Twenty-five

The morning meeting was magnificent. It was the largest in the history of the Uppsala Police. Even those who had no real reason to be there, including all commanding officers, had turned up, on time no less.

The chief of police came down in uniform and no one would have been surprised to see the national commander himself sail in. District Attorney Fritzén, who was formally in charge of the investigation into the three murders and was dressed in a suit and brightly colored tie, had three thick binders with him, that he dropped onto one of the tables with a bang.

Ann Lindell walked up to Ottosson.

“Have we contacted all of Palmblad’s relatives?” she asked.

Ottosson was too nervous to reply. He had tried in vain to catch the eye of the chief of the crime divisions, who in turn was trying to get the police chief’s attention. The latter, however, was busy reading a document that had come from Kungsholmen in Stockholm that morning, and trying to understand what was meant by the questions in the fax.

It nonetheless fell to Ottosson to begin the meeting since none of the others wanted to take the risk of making a fool of themselves.

As anticipated, the resulting discussion was animated but very little was said that was of concrete help to the investigators. Fritzén spoke at length about the media’s image of the murders. Attention was at a maximum and cars from the press buzzed like bees around the police station in Salagatan.

Several calls had come in from Jumkil and Alsike, where people living close to the murdered Blomgren and Andersson complained of the unusually intense traffic and all the curious people who were invading the area.

The assembled group was losing concentration but when the attorney started in on his thoughts about it being time to turn to Stockholm, the silence thickened.

“In light of things I would not advise bringing in National Homicide even if it would perhaps mean a certain relief. Uppsala is such a large district that we should be able to handle this on our own.”

Several investigators nodded. The higher authorities wore a becomingly neutral expression.

After Fritzén the chief of police took the stand. He spoke for a long time about nothing. Sammy Nilsson coughed meaningfully. Lindell felt the level of irritation rising and Ottosson longed for the conference room with the small group of investigators.

Is this what it’s like to wage war? Ola Haver thought, and felt like a subordinate officer who had arrived at the front in order to take part in a commissioned officers’ strategy meeting. He got up and left the room. Sammy followed him. Ottosson stared wide-eyed at them and gave Lindell a look as if to say, I want to go too. Lindell nodded but Ottosson just smiled and stayed put.

After about an hour the meeting was concluded. Now everyone felt informed and above all, involved. This was probably the only positive result.

The investigators met with Ottosson. It was crowded but Berglund brought in a couple of chairs so everyone could sit.

“This is like morning prayers,” Ottosson said when everyone was assembled. He tried to set a jovial tone, but failed since his body language indicated something very different.

“Otto, what are you hiding?” Sammy asked.

Ottosson looked up from his notes, embarrassed.

“What?” he asked.

“You look constipated,” Berglund said.

“I’ve received a tip,” Ottosson said quietly.

“From who?” several people asked in unison.

“Gusten Ander. It’s something that has to do with chess.”

“—Mate,” Sammy Nilsson added.

Ottosson gave him a grumpy look. Then he quickly summed up his conversation with Ander the night before.

The silence was deafening.

“Silvia,” Fredriksson said finally. “I’ll be damned.”

Sammy Nilsson burst out a ringing peal of laughter.

“This is completely insane. It’s like a tip from ‘Crazy Beda.’”

“Crazy Beda” was his nickname for all of the—mildly put—fantastic tips and ideas that were called in to the police.

“Has there been any threat?” was the first thing Fredriksson wanted to know.

“Security has nothing,” Ottosson said, having checked that morning.

“Nothing concrete, in other words, just a chess fanatic’s—what should we say—fanciful concoction,” Berglund said. “But I know Ander well and he doesn’t normally let himself get carried away.”

“That’s my considered opinion as well,” Ottosson said in a formal tone, as if he wanted to compensate for the outlandishness of the investigative hypothesis with his proper formulations.

“Who could be thought to have the motive for a serial killing with the queen as the final target?”

Fredriksson’s question made Ottosson sink back into his chair. Until then he had been sitting leaning forward, as if about to spring into action.

“We’ll have to consult upstairs,” Berglund said, “however much it hurts.”

“And who would set this up like a chess game?” Fredriksson continued.

“And a relatively unknown chess game at that,” Ottosson said.

“We can do a Gallup,” Sammy Nilsson said. “Is there anyone here who knows about even one game somewhere in the world?”

