“And you’re going to follow their advice?” Hampus raised his eyebrows, clearly unconvinced.
“Right now I can’t put in the kind of training necessary to defend my title,” Embla said with a sigh.
Göran swilled down the last of his toast and marmalade with a big gulp of coffee. “No title is worth permanent brain damage. You’re the reigning Nordic light welterweight champion. You have nothing to prove.”
She knew he was right, but it still hurt. She was training almost as regularly as before, but she had to be a lot more careful. It was frustrating.
Time to change the subject. She found it hard to discuss her uncertain future in the world of boxing. She decided to bring up something that had occurred to her as she lay awake the previous night.
“I’ve been thinking about Ted Andersson and David Hagen. It seems likely that Hagen was the guy who was waiting inside the bar, and who then went with Ted and Johannes to Breidablick. He’s lived in Strömstad, so he and Ted could well be old friends. Maybe he knows Johannes, too. What if we contact Oslo, see if Ted’s popped up in any of their investigations in the past? Something narcotics-related, probably, even if it’s been a few years since he did anything like that around here.”
Göran frowned, weighing what she’d said. The two men had both grown up in Strömstad and now spent a lot of their time in Oslo, so a connection wasn’t too much of a stretch. And it could well be worth checking out what Ted might have been up to across the border in Norway.
“Great idea,” he said.
“Absolutely,” Hampus agreed. “It’s difficult to get a handle on Ted; one minute he’s the heartbroken, grieving daddy, the next he’s going crazy, accusing Kristoffer and Johannes and yelling at us.”
“I’ll call Oslo later. I know it’s Sunday, but there ought to be someone there who can help,” Göran said.
Hampus’s cell phone pinged. He picked it up and quickly read what was on the screen. A huge smile spread across his face, and he punched the air.
“Yes! I got it!”
For the first time since the three of them were reunited almost a week ago, he looked really happy.
“What did you get?” Embla asked.
“The apartment—my bid was the highest.”
“Congratulations—where is it?”
“Just over a mile from the house. It’ll be perfect for us.”
Göran and Embla were puzzled. It was Göran who asked the question.
“Us? Are you moving in with a new partner?”
“What? No, no—Filippa and I will be co-parenting. She and the girls will carry on living in the house, and the kids will come and stay with me every other week. It’s a two-bedroom apartment.”
It sounded like a good arrangement from the children’s point of view; there wouldn’t be any problem with preschool or their friends.
They cleared the breakfast table, ready to start work. The sky had begun to brighten; it had stopped raining, and the sea rolled slowly toward the shore. The gulls were circling down by the jetty. In her mind, Embla saw a thin body in a pale-blue summer dress, carried by the waves. So cold. So horribly cold.
“Daydreaming?”
Göran’s voice brought her back to reality. She gave him a little smile to show she was definitely in the moment, then she ran upstairs to get ready for another trip to the hospital.
Eva was sitting in the green armchair by the window, reading the morning paper. She peered at them over the top of her glasses when they walked in; when she saw who it was, she smiled and stood up to greet them. Kristoffer was resting on the bed, his iPhone earbuds firmly in place. For the first time he wasn’t wearing pajamas, but clothing supplied by the hospital for its patients. It wasn’t particularly flattering, but it was still a sign that he was feeling better.
“As you can see, we’re making progress!” Eva said cheerfully.
Kristoffer glanced at them with his one visible eye, but quickly looked away. At least he’d noticed their arrival, which meant he’d emerged from his bubble. Embla went and stood at the foot of the bed.
“Hi, Kristoffer! How are you feeling today?”
She tried in vain to catch his eye, but she was beginning to understand that this wasn’t necessarily a bad sign. It was just the way he handled encounters with other people.
“Better,” he muttered.
