The Silent Girl (Sebastian Bergman 4)

by Michael Hjorth

  ‘So plenty of people knew he was out, but only a few could have done this.’ Sebastian hadn’t said anything for a long time, but now he stepped forward. These moments were the ones he enjoyed the most: when a case took a different turn, and instead of having too little to work on, they suddenly had too much. Everyone on the team felt the same, to a certain extent. You didn’t apply to join Riksmord unless you liked a challenge and thrived under pressure. However, Sebastian was definitely the one who revelled in those instances where the ground opened up beneath their feet.

  ‘How do you know that?’ Erik asked, justifiably sceptical. It was obvious that he had some way to go before he could see the charm in these situations. Sebastian stared him down. If he wanted to challenge Sebastian, that was fine, but he needed to listen.

  ‘The gun. This tells us that Ceder knew who had it. The killer knew that Ceder knew, but he didn’t trust him to keep quiet.’

  He was pleased to see everyone taking in what he had said and beginning to think along the same lines. Even Erik nodded. Either he really was listening, or he had got fed up of being difficult. Sebastian didn’t really care which.

  ‘Let’s say he’d lent it to someone,’ he went on, almost enjoying himself. ‘It was a very expensive shotgun – he wouldn’t lend it to just anyone. That’s why his death had to look like suicide – so that we wouldn’t start checking out his friends.’

  He turned to Erik.

  ‘He can’t have had the biggest circle of acquaintances in the world – put them under pressure. Go for his friends.’

  Torkel nodded.

  ‘Good idea, Sebastian. We’ll start there. Erik, we’ll need your help – you know who he hung out with.’

  It was a long time since Torkel had looked appreciatively at Sebastian, but he was clearly pleased. Sebastian felt quite proud; he could see that Vanja was impressed too.

  Why wasn’t he like this more often? he wondered. Focused, energetic, engaged – instead of bored and switched off.

  Vanja liked him when he behaved this way, and what he wanted more than anything was her love and respect.

  Why wasn’t he like this more often?

  She had even asked him why he had started working with the police. Nothing else. Nothing about all his women. Nothing about Ursula or Ellinor. No, when they had the chance to chat, her first question, in fact her only question, had been about the police.

  Because that was what really mattered to her. She was a police officer, and it was a major part of her identity. Perhaps it formed the whole of her identity, particularly now she was no longer her father’s daughter.

  He needed to remember that. He would show her why he wanted to work with the police, he promised himself. He would be really good from now on.

  Torkel’s mobile rang; it was Ursula. They could all see from his expression that it was important.

  Sebastian wasn’t the only one who was good.

  So was Ursula.

  Really good.

  Billy parked the SUV outside the white two-storey house and they got out. Everything was quiet, except for the blue-and-white police tape still fluttering in the breeze up on the veranda. Sebastian looked up dubiously at the building. He knew the bodies were no longer there, but he still found it difficult to enter a place where children had been executed.

  ‘Are you coming?’ Vanja called from the front door; Torkel and Billy had already gone inside. Sebastian nodded and took a deep breath. After all, he had seen the pictures already, and if he was going to keep the promise he had just made and make more of a contribution to this case, then he had to put in the effort.

  Which included a visit to the scene of the crime, whether he liked it or not.

  He ducked under the tape, went up the seven steps to join Vanja, then stopped. A metre or so inside the door was a huge patch of dried blood. He opened his folder and found the pictures the technicians had taken when they arrived. Karin Carlsten lying on her back, the charred black gunshot wound against her white sweater.

  ‘What do you think?’ Vanja asked, leaning over to see the photograph.

  Sebastian looked up, examined the front door, turned to the steps and back again.

  ‘It was planned,’ he said. ‘This wasn’t done on a whim, or in a moment of anger.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I don’t know, but there are plenty of indications.’

  He turned around again and pointed to the spot where they had parked the SUV.

