The thing was clearly home-made. But for what purpose?
He bent down closer to the cylindrical plastic tent and shone his light into it, but all he could see was various hues of dark green and brown. As though it were full of algae or something like that, growing on the inside.
But it was the thing hidden behind the outer layer, behind all that green stuff, that drew his attention, and only at that point did he realize it was moving.
2
EVERYTHING YOU KNOW is wrong…
An impenetrable wall of legs blocked the view in every direction. About twenty people of various ages with shopping trolleys, all staring at him. He pushed himself up into sitting position on the polished stone floor and turned towards the girl’s voice behind him. It was Matilda, his daughter. She was sitting with her legs crossed, regarding him with that new look in her eyes he would never get used to. The one that wasn’t her own and so clearly proved she was no longer herself.
‘What did you say?’ he asked.
Everything you know is wrong…
The brittle voice was coming from her. He could see her lips moving as the words were spoken. But it wasn’t Matilda’s voice – at least, not his Matilda.
‘Fabian, can you hear me?’ Fabian looked up and saw Sonja bending over him. ‘You passed out.’
‘No, Sonja.’ He shook his head. ‘I didn’t pass out.’
She gave him an insistent nod and a smile. ‘Come on, I’ll help you up.’ She managed to pull him to his feet and then turned to the people ogling them. ‘You can stop staring now and go back to doing your shopping. Show’s over.’ The spectators scattered, but out of the corner of his eye he noticed a man in dark clothes sweeping past them on his way to the meat counter, which abruptly made him aware he was at Ica Maxi in Hyllinge.
Sonja took his face in her hands and made him look at her. ‘You and Theodor. You had an argument and were yelling so loudly everyone stopped and stared. I tried to calm you down, but…’ She shook her head. There was no trace left of her earlier serenity. ‘I had no idea he was so strong. You fell and hit your head on the floor and now he’s… Matilda and I, we tried to make him stay, but it was impossible. Do you understand me? And now we have to find him before it’s too late.’ She was on the verge of tears.
‘Sonja, don’t worry.’ He patted her cheek. ‘I’m sure we’ll find him.’
Everything you know is wrong…
He whipped around to glare at Matilda. ‘Is it you saying that over and over again?’
‘Why ask when you already know the answer?’
Greta. The ghost. Was she the one trying to tell him something? Was that what this was all about? He didn’t even believe in ghosts. Or spirits, as Matilda insisted on calling them. And that dark-skinned man over by the meat counter, waiting to be served. Why couldn’t he take his eyes off him? What was the matter with his face?
Suddenly, the man was sprinting towards the counter. Then, in one smooth motion, he put his left hand on the rounded glass case and practically flew over it to the other side, where he snatched up a knife from a cutting board and buried it in the neck of the customer assistant, who Fabian suddenly recognized as Assar Skanås, the man with the beige Sweden Democrats jacket and his jeans pulled up too high.
Skanås screamed with pain, while doing his best to stem the blood flow with one hand and fend off his attacker with the other. But the blood was pumping out of his carotid artery with such force that everything within a ten-foot radius was splattered. And the attacker kept stabbing and stabbing as though he was never going to stop.
Fabian had never seen anything so savage. And yet it felt oddly familiar. Like an echo of something much worse.
Everything you know is wrong…
And that brittle girl’s voice. Why couldn’t she just leave him alone? Matilda was the one who had asked for and received that cryptic answer during her séance. Or… Had it been meant for him? Was that why it was playing on a loop?
‘No, please, don’t go.’ Sonja tried to hold him back. ‘We have to look for Theodor. You, me and Matilda, together. Otherwise we’ll never find him.’
But he’d already pulled free of her grasp and was on his way towards the blood-soaked meat counter, where Skanås was now collapsing onto the floor.
‘Goddammit, you have to listen to me,’ Sonja was screaming behind him. ‘Our son’s missing and we have to find him before it’s too late!’
It was up to him to apprehend the perpetrator, he could feel it. There was no one else. No superior. No team. Just him.
Scrambling over the glass display case, he slipped in the widening pool of blood around Skanås, who was lying lifeless on the floor with a meat fork stuck in his face.
There was blood absolutely everywhere. On his hands, clothes, face. He could taste the sweet, sticky iron on his tongue. But other than the door to the staff area, still swinging slowly back and forth, there was no sign of the attacker.
Everything you know is wrong…
He hurried after him and abruptly found himself in a laundry room. The killer was standing at the far end, next to a big yellow washing machine, bending down to push one of the buttons.
‘Hey!’ he shouted, reaching inside his jacket to pull his gun out of its holster. ‘Get down on the floor! Face down, arms out!’
But there was no gun. Or even a holster. And the man was on his way out through a heavy metal door. He ran after him, but the door slammed shut just as he reached it and no amount of banging or pulling could get it to open again.
Panting, bloody and dripping sweat, he turned to the row of washing machines and walked over to the yellow one, which had just started a programme and was filling with water.
Everything you know is wrong…
He bent down and looked through the glass door, straight into the spinning, almost mesmerizing dark.
