X Ways to Die

by Stefan Ahnhem

  Individually, each dice was just as likely to roll a three as a one or a six, of course. But put together it was something else entirely. The probability of all of them coming up six in one throw was negligible. Winning the jackpot at a casino was considerably more likely than rolling twenty sixes. And yet, that was what he’d done.

  He still couldn’t quite believe it, but there they were, twenty sixes that together made 120, which ordered him to do the last of the additional tasks. A task he’d never thought he’d get to perform. A task more complex and challenging than all the ones he’d already done put together. A dream scenario that was too good to be true, and to make sure he wasn’t about to wake up and realize it was all a dream, he pinched his arm so hard he drew blood.

  Persuaded that he was, indeed, fully awake, he went over to the shelves and took down the notebook with a big X on the cover. Then he sat back down and turned to task 120, and a shudder went through him the moment he laid eyes on the header, written in all caps.

  FORGET EVERYTHING

  Time, place, victim, weapon and method.

  Forget everything. This is a task like no other.

  54

  THE PRINTER FINALLY whirred to life. Stubbs, who was already in a foul mood, could only hope it wouldn’t take as long to print a page as it had taken to start up. One thing she really didn’t enjoy was waiting. Sluggish printers that refused to connect to her computer were another.

  A third one, since she was on a roll now, was musicals. She’d never been able to understand why actors should suddenly break into mediocre song and attempt to dance. And the songs were hardly ever good enough. No, if she wanted to see a film, she went to the cinema or watched TV. If she felt like listening to music, she put on a record. Mixing the two was like mixing ketchup and trivets.

  Rocket wasn’t a favourite of hers either. She honestly couldn’t fathom how something as bad and foul-tasting as rocket could still be in vogue. It had come out of nowhere, and suddenly every little café with pretensions had to put rocket in everything. In their burgers, on their sandwiches and, of course, in all their salads. For a while, she’d felt like she couldn’t even order a cup of coffee without it being garnished with that unappetizing weed.

  But working late was unquestionably number one on the list of things she never wanted to have to endure, and yet here she was, doing just that for the second night in a row. That had soured her mood more than anything, and as she waited for the printer, she mused that Mona-Jill was in fact directly to blame for introducing all of those evils into her life that night.

  Her plan had been to scan the map she’d found in Elvin’s boat using the multifunction printer, immediately after dinner. But when she’d discovered the meatballs on her plate were full of finely chopped rocket, she’d asked Mona-Jill how she could possibly have forgotten that the diabolical little leaves were definitely not her thing.

  During the discussion that followed, it turned out Mona-Jill hadn’t forgotten. On the contrary, she’d deliberately chopped up the spiky abominations and mixed them into the mince in an attempt to trick her into realizing how tasty rocket actually was. At that point, the fight had been unavoidable, and she’d said a number of things she’d wanted to take back and for which she’d apologized as soon as the dust had settled.

  But the mood had still been tense when they cleared the table after dinner and when Mona-Jill had suggested they watch Mamma Mia! – because it was a feel-good film that made people happy – she’d felt too guilty to say no. After all, Mona-Jill had opened up her home to her, not the other way around.

  Two hideous hours later, she’d finally been able to lay a blanket over Mona-Jill, who had fallen asleep on the sofa, and sit down in front of her computer to try to get the bloody printer started. She preferred not to think about how much time she’d lost. But at least the map had been scanned and was filling the screen in front of her.

  That it was a plot of land had been clear from the first. The question was where it was located. There were no names or property details to guide her. The only hint was a handful of numbers on the various buildings and Elvin’s virtually indecipherable notes. But she wasn’t going to give up until she’d zoomed in and scrutinized every millimetre as though it were a melanoma.

  Whether the plot was in any way connected to Molander was anyone’s guess. But why else would Elvin have been interested in it? A search of the Property Register had only returned one hit – for his house in Ramlösa – and repeating the search with Gertrud’s name hadn’t returned any hits at all, so whoever was listed as the owner, it wasn’t Molander.

  It was a very unusual plot of land, that much she could tell. A number of blue patches indicated some kind of water reservoirs. Or maybe ponds, which was peculiar in itself, and judging from the rectangular shapes, they seemed man-made, to boot. As though they were part of a water treatment plant, or maybe some kind of fishery…

  She had an idea and to check that she’d remembered correctly, she took out the set of keys Fabian had given her. It contained seven keys, and on one of the two marked with white tape, there was a hand-drawn fish. Maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe she was on to something.

  A blue line meandered along the bottom of the map. It was probably some kind of river or stream, and according to the map it formed the southern boundary of the property. A red four-lane road ran along the top of the map, cut through in the upper right corner by a grey and white line that looked like railroad tracks.

  The plot was, in other words, bordered by a stream, train tracks and a motorway. There must be a thousand plots of land of that description, and she could spend the rest of her professional life searching for the right one without any guarantee she’d ever find it.

  Her only chance was to make some educated guesses. Like, for example, that it was in Skåne. Molander was a dyed-in-the-wool Scanian and had even, as a young man, talked about Skåne seceding from Sweden.

