Lifetime Page 22
She stopped at the third item on the list.
Arson.
She heard Q’s cold voice echo in her chest.
The fire was started by someone who had a reason to start it. You’re at the top of the list of informal suspects.
She took a short walk round the newsroom.
The other crimes that were punishable by life imprisonment would hardly apply to an American, not in Sweden during peacetime.
She put her pen down and checked them out on the Internet just to be certain: incitement to mutiny, insurrection, high treason, treachery in dealing with a foreign power, arbitrary conduct in dealings with a foreign power, aggravated espionage, aggravated insubordination, undermining morale, disregarding preparations for war, unauthorized surrender, dereliction of duty, betraying the country, unauthorized possession of chemical weapons, mines and nuclear material.
Unauthorized possession of mines? Good grief.
She sighed.
So, which court? There were dozens of them in Stockholm alone. Probably a hundred or so throughout the country. Where to start?
She looked up Stockholm City Court and its various subdivisions.
She stopped, her fingers hovering above the keyboard.
If you’re given a life sentence, you appeal.
His case should have been heard in one of the Courts of Appeal.
There were only six of those: one each for the regions of Götaland and Svealand, Upper and Lower Norrland, Western Sweden and finally one for the southern provinces of Skåne and Blekinge.
She looked at the time: they usually took calls until four.
She started from the far south and worked her way up.
She was looking for a verdict in which an American had been sentenced to life, probably for murder.
On her sixth and final attempt, the Court of Appeal for Upper Norrland in Umeå, she was put through to a helpful young man in the archive.
‘That sounds like Stevens,’ he said. A minute or so later he sent her the case report against Michael Harold Stevens.
Annika leafed through to the summary of the verdict and let out a whistle.
An impressive catalogue of crimes.
The American had been found guilty of murder, grievous bodily harm, kidnapping, attempted extortion, posing a serious danger to the public, obstructing the course of justice, and breaches of firearms legislation.
Sounds like a hired thug who messed up badly.
She flicked through the document, all thirty-eight pages of it. In summary, Michael Harold Stevens had admitted that he had blown up a car in a quarry outside Skellefteå, which accounted for the charge of posing a serious danger to the public. A thirty-three-year-old man had been inside the vehicle and had died in the explosion, hence the murder charge. He had forced a thirty-two-year-old man inside another car (kidnap), driven him to a hunting cabin outside Kåge, put a pistol in his mouth (breach of firearms legislation), and made two demands: that he withdrew a witness statement (obstructing the course of justice), and paid off a drugs debt (extortion).
The two victims had both had criminal records. They were in the same criminal gang.
Stevens had also admitted taking part in the planning of the armed raid on the security van in Botkyrka the previous year.
She sighed with annoyance, and let the document fall to her lap.
This has to be the right American, but where does David Lindholm fit into the picture? What has he got to do with any of this? Who can I call and ask?
She looked back at the first page of the report to see who had been appointed to defend Stevens: a lawyer named Mats Lennström from the Kvarnstenen law practice.
Mats Lennström? But he’s Julia Lindholm’s lawyer!
She picked up the phone and dialled the number for the Kvarnstenen law practice.
‘You’re in luck,’ the secretary trilled. ‘Mr Lennström has just walked through the door. We weren’t sure if he’d make it back here today.’
Annika shifted restlessly on her chair as the woman transferred her call.
‘Lennström,’ he answered, and Annika got the impression that he wasn’t even sure of that.
‘I’m calling about three things,’ she said, once she’d introduced herself. ‘First, I’d like to interview Julia Lindholm. We’ve met before so she knows who I am.’
‘A lot of people would like to interview my client,’ he said heavily.
‘Yes, of course,’ Annika said, ‘but I know that all restrictions have been lifted now and she can see whoever she wants, so perhaps you could pass on my request.’
He sighed.
‘Then there’s this business of dissociative identity disorder,’ Annika said. ‘The National Board of Forensic Medicine has decided that Julia can serve time in prison, even though she’s evidently been acting as someone else, this other woman. What’s your view on that?’
‘Er,’ the lawyer said, ‘well, that’s their expert opinion, so I don’t really have any comment to make.’
Hurray! Confirmation! Now it was publishable!
‘And I was also wondering what really happened to Michael Harold Stevens,’ Annika said.
There was a moment’s silence, then the lawyer cleared his throat. ‘Why are you wondering about that?’
‘David Lindholm was his trustee, of course, but Stevens had some sort of accident at Tidaholm and was transferred to Kumla, and after that Lindholm was no longer his trustee. I wondered what happened.’
‘Have you read the report from the trial?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you know that Mike confessed.’
‘Yes.’
The lawyer paused – it sounded to Annika as though he was taking off his jacket. ‘Well,’ he said eventually, ‘it must fall outside the statute of limitations now. The policeman’s dead, and Mike’s never going to pursue the case.’
Annika waited in silence.
‘David Lindholm was in charge of questioning Mike,’ Mats Lennström said. ‘He confessed to everything he was charged with, and quite a bit more besides. The armed raid in Botkyrka, for instance.’ He fell silent.
