‘I’m not sure I follow?’ Fabian raised his free hand to pre-empt an outburst from Stubbs, who looked ready to erupt. ‘Right about what?’
‘You didn’t hear about the ship?’
‘What ship?’
‘Blimey. I just assumed those things were relayed to you guys.’
‘What things?’ Fabian could tell his body was about to flood with adrenaline.
‘I don’t know if you noticed last night, but a freight ship by the name of MS Vinterland was passing through Öresund while you were out on your caper with the boys.’
‘Yes, I remember it well.’ He could sense where the conversation was headed and started walking back towards his car. ‘It actually passed us close enough that it blocked the rubber dinghy from view for several minutes.’
‘Fabian!’ Stubbs called after him. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’
‘I’ll explain in the car,’ he called back. ‘Come on, hurry up. There’s no time!’
‘It’s not really our job to keep an eye on things that far north. But we couldn’t understand why it suddenly veered off course a few hours later, turning sharply eastwards. So, we hailed them but had no response.’
Stubbs hadn’t moved from under the oak tree when Fabian reached his car and opened the driver-side door. But then she finally relented and hurried over.
‘They didn’t respond until several hours later. Or, to be more precise, fifteen minutes ago.’
47
THE DRIVE UP to Halmstad should have taken at least an hour, but Fabian pulled up at the Central Station to drop off Stubbs, who was taking the train back to Helsingborg, no more than forty-five minutes after they left the car park on Skaragatan. Even so, a voice inside him was screaming that he could drive as fast as he pleased. It was too late anyway.
In his heart of hearts, he’d never truly believed Milwokh had drowned. But he certainly hadn’t expected him to get on board a freight ship and force them to change their course.
Just a few hours ago, this was exactly what he’d been hoping for. For Milwokh still to be alive to answer questions. But now that those answers had to be weighed against the risk of additional murders, he would have infinitely preferred a dead perpetrator and a million unanswered questions.
He’d tried to reach Frank Käpp on the Hallberg-Rassy several times on the way up, but to no avail. Meanwhile, he’d filled Stubbs in on the events of the night before, when Molander had threatened to destroy the forensic evidence against Milwokh if he was arrested before the case was brought to a close.
After going back and forth for a while, they’d agreed to hold off on the arrest until the evidence was safe. Which made finding it their number one priority.
‘Okay, I’ll be in touch when I’ve had a closer look at that map I found in Elvin’s boat,’ Stubbs said as she climbed out of the car. ‘If we’re lucky, it’ll turn out to be Molander’s place. If we’re even luckier, it’s where he’s hidden the evidence, and, if we’re really shooting the moon, you might even pick up the next time I call.’
She slammed the door shut and hurried off towards her train.
Fabian pulled back out and pushed on towards Slottsbron in central Halmstad. At a red light, he tried Frank Käpp again, but was once again redirected to his voicemail, where his happy voice suggested texting instead of leaving a message.
In the best of worlds, Frank had kept his promise and turned his phone off because they were in the middle of a therapy session. Or he might have forgotten to turn it back on when they were done and going for a walk or maybe even indulging in a glass of wine at one of Halmstad’s many restaurants.
He arrived at the marina, which at first glance looked considerably smaller and easier to navigate than the Råå Marina. Granted, it was relatively busy, but it shouldn’t take him much more than thirty, forty minutes to search the entire area.
‘What’s this then?’ someone said behind him as he was locking the car. ‘You can’t park here.’
Fabian turned around and saw an older man with a crutch, dungarees and a captain’s hat emblazoned with the Halmstad Marina logo. ‘No? It was the only free spot I could find.’
‘Is that right.’ The man, who was clearly the harbourmaster, tugged on his captain’s hat. ‘That’s the kind of information I file under U for useless knowledge.’
‘If there’s somewhere I can pay, I’d be more than happy to.’ Fabian walked over to the man and pulled out his wallet. He didn’t have time for this; he needed to get out on the piers as quickly as possible. ‘How much do you want? I won’t be longer than an hour, tops.’
‘It’s free, and as far as I’m concerned, you can park there all day. So long as you’re disabled, that it.’
‘This is disabled parking?’
‘Bingo.’ The man brightened. ‘Everyone around here knows that, and from what I can see, you don’t have so much as a blister on your foot.’
Fabian looked around, but the only sign he could see was a clearly handmade P.
‘Yes, I know, the wheelchair symbol has come off,’ the man continued. ‘It was painted with environmentally friendly bottom paint and that stuff doesn’t hold up too well.’
‘I see. Well, then I can inform you that it’s a crime to post home-made parking signs and tamper with municipal parking bays.’ Fabian held out his police ID.
‘So you’re police?’
He nodded. ‘But don’t worry, I’m not here to—’
‘You know, it’s only since I had to start using this,’ the man broke in, waving his crutch around. ‘It gets crowded here – on a bad day, I have to park all the way over by the crane. And that won’t do, not with my hip. The only thing it’s good for these days is predicting the weather. Speaking of which, we have a low-pressure area coming in in a few hours.’
