A bitter aftertaste

The scent of cardamom and freshly baked cinnamon buns hung heavy in the pre-dawn air, a fragrant promise of the day to come. Inside ‘Söta Bak’, the ovens glowed like a dragon’s heart. But Elsa, the elderly night baker, saw what she shouldn't. Not the rows of perfect kanelbullar, but a different kind of package, vacuum-sealed and tucked between the sacks of strong wheat flour. Her gnarled hand, which could shape dough with a sculptor’s precision, trembled as she reached for the internal phone. She never made the call. The rolling pin, still dusted with flour, was the last thing she ever felt. The killer wiped it clean, leaving Elsa slumped on the flour-dusted tiles, her final breath a ghost amidst the warm, sweet air.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The call came in as Inspector Mats Lundström was stirring his third coffee of the morning, a bitter brew as dark as his mood. September in Småland painted the forests in fiery hues, but his small Växjö apartment remained a study in grey. The divorce had been final for two years, but the silence still echoed. A photo of his son, Tobias, grinning in some Cambridge quad, was the only splash of colour.

“Lundström,” he grunted into the phone.

“It’s Elsa Johansson,” said the voice of his junior, Constable Petra Lindholm, young, sharp, and irritatingly energetic. “At Söta Bak. The baker. It looks… odd.”

“Odd how? Did someone burn the lussebullar?”

“She’s dead, Mats. And the scene… it’s too clean.”

Lundström sighed, the weight of a thousand such mornings settling on his broad shoulders. He pulled on a worn leather jacket, its scent a familiar mix of polish and regret, and headed out.

At Söta Bak, the dissonance was immediate. The shop front was a picture of rustic charm: gingham curtains, a chalkboard boasting the day’s specials, the intoxicating smell of yeast and sugar. The back room, however, was a morgue. Elsa lay peacefully, as if taking a nap, save for the awkward angle of her neck.

“No sign of a struggle,” Petra noted, her keen eyes scanning the spotless work surfaces. “But her shoes… scuffed. As if she was dragged slightly.”

Lundström grunted, his gaze sweeping the room. It was too tidy. A bakery was a place of controlled chaos; this was sterile. His eyes fell on a stack of flour sacks in the corner. One, slightly out of alignment, bore a faint, smudged mark, a partial print that didn’t match the floury texture.

“Who found her?”

“The owner, Björn Falk. He arrived to open up. He’s distraught.”

Björn Falk was a man whose physique suggested he sampled too much of his own merchandise, with a round, friendly face that currently was pale and tear-streaked. He sat in the small office, a hulking figure of grief.

“Elsa… she was like family,” Falk choked out, wringing a tea towel in his massive hands. “She’s been here for twenty years. Who would do this? We just bake bread.”

Lundström asked the routine questions, his mind elsewhere. He watched Falk’s eyes. They were red-rimmed and wet, but they darted, just for a fraction of a second, towards the large, industrial mixer in the corner.

Over the next few days, the case stalled. The coroner confirmed the cause: a sharp blow to the back of the neck, professional and efficient. The partial print led nowhere. Lundström found himself drawn back to the bakery, not as a detective, but as a customer. He sat in a corner, nursing a coffee and a surprisingly heavy almond pastry, observing.

He observed the stream of customers: elderly ladies, young mothers, and a different clientele—tough-looking men in expensive cars who would pop in for a single loaf of dark rye bread, always just after the afternoon bake.

“Strange,” Lundström mused to Petra over a pint that evening at a quiet pub. “The rågbröd. It always sells out by four. Who craves dark rye that specifically?”

“Maybe it’s very good rågbröd,” Petra offered.

“Or maybe it’s not just bread,” Lundström countered, his mind harking back to the meticulous Colin Dexter novels he favoured. Morse would have seen the pattern in the rhythm of the customers.

His break came from an unexpected source: Tobias, on their weekly video call.

“You look tired, Pappa,” his son said, his face pixelated on the screen.

“A difficult case. A baker was killed. It makes no sense.”

“Maybe she saw the dough rising,” Tobias joked. “You know, the other kind? A guy here at college, his cousin got caught. They were shipping stuff from Eastern Europe, hiding it in frozen food lorries.”

Lorries. Lundström’s mind snapped to the nightly deliveries at Söta Bak. The flour lorry from a Gothenburg wholesaler that always arrived late, its driver a sullen man who never made eye contact.

The next night, under the cover of a misty Småland darkness, Lundström and Petra watched from an unmarked van. The lorry arrived. Björn Falk, his friendly demeanour gone, directed the driver to the back. They didn’t unload sacks; they loaded them. Dozens of identical, heavy-looking sacks into a different, unmarked van.

“They’re not receiving,” Petra whispered, her breath fogging the window. “They’re distributing.”

Lundström’s blood ran cold. The bakery wasn’t the receiver; it was the hub. The perfect front. The daily foot traffic provided cover for the couriers, and the strong, distinct smells of the bakery masked any residual odour from the drugs.

He gave the signal. The silence erupted into controlled chaos. Blue lights strobed through the mist. Officers swarmed the yard.

Inside, the scene was even more revealing. Behind a false wall in the cold store, accessed by a mechanism hidden within the giant mixer’s control panel, was a packaging operation. Bricks of high-purity amphetamines, worth millions, sat wrapped and ready, alongside the vacuum-sealed packages Elsa must have seen.

Björn Falk was cornered, his friendly face now a mask of fury and fear. But he wasn’t looking at the police. He was glaring at the lorry driver, a gaunt man named Dragan.

“You fool! You left a mark on a sack! She saw it!”

Dragan said nothing, his hand edging towards a long, wicked-looking baking blade on the table.

“Don’t,” Lundström said, his voice calm but firm, his service pistol held steady. “The baking is over, Björn. It seems your recipes had a fatal flaw.”

The confession, when it came, was as bitter as Lundström’s coffee. Falk, drowning in gambling debts, had allowed his bakery to become the nerve centre for a Balkan cartel. Elsa, the loyal baker, had stumbled upon the truth.

