The Fire Dance

by Helene Tursten

  Irene got out of the car and inhaled the scent of wet earth and rotting plants.

  “Why are you spying on me?” asked Angelika. Her voice was sharp and hostile. Perhaps she thought it would mask the fact that she’d been crying.

  “I’m not spying on you. I was in the parking lot by Happy River when I saw you racing past like a car thief. I needed to talk to you anyway, so I followed you,” Irene said.

  “You must have been spying on me. How else would you have found me here?” Angelika asked suspiciously.

  Irene decided to tell it like it was. Ingrid would certainly mention that she’d been visited by a policewoman named Irene Huss who’d offered her coffee treats.

  “I had gone to see Ingrid to talk about what happened here.” Irene gestured to indicate the whole empty lot. When she glanced back at Angelika, she had a shock.

  Angelika looked positively terrified. Her dark brown eyes looked unnaturally small in her tiny face, which had lost all color. She sank down onto the ground, still staring at Irene and saying nothing. Her resemblance to Sophie was uncanny.

  Irene wasn’t sure how to proceed. In order to break the silence, she asked, “Were you able to reach Ingrid?”

  Angelika shook her head. She swallowed a few times before she rasped out, “No. She did not want to see me.”

  “Did you speak over the house telephone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ingrid said that she’d had no contact with you since the fire. Is that true?”

  Angelika nodded and looked away.

  “Why did you suddenly want to see her, then?” Irene’s question came out more sharply than she’d intended, and it had the same effect as cracking a whip.

  Angelika jerked and gave Irene a quick, fearful glance. Then she looked away at the grass covering the empty lot. She said nothing for a long time.

  Finally, she replied. “Two days from now it will be exactly fifteen years since Magnus died. He is buried here at Björlanda Cemetery. I was wondering if Ingrid wanted to come with me to visit the grave. Bring some flowers. Something. I don’t have time on Saturday, so it had to be today. But she didn’t even want to speak to me. We…we never did get along, exactly. I thought I’d try to mend our relationship now that she’s old and sick.”

  She looked up at Irene with clear eyes and an open smile like a little girl who wanted to be believed. Irene might have gone along with her story if it weren’t for the act, but now she knew Angelika was lying. This was not the place to pressure her, but Irene made a mental note for the future.

  “Couldn’t you have phoned ahead?” Irene asked innocently.

  “No use in that. I’ve called her before, you know, just to see if Frej was there, but she always slams down the receiver.”

  “Why are you and Ingrid on such bad terms?”

  Angelika gave a short, raspy laugh. “She’s hated me from the first minute she saw me. It’s nothing personal. She would have hated any woman who got too close to her beloved little brother. He was her surrogate child. And now she’s moved her affection to Frej. Thank God he has a strong personality and can resist her. Magnus was too weak to handle her.”

  She stopped talking and Irene could see the emotion drain from her eyes.

  “Do you still miss him?” Irene asked impulsively.

  Irene realized she’d asked the question before thinking how to phrase it. A long silence hung in the air until Angelika finally responded.

  “It was such a long time ago. So much water under the bridge since then. And now all this with Sophie…it’s hard. But he was Frej’s pappa, and we were married for almost nine years. I can still feel the empty space he left behind. I felt so alone then, so…abandoned.”

  Irene took a few more steps toward the huddled figure before she asked her next question. “What exactly happened fifteen years ago?”

  Tears streamed down Angelika’s face. “No one really knows. Perhaps Sophie…but I don’t think even she knew for sure. Sophie was incapable of lying. She may not speak about something…deliberately…but she never lied. She told me the truth when she said that she didn’t know Magnus was sleeping in the bedroom when she came home that afternoon. The house was not on fire when she rode off on her bike. She said she didn’t smell any smoke.”

  “So what do you believe happened?”

  “I’m convinced that Magnus fell asleep smoking. He had a habit of smoking in bed…especially when he’d been drinking.”

  She said this last bit in a defiant tone. During previous questioning, she’d always denied that he’d had a drinking problem. Irene nodded as if she understood and left it at that.

