The Ice Beneath Her

by Camilla Grebe

  “We’re not sure she’s done anything at all,” Manfred says, and explains to Lena Brogren why she’s been called in after ten in the evening. “We’re investigating the murder of a young woman, and Emma’s name has come up.”

  Lena Brogren gasps and brings her hand to her mouth.

  “Can you tell us a little about Emma?” I add.

  “Emma is…sweet and well behaved. Doesn’t make much noise. Never has, actually. We’ve spent plenty of time together since she was a little girl, so I know her well. But she’s always had a hard time with her social life, our little Emma. And after Gun died—that was Emma’s mother, my sister—she became very introverted. Difficult to connect with in some way. I usually visit her up there on Värtavägen, make sure she’s taken care of; I promised Gun I would. But the last two times I was there, she didn’t open up. Even though I heard someone inside. When I saw that picture of the dead girl, I called your hotline immediately.”

  The woman struggles for breath and continues: “She’s not dead, is she?”

  “No, no,” I say. “The woman found in Jesper Orre’s house has been identified, and it was not Emma.”

  Lena Brogren’s relief is palpable. She sinks deeper into her chair. Nods and wipes the sweat from her forehead.

  “Why did Emma drop out of high school?” Hanne asks.

  The woman looks confused. “She didn’t drop out of high school. She never started. That horrible thing happened with her shop teacher, and it pushed her off balance.”

  “What happened with her shop teacher?” I ask.

  “That substitute. He assaulted Emma. They fired him, of course, but what good did that do? The damage was already done. Can you imagine taking advantage of a fifteen-year-old, whom you’re also responsible for? What kind of monster does such a thing? But the Lord works in mysterious ways, doesn’t He? That man ended up dead anyway. Murdered. A horrible story, but I couldn’t feel too sorry for him. We coddle criminals nowadays, don’t you think? You work with this kind of thing all day, you must think—”

  Manfred interrupts her gently:

  “This substitute teacher. What was his name?”

  She hesitates for a moment, seems to be searching her memory. “They called him Woody.”

  Hanne bends forward and puts her hand lightly on Lena Brogren’s arm. A gesture that’s empathetic, but also expectant and curious.

  “Woody? That sounds like a nickname, Lena. Do you remember what his real name was?”

  The woman blinks several times, and for a second I think she’s going to start crying. “No,” she says. “Something foreign, of course. Yes, he was an immigrant. Did I mention that?”

  “Miguel Calderón?” Hanne asks.

  The woman’s face clears, and she shudders. Nods slowly with her jaw clenched. “Calderón. Yes, that was it.”

  EMMA

  ONE WEEK EARLIER

  Jesper quickly pushes the front door shut, but I’m faster, wedging my ergonomically correct boot—the one that can withstand both rain and falling rocks—into the gap before he can close it. I take out the small plastic contraption I bought on the Internet, the one that resembles a cellphone, and hold it against his hand while pressing the red button.

  He lets out a shrill scream, releases the door, and collapses on the floor inside. I look around quickly before slipping into the warmth of the hall and closing the door behind me.

  The stun gun isn’t dangerous; it said so clearly in the instruction manual. It just incapacitates the victim for a few minutes. It’s unpleasant, but in no way harmful to healthy people. And Jesper is healthy. He’s healthy and successful, and like most healthy, successful people, he has no idea how lucky he is. And he needs to be reminded.

  I put the stun gun back in my pocket and drop down on my haunches beside him. I take out the plastic ties and fasten his wrists together behind his back. He snorts and spits and wriggles a bit, but puts up no real resistance, which almost disappoints me. It’s a little too easy. I’ve played countless scenarios in my head in which Jesper and I roll around on the hall floor in a fight to the death. But instead he just lies there, as helpless as a child.

  It strikes me that he’s no longer sexy or attractive. Just a pale, middle-aged man whose delusions of grandeur have finally caught up with him.

