They were going to need help.
He needed help.
There weren’t many people he could turn to. He immediately dismissed Hans Olander, his boss in Karlstad. Olander had made it crystal clear that he supported the other candidate, Per Karlsson. When Erik got the job, Olander’s first words were: ‘Oh, well, let’s see how it goes’. He definitely wasn’t the right person to ask for help just two months later. In addition, Olander had already intimated in a phone call that he would be happy to take over the case, as its complexity demanded what he referred to as ‘seniority’. It was only the confidence that Anna Bredholm, the Chief of Police, had in Erik’s abilities that had kept him in charge, for the time being at least. But he didn’t want to call her either; Anna was one of Pia’s closest friends, and it would look as if he was advancing his career on the back of his wife’s contacts. There was already a certain amount of malicious gossip, and he certainly didn’t want to provide any further ammunition. No, he needed someone who was completely removed from the political arena of Värmland.
‘There’s no shame in not being able to do everything yourself’ – that’s what his mother always used to say. It was true, of course, but what kind of signal would it send out if he brought in outside help on the second day of his first major case? Working out what Olander would think wasn’t exactly rocket science, but what about everyone else? Would he be undermining his authority, making things more difficult for himself in the future? Would it make him look weak?
Whatever, he thought. If the Carlsten murder wasn’t solved, he would be seen as incompetent, and that was worse.
In his mind’s eye he saw that little boy, shot in the wardrobe.
It was time to call in the best.
He had never found it difficult to look at her.
Quite the reverse – he loved to gaze at her mouth, her nose, her cheeks, and finally her eyes. Sometimes he would secretly watch her in the office. There was something special about observing her when she was unaware of his scrutiny. Of course she had usually realised, and then he would quickly look away, try to appear unconcerned, but when he glanced back she would be smiling.
But just before the incident the smile had disappeared, replaced by a troubled expression on her face.
That was the way their relationship had been developing: in the wrong direction. He wasn’t sure how it had happened.
She and Micke were divorcing, and Torkel had hoped that he would progress from being her lover to becoming her lifelong companion, but things didn’t turn out like that. Not at all. Instead they met less and less often, and she had started avoiding him. He missed her.
It was hard for him to accept that she didn’t want him as anything other than a lover, but now he was facing an even greater challenge than his disappointment at being rejected.
He could no longer look at her face.
She was lying on the sofa in the living room, under the speckled red woollen blanket. However hard he tried, he saw only the white compress covering her right eye, taking over the face he loved. He knew he needed to meet her gaze, but somehow he just couldn’t do it. The bullet had ripped through her right eyeball, destroying the optical nerve, but according to the doctors the angle of the shot meant that it had exited through her temple without causing too much damage. But her right eye was gone for good.
He stood up; he had to get away from the compress for a while. He headed for her kitchen.
‘Would you like another coffee?’
‘I’m fine,’ Ursula said. ‘You help yourself.’
Torkel looked down at the cup in his hand, feeling stupid; he had hardly touched his drink. Was it obvious that he was running away? He couldn’t turn back now; he walked into the kitchen.
‘I’ll just top mine up,’ he said, mostly to himself. Ursula’s voice followed him.
‘How’s Vanja?’
Torkel stopped at the black coffee machine next to the cooker.
To be honest, he had no idea. He hadn’t thought about anyone except Ursula lately. He had hardly been into the office, and was hoping that no one would call on the team for quite some time. He wanted to be able to focus on Ursula.
‘Fine, I think,’ he said eventually.
‘Are you sure?’ Ursula sounded dubious. ‘She called round the day before yesterday, and I thought she seemed pretty low.’
Torkel listened as he added a few drops of fresh coffee to his cup.
‘I haven’t seen much of her,’ he admitted. ‘She’s got some kind of problem going on at home, or so I’ve heard. But to be perfectly honest, I don’t know.’
I’ve been thinking about you, he wanted to say. He went back into the living room and sat down.
‘That’s because you’ve been spending so much time with me,’ Ursula said, smiling at him for the first time in ages. ‘And I really want to thank you for that.’
Slowly she reached out and took his hand. Hers was warmer than usual, but just as soft as always. He had missed her touch.
It took so little; it was ridiculous. He tried to focus on the eye that was still there. The blue-grey iris. It looked tired, but it was still Ursula. She was in there. For a second he managed to forget that compress.
‘You came to see me every single day in hospital, and you’re here so often. I really do appreciate it, but it’s …’ Ursula hesitated. ‘It feels a bit strange.’
‘It’s difficult for you?’
‘Can I be honest?’
She gently let go of his hand and turned away. That told Torkel everything he needed to know, but she kept on going anyway.
‘There’s a dichotomy. You want more than me, which makes things complicated. You care about me, and I just disappoint you.’
‘You don’t disappoint me.’
‘That’s not true. Is it?’
Torkel shook his head. She was right; there was no point in pretending. He had so many questions, but one overshadowed all the rest.
What had she been doing in Sebastian’s apartment?
