Victim Without a Face

by Stefan Ahnhem

  His car was parked a fourteen-minute walk away, where Köpingevägan crossed Malmögatan. He was in no rush, so he strolled at a leisurely pace. Everything had been going his way for the past few hours, and for the first time in several days his plan was right on schedule. The only thing that made him walk faster was the rain, which was starting to beat against his umbrella. The last thing he wanted was to get wet. He had a change of clothes in the car, but he had specifically chosen the ones he was wearing for tonight, and he wouldn’t have a chance to change before he was finished and on the boat.

  He dropped his house key into the storm drain, and turned right onto Jönköpingsgatan, right near Tycho Brahe School. Whenever he found himself in the vicinity of his old secondary school, he started thinking about how he had graduated with a perfect 5.0 grade point average, the highest in his class, and was still forced to watch as the scholarship went to Claes Mällvik, who only had a 4.63. It still upset him to think about it. Everyone had been so overly conscious of how difficult life had been for Claes, and they’d given him the scholarship as a consolation prize.

  He couldn’t deny that Jörgen and Glenn, not to mention Elsa and Camilla, had all been absolutely horrible to Claes in compulsory school, and they deserved what they got, but that didn’t change the fact that he had disliked Claes ever since they started the first grade. Claes had literally got all the attention.

  It had probably been more or less involuntary back in compulsory school, but in their upper years Claes had learned to take advantage of it — no one laid a finger on him there. And yet he made sure everyone knew what a hard time he’d had, and reminded them how goddamn sorry they should feel for him. The scholarship ceremony had been the last straw — he had promised himself never to end up overshadowed by Claes again.

  It was a promise that reaped consequences only a few weeks later. He had just been accepted to the engineering school at Lund University, and found out a day or two later that Claes would be going to Lund as well. He decided then and there to scrap his university plans and start his own business instead. His school-level engineering degree would have to do.

  His idea had been to have a sort of inventor’s workshop, where he could build specially designed machines. He wasn’t flooded with orders at the start, but he’d been able to pay the rent. Once microprocessors took over on a large scale, he’d ploughed through all the books he could find on the subject and worked fifteen hours a day. He loved it. A few patents later — including one for a knife-sharpener that IKEA sold all over the world, as well as the feed device on most bottle-return machines — he was financially comfortable.

  He realized later on that he’d never been as happy as during that time. Even Claes was out of the picture. He’d had no idea at the time that Claes would show up again a few years later, only to cause him such pain that just thinking about it brought everything vividly back to life. His only real problem back then had been the same one he’d struggled with throughout his youth.

  The loneliness.

  It started raining harder and he had to hold the umbrella with both hands to keep from getting wet. He took a left onto Malmögatan and could see his car. He glanced at his watch and calculated that he still had plenty of time. Everything was coming up roses for him, and he even had enough energy left over to laugh about the time he’d been so desperate to meet someone that he’d created a profile on an online dating site, which was so fucking pathetic.

  He’d met a few different women, but it had never gone further than having coffee. Each time he’d had to swallow his humiliation when they made excuses about why they had to leave early. Those white lies were meant to spare him, but they only made things worse.

  He’d had an especially hard time getting over one woman in particular. She hadn’t even bothered to come up with an excuse and just got up to use the bathroom in the middle of their conversation and never came back. He’d sat there waiting for forty-three minutes before he realized what was going on and had to pay the whole bill. Nowadays, he didn’t understand why he had taken it so hard, why he couldn’t just swallow his pride and move on.

  He’d had to get closure, so he decided to contact the woman again and demand an apology. But she had blocked him, so he created an entirely new profile in which he presented himself as an art director at an ad agency and claimed to work as a model as well. He used a picture from an ad for Stenströms shirts. It didn’t take long to reconnect with the woman, and he got her to agree to meet him at Le Cardinal.

  He made sure to arrive fifteen minutes early. He took a seat in an out-of-the-way spot at the bar that gave him a full view of the door; he watched as she came in, her eyes scanning the room for her date. He watched her in peace and quiet as she was shown to a table, ordered a glass of red wine, and looked at the clock. She grew more and more uncomfortable sitting alone, and told the waiter for the third time that she wasn’t ready to order dinner, only another glass of wine and a bowl of nuts. He enjoyed every second as if each one were a drop of fancy champagne that had just been rescued from an old shipwreck.

  Fifty-eight minutes passed before she paid and left the restaurant, unaware that she was being followed. Her steps were brisk and irritated as she clip-clopped down to Knutpunkten and boarded a bus; he easily got a seat directly behind her. Like everyone else, she hadn’t noticed him. She got off at Adolfsberg and he kept his distance while he followed her to her building. Five minutes later, he went in and rang her doorbell.

  He arrived at his car. The rain was so heavy that he didn’t collapse his umbrella until he was inside the vehicle. He placed it on the floor of the passenger seat and closed the door; then he turned the key in the ignition and let the car idle to clear away some of the fog.

  It had taken her just over a minute to answer the door, but he remembered it as one of the longest minutes in his life. She gave him a quizzical look; he didn’t know whether it was because of his stubble or his anonymous face. She asked who he was and what he wanted; he reminded her of their little date.

