The Man From Beijing (3 page)

‘He has cancer. Didn’t you know?’

‘No. Where?’

‘In his stomach. Apparently it hasn’t spread. Anyway, he has a sub from Uppsala. Valentina Miir’s her name. If I’ve pronounced it right.’

Huddén shouted to Ytterström, who was drinking coffee by one of the cars. He confirmed that the police doctor would be here at any moment.

Sundberg started examining the body closely. Every time she was confronted by a corpse, she was overcome by the same feeling of pointless-ness. She was unable to awaken the dead, the best she could do was to expose the reasons for the crime and send the killer to a prison cell or to an asylum for the mentally ill.

‘Somebody has gone berserk,’ she said. ‘With a long knife. Or a bayonet. Possibly a sword. I can see at least ten wounds, nearly all of them potentially fatal. But I don’t understand the missing leg. Do we know who the man is?’

‘Not yet. All the houses appear to be empty.’

Sundberg stood up and looked around the village. The houses seemed to return her attentive gaze.

‘Have you been knocking on doors?’

‘I thought I should wait. Whoever did this might still be around.’

‘You’re right.’

She beckoned to Ytterström, who threw his empty cardboard cup into the snow.

‘Let’s go in,’ she said. ‘There must be people around. This isn’t a ghost town.’

‘There’s been no sign of anybody.’

Sundberg looked again at the houses, the snowed-over gardens, the road. She drew her pistol and set off towards the nearest house; the two men followed. It was a few minutes past eleven.

What the three police officers discovered was unprecedented in the annals of Swedish crime and would become a part of Swedish legal history. There were bodies in every house. Dogs and cats had been stabbed to death, even a parrot had had its head cut off. They found a total of nineteen dead people, all of them elderly except for a boy who must have been about twelve. Some had been killed while asleep in bed; others were lying on the floor or sitting on chairs at the kitchen table. An old woman had died with a comb in her hand, a man by a stove with an overturned coffee pot by his side. In one house they found two people locked in an embrace and tied together. All had been subjected to frenzied violence. It was as if a blood-laden hurricane had stormed through the village just as the old people who lived there were getting up. As the elderly in the country tend to rise early, Sundberg assumed the murders had taken place close to sunrise.

Vivi Sundberg felt as if her whole head was being submerged in blood. She shook off her outrage, but felt very cold. It was as if she were viewing the dead disfigured bodies through a telescope, which meant that she didn’t need to approach too closely.

And then there was the smell. Although the bodies had barely turned cold, they were already giving off a smell that was both sweet and sour. While inside the houses, Sundberg tried to breathe through her mouth. The moment she stepped outside, she filled her lungs with fresh air. Crossing the threshold of the next house was like preparing to face something almost unbearable.

Everything she saw, one body after another, bore witness to the same frenzy and the same wounds caused by a very sharp weapon. The list she made later that day, which she never revealed to anybody, comprised brief notes on exactly what she had seen:

House number one.
Dead elderly man, half naked, ragged pyjamas, slippers, half lying on the staircase. Head almost severed from body, the thumb of the left hand three feet away. Dead elderly woman, nightgown, stomach split open, intestines hanging out, false teeth smashed to pieces.

House number two.
Dead man and dead woman, both at least eighty. Bodies found in a double bed on the first floor. The woman might have been killed in her sleep with a slash from her left shoulder and through her breast towards her right hip. The man tried to defend himself with a hammer, but one arm severed, throat cut. Remarkably, the bodies have been tied together. Gives the impression that the man was alive when bound but the woman dead. No proof, of course, just an immediate reaction. Young boy dead in a small bedroom. Might have been asleep when killed.

House number three.
Lone woman, dead on the kitchen floor. A dog of unknown pedigree stabbed to death by her side. The woman’s spine appears to be broken in more than one place.

House number four.
Man dead in the hall. Wearing trousers, shirt; barefoot. Probably tried to resist. Body almost cut in two through the stomach. Elderly woman sitting dead in the kitchen. Two, possibly three wounds in the top of her head.

