by Arne Dahl
‘Stay away from the congestion charge zone,’ Blom said.
‘No cameras.’ Berger nodded.
Only when they reached Farsta did he start to feel safe. Then he repeated: ‘How the hell did they find us?’
‘They can’t have had a transmitter on my van,’ Blom said. ‘They’d have picked us up last night. Or this morning when we were out shopping.’
‘So what, then? Have I got some fucking chip in my body? Have you?’
‘Hardly,’ Blom said. ‘My guess is that they’ve managed to reverse the GPS signal after all. I didn’t really think that was possible yet, you need to fix at least four satellites to do it.’
‘Are we safe in the boathouse? Can we go back there? Or will Roy and Roger be sitting there waiting for us?’
‘That depends on when they managed to pick up the signal.’
Berger sighed.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘We’re just going to have to find out.’
29
Wednesday 28 October, 19.04
The rain was scattering myriad fleeting rings across the dark surface of Edsviken.
There had been no one waiting for them in the boathouse.
There was no evidence to suggest that they had been discovered.
Berger was leaning on the railing out on the jetty, breathing out at last. He was soaked and was trying his best not to fall asleep where he stood. There was a break in the middle of the railing where a ladder led straight down into the water. Even the thought that it might be necessary to climb down there before long made the blood run cold in his veins.
Blom came and stood next to him. She was just as wet as he was.
‘Done?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘I’ve rigged up four cameras at strategic points,’ he confirmed. ‘Are they really the same kind you used in Vidargatan?’
She nodded. ‘And I’ve changed the plates on our stolen Mazda.’
‘How much stuff have you actually got in those Security Service cases?’ he asked.
She didn’t answer. They stood for a while looking out over the dark inlet.
‘Sometimes I wish I still smoked,’ Berger said.
Then they went back inside. They sat down at their respective carpentry benches, at their respective computers. Next to each bench lay a sleeping bag and camping mat. Completely untouched.
Berger was drinking coffee, Blom tea. They were both trying to ignore how tired they were.
Berger tried typing with his damaged left hand. It worked surprisingly well. He was following up an idea that had occurred to him up on Västerbron, while he was feeling ashamed at having introduced himself as Charles Lindbergh.
Blom had begun by checking the most obvious thing. After a while she said: ‘There’s no national alert.’
He looked at her in silence.
‘The police aren’t looking for us,’ she clarified. ‘The Security Service hasn’t gone public about our disappearance. No press conferences.’
‘Good,’ Berger said. ‘So just the sharpest cops in Sweden hunting us in the utmost secrecy, then.’
Blom flashed him a bitter look.
He went on: ‘What do Deer and Allan know?’
‘They know I’m Security Service and that we pulled you in for questioning on behalf of Internal Investigations. Not much more than that.’
‘And where do they think I am now?’
‘In our custody, I presume. Unless August Steen has fabricated some story about you being on holiday. To be honest, I don’t know.’
Berger muttered something and they both went back to their computers. Blom sat quietly, typing her way deeper and deeper into the Security Service’s endless archives. Berger was digging into an abandoned police investigation, trying to find connections. At one point he got up and went over to the big whiteboard. Eventually he found what he was looking for. A video clip had been running for a while on his computer before Blom folded the screen of her laptop down with a groan.
‘No luck?’ Berger said.
‘No Nils Gundersen in any Security Service files,’ Blom said.
‘It was a gamble,’ Berger said, shrugging. ‘Gundersen may be no more than a character from Alicia Anger’s confused imagination.’
Blom nodded. ‘There might be another option, but it’s considerably more complicated.’
Berger thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know if I dare activate Syl …’
Blom looked at him. ‘Now you’re being almost ridiculously mysterious.’
‘Syl,’ Berger said slowly, ‘is the reason I was able to find you.’
‘I’ve been wondering how you managed that,’ Blom said. ‘So Syl is some sort of program?’
