The Tunnel

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  He pulled out the top desk drawer. Drawings. Recent ones. Self-portraits of Jennifer on a hospital bed, observing herself in a mirror. Another pencil drawing, finely detailed, of her brother as he stomped a snake to death. The animal he had learned to associate with his little sister’s life as a junkie.

  Katz moved on to the basement. He passed a hobby room with a couch and chairs and a TV, turned left down a hallway, and suddenly found himself in something that resembled a doctor’s examination room. The setting of her most recent self-portrait.

  A county-hospital stretcher stood along one wall, covered with a paper sheet. There was an IV stand at its head, with a bag of nutrient replacement hanging from one of its hooks.

  An adjustable lamp hung from the ceiling. On the floor was a bottle of hand sanitizer.

  Through the glass doors of a medicine cabinet he could see sterile compresses, syringes, gauze, blood pressure cuffs, and an otoscope. A dozen boxes of methadone with labels from Danderyd Hospital lay on the top shelf.

  A metal hatch had been installed in the far wall; it was one meter high by half a meter wide. It locked from the outside by way of a large padlock. The key hung from a nail.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He guessed that this part of the house had once been equipped to house a boiler.

  A chamber pot stood on the floor next to an empty wine bottle. A camping table held a couple of plastic forks and plates with scraps of food.

  On the far side of the room he could make out a bed.

  Had they been keeping her locked up here since the night they killed Ramón?

  He looked at the body that was lying under the blanket, its back toward him. The even breaths. The light brown hair across its shoulders. At first he thought she was asleep, but he was mistaken.

  “Mum?” she said without turning around.

  “What can I do for you?” asked the attendant behind the archive desk on Agnegatan.

  She briefly explained her errand.

  “Three hits,” he muttered after entering the search terms into the computer. “Would you like me to bring out the material?”

  “Yes, please.”

  The attendant opened the door behind him and vanished in among the sixteen thousand shelf-meters of old investigation materials that went by the name “criminal archives.” Five minutes later he was back with the closed cases in a trolley.

  “Here you go,” he said. “Take as much time as you need.”

  She sat down at one of the reading tables, opened the top folder, and began to page through it.

  The first police report on Carl-Adam Tell had been made in the early nineties, shortly before his divorce. It concerned Beata Roslund’s son from a previous marriage: Eric Söderberg. The boy, fourteen at the time, had told his mother that Tell had wanted them to watch pornographic films together. He hadn’t dared to refuse.

  Beata Roslund had filed the report. A psychologist had talked to the boy. Beata had been present, and according to the transcript she prompted her son to such an extent that in the end she was asked to leave the room. They had watched porn, nothing more, the boy maintained, speaking in a recorded interview that was later transcribed. Tell hadn’t made any sexual advances; they had each been sitting in their own easy chair in the basement hobby room in Vallentuna to watch the VHS tape. According to the boy, the pornography they watched was extremely violent. His stepfather had asked if he liked what he saw.

  Tell, in an initial interrogation, had denied the incident ever happened. He didn’t own any pornographic films, he said; he opposed anything degrading to women and he respected his stepson—he would never in his life think of subjecting him to such abuse. He denied even being alone with the boy on the night in question. The whole family had been at home.

  When asked why he thought the boy might make up such a story, he responded that they ought to ask his wife. According to Tell, Beata Roslund was behind the whole thing. She was trying to get revenge on him. Their marriage had been on the rocks ever since an infidelity came to light a few months before.

  It had been word against word, Eva thought as she sat in the bright light of the reading lamp, listening to the attendant whistle as he worked at the photocopier a few meters away. The police had followed up once the divorce became reality. So Beata Roslund’s husband had not left her after all, as she had told Katz—she herself had pulled the plug. She had demanded her ex-husband be interrogated again.

  She browsed on . . . Beata Roslund had claimed her ex-husband frequented prostitutes and sex clubs that organized orgies, and that he had done so throughout their marriage. She considered it a miscarriage of justice that the two of them had been awarded joint custody of their daughter.

  She opened the next folder. The second report, made seven years later. This time it concerned Jennifer, who had been nine at the time. According to Beata Roslund, the girl had returned from spending the autumn break with her father in poor psychological condition. When she pressured her daughter into telling her what had happened, she said that Tell had brought her to a house in the country one evening. To an orgy involving several men and women, in which the women had been sexually degraded. According to Beata, the girl was given sleeping pills and put to sleep in a separate room, but she woke in the middle of the night when the orgy was in full swing. Her father had found her and brought her back to the room, where she went back to sleep. When she woke up the next morning, they were back in Tell’s flat in Norr Mälarstrand. When Jennifer asked about what had happened the night before, he told her she had just been dreaming.

  Like a witches’ ride to Blåkulla, she thought as she turned the page. Or was there something to the accusations? Had Mattson’s country home already been up and running back then? Or had it been somewhere else? The tunnel, she thought, the one both Jorma and Katz had mentioned? But no names showed up in the investigation, since Tell categorically rejected all the statements as wild fantasies and even filed a counter-action against his ex-wife for slander. Word against word once again, and the investigation was laid to rest. Though sympathies lay with the man’s side of things. The story just did not seem reliable. According to the testimony of an expert witness, they could not rule out the possibility that the girl had fabricated the memories, perhaps with the help of her mother.

