She trained regularly at the local gymnastics club, and early on she finished third in a competition. She dreamed of becoming an air hostess. An unusual dream for a little girl in one of Hallunda’s tower blocks, but perhaps not that surprising. Angelica Reyes wanted to see the world. In her teens, she’d developed a wanderlust that had never really waned.
It’s not easy to follow those incremental changes after so much time has passed; it’s more a case of feeling your way to them. Her wanderlust remained, but apparently started to manifest itself in other ways. A friend explained how Angelica loved smoking marijuana, even at the age of fifteen. Is that true? Could be, you have to assume.
A little while later, Birck and I listen to the sound recordings placed at the heart of the preliminary investigation. They were considered crucial to the overall picture of her. The interviews are stored as digital sound files on a thumb drive, and Birck clicks between them with a confused look on his face.
‘They’re not in any kind of order,’ he mutters. ‘Jeez, I can’t find anything here. There’s no way this is Levin’s doing.’
‘It probably isn’t,’ I say. ‘He didn’t like computers. I’d guess it was an assistant who put this together.’
The files are of various people talking about Angelica Reyes, and as she approaches her teens they describe a person who is changing, changing in ways that are seemingly difficult to pin down.
‘She became, you know,’ one of her classmates from middle and high school says, ‘well, things started to happen around her. Everything was fine until we started in sixth grade, I think it was. She started smoking — cigarettes, I mean — and drinking. She went to parties with older guys, that sort of thing. She was skiving off all the fucking time, you know, and then before long she was in the smoking area every day, if she even made it to school. Then, in sixth or seventh grade I think, this thing happened. She claimed that she’d been at a party and these two guys had raped her. I think that’s what pushed her over the edge, or whatever you say, because no one believed her. By then there were all sorts of rumours flying around about her. She was a whore, a slut, this, that, and the other. Maybe she’d had sex with them, but rape? Everyone laughed at the idea. She didn’t report it to the police, and it was her word against theirs anyway. When a few months later it turned out that she was still hanging out with them — the guys who raped her — getting stoned with them and even staying over at one of their places, everyone saw that as evidence that it had never happened. And anyway, whichever version was the truth, she still looked like a nutter — who the fuck hangs out with people they’ve been raped by? If, on the other hand, she hadn’t been raped, who the fuck falsely accuses people of crimes that serious? She was after attention, that was it. That was our take on it.’
Then the classmate on the tape goes quiet, before adding:
‘I haven’t ever given it much thought. In fact, it’s only just occurred to me, but by then she might not have had anyone else to turn to except them.’
Birck stares at the computer screen.
‘Jesus Christ.’ He turns his attention to the rest of the material. ‘Is the rape in the records?’
It isn’t. There was never a formal complaint, and no witnesses, just hearsay. A crime that disappears, like so many others.
Before long, her parents could no longer cope. They received comprehensive support from Social Services, without any significant impact. She developed a benzo addiction and in September 2003 she was remanded into a secure juvenile care home. When she emerged a few months later, she picked up exactly where she’d left off.
According to Stockholm’s Prostitution Unit, it was about then that she started guzzling increasing quantities of alcohol and tablets.
‘Autumn 2007,’ I read aloud. ‘She’s placed into care, and when she’s due for release, Social Services are notified. They write: Reyes reports that she is currently of no fixed abode and has been staying with friends and acquaintances. Crosschecks with the Prostitution Unit and the Vice Squad reveal that the individuals concerned are known prostitutes and suspected fences.’
‘Well I’ll be …’ Birck says drily.
The subsequent twists and turns in Angelica Reyes’ life are rather predictable: first a conviction for possession, then discovered inside an apartment that was known to house a brothel and instructed to leave. She received treatment for her amphetamine addiction, but before long she was combining speed and opiates, so-called speedballing, according to her medical records. Somewhere along the line, her social worker, who was interviewed on countless occasions after the murder, managed to secure Angelica an apartment at John Ericssonsgatan 16, her registered address from the first of March 2009.
It’s at that address, in her bed in that apartment, that she was found stabbed to death in the early hours of the thirteenth of October 2010.
Hallunda, Norsborg, Salem. The three vast concrete housing estates are different places, yet not really, and I recognise myself in Angelica Reyes’ biography. I can see us there, me and Grim, almost passing through the scenes where it all played out. We’re a few years older, but not many.
I think about Angelica Reyes, being thirteen or fourteen and being raped. That was the kind of story you’d hear out round our way, about people getting into trouble. And bad jokes of course. Someone once said that Norsborg’s county bird emblem is a fucking police helicopter. Someone else, better read than his mates, didn’t get it and protested: ‘Norsborg isn’t a county, you idiot.’
‘Right,’ Birck says, rounding up. ‘So they realise straightaway that they’re looking at a dead prostitute. The money lying on the bedside table, two thousand kronor, suggests that she’d recently had a client. They think they’re looking for a punter.’
‘Or a pimp.’
