The welcome committee

The ink was still wet on the packing boxes. The house, a charming red wooden villa on the outskirts of Växjö, smelled of fresh paint and pine forests. For the Pettersson family, Markus, Eva, and their teenage daughter, Linnea, it was a new beginning, an escape from the relentless pace of Stockholm. The first night, they celebrated with a bottle of wine on the porch, watching the light fade over Lake Trummen. It felt like a sanctuary.

The envelope was on the doormat the next morning. No stamp, no address. Just Linnea’s name, scrawled in a clumsy, blocky hand. Inside, a single sheet of paper. A child’s drawing, crudely rendered in crimson marker. A stick-figure girl falling from a high window. Beneath it, two words: GO HOME.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The call came through to Inspector Mats Lundström just after eleven. A bright, cold Tuesday morning. He’d been contemplating the cryptic brutality of his morning crossword, ‘Ariadne’s gift’ in seven letters and the dregs of his third coffee. The voice of the desk sergeant was an unwelcome intrusion.

“Family out on Sjöviksvägen, Mats. Nasty notes. Kid’s frightened.”

Lundström grunted, easing his bulk from the chair. He was a man in his mid-fifties, built like a worn-out oak, his face a roadmap of late nights and old disappointments. His divorce was a settled, quiet ache, and his son, Tomas, was happily buried in books at Oxford, a world away from the quiet dramas of Småland. Lundström navigated life with a weary, methodical patience, a quality that served him well in a county where murder was often a slow, simmering affair that finally boiled over.

The Pettersson house felt different from the moment he stepped inside. The newness was a thin veneer, cracked by the palpable fear. Eva Pettersson, a blonde woman with the tense posture of a startled bird, handed him the drawing without a word. Her husband, Markus, stood by the fireplace, his anger a solid, hot thing in the cool room.

“It’s just a prank,” Markus insisted, jutting his chin out. “Some local kids. Bored.”

Lundström held the paper by its corner. The red marker was aggressively bright. “Perhaps,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “But the choice of subject is… specific. Has your daughter had any trouble? Since you arrived?”

Linnea appeared on the stairs then, a pale, slender girl of sixteen. Her eyes were fixed on the drawing in Lundström’s hand. “No,” she whispered. “I don’t know anyone. Not yet.”

Lundström asked the obvious questions, his notebook a formality. Had they upset anyone? A dispute over the property? Markus was an architect, Eva a photographer. They were outsiders, city folk. It was enough.

Two days later, the second message arrived. This one was for Eva. A photograph, taken from the woods behind their property, through the kitchen window. Eva was at the sink, a perfectly framed, unaware subject. Someone had drawn a target over her back in the same red marker. The words this time were: THE LENS SEES YOU.

Lundström felt the first, familiar prickling at the base of his skull. This was no longer a child’s prank. This was a campaign.

He had uniforms do door-to-door. The neighbours were a mixed bag. On one side, an elderly couple who claimed to have seen and heard nothing. On the other, a man named Stig Håkansson, a burly, taciturn individual who bred hunting dogs and viewed the new neighbours with open suspicion. “They city-fy the place,” he grumbled to Lundström. “Too much noise. That girl plays her music.”

The investigation, such as it was, languished. Lundström spent an evening on the phone with Tomas, listening to his son talk about the intricacies of medieval history, a welcome escape from the vague malevolence on Sjöviksvägen.

The escalation, when it came, was swift and violent. It was Markus who found the family cat, a placid ginger tom, lying on the porch one morning. It had not been killed cleanly. Around its neck was a tiny, crudely fashioned noose, and another note: PETS ARE LIKE CHILDREN. FRAGILE.

Eva Pettersson screamed and did not stop for a long time.

The house was now a crime scene. A forensics team in white suits dusted the porch for prints, their faces grim. Lundström stood with Markus in the garden, the man’s earlier anger deflated, replaced by a hollow, terrified shock.

“Who does this?” Markus rasped, his hands shaking as he lit a cigarette. “Who… why?”

“That is what we must discover, Herr Pettersson,” Lundström said, his eyes scanning the tree line. “Before their focus shifts from animals to people.”

The pressure was mounting. The local press had caught the scent, dubbing the case ‘The Welcome Committee.’ Lundström despised the name. It trivialised the pure, focused hatred behind these acts.