  There were quite a lot of streams and rivers in Skåne, Kävlinge and Helge rivers being the major ones. But if it was in the vicinity of Helsingborg, it had to be Rå river. It was eighteen and a half miles long and emptied into the Råå Marina.

  She went to Google Maps, zoomed in on Rå river and started following it as it wound its way east through Skåne.

  She had always felt that Stockholm, with its archipelago of thousands of islands, was by far the most beautiful part of Sweden, and she probably still did. But north-west Skåne was a close…

  She sat up with a start, her eyes fixed on a number of green patches on Google’s satellite image. It would have been easy to dismiss them as vegetation and keep scrolling east. But the rectangular green formations had caught her eye, and when she zoomed in, she could clearly see that they were, indeed, ponds. Algae green, overgrown ponds near enough identical to the ones marked in blue on Elvin’s map.

  What’s more, they were located on a plot of land that, according to Google Maps, was wedged in between a four-lane motorway by the name of Rausvägen, Rå river and the tracks of the local commuter train.

  55

  LILJA PUSHED HER feet into her well-worn Birkenstocks, slipped on a pair of leather gloves, opened her front door and walked over to Pontus Milwokh’s flat, determined to get to the bottom of why her bedroom was so much larger than his.

  She put the key the locksmith had given her into the lock, turned it and entered, and after finding the light switch, she closed the front door and continued into the living room. Molander and his men were supposed to have been here and done their thing two days ago. But the black backpack and the hockey bag in the middle of the floor revealed they weren’t done yet.

  It was probably the assistants who had left some of their equipment. It certainly wasn’t Molander, since he always carried those aluminium cases with cut-out compartments no one under any circumstances could so much as look at. He would never leave them lying around, not even for one night.

  She continued through the room to the closed bedroom door, opened
it and turned on the overhead light. Everything looked exactly like before. Maybe they hadn’t even started the examination of the bedroom, which would explain why Molander hadn’t reacted to the discrepancy in its size.

  She’d measured her own bedroom to be eighteen feet across from the window to the wall facing the hallway and bathroom. In this room, the outer wall was at most three feet from the foot of the bed, which meant the difference was no less than eight feet.

  She walked over to the wall shared with her own bedroom and continued around the bed to the small nightstand in the corner. There, she turned on her phone flashlight and studied the corner and inner wall by the head of the bed.

  Molander had taught her that if a wall had been added as an afterthought, any telltale signs were most likely to be found along the edges and in the corners. It could be anything from an unintended gap letting light through to inconsistent moulding.

  But that wasn’t the case here. As far as she could tell, it was the same dirty-white skirting board all the way around. The same was true of the classic dark-blue wallpaper, which overlapped in the corner. In other words, there was nothing to suggest the wall was not original.

  The last trick Molander had taught her was to listen. She tapped the wall in a few different spots. Granted, it didn’t sound the same as the wall facing her bedroom. But that was probably mostly because it wasn’t load-bearing. Regardless, it sounded solid and not remotely jerry-built.

  She dismissed her phone’s low-battery warning and turned the flashlight onto the nightstand. But that didn’t seem to be hiding any secrets, either, so she moved on to the wardrobe wedged between the bed and the other wall.

  She’d started to examine it the last time she’d been here but had been interrupted by Klippan. Now, she opened it again and noted that everything looked the same as before. The sparse hangers with a jacket, a pair of trousers and two shirts. No more, no less. It was exceptionally ascetic and probably an indication that Milwokh kept his clothes elsewhere.

  She pushed the hangers aside, leaned in and started to look around in the light from her phone. Again, it was the edges that normally gave things away. Unfortunately, her phone gave up and turned off, and since she herself blocked most of the output from the ceiling light, it was too dark to make anything out. She took off one of her leather gloves and ran her fingers along the side of the back of the wardrobe.

  There was a gap there, all the way up one of the sides. But that could be innocuous. The backs of the Ikea wardrobes she and Hampus had put together in Perstorp had been like that. The flimsy panels that were supposed to be secured with tiny nails all the way round had kept coming loose again and again.

  She tried pushing on the back, but it didn’t budge. Not even when she put her back into it did it give so much as a millimetre. No, it definitely felt a lot more solid than their Ikea crap. Hampus’s Ikea crap.

  In the middle of the back panel, at approximately waist height, she discovered a round hole about an inch or so across. She wondered why it was there and couldn’t recall if the wardrobes in Perstorp had had the same kind of hole. Maybe it was to aid assembly or intended for power cords for lights.

  To make sure she didn’t overlook anything, she stepped into the wardrobe, bent down and put her eye to the hole. But the only thing she could see was an impenetrable darkness, which was exactly what one would expect to see behind a wardrobe. Even so, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right.

  But a feeling wasn’t enough. She needed something concrete. Something to back up the feeling. And until she found that something, she was stuck. In the end, she saw no alternative to giving up, stepping back out of the wardrobe and leaving the bedroom. Thinking she might have moved too fast, she decided to start over and went back to the hallway, where she stopped and looked around.

