by Arne Dahl
‘How should I know?’ Berger said. ‘I found Julia and Jonna, that’s all. But now I see that Julia and the biker gang in Västerås marked a shift. A shift on the part of the Security Service. You broke from your previous strategy. Did you realise that was the start of a new phase, a change of tactic on his part? Why did you show up on your bicycle precisely then? What the hell was the thing with the bike anyway? And why did you talk to that television reporter? Why did you give the name of your bizarre alter ego, Nathalie Fredén? I saw you hesitate; your not yet entirely smooth forehead actually frowned.’
Berger looked at her forehead. There really wasn’t much going on there. But that made the activity in the rest of her face all the more pronounced. It was as if her whole system of emotional markers had shifted down her cheeks.
Eventually she said: ‘I appreciate that things must seem a little confusing to you right now, Sam. It’s not that long since you broke into my flat and got beaten up by my men. Even so, it feels like you still think you’re sitting on this side of the table. Was that five questions you just asked?’
‘Answer one of them, at least,’ Berger said.
‘Nathalie Fredén was a well developed identity that I occasionally used undercover. You torched it.’
‘For good, I hope.’
‘It’s only torched in terms of the police, and both Allan Gudmundsson and Desiré Rosenkvist know where their true loyalties lie. They’re both loyal to authority. You aren’t, Sam.’
‘But why use that identity there and then? In Västerås?’
‘The killer led us to the biker gang in a conscious attempt to mislead us. We used a bicycle I’d requisitioned for a previous job, drove to Västerås with the bike in the back of the car and tried to make me look as little like a police officer as possible. There was a chance the murderer would show up, so I was simply there to do some surveillance. But then that reporter appeared, and I had to make a quick decision. Were there advantages to the perpetrator seeing me on television? Might I catch his interest somehow? It wasn’t an easy decision to give my fake name and risk blowing a well established alias, but I thought the advantages outweighed the disadvantages.’
‘Did you get into trouble as a result?’
Molly Blom laughed.
‘I’m not you, Sam. Don’t get us mixed up.’
‘There’s not much risk of that …’
‘And above all, don’t underestimate me.’
A sharp glare. Berger realised that he was unlikely ever to underestimate Molly Blom again.
‘Does Deer know I’m here?’ he asked.
She looked at him, in a different way. Possibly a slightly more human way. Although that probably wasn’t the right word.
‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ Molly Blom said.
‘Well you’ve clearly been released,’ Berger said. ‘But does she know I’m here? And where is “here”? Am I even in Police Headquarters? And these damn straps … what sort of fucking Guantánamo is this?’
‘Calm down,’ she said, and looked him in the eye.
And the strange thing was that he calmed down. Or grew calmer, at least. Curiosity got the better of anger. It was possible that he had never been more curious in his life.
Where the hell was he?
Who the hell was she?
What the hell was going on?
‘At least tell me this is all legit,’ he said. ‘That you are a Swedish police officer.’
‘All this has been sanctioned,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. Do you remember I said I’d get back to where we started?’
‘I’m a detective,’ Berger said. ‘I remember things.’
‘What do you remember?’
‘I said: “You’ve demolished my life. That’s possibly rather worse that a stained sofa.” You said: “But not worse than a stained and demolished fifteen-year-old.” So the Security Service suspect me of … well, what, exactly?’
Molly Blom’s eyebrows frowned. Her forehead remained flat.
‘It’s the timing,’ she said.
‘The timing?’ he said.
‘When exactly did you procure the regional police’s files on Julia Almström and Jonna Eriksson?’
Berger sat in silence, thinking. Produced wordless thoughts. Tried to make sense of everything.
‘If you don’t remember, I’ll tell you,’ Molly Blom continued. ‘Ellen Savinger was abducted from her school in Östermalm on 7 October, almost three weeks ago. But you requested the files on 3 October, Sam. As if you already knew that Ellen was going to be kidnapped.’
Berger sat there, motionless.
