The Chosen

by Kristina Ohlsson

  They couldn’t go fast enough for Alex. He was convinced they were running out of time.

  They raced along Strandvägen toward Djurgården, then turned onto Styrmansgatan. As they passed the theater and Nybrogatan, Alex thought about Peder and his idea that they were looking for two perpetrators who were at odds.

  Alex wasn’t sure he understood what Peder meant. At this stage he wasn’t even convinced they were looking for two perpetrators. Gideon Eisenberg was no taller than five foot six; he could easily have been the person who lay on the roof and shot Josephine, then worn shoes that were too big for him out on Lovön. The CSIs had said that while it looked as if the boys had slithered and stumbled in the snow, the killer’s tracks were even and controlled. That could work if he had been wearing oversized shoes, making him move more slowly.

  They had found absolutely nothing when Saul Goldmann’s office and apartment were searched. No murder weapon, no shoes. Alex hoped they would have more success with Gideon Eisenberg.

  They pulled up half a block away. No one had forewarned the Eisenbergs; they had just assumed Gideon and Carmen would be at home.

  Which they were, fortunately. Carmen answered the door, and Alex and two colleagues stepped into the hallway. Carmen was paler than any living person Alex had ever seen.

  “Have you come to see Gideon?” she whispered.

  Alex nodded.

  “He’s in the living room.”

  They walked through the wide hallway to the living room door and stopped dead.

  “I found him when I got home.”

  Carmen’s voice was barely audible.

  Gideon was hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Someone had taken down the chandelier and hanged him with a noose: CSI and forensics would determine if he had done it himself, but that was Alex’s instinctive reaction.

  “He left this.”

  Carmen handed him a sheet of white paper.

  “It was on the kitchen table.”

  Alex took the paper and read the brief message.

  Forgive me.

  The plane landed twenty minutes ahead of schedule. The passengers got to their feet as soon as it stopped moving, and Fredrika Bergman took out her cell phone. Her first call was to Spencer; she missed his voice. Missed being close to him.

  I’m home, darling.

  He still sounded hoarse:

  “That was a short trip.”

  “It was no fun without you, so I hurried home to Sweden.”

  He laughed quietly.

  “Did you manage to play your violin?”

  Fredrika thought about the instrument she had taken with her; she hadn’t played it once.

  “The trip would have been a complete fiasco without it.”

  Spencer laughed again but subsided in a fit of coughing.

  “Will you be home soon?” he said eventually.

  “I won’t be long, but I just have to call in at work first.”

  How many times had she said that over the past few days? Feeling incredibly guilty, she called Alex. He answered right away, and she listened to what he had to tell her without saying a word.

  They had arrested Saul Goldmann.

  Gideon Eisenberg had hanged himself.

  And Carmen had been taken to the custody suite at Kronoberg.

  “I’d like you to interview her,” Alex said. “There’s a chance she might know where Polly is.”

  “If that’s the case, are we really going to lock up the only person who knows where she is?”

  “You’re goddamn right we are—to put her under pressure, if nothing else. Besides, I don’t believe Carmen is the only person who knows where Polly is. You don’t just leave a five-year-old; she has to be with another adult. And don’t forget, Carmen and Gideon were with us when their daughter went missing, so if she is involved, she must have had help.”

  Fredrika was picked up by a patrol car at the airport and driven into the city with blue lights flashing. She had never made the trip from Arlanda at such speed. Trees and buildings were lost in a blur. She sat in the backseat, trying to gather her thoughts and work out what she wanted to ask Carmen Eisenberg.

  Where is your daughter?

  Where have you hidden her?

  She thought about David and Gali Eisenberg in Israel and wanted to weep. Now they had lost not only a grandchild but their son, too.

  It was more difficult to drive fast once they reached the city. The streets had still not been cleared properly, and the car skidded several times. Eventually they arrived, Fredrika was dropped off outside the entrance on Kungsholmsgatan, and the car sped away.

  She picked up her bags and went inside, into the warmth.

  Alex was in his office. He got up and gave her a hug. Held her tight, as if he wanted proof that she had survived the trip.

  “Can you cope with this?” he asked.

  “No problem. I’ll just take off my coat.”

  Her office looked exactly as she had left it a few days earlier. The next time she went to Israel she would stay longer. The sense of being away had already left her; the only thing on her mind now was how to begin the interview with Carmen.

  “What kind of shape is she in?” she asked Alex on the way down to the room where Carmen was waiting.

  “She’s in shock.”

  Which was only to be expected when someone had lost her son and her husband within a week.

  Alex was going to sit in on the interview, which was a good thing: Fredrika wasn’t sure if she could remember all the details he had given her.

  Carmen was a shadow of the woman Fredrika had met before.

  Pale and gaunt.

  Fredrika had never seen a more weary expression.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked when she had sat down.

  Carmen didn’t answer immediately. This isn’t going to work, Fredrika thought. We’re going to have to ring the emergency psychiatric service and take her over there.

  “Terrible,” Carmen said. “I feel terrible.”