‘It’s almost never the pimp. The girls are worth too much to them. My money’s on a punter. He pays up, and Reyes puts the money on table. Then they get on with it, until something happens to make this punter see red.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, what do you reckon? Like he’s struggling to get it up, and Reyes makes some comment? He might think it’s a dig, sometimes that’s all it takes. I think it happens quite a lot — that when they do get the chance to perform, they can’t. She has the misfortune to meet a client who has violent tendencies that night, someone who is convinced that his fragile masculinity is inextricably linked to the equipment between his legs.’
‘I think that was the working theory that emerged then,’ I say as I flip though the material in front of us, looking for the surveillance memo written before the first briefing.
‘Probably because that’s what happened. It nearly always is in cases like this. They never managed to find the right punter, that’s all. What this is — and you’ll have to excuse my lack of political correctness here, because I don’t give a shit — is a typical whore-murder, which they have the misfortune of not being able to solve.’ He looks at me. ‘But you don’t believe that.’
‘I don’t know.’ I stop looking through the material, and check the time. ‘But it is nearly lunch.’
‘Which reminds me, I’m having lunch with an acquaintance from the National Board of Forensic Medicine. He’s a real demon when it comes to DNA, perhaps he can help us with this.’ He laughs sarcastically. ‘I mean, we’re going to need all the help we can get. What are you doing?’
I’m meeting Sam.
9
You have to learn to live with each other, I think to myself, sitting opposite her at one of the window tables in Mäster Anders’ restaurant, halfway through lunch. If you do that, you can do anything, I think.
Learning to live with someone else. That’s the hardest part.
‘I’m not saying we have to have kids now,’ I say, ‘but maybe we should be talking about it.’
‘We have talked about it.’
‘Don’t you want to?�
�
Sam puts a bit of pork schnitzel into her mouth and chews slowly.
‘I was the one who brought it up in the first place,’ she says.
‘Exactly. What’s changed?’
‘I …’ She sips her low-alcohol beer. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Is it something to do with me?’
‘I’ve never liked your shoes.’
‘My shoes?’
She laughs.
‘Kidding.’
‘Dead funny.’
‘Sorry.’ She reaches for my hand. The palm of her hand is smooth and warm. ‘I do that when I’m nervous.’
‘I know.’
She was the one who brought up the subject of kids. That’s how we ended up getting Kit, our cat, who is basically useless in terms of doing anything other than wandering around looking gormless. The idea, I think, was to see whether we could manage to share the responsibility of anything more alive than pot plants. Until a while back, I was scared of it, but then, I don’t know, something changed. Something inside me.
We spent a week together in Athens at the end of the summer. We were going to sunbathe, go swimming, and visit the city’s ancient worlds, admire its art and architecture. But then the Greek economy collapsed, and not long afterwards came the reports of the refugee disasters in the Aegean Sea. We couldn’t cancel the trip, so we decided to go anyway and see whether we could do anything to help. We handed out toys and bottled water to the few refugee families we saw, but that was the most disturbing thing about the whole experience: just how few refugee families we saw. You didn’t notice them at all. They’d hit the mainland and then — poof — disappear.
Exploring a city where people disappear like that isn’t terribly appealing, so for the most part we stayed in our hotel room and had sex. One time, Sam emerged from the bathroom afterwards with a troubled look on her face, and with her slim, tattooed body glistening in the warmth of the room.
‘I think I’m ovulating,’ she said.
For the rest of our time in Athens, I was walking around with something in my chest, a feeling I couldn’t put into words. She didn’t get pregnant, to her obvious relief, while I was … well, what was I? Not disappointed, that’s not the right word. I don’t know …
‘What are you up to at the moment, anyway?’ Sam asks, breaking my train of thought. ‘At work, I mean.’
‘Are we finished talking about kids?’
‘Leo. Give me a bit of time. What are you doing at work?’
‘I’m on an old case. It’s going to be transferred soon, which Morovi sees as a personal defeat. We’ve got a week to solve it.’
‘Who had the case to begin with?’
‘Levin.’
Sam’s lips form a little ‘o’.
‘I understand,’ she says.
We carry on eating, not talking about kids or work. It’s nice, but I still feel a bit down. I spent so long working so close to Levin, first at Violent Crime and then during his short spell in charge of Internal Affairs, yet there was so much that he never told me.
Then he died.
Levin died. Was murdered. And I was injured in the operation to arrest the perpetrator. Which was how I ended up in hospital, which was when Grim disappeared.
For a few days that summer, the tabloids and broadsheets all ran the extensive search for the missing John Grimberg as their top story. Several times I heard the chopping of rotor blades outside my hospital window. I would convince myself that the whirr was accompanied by sirens, yet each time I had to accept that although the rotors were real, the sirens were coming from inside my own head. A desperate search was in progress, and hundreds of officers from across Greater Stockholm had been tasked with finding him. They had Stockholm’s Central Station under surveillance, as well as the two main airports, and were attempting to deploy everything at their disposal, from dog units to mobile-phone records, but to no avail.
I lay there smiling to myself in my hospital bed, while no one was looking. He stayed disappeared, I didn’t hear a peep out of him.
Christ, I need to tell her.
‘There’s something I think I’d …’
‘I’m not really hungry,’ she interrupted.
‘Huh. Me neither.’