The pins and wires holding his broken jaw in place made it difficult for him to talk, but at least he removed his earbuds. The faint sound of Wilson Pickett’s version of “Mustang Sally” seeped out into the room. Embla recognized the music and felt the need to show off, but admitted it was because her friend Tobias in Dalsland was also a fan of rockabilly, and often played it on his car stereo. On the subject of cars, she mentioned that she was having some problems with her 1990 Volvo 245. Could he possibly take a look at it for her when he was back at work? Something resembling a faint smile passed across Kristoffer’s face as he nodded.
Cautiously, Embla broached the key question, the real reason for their visit.
“Kristoffer, have you had any more thoughts about the battery-powered candle that forensics found in a toolbox in the trunk of . . . was it a Pontiac?”
“Plymouth Fury.”
“Okay, a Plymouth Fury. Do you have any idea how the candle could have ended up there?”
He met her gaze for a second, then immediately looked away. She realized he had tears in his eyes. Eva noticed, too, and handed him a tissue without a word. He blew his nose, then slowly and laboriously began to speak.
“Amelie . . . was . . .”
Embla held her breath. What was he trying to say? He wiped his nose with his shirtsleeve and tried again.
“Dad . . . ran over . . . Amelie.”
“Kristoffer, what are you saying? Olof ran over the child?”
Eva stared at him, and her hand flew to her mouth as her expression shifted from pure horror to certainty.
Kristoffer’s only response was a nod.
“What makes you think your father ran over Amelie?” Embla asked.
Somehow Kristoffer managed to tell his story. With a lot of help from Eva, who seemed to understand him almost intuitively, he explained what he had realized when he first heard about the discovery of the candle. It took quite some time, but the course of events was finally clear.
Around fifteen minutes after Kristoffer arrived home, Olof drove into the yard. He’d stuck his head into the kitchen, where Kristoffer was eating a sandwich and drinking a glass of milk. The boy immediately noticed that his father was drunk and very agitated. Olof had told him he’d had a few things to take care of in Strömstad, so he’d decided he might as well test-drive a 1967 Buick Electra that was in for repair. On the way home he’d hit a deer; the windshield had been damaged and one of the headlights was broken. He’d asked Kristoffer to carry out the repairs as quickly as possible. Kristoffer was about to fix the starter motor on a ’68 Pontiac Firebird that was due to be collected the next day, so he promised to deal with the Buick as soon as he was finished with the Pontiac. Olof had gotten angry at first, but after a while he’d conceded that his son was right; the Pontiac had to be ready for the following day. Kristoffer had repeated his promise that the Buick would be his next job, and Olof had left the house. Kristoffer had gone to the bathroom, and while he was in there, he’d heard the sound of a car starting up and driving away. He was worried, because he knew Olof was far from sober.
When he went out to the workshop, he saw that the Plymouth Fury was missing—the car in which Amelie’s candle was later found.
The Plymouth was due for a respray, but it wasn’t urgent. The owner was on an extended vacation in Thailand, and they’d agreed that the car would be ready by the beginning of March.
Needless to say, Kristoffer wondered why his father had taken the Plymouth rather than his own Mercedes, but couldn
’t come up with a sensible explanation.
Olof was gone for exactly one and a half hours. When he returned he didn’t go straight into the workshop to join Kristoffer and his friends, which he usually did. He came in a while later to say hi to Anton and Gabriel, and said he was off to the Lions’ Christmas party.
The following day Kristoffer had been questioned about Amelie’s disappearance. Before the interview Olof had made it clear that he and his lawyer would do the talking; all Kristoffer had to do was nod and agree with whatever they said. Even at that point Kristoffer had thought his father was behaving strangely, but he assumed that he and Charlotta Stark knew how to handle a conversation with the police.
So when Olof stated that he’d been in the workshop with his son from the time he got home until he went to get ready for the party, Kristoffer had simply done as he’d been told, and agreed.
Kristoffer had spent the Christmas holiday fixing the Buick’s damaged windshield. The workshop had a well-stocked store of original parts imported directly from the United States, and fortunately there was a suitable replacement. The broken windshield was removed and thrown in a dumpster outside the workshop.
