksgatan, halfway between the train station and the harbour. It was large for a single person, but Anita had told Kevin that it had been left to him by his parents. It was a rendered building painted the colour of blue slate that towered over the single-story fishermen’s cottages it was attached to. Like its neighbours, this was one of the town’s original buildings. Lennartsson welcomed them through the stout wooden front door into a high-ceilinged living room. He wasn’t house proud, Kevin noted. Everywhere was a mess. On a genuinely distressed oak table was a tray of his uneaten breakfast, surrounded by books and newspaper cuttings. He had to clear a stack of notebooks off the sofa so he could offer them a seat.

‘If I’d known you were coming, I would have tidied up,’ Lennartsson said in English. He didn’t want to be rude to his visitor.

‘It’s my fault, Klas. I should have rung first.’

Lennartsson waved away Anita’s apology. ‘I’m glad you came. I wanted to talk to you. I’ll fix some coffee first.’

With that, he hurried out with the tray.

‘He’s always been like this,’ Anita said, raising an eyebrow. ‘I remember it used to drive his mother mad. She died a couple of years ago.’

‘It looks like he hasn’t cleared up since,’ Kevin observed. For a man who liked everything orderly, he was still trying to get his head round Sweden’s shambolic electrics (unattached light roses hooked to wires festooned across ceilings and plugged into a wall socket: there was one in Lennartsson’s living room, too), and the peculiar bathroom in Anita’s rented home. (The stand-alone bath next to the wall doubled as a shower. The only problem was that the water ran down the gaps around the bath, flooded the floor and soaked the bathmat. The only escape for it was a hole in the floor underneath the bath. When he mentioned this to Anita, all he got in return was a dismissive ‘That’s what the mop and wiper are for’.) Even the doors opened outwards, which Kevin kept forgetting.

Lennartsson returned with the same tray, but with a thermos jug of coffee and three cups. He distractedly poured the black coffee out, spilling some onto the tray. He was in such a state that Kevin didn’t have the heart to ask for some milk.

‘Are you OK, Klas?’ asked Anita with genuine concern.

‘Not really. I had a couple of local newspapers calling me last night to do obituaries on Rylander. I knocked something up, but my heart wasn’t in it.’

‘It’s understandable.’

Lennartsson stared out of the window over to the patch of green grass and trees on the other side of the road.

‘I still find it difficult to believe that he would kill himself. I sat with him for hours and, though I knew he was in pain, he seemed real determined to finish telling his story.’

‘Were you any closer to his “secret”?’ Kevin asked.

Lennartsson slowly shook his head. ‘No. All he did say was that he wasn’t ashamed of what he had done, but he still felt guilty about the person it most affected.’

‘Sounds like some romantic interlude. A lover he shunned?’ Kevin suggested.

‘Whatever it was, the answer lies in Berlin.’

It might be a Saturday morning, but Moberg had made sure the whole team was in – Wallen, Hakim, Brodd and himself. He had even avoided his usual Friday night booze-up with Pontus Brodd so that all his faculties were sharp for this meeting. He sensed that there was a chink of light in the case, where twenty-fours ago there had been none.

All the items retrieved from the Kronborgsvägen apartment were laid out on the meeting-room table. The nun’s habit was draped carefully over a chair. Moberg had had to cut Brodd off in mid-sentence when he realized he was going to come up with some inappropriately smutty joke.

Moberg started the meeting with: ‘Before we go through all of these items, we’ve drawn a blank on Julia Anna Akerman so far. We’ve found ten women with that name, and none are the right age. And certainly not one with a Malmö connection. I’ve still got people on it, but it’s not as straightforward as it should be.’

‘She could have changed her name,’ Brodd suggested.

‘But we’ve got a Swedish passport in that name on the table here,’ Moberg said, pointing out the obvious. ‘Right, let’s go through what we know we have. Klara?’

Wallen pointed to the bagged-up objects. ‘According to her passport, she is called Julia Anna Akerman; born May 20th, 1979. Birthplace: Malmö. Passport issued on February 16th, 2008.’

‘It looks like the genuine article,’ said Moberg, ‘but we can find no record of a Julia Anna Akerman being born on that date in Malmö, or any other time. We need it checked out to see if it’s a fake.’

‘The Easyjet boarding pass shows that she was flying back to Geneva the next day. We’ve checked, and she made six trips to Kastrup in the last seven months. Always for no more than a couple of nights here. So, she doesn’t live in the Kronborgsvägen apartment, but uses it for flying visits. Which also explains why she wasn’t seen by regular joggers in the park.’

‘Could she be an air hostess?’ Moberg wondered.

