The Man Who Wasn't There

by Michael Hjorth

  ‘It’s to do with his role in Säpo and a missing persons case in 2003.’

  ‘What missing persons case?’

  ‘I’d rather not go into that over the phone.’ The response was silence. ‘I can assure you I have absolutely no intention of dragging your brother’s name through the mud. I just want to find out the truth.’

  ‘He never discussed his work with me,’ Charles said, and Lennart felt as if he had broken through the other man’s initial reluctance to co-operate.

  ‘He might have said something you didn’t attach any importance to at the time, but it might help me.’

  There was another brief silence.

  ‘OK, but I live in Oskarshamn.’

  ‘I can get there.’

  ‘All right. When?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Lennart couldn’t help smiling. The conversation had gone better than he had dared hope. The story was back up and running.

  Just over an hour after Billy had gone through the Bakkers’ photographs, the team were gathered in the Room. Torkel had called Vanja and Sebastian; Vanja didn’t answer so he had left a message, but he had spoken to Sebastian and more or less ordered him to come in. They were back in Stockholm, and if he regarded himself as a part of Riksmord, he needed to get his arse in gear. So now four of the six chairs around the oval table were occupied by Torkel, Ursula, Jennifer and Sebastian; they were looking at the whiteboard, where Billy had put the picture of Jan Bakker drinking from the waterfall, with an enlargement of the cabin in the background. He pointed at the slightly out-of-focus image as Sebastian reached for a bottle of mineral water.

  ‘This is the building you can see in the background here,’ he said. ‘Just so you know where we are . . .’

  He moved over to the map.

  ‘This is where the picture was taken,’ he said, indicating a spot about ten centimetres from the cross marking the grave. ‘The bodies were found here, which means the cabin was about here,’ he went on, pointing to a location only a centimetre from the grave.

  The door opened and Billy broke off as Vanja walked in. Torkel’s first thought was how tired she looked.

  ‘Good to see you,’ he said, sounding pleased and surprised.

  Vanja nodded in response, pulled out a chair and flopped down.

  ‘I left you a message,’ Torkel said as she shrugged off her jacket. Was it his imagination, or had she lost weight?

  ‘I know, that’s why I’m here.’

  ‘How’s it all going?’ Vanja didn’t reply immediately. She looked over at Sebastian, who nodded encouragingly.

  ‘I didn’t get onto the FBI programme,’ she stated in a voice devoid of emotion.

  ‘What? Why not? What happened?’

  Torkel seemed completely taken aback; clearly nobody had bothered to inform him, Sebastian thought.

  ‘Håkan Persson Riddarstolpe happened,’ Vanja said with shrug. ‘He said I wasn’t suitable.’

  There was silence around the table, the kind of silence that arose when everyone knew they ought to say something reassuring and sympathetic, but nobody had a clue what that might be.

  Torkel was finding it difficult to make sense of what she had said. Håkan Persson Riddarstolpe was a very competent individual. He might not be among the very best, but Torkel had never heard of him making a mistake like this. Not since that business in Sala all those years ago at any rate. What had happened? Nobody was more suitable than Vanja. This had to be sorted out before it was too late.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ he said, breaking the silence.

  Vanja shook her head.

  ‘There’s no appeal.’

  ‘He’s an idiot, I’ve always said so,’ Sebastian chipped in.

  ‘It’s obviously a mistake; I’ll find out what’s going on,’ Torkel said.

  Vanja gave him a faint, grateful smile. Sebastian wondered how much influence Torkel had; would his costly visit to Riddarstolpe be in vain? Jennifer slowly raised her hand.

  ‘This might not be the right time, but if I’m supposed to be filling in for Vanja—’

  ‘We’ll consider your position later,’ Torkel interrupted her.

  ‘You might as well stay,’ Vanja said. ‘I’m going to need quite a bit of time off. My father’s been charged . . .’

  She saw Ursula, Billy and Jennifer give a start; they knew nothing about Valdemar’s arrest.

