The Final Word

by Liza Marklund

  Besides, it was both interesting and justified, a way of gaining knowledge of the issue he was investigating. A democracy is based upon the fact that unpleasant things must be allowed to exist. As Voltaire said, ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’ (well, he hadn’t actually used those words, but that was the meaning of a letter he wrote to Abbot le Riche on 6 February 1770).

  Thomas looked back at his post once more.

  Anders Schyman should be fucked up the arse with a baseball bat . . .

  The words were there, expressed and eternal, commented upon and affirmed.

  He took a deep breath and closed the site. A sense of calm spread through him. Annika was welcome to stand down there in the street with her mobile phone and her ugly bag.

  He was properly hungry now, and the sole fillets were just the right temperature.

  Admired, respected, feared.

  Someone.

  Annika announced her arrival at the reception desk of the Public Prosecution Authority and was asked to take a seat in a waiting room that might have belonged to a dentist. It smelt of disinfectant and unspecified discomfort. She was alone, and for that she was grateful.

  The man who had been in charge of the preliminary investigation into Josefin’s murder, Chief Prosecutor Kjell Lindström, had retired, and the matter was now in the hands of Deputy Prosecutor Sanna Andersson. Discreetly, she took out her camera. She filmed the room and the signs on the walls for a minute or so: they might be good as inserts. She put the camera away and started to read a two-year-old issue of Illustrated Science, which featured an article about how fish had crawled up on to land 150 million years ago, developed legs and turned into reptiles, carnivores and humans.

  ‘Annika Bengtzon? Deputy Prosecutor Andersson can see you now.’

  She put down the magazine, picked up her bag, and was shown along a corridor to a cramped office. The woman who met her, hand outstretched, was barely thirty. ‘Welcome,’ she said, in a thin, high voice.

  Fifteen years had passed, so obviously Josefin had sunk like a stone down the list of the justice system’s priorities.

  ‘Sorry you had to wait,’ Sanna Andersson said. ‘I’ve got a case in court in forty-five minutes. It was Liljeberg you wanted help with, wasn’t it?’

  Annika sat down on a chair and waited until Sanna Andersson had gone back round her desk and taken her seat. ‘I’ve put in a request to see the preliminary investigation into the murder. She was found in Kronoberg Park on Kungsholmen on the morning of the twenty-eighth of July, fifteen years ago.’

  ‘Of course,’ the deputy prosecutor said, opening a drawer and taking out a thick file. ‘It was looked into again last year. A man confessed to the murder.’

  Annika nodded. ‘Gustaf Holmerud,’ she said. ‘The serial killer. He confessed to the murders of a number of other women as well.’

  Sanna glanced at her, then went back to the file. ‘Yes, he confessed to pretty much all the murders we’ve got, and was actually found guilty of five before someone pulled the emergency brake. I know that the prosecutor general is looking into several of those convictions, to see if he can order a retrial. Here it is.’ She ran her hand over one page in the folder. ‘Josefin Liljeberg. Death by strangulation. I went through this last night. It wasn’t a particularly complicated case.’ She turned the first page and looked at the headings. ‘You’ve asked to see the whole file?’

  ‘I covered the case at the time and followed all the developments.’

  Sanna Andersson leaned over the documents. ‘There are some pretty sensational ingredients here: a notorious porn club, a government minister brought in for questioning. Is that why you’re interested in the case?’

  She shot Annika a neutral, expressionless look, and Annika opened her mouth but found herself unable to reply. No, that’s not why. Josefin got too close to me. I became her, she became me. I took a job in the club where she worked. I wore her bikini, her underwear. ‘As I understand it, the police regard the case as cleared up,’ she said eventually. ‘Joachim, her boyfriend, killed her. The reason he was never prosecuted was that six people gave him an alibi.’

  Sanna Andersson closed the file. ‘Correct,’ she said. ‘Violence within relationships ought to be classed as a public-health problem.’ She checked the screen of her mobile phone.

  ‘Can I quote you on that?’ Annika asked.

  The woman smiled. ‘Sure,’ she said, standing up. ‘I’ve decided you can have the names of the six witnesses who gave Josefin’s boyfriend his alibi.’

  Annika, too, got to her feet, astonished at the young woman’s authority and efficiency.

  ‘They lied to the police,’ the deputy prosecutor said, ‘which could well mean they were guilty of protecting a criminal. That passed the statute of limitations a long time ago now, so they’re not risking prosecution if they change their minds. Maybe they feel like talking now – if not to us, then perhaps to you.’ She held out a document as she reached for a brown briefcase that looked extremely heavy.

  ‘Can I quote you on what you said about the prosecutor general as well?’ Annika asked. ‘That they’re looking into the possibility of asking for a retrial of Gustaf Holmerud’s cases?’

