by Jens Lapidus
“He loved all kinds of games, but mainly poker, I think. He’d always been that way.”
“Did he play for money?”
Cecilia turned to the window again. “For money? Oh yes, very often. The gambling was at the root of it all. I’ve realized he must’ve been living a double life, but now he’s dead, and at some point, you have to forgive people. And there’s one more thing I’d say about Mats: there was something in his relationship with the kids, there was a certain comfort there, he was the best father I could’ve wished for.”
Cecilia closed her mouth. Maybe she’d said all she had to say.
But Teddy wasn’t done, not yet.
“How did he kill himself?”
Cecilia went over to the kitchen counter and started to wipe the already-gleaming surface. “He jumped from a ferry, one of the ones to Finland. It was so awful. But I don’t really know why. We weren’t living together then. All I know is that he hadn’t been well during certain periods. That was obvious.”
“Hadn’t been well how?”
“He wasn’t always very stable, which is understandable given what you did to him. He got depressed. He was even hospitalized at one stage.”
Cecilia’s words cut deep—maybe Mats had never recovered from what Teddy had been a part of. Teddy almost regretted coming here. But he needed more. He said: “Do you, Benjamin, or Lillan still have any of Mats’s things?”
Cecilia left and came back after five minutes. She was carrying a bag.
“Benjamin had this in his room for years. The police didn’t take it when they searched the house.”
Emelie bent down to look at the things Teddy was carefully lifting from the bag. A watch, a few small photographs, a key, an A5 sheet of paper, two ties, a pair of cuff links, a pack of cards.
They laid the objects out on the kitchen table. Cecilia moved away again, let them look for themselves.
The first photograph was of Cecilia, Mats, Benjamin, and his little sister, Lillan. It must’ve been taken some time ago, more than a decade; Benjamin looked about eleven or twelve. They were all wearing swimsuits—Mats was tanned. He was smiling, but there was still something drawn about his face.
“He’s smiling with his mouth, but not his eyes—don’t you think?” Emelie said quietly.
“I don’t know,” Teddy replied. “You can’t tell who someone is from a picture. It’s close contact that counts.”
The sheet of A5 seemed to have been torn from a notepad. The handwriting was ornate, careful. Teddy read.
Don’t blame me for everything that happened. Be stronger than I ever was. This has nothing to do with the divorce or with Mom. I love you all.
Dad
Simple words of farewell—Teddy tried to make out what they meant. It was clear enough what it was.
“This?” Emelie said, taking out another photograph.
Like the earlier one, it also showed the family, and must have been taken even longer ago. Benjamin looked about seven. Mats, Cecilia, Lillan in a baby carrier, and then Benjamin. They were standing on a moss-covered stone, trees in the background. Mats was holding up a box full of mushrooms.
Teddy picked up the picture. Someone had poked two holes where Mats’s eyes should have been.
Later, outside, they stood opposite one another on the street. Teddy took a step forward.
Emelie took one back.
He said: “Want to meet up tonight?”
She took out her phone and started scrolling through it. “I’ve got tons of work to do. Plus I’ve got to go down to see my parents in Jönköping.”
“How often do you see them?”
“Normally just at Christmas and over the summer.”
“Is it a birthday or something now?”
Emelie’s mouth looked taut. “No, I just feel like I need to see them.”
“Okay, but we’ve got to talk things over sometime.”
“Yeah, we should go out to the house in Värmdö and take a look there, too.”
“Definitely.”
“What are you going to do now?” Emelie asked.
“I’m gonna call Tagg, my old pal from the slammer. I’m going to ask him about Topstar.”
“What’s that?”
“The pack of cards in Benjamin’s bag. Did you get a good look at it?”
“No, not really. I thought the farewell note and the holes poked through that photo were more interesting.”
“There was a name on the back of the cards. it’s a promotional pack. Topstar—I think it must be a club.”
“Okay, but maybe they’re Benjamin’s?”
“Maybe, but everything else in that bag seemed to be linked to Mats.”
—
Zinkensdamm Station. Farther up the hill, over toward Skinnarviksberget, he could see the small, picturesque cottages still standing from years ago. He wondered who lived in them, these tiny houses in the very heart of Stockholm—his instincts told him it wasn’t the wealthy. This wasn’t their part of town; a different hierarchy ruled here, a different class system.
A man in ripped jeans and a Windbreaker was standing nearby, talking loudly on his phone.
Teddy thought to himself that he would have to help Nikola find a place of his own. And a job. He should visit his father, Bojan. He needed to call Tagg. Look into Mats’s gambling. Get to the bottom of who’d been killed out on Värmdö. And above all, call Loke, double-check everything he’d told him about Mats’s kidnapping.
The entrance to the metro station was gray, with huge fans in the ceiling. He turned around. The man in the Windbreaker was walking toward the station behind him.
Teddy stopped by the barriers, pretended to search for his metro card.
He didn’t know what to think. Windbreaker man stopped, too. Peering over, almost. Like he was waiting.
Teddy took the escalator down.
He felt the back of his neck prickle.
The walls were filthy.
Step after step after step—the escalator was swallowed up by the ground.