A truck came along on the first Thursday of each month to take away the dumpster and replace it with an empty one. However, because of the Christmas and New Year’s break, the company responsible had skipped the January collection, and the truck wasn’t due until the beginning of February.
Kristoffer turned his head and looked out the window as he whispered, “The windshield’s . . . still in there.”
He and Olof had worked together on the final repairs before the Buick was resprayed its original color, a pale bluish-green. The owner had been delighted when he picked up the car on Saturday—the day before the fire. He was one of the witnesses—along with Olof, Eva, Anton, and Gabriel—who’d provided Kristoffer with an alibi for the time of Viggo’s disappearance.
“Lucky he came then. Otherwise people would have thought . . . I took the little boy,” Kristoffer said with difficulty.
When he found out that Amelie’s candle had been found in the Plymouth, the pieces began to fall into place. His father hadn’t hit a deer; it must have been Amelie, running along the dark road. Olof had been too drunk to see her.
“Dad’s . . . dead. I want . . . the parents . . . to know.”
Kristoffer’s gaze was fixed on his tearful aunt.
“Why do you think the candle ended up in the toolbox?” Hampus asked gently.
Back to the key question. Kristoffer’s eye darted from side to side before he answered.
“Dad must have found it after . . . after he . . .”
He couldn’t go on, and Eva stepped in.
“You mean after he’d hidden Amelie somewhere.”
He nodded and continued in a monotone, “No time . . . Christmas party. Panicked . . . hid it . . . in the toolbox. Must have meant . . . to get rid of it . . . forgot . . .”
Could Olof have forgotten? Very likely, Embla thought. He’d been under extreme stress, plus he was in the middle of one of his drinking bouts.
Both Amelie’s cell phone and the candle must have fallen out in the trunk of the Plymouth, but he hadn’t noticed until after he’d hidden the body. He probably got mad when her phone kept ringing, which was why he threw it into the recycling container.
These were all hypotheses based on circumstantial evidence and guesswork; they would never be able to prove what had actually happened.
By this time Kristoffer was exhausted. His eyelid flickered, and within a minute or so he was fast asleep. Embla and Hampus signaled to Eva to come with them. They left the room quietly, nodded to the officers on duty outside the door, and moved over to the area by the elevators. It wasn’t the ideal place for a chat, but luckily no one was around to overhear them.
Eva spoke first.
“I’m devastated, but I think Kristoffer’s drawn the right conclusion.”
“It does sound credible, but we’ll need to check out a few things,” Embla said.
The elevator stopped on their floor and the doors slid open. They fell silent, waiting to see who would appear. A porter pushing a whey-faced elderly man in a wheelchair emerged and headed down the corridor.
Embla turned back to Eva. “Where do you think Olof could have hidden Amelie?”
Eva shook her head, frowning as she thought hard. After a moment she stiffened, and the look she gave Embla was hard to interpret.
“Kristoffer is good with time. If he says Olof was gone for an hour and a half, then that’s exactly right. Which means he didn’t go very far. Could he have hidden her out at Sandgrav?”
Embla called Göran as soon as they left the hospital. He sounded cheerful, and she could hear voices and the clinking of crockery in the background.
“Hi—Paula and I are having coffee in that place where you met the two boys yesterday. It’s great, and the cakes—”
She couldn’t listen to any of that. “Kristoffer talked,” she said, cutting him off. “We might have a breakthrough in Amelie’s case.”
That shut him up. He didn’t interrupt once as she summarized what Kristoffer had told them.
“I’ll see you at Breidablick,” Göran said when she was done. “That dumpster needs to be emptied with great care. There’s no point trying to get the CSIs over from Trollhättan today for a windshield that might possibly be of interest, but I want it in the lab in Gothenburg as soon as possible. I’ll take it down there myself.”
