At that moment the phone beside her rang and she jumped. She went into the bathroom and picked up the receiver there.
It was Detective Inspector Q, Annika’s contact in the police force.
‘How the hell did you know I was here?’
‘I spoke to Berit. It’s about the fire in your house. Forensics have just got back, and they’ve got a preliminary cause. The level of destruction and the explosive way that the fire spread suggest that the fire broke out in several places simultaneously, and probably on more than one floor, which in turn suggests that it was started deliberately.’
‘But that’s exactly what I told you!’ Annika said. ‘I saw him, I know who started it.’
‘Who?’
‘Hopkins. The neighbour. He was standing in the bushes spying on us after we got out.’
‘I think you’re wrong, and you should think very carefully before pointing the finger at anyone. Arson is a serious offence, one of the worst in the book. It can carry a life sentence.’
‘It would serve him right,’ Annika said.
‘And insurance fraud is also serious,’ Q said. ‘We investigate that sort of case very thoroughly.’
Annika snorted. ‘Don’t try that one,’ she said. ‘I know exactly what happened. Anyway, haven’t you got anything else to worry about but the fire in my house? The Nobel killer, for instance? Or David Lindholm’s murder? By the way, have you found the boy yet?’
There was a noise at the other end of the line, someone entering the detective’s office and voices in the background. The receiver was put down. Now she could hear rustling and clattering.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ Q said, then hung up without waiting for an answer.
She was left with the phone in her hand, listening to the sounds of the computer games in the bedroom.
Suddenly she was overwhelmed by a desperate longing for Thomas.
You never gave me a chance. Why didn’t you say something?
She wants to see me again. I’m on my way there now.
He’d walked across the parquet floor, picked up his briefcase, opened the front door and looked out at the grey gloom. He’d stepped outside, closed the door behind him and hadn’t looked back, not once.
‘Mummy,’ Kalle said from the bedroom. ‘There’s something wrong with Mario. He won’t hit the ball.’
She pressed the palms of her hands to her eyes for a few seconds, breathing through her mouth. ‘Coming!’ she said, standing up.
She ran some water in the basin and rubbed her face hard for a few seconds.
Kalle opened the door. ‘I can’t press “hit”,’ he said, holding out the Game Boy.
She dried herself on a flannel and sank on to the edge of the bath. She took the computer from him and pressed various buttons, then realized what had happened. ‘You must have pressed “pause”,’ she said, showing him the command to start the game again.
‘No, I didn’t!’
‘You probably didn’t mean to,’ Annika said. ‘You must have done it by mistake.’
‘No, I didn’t!’ Kalle’s eyes were full of tears as he snatched the game from her.
For a moment Annika’s eyes flashed black, and she lifted her hand to slap him. She stopped herself with a gasp.
Oh, God, I mustn’t fall apart. What would we do if I did?
‘Well, at least Mario can hit the ball now,’ she said breathlessly.
Friday, 4 June
7
The door of Detective Inspector Q’s office was ajar. Nina hesitated, not sure if she should press the button beside the three little lights on the wall, labelled Busy, Wait or Come In, or if she should just knock.
Before she had made up her mind, the door opened abruptly and the detective was standing in front of her, hair all over the place, his loud shirt only half tucked into his jeans.
‘What the hell?’ he said. ‘What are you doing? Eavesdropping?’ He held out his hand. ‘Nina Hoffman, I presume?’
She looked him in the eye. ‘Yes, that’s right. And you’re Q.’
‘Come in, for God’s sake. My secretary isn’t here today, so I’ll have to get the coffee myself. How do you take it?’
Nina stared at him. What was he on about? ‘Thanks, I’m okay,’ she said, stepping into the office.
It was on the third floor of Police Headquarters on Kungsholmen, so impersonal that it bordered on spartan. There weren’t even any curtains. A dead pot-plant stood abandoned in the window, perhaps part of the furnishings when he had moved in.
She stood there for a minute or so while he went to the coffee-machine further down the corridor.
‘Don’t worry, the chair isn’t booby-trapped,’ he said, pointing at it when he came back with a steaming plastic mug in his hand.
Nina sat down on the worn old chair, feeling extremely uncomfortable.
She had heard about Detective Inspector Q, even if he wasn’t anywhere near as well known as David Lindholm. And, unlike David, he wasn’t universally liked either. There were a lot of officers who thought his weird clothes were a bit affected, and then there was his passion for cheesy pop music. There were also stubborn rumours that he was gay.
Q settled down on the other side of the desk. ‘That was a bit of a bloody coincidence, wasn’t it?’ he said, blowing on his coffee.
‘What?’ Nina wondered.
‘That you just happened to be first on the scene of that particular crime.’
‘Is this an interrogation?’ Nina asked, tilting her chin.
He threw out his arms. ‘Absolutely not!’ he said. ‘Call it a conversation between fellow officers, if you like. I’m just curious to hear what you think about the things that don’t have their own little box on the official report.’
He really was extremely odd, Nina thought, considering he was such a senior officer. ‘What do you want to know?’ she asked.
‘How did you react when you got the call?’
Bondegatan’s a long street – there must be a thousand people living on it.
‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘Why would I have thought anything in particular?’
The man on the other side of the desk toyed with his mug of coffee, and looked at her in silence for a whole minute. Nina felt her tongue swell in her mouth. She had an almost unbearable urge to lick her lips.
‘Do you know what?’ Q said eventually, his voice now tired and muted. ‘I think you’re lying. I think you know much more than you’ve reported so far, because you want to protect your best friend. But, believe me, you won’t help her by keeping quiet. If I’m to stand any chance of sorting out this mess, I need to know what happened.’
Nina made an effort to keep her back straight, and nodded. Yes, she could see that.
‘I knew David Lindholm,’ Q said. ‘Better than most people. Let’s just say that I’m not an unqualified supporter of the current claims that he was a great hero.’
Nina was astonished. ‘What do you mean?’
‘We trained together. Why David joined up is one of life’s great mysteries. He wasn’t remotely interested in police work, just wanted to carry on with his extreme sports and chase women.’
‘That’s just part of being young,’ she said.
‘He could be violent as well, at times, went in far too hard. Had you noticed that?’
‘I never worked with him. He’d left active fieldwork behind long before Julia and I got to know him.’
Q sighed and leaned forward over the desk. ‘Yes, well, right now there’s something considerably more important than David Lindholm’s character and the question of Julia’s guilt, and that’s their son. Have you any idea where Alexander might be?’
Nina tucked a strand of hair behind one ear. ‘Julia’s parents live in Södermanland, on a farm just outside Katrineholm. They look after Alexander sometimes, but he’s not there. I spoke to them yesterday.’
‘It was Julia’s parents who reported him missing,’ Q said.
Nina sat completely still. ‘David�
��s father died years ago, and his mother lives in an old people’s home. I haven’t spoken to her but he’s unlikely to be there. Julia didn’t have much to do with her neighbours or the other mums at nursery, but I suppose he could have been spending the night with one of them.’
‘The boy hasn’t been to nursery for the past week. No one’s seen him since last Friday, neither the staff nor the other parents.’
This is worse than everything else. How did it get to this?
‘So what … do you think’s happened?’
‘Was the Lindholms’ marriage in trouble?’
Nina looked down at her lap. ‘I suppose you could say that,’ she said.
‘Enough trouble for Julia to be on the point of leaving him? For her to have prepared her departure somehow?’
‘I don’t know,’ Nina said.
Q fixed his eyes on hers. ‘Could she have hidden the boy somewhere?’ he asked. ‘Could he be alive, locked up somewhere?’
Could Julia have done that? Could she have locked Alexander away somewhere, then gone home and shot David?
‘It’s now thirty hours since the murder,’ Q said. ‘Time’s running out. If the boy doesn’t have access to water, we need to find him within twenty-four hours, forty-eight at the most. I hope you appreciate just how serious a situation this is.’
A draught from the door made her shiver. ‘Julia’s got a summer cottage,’ she said. ‘Out in the woods near Katrineholm. She rents it from her parents’ neighbours. They don’t spend much time there. David thinks it’s too basic, but Julia’s very fond of it.’ She realized she’d used the present tense when she’d referred to David.
Q was making notes.
‘She rents it? That’ll be why we haven’t found any trace of it in the property register. Where is it?’
‘In the woods outside Floda, halfway towards Granhed,’ Nina said. She took a sheet of paper and drew a shaky map showing the way to Julia’s cottage. ‘It’s called Björkbacken,’ she said, ‘but there’s no sign. You can’t see the house from the road, and the post gets delivered to a box in Floda, but there’s an old milestone beside the track, an iron sign saying how far it is to Floda Church. You can’t miss it.’
She pushed the sheet over the desk and the detective picked it up.
‘How often does she go out there?’
Nina thought. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We haven’t seen much of each other over the past few years …’
‘Why not?’
Nina hesitated. ‘David,’ she said. ‘We … we didn’t really get on.’
‘Because?’
She looked at the dead plant, remembering the first time she and Julia had met David.
He’d come to give a lecture at the Police Academy, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, big cowboy boots on his feet. His hair was short and spiked, and he’d had several days’ stubble.
She recalled their teacher’s breathless enthusiasm.
We should really have been looking at crime prevention today, with a particular focus on racism, but now that we’ve got the opportunity to hear David Lindholm instead, obviously we’re delighted …
Several of the other teachers had turned up in the lecture room, which was highly unusual.
David had sat down on the table at the front of the room, one boot dangling, the other firmly on the floor. He leaned forward with one elbow on his thigh. The impression was at once nonchalant and authoritative.
Julia’s whisper had been like a warm breeze in her ear.
Just look at him! He’s even better-looking in real life than he is on television …
The lecture had been fascinating, one of the best of the whole course. David talked about the art of negotiating with criminals in extreme situations, when hostages were involved, for instance. He described situations and events that made everyone gawp, shifting easily between seriousness and banter. His smile was radiant and white, and he’d noticed Julia straight away. Nina had seen him turn towards her when he made a joke, and once he even winked at her. Julia had blushed.