He walked toward the platform. There were people everywhere. But the man was still there. Thirty feet behind him.
The train pulled in. Norsborg. Teddy didn’t get on.
Guess what: the guy in the Windbreaker didn’t, either.
Three minutes later, the next train rolled in.
They got into the same car.
Teddy stood up. Thought: What the hell’s going on?
13
The area around the house almost looked abandoned. Not what Emelie had expected. The branches of the apple tree were sprawling, clearly hadn’t been pruned for years, and there was already so much grass growing through the gravel that unless someone did something about it, the yard would be one big lawn before summer was over.
The house itself looked fresh, though. Painted red. Lots of intricate woodwork. She could see water in the distance.
Värmdö, Ängsvik: the house where the dead man had been found.
She’d tried to find out who owned it—it was registered in the name of a Spanish citizen, Juan Arravena Huerta, but she couldn’t find any information about him, not on the Internet and not even when she called the Spanish authorities. She promised herself to keep searching: check the deeds. Look into who had owned the place before the Spaniard.
They pulled up on the gravel and climbed out of the car: Emelie, Teddy, and Jan from Redwood Security—the ex-cop who’d retrained as a private security consultant, who’d helped her with investigations in the past. Jan was dressed like he always was: blue shirt and jacket, both too crumpled to belong to an office monkey, but smart enough to give the right impression. His old pulse meter was gone, replaced by a smartwatch that looked like a mini version of a phone.
“Means my hands are free more often. Plus, it’s pretty snazzy, too, right? You can change the strap. And it even keeps track of my health.”
“Snazzy”? Come on, Emelie hadn’t heard that word since she was about seven.
For the
most part, Jan looked grumpy. Narrow lips and small, pointed creases at either side of his mouth. But he really wasn’t the sullen type. Emelie liked him a lot.
She’d called him straight after the remand hearing and told it like it was: “I’ve kind of changed tack, taken on a criminal case. Would you do some work for me?”
What she didn’t tell him was that she had no idea how she would pay.
In a few weeks, Sweden would fall into its annual summer coma. She and Jan had joked in the car on the way there: talking about new DNA techniques; Elias Ymer, the hope of Swedish tennis; and the latest epic Volvo ad. But not Teddy. He’d kept quiet.
Emelie thought about her proposition to him a few days earlier. She couldn’t believe it had slipped out. It was just so obvious: Teddy wasn’t her type. A former super-gangster. Jailbird. Loser. Maybe it was just the booze; she couldn’t handle it very well when she was tired. Or maybe it was the stress, the fact she’d been flung into something unfamiliar, her first remand hearing the very next day. That had gone to shit, too. She was a newbie, completely green.
She’d talked to her client in private once the video-streamed hearing was over. He’d nodded when she asked whether he knew what had just happened, but exactly how much he’d really understood was another matter. He’d been lying quietly in bed, unmoving.
She’d sat down next to the bed anyway. “You know I haven’t worked on this kind of case before, don’t you? And that I’ve only been a lawyer a few days?”
Benjamin hadn’t said a word.
“So honestly, I’m far from an expert in any of this. You should have someone with a few years’ experience defending you.”
His eyes had remained closed.
It wasn’t just in relation to Leijon that what she was doing was risky. Benjamin Emanuelsson had been given full restrictions. That meant he wasn’t allowed any contact with the outside world, and this also applied to Emelie. She couldn’t just break the restrictions. But Benjamin had asked her to make Teddy understand. She wondered what that meant. Did involving Teddy break the restrictions? What if Benjamin was actually manipulating her to get rid of, or maybe even introduce, information that might influence the police investigation?
To put it bluntly: it wasn’t just her job at Leijon on the line. It was her entire fucking career—her newly earned title, who she was. She wondered whether she was going mad: why she’d even agreed to take it on.
Was it worth it?
That depended on what Benjamin Emanuelsson wanted.
Who he was. What this was really all about. Who the dead person was. What had happened on Värmdö.
She’d tried again: “Benjamin, can you hear me?”
This time: a faint nod.
“Did you understand what I just said, about having me as your lawyer? Do you still want me?”
Again, he’d nodded.
The police tape was still stretched across the entrance. The 27:15 notice was taped to the door: ACCESS PROHIBITED pursuant to ch. 27, § 15 of the Code of Judicial Procedure. Trespassers will be prosecuted. But Emelie had permission from Rölén, the prosecutor, to take a look around. And Jan—her CSI guru, crime scene genius, her very own forensic super-consultant—maybe he would manage to find something the police had missed.
She thought about the remand memo she’d been given before the hearing. The police had found blood-spattered clothing in the woods. Clothing that might belong to Benjamin—and that might have the victim’s blood on it. That didn’t sound good at all. With any luck, the National Forensics Centre wouldn’t take too long to analyze them.
Benjamin had been in custody for almost a week now, but she hadn’t been given any new information about the case. That was just how things were in Swedish criminal proceedings, or so she’d been told. The prosecutor and the police conducted the initial investigation under so-called preliminary inquiry secrecy. Neither the suspect nor their defense counsel was allowed to know a thing before they felt they were done—until the prosecutor felt ready to present their preliminary findings. Most lawyers just waited patiently for their opponents to finish, but Emelie had other plans. She would try to get somewhere on her own.
