‘Tomas, I don’t have time for this.’ Fabian walked into the bathroom and splashed water on his face.
‘You’re boring. Jarmo and I weren’t in the club to see what went down, so we contacted the hospital where Arcas has been admitted.’
‘And? Did you get an answer?’
‘He’s missing an eye.’
‘What do you mean, “missing an eye”?’ Fabian dried himself with a towel.
‘Hell if I know. Someone must have taken it. And my guess is that it was one of—’
‘The girls.’
‘Exactly! Nice to hear that you’re finally awake.’
‘Do you know if everyone was arrested?’
‘No idea. But there are literally broads everywhere here.’
‘At the department?’
‘Yes, they’re being questioned by borrowed uniforms and interpreters. Several of them can’t even speak—’
‘Tomas, listen to me right now. This is important,’ said Fabian, putting on deodorant under his shirt. ‘You and Jarmo have to make sure that every single one of them is handcuffed. No one is allowed to leave. Do you understand? No one.’ He hurried out of the bathroom and saw Sonja walking into the hall.
‘And how the hell would that happen? Höglund is almost boiling over already. He’s never going to—’
‘I’ll take care of him. Tomas, I have to go now.’
‘But—’
‘Just do as I say!’ Fabian hung up, tried to collect himself and went up to Sonja, uncertain whether he should hug her. ‘Hi, darling.’
‘Don’t I get a hug?’
‘Of course. I just didn’t know if…’ He fell silent and embraced her. ‘Listen, I’m in the middle of a case and am actually on my way out.’
‘Sure, no problem,’ she nodded. ‘I’m just going to grab some clothes from home and buy the last outstanding Christmas presents. You’re coming out tonight, right?’
Fabian looked at her without saying anything. He wanted nothing more than to promise that he would come out and celebrate Christmas as planned. Maybe everything would work out for once and Aisha Shahin was already in custody. Then the only thing he’d have left to do would be to confront Edelman with the evidence and get him to realize that he had no choice but to tear up the old investigation. He’d already made far too many promises that went unfulfilled.
‘Okay, I get it.’
‘Sonja—’
‘Fabian, it’s okay. I understand that you’re in the middle of something that you can’t talk about, but it would be really nice if you came out and celebrated Christmas with the family.’
‘All I want is to come, but—’
‘I’ve thought a lot about what I said last Sunday, and…’ She looked away.
Now it’s coming, thought Fabian. She’d gathered up enough energy to be able to say she wanted to break up. And maybe that was exactly what they should do. Maybe his dream last night – or was it a reality? – was proof that the flame really had gone out and that their relationship was dead and should be buried before the decomposition had gone too far.
‘If you want to, I want to.’ She met his gaze again.
Fabian felt his strength returning, and made an effort to say something.
‘Wait, I’m not done here. When this is all over, and when you’re finished with whatever it is you’re doing, I want us to start over – really start over.’
Fabian leaned forward and kissed her. He could feel her response for the first time in a long while and could tell that she was prepared to give them one last chance. But then her lips tensed and her tongue disappeared.
‘A person could almost get a little jealous.’
Fabian whipped around and saw Niva coming in from the living room, fully dressed.
‘You must be Sonja. Niva Ekenhielm.’ She extended her hand.
‘I know who you are,’ said Sonja without so much as looking at her hand. ‘On the other hand, I don’t know what you’re doing here.’
‘She’s helping me with the investigation. We’ve been working day and night,’ said Fabian, wondering how he should continue.
‘You’ll have to excuse me, I didn’t want to disturb you, but I have to tell Fabian something.’ Niva turned to him. ‘Tomas told me about your theory and I think it adds up. Apparently Diego Arcas had serious scar tissue in the middle of his left cornea. He’d been on a waiting list to get a new one for several years before he gave up.’
Fabian nodded very curtly to show her it had to wait.
‘Which would support our information that Semira Ackerman had problems with her right eye,’ Niva continued, handing over a printout.