“I lost to my brother once,” Ola Haver said.

“Which one?”

“My little brother.”

“I see why you still remember it,” Nilsson said, grinning.

“Well,” Ottosson said, “that’s how it is, but it restricts our search. Ander was going to come by with a memo. He’ll be here presently.”

“Is this it?” Lindell asked and picked up a green folder. “It’s lying on your desk. Antonov versus Urberuaga, and the date is 1936.”

“That’s the Basque,” Ottosson explained. “How the devil could he be so fast?”

“It’s at least fifteen pages,” Lindell said, who had opened the folder.

“Read it and then let me know how and if we can proceed with this thing.”

“You mean,” Lindell said, “that the victims have nothing more in common with Silvia or each other, apart from the fact that they have been selected more or less at random in order to coincide with moves in a chess game.”

“Read it and weep.”

Lindell looked far from amused. Ever since she got up that morning she had had the feeling that there was something about Petrus Blomgren that she had missed. It was a thought she had had last night that had whirled by without gaining a foothold. Since then it lay working in her subconscious but she couldn’t get ahold of the loose thread.

Now she would have to put Petrus aside in order to study chess history.

Sammy Nilsson told them about his night activities at the kitchen table with the ViCLAS method. He read through his list: “access to a car, local knowledge, rapid succession of events without excessive complications, and no use of a conventional deadly weapon.”

“What does this tell us?” he asked rhetorically and acknowledged Ola Haver’s smile. “Yes, I know, we’re constantly asking ourselves this question, but it’s the pattern we have to detect. I don’t believe in the chess idea, it seems too unbelievably sophisticated. Stuff like that only happens in books. No, I think this is a local guy with a number of enemies who pops them off with a weapon he happens to have near at hand. Is it the same weapon? I think so, and what does that tell us? The weapon itself may have a symbolic value for the perp. Or else it’s simply a lack of imagination.”

“But it’s also smart to bring the weapon with him,” Berglund said.

“True,” Sammy Nilsson said emphatically.

He who normally was not particularly active at these meetings was now overflowing with energy.

“We’re looking for a man, in fair physical shape, with a relatively nondescript car, maybe someone with a country background, and I don’t think we’ll find him already in the database.”

Edvard, Lindell thought, and couldn’t help but smile.

“It’s not a clerk at the Department of Agriculture,” Haver muttered, “that much is clear.”

“Or else that’s precisely what he is,” Beatrice said in an unexpectedly sonorous and forceful tone of voice. “A little dry, flabby man, balding, with a townhouse in Valsätra, wife, dog, a Volvo 760, half-grown children, and troubling sex dreams at night.”

“There, we have him!” Haver burst out.

Ottosson coughed.

“What do you say, Allan?”

Fredriksson pinched his nose, as he usually did when there were too many questions.

“I can buy two farmers,” he said after a short pause, “but throw in an academic on top of that, that changes things. The motive must be very complicated. It can’t simply be someone out to settle a score with farmers, as we initially believed. It’s true that Palmblad was out in the country a lot as the owner of some stables, but is this significant? Neither Anders-son nor Blomgren were involved in any trouble such as land disputes, unpaid debts, or anything else that had to do with their main line of support, right? I don’t think Palmblad did either. If this is about chess, then yes, the horses are important: a knight is forced from the board. Then he could be replaced by any man with horses. Even a teenage girl could have been the intended victim.”

He stopped but everyone saw that there was more and waited from him to finish.

“I believe in an irrational motive,” Fredriksson said, “something we won’t think of in the first instance. This could be the work of a sick mind with an idée fixe, something that doesn’t have anything directly to do with the victims.”

“Give me an example,” Sammy Nilsson said.

Fredriksson pinched his nose.

“Someone who doesn’t like seventy-year-old men,” he said. “I’m thinking like this: it could be a woman who in her childhood was abused by dirty old men. At that time, perhaps twenty, thirty years ago, she was quiet, but now she’s taking her revenge.”

“Do you mean that all of the victims are pedophiles?” Bea asked.

“No, not necessarily. Perhaps none of them are. But they are seventy-year-old men and represent their gender and age group. Perhaps the real pedophile is dead but would today have been seventy.”

“I see you’ve really thought about this,” Ottosson said. “That’s good! We need to consider this from all possible angles.”