“She was going to call the police,” Falk mumbled, head in his hands in the interrogation room. “I didn’t want to… Dragan, he… he said it had to look like an accident. But she fought back.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

A week later, the first autumn storm was lashing the streets of Växjö. Söta Bak was sealed, a black ribbon still tied to the door handle. The case was closed, the network dismantled, but the aftertaste was sour.

Lundström stood by his window, watching the rain. He had just spoken to Tobias, a conversation lighter than air compared to the weight of the last fortnight.

He picked up the photo of his son. The innocent smile seemed a world away from the greed and violence festering behind the façade of a small-town bakery. It was a reminder that the most poisonous things often came wrapped in the most pleasant of packages. With a sigh, he put the photo down, turned off the light, and sat in the comforting darkness, the ghost of cardamom and betrayal finally beginning to fade.

END

The Växjö vortex

The silence in the lab was not one of peace, but of interrupted chaos. Beakers sat with half-evaporated, iridescent liquids. A schematic on a large lightboard showed a device of terrifying complexity, parts of it angrily scratched out. On the main workbench, a polished metal sphere, humming at a frequency just at the edge of human hearing, pulsed with a soft, malevolent blue light. It was the heart of the room, and it was waiting. Its creator, Alvar Engberg, was gone. Not on a trip, not at the pub. Vanished. The only clues were a single, shattered vial that smelled of ozone and burnt almonds, and a single drop of a strange, mercury-like substance that refused to be wiped away. The local police took one look, knew it was beyond them, and made the call. It was a job for Inspector Mats Lundström.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The Volvo crunched to a halt on the gravel path, its solid Swedish engineering a stark contrast to the spindly, modern architecture of Alvar Engberg’s lakeside home and laboratory. Inspector Mats Lundström heaved himself out of the driver’ seat, his knees protesting with a familiar ache. He was a man in his mid-fifties, built like a worn-out oak tree, solid, but showing the weather of a long life. His face was a roadmap of lines earned from squinting at too many crime scenes and too few happy memories.

His partner, young Constable Eva Thörnblad, was already out, buzzing with an energy that made Lundström feel tired.

“Quite the place,” she said, nodding at the angular building of glass and steel. “Must have cost a fortune.”

“Engberg held over two dozen patents,” Lundström grunted, pulling his worn tweed coat tighter against the chill. “Mostly for things no one knew they needed. Self-heating shoelaces, a fridge that told you when you were out of milk… eccentric, they called him. A polite word for ‘difficult’.” He missed his son, David. A text about some obscure point of English history he was studying at Cambridge had been the only bright spot in his morning.

They were met at the door by Engberg’s assistant, a pale, nervous man in his thirties named Filip. “He’s never missed a day,” Filip stammered, wringing his hands. “Not once. He was working on the project… the big one. He was so close.”

“The big one?” Lundström asked, his tone deliberately flat.

“The Vortex. That’s what he called it. A… a localised atmospheric condenser. He said it could end droughts.” Filip led them into the lab. The air was thick with the smell of chemicals and something else, something electric.

Lundström’s eyes swept the room, taking in the controlled pandemonium. They settled on the humming sphere. “And that?”

“The core,” Filip whispered, as if afraid it might hear. “It’s active. I don’t know how to turn it off.”

As Thörnblad began taking pictures, Lundström’s gaze fell to the floor near the main workbench. A small, dark puddle gleamed, not like water, but like liquid metal. He crouched, his joints cracking a protest. He prodded it with a pen. It was dense, viscous. He tried to smear it, but it simply recoiled, reforming into its perfect droplet shape.

“Don’t touch that,” a sharp voice said from the doorway. A woman stood there, her face a mask of aristocratic annoyance. Lena Björkman, Engberg’s neighbour and, by her own account, his most beleaguered one. “That man’s experiments are a menace. Last month, it was a sonic bird-deterrent that shattered my greenhouse windows. The month before, a cloud of pink, sticky foam descended on my garden party.”

“You had a disagreement with Mr. Engberg?” Lundström asked, rising slowly.

“Constantly. I was suing him. This,” she waved a hand around the lab, “is an environmental hazard. I told him I’d have this place shut down.”

Lundström made a non-committal sound. A motive, clear and simple. Almost too simple.

The investigation plodded on. Engberg’s bank records showed no unusual activity. His computer was a maze of encrypted files. There were no signs of a struggle, no forced entry. It was as if the man had simply dissolved into the air.

Later that afternoon, Lundström stood by the lake, staring at the dark, placid water. Thörnblad joined him. “Filip’s alibi checks out. He was at a supplier in Kalmar all day. Lena Björkman was at a council meeting, confirmed by a dozen witnesses.”

“So, our two most likely suspects are in the clear,” Lundström mused. “Convenient.” He looked back at the lab. “He’s here. I can feel it. Either he’s in there, or the answer is.”

The break came from an unexpected source. The drop. The strange, mercury-like substance had been bagged and tagged, but the lab techs were baffled. “It’s not any known elemental metal,” one of them told Lundström over the phone. “It’s… complex. Organic, almost, but with a metallic structure. And it’s emitting a low-level radio frequency.”

“A frequency? To what?”

“We don’t know. But it’s constant.”

An idea, slow and deliberate, began to form in Lundström’s mind. He drove back to the lab, Thörnblad in the passenger seat. The evening was drawing in, and the lab, with its single lit window, looked like a lantern in the gathering gloom.

Inside, Filip was nervously monitoring the humming sphere. “The power draw is increasing,” he said, his voice tight with fear. “I don’t know what will happen.”

“Inspector,” Thörnblad said, holding up her phone. “I’ve been going through Engberg’s public lectures. He gave a talk last year on… get this… quantum-locked biological preservation.”

Lundström looked from Thörnblad’s excited face, to Filip’s terrified one, to the pulsating sphere. His eyes then dropped to the floor, to the spot where the strange drop had been collected. A clean patch, except… was there a faint shimmer?