‘I guess I’ll go,’ said Sonja, making an effort to turn around.
‘No, wait, tell me more about your day. You were going to pick up some clothes,’ said Fabian. ‘And shouldn’t you put on some coffee?’
Sonja looked at them, clenched her teeth and shook her head, before leaving the apartment.
‘Oh, boy, I hope she wasn’t upset,’ said Niva.
Fabian turned around and looked her in the eyes and tried to understand what was going on in her head and whether something really had happened between them. Was she just toying with him? Maybe that smile was sheer schadenfreude at seeing him fumble so desperately for answers. The last thing he intended to do was to humiliate himself even more and ask.
He would rather continue to hover in uncertainty.
104
UNTIL NOW THINGS HAD mostly gone her way. Other than a number of minor setbacks, which had all been remedied, only the issue of the Minister for Justice’s car was still a concern. The Danish police had found it at the bottom of Helsingør Harbour, but the connection between the two countries hadn’t been made for some reason. It was only a matter of time before the police on either side of the border put two and two together and started talking to each other. Then they would finally discover what was hidden beneath the surface and Gidon Hass would become a distant memory.
In an ideal world, she would have already been sitting in the rental car on her way out to the airport for the last time with all of Efraim’s stolen parts packed in the ice that filled her watertight suitcase.
She’d even hoped that once she’d gone through check-in and security she would have time to celebrate with a glass of champagne. She’d never tasted it before and wasn’t even sure she would like it, but she deserved it if she’d made it all the way to the finish line, even if it would be her last glass.
Instead she was now sitting handcuffed to a chair in the police station.
It couldn’t be interpreted as anything other than a serious setback.
Yet she didn’t feel the least bit worried. She simply hadn’t taken into account the risk that the police might arrest her too. Fortunately, she’d prepared a plan for how she would handle such a situation – a plan that she would have preferred to avoid, but now had no choice other than to implement.
The arresting officer from the courtyard had swallowed her story whole. She told him that she had managed to get away from the rest of the group and stayed hidden in the ventilation conduit. He’d tried to calm her, explaining that she no longer needed to be afraid. Then he’d shown her to the minibus where she blended in with the other girls.
Now she just looked like all of the other victims. The carelessly shaven policeman sitting across from her smelled of mould and was apparently clueless. She’d given him the expected answers and he had dutifully jotted them down in sprawling handwriting.
Fabian Risk was different. He had surprised her more than once already. Out of nowhere, one of his colleagues had come storming in and chained her to the chair, although he didn’t recognize her. Nobody seemed to recognize her, even though she’d been there scrubbing the corridors, cleaning their desks and emptying their wastebaskets countless times during the past year. But soon Fabian would surely arrive, and he wouldn’t be as easy to handle.
Despite that, she was happy that she’d let him live and left
the condemned apartment before he got there. In the end, either he or maybe that Danish policewoman would connect all the leads. If it wasn’t now, it would happen as soon as he looked at her computer. She wondered whether she should be more worried than she actually was. The plan was hanging by an extremely thin thread and not just one but a number of things could still go wrong.
But she felt as if that almost didn’t matter now, as if she’d taken a sneak peek at the future and knew that it would work out. She felt completely calm even though it was contrary to all reason and in many ways unlike her, who always preferred to be safe than sorry. She was quite convinced that God, who had stood by her side the whole way, wouldn’t fail her at the finish, so she leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes.
She was close now.
As close as she could ever have dreamed.
105
EVERY YEAR ON THE last workday before Christmas Eve, Herman Edelman and the rest of the management group gathered in Stadhuskällaren for a long Christmas lunch. It was a tradition that had grown so entrenched in recent years that not even a major operation, such as the one against Diego Arcas, could get them to break it.
