Camilla Lackberg Crime Thrillers 1 and 2: The Ice Princess, The Preacher

Erica shuddered. The thought of taking fingerprints off a corpse was a little too macabre for her taste.

Together they searched the rest of the house. Erica took time to go through Alex and Henrik’s bedroom more thoroughly, since her previous visit had been so rudely interrupted. But she found nothing else. The feeling that something was missing lingered, and it irritated her that she couldn’t think of what it was. She decided to tell Patrik; he was just as frustrated as she was. To her satisfaction she also saw that he looked quite uneasy when she told him about the intruder and how she had been forced to hide in the wardrobe.

Patrik heaved a sigh and sat down on the edge of the big four-poster bed, trying to help her figure out what it was she was searching for in her memory.

‘Was it something small or something big?’

‘I don’t know, Patrik, probably something small, otherwise I would have noticed it, don’t you think? If the four-poster bed was gone, for instance, I would probably have noticed it.’ She smiled and sat down next to him.

‘But where in the room was it? By the door? Over by the bed? On the bureau?’

Patrik fingered a little scrap of leather he found on Alex’s nightstand. It looked like some sort of club insignia, with an inscription burned into the leather in a childish hand: ‘T.T.M. 1976.’ When he turned it over he saw some indistinct spots of what looked like old dried blood. He wondered where it had come from.

‘I don’t know what it was, Patrik. If I did I wouldn’t be sitting here tearing out my hair.’

She glanced at him in profile. He had wonderfully long, dark eyelashes. His beard stubble was perfect. Just long enough to be felt as light sandpaper against the skin, but short enough not to scratch uncomfortably. She wondered how it would feel against her skin.

‘What is it? Have I got something on my face?’

Patrik wiped his mouth nervously. She quickly looked away, embarrassed that he had caught her out staring at him.

‘It’s nothing. A little crumb of chocolate. It’s gone now.’

There was a moment’s silence.

‘Well, what do you say – we’re not going to get any farther now, do you think?’ Erica said at last.

‘No, probably not. But listen, ring me as soon as you think of what’s missing. If it’s important enough for someone to come here to find, it must be important to the investigation as well.’

They locked up carefully, and Erica placed the key back under the mat.

‘Would you like a ride back?’

‘No thanks, Patrik. I’ll enjoy the walk.’

‘See you tomorrow night then.’ Patrik shifted from one foot to the other, feeling like an awkward fifteen-year-old.

‘Okay, I’ll see you at eight. Come hungry,’ Erica said.

‘I’ll try. But I can’t promise anything. Right now it doesn’t feel like I’ll ever be hungry again.’ Patrik laughed as he patted his stomach and nodded at Dagmar Petrén’s house across the street.

Erica smiled and waved as he drove off in his Volvo. She could already feel anticipation churning inside of her, mixed with insecurity, anxiety and outright fear.

She started for home but hadn’t gone more than a few yards before she stopped short. An idea had come out of nowhere, and it had to be tested before she could let it go. With determined steps she went back to the house, took the key from under the mat, and entered the house again, after first carefully kicking the snow off her shoes.

What should a woman do who was waiting for a man who never showed up for a romantic dinner? She should ring him, of course! Erica said a prayer that Alex had a modern telephone and hadn’t fallen for the trendiness of a ’50s Cobra phone or still had some old Bakelite model. She was in luck. A brand-new Doro hung on the wall in the kitchen. With trembling fingers she pushed the button for the last number called and crossed her fingers that nobody had used the phone since Alex’s death.

The phone rang and rang. After seven rings she was about to hang up, but then the voicemail switched on. She listened to the message but hung up before the beep. Her face pale. Erica slowly replaced the receiver. She could almost hear the clatter in her head as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Suddenly she knew precisely what it was that was missing from the bedroom upstairs.

Mellberg was seething with rage. He strode through the station in a fury. If they could have, the employees at Tanumshede police station would have taken cover under their desks. But grown-ups didn’t do that, so they had to suffer through a whole day of fiery oaths, reprimands and general abuse. And Annika had to bear the brunt of it. Even though she’d developed a tough hide during the months since Mellberg had become boss, for the first time in a long time she felt on the verge of tears. By four o’clock she’d had enough. She left work and stopped at Konsum to buy a large tub of ice cream. Then she went home, turned on Glamour TV and let the tears run down into the chocolate ice cream. It was just one of those days.

It drove Mellberg crazy that he’d been forced to release Anders Nilsson from gaol. He felt in every bone of his body that Anders was Alex Wijkner’s killer, and if he’d only had more time alone with him he would have wrung the truth out of him. Instead he’d been forced to release Anders because of a fucking witness who said she saw him come home just before Separate Worlds started on TV. That placed him at home in his flat by seven o’clock, and Alex had talked with Birgit at a quarter past. Bloody hell.

Then there was that young cop, Patrik Hedström. Kept spouting a bunch of wild ideas that it was somebody other than Anders Nilsson who murdered the woman. No, if there was anything he’d learned in all his years in the police, it was that everything was most often exactly what it appeared to be. No hidden motives, no complicated plots. Just riff-raff that made life unsafe for honest citizens. Find the riff-raff and you find the perpetrator, that was his motto.

He hit the number of Patrik’s mobile.

‘Where the hell are you?’ No pleasantries needed here. ‘Are you sitting around gathering navel lint somewhere, or what? Down here at the station we’re working. Overtime. I don’t know if that’s a phenomenon you’re familiar with. If not, I can fix it so you no longer have to worry about that either. Not here, at any rate.’

