Midnight In Malmö: The Fourth Inspector Anita Sundström Mystery (The Malmö Mysteries Book 4) (29 page)

‘And you did nothing?’ Wallen shouted in disbelief.

A middle-aged couple further along the path turned round in surprise, before continuing their constitutional.

Isaksson took off his glasses and scratched behind his left ear, then replaced his spectacles. ‘I’m ashamed,’ he gulped. ‘I’ve had to live with that knowledge… and now her awful death.’

Moberg couldn’t weigh up this man. From the haughty politician with such strident views, here was a vulnerable human being. A man admitting failure. Was it an act?

‘So what happened then?’

‘Nothing for a few years. Then, when I was checking out the Skåne County Police in my capacity as a council member…’ he ignored Moberg’s scowl ‘… I came across an old police report that mentioned that Ebba had been found soliciting. I’d heard from Sjöbo contacts that she’d run away from home and that her father wasn’t speaking to her. I don’t think he ever realized what was going on under his nose.’

‘And you found her?’

‘Yes. She was living in a hovel in Rosengård. Still a beautiful girl; but in a mess. I wanted to get her off the game. So, I approached Markus Asplund. His company was successful, and I asked if he could give her a job. He was happy to help and, gradually, she seemed to turn her life around. I think that’s when he fell in love with her.’

‘You mean started shagging her,’ Moberg said brutally.

‘He wouldn’t have seen it that way.’

‘What went wrong?’

Isaksson reached for his packet of cigarettes and then changed his mind. ‘Despite everything, she slipped back into her old habits. I know Asplund tried hard to keep her on the straight and narrow, but she was too damaged by then.’

‘But it’s quite a jump from trawling the streets of Malmö to a nice house in Switzerland and some well-heeled clients.’

‘Do you mind if we walk? I’m getting stiff.’

Moberg nodded reluctantly. He was comfortable, and he avoided exercise as much as possible. They all stood up and began to wander slowly through the park.

‘Asplund was at the end of his tether when he came to me. He knew that she would never change her ways. It was a case of if you can’t beat them…’ He was lost in thought for a moment, and then he was back. ‘He came up with this idea that if she was going to be a “professional”, then she must do it as safely as possible. With more respectable people. No, that’s not the right word. Discreet people. Men who wouldn’t beat her up and abuse her; treat her badly. Ebba had been on occasional business trips with Asplund, and she was always being chatted up by his contacts. It wasn’t a huge step to charging them.’

‘So, are you saying that Asplund found the clients?’

Isaksson came to a halt and nodded.

‘They were
his
business contacts?’

‘I believe so. He wanted Ebba to earn enough so she didn’t have to have too many men. Just a select few. Maybe it was easier for him to come to terms with that. It would enable her to fund a better lifestyle, and, to be honest, I think he thought it would enable him to wean her off the game altogether. Deluded. It was too late by then.’

‘But where did you come in? I assume you came in?’

Isaksson began to walk off slowly with Moberg and Wallen in tow.

‘Asplund wanted Ebba to have a fresh start in a new country. He went to Switzerland a lot, and she would be able to keep a low profile there. It’s a place where people don’t ask questions. But he wanted her to make the break complete by giving her a new identity. I managed to arrange a passport for her as Julia Akerman.’ He stopped again, and Moberg nearly bumped into him. ‘I failed her once, but at least this gave me a chance to help her.’

‘And sleep with her.’ Isaksson wasn’t going to get any sympathy from Moberg.

‘I’m not proud of it. But my wife…’ His voice trailed off.

‘Ebba played out your religious fantasies? The nun thing?’

‘It was her way of repaying me.’ Moberg could feel Wallen bridling next to him.

‘If that’s the case, why did she charge you?’

Isaksson adjusted his glasses as he eyed the chief inspector.

‘She didn’t. But it was my way of giving her something. Gifts of money, not payment for services. I’m not a rich man. I don’t know what her real “clients” paid… a lot I suppose.’ He sighed. ‘Maybe it was to salve my conscience.’

‘It’s semantics. It’s your way of trying to get round Swedish law. Trouble is that she put it all down on a spreadsheet, so whatever you say, it looks like you paid for sex.’ Moberg enjoyed keeping him wriggling on the hook.

‘Look, I’ve been totally honest with you,’ Isaksson said earnestly. ‘Doesn’t that count for anything?’

Moberg grinned at him. ‘Afraid not.’

‘Where were you on the night of Tuesday, June the third between nine and midnight?’ Wallen asked formally.

