That Danilo had shown up in her dreams made her even more worried. He had appeared in them before, but never so intensively and clearly as he had the previous night.
She thought about how she had been nine years old when the nightmares had begun. The nights became torture. As soon as Margaretha and Karl said good-night and turned off the light, she had opened her eyes and wondered how she would be able to keep herself awake all night. She had never turned on the light; she’d let the room remain dark. The fear didn’t come with the darkness. It came with the dreams.
She had never been afraid of the sort of things a person’s imagination could come up with. She’d been afraid of what she’d experienced herself as a child.
She had tried to swallow her fear, pretend it didn’t exist, forcing herself to stay awake at night. But in the end, she hadn’t been able to fight it. She had fallen asleep. And she had dreamed.
Every time she awoke, the sweat lay like a film over her thin body. She had sat up, pulled her knees up to her chin and dried her tears with the sleeve of her nightgown.
Jana crossed in the crosswalk and thought how Father used to bolt her door from the outside so that she wouldn’t come into their room at night.
But that had never stopped her.
Silently and slowly she would climb out through the window, out of her room and into theirs.
Mother always slept on her side, breathing so quietly it was almost inaudible. Jana would sneak up to the bed, stretch out her hand and hold it in front of Margaretha’s mouth, feeling how it tickled when she exhaled.
Carefully, she would pad around the bed to Father’s side and stand close, holding both of her hands an inch from his face and feeling his breaths come in deep bursts from his mouth.
Then she would huddle up, lie on the floor and wait.
Wait for the fear to come.
They never had any idea that I was there, she thought, pushing the door to the police station open. They never had any idea what I was actually dreaming about. And now her mother was gone.
But everything was collected in her journals, and right now that was what meant most to her. She would do anything and everything to get them back.
* * *
Henrik Levin had just closed the door to his office when he again heard his cell phone ring.
“This is Henrik,” he said, sitting down in his chair.
“Do you have a minute?” pathologist Björn Ahlmann said. “For the Shirin Norberg case?”
“You’re done with the autopsy report?”
“I will be soon.”
“Tell me what you’ve found,” Henrik said, pressing the phone to his ear even harder as he observed the tangled pattern of roads, tram lines and bus routes below him.
“This has nothing to do with rape or attempted rape. But she has been subjected to extremely aggressive violence directed at her arms, legs and kidneys. Her hands, as you know, were severed.”
“With what?”
“Probably a Gigli saw.”
“Which is?”
“A surgical tool used to saw through bone. It’s a long, saw-edged wire that’s fastened to handles.”
Henrik let his gaze wander up the dismal facades on the other side of the street.
“Had she been drugged?” he asked.
“I haven’t received the results back for all of the tests yet,” Björn answered.
“DNA?”
“I can’t give you any more than that right now. But I want to make you aware of the time line. The bruising on the body occurred much earlier and separate from the severing of the hands.”
“How much earlier?”
“I would guess upwards of four days, at least.”
* * *
With both hands on the steering wheel, Philip turned his Audi A5 onto the E4 highway and continued toward the Klinga interchange. Just before the exit, his gas light came on, and he swung into the gas station. The credit card reader beeped loudly as he entered his PIN code.
He put the pump handle back after five gallons and got back in his car. He continued past the Go-Cart arena, turned left on Linköpingsvägen and then left again, onto a narrow gravel road to a neighborhood called Borg Boklund.
Katarina Vinston’s house stood on a small hill on the left. On the right, barely visible, were two other single-family homes.
Philip parked on the side of the road, opened his car door and got out. He stood with one leg still in the car for a moment.
The house was red with white trim. All the windows were dark, and he couldn’t help but think that the house looked almost abandoned.
When he left the car, the gravel crunched under his feet. He opened the gate to the yard, walked onto the lawn and up to the house. A broom had been leaned against the front door.
He rang the doorbell, waited a moment and then rang again. He tried the door handle twice, but it was locked.
He listened at the door, but all he heard was the whispering of the trees. Everything was quiet—unnervingly quiet.
Philip peered carefully in through the narrow window next to the front door, trying to see any evidence that Katarina might be inside. But all he could see were a jacket and scarf hanging up on the wall at the entrance, and, farther down the hallway, the kitchen with its long, narrow wooden table, Windsor-style chairs and braided rug.
He rang the bell one more time, waited and then backed away from the porch. He looked around, thinking maybe there would be someone to ask, someone who might know her whereabouts, but the only thing he saw was a deer at the edge of the woods, standing completely still, its head high. There were the two houses farther off, but he would feel odd going there and making such a big deal out of it.
He hesitated at first, but then he stepped around into the flower bed and stood on tiptoe in the black soil to look in the side window, but was met only by darkness.
