by Arne Dahl
Blom’s eyes were on fire now. She clenched her fist and looked off to the side, up towards one of the small cameras embedded in the ceiling. Two seconds later the man called Roy yanked open the door and stared at Blom with his nostrils flaring. She shook her head briefly. Roy returned to the control room, apparently disappointed.
‘Next time I’ll let him do what he likes,’ Blom said with strained calm. ‘Are you ready to give precise answers to my questions?’
Berger looked into her eyes. They were different now. He tried to put together the barest outline of what was going on. Whatever was happening was completely out of his control, and didn’t seem to have anything to do with Roy either. He nodded.
‘When did you last see your twins?’ Blom asked.
‘Like you said, that picture was taken in April, two years ago, two and a half. One month later that scum took them from school, three weeks before the end of term. Year 2. They were eight then, they’re eleven now.’
‘I assume you’re aware of how much information your reply contained, Sam?’
He made a grudging gesture with his head but remained silent.
Blom went on: ‘You use the term scum to refer to your ex-wife? The same name you’ve given our kidnapper?’
‘She is scum,’ Berger said. ‘And we were never married, thank God.’
‘Well, at least it’s refreshing that you don’t call her a whore,’ Blom said. ‘After all, you’ve turned poor Desiré Rosenkvist into your Madonna, your little Deer.’
Before Berger had time to respond Blom flipped the second frame, the bright blue one, revealing a picture of Berger’s former partner. It was a wonderful picture, taken on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and he still couldn’t quite bring himself to look at it. It was always turned the wrong way round on his desk at home. But now he looked away too late.
‘Here we have “scum” number two,’ Molly Blom said. ‘Originally known as Freja Lindström. You lived together for eleven years. During those years you had Oscar and Marcus together. Freja didn’t marry you during those eleven years, Sam, but when she met French businessman Jean she got married after just six months. The whole family now lives in Paris. Freja is now Freja Babineaux, and your sons are now Marcus and Oscar Babineaux. Is it true that you haven’t seen them since that April day two years ago? When she took them and ran?’
Berger’s eyes had been closed for a while. Now he opened them.
‘Ran?’ he said.
‘There’s a police report from Arlanda Airport,’ Blom said. ‘Some sort of altercation with the security personnel, committed by a Samuel Berger. Came to blows. But Freja, Marcus and Oscar Lindström were all on the next flight to Paris. Little more than a month later they were Freja, Marcus and Oscar Babineaux. So yes, “ran” seems to be the correct word.’
‘No,’ Berger said quietly. ‘My life fell apart when she left, I wasn’t in a fit state to look after two unruly eight-year-olds. I let her have custody. But I’d hardly have done that if I’d known she was going to take the twins out of the country. When I found out, I went to Arlanda to try to persuade her to stay.’
‘And instead you assaulted the staff at the security check?’
‘Hardly assaulted …’
Berger closed his eyes again. He was trying to stop them overflowing. But he couldn’t hide the situation with his hands. Nothing to wipe the inevitable tears with.
Blom continued mercilessly: ‘Obviously your hatred of women didn’t start when your partner left you in February almost three years ago, taking the twins with her – Freja had no doubt been the target of that for a while – but after that you took it to a new level. Then in May, when she perfectly legally picked Marcus and Oscar from Sofia School and took them with her to Paris, your hatred of women grew, Sam. After the incident at Arlanda you started referring to your ex as “scum”, and became outright dangerous. Barely a month later, on 7 June, fifteen-year-old Aisha Pachachi went missing from Helenelund in Sollentuna, where you grew up. It was the end of the school year, right in the middle of all those celebrations you could no longer be a part of. You only got to attend one end-of-year celebration with them, Sam, and that was when your sons were in their first year of school. How crazy must that have made you?’
Berger remained silent and stared down at the table. Blom carried on, without taking her eyes off him: ‘That summer you started taking your revenge on a whole gender, Sam. You wanted to make sure those fifteen-year-old girls didn’t grow up into treacherous adult women. You’re on a crusade against evil women of the future who steal men’s sons from them. You grab them before they have a chance to harm any men. You vent your fury on these young girls. When you make your activities public, as with Ellen’s kidnapping, you also make sure you’re in charge of the investigation – that’s why you suddenly made the kidnappings public after keeping them hidden for so long. The fact that you transfer the grotesque term you use for the mother of your children – scum – to the murderer, who happens to be you, makes the whole thing so perverse that it’s almost intriguing.’
After a heavy silence Berger looked up at her. Tears were streaming from his eyes. ‘I love my children. I want them back.’
‘I’m sure they’d love to come back to their serial-killer father,’ Blom said brutally.
Ordinarily Berger would have been able to wipe his tears away in a matter of seconds and start again. That wasn’t possible this time. They just ran, like they would down a little girl’s cheeks, or the cheeks of a psychiatric patient.
It was almost like a revelation. It had been a long time since he had seen himself in such a clear light.
In far too many ways, Molly Blom was right.
In every respect except the vital one, in fact.
And it was as if she knew that. As if she were punishing him for something else. For being who he was.
‘You know I haven’t done this,’ he said.
