Midnight In Malmö: The Fourth Inspector Anita Sundström Mystery (The Malmö Mysteries Book 4) by Torquil MacLeod Page B

stood a heavy piece of furniture that looked like a wardrobe but Hakim assumed must be a cupboard. Two matching sofas in cream faced the fire, while beyond them was a dining table; bare except for a simple candelabra. There were eight chairs. To the left of the dining area was a door which led directly into the kitchen. At the far end of the room was a French window. Through this there was an uninterrupted view over to the Alps. Tasteful paintings, many of them of local Swiss scenes, adorned the walls. They gave the room the personality that the bland furniture failed to. Nothing about the room suggested any connection to Sweden – even the sheet music on the piano was Chopin.
    Along the corridor from the living room were two bedrooms, both en suite; a luxury bathroom; and a storeroom for domestic appliances. All had the high ceilings of an early 19th-century house, and the renovation, though totally modern, had been carried out in sympathy with the original building. From his cursory glances around the apartment, Hakim surmised that Julia Akerman was not used to having visitors; there was a slightly musty smell and an unmade-up bed in the second bedroom. Nowhere gave a clue as to what nationality Akerman really was – Hakim was beginning to think that she wasn’t Swedish at all. However, the final room in the apartment set his pulse racing. It was an office. This was where Akerman must have conducted her business, whatever that was. The solid, plain, modern desk had a computer on it. But it was what was on the wall above that immediately caught Hakim’s eye. Two small watercolours. He recognized the scenes and knew the artist; he was a Malmö-based painter named Hopp. One picture was of Sankt Petri Kyrka, Malmö’s biggest and oldest church; the other was the distinctive Ribersborgs cold-water bathhouse that straddles the end of a pier jutting out from the city’s main beach. This could be significant, though both pictures could have been picked up on one of her visits – they certainly didn’t prove she was Swedish. Hakim knew that, as well as renting the Kronborgsvägen apartment, Akerman had made trips most months to Copenhagen from Geneva since the middle of last year.
    The office had very little else in it other than a small wooden chest of drawers, a shelf containing a few travel books, and a CD player/radio on a table in the corner. There was a large diary on the desk. It was open at the first week of June. As they had discovered from her flight tickets, she had arrived in Malmö on the Monday. She had written “Malmö” in the diary on the Monday and Tuesday. In the space for each day, there was also written a couple of capital letters – initials? AI on Monday and MA on Tuesday. On Friday was written “Madrid” and another pair of letters – GT. The following week: Paris and Barcelona. Flicking through the rest of the month: London, Lisbon, Naples and Rome. Again with letters or initials. He went back to previous months, and there was much the same pattern – and the same letters. Maybe she was in the travel business, thought Hakim, though he would have expected to see more evidence of that.
    Lacaze had followed him round like a faithful dog. Hakim wanted time alone in the office.
    ‘Lacaze, why don’t you look round the rest of the house again?’
    ‘What I look for?’
    ‘We need to find out what Julia Akerman did for a living. Her job,’ as Lacaze looked puzzled. ‘Anything about her that makes it easier to understand who she was. You could start with her bedroom.’
    Lacaze shot him a suspicious glance.
    ‘I’ll try and get into her computer.’
    As Lacaze left, Hakim turned on the computer. To break in was going to test all of those advanced IT courses he had been sent on during his time in Gothenburg. It was the very fact that they had tried to push him into cyber crime, at which he was actually very adept, that had made him look for a transfer back to Malmö and join a more conventional