Detective Inspector Huss: A Huss Investigation set in Sweden, Vol. 1 (12 page)

Andersson looked around the room, but no one else came up with a guess. Triumphantly he exclaimed, “The rag! The rag with the Ajax on it! It wasn’t found in the apartment. The only cleaning rags we found were in an unopened package in the broom closet. Now we’ve run into some bad luck, because we weren’t on the alert this morning. The sanitation department came and picked up the garbage before we had a chance to look through the cans. And the only fingerprints on the door opening onto the courtyard belonged to Irene and to Henrik von Knecht. Someone wiped off the handle before Irene and von Knecht’s son touched it.”

The others gave Irene a quizzical look, but neither she nor the superintendent felt like explaining about the hide-and-seek game with the press the night before.

Instead Irene said, “According to Sylvia von Knecht the cleaning woman is Finnish; her name is Pirjo Larsson and she speaks terrible Swedish. We have to get her phone number, and then we can find her address. She lives somewhere out in Angered. Hannu, may I ask if you speak Finnish?”

Hannu Rauhala nodded.

“Would you please handle the interview with Pirjo Larsson?”

Another nod from Hannu.

Irene reported on the conversations she had had during the day. They all thought, just as she did, that quite a few interesting angles had developed, even though there was no motive yet or any plausible perpetrator.

Birgitta Moberg had managed to reach the Wahl couple in Provence by phone. Their youngest daughter, who was unmarried, was listed in the phone book; she had given Birgitta the number. She had called the couple, who had already heard that Richard von Knecht had been murdered, from one of their daughters. They told Birgitta that they had taken the car ferry to Kiel the previous Sunday evening. This morning they reached their farm about fifty kilometers outside Aix-en-Provence. They could only confirm what others who were at the party had said, that von Knecht was happy and in high spirits as usual, and that they didn’t have the foggiest idea of a motive or murderer.
Unbelievable,
was their comment. She leafed through her notes.

“Waldemar Reuter was at his brokerage office. He didn’t have time to talk to me today but promised to come here tomorrow morning at eight. He did say this much: He was shocked and found it impossible to comprehend why anyone would want to kill von Knecht. Seems to have been a regular model citizen, that Richard von Knecht,” she said dejectedly.

There was a discreet knock on the door, and the secretary came in with a thick stack of faxes under her arm. Dryly she said, “Greetings from the fax room to Inspector Huss; the fax machine burned up! Do you know why?” With that she slammed the heap on the table in front of Irene.

She had to admit that her journalist contact at
Swedish Ladies’ Journal
was a real find. Irene could see that, even after a cursory glance through the pile. Everything was neatly arranged in chronological order and stamped with the date.

Jonny reported on the investigative material he had been allowed to examine with his two colleagues in Financial. Von Knecht was mixed up in a tangle of suspected tax crimes that had to do with moving money out of the country for stock deals abroad. The material, gathered over a period of almost two years, had been left untouched, Jonny explained.

“These guys in Financial are trained to unravel financial crimes, but they work here at police headquarters, even though they’re actually associated with the National Unit for Financial Crimes in Stockholm. So it’s a government deal, really. But since their work often runs into a hitch on the prosecution side, they do some other investigative work here at Crime Police. Evidently there were suspicions of insider trading relating to the sale of a pharmaceutical company a couple of years ago. But it couldn’t be proven. Von Knecht made a neat little profit of eleven million on that one. According to the financial guys, they think his offshore assets are larger than the ones he has in Sweden. But since foreign brokers handle those deals, they’re hard to check up on. And in Sweden he’s taxed on personal assets of a hundred and sixty-three million!”

The appreciative whistles and shouts in the room were interrupted by an angry buzz from the intercom.

“Hello! This is the duty officer! Will you please come down and get your damned pizzas? It stinks like a pizzeria in here!”

Fredrik Stridh and Birgitta Moberg volunteered. It occurred to Irene as they vanished out the door that she had seen them together quite a bit lately. Jonny Blom seemed to be thinking the same thing. He unconsciously pressed his lips together as he gazed after them with a gloomy expression. The others were busily rising and stretching their legs.