‘We’re checking that out.’

‘We’ve been on to the Swiss authorities to see if they can find a Julia Akerman. We’ve got a credit card from a bank in Switzerland, and she also pays her rent through them, according to Mankad, so there’s a good chance she lives there, or certainly spends a lot of her time there.’

‘Of course, if she
is
in the travel business, she may be based somewhere else, but Switzerland is a useful place to have a bank account.’ This was Wallen again, who was increasing in confidence. Maybe it was Anita who intimidated her more than Moberg, she wondered fleetingly before she moved on to the next object. ‘This key is for a Mercedes car. There was no sign of one near the apartment, so we conclude that she has one at home, wherever that is. It might be at Geneva airport. We don’t know. The others are house or apartment keys. Again, for where, we don’t know yet.’

‘And the mobile?’

‘It’s a basic Nokia pay-as-you-go phone, so we don’t know where it was bought, and it’s difficult to trace calls. I would have expected her to have a fancy phone. Strange thing is: she hadn’t received any calls. Of course, she may have deleted them. We’re going to get that checked out as well. She only had one number in her contacts section. It’s one in Skåne.’

‘And?’

‘We rang it, and it turned out to be a nursing home outside Sjöbo. They have never heard of Julia Akerman. And no one in the home is called Akerman.’

There was quiet as they all pondered this surprising piece of information.

‘I suppose we’d better deal with
this
,’ Moberg sighed incredulously as he waved a large hand at the nun’s habit.

‘As far as we can see, it is a proper habit. The kind an actual nun would wear. It’s not one of those sexy nun outfits that Brodd probably fantasizes about.’

‘What do you mean?’ Brodd reacted angrily.

Moberg was amused. Good for Wallen.

‘So, she’s not necessarily into sex games.’

‘But she had lots of revealing underwear,’ put in Hakim as he wondered how horrified his mother would be if she had seen him rifling through a woman’s knickers drawer.

‘You don’t think she could have been a real nun at some time?’ Moberg threw the thought into the open.

‘Well, she hasn’t half reformed!’ Brodd snorted.

Moberg ignored his comment. ‘The other religious connection is the cross round her neck. We’ve been told it’s Eastern European. Probably Polish. Does that give us any clues?’

‘Maybe that’s why we can’t trace her,’ suggested Hakim. ‘What if she was born in Poland and either changed her name to a Swedish equivalent or simply changed her name to fit in?’ He knew Poles got just as hard a time as Iraqis. Swedes always assumed they were going to pinch their cars and whisk them back over the Baltic.

‘So, we might have a religious Pole who has a Swedish passport and lives in Switzerland. It sounds like the start of one of your fucking awful jokes, Pontus. Right, there’s still a lot of checking to do. Unless we can nail down who she is exactly, we’re never going to come up with any suspects.’

Anita and Kevin spent the rest of the day wandering around Simrishamn. Kevin seemed to enjoy the harbour, with its rows of colourful cottages huddled along cobbled streets. They had spent a couple of hours at the local loppis – ‘A bit like a British car boot sale,’ Kevin remarked – near the Nils Holgersson School. Tables were laid out with everything from second-hand clothes to unwanted bric-a-brac. A large crowd had gathered and business was brisk. Anita bought a couple of thick woollen jumpers – ‘Winter will be here soon enough.’ Kevin guessed it must be an example of Scandinavian pessimism.

Anita acknowledged the few familiar faces who greeted her with smiles of recognition. As Kevin was debating whether to buy a small porcelain shepherdess as a present for one of his daughters, he noticed Anita chatting earnestly to a ruddy-faced man in his mid-sixties with cropped hair like himself but with a far more impressive stomach. They parted with a burst of laughter. By that time, Kevin had abandoned thoughts of a purchase; the figurine was a bit tacky anyway.

‘That was Stefan. He’s a cop based here in Simrishamn. I’ve known him since I was a teenager; he used to come to our school and give talks.’

‘You looked to be in deep discussion.’

Anita smiled. ‘I was just being a nosy bitch.’

‘Your
bête noire
?’

‘Oh, yes. I was just wondering what she was doing here in Simrishamn. So are Stefan and his colleagues. Zetterberg just appeared yesterday and commandeered an office. They thought it might be something to do with Albin’s suicide, but now the rumour mill believes she’s been sent by Ystad to keep an eye on them. There have been large hints that there are to be job losses. They’re talking about centralizing things from Lund, so smaller police stations are under threat. As you can imagine, they’re all paranoid now. But Stefan’s not too bothered; he’s coming up for retirement and looking forward to concentrating on building his boats.’