  ‘If he’d got angry with the family somewhere else, he would have driven home, fetched the gun, parked the car, rushed up the steps, yanked open the door and stormed in. This …’ He made a sweeping gesture. ‘This tells us that he rang the bell, waited, got ready, and put the barrel of the gun to Karin’s chest when she came to the door.’

  They stepped around the blood and carried on into the house.

  ‘Has he killed before?’ Vanja wondered as they approached the kitchen. ‘Is there any point in going back over unsolved murders?’

  ‘Maybe. He certainly wouldn’t have any problem in doing it again,’ Sebastian replied. They passed Torkel and Billy, who had stopped in the kitchen. Sebastian glanced at the bloodstains by the table, where the child’s footprints were still clearly visible. ‘Not after this.’

  ‘Jan Ceder proves that.’

  ‘True …’

  Torkel watched as Sebastian and Vanja made for the stairs; he took out his phone and called Ursula, who answered right away.

  ‘We’re in the house now. What have you found?’

  ‘Are you in the kitchen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ursula leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She had stayed away from her screen while Torkel was driving to the scene, but her headache had still got worse.

  ‘Are the footprints still there, or has some local bright spark decided to do a little cleaning?’

  Torkel smiled. Whatever happened, Ursula retained her total lack of confidence in any police officer who didn’t work for Riksmord.

  ‘They’re still there.’

  ‘I want you to measure them – measure the length.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s something I need to check,’ Ursula replied, her tone making it very clear that there was no point in asking for further information at this stage. Torkel turned to Billy.

  ‘Could you measure the footprints, please?’

  Billy looked as if he would like to ask why, but held his tongue and went off to the SUV. Torkel waited until he was out of earshot, then resumed the conversation with Ursula.

  ‘How are you?’ he said gently. ‘You sound tired.’

  ‘I’ve got a splitting headache.’

  ‘You should only be working if you can cope.’

  ‘I’ve taken it easy for long enough.’ Ursula leaned forward and clicked on a document in which she had marked several sections.

  ‘I miss you,’ she heard Torkel say softly.

  ‘That’s very sweet of you,’ she said, enlarging the text on the screen. She knew she sounded slightly dismissive, but she really didn’t have the energy to pander to Torkel and concentrate on the job, and the job was more important. ‘According to the material I have, there was a pair of boots and a pair of shoes in the hallway, size thirty-two.’

  ‘If that’s what it says I’m sure it’s correct – would you like me to check?’ Torkel glanced at the shoe rack in the hallway. ‘Nothing’s been moved.’

  ‘No, there’s no need.’ Torkel could hear Ursula tapping away on her keyboard. ‘Approximately twenty point five centimetres.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘If you wear size thirty-two shoes, the foot is approximately twenty point five centimetres long,’ Ursula explained, closing her eyes once again as a stab of pain shot through her head. The tablets hadn’t helped at all. ‘How long are the footprints?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ Torkel replied as Billy reappeared with a tape measure in his hand. Torkel nodded to the prints in the
congealed blood, and Billy knelt down.

  ‘The assumption is that the boy who was found in the wardrobe ran through the kitchen after the second shot, and trampled in his brother’s blood,’ Ursula said, getting up and going into the bathroom. ‘But for a start the prints were made by someone who was walking, not running, and secondly the boy in the wardrobe has too little dried blood on his feet to have gone through the pool in the kitchen.’

  She opened the bathroom cabinet and took out a bottle of a stronger analgesic, shook out a tablet and put it in her mouth. She bent down and filled her mouth with cold water from the tap, then threw back her head and swallowed it. She put the phone back to her ear as she left the bathroom.

  ‘Even if most of it had been wiped off on the floor or on a rug or something on his way up to the bedroom, the soles of his feet should have looked different.’

  She sat down and clicked on the photographs of the six-year-old who had tried to hide. The sight was equally painful each time she saw it. ‘There are only odd flecks of blood, probably his own.’