Blom went on: ‘I can’t understand it, Sam. How did you know in advance that Ellen Savinger was going to be kidnapped?’
He remained silent. She watched him. Intently.
The look in her eyes had changed. It was odd: not only was she sharing a large amount of information with him after getting someone to stick a syringe in his neck, but her expression wasn’t full of hate. It was more questioning than that.
On closer inspection, the whole thing was actually very peculiar.
‘Is it true that you were originally an actress?’ he asked.
She looked disappointed.
Then she took a deep breath. ‘Four days before Ellen Savinger was kidnapped, you secretly acquired the files covering the investigations into Julia Almström and Jonna Eriksson from two different regional police forces, Central and Bergslagen. Do you really not understand that that act is a lot more suspicious than standing at different police cordons with a bicycle between your legs?’
‘That’s not true,’ he said.
The room started to spin. Either the sedative from the injection hadn’t completely left his system, or reality was catching up with him – an awareness of why he was actually sitting there.
It wasn’t because he’d exceeded his authority.
It was something much worse.
‘Not true?’ Molly Blom said.
‘The reorganisation,’ Berger said, while everything was spinning.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘The chaos at the start of the year,’ Berger went on, but the spinning didn’t stop. A wave of nausea washed over him.
‘The Security Service became an independent body and everything else was gathered together under the Police Authority. And?’
‘Have you got any water?’
‘No,’ Molly Blom said calmly. ‘Carry on.’
‘Julia Almström wasn’t investigated by the Central Police District,’ Berger said. ‘But the biker gang in Västerås was, before the reorganisation. It was the local Västmanland police who were in charge of the original investigation. But a month or so after the reorganisation, the newly formed Bergslagen Police District took over Julia Almström’s disappearance.’
‘And you managed to say all that even though the whole room is spinning?’
‘How do you know about that?’
‘I can tell by looking at you,’ Molly Blom said calmly. ‘What are you trying to say?’
‘That at the beginning of October is was relatively easy to extract files without leaving any trace. Things were still in a state of chaos following the reorganisation.’
‘But you did leave a trace,’ Blom said. ‘And I don’t think you were alone.’
‘I was alone,’ Berger said, unexpectedly sharply.
‘We’ll come back to that,’ Blom said, giving him a hard stare. ‘We found a trail, anyway. The files relating to the investigations were pulled four days before Ellen Savinger disappeared.’
‘No,’ Berger said. The room really didn’t seem to want to stop spinning. ‘I didn’t leave a trail, at least no dates. Things were chaotic, it was fairly easy. If there’s a trail, it’s been planted.’
‘Planted?’
‘Yes. I didn’t leave a trail. And I pulled the files five days after Ellen went missing, Monday 12 October. I’d spent the whole weekend looking for parallels. Other fifteen-year-old gir
ls who’d disappeared.’
‘The whole weekend?’ Blom exclaimed, her voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘Two whole days?’
‘I didn’t have longer than that. I found two new victims. Given more time I’d have found Aisha Pachachi and Nefel Berwari as well, in spite of your attempts to cover them up. And you were the one who informed me that there were more, Nathalie Fredén. When you reacted so strongly to me saying “three crime scenes”.’
‘Let’s set that peculiar lie to one side,’ Molly Blom said. ‘It’s a lie that implies that someone with access to all the police material – a police officer – would have brought forward your incursion into regional police records to a time before Ellen’s disappearance. A lie which is far too crazy to be properly thought out, so I’m consigning that to the category of wild excuses. And that’s why it isn’t really the main point. The main point – as you know all too well, Sam – is this.’
With that, she put her hand on his box of watches. Slowly she slid the little gilded catch to one side, opened the lid, revealing the velvet-lined compartments.
‘Here we have no fewer that four watches, made by Jaeger-LeCoultre, Rolex and IWC, all from the fifties and sixties. The fifth ought to be on your wrist, but then we wouldn’t have been able to strap your wrists. It’s in front of you.’
