Victim Without a Face

by Stefan Ahnhem

  “Thanks. It’s really nice of you to help. I really didn’t mean to —”

  “How are things otherwise?”

  “Fine. We just moved, so things are a little bit topsy-turvy. But it feels... I think it will be good. You?”

  “Really awful and lonely, as usual. My therapist says it will be a while before I can move on.”

  “I’m sure you’ll start to feel better soon. Now that I’ve moved you can have Stockholm all to yourself.”

  “What kind of consolation is that if you keep calling me?”

  Fabian was about to answer, but he didn’t have time. She’d hung up. He took a sip from his cappuccino and poured the rest down the sink.

  7

  “DAD, GUESS WHAT WE DID!” Matilda shouted, rushing toward Fabian, who was coming through the door. “We went swimming! There were really big waves and it was super cold! And we’re going again tomorrow. Mom promised I could get a new swimsuit!” She hopped into his arms. “Can you come with us, please?”

  “What if it’s way too cold for me?” He walked into the kitchen, still holding Matilda.

  “Dad, please. Please.”

  Fabian went up to Sonja, who was setting the table for dinner, and gave her a kiss.

  “Dinner’s just about ready,” she said with a smile. “How did it go? Did you finish what you needed to get done?” She took off her apron and looked into his eyes.

  “Darling, it —”

  “Forget I even asked. Forget that you’re actually supposed to be on vacation.”

  “Darling...”

  “Let’s not talk about it. Go get Theo instead.”

  “Sure. Where is he?”

  “In his room.”

  “He’s been in there all day,” said Matilda.

  “He didn’t go swimming with you?”

  “No. He’d been hoping you would come along and help him choose a snorkel,” said Sonja.

  “Dad. Promise you’ll come with tomorrow. Please... Promise?”

  “I promise. To try my very, very —”

  “You’re so silly.” Matilda wriggled out of his grasp.

  Fabian turned toward the stairs just as the phone rang. “Is that thing hooked up already?”

  “Apparently.” Sonja walked over to the phone and lifted the receiver. “Yes, this is Sonja Risk... Yes, he’s here. For you.”

  Fabian knew who it was right away, thanks to Sonja’s curt tone. You treacherous fucking weasel, he thought before he took the receiver.

  “Yes, this is Fabian Risk,” he said in his most formal voice.

  “Hi, sweetie,” Niva answered from the other end. “I thought it was best to call your home number instead of your cell, so it wouldn’t seem as suspicious. After all, we have nothing to hide about this conversation, do we?”

  “No, absolutely not.” Fabian said, shrugging at Sonja as he walked into the living room. “Did you find anything?”

  “You’re always such an eager beaver. To be honest, I don’t understand how Sonja stands it. Everything’s over before it even starts.”

  “Niva, we were just about to sit down to dinner.”

  “How sweet. There was a 739-krone charge to the card number you sent me from the OK gas station in Lellinge at 10:22 p.m. He also used it at the BorderShop in Puttgarden, where he must have bought enough beer for the whole Oktoberfest.”

  “Thanks for your help.”

  “It was nothing.”

  Fabian hung up and sat down to eat. Sonja would obviously be wondering what the call was about. She had every right to ask questions.

  But she would have to wait until he got home later tonight.

  *

  FABIAN MANAGED TO LEAVE the house at just after ten o’clock. He got in the car, and headed for the OK gas station in Lellinge, which was about forty kilometres southwest of Copenhagen. He estimated that he would arrive just before midnight.

  Although Theodor had refused to open the door when he was leaving, and Matilda and Sonja were now both mad at him, he had decided not to put off the journey to the next day. He had managed to buy some time and couldn’t afford to waste it by letting an entire night pass by.