The pizzas were devoured quickly, right out of the boxes, using the plastic utensils that had been supplied. The local pizza maker knew what was required when he made deliveries to police headquarters.

The coffeemaker was turned on. Andersson leaned back in his chair, feeling full, bloated.

Just at that instant a powerful muffled explosion was heard. The pressure wave made the windowpanes bend inward and start to rattle ominously.

“Damn, one of the refineries on Hising Island must have blown up!”

Jonny meant it as a joke, but nobody laughed. It was an unpleasantly large
boom,
even if it wasn’t the Shell Oil tank that had exploded.

Andersson shrugged his shoulders and tried to ignore the outside world.

“That explosion is someone else’s problem. Well, we’ve heard a report from everyone—except for you, Hannu.”

Hannu Rauhala looked straight at the superintendent when he began to speak. His voice was unexpectedly deep and his lilting Finnish accent sounded pleasantly soft. “I’ve been at the tax office—”

Jonny sat up in his chair and interrupted him, sounding agitated. “We don’t need to do double work!” He sounded agitated. “I’ve already ferreted out everything of interest from Financial!”

Hannu’s expression didn’t change, and his voice didn’t alter, but his eyes took on a colder ice-blue tinge.

“Richard von Knecht has another son.”

In the tense silence that followed, it seemed as though the sirens from all the police cars and fire engines in Göteborg began wailing at once.

“WHAT ARE YOU SAYING? And what the hell is going on in town?”

The color in Andersson’s face rose considerably. He had thought they had a good grip on things. And suddenly all hell was breaking loose, both inside the department and out!

Hannu Rauhala kept his eyes riveted on the superintendent and continued, unmoved. “The tax authorities have copies of his personal file. Richard von Knecht has admitted paternity of a son, Bo Jonas, born July twenty-third, nineteen sixty-five, in the Katarina district in Stockholm. The mother is Mona Söder, November second, nineteen forty-one. It’s all on von Knecht’s death certificate.”

“How did you get access to . . . Oh, the hell with it.”

One look in those ice-blue eyes and Andersson decided to put off the question until later. Instead he said, “This is interesting. I wonder whether the wife and his son Henrik know about the existence of Jonas? Irene, since you’re already in contact with both of them, you handle it. Hannu, you take Pirjo Larsson. We have to find out if she has a key to von Knecht’s apartment. Ask her who may have visited him while she was there, or if she saw anything else that seemed odd. And the rag. Don’t forget to ask her about the rag. Keep digging for information about Jonas and his mother. Maybe we’ll need to enlist the help of our colleagues in Stockholm. What a damned racket those sirens are making. Has half of Göteborg blown sky-high?”

Angrily he pressed the intercom button for the duty officer. At first nobody answered his call. He had to try again.

“Yeah, Dispatch here,” replied a calm male voice.

“What’s happening in town?”

“A building on Berzeliigatan is on fire. Suspected bombing. Didn’t you hear the explosion? It’s barely a kilometer from here.”

“Sounds like the boys at PO-One are going to be busy tonight!”

“No doubt. See you.”

The superintendent looked crestfallen when the intercom clicked off. To cover his embarrassment, he continued briskly, “So now we know, but that’s somebody else’s headache. We have to concentrate on the von Knecht family. Go on, Hannu, do you have more info on the second son?”

Hannu shook his head. “Nope, but you can take it from here, right, Jonny?”

“The rest of the family’s assets, last year’s tax returns. Sylvia von Knecht’s income was one hundred fifty thousand, personal net worth six hundred sixty-eight thousand. Henrik von Knecht’s income was five hundred thousand, net worth four hundred fifty-three thousand. Charlotte von Knecht’s income was seventy-two thousand and she has a net worth of zero.”

“A pauper compared to Pappa von Knecht. And who isn’t, compared to him?” Fredrik commented on Jonny’s research. Casually he remarked, “Truth be told, Charlotte and I are in the same financial bracket.”

The others laughed before taking a coffee break.

