Murder in Malmö: The second Inspector Anita Sundström mystery (Inspector Anita Sundström mysteries) (27 page)

‘Tell me about your grandmother.’

The interview room was featureless and bland. Yet the most extraordinary stories had unfolded in these drab surroundings. Elin Marklund was back to her composed self. She was calm. Almost at peace with herself. She sat alone on one side of the table as the tape recorded her story – her confession. She had refused to have a lawyer sit in on the interview. Opposite her were Anita and Nordlund. Anita was relieved that Moberg or Westermark weren’t involved. They could conduct the interrogation at their own pace. She and Nordlund had been surprised how meekly Marklund had given in. How co-operative she had been. She hadn’t been interviewed straightaway, as the team decided to go through her computer first. And they had sent off to forensics the worn, brown, metallic canister with the Zyklon B label and Degesch company logo slashed around the middle in red lettering against an orange background. Great care had been taken while digging it up behind Marklund’s house.

It was Thursday morning. 10.27am.

‘Hanna. That’s her name. She was Danish. And, as you gathered from her early photo, Jewish.’

Elin took a sip from the bottle of water she had asked for before the interview began.

‘Like many Danish Jews, she managed to escape to Sweden after the Nazi occupation of Denmark. She was one of the lucky ones. Her parents weren’t. They were rounded up. It was a brave Danish fisherman who got Hanna and a few others over here. The Öresund may not be that wide, but that crossing was very dangerous with so many German patrol boats around. Hanna was welcomed with open arms by a Swedish family. After the war, she stayed on, as she had no people to go back to. Her parents died of malnutrition at Theresienstadt, Hitler’s so-called show camp. Hanna married Oskar Marklund. They had a son, my father. I never knew him, as my parents died in a car crash when I was only a few months old.’

‘So, your grandparents brought you up. I assume the house in Skanör was their home.’

Marklund twirled the water bottle around in her manicured fingers.

‘Yes. Mainly my grandmother’s because Oskar died when I was eight.’

‘You must have been close.’

Marklund looked across at Anita. ‘Very. She taught me the importance of tolerance. She loved Sweden because it was a country that sheltered the oppressed. She was proud to be taken in by such a liberal state. She cherished our values. I’m glad she didn’t live to see the Sweden of today, where immigrants are treated with suspicion and distain. The Jewish community here is persecuted. And we’re turning into a nation of Islamophobics. Do you know, there are at least fifteen thousand xenophobic Swedish websites? They seem to think that the Jews are world conspirators and that the Muslims are taking over through mass-immigration.’

‘I understand what you’re saying. However, we need to know about Tommy Ekman,’ prompted Anita, whom Nordlund was happy to let lead the questioning.

‘Tommy Ekman. Smooth Tommy Ekman. I thought he had hired me because of my excellent track record. I soon discovered he was less interested in my mental attributes and more interested in my physical ones. I’d only been at E&J a few days when he hit on me. That’s when I invented a husband. It didn’t keep him at bay for long. Suggestive remarks when we were alone and endless flirty emails. Then he called me in for a late meeting one evening a couple of months ago. He’d been out with clients all afternoon on a boozy lunch. He must have topped that off with a lot more drink when he got back. He tried it on again. It was easy enough to fend him off, as he was very drunk. Then he started coming out with things about some group he was in. All to do with Gustav Adolf. It didn’t make much sense. He burbled on about how he and his powerful friends were going to take Sweden back for the Swedes, as it had been in the golden age of Gustav Adolf the Great. It was a side of him that no one in the company had seen. We all thought he was apolitical. But that evening the mask dropped. I don’t know whether he thought I’d be impressed or if he was just showing off, but he unlocked a drawer in a cabinet he kept in his office. He produced this canister. He was so proud of the bloody thing. Said he’d bought it off a dealer on a business trip to Germany. I couldn’t believe it when I twigged what it was. It was horrifying. And he just thought it was funny. It didn’t occur to him that I might have Jewish blood. Mind you, it hadn’t occurred to me that Tommy was a fascist, racist or whatever. It was the first time I’d heard him express any political views before.’

‘And after?’ asked Anita.

