‘It’s tough,’ I say.
‘Tough?’ Birck’s reclining in a chair with his feet on the desk and a cup of vending-machine coffee in his hands. ‘What is?’
‘Working out what’s significant and what isn’t.’
‘Oh right, yes. What did you say to Sam?’
‘Nothing. But she did wonder why I had my gun on the hat stand. And why the hall carpet smelt of whisky.’
Birck laughs. So do I, despite my embarrassment, because you have to do something.
‘You’re going to have to tell her.’
‘I know.’
‘Before she starts getting suspicious.’
‘I think she already is.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Sam is Sam,’ I say. ‘It’s really just a feeling I’ve got.’
She was there in the hall, taking off her winter clothes less than a quarter of an hour after Birck had left. She asked about the weapon on the shelf and the whisky on the carpet and I answered with as few words as I could, since it was so difficult to lie.
‘Is everything okay?’ she asked later, in bed.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘You sure?’ She stroked my cheek. ‘You seem a bit distant.’
After that, she fell asleep, but I lay there with her words echoing around my head. They mixed with my shame about lying and my anxiety about Grim, the need for some kind of sedative stronger than alcohol, and not until much later did sleep finally arrive, like a wave coming to sweep me away.
‘You do know,’ Birck says, next to me, ‘that this is aiding and abetting.’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s worse than anything you’ve done thus far.’
‘I know.’
‘And this has been going on for over a week. Why didn’t you say anything? At least to me. You know if this gets out there’s going to be hell to pay.’
‘What do you want me to say? I know. It was wrong.’
For a second, I wish I’d never said anything, that I’d just kept quiet, kept lying, kept it all to myself. That would’ve been so simple, wouldn’t it, to just keep going as if nothing had happened? It would’ve been simpler than this at any rate.
‘Besides,’ says Birck, ‘a large part of me still thinks that this is nothing more than a particularly hard to solve whore-murder.’
The computer bleeps. Finally, the material has arrived in my email, via the intranet — a large video file and a smaller folder containing the still images from our surveillance of Västmannagatan 66.
23
I open the computer’s media player and play the video. My voice is audible, excited, and impatient in the passenger seat. In the sharp foreground, Västmannagatan 66; and in the background, smaller, more blurred, you can just about make out number 68.
‘We’ll have to see if luck’s on our side for once,’ says Birck.
Falling budgets mean that moving pictures are only to be used when something happens, in this case when someone leaves or arrives at Västmannagatan 66. Not just because video files take up so much storage on the little memory cards, which in turn are considered very expensive, but also because whoever has to sit and sift through the material afterwards doesn’t need to waste more man-hours than absolutely necessary on an activity that, 98 per cent of the time, generates no results.
We’re pinning our hopes on the man having been captured on film outside Västmannagatan 68 at some point when we happened to be documenting someone arriving or leaving the building next door.
This is going to take a fair amount of good fortune.
‘About eleven, according to Sarac,’ I say. ‘Wasn’t it?’
‘If we’re going to believe Grimberg.’
I spool through to quarter-to. The onscreen clock ticks forward a second at a time, 22:45:31, 22:45:32, down in the bottom-right corner. The image freezes for a second, before the clock jumps forward four minutes, then two and a half, then another five, and then four more.
A man leaves Västmannagatan 66, disappears from view. At the same time, a car arrives from the north, its headlights like two white eyes in the darkness. The driver parks outside 68 and then gets out, nothing more than a silhouette in the grainy picture.
It’s a man. He glances over his shoulder, first right and then left, and pushes his hands into the pockets of his coat. He looks to be wearing boots, and he reaches to open the door of number 68 with his left hand.
The picture freezes.
When the frames start rolling again, over fifteen minutes have passed and the car that was parked on the street is gone.
I spool back.
‘There.’ I try and zoom in. ‘It’s the right time, anyway.’
Birck squints.
‘God, this really says it all,’ he mumbles. ‘While Swedish police officers are sitting and staring at an insignificant building, a suspected murderer slips in through the entrance next door.’
I pull out my phone and take a picture of the man’s face on the computer screen. He looks between thirty and fifty — you couldn’t be any more specific than that — with an upright posture and broad shoulders. His nose is unobtrusive, while his cheek- and jawbones are slightly more pronounced. Curly or wavy hair. I think he’s probably got a few days’ worth of stubble on his cheeks, but that could be a trick of the light.
I send the picture to Grim, with the words lukas bengtsson?
yes
how sure are you?
sure
it’s a shitty picture. how sure are you?
very sure
I study the screen. A police radio crackles in Miro Djukic’s ear on the twelfth of October 2010. Lukas Bengtsson. Why does this man claim to be someone he is not? Because he’s got something to hide. He was the one that was out to get her. It was him she was trying to flee. A cop, fuck.
‘Lukas Bengtsson as the perpetrator,’ Birck says slowly. ‘That’s the theory. Correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘A colleague, then. Possibly.’
‘Exactly.’
Birck exhales.
‘So what the fuck do we do now?’
