MALICE IN MALMÖ Read online

  The last six months had been hard for both Liv and Hakim. They were still determined to get married. Confined to a wheelchair, Liv was living with her brother in his family bungalow near Helsingborg, while Hakim had moved back in with his parents. This was so that he could save the money which, combined with Liv’s compensation when it came through, would enable them to buy and adapt a house that would accommodate Liv’s needs. Any of Anita’s offers of help made to Hakim had been rejected. She could understand, but it didn’t make her feel any better.

  Anita reached over and picked up her glasses and slotted them back on. She noticed a familiar face in Brodd’s newspaper. It was a presenter from some popular kids’ show, though she couldn’t remember his name.

  ‘I don’t know why you read a rag like Sanningen,’ she said, staring across the quiet street at the darkened warehouse. ‘The Truth, my arse.’

  ‘It’s great. Especially The Oligarch. He’s just sown up Jimmy Brantling.’

  Now she remembered. He was the over-the-top guy with wacky hair and colourful clothes who enthusiastically leapt about a lot. She had found him profoundly irritating, but children seemed to adore him.

  ‘Don’t tell me The Oligarch has entrapped him! How did he do that? Half the things he does can’t be legal.’

  ‘He posed as the commissioning editor for some Lithuanian TV station that wanted to take Brantling’s show. Promised big bucks. Could be syndicated in all the Baltic States; and also claimed he had contacts in Germany: the biggy! Jumping Jimmy fell for it and ended up having too much champagne. Drugs appeared. He’s caught on camera snorting. But the funniest thing is that he told The Oligarch that he hated “bloody kids”.’ Brodd couldn’t help chortling. ‘That’s him finished.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem fair that he tricks people into doing these things,’ Anita protested half-heartedly.

  ‘He doesn’t just go after celebs. He’s done some serious investigative reporting. Like that business fella who was caught insider trading. Corrupt. Didn’t entrap him. Just good journalism.’ Anita wasn’t sure if Brodd would recognize good journalism if it leapt off the page and grabbed him by the throat. ‘A number of dodgy types have been caught and put away because of him,’ Brodd concluded firmly.

  The Oligarch was well-known in Sweden, though no one had any idea what he looked like. His bye-line photo was a silhouette and he’d never appeared on camera as himself. As far as Anita could gather – though she’d be the first to admit she wasn’t particularly interested – he often posed as a rich Russian of some sort, duping his victims into confessing things that would wreck their careers. Hence his self-styled nickname. Anita assumed he must be Russian or from one of the old Soviet-controlled states.

  Anita took out the flask she’d brought along and poured the remains of her coffee. She didn’t offer Brodd any of the dregs; he liked to buy his caffeine fix from a late-night café on the way to the industrial estate to have with his large Marabou fruit and nut chocolate bar. In fact, he’d gone through two bars that night, and the yellow wrappers were stuffed near the gear stick. Anita took a sip, and the warmth in her throat made her feel better. She would give it one more hour then they’d call it a night.

  ‘I’ve got to go and pee,’ Brodd announced as he put down his paper.

  ‘Do it quietly,’ sighed Anita. ‘And out of sight.’

  Brodd eased his gangly frame out of the driver’s side of the car and shut the door as soundlessly as possible. It still made a metallic thump, which broke the still night air. Not that it really mattered as there was no chance of anything happening tonight. Anita just prayed that Moberg would admit defeat and call the whole thing off. It would be a relief not having to spend another night stuck in close proximity with a shiftless colleague who liked nothing better than to eat Indian food every evening and was prone to fart when bored. (Inevitably, the window would have to be opened, letting in the cold night air and souring Anita’s mood even more.)

  Leaning back against the headrest, Anita let her mind begin to wander again. It settled on the other problem in her life – Kevin.

