Who Watcheth

by Helene Tursten

  Irene made her way back to the front, and spotted fresh tire tracks. She hadn’t noticed them when she first took a look around. Was the workshop used as a garage for a car? She turned and looked back at the apartment blocks. Daniel’s place was about a two-minute walk away. She took out her cell phone and called Tommy. He answered almost right away, and she quickly explained what she had found.

  “We’re on our way,” Tommy said.

  Irene could hear a hint of excitement in his voice. His instincts had kicked in, too. If there really was a car in the garage, and they could prove it belonged to Daniel, the investigation would take a completely new turn.

  “Do you know if Daniel’s home?” he asked.

  “I have no idea. I’ve avoided being seen from his apartment.”

  “Perhaps you should keep an eye on the place, just in case he goes out.”

  “Okay,” Irene said with a sigh, “but there are rear exits from the building. I’ll have to try to find a strategic position.”

  “Do your best. Backup will be with you very soon. I’ll try to get some help with surveillance, too. Hannu and Sara are out on a suspected homicide in Hisings Backa, but Jonny and I will be there. I’ll contact CSI so they can come out to Frölunda as soon as they’ve finished in Hisings Backa.”

  “Sounds good. Let me know when you’re approaching Basungatan.”

  Irene ended the call, but almost dropped her phone when she heard a man’s voice behind her

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  She spun around and saw a man with a shaved head with a huge Leonberger on a leash. The dog’s tail was wagging, but its master looked deeply suspicious. He was around sixty years old, short and squat with leathery skin. The dog’s head was on a level with his hip. He was wearing heavy boots that seemed to match his heavy-duty blue nylon work clothes.

  Irene quickly produced her police ID. “Detective Inspector Irene Huss.”

  “What the hell is a cop doing here?”

  Irene felt a sudden spurt of anger. She couldn’t be bothered to waste time on this idiot.

  “Police business. If you’ll excuse me I’ll get on with my job,” she said coldly.

  As she looked at his clothing, she was struck by a sudden thought.

  “Who are you, anyway?”

  The man gave her a nasty look. “Kenneth Svensson. I’m in charge of the maintenance service for this area,” he muttered.

  “Excellent, in that case I have a question for you. Who’s using this garage?” she said, nodding in the direction of the grey concrete structure.

  Svensson raised his eyebrows. He seemed genuinely surprised.

  “Using . . . What are you talking about?”

  “Just answer the question, please.”

  The poisonous expression was back.

  “No one is using this dump. It’s scheduled to be demolished. They’re supposed to be building some kind of wellness center here, whatever that is.”

  “There seems to be a car inside.”

  “Could be. I don’t know anything about that, but if there is, it will have to go, too. The old drunk who used to rent this place died last year, so I guess it’s his car.”

  Kenneth Svensson glared at her before firing off his final shot. “So it’s my job to make sure nobody uses this shithole before it’s knocked down. Which will be in three weeks’ time.”

  He turned and headed back through the trees, with the dog ambling at his heels. Irene followed him, wondering where was the best place to position herself in order to keep an eye on Daniel. She looked up at his windows and balcony, but could see no sign of movement behind the curtains. What does this guy do during the day? Eventually she decided to drive to the visitors’ parking lot in front of his apartment block. At least that way she could cover one side of the building.

  •••

  Tommy called ten minutes later, and Irene directed him to the parking lot next to the narrow path leading to the workshop. They arrived at the same time. Jonny got out of the car and retrieved a large cloth bag from the backseat. Good—tools that could be used to break in would be very handy.

  “Hi. I guess you’re not a prospective buyer for the place you found,” Tommy said with a big smile.

  He looks excited; let’s hope he’s not going to be disappointed, Irene thought.

  “Hardly. It’s due to be pulled down in three weeks.”

  They headed along the path toward the grey concrete building. With just a few meters to go, Irene suddenly stopped. Jonny almost ran right into her.

