by Arne Dahl
The mountaineers were clambering laboriously up the snow-covered mountain. Their dark silhouettes stood out in the distance against the extraordinary multicoloured sunset. But there it stopped. If the mountaineers had carried on a few metres they would have tumbled into a void. And, to their not inconsiderable surprise, would have landed flat on the wooden floor of a boathouse by the waters of Edsviken in Sollentuna, just outside Stockholm, Sweden.
Sam Berger and Molly Blom looked at the half-glued photograph. Then they screwed the lids back on the tubes of glue and looked at the remnants of the board, which lay strewn across the floor like the pieces of a puzzle.
They couldn’t do any more. Not right now.
‘You didn’t say anything about the ammunition,’ Berger said.
‘And you didn’t say anything about William’s last words,’ Blom said.
Their eyes met.
‘William’s dead,’ Berger said. ‘Six out of seven girls have been rescued. Everything except my conscience ought to be under control. And everything is under control, isn’t it?’
‘We’re going to lose our jobs,’ Blom said.
‘You know that’s not what I mean.’
‘I know.’
They looked once again at the sad, half-repaired picture, which incorporated a now entirely empty whiteboard. Everything had been removed from it.
‘There’s a lot in what Allan says,’ Berger said. ‘William kidnapped Aisha Pachachi two years ago. You interviewed her parents. Then, when he needed a third hideout, it was logical to return there, to his childhood home. He got rid of the parents, who were now on their own there, bought the flat next door, and when the Pachachis’ son came back from IS a heroin addict, he got rid of him, together with a junkie friend who was also a mass murderer. And Aisha had been in William’s captivity the longest. Her body eventually buckled under the effect of those banned drugs, and she died while they were being moved between Märsta, Bålsta and Helenelund. End of story.’
‘Are we happy with that?’ Blom asked.
‘Our aim was to rescue the girls and catch William,’ Berger said. ‘We’ve done that. We need sleep.’
‘But are we happy?’ Blom persisted. ‘Is everything clear? Is the picture complete?’
‘Stop it. You need sleep as much as I do.’
‘I doubt it,’ Blom said. ‘But you feel that something’s not right too.’
‘But can I really be bothered with it?’
‘You don’t care where Aisha Pachachi is? There’s one girl still missing, a whole family, in fact. William didn’t hide his victims. Anton Bergmark was in a wheelchair, Simon Lundberg in the cave, the IS guys at the kitchen table, Aunt Alicia Anger in her rocking chair.’
Blom pushed a printout towards Berger. He looked at the grotesque picture of the old woman in the rocking chair, her face drained of all colour, a black sock sticking out of her mouth.
Berger pushed the photograph away with distaste. He’d seen enough for a while.
‘The nursing staff and the police were sure it was an accident,’ he said. ‘Alicia Anger was confused enough to eat a sock by mistake and choke on it. You saw her, Molly, she wasn’t exactly in full command of her faculties.’
‘We’ve got the recording from your phone. Everything William said in and outside the boathouse,’ Blom went on.
‘But we don’t need to play it,’ Berger said. ‘Because you remember it all anyway.’
She pushed the photograph back towards Berger and said: ‘“Aunt Alice. She was kind. I didn’t even know she was alive.”’
Berger closed his eyes. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘He didn’t kill her.’
‘So who did?’
‘Explain about the ammunition again,’ Berger said. ‘Slowly this time.’
Blom breathed in slowly. ‘When I go undercover there may be occasions when I’m forced to shoot people I shouldn’t be shooting. Then it’s important that they don’t die by mistake. So I use fully jacketed ammunition, which passes straight through the body, and avoid the standard-issue police ammunition, Speer Gold Dot, which has a hollow point and expands on impact, causes much more damage. But my usual ammunition had been swapped for hollow-point bullets.’
‘Dum-dum bullets,’ Berger said.
‘They sometimes get called that,’ Blom said. ‘But that’s not really correct.’
‘When would that have happened?’
‘They’re in my cases; they’re always in the van.’