  Fabian considered the facts he knew about the case on the drive there. It would have been impossible for the perpetrator to know exactly where, and how many times, Jörgen would stop, but he must have assumed that Jörgen would stop at least once on the way down to fill up the tank. According to Molander, the gas tank of the Chevy they’d found at the school contained 88 litres of 95-octane gasoline. It could hold up to 120 litres total, which meant that Jörgen had used up 32 litres. The station he had filled up at was 144 kilometres from the school, including the bridge crossing. Using 32 litres in 144 kilometres meant that the fully loaded Chevy had used 2.2 litres per 10 kilometres — a fair estimate. It seemed reasonable to assume that Jörgen hadn’t made any unnecessary detours, but had driven straight to the school.

  Jörgen Pålsson used his credit card only once in Denmark, at the OK gas station at 10:22 p.m. The 739-krone charge equalled about 75 litres of gas. If he had started his journey in Ödåkra with a full tank of gas and didn’t fill up until Lellinge, 380 kilometres later, a 75-litre pump seemed just about right. Jörgen had passed through the toll booth at Lernacken fifty-six minutes later, at 11:18 p.m., but it shouldn’t have taken more than forty minutes to go that distance. This meant that he had lingered at the gas station for fifteen to twenty minutes.

  Then he’d crossed the bridge with a passenger riding shotgun.

  *

  THE MAN IN THE booth at the Øresund Bridge handed Fabian back his credit card, and the boom in front of him lifted. He pressed the gas pedal as the radio played one of his favourite songs. He turned up the volume until Kate Bush’s voice filled the car, singing about making a deal with God to swap places with her lover. He started humming as she sang the chorus line “Running up that hill.”

  This was the first time he’d ever crossed the bridge and the view bordered on magical. The sky shimmered dark blue and gold in the glow from the shining half-moon, and far below him the calm waters of Øresund acted as a gigantic mirror.

  8

  GLENN GRANQVIST SAT AT the kitchen table, unscrewed the lid of the glass jar, and looked down at the pieces of herring swimming around in the cloudy liquid. The jar was left over from when Anki had lived here; he didn’t even like herring all that much. There was something that irked him about the texture, so he had to swallow the pieces whole and wash them down with a cold beer to keep them from coming back up again.

  But now the beer was gone. Most of the things Glenn liked were gone, and these days he was emptying jars whose best before dates were in the distant past — olives, pickles, mustard, remoulade, and all of Anki’s damn herring. He fished out another piece, stuck it in his mouth, and washed it down with the juice from a can of pineapple.

  He hadn’t been able to relax since he’d heard the news about Jörgen. He was having a hard time sitting still and had to keep in constant motion. He felt like he was on tenterhooks and that his heart was beating in double time. His best friend was dead, not because of a tragic accident or a brief illness, but because someone had purposely taken his life in such a meticulously planned and terrible way that the very thought of it sent cold shivers through his body.

  He thought of all the fun they’d had together over their thirty- seven years of friendship — almost a whole lifetime. They’d met in first grade. After just a few minutes they ended up in a fight. They’d been best friends ever since and had stood by each other through thick and thin.

  But they had done a few stupid things, too; quite a lot of them when he thought about it. They’d left most of that behind, convincing themselves that they hadn’t done anything to be ashamed of — and it had worked. For all these years he’d slept peacefully at night with a conscience as pure and clean as a commercial. Until Lina called him more than a week ago to tell him that Jörgen was missing. He’d had an inkling that something was off
right from the start, and since then the images had kept popping up in a steady stream: old, forgotten memories that he thought had been stomped down into a hard, unrecognizable crust — paved over so they would never again see the light of day.

  And yet here he was thinking about them.

  He wasn’t surprised in the least that Jörgen was dead, or that he had been murdered. It was those fucking sawed-off hands that had scared Glenn out of his wits. If it hadn’t been for that one little detail, he was sure he would be sleeping at night. He wasn’t able to grieve for Jörgen or be there for Lina — he had hardly even dared to contact her.