Afterwards several of the teachers and students flocked round him, but when Nina and Julia were getting ready to leave he excused himself and came over to them.
There is a future for Sweden, he said. With you two in the force the bad guys will be queuing up to get arrested …
He was pretending to talk to both of them, but he was looking at Julia.
Julia smiled her wonderful smile and her eyes sparkled.
Nina could still remember the prick of jealousy. Now she said to Q, ‘I think David felt I was too close to Julia. Some men find that sort of thing difficult.’
Q looked at her intently for several seconds. ‘You reported that Julia mentioned another woman in the flat.’
‘Yes, that’s right. There was nothing to indicate that that had been the case, but obviously I made a note of what she said.’
‘Do you think she was telling the truth?’
Nina said nothing for a few moments. ‘I don’t know. It’s probably up to Forensics to see if there’s any evidence of an intruder …’
‘There were a lot of different fingerprints in the flat,’ Q said. ‘It must have been a while since it was last cleaned properly. You didn’t see any signs of a breakin, no indication that the door had been forced?’
‘No.’
‘Forensics have found traces of blood on the floor of the hall. Did you notice anything there?’
‘No. But I saw a gun on the bedroom floor, at the end of the bed.’
‘That was Julia’s.’
Nina said nothing.
‘Could this other woman have got in by any other way?’ Q asked. ‘Through an open window?’
The breeze from the bedroom, a window open slightly. Curtains drawn, a room in complete darkness. Shadows but no movement. Only the smell, sharp and unfamiliar.
‘The bedroom window was probably open,’ she said. ‘I didn’t check, but there was a draught from in there.’
‘Which way does the bedroom face?’
‘Towards Bondegatan.’
‘Is it possible to get in or out that way?’
‘The flat’s on the third floor, and the façade of the building is plastered. In theory it would probably be possible, using a rope, but you’d have to attach it somehow, either up on the roof or somewhere inside the flat.’
Q sighed. ‘And you’re quite sure of the information about the other woman?’
Nina stiffened. ‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s no way you could have misunderstood it?’
What were they really thinking? And what lay behind this peculiar conversation?
‘Do you think I fabricated it in order to help my friend?’
‘I don’t think anything. But I would appreciate your help in trying to work out what happened.’
Q leaned forward in his chair and held her gaze. ‘It’s like this. Julia isn’t talking to us. We’re extremely keen to get her to communicate. I was wondering if you could pay her an informal visit to hear what she’s got to say.’
Aha. So this is where we’ve been heading.
Nina folded her arms. ‘You want me to spy on my best friend? Is that what you’re suggesting?’
‘Call it whatever you want,’ the detective said calmly. ‘I’m offering you the chance to see Julia and find out how she is. If you think it fitting, you could always ask about the other woman, and about what happened in the flat yesterday morning.’
‘So I’m supposed to conduct some sort of interrogation without there being any sort of defence lawyer present?’ Nina said. ‘That’s completely unethical!’
‘Maybe,’ Q said, looking at his watch. ‘She’s in Kronoberg Prison, as of now, more or less. I could get you permission to go in, if you think it would help, I mean.’
‘So she’s been discharged from hospital? Already?’
‘I saw her last night,’ the detective said. ‘She was as fit as a fiddle.’
‘But she was comp
letely out of it yesterday morning.’
‘She wasn’t particularly talkative, but that’s hardly unusual. She’s behaving like people normally do in custody.’ The detective inspector wrote something on a sheet of paper and stood up. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Julia,’ he said. ‘I think she’d appreciate a visit from you. These are my telephone numbers. Call me when you’ve made up your mind.’
Nina took the piece of paper and stood up too. ‘Just one question,’ she said. ‘How come you’re in charge of this case?’
‘I work here, and I had nothing better to do,’ Q said.
‘But police officers suspected of any crime are supposed to be investigated by the police authority,’ Nina said. ‘Why isn’t that happening with Julia?’
The detective held the door open for her.
‘Julia Lindholm resigned from the force on the fifteenth of May,’ he said. ‘The senior prosecutor with the police authority has decided that she should be treated as an ordinary mortal. She can hardly be investigated by her former colleagues on Södermalm, which is why the case has come to us at National Crime rather than to the local district.’
Nina stared at him. ‘That’s not possible.’
‘I can assure you that I take the rivalry between the district police authorities and the National Crime squad very seriously, but in this case we had no option.’
‘She can’t have resigned. She would have talked to me first.’
‘My secretary is off today, as I said earlier, so I’m the one who gets to sit and file their nails. So, if you don’t mind …’
He nudged her out of the bare room and left her standing in the corridor.
Annika was leaning against the door frame with a mug of coffee in her hand, watching the children chasing Berit’s dog around the large lawn in front of the house. Kalle was quicker, of course, but Ellen was keeping up fairly well on her little legs. She had a good stride … Maybe she’d turn out to be a sprinter.
The view from the porch of Berit’s guest cottage was wonderful. Up to the right lay the main house, two storeys, a terrace, ornate woodwork. To the left the meadow sloped down towards the lake and the beach, where the neighbour’s horses usually went to shit in the summer. Straight ahead, on the far side of the paddocks, lay the forest.
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