‘So it must have happened just before you broke me out of Security Service custody and we took off?’
‘Yes,’ Blom said. ‘I don’t think William would have died if I’d had my usual ammunition. But it still feels pretty far-fetched.’
‘Same as the conclusions about what William said when he was dying,’ Berger said. ‘I bet you can quote that too.’
‘“I watched over them. I was the connection. It took its toll. I thought Anton would get rid of it, but that wasn’t enough. My knuckle marks were in the door.”’
‘Yes,’ Berger said, ‘that was it. And what does that mean? It could be nonsense like most of what he said. He watched over the girls; he was the link between them. He thought his assault on Anton Bergmark with the hammers, the change of roles, would get rid of whatever was taking its toll, but it wasn’t enough. So he moved on to the girls. And then the link to me, the knuckle marks in the door of his childhood bedroom in Helenelund.’
‘But what if that wasn’t meant as a link to you?’ Blom said. ‘That came later, after all: “It’s not a house, Sam. It’s the start of everything. Where I got my only friend.” That’s when he tells you that the third house is the Pachachis’ flat.’
‘I don’t really follow, Molly.’
‘Nor do I. Not really. But William was definitely trying to tell us something. He watched over someone. He was the connection between others. Maybe not the girls. Maybe he was watching over the people who lived where his knuckle marks were in the door?’
‘The Pachachi family? Why on earth would he be doing that?’
‘On behalf of someone,’ Blom said. ‘He was the connection. But he was weighed down by something, something unpredictable, a childhood trauma. In the end assaulting Anton wasn’t enough, because his knuckle marks were in the door of one of the people he was supposed to be watching over.’
‘Aisha Pachachi?’
‘She lived in his old room,’ Blom said. ‘A fifteen-year-old girl, like the ones who had bullied and ridiculed him, had occupied the room where he got his only friend, Sam. And that only friend was you.’
‘It’s a bit thin,’ Berger said. ‘I don’t really buy it. It’s too vague. He was there, in his old bedroom? He watched over the people living in his childhood home? Watched over how?’
‘On someone’s behalf,’ Blom said. ‘He was the connection between Pachachi and someone. And it drove him mad, it took its toll. He tried to drown it out by systematically torturing his old tormentor Anton Bergmark, but that wasn’t enough, because every time he was in the flat he saw the marks of his knuckles in the door to one of the rooms. And there was someone who reminded him of one of the fifteen-year-old girls who had humiliated him as a teenager. In the end he felt obliged to snatch her, and it all started.’
‘He was watching over the Pachachi family on someone’s behalf?’ Berger said. ‘Whose?’
Molly Blom rubbed her face.
‘Who brought him to Sweden?’ she said. ‘Who gave him a job? A highly qualified technical job?’
‘Wiborg,’ Berger said. ‘Wiborg Supplies Ltd.’
‘And by extension?’
Berger heard himself groan. This wasn’t where he wanted to go. Anywhere, but not here. ‘By extension?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Fuck,’ Berger said. ‘The Security Service.’
Blom grabbed his wrist and turned his watch towards her. Condensation had begun to gather on the glass again, but the hands said eight o’clock exactly.
&n
bsp; ‘She’s the embodiment of punctuality,’ Berger said, retracting his arm.
Sure enough, there was a knock on the door.
Blom drew her pistol and lowered it behind the carpentry bench. Berger went over to the door and looked out cautiously.
She was standing there with her thin, mousy hair glued to her head, as if she’d emerged from a week-long downpour.
‘Syl,’ Berger said. ‘Come in.’
And Sylvia Andersson, known by very few people as Syl, walked into the boathouse and looked around.
‘Charming,’ she said, her eyes on the half-repaired photograph of mountaineers etched on the side of a snow-covered peak.
‘Have a seat,’ Berger said, gesturing towards a free chair by the carpentry bench, next to Blom, who was tucking her pistol back in its holster.
Syl nodded at Blom and sat down. Berger met her gaze. There was something unmentionable lurking there. A primal terror. But, on the other hand, that had been there for a while now.
