The Silent Girl (Sebastian Bergman 4)

by Michael Hjorth

  It sounded good, but it wasn’t true.

  He’d written a thesis, but not in order to gain a unique position. In fact he had chosen the topic because he had always been drawn to the darker side of the human psyche, and because serial killers had fascinated him for a long time.

  He continued with his doctored version.

  ‘When I got the chance to continue my studies with the FBI, I thought it was too good to be true. I took the opportunity right away, and then it was too late to do anything else. This was the only thing I knew.’

  Another slight modification of the facts.

  Training with the FBI had been his only way out. The complaints about his sexual misconduct had reached the top, and he was just one board meeting away from being thrown out. The trip to the USA saved him from being sacked. It was just like everything else in his life, he realised. There was always a hidden agenda with whatever he did. Even today, sitting here behind a rock and trying to make Vanja like him by telling her what he wanted her to hear. This was who he was: a man who was good at revising the truth so that it suited him.

  ‘Well, at least one of us managed to follow the FBI programme,’ Vanja said with a hint of bitterness in her voice.

  Sebastian realised he had unwittingly touched a nerve; she had found her rejection deeply humiliating. He tried to repair the damage:

  ‘You’ll get there – it’s only a matter of time.’

  Vanja didn’t reply; instead she stood up and brushed the pine needles off her jacket. She seemed to have lost interest in pursuing the conversation.

  ‘I’m tired of this. Let’s walk around the house,’ she said, waving towards the back of the isolated dwelling.

  Sebastian also got up, annoyed with himself; why the hell had he mentioned that bloody FBI programme?

  They set off slowly in a wide circle, keeping well away from the building. Undergrowth, trees, bushes and a huge ditch made it very difficult to move sideways without being seen. When they were almost halfway round, they could see that the place looked equally deserted from this position. They waited for ten minutes; the only sound was the constant barking.

  ‘Does that dog bark all day? How the hell does Ceder put up with it?’

  Sebastian looked over at the pen; it was almost hidden by the house from this angle, but he thought he could see something in there.

  Something he hadn’t seen before.

  Something large.

  ‘We need to move closer so that we can get a better view of the pen,’ he hissed.

  Vanja glanced at him, then over at the pen. She spotted it too. There was a grey shape next to the kennel. Was it a sack? She wasn’t sure.

  Sebastian set off, moving quickly; he didn’t care if anyone spotted him from the house. He needed to see what was lying in the pen. Vanja followed, catching up with him just as they got close enough to have a clear view.

  There was definitely something in there.

  Something that shouldn’t be there.

  A body.

  ★ ★ ★

  Erik was the first to arrive. By that time Sebastian and Vanja had decided to let the dog out. They didn’t touch his master, who was slumped against the scruffy kennel holding a pump-action shotgun in his hands. It looked exactly like the pictures they had seen of a 12-calibre Benelli SuperNova. The weapon was lying along the stiff body, with the stock between the legs and the barrel pointing to where the head had been. Now only parts of it remained; the right-hand side, the lower jaw and large parts of the neck were no longer there. The force of the blast had ripped everything away, and the concentrated injuries indicated that the distance between the barrel and the body had been minimal. Presumably it had been pushed right up against the lower jaw when it was fired.

  However, they were pretty sure they were looking at Jan Ceder. Most of the face was missing, but the nose and the left eye had survived. The scalp was also more or less intact, and that tuft of red hair looked like a clown’s wig perched on top of a sludgy mixture of blood, bits of brain, teeth and fragments of bone. It was a disturbing sight.

  Erik walked over to the body. They had warned him about what he was going to see, but still the colour drained from his face.

  ‘Is it Ceder?’ he asked, even though he knew the answer.

  That kind of thing often happens when we are faced with the truly macabre; only the obvious remains.

  ‘Yes, we found him like this,’ Sebastian replied. ‘The dog was barking like mad.’

  Erik gazed at the body. He was trying to appear rational, but with limited success.

  ‘Shit,’ he managed eventually. In his peripheral vision he saw Torkel arrive and park next to his car. ‘Do you think it’s suicide?’ Erik went on, turning to Sebastian.

  ‘I’m neither a technician nor a forensic pathologist. Would you like me to guess?’ Sebastian said acidly.

  ‘It’s a bit too perfect in my opinion,’ Vanja said as she joined them. She had just found a piece of rope and tied the dog to a tree a short distance away. It was still barking. Erik looked enquiringly at her. ‘What do you mean?’

  Vanja pointed to the gun in Ceder’s deathly white hands.

  ‘I’m assuming that’s the gun that killed the Carlstens?’

  Erik crouched down and examined the shotgun.

  ‘Could be. It’s the right make and model.’

  ‘That bothers me for a start,’ Vanja said. ‘Why would he use the murder weapon to take his own life?’

  ‘Maybe it’s his way of confessing?’

  Sebastian had intended to take a step back, let Vanja take care of this. They were a team now, and in a team you sometimes have to play second fiddle. Even though that wasn’t a role he was used to. However, there was something about Erik Flodin that set him off, and he just couldn’t keep quiet.