House number seven.
Two elderly women and an elderly man dead in their beds upstairs. Impression: they were awake, conscious, but had no time to react. Cat stabbed to death in the kitchen.

House number eight.
Elderly man lying dead outside, one leg missing. Two dogs beheaded. Woman dead on the stairs, hacked to pieces.

House number nine.
Four people dead in the living room on the first floor. Half dressed, with cups of coffee, radio on, station one. Three elderly women, an elderly man. All with their heads on their knees.

House number ten.
Two very old people, a man and a woman, dead in their beds. Impossible to say if they were aware of what was happening.

Towards the end of her list she no longer had the mental strength to record all the details. Nevertheless, what she had seen was unforgettable, a vision of hell itself.

She numbered the houses according to the discovery of the bodies. That was not the same order as their locations along the road. When they came to the fifth house during their macabre inspection, they found signs of life. They could hear music coming from inside the house. Ytterström thought it sounded like Jimi Hendrix.

Before going inside they called in two other officers as backup. They approached the front door – pistols drawn. Huddén banged hard on it. It was opened by a half-naked, long-haired man. He drew back in horror on seeing all the guns. Vivi Sundberg lowered her pistol when she saw he was unarmed.

‘Are you alone in the house?’

‘My wife’s here as well,’ said the man, his voice shaking.

‘Nobody else?’

‘No. What’s going on?’

Sundberg holstered her pistol and gestured to the others to do the same.

‘Let’s go inside,’ she said to the half-naked man, who was shivering with cold. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Tom.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Hansson.’

‘Come on, Tom Hansson, let’s go inside. Out of the cold.’

The music was at full volume. Sundberg had the impression there were speakers in every room. She followed the man into a cluttered living room where a woman in a nightdress was curled up on a sofa. He turned down the music and put on a pair of trousers that had been hanging over a chair back. Hansson and the woman on the sofa were about sixty.

‘What’s happened?’ asked the woman who, clearly scared, spoke with a broad Stockholm accent. Probably they were hippies left over from the sixties. Sundberg decided not to beat about the bush; there was no time to waste – it was possible that whoever had been responsible for this outrage might be on the way to carry out another massacre.

‘Many of your neighbours are dead,’ Sundberg said. ‘Horrendous crimes have taken place in this little village overnight. It’s important that you answer our questions. What’s your name?’

‘Ninni,’ said the woman. ‘Are Herman and Hilda dead?’

‘Where do they live?’

‘In the house to the left.’

Sundberg nodded.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so. They’ve been murdered. But they’re not the only ones.’

‘If this is your idea of a joke, it’s not a very good one,’ said Tom Hansson.

Sundberg lost her composure briefly.

‘I’m sorry, but we only have time for you to answer my questions. I can understand that you think what I’m telling you seems incredible, but it’s true – horrific, but true. Did you hear anything last night?’

The man sat down on the sofa beside the woman.

‘We were asleep.’

‘Did you hear anything this morning?’

They both shook their heads.

‘Haven’t you even noticed that the place is crawling with police officers?’

‘When we play music loudly, we don’t hear anything.’

‘When did you last see your neighbours?’

‘If you mean Herman and Hilda, yesterday,’ said Ninni. ‘We usually run into each other when we go out with the dogs.’

‘Do you have a dog?’

Tom Hansson nodded in the direction of the kitchen.

‘He’s pretty old and lazy. He doesn’t even bother to get up when we have visitors.’

‘Didn’t he bark during the night?’

‘He never barks.’

‘What time did you see your neighbours?’

‘At about three o’clock yesterday afternoon. But only Hilda.’

‘Did everything seem to be as usual?’

‘She had back pains. Herman was probably in the kitchen, solving crosswords. I didn’t see him.’

‘What about the rest of the people in the village?’

‘Everything was the same as it always is. Only old people live here. They stay indoors when it’s cold. We see them more often in spring and summer.’

‘There aren’t any children here, then?’

‘None at all.’

Sundberg paused, thinking about the dead boy.

‘Is it really true?’ asked the woman on the sofa. She was frightened.