  Billy straightened up and Torkel looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘Twenty-three centimetres, maybe a fraction over.’

  ‘Twenty-three centimetres,’ Torkel relayed to Ursula. She didn’t answer immediately, but he could hear her tapping on the keyboard again.

  ‘Size thirty-five or thirty-six.’

  Suddenly Torkel realised what Ursula was saying, what she had seen, and what she had proved with their help.

  The footprints in the blood didn’t belong to the boy they had found in the wardrobe.

  Someone else had been in the house.

  ★ ★ ★

  ‘Who could do such a thing?’

  Vanja and Sebastian were standing side by side, gazing into the wardrobe. Sebastian still had his folder open, but neither of them was looking at the pictures. The traces left in the wardrobe made that unnecessary. It was unbearable.

  ‘Kill children, you mean?’ Sebastian wondered.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘More people than you’d think. In order to do this you have to dehumanise your victims, make them …’ Sebastian fell silent. Outside they could hear the sound of birdsong.

  The sound of spring.

  Full of life.

  ‘Once you’ve done that, the age of the victim doesn’t really matter,’ he went on, closing the folder.

  They turned and left the bedroom. On the narrow landing Vanja glanced at the blood on the bathroom door.

  ‘Does all this tell you anything about the person who did it?’ She made a sweeping gesture that encompassed the entire house, but before Sebastian had time to answer, they heard Torkel calling to them.

  Telling them to come downstairs.

  Right now.

  ★ ★ ★

  They had been wrong, apparently. It wasn’t the younger brother who had run through the blood.

  It was someone else.

  The size of the prints suggested a child or a small woman – most probably a child, as no one had contacted the police. But who could it be?

  ‘I spoke to Erik,’ Billy said on his way back into the kitchen. ‘No children reported missing since last Wednesday. No women either.’

  Torkel turned to Vanja. ‘Check with the neighbours, see if they know who might have been here.’ She nodded and left the house.

  ‘Search the house again,’ Torkel told Billy. ‘See if you can find any trace of a fifth person.’

  Billy went upstairs while Sebastian stayed where he was, contemplating the footprints in the blood. He glanced over at the living room; what had actually happened here? The mother is shot. The older son is shot – but then what? Were there two of them watching TV? The younger brother and someone else? Fred runs past the killer. Up the stairs. The murderer knows that the family consists of two adults and two boys; he has just shot one child and seen the other, so he doesn’t even look in the living room where a third child is hiding.

  Possible.

  Credible, even.

  But then what?

  ‘Come with me,’ Torkel said, interrupting his train of thought.

  ★ ★ ★

  They followed the bloody footprints until they faded at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Whoever it was didn’t go up,’ Torkel stated, considering the possibilities. On the right was a small study, and further along there were two more doors, one leading to a bathroom containing a bath, a double washbasin and a toilet.

  The second door led to an L-shaped utility room. It was long and narrow, and the shelves crammed with everything from gardening tools to hockey equipment opposite a washing machine and tumble dryer made it feel even more cramped. There was another door at the far end. Torkel tried it; locked. He turned the latch above the handle, and suddenly they were looking out over the lawn, extending down to the meadow. He examined the door. It was the old-fashioned type that didn’t need a key to lock it from the outside; you just pulled it shut. There was no reason why the police should have paid it any attention when they first arrived on the scene.

  Torkel and Sebastian stepped out into the sunshine at the back of the house.

  ‘You witness several murders,’ Torkel said. ‘You run out here …’ He took in his surroundings. ‘Where do you go?’

  Sebastian sensed that the question was rhetorical, but chose to answer anyway.

  ‘Everyone reacts differently.’ He took a few steps across the lawn, turned to face the forest. No buildings in sight to offer the most obvious means of protection. ‘Some people would just run away,’ he went on, turning back to Torkel. ‘Run as far as possible without thinking. Others would be surprisingly rational.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Sebastian looked up at the closed back door; in his mind’s eye he saw it open and a child or a woman emerge. The cold must have struck them immediately.