‘Why did you requisition the files on Julia Almström and Jonna Eriksson four days before Ellen Savinger was kidnapped?’
‘That’s not right …’
‘I’ll tell you why,’ Blom said pointedly. ‘Because you wanted to show off, make yourself out to be smarter than you are. You could calmly lead us to Julia and Jonna without risking anything. Desiré Rosenkvist and the others would be so impressed. You could show off while keeping your own role concealed. You neglected to say anything about the first two victims, Aisha Pachachi and Nefel Berwari, and any evidence relating to Julia and Jonna was already long gone. But not entirely.’
She pointed at the little cogs that were still lying on the table, next to their small plastic bags.
‘There are no crime scenes for Julia and Jonna,’ Molly Blom went on. ‘Yet these little cogs belonging to a Patek Philippe 2508 Calatrava have been gathered from two crime scenes. No one in the world knows where Julia Almström and Jonna Eriksson were held captive and killed. No one except the murderer. These aren’t clues, Sam Berger, they’re trophies. These cogs are trophies of the sort that serial killers almost always collect. Really sick serial killers. And you’re a really sick serial killer. You want to stop women from growing up. You’re scum. You’re the Scum.’
Molly Blom paused. She looked intently at Sam Berger. She owned him.
He nodded slowly.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It really does look atrocious.’
‘You sacrificed your best watch,’ Blom said. ‘You took your finest possession apart and started putting one cog from the watch in each of the places where you murdered the girls. If a single cog disappeared for good, you would have sacrificed your favourite object in the whole wide world. It was all about raising the stakes. Not a single cog was to be found by the police, not a single crime scene, not a single girl’s body. You’re gathering your Patek Philippe 2508 Calatrava back together, Sam. Soon time will be running smoothly again. When you’ve murdered enough girls.’
Berger was breathing heavily. After a while he said, as calmly as possibly:
‘I’ll have to come back to the cogs. In a minute. But first I need an answer to a question.’
‘You need an answer? You don’t have the right to anything, scum, least of all a question.’
‘But otherwise nothing makes sense. Lina Vikström?’
‘What?’
‘You called the police as Lina Vikström from Märsta,’ Berger said. ‘You had an almost impeccable Security Service mask on your voice. You said you’d seen Ellen Savinger through the window of a ramshackle house in the neighbourhood. You said you’d seen a pink leather strap round her neck, with an Orthodox cross. Because the Security Service had full access to the police investigation, and were actually ahead of it, the pink strap wasn’t that strange. But the strange thing is that you knew where Ellen was being held captive. We’d been looking for her for almost three weeks: it was top priority. How the hell did the Security Service find her before we did? And why didn’t you want to go in? Why put us on the Märsta trail?’
Blom looked at him.
‘You purposefully concealed a clear line of inquiry,’ she said.
‘What the hell?’ he said. ‘I didn’t do that.’
‘Of course not,’ she said with icy chill. ‘So you checked car rentals? All the car rentals within something like a two-hundred-kilometre radius?’
‘I had three officers on it,’ Berger said. ‘They found a few possibilities, but nothing sufficiently promising. Every fifth car hired in the Stockholm area is apparently picked up using fake documents. Very difficult to pin down.’
‘But you were sloppy,’ Blom said. ‘If I can put it like that. A report came in from the Märsta Police about a van that had been hidden in one of the derelict buildings on the neighbouring land. An old lady walking her dog, an Asta Granström, came across it early one morning. It was a van that had been rented from Statoil in Gävle back in the spring.’
‘Like hell,’ Berger said. ‘We’d have found her.’
‘She died before you found her,’ Blom said. ‘My theory is that you murdered her. You were in Märsta. You were the one who rented that van, Sam Berger. You were leading the investigation by day and creeping around Märsta by night. When you tortured Ellen. And you killed the old woman and managed to stop her report from getting any further than the Märsta Police. It never found its way into the investigation.’
‘Because the Security Service prevented it,’ Berger shouted. ‘Because you allowed it to leak into the investigation indirectly, via Lina Vikström. Christ – you managed to keep the Märsta Police quiet? But you can’t have killed the old woman. I don’t remember an old woman from the investigation.’
‘Because you killed her,’ Blom said. ‘Then put a lid on it.’
‘But I don’t even know who you’re talking about, Molly. Who was this old woman? How did she die?’
‘Don’t call me Molly, you bastard. I don’t want my first name in your mouth. Now, try to explain away those cogs from your very favourite watch. If you can.’
Berger felt the whole world spinning. Pain was burning through every nerve cell in his body.
‘The cog,’ he wheezed. ‘Yes. Bloody hell. When I got hold of the files on Julia Almström and Jonna Eriksson – five days after Ellen’s disappearance, not four days before – I realised that the local police couldn’t have conducted a thorough search of Julia and Jonna’s homes. It was a chaotic time, both before and after the reorganisation. The soon-to-be defunct local force in Västmanland didn’t make much of an effort with Julia, and the completely new regional Bergslagen Police was largely incompetent when it came to Jonna. I simply went to their homes. The Almström family in Malmaberg in north-east Västerås was very accommodating; they were in pieces. Julia’s room remained exactly as she had left it, and there – tucked in beside the skirting board next to Julia’s wardrobe – I found the first cog. That one.’
