Chapter 18
The parking lot outside ?re police station on Kurortsv?gen is empty. As they get out of the car, Hanna sees Carina Grankvist’s white Volkswagen turn in off the main road. The crime scene investigation must be finished.
Daniel locks the car, and they make their way with Carina up to the meeting room, where Anton Lundgren is waiting with Rafael Herrera—or Raffe, as everyone calls him.
Both men are based in ?re as general investigators. They are really supposed to deal with crimes such as robbery, abuse, and criminal damage, but in a homicide case like this, every available resource is needed.
Anton and Raffe are sitting at the rectangular wooden table on bright-red chairs. The colorful upholstery forms a stark contrast to the otherwise white room. Only a few years ago the local hospital was housed in this building, and its legacy still lingers in the décor.
As Hanna walks in, Raffe is busy setting up the link to ?stersund.
A second later their boss, Birgitta Grip, appears on the screen.
She is accompanied by several colleagues from the Serious Crimes Unit, much to Hanna’s relief.
Both she and Daniel have been worried about the lack of resources.
This means that the case is being prioritized, even if that means that other matters have to be set aside.
Grip, who is in her sixties, strokes her chin and looks from Daniel to Hanna.
“Which of you would like to begin?”
Hanna can’t help feeling a sense of satisfaction that Grip included her in the question.
Daniel has been with the unit for a lot longer than her, and he was the one who helped her to secure the post in ?re.
He is regarded as more experienced, although he is only two years older.
However, they have worked together for almost fifteen months now, and it seems as if Grip regards her as a reliable member of the team.
Hanna sits up a little straighter. She has the utmost respect for Grip, who leads the unit with a firm hand. Grip grew up in ?stersund, and is well aware of the challenges of working in a rural community. She is also wise and fair, and extremely practical.
Hanna has never had a female boss before, and she likes it.
Manfred, her former superior who gave her no choice but to leave her post in the Domestic Violence Unit with the City Police in Stockholm, was completely different. He had his favorites, and didn’t like it when anyone opposed him or asked difficult questions.
In complete contrast, Grip encourages different points of view. She likes it when her officers look at things from another angle.
In the past, Hanna didn’t give much thought to the need for female role models—she would simply shrug if the issue arose. Now she realizes what it’s about. Grip makes Hanna stronger as a police officer. She feels more secure in her own role with a competent woman as head of the unit.
In a case like this, involving extreme violence against a woman, that feels especially good.
Daniel glances at Hanna. “You or me?”
“Go for it.”
There is no power play here. They are equals, and she knows that he would never show off at her expense.
Daniel summarizes the situation they encountered when they arrived at the hotel in the morning. He gives their first impressions of the crime scene, the brutality of the attack, the shock among the staff.
“Anything you’d like to add?” he asks Hanna.
She studies her notes. Daniel has already given an overview of the interviews conducted during the day, and the people they met. He hasn’t said anything about motive or possible perpetrators, but that will come later. They don’t know enough at this stage.
“I think you’ve covered most things,” she says.
“Okay.” Grip turns her attention to Carina, who is sitting opposite Hanna. “What can you tell us?”
Carina shares a number of photographs from the scene. The first, a close-up of Charlotte Wretlind from the waist upward, makes Anton cover his mouth with his hand. Hanna can see that their colleagues in ?stersund are also affected.
Raffe gasps. “My God.”
“Indeed,” Carina agrees. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The body is on its way to the National Forensic Center in Ume?, but we can state that Charlotte Wretlind suffered several dozen knife wounds over her entire body. The one to the throat would have been enough to kill her.”
Carina shows more pictures of the body and the hotel room—all equally difficult to look at.
“So let’s talk about the perpetrator,” Grip says. “What’s your view, Carina? Man or woman?”
“We’ve managed to secure a partial shoe print.
It seems as if the murderer stepped in the victim’s blood on the way out, then trod on the carpet.
According to our measurements, we are looking for someone who wears a size forty-five shoe, which suggests it’s a man.
