Slowly We Die

by Emelie Schepp

  It felt like she was waiting for everything right now. Philip Engström’s wife wasn’t answering the phone; Henrik hadn’t come back from the interrogation; Ola still hadn’t gotten any hits on anyone named Erika Silver. And now the fucking coffee machine was making her stand there and wait.

  She looked at the clock. The machine had promised service in one minute, but two had already passed.

  Standing there was beginning to feel annoyingly uncomfortable when Henrik came into the room.

  “Philip Engström is being evasive,” he said bitterly.

  “What a surprise,” Mia said, sitting in a chair.

  “He’s standing by his story, though, that there is an Erika Silver, and he seems to be going with the idea that her last name was something different,” said Henrik. “But I don’t know what I should believe anymore.”

  “You’re doubting his story?”

  “No, I’m not doubting it. He does actually have an alibi for the murder of Shirin Norberg. I have a hard time seeing his colleague being mistaken about such a thing.”

  “But he has no alibi for the murders of Katarina Vinston and Johan Rehn.”

  “He doesn’t?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Didn’t you get a hold of his wife?”

  Mia shook her head no. “But I’ll try again.”

  Just then, the machine beeped. It was ready for use.

  Mia stood up and filled her mug to the brim. She blew on the coffee just as Ola was coming in to join them. His excitement was visible.

  “Good news!” he said triumphantly. “We have her name. It’s Erika Sandell. Had surgery in March of 2005 at Vrinnevi. No husband, no children. She’s lived in Fiskeby, west of town, for twenty years.”

  “Where in Fiskeby?” Mia said, signaling to Henrik to get moving.

  “Drive over the bridge, get off at Sörbyvägen, take a left on Leonardsbergsvägen. The house should be at the end of the road.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  JANA BERZELIUS CHECKED her cell phone before stepping into the courtroom. Father hadn’t called back—yet. She knew that the analysis itself would take time and she shouldn’t have called, but she just wanted to make sure that he had done what she had asked him to.

  She had never before turned to him for help, and the nagging uncertainty of whether she had done the right thing made her tense. It was likely he was the only one who knew how the contacts in his intricate network functioned.

  She heard subdued voices when she stepped into Courtroom 2 for the hearing about an aggravated extortion case. She shook hands with the plaintiff, a young, twenty-two-year-old man, before sitting down beside him. He was nervous and chewed on the inside of his cheek constantly.

  She looked at the presiding judge and the lay judges, and at the defendant and his scurrilous defense attorney, Peter Ramstedt. Peter’s wide grin was impossible to misinterpret, nor was his clicking pen. He was confident he would win.

  She took a number of papers from her briefcase, among which was her summons application, which she would soon request to have read. She only had time to skim through it quickly before the presiding judge greeted everyone and thereby began the proceedings.

  She looked at her cell phone one last time before turning it off. Then she prepared to begin.

  * * *

  The house was the farthest one on the street, as Ola had said, and almost out of sight, but the white facade and the dirty clay roof tiles were still visible.

  There was nothing suspicious about the house itself. It looked like any other single-family home, on any other road, in any other midsize city.

  There was a satellite dish on the roof, a straggly apple tree in the yard and an overturned ceramic pot on the stone pathway.

  The gate squeaked when Henrik Levin opened it. He heard Mia Bolander’s steps behind him and looked at the windows, noticing that some of the blinds were down and thinking it was far too quiet and calm for anyone to be home.

  He pressed the doorbell, but he didn’t hear any sound on the other side of the weather-beaten door. With his hand in a fist, he knocked hard three times, took a step back and waited. They waited for three minutes, then one more, and then two more to be on the safe side. Experience had taught him that if no one answers within six minutes, no one is going to. Ever.

  They went around the back of the house, but nothing indicated the house was anything other than empty.

  “There,” Mia said when they had come full circle, pointing to a small window next to the front door. “I can get in there if you let me stand on your shoulders. That way we’ll avoid a little paperwork and gain a few hours.”

  Within a few minutes, they were both standing inside the house.

  It smelled closed-up and almost a little sweet. Cobwebs covered the corners of the ceilings and the light fixtures.

  “Hello?” Henrik called despite the house seeming completely abandoned.

  The kitchen was small and square and was located next to a living room that was twice its size. Pots and pans and boxes covered the countertop. There was a thick layer of grime covering the sink, and crumbs on the floor.

  Henrik looked around, thinking that the silence felt ominous.

  They turned around and left the kitchen. They walked past boxes and tin cans and continued into what seemed to be a path through the garbage.

  The door to the bathroom was open and Henrik went in. There was filth everywhere he looked.

  He went out again and looked at a wooden star hanging in one of the windows in the living room. Its blue paint had faded. Someone made that many years ago, he thought.

  He moved his gaze to something in the hallway, right behind Mia.

  “What are you looking at?” she said, turning around.

  “A door,” Henrik said.

