She continued.
“Did you touch your wife’s neck that night?”
Matthias looked up.
“No.”
“Did you hold her down?”
“No.”
“Did you cause her death?”
His eyes remained on hers.
“No.”
Helena watched him for several seconds.
Then she closed her notebook.
A client’s denial was not evidence of innocence.
She knew that.
But something about the way Matthias had answered unsettled her expectations.
He did not offer elaborate explanations.
He did not attack the police.
He did not blame Annika.
When Helena asked whether he understood how serious the evidence appeared, he nodded.
“Yes.”
“Then why do you think I can help you?”
Matthias looked at her.
“Because I need somebody who won’t decide what happened before the evidence is examined.”
Helena held his gaze.
It was an excellent answer.
She would later wonder how long he’d spent preparing it.
Annika Lindholm had been buried before Helena accepted the case.
Her funeral took place in a church near the water, attended by relatives, colleagues, architects, artists, and people who knew her through the charities she supported.
Helena watched a recording of the memorial weeks later.
Annika’s younger sister, Ingrid, stood at the lectern reading a letter.
She was thirty-five, with dark hair and a resemblance to Annika around the eyes.
Halfway through, she stopped.
Her hands trembled against the paper.
She spoke about her sister’s kindness, stubbornness, and habit of making plans no one else knew about until they were already underway.
Then she mentioned that Annika had been preparing to leave her marriage.
The camera shifted uneasily.
Ingrid looked toward the front pew.
“She was frightened,” she said.
Her voice broke.
“She told me she was frightened.”
The recording ended afterwards shortly
Helena sat in her office looking at the frozen screen.
The statement troubled her.
Fear was important.
But fear could have many causes.
A frightened woman might be afraid of her husband.
She might also fear divorce, public humiliation, financial uncertainty, or something unrelated to the marriage.
The law required more than emotional inference.
Helena wrote the word fear in her notebook.
Then underlined it.
She did not yet understand that she would spend much of the following year trying to explain that word away.
The first months of the defence were methodical.
Helena assembled a small team.
Erik supervised legal strategy.
A junior lawyer, Freja Lund, organised disclosure and witness statements.
An independent forensic physician reviewed the medical findings.
A digital specialist examined the available communications and device records within the permissions granted to the defence.
Their task was not to establish an alternative story at any cost.
It was to test the prosecution’s case.
Several questions emerged.
The timing of death was less precise than early police summaries suggested.
The medical findings established compression of the neck but did not determine the exact circumstances in which it occurred.
There were inconsistencies between the emergency call and the first officer’s written notes.
And a camera covering one service entrance to the property had malfunctioned during part of the relevant evening.
None of these facts proved Matthias innocent.
But together they complicated the prosecution’s apparently straightforward narrative.
Helena worked hard.
She visited the property.
Reviewed architectural plans.
Spoke with experts.
Spent evenings reconstructing the known timeline across sheets of paper spread over the conference table.
Matthias remained in detention while the case progressed.
She met him regularly.
At first, their conversations were confined to evidence.
Then they began discussing Annika.
He described her work.
The buildings she loved.
Their travels.
The house they had renovated together.
Sometimes he seemed affectionate.
Other times resentful.
Helena found herself noticing the contradictions and interpreting them as signs of grief.
In one interview, Matthias described Annika’s habit of leaving books open facedown.
“It drove me mad,” he said.
Helena smiled despite herself.
“My daughter does that.”
Matthias looked up.
“You have a daughter?”
“Sixteen.”
“Does she live with you?”
“Half the time.”
He nodded.
Then, after a moment, he asked whether she was close to her.
Helena glanced at her notebook.
“That’s not relevant.”
“Of course.”
He looked down.
A few seconds later, he said quietly, “I didn’t mean to intrude.”
Helena watched him.
She had expected the question to irritate her.
Instead, she found herself thinking about Sofia.
That evening, she went home before seven.
Her daughter looked surprised.
They made dinner together.
Helena considered telling her about the client who had reminded her to leave work.
She decided against it.
By February, newspapers had begun calling Matthias the Winter House Murderer.
The name came from a photograph of the Lindholm residence under snow, taken by a tabloid photographer shortly after the arrest.
Helena despised the phrase.
It transformed a woman into a setting and a defendant into a character.
Yet she knew the public’s appetite for such stories would influence the atmosphere surrounding the proceedings, even if it could not properly determine the evidence.
At a press conference, a journalist asked why she had agreed to represent a man whose wife had allegedly feared him.
Helena replied that allegations, even serious and emotionally compelling ones, still required proof.
The clip circulated widely.
Some viewers praised her.
