The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [65]
Lindell decided that Sammy Nilsson should go to Umeå and question the beneficiary, Lovisa Sundberg, and her husband, the architect who was confined to a wheelchair.
Nilsson took the morning flight to northern Sweden, returned the same day, and then reported back on his excursion in a meeting late that afternoon.
“They live in an area called Pig Hill,” he told them and sounded as if he thought it fit them perfectly.
“Were they pig-like?” Lindell asked.
“Stuck-up, if you like. If I had just been made a millionaire so painlessly I wouldn’t be so damn sour.”
“Painlessly,” Lindell objected. “We’re talking about a murder.”
“They weren’t grieving a whole lot, that much was clear. I got the impression that they only kept in touch with the old man because of the inheritance that was coming their way.”
“Were they sure of it then?”
“Hard to say They asked if there was a will.”
“Did they know Petrus Blomgren?” Ottosson asked.
Sammy Nilsson shook his head. He told them that Lovisa Sundberg had lived in Uppsala for a short time in order to study. She was a teacher and had studied French at the university in order to expand her competency. During that time she had lived in a small cottage on her uncle’s farm.
For a while she had thought about staying on in Uppsala but then she had met the architect, who was not disabled at that time, and he had a well-paying job in Umeå. So when she was done with her studies she moved up there.
Jan-Elis Andersson was both angry and disappointed. He would have liked to have seen his niece stay on, probably with the thought that he would get help with the horses he was taking care of on the farm.
“Cheap labor,” Ola Haver said.
“She was allowed to live there for free in exchange for helping out in the stables,” Sammy Nilsson said. “From what I can understand that was a lot of work.”
However they twisted and turned the case of the niece and her husband they couldn’t find anything that made it likely that the Umeå couple had any connection to the crime. Both of them had excellent alibis and it was at the very least improbable that they would have hired a killer.
Ann Lindell was finding it hard to concentrate. She was completely convinced of a connection between the two murders and the niece appeared less interesting. She let her thoughts run away and internally summed up the advances of the past few days, or rather, the lack of advances.
Checking the passenger lists to Mallorca had turned out to be impossible to do. The records simply didn’t exist any longer. Lindell considered whether or not it was worth the effort to try to gather information on the hotels in Mallorca. Perhaps they could find Blomgren’s name in some register, but it was likely that even these had been destroyed or were unavailable after twenty years.
Contact with a dozen or so members of the Federation of Farmers who could possibly give information about both of the men’s activities within the farmers’ co-op turned out to be a waste of time. There was nothing that spoke for the fact that Andersson and Blomgren had ever met in the context of the organization.
No witnesses had stepped forward to say anything about a suspicious car or any unknown persons who had moved in the murder victims’ circles, either in Alsike or Jumkil.
The cases were slowly going cold. Lindell didn’t like it. Or rather, she hated it. Two unexplained murders were simply too much. She could also see it in Ottosson. He was becoming increasingly tense as the days went by. His former cheeriness had been replaced by an irritable impatience.
Even the newspapers had stopped writing about the murders. The first few days’ fat headlines bore witness to the journalists’ excitement. The “Country Butcher” became an accepted concept. Now everything was quiet. Lise-Lotte Rask, who was responsible for press information, said that a few isolated reporters diligently called to see if there had been any breakthroughs. She thought she