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