Midnight In Malmö: The Fourth Inspector Anita Sundström Mystery (The Malmö Mysteries Book 4) (11 page)

‘Four apartments. Two from here; two from front,’ Lacaze explained. The left-hand door had a name plaque with J. Akerman on it. Hakim produced the set of keys that they had found at Akerman’s Malmö apartment. The thickest fitted the lock. He felt a prickle of sweat run down his back. He hesitated for a moment. He was going into a dead person’s house. That beautiful woman who had been stabbed in Pildammsparken lived her life here. She’d done all those ordinary, inconsequential things that people do at home. When she’d left here, she had little idea that it would be for the last time. He was aware of Lacaze standing impatiently behind him. He pushed open the door.

There was a large hallway. It was painted a clinical white, but one entire wall was covered with an exotic Indian tapestry of an elephant. Against the opposite wall was a long, mahogany bench, on which was casually draped a blue, all-weather jacket; it must have been raining before she left. Immediately to the left of the front door was the kitchen. Hakim thought he would get his bearings first before he investigated each room individually. Straight ahead was a wall with glass panes from floor to ceiling. In the centre of it was a double door. He opened the door and stepped into the elegant living room. A piano stood in one alcove at the side of the plain wooden fire surround. Logs were piled neatly in a wicker basket next to the hearth. Above the fireplace was a huge gilt mirror, which made an already large room appear even more expansive. In the other alcove stood a heavy piece of furniture that looked like a wardrobe but Hakim assumed must be a cupboard. Two matching sofas in cream faced the fire, while beyond them was a dining table; bare except for a simple candelabra. There were eight chairs. To the left of the dining area was a door which led directly into the kitchen. At the far end of the room was a French window. Through this there was an uninterrupted view over to the Alps. Tasteful paintings, many of them of local Swiss scenes, adorned the walls. They gave the room the personality that the bland furniture failed to. Nothing about the room suggested any connection to Sweden – even the sheet music on the piano was Chopin.

Along the corridor from the living room were two bedrooms, both en suite; a luxury bathroom; and a storeroom for domestic appliances. All had the high ceilings of an early 19th-century house, and the renovation, though totally modern, had been carried out in sympathy with the original building. From his cursory glances around the apartment, Hakim surmised that Julia Akerman was not used to having visitors; there was a slightly musty smell and an unmade-up bed in the second bedroom. Nowhere gave a clue as to what nationality Akerman really was – Hakim was beginning to think that she wasn’t Swedish at all. However, the final room in the apartment set his pulse racing. It was an office. This was where Akerman must have conducted her business, whatever that was. The solid, plain, modern desk had a computer on it. But it was what was on the wall above that immediately caught Hakim’s eye. Two small watercolours. He recognized the scenes and knew the artist; he was a Malmö-based painter named Hopp. One picture was of Sankt Petri Kyrka, Malmö’s biggest and oldest church; the other was the distinctive Ribersborgs cold-water bathhouse that straddles the end of a pier jutting out from the city’s main beach. This could be significant, though both pictures could have been picked up on one of her visits – they certainly didn’t prove she was Swedish. Hakim knew that, as well as renting the Kronborgsvägen apartment, Akerman had made trips most months to Copenhagen from Geneva since the middle of last year.

The office had very little else in it other than a small wooden chest of drawers, a shelf containing a few travel books, and a CD player/radio on a table in the corner. There was a large diary on the desk. It was open at the first week of June. As they had discovered from her flight tickets, she had arrived in Malmö on the Monday. She had written “Malmö” in the diary on the Monday and Tuesday. In the space for each day, there was also written a couple of capital letters – initials? AI on Monday and MA on Tuesday. On Friday was written “Madrid” and another pair of letters – GT. The following week: Paris and Barcelona. Flicking through the rest of the month: London, Lisbon, Naples and Rome. Again with letters or initials. He went back to previous months, and there was much the same pattern – and the same letters. Maybe she was in the travel business, thought Hakim, though he would have expected to see more evidence of that.

Lacaze had followed him round like a faithful dog. Hakim wanted time alone in the office.

‘Lacaze, why don’t you look round the rest of the house again?’

‘What I look for?’

‘We need to find out what Julia Akerman did for a living. Her job,’ as Lacaze looked puzzled. ‘Anything about her that makes it easier to understand who she was. You could start with her bedroom.’