‘Yes,’ Sundberg said. ‘It could well be that everybody in this village is dead. Apart from you.’

Huddén was standing by the window.

‘Not quite everybody,’ he said slowly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Not quite everybody’s dead. There’s somebody out there on the road.’

Sundberg hurried over to the window and saw a woman standing in the road outside. She was old, wearing a bathrobe and black rubber boots. Her hands were clasped in prayer.

Sundberg held her breath. The woman was motionless.

3

Tom Hansson came up to the window and stood beside Vivi Sundberg.

‘It’s only Julia,’ he said. ‘We sometimes find her outside in the cold without a coat on. Hilda and Herman usually keep an eye on her when the home help isn’t here.’

‘Where does she live?’ asked Sundberg.

He pointed at the house next to the last one at the edge of the village.

‘When we moved here,’ he said, ‘Julia was married. Her husband, Rune, used to drive forestry vehicles, until he burst an artery and died in the cab of his truck. She went a bit odd after that – wandering around with her hands clenched in her pockets, if you see what I mean. I suppose we’ve always thought she should be able to die here. She has two children who come to see her once a year. They’re just waiting for their little inheritance and couldn’t care less about her.’

Sundberg and Huddén went outside. The woman looked up when Sundberg paused in front of her, but she said nothing. Nor did she protest when Huddén helped to lead her back home. The house was neat and tidy. On one wall were photographs of her dead husband and the two children who didn’t care about her.

Sundberg took out her notebook for the first time. Huddén examined a document with official stamps that was lying on the kitchen table.

‘Julia Holmgren,’ he said. ‘She’s eighty-seven.’

‘Make sure somebody phones the home-help service. I don’t care what time they normally come to see to her, get them here right now.’

The old woman sat at the kitchen table, looking out of the window. Clouds were hanging heavily over the landscape.

‘Should we try asking her a few questions?’

Sundberg shook her head.

‘There’s no point. What could she possibly tell us?’

She nodded at Huddén, indicating that he should leave them alone. He went out to the yard. Sundberg went into the living room, stood in the middle of the floor and closed her eyes. She tried to come to terms with what had happened.

There was something about the old woman that set bells ringing faintly in the back of Sundberg’s mind. But she was unable to pin the thought down. She continued standing there, opened her eyes and tried to think. What had actually happened that January morning? A number of people murdered in a tiny remote village. Plus several dead pets. Everything pointed towards a wild frenzy. Could a single attacker really have done all this? Had several killers turned up in the middle of the night, then disappeared again after carrying out their brutal massacre? It was too soon to say. Sundberg had no answers, only a set of circumstances and many dead bodies. She had a couple still alive who had withdrawn to this place in the middle of nowhere from Stockholm, years ago. And a senile old woman in the habit of standing in the road wearing only a nightdress.

But there was a starting point, it seemed. Not everybody in the village was dead. At least three people had survived. Why? Coincidence, or did it have some meaning?

Sundberg stood motionless for a few more minutes. She could see through the window that the forensic team from Gävle had arrived, along with a woman she assumed was the police doctor. She took a deep breath. She was still the one in charge – for the time being, at any rate, but she needed help from Stockholm today.

She pulled out her mobile phone and called Robertsson, the district prosecutor, to explain the situation.

Sundberg wondered how he would react. None of us has ever seen anything like this before, she thought.

She went outside where the two forensic officers and the police doctor were waiting.

‘You need to see this for yourselves. We’ll start with the man lying outside in the snow. Then we’ll go through the houses one by one. You can decide if you’ll need extra assistance. It’s a very big crime scene.’

Sundberg parried their questions. They had to see it all with their own eyes. She led the procession from one macabre scene to the next. When they came to the third house, Lönngren, the senior forensic officer, said he needed to call for reinforcements right now. At the fourth house, the police doctor said the same thing. Calls were made. They continued through the remaining houses and gathered once more on the road. By then the first journalist had arrived. Sundberg told Ytterström to make sure nobody spoke to him. She would do it herself as soon as she had time.