The Postcard Killers Read online

  Dessie stepped into the gallery on Österlånggatan in the Old Town, holding her breath.

  “Hello?” she called cautiously.

  She always felt so grubby when she came here. The floor, ceiling, and walls were all painted pristine white. Even the patrons’ restroom and the staircase to the offices above were entirely white. She knew the reason why. She’d been told it was to “trap the light” and “do justice to the art.”

  “Christer? Are you here?”

  She felt as though the illusion of purity would shatter if she called out too loudly.

  “Hi, Dessie,” said a surprised voice behind her. “What brings you here?”

  Dessie spun around. She hadn’t heard him come in.

  Christer, her ex-husband, was dressed as he always was: black polo sweater, black gabardine trousers, and soundless moccasins. He looked like a caricature of a gallery owner.

  “Sorry to intrude,” she said with a slightly strained smile. “I need your help.”

  They had been married for four years. The marriage had given Christer a wife he said he loved, and Dessie had been given a context to belong to. Parties to go to, people to talk to. Christer could be charming, but she had never been able to talk to him.

  He looked at her in astonishment.

  “Okay, what do you need help with?”

  She felt her palms sweating. Maybe this was crazy. Maybe her idea was completely mad. But she was excited about solving these murders. She felt passionate about it.

  “It’s a bit complicated,” she said. “It’s just an idea I had…”

  She took a deep breath. She was here now, after all. “It’s about a particular painting,” she said. “I need your help identifying a painting.”

  Chapter 46

  CHRISTER HELD UP HIS HANDS in a gesture of curiosity.

  “What painting? Have you got a picture of it?”

  Dessie hesitated.

  “No,” she said, “not exactly. I can describe it. There’s a woman sitting with a cushion on her lap, and there’s a man lying on her lap with his head on the cushion.”

  Christer looked none the wiser.

  She put her knapsack and bike helmet on the floor. Then she sat down next to them.

  “A woman,” she said, “sitting like this.”

  Then she lay down on the floor. “And a man, lying like this.”

  She pulled one leg up, spread the fingers of one hand, and stretched the other hand out.

  Christer blinked several times.

  “Dessie,” he said, “what are you doing? What’s this all about? Surely you’re not decorating.”

  Dessie sat up. She had the photocopy of the dead couple from Dalarö in her knapsack. She didn’t want to show it to Christer. He was so sensitive about blood. He used to think it was unpleasant even when she had her period.

  “A picture,” she said. “I’m after a picture or a painting with people in the positions I just showed you.”

  He looked thoughtfully at her.

  She lay down again, stretching her right hand across the floor.

  “Like this,” she said. “The man’s holding something in his right hand.”

  “Dessie,” he said quietly, “why are you here?”

  Dessie felt her cheeks starting to burn. He thought the painting was a pretext.

  She jerked her neck, stood up, opened the knapsack, and pulled out the photocopy.

  “Maybe you should sit down,” she said.

  He took a step toward her.

  “Just say it,” he said. “Tell me why you’ve come to see me. It’s not about art, Dessie.”

  Dessie showed him the photocopy. She saw his eyes open wide and his face go as white as the walls.

  She caught him before he fell.

  “Good god,” he said. “Are those… are those… people?”

  Her reply was needlessly harsh. It just came out that way.

  “Not anymore. Look at the way they’re positioned. Doesn’t it remind you of anything? Where have I seen that before?”

  “For heaven’s sake,” he said, shutting his eyes, shaking his head. “Take it away.”

  “No,” Dessie said. “Take a proper look. Please. Look at the man.”

  She helped Christer sit down on the floor. He was breathing deeply and had to put his head between his knees for a few seconds.

  “Let’s see,” he said, taking the picture, looking at it for a couple of seconds, then pushing it away again.

  “The Dying Dandy,” he said. “Nils Dardel, nineteen eighteen. It’s in the Museum of Modern Art.”