He walked over, crouching again with a grunt. He wasn’t looking at the floor, but just above it. The air seemed to waver, like heat haze off a summer road.

“Filip,” Lundström said, his voice dangerously calm. “Engberg’s Vortex. It wasn’t for water, was it? A ‘localised atmospheric condenser’… that’s a lie.”

Filip’s face went ashen.

“It’s a field generator,” Lundström continued, rising and pointing a thick finger at the shimmer in the air. “It doesn’t condense the atmosphere. It twists it. It alters states. He wasn’t trying to make it rain. He was trying to move things. Or make things… intangible.”

A deafening crackle filled the room. The sphere’s hum rose to a piercing whine. The shimmer in the air intensified, solidifying into a shimmering, vertical oval. Through it, they could see a distorted version of the lab and the faint, terrified outline of a man, his mouth open in a silent scream. Alvar Engberg.

“He’s phased!” Filip screamed over the noise. “The initial test went wrong. It trapped him between states! The sphere is the anchor, but it’s unstable. The energy feedback is building!”

“Turn it off!” Thörnblad yelled.

“I can’t! The shut-down sequence requires a biometric key! Only Alvar’s handprint can do it!”

Lundström’s mind raced. The drop. The radio frequency. It wasn’t a by-product; it was a beacon. A piece of Engberg, still anchored to our reality. He looked at the trapped, ghostly figure, then at the sphere. The solution was insane. It was brilliant.

“Thörnblad! The evidence bag! The drop!”

She understood instantly, tossing him the small, sealed plastic bag. Lundström strode towards the shimmering vortex. The air crackled around him, snatching at his coat. He could feel a terrifying coldness, a pull that threatened to unravel him.

“Inspector, no!” Filip cried.

Lundström ignored him. With a final, grunting lunge, he thrust the evidence bag, and the anomalous drop within it, into the heart of the shimmering field.

The effect was instantaneous. The drop flared with brilliant silver light. The frequency it emitted synched with the sphere. The ghostly image of Engberg snapped into sharp, solid focus. There was a sound like a universe sighing, and the physicist collapsed onto the floor, gasping and solid. The sphere’s light died. The hum ceased. The silence that followed was absolute.

* * * * * * * * * * *

A week later, Lundström sat in his office, a cup of lukewarm coffee on his desk. The case was closed. Alvar Engberg was recovering in hospital, suffering from severe dehydration and shock, but alive. His story was one of a catastrophic experiment, a trap of his own devising. Lena Björkman had dropped her lawsuit. Filip was being hailed as a hero for his attempts to stabilise the machine.

On his phone was a picture from David: a stone cross in a Cambridge churchyard. Lundström smiled faintly. Some mysteries of history were safe, comfortable. Others, like the one in Engberg’s lab, were best forgotten. He took a sip of his coffee. It was bitter, but it was real. And for now, that was enough. The Vortex was sealed, the inventor saved, and the quiet, orderly world of Växjö was, for the moment, secure. Some days, that was the only victory worth having.

END

The digital gallows

The first sign was a flicker. A single, dismissive blink of the lights in the Växjö police station at 4:17 AM. The second was the silence. The low, perpetual hum of computers and servers vanished, leaving a void filled only by the ticking of an analogue clock. Then, the screens awoke. Every monitor, from the front desk to the Chief’s office, flashed once before displaying the same message, etched in stark, blood-red letters against a black background:

VÄXJÖ IS ASLEEP. WE ARE AWAKE. YOUR LIVES ARE OUR DATA. YOUR DATA IS OUR LEVERAGE. 50 MILLION KRONOR IN BITCOIN. YOU HAVE 12 HOURS. OR WE WILL PULL THE PLUG. FOR GOOD.

* * * * * * * * * *

Inspector Mats Lundström felt the headache begin behind his eyes before he’d even finished his morning coffee. He stood in the incident room, a cacophony of frantic voices and uselessly dark screens. The town was in chaos. Traffic lights were dead, creating snarls of metal at every intersection. ATMs spat out nothing but error messages. Phones, landlines and mobiles, were useless bricks. Hospitals were running on emergency generators, their digital patient records inaccessible.

“It’s a ghost town out there, Mats,” said Constable Anja Lindgren, her usual cheerful demeanour replaced by grim urgency. “It’s not just us. The bank, the power station, the water treatment plant… even the library’s public terminals. All locked out. All showing the same message.”

Mats grunted, stirring a third sugar into his coffee. At fifty-six, his face was a roadmap of past cases and late nights, his hair a thick, steely grey mane he refused to tame. He felt a profound, old-man’s irritation at the digital world. “A ghost town? No. Ghosts are memories. This is a hostage situation. The whole bloody town is tied to the railway tracks.”

Chief Inspector Bertilsson burst in, his face florid. “Lundström! The National Cyber Crime Unit is on their way, but they’re stuck in traffic outside Jönköping. We’re on our own for the first few hours. I need you to lead this. You’re… analog enough to think around this.”

Mats offered a thin smile. “You mean I’m old, sir.”

“I mean you don’t panic when your tablet won’t charge. Find me a thread, Mats. Any thread.”

His first visit was to the municipal power station. The manager, a harried man named Stig Håkansson, was pacing outside.

“It’s impossible!” Stig wailed. “The control systems are locked. We can’t reroute, we can’t monitor load, nothing! If we try to force a manual reboot, their message says it will trigger a cascade failure that will burn out the primary transformers. It could take weeks to fix.”

“Who has this kind of access, Stig?” Mats asked, his voice a low, calming rumble.

“Someone on the inside? A disgruntled employee? A contractor? We had a system upgrade six months ago… a private firm from Stockholm handled it.”

Mats made a note in his little black book, the pen feeling reassuringly solid. An inside track. It was always, on some level, an inside job.

* * * * * * * * * *

The thread, when it came, was not digital, but human. A call came through a lone, patched-in radio. A body. At the offices of ‘Nordic Digital Solutions’, the firm that had upgraded the power grid.