His break came from an unexpected source. Linnea, huddled under a blanket in a patrol car, mentioned something she’d forgotten. A man, a week or so after they moved in. He’d been in the woods with a camera, a big lens. She’d thought he was a birdwatcher.

A photographer.

Lundström’s mind, a well-oiled machine of connections, whirred into life. The second note: THE LENS SEES YOU. Eva was a photographer. Was this professional jealousy? A territorial dispute?

He had Eva Pettersson’s client and colleague list run through the system. One name came back with a minor history: a man named Jesper Möller, a local nature photographer. A known eccentric. A loner. He lived in a cabin deep in the woods, not two kilometres from the Pettersson house.

Lundström decided to pay a visit alone. The cabin was dark, the silence broken only by the cawing of crows. He knocked, the sound echoing unnaturally. No answer. He tried the door. It was unlocked.

The interior was a chaos of developing trays, chemical smells, and photographs pinned to every surface. And there, on a large corkboard, was the Pettersson family. Dozens of them. Markus leaving for work. Linnea walking home from the bus stop. Eva in her garden. And in the centre, the red-marker drawing of the falling girl, like a dark, malignant heart.

“They ruined it,” a voice said from the doorway.

Lundström turned slowly. Jesper Möller stood there, a thin, intense man with wild eyes, holding a heavy tripod like a club.

“Ruined what, Herr Möller?” Lundström asked, his voice calm, his body tensed.

“The light! The silence!” Möller spat. “Their noise, their cars, their stupid modern life! This is my place! My sanctuary! They were a blight. I just wanted them to leave.”

It was a confession, tumbling out in a furious, self-pitying torrent. He had watched them, grown to despise their very existence. The notes, the photograph, the cat… it was all him. A campaign of terror to reclaim his peace.

Lundström read him his rights, the formal words a stark contrast to the man’s hysterical ravings. As he led Möller to the car, he felt the familiar post-arrest emptiness. The puzzle was solved, the monster found. It was, he supposed, a result.

But back at the station, as he typed his report, a single, stubborn thought nagged at him. The first drawing. The one of Linnea falling. Möller had confessed to it all, but when Lundström had asked him to describe it, he’d been vague. “A girl… a threat,” he’d said.

Yet the drawing had been specific. Linnea’s bedroom was on the second floor. The window in the drawing was a large, square one, modern. The Petterssons’ windows were all older, arched at the top. Möller, a man who noticed every detail of light and composition, would have known that. Wouldn't he?

Lundström picked up the phone and called the forensics lead. “The paper for the first note,” he said. “The child’s drawing. I want it analysed separately. Check it against Möller’s other paper. And I want a full background on the previous owner of that house. Before the Petterssons.”

The answer came the next day. The paper was different. A common brand, but from a different batch. And the previous owner? A family named Borg. They had left suddenly, a year ago. Their daughter, Ida, had died. A fall from a window during a party. The case was ruled an accident. The window in the official report was large, and square. In her old bedroom.

A cold dread settled in Lundström’s stomach. Möller was a convenient culprit, a madman who had happily confessed to a campaign of harassment. But he hadn’t started it. Someone else had. Someone who knew the house’s history. Someone for whom the drawing was not a generic threat, but a memory.

He drove back to Sjöviksvägen, the pieces clicking into a new, more terrifying configuration. He didn’t go to the Pettersson’s. He went next door, to the home of the quiet elderly couple, the Anderssons.

The old woman answered, her eyes wide and fearful.

“Fru Andersson,” Lundström said, his voice soft. “Ida Borg. She was your granddaughter, wasn’t she?”

The woman’s hand flew to her mouth. Her husband appeared behind her, his face a mask of grief and something else... guilt.

“We just… we couldn’t bear it,” the old man stammered. “Someone else living there. Being happy there. Where our Ida… We just wanted to scare them. Just the one note. We never meant for… for the rest to happen. We thought that Möller man…”

Lundström looked at them, these two broken people, their grief curdled into a poison they had released into the world. They had lit the fuse, and a madman had taken up the torch. There were no monsters in the woods, only the terrible, quiet monsters of human sorrow.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The arrest of Jesper Möller made the papers, but Inspector Mats Lundström filed a separate, confidential report on the Anderssons. No charges were brought. Some justice, he felt, was not found in a courtroom. Sitting at his desk, he looked at the photo of his son, Tomas, smiling from a world away. He picked up his pen, and finally filled in the crossword clue. ‘Ariadne’s gift.’ Seven letters. The answer, so obvious now, was ‘THREAD.’ It was all about following the thread, no matter where it led. Even back to the quiet, broken hearts next door.