  Hands had been Jörgen’s specialty. It didn’t matter how bloody and wrecked they got, he only used his fists to hurt and abuse. He hadn’t started using the brass knuckles until after ninth grade. Glenn’s own specialty had been kicking with his red, steel-toed Doc Martens.

  He didn’t understand why they had kept it up for so long. It was one thing during their school days — they had been bored and needed something to pass the time. It had made him feel powerful at that age: their victim would positively tremble with fear as soon as he saw Glenn and Jörgen, and would do everything they told him to. But why did they continue? It was like they had become addicted and couldn’t stop until he was dead. And they thought they had killed him at their last “meeting.”

  The get-together had lasted for over five hours. That was eleven years after they finished the ninth grade. Until then, they had left him alone after they finished school and messed with other people instead. The truth was, they’d grown tired of him and had more or less forgotten about him, until the middle of a drunken night in Copenhagen when Jörgen suddenly came up with the idea to get back in touch with him to have one last meeting.

  Equations exist to calculate how much energy the body burns when you go for a run, have sex, or sleep. But there was no formula to tell them how many calories they burned during a fight. It must have been a lot, because after three hours both he and Jörgen were totally exhausted. Their victim had screamed, cried, and begged for mercy. He said they could have his money, and that he was willing to do anything as long as they stopped. But they wanted him to give up and die.

  The bastard refused to die. Sure, they could have stuck a knife in him, but that would have been cheating. They only used their hands and feet — nothing more.

  They left the apartment and went to Tre Häster for a while to have steaks with fries and béarnaise sauce and large Cokes. Glenn could still remember how good it had tasted. It was as if their bodies were crying out for more blood sugar. After eating, they’d played pinball. He managed to get several multiballs and he might have set a personal record if only the machine hadn’t tilted. They didn’t say a word about the assault while they played the game, but a silent agreement was hovering in the air. They would keep at it until he gave up — once and for all.

  When they went back, it turned out that their victim had managed to drag himself into the hall and pull the phone down from the table. He couldn’t have known they’d cut the line.

  Two hours later, they were the ones giving up. It was the first time they had ever grown tired of beating someone. The last thirty minutes mostly felt monotonous and unexciting, and Glenn recalled that they’d rationalized quitting because he would surely die on his own within a few hours.

  They spent the next several weeks poring over the newspapers for an obituary or an article about the murder, but they didn’t find a thing. There wasn’t even a police report. After two months they went back to his apartment and found it completely empty. He had vanished.

  They both felt uneasy and the feeling grew stronger. Where had their victim gone? Was he planning his revenge? They had discussed it on several occasions and came to the conclusion that they probably didn’t have much to worry about. After another few years passed, they no longer gave it a second thought.

  But then Jörgen’s body was found with both his hands sawed off.

  Did this mean it would be his turn soon? Would he get his feet sawed off?

  He lay down on the bench in the kitchen and closed his eyes. Exhaustion felt like it was eating him up from the inside, but he didn’t dare fall asleep. The few hours of sleep he’d managed to get during the past week had been worse than being awake. His dreams were stranger than ever — repressed memories came to life and twisted into a horror-film director’s wet dream.

  He had once read about a researcher who managed to stay awake for eleven days. After four days he had started hallucinating and thought he was the Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona. But after six days he was back to normal and he even managed to beat his assistants at pinball before starting to sleep regularly again.

  But he would never be able to manage eleven days.

  He needed to think clearly and not lose focus. He sat up, rubbed his eyes back to life, and stuck another piece of herring in his mouth. He tried swallowing it, but it wouldn’t go down. He had already finished the last of the pineapple juice and the piece of fish kept coming back up until he steeled himself and started chewing. He needed to eat for energy if he was going to have any chance whatsoever when it counted. He was certain he was going to have to defend himself. He would put up a fight.

  At least no one could accuse him of being a lazy-ass. Almost all of his preparations were finished. He had armed himself, installed locks on every window in his house, and rewired all the lights so he could turn them off with a single switch on a remote control he carried with him at all times. He’d also run barbed wire across the lawn behind the house and attached it with fishing line to the wind chimes in the upstairs window, so that he would be able to hear anyone who went back there.

