was also shot from a distance of only a few centimeters. He must have placed one knee on the bed and leaned over Sten in order to get so close to Elsa.
“Two shots hit Jacob, and one definitely fatal shot each for Sten and Elsa. Perhaps he didn’t want to fire more often so as not to risk being heard. One or two shots may pass as a backfire, but three or four will arouse suspicions,” Irene continued.
“The fact is that no one heard any shots at all. It was after midnight when they were shot,” Fredrik pointed out. “The rectory is in a remote location. The neighbors who might have heard something were probably in bed asleep.”
“We also have no reports of suspicious cars near the rectory. In such a small place as Kullahult, people should have noticed if an unfamiliar car showed up during the evening or night,” the superintendent said gruffly.
“But we have the car in the woods near Norssjön. And the technicians have confirmed that the woolen threads we found come from the same piece of clothing. Of course, we don’t know for sure that the clothing belongs to the murderer, but in any case someone walked between the clearing and the beach below the cottage,” said Irene.
Suddenly Andersson left the room. The others looked at each other in surprise. Since the door was open, they could hear him rummaging around in his office, mumbling, most likely swearing. He came back after about a minute, red in the face but with a triumphant smile. In one hand, he held a set of maps of Göteborg and surrounding areas.
“I found it. It’s more detailed than the road map,” he said while he was flipping through the pages to find the ones covering Kullahult and Norssjön.
“I thought about Fredrik and Irene’s walk from the position of the car in the woods to Schyttelius’s cottage, and then something struck me. If you drive on the roads, then it’s at least six kilometers between the cottage and the rectory. Let me check. . . .”
With a lot of puffing and mumbling, Andersson measured the distance on the map and tried to transform the map’s scale into kilometers.
“Twelve kilometers, round trip. Plus two hundred additional meters to the suspicious car in the woods,” he determined finally.
He tore out the page for the Norssjön area and placed it next to the map of Kullahult. He placed his fat index finger where the cottage was located and said, “But if the murderer went to Norssjön and then walked straight through the woods, the distance would be considerably shorter. Let’s see. . . .”
New grunting and measurements revealed that it was four and a half kilometers between the crime scenes, if one took the path through the woods.
“Add two hundred meters to reach the car. A total of nine point two kilometers back and forth. It’s not impossible to walk it,” said the superintendent.
“But terribly difficult! We were pretty tired after trudging those two hundred meters through the woods,” Irene objected.
“But we had on the wrong kind of shoes,” Fredrik said. “If this guy is used to being in the woods and had the right gear, then it wouldn’t be a problem.”
“But it must have been pitch-black in the woods if the murderer set out right after killing Jacob. He’d have to be careful not to break his ankle or get lost. But he might have felt safe if he used a flashlight,” Tommy added thoughtfully.
“The murderer seems to be very much at home. He knew where the keys were to the front doors and to the computer room at the rectory, and where the gun cabinet was. He knew of the small hiding place behind the panel in the cottage. And maybe he went through the woods between the cottage and the rectory. What strikes me is the degree of his local knowledge,” Irene concluded.
Fredrik glanced at Irene. “We never continued farther than the cottage. Maybe there’s a path or a trail there that we missed. Maybe we should go out and look again . . . ?”
“You can go out in the woods and look around,” Irene said. “I’m going to see Eva Möller.”
She really didn’t want to have him accompany her. At the same time, she wondered if she was crazy to take an airhead like Eva seriously. But she couldn’t get the cantor’s last words out of her head: “Together we can find out Sten’s hidden secrets. . . .”