End

A cone of betrayal

The scream tore through the idyllic summer evening, a sharp, silver needle in the placid fabric of the small town of Årby. It came not from some dark alley, but from the ‘Glasstrutens Glädje’ The Joy of the Ice Cream Cone, a place of rainbows of sprinkles and the gentle whir of soft-serve machines. Inside, amidst the sweet, cloying scent of waffle cones and spilled strawberry syrup, lay the owner, Elsa Persson. The ice pick buried in her chest was a grotesque, metallic counterpoint to the pastel colours of her shop. It was a murder so brutal, so out of place, that it curdled the town’s innocence in an instant. For thirty years, the ‘Ice Cream Shop Murder’ festered, a cold case file that whispered of a killer who had melted back into the everyday life of Årby. Until now.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The call came on a Tuesday, a day of soft, persistent rain that greyed the streets of Växjö. Inspector Mats Lundström sat at his desk, a mug of strong, black coffee warming his hands as he contemplated a photograph of his son, David, grinning in his graduation gown at Oxford. The distance felt physical, a dull ache beneath his ribs. The phone was an intrusion.

“Lundström,” he answered, his voice a low rumble.

It was the station chief. “Mats, we’re sending you to Årby. The Elsa Persson case.”

Lundström’s eyebrows, thick and greying, knitted together. “The ice cream shop? That’s a museum piece.”

“Not anymore. New evidence. A DNA hit from the murder weapon. It’s come back to a local. A respected one.”

An hour later, Lundström’s Volvo crunched to a halt outside the now-derelict ‘Glasstrutens Glädje’, its cheerful sign faded and peeling. The local constable, a young man named Pettersson with an earnest face, stood waiting under a large umbrella.

“Inspector. It’s… an honour,” Pettersson said, slightly flustered.

“The honour is all mine, I’m sure,” Lundström murmured, his eyes scanning the quiet, rain-slicked square. “So, who is this paragon of the community our database has so rudely accused?”

Pettersson swallowed. “Stig Ahlin, sir. The pharmacist.”

Lundström gave a short, humourless laugh. “Stig Ahlin? He gives talks to the Rotary Club about cholesterol. He sponsored the new village flower beds.”

“Exactly, sir.”

Stig Ahlin’s pharmacy was a temple of order and clean, clinical smells. Ahlin himself was a neat, balding man in his late sixties, with wire-rimmed glasses and an expression of perpetual, mild concern. He didn’t flinch when Lundström and Pettersson entered, the bell above the door tinkling merrily.

“Inspector,” Ahlin said, wiping his hands on a clean white towel. “I heard you were in town. A dreadful business, dredging all that up.”

“The past has a way of floating to the surface, Herr Ahlin,” Lundström said, leaning casually against a counter of cough lozenges. “Especially when DNA is involved. Your DNA, to be precise. Found on the handle of the ice pick that killed Elsa Persson.”

Ahlin’s composure was remarkable. He simply nodded, a sad, weary gesture. “Yes, I was afraid of that. I knew Elsa. Everyone did. I was in her shop that afternoon, buying a tub of vanilla for my wife. I must have touched that ice pick. It was on the counter, you see. She used it to break up blocks of chocolate.”

It was plausible. Too plausible. It had the rehearsed feel of a story held close for thirty years.

“Convenient,” Lundström said softly. “And your wife can verify this?”

A shadow passed over Ahlin’s face. “My wife passed away five years ago, Inspector. Cancer.”

Lundström offered a curt nod of sympathy that didn’t reach his eyes. “My condolences. But a dead alibi is no alibi at all.”

The investigation became a slow, meticulous dissection of a town’s secrets. Lundström, with the eager Pettersson in tow, moved through Årby like a surgeon. They spoke to Birgit Karlsson, Elsa’s fiercely loyal former assistant, now running a small café. Her bitterness was as strong as her coffee.

“Stig Ahlin?” she spat. “He was always hanging around. Smarmy. Elsa was too kind. She lent money to half the town. Including him, I’ll bet. She was soft, but she kept a ledger. Meticulous. It vanished after she died.”

A ledger. The word hung in the air, tantalising.

They visited the grand, isolated house of Sven Berglund, a wealthy, retired businessman who had once been the town’s major employer. He received them in a study lined with hunting trophies.