  Kevin Ash, detective sergeant of the Cumbria Constabulary in north-west England and long-distance lover. That arrangement suited Anita perfectly. The only problem was that Kevin had flown over to Malmö to stay with her two months before and was still ensconced in her Roskildevägen apartment. Right now, if not fast asleep as she should be, he’d probably be glued to some Swedish TV programme, mindlessly not understanding a single word. His continued presence was causing friction. She had to curb her irritation because she knew it was her fault that he’d decamped into her precious space and showed little inclination to move. The reasons that she hadn’t shown Kevin the door were due to a mixture of wavering affection and growing guilt. The previous year, she’d asked him, as a favour, to go to London and find out information about a man who was running a British slave gang in Sweden. Kevin had successfully unearthed the intelligence that was key to the success of the investigation despite being warned off by a senior detective of the Metropolitan Police. The fallout from the arrest of the gang leader was that a number of Met officers were discovered to have been on the villain’s payroll, and heads rolled. The fact that the process had been instigated by a fellow policeman hadn’t gone down well among the close-knit brotherhood of corrupt coppers. Unfortunately for Kevin, the chief constable of the Cumbria Constabulary happened to be a former senior officer at the Met. Under the pretext that he had mishandled an ongoing investigation into a Lake District hotel scam, Kevin had been put on indefinite ‘gardening leave’. With time on his hands, Anita had asked him over to Malmö. He was still here.

  Anita would leave for work with Kevin curled up on the day bed in the living room with his second mug of Lipton’s breakfast tea clutched on his lap. Every day, he would watch in weird fascination the morning magazine shows with the ever-smiling, clean-cut presenters enthusing over everything from fashion to fancy new recipes. More worryingly, he was also into the kids’ channel and particularly liked Elias och räddningsteamet with its talking rescue boats. He said he watched it because Anita’s one-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, Leyla, was into it – Anita was pretty sure she wasn’t. Antikrundan, Sveriges mästerkock – nothing passed Kevin by (despite purporting not to like their British counterparts The Antiques Roadshow and Masterchef). Anita had asked him why he watched so much Swedish television. He replied that it was a way to learn the language. The fact that he still only used hej and tak made Anita think that his Swedish linguistic skills had plateaued early. Luckily for him, there were also plenty of British and American programmes to keep him happy (subtitled for Swedish audiences), so he could still catch up with Midsomer Murders, Murder She Wrote and Escape to the Country.

  Another unhealthy obsession was for frightening amounts of Offesson’s coffee and, more alarmingly, an addiction to falafels, a popular Malmö dish. To Anita’s horror, he didn’t eat anything else for a fortnight. She’d managed to wean him off with her own far-from-imaginative cooking. While she was at the polishus, Kevin would make a daily pilgrimage into the city centre and park himself in Lille Torg. In Malmö’s hippest square, he liked to sit in its most off-beat café, Folk & Rock. It was cluttered with mismatched furniture and adorned with CDs and posters of a generation of musicians that Kevin grew up with. It seemed to come with its own beggar, whom Kevin had befriended. He said he wasn’t used to seeing people actually begging inside cafés and shops. Anita thought the main attraction was probably the lively group of young women who served behind the counter; the tall one with the John Lennon spectacles being a particular favourite. They all spoke excellent English. Though she didn’t for one moment think that Kevin would stray. He was like a faithful puppy, and she knew he was passionately in love with her. The fact that she couldn’t return that depth of feeling was another barrier between them. Their previous arrangement of meeting up three or four times a year had been ideal as far as she was concerned. It was fun; the sex was lively after pr
olonged periods of celibacy, and afterwards she could return to the normality of her own space with her family close by. After missing having her son Lasse around when he moved out to live with Jazmin, she had gradually got used to having the apartment to herself. She had total freedom to slob around as much as she wanted. She didn’t have to think about the needs and sensibilities of a co-occupant. Roskildevägen was her haven and symbol of independence. A moping, love-struck Kevin seriously compromised all that. It led to arguments, after which she would feel remorse.

