‘Okay.’ Klippan took the keys the locksmith held out to him and waited until he’d left before turning to Lilja, who was going through the contents of the fridge.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Lilja said as she pulled out the vegetable drawer. ‘But we’re right. I know we’re right. He’s our guy. I mean, look. Guacamole, pickled herring, a pound of mince, a few organic tomatoes and a pesticide-infused cucumber.’ She turned to Klippan. ‘That’s pretty much exactly what he purchased in the surveillance video you showed us.’
‘Irene—’
‘The only thing missing is the taco shells, and I bet they’re here somewhere, freshly painted black.’
‘Irene, I’m not saying we got it wrong. But the thing is, he’s not here. So I suggest we look around and see if we come across anything of interest. If not, all we can do is wait until Molander has time to come out here.’
‘But if he’s not here…’ – Lilja pulled out her phone and dialled a number – ‘…then how do you explain the door being locked from the inside?’
‘I don’t know.’ Klippan spread his hands. ‘Hopefully Molander can think of an explanation. Who are you calling?’
Lilja put her phone on speaker and held it up.
‘You’ve reached Ingvar Molander of the Helsingborg Police Forensic Department. Please leave a message after the beep.’
She ended the call with a sigh. ‘He never picks up any more.’
‘I guess he has his hands full, like the rest of us.’
‘Doing what exactly? He started on Ester Landgren’s room more than three hours ago, and unless he’s found anything particularly riveting, he should at least be able to answer his phone.’
‘I’m sure there’s a good reason.’ Klippan turned around and walked over to the sofa. ‘Let’s have a look around instead and take it from there. Okay?’
Lilja didn’t move. She wasn’t ready to let her guard down. Not yet. Things had unfolded too quickly. It hadn’t even taken them ten minutes to conclude Milwokh wasn’t in his flat, even though there was no obvious explanation for how he could have got out.
After a while, she walked over to the bedroom, where the walls were, surprisingly, not all black, but rather covered with a greyish-blue 1960s’ wallpaper. Clearly this was the only room he hadn’t had time to redecorate to look like the ninth circle of hell.
Apart from a small nightstand, a wardrobe and a men’s valet over by the window, the neatly made bed took up most of the room. Bedrooms didn’t have to be spacious, of course, but this one was unusually tiny. She would panic if she barely had room to walk around her bed.
Suddenly, her uneasiness returned. She could feel it all over. Spreading from the pit of her stomach. As though she’d come too close for her own good. As though she’d be able to hear him breathing, if she could just be still enough. If her heart could just beat slower.
She looked down at her Dr. Martens, almost invisible against the black floor. It was a silly notion, of course. The arrest team had searched the room.
Even so, she was unable to shake the idea that maybe they’d been rushed and overlooked something. That he was hiding under the bed. That any moment, hands might grab her ankles and pull her feet out from under her.
He’d be on top of her before she could so much as cry out. Her pulse, her damn pulse was drowning out all other sounds when she finally got down on her knees and slowly bent down to check under the bed.
It was dark and she couldn’t see all the way to the wall, but once she got her phone out and turned on the flashlight, she could plainly see there was no one there. But she didn’t feel relieved. Where was Milwokh? He couldn’t have just disappeared like some Houdini.
She stuck her arm as far under the bed as she could reach and dragged a finger across the floor. Not so much as a speck of dust. He hadn’t just cleaned. He had scrubbed and scoured the entire flat clean of every last hair. There probably wasn’t a fingerprint to be found in here, and the toothbrush in the bathroom was probably completely devoid of DNA.
She stood up and heaved a sigh. The only place left to check was the wardrobe on the left side of the room. But it was the same as the bed. Why couldn’t she just trust that the arrest team had done their job?
Clutching her gun in one hand, she closed the other around the small door knob and opened the wardrobe. What had she expected? That he would be sitting in there behind the clothes as though they were playing hide and seek?
There were hangers with clothes in the wardrobe. But only a handful. As a matter of fact, it looked remarkably empty. And there were no baskets of socks and underwear, only a single rail at the top.
Without a clear idea of what she was looking for, she pushed the hangers to one side and turned the flashlight on her phone back on.
‘Irene! Where are you?’ Klippan called out.
‘In here! In the bedroom!’
‘I think I’ve figured out how he got out! Come and have a look!’
Lilja turned the light off and went back out to Klippan, who was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, waving for her to join him.
‘There’s a balcony out here.’
‘I know, and I already checked it. The door was locked from the inside.’
‘The balcony door, yes. But not the window.’ Klippan pointed to the window next to the door. ‘See? It’s closed, sure, but not latched.’ He pushed the frame with his index finger and it opened. ‘Once he was on the balcony, he probably just pushed it closed as best he could and climbed down the drainpipe, one balcony at a time. Even I could pull that off, if I were a few pounds lighter.’
The window latches, that was what she’d missed. That meant he was still on the loose. Even so, she felt a measure of relief.
‘Maybe he saw us through the window when we drove up,’ Klippan said, and she nodded.
At least the puzzle pieces fitted together again. This wasn’t some supernatural being they were hunting, it was a flesh-and-blood human who was subject to the same natural laws as them.
