He set the alarm for seven o’clock and crawled under the covers. Every part of him was in desperate need of a few hours’ rest. Their crime scene investigator, Hillevi Stubbs, was combing the nap room in the parliament building and the condemned apartment for clues, while the forensic team was examining Grimås’ body. Malin had got a second wind and returned to the parliament building. She had wanted to study the surveillance videos in more detail so that she could try and identify the mystery guard.
She’d wanted him to come along, but he declined, well aware that this was the calm before the storm and likely his last chance to get some sleep. Within the next thirty minutes, the news of the minister’s death would be public and, even if Edelman withheld the worst details, the media would inevitably find out, nosing their way from headline to headline, each worse than the last.
But right now none of that mattered. He couldn’t stop thinking about Sonja’s letter and the possibility that she had thrown in the towel. They had spent so many amazing years together, he couldn’t accept that their relationship was about to expire silently, like sand in an hourglass.
The least they could do was talk to each other. Sonja had proposed more than once that they go into therapy and explored options about where they could go. But he’d opposed every suggestion and thought she was exaggerating the problems. He thought they should be able to sit down and talk about their issues alone, without some money-hungry stranger watching them. But the truth was, he didn’t dare.
He rolled over on to Sonja’s side and burrowed himself under her blanket. She was warm and her hair smelled faintly of oil paint, even though she’d just showered. She was sleeping too deeply to notice his presence and didn’t even react when he said her name. Perhaps she was listening subconsciously, he thought, leaning down towards her ear. ‘Sonja, I love you. Just so you know, I love you more than anything,’ he whispered. ‘And I promise you that I haven’t given up, not by a long shot. Do you hear me? If you want us to go into therapy, then let’s do it. Okay?’
‘Mmm.’
Whether that was an answer or only a sound was impossible to say.
‘Sonja, I love you,’ he whispered one more time. ‘Fabian loves you.’
‘Love you too,’ she said in an exhalation so low that it was almost inaudible. But for Fabian it was more than enough.
29
IT WAS ONLY ELEVEN minutes to six in the morning when Fabian and Malin stepped into the faintly illuminated stairwell at Hornsgatan 107. In several respects it was a perfect location on Södermalm, a stone’s throw from the Årstaviken green space, but judging by how it looked up close it might as well have been any run-down suburb, thought Fabian.
Malin had called twenty minutes earlier to report how she had managed to decipher the guard’s nametag on one of the surveillance videos from the parliament buildings. The guard who went off with the minister was named Joakim Holmberg. He was thirty-seven years old, lived alone and had worked as a guard for the past five years.
‘Sixth floor,’ Malin said, pulling open the elevator door.
‘Let’s take the stairs,’ said Fabian, making to leave.
‘Easy for you to say. You don’t have a whole family to drag along,’ said Malin, hurrying behind him. ‘I asked Wojtan to look him up. Do you want to hear what he found?’
Wojtek Novak had replaced Niva Ekenhielm when she quit two years ago. He refused to be called ‘sci-fi cop’, and insisted on being addressed as an ‘information technology criminal investigator’. Most people called him ‘Wojtan’ or ‘Cyber-Wojtan’. After spending a year getting up to speed, there was no longer any doubt that he was an asset, even if he would never be anywhere close to Niva’s level.
‘Absolutely. Let’s hear it,’ said Fabian, losing the struggle against a yawn.
‘As I said, he’s thirty-seven years old and lived with his mother until she died of breast cancer two-and-a-half years ago. Cosy, right? And I don’t mean the breast cancer. Now he’s taken over the lease.’
A loner who had never moved away from home. It couldn’t get much worse, thought Fabian, and waited for Malin, whose face was starting to get red from the exertion of walking up the stairs. ‘Anything else?’
‘Oh, yes. I’m just getting started. On Facebook he likes both Swedish Democrats and the blog Politically Incorrect. And every week on Flashback, he contributes to various different gun threads.’