Isaksson’s eyes showed relief. ‘I was at a council meeting until nearly ten. Then I had a private meeting with another councillor, Emeli Nilsson, until nearly eleven. Then I went home. You can check it all out.’

Moberg had to admit this was a blow, but if the politician had been telling them the truth, then – sadly – he wasn’t in the frame. That didn’t mean that he still couldn’t land him in the shit.

Isaksson looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got a meeting in fifteen minutes. You’ll have to excuse me.’

‘I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of you, herr Isaksson.’

The politician hurried away.

‘Hang on!’ Moberg called after him. Isaksson hesitated, not wanting to return. But he waited for Moberg to rumble up to him.

‘Ebba had a scar on her shoulder. I’m sure you noticed. Know where it came from?’

‘She got it in Sjöbo. I only found out long after it happened. After I’d left the town.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘Pastor Kroon attacked her.’

By the time they reached Moberg’s car, he was sweating profusely and he leant against the vehicle.

‘I hate the heat.’ Wallen could tell he wasn’t happy. He’d just seen his favoured suspect slipping through his fingers. ‘You’d better look into his alibi. If it checks, he’s not our man. But it doesn’t mean I’m not going to shaft the sanctimonious bastard.’

Wallen had to agree. She was appalled, if not totally surprised, that a man who supposedly cherished Christian values could, once he eventually became aware of it, stand by and let the young Ebba Pozorski be abused to such an extent that her whole life was wrecked. And then to compound it by taking sexual advantage of her after he had tried to make it up to her. She would quite happily see his career crash and burn.

‘Do you think that they could still be in it together?’ she suggested, resurrecting an earlier idea of the chief inspector’s. ‘They both had possible reasons to get rid of her. The murder still could have been carried out by Asplund.’

‘They’re not exactly casting stones at each other.’ Moberg kicked at a pebble on the pavement and it went scuttling into the grass verge. ‘I want you to have another go at Asplund and see if he corroborates the whole setting-Ebba-up-abroad scenario.’

‘What about Pastor Kroon?’

‘That was a turn up for the books – if Isaksson’s right. Of course, Kroon might be the scapegoat the two of them need. What did you make of him?’

‘Like Brodd, I thought he was weird. Not likeable.’

‘Could he have done such things to Ebba?’

Wallen reflected on the question for a few moments.

‘Possibly.’

‘More to the point, could he have physically committed the murder? He must be getting on in years.’

‘He has a bicycle, so he’s fit enough to ride that around. Whether he could have jogged up behind Ebba, I don’t know. Of course, he might have been hiding in the trees waiting for her, so he wouldn’t have had to run far.’

Moberg unlocked the car and opened the door. ‘We’ll wait for it to cool down a bit. It’ll be bloody hot in there.’

‘There’s one thing that Asplund said that I didn’t think about at the time. Ebba turned up at his apartment, which annoyed him. Off limits because of his wife. But he said that she was upset. Something had spooked her, he said. She didn’t say what it was. But what if she had seen Kroon, here in Malmö?’

‘Well, that’s another thing we need to check out. His movements on the day. We also need to speak to former members of his wacky church and see if they back up Isaksson and Asplund. Because if this whole thing isn’t an elaborate story concocted by those two, we’re looking at a new suspect – Pastor Kroon.

Anita and Kevin emerged from the front of the hotel. They stopped to talk.

‘Any sign of him?’ asked Anita as Kevin went through the routine of lighting up a cigarette and scanning the street in both directions.

‘Not that I can see.’

‘OK, off you go. Hopefully, he’ll follow you.’

As they had planned, she turned to go back into the hotel. Kevin was going to try and act as a decoy.

‘Well, aren’t you going to give me a goodbye kiss? Make it look authentic.’

She stepped back towards him and gave him a full-blooded kiss on the lips.

‘Does that look authentic enough?’ she said teasingly after prizing herself away.

‘That’ll do.’ And he set off towards Alexanderplatz.

Anita went back to their room. Even if Kevin managed to waylay Benno Källström, his female companion, Fanny, might be waiting for her to make a move. Before Kevin left, they had agreed that Anita would take the underground to a couple of stations beyond the one beneath Manja Albrecht’s apartment block, and then switch back. Fortunately, Anita had glimpsed Fanny on a couple of occasions and knew what she looked like. She would take care when approaching the apartment, and the fact that she had been asked to go in the back way indicated that Hans-Dieter Albrecht didn’t want anybody attracting attention.