  Dessie closed her eyes, seeing the painting before her. Of course! It floated up from her memory. She knew exactly which painting it was.

  She leaned over and kissed her ex-husband on the cheek.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “This may save lives, Christer.”

  Chapter 47

  DESSIE CAUGHT HER BREATH AS she locked her bicycle outside the entrance to the Museum of Modern Art on the island of Skeppsholmen.

  The yellow building was glowing in the sunlight, making her squint just to look up at it.

  She didn’t think she’d been here since her divorce from Christer.

  She went into the upper entry hall, into an environment similar to her ex-husband’s gallery: pristine white, harsh lighting. It looked just as she remembered it, the glass walls, the espresso bar, the chrome lamps.

  She and Christer had been to a party here in the foyer just a few weeks before their marriage came to an end.

  She went up to the information desk, staffed by a tall woman in an all-black outfit.

  “Excuse me,” Dessie said. “I’m trying to find a painting called The Dying Dandy.”

  “Eighty kronor,” the woman said.

  Of course, the new right-wing government had abolished free entry to Sweden’s museums.

  Dessie paid.

  “You’re on the right floor. Just follow the corridor to the left as far as you can, then take a right and then the first left again,” said the woman in black.

  Dessie couldn’t remember the reason for the party she had attended with Christer. It was probably someone’s birthday, or someone new had managed to get an exhibition at the Modern.

  She suppressed the memory and headed off along the long corridor beyond the espresso bar.

  The museum was almost empty at this early hour. She could hear people talking from deep within the catacombs but saw no one, not a soul. It wasn’t just newspapers but also an appreciation for art that was on the decline, even here in Sweden.

  Eventually she found the right room.

  There it was! She recognized it immediately.

  The Dying Dandy, oil on canvas, one and a half meters tall, almost two meters across. One of the most famous Swedish paintings of the last century.

  Chapter 48

  DESSIE STOPPED IN FRONT OF the painting, oddly moved.

  It was an impressive creation, with its sweeping shapes and strong colors: the narcissistic man lies dying on his white cushion, a mirror still in his hand.

  His equally affected friends are gathered around him. They’re mourning, but the only one in tears is the man

  in the purple jacket and orange shirt up in the left-hand corner.

  The woman holding him and the white cushion on her lap looks almost amused.

  There was no doubt about it now: this was the model for the murders on Dalarö.

  The killers must have known the painting. Maybe they’d been here.

  Maybe they’d stood exactly where she was standing now, pondering Dardel’s work: Was it an allegory about the act of creativity? Or was Dardel holding up a forbidden image of homosexuality?

  A thought ran like fire through her brain. She took a deep breath, looking up at the ceiling, then felt the adrenaline kick in.

  Up in one corner, right above the door, was a discreet surveillance camera.

  Right now, her image was being captured somewhere.

  She took o
ut her mobile and called Gabriella at police headquarters.

  Chapter 49

  DESSIE WAS HOLDING UP THE color reproduction of Dardel’s masterpiece in one hand and the photograph from Dalarö in the other.

  Her hunch had to be right. Jeez, she was better at this than the police!

  Gabriella’s desk was covered with Jacob’s postcards and the photographs of the bodies. Beside them were pictures Dessie had printed from the Internet.

  Gabriella looked at the pictures one by one, her eyes opening wider and wider.

  “God,” she said, picking up the picture of the murdered Germans, “you’re right, Dessie.”

  “Sorry,” said Jacob, “but what are you talking about?”

  Dessie looked at his unruly mop of hair. He looked like he’d been quite literally tearing it out. Suddenly she felt so sorry for him, for his pain, his terrible loss.

  “The killers arrange the bodies to imitate famous works of art,” she said. “Look at this one, Jacob.”

  Dessie picked up the photograph from Paris. Emily and Clive Spencer’s bodies were sitting side by side in bed, both with their right hand over the left resting on their stomachs.