‘And we live pretty close to here,’ she went on. ‘And I don’t need to be at the gallery for another half an hour.’
‘And?’ I say, confused, my thoughts elsewhere.
‘Leo.’ She leans across the table. ‘I’m asking to go back to ours so that you can fuck me.’
When I arrive back at HQ afterwards, Birck gives me a funny look.
‘What’s up with you then? You look … high, almost.’
‘How was lunch at National Forensics?’
‘Not a patch on yours, by the looks of it.’
10
The room down in the archive soon feels like a whole different world. Above ground, it’s November, and 2015, but down here, behind the glass walls, it’s October, and 2010. The serial rapist in Örebro has been arrested, and wherever you go you hear ‘Dancing on My Own’ by Robyn, or Eminem and Rihanna’s ‘Love the Way You Lie’. The Swedish election results are just a few weeks old. The financial crisis lies draped over the globe like a sodden blanket.
It’s in that world that news of the murder of Angelica Reyes arrives, and it does so carefully and discreetly. On day one, a half-page story in the paper; day three, a single paragraph; day four, nothing. She is forgotten.
The next week, Birck and I work on the case from first thing till late, day after day. There are no signs of any errors or mistakes in the investigation. It was unsuccessful nonetheless.
The crime scene itself reveals less than might’ve been hoped for. This ought to be a cause for concern, yet the documents show no signs of that, not at first.
A few textile fibres are recovered from the rug, the bed, and Angelica Reyes’ abdomen — by her navel. They are likely to have come from the perpetrator, but they cannot be linked to anyone or anything. Not only that, one of the bloodstains comes from someone other than the victim. This is also presumed to have come from the assailant, but repeated trawls of the DNA register draw only blanks.
What ought to be helpful is the mobile phone. It belongs to Angelica Reyes and is discovered in Kronoberg Park in the early hours of the thirteenth of October. A mother taking her five-year-old to preschool stops and picks the phone up off the ground. It’s soon handed over to the police, lifeless and dirty, rendered useless by a night out in the rain. No fingerprints, but traces of blood. Angelica’s blood.
My pulse is quickening. Kronoberg Park is sealed off while an extensive search for forensic evidence is conducted. Nothing is recovered. The rain along with the hundreds or perhaps even thousands of people who have moved through the area since the time of the crime have destroyed the little evidence it might have been possible to recover.
A strange article from her home captures the imagination. A little USB thumb drive, black, matt finish, no cap.
It contains seventy-two childhood images, from 1986 to 2001, many of them scanned: Angelica Reyes, whose roots spread from Santiago to Hallunda; photos of a sunny Chile, a smiling family in a courtyard somewhere; in another, indoors this time, a chubby little child crawling across the floor. Pictures from a first bike ride with training wheels, a family dinner, and then — all of a sudden — we’re in Sweden. You can tell by the light — colder, not as close. From there on, it’s images of growing up amidst the concrete, rows of tower blocks, a last-day-of-school photo showing Angelica Reyes laughing, revealing her white teeth. She has slight acne. It’s 1998. She’s rarely on her own in a photo; you’d probably never guess what lay ahead for her. But perhaps there was a clue there — the look in her eyes, a longing to get away.
Interviews with her relatives reveal nothing more than this: in 2006, she went through the photo
album in her parents’ flat, picked out a few pictures, and had them digitised. She wanted to be able to keep them with her, she said. Further investigations confirm this — she used to keep the USB stick in her handbag.
That’s not where it was found. Instead, it was discovered behind Angelica Reyes’ bed, in a hole in the wall just big enough to hide it in. She probably made the hole herself — the estate agent who inspected the flat before she moved in failed to mention it.
Angelica Reyes doesn’t own a computer, which makes it all that little bit more confusing. Since there are no signs that the USB has been used or moved, it’s unlikely to be linked to the crime itself, yet in the files Levin has added lots of notes and question marks about that particular detail. Perhaps she wanted to store it in a more secure place than her handbag? he proposes tentatively. Then: Pictures can often be very important to people — sometimes it’s all they have.
Birck turns a page in one of the files, scratches his head, and looks tenderly at the cigarette packet I’m spinning between my fingers.
‘A mobile phone, a few fibres, a whole array of blood spatter which cannot be tied to anyone, that can’t even be usefully analysed by Forensics — okay, there’s a decent DNA sample, but with zero matches in the database — and a USB stick full of pictures of Santiago and Hallunda. That’s all they’ve got?’
‘Looks that way,’ I say. ‘But they seem pretty optimistic anyway.’
‘And my contact at National Forensics had nothing for us,’ Birck goes on. ‘Cold,’ he said. ‘The Reyes case is ice cold.’ Which it is.
It is. But back then, in 2010, it’s burning hot.
In the days after the murder, the team chart her last movements. They talk to friends, social workers, and then, later, old classmates and teachers. They are shown the pictures from the USB stick, and asked whether any of them stand out. They don’t.
Angelica didn’t keep a journal, but they get hold of her diary via one of her friends. Each side is scanned in and stored. It doesn’t look as though she used it very much. Perhaps she didn’t have that many appointments, at least not of the kind you write in your diary.
The Thin Blue Line Page 3