  “It’s not dangerous,” I say. “I had to. We need to talk. You owe me an explanation.” His legs jerk a little, and he drools on the floor, which makes me uncomfortable, because it reminds me of a bedridden old man. Then he coughs. “Let me go, for fuck’s sake. It hurts.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “but I need you to be still and listen to me. Then you can do what you want.”

  He doesn’t answer. Just lies there on his side on the floor, looking pathetic. His chest is heaving up and down, and his eyes are closed as if he’s trying to shut me out. I take off my coat. Fold it, bend over, and put it under his head. Then I sit down beside him on the floor and gently stroke his hair.

  “What do you want?” His voice is a whisper.

  “I want to know why.”

  “What do you mean, ‘why’?”

  He sounds confused, I guess due to the lingering effect of the electric shock.

  “Why you left me. Why you took my money and my painting. Why you got me fired. Why you killed my cat. Why. Why. Why.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  His voice is as harsh and inhospitable as the frozen ground outside. As if I were a mere burglar pushing my way into his home instead of his girlfriend. I take out the stun gun and give him a shock, mostly to show him it’s not okay to talk to me like that. He jerks as if he’s been kicked in the groin, moans, and then lies still.

  “Don’t you dare mock me. You toyed with me for as long as it suited you, and then you threw me away. And all I want to know is why. Is that too much to ask?”

  He doesn’t answer, but I can see him breathing. Around his hips a wet spot has formed; it spreads across the hall floor toward the door.

  “You killed our child,” I say in a low voice.

  He makes a little sound. It sounds like a cough, or maybe a dry, unhappy little laugh that he’s attempting to mask.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he repeats.

  I consider giving him another shock, but I decide that’s not a good idea. I don’t want to hurt him, just force him to listen. And give me an explanation.

  “Why didn’t you contact me?”

  Jesper draws a deep breath and looks at me for the first time since collapsing on the floor. His eyes are bloodshot. His gaze flits anxiously between me and the ceiling.

  “Are you the one who wrote that letter?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “I…thought it was best not to contact you.”

  He sighs and curls up on the floor like a shrimp. There’s a short pause, then he starts speaking again:

  “What’s your name?”

  “Come on. You know that. My name is Emma.”

  “Please, Emma…”

  Tears run down his hollow cheeks as he continues: “Listen to me. Can you do that?”

  “Sure.”

  I lean against the wall, cross my arms over my chest, simultaneously curious and disturbed by this sudden initiative.

  “I know you believe we know each other. That we…are close to each other. But it’s not true. I’ve never met you before. What you remember…never happened. I haven’t betrayed or deceived you or…killed your cat or whatever it was. All of that…is in your head. Do you understand? It’s something you imagined. We have never…you and me. We have never met before. I don’t know how to make you believe me, but…Emma. I don’t think you’re a bad person really, I don’t.”

  I lie down beside him on the floor, rest my cheek against the cool stone tiles. My face is just inches from his. I wonder if everything he says is purely a lie or if he actually believes it himself. Maybe this is some form of repression.

  “You left me the day
we got engaged. I don’t know why you disappeared so suddenly, but my guess is that it has to do with that dark-haired girl. What you didn’t know is that I was pregnant.”

  He doesn’t answer, just lies there with tears streaming down. I continue:

  “Leaving me…I can understand that. People do that. I get it. What I don’t get is why you did all those other things, why you had to…destroy me.”

  His face contorts in a grimace, and he looks so miserable that I take my hand and rest it across his cheek.

  We lie there for a moment in complete silence on the cold floor. His breathing calms down a little bit and his sobs peter out.

  “Listen, Jesper. Everything will be all right again.”

  He nods, and a string of drool runs from the corner of his mouth to the floor. “Everything will be all right again,” he says quietly.

  “Because we love each other,” I say, and kiss his tear-and-snot-smeared cheek.

  “We love each other,” he repeats.

  Suddenly, I hear someone coming up the front steps, and then a click as the door opens.

  I turn around, and there she stands.

  The dark-haired woman puts her hands over her mouth, as if trying to stifle a scream.

