by Arne Dahl
‘Is it ready?’ she asked.
The man was wearing blue overalls, appeared to be in his forties, and the look in his clear blue eyes was very different from the rest of his appearance. He nodded. ‘Part-paid and ready for delivery. And no receipt?’
‘No receipt this time,’ Blom confirmed.
He nodded slowly, as if nothing could surprise him, and went over to his desk. He heaved a parcel out of a drawer and held it out towards her. She in turn handed him the brown envelope. He took it and put it back in the same desk drawer.
‘Thanks, Olle,’ she said, but he had already returned to his computer.
She drove back the same way, but at Lindhagensplan she carried on along Drottningholmsvägen, drove right across Kungsholmen, across Barnhus Bridge, and all the way along Tegnérgatan until she reached the narrow street that linked Engelbrektsgatan and Eriksbergsgatan.
She left the van double-parked and went into number 4, Stenbocksgatan. She took the stairs in just a few strides, undid all the locks, went in and soaked up the atmosphere. It felt defiled, dirty. As if the atoms of a nasty fight were still in the air. Then she went into the living room and looked at what had once been a brilliantly white sofa.
Four of the six cushions were spoiled, as was one armrest. Splatters of blood from Berger’s wounded right knuckles. It must have taken a hell of a lot of effort to produce that much blood.
Berger must have been clenching his fist very hard.
Molly Blom shook her head. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to get the sofa replaced. And she wouldn’t be able to stay there as long as it was present.
She went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, took out two protein drinks, gulped them down, and ate half an apple that she unwrapped from its cling film.
Then she did a quick search of her own home. She would have preferred to go through it more thoroughly, but what had she said to the guys in the observation room? ‘I’ll be gone an hour. An hour and a half at most.’ It would have to do. She hated when things didn’t work perfectly. The way she did. These days.
The kitchen. OK, no obvious peculiarities. Nothing in the fridge, nothing in the cupboards, nothing on the worktop, nothing in the bin. He had evidently been in a hurry. The blood was hardly planned. Obviously it could have happened during his fight with Kent and Roy, but her gut said Berger had clenched his fist hard enough to reopen his wounds because he was livid and stressed. When he saw his knuckles and saw the whiteness of the sofa, temptation got the better of him. OK, she could buy that. He wasn’t a man who appreciated the finer things in life. When he saw the sofa he reacted instinctively. White things need messing up.
The bedroom. Quickly. Yes, the photographs on the chest of drawers had been moved. He had picked up or at least moved the pictures of her climbing. What had he been thinking? He had believed that she was a fundamentally damaged person – the Nathalie Fredén she had wanted him to see – and then he was confronted instead with this new personality. A mountain-climbing personality. The opposite of losing control.
That was probably Berger’s reaction. She changed from someone who had lost control to someone in complete control. And vice versa, in his case: from full control to losing control. Everything he had assumed about his suspect had turned out to be the exact opposite.
He must have been surprised to get so much out of her when he himself was being questioned. But she really did need him to know about Aisha Pachachi and Nefel Berwari.
Otherwise there wouldn’t be any point to any of it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to draw any conclusions at all. Otherwise she wouldn’t have had any use for him.
And she really did need him.
Precisely how he had managed to find her real identity remained something of a mystery. Yet at the same time it was promising. This was a man who knew what he was doing. Had he also known what he was doing when he had been wandering recklessly through her apartment? Or had he been panicking?
He was looking for the most important things, trying desperately to find the essentials. Trying to think things through with a knife to his throat.
Just as she had planned.
He must have put down the picture of her hanging from a rope beside a sheer rock face – that seemed most likely, seeing as that photograph had been moved furthest – and then gone back into the living room. There he had turned to the bay window containing a desk. What could he have seen there?
The six pads of Post-it notes in assorted colours. Had he actually been able to draw any conclusions from those? If he had, then he really was sharp.
She turned and stared at the huge photograph of the climbers heading up a snow-covered mountain. She looked at their black silhouettes against the colourful sunset. Had he stood there? Had Berger walked this way, out into the bay window, and then turned round?
A sharp, intense ringtone broke the silence. Molly Blom was jolted from her reflections and eventually managed to pull her mobile out of her bag. An hour had passed. And she still had one more stop to make.
Even though the rush-hour traffic had started to build up, she managed to get back to Kungsholmen in reasonable time. She parked in the usual courtyard and opened up the parcel from Wiborg Supplies Ltd. Inside lay something that looked like an ordinary white smartphone, but when she switched it on the screen looked completely different. She gave a quick nod, then headed out onto Bergsgatan. She walked up towards Police Headquarters, went in through the main entrance on Polhemsgatan and tapped in codes to get through a number of doors until she reached the domain of the Security Service. It took a few more codes, swipe cards and fingerprints before she reached the headquarters of the various departments. Eventually she reached the right place, the Intelligence Unit, and, as the sign on his door suggested, Steen, the head of the unit. She knocked. After an appropriate interval there was a dull whirr to indicate that the door had been unlocked.
She went in. Behind the desk sat a well preserved, steel-grey man in his sixties. He pushed his reading glasses up onto his forehead and looked at her.
