by Bragelonne
‘Lennart!’
Bergström squeezed himself into the narrow store room, with Emily right on his heels.
‘You’ve got something?’
‘I think so, yes: there appears to be a cellar or something of the sort beneath the whole length of the kitchen. The trapdoor seems to be right under my feet.’
‘Didn’t you realise that before you set your feet down on it?’
Björn ignored the irritable tone of the Kommissionar’s remark and pointed at the ground. ‘Take a look. A thick parquet floor. And, below it, a concrete layer ten millimetres thick, I think. And before you ask me, I’m with forensics, not a mason. So, I have no pneumatic drill or crowbar with me.’
‘There’s no way you could pass for a mason, Björn, if you think using a pneumatic drill or a crowbar to pull out parquet flooring and a centimetre of concrete would work,’ the Kommissionar responded, smiling broadly. ‘Go and play with your brushes and magic powders, and I’ll go and get my own simple drill from my house.’ He gently slapped the back of the SKL chief and grinned.
Björn nodded, a half-smile peering through his thick moustache.
Bergström refused to let anyone else use his drill and took charge of the digging process. It took him twenty minutes to pull out the wooden parquet and break through the layer of concrete.
Once he’d managed to open the trapdoor, the light below came on automatically, revealing a set of stairs covered by a thin film of dust. Bergström went down first, Emily, Olofsson and Björn following him, all clad in white suits, their shoes covered, their hair tucked under plastic caps and wearing latex gloves.
They reached a room about four metres by three, with a ceiling height of approximately two metres twenty, its floor and walls covered with white tiles. A large table and a stainless-steel cart stood at its centre. To the right were a steel tub and a further two carts. At the back, facing the entrance, someone had filed away a dozen cardboard boxes on a set of metal shelves fixed to the wall. To the left was a door.
‘It feels like an abandoned morgue,’ Olofsson commented, his voice a whisper, as if speaking to himself.
Emily advanced towards the door and cautiously began to turn its handle.
Again, motion sensors had been installed and a light automatically came on, illuminating the room. It was much larger than the previous one, extending under the whole house. Shelving ran from floor to ceiling, almost geometrically aligned, precise, meticulous.
Emily took a few steps into the room and froze instantly. Her heart was beating so hard she was unable to hear the cries of fear and horror emanating from her colleagues.
As far as their eyes could see, rows of children’s bodies were laid out along the metal shelves. Skinless bodies, their muscles exposed to the air. A film of thin muscle fibres barely covering their bones.
And, all of a sudden, she heard them. All the children. Their screams. Dark and savage. A chorus of lamentations streaked with pain and despair.
She placed her hand on that of the child lying closest to her; it was a thin, icy little hand, and it felt like a signal to cry, cry along with all the others until the pain that weighed on her so much stopped, until it just evaporated. She could now tell the children that she could hear all of them, that they were no longer alone.
Falkenberg police station
Thursday, 23 January 2014, 19.00
KARL SVENSSON PEERED at the dirty wall as if searching for a window. From time to time, he adjusted the collar of his checked shirt, then returned to his contemplation of the wall.
When Bergström entered the interview room, Svensson looked up at him with disdain.
Anger ran through the Kommissionar’s body like poison, slowing his breath and tightening his muscles. Bergström was angry at himself. He loathed his lack of professionalism, of proactivity, of flair for his work. He had been keeping an eye on the sculptor for some time, but had never been able to catch him in the act. The young girls had always pretended they’d met Svensson while hitchhiking or had just been modelling for him, and none of the parents had been willing to lodge an official complaint. If only he’d done his job properly, Bergström thought, insisted, persevered, they might not have reached this stage.
Olofsson had gone to check on Karl’s comings and goings at the time of Tomas Nilsson’s disappearance as well as those of the London children.
As for Emily, she had remained in the cellar with Björn. She hadn’t responded when the Kommissionar had suggested she join him for Svensson’s interview. Instead she sat on a stool, her face just a few inches away from the cheeks of one of the cadavers, as if she were whispering into his ear.
Bergström sat down facing Svensson and placed a thick cardboard folder in front of him.
‘When did you move into your villa, Karl?’ Bergström’s voice was calm, but underneath the table his fingers were quivering uncontrollably.
‘Mid-November, last year.’
‘Why did you decide to leave Stockholm?’
‘As I seemed to be coming to Falkenberg almost every weekend to see friends, I warmed to the idea of settling here. And I also needed a larger space to create in, to work in.’
‘There’s no “space” like that in Stockholm?’
‘Stockholm will never be on the west coast.’
‘Why not Båstad? Your mother comes from there and you spent most of your summers there when you were a child, didn’t you?’
‘My father hails from Falkenberg, and my grandparents lived just yards from Skrea beach.’
‘Why did your father acquire this particular house?’
‘I don’t know. He’s the one you should ask.’
‘You have no idea? You were twenty-four in 1995 when he bought it; surely you remember something?’
‘I was living in London then.’
‘And you no longer visited Sweden?’