Berger laughed. ‘Not far off, really.’
‘Stop being difficult.’
‘I shouldn’t be saying this even now.’ Berger sighed. ‘But you and I have ended up in a tricky position of reluctant but unavoidable trust. Syl’s real name is Sylvia Andersson, and I’ve worked with her pretty much since Police Academy. She conducted an anonymous search for Wiborg Supplies Ltd and found your name on a list that we then cross-referenced with Botox clinics.’
‘A list?’ Blom exclaimed. ‘What sort of list?’
‘The Security Service’s “internal” and “external” resources.’
‘What? All of them?’
‘There was something about weak security around the time of the reorganisation at the end of last year. Syl said she’d found several anomalies there. Maybe she found her way down to the very deepest levels.’
‘There may well be files I don’t have clearance for,’ Blom said, ‘but I’d still prefer not to have to rely on this Syl of yours. After all, we are on the run from justice. Let me try my way first.’
‘Your considerably more complicated way,’ Berger nodded. ‘So what is it, then? No secrets, now.’
‘MISS,’ Blom said bluntly.
Berger looked at her and slowly shook his head.
‘The Military Intelligence and Security Service?’ he said. ‘Have you got friends there? An old lover, perhaps?’
‘Not old at all,’ Blom said calmly. ‘So what have you been up to? “No secrets, now.”’
‘This,’ Berger said, turning his laptop round.
It was security footage from a cash machine somewhere in the city centre. It was raining gently, but the scene was well lit, and deserted. Eventually a young girl walked past. In her hand she had a pair of bolt cutters. Berger froze the film when the girl turned her face towards the camera. She really did look tense. Tense to the point of bursting.
‘Emma Brandt, fifteen years old,’ Berger said. ‘Hornstull, late on Midsummer’s Day this year.’
‘Good,’ Blom said. ‘Take a screenshot. I want a printout.’
‘A printout?’
‘I want pictures of all the kidnapped girls,’ she said, pointing at the whiteboard.
Berger nodded, took a screenshot and went on playing the clip. Once again, the scene was completely deserted. He pressed fast-forward. If it weren’t for a moonlighting sparrow, the footage would have looked like a still picture. Then he slowed the playback to normal again. Soon a van swept past. He froze the picture again. On the side of the white van the word Statoil stood out clearly, above a line of much smaller writing.
‘Ah,’ Molly Blom said.
‘Ah,’ Berger echoed, and zoomed in on the writing below.
The picture was badly pixelated and barely legible, but the letters spelled out the name Gävle.
‘Here comes William,’ Berger said. ‘Seven minutes later. By now Emma Brandt has made it all the way to the crown of the bridge. Maybe she’s also started to cut the fence.’
The van flickered past, frame by frame. When Berger stopped the clip again it was possible to read a couple of letters and at least one digit on the number plate.
‘You lot kept the information about the Statoil van secret from us,’ Berger said. ‘But I just found it on your board. The number matches.’
<
br /> Blom nodded. ‘Nice,’ she said. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? Statoil in Gävle. The one at Sätrahöjden. We checked it out thoroughly. Hired in May by a Johan Eriksson.’
‘Brother of Erik Johansson?’
‘Hmm,’ Blom said. ‘We followed it up carefully. There was no trace of it. And the security footage from the petrol station had long since been wiped.’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me if this was the same van that was seen outside Ellen Savinger’s school in Östermalm.’
‘At least we’re getting closer to some real evidence,’ Blom said.
They went back to their respective laptops. The darkness outside the boathouse couldn’t get any darker. The passage of time, though impossible to tell from the world around them, showed on their increasingly tired faces.
After a couple of hours a crooked smile spread across Berger’s face, and he snatched up Blom’s untraceable mobile phone and went out onto the jetty.