It was only when a hand smacked against the glass in front of him that he realized there was someone in the washing machine. Someone desperately struggling to get out as the drum kept spinning. First one way, then the other.
In an attempt to stop the programme, he pushed all the buttons, and when that didn’t work, he started punching them. But the drum kept spinning while it filled with water and the hand was banging ever more desperately on the inside of the glass door.
He followed the thick power cable from the back of the machine to an outlet with a switch. But even after he turned the outlet off, he could hear the drum continuing to fill with water and spin.
Overcome with despair, he sank to the floor next to the glass door and peered into the dark, rotating hell on the other side, unable to help.
Everything you know is wrong…
Even when he realized it was Theodor’s face pressed against the glass, he remained unable to save him. His own son. There he was, fighting for his life while the spinning drum kept pushing his head under the water, again and again.
Theodor screamed. Fabian screamed, too, at the top of his lungs. And yet the only sound was the sloshing water and the drum rotating faster and faster until Theodor’s screaming face became a blurred smudge.
*
Fabian opened his eyes and found himself staring at the ceiling light that the house’s previous owner, Otto Paladynski, had left behind and which was still hanging in their bedroom even though neither he nor Sonja liked it.
It had been a dream, he told himself. A nightmare. In real life, things were better than they had been in years. With Sonja lying naked next to him in bed, Swing Party Killer Eric Jacobsén under arrest and the boarding cards that knocked the bottom out of Ingvar Molander’s Berlin alibi safely hidden away, it would be greedy to wish for more.
Even Theodor had come to his senses and decided to head across the sound that very afternoon to report to the Danish police, tell the truth and offer to testify in the ongoing trial of the Smiley Gang.
Nonetheless, he could feel his heart pounding like a galloping horse in his chest. Like the onset of a panic atta
ck that at any moment might trick his brain into thinking he was unable to breathe and about to die.
Was it because of the dream? Because it had been a dream, hadn’t it? It had certainly been strange and twisted enough that he’d suspected as much long before he even woke up. But no, it wasn’t the dream itself that had scared him, he realized now. It was what it was trying to tell him that had set his adrenaline pumping.
He got out of bed, quietly so as not to wake Sonja, hurried out into the hallway and threw open the door to Theodor’s bedroom. To his immense relief, Theodor was in his bed. His beloved son, who was breathing heavily and didn’t even stir when he gently kissed his forehead and tucked him in. Proof positive that Matilda, that Greta person and his entire dream had been wrong. No one in their family was going to die.
Or maybe the dream hadn’t been about Theodor at all?
He tried to recall what had happened in it and eventually concluded the dream had got almost everything wrong. In reality, the victim behind the meat counter had been Lennart Andersson and not the paedophile Assar Skanås. He was under arrest for the murder of Moonif Ganem. Moonif, not Theodor.
Nothing had been right. Absolutely nothing.
Which was exactly what that brittle girl’s voice coming out of Matilda’s mouth had kept repeating.
Everything you know is wrong…
And now, he finally understood why.
3
IT WAS ONLY quarter to six in the morning when Fabian entered the conference room on the top floor of the Helsingborg Police Headquarters. In a few hours, the whole team would be there to hear what Klippan had to report about the CCTV footage from Ica Maxi from the week leading up to the murder of Lennart Andersson. He’d spent the past few days going through it, and they were all hoping he’d found something that could lead to a breakthrough in the investigation, which had so far come up short in terms of both suspects and strong leads.
But that wasn’t why Fabian was there. In fact, he was trying to avoid the others. Whatever his general opinion was on the subconscious and dreams, there was no denying his most recent one had put a finger on a feeling he’d been doing his best to dismiss for some time, and the jam-packed whiteboard walls were the only company he needed right now.
He studied them closely until he felt assured everything was still there. Even though two of the investigations were more or less closed, the walls remained filled with pictures of victims, crime scenes and perpetrators. Lists of potential motives jostled for space with notes and ideas, some crossed out and others circled, and everywhere arrows of various colours, tying everything together.
From close up, it was possible to make out various reasonably logical trains of thought. But from a distance, it resembled nothing so much as utter chaos, which in hindsight seemed the perfect illustration of how their work had progressed over the past few weeks.
But then, they’d been dealing with three major investigations simultaneously. Three parallel murder investigations that seemed to have nothing at all in common. Three fundamentally different worlds, each with victims and suspects, clues to be followed up on, crime scenes to be analysed, theories to be examined from every angle, dismissed and reintroduced.
He had no idea how many interviews they’d conducted in the past week or how many CCTV tapes they’d scrutinized. But it was a very large number, and even though there were things they’d missed, they had, by and large, conducted each investigation by the book, and in the end they’d arrested two perpetrators who were going to be convicted and sentenced.
But in all honesty, as far as motives went, they’d been groping in the dark, and much as it hurt to admit it, they still were.
As the brittle girl’s voice in his dream had kept telling him, everything they knew was wrong.
There could be no doubt broadband entrepreneur Eric Jacobsén was guilty of installing hidden cameras in various women’s homes, or that Molly Wessman’s had been one of them. It was also abundantly clear that, disguised as his alter ego Columbus, he’d had sex with Wessman and tattooed his symbol between her legs. He had admitted as much. But when it came to him poisoning her with ricin, they had neither proof nor explanation. Much less a viable motive.
