The Magdalena File Read online

  Sara had noticed people reacted differently when confronted with the violent death of a loved one: some with uncontrolled grief, some with unemotional coldness, while there were even those who expressed relief when they heard the news. But there’d been no vague answers, no ‘I can’t remember’ responses in Kristina Hoffberg’s recollection, something that was typically so common when interviewing people who had been through traumatic events. In Kristina’s case it was just detail after intricate detail, almost as if she’d been reading a script, and yet in spite of the detail there seemed to be things left out. Sara would still have to consider Kristina Hoffberg as a possible conspirator to her husband’s murder.

  In the background, a breaking news banner flashed on Sara’s muted TV, as several Opposition Party leaders stood in front of the news cameras, complaining about the Prime Minister’s decision to give Parliament a holiday because of a few rodents and comparing it to Hitler’s power takeover when the Reichstag had been torched by the Nazis. There would be repercussions, they warned, and one even went so far as to threaten the PM with yet another session in front of Parliament’s Committee on Constitutional Oversights.

  The television cameras then focused on the nation’s highest politician as he carefully pointed out why the Opposition should be happy; they wouldn’t have to get used to the presence of rodents where they worked. Then, he added, smiling with obvious pleasure, there seemed to be many of them in the Parliament Building.

  At the close of his comments the cameraman panned to the right and just before Sara slipped into the private world of meditation, she caught a glimpse of Niklas Shoreman, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, speaking on a cell phone. He gestured wildly as he spoke. Dressed in an immaculate grey suit and a matching tie, he could easily have passed for a male model at any French fashion designer, even though he publicly decried the bourgeois need for cultural capitalism. At this moment he was another cog in the several wheels spinning at top speed, all looking for Leo Hoffberg’s killer.

  Chapter 4

  Monday, and a raw autumn morning. Sara decided to skip the bus and clear her mind by walking to the train. Sundbyberg was bathed in the frosted colours of late October. She wove through streets glistening with ice on her way to the station, and passed a shop selling textiles. Yarn balls of hand-woven Gotland’s wool rested in the window beside bolts of hand-woven linen. A bone-chilling winter was only weeks away. She had no time to shop, and hurried on.

  The irregular working hours, morbid quality of her job, and her own solitary nature had left her social life a sterile desert. Sara broke her nearly monastic existence outside her workplace on very few occasions, but when she did, she took the opportunity to experience a complete change of scenery. Two or three times a year she took part in a medieval fantasy live theatre, playing the part of a witch and soothsayer, known to the other players only as Adelisa.

  Sara’s research for her secret hobby was meticulous, a copy of what she did at work. She’d become a proficient seamstress while creating her own wardrobe of hand-woven linens. Adelisa’s heavy grey jacket, woven from the wool of Gotland’s sheep, had cost her a small medieval fortune to purchase the materials. No one at homicide knew of her leisure time activity, and none of the live theatre players knew what she did for a living in the real world.

  *

  Sara’s train to the Central Station was late as usual.

  Why is it so difficult to coordinate a bunch of railway cars limited to movement on a set of tracks?

  She’d been in Switzerland on a school trip and had been amazed by their train service, telling her grandmother she could set her watch by the arrival of a commuter train into the station. Time seemed to run on a different set of tracks in Stockholm.

  When Sara got into the city she continued her walk to work. The exercise would trim off the half-burger from Stallarholmen, and she needed to go through the Hoffberg case in her mind before meeting with the team. Then there was the question of why Ekman was getting involved. “National Security,” he’d said, but it was what he did.

  I’d better get this case in the box before he takes over entirely.

  The air was crisp with the smell of the oncoming winter, and tinged with birch smoke from the few fireplaces still burning real fuel. Sara was glad she’d put on her gloves. Winter was her favourite season, a time when nature helped her out by making it difficult for criminals to move around without leaving tracks. She brought the plastic bag with the envelope containing the map with her into Police Headquarters in Kungsholmen. Sara removed her boots, gloves, coat and sweater in her office and headed for the corridor of rooms where active case material was stored while under investigation.