‘We need to look in Reyes’ diary,’ I say. ‘She might have had some relationship to him. There might be something about Lukas Bengtsson in there.’
‘I wonder what he was afraid of,’ mumbles Birck. ‘Was she going to squeal, do you think? Walk into reception downstairs and tell them that he was paying her for sex now and then?’
‘I don’t know.’
In the next room, the radio: It’s ten o’clock. In two hours, Sweden is introducing border controls. Panic, no one says but everyone is thinking.
‘The car,’ says Birck with a start. ‘Fuck me, the car.’
I rewind the recording a bit.
There. A light-coloured Audi arriving. Lights blazing.
‘Wait till it’s right in front of that street lamp,’ says Birck. ‘There. What do you make that out as?’ He puts his finger on the screen. ‘OSK … The numberplate’s filthy isn’t it, but I reckon that’s an eight rather than a six or a three. OSK 853. Check that.’
The registration OSK 853 sits on a car that has passed its annual roadworthiness tests to date, never been reported stolen, and is still with its original owner. So far, so nice and simple.
The problem is that the owner lives in Varvet, an old no-man’s-land down in Småland, and the numberplate in question is attached to a fifteen-year-old Toyota.
And if that weren’t enough, this Toyota is apparently blue in colour.
‘False plates.’ Birck leans back with a nasty grimace and pushes his hands through his hair. ‘Fuck. We’ve got absolutely nothing. What we have is the five-year-old murder of a whore who no one besides us seems to give a shit about. A whore who, according to none other than star witness John Grimberg, may have
been the victim of threats. Meanwhile, the world is in meltdown outside our window, with torrents of refugees completely out of control, gangland carve-ups, waves of robbery and theft, and God knows what.’ He slowly shakes his head. ‘I don’t know what we can do about this, Leo.’
He sounds regretful, which surprises me.
‘We’re on our way to solving a murder,’ I say. ‘If you go to Morovi, we will lose that chance.’
‘It makes no odds,’ says Birck.
‘It certainly does and you know it.’
‘I can’t believe that you lied to me. That you’re lying to Sam.’
‘I’m going to tell her.’
‘Are you?’
‘Yes.’
I call Morovi, who’s in a meeting, and sounds stressed. In the background, someone calls the interior minister and the migration minister, the two men responsible in the eyes of the media and the public for the new border controls in Sweden, ‘clowns’.
‘I can hear you’ve got your hands full,’ I say. ‘But tomorrow, Gabriel and I would like to …’
‘You’re on a course tomorrow,’ Morovi interrupts. ‘Don’t forget.’
‘Am I? Where? What’s it about?’
‘Am I your mother, Leo?’
‘No.’
‘Right then.’
The call ends with a click.
24
I’m looking at the scanned pictures of Angelica Reyes’ diary, a page for each day of the long year that was 2010.
She doesn’t put an awful lot in it: the odd appointment she has to make here and there with her social workers or the housing service, her parents’ birthdays, twenty-fifth and thirtieth birthday parties she’s been invited to. It really doesn’t say much about her, and yet it’s only when I actually sit down with it and start flipping through the diary that the rage comes.
On the twelfth of October 2010, it comes to an end. Someone brings it to an end. The diary doesn’t record many commitments, but they’re there nonetheless. Her mum’s birthday was the ninth of December, and Angelica has written Mum 53, drawn a little heart, and added, Bake a cake!
Those plans come to nothing. It turns white and empty and cold.
She was a person.
When I blink, I’m back in Salem, many years younger and a different person to the one I’ve become, but somehow not. Me and my best friend save a little girl from death. She’s got big headphones and terrified eyes, and dreams of becoming an air hostess. Our lives cross that night, only for an instant. In spite of everything, at the time, none of it seemed particularly ominous. Then things go really bad, as they sometimes do for girls from Hallunda and Norsborg.
For many, things turn out alright, while a few slip down into the darkness. Only very few end up like Angelica.
Not Reyes. Now she’s Angelica.
I think about the blood, and the stabbing.
The fear she must’ve felt, the pain. A stranger — is it a stranger? — in her own home.
I return to the diary. My rage doesn’t blow over, but it sharpens my senses, almost a pleasant sensation.
From the end of September that year, a note in English in the margin: don’t be like the rest of them, darling.
That could’ve been a challenge, an aspiration, directed at someone else. Or is it the point where she decides to cut loose? Is that what those words signify? Maybe. It might also be the case that the note means nothing.
Sometimes words are just words.
And there’s no mention of Lukas Bengtsson, nor a white Audi. Not even Ludwig Sarac.
I wonder where she was planning to go, how the night of the twelfth of October was supposed to end? There’s nothing about that. Maybe there was no plan. I think about Jonna Danielsson, who left life on the street behind. It wasn’t impossible to escape.
I flip to the ninth of December: Mum 53. Bake a cake!
She still had her family. Lukas Bengtsson pushed her so far that she tried to disappear.
25
OSK 853. Audi. White.