  The ex-spouses did not have much contact. An enclosed report from social services stated that they didn’t even see each other on the sporadic occasions they handed over their daughter into the other’s custody; a court appointee took care of that. On paper, the girl was supposed to spend every other week with each parent. But Beata Roslund did everything in her power to obstruct the agreement.

  What was her motivation . . . revenge? Genuine hatred? Or incidents that really had occurred?

  She stood up, walked over to the counter, and returned the materials to the attendant.

  “You said you got three hits,” she said.

  “The third file was opened a year ago,” was the response.

  “So?”

  “The investigations you’ll find in here are all more than fifteen years old . . . archived before digitalization. You can pull up the third one on the guest computer. Or on the intranet. You’re with the Economic Crime Authority, right? I recognize you. It’s too bad about that Hoffman.”

  She ignored the looks she got as she walked down the hall. She hadn’t visited the office in six weeks, but it felt like a year. She got a cup of burned coffee from the break room and glanced quickly at the closed door of Hoffman’s office. His nameplate had been removed.

  As soon as she was inside her office, she navigated to the server and read the report.

  Carl-Adam Tell had been found near his boat at Norr Mälarstrand, drowned, just over one year earlier. The body, which was found ten hours after his death, was autopsied as a matter of routine. Tell had had large amounts of alcohol and sedatives in his blood. The accident had happened late at night, a few days before the boat—a 50-foot catamaran—was to
be stored for the winter. There were no witnesses to the incident. He had probably slipped on the deck, hit the back of his head on the railing, and been knocked unconscious before falling overboard. At least that was how the medical examiner explained the swelling on the back of his head.

  She leaned back in her office chair and looked out the window at the bare trees around Kungsholm Church.

  Had they started with him? The first victim in their orgy of revenge. Had they tracked him down when he was on his boat late at night while heavily under the influence? Had they hit him in the back of the head with a hard object and thrown him overboard? And bided their time for almost a year before they got Ramón and John Sjöholm? All the men they hated for hurting Jennifer.

  But what about what happened at the house? The shootings?

  She brought up the weapons registry to see if Eric Söderberg was listed in it, or if he was a member of a shooting club, but got no results.

  “They do it out of love,” she said as she reclined on the camp bed in front of Katz. “As if I don’t have free will. And you should know . . . Mum is vindictive. She always has been.”

  Her voice was strained; she was in withdrawal.

  “They’d had enough, I guess. All the hate they’ve stored up inside throughout the years—for the men they think have used me—it needs to find an outlet somewhere.”

  She absentmindedly scratched at her arms. Lovely arms, Katz noticed, lithe and muscular. In another life he would have been attracted to her.

  “The treatment centers have never worked for me. Mum lets me stay here when I want to, despite the terrible thing I did to her. I have a key. Beata’s only rule is that I’m only allowed to come at night, when the neighbors won’t notice. God knows how many cold turkeys I’ve done in here. It might sound sick, but the padlock . . . it’s voluntary.”

  She didn’t seem surprised to see him there. As if she had somehow been expecting a visit in her self-imposed prison. She had told him about the murders of Ramón and Sjöholm as dispassionately as if she were talking about people she’d never met. It had all gone down much as Katz had guessed. A mother’s hatred for the men she considered to be exploiting her daughter. A son’s loyalty. And she had also confirmed that she, Ramón, and Sjöholm had delivered women to the network.

  Magnus bought sex from me in Switzerland, when I lived there. He used to do some sick fucking shit to me.

  Wiksten had recognized her when she showed up at the shelter with Ramón. He’d offered them a large amount of money if they could procure what he wanted. That was the money they had used to buy the heroin.

  Without batting an eyelid, she told him about the women they’d tricked, saying that they would drive them to see rich clients, a simple job, and they even paid them in advance. Then they would deliver them, high, to the house.

  There was something wrong with her, Katz thought as he listened. Something had happened to her to transform her into the person she was.

  “Did Mum tell you about the accident?” she asked.

  She sat up on the camp bed. Placed the empty wine bottle on the camping table. Put on the robe that had lain on the floor. The skin of her thighs was covered in goosebumps.

  “When I was sixteen, Dad took me on a road trip through Europe. He stopped at a rest stop outside Frankfurt. We had been driving all night, from Stockholm, and he only made one stop along the way—at a roadside brothel where he knew the owner. He did what he always did at those places. Afterward he was tired . . . drunk. He lay down in the back seat. I knew how soundly he slept. The key was in the ignition. All I had to do was start the car. I drove the car back up the same exit ramp we’d taken and hit the accelerator as hard as I could.”

  She stopped talking and scratched her arms.

  “Afterward no one could tell which car had come from which direction. There were no traffic cameras on that particular stretch of motorway. And it was nighttime, too dark for anyone to get a clear picture of what had happened. They took for granted that the guy in the Porsche had been driving against the traffic. He was only nineteen and had been convicted of careless driving before. And of course they couldn’t question him, because he was dead. But Dad knew the score.”