  “Why do you think Frej slept so long that afternoon at Ingrid’s house?” she asked in her most neutral tone.

  Angelika stiffened. “What did she say when you talked to her?”

  “She wasn’t clear…”

  Angelika seemed to relax. The tense look in her face softened, and she even smiled slightly. She dried her tears with a tissue from one of her pockets and blew her nose. Then she cleared her throat before she answered.

  “She always babied Frej. He had a cold that day, and he was tired. So she put him to bed and let him sleep. She didn’t know that you’re not supposed to let an eight-year-old sleep for so long.”

  “Still, she saw all those fire trucks and the ambulance and the police cars. She’d even called in the alarm herself. It wasn’t exactly a normal afternoon.”

  “No, it wasn’t, but Ingrid was a strange bird. I don’t believe she thought things through. Nowadays she’s really cuckoo. At least, that’s what Frej told me. You can’t trust anything she says.”

  Angelika gave her a hasty glance. Why is she so nervous about something Ingrid might have said?

  Angelika got to her feet and brushed at the dampness on her pants. “Now I really need to get going. I have to teach all afternoon. It’s great that your daughter has started capoeira. You have to be in fantastic shape to be able to do it, and Frej says she is.”

  Before Irene could think up another question, Angelika swept past her. Without a backward glance, she got in her Fiat and drove off. Irene watched her rear lights disappear behind a cascade of water kicked up by her tires.

  * * *

  Irene would need a search warrant. Otherwise it would not be possible to get into the basement of the Änggården mansion. It would also be a good idea to check into Frej’s darkroom. Not that she suspected Frej could hold his sister captive in that room without Marcelo noticing. She just wanted to take a closer look at what Frej was up to.

  Did she really suspect Frej of killing his sister? Irene thought long and hard. He had no direct benefit if his sister was out of the picture. The reverse was true. Now his mother inherited the house and she was making Frej’s life much more difficult than when he’d lived with Sophie. Frej seemed to be an open and uncomplicated kind of guy. He had many friends and a number of interests. Frej had no motive for killing his sister, or, to be more accurate, his half-sister. In fact, it seemed that they’d had a good relationship over the years. Extremely close, in fact, considering that they’d been raised in separate households.

  Marcelo had even less of a motive. He’d be kicked out of an apartment that he felt comfortable in. There was no sexual motive, either, and it appeared that he and Sophie had been good friends, even if Sophie’s nightly appearances in his bedroom indicated she had hoped for something more.

  Was there anything more? Sophie appeared to have been an unusually asexual young woman. Where did she fit in on the sexual spectrum? Did she have a place? Irene’s experience told her that everyone has something that turns them on, but in all of Sophie’s twenty-six years, there was no indication that she’d ever been in love or in a relationship with either a man or a woman. Nor were there any indications of any other, more unusual, tendencies. All she had was dance: her life and her passion. It seemed that dance had replaced all human relationships in Sophie’s life. Perhaps that was indeed the case. It was through dance
that Sophie could reach others even though it seemed she’d never gotten close to anyone, with the possible exception of her teacher Gisela Bagge. Gisela had called herself “something of a mentor” for Sophie, and she and Angelika had been dancing together when Angelika met Ernst Malmborg. Later on, Gisela had seen Sophie’s talent as well as the strained relationship between mother and daughter. She’d also said that she’d been Sophie’s closest friend.

  Still, even to Gisela, Sophie had been a mystery.

  According to the psychologist at Child Protective Services, she’d had a genetic personality disorder that made it impossible for her to form attachments to other people. This made the entire speculation go in circles: Was there ever a person Sophie felt close to at all?

  The only one Irene could think of was Ernst Malmborg.

  Still, could their relationship be described as “deep”? Perhaps they just got along because they were so similar. It didn’t mean that they were close—just that they’d let themselves be at peace in each other’s company.