The scene was a stark contrast to the chaos outside. The office was modern, silent, and sterile. A man in his late thirties, sharp suit, lay sprawled on the floor of a server room, a heavy, vintage glass ashtray lying near his head, smeared with blood.

“His name is Felix Ljungberg,” Anja said, checking the man’s wallet. “Head of IT Security. Ironic.”

Mats crouched, his knees complaining. He didn’t touch the ashtray. It was an oddity in this temple of technology. He looked at the victim’s hands. No defensive wounds. Clean nails. This wasn’t a struggle. It was an execution.

“He knew his killer,” Mats murmured. “Let them in, turned his back. Felt safe enough to have a conversation.” He pointed to two coffee mugs on a nearby desk. “And he was a hospitable man.”

The company CEO, a sleek woman named Eva Thorn, arrived, her composure cracking at the edges. “Felix? But… he was our best. He was working all night on the hack!”

“Was he now?” Mats asked, his tone deceptively mild. “And what did he say?”

“He said he’d found a backdoor. A piece of code he called ‘The Latch’. He said he thought he could reverse it, or at least trace it.”

Mats looked around the pristine, lifeless room. A dead expert. A mysterious ‘Latch’. A very physical, personal murder happening concurrently with a faceless, digital siege. They were connected. They had to be.

* * * * * * * * * *

Back at the station, a semblance of order was returning via battery-powered radios and sheer bloody-mindedness. Mats spread a map of Växjö on a table.

“The hack is one thing. The murder is another. They are two hands of the same beast,” he declared to Anja and a small team. “Ljungberg found the key, so he was silenced. But why kill him with an ashtray? In a building full of blunt objects? It’s a statement. It’s personal.”

His phone, a relic that only made calls, buzzed. It was his son, Karl, in England. The line crackled.

“Dad? I saw the news. Are you alright? The whole town’s offline.”

“I’m fine, Karl. Just a busy day at the office.” Mats felt a familiar pang, a mix of pride and loneliness. His divorce, Karl’s move abroad… his life had become a series of long silences punctuated by brief, cherished connections.

“Be careful,” Karl said. “This sounds… big.”

“It is. Talk soon, son.”

The call grounded him. He was protecting something real, not just data.

They dug into Felix Ljungberg’s life. He was wealthy, ambitious, and had a bitter, recent falling out with his business partner, a man named David Eklund. The company, ‘Streamline Tech’, had gone under, and Eklund blamed Felix, claiming he’d stolen intellectual property—a revolutionary network integration protocol.

“A protocol that could, say, create a backdoor into every system in a town?” Mats mused.

David Eklund was a ghost. His apartment was empty, cleared out. But he had a passion: vintage smoking paraphernalia. He collected old pipes, lighters, and ashtrays.

“The ashtray,” Anja said, her eyes wide. “It’s his calling card.”

* * * * * * * * * *

With three hours left until the ransom deadline, they had a name, but no location. The National Cyber unit was still hours away. The town was growing restless, fearful.

Then, a break. An old watchman at the disused Linnaeus Pumphouse, by the lake, reported seeing lights and a generator running. A place with no digital footprint, hardwired into the town’s original, physical infrastructure.

Mats and Anja moved in quietly, with a small armed unit. The old brick building was cold and damp, but inside, a modern server farm hummed, powered by a chugging generator. And there was David Eklund, a gaunt, intense man in his forties, staring at a wall of monitors showing the countdown to doomsday.

“Eklund! It’s over,” Mats said, his voice echoing in the cavernous space.

Eklund spun around, not surprised, but triumphant. “Inspector! Is it? In ten minutes, unless I get my money, Växjö’s financial records, medical histories, and private emails will be published online. Then, the lights go out for a week.”

“You killed Ljungberg.”

“He stole my life’s work! Called it his own. ‘The Latch’. My design! He was going to be the hero who saved the town, getting rich off my genius. I just gave him the recognition he deserved. A smashing success.” He smiled, a cold, dead thing.

It was then Mats noticed it. On the control console, next to a keyboard, sat a single, heavy glass ashtray, identical to the murder weapon.

“It’s not about the money, is it?” Mats said, stepping slowly closer, his hands open. “It’s about the spectacle. The humiliation. You wanted to show them all how fragile their new world is. How the man they cast aside could hold them all to ransom.”

“You’re analog, Inspector. You understand. Everything these days is soft, virtual. I wanted to leave a mark. A real, physical mark.”

As Eklund monologued, Mats’s eyes scanned the setup. Wires. Cables. A physical connection from the servers to the pump house’s ancient mainline. It was the master switch.

With a sudden, grunting lunge, Mats didn’t go for Eklund. He went for the console, his body crashing into it, his hands scrambling for the thick, primary power cable. He yanked it with all his strength.

Sparks flew. The servers screamed a death rattle. The monitors went black.

Eklund roared in fury, grabbing the ashtray. He lunged at Mats, but Anja was faster. Her taser probes hit him in the chest, and he crumpled to the damp stone floor, twitching.

The silence that followed was broken only by the sputtering generator.

* * * * * * * * * *

Two days later, the digital world was slowly stuttering back to life. The National Cyber unit was mopping up, impressed by the old-school police work.

Mats Lundström sat in his favourite chair by the window, a glass of whisky in his hand. The headache had finally receded. On the table lay a postcard he’d bought earlier. A picture of Växjö Cathedral, serene in the sunlight. He picked up his pen.

Dear Karl, he wrote.
All is well here. We had a spot of bother with a disgruntled fellow who didn’t like the modern way of things. It reminded me of a truth we often forget: no matter how complex the machine, it’s always a human hand that throws the switch, for good or for ill. Looking forward to your visit next month.
Love, Dad.

He took a sip of whisky, the amber liquid warm and familiar. Outside, the town’s lights glittered, steady and sure. For now, the ghosts were back in their machines, and the silence was peaceful.