  She grew quiet. Reached for something on the table; a drawing pad, Katz saw, and a pencil.

  “He broke off contact with me after that.”

  “But you saw him again?”

  “You know how it is; a junkie always needs money.”

  She started drawing. She stopped and measured him with her thumb in the half-light. The lead rasped against the paper.

  “The last time, Ramón came with me. We ended up fighting. I don’t know exactly what happened, because I was super fucking high, but Ramón hit him in the head with something . . . and then we made sure he fell overboard.”

  She held up the drawing for him. It was the start of a portrait of the two of them together. They were in this very room. Katz had his arm around her shoulders. Comforting her, it looked like. Both were nude.

  “You took something from him before you left.”

  She licked her thumb and erased something from the paper. Nodded.

  “Yes. An address book.”

  “The numbers . . . whose are they?”

  She looked at him placidly.

  “Contacts, I think . . . at the different stations.”

  Her eyes were glassy. She had stood up and was hugging her own body.

  “I have memories from my childhood, from other houses, in other cities. I saw things I wasn’t supposed to see. I understood things that were impossible to understand. Dad never touched me . . . but I realized who he was, what he and his friends were up to. We kept the address book for security, in case something happened to one of us. We didn’t even dare to keep it at home.”

  She stopped talking and pulled a plastic bin from beneath the camp bed. Packs of heroin. A few syringes. The drawing had fallen to the floor. Katz’s face had been rubbed out.

  “At Mattson’s house . . . someone came in and executed four people.”

  Katz noticed how the words got stuck in his throat, how the draw was coming back to him, just as strong and as unpredictable as always.

  “It wasn’t Mum and Eric, if that’s what you’re thinking. An alarm was sounded. Someone or some people decided to amputate an injured limb from the greater body. Cut it off. That’s how it works.”

  Her lovely, clear blue irises seemed to see right through him.

  “Hoffman, Mattson, and a bunch of other people whose names you’ll never learn . . . Dad knew them all.”

  Her voice stopped, as if it had faded into the haze of his abstinence. And she wasn’t looking at him, he realized, but at the person behind them.

  “The tunnel,” she whispered as the beam of a flashlight lit up the room. “Dad was the one who created it.”

  She couldn’t reach Katz. His phone was dead; it went straight to voicemail when she called. He was supposed to show up over an hour ago.

  She instinctively knew that something was wrong.

  She dialed Jorma’s number as she stood inside the cafe and watched the daylight disappear. She heard that slight Finnish accent that would never fade, even though he was born and raised in Sweden.

  “Is something wrong?”

  She explained as best she could. She told him about Katz’s call, and how he’d asked her to look up a few things about Jennifer Roslund’s family.

  “I’ll be right over,” he said. “Where are you?”

  “In the city. Outside Ritorno.”

  “Great. I’ll be there in fifteen.”

  They drove toward Vallentuna, which was the best option she could think of for the time being. Katz hadn’t mentioned where he was, but, considering what he’d asked her to look up, it seemed plausible that he’d gone there. The suburbs marched past outside the window, getting fancier and fancier the further east they drove.

  They turned off just before Väsby, followed the GPS directions toward Täby Kyr
kby, and turned north again, approaching the nouveaux riches neighborhoods.

  They parked the car outside a shop five hundred meters from the house and walked the last little bit. Glowing Advent stars hung in windows. She pulled her coat tighter around her body.

  Small, meaningless fragments of thoughts were whirling inside her head. She had a bad feeling about this . . . really bad this time.

  They approached the house, a white, two-story brick villa on a cul-de-sac. Skeletal trampolines on the neighbors’ lawns. The bare trees. A thin layer of snow that had piled up in little drifts in front of garages.

  A car was carelessly parked by the pavement.

  The house was dark; the front door locked.

  They followed a paved pathway to the back of the house. Neither of them said anything. They couldn’t say why, but both knew they didn’t have much time. She wiped a snowflake from her eye, blinked, and saw an empty pool with a gray tarp covering it, a greenhouse reflecting the last of the daylight, the metal door of an open electrical box that was mounted on the tar-paper wall of the garage.

  The massive picture windows were dark. But Katz was somewhere in there, she was sure of it.

  There was a dull crack as Jorma kicked in the glass terrace door. He carefully stuck his hand through the shards of glass and unlocked it. He paused briefly before opening it . . .

  “Did you bring the Colt?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “I got rid of it. Didn’t think I’d need it anymore.”

  No sounds or movements as they walked through the living room. Their eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light. They rounded a corner and found themselves in a kitchen. Their eyes swept across the furnishings: the kitchen table, the chairs, the potted flowers on the windowsill. A set of kitchen knives, sorted by size, hung from a magnetic strip above the counter. One was missing.

  The room was oddly quiet. No hum from the fridge—it was as if a fuse had blown. She hit a light switch, but nothing happened.

  The scents of another person’s home made her lose confidence. She had the sense of having taken a wrong turn, of being out of place.