  ‘So after taking the trouble to set up an alibi, and spending twenty-four hours in custody flatly denying everything, he comes home, gets out his shotgun, which he’s hidden so well that we couldn’t find it, and shoots himself. Does that sound likely to you?’

  Erik didn’t answer right away. He really didn’t want to start arguing with Sebastian at this point, but after a quick glance at his so-called colleague’s sceptical, condescending expression he decided he had to say something.

  ‘We have no way of knowing what he was thinking,’ he said defiantly. ‘It’s a possibility, isn’t it?’

  ‘It must be wonderful to be you,’ Sebastian said, not even attempting to hold back on the sarcasm. ‘Life is just full of possibilities …’

  ‘It is a possibility.’ Vanja stepped in. Allowing the two of them to carry on bickering was no help whatsoever. ‘But it’s unlikely. If we’d had evidence against him I might be more inclined to take that view – if he was under pressure and it was only a matter of time before we got him. But we had nothing. I’m sorry, Erik, but it just doesn’t make sense.’

  Erik nodded and turned to Torkel, who stopped dead when he saw Ceder and reacted exactly as Sebastian had expected.

  He shook his head. Told them to cordon off the area. Took out his mobile to call Billy.

  He didn’t speculate at all.

  ★ ★ ★

  Billy had never reflected on how much he and the Riksmord team relied on Ursula, but with four murders in one house and another body in a dog pen, he actually felt her absence on a physical level throughout his entire body. It wasn’t so much that they were one person down – Fabian had proved himself a highly competent forensic technician – it was Ursula’s instincts he missed, particularly when it came to deciding which clues to follow up immediately and which to leave until later. His approach was structured and meticulous, but Ursula had an intuitive feeling for what was important. Without her he felt as if all he had done was to gather and organise masses of information. He needed her to prioritise what they had found. She had a unique ability to cut through all those pages, all those reports and possible leads and to find a direction. Right now this was like baling water ou
t of a boat without any time to look for the leak, let alone seal it up.

  And it didn’t feel good.

  He was standing in front of another dead body, trying to appear calm and methodical, as if it was the same old Billy bending over the deceased, but inside a wriggling black snake of anxiety was increasingly making its presence felt.

  The uniformed officers Erik had brought in were busy cordoning off the area, while Fabian had taken the initiative and called Karlstad to ask them to send over the coroner. They didn’t really want to touch the body until he or she arrived; it was essential that everything was done correctly. There would be serious consequences if they were unable to establish the cause of death.

  Either it was suicide, in which case the murders in Torsby would instantly be solved.

  Or it was another murder, taking the investigation to a whole new level. That would mean the killer had struck again, demonstrating a cold, terrifying ruthlessness.

  The third possibility, of course, was that the two cases weren’t connected at all; Ceder could have been murdered for completely different reasons, and the killer had merely exploited the fact that he was under suspicion in order to muddy the waters.

  So many options.

  Too many.

  God, how he missed Ursula and her sharp mind.

  He decided to start with the gun. Fabian was asked to examine the ground in and near the dog pen. Billy checked whether the gate could be locked and unlocked from the inside; according to Sebastian, it had been closed and locked when he and Vanja discovered the body. The simplest way to work out whether another person had been involved was to find out whether Ceder could have shut himself in; Billy quickly established that this was entirely possible.

  No luck there.

  He then focused on the weapon. He took lots of photographs, too many perhaps, as if the extra pictures might calm him down, before gently trying to free the shotgun from the dead man’s grasp. It wasn’t difficult; rigor mortis had not yet set in, and the hands were still slightly warm, indicating that Ceder hadn’t been dead for very long – an hour, two at the most. They knew exactly when he had been driven home, so he wouldn’t have had time to do very much before he or someone else placed the barrel of the gun underneath his chin.

  Billy went over to the SUV and carefully placed the shotgun on a sheet of thick plastic in the back. He dusted it and found five complete fingerprints; one on the guard below the trigger, two on the stock, and two more on the edge of the magazine. He secured them with film and transferred them to individual cards. He assumed they were Ceder’s, because the prints on the stock were exactly where his left hand had been. Unfortunately he found only a partial print on the trigger itself, much too small and unclear to be of any use.

  Back to the gun itself. He drew back the fore-end, allowing the empty cartridge to drop onto the plastic sheet. He picked it up with a pair of tweezers; it was matt black, with gold-coloured metal around the primer – the same kind of ammunition they had found at the Carlsten house. Saga 12.70 44 gr. His stomach turned to a block of ice.

  He shouted to Torkel, who was talking to Sebastian and Vanja; all three of them came hurrying over. ‘What have you found?’ Torkel wanted to know immediately.

  Billy showed them the cartridge. ‘It’s the same ammunition as we found at the house.’

  ‘So this is the gun that was used?’ Vanja asked eagerly. Billy shook his head.

  ‘I can’t say for sure. The National Forensics Lab will have to help us out there.’ He pointed to the side of the cartridge. ‘When the hammer strikes the primer, it makes a little dent in the metal just here. That dent is unique to each shotgun, and we have two cartridges – one from here, and one from the Carlsten house.’

  Torkel nodded encouragingly.