  Angelika had an economic interest in Sophie’s death, but no other motives. Why would she keep Sophie hidden for three weeks? If she’d had a hiding place, where would it have been? And how could she have dragged her daughter to the shed and then set it on fire? It didn’t seem plausible. Angelika was a greedy liar, but it was hard to imagine her killing a family member in cold blood.

  If Sophie had not been hidden in the mansion basement, where should she search? The answer was defeatist: anywhere at all. The killer might not be anyone in Sophie’s circle. Considering the abuse Sophie had suffered as well as the fact that she’d been drugged, it was more than likely that the killer was outside that circle. The only hope for the investigation was that there was a clue somewhere: a person, a contact, a coincidence, perhaps a secret relationship.

  There had to be a lead to the killer. She would just have to find it. Perhaps she’d already run into it without knowing it.

  Right now, she felt as if she were searching in the dark.

  The truth was they had nothing concrete to go on. For the first time, Irene wondered if it was a drawback to have been on the arson investigation all those years ago. Perhaps the old, unsolved case was preventing her from seeing this one clearly. She would just have to keep going forward one step at a time. Perhaps that would drive the killer out of his hiding place.

  Irene sighed. Her speculations were not bringing her any further. She decided to convince Superintendent Andersson to ask the prosecutor for a search warrant for the Änggården mansion. It was the only thing she could think of right now.

  * * *

  When Irene walked into the conference room for the Friday morning prayer, she realized there was an unusual tension in the room. Everyone’s eyes turned to her and Andersson glared at her darkly.

  “You’re late!” he barked.

  “There was an accident in the Gnistäng Tunnel…” Irene started to explain.

  “And you’ve been reported for attempted murder!” the Superintendent cut her off.

  Irene’s mouth fell open as she tried to make sense of his statement. All that came out was a “Whaa…?”

  “The nurse at Ingrid Hagberg’s assisted living facility phoned us, absolutely furious. She’d already called Frej and accused him of bringing sweets to her, but he denied it. Then they called his mother and she knew that you’d been there. So they put two and two together, and it came out you tried to off the old lady!”

  “What? How? What…what do they mean?” Irene stammered.

  “Ingrid Hagberg has a severe case of diabetes. After you filled her up with sugar, she wound up in a diabetic coma and is intensive care right now!”

  Ingrid’s greedy look at the bakery bag. The way she’d shoveled the cream puffs into her mouth. How her hands shook just like a dry alcoholic who’d gotten a free bottle of the hard stuff. Irene replayed the scene in her mind and cursed her own idiocy.

  “Oh, good Lord, give me strength!” she moaned.

  “You could certainly use it,” Andersson replied drily.

  “She didn’t tell me she had diabetes,” Irene tried to defend herself.

  “No, after her brain damage, she is apparently unable to recognize her own illness. The nurse says that they regularly search her apartment to make sure there are no sugary things in it. Everyone who visits has firm orders not to bring anything with sugar.” Andersson took a deep breath as his fingers drummed the table. “Let me remind everyone here that this Unit does not ever—and I mean ever—take anything sweet to anyone we want to interrogate!”

  Irene kept her mouth shut. Of course, the sweets had been a bribe to get Ingrid in the mood to talk. Still, Irene had thought it would be nice for an old lady to have treats with her coffee even though she had to admit that she’d had an ulterior motive. She’d never considered that Ingrid could have diabetes. Irene felt absolutely awful.

  “I’m going to take you off the Sophie case for a while. You’ve gotten nowhere with it anyway. We’ll take it from the top next week.”

  The Superintendent gave Irene a harsh look before he stretched to his full height and looked over his entire team.

  “And now for the good news. It appears that the investigation of the so-called Gang Murder has gotten somewhere.”

  The Superintendent’s expression brightened as he turned toward Birgitta, who stood up. The large screen on the wall blinked on to reveal an enlargement of a photograph obviously taken at night.

  “These photographs came in a padded envelope in the mail last night. Anonymously. However, we have found a fingerprint on the inside flap of the envelope. I’ll get back to that in a minute.”

  Birgitta turned to look at the picture on the screen.

