Camilla Lackberg - The Stonecutter

He stared vacantly at the papers in front of him and tried to clear the cobwebs out of his brain enough to keep working. When the telephone rang, he almost jumped out of his seat, and it rang three times before he collected himself enough to pick up the receiver.

‘Patrik Hedström.’

Ten minutes later, he grabbed his jacket from a hook by the door, dashed over to Martin Molin’s office and said, ‘Martin, some old guy out pulling up lobster pots, a Frans Bengtsson, has brought up a body.’

‘Whereabouts?’ Martin said, looking confused. The dramatic news had broken the listless Monday morning at Tanumshede police station.

‘Outside Fjällbacka. He’s moored at the wharf by Ingrid Bergman Square. We have to get moving. The ambulance is on the way.’

Martin didn’t have to be told twice. He too grabbed his jacket to face the bitter October weather and then followed Patrik out to the car. The trip to Fjällbacka went quickly, and Martin had to hold on anxiously to the handle above the door when the car careened onto the verge around the sharp curves.

‘Is it a drowning accident?’ Martin asked.

‘How the hell should I know?’ said Patrik, instantly regretting snapping at Martin. ‘Sorry – not enough sleep.’

‘That’s okay,’ said Martin. Thinking about how worn-out Patrik had looked the past few weeks, he was more than willing to forgive him.

‘All we know is that she was found about an hour ago. According to the old man, it didn’t look like she’d been in the water very long. But we’ll see about that soon,’ Patrik said as they drove down Galärbacken towards the wharf, where a wooden snipa was moored.

‘Did you say “she”?’

‘Yes, it’s a girl, a kid.’

‘Oh, shit,’ said Martin, wishing he’d followed his first instinct and stayed in bed with Pia instead of coming in to work this morning.

They parked at Café Bryggan and hurried over to the boat. Incredibly enough, no one had yet noticed what had happened, so there was no need to ward off the usual gawkers.

‘The girl’s lying there in the boat,’ said the old man who came to meet them on the wharf. ‘I didn’t want to touch her more than necessary.’

Patrik had no trouble recognizing the pallor on the old man’s face. It was the same on his own face whenever he had to look at a dead body.

‘Where was it you pulled her up?’ asked Patrik, using the question to postpone having to confront the dead girl for another few seconds. He hadn’t even seen her yet, and already his stomach was turning over uneasily.

‘Out by Porsholmen. The south side of the island. She got tangled in the line of the fifth pot I pulled up. Otherwise it would have been a long time before we found her. Maybe never, if the currents had swept her out to sea.’

It didn’t surprise Patrik that Bengtsson knew how a dead body would react to the effect of the sea. All the old-timers knew that a body first sank, then slowly came up to the surface after it was filled with gases, until finally, after more time passed, it sank back into the deep. In the old days drowning had been a real risk for a fisherman, and Bengtsson had surely been out searching for unfortunate victims before.

As if to confirm this the lobsterman said, ‘She couldn’t have been down there long. She hadn’t begun to float yet.’

Patrik nodded. ‘You said that when you called in the report. Well, I suppose we’d better have a look.’

Martin and Patrik walked very slowly out to the end of the wharf where the boat was moored. Not until they were almost there did they have enough of a view over the rail to discern what was lying on the deck. The girl had landed on her back when the old man pulled her into the boat, and her wet, tangled hair covered most of her face.

‘The ambulance is here,’ said Patrik.

Martin nodded feebly. His freckles and reddish-blond hair seemed several shades redder against his white face, and he was fighting to keep his nausea in check.

The greyness of the weather and the wind that had begun to gust created a ghastly backdrop. Patrik waved to the ambulance team, who seemed in no hurry to unload a gurney from the vehicle and roll it towards them.

‘Drowning accident?’ The first of the two EMTs nodded inquiringly towards the boat.

‘Looks like it,’ replied Patrik. ‘But the Medical Examiner will have to make that call. There’s nothing you can do for her, in any case, besides transporting her.’

‘No, we heard that,’ said the man. ‘We’ll start by getting her up on the gurney.’

Patrik nodded. He had always thought that situations in which children had fallen victim to misfortune were the worst things a police officer could encounter on the job. Ever since Maja was born the discomfort he felt seemed multiplied a thousandfold. Now his heart ached at the thought of the task that lay before them. As soon as the girl had been identified they would have to destroy her parents’ lives.

The medics had hopped down into the boat. They carefully picked the girl up and lifted her onto the wharf. Her wet red hair fell on the planking like a fan around her pale face, and her glazed eyes seemed to be watching the scudding grey clouds.

At first Patrik had turned away, but now he reluctantly looked down at the girl. Then a cold hand gripped his heart.

‘Oh no, oh no, Jesus God.’

Martin looked at him in dismay. Then it dawned on him what Patrik meant. ‘You know who she is?’

Patrik nodded mutely.

Agnes never would have dared to say it out loud, but sometimes she thought it was lucky that her mother had died when she was born. That way she’d had her father all to herself, and considering what she’d heard about her mother, she wouldn’t have been able to wrap her round her little finger so easily. But her father didn’t have the heart to deny his motherless daughter anything. Agnes was well aware of this fact and exploited it to the utmost. Certain well-meaning relatives and friends had tried to point this out to her father, but even if he made half-hearted attempts to say no to his darling, sooner or later her lovely face won out. Those big eyes of hers could so easily well up with heavy tears that would run down her cheeks. When things reached that point, his heart would relent, and she usually got what she wanted.

As a result she was now, at the age of nineteen, an exceptionally spoiled girl. Many of the people who had known her over the years would probably venture to say that she had quite a nasty side to her. It was mostly girls who dared say that. The boys, Agnes had discovered, seldom looked further than at her beautiful face, big eyes, and long, thick hair, all of which had made her father give her anything she wanted.

Their villa in Strömstad was one of the grandest in town. It stood high up on the hill, with a view over the water. It had been paid for partly with her mother’s inherited fortune and partly with the money her father had made in the granite business. He had been close to losing everything once, during the strike of 1914, when to a man the stonecutters rose up against the big companies. But order was eventually restored; after the war, business had begun flourishing anew. The quarry in Krokstrand outside Strömstad, in particular, began pulling in big profits with deliveries primarily to France.

Agnes didn’t care much about where the money came from. She was born rich and had always lived as rich people do. It made no difference whether the money was inherited or earned, as long as she could buy jewellery and fine clothes. She knew that not everyone viewed things this way. Her mother’s parents had been horrified when their daughter married Agnes’s father. His wealth was newly acquired, and his parents had been poor folk. They didn’t fit in at big dinner parties; they were only invited when no one outside the immediate family was present. Even these gatherings were embarrassing. The poor things had no idea how to behave in the finer salons, and their contributions to the conversation were hopelessly meagre. Agnes’s maternal grandparents had never understood what their daughter could see in August Stjernkvist, or rather Persson, which was his surname at birth. His attempt to move up the social ladder by simply changing his last name was nothing that could fool them. But they were enchanted with their granddaughter, and they competed with her father in spoiling Agnes after her mother died so suddenly after giving birth.