“Any trace of poison?” Persson looked at Thomas. It was obvious that he was hoping for a negative response.
“No chemical substances whatsoever, at least in the preliminary report. However, they have sent samples to Linköping for analysis, and it’s difficult to be certain until we’ve heard from them.”
“Anything else?”
“Crush injuries.”
“What?”
“Crush injuries to the head and the rest of the body, as if he’d hit something with tremendous force, or as if someone had hit him with a blunt object. He had a number of broken bones, along with severe bruising.”
“Any idea what might have caused all that?” Margit asked, looking at Thomas.
He looked down at his papers again. “The report only describes the injuries; it doesn’t suggest how they might have happened or what caused them.”
Margit raised her eyebrows. “It seems as if our friends in pathology have taken the easy way out this time. I think we should call and ask if they have some kind of theory we could work with.” She leaned back with an expression that made it clear she expected more substance from the medical profession. She was making no attempt to hide her bad mood.
Persson was also unhappy. He sighed and turned to Margit and Thomas. “So what’s the next step?”
“We’ve had a call about Almhult,” Thomas said. “It seems someone saw him on the ferry to Stockholm just over a week ago. We’ll check that out right away. We’ve also put up posters all over Sandhamn, asking anyone who spoke to Kicki Berggren to contact us. That might help.”
He looked at Margit, who nodded.
“We’re also going to look into any possible connections between the house owners and Systemet, anything that might link one of them to Krister Berggren,” Thomas said.
“Right,” said Persson. “As you know, I was intending to take my vacation next week, so if you could solve the case by Saturday, that would be great.” His feeble attempt at humor didn’t go down very well. He stood up and wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief that looked well used.
The meeting was over.
CHAPTER 45
The woman who opened the door the third time the bell rang had blobs of something that looked like vegetable puree all over her T-shirt. She looked stressed and was clutching a dish towel in one hand. The sound of children screaming emanated from the house.
“Are you the person who called from the police?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder where the piercing screams had turned into something more like a furious roar.
Thomas nodded. “My name is Thomas Andreasson, and this is my colleague, Margit Grankvist. May we come in for a few minutes? We’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s OK.”
The roaring continued, and the woman looked even more stressed.
“Come in. I’ve left my daughter on her own in the kitchen, and I need to get back to her.”
She disappeared down a narrow hallway to the right of the entry, and Margit and Thomas followed.
It was a pleasant house, cozy and well cared for, in the middle of Enskede, one of Stockholm’s older suburbs. A typical old-style house with a yellow wooden façade, white eaves, and a small south-facing garden. Thomas counted four apple trees and one plum tree.
A gray cat slid past, uninterested in the visitors.
In the kitchen a very cross little girl was sitting in a high chair, banging her spoon on the table. The remains of something orange were strewn across the floor; it was the same color as the blobs on her mother’s T-shirt.
The hard-pressed mother pushed a strand of hair from her face with the back of her hand. She wiped her hands on the dish towel and extended her right hand. “Malin. Sorry about the mess. My daughter seems to have woken up in something of a temper today. Please, sit down.”
Margit tried to discreetly check whether there was anything orange on the kitchen chair before she sat down.
“You wanted to talk to me about my journey home from Sandhamn?”
Margit nodded. “We heard that you and your family were on the same ferry as the man who was found dead on the island just a few days later,” she said.
“I think so.” A fleeting expression of uncertainty passed over the woman’s face. “There was a man sitting just a few seats away from us who looked exactly like the picture in the paper.”
“Could you describe him?”
Malin thought for a moment; she wiped a blob of carrot puree off the table before she answered. “He was a real mess. Kind of shabby and run-down, you know? He was wearing a hoodie with the hood pulled tight, so I didn’t see him very clearly. But he certainly stank. Sorry. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead. But he smelled gross—like stale booze or something. That’s why my eldest daughter, Astrid, asked about him. She’s four.”
“Did he do anything in particular during the crossing?”
“Not that I can remember, but I wasn’t really paying attention.” She smiled and pointed to the little girl, who had calmed down and was now clutching her sippy cup. “They keep you busy when they’re that age.”
“Could you tell us if you noticed anything else?”
“I’m sorry. There isn’t really much I can say. He sat there during the whole trip, as far as I can remember. It takes about two hours.”
“So he went all the way into Stockholm? He didn’t get off beforehand?”
“No, we were quite late getting off. It took forever to pack up all our stuff. He got off about the same time; I remember that quite clearly.”
She glanced at her daughter, who was now fully occupied in trying to remove the lid of her sippy cup so she could pour water all over the table.
Thomas thought for a moment. If Jonny Almhult had been sitting there with his hood pulled down, it was hardly surprising that no one from the ferry company remembered him, in spite of the fact that they had shown his photograph and questioned the crews of all the ferries serving Sandhamn.
He bent down and picked up the sippy cup, which the little girl had dropped. She took it and immediately threw it on the floor again, beaming at him.
An entertaining new game.
“And you didn’t see him after that?”
“No, I don’t think so.” She seemed hesitant. “Or did I? I’m not absolutely certain; I might have seen him on Skeppsbron. My husband picked us up in the car, and as we were waiting under the lights outside the Grand Hotel, I thought I saw him walking toward Skeppsbron.” She picked up the cup her daughter had just dropped for the fifth time. “But I can’t swear it was him. I mean, it could have been anybody wearing a gray hoodie.”
Thomas reversed the Volvo out of the little cul-de-sac and drove back the way they had come. Enskede was really charming, with old wooden houses surrounded by a variety of fruit trees. Just the kind of place you would want to live if you had a family.
Children.
Margit broke the silence. “It was well worth coming out here to speak to her, don’t you agree?”
“Absolutely. Now we know Almhult came into town four days before his body was found. But where did he go after he got off the ferry?”
Margit thought for a moment, then opened the glove compartment and started rummaging around.