Berger pointed at the largest of the cogs on the interview-room table between them.
‘Tucked in beside the skirting board?’ Blom said, with heavy sarcasm.
‘Then there was Jonna Eriksson,’ Berger went on. ‘She was a foster child with a notorious family in Kristinehamn. A new girl had already moved into her room. But there it was, nonetheless, at the back of a bookcase, another cog. That one. And I found Ellen’s beside one of the pillars in the basement. Sort of tucked in under the post.’
‘But you’d found both Julia and Jonna’s cogs before you found Ellen’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘How the hell did you know that you were supposed to be looking for cogs?’
Berger leaned back and closed his eyes. After a while he said: ‘Because he knows who I am.’
But Blom stood up and slammed her fist down on the table as soon as Berger started to speak, completely drowning him out with a roar: ‘Now shut up and think before you tell any more lies!’
He stared at her.
She went on: ‘Now we’re just going to sit here and stare at each other until you tell the truth, you pathetic piece of shit. I don’t care if it takes half an hour.’
Then she sat down again and stared at him. He stared back. He was trying desperately to grasp what was happening, but he understood nothing, except that he should remain silent.
Time passed. They remained completely motionless for five seconds, ten. Fifteen, then Berger saw Blom slide her hand under one of the files and touch the new white smartphone beneath it. Without turning his head, he let his eyes slide over to the recording equipment on the side table. The red light flickered but went on glowing.
Molly Blom leaned forward and said quietly: ‘Twenty seconds exactly. Listen carefully now, don’t say anything. This isn’t a mobile phone. It’s a remote control that lets the last twenty seconds run on a loop for a while. We can’t take more than a few minutes or they’ll notice out in the control room. Nothing we say now is being recorded. But we don’t have much time. You know who the killer is?’
Berger stared at her wildly for two seconds. That’s all they could afford.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think we grew up together.’
‘And the cogs?’
‘Several things. He likes clocks. He loves clocks. Big ones, like you get in clock towers. It’s likely that he’s torturing these girls using clocks. Perfect, intractable mechanisms.’
‘But the cogs from your Patek Philippe are small.’
‘In part he wants to show the world that this is about clocks. And in part he’s leaving clues for you, implicating me. I realised that as soon as I found the first cog. That he was the one who had stolen my watch. Now he’s distributing the cogs to incriminate me. That’s why I’ve been collecting them and keeping them away from the investigation. They’re his way of getting back at me.’
‘Evidence?’ Blom said.
‘You left several lines of inquiry for me,’ Berger said. ‘Two things that stuck out from my interviews with you. When you said “The betrayal” so distinctly and your comment “You know exactly what happened”. Those were the two times you emerged from your role as Nathalie Fredén. I’ve been racking my brains. Was I the one who betrayed you? When, where, how? I don’t know you.’
‘Don’t play dumb, Sam Berger,’ Molly Blom said. ‘You know exactly what happened.’
He stared at her, overwhelmed by the rustling of aspen leaves, and felt himself turning pale.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said.
‘I became a cop for reasons of justice,’ she said. ‘What happened to me should never happen to anyone else. Especially not a woman. A girl.’
‘You were there? At Helenelund School? I don’t remember you.’
‘I was in the year below,’ she said. ‘Your lunatic of a friend grabbed me one day. He strapped me into that sick contraption. And you saw me. You saw me through the window, you bastard. And you ran away. You fucking coward.’
Berger was perfectly silent. He couldn’t get a single word out.
‘Your betrayal in that moment,’ Molly Blom said, ‘still leaves me utt
erly speechless. From that second on I couldn’t trust anyone in the whole world.’
‘Fucking hell,’ Berger said.
‘Not much time left,’ Blom said. ‘They’ll be starting to wonder out there.’
The sound of aspen leaves in Berger’s ears was deafening. Even so, he knew there was one question that had to be asked. ‘I retrieved the investigations five days after Ellen Savinger went missing. Why are you saying it was four days before?’
‘Because that was my opportunity to attack you. To get to this point.’
‘You changed the dates?’
‘So that the Security Service could go in as hired hands for Internal Investigations. It was my chance to get to meet you. Under the right circumstances. Once I’d punished you enough.’
‘And why did you want to meet me under the right circumstances? Because you know who the killer is as well?’
‘I’ve suspected it for a while,’ Blom said, moving her neck from side to side. ‘His name is William Larsson.’
‘Yes,’ Berger said. ‘William Larsson. He joined my class in Year 9. His face was all crooked, misshapen. He had some sort of rare disorder, some inherited variant of something like Proteus Syndrome, I think; it wasn’t entirely clear. His mother, who was on her own with him, had to keep moving around Stockholm because he kept getting bullied. At Helenelund School, among others. The girls weren’t kind to him.’
‘The fifteen-year-old girls,’ Blom said. ‘And one of them was me.’
‘I’d have sounded the alarm if I’d found him,’ Blom said. ‘Then of course it would all have ended up in the investigation. But he no longer exists. William Larsson has ceased to exist. I was forced to look underground.’