Svensson sighed with annoyance. ‘The house had direct access to the beach. There weren’t many places that offered you that sort of view in Falkenberg at the time. And the fields surrounding us are also part of the property.’
‘The previous owner sold it to your father in instalments, for a derisory sum and continued to live there. Do you know why? Did they know each other?’
‘I don’t know.’
Bergström’s fingers tapped out a rhythmic pattern on the cardboard folder. Svensson watched as the fingers moved, and wetted his lips.
‘You moved into the house in November. That was just after the death of the previous owner?’
‘No. I had some renovation work done, it took six weeks.’
‘What sort of work?’
‘A paint job, a new kitchen, a new bathroom.’
‘And new flooring?’
Svensson swallowed audibly. ‘Yes.’
‘And the cellar?’
‘What cellar?’
‘The cellar under the house.’
‘There is no cellar.’
Bergström looked at Svensson with undisguised anger. ‘Did you know a certain Erich Ebner?’
‘He was the previous owner of my house.’
‘Correct. And do you know what else you have in common?’ Bergström opened the cardboard folder, took a few photos and laid them out on the table, facing Svensson. ‘You like children.’
On the edge of panic, Svensson glanced at the photos of naked young girls. Sweat was pearling down his forehead and temples.
‘They’re models. For my sculptures. And they’re not children. They’re all older than fifteen.’
Bergström looked back at him, a note of doubt spreading across his face.
‘I’m not so certain, Karl … As I was saying, you share your love of children with Erich Ebner.’
Bergström placed another four photos on the table; bodies recovered from the cellar.
Svensson jumped out of his chair. His back right up against the wall, he pointed at one of the photos with an unsteady finger.
‘Fuck, what is that? What is it?’ He
was shrieking, saliva flying out of his mouth.
‘One of the flayed kids we have found in your cellar, Karl.’
‘But I have no damned cellar! There is no cellar in my house!’
‘And the tools you keep in your workshop, Karl?’
‘No, no, no, no, no…’ His hands held together in prayer, his chest thrust forward and his eyes wide open, Svensson seemed to be begging for his life. ‘Listen to me, Kommissionar…’
‘And the oven, Karl? The tens of litres of hydrofluoric acid? The surgical instruments?’
‘Listen … listen to me…’ Svensson opened his mouth wide as if gasping for air. ‘They’re my work instruments. I use all those to sculpt the glass. The tub, the hydrofluoric acid, the oven in which I shape the glass… everything! The asbestos gloves … and what you say are surgical instruments – they’re dental tools from the 1940s: that’s how I cut the glass, with metal heads, knives too…’
He sat down again, placed his hands flat on the top of the table. He moved them nervously several times, widening the space between his fingers then bringing the digits together again, as if he were trying to draw a specific figure.
‘It’s all for my sculptures, Kommissionar,’ he continued, his voice unsteady, each word accompanied by a downward movement of his head. ‘It’s for my sculptures. I would never, absolutely never harm a child. Never. But where … where did you find these…’
‘In your cellar, Karl, as I said before.’
Svensson brought his hands to his face and began to sob, his whole body shaking from side to side. ‘But what cellar? I don’t understand; I just don’t understand…’
Bergström leaned against the back of his chair.
‘Do you know what also bothers me, Karl? It’s the fact that the young woman who had given you an alibi for the night of Linnéa Blix’s disappearance – well, she’s now changed her mind.’
Falkenberg police station
Thursday, 23 January 2014, 19.00
OLOFSSON BLINKED as he shook his head. The memories of the flayed children stuck to the back of his eyes like a piece of paper caught between the wipers and the windshield of a car, bothering you throughout your whole, endless journey.
At first, coming across all the bodies of children, he had suspected a bad joke. With their opaque eyes and visible muscles, they could have been made out of plastic. They hadn’t decomposed and no rotting smell emanated from them.
This awful sicko had torn their skin away and treated them with some sort of solution. And he had then filed them away on the shelves like random pieces of meat, a label attached to each ankle indicating their provenance. Yes, that was just what they were – slabs of meat labelled according to origin.
Olofsson had felt like running away. But the three other cops he was with had more guts: he’d had to demonstrate he was as tough as them. Bergström had immediately contacted the prosecutor and the coroner, while Björn had called in the rest of his team. As for the Canadian woman, she had approached the cadavers so closely he had almost felt sick.
He had to confess, though, the bitch didn’t appear to be phased in the slightest. He would never admit to it, but he had been rather impressed by her cognitive interview with Anna Gunnarson the day before. He would never have thought that just chatting about clothes and hairstyles would help her put a finger on elements crucial to the investigation. And all that stuff about the swastika had proven to be the cherry on the cake. There was no doubt she was extremely savvy.
As a clever man, he’d swallowed his pride and made himself insignificant. If he could get himself on the profiler’s good side, he could learn a lot. Maybe then people would respect him a bit more.
A window opened up on his screen: he had just received an e-mail. It would hopefully be good news.
Bergström had asked him to interview the owners of the two other properties in Svensson’s hamlet. Maybe they had known Erich Ebner? Or had they possibly seen Ebner and Svensson together? Olofsson had traced all the owners back to 1947, when Ebner had moved in, but only Lars Rhode and Markus Stormare, the current owners, were still alive.