“Elsa?” Berglund boomed, pouring himself a generous whiskey though it was only noon. “Pretty thing. A tragedy. This town has been living in the shadow of that shop for too long. Ahlin? A pill-pusher. But a murderer? I doubt it. More likely it was some drifter.”

But Lundström’s instincts, honed over thirty-five years, were twitching. He felt the subtle resistance, the carefully constructed narratives. That evening, sitting in his cramped, temporary office, he dialled England.

“Dad?” David’s voice, bright and clear despite the static, was a balm.

“David. Are you eating properly? That college food…”

“I’m fine, Dad. Are you on a case? You have your ‘puzzling’ tone.”

Lundström almost smiled. “A very old puzzle. It seems the most respectable pieces are often the ones that don’t quite fit.”

The break came from Pettersson, who had been doggedly chasing the ledger. He found it, not in a safe or a lockbox, but buried in a crate of old recipe books in Birgit’s café attic. It was a simple accounts book, but in the margins, in Elsa’s elegant script, were notes. Not just figures, but secrets. ‘S.B. - 50,000 kr - for silence?’ was one entry, next to Sven Berglund’s name. And next to Stig Ahlin’s: ‘S.A. - 25,000 kr - to fix his mistake. The girl.’

Lundström stared at the page, the pieces clicking into a dreadful, ugly picture. It wasn’t about money. It was about blackmail. Elsa hadn’t just been kind; she had been powerful. She knew things.

He confronted Berglund first. The businessman’s bluster evaporated when shown the ledger. “It was a long time ago,” he whispered, deflated. “A… business indiscretion. Elsa found out. She promised to keep quiet, for a price. But I didn’t kill her! I paid her!”

Then, Lundström went to the pharmacy. It was closed, but a light was on in the back. He found Stig Ahlin sitting at his desk, an old photograph in his hands. It showed a younger, happier Ahlin with his wife, and a baby girl.

“The girl,” Lundström said quietly, not as an accusation, but as a statement of fact.

Ahlin looked up, his eyes red-rimmed and utterly broken. The mask of respectability had finally shattered.

“My daughter,” he whispered. “She wasn’t… well. A difficult birth. My fault. A miscalculation in a compound I prescribed for my wife. Our little girl… she lived only a week. A secret we buried. My wife never recovered. Elsa… she was a nurse before she opened the shop. She recognised the symptoms, put it all together. She asked for money, to ‘help us through our grief’, she said. It was extortion.”

“So you went to the shop that night,” Lundström prompted, his voice gentle but relentless.

“To beg her to stop. I had the ice pick from my fishing kit in the car; I was going to the lake later. I don’t even remember taking it inside. She laughed at me. Said some secrets were too valuable to ever be forgotten. And then… the red. So much red, on all the white. It looked like… raspberry sauce.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the ticking of a clock and the patter of rain against the window.

“You wiped the handle,” Lundström said. “But not well enough.”

“I’ve been wiping it clean every day for thirty years, Inspector,” Ahlin replied, his voice hollow. “In here.” He tapped his temple. “I planted the flower beds in her memory. I gave talks about health. I tried to be so good. But the stain never goes away.”

Lundström nodded to Pettersson, who stood in the doorway. As the young constable read Ahlin his rights, Lundström looked out at the quiet, sleeping town of Årby. The killer hadn’t been a monster from the shadows. He had been the man who sold you aspirin and asked after your grandchildren. The evil had been served with a smile, in a place of rainbows and sprinkles, and it had taken three decades for the bill to finally come due.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Back in Växjö, the rain had cleared. Lundström packed the last of the Elsa Persson file into a cardboard box, the case closed. He picked up the photograph of David. The ache of distance was still there, but it felt different now. Less like a void, and more like a connection sustained. He thought of Stig Ahlin, a man so trapped by a single, terrible moment that his entire life had become its memorial. Lundström picked up the phone. It was time to book a flight to England. Some puzzles were meant to be solved, and some connections were meant to be renewed, before the ice, as it inevitably does, began to form.