  “The Mona Lisa,” she said, putting a copy of da Vinci’s masterpiece alongside the photograph.

  Jacob clumsily grabbed the pictures, crumpling them slightly.

  The mysteriously smiling woman on the painting was holding her right hand over her left and resting both on her stomach.

  “Christ,” he said finally, “you’re right. That’s what they’ve been doing.”

  “Karen and Billy Cowley,” Dessie said.

  She put down the picture of the couple murdered in Berlin, showing them in profile, the side with their uninjured eye looking toward the camera.

  Beside it she laid a printout of an Egyptian statue.

  “The bust of Nefertiti, probably the most imitated work of art from Ancient Egypt. It’s in the Neues Museum in Berlin. The killers saw it there, I guarantee you.”

  Gabriella leaned forward. Her face was flushed, two red marks glowing on her cheeks. Dessie glanced at her. They had been there, too, to the Neues Museum, on their first trip away together.

  Jacob picked up the picture and studied it intently.

  “What do you mean?” he asked Dessie. “What do their gouged-out left eyes have to do with it?”

  “The bust of Nefertiti is missing its left eye,” Gabriella said. “Everyone knows that.”

  Chapter 50

  DESSIE WASN’T PARTICULARLY INTERESTED IN art. Hell, she hadn’t recognized the connection to The Dying Dandy. Not at first. But she was fairly knowledgeable about the theory, something she had picked up during her marriage to Christer, probably as a means of self-preservation. She hadn’t wanted to come across as an ignorant country girl from Norrland at the various openings. She hadn’t exactly felt any real emotion or joy from art, however.

  Gabriella, on the other hand, had a genuine love of art. She’d gotten on very well with Christer, better than Dessie had actually.

  “Amsterdam,” Dessie said, picking out a copy of the next painting. “Vincent van Gogh. Heard of him?”

  Jacob looked at her with indulgence.

  “I’m an American,” he said, “not a barbarian.”

  “One of his self-portraits,” she said. “It usually belongs in London, but this spring it was on loan to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. He actually cut off his left ear, but the killers clearly didn’t know that, because they cut off—”

  “The right ears of their Amsterdam victims,” Jacob said breathlessly. “Hell. What are they up to?”

  A silence fell. Jacob drummed his fingers on the table, something he did when he was deep in thought.

  Gabriella looked through the pictures of the bodies and compared them to other works of art that Dessie had printed out.

  “Florence is Botticelli’s Birth of Venus?”

  “The Uffizi,” Dessie confirmed.

  “What about Athens, then? What’s Athens meant to be?”

  “I don’t know that one. But Madrid has to be The Naked Maja by Goya—from the Prado. What do you think, Jacob?”

  But Jacob wasn’t listening now. He had gone very pale. He was staring vacantly out at the greenery in Kronoberg Park.

  “Who was Kimmy?” he asked. “Which work of art is she? What were they imitating?”

  Dessie felt her palms sweating. She looked through the printouts and held them out to him.

  “The Sistine Chapel,” she said softly. “The Creation of Adam is a detail from the ceiling fresco. You know, Michelangelo…”

  She held the larger picture, with God lying in front of a human brain and stretching out his hand to Adam, and then a close-up of God’s finger almost touching Adam’s hand.

  Jacob turned to look at Dessie. His eyes were an even brighter blue, radiating a sorrow she couldn’t begin to understand.

  This is Kimmy’s dad, she thought. Not Jacob the policeman, just Jacob the dad.

  Instinctively she put her hand on his arm, which was tensed up and very strong.

  “But what does this actually tell us?” Gabriella said. “That the killers are fucked in the head? We already knew that.”

  Her tone was terse, almost dismissive. Dessie looked at her in surprise. She removed her hand from Jacob’s arm.

  “It tells us more than that,” Jacob said, now a policeman again. “It tells us a lot of things. They’re showing off. They’re contemptuous. They’re demonstrating to us how they have power over life and death. Maybe that death is a form of art that they can use as they please.”