  “Oops! What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “The barricade.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s across the door.”

  “Well, that’s where I’d expect to find a barricade,” Jonny said, sighing demonstratively.

  “When I left here twenty minutes ago, it was lying on the ground. In the grass just there.”

  “In which case someone must have slid it into place while you were gone,” Tommy said, somewhat unnecessarily.

  “Daniel. I didn’t see any sign of him, although he could have gone out when I went to pick up my car and move it to the visitors’ parking lot, so I could keep an eye on his apartment. Or he could have left by the exit at the rear of the building,” Irene said.

  Tommy gazed pensively at the securely barricaded door. “Or he was inside when you were here.”

  Irene’s whole body was covered in goosebumps. If Kenneth Svensson hadn’t come along with his dog, things could have turned out very differently. In order to hide how she was feeling, she pointed to the barely visible marks on the ground.

  “Watch out for the tire tracks,” she said.

  They walked around the tracks in a wide semicircle and stood by the door.

  “It’s padlocked,” Irene said.

  “Not for long.” Jonny opened his bag and triumphantly brandished a pair of powerful bolt cutters. A second later there was a loud click and the padlock landed in the plastic bag Tommy was holding out.

  “In case of prints,” Jonny said with satisfaction.

  The lock on the door itself was perfectly ordinary and didn’t cause Jonny any problems at all.

  The door squeaked in protest as they slid it open. Irene switched on the light, and a flickering glow from several ancient fluorescent tubes illuminated the interior.

  As expected, there was no car, but fresh patches of oil on the cement floor gave away the fact that a vehicle had been there very recently.

  “A car was started up in here not very long ago—breathe in,” Tommy ordered.

  Obediently Irene and Tommy sniffed the air: dampness, dirt, mold and exhaust fumes.

  “There are mice in here,” Jonny informed his colleagues.

  Irene could also smell mouse droppings. There were so many different odors that her sense of smell became blunted after a while. They started to look around. The old workshop wasn’t very big. There might have been room for three cars back in the day, but it was more than adequate for bicycles. The workbenches along the walls were overflowing with all kinds of crap, as were the shelves above. In one corner several rakes and pruning shears were propped up, but it was the pit that immediately attracted Irene’s attention. She went across and looked down.

  “Over here,” she said, more sharply than she had intended.

  The bottom of the shallow pit was covered with a large sheet of builder’s plastic. Then Irene saw the tape, the knife and the bottle of Yes. There was a hose hanging on the wall above the pit.

  “The bastard was ready to make a new package,” Jonny said.

  “I’m guessing this was meant for Efva,” Tommy mumbled.

  It was a horrific thought, but he was probably right.

  Jonny went and took a closer look at the gardening tools. “They’ve got DB on the handles
.”

  “Daniel Börjesson. Right, we bring him in, and this time we don’t let him go until he . . .”

  Tommy didn’t finish the sentence, but Irene noticed his clenched fists.

  “There has to be more,” she said.

  She went over to a door at the back of the workshop. There was a broken window next to it, partially boarded up. She tried the handle, and the door opened. The room was tiny and stank like a garbage dump. She saw an old camp bed by the wall, piled high with plastic bags containing empty pizza boxes, clothes and God knows what else.

  “Clothes . . . women’s clothes. And Elisabeth’s purse—the one we saw on the CCTV film from the ICA store,” Irene said.

  “Ingela Svensson’s and Elisabeth Lindberg’s stuff. And look at the board,” Jonny said.

  The sheet of plywood was covered in photographs, all of women, all taken through their windows or outdoors. Marie Carlsson . . . Ingela Svensson . . . Elisabeth Lindberg—and two women Irene had never seen before. They appeared to be middle-aged and were going about their lives oblivious to any danger. One was tall, her long blonde hair loose down her back. She was in her living room in an embroidered pale green tunic and looked as if she was whistling. The other woman had short dark hair. In one picture she was getting into a small white car, in another she was watering potted plants on her kitchen windowsill.