  “We understand that, but as I’m sure you realize, we have questions to which we need answers. Right away.”

  Silence.

  “When did you find Gideon?”

  “When I got home from work. I was only in the office for a few hours. I couldn’t stay there. People just sat there staring at me; they didn’t know what to say.”

  “A lot of people find it difficult to deal with another person’s grief,” Fredrika said. “Which means they sit and stare instead. What time did you get home?”

  “Five o’clock.”

  Which meant she had been alone with the body for over two hours.

  “You didn’t try to get him down? To save him?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I could see that he was dead. I’ve seen dead bodies before.”

  “So what did you do?”

  Carmen ran a hand through her hair. She looked as if she was about to burst out crying but had run out of tears.

  “I don’t really remember,” she said. “I went and sat on the sofa. Looked at him. Kept him company.”

  Fredrika was edging her way forward, unsure of how to move on.

  “Were you surprised when you found him?”

  “Not really. Gideon hasn’t been feeling too good. He never has, to be honest. You know what happened to him when he was a child?”

  Fredrika nodded and Carmen looked relieved. No doubt she was glad to be spared the ordeal of putting the indescribable into words.

  “I don’t think he was ever normal after that. When we met, I didn’t notice it at first, and we had so much in common. Fun. We had fun. I saw the scars when he took off his clothes, of course; there were so many of them, like the runs in an anthill, all over his skin. But he said he was okay; he told me he’d had help. It wasn’t until we had children that he changed.”

  “In what way?”

  “He suffered from periods of depression. He was never really happy; he always seemed anxious a
nd miserable. Overprotective. He got worse and worse, in spite of the fact that we were living in Sweden, where I thought we could feel perfectly safe.”

  Fredrika remembered what Saul Goldmann had said, according to Alex: that Gideon had shown an interest in young boys.

  “You didn’t suspect that Gideon had been damaged in other ways by what had happened to him—psychologically, I mean?”

  Carmen looked blank, then she got angry.

  “I know what you’re talking about. There were rumors that he liked little boys, but none of that was true. It was just something Saul spread around. He’s the very antithesis of a good friend. He’s a complete bastard.”

  “Why would Saul say such a thing if he didn’t believe it was true?”

  “How should I know? To turn the spotlight on someone else, perhaps. A lot of people looked at Saul and wondered if he had emerged unscathed from his own childhood or if he was as sick as his father. But there was nothing wrong with Gideon, not in that way. That wasn’t what Saul’s father subjected him to.”

  Fredrika decided to change the subject.

  “Do you know where Gideon was when the boys went missing?”

  Once more Carmen was silent.

  “I know he said he was at the bank,” she said after a little while. “But he wasn’t.”

  “No?”

  “No, he’d gone for a walk.”

  Fredrika and Alex looked at one another.

  Gone for a walk?

  “At least, that’s what he told me,” Carmen whispered. “And I believed him, because he often did that to shake off a migraine. But we didn’t think you would understand or believe him, so we agreed to say he’d been at the bank as arranged.”

  Carmen took a sip of water from the glass in front of her.

  Alex stepped in.

  “Carmen, do you know where Polly is?”

  She gave a start.

  “Polly? No, how . . . Why are you asking me that? Polly’s missing!”

  Indeed she is.

  “Perhaps you were afraid of losing her, too,” Fredrika said. “So you hid her away.”

  Carmen shook her head so violently that Fredrika was afraid she might hurt herself.

  “No, no, no! No, I don’t know where my Polly is!”

  She started crying, quietly at first, then louder and louder. Until the crying became a scream, filling the entire room.

  “Please, help me. Help me to get my daughter back. Because I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose her, too.”

  Fredrika and Alex exchanged despairing glances. They were in agreement.

  Carmen didn’t know where Polly was.

  Nor did they.

  CONCLUSION

  It wasn’t the coldest evening he had ever experienced, but it was the longest. He was hidden in the shadows behind the entrance to the underground station, which gave him a clear view of the stairs he was watching. If everything went as expected, he would soon have company. The thought of what he had to do filled him with horror.

  It was only a question of time before she appeared.

  Nadia.

  The woman who had been recruited by Efraim for Mossad as a secret source on the West Bank. Who had been known as the Paper Boy. And who had given birth to Efraim’s child.

  Benjamin.

  He had reached the age of ten by the time he rushed into a house and activated an explosive device hidden under the floor.

  He had been running away from Gideon and Saul while Efraim stood to one side, phoning for reinforcements. He had never been able to forgive Gideon and Saul for what they had done. He had sworn that one day they would pay. The fact that they didn’t know Benjamin was his son and therefore wouldn’t understand why their sons had to die was irrelevant. Revenge was still necessary.

  It had seemed so simple. If Efraim Kiel looked back, he had made only one mistake: he had told her what he intended to do.

  “Next year a decade will have passed,” he had said. “And then I am going to go to Stockholm and end the lives of Gideon’s and Saul’s sons in return for what they did to Benjamin.”

  He had wanted to leave Gideon’s second child, Polly, out of the whole thing.

  And that was where it had all gone wrong.