  He stepped over the garbage, carefully moving the cans of food that stood in front of the door before placing his hand on the door handle. He pulled on it, but it only opened an inch.

  “Help me,” he said to Mia.

  “Damn, it’s stubborn,” she said, bracing with her foot against the wall.

  The door opened and Henrik staggered back, stopping himself with a hand against the wall. Then he went to the doorway and saw stairs leading straight down into pitch-black nothingness. A musty smell wafted up from the darkness. Mia made a face and covered her mouth with her hand to try and stop herself from gagging.

  “After you,” she said.

  * * *

  “My whole body hurts when I think about Philip,” Lina Engström said. She pulled on the arms of her sweater, avoiding looking at Sandra. Even though they had talked so many times before, she still didn’t feel completely comfortable talking about her husband with her. Maybe it was because Sandra and Philip worked together.

  Lina and Sandra sat on opposite sides of the sofa in the living room. The teacups sat on the table, and they’d been empty for a long time.

  “It’s awful,” Lina said, “and I really wish I could not think about him at all. You know how it is...you think you know someone, that what you read in their eyes is true. That what they say is what they actually mean. And then you find out that’s not the case at all.”

  Sandra nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “And now you’re saying he made a mistake at work,” she continued. “But why would the police be hunting him down for that? What sort of a mistake?”

  “There were many mistakes,” Sandra said. “I can’t say any more about that because of...”

  “...professional secrecy, I know. But where is he, then? And why would a murderer be hunting him down?” Lina tugged on her sweater again.

  “Yes, it sounds crazy, I agree...but I don’t know if you know that Philip...”

  “What?” said Lina. She stared suddenly at Sandra.

 
“I don’t know how much you talk to each other...” Sandra said.

  “We don’t talk to each other at all,” Lina said sharply. “What is it?”

  “Did you know that Philip takes pills?” Sandra said.

  “No. I did suspect it, but I never...”

  “Okay,” Sandra said, taking a deep breath, “I think that his strange behavior lately is because he’s addicted to these pills...”

  Just then Lina’s cell phone rang. Her heart began pounding as she picked it up from the table.

  “Who is it?” Sandra said.

  “I don’t know,” Lina said, stressed. “I don’t recognize the number...”

  “But maybe it’s Philip. Why don’t you just answer?”

  “I don’t dare.”

  “What are you scared of?”

  “Everything, I think. But mostly that someone is going to call and say that something happened to him.”

  “Now you’re blowing everything out of proportion again.”

  “Yes, maybe I am,” she said.

  “You should call back and see who it was,” Sandra said when the ringing had stopped. “It’s better to know than not, right?”

  “Yes...” Lina said hesitatingly.

  She looked at Sandra again.

  “But how do you know he’s taking pills?”

  “Lina, he and I are work friends; we’re together around the clock sometimes and we talk. Besides, a few things have happened at work that...”

  “But...what sort of pills are they?”

  “Sedatives...sleeping pills...” Sandra said.

  “Sleeping pills? But that can’t be true. He has a terrible time sleeping.”

  “That’s exactly it.”

  * * *

  Mia was still holding her nose and staring straight into the darkness. She stood behind Henrik, who fumbled around in his jacket pocket, pulled out his pocket flashlight and turned it on.

  He took a step down the steep stairs, and she heard the wood creak under him. She followed his steps, thinking of all the horror films she’d seen.

  As a little girl, she had hardly dared to be alone in the bathroom, even to wash her face. The sink was right across from the bathroom door, and she always had the crazy notion that if she looked into the mirror, she’d see someone in the doorway behind her. A classic fucking horror film cliché.

  She still didn’t like mirrors, which explained why she was so startled to see the dusty mirror standing near the stairs on the rough cement floor.

  The low ceiling meant Henrik had to walk hunched over, and he swept the beam of light over the walls and some drapes, looking for a light switch. But there weren’t any.

  It smelled like mold and old basement—and something else.

  Henrik suddenly gasped.

  Mia looked at him and then at what was illuminated by his flashlight. In the light she first saw a wheel, then a wheelchair, and then she saw that in the wheelchair sat a woman. Or what was left of a woman, at least.

  “Is that Erika Sandell?” Mia said, exhaling.

  “I assume so,” Henrik said.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “SHE’S BEEN DEAD a long time,” Anneli Lindgren said, pulling on a blue glove that snapped against her wrist. She had just arrived with two other forensic techs who would now work through the house room by room.

  Henrik Levin and Mia Bolander stood to her left, both with their eyes on the woman in the wheelchair, her hanging head and her amputated legs.

  “How long?” Henrik asked.

  “Hard to say at first glance. But considering how far the decay has gone, she’s probably been here a few years.”

  “A few years?” Henrik said.

  “Yes, or even longer. It’s hard to know exactly.”

  Henrik sighed and looked around in the now brightly illuminated basement, letting his gaze sweep over the walls and the curtain hanging behind the dead woman in the wheelchair.