It couldn’t be a coincidence, he was sure of it.
He had meticulously gone through every single interview with Ellinor Bergkvist and Sebastian during the course of the police investigation – 149 pages of dense print. Time and time again Ellinor insisted that she and Sebastian had had a long and intimate affair. They had fallen in love at first sight, and he had begged her to move in with him. On page after page Ellinor explained how she and Sebastian had enjoyed what could best be described as a 1950s relationship. She had cooked and kept the apartment looking nice, she had bought flowers every Friday, while he had worked and taken care of the finances, coming home to dinner on the table and a willing sexual partner. This had gone on for months, until the day when he threw her out and changed the locks, which led to her firing a gun through the peephole in his front door. Her aim had been to show Sebastian that he couldn’t treat her like that. She had wanted to injure or kill him. Over and over again she repeated that she didn’t know there was anyone else in the apartment.
The Sebastian Bergman who emerged through these 149 pages surprised Torkel. The man he had once called a friend was completely unrecognisable. The man he still thought he knew well. To begin with, when he had read only Ellinor’s interviews, Torkel was convinced she was lying. It was obvious she had a screw loose. The result of a major psychological assessment hadn’t yet come through, but Torkel was pretty sure Ellinor would be sent to a secure psychiatric unit once the trial got under way in a month or so.
But the interviews with Sebastian confirmed much of what she had said, even if he gave a different reason for her ending up in his apartment. She had moved in when it seemed she might be in danger from the serial killer Edward Hinde, and she had somehow stayed put, but otherwise Sebastian’s story more or less matched Ellinor’s. Sebastian, who as a general rule never wanted to see a woman more than once, had had a long-term live-in partner.
Sebastian had felt terrible about what had happened, and had expressed great remorse
in his interviews, but he had never visited Ursula in hospital. Not as far as Torkel was aware, anyway. Perhaps the shame was too great, and he couldn’t cope with seeing her? Or perhaps he just didn’t care. Torkel had no idea. Reading the interviews merely underlined what he already knew: he didn’t understand Sebastian Bergman at all.
He had to ask the question.
‘Has Sebastian been to see you?’
‘Once.’
It was obvious that Ursula wanted to change the subject, but he kept going. He couldn’t just let it go.
‘How come? I don’t understand him at all.’
‘I do,’ she said, a little sadly. ‘He’s an expert when it comes to avoiding anything that’s painful.’
‘Not a particularly attractive quality.’
‘I think it’s more of a defence mechanism; my only consolation is that he’s probably the one who suffers most.’
She took his hand again. Torkel’s cheeks grew warm. At least she really saw him. He had lived on hope for a very long time where Ursula was concerned; he could go on living that way for a while longer.
Being seen was better than nothing.
But she had been in Sebastian’s apartment. Not with him.
He tried to push away the thought, to concentrate on the warmth of her hand. Her touch ought to be calming, reassuring, but it wasn’t. Without even being there, Sebastian was standing between them.
The sound of his mobile interrupted his train of thought.
They were heading west along the E20 in the SUV.
As always Billy was behind the wheel, and as always he was driving too fast. Torkel usually asked him to slow down, but not this time. Instead he sat gazing out of the window at the endless pine trees lining the road on both sides. That was what Sweden seemed to consist of as soon as you left the suburbs: forest, forest and more forest.
Sebastian and Vanja were at the back. Side by side. Torkel found this strange; Vanja had been very distant with Sebastian the last time he saw them together. Something must have happened.
In the middle, where Ursula usually sat, was their luggage.
He suddenly heard Sebastian laugh; Vanja must have said something funny. Their luggage was in Ursula’s seat, but Sebastian was laughing as if nothing had happened. Torkel felt even more annoyed as he gazed out at those endless bloody trees again.
★ ★ ★
After a few hours they turned onto the road that would take them all the way to Torsby in northern Värmland. Billy had never been there, and suspected none of his colleagues had either. The town’s home page proudly announced that Torsby was the place where Sven-Göran Eriksson and Markus Berg had dribbled their first footballs, and that it boasted Sweden’s only tunnel for cross-country skiing. Billy knew about Eriksson, mainly because of all the stories about his love life in the tabloid press, but he hadn’t a clue who Markus Berg was, and he hadn’t been cross-country skiing since he was thirteen.
‘I was joking. I was just joking, darling.’
Billy remembered the words very clearly. They had cleared up the case of the mass grave in the mountains of Jämtland. He had shot Charles Cederkvist. One morning he had given Maya a key to his apartment. When she hugged him she had whispered that the next step was to get married. In May. She had seen his expression, a mixture of surprise and terror, and she had given him another hug.
‘I was joking. I was just joking, darling.’
That was exactly what she had said.
Word for word.
However, when she presented him with a list of 150 potential guests two months later, wondering if he’d like to help her cut it down a little, he realised the wedding in May was no longer a joke, but a solid reality.
Maya.
He loved her, he was sure of that. But everything was happening so fast.
By midsummer they would have known each other for a year. And been married for over a month.