END

The bitter harvest

The first light of a Swedish autumn morning glinted on the Kronoberg Castle ruins, painting the still waters of Helgasjön in hues of gold and copper. In the town of Växjö, the air was crisp, carrying the scent of pine and damp earth. It was a morning of quiet promise, a time for coffee and semlor, for routine and peace. But in the pristine kitchen of the ‘Smålandet Livs’ bakery, that promise curdled. Agneta, the owner, her hands dusted with flour, took a tentative sip from a new carton of cream. A moment later, her face contorted, not in pain, but in profound, shocking confusion. She stumbled, clutching the counter, a low moan escaping her lips before she collapsed. The peace of Växjö had been poisoned, and the first seed of a terrible harvest had been sown.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

The call came just as Inspector Mats Lundström was savouring the last, lukewarm dregs of his coffee. The station was quiet, the way he liked it. At fifty-six, his large frame was settled comfortably into the weariness of his chair, his face a roadmap of lines etched by too many late nights and the bleak landscape of human folly. His mind, as it often did, was halfway across the North Sea, in Oxford, where his son, Tomas, was navigating the complexities of an English literature degree. The divorce had been amicable, as these things go, but the silence of his apartment was a constant, low hum of absence.

“Mats,” said the voice of his young sergeant, Anja Holm, her usual cheer replaced by a sharp urgency. “We’ve got one dead, two critical at the hospital. Bakery on Storgatan. Looks like food poisoning, but… it’s bad.”

Lundström grunted, heaving himself up. “Food poisoning doesn’t usually kill people before breakfast, Anja. Not unless it’s particularly ambitious.”

At ‘Smålandet Livs’, the scene was one of controlled chaos. The air, usually rich with the smell of warm cardamom and yeast, was now tainted with the antiseptic tang of officialdom. Agneta’s body had been removed, but a ghostly outline remained. Her husband, Lars, a bear of a man reduced to a quivering wreck, sat in a corner, his face buried in his floury hands.

“She tasted the cream,” he sobbed to Lundström. “Just a sip. To check it. The new delivery from ‘Änglamark Dairy’.”

Lundström’s eyes, pale blue and perpetually sceptical, scanned the kitchen. “The same cream others bought?”

“Yes,” Anja confirmed, consulting her notes. “Two customers are in hospital. Both used it in their morning coffee. Same batch.”

It seemed straightforward. A tragic, horrific accident at the dairy. But as Lundström bent down, his knees protesting, he saw it. Tucked behind a sack of sugar was a small, brown glass bottle. It was unlabelled, and its cap was off. Using a pen, he carefully nudged it. A few crystalline grains clung to the inside.

“Get this to the lab,” he said, his voice low. “And get someone to the dairy. Now.”

The dairy was a picture of Swedish efficiency: stainless steel, humming machinery, and the clean, cold smell of milk. The manager, a nervous man named Pettersson, was adamant.

“Impossible! Our hygiene protocols are impeccable. The batch was clean when it left here. I’ll stake my livelihood on it.”

Lundström believed him. The contamination hadn’t happened here. It had happened after delivery. As they drove back to the station, Anja’s phone rang. Her face paled.

“Sir… another one. A preschool. They used the same batch of cream in their morning porridge. Twelve children and two staff are being rushed to hospital.”

Lundström’s jaw tightened. This was no accident. This was an attack.

The investigation became a whirlwind. The lab confirmed it: a high concentration of amatoxin, derived from the Death Cap mushroom, found in both the cream and the mysterious bottle. The bottle yielded no fingerprints. It had been wiped clean.

“Someone who knows what they’re doing,” Anja mused, spreading reports across Lundström’s desk. “Amatoxin is complex. You don’t just stumble upon it.”

Lundström stared at a list of dismissed employees from the dairy over the past two years. His finger, thick and stubby, landed on a name. “Stig Persson. Fired eighteen months ago for repeated negligence. A chemical engineer by training.”

Stig Persson’s small, dilapidated house on the outskirts of town was shrouded in gloom. He answered the door looking much older than his fifty years, his eyes burning with a resentful fire.

“So, the great Inspector Lundström,” he sneered. “Come to harass the little man again? They framed me, you know. Pettersson and his cronies. Set me up to take the fall for their own shoddy work. Ruined my life.”

The interview was a masterclass in bitter evasion. Persson admitted his knowledge of chemistry, he admitted his hatred for Pettersson, but he offered a rock-solid alibi for the previous night. He’d been at a public library in Almhult, miles away, a fact confirmed by CCTV.

“He’s our man,” Anja said as they left, frustrated. “I can feel it.”

“Feeling isn’t evidence, Anja,” Lundström replied, his gaze distant. “And feeling can lead you down the wrong garden path. He’s too clever to have no alibi. This feels… staged.”

Back at the station, a break came from an unexpected source. A young constable, reviewing traffic camera footage from near the bakery, found something. In the pre-dawn darkness, a figure in dark clothing, of indeterminate build and gender, was seen loitering near the bakery’s delivery entrance. Not taking anything. Just… waiting.

“The delivery driver,” Lundström said, snapping his fingers. “Where is he?”

The driver, a cheerful young man named Emil, was baffled by the questions.

“Yeah, I make the drop at the bakery first, always. But that morning, my van had a flat. Right there on Storgatan. I had to change it. Took me ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Left the crates on the pavement. It was still dark. No one around.”

“No one?” Lundström pressed.

Emil’s face lit up. “Well, actually, yeah. That weird bloke who runs the health food shop across the street, Björn. He came out, asked if I needed a hand. I said no, but he hung around for a bit, chatting. Nice of him, really.”

Björn’s ‘Naturligt Gott’ health food shop was a temple to organic living. The air was thick with the smell of dried herbs and essential oils. Björn himself was a slight, intense man with fervent eyes.

“This is a sign!” he declared, when Lundström and Anja entered. “A cleansing! The universe is purging the poison of industrialised food! That dairy is a blight!”

