“So the use of rat poison would suggest that the murderer wasn’t familiar with its effects,” Margit said. “An amateur, in other words.”
“Absolutely. Rat poison is easy to find, and it looks dangerous. But it’s far from effective if you want to be sure of success, so to speak.”
Thomas considered Henrik’s theory. “So if you’re right, we’re dealing with a perpetrator who acted deliberately but didn’t really know how to go about it,” he said.
Henrik shook his head. “Not necessarily. It could also be a murderer who wasn’t prepared and simply used what was at hand.”
“You mean he used the first poison that came to mind?” Thomas said, with a trace of doubt in his voice.
“That’s right. If you haven’t planned in advance to murder someone, but suddenly find yourself in a situation where you feel you have no alternative, then wouldn’t you use whatever you had in the house?”
“Can you buy rat poison on the island?” Margit asked, directing her question to Nora.
Nora looked dubious. “I don’t know, but you can certainly bring it over from town.”
“Hang on. It’s not that easy to fool someone into taking rat poison,” Thomas said. “How do you get someone to polish off a plate of blue granules without making them suspicious? That’s just not possible.”
Nora picked a long blade of grass and wound it around her finger. She frowned as if she were trying to remember something. “I remember some kind of liquid rat poison from when I was a kid,” she said. “My mother used it while we were here, because she used to keep the bottle on the top shelf, and she threatened us with no Saturday sweets if we so much as touched it. It was a dark-brown bottle, as I recall, and there was a skull and crossbones on the label.”
Margit straightened up and looked at Nora. “Liquid rat poison. We should have thought of that. That has to be the explanation. You could just add it to a drink, and it would be easy to fool somebody who wasn’t on guard.” She turned to Thomas. “We’ll give Carina a call; she can look into what’s available. We need a fresh approach.” She patted Nora on the shoulder. “Good thinking.”
Nora looked embarrassed but graciously accepted the praise. Then she frowned again. “Why would the murder of Kicki Berggren be spontaneous, if the murderer had already killed Krister Berggren?”
The question hung in the air.
“We still don’t actually know whether Krister Berggren was murdered,” Thomas said.
“No,” Margit said, “but if he was, no one was supposed to know that. The murderer probably thought he would never be found. That loop of rope around his body was almost certainly attached to a weight, so it would sink to the bottom of the sea. If the rope hadn’t broken, and the temperature of the water hadn’t brought the body to the surface so it was washed ashore on Sandhamn, nobody would ever have found out a murder had been committed.”
Thomas nodded. “If Kicki Berggren hadn’t been killed, her cousin’s death would probably have been dismissed as an accident.”
Margit said, “The discovery of Krister Berggren’s body was unfortunate for the murderer. Then Kicki turns up. Somehow she knows, or thinks she knows, who killed her cousin. So she comes over to Sandhamn and confronts him.”
“He panics,” Thomas said, “and decides to get rid of her, too.”
“Exactly,” Margit said.
“And since the murderer wasn’t expecting Kicki to turn up, he uses whatever he happens to have in the house, namely rat poison,” Thomas said.
Margit leaned back in her chair, looking pleased with herself. The more they understood about the murderer, the better their chances of solving the case. Thomas knew from experience that an unplanned crime usually left a fair amount of evidence behind, and they needed all the help they could get in this investigation.
They didn’t have to wait long for Carina to call back. Thomas could hear from the unmistakable excitement in her voice that she had something to tell them.
“I couldn’t reach any of the pest-control people at this time of day, but I checked online. I found seven types of rat poison containing warfarin, all in the form of blue granules; the usual stuff, in other words.”
“Was that all?” Thomas couldn’t hide his disappointment.
“Don’t be so impatient,” said Carina. “I found something else. Something very interesting. There used to be a product called Warfarin Liquid Rat Poison. It was banned on December 31, 1990, but it was on sale until that date.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.” A big smile spread across Thomas’s face.
“And another thing: it was far more concentrated than the rat poison you can buy today. It was almost fourteen times as strong as anything on the market now. Significantly more effective, in other words.”
Thomas whistled. Carina was good. He pictured her face, and to his surprise an unexpected feeling of happiness suffused his entire body. “Terrific work, Carina,” he said, feeling slightly confused as he ended the call. He sat there holding the receiver, startled by his reaction.
A comment from Margit brought him back to reality. “That explains everything. If the murderer had access to liquid rat poison, then obviously it would be much easier to dupe Kicki Berggren into taking a dose that was high enough to kill her.”
“It would have been pretty straightforward,” Thomas said. “All he had to do was mix it with something else she was going to drink.” He finished off his beer and got to his feet.
“Time for a chat with Philip Fahlén, I think. We can always ask if he has any rat poison in the house. Liquid rat poison.” He winked at Nora.
Carina sat for a while lost in thought after her conversation with Thomas. She had blushed with pleasure when he’d praised her over the phone. Over the past few weeks he seemed to have noticed her more than he had in the past. They had also spoken quite a lot. He often asked her to sort something out or to contact people involved in the investigation. And there had been a fair amount of small talk, too.
She felt as if she had gotten closer to him.
He had sounded delighted when she told him what she had discovered on the Internet. As soon as she found the information about the liquid rat poison, she knew he would be pleased. Really pleased. She could hardly wait to call and tell him.
When she heard his voice on the other end of the line, it made her tingle all over. She was sure he had felt it, too. It couldn’t just be her imagination, could it?
She decided to suggest going out for lunch one day soon when he was back at the station. After all, everybody had to have lunch, and it wasn’t quite as big a step as dinner.
She didn’t dare ask him on a date, not yet.
She was humming to herself as she picked up her bag, ready to set off for the gym. You needed a high level of fitness to get into the police training academy, and by now even six miles on the exercise bike felt like a pleasant way to spend the evening. She smiled at her reflection as she passed the mirror in the foyer on her way out of the building.
CHAPTER 51
The shore at Fläskberget was almost deserted. Calm had descended after the invasion earlier in the day. A forgotten red plastic spade down by the water’s edge was almost the only evidence of the hordes of families who had been there; a child’s blue shoe was sticking up out of the sand.