I make a note in the margin of my notepad. It’s mid-morning on Friday the thirteenth of November, and I’m sitting blinking to stay awake in a lecture theatre at Forensics, along with colleagues from all over Stockholm.
False plates, I add, and Lukas Bengtsson.
The course is eight hours long, including breaks for lunch and coffee, and since there are detectives present in the audience, these have been made generous. Apparently, I’ve been listed as a delegate since September, but I have no recollection of registering. The course is ‘Modern Forensics in Digital Arenas — a full-day course for detectives in Stockholm’, and is being given by Miranda Shali, the woman informally known within Forensics as ‘the Genius’.
She’s short and slight, with long, dark hair worn up in a thick bun; she’s probably a few years younger than me and has a PhD from Oxford.
The point of the course is to instruct us in how to approach investigations where events occur partly online or in some kind of hardware, such as a computer or a mobile phone.
I write Lotta Jidhoff, Jorge Grens, Ludwig Sarac in my pad.
Why is the man at St Göran’s/in the Audi after Angelica — and Grim?
Whoever can answer those questions, I think to myself, probably knows why she died and who was holding the weapon.
When the afternoon darkness has fallen outside the lecture theatre’s windows and the course is over, I return to the archive room where the files relating to the Angelica Reyes case remain. I find what I’m looking for and quickly make my way back through HQ.
Up in Forensics, the air is dry and cool, and the furniture’s old, but in a way that makes you feel reassured rather than hopeless. Dr Miranda Shali’s room is right at the end of one of the long corridors. I find her sitting at her desk, filling in a form.
‘Yes?’ she says, looking up. ‘What’s this about?’
‘Thanks for a good course.’
‘Did you learn anything?’
‘I think so.’ I hold up the memory stick that was found in the wall behind Angelica Reyes’ bed. ‘I’m wondering about this.’
‘What about it?’
‘That’s what I don’t know. Could be nothing.’
She examines the stick, apparently looking for something that you have to be Miranda Shali to find.
‘Which case is this?’
‘Angelica Reyes.’
Shali’s prominent, dark eyebrows slide up her forehead.
‘Well I never.’ She gives it a last look, before putting it to one side. ‘It’ll be a few weeks. Cold cases go to the back of the queue.’
‘You can’t jump the queue?’
‘Everyone wants to jump the queue.’
‘But …’
‘I’ll have a look as soon as I can. I expect that will be a few weeks.’ She gives me a decisive stare. ‘Okay?’
‘Okay.’
Shit. I can’t help thinking that this is urgent, that someone is in danger.
When I leave the Genius, it’s half-past five in the evening on Friday the thirteenth of November. Four hours later, word comes of something going on in Paris.
That’s when the storm begins.
26
‘Where have you been?’ Sam asks when I get in and she rolls over in bed.
In her hands, The White City, a thin little book with a discomfiting cover.
‘On a course.’
‘Was it good?’
‘It was useable, yes. You?’
‘I’ve been at work. Then I took my clothes off. Since then I’ve been waiting for you.’
As she moves to put the book down, I can make out the curve of her breasts through the fabric of her T-shirt. I get undressed and lie down next to Sam, feel her soft skin against mine.
She runs her hand across
my chest, before removing her knickers in a supple sweep and then stuffing them in my mouth, holding her hand in place so that I can’t spit them out. Her panties are warm, I close my eyes and feel Sam kissing my face, my chin, my neck.
‘You need to spend more time at home,’ she mumbles, her warm breath and her tongue pushing on my chest.
I try to say something.
‘Shhh.’ She pushes the panties further into my mouth, and her hand into my boxers where she takes a tight grip on me.
‘You’re not lying again, are you, Leo?’
For a second, the shame cuts through the lust, makes it wane.
I shake my head.
Sam claws her nails over me, a sharp pain that slowly turns into something else.
She kneels down alongside and looks down at me. Long locks of hair fall across her shoulders and onto the T-shirt that goes down to her belly button. Slowly, she teases her panties from my mouth. Then she straddles me, shifting herself to a comfortable position sitting squarely on my face.
‘Like that,’ she exhales, her eyes closed. ‘Yes, just like that. There.’
I try to say something.
‘Shhh,’ Sam repeats. ‘You’re not supposed to talk now.’ She pushes her fingers through my hair, before grabbing hold of it tightly and grinding her hips against me. ‘You’re going to be quiet now, gonna stay quiet till I …’
The words seep out and slip away through the room.
‘I need …’ I say, and there must be something in my voice, because Sam lifts herself up a bit, leans on her elbows, and rests her head in her hand.
‘What is it? What do you need?’
‘I need to …’
At that very moment, my phone buzzes on the bedside table, a text from Birck.
seen the news?
‘What is it?’ Sam asks again.
‘I don’t know, something must’ve happened.’
I feel for the remote control, and as the bedroom telly flickers into life it’s showing special reports from Paris. Eleven o’clock. It’s not until dawn that the scale of events become apparent. One hundred and thirty dead, probably more.
The Thin Blue Line Page 9