The strength behind the blows with the knife also leads me in that direction, because there are so many and they’re so deep, but I’d like to hear what the forensic pathologists have to say. ”
Hanna doesn’t think there can be any doubt about the killer’s gender.
As soon as she saw the victim’s mutilated body, she was certain they were looking for a man.
They have already established that there don’t seem to be any defensive wounds.
That could be down to either the murderer’s physical superiority or that the victim was simply unable to defend herself in the face of acute danger.
This is known as the freeze response, when a person is so afraid that they can’t move a muscle.
It often happens to women, especially in assault cases.
Hanna has come across it frequently in the past.
Grip nods. “Okay, so it sounds like a man with size forty-five shoes. That suggests someone who is quite tall, and presumably pretty strong. What else can we say?”
“He must have been covered in blood,” Carina says. “It went everywhere, all over the room. With the kind of close contact required to stab someone in this way, it would have been impossible for the perpetrator to avoid getting blood on his clothes.”
“So little chance of a discreet exit.” Daniel leans back on his chair. “If anyone saw him after he left the Silver Suite, it must have been obvious that he’d committed a crime.”
“It’s a big hotel,” Hanna points out. “They have over four hundred beds and one hundred and twenty members of staff in the high season. There should be witnesses who noticed him leaving the scene.”
“What about CCTV?” Raffe asks. “Could we be lucky enough to find that he was caught on film?”
“They’re gathering everything up and will send it over as soon as possible,” Hanna replies. “We mentioned it to the manager.”
“Carina, what can you tell us about the murder weapon?” Grip says.
“Obviously it’s a knife, probably an ordinary hunting knife, given the number and size of the wounds.”
“A hunting knife,” Raffe echoes. “Where do we even start?”
The question is rhetorical. Everyone knows that a large percentage of the population of J?mtland go hunting. If you hunt, you have a hunting knife as part of your basic equipment.
“That’s your problem,” Carina says dryly. “I just answered the question.”
“Thank you, Carina—that’s a good start,” Grip says.
Daniel folds his arms and looks around the table and at the screen. “It doesn’t seem like a very professional job. It’s too messy. If the main aim was to kill the victim, then the single blow to the throat would have been enough. Instead he seems to have stabbed her repeatedly, in a frenzy.”
Hanna agrees. There is something deeply aggressive about the whole thing, from the multiple stab wounds to the fact that Charlotte was attacked in bed.
“I don’t think it was just about taking her life,” she says. “It almost feels as if Charlotte Wretlind was being made to pay for something.”
A punishment.
Grip pushes back a strand of her steel-gray hair, which tones with her deep-set eyes. “I agree. Let’s take a look at the victim’s background. What do we know about her?”
Anton has looked into Charlotte’s life while Daniel and Hanna were at Copperhill. He has his laptop open in front of him.
“I ran a multiple inquiry and searched all our databases,” he begins. “She doesn’t appear anywhere.”
A model citizen, in other words, Hanna thinks.
“She renewed her passport six months ago—this is what she looked like then.”
A passport photo of Charlotte appears on the screen. She looks cool and professional, wearing a dark jacket and a blouse with a pussycat bow.
“Born in 1965,” Anton continues, “which means she was fifty-six at the time of her death. Her mother lives in a care home for dementia sufferers. Her father is dead. She was married to a man called Mats Rutberg for a few years in the late nineties—the divorce went through in 2000. Since then she has been single, and is registered at an expensive address in the ?stermalm district of Stockholm—Tysta Gatan 7.”
“Children?” Raffe wonders, adjusting the dark ponytail that his is signature. Hanna has never seen him with his hair loose, and only once with a different style, when he went for a man bun on top of his head.
“One son, born in 1997. His name is Filip Rutberg Wretlind, and he lives not far away from his mother, on Banérgatan in the same district. He has embarked on several education courses, including at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, but he hasn’t completed any of them.
At the moment he seems to be mostly drifting around. ”
“Has he been informed?”
“Yes. The Stockholm police took care of it.”
“And the ex-husband?”
“They’re trying to track him down—apparently he lives abroad.”
“What do we know about the victim’s finances and work situation before the Storlien project?” Daniel asks.