*
Lilja’s and Klippan’s voices grew increasingly muffled further away from the kitchen. From the bedroom, they sounded like a distant murmur, the words impossible to distinguish.
The wardrobe door stood open, like Lilja had left it, and the handful of hangers were still pushed to one side, exposing the back and the small round hole just big enough for a person to stick their finger in, reach the narrow metal plate above the hole and push it aside to open what was in reality a secret door.
There, on the other side of the hole, behind double layers of soundproofing materials and a closed blackout blind keeping the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights from seeping out, was a windowless space of a few square feet.
On the floor lay a packed backpack. Next to it stood a desk with a computer, a notebook with a big X on the cover and a round board with an inch-high rim covered in green felt. A map of Skåne was pinned to the wall, divided into a twelve-by-twelve grid of squares, a few of which had been marked with tiny symbols.
The wall opposite was almost entirely hidden behind a built-in bookcase. Some of its shelves were empty, others were littered with everything from a large collection of dice and syringes to a severed ponytail and a dark-skinned, photorealistic mask.
Underneath the bookcase, on a narrow cot, lay Pontus Milwokh, waiting, completely still with his eyes open and his sword resting on his chest.
23
THE BYPASS TOOL slid into the letter box unhindered and he managed to catch the thumb turn on the inside on the second attempt. Then he just had to turn it, open the door and enter.
There was no way of knowing for sure, but something told him this might be his very last hurrah. That what had started as a rash overreaction, and then slowly but surely evolved into a severe addiction, was irrevocably coming to an end.
The flat looked as expected. Two rooms, bathroom and kitchen. Most of the rooms could have done with a renovation. Ikea furniture, a bookcase with no books in i
t and a few Tarantino posters on the walls. A TV with a video game console, a pair of hand weights and a rolled-up yoga mat.
That was exactly why it was so important to get everything right. Not just superficially and generally, but down to the smallest detail. His plan was complex and full of steps that could go wrong. But if he pulled it off, it would not only provide release for all the pent-up energy raging inside him – it had been over two months, after all – he would also free himself of all suspicion. Not even Risk would think to look his way.
The fuse box was located in the hallway, and though the fuses were unmarked, finding the one for the bathroom didn’t take long.
The reason was that he didn’t really have time to do this. Even though night had fallen, he had so many things to get to it was virtually impossible to plan and execute something of this magnitude, and in a way, this made him immune to suspicion.
After unscrewing the fuse and replacing it with his own modified one, he went over to the kitchen and searched the cupboards and pantry until he found what he was looking for.
As far as choosing his victim was concerned, he’d imposed only one criterion, that they were sufficiently different from Moonif, Molly and all the rest of them to fit the pattern; and after searching various databases, he’d identified the perfect candidate.
The bucket was one-third full. He poured half of the powder into the sink, rinsed it out and mixed in his own. Then he snapped the lid back on and put the bucket back on the bottom shelf of the pantry.
Mattias Larsson of Tryckerigatan 27B. The address was in Planteringen – a forgotten neighbourhood in south Helsingborg surrounded by motorways and adjacent to the South Harbour, an industrial port. The flat was on the second floor of a square brick house with recessed balconies.
There was no outlet by the basin in the bathroom, so he had to run a cable from the light socket in the ceiling all the way down behind the bath.
Mattias Larsson was a twenty-seven-year-old plumber. He hadn’t been able to find an active Facebook profile, and hadn’t had the time to try to worm his way in through friend requests anyway. It had to happen today, or, rather, tonight.
He stripped the last six feet of cable and removed the insulation at the end of the brown and blue wires. Then he secured one with sturdy tape a few inches from the foot of the bath and the other at the same height at the head.
Luckily, he’d been able to find Mattias Larsson on Instagram. Even better, he had a public profile where he was in the habit of posting an endless series of pathetic workout selfies. If Instagram was to be believed, he put his poor body through the wringer practically every day, and on Tuesday nights it was all about legs.
Grounding the bath was slightly more complicated because the floor was covered in dark green vinyl and the pipe leading down into the floor drain was plastic. He had no other choice than to connect the yellow and green wire to the ground of the light socket and tape the other end to the bottom of the bath.
After sealing the bath’s overflow drain with silicone, he just had to mix the two-component glue, fasten the metal loop to the bottom of the bath and test how far he had to turn the tap to make approximately three litres per minute come out. Then he could sit down on the none-too-clean floor and wait.
On this particular night, Mattias Larsson had plans to take his girlfriend, Hanna Brahe, out to dinner to celebrate the third anniversary of their engagement. At least, if the girlfriend, who seemed to live at the gym and also had a public Instagram account, was to be believed.
He didn’t have to wait long on the bathroom floor. After only six and a half minutes, he heard a key turn in the front door lock, followed by the sound of the door opening and a second later closing again and being locked.
Mattias Larsson had come home a full twenty minutes earlier than expected. Perhaps he wanted extra time to prepare for his date. Or maybe he hadn’t been able to complete his leg session. It didn’t matter. He was ready for him.
