Ultimatum

by Anders de la Motte

  He let go of the handgrip above the door and flexed his fingers a few times.

  “But if your theory is right, then Sarac thought he had contacted Stenberg personally. So the murderer must have chosen a location that had some association with Stenberg and therefore seemed plausible. And why not somewhere that’s uninhabited in winter and that also works perfectly if you want to get rid of a body? When you put that together with the place where the body was found, you end up with . . .”

  “Källstavik,” Julia said. “The party’s training center.”

  “The grounds cover over fifty hectares,” Amante went on. “There are a number of individual houses spread out around the property, and several of them are rented to senior party bosses. Stenberg doesn’t have a house of his own there, but his father-in-law has one that’s used by the whole family. Two cottages for guests, a woodshed, and a boathouse. The boathouse is down by the lake, of course, just seven or eight hundred meters as the crow flies from where Sarac’s remains were found.”

  Amante sounded eager, almost excited. And suddenly Wallin’s words of warning were back in her head. In my experience, people like Amante usually go to pieces completely, sooner or later.

  She pulled onto the road’s shoulder just before the turning to Källstavik and switched the engine off.

  “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. Something I need to know before we go on.”

  “Sure.” He looked at her. The usual gloomy look in his eyes had been replaced by something else—something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  “What’s the real reason you ended up at Violent Crime?”

  Amante looked away and Julia almost said something more. But instead she kept quiet and sat him out. She could practically feel his gloomy mood returning.

  “I had a breakdown. On Lampedusa. My wife left me; I was drowning in bureaucracy. And the dead bodies . . .” He paused. “They just kept coming. More boats pretty much every day.”

  Amante fell silent for a few moments.

  “I went to pieces. I tried to commit suicide but failed, as you can see. Then I spent a couple of months in the Alps, at a rest home.” He made air quotes. “When I got out, my stepfather got me a job at Violent Crime on the condition that I sorted my life out and stopped embarrassing him.”

  “I understand,” Julia said. She felt suddenly guilty for dragging up his past. Even so, she wanted to ask more. Find out if he was okay to go on. Or if he was likely to drag her down with him when he fell.

  Amante almost appeared to read her mind.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Just drive, Gabrielsson, so we actually get there sometime soon.”

  • • •

  The man behind the counter in the little smoke shop grinned stupidly at Natalie.

  “Like I told your boyfriend the other day, I’m missing some parts for the printer, and they haven’t arrived yet. So I haven’t been able to finish the passports yet. You’ll have to wait a bit longer.”

  “But I called you yesterday. You said they’d be ready today.”

  “Not me. You must have spoken to my brother. We sound very similar. Must have been a misunderstanding.”

  Natalie glared at the man. He smiled back. Two of the guy’s front teeth were gold, which didn’t exactly make him look more trustworthy.

  “How long do you think it’ll take?”

  “Inshallah . . .” The man threw his hands out and looked up at the grimy ceiling, where a little spherical camera stared down at Natalie. “A few days, I’d say. Toward the end of the week, something like that. Give me your number and I’ll call you as soon as they’re ready.”

  Natalie went on glaring at the man as she tried to work out all the things she’d have to sort out.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?” she said.

  She left the shop and began to make a list in her head. Buy more food, rearrange their flights, the hotel, her appointment at the bank in Zürich. She crossed the street and walked slowly toward the supermarket parking lot where she’d left the Golf. She might as well buy the food while she was there.

  • • •

  It wasn’t until she reached the fruit section that Natalie was sure. She’d got herself a cart and had been cruising up and down the aisles rather aimlessly, the way everyone does in a shop they’re not familiar with. At one point she almost ran into a dark-skinned man with a baseball cap and neatly trimmed stubble. For a moment she got it into her head that he was a cop in plain clothes. He actually reminded her of the handsome cops she’d watched at the gas station, so she looked at him slightly longer than usual. She calmed down when she saw the word THUG tattooed on his knuckles. It was always convenient when people chose to label themselves like that.

  She went on with her shopping but couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she was being watched. It got stronger as she walked about. She changed direction abruptly a couple of times, and when she spotted the man again by the bananas, she was sure. The guy in the baseball cap wasn’t a cop. But all the same he was following her.

  She continued on to the clothing department. She picked up a few garments at random, parked her half-full cart in plain sight, and went into one of the little changing rooms. She took off her jacket and sunglasses, then let her hair down over her shoulders. She looked at the result in the mirror: not perfect, but good enough. Common, as Cassandra had put it. Not the sort of person anyone would notice.

  Cautiously she left the changing room, made a wide detour around the cart, which Cap Man was bound to be watching like a hawk, and made her way back outside through the entrance in case he had an accomplice watching the cash registers.

  This wasn’t good, not good at all.

  • • •

  Julia let the car roll slowly along the gravel road. The house used by the Stenberg family lay partway up a hill covered with oak trees, half-hidden by vegetation. A dark-colored car was visible in the drive.