  All he had left to do on his list was to install the peephole in his front door, but that would have to wait until tomorrow when it was light out again. There had been a peephole in the old door, but he’d considered it an unnecessary expense when the door had to be replaced, only to change his mind and buy one to install on his own a few weeks later. That had been three and a half years ago. But he would install it tomorrow.

  It was a really stupid idea for him to be living in this house now that Anki had left him. He was only staying to spite her. He didn’t even like the house. It was poorly built, with its thin plaster walls that smelled mouldy even though they were only ten years old, and he’d already had to replace the door...

  The ringing doorbell interrupted Glenn’s thoughts about his inadequate house. It was eleven thirty at night. Who the hell could it be at this hour?

  The bell rang again.

  Glenn had assumed his assailant would come through the backyard, which wasn’t visible from the outside. He had set up the barbed wire so that the attacker would trip, giving Glenn time to get on top of him and manhandle him inside. If, contrary to all expectations, the assailant managed to get all the way up to the house, the large glass doors would be easy for him to force. But Glenn was ready for that, too. He would drive the attacker into his workroom, where the man would never be able to get out — at least not before Glenn calmly locked him up and called the police. He was already looking forward to being in the papers as the hero who’d caught the murderer. It would sure show Anki.

  But the front doorbell ringing wasn’t part of his plan. The killer wouldn’t just walk up to the front of the house and ring the bell. It wasn’t possible. So who could it be?

  The wind chimes had given him his first false alarm the night before. He’d turned out all the lights and rushed out into the yard in no time, but it was just a dog that had wandered in and got stuck in the barbed wire. The dog had managed to tear itself free and run off before Glenn could help it.

  Maybe it was the dog’s owner at the door. Glenn wondered if there could be anything illegal about putting up barbed wire in your own yard. It was his land, after all.

  He grabbed the baseball bat and cautiously walked down the hall. The bell rang again.

  Why hadn’t he installed that goddamn fucking peephole? H
e unlocked the door and opened it.

  9

  IT WAS 11:30 P.M. by the time the GPS told Fabian that he had nearly arrived at his destination in Lellinge. The trip had gone faster than expected. There was hardly any traffic and, after hearing “Running Up That Hill” on the radio, he’d listened to the entire Hounds of Love album. It had helped jog his memory about his school days.

  He’d never liked Jörgen Pålsson and had made sure to stay as far away from him as possible. It wasn’t because Fabian was afraid, but more so out of faintheartedness. He wouldn’t have to witness the abuse and be forced to take a side if he hadn’t seen anything. It might explain why his memories were so fuzzy. He was so fucking pitiful.

  At least he remembered enough to say that Jörgen Pålsson and Glenn Granqvist had spread fear throughout the class, but they’d picked on one person in particular: Claes Mällvik. Mällvik was bullied as soon as the names were read for attendance in first grade, all the way until he finished the ninth grade. Everyone in the class had been well aware of it, and surely the same went for the teachers. Yet no one had done anything but avert their eyes.

  There was one incident that Fabian hadn’t been able to ignore. An incident he had repressed — but the chopped-off hands in the shower room brought it back to him. His complacency made him feel as guilty as Jörgen and Glenn.

  They had just finished gym class and were on their way into the locker room. Claes never showered, a fact the gym teacher had recently discovered. He threatened Claes with a failing grade if he didn’t start washing. The teacher told him that it was a matter of personal hygiene to shower after gym class, not only for yourself but also for everyone around you; he probably had no idea how these threats would affect Claes.

  The white-tiled shower room had eight showers along two walls. Everyone could sense what was in the air, and hurried toward them — everyone but Jörgen and Glenn. What the hell are you staring at? Are you a fag or something? No, he’s a tranny! Check out his dick! It’s so fucking tiny it looks like a pussy!