“I think the first thing we should do is sit down and have a talk,” said Knutas, and he walked right into the living room and sat down on the sofa with the floral upholstery without taking off either his shoes or his jacket. He pulled out his notebook.
“When did you discover that Frida hadn’t come home?”
“This morning around eight o’clock when Svante woke me up. He’s our two-year-old.”
He sat down on a wicker chair next to the superintendent.
“I took the kids over to my parents’ house. I didn’t want them to be here at home while I’m so worried. We have two more, a girl who’s five and a boy who’s four.”
“What did you do when you discovered that Frida wasn’t in the house?”
“I tried calling her cell phone but didn’t get an answer. Then I called around to her girlfriends. No one knew anything. So I alerted the police. A little later I drove over to the Monk’s Cellar, taking the same route that she should have taken home, but I didn’t see anything.”
“Have you talked to her parents or other family members?”
“She’s from Stockholm. Her parents and her brothers and sister all live there, but we hardly ever hear from them. They don’t have much contact with each other. Frida and her parents, I mean. That’s why I haven’t talked to them. I didn’t call her sister because I didn’t want to upset her for no reason.”
“Where do your parents live?”
“They live in Slite, on the east side of the island. They came over to pick up the children about an hour ago.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Just about a year. We used to live in Stockholm. Last summer we moved to the island. I was born and raised here, and all of my family is here on Gotland.”
“How was Frida when she left home yesterday? I mean, what was her mood like?”
“Same as always. Cheerful, looking forward to the evening. She had really spiffed herself up. She’s so happy about making friends with those women. Well, I am, too, of course. It wasn’t easy for her to move here in the beginning.”
“I understand. You have to excuse me for asking, but how are things between you and Frida? What’s your relationship like, I mean?”
Stefan Lindh squirmed a bit. He had one leg crossed over the other. Now he switched legs and blushed slightly.
“Um, well, it’s fine. Of course there’s a lot of work to do. The three kids take up almost all our time. There isn’t much time left over for anything else. Things are about the same for us as for most people, I suppose. No real problems, but we’re not exactly floating on cloud nine, either.”
“Have you had a fight or any kind of crisis recently?”
“No, just the opposite. I think things have been unusually good between us lately. It was tough when we first moved here, but now Frida seems to be thriving. The kids are doing well. They think the daycare center is fun.”
“Has anything out of the ordinary happened lately? Have there been any strange phone conversations, or has your wife met anyone new that she’s told you about? Maybe at work?”
“I don’t think so,” Lindh replied hesitantly, with a frown. “Not that I can recall offhand.”
“What kind of work does she do?”
“She’s a hairdresser. She works at the salon across from the Obs supermarket at Ostercentrum.”
“So she must meet lots of different people. Has she mentioned any particular customer lately? Anyone special?”
“No. Of course she talks about plenty of crazy customers, but there hasn’t been anyone in particular lately.”
“I noticed that you have a security system on your house. Why is that?”
“Frida wanted to have it installed when we moved in. She’s afraid of the dark and doesn’t feel safe without it. I travel quite a lot for my job, and sometimes I’m gone for several days at a time. Things are much better now that we have the security alarm.”
Knutas handed Stefan Lindh his card. “If Frida comes home or contacts you, call me on my direct line. You can also reach me on my cell phone. It’s always on.”
“What are you going to do now?” asked Lindh.
“We’ll start looking,” replied Knutas, and stood up.
Knutas took the direct route back to headquarters. The others gradually came in, one after the other. It was past 9:00 p.m. by the time everyone had gathered in Knutas’s office. They had all heard approximately the same story: that Frida had met a man and had talked to him for over an hour. None of the girlfriends had ever seen him before. They described him as tall and good-looking, with thick medium-blond hair, about thirty-five. One of the women noticed that he hadn’t shaved that day. Frida and the stranger had flirted quite openly, and for a while he had held her hand.
The girlfriends thought she was out of her mind. Married and the mother of three. What would people say? Visby was a small town, and they had seen plenty of familiar faces at the inn.
The others had walked home together because they lived in the same direction, but Frida had bicycled off alone. Even though Frida liked to flirt, they didn’t think she would go home with some strange man. They all agreed about that.
Knutas’s cell phone rang. During the conversation, which for Knutas’s part consisted of solemn grunts and uhhuhs, the superintendent’s face took on a grayish hue.
Everyone’s eyes were fixed on Knutas when he hung up. The silence in the room was palpable.
“A woman was found dead in the cemetery,” he said grimly, and reached for his jacket. “All indications point to murder.”
The young man who found the body had been taking his dog for a walk without a leash. When they passed the churchyard, the dog dashed into the cemetery, heading straight for some shrubbery.
When the investigative team arrived, a cluster of people had already gathered at the cemetery. Several police officers were in the process of putting up crime scene tape to prevent the curiosity seekers from coming closer.
One of the officers led the group to the murder scene. The woman’s body had been hidden under branches that were arranged to make it seem natural. Knutas looked with horror at the slender figure on the ground. She was naked, lying on her back. Her throat was covered with blood that had run down over her breasts. There were gashes, some several inches long, on her stomach, her thighs, and one of her shoulders. Her arms were at her sides, splotched with dirt. Scratch marks were clearly visible on her legs. Her face was horribly pale. She looked like a wax doll, Knutas thought. As if she had been emptied of blood. Her skin was a yellowish white with no luster at all, her eyes wide open and dull. When Knutas leaned down to look at her head, an ice-cold band began pressing into his forehead. He shut his eyes, then opened them again. A scrap of lacy black fabric was sticking out of the victim’s mouth.
“Do you see it?” he asked Jacobsson.
“Yes, I see it.” His colleague was holding one hand over her mouth.
Sohlman appeared behind them. “The ME is on his way. He happened to be in Visby for the weekend. Sometimes we’re in luck. We haven’t yet confirmed the identity of the victim. She has no purse, no wallet, or any kind of ID, but it’s most likely Frida Lindh. The age and description match, and a woman’s bicycle was found in some bushes across the road.”
“This is too awful,” said Knutas. “Just a few hundred yards from home.”
The huge corridor in TV headquarters in the Gardet district of Stockholm was packed with people. It was the evening of Swedish TV’s annual summer party, and all the employees in Stockholm were invited. More than fifteen hundred guests had arrived, mingling in the enormous studios lining the corridor. They were normally used for taping entertainment shows and soap operas, but now they had been turned over to the dancing and partying. The corridor itself had been transformed into a gigantic cocktail lounge in which several different types of bars had been set up.
Over there the confident meteorologist was snickering with the most ruthless of the reporters. An anchorman was swaggering around with a bleary gaze, as if searching incessantly for a smooth-skinned, curvaceous intern to sink his teeth into. The cool crowd from the entertainment division was cavorting around on the dance floor, sticking close together and apparently oblivious to the rest of the people around them.