Fabian actually didn’t have time. If it turned out that Aisha Shahin was one of the girls in custody from the Black Cat, under no circumstances could they risk her slipping out of their hands. But he needed a green light from Edelman before he could officially arrest her, which would mean he would have to put all his cards on the table, however much he wanted to avoid it. Without approval they had no choice other than to release her again.
After crossing Stadshusbron, he made a sharp left turn across the opposite lane, forced the ploughed wall of snow on to the bike path, and parked in the middle of the broad sidewalk outside Stadshuset. Even though it was midday, the welcoming outdoor candles were already burning outside the restaurant entrance on the east side of the building.
He found them in the back of a private room under a stone archway. And judging by the noise they’d already managed to consume a fair amount. The police commissioner Bertil Crimson and prosecutor Jan Bringåker were there, as was Anders Furhage from SePo with Eva Gyllendal, chief of the Stockholm Police, sitting beside him. The group had expanded to include Ingrid Brantén, the head of department of the Ministry of Justice. Not unexpectedly, she was sitting next to Herman Edelman, and Fabian could only assume that the two had recently had a good deal of contact with each other.
‘Fabian,’ Edelman exclaimed when he caught sight of him. ‘I thought you’d be home making gingerbread cookies!’
‘I will be as soon as we’ve had a chance to talk.’
‘As you can see, I’m a bit occupied here. Can it wait?’
‘Unfortunately, no. But if you can’t get up, we can discuss it here instead.’ Fabian waited for one of the others to ask what it concerned, but no one said anything.
Finally, Edelman himself broke the silence with a disgruntled sigh.
‘It appears you’ll have to manage without me for a little while, but I’ll be back in a minute.’ He raised his schnapps glass, emptied it and stood up.
They went over to a vacant table some distance away. Before they’d even sat down the murmur of the others was back at the earlier level.
‘What’s this about?’ said Edelman in a tone that made it clear he didn’t intend to waste time on small talk.
‘There’s a chance that we’ve arrested the correct perpetrator, and I need your approval to—’
‘I thought we were through with all this.’
‘Yes, you might have been, but evidently we weren’t.’
‘Let me decide on that.’
‘Herman, I know that Carl-Eric Grimås was guilty of buying an organ on the black market, and I know that you were the one who helped him contact the embassy and, by extension, the pathologist Gidon Hass.’
‘Grimås wasn’t guilty of anything.’
‘No? What do you call buying yourself a new liver on the black market?’
‘For one thing, it wasn’t illegal in Israel at the time, but I also can’t understand why a person should feel guilty about wanting to live. Who doesn’t want to take one more breath and cling to the dream of immortality?’ Edelman waved over the waiter, who was carrying a tray of schnapps glasses, and took two of them. ‘It’s easy for you to get on your high horse: you’re no more than halfway through life. Even if you’re aware that one fine day this will all come to an end, you live your life as if it’s going to be eternal. I can promise you that once you’re my age all of that changes, and some of us get more desperate than others. I wouldn’t describe any of them as guilty, at least not until I was faced with the choice myself.’
‘If you don’t think it’s a big deal, why would you make such an effort to conceal the truth?’
Edelman seemed completely nonplussed for a few seconds, before he lit up in a smile and started laughing. ‘Young Padawan, I have taught you well.’ He pushed one schnapps glass over to Fabian and raised the other. ‘Cheers.’
Fabian took the glass and raised it – this time he didn’t intend to make the mistake of refusing – and emptied it in one gulp. He would need all the help he could get.
‘You know, it’s funny. I feel like I’m seeing myself in the mirror when I look at you. Besides the beard and the belly, which I already had by your age, there’s no great difference between us. Just like you, I was convinced that all investigations needed to be solved. I didn’t care how many resources were required or what the consequences were: the truth was paramount and always worth the price. It was only in later years that I’ve come to see how wrong I was. The so-called truth is actually nothing but a chimera, and my constant search for it has cost me everything that really meant something to me. It’s long since too late for me, but not for you. Take that as some good advice.’