  She tried to close the door but he was quicker and forced his way through the crack. Then he raped her. He took her right there on the hallway rug — not because he wanted her, he just wanted to degrade her.

  The way she had degraded him.

  She reported him, of course, and he was called in for interrogation. They fingerprinted him and tried to force him to confess. He adamantly denied that there was ever any rape. He acknowledged they had absolutely had sex, and that maybe it got a little violent, but it was nothing she hadn’t consented to. Finally, after several days in jail, there was nothing they could do but let him go.

  He programmed the address into his GPS, put the car in gear, and pulled out onto Malmögatan, heading for Södra Stenbocksgatan. In eighteen minutes he would arrive at the first home.

  92

  “IT DOESN’T GET ANY better than this.” Ragnar Palm threw one arm out toward the prison’s common area, which had been placed at their disposal.

  Tuvesson’s eyes scanned the room. “It still feels pretty jail-like.”

  “Maybe because that’s exactly what it is.”

  She sighed. “How many bathrooms do they have access to?”

  “Two. And what’s the gender breakdown?”

  “Five and five.”

  The ten cots were lined up across from each other along two walls, with a few metres between them. There were chairs between the cots, which were meant to act as nightstands. Tuvesson sat down on one of the cots and asked herself whether she would have agreed to sleep here, even if it was only for one weekend; although truthfully, they had no idea how long they would end up staying.

  Palm sat down on the cot across from hers. “Do you think it’ll work?”

  “It has to work. There’s nothing else we can do.”

  “I hope you realize that if this gets out — ”

  “Ragnar, it can’t get out under any circumstances, not before the killer has been caught. How many of your people know about it?”


  “Only those who need to know: my boss and some of the staff, who are definitely not a problem. They have to abide by confidentiality. But the prisoners don’t.”

  Tuvesson’s phone started ringing. It was Klippan.

  “I’ve called everyone and I’m going to start picking them up now.”

  “Did everyone agree to it?”

  “Yes, but they all have a bunch of questions I can’t answer. How are things at your end?”

  “I’m at the jail and... well, let’s hope that they don’t have to stay very long.”

  “Did you get hold of everyone?”

  “Everyone but Seth Kårheden. He was supposed to land at Kastrup two and a half hours ago, so he should be home anytime now.”

  “He still hasn’t turned on his cell?”

  “No, it doesn’t seem like it.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Domsten. I’ll start picking up the others, and I’ll keep calling. If he doesn’t answer I guess I’ll just go over there.” Tuvesson hung up, got up from the cot, and headed for the exit.

  *

  FABIAN RISK HAD BEEN absolutely certain that he was about to die just like his classmates, but he’d just come to, albeit with a bad headache, so it looked like it wasn’t his turn to go — yet. Waking up felt like a punishment even worse than death: a waking nightmare, where he was alive and Theodor was dead.

  He could hear a faint, barely audible buzzing, and felt his head vibrate slightly. Then the vacuum-like silence returned. He tried to move, but he realized that he was bound to an old dentist’s chair. His feet, legs, and arms were held down with straps, and his head... he couldn’t see how it was fastened, but when he tried to move it, the pain at his temples increased. Whatever the contraption was, it stuck out on both sides of his face, like two blinders that prevented him from looking in any direction other than straight ahead. All he could see was a dark screen hanging on the wall in front of him that curved round to the right.

  The faint buzzing returned and he felt his head vibrate again. At the same time, the screen in front of him lit up with a black-and-white portrait of a young Torgny Sölmedal. The picture must have been taken sometime during his middle-grade years; they had been done by a photographer in a real studio, with professional lighting. Sölmedal was sitting on a tall stool with his hair neatly parted down the middle and was wearing what looked to be his nicest shirt; he looked straight into the camera with a warm smile.

  How could he never have noticed him? Fabian didn’t understand. How come no one in the class had noticed him, not even their teacher, Monika Krusenstierna? And now he had been forced to take her place in the windowless little room with its curved, dark-curtained walls, where the only light came from the screen. He heard the faint buzzing once again. This time, minor as it was, he noticed that his field of vision had shifted slightly to the right.

  Fabian had figured out what was happening. Torgny Sölmedal was right: he was guilty of the very same thing as Monika.

  But the victim was his own son.

  *

  IRENE LILJA SAT BEHIND Molander and watched as he scanned the fingerprints and checked them against the database. Her exhaustion seemed to have vanished; the same went for Molander’s bad mood. Clearly both of them had the feeling they were close to a breakthrough, but it might take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours before they knew the answer.

  “Is there anything we can do to speed up the search?” Lilja asked.

  “Yes — limit it to look for men born between 1965 and 1967.”

  “And how long will that take?”

  “You tell me,” Molander replied. He dropped a pillow to the floor, stretched out on it, and closed his eyes.

  Lilja knew that Molander was doing the right thing, but she would never be able to fall asleep now, not when they were so close. She couldn’t take her eyes away from the screen, where the database of stored fingerprints was flickering away as if it would never stop. But she could feel it. She could feel it in her bones.

  Any second now, the flickering would stop.