END

The day of the willow man

The note was always the same. A single sheet of cheap, cream-coloured paper, folded once. The message, typed on a machine with a misaligned ‘e’, was brief and chilling: ‘For the Tree. One for the past. One is taken.’ It arrived at the Växjö police station every year, on the morning of September 24th. And every year, for the past three years, someone from the small community of Ödestugu had vanished. No bodies were ever found. No ransoms were demanded. It was as if the mist that clung to the shores of Helgasjön lake simply swallowed them whole. The press, with a grim fascination, had dubbed the unknown perpetrator ‘The Willow Man’, after the ancient, weeping willow that stood sentinel on the point where the last victim was seen. For Inspector Mats Lundström, the day was a splinter in his mind, a recurring nightmare of failure that no amount of Swedish coffee could wash away.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The rain fell on Växjö in a persistent, grey drizzle, matching Inspector Mats Lundström’s mood perfectly. He sat at his desk, the case file open before him. Three faces stared back. Erik Johansson, a retired postman, vanished in 2021. Anette Persson, a librarian, in 2022. Liam Forsberg, a university student, in 2023. No connection, no motive, no evidence beyond the notes.

His phone buzzed, shattering the silence. It was his son, William, calling from England.

“Hej, Pappa,” William’s voice was bright, a spark from another world. “Just checking in. It’s the 24th. I know what today is for you.”

Lundström felt a familiar pang, a mixture of pride and loneliness. “Hej, min son. Yes, the day. Another note arrived this morning. Same as the others.”

“Any leads?”

“None. It’s like chasing a ghost.” He looked out at the slick, dark streets. “How’s the thesis going?”

“It’s going. Listen, Pappa, don’t let it consume you. Again.”

Too late, Lundström thought, after hanging up. It already has. He was a man in his mid-fifties, his own life as cold and empty as his minimalist apartment. The job was all he had left, and this case was the one that mocked him, a puzzle with pieces that refused to fit.

His partner, young, energetic Constable Hanna Eklund, burst into his office, her cheeks flushed. “Mats! We’ve got something. A witness. From Ödestugu. An old woman, Elsa Gren. She says she saw a man acting strangely near the willow tree late last night. A man with a limp.”

Lundström was on his feet in an instant, the weariness sloughing off him like an old coat. A limp. That was new. “Let’s go.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

The village of Ödestugu was a postcard of rural Småland, a collection of red-painted cottages and fir trees huddled against the vast, brooding lake. Elsa Gren lived in a house crowded with porcelain figurines and the smell of mothballs.

“He was favouring his right leg,” she said, her voice a thin whisper. “Not old, but not young. He walked with purpose, towards the tree. I thought it was odd, so late, with the weather.”

“Can you describe him?” Lundström asked, his voice gentle.

“He wore a dark coat with the collar up. But he carried a bag. A doctor’s bag, like the old ones.”

At the willow tree, the forensics team found nothing but churned mud. But Lundström’s eyes, trained by decades of disappointment, caught what others missed. A few metres away, half-buried in the wet earth, was a small, brass key. It was tarnished and old-fashioned. It didn’t look like it belonged to a house or a car. It looked like it belonged to a diary, or a chest.

“The limp,” Eklund mused as they drove back. “An injury? A disability?”

“Or an affectation,” Lundström replied, staring at the key in his evidence bag. “A deliberate clue, or a deliberate misdirection.”

Back at the station, the key yielded its secret. It was stamped with a tiny, almost microscopic maker’s mark: A. V. Kronoberg, 1979. A. V. was Anders Vinter, a local locksmith who had retired decades ago. His shop was now a trendy café.

“1979,” Lundström murmured. “What happened in 1979?”

* * * * * * * * * * *

The Växjö archives were a temple of dust and forgotten stories. Lundström and Eklund spent hours sifting through brittle newspapers. And then they found it. September 25th, 1979. A fire. A small farmhouse on the outskirts of Ödestugu. The owner, a reclusive man named Tomas Arvidsson, had perished. The article was brief, the investigation concluded it was a faulty stove. A tragic accident.

But one line caught Lundström’s eye. Tomas Arvidsson was a known loner, but he was a master woodcarver. His specialty? Creating life-sized figures from willow wood. The local children, the article said with a hint of mockery, called them his ‘Willow Men’.

Lundström’s blood ran cold. “It’s not about the tree,” he said to Eklund. “It’s about the artist.”

They tracked down the only surviving relative, a niece named Birgitta, who lived in Kalmar. Over a crackling phone line, she filled in the gaps. “Tomas wasn’t just a woodcarver. He was heartbroken. The love of his life, a woman named Karin, left him for another man. She just vanished one day, leaving only a note. Tomas never recovered. He believed she’d been taken from him.”

