by Jens Lapidus
“I don’t get it.”
“Amphetamine, Emelie. It got rid of the panic, gave me a boost. But after four days, I was using it morning, afternoon, and night, and the thought of going without it made me break out into a sweat. It was crazy.”
Emelie didn’t know what to say. Amphetamine. This job was a bigger health risk than her mother could ever imagine. But things were different with her, right? She was in control. She wasn’t planning on losing it.
Everything looked so nice in Jossan’s kitchen. Maybe it was the lighting. The lamp shade was incredibly low, two feet or so above the table, and the spotlights under the cupboards were dimmed. The brass blender was gleaming. The rug on the floor looked soft. Jossan herself looked beautiful in a way Emelie had never really thought about before. Maybe it was just the wine and their conversation. The fact they were really talking.
Still, she needed to change the topic. “I’ve got a few things I’d really like to go over with you. Work stuff, kind of, but not really. Is that okay?”
“Sure.”
Emelie grabbed her bag from the hallway. Tipped Mats Emanuelsson’s documents and the other objects she and Teddy had found in Benjamin’s bag onto Jossan’s kitchen table.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “I’m doing a DD on someone’s private finances, and can’t get it to hang together.”
An hour later, they’d gone through it all. Old pay stubs, bank statements, and card specifications.
Jossan said: “There’s one thing you can be sure of, this Mats Emanuelsson can’t have supported an entire family on his income, not from his job or his capital. At least not if his wife was working as an administrator for the county council. It’s impossible.”
She was right—once they’d gone through Mats’s finances together, it was clear, just as Emelie had suspected.
“And that key,” said Jossan, “I’m pretty sure it’s for a safe-deposit box. Must be a pretty old-school one, if it has one of those, but you see them sometimes. Have you handled anything like that in a case before?”
She pointed at the key from the bag.
25
The woods outside Bårsta. Dense spruce and pines. The ground: constant shadow. Life in the darkness.
In front of Teddy: a hole.
His hole.
He’d been here plenty of times before in the past. He’d borrowed the spade and the iron bar from Tagg.
His old hideaway: he’d never thought he would be back here. Had promised himself to leave the things stashed away there behind him, rusty memories of a past life.
Bar and spade. Sweat on his forehead. Workman’s gloves and mud on his boots. His back was damp. Roots, rocks, earth. He’d be deep enough soon. Down in the hole with his weapons.
He was fucked-up with rage.
They had tricked him into kidnapping Mats Emanuelsson nine years ago, probably made Ivan think it was all about money, too. He was the only one who’d served a single minute for it. Then Mats had gone and killed himself four years ago. They’d made it happen somehow. And now Benjamin was being held on suspicion of murder—somehow, that was connected to all this, too. Teddy was sure of it. They were shadowing and following him. They’d tried to clip him, but almost killed Sara instead.
The line had been crossed way, way back. Above all: he’d helped the predator without even realizing it. He had a debt to repay. He’d already waited too long.
His thoughts turned to Sara. The first time she came to the prison with that other warden, Emma. When she told him to stop asking Emma to do things she wasn’t allowed, he’d listened. And right then, at that moment when he listened to Sara. That was when something had started to change in him. Their moments in the common room, their time in the hallways when no one else was around, the hours in the visiting room. The letters, the phone calls. All with her.
He thought he’d let go of her as a woman, just like she’d let go of him. But he knew he hadn’t let go of her as a person.
A journey from the bottom up. With Sara, everything had changed.
And now: Teddy was back to square one again. He knew himself, could feel it. He was his old self, and there was nothing he could do about it.
The digging gave him blisters, even though he was wearing gloves. The metal wire he’d wound around one of the trees years ago was still there. The carving he’d made on the bark, too, though it wasn’t very clear. He drove the spade as deep as he could into the ground.
There: something hard—the Samsonite suitcase he’d stashed everything in. His very own treasure chest.
—
Only a couple of swigs left in the bottle of whiskey.
Two pieces of snus under his lip. No more gum. He didn’t give a shit: he just wanted to taste the tobacco today.
He was at home. His apartment stank. Half-eaten kebabs. Pizza boxes and Coke cans. He’d shoved the pistol and the sawn-off Remington shotgun into the wardrobe: being buried for the best part of a decade didn’t seem to have affected them.
Five days had passed. He hadn’t dared get in touch with Sara—for her sake, more than anything. She’d survived the drive-by shooting, but it was his fault it had even happened. It was him they’d been after. He hoped she’d told the police what had happened. He’d done it, if nothing else, during the short interview they’d had with him in the hospital.
Teddy’s place was so small, he could see every wall and every corner from his seat at the dining table. He could see the little pantry area, sadly lacking a dishwasher, the door and the safety chain he carefully put on every time he came home.
In some ways, the apartment reminded him of his cell in Österåker. The plastic floor was the same shade of beige. The walls were covered with a similar dirty-white textured wallpaper. The mattress on his bed felt just as spongy. The view from the kitchen just as depressing: another building ten feet away. He didn’t want to admit it, but he’d found it comforting. Though now he wasn’t so sure anymore.
