by Jens Lapidus
“How are you meant to defend yourself against a murder charge when you don’t even know who the dead person is?” Teddy asked.
Jan grinned. “Which of you is the lawyer, exactly? That’s a very good question, though. I’ll test the blood. See if I get any matches.”
“Is there anything else we can do?” Emelie asked.
Teddy thought: She knows so little. He said: “We’ll just have to wait and see. The preliminary report’ll turn up sooner or later. But there’s still plenty we can do now.”
—
Teddy got in touch with Dejan and asked if he had time to meet. Dejan’s voice practically reached falsetto. It always did when he was happy about something. He immediately suggested a dive bar in Flemingsberg.
They met there a few hours later. Greeted one another: arm swing, hand slap—firm grip. Not like the Swedes: a limp handshake and a shy look in the eye. Teddy got straight down to business: “Look, Dejan, I know you don’t like going on about the old days, but you know what I got sent down for.”
“Sure, man.”
“I’ve never asked before, but what did you know about that guy we grabbed?”
“Nothing. Honest. No more than you.”
“They told us he was flush, that we’d get a share of the three mil. They said that was why he was living in a hotel, d’you remember, when we were watching him, he was living in a hotel?”
“Shit, Teddy, ’course I remember. I thought about it the whole time you were inside. And I get it if you’re bitter, but you should forget it now, man. What’s done’s done.”
“But what did you know about him, can you just tell me that?”
“I told you, not much.”
“Did you know he was a gambler?”
“Ivan mighta mentioned it. Probably why he had loads of cash. But y’know, it all went to shit. Shame you can’t ask Ivan, if you really want to know.”
Teddy took a swig of his beer. Ivan was the one who’d told them what to do. He was the one who’d told them to grab Mats. But he’d died six years ago. Lung cancer, apparently.
“Was it just the ransom Ivan wanted?”
Dejan hooked the lump of snus tobacco from his mouth and stuck it under the bar.
“Yeah, Jesus, you hear something else? I mean, me and you, we never did stuff for anything but the dough.”
After he left, Teddy called Loke.
Loke: first-rate hacker, but they’d gotten to know each other in Hall Prison. Loke was doing two years for file sharing—information wants to be free, and all that crap. The strange thing was that they’d locked up a twenty-seven-year-old nerd with pale, skinny arms and a slight lisp with drug dealers, gang members, and all-around criminals, but that was just how things were.
Anyway: Teddy liked the guy. Loke’d called a new inmate—Ibbe Salah—a “gassy nobody.” The problem was that Salah—other than being inside for GBH and serious weapons offenses—was sergeant at arms in Scorpions Sweden.
They’d forced their way into Loke’s room and said it like it was: “You hand over a hundred big, we forget about it.” But Loke had refused, thought he could talk his way out of it the same way he’d almost managed to turn Swedish public opinion on its head during his trial.
The next day, someone had shat in his food.
A day later: someone had stamped on his foot so hard, they crushed his toes.
By day three, he’d started to get it: someone sneaked into his room and put a nail, on end, in his mattress.
Eventually they’d all gotten together in Teddy’s room. Salah, Loke, Teddy, and two of Salah’s guys. Teddy was a veteran on his wing. Everyone knew he was a man of honor. In the end, he fixed it so Loke paid five thousand to the Scorpion members’ account, and like that, the problem was gone.
Teddy had thought that Loke would be bitter and angry—but the opposite was true. Since that day, Loke Odensson had been unerringly loyal to him.
“All right, darling,” Loke shouted down the line when he realized it was Teddy.
“Hey, man,” said Teddy. “I need to ask you something. You remember when you checked out Mats Emanuelsson for me?”
“Yep.”
“I’ve been thinking about it. Can you check again? Was he really part of some sick network, all that stuff?”
Loke sounded happy, like always. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
Teddy went back to Cecilia’s apartment. Asked if he could take a look in Benjamin’s room. Asked if she knew anything about Topstar.