‘Well, I never,’ Steen said. ‘Miss Blom. How have you been getting on?’
‘I’m reporting as agreed,’ Molly Blom said stiffly. ‘Questioning is proceeding according to plan.’
‘Has Berger confessed his involvement?’
‘No. But the picture is getting clearer.’
‘And is it as we anticipated?’
‘To a large extent, yes.’
‘Imagine that something planted so long ago could bear fruit,’ Steen said. ‘That gives us something to think about.’
‘Berger is a police officer, in spite of everything,’ Blom said. ‘That means we have to be doubly sure of everything.’
‘As agreed,’ Steen said. ‘Nothing goes to the prosecutor until we’re sure.’
‘Then, August, there’s something that you might have forgotten.’
‘And what might that be?’
‘Ellen Savinger.’
August Steen looked astonished. ‘What?’ he said.
‘Ellen Savinger,’ Molly Blom repeated, holding her ground.
‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ Steen declared.
‘The missing fifteen-year-old,’ Blom clarified in a neutral voice.
‘Oh. Yes. Of course. But presumably the Islamic line of inquiry now looks considerably cooler?’
‘It does. But Ellen is still alive.’
‘She’s at least the fifth victim,’ August Steen said. ‘Of course she isn’t alive.’
‘We can’t make that assumption. On the contrary, the situation is in all likelihood urgent.’
‘But that’s a matter for the regular criminal police. Once the jihadist trail vanished and the whole thing mutated into an internal investigation, we became hired hands. With one specific task: to investigate Berger’s involvement.’
‘On the other hand, we’ve been hiding things from the criminal police,’ Molly Blom said. ‘They’ve had to work from false assumptions.’
‘And Ellen Savinger?’
‘Dead,’ Steen said. ‘But the final victim.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘I know you’re deeply engaged in this, Molly,’ Steen said in a different tone. ‘I know you’ve been trying to flush out the killer since the third murder. I know that the whole bicycle project was your baby. It was an ingenious but, in my opinion, rather too protracted and even fanciful method of attracting the perpetrator’s attention, but of course it turned out to be an exemplary piece of planning. He found you in the end. And now you’ve made it, Molly. The seed has borne fruit. Because you’re an internal resource, you won’t be able to bask in the glory, but here, within the service, you’ll be a hero. Berger is, however, not a threat to Sweden’s democratic system, its citizens’ freedoms and rights, or national security.’
‘Then I request permission to bring this project to a close as soon as possible.’
‘Request granted. Thank you for your verbal report. In this time of change I need you on other cases, cases which really threaten Sweden’s democratic system, et cetera.’
Molly Blom left her boss’s office and walked down the corridor. She wasn’t entirely happy with August Steen’s tone. It implied an indifference towards Ellen Savinger’s fate that couldn’t only be attributed to Steen’s trademark professionalism.
When she reached the lift a man was already waiting, someone she vaguely recognised. They nodded to each other. When the lift arrived the man pointed questioningly at the button marked G. She gave a brief nod. He pressed G. The lift sank through Police Headquarters. They got out at G, and the man walked towards the exit. She took her time, tied her shoelace, and waited until he was out of sight. Then she got back in the lift, ran her card through the reader and tapped in the six-digit code. The lift started to move down.
When it arrived she made her way along the beige corridors until an almost invisible door emerged from the homogeneity. She went in. The two thickset men were no longer staring at their computers. One was eating a banana; the other was taking a nap.
She nodded to the banana-eater and called out sharply: ‘Wake up, Roy.’
The sleeping man jerked awake in front of his computer, and his diver’s watch knocked against the wall.
‘Get him,’ Molly said.
They went out.
Molly Blom sat down on one of the chairs in the control room and pulled the white smartphone from her bag. She looked at it for a while. Then she calibrated it, stood up, took a deep breath and thought: It’s time.
It really is time.
21
Time has stopped. It really has stopped.
He is balancing on the slippery rock, his feet are slipping, but even so his sweaty hand has slowly but surely managed to clear a peephole in the window.
The door glides open. Light shoots into the absolute darkness of the boathouse. It falls across the interior, right into its depths. It streams past boat engines and life jackets, past stranded buoys and rusty anchors; it rolls past the eyes of mooring rings and hawsers and sails; it catches chains and cogs and cables that are no longer merely randomly scattered about the old boathouse but are actually joined together.
But none of that is important. Everything else vanishes when he realises what the narrow beam of light falls across. It’s a face.
It’s a girl’s face.
The patch of strong spring light seems to blind her. Her face twists from side to side; she pulls back from the light. For a long time she seems unable to see. Eventually she opens her eyes. They turn towards the door. And at that moment the other boy steps into the light. His friend’s blond fringe looks luminous in the sunlight, his whole head glowing. Then he turns sideways, and the light falls across his face at an angle, making it seem even more irregular and misshapen than usual. Then he reaches for the door and begins to pull it shut.
Outside on his rock he sees the girl’s eyes in the slowly narrowing light. They’re full of something he can’t understand. Is it happiness? Is it desire? Is it … terror?