‘Not after either. He came to me the next day in a panic and said I was to forget about what I’d seen or I’d never get a job in advertising again.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘No. After the initial revulsion, I became angry. I wanted to find out more. Late one evening, when the building was empty, I went to his office and got on his computer. I found the
Sjätte November
folder. I downloaded it onto a memory stick.’

‘It makes interesting reading.’ Anita’s first reaction to what they’d found in Ekman’s files, downloaded from Marklund’s computer, had been one of disbelief. The information would send shock waves around Sweden. The people mentioned had been above suspicion, which is why the group hadn’t registered with the national police monitoring right-wing organizations.

‘Oh, yes. Such respected, wealthy men planning to change the face of Sweden. Using their money to spread fear. Paying people – including young Muslims - to hound an increasingly frightened Jewish community. As a cop, you must know more than most how difficult it is for Jews to live in Malmö at the moment. And then fermenting trouble amongst the immigrant populace, particularly Muslim. They paid agitators. Every incident is catalogued. I’m sure you’ve cross-checked the dates?’ They had.

‘Why are all the activities referred to taking place here in Malmö?’

‘I assume it’s because all the names on the list live here in Skåne. They have to start their revolution somewhere. And we have a large immigrant population in Malmö. Strangely, if you read the material from their meetings and correspondence, they don’t seem to be archetypical neo-Nazis and racists. Or certainly they don’t think of themselves as such. In their eyes they’re not fascist Swedes like Per Engdahl or Sven Olov Lindholm in the past. They see themselves as patriots - saviours of Sweden and its values. More like medieval knights on a crusade, or warriors following their hero, Gustav Adolf, and building an empire everyone would look up to. What they seem to have forgotten is that welcoming refugees to Sweden is an integral part of our contribution to civilization. It was only Tommy who seemed to have true Nazi tendancies, though he kept that well concealed. Hence the hidden Zyklon B. Even then it was like an exciting game to him.’

Anita got out her snus tin. She offered it to Marklund, who shook her head. Anita took a sachet and glanced at Nordlund.

‘When did you decide to kill Tommy Ekman?’

Marklund paused before speaking. It was as though she wanted to get the story right so that they could understand why she had done what she had.

‘At first I wanted to do something about what I’d found out, but didn’t know what to do.’

‘Why didn’t you come to us?’

Marklund snorted in derision. ‘The police! You’re joking. For all I know, you’re in Wollstad’s pocket. Everything would have been covered up. The group have untold wealth. They can buy silence and make things or people disappear. Or at least they could. But not now. Now, I can have my day in court and they – or the police - can’t shut me up.’

Her calmness cracked as she squeezed the water bottle tightly. For the first time, Anita could see the vehemence, the passion, the anger and the hatred in those smouldering brown eyes. For the first time she could really imagine this woman as a murderer.

‘We’re here to uphold justice,’ put in Nordlund.

She gave Nordlund a scathing glare. ‘Even after this, you’ll never bring Dag Wollstad to account.’

‘We will if we discover he’s behind this. Inciting civil unrest is a serious crime,’ Anita said with conviction. ‘Back to Ekman, please.’

‘What made up my mind was that disgusting cleric. On the film.’

They had recovered a copy at Marklund’s home.

‘The bile he came out with, so cold and calculating. You’ve seen it. Tommy even filmed that with equipment from the agency. The cleric went on about the Holocaust and how it hadn’t really happened. Just clever Zionist PR. I was so consumed by bitterness and revulsion, but I felt powerless to do anything. All I could think about was my grandmother and what she had been through, and how her parents had died. And then, suddenly, I thought I knew what I had to do. Do to them what they pretended hadn’t happened to the Jews. I had a list of leading members of the group. They were only initials but I worked them out from other notes in Tommy’s files. I read up about Zyklon B and worked out how I could use it. It helped that I’d studied chemistry at university before I decided advertising was more glamorous.’ Her background should have been checked out more thoroughly, thought Anita.

‘Then, a few days before, Tommy told me he’d be at home by himself on the night of the pitch. Wife and children away. He suggested that I should pop round for a drink. He was never very subtle. I said I’d think about it, though I had no intention of taking him up on his offer. Then, I realized he was presenting me with an opportunity.’

‘You knew about his spare set of house keys.’