“I wish I could help you, but I have no idea. Mats had a separate life as a gambler, and I didn’t know anything about it.”
He asked anyway. Names of Mats’s friends, bosses, colleagues. Cecilia answered as best she could. Teddy asked her to go back over everything she knew about the kidnapping.
She stood by the sink and started pouring coffee, just like last time he’d been there. Turned her back to him. Demonstratively.
“I don’t want to talk about what happened to Mats anymore.”
Before Teddy left, he asked to take a look in their basement.
“Why?”
“I’m just trying to help, you know that. We found some interesting things in that bag of Benjamin’s. So I just thought that maybe in the basement…”
“Okay, fine. We’ve got the biggest basement space in the building, and my kids refuse to let me clear it out, so you’ve only got yourself to blame. They’re nostalgic.”
She was right. Their space was unexpectedly large for an apartment. And it was one big mess, all kinds of things filling the space right up to the mesh walls. Teddy riffled through old winter clothes, karate outfits, skis, sacks of earth, and lampshades. It was insane, the amount of stuff these ordinary Swedes kept in their storage spaces—they were like squirrels: they hoarded stuff for no real reason. He found an old helmet that looked like it was from World War II, a wet suit, and a collection of bowie knives. He opened football kit bags, baskets of swimming things, and old toy boxes. In one of them, he found an air gun.
He asked Cecilia about the knives, the gun, the helmet.
“That’s Benjamin’s stuff,” she quickly said. “He collected things like that when he was about fourteen.”
Teddy tried to see the pattern. The kidnapping—the predator who’d wanted the computer—the gambling—the suicide—the suspicions against Benjamin today. But his mind was still as blank as a cloudless sky.
He thanked Cecilia and headed home.
Loke called back that evening.
“Sweetie, it’s me.”
“Have you found anything?”
“Not exactly, but I’m not as certain as I was before.”
“Why?”
“I mean, I’m not a hundred percent sure Mats himself was part of the network. But there were files linked to disgusting kiddie fuckers on his computer, that’s one hundred percent. So honestly, I should probably take back some of what I told you before. I can’t be sure some network was behind you kidnapping him.”
“Okay, thanks. Is there some way you can find out more about them?”
“I’d need access to the computer or a copy of the hard drive.”
“Right, okay. I’ve had confirmation from others that it was a computer that we, if you know what I mean, seemed to want.”
“Maybe, but still, I probably went a bit far before.”
“Okay. One more thing. Topstar: can you check if there’s any club with that name in Stockholm? Or that used to have it?”
Loke smacked his lips. “Cutie pie, this is right up my street, and sounds much less grim than that computer. I’ll trawl the net for the club. See what I can find.”
16
Riche: classy, stylish, great people watching. The place for lunch in Stockholm for generations, and at night: timeless bar numero uno.
“You look like a fucking Moomin,” Jossan said as she hugged Emelie when they met there for lunch.
“What d’you mean?”
“White as a sheet, white as
milk, whatever you want. Is everything okay? Doesn’t look that way.”
She hadn’t seen Josephine for a few days. Emelie: drowning in work at the office again. A new case had started. She had to set up a number of SLAs for a telecoms operator.
Jossan: busy in the marathon negotiations between Cross Port Dynamics Ltd. and the serious venture capitalists who wanted to buy their way in. She’d been in Luxembourg since a week back, battling eighteen hours a day for a bad-tempered client younger than she was.
Emelie never really felt all that comfortable at Riche, but Jossan kissed the head waiter on the cheek, adjusted her Chloé bag on her shoulder, and swept in like she owned the place.
The glasses were hanging in a circle above the bar—promising success in the so-called divorce bar. Anders Timell, the restaurateur, was running about with his hair a mess, kissing people on the cheek like a madman. It was pretty bright inside, but the noise and the buzz were already at midnight levels.