“We’re completely in the dark, in other words,” Haver said.

The discussion continued for another hour. Berglund reported on all of the telephone calls that Blomgren and Andersson had made over the last while but so far there was nothing that looked out of the ordinary. It was a short list, in Blomgren’s case sixteen outgoing calls a month, and none made to any numbers that could be considered surprising.

Beatrice had checked out the alarm company, whose phone number they had found in Blomgren’s kitchen, but it had not led to any discoveries. The only thing that was somewhat noteworthy was the fact that he had declared bankruptcy four years earlier and that eight years ago he had been charged with unlawful threat. That case was laid down.

Fredriksson made an overview of the murdered Carl-Henrik Palm-blad’s career. Born and raised in Härnösand, his father a pastor, his mother a deaconess, moved to Uppsala in order to attend the university, studied history of religion, French, and Nordic languages, later taught at the university, and the last ten years before his retirement worked as a bureaucrat in the university administration.

He had two children, his daughter Ann-Charlotte who was a grammar school teacher and had lived in Erikslund for twenty-five years, and a son, Magnus, who sold cash registers and other equipment in a retail business and lived in Täby, north of Stockholm.

Palmblad did not appear to have had any financial difficulties, at least not according to his daughter. After his divorce fifteen years ago he had not sought out any regular female companionship, as far as she knew, and certainly not in the past five, six years. Palmblad seemed to have spent most of his time in the stables.

That was the outer picture of Palmblad’s life. Now Beatrice and the two investigators brought in from Criminal Investigations continued to work on filling in the details.

Lindell felt as if she was sitting on pins and needles, even though she knew it was important to hear all of the thoughts of the group. But Haver was right when he said they were fumbling in the dark, without having a single true lead.

The first thing she did when she came back to her office was to open the chess folder.

Ander began with a look back at the history, describing the two combatants from the tournament in Barcelona. He had apparently dug down properly in his sources, because the background was substantial, with the Spanish civil war as a backdrop and the feeling of euphoria that apparently characterized Catalonia and Barcelona during the beginning phases of the war. To arrange a chess tournament was a way of upholding civil life—Franco was not going to be allowed to disturb something as important as chess—and also, Ander wrote, it was an expression of international solidarity with the republican government in Madrid. Especially after the failure of the alternative sport competition held in 1936 as an answer to the Olympics in Nazi Germany. Ander described how the boxer Henry Persson and the other Swedish competitors had to turn back in Paris after getting the news that civil war had broken out.

Antonov was at that time a celebrity in chess circles, with legendary matches against stars such as the cautious Dutchman Euwe, the antise-mitic Russian Alekhine, and the Cuban, Capablanca, who was the world champion in the twenties and had only lost thirty-five out of almost six hundred matches in major tournaments. Anders had also made a note of several matches against Swedish masters such as Lundin, Ståhlberg, and the uneven Stolz.

The Basque player, Urberuaga, was, however, relatively unknown but immediately received attention as the one who, although he had not perhaps been able to shake the great Russian, had nonetheless made a little history.

Ander had also attached a short biography of the Basque. Lindell was at first irritated over the extensive nature of the report but soon found herself drawn into Urberuaga’s later fate. How he enlisted in the republican army, taking part in the struggles in Teruel and Belchite, was wounded on two occasions, and then fled together with a hundred thousand others to France when Franco’s troops surrounded Barcelona. There he ended up in a camp, escaped, and participated in the underground resistance against the Nazis during World War II, fled once more, and eventually ended up in Mexico where he lived until his death in 1966.

In Jalapa he started a chess club that got the name “No pasarán,” apparently a battle cry during the civil war, and he frequently took part in tournaments, even internationally.

“A pretty decent player,” Ander commented. “Uneven in both his temperament and his strategy, and who with time developed severe alcoholism.”

Antonov’s fate was even worse. When he returned to the Soviet Union he was immediately imprisoned. The list of accusations included spying as well as traitorous activity. In all likelihood he died in a camp somewhere beyond the Ural. Whether he had had the opportunity to play chess in the camp was not known.

The next part of the report dealt with the literature available on the subject. There was a list of eight titles. “There are probably many more,” Ander wrote, “but it is these that are somewhat known in Sweden. To this one should add a large number of print articles and information on the Internet.”