Berger looked at his Rolex Oyster Perpetual Datejust on the interview-room table. The tiny drops of condensation had moved, so he could only see the centre of the dial, with the two hands pointing in different directions. There was no way of working out how long he’d been unconscious.
Molly Blom looked at him. ‘In a more traditional internal investigation, I would have been very interested in the fact that the combined value of these watches exceeds half a million kronor.’
‘They were inherited,’ Berger said. ‘From my grandfather. His name was Arvid Hammarström.’
‘Good to hear you haven’t lost your sense of humour,’ Blom said in an expressionless voice. ‘That suggests we’ve got energy for the next session. Which will be very different, I can assure you. But, as I say, your improbably expensive watches would only have been of interest if this had been a traditional case. Which of course it isn’t. There’s nothing traditional about this.’
‘I’m good with watches,’ Berger said, holding on to the metallic armrest with half-immobilised hands.
‘You’re good with watches?’
‘I buy broken ones and repair them.’
‘And you think I’m interested in your pathetic little hobby? You think that’s why I’m talking about your watches?’
‘I don’t know what you mean now.’
‘Oh, but you do,’ Blom said, grabbing hold of a couple of the box’s velvet-lined dividing walls and pulling upwards.
In the little space beneath the watches was a jumble of plastic. Molly Blom picked up one of a number of extremely small ziplock bags and carefully read the label that was stuck to it. ‘“Ellen Savinger”. Goodness,’ she said. ‘What could this mean?’
Berger said nothing. But his breathing was perfectly audible.
‘The more innocent explanation is that this is something you found in the house in Märsta and withheld from the investigation. Shall we take a look at what it is?’
She opened the little zip and tipped the contents of the bag out onto the table, between the two photograph frames. What fell out was a tiny cog, no more than a centimetre in diameter.
‘Where did you find this?’ she asked.
Berger remained silent. It was a long time since he’d felt his brain cells work so hard.
‘OK,’ Molly Blom said after a while. ‘This could be written off as the traditional hubris of a burned-out detective inspector. “I’ve found something no one else found, and I’m going to solve this much more quickly than the official investigation can.” That would obviously be misconduct, but not misconduct of the worst sort. But then we have this.’
Two more of the little plastic bags were pulled out. Outwardly they looked just the same, including the labels with the tiny writing in ballpoint pen.
Molly Blom laid the three bags out so that they were in a line, the open one marked Ellen Savinger on the right, with the cog in front of it. Then she picked up the middle one and said as she opened it: ‘Jonna Eriksson.’
And she tipped out a similar minute cog onto the table. Without a word she repeated the same manoeuvre with the last bag, marked Julia Almström. Another cog, slightly larger this time, rolled out.
‘If you stole Ellen’s cog from the house in Märsta, where do the other two come from?’
Berger’s silence hung heavily in the room, as inescapable a car alarm.
Blom went on: ‘The cases before Ellen Savinger’s featured neither a body nor a crime scene. There were two failed attempts to find Julia and Jonna – the bikers’ clubhouse in Västerås and the buried elk in Kristinehamn – but neither of those crime scenes turned out to be connected to these offences. Let me ask once more: Where do these cogs come from?’
Because Berger’s silence had entered a new and apparently final phase, Molly Blom said. ‘But we’re not done yet. There’s more. Are you ready for more, Sam Berger?’
She picked his Rolex up from the table and put it next to the others in his watch box. She looked at it pointedly.
‘Six compartments. But only five watches. That empty compartment looks rather sad, doesn’t it?’
Then she leaned over and removed a bundle of old papers from her bag. She tapped them together on the desk. ‘Every watch of this quality has an individual guarantee. I’ll count those guarantees. One, two, three, four, five … six. Hang on, that isn’t right. There are only five watches. I’ll count again. One, two, three, four, five, six.’
‘Stop it,’ Berger said.