Riche: Emelie only recognized the most well-known faces from the financial elite, but there were sure to be many more there. Hedge fund managers, analysts, venture capitalists. And then the usual celebrities: Viggo Cavling, Sven Hagströmer, Tintin von Thulin, Jonny Johansson, and Magnus Uggle, of course. Plus Douglas Kreuger. The latter was one of the youngest partners Leijon had ever had.
Emelie put down her menu. “How are you? How was Luxembourg?”
“I mean, it’s impossible to find quark there.”
“Right, because you need your quark and sugar-free juice for breakfast every day?”
“Every day. I’m not a woman who likes to compromise. Avoid all kinds of calories, that’s the trick. Plus, the hotel gym was really depressing, so I came up with my own Tabata workout. Burpees first, then push-ups, then sit ups, then squats, then—”
“The plank, then the side plank—on both sides—then knee raises with rotation, and last of all, back lifts.”
Josephine put down her menu, too. “You know me, girl.” She smiled. “But I feel like I don’t know you anymore. You never tell me when something’s wrong. Because I can tell, you know, something’s not right.”
There were plenty of things you could say Jossan wasn’t. Intellectual, environmentally aware, interested in gender power structures—just a few examples. But there were three things she knew more about than anyone Emelie had ever met: asset-transfer agreements, Hermès bags, and people.
Just to be on the safe side, Emelie had disconnected her cell from the office telephone system. It was a pure precaution: if she got a call about Benjamin from prison or the courtroom, she didn’t want it going through to the main switchboard. Someone from Kronoberg Remand Prison looking for Emelie Jansson. That kind of call would definitely raise eyebrows. She’d given her home address to the court, too, and given them her own email address—one she’d created for free on Gmail.
The only thing she couldn’t shield herself from was the press. After the custody hearing, there’d been a few articles about the murder in both Expressen and Aftonbladet.
Unconscious man held on suspicion of murder.
Unidentified victim brutally murdered.
They’d even interviewed her old professor in penal law, asked him why someone unconscious was being kept in custody. As luck would have it, her name hadn’t been mentioned anywhere.
She couldn’t bring herself to think about what the hell she was really doing.
“Hello, ground control to Major Tom. Anyone home?” Jossan set the cutlery down on her plate. She’d barely touched her food.
“Other than having loads of work and something being wrong, not that you want to talk about it, how’s life?”
Emelie had no answers to Jossan’s questions. Her head was spinning.
No, it wasn’t spinning. It was burning.
They got up from the table. She hadn’t even noticed that Jossan had paid the bill.
Outside, in the fresh air.
“Let’s do something another time, since you couldn’t be here today,” Jossan said.
It was only once Emelie walked away that she realized what she’d said. She really hadn’t been a good friend. Completely absent. The one small consolation was that Jossan could clearly joke about it.
—
“Welcome to passengers traveling with us on this service to Copenhagen today. My name is Marcus, and I’m your conductor for this part of the train. Smoking is not permitted anywhere on this train, and I would like to remind you that nor is the consumption of alcohol not bought on board. I hope you enjoy your journey with SJ today.”
No cigarettes, Emelie thought. Not even in the bathroom. Even though I’m traveling first-class.
She really just wanted to sleep. Use the gentle rocking of the train to relax. She would be meeting her mother in a few hours. Maybe her father, too.
He worked as an official with the Swedish Board of Agriculture, though Emelie had never quite understood exactly what he did there. All she knew was that they were much too forgiving when it came to signing him off in his bad periods. Still, he’d mostly been fine during her childhood, when he hadn’t been going through a rough patch. Always encouraged her to do well in school without putting pressure on her, supported her in the choices she made. Both he and her mom had been active in the Isolate South Africa movement and other idealistic groups, but their political engagement had long since dropped off, and these days, they seemed to be most interested in different types of self-realization. Big ideas about the world around her had, for her mother, been reduced to thoughts of healthy food, mindfulness, and home interiors. For her dad, there seemed to be nothing left, other than the odd bit of woodwork and his bad red wine habits.
