Free Unseen by Mari Jungstedt

kids.”
    “That’s just my luck,” said Peter with a grin. “We need some shots of the outside, too. Give me a few minutes.” He disappeared around the corner of the house.
    The parking lot outside Obs supermarket in the Östercentrum shopping center was almost empty. In a couple of weeks it’ll be nearly impossible to move , thought Knutas as he sat at the desk in his office. He had talked to his wife on the phone. With the greatest enthusiasm she had described bringing a pair of twins into the world that day. She waxed poetic, since she herself was the mother of twins. Her positive attitude rubbed off on him, but it only lasted a little while. The warmth he had felt during their conversation was quickly replaced by a nagging uneasiness over Helena Hillerström’s murder.
    Up until now, Gotland had been relatively murder free. Since 1950 only twenty murders had been committed on the island, and ten of them occurred during the nineties. The increase disturbed him. Almost all the murders had to do with internal disputes, usually within a family. Jealousy and drunken fights, for the most part. Two murder cases remained unsolved. One involved an elderly woman who was killed with a cane in her own home in Fröjel in 1954, and one at the Visby Hotel in December 1996, when a female night clerk was murdered, presumably in connection with a break-in. That killing had taken place during Knutas’s time as head of the criminal department. In spite of the fact that the NCP were brought in at an early stage and three of their detectives stayed in Gotland for six months after the murder, they never managed to crack the case.
    It still rankled inside him, like a thorn, but he tried not to think too much about it. The hotel murder had already given him enough sleepless nights.
    He pulled out his pipe and carefully began filling it.
    And now this. But this is something completely different , he thought. A young woman killed in a bestial way and with her panties stuffed in her mouth.
    Two inspectors from the NCP had arrived in the morning, and that’s when they had their first meeting. The jovial Detective Superintendent Martin Kihlgård, convivial and loud, seemed almost a little too hearty. Previously Knutas had only heard people talk about him, and he knew that the man was quite competent. Even so, he didn’t really feel comfortable with him. No doubt things would get better with time. Kihlgård’s assistant, Detective Inspector Björn Hansson, made a more formal and precise impression, and that suited Knutas better.
    Helena Hillerström’s body had been sent to the forensic medicine division in Solna, but first the medical team had examined the body at the scene. He was grateful for that. Experience told him that the chance of solving this murder increased significantly if the body was examined at the scene of the crime itself by the ME. In addition, a large area had been immediately cordoned off after the body was found. That was something else he had learned over the years. The bigger the area that was off limits, the better.
    One problem was the lack of witnesses. No one had seen or heard anything. There were no buildings in close proximity to the beach. The only houses in the area stood some distance up the slope.
    No murder weapon had been found, and no other clues of major significance. The only concrete evidence they had was several cigarette butts, which could just as well have been discarded there at some previous time, and a couple of shoe prints. The only thing they thought they knew about the killer was that he had big feet.
    Everyone who had been at the party, except for Kristian Nordström, had now been interviewed. Nothing useful had come out. Knutas was almost positive that Per Bergdal was innocent. He had conducted enough interrogations in his years with the police that he could depend on his gut feeling. There was something straightforward and sincere about Bergdal’s manner of responding. By all accounts the