He felt a bit better in the pit of his stomach when he’d had a chance to put some pressure on that young whippersnapper. You had to keep them on a short leash, or those young cocks would get too full of themselves.

‘I want you to drive down and talk to a witness who places Anders Nilsson at home at seven o’clock. Press her, twist her arm a little and see what you can find out … yes, NOW, damn it.’

He slammed down the receiver, grateful for the circumstances in life that put him in a position to make other people do the dirty work. Suddenly, life seemed considerably brighter. Mellberg leaned back in his chair, pulled open the top drawer, and took out a packet of chocolate balls. With his short sausage-like fingers he took one out of the packet and blissfully stuffed the whole thing in his mouth. When he finished chewing it he took another. Hard-working men like himself needed fuel.

Patrik had already turned off towards Tanumshede via Grebbestad when Mellberg rang. He pulled into the entrance to the Fjällbacka golf course and turned the car around. He gave a deep sigh. It was getting to be late afternoon and he had plenty to do back at the station. He shouldn’t have stayed so long in Fjällbacka, but being with Erica exerted a particularly strong attraction on him. It felt like being sucked into a magnetic field; he had to use both strength and will power to pull himself free. Another deep sigh. This could only end one way. Badly. It wasn’t so long ago that he finally got over the break-up with Karin, and now he was already going full speed ahead towards new pain. Talk about self-destructive. The divorce had taken over a year to process. He had spent many nights in front of the TV staring blankly at high-quality shows like Walker, Texas Ranger and Mission Impossible. Even TV Shopping had felt like a better alternative than lying alone in the double bed, tossing and turning, while images of Karin in bed with another man flickered past like a bad soap opera. And yet the attraction he felt for Karin in the beginning was nothing compared to the attraction he now felt for Erica. Logic whispered malevolently in his ear: won’t the fall be that much greater?

He drove much too fast, as usual, in the last tight curves before Fjällbacka. This case was starting to get on his nerves. He took out his frustration on the car and was in real mortal danger when he sped round the last curve before the hill down to the place where the old silo once stood. Now it was torn down and instead there were houses and boat-houses built in the old-fashioned style. Prices were around a couple of million kronor per house; he never ceased to be amazed at how much money people must have to be able to buy a summer house at those prices.

A motorcyclist appeared out of nowhere in the curve and Patrik had to swerve in panic. His heart was pounding fast and he braked to a bit below the posted speed limit. That was a close call. A check in the rear-view mirror assured him that the biker was still on his machine and could continue his journey.

He kept going straight ahead, past the minigolf course and up to the intersection by the petrol station. There he turned left to the blocks of flats. He reflected one more time over how horribly ugly the buildings were. Brown and white constructions from the Sixties, like big square blocks tossed near the southern entrance to Fjällbacka. He wondered about the rationale of the architect who designed them. Had he gone in for making the buildings as ugly as possible, as an experiment? Or did he just not care? Apparently, they were the result of the frenzy to build a million housing units in the Sixties. ‘Homes for all.’ Too bad they didn’t say: ‘Beautiful homes for all.’

He parked in the lot and went into the first entrance. Number five. The stairwell to Anders’s flat, but also the flat of the witness Jenny Rosén. They lived two flights up. He was puffing hard when he reached the right landing, reminded that he’d been getting far too little exercise and way too much coffee cake lately. Not that he’d ever been a paragon of physical training, but it had never been this bad before.

Patrik stopped for a second outside Anders’s door and listened. Not a sound to be heard. Either he wasn’t home or he was passed out.

Jenny’s door was on the right, and directly opposite from Anders. She had exchanged the standard name-plate for her own made out of wood, with the names Jenny and Max Rosén in ornate script with decorative roses winding round the plate. So she was married.

She had rung the police station with her testimony early this morning, and he hoped she would still be at home. She hadn’t been when they knocked on all the doors in the stairwell yesterday, but they had left a card and asked her to ring the police station. That’s why it wasn’t until today that they got the information about Anders’s return home on the Friday evening when Alex died.

The doorbell echoed in the flat, followed at once by a loud shriek from a child. Footsteps could be heard in the hall, and Patrik felt rather than saw someone looking at him through the peephole in the door. A safety chain was unhooked and the door opened.

‘Yes?’

A woman with a one-year-old child was standing there. She was very thin with bleached blonde hair. From the colour of her roots, her natural hair colour must have been somewhere between dark brown and black, which was confirmed by a pair of nut-brown eyes. She wore no make-up and looked tired. She had on a pair of worn jogging trousers with baggy knees, and a T-shirt with a big Adidas logo on the front.

‘Jenny Rosén?’

‘Yes, that’s me. What’s this about?’

‘My name is Patrik Hedström and I’m from the police. You put in a call to us this morning, and I’d like to talk with you a little about the information you gave.’

He spoke in a low voice so he wouldn’t be heard in the flat across the landing.

‘Come in.’ She stepped aside to let him in.

The flat was small, a bedsit, and there was definitely no man living there. None older than one year at any rate. The flat was an explosion in pink. Everything was pink. Rugs, tablecloths, curtains, lamps, everything. Rosettes were once again a popular motif, and they were on lamps and candlesticks in a profusion that was both lavish and superfluous. On the walls were pictures that further emphasized the romantic disposition of the occupant. Soft-focus female faces with birds fluttering past. Even a picture of a crying child hung over the bed.