‘No other types of threads?’ Fabian continued up the last staircase.
‘Such as?’
‘Hunting, dismemberment, human anatomy and so on.’
‘No idea. If he did, he wrote it using a pseudonym. But listen to this: from 1997 to 2000 he applied to the Police Academy every year without being accepted. The explanation…’ She climbed up on to the last step, took out her phone and read out loud: ‘“The applicant suffers from such powerful social phobias that we consider the police profession to be completely unsuitable.”’
‘But working as a security guard at the parliament buildings was evidently not a problem.’
‘Or maybe that’s how he got scared of the dark. Hold on, this is where it starts to get really interesting. Do you know who was rector at the Police Academy during that period?’
Fabian thought, but finally shook his head.
‘Carl-Eric Grimås.’
‘Really?’
Malin nodded.
‘You think that could be a motive,’ said Fabian, holding out the door to the access balcony.
‘Why not? In 1995 he quit as head of the National Bureau and became rector at the Police Academy for a few years before going into politics.’
‘But that was almost ten years ago,’ said Fabian. ‘Seems like a very long time to hold a grudge.’
‘Maybe he couldn’t execute his plan until his mother died.’
They continued along the access balcony from which they could see right into the residents’ kitchens. The first two apartments were vacant; five people were playing cards in the third; and the fourth belonged to Joakim Holmberg. His lights were off.
Fabian curved his hands around his face and looked into the kitchen, which did not appear to have been cleaned since Mum had died. The counter was full of crusty dishes and the floor was covered with old pizza boxes and McDonald’s bags. But the Coca-Cola cans were most striking of all. They were stacked by the hundreds and formed various high towers.
‘Shit, it’s open,’ said Malin, while Fabian turned around. ‘What do you say? Should we go in or wait for the response team?’
Fabian nodded and stepped carefully into the hall. Behind him, Malin took out her pistol, chambered a round, then followed him in and closed the door. The air was thick and stuffy and the only sound was from the traffic on Hornsgatan.
‘Isn’t it a little strange to leave your door unlocked?’ Malin whispered. ‘Even if you’re at home you lock the door, especially when you have an access balcony.’
Fabian signalled for to her to be quiet and opened one of the doors in the hall with his foot.
‘You don’t think he’s home, do you?’
Fabian shrugged and looked into the bedroom, which appeared to be in the same need of sanitization as the kitchen. There was an unmade bed and dirty clothes tossed in piles on the floor. More stacks of Coca-Cola cans covered large parts of one wall.
‘Talk about dependency,’ said Malin, entering the room.
Fabian continued through the hall, which opened up into a larger room. In contrast to the kitchen and bedroom, it was pitch dark. Once he finally managed to find the light switch, he realized that in this room was the key to Joakim Holmberg. He had put his soul in here and had built up a world in which he avoided confronting other people, a world where he alone was in the centre.
Just like in the condemned apartment on Östgötagatan, the windows were covered and couldn’t let more light in even if it was a sunny summer day. All light came from the spotlights in the ceiling, which were aimed at a dozen mannequins, each dressed in a diff
erent costume, including a monk’s cowl, a bikini, a nurse’s uniform and bondage gear.
Some of them sat on the leather couch, as if they were talking to each other, and had wine glasses set out on the smoke-coloured glass coffee table in front of them. Others stood or were lying on the floor in various obscene positions.
There was a swivel armchair with cup holders raised up on a small podium in the middle of the room that faced a shelf containing a big-screen TV, PlayStation, Xbox, desktop computer and a surround-sound system. A box of Kleenex and a tube of softening cream sat atop a small round table beside the armchair.
Fabian approached the armchair, climbed up and sat down, discovering immediately that all the mannequins were turned towards him in one way or another, as if he was the centre of the party and the natural focus of everyone’s attention.
