Camilla Läckberg - The Gallows Bird

His thoughts wandered further to Erica. There were only two days left until she would be married. That also felt so right. She was taking a step forward just as he was doing. He was sincerely happy for her. It was so long since they’d been a couple; they were young then, completely different people. But their friendship had endured through the years, and he had always wished for something like this for her. Children, togetherness, a church wedding, which he knew she’d always dreamed of – although she never would have admitted it. And Patrik was perfect for her. Earth and air. That’s how he thought of them. Patrik was so solidly anchored to the ground he stood on, stable, smart, calm. And Erica was a dreamer, with her head always in the clouds, yet still with a courage and an intelligence that stopped her from floating too far away. They really suited each other.

And Anna. He had thought a lot about her lately. The sister that Erica had always overprotected, whom she had regarded as weak. The funny thing was that Erica saw herself as the practical one and Anna as the dreamer. During the past few weeks he had got to know Anna well and realized that just the reverse was true. Anna was the practical one, the one who saw reality as it was. If nothing else, she had learned that much during her years with Lucas. But Dan realized that Anna let Erica maintain the illusion. Maybe she understood Erica’s need to feel like the responsible one.

Dan got up to fetch the phone and the telephone book. It was time to start looking for a flat.

The mood was sombre at the station. Patrik had called a meeting in the chief’s office. Everyone sat quietly staring at the floor, unable to take in the incomprehensible. Patrik and Martin had dragged in the video trolley. As soon as Martin was informed, he realized what it was that had eluded him when he watched the videotapes from Lillemor’s last evening alive.

‘We’re going to have to go through these step by step. Before we do anything,’ Patrik said when he finally broke the silence. ‘There is no room for mistakes.’ Everyone nodded in agreement.

‘The first penny dropped when we discovered that a name had been deleted from the list of dog owners. There were originally a hundred and sixty names, both when Gösta put together the list and when Annika matched them up with current addresses. By the time I got the list there were only a hundred and fifty-nine. The name that was missing was Tore Sjöqvist, with an address in Tollarp.’

Nobody reacted, so Patrik continued. ‘I’ll come back to that. But it caused one piece of the puzzle to fall into place.’

Everyone knew what was coming, and Martin buried his face in his hands and closed his eyes, with his elbows resting on his knees.

‘I had thought that the places where the victims were murdered seemed familiar. And when I finally understood, it didn’t take long to confirm the connection.’ He paused and cleared his throat. ‘The sites of the victims correspond one hundred per cent with places where Hanna has worked,’ he said quietly. ‘I had seen them in her application documents before we hired her, but…’ He threw out his hands and let Martin take over.

‘Something that I saw on the video from the evening Lillemor died kept bothering me. And when Patrik told me about Hanna… Well, we might as well just show you.’ He nodded to Patrik, who pressed ‘play’. They had already advanced to the right spot, and it took only seconds before the scene of the violent argument appeared on the screen, followed by the arrival of Martin and Hanna. They could see Martin talking with Mehmet and the others. The camera then followed Lillemor who ran off towards town, confused and unwittingly running towards her own death. Then the camera zoomed in on Hanna, who was talking on her mobile. Patrik froze the picture there and looked at Martin.

‘That was what bothered me, although I didn’t realize it until now,’ Martin said. ‘Who was she calling? It was almost three in the morning and we were the only ones working, so she couldn’t be ringing any of you.’

‘We got a list of her calls from her operator, and it was an outgoing call. To her own home. To her husband Lars.’

‘But why?’ said Annika, and the bewilderment on her face was shared by all the others.

‘I asked Gösta to check the personal register of citizens. Hanna and Lars Kruse do have the same surname. But they aren’t married. They’re siblings. Twins.’

Annika gasped. There was a ghastly silence in the room after Patrik dropped that bomb.

‘Hanna and Lars are Hedda’s vanished twins,’ said Gösta in explanation.

‘Yes, and we still haven’t received the information from Uddevalla,’ said Patrik. ‘But I’ll bet anything that we’ll find that the children’s names were Lars and Hanna, and that they picked up the surname Kruse somewhere along the way, most likely through adoption.’

‘So she rang Lars?’ said Mellberg, who seemed to be having some difficulty following all the sudden revelations.

‘We think that she rang Lars, who picked up Lillemor. She may even have told him to pick her up. Lars knew all the cast members and wouldn’t have appeared to be a threat.’

‘And don’t forget the fact that Lillemor had written in her diary that she thought she recognized someone, a person she thought of as unpleasant. In all likelihood that someone was Lars. What she remembered was the encounter with the man she thought was her father’s killer.’ Martin frowned.

‘But apparently she couldn’t place Lars; she didn’t associate him with that memory. And she wasn’t even sure that she really recognized him. In the state she was in, she probably would have accepted help from anyone gratefully, as long as she could get away from the TV crew and the cast members who had argued with her.’ Patrik hesitated but then continued. ‘I have no proof of this, but I also believe that Lars may have been the one who started the quarrel that evening.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Annika. ‘He wasn’t even there.’

‘No, but there was something in the interviews with the cast that didn’t seem right. I looked over the transcripts before this meeting, and all the cast members who argued with Lillemor reported that someone told them that Barbie was “talking trash about them” or words to that effect. I have no concrete evidence, but my feeling is that Lars used the individual conversations he had with the cast members earlier that day to sow discord between them and Lillemor. Considering all the intimate, private information they must have given him, he would be able to cause a lot of damage and direct everyone’s wrath towards Lillemor.’

‘But why?’ said Martin. ‘He couldn’t predict that the evening would proceed as it did, and that Lillemor would run away like that.’

Patrik shook his head. ‘No doubt it was pure luck. An opportunity opened up, and he and Hanna exploited it. No, I think that the basic idea was to create a distraction for Lillemor. He worked out early who she was, knew that she had seen him that time eight years earlier, and was afraid that she’d remember. So he was going to give her something else to think about. But when the opportunity arose, then… he decided to solve it in a more permanent way.’

‘Did Lars and Hanna kill their victims together? And why?’

‘We don’t know that yet. In all likelihood it was Hanna who tracked down the victims’ names and addresses, since she had access to that sort of information at the police stations where she’d worked.’

‘But she hadn’t even started working here when Marit was murdered.’

‘No, but information like that can also be found by searching newspaper archives. That’s probably how she found Marit. I have no idea why. But everything is probably connected to the original accident, when Elsa Forsell killed Sigrid Jansson. Hanna and Lars were in the car; they had been kidnapped by Sigrid Jansson when they were three, and had been living in isolation in her house for over two years. Who knows what sort of trauma they’d been subjected to?’