Anyway, of course he drank sometimes, but with one of the golden rules from before—control. Situations could get quickly out of hand, someone might need a talking-to. When Ivan or one of the others called, you had to be ready. Lying around or sleeping at three in the afternoon was never the problem. But you had to be able to get up, and fast. His trademark had always been F-E-A-R. And control was the key to that.
But today, he didn’t give a damn. He didn’t give a shit about his name. Teddy: didn’t have a trademark.
Teddy: with the growing feeling he wanted to kill someone.
He had an idea. Step one of it was Swedish Premium Security. Time for full contact now. He didn’t know if they were behind the attack at Sara’s house—it didn’t matter. No more wannabe spy bastards would be following him around from now on.
Loke had helped him get hold of a list of the people who worked for the company. The rest was easy: he’d managed to find pictures of most of its employees online. Teddy recognized the man who’d been following him in town. His name was Anthony Ewing.
He picked up the bottles from the delivery point at the supermarket. Propofol-Lipuro. Loke: impressive knowledge of so-called net pharmacies—no need to waste time at the doctor or picking up prescriptions. They arrived in bubblewrap and cardboard. The postmark showed they’d come from Spain, but the markings on the packaging looked Chinese.
After that, he headed straight out to the suburb of Hässelby.
Out there: so calm. So idyllic. Until today.
He waited in his car outside the entrance to the guy’s place. It looked like it was from the eighties, the same as all the other houses along the street. Flat roof. Big windows. A huge trampoline taking up most of the lawn. Plus: the same cars, the same values, the same middle-class everything.
Teddy had taped over the letters and numbers on his registration plates.
Somewhere around four, two teenage boys rolled up on skateboards and went into the house.
At about six, a woman arrived, shopping bags in her hands.
Teddy had started to sober up. But the fire in him was the same: he was burning up from the fucking inside.
At seven, Anthony pulled up in his Audi A4.
Teddy’s car was parked in front of his garage doors. Anthony came to a halt, waited for Teddy to move.
But he didn’t touch the wheel. Instead, he pulled his balaclava down over his face and stepped out. Tore open the door of the Audi. Pulled out the needle filled with Propofol-Lipuro. Jabbed it into the man’s neck. The bastard was wearing the same Windbreaker as the last time he’d followed him.
Teddy had done this kind of thing before.
Anthony yelled. Tried to climb out of the car. Teddy held him down.
After five seconds, he was sleeping like a baby.
Teddy dragged him to his own car, shoved him into the trunk. Tore off.
Maybe one of the guy’s kids had seen, or his wife. Maybe a neighbor or two. But what could they do? It wasn’t like they had a license plate to go on.
An hour later. Teddy slapped Anthony on the cheek. Pinched his arm.
He’d parked out in the woods, Bårsta again. Put Anthony into the backseat of the car. Arms held behind him with cable ties, feet bound with electrical tape.
“What the fuck…,” he managed to blurt in an English-tinged accent before Teddy jammed his old Zastava in his face.
“Shut up and listen.”
He pressed the gun against the tip of the guy’s nose. It was soft, like it was made of foam.
“I just want to know one thing, then you can go.”
Anthony’s eyelashes trembled; they were long.
“Who are you working for?”
“What d’you mean…?”
“Answer me.” Teddy pressed the gun even harder against his nose.
“Please, don’t do anything…”
“Who are you working for? Who’s paying you to follow me?”
Anthony was cross-eyed, his pupils fixed on the barrel of the gun.
“I don’t know.”
“So what’s your job?”
“Please…”
Teddy pressed harder.
“Fine, we had to carry out personal secret surveillance of you. Information gathering. We had to document your activities, contacts, times, places.” Anthony’s mouth barely opened as he spewed out his words. He probably didn’t want to move his face too much.
“Why? What are you trying to find out?”
“I have no idea. I promise. We just pass the information on to our boss, who gives it to the client.”
Teddy took off the safety catch. “I’m gonna ask you one last time. Who are you working for?”
He sobbed: “I swear, I swear, I’ve got no idea. My boss forwarded me an email with the job details. We never meet the clients physically. Just see emails.”
“What address?”
“Wait. You can look, if I can get my phone.”
Teddy cut the cable ties. On tenterhooks now. His pistol still in the guy’s face as he fumbled for his phone. Scrolled through his inbox. Held it up for Teddy to see. An email. The message said roughly what Anthony had just described. And ended with the initials KS. The email address looked like nonsense: [email protected].
Shit—Ewing wasn’t lying. Teddy would have to get Loke to look into this, too.
It was like being inside a bubble. No matter which way he turned, he came to the same slippery wall. He had to burst it, get out.
He thought: Mats had a backer he did business with. Sebbe Petrovic. Sebbe: part of the same crew Teddy used to be involved with.
That pointed in a clear direction, if nothing else.
One that led him to step two: Kum.