‘You were aware that Kremph was innocent the whole time and that someone else, someone who was far from finished, was behind this, yet you drove the investigation in the wrong direction to protect yourself and your own involvement. If it hadn’t been for you, we might have been able to save Adam Fischer and Semira Ackerman. You want me to take advice from you? Bullshit.’
‘Fabian, you can go at it as hard as you want. It doesn’t matter to me. The perpetrator is arrested and dead. The case is closed and we’re about to go on holiday. However much you want to believe it, there’s nothing you can do about it now. Not one thing, so Merry Christmas to you.’ Edelman stood up and turned to leave.
‘Let me shut the door.’
Edelman stopped and turned back again towards Fabian, who was still sitting at the table with his cell phone in his hand.
‘Don’t tell me this is about that damned leak again.’
‘Unfortunately it is.’
‘In other words, they still haven’t been able to close it.’
‘No, but—’
‘I knew it. This is exactly what I was worried about. I could feel it. I never would have agreed to go along—’
Fabian paused the recording from the wiretapped call between Edelman and Grimås, and set down the phone. ‘We’re done when I say we’re done.’
Edelman stared at the phone on the table. ‘So Niva is on board again. Interesting. She always had a soft spot for you. I assume you’re aware that this is never going to hold up in court, not to mention that what you’ve done is a criminal offence.’
‘You can report me if you want, but first I want you to sit down again,’ said Fabian, putting the phone back in his pocket.
Edelman took a seat and looked Fabian in the eyes. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Open up the investigation again and give me free rein to lead it. Tell Höglund and Carlén that I’m going to need an interview room, and make sure that arrest order and the rest of the paperwork are ready within thirty minutes. Considering that Jan Bringåker is sitting at your table, I can’t imagine it will take more than fifteen.’
Edelman looked sombre while he thought. When he
finally nodded his okay, Fabian had already stood up and headed for the exit.
106
EVEN THOUGH FABIAN CLEARLY recognized the dirty-white walls, the brown fixtures that always contained at least two blinking fluorescent lights, and the patchy grey linoleum floor that was so worn it was impossible to get clean, he stopped after a few metres and wondered whether he was in the wrong place.
The usually calm and rather slow-paced department was now full of people and new faces. This wouldn’t be quite as easy as he’d imagined. Even his own workspace was occupied by a uniformed police officer, who was on the phone while cleaning his nails with a ruler.
From what he could see, Tomas and Jarmo had cuffed the girls in the chairs they were sitting in. He overheard a number of questions: Where did they come from? How had they come in contact with Arcas? What had they been subjected to? But no one seemed to be asking the most important question: Who tore out his eye? Instead they were all being treated as victims of Arcas’ human trafficking, which may be the case. Aisha Shahin could have escaped before they’d even arrived at the police station.
But he was far from sure. The operation at the club had been very extensive, so there was still a chance that she was at the department right now, making up credible answers and waiting for the right moment to slip away. She could basically be any one of the captured women, imitating their nervously shifting gazes and making fragments of their stories her own.
He hurried around to get a sense of how many women there were and what they looked like. He thought about how he could gather them all in the same room and study their eyes, which should indicate if any of them stood out from the rest. But there were no guarantees that someone had seen what had happened or that this wasn’t the first time they’d met. He also thought someone should cross-examine their stories while Niva double-checked their information to find out which of them was lying. But that would take time considering all the language barriers.
Time they didn’t have.
There was still one person whom he couldn’t stop thinking about. The officers he had put on to Malin’s disappearance were working around the clock, and Fabian was desperately hoping that, since Malin Rehnberg had never been involved in the illegal organ market, the killer would have no reason to make her the next victim. But, even if she was alive, Malin was likely tied up and terrified somewhere, and it was his responsibility to find her before it was too late. He’d made Anders a promise and if he failed he would never be able to forgive himself.
The Ninth Grave Page 42