‘But?’ Annika said.
‘When the sentence was upheld by the Court of Appeal, Mike was taken to Kumla for evaluation – everyone sentenced to more than four years goes there first. Then he was sent to Tidaholm, and presumably that was when he grasped he’d been fooled.’
‘Fooled?’
‘Yes, I should have checked it all a bit more thoroughly. Mike and David Lindholm had come to an agreement under the terms of which he would have served a shorter sentence at the facility in Ljustadalen. But none of what David promised him was legally binding. I ought to have realized …’
Annika sat up straight in her chair. ‘Do you mean to say that you didn’t know if it was legally binding or not? And that you didn’t check, if you weren’t sure?’
‘You trust the police, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Especially such a renowned figure as David Lindholm.’
What an idiot! It’s hardly surprising they picked him to defend Julia, if they wanted to get her put away.
‘What sort of accident did he have?’
‘He slipped in the shower and fell on something sharp.’
Annika had to suppress an audible snort of derision. ‘Puncture wounds,’ she said. ‘Mike talked, and five men were locked up for the Botkyrka raid. They weren’t exactly happy about it. They had friends in Tidaholm. They sharpened their toothbrushes or cutlery and attacked him in the shower.’
‘That’s all speculation on your part.’
‘Tell me one thing,’ Annika said. ‘What did Stevens do in return? Did he get back at the Botkyrka gang, or David, maybe? Or his wife? Or his son?’
‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot to do,’ he said, and hung up.
Annika sat there, staring into thin air for a whole minute.
There was nothing remotely heroic about the way David Lindholm had solved the raid on the security van in Botkyrka.
Quite the reverse. He had used his public reputation to gain a man’s trust, then betrayed him.
What an arsehole!
She moved on to the second man on the list, Ahmed Muhammad Svensson. She pulled out the report of the trial in Malmö City Court: attempted murder, aggravated kidnap, aggravated extortion and threatening behaviour. Ahmed Muhammad Svensson had married a Swedish woman and taken her surname to make it easier to fit into Swedish society. It hadn’t worked out very well. He hadn’t been able to find a job and had become depressed, then begun to hit his wife and their four-year-old daughter. In the end Mrs Svensson asked for a divorce.
Then Ahmed Muhammad had got hold of his neighbour’s hunting rifle and gone to their daughter’s nursery. He had arrived in time for the afternoon break, when all the children were eating rosehip soup and almond biscuits. He had announced loudly and in tears that he was going to shoot the children, one by one, until his wife stopped the divorce proceedings and the Swedish government gave him a million kronor. And a new colour television.
God, how tragic.
The hostage drama had got out of hand at once.
One young man, a student at a nearby sixth-form college, had been doing work experience at the nursery and managed to get out through the balcony door to the car park at the back of the building. Ahmed Muhammad Svensson had fired three shots at him, hitting a parked car and a lamp-post, hence the charge of attempted murder.
The lad had naturally sounded the alarm and ten minutes later the whole nursery had been surrounded by police and emergency vehicles. At the trial the staff had described how Ahmed Muhammad Svensson had been terrified by the commotion and had sat hugging the rifle as if it were his only salvation. The local police had obviously tried to talk some sense into him, but he hadn’t been willing to enter into any form of dialogue.
It had just so happened that the experienced negotiator David Lindholm was in Malmö for a seminar that day. Someone high up in the police was aware of this, and Lindholm was called to the scene as an expert. Lindholm had, entirely of his own volition, gone inside the building and talked to Svensson for about two hours. The children had come out in groups of five, accompanied by a member of staff. Svensson’s daughter had been in the last group.
Finally the hostage-taker himself had emerged, arm in arm with Police Superintendent Lindholm.
In court David Lindholm had testified that Svensson had threatened to shoot the children, the staff and himself, and that he had believed he was likely to carry out his threat at any time. Svensson hadn’t said much, just that he regretted what he had done and would never have been capable of harming children.
And he was given a life sentence. Poor bastard!
Because David Lindholm had betrayed someone, again.
I wonder what he did to the third, Filip Andersson?
She shivered slightly: those terrible axe murders. The paper had printed acres of coverage. She typed ‘facts filip andersson’ into the computer and waited.
And waited and waited.
What’s this? Why’s it going so slowly?
Then the screen flickered and a short list of articles appeared. ‘Notes and facts filip andersson’ she read on the first one. This looks very odd …
She studied the screen, and realized she’d typed the terms of the search into the wrong box. She hadn’t searched the Internet or the newspaper’s archive, but the hard-drive of the laptop.
So …
She clicked on the file and up popped an ordinary Word document.
‘Is he innocent?’ she read.
Facts pointing to FA: 1. He had evidently been at the scene of the murders. His fingerprints were on the door-handle, on the female victim’s handbag, and in four different places inside the flat. 2. He must have been present when the murders were committed. He left his trousers to be dry-cleaned the following day, the police found the ticket in his wallet and managed to pick the trousers up just before they were cleaned. On one trouser-leg there were traces of blood whose DNA matched the female victim. 3. He had a motive. The three people in the flat had deceived him somehow, although in what way is unknown.
