Authors: Hakan Ostlundh
The day disappeared into the grayness. It was as if time stopped. It became silent; the damp crept into the houses and settled into your clothes. A soundless, invisible rain.
Alma Vogler looked small and crushed sitting across from Sara and Fredrik. She had had an hour and a half to herself to think, in the backseat of a police car on the way through the gray weather.
“If you have questions I could just as well have answered them at home,” said Alma. “I don’t understand why I have to come along to Visby.”
But there was no protest. Her voice was weak and bewildered. She had on a pair of jeans and a natural white wool sweater that fit tight around her body. It made her look fragile.
“You were not at home on Friday between six and eight,” said Sara.
Alma’s gaze wandered.
“I may have been mistaken by a few minutes,” she said.
Sara sat quietly and waited, but Alma did not continue.
“Exactly when were you at home then, do you think?” asked Sara.
“I don’t know. You don’t go and look at the clock all the time when you’re at home, do you?”
She looked imploringly at Sara and quickly glanced at Fredrik.
“I thought I was at home between six and eight. I must have arrived a little later.”
It hardly sounded like Alma believed what she was saying herself. Sara looked down at the report she had brought with her to the interview, marked a line with her finger.
“But here in the interview last Saturday you say that you had dinner at five thirty. Do you mean that you left the house after dinner and came back later, or is it not true that you had dinner then?”
Alma Vogler breathed heavily through her nose and made a gesture as if she was trying to grasp something in the air.
“Perhaps I didn’t express myself that clearly.”
“At twenty past six on Friday you drove past Nyström’s, the ICA store on Fårö,” said Sara. “You were driving north, so even if you would have turned in somewhere and returned right after, you can’t very well have been home before quarter to seven.”
Alma looked unhappily at Sara. Fredrik leaned a few inches forward.
“But it does seem strange that you only would have driven to the store and turned around,” he said. “And it wasn’t to shop, was it?”
“No,” Alma let out.
“No, because the store was closed, of course,” he said. “On the other hand, if you continue in the direction you were headed and turn left at Eke, you can get to Kalbjerga that way, too.”
“Okay,” said Alma, sighing heavily. “You’re right. I was not at home. I went over to Elisabet’s.”
“Were you on your way to her place when you passed the store?”
“Yes.”
“And that version Elisabet can, of course, confirm?” said Fredrik. “The former was attested to by your husband. If you have several alternative alibis perhaps we can take them all at once.”
He rested his forearms on the table and looked inquisitively at her.
“No, she can’t. She wasn’t home.”
She sounded more definite now. If this was the truth, it meant that Elisabet had lied, too. All of them had lied. Elisabet, Alma, their husbands, their father Ernst Vogler …
“We thought it was simplest. That we said we were at home. There would just be a lot of trouble otherwise.”
In contrast to what it had become now, thought Fredrik, but looked at her without saying anything.
“We have nothing to do with that,” said Alma, her voice rising in pitch.
“So when did you get to Elisabet’s?” said Sara. “Six thirty?”
“Something like that,” said Alma, lowering her voice.
“And she wasn’t home then?”
“No, exactly.”
“Not Ernst, either?” asked Sara.
“Yes, he was there. Elisabet had gone to Skär to look after the lambs. They have lambs there.”
“But still you all agreed to say that everyone was at home between six and eight? Elisabet with you, and you with her?”
“Yes.”
Sara turned toward Fredrik.
“I think we’ll take a break.”
He nodded.
* * *
“Maybe they did it together, Alma and Elisabet. Or whatever combination of these five,” said Göran. “Now everything is open.”
“We’ll have to get a DNA sample,” said Ove.
“Hmm, we will,” said Göran, “but we don’t have any good DNA to compare with.”
“There is still a blond person with shoe size seven or eight who has been in the house,” said Fredrik. “One of the men may be involved, of course, but if these are the guilty parties then it’s one of the sisters who was holding the hammer.”