  She had even resorted to ploys to get him out more. She’d introduced him to her local pub, The Pickwick (now he spent a lot more time there than she did, having become very friendly with the barman, Matt, a fellow Brit) and, mindful of his pet passion, she’d sent him off exploring local historical sites. She’d even managed to get him up to Stockholm for a few days, which gave her much-needed respite. And it wasn’t as though he didn’t try to help: he was constantly tidying up (he’d put things away in logical places, which meant that she could never find them again – that was profoundly infuriating); he babysat for Lasse and Jazmin and obviously loved little Leyla; and he bonded with Lasse over football and visits with him to the sauna at Kallbadhus. It’s just that he was under her feet at a time when she didn’t want any added pressure to a working life that was stressful enough.

  Basically, she knew Kevin was bored. Without his job he felt emasculated. He had no sense of worth. She had spent enough time sitting with shrinks to know that he was depressed, though he would never admit it. And she knew that it was all down to her manipulation of a man who loved her to get a result in an important case. She hadn’t foreseen the consequences. Now she was paying the price.

  The car door was wrenched open, and Brodd lowered himself into the driver’s seat, slightly out of breath. ‘Someone’s coming.’

  Anita was immediately alert. She sat upright. She gently pressed the button for the window, which slid noiselessly down to about halfway. She could hear a vehicle.

  ‘Should we call for back-up?’ Brodd whispered, still trying to control his breathing.

  ‘Just wait.’

  Where their car was tucked away, they could only see the warehouse straight ahead and the approach from the right, which was the road into the industrial estate. The oncoming vehicle was coming from the left. Could the gang have laid low somewhere else on the estate for most of the night so they wouldn’t be spotted coming in? Anita could feel Brodd tense beside her.

  Then a van appeared. In the subdued light, it looked blue. There was only the driver visible. It slowed down as it passed them, which made it all the more suspicious. Casing the warehouse? Then the driver turned and gave them a cheery wave. Brodd found himself waving back until he caught Anita’s scowl.

  ‘Someone from a night shift?’ he suggested apologetically.

  Anita watched the van disappear round another building. ‘As everybody seems know we’re here, I think it’s time to go home.’

  CHAPTER 3

  Anita got into the polishus early in the afternoon. After their abortive surveillance, she’d gone home and flaked out for a few hours. When she’d got into the shower, still half asleep, she discovered that Kevin had bought a new shower gel. It irked her unreasonably. It was inconsequential, but she always purchased the same brand. She liked the smell. This one was a strange, slime-green colour, the odour was oddly antiseptic and it didn’t lather smoothly. She knew he was trying to do his bit by getting the shopping in. But it was little things like this that she found trying. Maybe she was just tired after three nights sitting in a car with Pontus Brodd, and frustrated that they’d wasted their time on an unfounded tip-off. She’d found herself criticizing the new shower gel instead of thanking Kevin for preparing a late breakfast for her. That tiny complaint had escalated into a full-scale row about how his help around the apartment wasn’t actually helping. When she tried to apologize by explaining her tetchiness was down to the situation at work, he’d retorted angrily that at least she had fucking work to go to. He’d stormed out of the apartment shortly afterwards.

  She’d hardly had time to settle down to write the report on their efforts of last night when Klara Wallen popped her head round the door. To add to the poor atmosphere within the squad, which Anita recognized hadn’t been helped by her own actions, Wallen wasn’t one to lift the mood. Since her move to Ystad with her partner, Rolf, who’d wanted to move back to his home town, Wallen had to cope with a good hour’s commute each way. And that’s if the trains were running to time; they were no longer as reliable as they’d once been. As Rolf was a man who expected to have a meal on the table when he got back from work and didn’t lift a finger to help around the home, tensions had risen. Why Wallen didn’t tell Rolf where to shove his meals was beyond Anita. Needless to say, Anita had coped with a number of tearful sessions in the female toilets. Deep down, Anita suspected that Klara was frightened of Rolf. It made her own gripes about Kevin’s peccadilloes seem rather pedantic.

  ‘He wants to see you.’ Anita didn’t need to ask who he was. Not another night’s surveillance! She would have to conjure up a mystery illness if she was forced to spend any more time trapped in a car with Brodd.