Then she twists her head back and catches sight of him through the window. Their eyes meet. It’s a moment of peculiar contact. The look in her eyes changes, and he doesn’t understand what it is. He’s too young, too immature, too unprepared to understand it, but her eyes open wide, and only then does he see the tape covering her mouth. He sees her push at the tape with her tongue, and he sees something moving down her forehead. Only when the drop reaches her left eye does he realise that it’s blood, a drop of blood that’s trickled down from her hair. And only when her eye is completely red does he hear the heartrending scream through the tape. It makes him lose his footing, and, just as the other boy closes the door completely and darkness returns to the boathouse, he falls off the rock.
He gets to his feet. The heartrending scream is still echoing, and he can’t blame the fact that he’s hit his head or twisted his ankle, but he runs away.
He runs. As fast as his legs will carry him.
Once he’s built up speed through the chest-high grass, the scream stops abruptly.
22
Tuesday 27 October, 18.10
When Berger was roughly yanked to a sitting position on the hard bunk he had no idea what had woken him. A dream, perhaps, a memory, a message from the depths of his unconscious. Perhaps it was – on closer reflection – simply the fact that there were two men standing in his cell gripping his arms. When they got him to his feet his eyes were still flaring from the world of dreams. As they dragged him through the gloomy corridor he still couldn’t see straight. And as they strapped him into the metal chair in the interview room he had trouble fixing his gaze on Molly Blom. She was sitting in her place, with her elbows on the table, staring into his eyes. He looked at the table and tried not only to focus but also to see if anything had changed. It had. His eyes settled on his Rolex. The condensation was almost gone from the face now, the hands showed that the time was almost quarter past six; he just didn’t know if it was morning or evening. And beneath one of the many folders, Berger noticed a mobile sticking out, a white smartphone that he hadn’t seen before. He was on the point of commenting on it when Blom turned one of the two picture frames so that he was staring into the happy faces of two ten-year-old boys. The Arc de Triomphe rose up behind them.
Paris.
‘Marcus and Oscar,’ Molly Blom said.
‘But what …?’ Berger said, taken aback.
‘The photograph is from your desk in Police Headquarters,’ Blom interrupted. ‘It shows your twins, Marcus and Oscar. When did you last see them?’
‘Like hell am I going to answer questions like that.’
‘This is nothing compared to what you subjected me to.’
‘Not you. Nathalie Fredén. You aren’t Nathalie Fredén. And there was a purpose to that.’
‘And you don’t think there’s a purpose to this?’ Blom said.
‘Yes, to frame me, of all people, for a crime I haven’t committed. Me. The person who’s been hunting the Scum harder than anyone.’
‘You’re wrong there. And I promised you that this session would be different. It will be, Sam, and there’s no point in you pretending otherwise or trying to obstruct the proceedings. This fight is already lost. Do you understand?’
‘Because you have two “external resources” out there in the control room? Because they don’t have to obey the same laws as us? What are they going to do? Waterboard me? Is it really true that one of them’s called Roy? I don’t suppose the other’s called Roger?’
Blom gave Berger a long, disappointed look. In the end she shook her head. ‘We’ll start again. When did you last see Marcus and Oscar?’
&nb
sp; ‘How can that be even remotely relevant?’
‘When?’
‘Go to hell.’
‘When they were this old, or thereabouts?’
Blom pushed a printed photograph towards him. It was the one from his mobile. The one everything stemmed from. The fixed point, the pole star, the still point of the turning world.
‘Our experts have concluded that this is the most regularly used item in your entire mobile phone. You seem to keep going back to it.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Berger said.
He didn’t even have enough energy to feel angry any more. He felt hopelessly lost. Exposed. And at the same time something else was going on inside him. A process. A process that involved a pink Post-it note.
‘Winter clothes, I’d say,’ Blom went on, unconcerned. ‘Winter clothes, even though it looks rather springlike in that ditch with all that coltsfoot. What’s the old peasants’ saying? Bring in the spring with a sweat, and the autumn with a shiver? I’d guess the second half of April. What year?’
Berger remained silent.
Blom slammed her fist down on the table, then fixed her flaring eyes on him and roared: ‘There’s no way you’re going to sit there and sulk, you pathetic excuse for a cop! The clock’s ticking for Ellen Savinger.’
‘If I was the murderer,’ Berger muttered in surprise, ‘why would I care about that?’
‘Answer my questions. That’s all you have to do. Answer the questions as quickly as possible. Don’t say anything else.’
He wondered how many times he thought he’d seen his first glimpse of the real Molly Blom.
‘You know exactly when the picture was taken,’ Berger muttered. ‘You just have to look at my phone; it’ll tell you, down to the minute.’
He looked up and met her gaze. It hadn’t changed at all.
‘If you really do want to save Ellen,’ he went on, forcing himself to meet that stony gaze, ‘why did you spend so long on all that mysterious Nathalie Fredén crap? To see what I knew? You could have done it this way instead, with a bit of standard-issue torture from your external resources; it would have gone much faster. No, that’s not true. You’re the sharpest instrument Internal has got – the sharpest those clowns have ever had – and you weren’t putting on that performance for my benefit. You don’t think I’m guilty at all. This is another performance. I wonder what kind.’