Maggie laid down her wine glass and looked at her husband. ‘Seriously, what do you think you’re going to achieve by flying all the way to Stockholm?’
‘Hopefully we will be able to speak to the Andersson boy and his father, but they’re not the only ones we need to talk to.’
‘Oh?’
‘No.’ His face clouded for a moment. ‘It was a remark that Kirsty made, actually. We followed it up. Seems like Mr Magnusson has his own private jet.’
Maggie’s eyebrows rose. ‘Impressive,’ she remarked.
‘Well, we all know he’s a multi-millionaire,’ Lorimer replied. ‘But’ — he paused, looking his wife in the eye — ‘what we didn’t know until today is that Henrik Magnusson was in Glasgow the night his daughter was murdered. And that his jet took off from Glasgow airport shortly after two a.m. on the Saturday.’
‘This changes everything.’ Jo Grant ran her hand through her newly gelled hair.
‘Yes,’ Lorimer replied. ‘As far as we knew, Magnusson was in Stockholm that night. Even told Dr Fergusson that he couldn’t get a flight out straight away. Something’s not right.’
‘No.’ The DI’s sigh seemed to come all the way from her thick-soled boots. ‘How long will you be gone?’
Lorimer shrugged. ‘As long as it takes. Might have to hook up with some of the local police in Stockholm, we’ll see. Depends on what I find.’
‘And Colin Young?’
Lorimer caught sight of her face, eyes flicking away from his own. She was feeling it now, all right, a sense of unease that she had arrested the wrong man after all.
‘Up to the Fiscal. But I doubt there’s anything like enough evidence to release him yet. And, Jo?’
‘Yes?’ She met his keen blue gaze now.
‘Despite what Kirsty Wilson thinks, you might still be right.’
Professor Solomon Brightman sat back and looked at the words he had typed onto the screen. He blinked, thinking about the profiles he was creating. One was of a shadowy figure that leapt out at blonde women from his hiding places in the woods. And his chosen victims were so alike. That was significant, he thought. Why a person should suddenly take it into their head to attack and try to kill suggested some sort of trigger. Something to do with a woman who resembled his victims, perhaps? Had the killer undergone a recent trauma? Or were the attacks drug-related in some psychotic way? He would think more about that later but now he wanted to concentrate on a different man.
Solly scrolled back to read the pages that related to a previous profile: Henrik Magnusson. So far he had built up a picture of a domineering father who was trying to mould his only daughter into the sort of woman he wanted her to be. Someone in the image of her dead mother, perhaps? He stroked his beard. It was a possibility. He had asked Lorimer to find out what he could about the late Mrs Magnusson. Had she been a virginal bride? Or had he elevated her to a position of perfection as memory had faded? It happened sometimes. It was easier to forget the petty, human things that made a couple irritated with one another and only remember the good times.
And if his theory was correct then he had to ask one important question: had Eva been a disappointment to him in some way? Solly stared at the screen. He was seeing not the words now but picturing in his mind’s eye the photograph of a girl laughing into the camera on the ski slopes, laughing for her father. Or, he wondered, had she been laughing at him? A teenage girl who had slept around as easily as Eva had in the months she had been in Glasgow was surely adept in her sexual adventures long before her arrival in the city.
None of Jo Grant’s team had asked the question of where Eva’s father had been on the night of her murder, assuming Magnusson to have been in Stockholm. Never make assumptions, he remembered Lorimer telling his team on more than one occasion when he had sat amongst the officers. But they had, and who could have blamed them for that? The fact remained that the Swede had been in Glasgow on the night of his daughter’s murder. And now Solly Brightman had been asked by Strathclyde’s finest to regard the man as a potential suspect.
CHAPTER 37
Stockholm.
Lorimer looked out of the window as the plane came into land, marvelling at the water everywhere, tiny clusters of houses dotted on the margins of what appeared to be islets floating down below. The sky was an icy blue, the weak sun making the snow-covered landscape sparkle; an illusion of warmth in a land in the iron grip of winter. It was like an illustration from a fairy tale, he decided as the plane banked for the final descent, these steep-roofed houses clustered together, clad in white. And wasn’t this the land of Hans Christian Andersen? Memories of childhood tales came back: the Snow Queen and the fragment of mirror that had lodged in a child’s heart, freezing it and turning him to darkness and despair.
No, he remembered now, Andersen belonged to Denmark. And it was quite a different Andersson that he would shortly be seeking.
Solly had been right urging him to take his warmest coat, Lorimer thought as the doors opened with a sigh, the clean sharpness taking his breath away.
It was a short taxi ride to the small hotel he had booked online and the driver was mercifully silent. Lorimer gazed out of the window as the city streets became narrower and the traffic slowed, allowing him to admire the pastel-coloured old buildings. He had read somewhere that Stockholm was called ‘The Venice of the North’ and now he could see why as the taxi slipped down a narrow cobbled street emerging into daylight, the water glimmering nearby. It would be a lovely city to visit properly, he told himself. Perhaps one day, with Maggie…
A quick splash in the hotel’s ample wash basin was all that was needed before Lorimer headed out once again into the streets. He had called his counterpart in the Stockholm police to let her know that he had arrived. Should anything unusual happen then he had the back-up of her force, the senior officer had assured him.
Magnusson’s home was in the outskirts of Östermalm, the eastern part of the city, and that was where the detective superintendent was heading first. There were only six hours of daylight at this time of the year and already the afternoon sky had turned grey. Once more Lorimer looked out of a taxi window but this driver was eager to chat, wishing no doubt to impress the visitor with his beautiful city.
‘We go through the Old Town, sir,’ the man told him, his English flawless but overlaid with an American accent. ‘It’s called Gamla Stan,’ he added. ‘I’ll show you our royal palace if you like.’
‘I don’t have time for sight-seeing, I’m afraid.’ Lorimer leaned forward, seeing the disappointment on the man’s face. ‘I’m here on business rather than for pleasure.’
‘Well, you’ll see some of the best architecture in the world anyway,’ the driver boasted. ‘Just keep looking out the window. Best preserved city centre you’ll ever see. Medieval.’ He grimaced as though a bad taste had come into his mouth. ‘Used to be old stuff everywhere when I was a boy. Tore most of it down where I live.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yeah. Place called Klarakvarteren. Ever heard of it?’
‘No, sorry.’
‘Huh! Famous in its own way, y’know. Urban renewal, they called it. Urban disgrace most of us think!’
Lorimer let the driver chatter on, complaining about the way developers had made their fortunes back in the sixties and seventies. Had Magnusson been part of that, he wondered? Had he made his money out of that particular part of the city? He dismissed the thought at once: Henrik Magnusson would also have been a child back then. But perhaps his own empire had been built on the success of such developments?
‘Posh part of town, here,’ the driver snorted, looking up at the massive apartment buildings as they passed by. Lorimer nodded silently, thinking how much they reminded him of the wealthier arrondissements of Paris.