  She backs slowly out the front door without saying a word, while I jump up and run over to her. The scent of perfume hovers around her, and I’m suddenly aware of how I must appear: unshowered, smelly, my hair on end.

  I grab her wrists, and she loses balance. She’s wearing slender, high-heeled black leather boots more suitable for shopping than hand-to-hand combat.

  “What the hell?”

  Her voice is shrill and surprised, and I figure I’m the last thing she expected to find here in the hall. She must have assumed she’d already outmaneuvered me. We pull in opposite directions while spinning around. I let go of her wrist at just the right moment, when she’s just at the top of the stairs. She flies away like a child jumping out of a swing. Her scream as she tumbles down the stairs is horrendous, like a dying animal’s.

  She’s lying halfway down the stairs, and I take a few steps toward her. Her dark hair is spread out like a fan around her head, and a red spot is growing fast. I squat down beside her and watch. It’s impossible to see if she’s still breathing, but the blood continues to flow from her head. A sea of blood is forming, and a little river has broken free. It flows down the steps like a waterfall.

  I stand up. Everything is rocking back and forth. This wasn’t part of the plan. No one was supposed to get hurt. I was going to talk to Jesper, nothing else. I close my eyes in an attempt to force the dizziness away.

  Jesper screams.

  “Stop! She has nothing to do with this. Hit me instead. I should have answered your letter, your text messages. Do what you want to me, but don’t touch Angelica. Please. Emma. Please.”

  The room is spinning faster and faster, and I’m overcome by a sudden nausea. The smell of blood and urine closes in on me. I throw another glance at the woman. She lies as motionless as before. Beside her feet something metallic glitters: a pair of car keys. I pick them up and pull the woman’s body onto the hall floor. Kick her in the face to see if she’s alive. She whimpers slightly.

  “Please. Let me go. Please…I’m sorry. I should have called. Please. Forgive me!”

  Jesper’s voice sounds distant, as if it’s coming from inside a tube. I see no reason to answer him, and frankly I don’t know what to say. Everything has gone wrong, and the only thing I want is to get out of here. To escape the sight of Jesper’s lean body on the floor and the smell of fear and death.

  But I can’t. Not yet.

  I have to show this woman, this woman who took Jesper away from me, that she hasn’t won. She has to see who he loves and belongs to, even if I have to force her to.

  “Watch,” I whisper. “Watch closely now.”

  HANNE

  Owe’s text message arrives at five o’clock in the morning. It wakes me from a troubled sleep. I pick up my cellphone from the floor and read it.

  I love you.

  That’s all. No threats, no begging for me to come home. I stare at the display, which glows in the dark. Marvel at how trite that sentence sounds. It’s as if the words have lost their meaning—they feel doctored and tasteless, like processed food.

  I sit up. My back aches after hours on an uncomfortable sofa in the waiting room. The group has been working all night, but I needed to lie down for a while. I’ve always been like that. Owe thought it was funny. Teased me because I was like a child who needed to eat and sleep at specific times.

  But the fact is, it’s true. I can’t go for an extended period of time without sleep. It’s not that I get grumpy and surly—no, it’s that I lose the ability to think clearly, to make the simplest connections.

  And I can’t allow that to happen right now.

  Where could she have gone, the woman who murdered Jesper Orre and his girlfriend? The woman who…

  I realize with growing frustration that I actually don’t remember her name anymore. It is as if it disappeared during sleep, gone up in smoke while I was on that hard sofa, dissolved into the stuffy air of the waiting room.

  I sit up and pull on my cardigan. The floor is cold under my bare feet as I walk to the window. In the darkness outside, lonely snowflakes whirl past. The surrounding buildings are dark, with only a few windows here or there dimly lit, gleaming like beacons in the night.

  —

  In the room on the third floor, there’s feverish activity. Manfred, Sanchez, and Bergdahl are here, as well as a dozen other people I don’t recognize. Peter walks over to me as soon as I enter the room. Puts his hand gently on my shoulder.

  “How’s it going?”