“Who was the other man?” Lundström asked.

“I don’t know his name. He was from the village. A… a postman, I think. Yes, a postman.”

Erik Johansson. The first victim. A retired postman.

The pieces, frozen for years, began to shift and grind against each other. The limp. Lundström remembered the old fire report. Tomas Arvidsson had broken his leg escaping a barn fire as a young man. He walked with a slight limp for the rest of his life.

“He’s not kidnapping them,” Lundström realised, a grim certainty settling over him. “He’s punishing them. He’s re-enacting his loss. Karin vanished, so he makes others vanish. ‘One for the past.’ He’s avenging Karin.”

“But who are the others? The librarian? The student?” Eklund asked.

“We need to find out who they were related to. Who their families were in 1979.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

The investigation became a frantic race against a clock they couldn’t see. They discovered that Anette Persson’s mother had been Karin’s best friend, the one who had encouraged her to leave Tomas. Liam Forsberg’s grandfather had been the fire chief who had, perhaps too hastily, declared the 1979 fire an accident.

The pattern was clear. The Willow Man was methodically eliminating anyone he held responsible for his shattered life. But who was he? Tomas Arvidsson was dead.

“A son?” Eklund suggested. “The records show Tomas never married, never had children.”

“A disciple?” Lundström countered, frustration mounting. “Someone who has taken up his cause?”

The brass key was the final piece. It didn’t fit any of the victims’ possessions. Lundström laid it on his desk, staring at it as if demanding it speak. A doctor’s bag. An old locksmith. A fire. A woodcarver.

His phone rang. It was William. “Pappa, I was reading about your case. This key… a doctor’s bag. What if it’s not for medicine? What if it’s for tools? Woodcarving tools?”

The world snapped into a terrifying, crystalline focus. Lundström saw it all. The limp was a performance. The bag held not medical supplies, but the tools of the woodcarver’s trade. And the key… the key was a relic, a token from the past.

He knew where the Willow Man would be. Not at the tree. That was just a stage. He would be at the source. The ruins of the old farm.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The rain had turned to a fine, icy mist as Lundström and Eklund, backed by an armed response unit, moved through the skeletal remains of Tomas Arvidsson’s farm. Behind the charred foundations of the house stood a large, dilapidated barn, its doors padlocked shut.

The brass key fit the lock perfectly.

Lundström pushed the heavy door open. The air inside was thick with the scent of damp earth and fresh-cut wood. In the centre of the barn, under the beam of a single, dangling work light, stood a man. He was of average height and build, his face obscured by shadows. He wore a dark coat and, on the floor beside him, was an old-fashioned doctor’s bag. And he was standing perfectly straight, no sign of a limp.

Around him, arranged in a silent, macabre circle, were three life-sized, exquisitely carved willow figures. The faces were perfect, haunting renditions of Erik, Anette, and Liam.

“Inspector Lundström,” the man said, his voice calm, educated. “I wondered if you would ever find your way here.”

“It’s over,” Lundström said, his hand resting on his service weapon. “Where are they?”

The man smiled, a sad, empty gesture. “Where she is. Gone. But remembered. Perfectly preserved in my art, as she is in my memory.” He gestured to the figures. “They took her from me. They broke him. My father.”

“Your father was Tomas Arvidsson.”

“He was a genius! And they destroyed him. The postman who stole his love. The friend who poisoned her against him. The official who dismissed his tragedy. They created the Willow Man. I am merely… his hands.”

His name was David Lindgren. He was a respected art teacher from Växjö. He had been a young boy when his mother, Karin, had left his father. He had watched his father’s descent into madness and grief, and had secretly learned his craft. After his father’s death, the mission had consumed him.

“The limp?” Lundström asked, playing for time as the tactical team surrounded the barn.

“A tribute,” David said softly. “And a useful way to make people see what they expect to see. The ghost of my father.”

As he was led away in handcuffs, he looked back at his creations. “They are perfect, aren’t they? Just like she was.”

Lundström did not answer. He looked at the hollow eyes of the willow figures and felt not triumph, but a profound and weary sadness.

* * * * * * * * * * *

A week later, the case was closed. The bodies of the victims were found buried in a quiet corner of the woods, each with a small, carved willow token placed in their hands.