  Dessie was surprised at the depth of the thought.

  Gabriella’s intercom crackled.

  “The video from the Museum of Modern Art is at the Bergsgatan reception desk now,” a voice said.

  Jacob stood up.

  “Ask for the recordings from all the museums,” he said.

  Gabriella’s head jerked.

  “Do you realize how many recordings we’re talking about? Anyway, they won’t have them after such a long time.”

  But Jacob had already left the room.

  Chapter 51

  THE RECORDINGS FROM THE SECURITY cameras at the Museum of Modern Art were of relatively good quality. Hopefully, they would be incriminating.

  They were a bit grainy, and the colors were slightly flattened, but the people coming and going were clearly visible in the bright lighting.

  The recordings had no sound.

  Jacob and Gabriella had barricaded themselves into a video suite deep in the basement of police headquarters, in the middle of piles of computer disks. The files weren’t in order or marked in any useful way, which meant they had to go through each of them in turn.

  “Where to start with this very bad movie?” Gabriella said, a note of resignation in her voice.

  Jacob flipped through the disks, thinking out loud.

  “The murders took place on Saturday afternoon. So they must have visited the museum before that.”

  “If they were ever actually there,” Gabriella said. “Don’t forget that part.”

  Jacob chose to ignore her negative attitude.

  “Saturday morning isn’t very likely,” he said. “They were probably busy doing other things then.”

  “Like what?” Gabriella said.

  He looked at her in mild despair.

  “Buying champagne and smoking dope with the German couple they would then murder in cold blood.”

  They divided the recordings between them and started their random viewing.

  Chapter 52

  JACOB WAS STUDYING A SCREEN where a group of schoolchildren were wandering aimlessly around the room containing Swedish art at 9:26 on Friday morning. He hit the fast-forward button, and the children suddenly started dashing about like mad things, jumping around the room like midget actors in an old silent movie.

  “What do you think of Dessie?” Gabriella asked out of nowhere without turning away from her sc
reen.

  Jacob looked over at her in surprise.

  She had also sped up her recording, and had reached Thursday 2:23.

  “Pretty smart girl, for a journalist. Why? What do you think of Dessie?”

  Gabriella got to the end of her recording and reached for a new disk from the pile. Friday 3:00 started with three old ladies who seemed more interested in one another than in the art around them.

  Gabriella slowed down her recording to look more carefully at a group of Japanese visitors on a guided tour in front of Dardel’s painting.

  “She’s got a lot of integrity, which makes her seem tougher than she is. It was probably a mistake to force her to write that letter,” Gabriella said.

  Jacob glanced over at Gabriella’s screen and watched her hit fast-forward again after the Japanese tourists disappeared.

  “Stop! Look at that,” Jacob suddenly said.

  At 3:27 a young couple came into the room and stood in front of The Dying Dandy. Only their backs were visible.

  The woman had long hair, dark but not black. It was hard to judge the exact color because of the quality of the film.

  Beside her was a tall, well-built man with fair hair. The man put his arm around the woman’s shoulders. She stroked his back and slipped her fingers under the waistband of his jeans.

  Together they went right up to the painting, like they were inspecting it thoroughly.

  “Do you think that could be them?” Gabriella wondered.

  Jacob didn’t answer.

  The couple kept standing there, looking at the painting, speaking only occasionally to each other. They paid no attention to any of the other works in the room.

  Gabriella moved the video forward frame by frame so they didn’t miss anything, not a single gesture.

  Jacob wished he could hear what they were saying to each other.

  The young couple stood in front of the canvas for almost fifteen minutes. They had their arms around each other the whole time.

  Then they abruptly turned to leave the room. The woman kept her head lowered, but just as the man reached the doorway, he threw his hair back. Suddenly his handsome features were caught in razor-sharp precision by the security camera.