  She tossed the plastic bag onto the table. “Here’s a beginning to start us thinking. It has to be sent to Forensics, but we can take a peek at it before, if we’re careful.”

  Sven gingerly opened the envelope, seizing the map with a pair of tweezers. “OK,” he said, “so this must be from Spimler’s boat.” He spread the map on the table in front of them.

  “No, boss,” said Sara, “this is from Hoffberg’s boat. The map from Spimler’s boat is still in Forensics, but according to the description, I’d bet they’re photocopies.”

  Everyone in the room chewed on the morsel, their first tangible link between the two neighbours. Spimler, whose name was already on the whiteboard at the end of the room, was now a definite suspect in the Hoffberg killing.

  The map, a page out of a set of navigational charts, squared off with lines of longitude and latitude and some occasional numbers indicating depth. There were no other symbols; no islands, no shoreline, just white paper between the thin, black grid lines and some numbers, mostly two digits between seventy-five and eighty-five. They stared at the map like it was a watch-pot, waiting for something to boil up from the emptiness between the lines.

  Sven was first to speak. “OK then. Let’s see where these two went fishing.” He took an almanac out of his pocket and opened it to a section containing pages of maps, including the eastern shoreline of Sweden. He looked at it briefly, then continued on to a page of the southern coastline of Finland. He followed the grid on the tiny map to the bottom of the page, then found the page covering the entire Baltic Sea forming a border with Finland, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. He checked the region covered by the map from Hoffberg’s boat and made a small dot on the map in his almanac.

  “Now, what’s out there, I wonder?” asked Sven.

  Silence. No sailors in this group. Heads turned towards Sven, but he didn’t elaborate. Sara took up the report from the forensic examination of the Hoffberg house. There was a detailed list of each room, showing the location of each item deemed important to the case, and a description of why it had been included in the heap of black plastic bags now piled up against one of the walls. She was looking for a description of the box in the bedroom when an entry regarding the contents of the sink caught her eye.

  “Hey, here’s something. There were two coffee cups in the sink. They’d been washed, but there were traces of Rohypnol left in the sink. Looks like we can explain how Hoffberg could have been immobilised. It also seems to rule out a violent break-in. If you can share a cup of coffee with your murderer then there’s some kind of familiarity between them. So why would Hoffberg let his killer into the house, even share a cup of coffee? It doesn’t seem like he was afraid he’d be harmed.”

  “There’s another thing,” said Robert Johnson. “There was no tape on the victim’s mouth. The killer wasn’t worried about the victim screaming for help while he was getting tortured.”

  “Maybe the killer wanted the victim to speak. Maybe the killer was torturing him to get information,” said Sara, “and whatever he wanted to know was so important he didn’t care if the victim shouted for help.”

  The new guy, Dan Olsson, had already begun to research the victim and he began his summary. Hoffberg had decided not to run for office in the last election, stating to the press that fa
mily reasons lay behind his decision.

  Sara quickly added a column for Kristina Hoffberg on the whiteboard, then the words shopping, at café during murder. She added a question mark after, then another to indicate her uneasiness after her interview with the widow. Olsson told her he’d found a bunch of love letters and postcards from the victim to the widow when he was still married to his first wife.

  “So Leo was a bad boy when he was younger,” said Sara. “Do we know where the first wife is today?”

  “She remarried, and lives in the US. As far as we know they had little to do with each other after the divorce, which was nearly fifteen years ago,” said Olsson.

  “There was a postcard in Hoffberg’s kitchen,” said Sara, as she wrote divorced & remarried under Leo’s column, and love letters & postcards under the column for Kristina. “It was from a person called Magdalena, a cleaning woman from Poland according to Mrs Hoffberg. She gave me a phone number.” Sara wrote the number under Kristina Hoffberg’s name.