He stepped back and walked around the back of the house. At the rear was a glassed-in sunroom, the door to which was also locked.
He went back around to the front and stood in the street and looked at the upstairs windows for two full minutes. Then he tried her on his cell, but her voice mail picked up.
Finally he pulled the pills from his pocket, pushed one out of the blister pack and swallowed it before getting back in his car.
He couldn’t shake off the feeling that the house appeared abandoned, as if no one lived there anymore. The entire way back to Norrköping he asked himself the same question: Where had Katarina disappeared to?
CHAPTER
TEN
“SO WHAT BJÖRN Ahlmann is claiming, then,” Gunnar Öhrn said, resting his elbows on the table in the conference room, “is that many of the bruises on Shirin Norberg’s body happened a few days before her hands were severed?”
The meeting had been going on for five minutes, but it was already warm in the room at the police station. Henrik Levin was drinking from his coffee cup, Mia Bolander was twirling a lock of hair around her finger, Ola Söderström was rocking his chair, and Jana Berzelius and Anneli Lindgren both sat still with their eyes on Henrik.
“Is that right?” Gunnar asked.
“Yes, that’s right,” Henrik said, putting his coffee down. “The bruises on her body did not appear to occur at the same time as her hands were severed. And according to Björn, there is no doubt that someone had abused her. There are also signs that indicate that she was subjected to systematic violence for a long time. The question is whether the person who abused her over time is the same one who mutilated her in the end.”
It became quiet in the room. Gunnar swept his gaze over the faces around the table. He met Anneli’s eyes for a moment, but he didn’t linger there.
“And her hands?” he continued.
“Yes,” Henrik said. “Her hands were probably amputated using a surgical instrument l
ike a Gigli saw, but...”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Jana said, spinning her pen with both hands, “but this possible boyfriend that the neighbor described, do we have any trace of him? Have you checked the victim’s computer, what she downloaded, what sites she visited, if she chatted...”
“Yes, of course we did,” Henrik said.
“And her cell phone?”
“I’ve gone through it,” Ola said. “She or someone else appears to have erased all of the texts.”
“Why would she do that?”
“If you look here,” Ola said, putting a bunch of papers on the table, “you’ll understand why.”
The list of calls was four pages long.
Jana cast a quick glance at them.
“Numerous times every day, Shirin received ominous text messages,” she said.
“Ominous?” Mia snorted, pulling the papers toward her. “These clearly are murder threats, plain and simple.” She read aloud: “‘You are worth nothing. People like you need people like me. See you tonight, whore.’”
Mia flipped through the pages and continued, “‘You will let me in. Otherwise I’ll wake you up at night, force you to say your last words and then I’ll kill you and your daughters and no one will even care.’ And ‘Don’t you even dare to answer now? Ha ha, you’re so disgustingly pathetic. Answer, for Christ’s sake. Answer!’”
Mia put the papers back down. “Seems to me these were sent by a real knight in shining armor.”
“But who did send them?” Gunnar asked.
“Unfortunately,” Ola said, “all of the texts came from a prepaid phone.”
“No other phone numbers that we can track from the list?” Mia said.
“No,” Ola said. “There are a few calls to and from the oldest daughter, Aida, but nothing else.”
“Maybe Aida knows who sent the threats?” Gunnar asked.
“She seemed ignorant about most of it when we talked to her, right, Henrik?” Mia said. “Either she is still in shock, or it simply hasn’t sunken in yet that her mother is dead.”
“Yes, she did act a little strange, you could say,” Henrik said thoughtfully.
The room fell silent.
Gunnar clasped his hands on the table.
“Or did she feel afraid and threatened into silence?”
“I could buy that,” Mia said. “But then her grandmother Maria Ashour must also have been threatened, because I still think it’s damn strange that she didn’t know that her daughter was being abused in this way. It seems completely bogus that she’s not letting us talk to the youngest daughter, even when we gave her assurances that the interrogation would be handled sensitively. Maria didn’t say anything useful at all during our questioning.”
“It could be taken that both Aida and Maria are trying to hide something,” Henrik said. “But I don’t quite know what they would have to gain from that.”
“Yes, I have a very difficult time seeing how Maria would have been able to turn a blind eye to this recurring abuse of her daughter,” Mia said. “It’s not likely at all.”
Gunnar nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “But the hands? What do we think about that aspect? Why cut them off?”
Everyone fell silent.
“He’s a fucking sadist, if you ask me,” Mia said after a moment.
“Punishment for something,” Anneli said.
“Yes, she suffered enough, that’s for sure,” Henrik said.
Jana laid her pen on the table.
“But the neighbor attested that Shirin had someone in the apartment at least from time to time. He had even seen the man, if I understood you correctly, Henrik.”