Lindell sighed, eyed the list, and continued with part three of Ander’s report, the part that described the actual match: “The Basque was black and Antonov white. The beginning was not sensational. At the midpoint, black’s center was weakened and he almost landed in a forced-move situation, but defended himself decently with the sacrifice of a pawn. Antonov believed himself to be secure and saw Urberuaga’s weakness as a sign of fatigue, possibly thinning patience, and he moved the queen to De8 followed by several quick moves that also increased white’s position. The Basque lost yet another pawn. Two surprising and poisonous moves by Antonov, whereupon black reflected for a long time, countering but thereafter losing a knight. Normally this match could only have gone in one direction but Urberuaga astonished everyone, including the Russian, with a three-move combination that threatened the white queen. Slowly but surely Antonov came to realize that what he had taken for weakness had been an extremely clever trap. White lost the queen. It had cost him some pieces but in one stroke black immediately emerged much stronger.”

Good god what nerds, Lindell thought and read on.

“In spite of this, white eventually came out the winner and thereby the Barcelona exhibition match was the display of a youthful drive to shine but also of the older man’s (Antonov was thirty-six) superiority when it came to calm strategy and tactical adaptability.”

Oh really, Lindell thought, what does all this have to do with our murders? Ander pointed out what everyone in the investigative team had discussed that morning, that the murders appeared so deliberate but that it was impossible to find a reasonable explanation as to why specifically Blomgren, Andersson, and Palmblad had fallen victim to the serial killer. “The motive must still be on high,” as Ander put it, “somewhere beyond the three victims. They were chosen at random to fit a pattern. Each of them was cleverly chosen in that they lived isolated and that the perpetrator could approach them without being intercepted.”

To hell with it, Lindell thought and shut the folder, getting up and standing at the window.

“The sun shone on the bones of the dead,” she recited out loud while she tried to gather herself for something that would sound like a counterargument when she now had to report to Ottosson. She was convinced that he had already read the report and had simply pretended not to know that Ander had delivered it. He had apparently wanted her to make up her own mind first.

She took the folder and went in to see Ottosson, who was speaking on the phone. He waved to her to sit down. Lindell heard that it was a higher-up on the other end. Ottosson always had a special tone in his voice when he spoke to higher command. It rubbed Lindell the wrong way but she sensed that she probably did the same thing.

Ottosson hung up with a sigh.

“The top dog,” he said in a tired voice.

“Which one of them?”

“The absolute highest,” Ottosson said. “The chief. Yes, well,” he continued quickly, apparently unwilling to comment further about what had transpired on the phone, “what do we think?”

Lindell shook her head.

“It’s doubtful,” she said. “It sounds a bit science fiction-y.”

“I was just talking to outer space,” Ottosson inserted and smiled in that kindly, sad way that only he could, “so it fits a little with science fiction.”

“I don’t believe in the fact that the murder scheme has been dictated by a seventy-year-old chess game,” Lindell started and listed all her reasons.

When she finished, Ottosson sat quietly for a while.

“Fredriksson believes it,” he said suddenly. “He can’t say why and he agrees that it sounds implausible, but something tells me we are dealing with someone this crazy.”

“Is that what you said to your superiors?”

Ottosson immediately looked embarrassed.

“No, not exactly.”

“Not even indirectly I take it? I really don’t want to learn more about chess,” she said and cursed her unusually passive tone.

“I understand,” Ottosson said.

“Put Fredriksson on it then. Oh fuck,” it slipped out of her, “I was supposed to talk to Allan. I knew there was something.”

“What?”

“In Blomgren’s house I thought I saw something like a photo album, but then Fredriksson was the one who examined the room and I forgot about it in all the activity.”

“And now you want to look through it? Don’t mention it to Allan, he’s sensitive about things like this.”

“Don’t worry,” Lindell said, “I’ll just go out there. I know where the key is.”

Lindell stood up but before she left she couldn’t help asking Ottosson: “What did the top dog say?”

“He had apparently spoken with the professor who lives next door because he said that we should, and I quote, ‘remove all bicycle officers and rookies from the investigation.’”

The maple outside Blomgren’s house was now completely denuded and the leaves lay strewn across a large portion of the lawn like a thick rug. The pale sun was filtered through the tops of the fir trees in the west and reflected across the red and yellow shades of the leaves, creating the illusion of an impressionistic painting.