  Robert Johnson had looked into Spimler’s background. “Spimler is ex-military,” he said. “He left the Navy ten years ago and last worked as a diver for a private company, NUTS – Nordic Underwater Technology Scanners. I’m still trying to contact them to see what he was working on lately, but no one’s answering the phone. His military record indicates he was a good shot, marksman class, but Hoffberg was shot at close range in the back, so it’s probably not relevant to the case.”

  “Everything is relevant until we’ve got this solved, Robert,” said Sara.

  Sven first looked sharply at her, then let her off the hook. “Sara’s right. We have to keep our minds open. The tiniest bit of information could solve this murder.”

  Yvonne Cantsten opened the door shyly and said hello to everyone. A lock of blonde hair spilled over her glasses as she sat down, and she quickly put it back into place. She sat upright, knees together, her low heels planted firmly beside each other. Sven introduced her as their Assistant District Attorney for the Hoffberg case. She opened a thick green binder to a section beginning with H.

  Cantsten cleared her throat. They waited for her to continue, but she just looked at them instead. Sven introduced everyone by name. When he got to Sara’s name she smiled, but Cantsten didn’t smile back. Oh great, the usual cooperation between women again, thought Sara.

  “Don’t let me interrupt your meeting,” said Cantsten. “Sven gave me the basic details yesterday. I’m just here to get a feeling about this case.”

  “Yeah, OK, then I’ll continue,” said Sara. “The dog team was out there yesterday. We now know the dogs found three scent trails at the back of the Hoffberg house. One was either coming up from the shore or going back to the boat, and from the look of the tracks it was Hoffberg coming up from his boat. The second scent went from the back of the house and continued through a patch of woods next to the driveway. They followed a trail ending at a place where a car had been parked. We have a fair set of tyre tracks to match to a vehicle if we ever find it. This same scent went from the parking place up to the front door, and was also found in the kitchen and garage.

  “It looks like the killer came in a car, parked it near the house, walked up to the front door, went into the kitchen, killed Hoffberg in the garage and left by the back door. The killer wore some kind of plastic booties so we’ll have trouble finding a shoe-print, but from the look of what Forensics pulled off the garage floor they’re big, man-sized, and they’re guessing the killer was probably medium build.”

  Sara continued as if she hadn’t heard the snickering behind her. “Dan, keep up the good work on Hoffberg’s background. You might want to talk to the Chairman of the Defence Committee at Parliament to see if you can get them to talk about Hoffberg. Robert, we need to get more information on Spimler. We also have to know if we’re chasing one person or several. See if there might be something more you can get out of the military regarding his background as a diver. Talk to his wife, maybe she’s got new ideas about where he might be. I’ll talk to Kristina Hoffberg again and try to find out more about why he quit the Parliament. We might have a motive there if she’s involved. And Robert, can you try to talk to the Hoffbergs’ cleaning lady, a woman called Magdalena?” She pointed to the number she’d written on the whiteboard. Finally she said, “You can also try to get something the dog team could work on, some personal article of clothing. I’d like to know if it’s Spimler’s scent we found going from the back of the house to where the car was parked. And remember, as far as she’s concerned we’re just trying to help her find him. Keep the Hoffberg case out of it when you speak to her. Let’s get together again first thing tomorrow morning. And Robert, don’t be late.”

  Sara looked at Cantsten to see if she had anything to add, but she’d already closed her binder and was nearly out the door when she turned back and approached Sara.

  “Sorry, nice to meet you,” said Cantsten, and then disappeared before Sara could say anything more than “Same here.”

  *

  Hurtree jogged until he could barely breathe. Wheezing, he found a bench in the park near his apartment, swept off the snow and sat down. Sweat dampened his running clothes and the chill invigorated him. He thought back to a night many years ago in Augsburg, an hour west of Munich.