“For many years Charlotte was a partner in a well-known risk capital company, IQP. By any standards, her personal financial situation was very comfortable. Her apartment is pretty large, and is in one of Stockholm’s most desirable areas.
She also has a summer cottage on the island of Ingaro in the Stockholm archipelago, and an apartment on Majorca.
Three years ago she left the company and started her own business known as SEG—Swedish Establishment Group—where she is the director and chair of the board. ”
“SEG are behind the Storlien project,” Hanna adds. “Charlotte’s business partner, Henry Sylvester, told us.”
“Exactly,” Anton says. “They have five employees, and the office is also in ?stermalm.”
“What shape are the company finances in?” Daniel wants to know.
“I can look into that,” Raffe offers.
Hanna remembers that he took care of the financial aspect of their previous investigation, when the skier Johan Andersson was murdered. Apparently Raffe has completed some courses in business finance over the past year; personally she can’t think of anything more boring.
She also knows that Raffe and his partner, Nilla, are trying to have a baby, but it’s not going too well. Hanna has met Nilla a few times; she’s a sweet person in her early thirties who enjoys baking and works as a preschool teacher in Kall, where they live.
Maybe Raffe’s online courses are a form of distraction? Or maybe he’s just ambitious.
She glances at Daniel. He told her quite early on that Ida had unexpectedly found herself pregnant with Alice when they had been together for only a few months.
At the time, they weren’t even sure they wanted to keep the child.
It somehow seems unfair that Raffe and Nilla, who have been together forever, are struggling to have a family when it’s so easy for others.
Life, she thinks. It rarely turns out the way we expect. She is thirty-six years old and single, something that her mother often points out. It seems increasingly unlikely that she will ever meet someone and have children of her own.
The thought is unexpectedly painful.
Daniel’s voice interrupts her gloomy reverie.
“It’s interesting that the door of the suite shows no sign of forced entry, suggesting that the victim herself might have let the perpetrator in—but then again she was wearing nothing but panties when she was found, which contradicts that idea.”
Hanna thinks about Henry Sylvester, the business partner who has known Charlotte since they were children, and now seems likely to be able to drop out of a multimillion kronor investment he’d been talked into.
If he’d knocked on her door late at night, no doubt Charlotte would have let him in.
Could he be involved? He said he flew up to ?re this afternoon—yesterday he was in Stockholm.
Hanna makes a note to check out his alibi.
She can’t really see the elegant businessman wielding the knife himself, but neither can she rule it out.
“Take a look at Sylvester too,” she says to Raffe. “See what shape his company finances are in.”
Grip steps in. “A member of staff could have opened the door with a master key.”
“That’s definitely a possibility,” Daniel says. “We need to check which key cards were used for the victim’s suite yesterday, and we also need to map all the hotel employees.”
Daniel’s final words make Grip sigh in a way that says it all.
Background checks take time. She begins to allocate tasks.
Two younger investigators from ?stersund will question individually everyone who was on duty the previous day.
In addition, background checks must be carried out on every employee.
Hanna is disappointed when that job goes to an older colleague, Nisse Sundbom, who has failed to impress her.
He is one of the veterans in the unit, someone who rarely overexerts himself.
“Is there anything to indicate that this could happen again?” Grip asks. “Should we be afraid that the killer might intend to harm other guests? If so, we might need to consider closing the place down.”
Hanna meets her boss’s worried gaze. Once again the image of Charlotte’s body comes into her mind. The idea that they could be dealing with a crazed killer is terrifying.
“I’m inclined to think this was personal,” Daniel says. “It doesn’t feel like she was chosen by chance, even if we don’t have any evidence to the contrary.”
Hanna agrees. Her gut instinct tells her that Charlotte’s death wasn’t a horrific random act.
Then something else occurs to her.
What if the aim of the brutal murder was to create a smoke screen, a facade to send her and her colleagues in the wrong direction? What if someone out there wants them to start looking for a madman, when in fact it’s a contract killing?
In which case, what appears to be frenzied violence could be something else.
A plan to mislead the police.