  “We need to try to identify those two. And there’s Efva,” Irene said.

  Above the camp bed was a newspaper cutting with a picture from the press conference about the Package Killer’s two victims. The superintendent was smiling, and looked fantastic in her white blouse and dark uniform jacket. There were also a number of smaller photographs of Thylqvist taken with Daniel’s camera: Thylqvist taking bags of groceries out of the trunk of her car, Thylqvist coming out of the front door of the apartment block in her uniform. Tommy and Jonny moved closer. They didn’t notice as Irene quickly removed two photographs right at the bottom, nearly hidden by a cluster of empty bottles on the table.

  It was obvious that the first in the series of three had been sent to Thylqvist along with the chrysanthemum. These two showed what followed. At the moment she didn’t quite know what to do with them, but she would deal with that later. At the moment her main concern was that Tommy didn’t need to see them—and nor did Jonny! She slipped them in her pocket, and nearly jumped out of her skin when Jonny suddenly yelled:

  “Irene!”

  He was pointing to a picture low down on the board.

  “That’s you.”

  Her heart pounding, Irene took a closer look. The photograph had been taken outside her house at dusk. In the background the living room window glowed invitingly. Egon was sniffing around the edge of the grass, and Irene was walking along, lost in thought.

  She knew exactly when it had been taken: two weeks ago, when the realtor had come to see the house. She had taken Egon for a little walk, and she remembered the sound of something moving in the bushes. The snap of a dry twig. Egon had reacted, wanted to go back home. He had sensed danger lurking in the twilight.

  Irene cleared her throat to make sure her voice would hold up. “I just realized that Daniel actually met Efva.”

  “When?” Tommy asked.

  “I was interviewing Daniel at the station, and she came in to ask Jonny for the car keys.”

  “That’s right—they were in my pocket,” Jonny confirmed.

  “Hmm. This guy makes up his mind pretty fast,” Tommy said.

  “I wonder why he likes them a little older?” Jonny mused.

  Irene had asked herself the same question several times during the investigation, and was fairly sure she had come up with the answer.

  “Marie. His mother. I think it’s got something to do with her. She’d just turned sixteen when she had him, and she died two months later. She would have been forty-nine now.”

  “Possibly. Anyway, the shrinks can get to the bottom of that once we’ve got him. They should have enough material for an entire conference by the time they’ve finished with that guy. I’ll put out a call for him. Pity we don’t know what car he’s driving. Then again, it’s probably stolen,” Tommy said.

  “Or it’s the deregistered Renault Express with false plates; that heap of trash has been bothering me all along,” Jonny muttered.

  Irene’s glance fell back on the clothing hanging on two strong hooks on the back of the door, and she suddenly realized what they were and was there in a second. An extremely scruffy jacket with matching pants in thick dark-blue nylon, and a dark-blue baseball cap. The jacket had a matted fleece collar and fraying elasticized cuffs. Dark oil stains were visible in several places. There was a reflective band around the sleeves and the legs of the pants. One sleeve carried the words börjesson’s cycle repair shop in white. An unbelievably filthy flannel shirt that had once been blue-and-white checked hung beneath the jacket. A pair of heavy, scuffed leather work boots lay on the floor.

  These were Ivar Börjesson’s work clothes, without a shadow of a doubt. Daniel’s grandfather, who had been dead for eighteen years, had worn these clothes.

  The stench was indescribable.

  The three detectives went outside to wait for the CSIs. The slanting rays of the afternoon sun filtered down through the trees, and the air was beginning to feel a little chillier.

  “Half past four. Aren’t you supposed to be driving up to Värmland today?” Tommy asked.

  “Yes—Krister’s already there.”

  “Why don’t you go? We can take care of this. You’ve worked hard all week—you’ve got plenty of time due.”