Fabian looked up at the sun, which looked unthreatened in a cloudless sky. ‘I’m actually looking for a boat. A Hallberg-Rassy in a guest slip.’
‘Hallberg-Rassy?’
Fabian nodded.
‘One of the bigger models?’
Fabian nodded again.
‘It’s in slip 128.’
‘So it’s here?’
‘Came in this morning. A couple with a child.’
‘A son of about ten?’
The harbour master brightened and nodded.
He had no trouble locating the boat off one of the four jetties extending out into the harbour. Unlike the first time he’d seen the Hallberg-Rassy at the Råå Marina, it was now berthed with its bow pointing in towards the jetty. Other than that, it looked, as far as he could recall, much the same.
The genoa was wrapped around the forestay, the sheets had been detached and the mainsail was meticulously folded up and covered, exactly how it should be. Everything was in its place, neat and tidy. As if last night’s attack had never happened.
Fabian got up on tiptoe to try to see if there was anyone in the cockpit, but the dodger blocked most of it from view.
He grabbed the bow line, pulled the boat closer and tapped his keys against the pulpit. It made almost no sound to his ear, but he knew the metallic clanging would spread through the hull, like when you hit a radiator in a block of flats.
There was no reaction.
He stepped on board and continued sternward along the teak deck to the cockpit. It, too, was neat and tidy. The doors to the saloon and the aft cabin were both locked, and he knocked on them mostly for the sake of having done it.
When he’d been told Milwokh had seized control of the freighter and forced it to turn east, he’d assumed he was going after the Käpp family. But maybe he’d simply wanted to use one of their lifeboats to get back to shore so he could lick his wounds and let the dice choose a new victim in due course.
That was pure speculation, however, and his best option at the moment was to have a seat, wait for the Käpps to turn up and make sure they were safe until Milwokh could be apprehended.
But that turned out to be easier said than done. Jus
t sitting there doing nothing was virtually unbearable. The silence and the slow lapping of the waves against the bow quickly got under Fabian’s skin and the calm he’d felt on finding the boat was being replaced by a creeping sense of unease.
Maybe they weren’t sipping wine and enjoying the lovely weather. Maybe they’d never got as far as contacting a therapist to set up an appointment.
He stood up and started going through the many compartments in the cockpit. Mostly to have something to do. But when he found a key at the bottom of one of the winch holders, he couldn’t stop himself from unlocking the door to the aft cabin, opening it and sticking his head in. Inside, he saw a rolled-up sleeping bag below a shelf filled with books and comics. On the opposite wall was a flat-screen TV and on a shelf next to it, a PlayStation.
But no ten-year-old boy. Or any trace of a sword fight. He left the aft cabin and moved on to the saloon instead, where he was struck by how much roomier it was than he’d expected. The galley looked like it had everything you might need and the ceiling cleared his head by at least a foot.
The saloon was tidy as well. Almost too tidy. Granted, everything needed to be put away on board a boat, but the Käpp family hadn’t struck him as neat freaks. Quite the opposite, actually.
The door to the forepeak was closed, and on his way over to it, it suddenly occurred to Fabian that he should probably take out his gun and remove the safety before continuing past the dining table and corner sofa. Once he reached the door, he pressed his ear against it and was greeted by that imploding silence he disliked so heartily. At length, he slowly put his hand on the handle and threw the door open.
The forepeak was empty.
Empty and very tidy.
And suddenly, it hit him like a ton of bricks. The realization that the inner voice that had been screaming itself hoarse had been right all along.
That he was too late.
Pontus Milwokh had got there first using the lifeboat he took from the MS Vinterland. He’d carried out the dice’s orders and then cleaned the boat until there wasn’t so much as a fingerprint left.
But what had he done with the bodies? Thrown them overboard, or had he… Fabian looked down at the carpet underneath his tattered red Converse and after putting the gun back in its holster, he bent down, grabbed hold of an edge and pulled the carpet aside.
The varnished wood sole underneath the carpet was the very picture of craftsmanship at its best. Nothing had been left to chance, and even though it was a shame to cover it with cheap carpet, Fabian could understand why a person would want to protect the wood from wear and tear.
But he was more interested in the three hatches leading down to the bilge, which was bound to be unexpectedly roomy as well.
He had just put his index finger through the flush hatch pull when his phone rang.
‘How are you getting on?’ asked Tuvesson.
‘To be honest, I’m not sure.’
‘Have you found them?’
‘Not yet.’ He looked down at the closed hatch. ‘But I did find their boat.’
‘And?’
‘Too soon to say, but I fear the worst.’
‘Okay. Let’s hope you’re wrong. The reason I’m calling is that Molander has just completed a triangulation for Frank Käpp’s phone, and from what we can see, he’s nowhere near—’
The thud above his head was so loud even Tuvesson heard it.
‘What was that?’
‘Someone has come on board. I’ll call you back.’ He ended the call and turned towards the companionway as the footsteps above moved sternward.
‘What the fuck? Look,’ exclaimed a voice, and then a man stepped down into the cockpit and blocked out all the light. A man he’d never seen before. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he demanded, staring at Fabian. ‘And what the hell are you doing on my boat?’