‘Have you got any further?’ Berger asked.
‘I don’t even know what I’m doing here,’ Syl said, trying to adjust her style-free hairstyle. ‘Remind me.’
‘Helping me,’ Berger said with a wry smile.
‘Yes, that’s done me a fat lot of good over the years,’ Syl said.
‘What have you found?’
‘The anomalies,’ Syl said. ‘There’s actually been quite a lot of digging about in the archive. All at the same time.’
‘The Security Service archive?’
‘That is what we’re talking about, isn’t it?’ Syl said caustically.
‘OK,’ Berger said. ‘And this happened at the turn of the year, or thereabouts?’
‘No thereabouts,’ Syl said. ‘Exactly.’
‘When someone knew that security would be weaker?’
‘That seems likely, yes. A number of files have been erased, the activity can be reconstructed, but not the files. At least not yet. I’m working on it.’
‘Is it possible to say when the erased files were first created?’
‘Specific historical moments, yes. The earliest I’ve found was from 1976.’
Berger and Blom looked at each other.
‘Seventy-six?’ Blom said. ‘April 1976 by any chance?’
Syl looked at her seriously for the first time.
‘That’s right,’ Syl said, ‘28 April.’
‘After Nils Gundersen had been in Sweden to recruit mercenaries,’ Blom said. ‘And when he got a young woman named Stina Larsson up the duff.’
‘There was a Security Service report about that?’ Berger said.
‘It’s not possible to say anything about the contents of the file,’ Syl said. ‘It’s just noticeable by its absence.’
Berger nodded. ‘That was the oldest document that was deleted from the archive?’ he said. ‘When were the next ones from?’
‘They’re fairly regular, but no more than one per year for the following fifteen years,’ Syl said. ‘I was able to uncover the size of the missing files, if nothing else, and these annual reports were much smaller than the one from 1976. That remained the largest up to March 1991. That one was also large. A bit larger, in fact.’
‘OK … 1991,’ Berger said to Blom. ‘Two years before sixteen-year-old William Larsson vanished without a trace. Have we got anything for March ’91?’
Blom shook her head. ‘Gundersen was forty-three, had been active on Saddam Hussein’s side in the first Gulf War. William was fourteen and being badly bullied in Stuvsta.’
Berger nodded and felt his brain getting closer to boiling point.
‘Let me guess: the next large intervention in the database corresponds with a file in the summer of ’93?’ he said.
‘Correct,’ Syl said. ‘July. Although before that there was more activity from March ’91 and the following three or four months. Four documents missing. Then one larger one again in July ’93.’
‘When William had just left Sweden.’ Blom nodded.
‘This goes a long way to explaining why Nils Gundersen is completely absent from the Security Service archive but crops up in MISS’s files,’ Berger said. ‘He’s been purged from it.’
‘MISS?’ Syl exclaimed. ‘The Military Intelligence and Security Service? What the hell have you dragged me into?’
‘What about after ’93?’ Berger said instead of replying.
‘Less activity,’ Syl said, staring darkly at her former boss. ‘Back to annual reports again. One small document is missing from each year, and soon even less than that. Every other year after the millennium, then nothing until towards the end of 2012. Then another large file disappears. The largest of them all: 11 November 2012.’
‘Three months before Anton Bergmark was attacked,’ Blom said. ‘That must have been when William returned to Sweden. And the Security Service had a file about it. A big one.’
‘We don’t know that,’ Berger said. ‘We don’t know for sure.’
‘We don’t know anything for sure,’ Blom said. ‘But the circumstantial evidence is piling up like shit in the Ganges.’
‘The sacred river,’ Berger said. ‘Then what?’
‘That’s where it stops,’ Syl said, getting to her feet. ‘Along with my involvement. You’ll have to manage on your own now.’
Berger looked at her. For the first time since Police Academy he managed to see behind Syl’s everyday exterior and get a glimpse of the Sylvia Andersson who had never really interested him, the single mother with a five-year-old daughter, Moira, the spitting image of her mother.