  Irene protested, but mostly for form’s sake. She couldn’t deny that it would be good to cover at least some of the three hundred kilometers in daylight.

  28.

  Before leaving home, Irene went into the bathroom. Methodically she tore the photographs she had smuggled out of the garage into tiny pieces, and flushed them down the toilet. Nobody would ever see them, especially not Tommy. Things were bad enough already.

  She had wisely packed her bag the previous evening. A glass of milk and a banana would suffice to raise her blood sugar level for the time being, and she would stop for coffee and a snack at Riks Rasta in Brålanda. She was sure Krister would have a delicious meal waiting by the time she got to Sunne: perhaps a creamy chanterelle soup with fresh thyme to start, with game to follow. Saddle of venison in a red wine sauce, served with a leek and potato gratin flavored with garlic would be perfect. Krister’s childhood friend Per-Erik was in charge of a local hunt, and often turned up with venison, hare or moose. Krister was a dedicated forager, and an interest in fungi seemed to be something that he and Egon shared. Perhaps they could train Egon to track down chanterelles? But dachshunds were originally bred to dig. Could little Egon dig a badger out of its sett? Unlikely—he wasn’t inclined that way, Irene decided.

  Dusk was falling fast by the time she passed Åmål. The coffee stop had done her good, and for the first time in several weeks she was feeling positive. She took out her cell to call Krister and tell him where she was, but the phone was dead. Irene swore. She had forgotten to charge the battery—and of course the charger was in Krister’s car. If she’d known that she would have called from a payphone at Riks Rasta. Then again, trying to contact someone at the cottage was always a risky business: the only place they had any network coverage at all was in one of the bedrooms, the one on the eastern side. Over the years they had often talked about whether they should install a landline, but they put it off because it was too expensive. At least we have electricity and our own water supply, she thought contentedly. And an electric toilet, which was very useful. The old dry privy had done its job, but it had been pretty disgusting sometimes.

  It was dark as she drove past Kil. There was still quite a lot of traffic on the E-45, but it was thinning out. It was Friday night, and the Swedish public was getting
ready to vote for this year’s winner of Idol, or whatever people were doing inside the brightly lit houses flashing by. She couldn’t wait to see Krister. And Egon, of course. A good dinner, followed by coffee in front of the fire. An early night . . .

  Before too much longer she reached Sunne, with the Selma Hotel and Spa on the left. In the darkness the building’s illuminated pointed-gable roof reminded her of an Alpine village. All the rooms had windows facing Lake Fryken, although the view wasn’t particularly striking right now, as dark clouds covered the moon and stars. The surface of the water lay black and silent. On the right lay the Selma Lagerlöf Hotel, with its elegance, class and style.

  There were hardly any cars at all on the road now, and Irene could go for several minutes without meeting a single vehicle. The car immediately behind her had been there ever since Grums. She recognized it because the right headlamp was a little fainter, and occasionally flickered. Maybe someone who commuted to Karlstad and was heading home to Torsby. She knew that several people traveled the hundred and ten kilometers in each direction every day. Many used the Frykdal railway, which was regarded as one of the most beautiful stretches in Sweden, but for those who worked inconvenient hours, driving was the only option.

  She flicked on the turn signal and turned onto the road leading to the Norwegian border; the car behind followed suit. Must be a Norwegian going home to Kongsvinger. Or maybe the driver lived in Charlottenberg. Irene turned up the radio as Paul McCartney’s voice came over the airways singing “Yesterday.” According to an article she had read, The Beatles’ old songs had been remixed and reissued. Not that she could hear any difference, but that was probably due to her car stereo. It wasn’t exactly top quality. There was no point in putting an expensive music system in a car in the city; it would just get stolen.

  Irene hummed along as she slowed down to turn off onto the dirt road to Kymmen. After a kilometer or so she would take the forest track down to the cottage. It was in a remote spot, but that was one of its main attractions. As Katarina had said when she was little, it was so quiet it hurt your ears.