“Yes,” Henrik said, “the neighbor had seen a man with both Shirin and the youngest daughter, Sara. A man with broad shoulders and black hair. Not a very good description, maybe, but he only saw him through the peephole.”
“In which case, we can’t lose sight of the fact that Sara has seen things she shouldn’t have seen,” Gunnar said. “That makes her our most important witness.”
“Exactly,” Mia said.
“And if we can’t question her, we can at least talk to Aida right now,” Gunnar said. “I think we should call her in for at least one more questioning. We’ll start there.”
* * *
She tried to look relaxed but was afraid that she wasn’t very successful. Aida Norberg glanced at the policeman sitting across the table from her. It was the same friendly detective as last time, Henrik Levin. They sat alone in the little interrogation room in the police station.
Aida placed both of her hands between her thighs and rubbed them slowly against each other. The chair was hard, and the Dictaphone lying on the table before her was small. She looked up at it a few times, but quickly looked back down again.
“I have to ask you a few follow-up questions,” the detective said.
“Okay,” she said, swallowing.
“And we might as well get right down to it,” he continued. “We know that your mother was being threatened by someone. We’ve found texts that she erased from her cell phone. The neighbor has also seen a man visit your mother.”
She blinked a couple of times, continuing to rub her hands against each other.
“I want you to be completely honest with me now, Aida. Who is that man? Who threatened her?”
“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head.
“Try to think. This is important.”
“I can’t.”
“Why can’t you?”
“I just can’t.”
She felt the tension in her shoulders.
“Is it someone who also threatened you?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Is it someone who has done something bad to you?”
“No.”
“You have to tell us.”
“I know,” she said, her heart pounding. “But there’s nothing to tell.”
* * *
“She’s clamming up,” Henrik Levin said in a low voice. “It’s obvious she’s keeping something from us.”
He was standing in the hallway with Jana, who had followed the interrogation with Aida from the observation room.
“I agree,” Jana said. “There’s a scared look in her eyes.”
“You saw that?”
“Yes.”
“And how did she seem to you?”
“Well, as you’ve already said, she’s very composed,” Jana said.
The fluorescent lighting fully exposed her face. Her skin was pale, her throat long and slim.
“It’s remarkable,” he said.
“But not everyone is sentimental,” she said.
“Maybe not,” he said. “But still...”
He crossed his arms over his chest, looking up at the ceiling for a moment. Then he leaned toward Jana and said: “Aida is never going to give us the perpetrator. Even if she knows, she’s not going to say anything.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No. If she were going to, she would have already.”
He looked at her.
“Would you have told even if someone threatened your family?” he asked.
“I don’t have a family,” she said, meeting his gaze.
“But if you did?”
“There’s something called the duty to report misconduct.”
“Yes, there is. But would you take the risk?”
“It would depend on the circumstances.”
“Of course it does,” Henrik said, releasing his arms. He lowered his gaze to the floor and looked at his shoes, thinking for a moment.
“I really want to question the little sister,” he said then.
“I think we should,” Jana said. “
Call Special Victims Investigator Mikaela Lundin.”
“Even though the grandmother Maria doesn’t want us to?”
“Yes, I think so. Considering the seriousness of this crime and the principle of proportionality, we have leeway for the decision to bring the youngest daughter in for interrogation. She can help us find the perpetrator. According to my judgment, witness statements are very valuable, and when you set that in relation to other evidence, the interrogation is absolutely necessary. I’d like you to tell Maria that.”
* * *
Philip walked straight through the gym to the row of treadmills. He stepped up on one and began maniacally punching in his weight and distance on the panel. The machine thudded loudly as he began to jog.
On the TV screen mounted on the wall in front of him, he saw a woman holding a children’s book about Native Americans. It made him think about all of the stories his father had told him when he was young. Stories about tents in desolate forests, paths through the wilderness, trampling herds of buffalo and loud birdcalls. Stories that were realistic and detailed.
He thought it was ironic that the memories of the stories his father had told him were stronger than most of his memories of the man himself. His father had worked and mostly kept to himself. He worked and mostly kept to himself. It struck Philip that this sentence could just as well be a description of his own existence.
What sort of spouse was he that he’d allowed himself to become so absorbed in his professional priorities? How had pills become his best friends?
Just as he felt his pulse increasing, a man walked into the gym. Philip didn’t know him but recognized him as a regular.
“My grandma runs faster than you do, dude,” the man with a wide back, muscular arms and skinny legs said, grabbing a barbell.
“What did you say?” Philip said, staring at him as he ran.
“I said, my grandma runs faster than you. And she has a prosthetic leg.”
“What the fuck do you mean by that?”
“Calm down, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “It was just a joke.”
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