by Jens Lapidus
Despite that, almost all she could think about was Katja and the shooting in Oslo.
Then Nina Ley called.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “You can look through what we’ve got against Adam. Off the record.”
“Have your suspicions been strengthened?”
“You can read everything for yourself. If you come here, you can read through the investigation,” said Nina. “But I can’t say they’ve been weakened.”
* * *
—
Emelie read what they had. The crime scene report, the analysis of Katja’s phone, forensic statements relating to her injuries and likely cause of death. Two stab wounds to the abdomen, caused by a sharp object, and so on. Photographs and a brief statement regarding the wound on Adam’s hand. Analysis reports into the blood found at the scene. Analyses of the carving knife. Analyses of the backpack on the roof. It was still the only question mark: they had found neither fingerprints nor DNA on it. Who had been on the roof opposite? Maybe the backpack actually had nothing to do with the murder.
Emelie glanced at the time on her computer: it was quarter to ten. There was something she was missing here. Something the police had missed, which she should be able to see. There had to be a pattern of some kind. Or maybe she was overestimating herself, thinking of crime novels and thrillers, where the hero always came up with something no one else had seen, where intuition was key and feelings led the way. But Emelie knew what reality was like: intuition came from hard work. From commanding the material.
She closed the lid of her computer. Placed her hands on her belly. She wasn’t showing yet, but she could still feel the difference. She was going to be a mother. A parent. Or was she?
Suddenly it came to her: she couldn’t remember any mention of Katja’s parents in the investigation.
She went through everything again. Katja’s father was dead, but she had a mother.
Emelie was going to try to get ahold of her tomorrow.
* * *
—
Haninge Centrum looked like any other shopping center from the past fifteen years. The same pale flooring, the same white walls, the same illuminated walkways between shops and the same open-plan, indoor squares full of cafés, juice bars, and cell phone stands. It was remarkable: in an age of choice, everything was the same.
As she scanned the people sitting inside Wayne’s Coffee, she immediately worked out which one must be Gunnel—a lone woman in her fifties, with such bad posture that it was hard to see how she had even managed to get there. Emelie wondered why Katja’s mother hadn’t wanted to meet at her house, or at Emelie’s office, but maybe that was her business.
Gunnel had a cup of tea in front of her. She was hunched over it as though she was about to fall, not looking up once. Her long blond hair seemed lank and greasy, but she had tried to hold it back with two pink clips—the color felt almost perverse.
The tables around her were all busy, but everyone seemed preoccupied with their own concerns, and the majority seemed to be speaking different languages—Emelie assumed that their ability to eavesdrop on her conversation with Gunnel was probably quite limited. This should be a safe place to talk.
“So you were Katja’s lawyer?” Gunnel asked.
“Yes, but we only managed to meet twice. When did you last see her?”
“She was such a good girl, deep down. This is so hard.”
Emelie had steeled herself for a difficult conversation. “I can’t even imagine what you must be going through right now,” she said.
“No one can,” Gunnel replied.
Emelie was clutching her coffee cup, but the minute the liquid beneath the thick layer of foamed milk touched her lips, she realized she didn’t feel like drinking it. She placed the cup back on the table. Gunnel hadn’t answered her question.
“So when did you last see Katja?”
Gunnel slurped her tea. “Why are you asking that?”
“I’m trying to understand what happened, and that means I need to gather as much information about Katja as I can.”
Gunnel hunched so far over her cup that her nose was practically touching it. “I see.”
“So, when did you last see her?”
“I called her a few months ago to warn her about that Adam. But she didn’t listen. I hope they send him down for life.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t want to be inquisitive, but it would be great if you could answer my question. You might have seen or heard something important. WHEN did you last see Katja?”
Gunnel straightened up, sitting upright in her chair. “I haven’t seen my daughter in five years, not since she turned eighteen. So, there you have it.” She pushed back her chair. “And the reason has nothing to do with you.”
“No, I know. But maybe you want to tell me anyway?”
Gunnel got up. “Katja accused me of all kinds of crap ten years ago. It was always someone else’s fault that things ended up the way they did.”
The thought struck Emelie hard, like a punch to the face: neither when Katja talked to her nor when she was being interviewed by the police had she said anything about how she had made contact with the first man. But now she remembered Katja’s words from the police interview: as though in passing, she had mentioned that she met him through someone she trusted.
Someone she trusted. Then. When she was thirteen.
Emelie tried to speak as softly as she could. “Did Katja think something was your fault? Is that what you mean?”
Gunnel’s voice no longer sounded sad. It was burning. “She was quick to get things into her head, Katja. She had far too big an imagination.”
“Did she get something into her head about what she went through when she was thirteen?”