  ‘I want to look in detail at the preliminary investigation, so I’m going to be a bit . . . distracted.’

  Sebastian took a swig of his mineral water. This was news to him, and it wasn’t good. Vanja was intending to help Valdemar. Sebastian had to bring her back to him, make her think of her father as a criminal, someone who had let her down. He hadn’t wanted to push himself forward after his successes with the FBI and Ellinor; he had assumed she would be in touch if she needed him, but it was obviously time to step things up again.

  ‘Have you been to visit him again?’ he asked in what he hoped was a neutral tone of voice.

  Vanja shook her head.

  That was something, at least.

  ‘We can talk about that later,’ Torkel said, bringing them back to the matter in hand. ‘We have some new information about our family on the mountain.’

  Billy took over once more. ‘As I said, there was a cabin here in 2003, an old hunting lodge from the 1930s. It burnt down in January 2004.’

  He went back to his seat and glanced at his laptop.

  ‘It was privately owned until 1969, when it was donated to the armed forces. From 1970 it was available to rent by anyone who was employed by the forces, or who had a family member in the forces.’

  Everyone was interested; this was good. This would give them what they really needed, something to work on. A name.

  ‘Do we know who rented the place during that week in 2003?’ Vanja wanted to know, drawn into the course of events, the tension, the chase, in spite of herself.

  ‘First of all we had to find the right administrator, then we had to get her to dig out records from ten years ago—’

  ‘We know you’ve been working hard,’ Torkel said impatiently. ‘Give us a name.’

  ‘Adam Cederkvist rented the house in week forty-four in 2003,’ Jennifer said. ‘He had his family with him.’

  ‘Lena, Ella and Simon Cederkvist,’ Billy supplied.

  The air seemed to go out of everyone in the room as a sense of anticlimax took over.

  ‘But it can’t be the Cederkvists in the grave.’ Vanja said what they were all thinking. ‘They set off on a round the world sailing trip in November. They sent postcards from Zanzibar in February.’

  Ursula leafed through her notes, even though she knew exactly what she would find.

  ‘Adam’s brother Charles Cederkvist’s DNA didn’t match either the male or the children in the grave.’

  ‘Oh, come on – it has to be them!’

  Once again someone put into words what they were all thinking; this time it was Sebastian. He got up and started pacing around the room.

  ‘Adam and his family rent a cabin in the same week that a family is murdered a hundred metres away; the place burns down a few months later, then Adam and his family vanish without a trace off the coast of Africa. Can’t you hear what it sounds like?’

  He stopped. Of course they could. Life was full of coincidences, they knew that, but this was too much.

  ‘Did Adam work for the armed forces?’ Vanja asked.

  ‘No, but his brother did,’ Jennifer replied. ‘Still does – the military intelligence and security service. He lives in Oskarshamn.’

  ‘So what did Adam do?’ Torkel wanted to know.

  ‘He was a colleague, in a way. Säpo.’

  Military intelligence and the security police. The chances of the whole thing being a coincidence suddenly seemed even more remote.

  ‘Let’s say it is Adam Cederkvist – how do we prove it?’ Billy wondered.

  ‘The wife’s
relatives,’ Vanja suggested.

  ‘That will take a few days,’ Ursula said.

  Torkel made up his mind. ‘Do it. There are too many question marks. Billy and Jennifer, find someone who saw the family after that week in the autumn of 2003 – colleagues, neighbours, anyone.’ He turned to Vanja. ‘Check with the school and nursery, find out if the kids came back at all after the autumn half-term holiday.’

  Vanja nodded. She had been getting a little tired of these situations, the hours spent in various conference rooms, the whiteboards and theories, but when something like this happened, when they got a breakthrough, when the search turned into the chase, she had to admit the feeling was hard to beat.

  ‘Ursula, contact the National Forensics Lab and ask them to double-check the results of Charles Cederkvist’s DNA sample,’ Torkel rounded off the barrage of orders. ‘I’ll speak to the police in Oskarshamn.’