During the relatively long call Blom printed pictures of Sunisa Phetwiset and Emma Brandt, the two potential new victims. She went over to the whiteboard and put them up next to the older pictures. There were now seven of them, and as she looked at the row of young faces – all victims of an insane serial killer who had tried to murder her nearly a quarter of a century ago – she felt not only revulsion and a terrible sorrow, but something else. A vague insight that quickly evaporated.
But she had seen something.
Something in the seven faces. And now it was gone.
Berger came in from the jetty, held the phone up and said, unnecessarily cheerfully: ‘Tomorrow we’re going to Kristinehamn.’
‘That’s, what, three hundred kilometres away?’
‘Only 250. Just think, you cycled all that way once upon a time.’
He was expecting a very sharp glare. But she merely said: ‘Tell me.’
‘Jonna Eriksson went missing together with her boyfriend, Simon Lundberg, on 12 February this year from her foster home in Kristinehamn. The newly established Bergslagen Police Authority conducted a large number of interviews with past and present foster parents, friends, teachers, you name it. They didn’t come up with anything of note, except that Jonna and Simon often ran away from their respective foster homes together. No one was particularly interested in them. But there was a significant date marked in their files – when Jonna’s best friend Sandra was due to come home after a long stay in Australia. That date has just passed. She’s home now. And she had quite a bit to say.’
‘Worth a round trip of five hundred kilometres?’
‘I think so. Sandra knows of a secret place in the Värmland forests where Jonna and Simon could have gone to hide away from the world. No one else knows about it. And no one contacted Sandra when she was travelling through the Australian outback.’
Blom nodded and gave a brief smile. It was a remarkable smile.
Then she stood up and went over to the whiteboard. She looked at the faces once more. They were almost all smiling.
Aisha Pachachi, Nefel Berwari, Julia Almström, Sunisa Phetwiset, Jonna Eriksson, Emma Brandt and Ellen Savinger.
‘I was standing here a little while ago, and I had some sort of revelation. It’s gone now, but I’m seeing something. When did William rent the house in Märsta, in the name of Erik Johansson?’
‘Over two years ago,’ Berger said, watching her intently. ‘From March, two and a half years ago. The owners live in Argentina.’
‘March,’ Blom said. ‘And he kidnaps the first victim, Aisha, at the end of the school year on 7 June. He obviously took her to the house in Märsta. The wall. Why were the mooring rings so deeply embedded? I haven’t been inside the house, of course. But that whole business of the labyrinth in the basement: is that his work?’
‘Don’t know,’ Berger said. ‘It seems crazy enough.’
Molly Blom scratched her head hard, as if she were trying to wake her brain cells up. Then she said: ‘He’s taken seven girls in two and a half years, if our hypothesis is correct. The Märsta house is the only crime scene we’ve got. Has he had seven similarly elaborate buildings at his disposal? Where he could calmly take his time constructing his torture clock? There can’t be that many, surely? Wouldn’t it be logical for there to be just one clock, one crime scene? Where he took all the girls?’
‘OK,’ Berger said. ‘You mean the Märsta house was the headquarters? That Ellen wasn’t the first girl held there? Even though only her DNA was found?’
‘How about this,’ Blom said, with the light of revelation shining in her eyes. ‘For each girl he tortured, he added a new layer of wall. Which works because the mooring rings are ten centimetres in diameter. In the end there can’t have been much left of the rings. He’s walled up all the DNA evidence.’
Berger felt his churning thoughts contort his face.
‘Shit, we have to go to Märsta tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I was hoping we’d get to Kristinehamn.’
‘Tomorrow?’ Blom said, pulling on her tracksuit top.
30
Thursday 29 October, 00.01
Berger pressed his back against the wooden planks. They were really so rotten they felt soft. He looked over at the remains of the next building. Blom was crouched there in the darkness; he couldn’t see her, just saw the play of her torch on the grass. Up among the aspen trees there were no leaves left, no rustling to perforate the night.
And it wasn’t raining.
He cast a glance at his watch. Behind the almost condensation-free glass the hands were pointing at midnight.
