Dark Angel полностью

‘Linn Blomgren, the young waitress at the café, gave us a very clear account of what happened. Just after three o’clock, Veronika Hammar came in alone. She’s a regular customer at the café, although she hadn’t been there for a while. She seemed tense and exchanged only a few words with the waitress. She ordered coffee and a piece of cake and then sat down at a table at the back of the café’s garden. The table is almost hidden by a lilac bower. A few minutes later the man turned up, bought coffee and a bottle of Ramlösa, and paid in cash. Then he sat down at Veronika Hammar’s table.

‘At that time there were six people in the café – four customers, Linn Blomgren, and a cook who’s in charge of the smörgåsbord in the kitchen. The customers were Veronika Hammar and the unidentified man, an elderly man sitting at a table doing a crossword puzzle, and Emma Winarve. The man with the crossword puzzle left the café first. Which means that Emma was the only witness to the crime. When the murder was committed, the cook was busy in the kitchen and Linn had received a phone call and was still talking when the unidentified man passed by her and disappeared. The next instant she heard someone screaming in the café garden. It was Emma, who had discovered that the woman sitting at the other table had collapsed. Linn called an ambulance.’

‘What a brazen bastard that man is,’ said Smittenberg. ‘To think he had the guts to do something like that.’

‘Ice cold,’ Sohlman agreed. ‘Why does he choose such public places for his murders? Is he the kind of perp who gets off on the risk of being caught?’

‘Very possibly,’ said Knutas. ‘Both of these murders certainly point in that direction. He seems to crave attention. But we’ll come back to that later. First I want to have all the facts on the table. What can you tell us, Erik?’

Sohlman told his colleagues about what had been found at the crime scene.

‘The perp succeeded in what was apparently his goal right from the start. Judging from what we know so far, Veronika Hammar died from cyanide poisoning, just like Viktor Algård. The poison was put in a glass of Ramlösa that stood on the table. She died in a matter of minutes. Emma Winarve, who administered CPR, ingested enough of the cyanide gas to make her lose consciousness. She’s in intensive care, in a serious condition. Veronika Hammar’s body has been taken to the morgue, and I’m hoping to have a medical examiner here by this evening. We’ve been having trouble locating one. The man came into the café just a few minutes after Veronika Hammar. They apparently knew each other. Maybe they had agreed to meet there, or else he was following her. Unfortunately, we had called off the police surveillance. And in this instance, Veronika didn’t have much use for the security alarm we had installed at her home,’ he added sarcastically.

‘There was no real evidence other than the glass and its contents,’ Sohlman went on. ‘No fingerprints on the Ramlösa bottle or on his coffee cup. According the waitress, the man was wearing thin leather gloves, typical driving gloves with little air holes, the kind people used to wear in the sixties, if you’ll recall. The perp sat there for about ten minutes, tops, before he vanished without leaving behind so much as a strand of hair.’

‘Did the waitress talk to him?’ asked Jacobsson.

‘No, he didn’t say a word after paying for his coffee. We do have a good description of the perp, although it sounds as if he was wearing a disguise, so I’m not sure how much the statements from the witnesses can really tell us,’ he said with a sigh. ‘But there’s one thing we do know, at any rate. The killer is a man. The question is: Who is he?’

‘Just a minute,’ said Knutas.

He got up and pulled down the white screen at the front of the room. Jacobsson, who sat closest to the switch, turned off the lights. Knutas used his computer to project an image on the screen. He’d had only a few minutes to tell Wittberg about his theory. No one else knew the identity of the killer they were looking for. The silence in the room was palpable.

A face appeared on the screen. It was a passport photo of a man in his forties. He was blond with dark eyes and an open, pleasant-looking face. It was obvious that he bore a striking resemblance to Veronika Hammar. The man was clean-shaven, and his hair was cut short. He looked like rather a decent person as he mustered a vague smile for the camera. Hardly the image of a double murderer. Knutas clicked to bring up another photo of the same man.

This one had been culled from the police records, taken fifteen years earlier. An unshaven young man with a crew cut and a wild look in his eyes, staring with hostility at the camera. Two very different portraits of the same man.