Joakim Holmberg clearly liked to be alone so he could pretend he was the centre of attention. He was an expert on weapons, sympathized with the far right, and, unsurprisingly, had not been accepted to the Police Academy. Fabian went over everything in his head. He sensed they were still missing the key piece that would make everything fit together.
He got out of the chair, walked around one of the mannequins that was spread out on the floor and went into the bathroom, where he turned on the light.
The tile and the porcelain in the sink and toilet, which had obviously once been white, now leaned more towards yellow. There was a can of baby powder on a shelf alongside a neat pile of adult nappies. A distant flushing interrupted his thoughts about an article he’d read on an adult daycare in England where elderly men used nappies and baby bottles. The next moment he could hear the water running through the drainpipes.
He was about to open the mirror-covered door to the medicine cabinet to see whether there were any medications, when he noticed, reflected in the mirror, a knee hanging out over the edge of the bath beneath a drawn shower curtain. Why did he have a mannequin in the bathtub? Or did he…
Fabian turned around and pulled back the curtain.
The man was dressed only in underwear and undershirt. His hands were joined with heavy tape. His eyes were shut and his mouth wide open. A dog collar was clasped around his throat with rivets that disappeared down behind his back. Fabian had only seen him on a grainy surveillance video, but the short, corpulent body, and the moustached face could only belong to Joakim Holmberg.
Had he committed suicide? Fabian carefully pressed his fingers under his ear against the carotid artery. Joakim had a pulse and suddenly lurched forward in shock in an attempt to sit up, only to be pulled back down by the collar.
30
‘I DON’T KNOW,’ SAID Joakim Holmberg, scratching the raw skin around his throat from where the dog collar had been.
‘Don’t know, as in you don’t remember, or do you actually not know? Or do you not feel like answering?’ said Fabian, who was sitting across from him with Malin, his skin crawling with irritation.
‘I don’t know.’ Holmberg finished a can of Coke and set it on the table alongside the other empty cans.
They’d been sitting closed up in the interview room for over two hours struggling with Holmberg, whose answer to almost every question was ‘I don’t know’. The room was stuffy, and the air they were breathing had been recycled so many times that Fabian didn’t even want to think about it.
It didn’t help that he’d had no more than three hours’ sleep and was still waiting for Sonja to call. She would probably be in a terrible mood as soon as she realized he’d already left and would probably be gone all weekend. He didn’t count on her understanding the explanation he’d left on his nightstand.
‘You don’t seem to know much,’ said Fabian, trying to ignore the fact that Holmberg quite unselfconsciously had an index finger stuck far up one nostril. ‘What do you know? Can you tell me your name? Do you know that?’
Joakim Holmberg kept his eyes on the table as he pulled out a booger and held it up in the air between his thumb and index finger. ‘Where can I get rid of this?’
Fabian exchanged a look with Malin, who was as visibly disgusted by the man on the other side of the table as him. ‘I don’t know. Does that sound familiar?’ He got up and started walking around the increasingly claustrophobic room. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. But the difference between you and me, or to be more exact, one of the millions of differences, is that I’m telling the truth. Because I have no fucking idea what people like you do with your disgusting slimy piles of snot, and I’m not sure I want to know either.’ He stood behind Holmberg and leaned on the back of his chair. ‘Malin, what do you say? Do you have any idea?’
Malin shrugged and shook her head without changing her expression.
Fabian could see that she was not following at all. He was surely about to cross a line, but he couldn’t resist any longer.
‘We had this one in class, a real creep,’ he continued. ‘You’d probably like him. He used to eat them. And not just his own, but others’ too. He said he thought they tasted good. So maybe there’s something to that? What do you say?’
Holmberg ignored Fabian and wiped the snot on one of the empty Coke cans. Then he reached for another one.
‘No, you can forget about that. There’ll be no more Coke going forward.’ Fabian grabbed the can. ‘Not until you’ve told us what the hell happened.’
‘I have. I was sitting on my throne—’
‘You mean armchair.’