Yes, so far this all makes sense.
Facts against FA being the killer: 1. Why weren’t there any traces of blood from the other victims on his trousers or other clothes? Chopping up the victims like that means you have to be in close contact with them. You can’t just swing at them: you have to stand on the arm or leg to hold it down on something solid, in these cases usually the floor, but in one instance a table, and for that to work the victims have to be either drugged or otherwise rendered compliant, in this case with blows to the head. It seems extremely unlikely that the murderer could have avoided getting any blood on his body and clothes, considering the quantity of blood involved. 2. Where’s the murder weapon? Is it really just an ordinary axe? Wouldn’t some sort of broad-axe or mattock or chopping tool, like a meat cleaver, have been more effective? 3. Why didn’t he throw his trousers away? The traces of blood that were found were microscopic. Might he not have known they were there? Why not? NB check tomorrow. 4. There were a lot of fingerprints in the flat, many of them unidentified. 5. Most importantly: there were traces of blood and DNA from another person at the scene of the murder, and these have never been identified either. An accomplice who was injured in the struggle?
She was staring open-mouthed at the laptop.
This wasn’t a published article. It wasn’t even publishable. It was a list of notes someone had made to help them keep track of the case, possibly because they were covering the trial or …
Sjölander! This was his old computer!
She clicked ‘archive’, then ‘properties’, and sure enough, Sjölander was listed as the author of the document. It had been written almost four years ago to the day, just before Filip Andersson’s trial.
So Sjölander had had doubts about his guilt.
So had David, according to Bure. More than just doubts.
He was probably the only person who believed that Andersson was innocent …
Why? How could David have been so sure of Filip Andersson’s innocence? What did that mean? And why was Filip Andersson so quiet? If he was innocent, why hadn’t he co-operated with the police?
She opened up the website of the National Correctional Organization again, and checked visiting times at the huge prison in Kumla: Monday to Friday, from nine a.m. until three p.m., weekends from ten o’clock until two.
Brilliant! Open every day! That’s what I call service!
She dialled the number of the main prison office and introduced herself. ‘I’d like to visit one of your inmates, a Filip Andersson.’ The officer transferred her to the acting prison governor and Annika repeated her request.
‘That won’t be possible,’ the governor said.
‘Really?’ Annika said. ‘Why not? I thought you were open for visits every day.’
‘We are,’ the governor said. ‘Three hundred and sixty-five days a year, except leap years. Then we’re open three hundred and sixty-six.’
‘So why can’t I come?’
‘You’d be very welcome,’ the governor said, sounding simultaneously amused and weary, ‘but the same rules apply to the media as to everyone else. Inmates can apply for permission to receive a visit or phone call from a particular individual, with their full name, postal address and ID number. They must also specify their relationship to the visitor. Then we evaluate the visitor, performing a criminal background check, and the inmate is informed either that a visit permit has been granted or denied, or that a visit can take place only under supervision. Inmates are then permitted to contact their visitor, who must then book a time with us.’
‘Wow,’ she said. ‘There are three men I’d like to visit. Please could you ask them to apply for permits to see me?’
The governor was a master of patience. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘We don’t act as go-betweens any more. You’ll have to contact the inmates yourself by letter or fax.’
‘You assume correctly,’ the governor replied.
‘But they’re allowed to reply by fax or letter?’
‘Not by fax, but they’re allowed to write letters. But I should warn you that they often don’t reply. Most of them don’t want any contact at all with the media.’
‘What a nuisance,’ Annika said.
‘What’s the purpose of your visits?’ the governor asked.
Annika hesitated. What did she have to lose by being honest? ‘I’m writing an article about David Lindholm, the police officer who was murdered. Three of your inmates had some sort of relationship with him. How long does it take to get a visitor’s permit, assuming they do want to talk to me?’
‘About a week, ten days. But I have to tell you that you can only visit one of our inmates, unless you’re a close relative.’
Annika closed her eyes and ran a hand through her hair. ‘What?’
‘If you have three brothers, you can visit them all, but you can’t have permits to visit three different prisoners without there being an exceptionally good reason. You’ll have to pick one.’
‘You don’t seem terribly keen on having the media visit your prisoners.’
‘We’re not, really,’ the governor said. ‘But we don’t prohibit it. And if you do come, I must warn you that photography is forbidden.’
Annika straightened. ‘Why?’
‘Chapter one, paragraph nineteen of the Criminal Custody Act 2006:26. “Audio recording and photography are not permitted within the premises of the facility.”’
She slumped in her chair. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Should I use the fax number on your website?’
‘That would be best,’ the governor said.
She said goodbye and pushed the computer away from her, glancing at the time, then looking out across the newsroom, with its flickering screens, bowed heads and coffee-stained desks.
He’ll have picked up the children by now.
They’ll be on their way home.
21
The lift doors were the lovely old-fashioned sort, two folding gates that had to be pushed aside to reveal the polished brass interior to those who inhabited the property in Upper Östermalm. Thomas could still remember how well thought-out the period detail had seemed the first time he had taken the lift up, with his own keys, to his own flat, in his own building.