“What is there to say that there can’t have been two in the house,” said Ove. “Maybe one of them didn’t leave any prints.”
Göran moaned and went back and sat down at the desk.
“Let’s calm down a little,” he said with his back turned to them. “We’ll start by bringing in Elisabet, then we’ll see what she has to say about the matter. I’m sure you have other things to keep busy with for the time being.”
They looked at each other and withdrew from Göran’s office. Fredrik thought about his desk and all the papers covering it.
The sea had vanished in the fog. The footbridges from the terminal to the gangways were also consumed, halfway.
Henrik sat in the armchair with the uncomfortably high arm support and looked out over the harbor area. The hotel room seemed to have shrunk after the latest interview with the police. He would not be able to stand it there much longer. If he didn’t have to take Ellen into consideration he would already have started throwing things around, or curled up in a ball on the floor, or simply escaped from there.
Something had changed between him and Maria without his understanding how it had happened. It was nothing they had said or done, but it was still so obvious. The closeness that existed between them, and which they both could have found a little consolation in, had been transformed into something else. It was as if they no longer knew how they should behave toward each other. Maria mostly stayed in the little bedroom. Ellen moved between them, unknowing, but hardly without noticing the changed atmosphere.
It was as if Malin’s dead gaze could see everything. It drilled right into their secret. Axel, too, was staring at him. What he could brush off before as a stupid but nonetheless meaningless escapade had been transformed into something rotten and loathsome. The first few days he had been too shocked to even reflect on it, but then it had come crawling and grown bigger and bigger. Did Maria feel the same? He thought so. He thought he could see it in her eyes that turned away, that no longer sought his. Or was he the one who was avoiding hers?
The dead knew everything. Saw everything.
For a fraction of a second he had actually believed that Maria could have killed them. Just when Fredrik Broman had set out the picture and he recognized the sweatshirt. As soon as he really thought about it he could never believe anything like that. But that had been a terrifyingly dark fraction of a second.
It was Sara’s own idea that she should be alone in the interview room with Elisabet Vogler. Perhaps it would get her to open up. With two police officers in the room Elisabet would feel pressured and the more pressure she felt, the more she would hide behind her dissociative manner and stay on her high horse. That was the theory at least. Göran had said okay. Ove and Fredrik had taken seats behind the mirror in the technology room.
Elisabet Vogler was her usual self from Sara’s meeting with her at home a few days earlier. She did not look the least bit upset. But Sara had not expected her to be, either.
“Why did you say you were at home between six and eight on Friday when you weren’t?” Sara began the interview.
She deliberately avoided the word “lie.”
“I thought it was simplest that way,” answered Elisabet Vogler.
She sat away from the table with her hands clasped and resting on one leg. Sara felt how easy it would have been to spit out something sarcastic. But she was not there to comment on Elisabet Vogler’s decision.
“Whose idea was it that you would stick to that version?” she asked instead.
“I don’t actually remember who suggested it, but it was a joint decision.”
From Elisabet it sounded as if she was accounting for a decision on the building committee rather than explaining why she had lied about her alibi in a murder investigation.
“So what were you doing between six and eight?” asked Sara.
Elisabet took a dramatically deep breath before she answered.
“I checked on the lambs. We have lambs up by Skär.”
“When did you leave home?”
“Around six.”
“And when were you back?”
“Around seven.”
“How long were you with the lambs before you drove back?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly, but at a guess half an hour.”
They had test-driven the stretch between Elisabet Vogler’s home and the pasture where the lambs were. If you kept to the speed limit it took twelve minutes to drive. That tallied pretty well. They had also test-driven the road between Elisabet Vogler’s home and Kalbjerga by way of Eke. That took fourteen minutes. That also fit pretty well. Especially if you added time for getting rid of bloody clothes and shoes.
“Is there anyone who can confirm this information?” Sara asked.
“Not that I know of. But there seem to be those who keep track of Alma. Maybe there is someone who has seen me, too.”