  The resolution was sharp so it was easy to tell who and what was in it. The photograph seemed to have been taken on a slant with a telephoto lens. In the background were two shimmering white taxis and a sign indicating it was taken in front of the Nils Ericson bus terminal at the Central Train Station. In the foreground, a large man was pressing a relatively thin young man against a brick wall. His left hand was around the young man’s throat. Both were wearing black leather jackets and baggy jeans. The large man had his hood up, but his victim’s face was easily visible. Without a doubt, it was gang leader Roberto Oliviera. He looked as if he were trying to defend himself by kicking his assailant.

  Birgitta clicked to the next picture. It was an enlargement of the previous photo. In his right hand, the larger man was holding a stiletto knife. Both his hand and the knife were bloody. Roberto had sustained five knife wounds, including in the liver and one severing an artery.

  He was dead when the ambulance arrived ten minutes after the call went in.

  The last photograph showed the suspect straight on.

  The top of his hoodie was still up, but his face could clearly be seen. It was Milan. No doubt about it. He still held the bloody stiletto knife. In his other hand, he had a white plastic bag. Apparently, he’d folded the knife and dropped it into the bag just seconds after this photo was taken. Perhaps he’d wrapped the bag around his hand earlier so that his clothes wouldn’t be covered with blood.

  In the background, his victim was sinking to the ground.

  The date and time for the murder of Roberto Oliviera were stamped on the bottom left hand corner of the photo.

  “Milan’s fried,” Jonny said contentedly.

  “Yeah, we got him all right, but the most interesting thing is who was behind getting him there,” Birgitta said calmly. She shifted back to the first picture. “Our technicians have gone over these and determined that they weren’t Photoshopped. Just to be on the safe side, we’re going to send them to England and have their experts make absolutely sure. These photos are consistent with what we thought happened. Roberto left his five companions to go to the bathroom. He had to search to find an empty stall, so he went over to the Nils Ericsson Terminal. His friends were still hanging around the Pocket Shop in the Central Station,
talking to some girls. When Roberto came out to rejoin his friends, he ran into Milan.

  “Perhaps Milan had been shadowing him. There are no witnesses to the murder itself—at least, not any who have come forward. The only one who talked to us, Victor Fernandez, is now in the hospital after being assaulted. He was part of Roberto’s gang, and he was the first one to find his boss. He stated that he’d seen Milan running away from the scene. Milan had turned around, and Victor recognized him. According to Victor, Milan was jumping into a black car on the other end of the parking lot. Unfortunately, no witnesses saw the car, either.”

  “Now Victor can’t testify. He has come out of his coma, but he can’t remember the past few years at all. The doctors don’t think he will ever regain his memory,” Tommy informed them.

  “Without the photos we’d never have had any evidence against Milan. But now we do,” Birgitta said.

  “So, spit it out, woman! Who sent them?” Jonny exclaimed impatiently.

  Birgitta smiled at him spitefully and said, “The thumbprint is clear and has shown the sender of the envelope to be…” She let her glittering brown eyes sweep across the room to make sure everyone was paying attention before she dropped the bomb: “Glenn ‘Hoffa’ Strömberg.”

  The room was so quiet they could have heard a pin drop. Everyone except Andersson and Hannu had the same expression: complete surprise.

  “Impossible! That devil had been sent up the river permanently!” Jonny said.

  “That was years ago. They’ve let him out.”

  Irene felt a shiver all the way to the marrow of her bones. This was not going to be one of her better days.vFirst this business with the diabetic coma and now Glenn ‘Hoffa’ Strömberg reappearing like an evil jack-in-the-box. She had done everything in her power to drive the fat vice president of the Hell’s Angels from her memory, which had been difficult right after she’d confronted him.

  The past few years, things had gotten better. Sometimes she would still dream of the assault and the humiliation she and her young colleague, Jimmy Ohlsson, had suffered during the incident. Jimmy had been permanently injured by kicks to the vertebrae of his spine. Irene’s physical injuries had healed, but the mental scars were still there.