‘Yes, and then—’
‘Stroking yourself. We’ve understood that much.’
‘No, I was going to do that, but I never got that far.’
‘Fabian, can I have a word with you?’ Malin motioned for him to follow her out and closed the door behind him. ‘What the hell’s going on with you? What are you doing?’
Fabian looked towards the TV hanging from the ceiling, which was showing the live police press conference. Herman Edelman was sitting to the left of Police Commissioner Bertil Crimson behind a cluster of microphones. Anders Furhage from SePo sat to his right explaining that the minister’s death couldn’t be ruled out as a terrorist act. Personal security had been increased for the majority of politicians, and the country’s threat level had been raised from two to three on the five-point scale.
‘Fabian? Has something happened?’ Malin tried to make eye contact with him.
His initial impulse was to play dumb, but he could tell from both the tone of her voice and the look she gave him that she wouldn’t give up until he gave in and confessed. ‘I don’t know. Sorry. I’m…’ He closed his eyes and started massaging his temples. ‘Sonja and I are going through a bit of a rough patch right now and, to be honest, I don’t know how things will end up. And last night I didn’t get a wink of sleep.’
‘You think I did?’
Fabian felt as if someone had just emptied a bucket of cold water over him.
‘Besides the fact that I stayed up all night working to identify that creep in there, these two pests have made sure that the only sleep I’ve had the past few weeks is when I blink a little slower. But that doesn’t give me the right to stomp in there and behave like shit.’
‘No, you’re completely right.’ Fabian could only agree. ‘But I just can’t take him. There’s something, I don’t know, about his whole—’
‘Yes, he’s a slimy creep who does strange things you’d rather not hear about. But he’s no murderer. He’s not the one who carved up the minister. That’s not even him on the surveillance video.’
‘I know. But why is he withholding information and refusing to talk?’
‘He’s not. You’re the one who’s not listening.’
‘Listening to what? The only thing he’s saying is that he doesn’t know anything, over and over again.’
‘You’re asking the wrong questions. I’m taking over as of now.’
They went back into the interview room, where Holmberg was once again sitting with one index finger up his nose.
‘
Okay, Joakim, let’s take this from the beginning,’ said Malin, closing the door behind Fabian. ‘You had just sat down on your throne and were going to have a little fun with yourself.’ She opened a can of Coke and handed it over to him. ‘But then something happened.’
Holmberg chugged a little more than half the can, let out a loud belch and nodded. ‘But I don’t know what,’ he said, going quiet. Malin did nothing to break the silence in the room. ‘I thought I heard something from the hall, but I wasn’t quite sure,’ he continued. ‘I’d just connected the surround sound and put on a movie.’
‘So you turned off the movie?’
‘Yes, and I went out to see what it was.’
‘And what did you find?’
‘I don’t know.’ Holmberg finished the can and started squeezing it.
Stillness filled the room again, while Fabian exchanged a look with Malin. She could always read him like an open book and signalled to him to stay calm and wait, but a few minutes later he could tell that the silence was also starting to get on her nerves.
‘It was, like, just white.’
The sentence came out of nowhere, and both Fabian and Malin looked as if they were unsure they’d heard right.
‘What do you mean, “white”?’ Malin moved her chair closer to him.
‘I don’t know. White.’
‘And then?’
‘I woke up tied up in the bathtub wearing a dog collar.’
‘So you have no memory at all of how you ended up there?’
Holmberg shook his head.
‘But everything was white. Did you hear anything?’
‘I don’t know. Well, yes, actually. It sounded like Darth Vader.’ Holmberg laughed and reached for another Coke.
‘Darth Vader from Star Wars? He came in and stole your clothes and passcode?’
Holmberg nodded, opened the can and drank. ‘It was kinda like this.’ He demonstrated by putting one hand in front of his mouth and nose and started to breathe exaggeratedly, like he was wearing a gas mask.
The Ninth Grave Page 13