Lacaze shot him a suspicious glance.

‘I’ll try and get into her computer.’

As Lacaze left, Hakim turned on the computer. To break in was going to test all of those advanced IT courses he had been sent on during his time in Gothenburg. It was the very fact that they had tried to push him into cyber crime, at which he was actually very adept, that had made him look for a transfer back to Malmö and join a more conventional unit with a wider remit.

Ten minutes later he was still struggling with the computer, when Lacaze appeared at the door. He beckoned Hakim to follow him. They walked along the corridor to the master bedroom. Like the rest of the house, it had white walls. Fine when the sun was streaming in through the large window, Hakim thought, but when it was dull, it would be very stark. Above the large double bed, there was a small, simple wooden cross, and there were two bedside tables, both with lamps. Their uncomplicated design could have been Scandinavian. What intrigued Hakim was a framed photograph on one of the tables. It was of a middle-aged couple smiling at the camera – hers was natural while his was forced. They were on a beach somewhere, and a picnic was laid out before them.

‘Here,’ Lacaze commanded.

Beyond the bed, next to the en suite, there was another door, now open. It was a substantial walk-in closet. Straight in front of them was a rack of designer shoes. On either side of the rack were wardrobes with sliding doors. All were open except the one at the end on the right. In the open ones, there was an array of dresses in a range of colours and designs. None of them looked as though they came from Lindex! Akerman liked to dress well.

Lacaze slid open the final door with a flourish. ‘
Voilà
!’

It took Hakim by surprise. He was the first to admit he had lived a pretty sheltered life in a Muslim household, though he’d learned a thing or two up in Gothenburg. But this was like stepping into one of the sex shops that Copenhagen was famed for. There was a huge array of what he mentally described as “sexy outfits”. Many of them would fight to cover the part of the body they were designed for. A range of scanty uniforms seemed to represent most occupations from soldier to French maid, air hostess to nurse. He couldn’t work out which force the short-skirted policewoman’s kit belonged to. The handcuffs looked real enough. And there were plenty of other titillating toys dangling from the back wall of the wardrobe. Hakim found himself blushing.

‘
Putain!
’ he heard Lacaze muttering behind him.

‘What?’

‘Whore.’

‘Maybe she just liked dressing up for her lovers.’

Lacaze gave him a scathing look. He waved his hand at the garish costumes, voluptuous corsetry, languorous lingerie and associated ironmongery. ‘This is work.’

‘A prostitute?’ Hakim wasn’t totally convinced. Lots of people had fetishes, though maybe not on this scale.

Lacaze nodded. ‘I go ask neighbours about her. Any visitors?’

Hakim agreed, and Lacaze left the closet. Hakim went back into the bedroom, picked up the framed photograph and took it with him back to Akerman’s office. What struck him was that this was the only photograph to be found in the whole house. He put it down on the desk and stared at it. The woman was still pretty, though she was quite chubby. She was a brunette and wore a denim dress. Hakim put her at about forty. The man standing next to her looked slightly older. His hair was very black, and he was more formally dressed in a shirt and neat trousers, even though they were at the seaside. Hakim found it difficult to gauge the age of the photo. Parents? Might make sense of Akerman’s natural colouring, which wasn’t blonde. Relatives? Whoever they were, they must have meant something to Julia Akerman. Did they know about the sort of things she had in her closet?

Hakim glanced around to make sure Lacaze wasn’t about. He turned the frame over, extracted the photo and slipped it into his pocket. He shoved the frame into the desk drawer.

The visit to the
Systembolag
was necessary, as the house was now very short of booze. Part of their relaxation had been over early beers – the hot summer was still continuing – followed by a bottle or two of wine over a meal in the evening. Kevin was intrigued by the fact that you could only purchase ordinary alcoholic drinks from a government-run operation. Though initially taken aback, he could see the benefits for somewhere like Britain, where he had to deal on a regular basis with youngsters out of their minds on cheap supermarket drink. He was also intrigued that the wine was laid out by price – rising from the cheapest to the most expensive – and not by the area of origin. Good idea, he thought.

Coming out into the sunshine, Kevin decided he wanted to nip into the church, which backed onto the
Systembolag
. Anita was quite happy for him to mooch around. When she was younger, she had been dragged into St. Nicolai too often by her mother to want to revisit it now, though she was quite willing to concede that it was a wonderful building. She parked herself on a bench outside, closed her eyes and let the warmth caress her. She had nearly fallen asleep when she realized someone was speaking to her.