At least he had come home alone. There were no voices, only a thud as his gym bag hit the floor and a hummed, off-key rendition of the summer hit ‘Somebody that I used to know’.
The first time he’d heard it on the radio, he’d liked it. Remarkable in itself, since he didn’t usually like any music written after the eighteenth century. But after hearing it just a few more times, he’d been so sick of it, the guitar intro alone was enough to ruin his mood.
But not this time. This time the humming, which came through louder and louder as Mattias Larsson moved further into the flat, filled him with pure joy.
It sounded like he’d stopped outside the open bathroom door. But he didn’t come in. Instead, judging by the sound, he pulled off his gym clothes in the hallway and tossed them onto the bathroom floor. Even his smelly underwear came off.
But apparently not his headphones, because the humming continued as he moved into the kitchen, where the door to the pantry creaked open and the bucket of protein powder from the bottom shelf was picked up and put down on the kitchen counter.
Only then did he stop humming. He was probably reacting to the fact that he was almost out of powder. But he must have concluded that he was misremembering, because soon enough the humming resumed and there were sounds of a bottle being filled with water and shaken. Then he flipped the lid up with a click and drank so loudly even the swallowing could be heard in the bathroom.
After that, it wasn’t long before he heard the sound of the bottle hitting the floor, followed seconds later by the sound of the muscular, 190-pound body collapsing.
24
FABIAN WAS BACK in the abyss. In the deep darkness, where it made no difference if he closed or opened his eyes. There was no light anywhere. True, he’d managed to get hold of Tuvesson, who had promised to contact a good lawyer, but that was all. Now, the only thing he could hope for was that Theodor had just been temporarily out of sorts after his first twenty-four hours behind bars and that somehow it would all work out and be behind them before he knew it.
He could only guess at how Sonja was feeling. The silence between them had been unbroken during their return journey across the sound. When they got back, he’d asked if she was okay with him going back to work, and she’d replied that he could do whatever he needed to silence his doubts.
As usual, she understood him better than he understood himself. No matter how fervently he wished it weren’t so, work was all that could take his mind off things enough to make the anxiety subside.
But right now, being at work was like dancing through a minefield; every step could be fatal. With the GPS tracker under his car, he risked drawing Molander’s suspicion regardless of what he got up to. Suspicion that would hardly be dispelled when he noticed his car had been parked outside his home on Pålsjögatan for almost two hours before he visited Theodor in prison.
Molander had already prodded him with insinuations about how absent he’d been from their investigations, and he wasn’t entirely wrong. His own secret investigation was now in such an intense phase he found it to be virtually impossible to sit across from Molander in meetings and pretend that nothing was going on.
But he had to pretend. Pretend that his focus was on the case they were all working on and that everything was right with the team.
That was why he parked his car on Kärngränden, outside the building where the Landgrens lived, took the stairs up and entered the flat, even though it was half past eight at night.
It could have been anyone’s home. A completely unremarkable home, characterized primarily by that inescapable chaos that accompanies all families with young children. A home where the children were finally asleep in their beds after toothbrushing, toilet visits and stories. Where parents were cleaning up after dinner so they could then curl up on the sofa with a cup of tea and watch the news.
But the plastic sheets covering the hallway floor all the way to the door where colourful wooden letters spelled out the name Ester revealed that this wasn’t a home like any other.
; According to Tuvesson, the parents were not in a fit state to be interviewed and it was doubtful whether there was any reason to put them through it. The perpetrator had already been identified and now it was all about securing forensic evidence to tie him to the scene.
But that was the easy part. How they were supposed to figure out where he was going to strike next, before it was once again too late, was a lot harder.
When he reached the closed bedroom door, he paused to compose himself for a few seconds before opening it, ready to face Molander and return his gaze unflinchingly.
The problem was that there was no sign of Molander in the slightly untidy room.
‘Hi, where’s Molander?’ he asked the two forensic assistants in white protective suits, who were collecting samples and taking pictures.
‘Good question. Definitely not here, though,’ one of them said, using tweezers to drop a hair into a small evidence bag.
‘Okay. Did he just leave?’
‘No, I wouldn’t say that. He took off more or less straight after we got here this afternoon. Right, Fredde?’ The assistant turned to his colleague, who was taking pictures of the unmade bed where there was a dried-in ring on the sheet.
‘Yes, he said something about needing to get back to the lab to sort out something, and that we should get started without him.’
‘Okay.’ It wasn’t like Molander to hand over an entire crime scene investigation to his assistants, but he supposed there was a lot of forensic stuff to get on with. ‘So, have you found anything?’
‘I guess. The usual.’ The assistant placed the evidence bag in a carrying case. ‘Some fingerprints and hairs of various descriptions. But I can’t tell you if they’re relevant until we’ve had them analysed.’
‘And do you have a working theory for how it happened?’
‘Not beyond the fact that he must have drowned her, and he could have used practically anything to do that. But my guess is that he did it here, at the edge of the bed. If you look closely, there’s a round indentation here.’ He squatted down and turned his torch on the rug. ‘I think it’s from some kind of basin or bowl he filled with water.’
X Ways to Die Page 12