The same was true of Assar Skanås. No one was questioning the fact he was a paedophile who would have given all the fingers on his left hand to complete his rape of six-year-old Ester Landgren in peace. But paedophilia alone didn’t come close to explaining why he would have forced Syrian boy Moonif Ganem into a large washing machine and centrifuged him to death.
It was the same with Lennart Andersson. Maybe the meeting Klippan had called would change things, but so far they’d been unable to come up with a plausible explanation for why anyone would stab him to death in front of a crowd of witnesses in Ica Maxi.
Since the three murders had taken place within a few days of each other, they’d searched far and wide for a motive that could connect the investigations, a common denominator.
When that had failed, they’d moved on to looking for three separate motives. They’d considered everything from xenophobia to sex addiction, turning each theory over and over to try to make it fit with known facts.
Motive, motive, motive. It was what their discussions had revolved around. It was as though the motive was the key that would unlock all the other mysteries. If they could just find it, the perpetrator would be within their grasp.
Fabian pulled out a chair, sat down in front of the whiteboard walls and began to formulate a thought he would have preferred to dismiss. A thought that ran counter to everything he and his colleagues believed in. Counter to their hard-earned experience as detectives. But the longer he stared at the chaos of pictures and notes, the more obvious it became.
A while later, the chaos in front of him was gone, as though it had never existed. Suddenly, it was all so clear. The geography and time frame, for one thing. Everything had taken place in the north-west corner of Skåne during a relatively short time period. What he saw in front of him now was something else entirely.
The similarities hidden in the dissimilarity.
Each murder had been so spectacular and different from the other two that maybe the common denominator should be sought in the extreme differences. The thought was mind-boggling, but after another minute or two, Fabian felt he was beginning to make out the pattern they’d been looking for.
‘Well, what do you know. Hard at work already, eh?’ That was Klippan, entering the room with a coffee urn in one hand and a laptop in the other. ‘You’re early.’ He put the urn down. ‘It’s only just gone twenty past six.’
Fabian shrugged. ‘You know what summer mornings are like.’ He couldn’t tell him yet. Not yet. ‘The light woke me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep.’
Klippan nodded, but his eyes, darting from the whiteboard wall to Fabian and back again, revealed he was less than convinced. ‘So you decided to come in and have a sit-down in here of all places. Interesting.’
‘I had nothing better to do.’ He needed more time to think and, above all, to come up with a better story than that his daughter had held a séance in his basement and summoned a spirit, which had then wormed its way into his dreams and made him see things clearly. ‘And you? I didn’t know you were such an early bird.’
‘Then you don’t know me at all. Unlike Berit, I wake up earlier and earlier. Once she gets up on the weekends, I’m ready to go back to bed. I guess that’s why we’re still married.’ Klippan laughed and opened his laptop. ‘But today, I just wanted to make sure I was here on time and that the technology’s up and running before our morning meeting.’
‘Right, you’ve been going through the CCTV footage.’
Klippan nodded. ‘And I’ve found some interesting things, if I do say so myself. But more on that when everyone’s here. Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing instead?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Fabian. You’re sitting there staring at the investigations, two of which are practically wrapped
up.’
‘But not the third one. We don’t even have a suspect for that.’
Klippan sighed and shook his head. ‘Fine, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t—’ Before he could finish, his mobile started to vibrate. He looked at it and frowned. ‘Yes, this is Klippan… Sverker Holm, that’s right.’
It wasn’t the terse exchange that followed that made it clear to Fabian something serious had happened.
‘Okay… Right… We’re on our way.’
It was how quickly the colour drained from Klippan’s face.
4
IT WASN’T THE first time Fabian had smelled the sweet, sickly odour of decay, far from it. During his first few years as a police officer in Stockholm, he’d regularly responded to calls from people who had reacted to corpse stench in their stairwells, particularly in the summer. In this case, it was remarkable how faint the smell was. Particularly considering that most signs pointed to Evert Jonsson having lain undiscovered for over a month.
That it was the hottest time of the year only compounded the mystery. The stench should have been overwhelming enough to make the neighbours notice and call the police two weeks ago at the latest. Instead, it had taken until today, and the reason hadn’t been the smell but a letter from the local power company addressed to Evert Jonsson that one of his neighbours had found on her doormat when she went to fetch the morning paper.
If I were you, I’d check on Mr Jonsson next door, someone had scrawled across the envelope. And after that, I might possibly pick up the phone and call the police.
The reason the smell was so faint became obvious the moment he and Klippan stepped into the living room and saw the six-and-a-half-foot-long, cylindrical plastic cocoon in the middle of the room.
Klippan stopped halfway into the room and seemed incapable of doing anything other than shake his head. Fabian walked the last few steps over to the dark green plastic tent alone and squatted down to try to see what was in it. But although the sun had climbed high enough by then to shine straight in through the window, he couldn’t see through the plastic.
X Ways to Die Page 2