His attempts to slow down the pace of their rush to the altar had been in vain, and seemed pathetic compared with her passionate conviction that this was the right thing for both of them. A refusal to affirm their future together seemed mean and petty, as if he didn’t love her.
He loved her very much.
He loved everything, from her intensity to the way she looked at him when they were lying in bed. He loved the fact that she threw herself into whatever she did. He loved the way she made him grow as a person. When he was with her he felt like the only man in the world, and for someone who had always had the sense of being an outsider, an observer, it was a wonderful experience.
So he gave in, ashamed of his caution.
To tell the truth, he had never thought of himself as someone who would get married, probably because of his parents’ divorce. He had been nine years old, and many times he had got the impression that he was more mature than either his mother or his father when they played him off against each other. But his main objection was the speed of the whole thing. It didn’t suit him. He liked to analyse, to reflect and plan, while Maya was always dashing off to look at a new venue, trying on new clothes, presenting him with new invitations on which he was supposed to express an opinion. In the end he had simply given up, realised that their big day together was more hers than his. Once again he was standing slightly to one side, assessing the situation rather than participating fully. That was just the way it was. He told himself he was OK with that. He still hoped that the murders in Torsby would be fairly straightforward so that he could get back and help Maya with the planning, but the signs weren’t good. An entire family wiped out. Weak circumstantial evidence against the only suspect, as far as he could make out. He usually felt hungry and focused on his way to a new case, but this time he was torn, as if he was always in the wrong place, wherever he might be.
He tried to push away his thoughts, concentrate on the monotonous road ahead. There was very little traffic, and the speedometer had crept above 140 kilometres per hour. Billy slowed down; it was usually Torkel who pointed out such transgressions, but he had remained silent virtually all the way, staring out of the window. He had aged recently, Torkel. Perhaps that wasn’t so surprising; Ursula’s ordeal had shaken Billy too. She was Torkel’s equal when it came to the leadership of the team, and Torkel wasn’t the only one who would miss her; they all would, Billy especially. He would need to oversee all the forensic data himself, and he didn’t know if he was quite ready to shoulder that important responsibility alone. In a way the team had also lost an eye.
However, those two at the back didn’t seem particularly concerned. It was strange, Billy thought as he glanced in the mirror. The last time he saw Vanja she had been furious with Sebastian, certain that he was trying to ruin her life. Now they looked like two kids on the back seat, on their way to summer camp.
Lately Billy had become more and more convinced that Sebastian’s constant efforts to build a close friendship with Vanja were based on a hidden agenda. It had started when Sebastian asked Billy to find the address of someone called Anna Eriksson, the very first time they met in Västerås. Anna Eriksson had written a letter to Sebastian’s mother in December 1979, and Sebastian needed to track her down. Billy hadn’t paid much attention at the time, but after a while he had realised that Vanja’s mother was called Anna Eriksson. Then her name came up again, on a list of potential murder victims who had all slept with Sebastian. So he had had an affair with Vanja’s mother, and Vanja was born in July 1980, around seven months after that letter was written.
But what finally made Billy sure that Sebastian was Vanja’s real father was the discovery that Valdemar wasn’t.
That was one coincidence too many.
The more he thought about it, the more it had to be true. Sebastian sought Vanja out whenever he had the chance, but never in a sexual way. Billy had seen Sebastian with other women; he was always very clear about what he wanted. He had even flirted with Ursula, but never with Vanja. Never. And yet he always wanted to be close to her.
Billy suddenl
y realised that he needed to know the truth. He couldn’t go around with such a strong suspicion without doing something about it.
He noticed that the needle had crept above 140 again. This time he didn’t bother slowing down; the sooner they reached Torsby and got started, the better.
★ ★ ★
As they turned off to park behind Bergebyvägen 22 as per instructions, they saw a group of a dozen or so people outside the building. Cameras and microphones – journalists, Torkel thought grimly. He recognised some of the faces – Axel Weber from Expressen, for example. Their eyes met briefly as the black SUV swung in through the open gates. Axel stepped aside, reaching into his pocket. Ten seconds later Torkel’s phone rang. ‘Yes?’
‘Are you in Torsby?’ Weber asked without preamble.
‘Maybe.’
‘So what can you tell me about the murder of the Carlsten family?’
‘Nothing.’
Torkel pushed open the door and got out of the car. It was good to stretch his legs after the long journey, even though all four of them had had a comfortable trip. He saw a man in his fifties emerge from a back door and walk quickly towards them. ‘I haven’t even met the SIO yet, so you’ll have to wait a while.’
‘Will you call me when you’ve spoken to him?’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’ Torkel ended the call and slipped the phone into his pocket as the other man reached them.
‘Erik Flodin. Thank you for coming.’ He nodded to everyone and held out his hand to Torkel.
‘Torkel Höglund.’
The two men shook hands, then the rest of the team introduced themselves before accompanying Flodin into the building that at first glance Torkel had assumed was a derelict car-repair workshop.
The Silent Girl (Sebastian Bergman 4) Page 4