And with that, everything fell into place.
48
WHEN LILJA MET the Wikholms for the first time that spring, her focus had been on Soni Wikholm, and she had primarily gone through boxes with her name on them. But she’d looked in the one box marked Hao as well, and reacted to the large number of dice in it. If only she’d known then what lay ahead.
Now she opened the box again, on the floor of her office at the station, and there it was. The rectangular wooden box filled with dice of every shape and colour. There were regular Yahtzee dice of white plastic. There were wooden dice with gold pips and transparent red casino dice. There were dice with strange symbols and as many as twenty sides.
Dice she hadn’t even known existed.
The box also contained a plastic Death Star, a collection of knives and two hardback books and two DVDs with stamped library lending cards from the Påarp Library in plastic pockets on their inside covers.
She’d decided never to read American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. She’d heard it was far more gruesome than the film, which had been slightly too much for her. The films Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive were both by David Lynch, and like many others of her generation, she’d gone through a Lynch phase. But she hadn’t managed to get through either of those two because she’d found them too weird.
She had, however, read Luke Reinhart’s The Dice Man and unless she misremembered, she owned both a Swedish and an English version.
At the bottom of the box, she found a photo album with faded pictures of Milwokh and his sister as children, running around the garden, building Lego models and playing Monopoly. But towards the end, the pictures changed, and even though Milwokh didn’t look older than eleven or twelve, he seemed to have entered the difficult teenage period, with eyeliner and a perpetual frown on his face.
Between the last two pages of the album was an old envelope from PhotoQuick. She opened it and took out a stack of photographs, all taken during the same visit to Tivoli in Copenhagen.
Pontus Milwokh didn’t look older than eight or nine and was in virtually every picture. He’d taken most of them himself in front of various rides. But for some of them he must have asked for help because they were taken from a distance and he was waving at the camera.
There was no sign of his parents or sister in any of the pictures. He could have gone with a distant relative or friend, of course. But after studying the pictures down to the last detail, two, then three times, Lilja had to conclude that it did in fact look like he’d been there by himself.
Given his young age, that was odd. Even knowing his parents, it was strange. But he certainly didn’t look upset.
On the contrary, his eyes were so full of joy and happiness it was almost impossible to comprehend that he had turned into such a monster.
49
THE HOT-BULB ENGINE was much too large and so loud a person could have been excused for thinking they were on a mid-sized fishing vessel rather than a small, open wooden skiff. But the harbourmaster needed no persuasion to explain at very great length why his do-it-yourself contraption was ingenious.
Within minutes, Fabian had tuned him out, moved to the bow, far from both the engine and the harbourmaster, and was using the headset of his phone as makeshift ear buds. What he wanted was silence. But since not playing anything through the headphones meant anything but silence, he’d turned on Brian Eno’s ambience album Thursday Afternoon, which helped create a space for his thoughts in the calm before what lay ahead.
It was only once they reached the open sea that he realized he’d been feeling that way all week. That everything around him was just the calm before the storm, before the abyss opened up in front of him. As though nothing made any real difference because everything was already preordained.
It was a feeling that went against his nature and everything he believed, and he would have preferred to pour all his energy into the complete opposite. Into thinking that of course it’s possible to effect change and make a difference. That was exactly what he’d been trying to make Theodor understand. But he hadn’t got through, and now he didn’t know if he even believed it himself any more.
Once he’d managed to calm down the alarmed family and explain why he’d broken into their yacht, he’d gone to find the harbourmaster to ask him if he knew anyone who would be willing to take him out in their boat immediately. The man had once more warned him of the low pressure that, according to his hip, was about to roll in, but had in the end offered to take him in his own skiff.
With Laholm Bay on their port side, they were moving south towards Hallands Väderö outside the Bjäre peninsula. Visibility could only be described as middling, and there was virtually no wind. Even so, the boat was pitching in waves left over from the previous day’s blustery weather, which, although they were evenly spaced and smooth as mirrors, were also long and deep. In other words, it was a day made to cause seasickness, but Fabian was so focused on analysing what he could see through the binoculars as he scanned the vague horizon that he didn’t notice. Here and there, he saw the occasional freighter, the size of a matchbox. From time to time, a motorboat whisked past in stark contrast with the yachts that bobbed about, waiting for the evening breeze to pick up, like scattered crumbs on a vast, billowing tablecloth.
The area Molander had identified was based on just two masts. One in Torekov and the other on Hallands Väderö, which, with a maximum elevation of thirty feet, was almost invisible in the thickening haze. It was an impossibly large area, and with the deteriorating visibility, time was an important factor.
The maximum speed of the little skiff was six knots, which meant they were easily outstripped by any boat running by engine. Yachts with their sails up, on the other hand, were no challenge. But those weren’t the ones Fabian was interested in; he was studying the ones lying still, their sails down.
A part of him was hoping they’d be forced to turn back to Halmstad with their errand unfinished. That Tuvesson would call and tell him Molander had just identified a new location further north. That the phone was still moving because Frank Käpp had broken his promise and was pushing on towards Gothenburg as originally planned.
X Ways to Die Page 26