  ‘It was pretty cold just after nine o’clock in the morning. The others were still in their pyjamas, and we know that he or she was barefoot.’

  ‘So he ran back inside?’

  ‘But this door was locked.’

  They set off back towards the front door. As they reached the corner of the house, Torkel stopped. The grass at the bottom of the drainpipe had been washed away, leaving loose, damp earth.

  The imprint of a bare foot. The wet surface had made the print swell, but Torkel thought it was probably about the same size as the footprints in the blood in the kitchen.

  The person ran back. Towards the front door.

  Torkel moved fast, up the steps and onto the veranda. Once he reached the hallway he stopped and waited for Sebastian, then held out his hand. Sebastian assumed he wanted the folder, and passed it over.

  Torkel quickly found the relevant page.

  ‘They didn’t find any size thirty-five or thirty-six shoes. So you think whoever ran away came back in to grab a coat and shoes?’

  ‘That would be my guess.’

  ‘There were five toothbrushes in the bathroom upstairs, and I found this.’

  Torkel and Sebastian spun around; Billy was standing in the kitchen doorway with a small red suitcase in his gloved hand. ‘It was in the boys’ room.’

  ‘Have you looked inside?’

  Billy nodded. ‘Mainly clothes. Size 146. Girl’s clothes.’

  She had made it.

  Behind a low fence the mountain opened up, leading into oblivion. The gaping hole in the rock that would swallow her up. Hide her on the outside, just as she was already hidden on the inside.

  She crouched down behind the bushes as close to the entrance as she could get without risking being seen, and scanned the open space in front of the cave.

  No sign of anyone.

  No cars, no sound of approaching voices.

  She straightened up and ran over to the fence, across the little gravelled area. A dented yellow metal sign was fastened to the wire mesh; it showed a policeman with his hand raised in a ‘Stop’ gesture, with the words ‘Authorised persons only
. Parents or guardians are responsible for their children’ printed below.

  The fence seemed to be there to keep out those who were too small to read the sign. It was no more than a metre high, and in some places the posts had fallen down.

  She had no difficulty climbing over.

  She hesitated before stepping into the darkness. She was going to be hungry. She hadn’t eaten anything since the morning when she devoured the Greek wrap – minus the red onion. She hadn’t drunk anything except the yogurt. But it would be OK. She seemed to remember that water ran down through the earth and rock where it was purified, then it dripped down into caves and formed underground lakes.

  She would sort something out as far as food was concerned. She had the tins she had taken from the cottage. She didn’t want to wait any longer. She was so close now. Just a few more metres and she would disappear for ever. Become unreachable.

  On the outside and on the inside.

  The girl clambered over the fence and marched purposefully down into the old cave system.

  Then she vanished into the darkness.

  ‘Nicole Carlsten.’

  Billy pinned a picture on the board in the incident room as Vanja looked up from the papers in front of her. A dark-haired ten-year-old girl smiled at them from a typical school photo. ‘Aged ten, lives in Stockholm. She’s a cousin of the two boys.’

  ‘And you’re sure it’s her?’ Erik wondered from his place by the door.

  ‘Not completely,’ Vanja replied. ‘According to the Torssons she often stayed with the Carlstens in the holidays, but they didn’t know if she’d been there this week.’

  ‘So where are her parents?’ Sebastian asked. He got to his feet and walked over to the board.

  ‘We tried to contact the mother earlier to tell her about her sister’s death, but she didn’t answer. She works for the Swedish International Development Corporation. I spoke to her boss, and she’s on her way home from Mali.’

  ‘When will she be here?’ Torkel demanded.

  ‘Apparently both mobile coverage and the reliability of flights from Mali are a little hit and miss,’ Vanja explained. ‘Nobody really knows.’