They were entering the ghosting hour.
Blom was suddenly gone. When he looked up from his watch she wasn’t there. His torch swept the grass, the trees, the rotting walls of the ruined outbuilding, a small, half-collapsed door in its facade.
Then the door was thrown open. The interior was illuminated, the light shining straight through to the road behind.
Blom appeared in the opening. She waved him towards her. He went over. He saw that the wall opposite was completely open, as in a garage. Her finger pointed into the beam of light, at the clay that acted as a floor. There were clear, relatively fresh, tyre marks.
They set off. How long had it actually been since Berger first laid eyes on this place? He had caught up with his advancing colleagues, seeing them emerge from the downpour, one by one, crouched figures which, even though he could only see them from behind, exuded an unmistakable focus.
Before long one of them would have his upper arms punctured by flying knives. So his first visit wasn’t actually that long ago; Ekman was probably still in hospital. Berger tried in vain to count the days before his thoughts went off in a different direction.
Towards evidence. Allan’s perspective.
A lot had happened during the last, very few days, an absurd amount had been ploughed up from the dirt of the past. They had now sniffed out seven possible victims of their mad perpetrator, who, judging by everything they knew, was William Larsson. But the fact remained that there was only one piece of evidence that a violent kidnapper was at work, and none at all to suggest a serial killer. The only physical evidence was still the DNA found in the basement of the house that was looming up in front of them. Ellen Savinger’s blood.
Aisha Pachachi could very well have followed her brother and become a child-bride of IS in Syria.
Nefel Berwari could very well have fallen victim to an honour killing in Vivala, Örebro.
Julia Almström could very well have fled the country with her unidentified ex-con boyfriend.
Sunisa Phetwiset could very well have been murdered by paedophile Axel Jansson.
Jonna Eriksson could very well have run away with her boyfriend and fellow unfortunate, Simon Lundberg.
Emma Brandt could very well have jumped from Västerbron and been carried out to sea by the current.
And William Larsson could very well be nothing more than a ghost conjured up from the darkest parts of Sam Berger and Molly Blom’s pasts, taking form withou
t actually existing. Looked at dispassionately, it seemed pretty likely that he had died in the nineties as a result of his severe deformities.
The whole thing could very well turn out to be ghosts in the machine, which were now, in the ghosting hour, about to reveal their true nature.
Apart from Ellen Savinger. She was, beyond all doubt, a kidnapped and possibly murdered fifteen-year-old girl.
And perhaps there was evidence behind the bloodstain on the wall that they weren’t dealing with ghosts after all, but with the very real victims of a serial killer.
Really real. Really behind the wall.
By the steps up to the porch blue and white plastic tape was still fluttering in the imperceptible night breeze. Berger went first, Blom followed. The likelihood of there being anyone inside the house was extremely small, but they both instinctively drew their pistols at the same time.
Berger pushed the door open and crouched down. He shone his torch at the knife-throwing mechanism. Nothing seemed to have changed. He slipped inside, followed by Blom.
Left, into the living room, everything was the same. A quick glance into the bedroom, then into the kitchen. The hatch in the floor was open, the police tape was where it had been when he was last there. There was nothing to indicate that anyone had been in the house since then.
Berger shone his torch on the steps and went down, then lit up the walls of the labyrinth. He turned and saw the focused look on Blom’s pale face through the darkness. They made their way through the maze of rooms to reach the hole hacked in the wall. Berger got down on his knees and shuffled through, holding his gun raised. His torch played across the bare but by no means mute walls while Blom slipped into the cell. Some white powder fell on her as she passed through the opening, as if the wall was slowly giving way. She spat out crumbs of plasterboard. Then she looked around and went over to the far wall. Her hand slowly traced the outer edge of the bloodstain, and she crouched down and found the nail marks in the floor with the torch. Toenails. Fingernails. Then she looked at the two posts and felt the mooring rings in the wall.