  ‘Good – in that case I’ll ask Erik if someone can take the gun and the cartridges over to the lab in Linköping. We need to know as soon as possible if it’s the same gun.’ He went off to speak to Erik, who was talking to Fredrika.

  ‘Well done,’ Vanja said to Billy. He searched for signs of irony, but couldn’t find any; it sounded as if she meant it. He gave her a little smile, but felt as if he’d only come up with the obvious, something that anyone with a pair of eyes could have spotted. He was no Ursula, not by a long way.

  ‘Fingerprints?’ Vanja went on.

  ‘I need to double-check our records, but my gut feeling is they’re Ceder’s, and no one else’s.’

  Vanja turned to Sebastian.

  ‘What do you think? What did Ceder do when he got home? Did he get in touch with the killer?’

  ‘Billy!’ Fabian shouted all of a sudden. His voice was shrill; he had found something. Billy, Sebastian and Vanja quickly went over to join Fabian, who was crouching down outside the gate of the dog pen.

  ‘He was here.’

  They could all see a clear footprint on the ground.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man who wears size forty-four boots.’

  Ursula was starting to get a headache. She had been sitting in front of the computer for hours, concentrating hard – totally against doctor’s orders. In spite of the steadily increasing pain, she wanted to carry on. It was incredibly liberating to focus on something other than herself, even though the material she had received from Billy was far from easy. It was a terrible crime – an entire family wiped out, by someone who could pull a trigger and watch as children were ripped apart. That was the strongest impression she had of the killer: coldness.

  There was nothing in the pictures to indicate rage or any other motive apart from the need to kill. Nothing had been smashed, there was no sign that anything had been ransacked or thrown around. The bodies had simply been left where they were.

  Ice cold. Methodical.

  The other thing that struck her was how quickly everything must have happened. The mother had died instantly, the boy in the kitchen hadn’t even had time to get up from his chair, the father hadn’t made it down the stairs. The only one who seemed to have had the chance to react was the younger boy, Fred, who had run from the living room, through the kitchen, upstairs and into the wardrobe to try and hide.

  Something was bothering Ursula.

  The timing. It had all happened so fast as far as the rest of the family was concerned, but Fred’s situation was different.

  She got up, went into the kitchen and swallowed two painkillers with a glass of cold water. Took a deep breath.

  What was it that didn’t fit?

  She went back to the computer.

  The police report concluded that the father hadn’t got any further because he was helping Fred to hide. He had used his last minute to try to conceal his son, then he met the killer on his way to the stairs. It was an entirely credible scenario.

  And yet … something didn’t fit.

  The perpetrator rings the bell. Karin Carlsten opens the door. Dies. The eight-year-old is in the kitchen. Dies. By this stage the killer should see the younger boy racing through the kitchen. Why didn’t he shoot the child there and then? Fred must have run straight past him. Did he need to reload?

  Ursula had checked: a fully loaded Benelli SuperNova held four cartridges, plus one in the bore. A person who displays such coldness should be completely prepared, carrying a fully loaded gun. Anything else would be unthinkable. Therefore, he must have had at least two cartridges left. He hadn’t fired and missed; the forensic examination of the scene had established that beyond doubt. No shots that had missed their target had been fired in the house.

  He was ice cold, focused.

  He wanted to be certain.

  He wanted to shoot them at close range. That suited him, Ursula felt.

  So he sees the boy in the kitchen. Sees him run up the stairs. Perhaps Fred is calling to his father.

  He lets him run. He knows that he will find him up there anyway.

  Ursula clicked on the images of the bloody footprints. They led out of the kitchen towards the stairs, grew fainter, then disap
peared completely before they reached the first step. The boy had been running for his life.

  God, how he must have run.

  She looked at the pictures again. Little bloody prints on the floor.

  Then she saw it. Saw what she had been searching for.

  The thing that didn’t fit.

  The boy hadn’t run at all.

  Fabian had lifted the print with a plaster cast.

  The team gathered at the SUV for a quick run-through. Erik was standing next to Fredrika, his face ashen.

  The same boots.

  The wear on the left-hand side at the front was identical. There could be no doubt. This wasn’t a coincidence.

  Two crime scenes.

  The same boots.

  The same killer.

  For a second they stood in silence, overcome by the seriousness of the realisation that the killer had struck again.

  ‘Billy, check out the make and model of the boots, then everyone needs to pitch in to find out where they were sold,’ Torkel said, bringing them back to the moment.

  Vanja glanced over at the pen, where Jan Ceder was still slumped against the roughly hewn wall of the kennel, and put her thoughts into words:

  ‘So Ceder was probably shot only an hour or so after we released him, with the gun he said had been stolen.’

  ‘How many people knew we were letting him go?’ Billy asked.

  ‘Far too many, unfortunately,’ Torkel said with a sigh. ‘A crowd of reporters saw him leave, and the prosecutor made a statement in a radio interview half an hour later.’

  Vanja shook her head wearily. ‘Idiot.’

  ‘To be fair, we usually let the media know when we release a suspect,’ Torkel said in an attempt to salvage Malin Åkerblad’s reputation. The look on Vanja’s face told him he was wasting his time.