  93

  HE HAD ARRIVED HOME at quarter past one in the morning and had been there no more than fifty minutes, yet his phone had already rung at least five or six times. He certainly wasn’t about to answer it. He hated unknown numbers. In his opinion, if you weren’t willing to make your identity known, you didn’t deserve an answer.

  So instead, he had a shower and a shave. He’d let his beard grow out while he was on vacation, so he had to give it a once-over with the trimmer before going at it with a razor. He kept the moustache. He’d had it as long as he could remember and was extremely proud of it. Despite the changing fashions over the years — everything from pencil moustaches to full beards — he had never altered a single whisker of his moustache, aside from trimming it twice a week.

  It was probably just Kerstin calling. She was the only person he knew who blocked her number. She had started doing it a few years ago, claiming that it was because he never answered when she called, as if he were more likely to answer these days. If only she would stop calling, period, and let him come home in peace and quiet.

  He tried to shake off thoughts of Kerstin; he pulled on his pyjamas and walked over to the fireplace, where he crumpled some old newspaper and a few wood chips into a ball and arranged three logs above it. As always, one match did the job.

  He didn’t feel tired in the least, and was looking forward to reading Helsingborgs Dagblad, which was due to arrive in his hallway soon. It was probably what he’d missed most during his trip: sitting in front of the fire while everyone else was asleep, reading the morning paper. Kerstin had never approved of the habit — in fact, she was always annoyed that she had to read an “old” paper once she finally dragged herself out of bed.

  She had probably tried to call his cell phone, too. There was no way for her to know he’d gotten rid of it. He had planned to keep it turned off throughout the pilgrimage, and to his surprise it hadn’t bothered him to go without it in the least. Quite the contrary; it had been an absolute joy to be unreachable. One day, when he was looking out over one of the deepest valleys of the Pyrenees, he just did it — he threw it in. For the rest of his pilgrimage, he enjoyed silence as his only companion.

  Other pilgrims had tried to reach out and talk to him but he hadn’t responded. He didn’t care what people thought. He wasn’t going to break his silence, which felt more and more important each day. And after a while they appeared — his very own thoughts, fragile and newly hatched. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to think through his own ideas without being interrupted by his boss, or Kerstin, or...

  More ringing. But this time it wasn’t the phone; it was his front door. Who could it be at this time of night? The phone was easy to ignore — you could even pull out the plug — but a doorbell was different. He walked to the door and opened it. A man he had never seen before was standing outside under an umbrella.

  94

  HE WAS BREATHING, BUT it didn’t feel like he was getting any air. Or maybe he wasn’t breathing? Maybe his body had stopped working, and the notion that he was breathing was no more than one last residual thought before his brain blinked out, like the flailing leg of a spider after it’s been ripped off its body.

  Was this what it felt like to drown? He’d heard it was supposed to be one of the most painful ways to die, but this didn’t hurt at all. He could hardly feel a thing, not even the metallic hatch against his feet. He had the vague impression that he was slowly fading away and disappearing.

  But then came the opportunity he’d spent several days waiting for, or maybe it was only hours. He had no idea; his sense of time had deserted him long ago. He could hear a dull sound coming through the walls: a distant door opening and closing, and someone shouting. He couldn’t hear what the person was saying, but it was definitely someone shouting, unless it was just another desperate attempt on his behalf to refuse to accept the facts — a hallucinat
ion that help was on the way.

  He decided that it didn’t matter. If he was dead, so be it, but if not, this was his very last chance. He mustered all his strength and lifted his feet into the air. At least, he thought he did. The important thing was that he tried to bang them against the hatch and make as much noise as he could. He tried to yell, but all that came out was a whisper. His feet sounded like dull, blunt drumbeats striking the hatch.

  He managed to kick the hatch three times, but couldn’t push any further than that, no matter how hard he tried. The suffocating silence was back, and he felt like he was holding his breath for a long time.

  He’d heard that the world record for holding your breath was over seven minutes. How long would he manage? How many minutes was he up to? He didn’t really want to die, not right now. For a few years he’d spent all his time thinking about how nice it would be to give up, stop fighting, and float out into nothingness instead.

  The darkness surrounded him like a cosy, warm hug. If only he had known it would be so simple. He wouldn’t have had to fight it, to be so scared and beat himself bloody. He sank deeper and deeper and finally...

  Finally, he saw the light.

  95

  HIS FACE FILLED THE whole screen. Although he had a full, neatly trimmed beard, he looked so anonymous that Irene Lilja finally understood why no one had noticed him. She sat there staring at his picture, forgetting to blink until her eyes teared up, feverishly searching for something to remember him by, but there was nothing. No tiny asymmetry, no large — or small — nose. His eyes weren’t even a particular colour. She tried to form a mental picture of the face behind the beard, but all she came up with were two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. He was so normal and average that the face just passed by and disappeared.

  He didn’t look like the sort of person who could cut off the hands of a victim who was still alive, or cut someone’s throat and make a Colombian necktie either. He looked more like someone who... well, what did he look like? She gave up. After all, she would never be able to describe him, at least not beyond the fact that he had a beard and looked incredibly ordinary.