‘Two Rolexes,’ Blom went on mercilessly while she looked through the dog-eared guarantees. ‘Two IWCs. One Jaeger-LeCoultre. And one Patek Philippe, apparently. Where’s your Patek Philippe watch, Sam?’
‘It was stolen.’
‘It seems to be the jewel in the crown, Sam. A – what does it say? – Patek Philippe 2508 Calatrava. We’ve just heard back from a watchmaker who’s supposed to be Sweden’s foremost expert on wristwatches, and he wasn’t even prepared to hazard a guess at the value of a watch of that description. He said it was priceless.’
Blom paused and looked at Berger. He really did look pretty feeble.
‘Are you seriously suggesting that this priceless watch was stolen and you didn’t bother to report it to the police?’
‘You need special insurance for it,’ Berger said quietly. ‘I couldn’t afford it. And I’m familiar with how a stolen-property report is dealt with by the police. Not at all, usually.’
‘So where and when are you saying it was stolen?’
‘A couple of years ago,’ Berger said. ‘At the gym.’
‘Two and a half, perhaps? In June, two years ago?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
Blom nodded for a while.
‘The watchmaker in question may have refused to value your missing Patek Philippe 2508 Calatrava, but he did say a lot of other interesting things. For one, he identified these three cogs. There’s a high probability that they come from a Patek Philippe 2508 Calatrava.’
20
Tuesday 27 October, 16.24
Molly Blom stepped into a room where two men were sitting staring at computer screens. They nodded to her, as if to acknowledge that everything was under control.
‘I’ll be gone an hour,’ she said. ‘An hour and a half at most.’
The man closest to the wall glanced at a large, cheap diver’s watch on his wrist. ‘And Berger?’
‘Let him rest,’ Blom said. ‘Take him to the cell, Roy.’
Then she opened the other door in the small room and went out into a featureless corridor. She followed it until she came to a lift that blended in to the beige wall. Inside the lift she ran a card through a reader and tapped in a six-digit cod
e, after which the lift began to rise.
Molly Blom looked at her reflection in the hopeless lift mirror. She had been involved in a lot of undercover jobs, played loads of roles, and on one level this was one of the simplest. She moved closer and looked into her own eyes, and actually thought that deep inside that blue stare she could catch a glimpse of the other level. The one telling her that this was the very hardest role she had ever played.
The lift reached the ground floor, G. There was no button below G.
She got out and found herself in a perfectly ordinary stairwell. On the other side of the door she could see Bergsgatan through the curtains of rain, but set off in the opposite direction, into a courtyard containing a dozen parked cars. She clicked her key fob and a dark van, a Mercedes Vito, flashed its lights. She jumped in and lifted up the passenger seat. In a compartment beneath the seat was a shoulder bag. She opened it and fished out a brown envelope and a mobile phone, which she switched on. She set a timer for one hour. She manoeuvred the bulky van around the small courtyard and drove out through the gates before they had opened fully. She headed down to Norr Mälarstrand, then to the hideous roundabout at Lindhagensplan and onto Traneberg Bridge. She carried on towards Brommaplan, then along Bergslagsvägen. She turned off towards Vinsta, one of Stockholm’s most soulless industrial estates, found a parking space in front of an anonymous and apparently dilapidated facade where a grimy sign announced that the building was the home of Wiborg Supplies Ltd.
She didn’t have time to get seriously wet before stepping into what was supposed to be the reception area. The few samples on display in the glass cabinets consisted of indefinable, dust-covered pieces of piping with unreasonable price tags. Taken as a whole, the reception area made a genuinely unwelcoming impression, which was only enhanced by the fact that the dour receptionist smelled of methanol. She caught sight of Blom and jerked her thumb towards the door to one side behind her. The lock whirred and Molly Blom walked through.
At first glance the industrial premises confirmed the impression made by reception. The combination of warehouse and workshop contained four men sitting at computers that only a very trained eye would have been able to distinguish from slow old desktops of the nineties. One of the men stood up and walked towards her.