His rants were passionate, but his alibi was as solid as Persson’s. He’d been documented attending an all-night meditation circle.

The pieces swirled in Lundström’s mind like leaves in a storm. The bitter former employee. The fanatical health nut. A poisoned town. He sat in his office long after Anja had left, the silence of the room pressing in. He thought of Tomas, safe in England, and felt a surge of fierce, paternal protectiveness for the people of this troubled town. He looked at the case files, at the photos of the sick children, at the empty space where Agneta had once stood.

It was the bottle. The unlabelled, brown glass bottle. It was too obvious. A plant. Someone was trying to frame Stig Persson. The method was too precise for a fanatic like Björn, but the fanaticism… that was the key. He picked up the file on Björn’s ‘all-night meditation’. The group leader confirmed his presence but mentioned he’d stepped out for ‘fresh air’ for nearly half an hour, just before dawn.

Lundström stood up, his body aching. He knew. He drove through the dark, quiet streets to Björn’s shop. A light was on in the back.

He entered without knocking. Björn was at a bench, grinding something with a pestle and mortar. He didn’t look surprised.

“Inspector. I knew you’d see the truth eventually.”

“The truth, Björn? Or your version of it?” Lundström’s voice was dangerously calm. “You didn’t just want to punish the dairy. You wanted to create a martyr. You wanted Stig Persson to take the fall for your ‘righteous’ act. You knew his history. You knew he’d be the perfect suspect.”

Björn smiled, a serene, terrifying expression. “The people needed a shock, Inspector. A jolt to their system. To see the death that lurks in their convenient, plastic-wrapped world. Stig is a sacrificial lamb for a greater good. My alibi was perfect. His motive was obvious.”

“But you made a mistake,” Lundström said, stepping closer. “You were too clever. You used a common bottle, but the way you wiped it clean… it was meticulous. Too meticulous for a distraught, vengeful man like Persson. He would have been messy, angry. You were calm. Clinical. You saw an opportunity to advance your crusade, and you took it, not caring who you hurt.”

For a moment, Björn’s serene mask slipped, revealing the arrogant, calculating man beneath. “Prove it.”

“We will,” Lundström said, his hand resting on his cuffs. “We’ll test every millimetre of your shop. Your clothes. Your herbs. Amatoxin leaves a trail. And we have a witness who placed you at the scene, ‘helping’ the driver, giving you all the time you needed to inject the poison into the cartons.”

The fight drained from Björn. He laid down the pestle. “It had to be done,” he whispered. “For the harvest of their souls.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

A week later, the children from the preschool were released from the hospital, their small bodies having fought off the poison. The town of Växjö, shaken to its core, began the slow process of healing. The autumn sun, weaker now, shone on the golden leaves of the trees lining the streets.

Mats Lundström stood by the window of his office, a fresh cup of coffee in his hand. It was over. Björn was in custody, his fanaticism laid bare. The silence in the room was no longer an absence, but a respite. He picked up his phone and dialled.

“Tomas?” he said, his voice rough with emotion. “It’s your father. I was just thinking… how would you like me to come visit for a few days? I hear the dreaming spires are lovely this time of year.”

As he listened to his son’s enthusiastic reply, he looked out at his own, more modest town. It was flawed, it was sometimes cruel, but it was his. And for now, it was safe.

END

The Växjö vault

The bell above the door of ‘A Touch of Antiquity’ jingled its cheap, tinny tune. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of beeswax and neglect. A young constable, new to the Växjö force, held up a faded ledger, his brow furrowed. “Inspector? The sums here… they don’t make sense. Who buys this many unmarked, mid-century ashtrays?” Inspector Mats Lundström, his coat smelling of autumn rain and old coffee, ran a finger over a dust-free shelf. The dust lay thick everywhere else, but here, on this specific stretch of oak, it was pristine, as if something heavy and rectangular was regularly moved. He didn’t answer the constable. He just smiled, a thin, weary smile. The hunt, he thought, was finally getting interesting.

* * * * *

The call came in at dawn. A body, found slumped over the steering wheel of a beaten-up Volvo in the woods just outside Växjö. Not a local. A Latvian national, according to his passport. No visible wounds, no signs of a struggle. Just dead. In the glove compartment, amidst greasy napkins and a road atlas, was a single, crisp hundred-pound sterling note and a receipt from ‘A Touch of Antiquity’ for a “Victorian Silver Snuff Box – 5,000 SEK.”

“Five thousand for a box that probably held someone’s great-grandfather’s sinus relief,” Lundström muttered to his partner, the earnest and relentlessly modern Detective Anja Borg. “Seems a bit steep, even for the Swedes.”

Anja scanned the car with a tablet. “No forced entry. Looks like he just pulled over and died. Heart attack?”

“Heart attacks don’t usually travel with untraceable foreign currency, Anja,” Lundström said, his gaze drifting towards the town, its church spire piercing the low grey sky. He thought of his son, David, in Oxford, and the hefty tuition fees paid in similar, crisp notes. The world was connected by invisible threads of money, and this dead man was a loose end.

The antique shop was their first port of call. The owner, Stig Larrson, was a small, neat man with fingers that fluttered like anxious birds. His shop was a curated chaos of porcelain, dark wood, and tarnished silver.

“Ah, the snuff box,” Stig said, wringing his hands. “A cash sale. A private collector. I never got a name.”

Lundström picked up a heavy, ormolu clock. “Business good, Stig?”

“It… ebbs and flows, Inspector. One must have a discerning clientele.”

“Discerning enough to pay five thousand for a snuff box that’s clearly Birmingham, 1890, not Victorian,” Lundström said, placing the clock down with a thud that made Stig jump. “The hallmark is wrong. A discerning man would know that.”

The tension in the shop was as palpable as the dust. As they left, Lundström noticed a sleek, black German sedan parked a little too conveniently down the street. It didn't belong.

The plot thickened with the forensics report. The Latvian, one Aleksei Petrov, had a faint, almost undetectable pinprick on his neck. A toxin. Sophisticated. Untraceable in standard screenings. A professional job.