  Because Efraim had told Nadia, who called herself Mona Samson these days, that there was another child. And she wanted him to take both, because she had no children left. The discussion had turned into a full-blown quarrel, but he had thought he had emerged as the victor. Until the day he received a message from the Paper Boy at his hotel.

  He had been stupid. Unbelievably stupid. He understood that now. He had sent her a message before he left Israel, said he was on his way to Stockholm to put things right. That his plans were in place; the time had come.

  He had hoped the message would bring her peace.

  But it hadn’t.

  She must have put a considerable amount of effort into her own preparations. Set up a new identity, created a dummy company. And, if you believed the media reports that had reached Israel by now, she had also embarked on a relationship with the father of one of the dead boys. They didn’t mention her name, but Efraim knew.

  Nadia with Saul or Gideon. The very thought made him feel sick.

  It couldn’t be true.

  Efraim’s preparations had been rigorous and time-consuming. He had gotten in touch with the boys via Super Troopers, an online forum he had heard about on a visit to Stockholm the previous autumn. If he hadn’t found them there, he would have contacted them some other way. He wanted to make sure they came along voluntarily the day he abducted them; he didn’t want to kill them on the spot. That would defeat half the point of the murders.

  The rest of the operation had been relatively simple. Getting away from Lovön after shooting the boys hadn’t been a problem; the response from the authorities had been anything but rapid. The tracks left by the wheels of the van had obviously failed to lead the police in any particular direction, which didn’t really matter anyway. The vehicle had been stolen and fitted with false license plates. He had also used a car for the abduction itself, because he thought the boys would be less inclined to go with a stranger driving around in a van. Everything was possible, as long as you had patience.

  But it seemed that Nadia hadn’t given up on the idea that Gideon deserved to lose both his children. At first Efraim couldn’t work out how she knew where he was staying, then he remembered that he had mentioned the Diplomat. A long, long time ago, when Benjamin was still alive and they still had a viable relationship. The first time Efraim visited Stockholm.

  “It’s right by the water,” he had said. “You can see boats when you look out of the window.”

  Why the hell had he gone back there?

  The simple answer was that he liked it. The staff didn’t ask unnecessary questions, and they already knew him by the alias he usually used.

  Unfortunately, Nadia had also stumbled upon his alias; she had once heard him on the phone, booking a flight. He hadn’t noticed her until he had hung up. He should have thought about that incident when he was planning his trip to Stockholm, and he cursed his own carelessness. If she hadn’t known his alias, she wouldn’t have been able to play her little game.

  He had been surprised that she had gone to the hotel and left him a message, but that was nothing compared to the fact that she had gotten into his room and found the gun he had acquired in order to kill the boys. He had trained her well in the skills needed to survive as a source on the West Bank for over ten years, and now he was paying a high price. She wasn’t a good enough shot to hit a small child from that distance, and as a consequence she had shot a teacher instead.

  If only she had said something.

  Then he would have gotten rid of the gun immediately and used a different one to shoot the boys.

  Instead he had to live with the fact that all three victims had been shot with the same gun.

  Whatever—they would never find it. It was resting safely at the bott
om of the Baltic Sea.

  A much more serious problem was his decision to save Gideon’s daughter, and that was only possible if he took her away. Therefore, Efraim had kidnapped Polly when she was in Tessin Park with her friend and the friend’s parents. He had given her a sedative, and she had been hidden in the van when he drove onto the ferry that would take him to Finland. The same van he had kept the boys in overnight on Lovön; he had to get rid of it anyway.

  In Helsinki he had had to push the boundaries, make use of contacts he had developed through his job, contacts who agreed to look after the child until the danger was over. And to get rid of the van.

  Perhaps he had already realized by that stage that he couldn’t stop the avalanche that had been set in motion. That it would crush everything in its path.

  Including himself.

  Suddenly he saw someone approach the doorway, peer inside, then step back.

  The darkness swallowed her up before he had time to react, but he knew he hadn’t been mistaken. He wasn’t the only one watching the apartment block. Nadia was there, too.

  Efraim hunched his shoulders against the cold and waited for Nadia the Paper Boy’s next move.

  Another late night at the office. It was almost half past nine. Shit. She really had meant to leave earlier and join her family in the temporary apartment. Not waste time in yet another meeting with GD, whose imagination appeared to be running riot about what she had been up to during her brief absence.

  “So you’re saying that Efraim Kiel has nothing to do with the murders?” he said again.

  “In my opinion,” Eden Lundell replied.

  Yet again. They had already gone over all this at lunchtime, but GD had insisted on another meeting. Säpo had been closely following the police investigation into the murders.

  “But you’re not prepared to tell me what that opinion is based on?”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  GD was starting to look annoyed, which wasn’t a good sign. Eden was too tired to argue in a civilized manner. She had spent hours catching up with work since she got back from London, and now she just wanted to go home. She had also spoken to Alex Recht and Fredrika Bergman. The case had taken a new turn; it seemed that Gideon Eisenberg was the guilty party, and he had hanged himself in his own living room.