  ‘Sit down, Anita,’ Chief Inspector Moberg growled at her when she entered his office. Hugely overweight and with a mop of badly dyed hair, Anita had noted that Moberg’s face seemed redder in hue these days. His mammoth appetite was legendary in police headquarters, as was the fact that he’d gone through three wives and at least two live-in partners. Each new relationship produced an ephemeral invigoration before inevitably hitting the rocks, and he would sink into the same self-destructive pattern – eating even more food and drinking even more beer. In the latter capacity, Pontus Brodd played his one useful role within the team: he accompanied the chief inspector on his after-work binges.

  ‘I’m convinced that there isn’t going to be any robbery down at the electrical warehouse,’ Anita started before Moberg could begin planning any more night-time operations.

  ‘It was a bum steer,’ Moberg agreed with a dismissive wave of hand. That was it! No apologies for the interminable hours spent on a pointless exercise. ‘No, forget that one; we’ve got something more concrete to occupy our time. A kidnapping.’

  ‘A kidnapping?’

  ‘Yes.’ Moberg was surprisingly relaxed about it. The last time there had been a kidnapping some ten years before, there had been frantic police activity. However, the perpetrators had been amateurs, and they’d been easily caught.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Mats Möller.’ The name rang a vague bell, but in what context Anita had no idea. ‘He’s one of the new breed of sexy business people who make their money confounding ordinary folk like us with technology.’ Exactly the type Moberg would normally have no time for.

  ‘Dot com sort of thing?’

  ‘Not exactly. Came up with some clever computer software program that can be used as a diagnostic tool in trucks and vans and things like that. He’s made his fortune from the motor and haulage industries. I don’t really understand it other than it makes running fleets of vehicles more efficient because they can identify any faults very quickly, fix whatever and get them back on the road. Saves millions. And it’s made Möller millions.’

  ‘Which makes Möller a juicy target.’ It now dawned on Anita who he was, and she remembered that she’d seen him on the television talking to a group of young entrepreneurs. The gist of the discussion had centred around Möller’s genius, and he’d said nothing to contradict that assessment.

  Moberg leaned forward, which had the effect of putting an enormous strain on his shirt buttons. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘When was he taken?’

  ‘Friday night.’

  ‘Why haven’t we heard about this before? He must have been missing for four days.’

  Moberg spread his chunky fingers out on his desk top. ‘No, he’s not missing. He turned up yesterday in Gamla Kyrkogården, tied to a bench. Hi
s ransom has already been paid.’

  ‘So, what are we meant to do?’

  ‘The commissioner wants us to investigate. But quietly. No fuss. No press. And that’s how Möller wants it, too. Something like this is bad for the reputation of the city. Doesn’t look good if one of our most high-profile businessmen gets kidnapped. As it’s obviously been carried out very slickly, the worry is that whoever is behind it might strike again.’

  Anita nodded. She could see the logic.

  ‘So, we’re going to see him now.’

  ‘We?’ Anita queried. It was rare these days for Moberg to get off his large backside and move from the sanctuary of his office.

  ‘Yes, we,’ Moberg barked. ‘I’m still capable of asking a few bloody questions!’

  CHAPTER 4

  Anita drove, though she found it difficult to manoeuvre the gears as Moberg spilled out of the passenger seat and invaded her driving space. It was only a short journey, but it made Anita realize how much Malmö had changed in a relatively short time. They passed the Central Station, recently transformed into a modern transport hub with an airport-like concourse of shops and eating places. Anita followed the road round to the left. On her right was the Inner Harbour. What she still thought of as the new university building had once stood alone. Now it was wedged in among a phalanx of contemporary structures. Many were part of the expanding university while others were office blocks. To the left was Malmö Live, described as an Event Centre. This strikingly modernist interconnected group of red, gold and white cuboid blocks of differing heights and orientations – consisting of an impressive concert hall, home to the Malmö Symphony Orchestra; a conference centre; an hotel, offices and housing – had changed the city’s skyline. Not all the designs were to her taste, but she was proud of the way Malmö was growing up and starting to replicate its sophisticated cousins, Copenhagen and Stockholm.