Murder in Malmö: The second Inspector Anita Sundström mystery (Inspector Anita Sundström mysteries) Read Free Page B

had been bedlam since, and he hadn’t had time for even a sandwich. On returning to the polishus he acquainted Dahlbeck, the commissioner of Skåne County Police, with the facts. Then he had had a first briefing session with the team. They were as non-plussed as he had been. A respectable businessman possibly gassed in his own shower. The commissioner thought Moberg had been winding him up at first. By the time he appreciated the fact that the crime was for rea,l he had made it clear that they were only to state that Ekman had been found dead at his apartment and that the police were looking into the circumstances. He didn’t want the press to have a field day with such a potentially gruesome story until the case was further down the line.
    After making brief, initial enquiries, there was certainly no obvious motive for the murder. What was clear was that it was meticulously planned. The shower must have been tampered with somehow. Then there was the gas. He had come across accidental gassing before, usually in workplaces where toxic fumes had escaped. Suicides, too. But in all his years of policing he had never come across a murder like this one. For it must be murder. Otherwise, it was a very strange suicide. It was beyond him. That was why he was waiting for an initial report from Eva Thulin when she got back from the forensic lab at nearby Lund. But before that happened, he hoped the food he had ordered from China Box on the corner of Värnhemstorget would arrive. Then he would be in a more receptive mood to take on board whatever bizarre information Thulin had for him.
    Anita slumped down in front of the television. She knew she should be out in the park opposite her ground-floor Roskildevägen apartment, yet she was unsettled. She was wearing her running gear and she rested the TV remote on her bare thigh. It was unseasonally warm outside and the apartment was clammy. So why was she idly flicking through the channels on the TV? She knew that it was worry about tomorrow morning and her reception at the polishus. Her attention was brought back to the telly when she heard an English voice. It was not uncommon on Swedish television, as many of the programmes were British or American imports that had Swedish subtitles. Many younger Swedes were virtually fluent in English through watching non-dubbed telly. Anita’s was even better because she had spent two years in the north east of England as a child when her father was working as a designer at the Electrolux factory at Spennymoor in County Durham. Then, a few years ago, she had been on secondment to the Metropolitan Police in London. What had caught her attention was the accent of the speaker. He was well-spoken, but had a definite trace of a north-eastern accent. Educated Geordie. He was obviously a cleric, judging by his dress. Maybe about sixty, he was tall with wispy grey hair. It was the thin lips that Anita found herself focusing on. Only when she started to listen to what he said did she become incensed.
    “Just look at the historical evidence. It certainly suggests that six million Jews weren’t deliberately gassed in the gas chambers. In fact, I think that Fred Leuchter has proved beyond doubt that there were no gas chambers at all in the concentration camps. Extermination was not a deliberate policy by Adolf Hitler, and I doubt whether more than about three hundred and fifty thousand Jews died during that time.”
    As he carried on in the same vein Anita shouted at the screen and then violently turned off the television before throwing the remote angrily onto the sofa. She went for a run.
    ‘All I can say is that it might have been some sort of crystals or pellets that had been placed in the drain. There are no traces of anything in the shower head. My guess is that the hot water started off the process, but what probably did for Ekman was when he turned the water off. The crystals probably reacted with the air to create a lethal gas. Certainly a preliminary