Missing in Malmö: The third Inspector Anita Sundström mystery (Inspector Anita Sundström mysteries) (21 page)

‘Has she turned up in any footage?’ asked Moberg.

‘Mirza and I have been through it all from every bar and restaurant in Lilla Torg, as well as visiting each one with a photo, but there’s no sign of her. We’ll have to widen our search to Stortorget and Skomakaregatan.’

‘We’re sure she was down in that area somewhere,’ put in Nordlund. ‘When I spoke to Ulrika Lindén, she was positive that Greta was sitting in a bar when she phoned. She could hear the background noise. And Greta had mentioned Lilla Torg when they were setting up the meeting.’

‘Of course,’ continued Westermark, ‘we can’t be sure that she met her killer in a bar. He might have turned up later; the voice the neighbour heard in the apartment. Basically, we don’t know her movements between the phone call with her friend and being heard by the neighbour – that’s approximately five hours.’

‘What about that guy there?’ said Moberg, pointing at a chubby, bespectacled face whose cheeks seemed to have pushed the eyes back into the head. The hair was reddish and unruly, the puffy lips thick and unappealing.

‘Karl?’ Nordlund made way for Westermark.

‘Like Fraser, we downloaded the photo of this gorgeous creature from the school’s website. He’s called Andreas Holm. I was given his name by Fraser. He’s head of the English department that Greta worked in. He appointed her. Fraser said that Holm fancied Greta, and he had a habit of appointing attractive young women to the department. What makes him interesting is that he has a history. Fraser said there were rumours but didn’t know any details. I’ve done some checking. Before coming to Malmö three years ago, he worked at a high school in Sundsvall. I’ve spoken to one of the head teachers. Holm left under a cloud. There was an official complaint made by one of his young colleagues, that he was stalking her. Out of school, he would suddenly turn up when she was in a bar or a shop, or would appear near her home, though he lived with his family in a totally different area. He also made inappropriate remarks to her. At first, she let it go because he was a senior colleague. But she acted when he grabbed her in an empty classroom. The school was going through a bad patch at the time; poor inspection report, a lot of problem kids, low morale among the staff. They didn’t want any more bad publicity, so they persuaded the teacher to drop the complaint and told Holm to get a job elsewhere. To make sure that happened, they didn’t give him a negative reference. So, basically, it was swept under the carpet and lucky Malmö got him instead.’

‘Any record of physical violence?’ Moberg asked.

‘No. But the first incident never got to that stage. It might well have done with Greta.’

‘Have you spoken to him?’

Westermark smirked. ‘He’s next on my list.’

They reached Worcester half an hour later than Ash had estimated. They pulled off the M5 motorway and found themselves heading down London Road towards the heart of the city. The trees here were only just starting to turn. Ahead was the tower of the cathedral. Ash, a cricket fan, recognized it at once. New Road, in his view, was one of the most picturesque grounds in the country. Rain was on the way. The sat nav directed them up a sharp turn to the right and along a street of red-brick terraced houses. To the left was a grassy park, beyond which the cathedral was revealed in all its graceful glory. In the distance, the Malvern Hills rose serenely from the Severn plain. Not as high as the Lakeland fells, they had a beauty of their own. Gentler, softer, more homely, they were sculptured onto the landscape like an artwork. Anita knew from Björn that his favourite English composer, Edward Elgar, had roamed their slopes to seek inspiration. She had liked the music as background, but Björn’s real legacy to her had been Santana.

Ash brought the car to a standstill in front of Number 4. Vanessa Ridley’s house stood in a small row at the top of the hill. Ash hesitated. He stretched his arms and yawned. ‘I’m gasping for a fag.’

‘That’ll have to wait,’ Anita said sternly. ‘Vanessa Ridley comes first.’

Ash rang the doorbell.

‘Sorry we’re late. Traffic,’ he added to his apology.

The woman standing in the doorway was fifty-two. Anita knew her exact age from Doris Little’s family tree. Her shoulder-length, jet-black hair came courtesy of a bottle. The thick, red lipstick and black eye make-up fought their way through the perma tan. The brown slacks were tight and the cleavage of the cream blouse low, both showing off a well-preserved body. The smile of welcome wasn’t faked, though. Neither was the half-smoked cigarette delicately protruding from the immaculate black-varnished fingernails of her left hand. Ash immediately noticed the rising smoke and gave Anita a smirk.