  He’d been following a group of drunken soldiers who had been boasting about their tank winning first place in a drag race between fifteen other tanks during manoeuvres near the border with East Germany. In the bar, the soldiers had been approached by a man who quickly made friends with them, buying several beers until they were the last ones to leave. Hurtree had followed the group, listening to their loud and boisterous banter, and heard the question fall out of the air, “And where do you store your tanks? Are they in the forest?”

  One of the soldiers gladly described the squat, green building in a forest about a mile off a secondary road. “And our tank, the winner, is the last one on the right.”

  Hurtree followed the man after he parted company with the soldiers, but lost him in the snowy park, Hurtree’s shoes squeaking his presence to the man in front of him. The following morning four tanks were stolen from the depot in the forest. It was the first time Hurtree encountered Schneller.

  *

  Lars Ekman strode through the arched portal to the inner courtyard of Stockholm’s City Hall. Sven Peterson was already waiting near a wall at the top of a flight of stairs, hunched against gusts of wind coming off the Arctic.

  “You’re early, Sven.” Ekman watched as Sven came down the stairs, his long grey trench coat flapping like a sail loose in the wind. A green army stocking cap covered his ears and concealed his greying hair.

  “Who’s counting?” Sven’s eyes watered and he wiped them with his gloved hand.

  “It’s the counting I’m worried about,” said Ekman as they both exited the courtyard into the frozen rose garden towards the water’s edge. “I need your thoughts on where Hoffberg might have placed his threat.” He pulled out Hoffberg’s letter from the inside pocket of his coat. It was still in the plastic envelope from Forensics, smudged from the coal-black powder used to extract fingerprints. “It says here it’s somewhere in the centre of the city. All we have to do is figure out where.”

  Sven gazed out over the Bay of Knights. Small white caps were beginning to form. “So far we’ve got nothing from the murder investigation that helps to point us anywhere. There was a map in Hoffberg’s boat, but it was only a chart of the water out in the Baltic south of Finland. A long way from here. Where would you hide it?”

  “I’ve been trying to get into Hoffberg’s mind to figure that out. It’s not easy. He must have been crazy.”

  “So where would a crazy politician put a threat which would destroy the centre of this city?”

  “Wherever it is, he knew it might be discovered before he got a chance to use it, so it’s got to be hidden really well.” Ekman turned towards the Parliament Building, now lit against the winter afternoon sky.

&nbs
p; “Yeah, everything over there has already been cleared,” said Sven. “The PM has had the entire political workshop searched. I’m sure you’ve heard about the stink it caused with the Opposition.”

  “Yeah, our PM has a penchant for riling them up. He seems to enjoy it.”

  Sven swivelled to the left. “Maybe he managed to get it into Government House. Maybe it’s sitting under the PM’s desk.”

  Ekman frowned, unaffected by Sven’s attempt at humour. “I already checked with security at Government House. Not a single unauthorised entry, and no sign of Hoffberg on any of the surveillance tapes. Anyway, Rosenbad is almost as hard to get into as my office.” He gazed out towards Stockholm’s southern island, where dark shapes of buildings stuck onto the steep cliff plunged towards the water. The headlights of commuters on their way home illuminated the shoreline. More than twenty church steeples pointed towards the black, starless sky.

  “Could it be in a church steeple?”

  “Well, there would be a number of them to search. No,” said Ekman, “I don’t think you could pack enough explosives into any building to take out the centre of the city, not even using military grade explosives.”

  “Well, if it’s not there, where is it?”

  Ekman stomped his boots on the icy walkway just behind the low wall protecting the garden from the blustery waters of Lake Mälaren. “I think we have to find out what it is first. A bomb with enough force to take out the centre of the city would have to be very, very big.” Ekman squinted into the wind as he continued, “Or very small.”

  Chapter 5

  The Prime Minister’s secretary provided a reliable membrane between those parts of the journalistic corps looking for weakness or a mistake. He was a trusted member of the Party, a personal friend of the PM for many years and a recruit handpicked by a childhood friend, Niklas Shoreman, now Deputy Foreign Minister, and a key player in the political games played behind the curtains.