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