‘I’m Detective Sergeant Kevin Ash from the Cumbria Constabulary and this is Inspector Anita Sundström from the Swedish police.’

Ridley gave Anita the once-over. ‘If you want any make-up tips, you’ve come to the right place, pet.’ The northern endearment was dripping in condescension.

‘Can we come in?’ Anita asked, ignoring the put-down.

‘Of course. You’ve come about that bloke who does family trees, haven’t you?’ She stood aside to let them in. ‘Is he in trouble?’

‘You could say that,’ answered Ash, who was already fishing in his pocket for his cigarettes.

‘Right,’ said Nordlund, ‘let’s get to Professor Sundström. I had him in again this afternoon. He was very unhappy because, somehow, the press have got wind of him being a suspect, despite nothing official coming from here. And the press also turned up on Anita’s doorstep this morning. No one knew he was staying there except us.’

‘Not quite true.’ Moberg drummed his fingers on the table in irritation. ‘I reported that information to Dahlbeck last night after you’d interviewed Sundström. Our revered commissioner was desperate for suspects so he had something to give the public to show we’re on top of things. I said it was too early for that, but the moron must have leaked it to the newspapers.’

Hakim watched Westermark intently while the chief inspector was speaking. He hadn’t batted an eyelid, but Hakim was sure as hell that it hadn’t been Commissioner Dahlbeck who had tipped off the media.

‘That apart, Sundström appears to be our main suspect. He’d had a relationship with the deceased in Uppsala, where she was a student. I don’t know what went wrong, but she came down to Malmö to get away from him. This is borne out by what Fraser gathered from her comments. The professor was obviously still in love with her and tracked her down to Malmö. Except, according to his version of events, he couldn’t find her and turned to Anita for help. He certainly has a potential motive. Jealousy. Can’t take rejection. I get the impression he’s a man who’s used to getting his own way. Likes being in control.’

Nordlund reached over to the table and picked up a clear polythene bag containing a mobile phone. ‘Karl’s looked into mobile phone calls made by Björn Sundström and Jansson. Sundström phoned Greta Jansson fifty-seven times in the three weeks leading up to her disappearance. Seventeen afterwards. Maybe this was a ruse to make us think that he was still trying to get hold of her.’

‘I’ve managed to track Greta Jansson’s call log,’ added Westermark. ‘Though we haven’t found her mobile, which is probably in the sea somewhere as we can’t get any signal from it, I’ve discovered that she had an account with Telenor. She didn’t actually make any calls on Friday, September 28th but she received some.’ He glanced at his notebook. ‘Four from Sundström, which weren’t answered. The last from Ulrika Lindén, which was made at the time we think Greta was in the unknown bar.’

‘Anyhow,’ Nordlund carried on, ‘he’s admitted he was in Malmö the weekend Greta disappeared – though, initially, he lied about that both to us and Anita – and his fingerprints were found in Greta’s apartment. That gives him opportunity.’ Nordlund put down the phone, picked up a plastic cup of water and took a careful sip. ‘The trouble is, if Sundström is our prime suspect, why did he approach Anita to find Greta? All it did was draw attention to himself.’

‘I would have thought that was obvious,’ weighed in Westermark. ‘He gets Anita to look for someone he’s already killed. It makes him look like the worried boyfriend. He’s the last person you’d expect to be guilty when the body was found. And it was bound to turn up eventually. Where his plan has backfired is that we know the relationship was over.’

‘Wait a minute,’ interrupted Moberg. ‘Let’s get back to the apartment.’

‘Yes.’ This was Thulin’s first contribution. ‘There’s a strange pattern, or rather lack of the sort of pattern you’d expect. It’s not what we found, it’s what we didn’t find. For example, the bed had been remade with fresh sheets. No semen stains, hairs, etcetera. So, either Greta had changed the sheets after getting up that morning or the murderer had changed them after the rape. Either way, any evidence there might have been has been obliterated. There was no sign of the old sheets, and she wasn’t on the block’s laundry rota for that day or the day before, which points to the second scenario. Then there’s the fingerprints, or again, lack of. The bedside table had no prints at all. You’d expect it to be covered with both Greta’s prints and possibly the previous owner’s, as she had taken the apartment already furnished. There were no prints at all in the bath and on the bathroom basin. The only ones we found were on the toilet seat, which was raised by the way, and they belonged to Professor Sundström. The coffee table was wiped clean too. So was the kitchen sink. Greta’s prints should have been evident in all these places.’