  ‘What shall I do?’ Sebastian said.

  ‘Nothing at the moment, but if the bodies in the grave are the Cederkvist family, I’d really like you to have a chat with the brother.’

  * * *

  Torkel went to his office and picked up the phone. He found the number for the Oskarshamn station on the computer and made the call. The switchboard put him through to the officer who knew who had gone to collect the DNA sample; he was out, but could be reached on his mobile. Torkel rang the new number and waited. When ‘Jörgen’ answered, Torkel explained who he was and why he was calling. Apparently Jörgen had gone to see Charles Cederkvist at the end of the previous week as instructed; he had been invited in, and Charles had offered him coffee. Ursula came into the office at that point; Torkel waved her to a chair and switched to speakerphone. This was her area, after all.

  ‘And you took the DNA sample?’ Torkel asked, even though the answer ought to be self-evident. That was the only thing Jörgen had been asked to do.

  ‘Yes. Well, he took it himself.’

  Torkel glanced over at Ursula, who was looking less than impressed.

  ‘But you saw him do it?’

  ‘Not as such – he went into another room to do it.’

  Torkel felt a creeping weariness in his bones. He had an idea of what had happened, but he had to make sure.

  ‘And where were you?’

  ‘I was in the kitchen, drinking my coffee.’

  Ursula sighed audibly and sank back into her chair; yet more evidence to support her theory that the level of competence among her fellow police officers fell on a rapidly diminishing scale the further you got from Kungsholmen. Obviously Oskarshamn was far enough away to approach the Keystone Kops model.

  ‘Was anyone else in the house while you were there?’

  ‘His partner, but she was asleep. She works nights.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he could have gone into the bedroom to take the swab?’

  ‘Well, yes, he could – I don’t know where he went.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he could have taken a sample of his partner’s saliva instead of his own?’

  Silence. Torkel thanked his colleague for the information, and ended the call.

  ‘Wouldn’t the lab check whether the sample came from a man or a woman?’ he asked Ursula as he dialled another number.

  ‘Not if we only ask them to compare it with another sample,’ she said with a shrug, as if to apologise on their behalf.

  ‘But the sample was labelled with Charles Cederkvist’s name,’ Torkel persisted. ‘Shouldn’t they have reacted to that?’

  ‘There’s no guarantee the technicians even saw the name. They were looking for evidence of a relationship.’

  Torkel got through to Oskarshamn again, and asked to be put through to the officer he had just spoken to; he wanted them to bring in Charles Cederkvist.

  While he was waiting, he met Ursula’s gaze, but said nothing.

  He didn’t like this.

  If it was Adam Cederkvist they had found, then someone had put a considerable amount of effort into authenticating the story of the round the world sailing trip. They also had a man who worked for the military intelligence service faking his own DNA sample, and a dead woman with two false identities who, in all probability, had carried out the highly professional execution of four people, one of whom worked for the Swedish security police.

  This was too big.

  Bigger than a mass murder.

  Torkel didn’t like it at all.

  After Charles had given the man from the TV programme directions and put down the phone, he remained standing in his living room for a while. They were coming at him from all sides now, surrounding him, trying to corner him. He needed to take care of it, just as he had taken care of everything else. He had to keep going, rationally and methodically. For a moment he had allowed himself the luxury of thinking about his brother, about the children, but emotions got in the way. They slowed you down, made you stand still, made you vulnerable. Action was the only answer. He would close every door they opened for as long as he could. This wasn’t about him, it was a matter of national security. Charles quickly packed a few essentials and went out to the car. Looked back at his house for what he presumed was the last time. He had been happy there. It had been a good house. A good life. It was a shame he would never get it back. Should he write a letter to Marianne? She would never understand. It would be better to call her. Later, when he had come up with a way to explain, to calm her down. She would be devastated.