Lars Rhode, eighty-five, had bought his house in 1989. He had rented it out to sundry summer visitors every year, and had never actually lived in it himself. He couldn’t recall any specific complaints or remarks made by his tenants about any neighbours and nothing about Ebner. Unfortunately, he hadn’t retained any detailed records about his past tenants.
Markus Stormare, whose e-mail he’d just received, suggested they speak on the phone that evening.
The detective immediately dialled his number. When Stormare answered, he quickly recognised the Skåne accent, its r’s pronounced the French way, flat.
‘My father was from around there. He bought the house in 1975,’ Stormare explained. ‘My parents were thinking of moving here when they retired. They had spent their whole life in Skåne and wanted a change of landscape. But my father fell ill and we had to rent out the house while we waited for him to get better. I never had the heart to sell it or live in it myself.’
‘Did you keep a record of your tenants?’
‘I must have some e-mails and phone numbers for the past ten years, I think, but not for earlier. They were only summer rentals.’
‘Do you recall if, amongst them, there might have been a family that came several times?’
‘Yes – a Danish couple with two little girls, the Knudsens. They rented the house for ten summers in a row, towards the end of the 1970s. Martha and Marius Knudsen. I remember them well, because they stopped coming all of a sudden after a bad fight with one of the neighbours.’
Olofsson froze. ‘Do you know which particular neighbour?’
‘No, not at all, but I’m sure the Knudsens will have a better recollection.’
Falkenberg police station
Thursday, 23 January 2014, 23.00
AS SOON AS SHE HAD WALKED through the door of the conference room, Emily began her off-the-cuff lecture, interrupting the conversation between Bergström, Olofsson and Alexis, and spitting out the brutal details of what she had discovered.
They had found sixty-two bodies in Svensson’s cellar. A label fixed to the ankle of each indicated a place – in all likelihood where the kidnapping had occurred and/or the child’s home – as well as a year, undoubtedly that of the child’s death. If the dates were to be trusted, the killer, Erich Ebner, had begun his killing spree in 1948.
Emily paused. Not so much to cushion the blow for her audience, who listened aghast to her information, but to get a grip on her own emotions.
The process of thinking through and building a psychological profile was such an intimate thing. Normally, she journeyed through every individual stage alone; she would never think about sharing the speculations that inevitably accompanied her road into the mind of the killer and then towards the killer himself. But, today, sharing her thoughts in this manner gave her an unexpected feeling of catharsis: she was letting go of an immense weight, or rather the people in front of her were helping her to do so. This served to clear and energise her mind.
‘1970, as we had initially believed, happens to be a key date in the creation of Ebner’s criminal personality,’ Emily continued, taking her coat off. ‘That year, a brutal and radical change in his victimology appears: according to the coroner’s early conclusions, most of the victims prior to 1970 were adults – men and women. Thereafter, we have only found male children. The years the bodies are labelled with correspond to all the disappearances we had found evidence of.’
Olofsson’s chair, on which he was rocking, ground to a halt. ‘Adults? I thought he was only interested in boys between six and ten?’
‘Something crucial must have happened in Erich Ebner’s life in 1970. The most likely hypothesis is the birth of a son, as Alexis had suggested, or news of a pregnancy. But, according to the Swedish records, Ebner never had a child. This is something we have to investigate further.’
‘Could 1970 be when he first met
his partner in crime?’
‘I don’t think so. His associate must be at least twenty years younger than him, I’d say, and I doubt that our dominated party is now in his sixties. I remain convinced of the validity of my existing profile and believe the man must be between thirty-five and forty-five.’
‘If Ebner had been killing since 1948, we should be confronted with more than sixty-two bodies, shouldn’t we?’ Alexis asked.
‘Between 1948 and 1970, Ebner would kill every fifteen to eighteen months, and not every nine months, as he appears to have done since 1970. However, even bearing in mind this lengthy cooling-off period, yes, we are still missing bodies. Some of the children kidnapped since 1970 were not found in the cellar. About twenty, if our calculations are correct.’
Olofsson stopped loudly munching on the potato crisps he had been eating. ‘So where are they, then? What if someone else kidnapped them? How can we be certain it was him?’
‘The nine-month cycle is too precise to allow any doubt. It would be too much of a coincidence.’
‘And the swastika?’
A growing migraine was laying siege to Bergström’s head. He sighed before wearily answering. ‘As Emily had foreseen, a branch of the symbol, was carved into the left arm of every single victim found in the cellar.’
‘So how did the crazy bastard manage to halt the decomposition of the bodies?’
Bergström cleared his throat. ‘The coroner believes Ebner practised polymeric impregnation, meaning that he replaced all the organic liquids in the body with silicone to help preserve the bodies of his victims. It’s a very lengthy process, which might explain the nine months between murders. Notwithstanding the significant symbolism – it matches the length of a pregnancy; although I don’t think that’s what Ebner had in mind.’
Emily opened a bottle of water that had been left on the table and took a long sip from it.