‘Well, well; if it isn’t Anita Ullman!’

At first, she was startled by the voice and the fact that the speaker had used her maiden name. The sun was obscuring the face of the woman who stood before her. She assumed it must be some local who knew her from her school days in Simrishamn. As her eyes got used to the light, there was no mistaking the features: the deep-brown, chin-length hair; the square jaw; the wide mouth; and the round, dark eyes. Anita had once thought her attractive, albeit in a slightly manly way, before they grew to loathe each other. She was larger than Anita and could carry any extra weight without it showing too much. She had changed. To Anita, she looked harder. Maybe that was the nature of their unforgiving jobs. Hers certainly hadn’t mellowed Alice Zetterberg.

‘Still sitting on your fancy arse doing nothing. Of course, that’s what attracted Arne. Not doing nothing… your arse.’

Anita didn’t rise to the bait.

‘Hello, Alice. I heard you’d suddenly appeared.’

‘Things to sort out here.’

‘So I believe.’ Anita caught Zetterberg’s momentary look of surprise.

‘The station. They think you’re here to appraise them.’

‘Oh, that. Yes. Downsizing. That’s modern policing for you.’

‘I was surprised to hear you were out at Albin Rylander’s.’

‘The call came in and I went out. He was an important figure. We needed to make sure there was nothing suspicious. You know what the press are like.’

‘And it
was
suicide?’

‘Of course. All very sad, but I believe he was dying anyway. Just brought the inevitable forward.’

‘I liked him.’

‘Oh, that’s right. You rent the house next to him, don’t you?’

‘How do you know?’

Before Alice could answer, Anita saw Kevin coming out of the church and waving behind Zetterberg’s back. Zetterberg glanced round.

‘Who did you pinch him from?’

Anita was about to say something nasty in return, but Zetterberg was already moving off. Kevin noticed the scowl on Anita’s face.

‘Did I miss something?’

‘You didn’t miss anything,’ she said bitterly.

‘Ah, your
bête noire
.’

They headed down towards the harbour, where they had parked the car. The cafés on Storgatan were full of mid-morning customers enjoying their alfresco coffees and pastries. Kevin wanted to take Anita’s mind off her encounter with the Zetterberg woman by prattling on about the church.

‘Did you know it was built up by the Premonstratensian brothers eight hundred years ago? There’s one of their abbeys near Penrith at Shap. Lovely spot, well hidden.’

Anita nodded in response, but she wasn’t really listening.

‘Look, do you want a coffee?’

‘No, it’s OK.’ Then she smiled ruefully. ‘I mustn’t let that bitch get me down. We’re on holiday, and I’m taking you off to Ystad. While she’s based over here, we won’t run into her over there!’

Kevin was relieved. They were getting on well, and he didn’t want anything to spoil the time they were having together. As they reached the car, Anita’s mobile bleated. With difficulty, she eventually located it in her bag; a black hole that Kevin suspected would still be spilling its hidden secrets into the next millennium.

‘Probably Lasse.’ Anita flicked up the message. ‘No, it’s from Klas,’ she said in mild surprise. ‘Didn’t even know I’d given him my number.’

‘Is it something interesting?’ Kevin asked expectantly.

‘Phew. Yes. Em… it translates as “Very successful trip. All is revealed. Will make sensational book. Flying back tomorrow. See you soon”.’

‘Well, does that mean he’s discovered Albin Rylander’s big secret?’

‘I’m sure we’ll find out as soon as he gets back.’

It had taken time, but at last Akerman’s computer yielded up its secrets. And knowing his way round computers, Hakim had little difficulty locating the files that would be most pertinent to the investigation. Lacaze had been right. Hakim couldn’t help being shocked. He thought he had got beyond that in his first few years in the police, as he had seen many horrific sights and been in life-threatening situations. And this was almost innocuous in comparison. Everywhere had prostitution. Maybe it was something to do with his Muslim faith. He wasn’t a committed believer, nor did he attend the mosque regularly, and yet he couldn’t shake off many of the tenets of Islam. Though he hadn’t consciously thought about it, abhorrence of prostitution must be one of them.