  He realised he had come back to emotions again. That was no good. They would destroy him. Nine years ago he had let them take over, and Patricia Wellton had died. This time he had to be proactive. He got in the car and drove off. He turned onto the main road, and after a short distance he saw a police car coming towards him. He slowed down, keeping well within the speed limit. The two cars passed, and in his rear-view mirror he saw the police car slow down and indicate right. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but he had a feeling they were heading for his house. He had been right. He wouldn’t be coming back. Not ever.

  Vanja said thank you and put down the phone. She had been speaking to the headteacher at the Vallhamra school in Märsta; the woman had been in the post for only five and a half years, but she had fetched one of the lower-school teachers who had worked there for over fifteen years, and who remembered Ella and Simon Cederkvist very well. Everyone had been terribly upset when they died.

  Vanja went along to Torkel’s impersonal but functional office; Ursula was already occupying the visitors’ sofa.

  ‘Charles Cederkvist wasn’t at home,’ Torkel said before Vanja had the chance to say anything.

  ‘At work?’

  ‘Not according to his boss.’

  ‘Are we putting out a call for him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Torkel said hesitantly. ‘We haven’t got much to go on.’

  ‘And I’m afraid I can’t really help.’

  Vanja perched on the arm of a chair.

  ‘The children didn’t return to school after the autumn half-term break, but they weren’t supposed to.’

  ‘Why not?’ Ursula asked.

  ‘Because of the round the world trip. They attended school up to the holiday, then they were going to be educated at home. Their mother was a teacher.’

  ‘But nobody saw them after half term?’ Torkel wanted confirmation.

  ‘No, but as I said, that doesn’t really mean anything.’

  ‘Thanks. Let’s hope Billy and Jennifer have more luck.’

  Vanja nodded and got to her feet.

  ‘Any idea where Sebastian went?’

  ‘Down to the canteen, I think,’ Ursula replied.

  Vanja was about to leave the room when Torkel stopped her.

  ‘Vanja . . .’

  She turned around.

  ‘I’m going to have a word with Harriet about this FBI business, and I’ll go higher if necessary.’

  ‘Thanks, but I don’t think it will make any difference.’

  Torkel watched her walk away, a troubled lo
ok on his face. Ursula stretched.

  ‘Look on the bright side. You get to keep her.’

  ‘That’s not what she wants.’

  ‘We don’t always get what we want,’ Ursula said laconically. Torkel nodded in agreement. As far as Ursula was concerned, he was painfully aware of that fact.

  Mehran got off the green line in Vällingby. According to Melika, Joseph lived in an apartment on Härjedalsvägen. Or at least he used to; she didn’t know if he was still there. She didn’t want to know, she insisted. Mehran glanced at the GPS on his mobile and set off. He was in no hurry; he didn’t even know what he would do if Joseph answered the door. Everything Melika had told him was spinning around in his head; he almost felt dizzy. It had been parts of a story, fragments of events from long ago that raised more questions than they answered. The main thing was that she was frightened. Terrified. He believed her; he had never seen that kind of fear before. It was as if it had been dammed up inside her, and came gushing out when she decided to open up to him. It made her story credible, even though Mehran couldn’t get his head around the whole picture.

  Said and Melika’s cousins had borrowed money to set up the shop. They borrowed from family and friends, but were barely making ends meet, so the cousins wanted to sell – particularly as more and more of the lenders started asking for their money back. They even had prospective buyers – two brothers. Said was sure the shop would start doing well before too long, and wanted to hold on to it. However, he didn’t have the money to buy out the other two. They had argued all the time, and it had taken its toll. Melika had been caught in the middle. She had to be loyal to her cousins, but at the same time she loved her husband, even if she sometimes thought he was naive.

  The problems really started when Rafi, the younger cousin who always spent more than he earned, borrowed from a man called Joseph. In fact his real name was Mohammed Al something – Melika couldn’t quite remember, but everyone knew him as Joseph. Nobody was happy when Rafi got involved with Joseph; there were plenty of rumours about him, about how he made his money. It was said that he knew people. Not just good people. That it was dangerous to cross him.