And what he saw was sheer, unalloyed terror. Possibly more for Moira’s sake than her own.
‘What do you suspect?’ Berger asked. ‘What can you see that we can’t?’
‘Nothing,’ Syl said through her teeth. ‘See nothing, hear nothing, and above all, say nothing.’
‘In one word? Off the top of your head?’
‘I see close collaboration between the mercenary you call Nils Gundersen and the Security Service, and I don’t want anything to do with it.’
‘And yet you said you were “working on it”?’ Blom said.
‘I don’t believe I said that,’ Syl snapped.
‘She can quote you verbatim,’ Berger said with a nod towards Blom.
Blom flashed him a dark look and quoted: ‘“A number of files have been erased, the activity can be reconstructed, but not the files. At least not yet. I’m working on it.”’
‘So what is it you’re working on, Syl?’ Berger said.
‘My name is Sylvia,’ Syl said.
‘What are you working on?’
‘Nothing. I’ve stopped working on it.’
‘Could there really be a way of reconstructing the erased files? That sounds unlikely. Doesn’t it, Molly?’
‘Totally improbable,’ Blom said, picking up the prompt. ‘I don’t see how anyone could pull that off. Maybe in the future. Seven or eight years from now.’
‘It does seem completely impossible,’ Berger said. ‘How the hell would anyone go about it?’
‘I know of a possible method,’ Syl said hesitantly. ‘It would require quite a lot of extra equipment.’
‘That you can get hold of?’
‘Not free of charge.’
‘Send us an invoice.’
‘Us? So what are you, then?’
‘Private detectives,’ Berger said.
42
Saturday 31 October, 15.19
They got no further than the security desk in reception before it became clear that everything had changed. First Berger tried his swipe card. Nothing happened; the guard behind the bulletproof glass didn’t even look up from the game of solitaire he was playing on his iPad. But when Blom tried her card he stood up, pressed a button and his voice rang out metallically: ‘Please wait a moment. Someone will come and get you.’
It didn’t actually take more than a couple of seconds before two powerful silhouettes emerged from the fluorescent lighti
ng of the nearest corridor of Police Headquarters on Kungsholmen in Stockholm. Berger let out a deep sigh.
During the long walk through increasingly demanding security measures neither Kent nor Roy said a single word. They didn’t even answer when addressed directly. In the end Berger and Blom were deposited on a sofa in the corridor of the Security Service’s Intelligence Unit. Above them a sign indicated that the head of the unit, Steen, had his office behind the nearest door.
Berger and Blom looked at each other. They didn’t say a word.
The compulsory fifteen-minute wait had already begun to acquire its own fifteen-minute wait when the door next to the sign suddenly made a low humming sound. Blom stood up, followed by Berger.
August Steen was sitting behind his desk. Berger had never met him before, and the first thing that struck him was the straightness of his back. It looked like he’d been sitting to attention for more than sixty years. He had a sudden vision of a fifties baby seat containing a steel-grey infant with a ramrod-straight back. It made the conversation that followed a little more bearable.
‘Sit down,’ August Steen said, giving the barest of nods towards the two low chairs on their side of the desk.
They sat down. After a pause Steen said: ‘Well, there’s no denying that the pair of you have put a rocket under the country’s police force during the past week. And the very fact that you rescued six girls and stopped the perpetrator means that we can allow ourselves to overlook the majority of your transgressions and actual law-breaking with an easy conscience. However, I and many others have a serious problem with the crime of disloyalty to your superiors.’
‘It was never about that,’ Blom said. ‘Everything we’ve done has been for our superiors, in other words the police, in other words the general public. Justice – isn’t that was all police work is about? Getting justice?’
‘By all means,’ August Steen said, his stony gaze firmly fixed on Blom. ‘But justice is a complicated concept, and involves more than a levelling of the scores once a crime has been committed. From the perspective of law enforcement it becomes even more important to prevent crime, stop miscreants before they set to work. Justice becomes less clear-cut when the crime hasn’t yet been committed.’