The meeting went on for another two hours. They went over and over various suggestions and hypotheses, but couldn’t tell whether they were getting any closer to the truth. Or whether it might already have been approached without anyone realizing it.

Andersson stifled a yawn and decided to wrap up the meeting with a few concluding remarks. “Okay, see you all here at seven-thirty in the morning.”

They had started packing up their notebooks, pens and pencils, coffee cups, and everything else essential to the investigation when there was another knock at the door. Without waiting for an answer, Officer Håkan Lund opened it, filling the entire doorway. He began with a greeting. “Peace. Thought I’d drop by with a report that might interest you.”

The group watched in surprise as he strode to the end of the table. Once he was there, he started his report. “I just came from the fire on Berzeliigatan. An eyewitness heard a loud explosion and then the place went up in flames. The windows of all the nearby buildings were blown out. According to the same witness the explosion came from the third floor. And there . . .”

He paused melodramatically and gave his audience a look before he went on. “That’s where Richard von Knecht had his office!”

You could have heard a pin drop; no one could think of a thing to say. Håkan Lund was obviously pleased with the effect of his news. He continued, “My shift was supposed to end at four, but we were held up by a big traffic accident near the Tingstad tunnel. Sleet and black ice. Five cars involved in a rear-ender. No injuries to speak of, but plenty of peripheral work with reports and directing traffic. Just as we were finishing, we got the call about the explosion on Berzeliigatan, corner of Sten Sturegatan. It was burning good by the time we arrived. There were three fire engines on site and a couple of patrol cars.”

“Is the building a total loss?”

Lund gave Andersson, who had asked the question, a thoughtful look and replied, “Let me put it this way: On a fire scale of one to ten, where one is a match and ten is a quasar, this was a nine. An inferno. So yes, the entire building was gutted.”

“God damn it!”

It wasn’t the most intelligent comment the superintendent could have made, but it expressed precisely what everyone in the room was feeling. Lund resumed his report of the events.

“On the ground floor there’s a hair salon. The hairdresser who was in the salon escaped to the street. She was busy cleaning up after the day’s work. Fortunately, she only received minor injuries to her head and back. On the second floor there are two apartments. The residents of the larger one, a retired couple, managed to escape. They were in shock, their hearing was damaged, and they had a number of ugly burns. The tenant across the hall works as a desk clerk at the Sheraton and wasn’t home when the place blew up. He arrived just as I was leaving. Evidently he heard about the fire on the news. On the third floor is—or
was
would be more correct—von Knecht’s office. Apparently, it was a large apartment, according to the downstairs neighbors. By the way, von Knecht owned the whole building. The apartment next to his is currently vacant. It’s a little two-room place that he rents out to companies that need an apartment for short-term periods.”

Lund broke off, quickly went over and poured the cold dregs from the coffeemaker into a plastic cup, swished the coffee around in his mouth before swallowing, then smacked his lips contentedly and said, “Your mouth gets so dry from a fire. And from talking too.”

No one responded, so he returned to his place and went on with his report.

“On the fourth floor of the building there’s a photographer. He lives in the two-room space and has his studio in the larger apartment above von Knecht’s office. The witnesses from the second floor, the retired couple, think he must be out of town at the moment. They haven’t seen him in several days. He sometimes does fashion shoots abroad. For his sake, let’s hope he’s away shooting beautiful women under the palms. Otherwise he’s dead. Grilled. It’ll be several hours before the smoke-eaters can go into the building.”

Lund paused and looked quite stern and serious as he went on. “On the fifth floor they managed to rescue a young woman with the hook and ladder. She was in shock, of course, and refused to climb down the ladder. But the fireman grabbed her and more or less carried her down. When she reached the ground, she suddenly remembered that her boyfriend was asleep somewhere in the apartment. But it was too late. There was no chance of getting back inside. Her apartment was completely engulfed in flames and there was a big risk that the floor would cave in. The lady in the apartment next door had better luck. She came home from work in the middle of the fire-fighting work. She had evidently heard about the fire, but it was still a shock. She collapsed on the street and the ambulance had to take her to the ER. The sixth floor was empty. Work had just started on renovating it into an apartment that would take up the whole floor.”