Lindell felt that Dorotea Svahn had noticed the fact that she had come by and she decided to visit the old woman after she had examined Blomgren’s bookshelf.

The TV room looked even more ordinary this time. Everything was in the same place as she remembered. She opened the little cabinet next to the bookshelf. The album was still there. For the first time in this investigation, Lindell felt a certain excitement.

The photo album was an old-fashioned model with a gray linen cover and stiff pages with glued photographs. The first one was of the house. An older couple was posing in front of the entrance, a couple that she guessed was Petrus’s parents. Then a large number of snapshots followed where the farm appeared to be the center. There were only a few pictures that she thought were taken outside Vilsne village. Quite a few people appeared in them, the parents regularly and a young Petrus also, stacking hay, standing at the gate or outside the barn in a pose that was supposed to be humorous.

The photographs seemed to be taken during a fairly narrow time frame. She guessed from the middle of the forties and about twenty years forward.

Ann flipped through the pages, as she believed Fredriksson had also done, but there was nothing that could reasonably have any meaning for the murder and the investigation.

A few captions had been written. One that Ann found slightly touching was written in pencil under a picture. “Me and mother” was written in spiky handwriting. Petrus, who in the shot looked to be in his thirties had his arm around his mother in a slightly awkward way. You could see that the old woman was smiling behind the hand that covered half of her mouth.

The last three pages were empty. Ann closed the album with a feeling of disappointment. She should have known better. If there had been anything to find here, Fredriksson would have spotted it.

She pushed the album back into place and was about to close the cabinet when her eyes slid to the book next to it. It was a thick volume from the Uppland Horse Breeder’s Association. She pulled it out and looked at the cover, which depicted a farmer plowing. The horse was struggling on an imagined field.

On the flyleaf, on a dotted line, it was written that the book belonged to Arthur Blomgren. She opened it and absently turned the pages. It was mostly text with statistical tables, but also several pictures of horses, among them one from a plowing competition in Rasbo, 1938.

When Lindell shut the book she caught sight of a white corner that stuck out in the back. She opened to that page and a snapshot tumbled out. In the brief moment when it swooped to the floor she knew she had found something valuable. It landed facedown so the first thing she saw was the inscription on the back: “To my beloved Petrus.”

She waited a second or so, then bent down to pick it up and turned it over. It was a picture of a woman. What else? she thought with a pleased smile. It was clearly a studio portrait but without identifying business markers.

The woman was in her forties, a brunette. The most eye-catching aspect to her was the beautiful hair pulled back into a ponytail. A girlish touch. She smiled, not an exaggerated grin, rather tentatively.

Ann thought she was beautiful and the first thing that struck her was the contrast to Petrus. But she immediately corrected herself. She had seen him dead, brutally slain, at seventy years of age. She pulled the photo album back out and looked up the picture of Petrus with his mother. Sure enough, he had been a handsome man, a little angular perhaps but that may have been the result of the circumstances. Styled in a photographer’s studio he may very well have been able to hold his own next to this woman.

Lindell turned the card over and read the dedication again, perhaps written by the companion to Mallorca and the reason he had gone to the doctor and gotten a prescription for sleeping pills. This was the tear in Petrus Blomgren’s life.

But was she also the reason he was murdered? Undoubtedly this photogenic woman was the absolute best thing, not to say the only thing, that they had found so far and that Fredriksson had missed. How would she tackle the fact that he had been sloppy? The photo had to be brought forward and the woman’s identity established. Should she lie and say that Dorotea had produced it? But why on earth would she be hoarding the picture of someone who was most likely the lover of the man she herself had probably been hoping for, at least at some point back in time?

No, that would be wrong, Lindell decided. Fredriksson would have to stand there with the shame.

Lindell laid the photo on the coffee table and then started flipping through all of the books in the small library. If he missed one clue there might be more, but the result was zero.

One photo, one woman, was the day’s yield. Lindell locked the door behind her, very satisfied, and steered her course to the neighbor’s house.

Dorotea Svahn looked at the picture for a long time and then shook her head, but kept it in her hand and Lindell hoped that the old woman wouldn’t turn it over.

“You don’t recognize her?” Lindell asked and took the photograph out of her hand.

“No, I’ve never seen her before.”

“Are you sure?”

The old woman nodded.

“So this is what she looked like,” she said. “I’ve always wondered.”