Lundström sat in his quiet apartment, a glass of whisky in his hand. He thought of William, of the life that had slipped through his fingers in his pursuit of other people’s ghosts. He had solved the mystery, he had caught the monster, but the taste was ashen. The Willow Man was not a man of flesh and blood, but a spectre of grief, passed from father to son. And as the long Swedish night closed in, Mats Lundström knew that some wounds never truly heal; they just find new, terrible ways to bleed.

END

The Mayor's secret

The ledger was a thing of quiet beauty, its pages filled with the elegant, looping handwriting of Växjö’s long-serving Town Clerk. But the figures told an ugly story. A thousand kronor diverted from the parks maintenance fund. Five thousand from the library’s new acquisitions budget. Smaller amounts from a dozen other, seemingly innocuous, sources. They were drops in the bucket, easily missed, expertly hidden. But over the last eighteen months, the drops had become a steady, secret stream. Someone was bleeding the town dry. And the Clerk, a man named Alvar Berg, knew the only person with both the access and the authority to orchestrate such a theft was the man he had loyally served for twenty years: Mayor Gustav Frisk. Berg closed the ledger, his heart a cold stone in his chest. He would have to act. He didn't know it would be the last decision he would ever make.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The body of Alvar Berg was found floating amongst the reeds of Lake Helgasjön, a stone’s throw from the grand, glass-fronted Växjö Town Hall. It was a crisp Tuesday morning, and the mist was still clinging to the water’s surface like a shroud.

Inspector Mats Lundström stood on the pebbled shore, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his worn trench coat. He watched as the forensics team, efficient and sombre, zipped the Clerk’s water-logged body into a black bag. Lundström was a man in his mid-fifties, his face a roadmap of lines carved by too many late nights and too much bad station coffee. His divorce was five years old, a quiet, Scandinavian affair, and his son, Tomas, was now at university in England, sending him infrequent emails about rugby and the peculiarities of British beer.

“Accident, Mats?” asked his young, earnest partner, Constable Anja Viklund, notebook already in hand.

Lundström grunted, his eyes scanning the scene. The Clerk’s expensive wristwatch was still on his arm. His wallet, though sodden, was in his inside pocket. “Robbery doesn’t seem the motive. He was a fastidious man, Anja. Meticulous. Men like that don’t take evening strolls along slippery shores after a bottle of akvavit.”

“His wife said he’d been troubled lately. Secretive.”

“Troubled by what?” Lundström mused, his gaze drifting from the lake to the imposing modern silhouette of the Town Hall. “That’s the question.”

Their investigation began in the ordered chaos of Alvar Berg’s office. It was there, hidden behind a false panel in a seemingly mundane filing cabinet, that Lundström found the ledger. He spent the afternoon cross-referencing its entries with the official town accounts, his frown deepening with every page.

“It’s brilliant,” he admitted to Anja, rubbing his tired eyes. “He’s been taking tiny amounts from everywhere. You’d never see it unless you were looking for it, and you’d have to be the Town Clerk, or the Mayor, to have the full picture.”

“The Mayor?” Anja’s eyes widened.

“Gustav Frisk,” Lundström said, the name hanging in the air. “The town’s favourite son. The man who brought us the new sports complex and the annual ‘Växjö in Bloom’ festival. It seems his ambitions might be more expensive than we thought.”

Confronting the Mayor was a delicate operation. They met in his sun-drenched office, a room filled with modern art and photographs of Frisk shaking hands with various dignitaries. The Mayor was a handsome man in his late forties, with a politician’s perfect smile and an easy charm.

“Inspector Lundström, a terrible business with poor Alvar,” Frisk said, gesturing for them to sit. “A true tragedy. How can I help?”

Lundström got straight to the point. “We’ve uncovered discrepancies in the town’s finances, sir. Significant ones. It appears funds have been systematically misappropriated.”

Frisk’s smile didn’t falter, but it became fixed, like a mask. “Misappropriated? That’s a very serious allegation. I assure you, our accounts are audited annually.”

“The amounts were too small, too scattered, for any standard audit to catch,” Anja interjected, earning a slight nod of approval from Lundström.

“And you think Alvar…?” Frisk left the question hanging, a masterful piece of misdirection.

“We found a private ledger in his office,” Lundström said, watching the Mayor closely. “It details the diversions. But it doesn’t name a beneficiary. We were hoping you might have some insight.”