26
Handelsbanken’s office in Kungsholmen. After some back-and-forth with the cashier, she opened the door and showed Emelie downstairs. On the walls, advertisements for the bank. Get more from your money—open a Bonus Account today. What a joke: interest rates in Sweden were in negative figures right now. Maybe it wasn’t so strange that people kept their money under their mattresses.
Bills, coins. Not everyone used credit cards and online banking. And especially not a few years ago, when things had all started for Mats.
The key was slim and rectangular, and on a piece of paper she’d found in Benjamin’s bag, there were two words and some numbers. Kungsholmen, 3234. When they first found it, neither Teddy nor Emelie had understood what it meant, but once Jossan mentioned the key, it all made sense.
“Not many people use safe-deposit boxes anymore,” the cashier said. “We introduced a ban on keeping cash in them in 2012. Plus, almost all bond transactions are registered electronically nowadays. I sometimes wonder what people still want them for.”
Emelie wondered, too.
The cashier showed Emelie how to get back out of the vault, and then closed the wrought iron gate behind her. Emelie was left alone. She went over to box 3234 and put the key into the lock. It fit. She’d never done this before, it felt like she was in some old film from the eighties. She pulled out the box—it was about a foot long, and heavy—took it into the booth and pulled the curtain shut. She put the box on the table.
Other than an envelope with the words “Forum Exchange” printed at the bottom, it was empty. There was something inside the envelope. She opened it.
A piece of paper, also from Forum Exchange. On it, she read: MTCNFE 30230403, and: Ask for everything in a blue plastic bag.
When she came back outside, her phone rang. It was the estate agent who’d worked for Fastighetspartner when the house on Värmdö was sold.
“I got your message. You wanted to know about the house in Ängsvik?”
Emelie explained everything again. Did he remember who’d signed the papers when the Roslings sold the house?
The agent cleared his throat. “I remember some stuff, actually, which I don’t normally do. But this was a bit unusual. The buyer was Spanish, Juan Arravena Huerta, but he spoke perfect Swedish. Didn’t look very Spanish, either.”
“No? What did he look like?”
“He was huge, covered in tattoos. I remember he had a tiger on one arm.”
Stockholm County Police Authority
Interview with informant “Marina,” 17 December 2010
Leader: Joakim Sundén
Location: Farsta Centrum
MEMORANDUM 4 (PART 2)
Transcript of dialogue (continuation)
M: By spring 2006, Maxim and his guys really had to start working. Michaela and I started calling him Smurf Man, it almost made him sound cute.
JS: Smurf Man?
M: Yeah, you know, he was Sebbe’s right-hand man, and he was in charge of finding our smurfs—the guys who made all the individual transactions. He had to make sure they behaved. But I’m guessing he didn’t act too cute as far as they were concerned.
We spent most of our time on work for Peder’s individuals, that’s what he called them, but we were still doing stuff for the old clients. I really didn’t know much about Peder, whenever he called it was always from a hidden number, and when he emailed me—which he hardly ever did—it was always from different, anonymous addresses. I never saw him in that law firm’s offices again, but we met maybe once a week at different places in town, and he’d give me the relevant documents and account numbers, plus contact details for different management companies in the Bahamas and law firms based in Lichtenstein.
One afternoon, I was at work—my normal job—and Niklas came over.
“Mats,” he said, “something’s been bothering me. Could we have a quick chat tomorrow, after lunch?”
“Sure, what is it?”
“A couple of invoices that don’t add up. You need to tell me what you’ve been doing.”
My heart was racing: the money I’d taken from clients to pay Sebbe. I’d been waiting for this, but trying to forget it would come up.
I was flat out with other things right then. And I’d gotten an idea in my head, an idea that might be able to take me and t
he kids away from all that crap for good. It was based on two key things.
The first was so-called options to purchase. It sounds complicated, but it’s actually pretty simple—a financial derivatives instrument. You paid a premium for the right—though there was no obligation—to buy an underlying share at a certain price at some point in the future. The whole thing was based on mathematical models I knew well, Black-Scholes and stuff like that. Bosse had made a load on his SinterCast shares. But with an option to purchase, things would’ve been different. If, instead of just buying the shares himself, he’d paid thirty thousand kronor for the option to buy forty thousand shares at fifty kronor each, and then the price rose to a hundred, just like it had, he would’ve made two million instead of two hundred thousand. And the only risk would’ve been the premium on the thirty thousand. The math was clear: earn an insane amount more with a lower initial stake, and in a shorter time. And the good thing was that the trade in that kind of option had exploded in Sweden over the past few years. It was a perfect fit.
The second thing was information. I needed information. Because I’d realized one thing: the trade in bond papers wasn’t anything like a poker table, where you could bluff and play on a hand that was actually worthless. You couldn’t fool the market like that, or at least not if you couldn’t control the spread of news. But information, that was the equivalent of a great bluff—if you knew things no one else knew, you could act ahead of the rest of the market. Kind of an inverted form of poker psychology. I would know what was missing before I went all in.