Helene Tursten - Detective Inspector Huss

WHEN ANDERSSON emerged from the rest room, Birgitta Moberg was standing a few meters away. He could tell that she was waiting for him. She walked right up to him and said, “Could I have a few words with you? I’ll make it fast.”

His stomach knotted. Was she going to start harping again on the fact that Jonny had sexually harassed her? Reluctantly, he ushered her into his office. Without any hemming and hawing, she got right to the point.

“It was a good idea you suggested on Friday, that I should stay at Mamma’s over the weekend. I didn’t want to say anything in the meeting, but it was probably Bobo Torsson who came by and rang my doorbell several times this weekend.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, not at all! That’s why I wanted to cool it and not say anything in front of the others. As you know, I have a studio apartment in Högsbo. My closest neighbor on the same floor is a sweet little old lady. She’s eighty-three, but sharp as a tack. It was late before I got home last night. It was almost eleven-thirty. When I put my key in the lock my little neighbor opened her door. She had stayed up waiting for me and was very upset. We have an intercom at the street door. If you don’t have your key, you have to ring someone from the street and ask them to open it. Sometimes kids ring as a prank, but what happened on Saturday and Sunday went well beyond the usual. Someone stood there and pressed all the doorbells at once out of sheer rage. When my neighbors answered their intercoms they got an earful of swearing and abusive language! My neighbor heard several times that the voice wanted to get hold of ‘that fucking whore who calls herself a cop.’ She quite correctly drew the conclusion that it had something to do with me, since I’m the only cop in the building. This occurred around seven on Saturday morning and at nine on Sunday night.”

“Did anyone see the ‘voice’?”

“No, that’s just it. He drove his car right up to the front door. Above it there’s a little roof to protect you from the rain and snow. I live on the third floor. That’s why my neighbor never managed to see more than a brief glimpse of a man climbing into his car and screeching off down the street. He was tall and thin. The car was big and red, she was sure of that.”

“And now you want us to check whether Torsson has a red car?”

“Right.”

“Why couldn’t you mention this in the conference room?”

She avoided looking at him directly and shifted her gaze around the room before she replied. “Because there’s someone in our department who’s tall and thin and has a red Volvo.”

He knew at once who she meant, and he wished he could break out in a hearty yet indulgent laugh and give her a reassuring pat on the shoulder. But the laugh froze in his throat because he couldn’t rule it out as completely impossible.

“Jonny. You mean Jonny,” he said glumly.

“Yes.”

There was a long silence. Finally she took a deep breath and said, “That’s why I’m staying with Mamma for a while longer. But you’re the only one I’m telling. Nobody else. You have the address.”

She turned on her heel and strode out. He nodded to the closed door. THE ARSON technician and the others had already taken their seats when the superintendent came in. He pretended not to notice their inquiring glances, but signaled to Pelle to get started.

Pelle began by telling them that the theory about the devil bomb was stronger than ever. It had been a real charge with explosives in an iron pipe, blasting cap, pentyl fuse, and gasoline containers, just as he originally suspected. The bomb was placed on top of a bureau in the entryway to von Knecht’s office. The reason they knew this was partially due to Sylvia von Knecht. Before she drove up to Marstrand on Friday night, she had helped Pelle make a rough sketch of the apartment and its furnishings.

Tommy raised his hand before he asked his question. “A bomb like that, is it hard to make? Does it take a long time?”

“For someone who knows how, it goes pretty fast. No more than an hour. The problem is getting hold of all the components. You can’t just go into Domus department store and buy blasting caps, plastique explosive, and pentyl fuses. The other stuff is easier to get hold of. To continue with what happened Wednesday night, I have to explain more about the detonator mechanism. The outer door to the office apartment was really solid. It opened outward. A thin steel wire was stretched between the handle on the door and a pin on the spring of the blasting cap. When the door was pulled open by the person we first thought was a young man, but we now know was a woman, the pin was pulled out and the spring struck the blasting cap. Boom ! We know the result. It’s only thanks to the solid outer door that there was anything left of the body at all. She was flung backward and was probably knocked unconscious instantly. The reason she was lying in a semiprone position when we found her is probably because she slipped down when the door swung back. We found this in the outer door.”

You could hear a pin drop when the arson technician pulled a thick plastic bag from his pocket. There was a blackened key ring inside.

“And yesterday I found this, at the spot where the body was found.”

Like a magician he pulled another bag out of his pocket. It also contained a key ring, but it was much smaller with only three keys on it. He shook the smaller ring.

“Two of these are car keys. To a Porsche. The third fits a garage door on Molinsgatan, where the von Knecht family keeps their cars.”

They all felt the draft as the phantom passed by. His breath stank of death and ashes when he laughed right in their faces.

Andersson’s eyes were popping out of their sockets like red Ping-Pong balls. His face was turning purple and his breathing was labored as he wheezed. Nobody moved. They all prayed silently that the superintendent wouldn’t have a stroke.

Pelle was disconcerted. He could sense the charged atmosphere, but he wasn’t quite sure what the cause was. So he kept silent and waited for Andersson’s comments on the discovery of the keys.

Andersson tried hard to pull himself together. It wasn’t easy, since even he realized that all the hypotheses and theories he had been working on had dissolved at a single blow. Finally he wheezed resolutely, “Somebody is screwing with us. Have you managed to indentify where the other keys on the ring go?” He asked even though, inside, he already knew the answer.

The arson tech nodded. “Yes. Two of them are to the office door on Berzeliigatan. Two are to von Knecht’s apartment on Molinsgatan, and the last two are to the summerhouse at Marstrand. Three are deadbolt keys and three are a normal Yale type. Each door has a Yale lock and a deadbolt.”

“We’ve always said that both these sets of keys had to be somewhere. And now they’ve both been found at the same impossible place, for Christ’s sake!”

Andersson put into words what everyone was feeling. The arson tech looked bewildered, but decided to go on with his report. He turned a page in his notebook and continued, “The problem right now is to get into a safe that’s set inside the wall. It’s not that large, but it’s in a tricky location, since there’s no floor to stand on. We’re trying to do it by standing on a skylift. We’ll have to drill around the safe and try to lift it out with a standalone.”

Several of the group said simultaneously, “A what?”

Pelle grinned and explained, “A standalone. To put it simply, it’s a big forklift truck on which you can raise the lifting fork very high while the truck stands ‘alone’ on the ground, so to speak.”

A weighty silence descended. It was Irene who finally broke it.