  “Keep going toward the water,” Amante said.

  The track came to an end at a little turnaround surrounded by pine trees. They got out of the car. In front of them lay a jetty with a little boathouse alongside, jutting out into the water. A weak breeze was blowing off Lake Mälaren, carrying with it the smell of inland water.

  “Locked.” Julia tugged slightly at the heavy padlock holding a heavy steel bar in front of the door. “Maybe we could get in from the other end?”

  They walked out onto the jetty but found that the far end was covered by a rolling door that ended half a meter above the water.

  “The ice formed in the middle of December and lasted until the end of March,” Amante said. “I checked with the weather service when we started our investigation. In February it would have been possible to raise this door and walk or ski straight out across the lake. All you’d need is a sledge to transport the body, and the chain saw. To cut a hole in the ice,” he clarified when she raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  He pointed across the water. Far away on the horizon, the other side of the lake was just visible as a strip of green.

  “The body was found some seven hundred meters in that direction. It wouldn’t take an experienced skater with the right equipment and pulling a sledge more than half an hour at most. In the middle of the night no one would have noticed, and it wouldn’t have taken much wind to cover the tracks through the snow. And the hole didn’t have to be any larger than this.” He formed a circle with his arms. “I’d guess it would have frozen over again in a couple of days. And with that, Sarac was—”

  “Out of the way,” Julia muttered.

  She looked out across the water, then back at the boathouse between the water and the trees. At the edge of the woodland was what looked like an old stone wall.

  “We have to get in there,” she said.

  The water was cold, or at least colder than she’d expected. She’d r
olled her jeans up and left her shoes and socks on the edge of the water, and had only taken a couple of steps before realizing that she’d gotten it completely wrong. The water was already over her knees and there was some way to go before she reached the far corner of the boathouse. The channel had to be deep enough for a reasonably large boat with its outboard motor down. That meant one and a half meters, maybe more. And she wasn’t quite one meter seventy centimeters tall. Wading out and ducking in under the door wasn’t going to work.

  She hesitated for a few seconds, then looked up at Amante, who was still on the jetty, fiddling with his phone. She took out her own phone and put it between her teeth, then fell gently forward and started to swim. The chill of the water made her shiver, but after a couple of strokes her body got used to it.

  She couldn’t find a ladder and had to climb up onto the boat itself to get out of the water. It was a motorboat, covered, between four and five meters long, several years old. Stenberg’s father-in-law clearly knew how important it was not to appear flashy or excessively wealthy. She jumped across to dry land and found a light switch next to the locked door. She wrung as much water as she could out of her clothes and slipped her phone into her back pocket.

  She stood still for a moment, trying to absorb her impressions. There was a strong smell of lake water and oil. Something else too, something more chemical. Chlorine, she guessed, used to clean algae from the boat.

  About a third of the area of the boathouse was occupied by water. On the landward side was a gentle concrete slope that led up to ground level. Two old railway ties on struts formed a workbench along one side, and in the middle of the space was an empty trailer and some sort of winch that she assumed was used to pull the boat out in the autumn. Everything looked both well used and properly maintained. As if the owner took care of his possessions and took pride in not buying new things unnecessarily, just as her dad had done.

  She climbed over the trailer and went across to the workbench. The impression of fastidious order grew stronger. Above the bench the tools hung in neat rows. On the wall careful outlines had been drawn, showing exactly where each tool belonged. Wrenches, hammers, various types of files, a large flashlight. She bent down and looked under the bench. A pressure washer, an industrial vacuum cleaner, a couple of plastic tubs. Everything you needed to maintain a boat. But no chain saw, nothing at all that could be used to dismember a body. But, considering how meticulous the perpetrator seemed to have been, perhaps that wasn’t altogether surprising. Even so, she felt a little disappointed.

  “Julia!” Amante called from outside. “Are you okay?”

  She went over to the door.

  “I’m fine. Just give me a couple more minutes.”

  She climbed back across the trailer again to return to the workbench, but stopped halfway. Her attention was caught by something on the ground.

  When she bent down, she discovered, despite the weak light, a groove in the porous cement floor. Then another one. Julia felt her pulse speed up. She fetched the flashlight and a thick pencil from the workbench. She climbed up onto the trailer and shone the flashlight down through its metal frame. There were a number of grooves of various sizes in the floor, and she realized that she was going to have to move the trailer in order to take a good look. She released the handbrake and, with an effort, managed to move the trailer just enough to clear the floor area. Then she jumped up onto one of the wheels, shone the flashlight at the floor, and counted out loud to herself.

  Thirteen grooves, some more visible than others, forming a sort of pattern around a space in the middle. She jumped down onto the floor again, got down on her knees, and drew parallel lines stretching away from both sides of the grooves, then a large oval around the gap at their center. She finished by drawing a circle above the groove at the top. She hopped back up onto the trailer and shone the flashlight at her handiwork. She shivered, not only because of her damp clothes.