Emelie wondered what the next few days would be like.
Norrköping. Linköping. Mjölby.
She would be arriving soon.
—
The prosecutor, Annika Rölén, had requested an extension. In other words, she wanted to keep Benjamin in custody for a few more weeks while the police continued their investigation. They would analyze DNA, continue the search for footprints, check fingerprints, look for traces of gunpowder and fibers from clothing. They would probably be performing an autopsy on the body, getting Forensics to analyze the results, and looking into Benjamin’s activities in the days leading up to the murder. They would empty his phone, check which cell towers it had pinged from, look into his bank cards.
The most important point was who the clothing in the woods belonged to, and whose blood it was covered in.
Detective Inspector Kullman had tried to conduct another interview with Benjamin—the only words they’d managed to get out of him were: “I don’t understand.” For the rest of the interview, he’d just lain there like he was dead.
But Emelie had continued with her own parallel investigation.
The Land Registry records showed that the house in Värmdö had been sold to the illusive Spaniard by Dag and Linnea Rosling about five years earlier. Emelie had contacted them and spoke to Linnea first. She was elderly, that was clear from her voice, and she’d handed the phone over to her husband.
Dag Rosling knew little more.
“We sold the old summer place through an agent. It’d been in the family since 1894. Can you believe that? But our kids weren’t interested, even though it’s a lakeside plot. They just want to go to Gümüslük every summer.”
“Did you meet the buyer?”
“No, never. You’ll have to talk to the agent.”
The agency that took care of the sale was called Fastighetspartner. She’d tried to get in touch with the agent, but apparently he’d left the company. They passed her on, and she got hold of his telephone number, but not him. She left a message, told him what was what. “My name is Emelie Jansson, I’m a lawyer, and I’m calling you in regard to a very sensitive issue linked to a house you sold near Ängsvik, on Värmdö, around five years ago. I need to know who bought the house.”
She hoped he would get back to her ASAP.
&nb
sp; She’d checked elsewhere, too. She’d gone out to Ängsvik and knocked on the door of the closest house. A yellow-painted villa about a quarter of a mile away, at the turnoff from the main road. A woman with a slightly off posture and a pair of toddlers who seemed to be doing Brazilian jujitsu in the hallway behind her had opened the door.
Emelie introduced herself. The neighbor’s name was Helena.
“I was just wondering if you knew who lived in the house back there?”
The woman shouted at the wild animals in the background: “If you don’t calm down, there’ll be no bedtime story.” The two small boys didn’t seem to hear her.
She turned to Emelie. “I don’t, actually. We hardly ever see anyone there. We used to see the Roslings a lot. They were so nice.”
“So is anyone even living there, since the Roslings left?”
“We think so. But it’s pretty well shielded by the woods, you know, so even when you walk along the road, you can’t really see in. The lilacs and privet hedges are pretty thick.”
“But you’re saying you think there’s usually someone there, that someone lives there?”
The kids in the hallway seemed to be committing serious violence against one another. Emelie didn’t know how anyone could think with all the noise, but it was probably normal for this house.
“Probably not,” Helena had said after a moment. “But we’ve seen cars driving that way. And I saw some people on the jetty below the house when we were out on the boat last autumn. My guess is it’s just someone’s under-loved summer place.”
“How often have you seen cars there?”
“Honestly, not that often. I can’t remember seeing anyone drive by more than three or four times since the Roslings sold it.”
“And only during summer?”
“Actually, no, now that I think about it. I know it was definitely winter once.”
“Do you know what kind of cars you saw there, the model, that kind of thing?”
“No idea, but I can ask my husband when he gets home. He’s better at that stuff.”
“And the people on the jetty, what did they look like?”
Helena turned to her children. “Please could you just be fucking quiet!” They looked at her like she was mad, then got up and loped off. It worked, though: they stopped screeching.