  His gangly body, his open boyish face. The light touch of his hand. It all affects me, and I can’t defend myself. Makes me weak and impatient at the same time, as if my body is signaling something urgent. Something important and inevitable is about to happen, a sort of natural disaster. My whole body feels it.

  I tremble and take an involuntary step backward. “Good. A little tired. Have you found anything?”

  Peter nods toward his colleagues.

  “We’ve gone through Emma Bohman’s debit card statement. Two days before the murder of Angelica Wennerlind, she spent three thousand kronor at a sporting goods store. Furthermore, she rented a car, which she never returned. We’ve found it a few hundred yards from Orre’s house. And a few weeks earlier, on the night Orre’s garage burnt down, she spent fifteen hundred kronor in a supply shop.”

  “Gasoline?”

  “We think so. And then we put out an APB for Angelica Wennerlind’s car. A red Volvo 740 station wagon. We believe Emma Bohman may have used it to flee the crime scene.”

  “Have you been in…Emma Bohman’s apartment?”

  “Yes, but it was empty. We got a search warrant and searched it a couple of hours ago. It was a fucking mess. Full of empty ice cream packages and cut-up pieces of paper. There was dry spaghetti on the kitchen floor and ketchup stains on the mirror. Pillows all over the floor. The technicians are still there. Do you have any theories about where she is now?”

  I look out across the room. Observe our colleagues’ concentration.

  “Somewhere where she feels safe. Let me go through her background information again. Maybe there’s something there.”

  —

  The hours pass as I work my way through a stack of papers. It starts to get light outside, a dawn as cold and hard as granite. The corridors are crowded, and the smell of freshly brewed coffee spreads through the room. The noise level rises. Someone places a cup in front of me, and I nod in thanks without looking up.

  Around ten, I take a walk. I trudge around the block through newly fallen snow, letting the icy wind open my coat and snowflakes melt on my face.

  There it is again: that feeling that I read something important, but didn’t make the connection. The whiteness of the snow burns into my retinas, and my cheeks sting f
rom the cold. And somewhere just below the surface, an insight is brooding. I know it; I just can’t get ahold of it. It flits away, hiding in the darkest corners of my consciousness, like a shy animal.

  As I go back to the police building, it finally comes to me. And suddenly I’m so afraid I’ll forget it that I have the impulse to go over to the guard and ask to borrow a pen and paper. But I decide to trust myself to remember, and hurry toward the elevators. Half-running through the corridor to my colleagues.

  “Kapellgränd,” I say to Manfred, who’s standing in the middle of the floor with a coffee cup. “Emma Bohman grew up on Kapellgränd. And when she was questioned by the police about the stolen ring she said Orre lived on Kapellgränd.”

  “Yeah?”

  Manfred looks confused. Sanchez and Peter join us. They watch me in silence.

  “She’s mixing fantasy and reality, and for some reason the apartment on Kapellgränd, where she grew up, is meaningful. We’re looking for a place where she feels at home. Safe. Kapellgränd could be that place.”

  Sanchez raises a hand to us. She looks tired, and has dark circles under her eyes from old, smudged makeup.

  “You do realize we have another problem on our hands?” she says quietly. “Angelica Wennerlind’s five-year-old daughter, Wilma, is also missing.”

  EMMA

  ONE WEEK EARLIER

  The street is quiet and still. Large, heavy snowflakes fall from the darkening sky. The red Volvo is parked in front of the house. I walk down the sidewalk toward the car with a firm grip on Jesper’s upper arm. At the rhododendron bush I stop and clean myself off with snow. I bury my face in the cold whiteness and rub away the blood. Jesper is standing next to me. Panting, like a dog.

  I take out the keys I took from the woman. I unlock the car, give him yet another shock, and press him down in the passenger seat. He says nothing. His face is completely drained of emotion and his eyes resemble wet, black stones.

  The black leather interior is worn and smells like a stable. For the first time in hours I allow myself to relax. Just a little, so that the cramping pain in my chest releases a little.