“God knows what she thought.”
Emelie’s mind was racing: the conversation with Katja in her office, the interview with Nina Ley. The questions that had been asked, what Katja had answered, what she hadn’t answered. How she had reacted.
She had reacted strongly. Physically. Cried. Shaken.
Emelie could hardly look at Gunnel any longer. But she had to ask: “Gunnel, did you have any idea of what was going on with Katja?”
28
“Roksana joonam,” Dad said as he opened the door. “How are you? You look tired.”
Roksana had taken out her nose ring, but she couldn’t hide the rest of her appearance—she was beyond exhausted.
“I’m fine,” she said anyway.
There was a new pair of guest slippers in the hallway, but Roksana couldn’t find the pair she usually wore.
“Where are my slippers, Baba?”
“I don’t know, you’ll have to ask your mother.”
Her father was wearing sweatpants today. They looked like a pair of Billie’s yoga pants, but Roksana knew they were from Iran. The two of them sat down in the kitchen. Her mother hugged her, then returned to her cooking.
“Here,” her father said, holding out a bowl of pralines.
Does anyone really like pralines, Roksana thought to herself, taking the one that looked least disgusting. “Merci.” It contained some kind of strawberry cream that was far too sweet.
She knew she would have to put on a more cheerful face—she was here to give them good news, after all, to tell them something that would make them happy. But there was just one thought whirling around her mind: How were she and Z going to scrape together the money? Their only chance would be if they could start making it themselves, but at one hundred times the scale they had managed with what they stole from the vet. How would that work? They would need to raid twenty clinics to get their hands on even a tenth of what those madmen wanted.
They had looked up a number of animal hospitals and storage facilities anyway, but the security at each of them was far too tight—they were hardly break-in spe
cialists, after all, and they didn’t want to get caught. Z had put out some feelers on Darknet, to see if there was anyone who wanted to sell Ketalar or similar, but the only people who got in touch were recovered junkies with half a bottle that they no longer wanted in their bathroom cabinets.
She made an effort. “I’ve got some good news to tell you.”
Her mother turned around. Dad stopped chewing on his chocolate.
“I’m going to get into the psychology program,” she said, drawing out the next sentence for a few seconds. “Because I got really high grades on the aptitude test.”
* * *
—
Twenty minutes later, the celebrations had finally calmed down. Her father had responded by uncorking a bottle of champagne and eating the rest of the chocolates; her mother had sent messages to Caspar and their relatives in Tehran. Her father had hugged her, laughing with joy. He had even put on some of his old tapes: Dariush at full volume. Her mother had pulled Roksana from her seat and danced her around the kitchen. And now the replies had started coming in: Dad’s sister and her children wanted to Skype.
They sat down in front of the computer. Five minutes later, they could see one another. On-screen: Aunt Etty and Roksana’s cousins, Leila and Val. She hadn’t seen them since last summer, when they came to Sweden.
Etty seemed to have had yet another nose job—she was starting to look more and more like Michael Jackson—but Leila and Val looked like normal. Both wearing jeans and T-shirts, Leila slightly paler than Val.
“My darlings,” Etty shouted.
Dad didn’t even ask how they were; he couldn’t hold back: the words just tumbled out of his mouth. “Roksana is going to be a psychologist. She got the highest, best, and finest score on the entrance exam for university, which means she can study wherever she likes.”
That wasn’t quite right, but Etty was beside herself with happiness. Leila mostly grinned, Val simply nodded—ice cool, like usual. Then Dad and Etty started talking about other things. Dad’s aches and pains, Aunt Etty’s renovations and trips to Paris.
“You have to see what we’ve done,” Etty said after ten minutes of chatter. The image started to move. Roksana didn’t know whether Etty was holding her phone or a laptop computer, but now they were being treated to a tour of her house. The living room and all of its rugs. The bathroom and its golden taps. And then the newly built rooms, of course. Etty’s bedroom. Leila’s bedroom. Val’s music room.
The camera swept past two guitars and a keyboard. But Roksana had spotted something else. On the wall, on a hook: something black. Round.
“What a nice room,” said Roksana.
“Yes, isn’t it,” Etty practically screeched. Val and Leila were no longer even part of the conversation.
“And look at this,” said Etty, moving the camera over to the window. “The view.”
The object on the wall became clearer. Etty moved forward.
It was a helmet.
A riding helmet.
* * *
—
On the way home from her mother and father’s house, she called her aunt’s number again over Skype. Etty wanted to chat, but Roksana asked to speak to her cousin.
“Val,” she said. “Can you help me?”