She paced the room, her nervous tension growing. What would she unearth tonight? Would she find out anything? She couldn’t assume that Albrecht would tell a perfect stranger all he knew about the secret life of Albin Rylander. She was also worried about Kevin. In her crazy attempts to discover what she thought was the truth behind the deaths of Rylander and Klas Lennartsson, she had possibly put Kevin in danger. If something happened to her, it was entirely her own fault. But Kevin had come because she knew that he was probably falling in love with her and would do anything she asked of him. But this? It was madness. She would ring him and tell him to return to the hotel. She wouldn’t go and see Albrecht. They would go back to Sweden tomorrow as planned and forget all about it. And then he could enjoy the last few days of his holiday. She was on the verge of picking up her mobile when it sprang into life. She grabbed it. It was Kevin.

‘I’ve no fucking idea where I am, but Benno was on the train.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Outside this building.’

‘What building?’

He laughed. ‘Once I knew he was on the train, I got off at the next station. And then I walked confidently into this apartment block. Followed someone in; made it look like I knew where I was going.’ Anita could tell from his voice that he was having fun, like a big kid. ‘I’ll hang around here for half an hour and hope I’m not reported for loitering!’ She was about to call it all off when he said, ‘You’d better head off now.’ He paused. ‘Be careful.’

Moberg had Wallen, Hakim and Brodd in his office for an early-evening briefing.

‘OK, tomorrow we hit Sjöbo. We’ve got a list of some of the church members from Asplund.’

‘We’ve started checking where they live,’ said Hakim. ‘Most still seem to be in and around the town.’

‘If we need to draft in extra officers, so be it. The commissioner is so relieved that our murderer might not be Isaksson that he’ll grant us anything. I want confirmation of what Isaksson and Asplund have told us before we move in on the pastor. Any luck with the bus CCTV, Pontus?’

‘Not yet, Boss.’ Brodd had been given the task of finding out if Pastor Kroon had taken a bus into Malmö on the day of the murder, as they had discovered that he had no registered car.

Hakim and Wallen’s second interview with Asplund a couple of hours before had verified Isaksson’s version of events. He had made complaints about Kroon’s behaviour toward Ebba, which had fallen on deaf ears amongst the congregation. But not even Asplund had known the extent of the sexual abuse that she had been subjected to until years later, when he had got to know her at Malasp Travel.

‘Why didn’t you bring it to the attention of the authorities when she was working for you?’ Hakim had asked.

‘I wanted to, but Ebba begged me not to. She didn’t want to be reminded of what had happened, or relive it in a very public court case.’

Asplund also confirmed that Isaksson had approached him about offering Ebba a job and how, when she drifted back into prostitution, he had helped set her up in Switzerland; and that Isaksson had supplied the passport. He was still non-committal about whether he had actually procured her clients – ‘I assume she met them through the job’ was all he would say. The team knew it would be difficult to prove otherwise, as all her former clients resided outside the jurisdiction of Swedish law, with many living in countries where prostitution wasn’t illegal.

The fact that the two stories tallied had meant that Blom was unwilling to keep Markus Asplund in custody: they didn’t have enough real proof to hold him, and she couldn’t see them finding enough to officially charge him within the mandatory three-day period. That pissed off Moberg, who couldn’t help feeling that it was far too convenient that each suspect was backing up the other with exactly the same story.

‘Now that Asplund has left us, we have to concentrate all our efforts on Pastor Kroon. The quicker we can do it, the faster we can either find he’s the killer or rule him out. If it’s the latter, then it’s straight back to the dynamic duo. But from what I hear of the cleric, I’d like to pin something on him. There must be a whole host of sexual-abuse-related charges. Anything will do.’

‘It might be difficult, as the chief witness is conveniently dead,’ Brodd pointed out.

‘Well, make sure he’s the fucking killer then!’

Anita hopped off the underground train at Frankfurter Allee. So did a number of her fellow travellers, who were making for the overground station with its numerous connections to other parts of Berlin. Anita crossed over to the other platform and couldn’t see anyone doing the same, though there were quite a few people, including a large group of garrulous students, already waiting for the Alexanderplatz-bound train. Within three minutes, she was on board and heading back into the centre. Only three passengers got off at Strausberger-Platz. She had decided that once off the train, she would walk along the other side of the road from Manja Albrecht’s apartment block because there the pavement was wide, and it would be difficult for someone to follow her without her spotting them. She walked down to the Strausberger-Platz roundabout, where she noticed an Italian restaurant. That might be a good place to meet Kevin afterwards for a debriefing session – if there was any debriefing to do.