“So, not a heart attack,” Anja stated the obvious, a new respect in her eyes for her superior’s initial scepticism.

“No. A silencing,” Lundström corrected. He stood by the map in the incident room, a red pin marking the antique shop. “Petrov was a courier. He picked up something from that shop. Not a snuff box. Something else. And he was killed before he could deliver it.”

Their break came from an unlikely source: the town gossip, Mrs. Persson, who lived opposite the shop and had nothing but time and binoculars. “Men in expensive coats, Inspector,” she whispered over tea and pepparkakor. “They come after dark. They never carry anything in. But they always leave with a small box. Always the same size. Like a shoebox.”

Lundström and Anja staked out the shop. For two nights, nothing. On the third, the black German sedan appeared. Two men in long, dark coats entered. An hour later, they emerged, one carrying a plain cardboard box.

“Follow them,” Lundström ordered Anja, who slipped into an unmarked car. He stayed, watching the shop. A light flickered in the back room, then went out. Stig Larrson was scared. And a scared man was a vulnerable one.

Lundström decided to apply pressure. He visited Stig alone, late the next day.

“The men in the coats, Stig. Who are they?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Stig stammered, his eyes darting towards the back of the shop.

“Aleksei Petrov is dead, Stig. Murdered. And you’re laundering money for the people who killed him. That doesn’t make you a businessman. It makes you an accessory.”

Lundström’s phone buzzed. It was Anja, her voice tight with excitement. “The car led me to a summer house by Helgasjön. High-end. Registered to a shell company in the Caymans. I ran the plates on the other cars there. One is registered to a known associate of the Riga Syndicate.”

The Riga Syndicate. The name landed in the room with the weight of a tombstone. Stig’s face crumpled. “They’ll kill me,” he whispered.

“They might,” Lundström agreed calmly, leaning on the counter. “Or you can help me stop them. Your choice.”

The dam broke. Through choked sobs, Stig explained. The shop was a front. The ‘antiques’ were massively over-invoiced. A customer, the Syndicate, would ‘buy’ a worthless item for an exorbitant price. The dirty cash would enter Stig’s legitimate business account. He’d take a cut, then wire the clean money to another shell company. The cardboard boxes contained the cash for the next cycle of laundering. Petrov had gotten greedy, tried to skim from the top. He’d been made an example of.

“The next drop,” Lundström pressed. “When?”

“Tonight,” Stig whispered. “Midnight. They’re closing the operation. Moving me out. The box tonight… it’s the final one. The big one.”

It was a trap, and Lundström knew it. The Syndicate was cutting its losses. Stig was a loose end, just like Petrov. They weren't moving him; they were eliminating him.

The final act was set for midnight. The police surrounded the shop, hidden in the deep shadows of the Växjö night. Lundström was inside with Stig, the air cold and still. The only light came from a single desk lamp, illuminating the dreaded cardboard box on the counter.

The bell didn't jingle. The door was opened with a key. The two men from the German sedan entered, their movements efficient and cold. The taller one, a man with eyes the colour of a winter sea, smiled at Stig. It didn't reach his eyes.

“The final payment, Stig,” he said, his Swedish accented. He glanced at the box, then back at Stig. “You have been… reliable.”

“And you have been murderous,” Lundström said, stepping out from behind a tall armoire. He held his service pistol, steady and level. “Växjö Police. You’re under arrest.”

The tall man’s smile didn’t falter. “Inspector. A shame.” His hand moved towards his coat.

“I wouldn’t,” Anja’s voice rang out from the doorway, her weapon aimed at the second man. Outside, blue lights flashed to life, painting the street in stark, pulsing strokes.

It was over in seconds. The fight was short, brutal, and decisive. The Syndicate men were professionals, but they were outnumbered and outmanoeuvred. As Anja cuffed the tall man, he spat at Lundström, “This is a small town, Inspector. You have no idea the storm you’ve brought down on it.”

Lundström holstered his weapon and picked up the cardboard box. It was heavy with bundled notes. “No,” he said, his voice quiet but firm. “This is my town. And we have enough storms of our own.”

* * * * *

A week later, the rain had returned. Lundström sat at his desk, the paperwork on the ‘Antique Shop Case’ finally complete. Stig was in witness protection. The two enforcers were singing, hoping for leniency, their information reaching back across the Baltic to Riga. It was a small victory, but a clean one.

On his desk was a postcard from his son, David. A picture of the Bodleian Library. On the back, it read: ‘Thanks for the transfer, Dad. All settled. Don’t work too hard. Love, D.’

Lundström allowed himself a genuine smile, the weary one reserved for rare moments of peace. He looked out at the wet, gleaming streets of Växjö, quiet and deceptively calm. He took a sip of his coffee. It was cold, but it didn’t matter. The ledger, for now, was balanced.

END

The bleeding chair

Dr. Arvid Falk was a man of quiet routines. The crisp mornings spent polishing his surgical steel, the afternoon lulls between patients, the evening ledger entries detailing crowns, fillings, and the occasional root canal. It was a life of ordered precision. But on this rain-lashed Tuesday in rural Småland, the order shattered. The last patient of the day, young Liam Sjöberg, never left the plush green chair. His mother, Helena, received the text an hour later, the words cold and digital as the instruments in Dr. Falk’s steriliser: I have your son. 500,000 kronor. No police. Or his smile will be the first thing to go. The silence that followed in the Sjöberg household was more deafening than any dental drill.

* * * * * * * * * *

The call came to Inspector Mats Lundström just as he was contemplating the profound sadness of a microwaved meatball dinner. The station was quiet, the persistent Växjö rain tracing lazy paths down his window. He listened, his large, capable hand cradling the phone, his face, a roadmap of lines etched by decades of Swedish winters and human frailty—betraying nothing.

“A dentist?” he rumbled, his voice like gravel rolling in a bucket. “Arvid Falk? Are we sure?”

