His heart lurched when he thought about the body in the woods. The faces of various people flashed through his mind. Fanny’s mother. How was she responsible for what had happened? Why hadn’t she paid more attention to her daughter? Fanny had been all alone with this problem. She had felt so bad that she had even tried to harm herself. She was only fourteen and still a child. Yet no grown-up had cared about her, not even her mother.
It was the same situation at school. Even though the teachers had noticed that something was wrong with Fanny, they did nothing. She was there, right in front of everyone’s eyes, but no one saw her.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20
As Knutas sat in his office drinking coffee, someone knocked on the door. Karin Jacobsson stuck her head in.
“Good morning! It sure is interesting how people can forget all about something and then suddenly remember the most important details.”
She dropped onto a chair across from him and rolled her eyes.
“That guy Jan Olsson from the stable called to say that Fanny had gone out to visit Tom Kingsley.”
“Is that right?”
“One time last fall Jan Olsson had to go over to Tom’s place to drop something off.”
“What did he drop off?” queried Knutas.
“He didn’t say,” Jacobsson went on impatiently. “But listen to this. Fanny’s bicycle was outside Kingsley’s house, and Olsson noticed that her jacket was hanging in the hallway.”
“Did he see her?”
“No. Tom didn’t invite him in.”
“Okay, that’s enough to bring Kingsley in. I’ll call Birger so we can get a search warrant for his house.”
Knutas reached for the phone to call the prosecutor.
“Sure, but there’s just one problem,” said Jacobsson dryly.
“What’s that?”
“Tom Kingsley has left. He’s on vacation in the States.”
“For how long?”
“He has to be back at work on Monday, according to the stable owner. But he booked an open-ended round-trip ticket and hasn’t yet made his return reservation. So we don’t know when he’ll be flying home.”
“We’re going in anyway.”
Tom Kingsley’s house stood in a wooded glade, not far from the racetrack. It was actually a summer cottage that he had been renting ever since he came to Gotland.
The road up to the house was not much wider than a tractor path. The police cars jolted their way forward. Knutas and Jacobsson were in the first car, with Kihlgard and Wittberg following behind. Prosecutor Smittenberg had immediately given the go-ahead to search the premises. Ordinarily, Tom Kingsley should have been notified, but no one knew where he was.
All the windows were dark. When they got out of the cars, it looked as if no one had been to the house in a while. The snow cover was untouched.
They had obtained keys from the landlord, whom Jacobsson had managed to locate during the course of the morning.
The ground floor of the house consisted of a small entryway and a living room on the right, with access to a cramped kitchen. The house was furnished simply but nicely: a dining table next to the window, a fireplace, and against one wall an old-fashioned wooden sofa with seat cushions covered with striped fabric. Between the kitchen and the living room was a woodstove. The kitchen, with windows facing the woods, was sparsely furnished: low kitchen benches, a pantry, an old electric stove, and a small refrigerator.
A narrow staircase curved up to the second floor, which had two small bedrooms and a hallway. It was neat and clean. Knutas lifted up the bedspreads. The bed linen had been removed and the mattresses underneath were worn. The police officers began methodically going through all the drawers and cupboards. Kihlgard and Jacobsson took the second floor, Knutas and Wittberg the first floor.
It wasn’t long before Wittberg shouted, “Come and look at this!”
With tweezers he was holding a piece of paper that looked like instructions of some kind.
“Do you know what this is?”
The others shook their heads.
“It’s instructions for taking morning-after pills.”
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21
The discovery of the pill instructions in the home of Tom Kingsley, combined with the fact that he had definitely denied having any sort of close relationship with Fanny, made the prosecutor decide to issue a warrant for Kingsley’s arrest in absentia. The fact that Fanny’s fingerprints were found on the instructions made the police even more convinced that Kingsley was the man they were looking for. After checking with the airlines, they determined that a week earlier he had flown to Chicago on SAS. The Stockholm police were informed, and employees at the SAS ticket offices were told to keep a lookout for Kingsley and to sound the alarm when he booked his return flight.
Knutas felt relieved, even though he didn’t know where Kingsley was. Now it was just a matter of waiting for his return.
In the meantime, he could take a much-deserved weekend to relax. Away from any kind of police work. He and Leif were going out to the Almlov family summer house in Gnisvard, on the coast about fifteen miles south of Visby, as they always did right before Christmas. He hadn’t been sure that he could actually get away this time because of the investigation. But a warrant had been issued for Kingsley’s arrest, and they couldn’t do anything else until he returned home. So Knutas had decided that it would be possible, after all. It was only a twenty-minute drive from Visby, and he could be reached by cell phone if anything happened.
As for preparing for Christmas, he had done everything that was expected of him-the traditional buying of the Christmas tree with the children, and all the grocery shopping and cleaning that he had done together with Lina. Late one evening he had made his own pickled herring in a sherry sauce, as he always did for the Christmas and Midsummer holidays. During his lunch hour he had run out to buy Christmas presents and had actually managed to buy everything, wrap all the gifts, and compose the traditional rhymes to go with them.
Now he was ready for his reward. Two days of solitude eating good food and doing some fishing-interests that he shared with Leif.
He hurried home after work on Friday afternoon and packed a bag with clothes and his fishing gear. It had been snowing all day. The snowplows had been working nonstop to make the roads passable. Knutas couldn’t remember the last time it had snowed so much on Gotland. If only it would stick around until Christmas.
In the car on their way south he felt himself relaxing more with every mile they put behind them. They were playing Simon and Garfunkel full blast. The wintry landscape slid past outside the windows, with expanses of white fields and an occasional farm.
A beautiful layer of snow covered the yard when they arrived.
It’s actually silly to call this place a summer cabin, thought Knutas. It’s more like a manor house. The typical Gotland-style limestone house from the mid-nineteenth century was impressive with its whitewashed walls, pitched roof, and smooth gables. During that era bigger houses were being built on Gotland to keep pace with the increasing prosperity in the countryside. This house had no less than seven rooms and a kitchen, divided into two wings. The farm also had a boathouse that was used as a storeroom and food cellar. Next to the house stood a sauna, only a few yards from the dock where Leif’s fishing boat bobbed up and down all year-round.
The place was rather isolated. The nearest neighbor lived a couple of hundred yards away.
“I can just imagine how cold it is in the house,” Leif warned his friend when he opened the heavy, creaking front door.
“It doesn’t feel so bad,” said Knutas as they stepped inside. He carried the bags of food out to the kitchen and started putting away the provisions. “But I suppose it will seem worse if we sit still.”