For a fraction of a second, a flicker of something cold and hard passed behind Frisk’s eyes. Then it was gone, replaced by statesmanlike concern. “This is shocking. Truly shocking. I’ll open the books to you completely, Inspector. We must get to the bottom of this. For Alvar’s sake, and for the town’s.”

The investigation stalled. The Mayor’s full cooperation proved to be a masterclass in obfuscation. They were buried in paperwork, led down bureaucratic blind alleys. Lundström felt the pressure mounting. The Chief of Police was receiving calls from concerned councillors. The local newspaper, Smålandsposten, was running vague stories about ‘financial irregularities’ at the Town Hall.

Lundström’s only respite was a nightly, stilted video call with Tomas in England.

“Another dead end, Pappa?” Tomas asked, his face pixelated on the screen.

“They’re all dead ends until you find the right one,” Lundström replied, managing a thin smile. “How’s the studying?”

“Tedious. Like your case, by the sound of it.”

“It’s the quiet ones, Tomas. The ones who smile to your face. They’re the most dangerous.”

The break came from an unexpected source. Anja, pursuing a hunch, started looking into the Mayor’s personal life. Frisk was a widower, his wife having died of cancer years earlier. He was seen as a devoted, grieving husband. But Anja discovered a series of large, regular cash withdrawals from Frisk’s personal account, coinciding with the dates of the fund diversions.

“He’s not spending it on himself, Mats,” she said, bursting into Lundström’s office. “Or at least, not in any way we can trace. No new cars, no lavish holidays. It’s just… cash.”

Lundström’s mind, a rusty but relentless machine, began to turn. A secret project. A man like Frisk, charismatic, powerful, but ultimately a small-town mayor… what was his grand ambition? What was worth killing for?

He remembered a throwaway comment from one of the Town Hall secretaries. She’d mentioned the Mayor’s recent, intense interest in the town’s old, disused waterworks facility on the outskirts of the forest.

That night, under the cover of a moonless sky, Lundström and Anja drove to the waterworks. The place was supposed to be derelict, but a dim, generator-powered light glowed from a basement window. The sound of machinery hummed in the still night air.

They moved in quietly, their torches cutting beams through the dusty gloom. The basement had been transformed. It was no longer a decaying municipal facility; it was a state-of-the-art, clandestine distillery. Gleaming copper vats and intricate piping snaked across the concrete floor, filled with a bubbling, pungent liquid.

“Aquavit,” Lundström whispered, the pieces clicking into place. “He’s not siphoning money. He’s siphoning funds to build this. A private, untaxed, immensely profitable brand. ‘The Mayor’s Secret’.”

“A brilliant plan,” a voice echoed from the shadows. Mayor Gustav Frisk stepped into the light, holding a heavy wrench. His charming façade was gone, replaced by the desperate, avaricious gleam of a man with everything to lose. “Alvar discovered it. The fool thought it was beneath the dignity of the office. He was going to expose me. A man of tedious principle.”

“So you killed him,” Lundström said, his voice steady, his hand subtly moving towards his service pistol.

“He fell during an argument at the lake,” Frisk said, his knuckles white on the wrench. “An unfortunate accident. Just like the one that’s about to happen to two nosy police officers who stumbled upon a criminal operation.”

He lunged, not at Lundström, but at Anja. It was a mistake. As he swung the wrench, Lundström moved with a speed that belied his age. He tackled the Mayor, sending them both crashing against a copper vat. The structure groaned, and a scalding stream of fermenting liquor sprayed into the air. The two men wrestled on the wet floor, a chaotic, brutal struggle amidst the spoils of Frisk’s greed. Lundström’s experience won out; he pinned the Mayor down just as Anja snapped the handcuffs onto his wrists.

* * * * * * * * * * *

A week later, the headlines in Smålandsposten were anything but vague. “MAYOR FRISK CHARGED WITH MURDER AND EMBEZZLEMENT.” The town was in shock.

Lundström sat at his desk, the familiar weight of the case file now a closed chapter. He had just finished his report and was contemplating the dregs of his coffee. On his computer screen was an email from Tomas.

‘Sounds like you found the right dead end, Pappa. A secret booze empire. Only in Småland. Well done. Talk soon.’

A small, genuine smile touched Lundström’s lips. The quiet, smiling man had been the most dangerous, just as he’d said. But for now, the ledger was closed, the balance, however precariously, restored. He picked up his coat, the case closed, and the gentle, relentless mystery of Växjö waiting for the next one to begin.

END

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