  “And poof, there goes Philip’s story,” Mia said.

  “Yes,” Henrik said, “but Erika existed, anyway. Even if her condition was worse than we’d expected.”

  “Yes,” Anneli said, “and if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to have her to myself now.”

  “We’ll take a look around upstairs, then,” Henrik said.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Anneli said.

  “You know we’re careful,” Henrik said, looking at Anneli with a knowing gaze.

  “You can never be too careful,” she said, turning her back to him.

  Henrik and Mia left the basement and went up the stairs to the first floor.

  “What are we to think about Philip after this?” Henrik said. “Innocent or not?”

  “It’s obvious he’s not innocent. Either he’s completely off his rocker from all of the pills, or he’s just trying to confuse us.”

  “We have to try to get a hold of his wife,” Henrik said. “See if she can confirm his alibi, if nothing else.”

  He stepped onto the first floor and shivered as the cold, damp air from the open front door permeated his jacket. He looked around and thought about the sequence of events. Shirin Norberg, whose hands had been severed, Katarina Vinston, whose tongue had been cut out, and Johan Rehn, who had lost both legs.

  And he thought about Erika Sandell, sitting in her wheelchair in the basement, dead.

  “And for all of these years, no one missed her,” he said aloud but to himself.

  He went back into the square kitchen. The words echoed in his head as he looked around. He looked at the pans and the boxes, at the food scraps.

  “But someone must have helped her get down into the basement,” he said. “And someone must have been paying the bills all these years.”

  He walked to the sink and looked more closely at the scraps, then opened the kitchen cupboards and looked.

  “Not all of the porcelain is dusty,” he said.

  “Okay...?” Mia said.

  “Look here,” he said, pointing to two cups standing side by side. “One has a layer of grime on it, and the other one looks almost freshly washed.”

  Mia turned to him.

  “But only Erika is on the books as living here?” Mia said.

  “Yes,” Henrik said.

  “Husband and children?”

  “No,” he said. “She didn’t have any family.”

  “So who the hell has been living here these past few years?” she said.

  * * *

  “It feels like I’m the only one who wants anything out of our relationship. Philip just always clams up,” Lina said, meeting Sandra’s gaze. “And now that all of this has happened—the police, the pill addiction, the murders—I feel like I don’t know anything anymore.”

  “I understand,” Sandra said.

  “Ugh, it feels like I’m the only one talking.”

  “You need to vent, and I’m a good listener.”

  “Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to talk to you,” Lina said, smiling. Then she turned her gaze to the blanket that lay beside her and starting fiddling with it.

  “Now you look worried again,” Sandra said. “It’ll work out. You’ll see.”

  “But,” Lina began, “I have this picture in my mind of a family, and I don’t know why I’ve been holding on to it so hard. It isn’t real.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “You’re going to laugh.”

  “No, I won’t. Tell me.”

  “It’s the traditional picture with a mom, a dad and children, a house with a white picket fence, Volvo station wagon, a dog...”

  “Sounds like a beautiful picture to me.”

  “Yeah.” Lina nodded, turning her gaze to the window. “But when you find out that the man you’re married to and love is a
pathological liar who’s addicted to pills...do you know how that feels? How tricked I feel?”

  “No, but I can imagine.”

  “I’m so angry, I could almost kill him.”

  Sandra gave a short chuckle.

  “Now that I can understand!” she said.

  Lina smiled, but her smile evaporated as her cell phone rang again.

  “You should probably answer this time,” Sandra said.

  “I probably should,” Lina said, feeling her hand tremble as she picked up the phone.

  “Hello?” she said.

  * * *

  Jana Berzelius left the courtroom without speaking to anyone, which seemed to bother attorney Peter Ramstedt. It seemed like the drawn-out hearing had gone in her favor, but the judgment wouldn’t be handed down until the following day.

  She went out through the lobby, down the stairs, then walked quickly through downtown toward her apartment.

  As she walked, she thought through everything one more time. There weren’t many escape routes. The way she had chosen was the simplest, but she wanted to be sure that she hadn’t overlooked any obvious difficulties that would prevent Danilo from getting from the apartment to the car in the garage. She hadn’t.

  She was more worried about how they would manage any unexpected problems that could crop up.

  As she entered the apartment and took off her coat, she saw him out of the corner of her eye. Danilo held his head high, as if he were already certain everything would go according to plan. In reality, his entire disappearance had had to do with confidence. It didn’t matter if you had a fake passport or driver’s license, convincing wigs or disguises, if you couldn’t talk, move and act with confidence. People saw what you told them to see.

  Danilo was probably a good actor, but the only role he was playing right now was himself. He had clean clothes, a new haircut and a freshly shaven face, for sure. At first glance, he bore no resemblance to the man who had broken into her home wearing scrubs almost a week ago. But a practiced eye would recognize him, she was sure of it.

  “Have you decided?” he asked.

  “We’ll go through the basement,” she said. “I’ll go first, then you.”