Before they drove back toward Strömstad, they stopped at a fast-food outlet. Hampus ordered the special, while Embla opted for a veggie burger—something she regretted after the first bite. Admittedly sawdust wasn’t meat, but forming it into a circular patty and calling it a veggie burger had to be a false declaration under some government ruling. The bread and salad were edible, however, and she washed them down with a can of mineral water. Hampus was much happier with his lunch: in less than fifteen minutes he’d put away a large Coke, mashed potatoes, and two hot dogs with all the fixings. Anyone who didn’t know him couldn’t possibly imagine how much he ate based on his gangly body. That guy must have worms, Embla thought sourly. She was still hungry.
The sun was low in the sky by the time they reached Breidablick. It was trying to peep through the clouds, but with little success. Even if it did manage to break through, it wouldn’t have long left to shine.
Göran and Paula had already arrived. They were sitting in the little white car, chatting and laughing away. When Paula saw the Volvo, she tried to adopt a more professional expression, but her sparkling eyes and flushed cheeks betrayed her. The contented look on Göran’s face gave him away, too. There’s definitely something going on between those two, Embla thought. Then again, it was nowhere near as weird as her liaison with Nadir. Neither Göran nor Paula were in a relationship. They were mature individuals who knew what they were getting into. All she could do was cross her fingers and wish them luck.
As soon as they got out of the cars, Göran started issuing directives: on with protective overalls, hairnets, gloves, and shoe covers. Embla thought the face mask was a little over the top, but Göran was very firm on that point.
“We need to ensure the least possible contamination,” he insisted.
They set off toward the dumpster beside the blackened ruin. The gable closest to the house was in better shape than the rest of the workshop. Next to the wall was something resembling a carport, which was where the dumpster was. This meant it was protected from the snow and rain. Another plus was that it was open-topped, so it was easier to climb in and out. Göran had found a ladder in the boathouse. He propped it up against the dumpster, then they all put on their protective gear.
Without any discussion, Embla clambered up; she was definitely the most agile. She peered over the top and saw a chaotic heap of old car parts, cables, rags, empty tins and oil c
ans, along with a whole load of other crap. This was going to take a while.
“I need to get in there—I can’t reach,” she informed her colleagues.
“I brought this,” Göran said with a cunning smile as he held up a long litter picker.
“It’s actually a disability aid, but I keep it in the car in case anything rolls under the seat,” he explained.
He must have had it in the Volvo, but Embla had never seen it before.
“Okay.”
Resolutely, she began the tedious task of removing objects one by one and passing them to Hampus at the bottom of the ladder. He then handed them to Paula and Göran, who checked them over. Embla would have to leave the larger items for the time being; they were too heavy for the tongs. At regular intervals Hampus gave her the camera so she could photograph the contents. Everything had to be meticulously documented. The work was time-consuming but vital. They mustn’t miss a thing.
When darkness began to fall, Hampus fixed a small floodlight onto one of the posts holding up the roof. Embla had reached quite a way down now and was grateful for the light; it made things so much easier.
“I need to move some heavy stuff. I’m going in,” she said.
Cautiously she lowered herself down. Fragments of metal and glass crunched beneath her feet. Now it was Hampus’s turn to climb the ladder. He shined the beam of a powerful flashlight into the bottom of the dumpster. The floodlight helped, but Embla needed to be able to see every detail. Methodically, she began to shift the bulkier items, which gave her more space.
Suddenly she caught the flash of broken glass.
“I can see a windshield!”
She didn’t even try to conceal her excitement. If it belonged to the Buick, it could mean a major breakthrough in Amelie’s case.
“Can you reach it?” Göran asked.
“I’m not sure—there’s a car seat on top of it.”
She began to edge toward it, holding a sterile plastic sack supplied by Göran. Most of the windshield was hidden by the broken seat. Little by little she managed to move the heavy seat, then she took more photographs before easing the windshield into the sack and passing it to Hampus. The broken headlight was there, too, and around what remained of the shattered glass she saw reddish-brown marks that could well be blood. Her heart leaped when she spotted red fibers stuck to the glass. Amelie had been wearing a red jacket when she went missing.
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