  Apart from the front door, there were two doors, both closed. One led to the bathroom, which was an exact mirror copy of her own with a bath, basin and toilet. She knocked on the wall that was shared with the bedroom. It sounded more solid that the one in the bedroom.

  Stepping back out into the hallway, she opened the other door, which in her flat led to a small storage room she’d crammed full of removal boxes. Milwokh, on the other hand, had divided the space into two separate areas.

  One half housed a collection of tools that would make the most inveterate power-tool geek cry for joy. Saws, drills and electric screwdrivers were jostling for space with toolboxes, bottles of glue and screws of every conceivable size. There was even a powerful nail gun in there, as well as pieces of timber of various lengths and some other sundries. As they had surmised after seeing his purchase history at Bauhaus, Milwokh had clearly built something. But what, and more importantly, where?

  The other half of the space served as a walk-in closet, apart from the vacuum cleaner and mop in one corner. Behind a curtain were neatly folded trousers and sweaters on shelves, a long row of shirts, sorted by colour, and drawers full of socks and underwear.

  From what she could tell, the space was the same size as her own, which only fuelled her suspicions. She managed to start her phone back up and squeezed the last drop out of the battery by illuminating the back wall, which was adjacent to the bedroom. But she couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary here either, so when her phone finally gave up, she tried knocking on it in a few places, only to realize she was no longer able to tell if it was any different from the other walls.

  But it absolutely couldn’t be the same wall as the one in the bedroom; they were too dissimilar. So she went back to the living room, took out her measuring tape and measured the distance to the outer wall. Ten feet. That looked consistent with the location of the inner wall in the bedroom and left eight feet between it and the hallway and walk-in closet unaccounted for.

  Eight feet that had been erased from the bedroom. She’d sensed it from the moment she stepped into the tiny room. But it was only now it dawned on her that she’d been right all along.

  There was another room in the flat. That much was beyond doubt now. A room that had been so carefully concealed that neither she herself, nor Molander and his team had managed to find anything that even resembled a way in.

  She returned to the walk-in closet to examine it more closely. But hard as she tried, she couldn’t find anything to suggest there was a way through the back. She was probably just too tired. She should go home and sleep on it and make sure to get Molander over as early as possible tomorrow.

  She decided to do just that, so she stepped out of the closet and was continuing into the bedroom to turn out the lights when the pieces suddenly fell into place and made her freeze mid-step.

  The walk-in closet wasn’t the problem, it was the wardrobe.

  Its mere presence was odd. In a bedroom so cramped it was hard to move about without bumping into things. And the fact that it contained only a handful of items of clothing made it even more suspicious. The wardrobe was not meant for clothes storage. It served a completely different purpose.

  The back panel was the key. It had to be. At first, she’d figured the solid feeling she’d had when she pushed it had meant everything was in order. But in fact, the opposite was true.

  She opened the wardrobe door again, climbed in, located the hole and inserted her index finger. To her surprise, it didn’t find a wall but only empty air. The wardrobe looked like it was flush against the wall. She inserted her middle finger instead to extend her reach.

  She felt around the hole on the other side of the back panel, first down each side and then underneath, without discovering anything of interest. It was only when she reached up as far as her finger would go that she discovered something made of metal, something she was able to push to the left after a few failed attempts.

  There was a faint click and then the back of the wardrobe slid open. With her hands held out in front of her, she walked straight into the dense darkness, and with the sound of her own breathing echoing in her ears, she fumbled along the walls f
or some kind of light switch.

  When she found it, the tiny space was suddenly bathed in such bright light she had to close her eyes.

  56

  IT HADN’T TURNED out too badly, the voice in Fabian’s mind told him as he climbed the stepladder in the middle of the living room and started examining the brass chandelier and its eight arms. If anything, it had gone rather well. As well as he could have hoped, if not better.

  That Theodor had talked to him and even hugged him back had to be considered positive. True, he’d cried and not been himself. But that was hardly surprising given where he was and what he’d been through. Hopefully it would be over soon.

  Maybe he’d gone too far when he promised everything would turn out all right. But what was he supposed to do? If anything, the outcome was less certain than ever. Especially after the assault. Why would they believe him over the others once he stepped into the witness box?

  Was that why he had a headache? His head normally never hurt. As a matter of fact, his whole body felt achy and uncomfortable, as though it didn’t belong to him. Maybe it was the price he paid for not going for a run or hitting the gym for weeks.

  But he hadn’t had the peace of mind to pull on his shorts and head out into Pålsjö Forest. And right now, he had to locate and remove the cameras Molander had installed around his house. At least that was easier now he’d seen the camera angles.

  The bathroom, bedroom and hallway were already done. As was the basement, the upstairs landing and the kitchen, where the camera had turned out to be hidden in the wall clock, of all places. In the children’s rooms they’d been inserted into cacti Molander must have rigged and brought with him. Sonja was currently in the studio, busy preparing for her performance piece tomorrow and not to be disturbed under any circumstances, so he was leaving that camera up for now.