Jan stooped carefully beneath the police tape. He was wearing latex gloves.
“Please don’t touch anything.”
He tried the handle on the outer door. It was unlocked.
They entered the house.
The place smelled musty.
A small hallway, no coats on the hooks. Maybe there hadn’t been any to begin with, but in all likelihood, the police technicians had emptied the place.
They continued, deeper into the house. The kitchen was on the ground floor. It seemed pretty deserted. Jan opened cupboards and drawers. They were virtually empty. He found some cutlery and a couple of plates in the cupboards. The pantry was empty. The fridge, too. One of the windowpanes had been replaced with plastic.
Jan said: “The police probably took the window, and they’d definitely empty the fridge. But the rest seems odd.”
“Why?”
“Let’s move on.”
The living room contained an armchair, a sofa, and a small wooden coffee table. An old TV on a bench. A lamp on the floor, and a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. But there were no rugs, no pictures on the walls, no curtains, and no other lighting.
They stopped by the table.
Emelie pointed. “Well, we know one thing for sure: the victim was in here somewhere.”
“Do you know who they were?”
“No, the prosecutor hasn’t released that information, but it was a man. They probably haven’t identified him yet.”
Jan bent down and poked at some dark patches on the floorboards with a cotton swab.
“The body was down here somewhere,” he said. “There’s been a lot of blood on these boards, let me tell you. And here, too.”
He pointed to the wall behind them. Then he got up, pulled out a camera, and took a few photos.
The stairs creaked alarmingly, particularly when Teddy went up them.
Upstairs, the house was even sparser. The three small rooms were virtually empty other than a bed and a small nightstand in each of them. The sheets were gone from the beds, but the blinds were still down. Again: no pictures, no curtains, no other furniture.
“It’s too empty here,” said Jan.
“What’s that mean?” Teddy asked. It was the first thing he’d said since leaving the car.
“The police don’t normally empty a place to this extent. They don’t take the furniture, the pictures, and crockery.”
“I think I can guess what that means.”
“Me too,” said Jan.
Emelie looked at the floral wallpaper. It looked like it had been there since the house was built, at least a hundred years earlier.
“Doesn’t seem like this place was being used as a normal house,” said Teddy. “There’s not even a vacuum cleaner in the closet downstairs.”
“Wait,” said Jan. He bent down. They were in the narrow hallway again. Emelie stepped into the kitchen to avoid brushing up against Teddy.
This time, Jan didn’t take out a cotton swab. He pulled out a flashlight instead.
They squatted down. Teddy’s and Emelie’s heads only a few inches apart. Jan took out a magnifying glass with his free hand, the flashlight still shining in the other.
Near the base of the wall, around eight inches from the floor, they could see four small, dark flecks.
“What do you think that is?” asked Jan.
“Dirt? Blood? Food?”
Jan asked Emelie to hold the flashlight as he took out a cotton swab and poked at one of the spots. Then he got up and fetched something that looked like a vial. He dropped liquid onto the cotton swab.
“I just added something called leucomalachite green—watch this.”
The soft tip of the cotton swab looked brown.
“Then I add a little hydrogen peroxide.” Jan dropped a different liquid onto the cotton swab using a
pipette.
“Et voilà.”
Suddenly the cotton swab was blue.
“Those flecks on the wall are blood. And this chemical reaction only occurs with human blood.”
Emelie bent down and studied the four small flecks again.
Jan pointed. “And they’re not just any old shape, either. See that? They’re smaller at the top, bigger and rounder toward the bottom.”
He got up.
“Conclusions, anyone?”
Teddy cleared his throat. “The shape means they hit the wall from above. Meaning something violent happened in the hallway, too—not just in the living room. Someone injured a person who wasn’t lying down or sitting. In other words: someone got injured here, while they were on their feet. But there’s not a lot of blood, so it probably wasn’t fatal.”
Stockholm County Police Authority
Interview with informant “Marina,” 15 December 2010
Joakim Sundén
Location: Haninge Centrum
MEMORANDUM 3 (PART 1)
Transcript of dialogue
JS: How are you today?
M: Still not great, actually. You know, if you go through what I went through, the old memories can come flooding back sometimes. Those days…I’m still not sleeping well…
JS: I know, but it’s good you came today anyway. No one knows you’re here, do they?
M: God no, definitely not.
JS: Good. Let’s continue from where we left off?
M: Sure, fine, I was telling you about how I met Michaela for the first time in Clara’s office, right?
JS: Right.
M: Okay, well, I started helping them toward the end of summer, 2005. Mostly in the evenings. Cecilia and the kids were going to be out in the country for a few more weeks before school started.
Michaela did her best to teach me, though I already knew most of it from my regular job. We started and registered businesses, came up with company descriptions and HQs. I sorted out addresses, churned out those OTPs people used back then, fobs and authorizations, did the accounting and looked after the formalities. It didn’t take long to work out that Sebbe wasn’t the end man, we were doing it for someone else.