  The rough drawing on the floor looked like a human body. Each major joint was marked by a groove in the floor.

  Thirteen very decisive cuts, one for each joint. All the way through, right through muscle and bone.

  We were right, she thought. This is where Sarac died. He was sawn into pieces on this floor before his body parts were wrapped in plastic bags and dragged out onto the ice. The perpetrator cleaned up after him, used chlorine to destroy any traces of DNA. Presumably he had pressure-cleaned the floor several times before he was happy. But he couldn’t do anything about the grooves left by the chain saw in the floor.

  “Amante,” she said, raising her voice, but got no answer. She felt in her pocket for her cell phone. She opened the camera function and aimed it at the floor. But before she had time to click the button, the door was thrown open wide. She turned around, thinking that Amante had somehow managed to pick the lock. But the man she saw in the doorway was someone else altogether. And he was holding a pistol in his hand.

  Forty

  Natalie slowly drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She had set off to drive to the Scout cabin to tell Atif what had happened. Explain that they wouldn’t be leaving that evening after all. But after a kilometer or so she changed her mind, pulled into a gas station, and decided to call him on his pay-as-you-go cell phone once she’d had a chance to think things through.

  Passport Guy and his brother had shafted them, that much was obvious. Somehow they had realized there was more money to be earned by informing on them. Because she’d called the shop before she showed up, they knew it wasn’t going to be Atif himself picking the passports up. They evidently assumed she was just some dumb bitch who was going to lead them straight to his hiding place, but now she’d managed to shaft the bastards instead. Now all they could do was wait for her to call again, which she obviously wasn’t going to do.

  But that didn’t solve their problem. Without passports they were stuck. Okay, so they could squeeze into her car and drive to Switzerland, hoping they didn’t get caught in a random check at one of the borders. But as soon as Cassandra and Tindra were forced to use their real passports, they’d be finished. Alarm bells would start to ring, the trip would be over, and she would get charged with aiding and abetting a criminal. Besides, Atif didn’t have a passport at all. And the thought of heading off on a road trip across Europe really didn’t appeal to her. She wasn’t at all sure her battered little Golf or her own sanity would survive a trip like that.

  Natalie put some ChapStick on her lips. She had to come up with some sort of solution to this. But how? She leaned her head back against the headrest and looked out across the forecourt of the gas station. She caught sight of one of the security cameras above the pumps. A little black sphere, the same sort she remembered seeing not that long ago. Suddenly she had an idea. Maybe there was a chance after all. But it would take a lot of nerve and intelligence—and a hell of a lot of luck.

  • • •

  Julia was crouched on the step of the boathouse. Amante was sitting beside her with his hands tied behind his back, as hers were. Her wet clothes were making her shiver in spite of the mild breeze. But it wasn’t her own condition that worried her. She could see Amante’s chest rising and falling heavily as beads of sweat trickled down his temples. He was staring down at the ground.

  “Couldn’t you untie his hands?” she said to the bodyguard watching them while his colleague talked on the phone a short distance away. “You’ve seen our IDs. I’ve explained why we’re here. For God’s sake, we’re colleagues. Can’t you see he’s not well?” She nodded toward Amante, whose eyes were still fixed glassily on the ground.

  The guard pretended not to hear. His colleague, a tall, well-built man with prominent features, walked slowly toward them. It became possible to hear part of his phone call.

  “Okay, so you can confirm that they work for you. And that this is a case of wires getting crossed?”

  A short silence as the person on the other en
d spoke.

  “Okay, I get it. If you’ve got the all-clear from Command, then there’s no problem. We’ll draw a line under the whole business.”

  The man sought to make eye contact with his partner, then jerked his head toward Julia and Amante. Their guard pulled out a bunch of keys and gestured for them to stand up. Julia had to nudge Amante to get him to his feet.

  “Here.” The man held his phone out to Julia as soon as her hands were free. “He wants to talk to you.”

  Julia took the phone and walked a few meters away, then turned away from them before she spoke.

  “Sorry to drag you into this. Pärson would have burst an artery if I’d called him. He thinks I’m shut away in my room looking through databases. And—”

  “I assume this relates to your investigation,” Wallin said drily. “I’ve spoken to the duty officer at the Security Police. He and I, and our bodyguard colleague Becker, have all agreed that it was a misunderstanding. That you, on my initiative, were investigating a tip-off but that we should obviously have informed the minister of justice’s personal protection team before we set off to the site.”

  “Th-Thanks,” Julia said. She realized her teeth were chattering.

  “Don’t mention it. Now I want you to get back in your car and drive back into the city as fast as you can. In precisely ninety minutes I want to see you, and you alone, in my office, when I will require a thorough explanation of precisely what the two of you were doing out in Källstavik. All the details, no holding back. Is that understood?”

  Julia looked at Amante, who was already getting back in the car. His movements were jerky, as if he was on autopilot.