The Princess of Burundi - Kjell Eriksson [71]
He found a laundry line with the cleaning supplies but could not bring himself to tie a noose. Instead he remained sitting with the green plastic-coated line in his hands, unable to kill himself.
After about an hour or so—he was unable to determine how long—he let the line glide from his hands and stood up. He ate some leftovers in the refrigerator, went into the sewing room, and fell asleep.
Allan Fredriksson had traced Vincent Hahn’s brother to Tel Aviv and with the help of Israeli police had managed to reach him on the phone.
Wolfgang Hahn, who worked as a computer-science instructor, had not been in Sweden for seven years. During that time he had talked to Vincent on the phone a handful of times, most recently a year or so ago. He even claimed not to know his brother’s most recent number. When asked if there was anyone in Uppsala who would be able to provide more information, Wolfgang mentioned his ex-wife, who he knew had sporadic contact with Vincent.
“How are things back in Sweden anyway?” Wolfgang asked. “I hear you’ll soon have even more Arabs than we do, and look at the problems they make for us!”
“Maybe that’s because you took their land,” Fredriksson said calmly. “What was Tel Aviv called fifty years ago?”
Wolfgang Hahn laughed.
“I see they’ve infiltrated the Swedish police,” he said, but with no hostility in his voice.
“Will you have a white Christmas?” was Fredriksson’s last question. When he hung up, he realized that Wolfgang Hahn hadn’t even asked why the police wanted to find his brother.
He looked up Vivan Molin in the phone book. She was listed as a laboratory assistant, living on Johannesbäcksgatan. According to Wolfgang she had been on disability for a while, he was unsure of the exact reason. They had no children together and she lived alone. A few years ago there had been a boyfriend in the picture, but he hadn’t heard anything about him for a while. Vivan Molin did not answer the phone.
Fredriksson called the health agency. She was not listed as being on disability. No employer was registered by her name either. Her last employment seemed to have been a temporary position with the Uppsala Biomedical Center. That position had lasted until August.
How likely was it that Hahn had looked her up? According to his brother, they were not on particularly good terms. Fredriksson sighed. Johansson and Palm were going door to door in Sävja, but so far they it had given them nothing. Most of Hahn’s neighbors had not even been able to identify him from the picture. His closest neighbor, a Bosnian from Sara-jevo, had only smiled enigmatically when asked if he associated at all with Vincent Hahn.
Fredriksson pushed the papers away. He didn’t even want to be working on the Hahn case right now. It was the murder of Little John that concerned him. He was sure they would be able to solve it eventually, not from any concrete knowledge but simply from the years of experience and the sense that a murder in John’s circles would eventually be cleared up. The new information about the poker game and John’s alleged winnings provided them with a motive. They would search for their perpetrator among the poker players—Fredriksson was 100 percent convinced of this. Now they simply had to uncover the whole story.
Haver and he had discussed potential overlap between Little John and Hahn, but both of them were skeptical. It was most likely a coincidence that they had been classmates. Little John’s murder was no work of Hahn’s. Even though they knew almost nothing about Hahn’s profile, his background and behavior, the fact that Little John’s body had been dumped in Libro made Hahn an unlikely suspect. He had neither a car nor a driver’s license—how would he have been able to carry it off?
Someone had proposed the idea that Hahn was targeting former classmates with pets. John with his fish, and Gunilla Karlsson with her rabbit. That Hahn saw himself as a freedom fighter for animals. But Fredriksson had dismissed this idea as highly unlikely.
He called Vivan Molin again, with no result.