‘Nearly everybody did. I also remembered where the key was to the cabinet where he kept the Zyklon B. The canister was easy enough to pinch. I erased all “The November 6
^th
Group” files the day after Tommy was poisoned, so you wouldn’t find any information before I had a chance to get to the others. I didn’t dare go in the day he actually died in case I gave myself away.’ She pulled a face. ‘I’m not used to killing people. So I took a sick day. You know the rest.’

‘I think so. But just let me get this straight. When you left the agency early, ostensively to go to the pharmacist’s on the way Geistrand Petfoods, you picked up your car from near the station and then drove directly to Ekman’s apartment?’

‘Yes.’

‘You let yourself in, found his bedroom and put the crystals in the en suite shower.’

‘I figured it would be the one he’d use.’

‘There’s something that’s still bugging me. Why did you make love to Ekman?’

Marklund blew out her cheeks and smiled. ‘It wasn’t meant to happen. I had to hang around during the celebration drink so that I could put his spare house keys back. I didn’t get an opportunity before. I knew that if they were missing, then you would conclude that it was someone from the agency. When we were alone, he thought he’d forgotten his house keys and was about to go into the drawer. To distract him I seduced him. Well, it wasn’t as though he needed much encouragement. So we did it on the desk. Afterwards, he went off to the bathroom to sort himself out and I put the keys back. The ironic thing is that he found his normal keys in his briefcase and didn’t go into the drawer after all.

‘Afterwards, I realized that you’d probably discover that we’d made love, and that you would draw the conclusion that, having done so, I was very unlikely to have killed him. Especially if I seemed horrified at the thought of my “husband” finding out.’

‘It worked very well. You were discounted early on.’ Anita caught Marklund’s eye. ‘Didn’t it make you feel guilty having sex with someone whose life you were about to end?’

‘No.’ Her denial was flat and unemotional. ‘He died the same way as his sick heroes dispatched millions. I hope he suffered as much as they did.’

Anita put away her snus tin.

‘OK. Martin Olofsson?’

‘I used to jog in the areas where I knew the main members of the group lived. I got to know their evening routines. Olofsson was fairly simple. I’d expected him the evening before. He obviously stayed an extra night over in Österlen. I’d have liked to have gassed him too, but modern cars aren’t much use any more. So I hit him with a spanner. You won’t find it. It’s somewhere out there in the Öresund. Then I made it look like a gassing. The Nazis used carbon monoxide to kill many of their victims in specially designed vans.’

‘But it was obvious that it wasn’t a suicide.’

‘It wasn’t meant to fool you. I wanted to send a message to the others in “The November 6
^th
Group”. Someone is coming to get you. It frightened off Ander Genmar. He disappeared somewhere.’

‘Spain.’

‘Ah. And I couldn’t find Lennart Persson.’

‘That gives us our
LP
. Who’s he?’

‘He owns half the warehouses in Sweden. Very rich.’

Anita shifted in her chair. She nodded to Nordlund to carry on.

‘So, Ingvar Serneholt was your next victim?’

Marklund stroked her right earlobe thoughtfully. ‘He should have been.’

‘What do you mean “should have been”?’

‘I did go out to his place a couple of times to work out how I was going to kill him. Then someone beat me to it. I don’t—’

‘Hang on,’ interrupted Anita. ‘Are you saying you weren’t responsible for Ingvar Serneholt’s murder?’

‘No. Someone did me a favour.’

‘But you were seen there that night. The jogger.’

‘Oh, I was there all right. But Serneholt had a visitor.’

‘Did you see who it was?’

‘No. But I was surprised that he was entertaining someone with such a crappy car. I thought he only mixed with the Porsche set.’

‘What was the make of the car?’

‘Citroën.’

‘Colour?’

‘Difficult to tell in that light. Brown... green. Could even have been dark blue.’

This piece of information had Anita’s mind racing. She thought she knew whose car it might be. It wasn’t a happy thought.

Nordlund broke the silence.

‘And what were you going to do about Dag Wollstad?’

‘He was the biggest fish. To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t the faintest idea how I was going to get him.’ She spun the water bottle round in her hands. ‘But, thanks to you, I know now. You’ve given me a platform.’

Nordlund looked at Anita. She nodded.