* * *
—
Four days later, it was all settled. Roksana was on her way. She wasn’t really in all that much of a hurry, not now that she had started the journey. The plane wouldn’t be leaving for two and a half hours. Still, the only instruction her father had given her was: “Leave plenty of time for checking in, Roksana joonam. They’re crazy with their bureaucracy.”
On the whole, both he and her mother had been thrilled when she told them she had booked the trip. “But I noticed that you didn’t get along so well when we called them on Skype,” Mom had said, her feelers as long as ever. Roksana knew she would have to come up with an explanation, so she told them the truth—almost. “But I met them when they were here. And then I called Val, and we really clicked.”
* * *
—
“Welcome to the Arlanda Express,” the automated man’s voice said. “The cheapest and most environmentally friendly way to travel between Stockholm city and Arlanda Airport.” When Billie had found out that Roksana was flying to Tehran, a skeptical note had appeared in her voice. “You’re flying?”
“How else would I get there?”
“You shouldn’t fly. Think of the environment.”
“You went to Los Angeles last autumn.”
“Yeah, but there’s a difference. I had to be there.”
Exactly why Billie had to be at the Moonfaze Feminist Film Festival was beyond Roksana, but she kept quiet.
* * *
—
The old man next to her smelled of sweat, and the cabin was cold. This plane seemed shabbier than the one she had taken on the first leg of her journey, to Istanbul. But she had also paid less than 3,200 kronor for the flights, so she couldn’t complain. It was surprisingly cheap.
She tried to read—she had bought two Susan Faludi books at Arlanda. One was Stiffed: a classic, according to Billie. The other was her latest: In the Darkroom.
The words merged together on the page. Roksana’s eyes were tired; she was seeing double. It was the same old thing. Her left eye was weaker than the right, an unusual visual defect, her optician had said. Plus four on the right side, minus two on the left—and the patch over her eye hadn’t made the least bit of difference.
She thought about why everything had turned out like it had. It had been niggling at her—not just the ketamine and the fact that everyone had wanted to pay for her and Z’s stuff, but the rest of it, too. She couldn’t put it into words, other than to say that the feeling had been very nice. But now she didn’t know what they were going to do. The crazies needed their money. This trip had to deliver what she was hoping for.
* * *
—
The pointed, snow-covered mountains surrounding Tehran glittered in the sunlight. The city looked like an enormous, deformed butterfly from the air: the center with its shopping streets and museums a feeble body in the middle. Imam Khomeini International Airport, on the other hand, looked small, but it felt far from petite when Roksana left the plane. There was another, bigger airport—Mehrabad—but Imam Khomeini was the biggest for international flights, according to her father.
Huge banners of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hung across the gate where Roksana’s plane pulled in. Her mother had told her: “They don’t recognize dual citizenship, Roksana, so your Swedish passport will be worthless there. Legally, I mean.”
“But I’m not an Iranian citizen.”
“You are. They follow the paternal line, and since your father is an Iranian, they consider you one, too. You’ll have to get an Iranian passport.”
There were, if possible, even more people in this airport than there had been in Istanbul, and almost all of them reminded her of Dad, Etty, Val, and Leila. For some reason, none of them resembled her mother. Maybe it was the way she moved that made her unique: her mother was always slightly irregular, bouncy somehow, like she was drunk or had a splinter in her foot—when, in actual fact, she always knew exactly where she was going.
Roksana clutched her new passport in her hand, concentrating on not allowing her eyes to wander, which happened easily in such situations.
Everything went much more smoothly than she had expected; her bag even appeared first on the luggage belt. All around her, there were uniformed guards with automatic rifles in their hands—soldiers. As Roksana started to drag her bag toward the exit, one of them peeled away from the group and began moving in her direction. She sped up: he couldn’t be after her, could he?
The soldier’s gun bounced against him. Roksana was only a few yards from the barriers now. He was following her, that much was clear.
>
“Khahar,” he shouted.
Roksana turned around. Met the young man’s tense eyes. He gestured to his head. Roksana glared at him. A moment later, she understood: she had forgotten her headscarf. She wasn’t allowed outside without it. As luck would have it, it was already around her neck, and she pulled it up over the back of her head like she knew Leila usually did. Her mother had given it to her at Arlanda, and it was actually pretty nice—a bit crazy, yellow with orange flowers.
She knew which exit she was supposed to take, and the first thing that struck her as she left the airport was the view: the city laid out in front of her was completely surrounded by the magical mountains she had seen from the air. They looked even more powerful now than they had from above, like something out of a Disney film. She took a deep breath and got another surprise—it was difficult to breathe here. The air was thick with exhaust fumes, stinging her nose and filling her lungs with dirt.
She spotted Val standing next to an enormous SUV.
“Welcome to Tehran, soedi,” he said.
Roksana smiled. “Swede”—she had never been called that before.