The confirmation came. Lundström grunted, ended the call, and pulled on his worn tweed coat. A dentist. It was a new one. Not a crime of passion in a drunken haze, not a greedy farmer disputing a land boundary, but a medical professional holding a boy hostage. It felt… incongruous. Like finding a rotten tooth in a prize-winning apple.

He drove through the slick, dark streets, the windscreen wipers keeping a steady, melancholic rhythm. His thoughts, as they often did, drifted to his son, Tom, in England. He’d sent him a text about the football, a safe, neutral topic. The complexities of fatherhood were a mystery he found far more baffling than any murder.

The Sjöberg house was a portrait of modern distress. Helena Sjöberg was a ghost of herself, clutching her phone as if it were a lifeline, her husband, Peder, a tight coil of furious impotence. Lundström took a statement, his questions gentle but persistent.

“Did Falk seem different lately? Anxious? In debt?”

“No. Quiet, as always. He’d been our dentist for years,” Peder said, his voice cracking. “He gave Liam a toy car after his first filling.”

Lundström’s team set up a trace on the phone. The money was being gathered, a frantic, fearful process. Lundström, however, felt a nagging dissonance. He dispatched a junior officer to pull Falk’s financials and another to discreetly watch the dental practice from a distance. It was a neat, red-brick building on a quiet street, its windows dark. Too dark.

“He’s in there with my boy,” Helena whispered, staring out at the rain as if she could see through the night and the walls.

“Perhaps,” Lundström murmured, more to himself than to her.

An hour later, the financial report landed in his inbox. It was the second piece that didn’t fit. Dr. Arvid Falk was not in debt. He was, in fact, remarkably solvent. No gambling habits, no secret loans, no recent large expenditures. The motive was crumbling.

Lundström stood, his large frame casting a long shadow in the dimly lit room. “I’m going to take a closer look.”

“The ransom demand! He said no police!” Peder Sjöberg cried out.

“He specified ‘no police’ at the house, at the transaction,” Lundström corrected him calmly. “He didn’t say anything about a mid-fifties, divorced man taking a stroll in the rain past his place of business.”

He drove alone, parking a street away. The rain had softened to a fine mist. The dental practice was silent, shrouded. But as he approached on foot, circling around to the back, he saw it—a faint, flickering light in the basement window. A television, perhaps. Or a torch.

The back door was a modern, solid thing, but the lock was standard. Lundström, whose career had begun in an era less reliant on digital forensics, had skills that were sometimes frowned upon by his superiors. A few moments of focused work with a set of picks from an old leather roll, and the lock yielded with a soft click.

The silence inside was absolute, broken only by the hum of a large freezer and the distant, tinny sound of a news broadcast from the basement. The air smelled of antiseptic and something else… fear. He drew his service pistol, the weight familiar and comforting in his hand.

He moved past the reception, past the waiting room with its outdated magazines, and towards the surgery. The door was ajar. He pushed it open slowly.

The scene was surreal. Young Liam Sjöberg was indeed in the dental chair, but he wasn’t tied down. He was wrapped in a blanket, a packet of crisps in his lap, watching a small portable TV on a trolley. He looked up, startled, but not terrified.

And in the corner, slumped in a chair with a bottle of vodka mostly empty on the counter beside him, was Dr. Arvid Falk. His face was puffy, his eyes red-raw. He held not a weapon, but a photograph. He looked at Lundström not with defiance, but with a profound, bottomless despair.

“Inspector,” Falk slurred, his voice thick with drink and grief. “It took you long enough.”

Lundström lowered his gun, his sharp eyes taking in the whole picture. No ransom money here. No accomplice. Just a broken man and a confused, but unharmed, boy.

“Liam,” Lundström said gently. “Are you alright?”

The boy nodded. “Dr. Falk said there was a gas leak. That we had to stay in the basement, but it was safe down there. He gave me crisps. He’s been crying a lot.”

Lundström’s gaze returned to Falk. “A gas leak,” he repeated, the pieces clicking into a different, darker pattern. “Where is she, Dr. Falk?”

Falk’s composure shattered. A ragged sob tore from his throat. He pointed a trembling finger towards the large, walk-in storage cupboard at the back of the surgery.

Keeping Falk in his periphery, Lundström crossed the room and pulled the cupboard door open.

Inside, lying on her side amongst boxes of gauze and surgical gloves, was a woman. She was elegantly dressed, her blonde hair perfectly coiffed. It was Eva Falk. And buried to the hilt in her back was one of her husband’s own, viciously sharp, dental probes.

Lundström closed his eyes for a brief second, the mystery solved, leaving only the tragedy. He called it in, his voice low and steady, requesting an ambulance and backup, though both were now for the living, not the dead.

Back in the surgery, he crouched beside Falk. The story tumbled out in a toxic flood. He’d found out she was leaving him. For his junior partner. The confrontation had happened here, in his sanctum, his place of control. A scream, a shove, and the nearest sharp instrument, grabbed in a blind rage.

“I didn’t know what to do,” Falk wept. “I called Helena Sjöberg to cancel Liam’s appointment, but when I heard her voice… the plan just… came to me. A ransom. A distraction. It would buy me time. Make it look like something else. I never meant to hurt the boy. I just… I couldn’t be alone with her.”

It was all there. The desperate, chaotic act of a man whose life had fractured in one uncontrollable moment. The ransom was never about the money; it was a smokescreen for a murder, a pathetic attempt to redirect the entire machinery of justice.

As uniformed officers led a broken Arvid Falk away, and a paramedic wrapped a foil blanket around a bewildered Liam Sjöberg, Lundström stood in the doorway of the surgery. The bright overhead light gleamed on the chrome and porcelain, a stage for a domestic horror that had spiralled into a public spectacle.

He thought of the neat rows of instruments, each with a defined purpose. And of the messy, unpredictable human heart that could pervert them all. He pulled out his phone and typed a new message to his son in England. Not about football. Just three words.

Thinking of you.

It was, he felt, answer enough to most of the mysteries that truly mattered.

End