She had caught sight of something under a bush at the edge of the field and was using all her strength to lift up the object. It was an axe. She held it out toward her sister.
“What’s that?” asked Johanna, her eyes wide.
“An axe, dummy,” said Matilda. “Let’s show it to Mamma.”
Since the axe was stained with what looked like blood and the girls had found it near the murder scene, their mother immediately called the police.
Knutas was one of the first to hear about the find. He jogged through the corridors of the police station and down the stairs to the tech department. Today all sorts of things were happening. The preliminary autopsy report had arrived in the morning, and it showed, as they thought, that Helena Hillerstrom had died from an axe blow to the head, but she had not been raped. On the other hand, she did have skin scrapings belonging to Bergdal under her fingernails, which was not particularly surprising, since they already knew about the fight. He had also spoken to SCL and learned that the panties had no trace of semen.
When Knutas came huffing and puffing through the glass door, Erik Sohlman had just received the axe in a paper bag.
“Hi, there,” he greeted Knutas.
“Did it just get here?” Knutas leaned over the bag.
“Yup,” said Sohlman as he pulled on a pair of thin latex gloves. “Let’s have a look.”
He switched on a couple more fluorescent lights that hung over the white examination table and carefully opened the bag, which had been sealed with a label that said: “Found 2001-06-06 at approx. 3:30 P.M. in a field at Lindarve Farm, Frojel. The find was made by Matilda and Johanna Laurell of Lindarve Farm, Frojel. Teclass="underline" 0498-515-776.”
Sohlman began photographing the axe. Cautiously he turned it this way and that so he could capture it from various angles. When he was done, he straddled a stool next to the examination table.
“Now let’s see if we can find anything interesting,” he said, pushing his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. “See this on the blade?”
Anders Knutas studied the heavy blade of the axe. He could clearly see dark spots on it. “Is that blood?”
“It looks like it. We’ll send it to SCL for DNA analysis. The worst part is that they always take so damn long. It may be several weeks before we get an answer,” muttered Sohlman.
He took out a magnifying glass and turned his attention to studying the handle of the axe. “We’re in luck. Since the handle is both painted and varnished, there’s a greater chance that there will be fingerprints.”
After a moment he gave a whistle. “Look at this.”
Knutas almost stumbled as he stood up from his chair. “What is it?”
“Here, on the handle. Do you see it?”
Knutas took the magnifying glass that Sohlman handed to him. The print of a finger appeared on the handle. He turned the magnifying glass, and suddenly he could see several fingerprints.
“They seem to be from at least two different people,” said Sohlman. “Can you see that they’re two different sizes? One small and one big. That means we’re going to need prints from the two little girls who found the axe, so we can make comparisons. It must have been protected in some way. Otherwise the rain would have destroyed the prints.”
“Do you think this could be the murder weapon?”
“Absolutely. The size and type correspond to the wounds.”
Sohlman pulled out a box of soot powder, which he brushed onto the axe handle. He took out two tubes, mixing their contents into a plastic paste, which he spread on the handle, using a little plastic spatula.
“Now we have to let it harden. It’ll take ten minutes.”
“Okay,” said Knutas, controlling his eagerness. “In the meantime I’ll go get Bergdal’s prints.”
They had their answer forty-five minutes later. The fingerprint on the handle of the axe turned out to belong to Per Bergdal.
So that’s how it’s going to be after all, Knutas observed, disappointed. Bergdal had apparently murdered his girlfriend on the beach. They couldn’t be entirely sure until the results from the DNA analysis of the blood came in, but if the blood on the axe was Helena’s, there could be no doubt. The boyfriend was the perpetrator. Maybe I’m getting old, he thought. My judgment is starting to slip.
He gathered the other members of the investigative team in his office to report on the results.
“Goddamn, that’s great,” said Norrby.
“This calls for a celebration,” exclaimed Sohlman. “Let’s go out on the town for a mandatory beer. I’ll buy the first round.”
Everyone got up, chattering happily.
Anders Knutas immediately notified the county police commissioner as well as prosecuting attorney Smittenberg. He called Karin Jacobsson and Thomas Wittberg in Stockholm and told them that they could come back home. Per Bergdal would be charged that very evening. The court proceedings for the issuance of an indictment would take place over the weekend.
The news was reported to the newspapers, radio, and TV, and the case was regarded as closed. Gotland could breathe a sigh of relief.
MONDAY, JUNE 11
Johan’s week would turn out to be tougher than he thought. As soon as he set foot in the newsroom on Monday morning, he was summoned to Grenfors’s office.
“Great job you did on Gotland.”
“Thanks,” said Johan, slightly on guard. He always had a feeling that the editors wanted something special from him whenever they started off the conversation by praising him.
“I assume nothing else is going to happen over there. After all, the boyfriend seems to be guilty,” Grenfors went on.
“Could be.”
“The thing is, now we’re in the shit here.”
“Is that so? Seems I’ve heard this before, haven’t I?” Johan said dryly.
Grenfors ignored his tone of voice. “We had to scrap the feature story that was supposed to run on Friday. We don’t have any new ideas. You talked before about putting together something on the gangster war in Stockholm. Do you think you’d have time to do it now?”
Johan understood the problem, so he didn’t want to be unreasonable, even though he’d been hoping for at least one calm day after the Gotland trip. Emma Winarve had haunted his mind all weekend, making it hard for him to sleep. He couldn’t understand what had gotten into him. A married woman and the mother of young children, from Gotland, and he hardly knew her. It was ridiculous. He looked at Grenfors.
“Well, I guess so. I have a lot of material already on tape from before. I don’t think there’s time to do a full-length story, but I could probably put together seven or eight minutes.”
Grenfors looked relieved. “Good. Then that’s what we’ll do. I knew I could count on you.”
When Johan returned to his cubicle in the editorial office, he started going through his material. The shooting in Varberg, when a man with a criminal record was killed right on the street with three shots to the head. An execution, pure and simple. Two months earlier the victim had been involved in the murder of a pizza maker in Hogdalen, who was shot to death while sitting in his car in a parking lot. The pizza maker in turn was in debt, big time, to the unknown owner of a restaurant in Stockholm’s underworld, which everybody knew had connections to the Russian mafia. In addition, he was an accomplice in the murder of a gym owner in Farsta, who was shot to death at the Taby racetrack several years before. And so it continued. Shootings, armed robberies, and even murder had become common fare in Stockholm. The news desk had stopped reporting all the incidents of armed robbery. They occurred so often that they no longer qualified as news on the broadcast. Most of the murders and serious felonies in Stockholm were committed by a small clique of hardened criminals. That was the angle that Johan was thinking of using for his story.
He had developed a good contact with the girlfriend of one of this year’s latest victims. He punched in her phone number. She had promised him an interview.