Elisabet smiled curtly.
“Thanks,” said Sara. “Then I don’t have anything else to ask you right now.”
Elisabet was about to stand up, but Sara stopped her.
“You can sit here awhile. I’ll be back soon.”
* * *
“You can’t exactly say that I got her to open up,” she said to Fredrik and Ove out in the corridor.
“Maybe she doesn’t have anything else to say,” Ove suggested, scratching his chin with a blunt finger.
“An apology would have been in order. If this is true then it’s so fucking dense…”
The irritation Sara had held back in the interview room was coming out.
“How much time have we wasted on those two?”
“Perhaps you should have tried to pressure her about the inheritance?” said Fredrik.
“No. I have to have something concrete to work with.”
Sara left them outside the technology room and hurried over to Göran’s office.
“I have to speak with Klint,” he said when Sara reported on the interview. “If it were up to me I would release her. We can’t have both Stina Hansson and Elisabet Vogler held for the same crime. And I believe more in Stina as a murderer than this lady. But we’ll do a house search and then we’ll see what the DNA sample can produce when we get the results from that wad of hair.”
“I would like to make another attempt with Ellen,” said Sara. “If the father goes along with it. Some detail may come up. Now that we have something to compare with, I mean.”
“That’s a good idea. Do it down at the hotel.”
* * *
The papers were sorted, the desk liberated from the white patchwork quilt. Fredrik instead had a bundle of letter-sized papers in chronological order in front of him. He was transferring the information to a list on the computer that he could then sort by various parameters such as date, place, and person.
Many of the trips he had been able to check off with Janna Drake. She had given him names of companies and individuals not shown by the bookings she sent over first. But certain trips he would be forced to go through together with Henrik Kjellander.
The review of Henrik’s travels had produced a long list of names. There were employees at advertising agencies, editors at magazines, models, makeup artists, stylists, assistants, and sometimes representatives of the companies that engaged the advertising agencies who in turn engaged Henrik.
Fredrik decided to first look at recurring names and places. There was nothing obvious, but he was more likely to find something interesting close at hand. During the sixteen trips to Stockholm, Henrik had stayed at a hotel once. Fredrik assumed he had stayed with relatives or friends, for example with Thomas Bark, on the other occasions.
He called Hotel Lydmar in Stockholm and the Old Theater Hotel in Östersund and asked them to send over guest lists for the nights Henrik Kjellander had stayed with them. He also called Hotel St. Petri in Copenhagen, the same hotel all five trips, and asked about their guest lists. The other hotels around the world he left for the national investigation bureau. They knew better what threads to pull on, but it would surely take time, in any event, with Capetown and New York. Italy was part of the EU. That ought to go quicker. At least in theory.
Fredrik let his eyes run across the names on the screen. The list was exhaustingly long even now. With the guest lists from the hotels it would be multiplied.
When the phone rang a few minutes later it was a welcome break. He saw that the call was internal.
“Yes, Fredrik,” he answered.
It was Anna, one of the radio operators.
“I have a man down at Storsudret on the line. He’s calling about a break-in at a summer cottage.”
“Yes?” said Fredrik.
He assumed that there was a good explanation for why she wanted to transfer the call to him. She knew that he was not working on break-ins at summer cottages. Especially not when a double murder had just happened on Fårö.
“It sounds like it could be something,” said Anna.
“Okay, connect him.”
There was a snapping on the phone.
“Hello?” a voice said. It sounded like it belonged to a man roughly Fredrik’s own age.
“Police department, Fredrik Broman.”
“Hello, my name is Markus Bergvall. Well, it happens that I am a neighbor to some people who have a summer cottage down on Storsudret, Larsson is their name.”
Bergvall took a breath and continued.
“Now I happened to see that there was someone there last Friday … Or to make a long story short…”
Thanks, thought Fredrik.
“I went past the cottage today again and then I discovered that someone had broken a window. So I went in to see what had happened, if there was anything stolen or such.”