‘That makes sense,’ suggested Westermark. ‘We know Sundström entered the apartment on the Saturday posing as Greta’s father. He went back to clean up and cover his tracks.’

Thulin nodded. ‘That could be true. But his prints did turn up on the fridge door and on the front door. In the living room, some of the books had his prints on them, as well as hers. It just seems odd that he was so careful in one respect, and yet left telltale signs in another.’

‘Presumably, he was concentrating on the areas where he remembered he’d been with Greta the night before.’

‘Westermark’s got a point,’ agreed Moberg.

Thulin shrugged.

‘It does beg the question about why he borrowed the key from the neighbour,’ offered Nordlund. ‘If Sundström raped and killed Greta, then he would have got hold of her key. Her bag was missing, so the killer must have had access to it.’

‘Maybe he just got rid of it at the same time he dumped the body,’ Westermark interjected, ‘and then realized later that he had to go back and sort out the apartment. After all, if you’ve just killed someone, you don’t always act rationally.’

‘Eva,’ Moberg turned his attention back to Thulin, ‘where do we think the rape and murder took place?’

‘Though the evidence has been cleared away, I think the rape probably took place in the apartment, even though there’s nothing in the forensics to support that theory. I think the lack of prints in the bedroom points to that being the location of the rape. But I’m not sure about the murder, though it could have happened there. There are no signs of a struggle. And there’s the practical problem of getting a dead body out of the apartment and down to a car to take to the harbour.’

‘So, to summarize,’ Moberg said, ‘Greta either met her killer in a bar, or she had a visitor when she returned. Then she could have been raped in the apartment and taken away and strangled somewhere else before being thrown into the harbour.’

‘Couldn’t he have raped her elsewhere, too?’ ventured Hakim. Everybody looked at him surprise, not because of what he had said, but because he had had the courage to voice an opinion in front of Moberg. ‘If he raped her in the apartment, wouldn’t it have been difficult to get her out of there if she was still alive? There would have to be some level of co-operation on her part.’

‘Maybe he just coaxed her out,’ ventured Wallen. ‘She would be traumatized by the experience.’ She had come across enough rape cases to know this could be possible.

‘The perpetrator could have slipped in some Rohypnol,’ Thulin said looking up from her notes. ‘It’s the rapist’s drug of choice. Of course, if he had, there’d be no trace after all this time. But we know she’d been in a bar, so she may have been drunk. In such a state, she could have been led out of the apartment. Unfortunately, the blood and tissue samples don’t show up any alcohol, but that doesn’t mean she hadn’t had a few drinks. Again, the sea has covered those tracks.’

‘If, hypothetically, Rohypnol was used, where was it most likely to have been slipped into her drink?’ Nordlund asked.

‘Could have been the bar, but the physical effects can kick in within half an hour. That would have been risky. Much more likely back at the apartment.’

‘OK. Anything else on the forensics side?’ asked Moberg.

‘Only this.’ Thulin produced a small evidence bag. They could see it contained a small, gold hooped earring. ‘Greta had pierced ears and this was still in one of them when she came out of the water. The other’s missing. It either came off in the struggle or it’s at the bottom of the sea.’

Moberg didn’t seem to be listening. Something else was on his mind. ‘Did Sundström have a car down here that weekend?’ It was a pertinent question that no one had previously asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Nordlund shaking his head.

‘And that goes for our other two suspects. I suggest you bloody well find out!’

CHAPTER 31

‘Well, I never! Murdered!’ Vanessa Ridley shook involuntarily. ‘And he was sitting here in my lounge just a few months ago. Doesn’t bear thinking about!’

Despite her protestations, Vanessa didn’t let her cigarette spill any ash on the garish, swirly-patterned carpet. Instead, she delicately flicked it into a large glass ashtray on the occasional table next to her armchair. The whole room was caught in an eighties time warp, from the cream woodchip wallpaper, to the stone cladding around the fireplace. To Anita, the decor seemed totally inappropriate for a 19th-century terraced house. The sharp-eyed Ridley read her mind. ‘Fort Royal Hill wasn’t my idea, love. John liked old houses. I would have preferred one of those nice semis in St. John’s across the river. But he gave me a free hand with the interior. And I’ve become fond of the place. It’s also easy to walk into town. I work in Boots; on the cosmetics counter.’ She stubbed out her cigarette.