  Sanna laughed. ‘Nice try! If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to run.’

  Annika hurried after her, jogging to keep up.

  Maybe Josefin wasn’t at the bottom of the priority list after all.

  The small high-security courtroom of Stockholm District Court was located on the top floor of the Stockholm City Law Courts, a strategic choice to make escapes and rescues more difficult. Nina Hoffman strode breathlessly up the last flight of steps. Defendants would have a long labyrinth of corridors and floors to negotiate on the way out, if they tried to escape. She looked towards the entrance to the secure chamber.

  The media were out in force again that afternoon. Most of the nationals were in place: she could see Berit Hamrin of the Evening Post in the queue for security clearance to sit on the public benches. Nina showed her ID and was let into the cramped, windowless anteroom. The prosecutor and his legal assistant were already there. A low-energy lamp in the ceiling cast a subdued bluish-white light that seemed unable to reach the corners of the room.

  ‘Ready, Hoffman?’ Svante Crispinsson said, greeting her warmly. ‘His lawyer’s likely to go for you hard. Don’t take it personally.’

  Nina gave a curt nod. She hadn’t been expecting anything else.

  ‘Just keep a clear head.’

  Svante Crispinsson was one of the northern district’s youngest prosecutors, and Nina had had dealings with him before. He was regarded as a little disorganized, as far as investigative work was concerned, but in court he was a great asset, unafraid and combative.

  ‘Let’s see if we can keep the members of the jury awake,’ the prosecutor said. ‘The old boy at the far left has a tendency to doze off.’

  Nina got herself a cup of coffee and sat on a chair close to the door. Crispinsson leafed through his papers, muttering inaudibly to himself. His suit was slightly too large and his hair too long; he gave the impression of being confused and artless, which made him seem honest and likeable.

  She straightened her back and stared at the wall in front of her. Ivar Berglund was guilty. She was certain of it. His timid appearance was an act. There was something extremely disturbing just beneath that unassuming exterior, something impervious and untouchable that only deeply criminal people possessed. She had felt it before, had lived close to it, far too close, when she was far too young.

  The coffee was insipid.

  Giving evidence in court was the part of her job she liked least. The public hearing was a performance in the service of justice. The judge and jury needed to be convinced that the chain of evidence was strong enough for a guilty verdict. But she preferred the darkness behind the scenes, complex investigations, getting closer and closer, tightening the noose.

  A bell rang and the parties wer
e called for the continuation of the main hearing into the case of murder or assisted murder. The prosecutor and his assistant went into the courtroom. Nina sat in the anteroom and waited, motionless. Usual practice was for the accused to be questioned first, followed by the witnesses, but Berglund had asked to be questioned last. That was unusual, but the judge had upheld his request when Crispinsson was given an assurance that he could recall certain witnesses afterwards.

  Control, Nina thought. He doesn’t want to speak until he’s heard what everyone else has to say.

  The door to the courtroom opened. She stood up, stepped into the dazzling daylight and walked straight to the witness stand without looking left or right. Everyone was staring at her as she crossed the floor: the spectators on the other side of the reinforced glass, Berglund, showing no emotion, his lawyer, openly provocative, and Svante Crispinsson, with the trace of a smile.

  She raised her hand to take the oath, and her jacket strained across her back. She had put on a bit of muscle since she’d last worn the outfit, whenever that had been. The last time she’d given evidence, presumably. She, Nina Victoria Hoffman, promised and swore on her honour and conscience to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, with no embellishments or amendments.

  Crispinsson coughed into his hand before he began to speak, and tugged at his hair. ‘Nina Hoffman, what is your job?’

  She was standing absolutely straight. She didn’t really need her suit to make her look like a plain-clothes police officer: she knew she looked like one, restrained and correct, unambiguous but lacking colour. ‘I’m a trained police officer, criminologist and behavioural scientist. I currently work as an operational analyst for the National Crime Unit in Stockholm.’

  The clerk typed, the sunlight reflecting off the strengthened glass. One of the peculiarities of the high-security court was the barrier that separated the public from those involved in the case. She was aware that the reporters behind her were hearing her words through a loudspeaker, with a tiny delay.

  ‘Can you give us a bit of background to your work last spring?’

  She stretched her shoulders, and felt Berglund’s eyes on her. It was hugely important that he was convicted. He was dangerous, unpredictable; his impervious core meant that he lacked the usual human inhibitions. She could sense his inner self behind those blank eyes, like oil on a stretch of water.

  ‘New information came to light that led us to take another look at a twenty-year-old case, the disappearance of Viola Söderland, and examine all the evidence once more.’

  Crispinsson nodded almost imperceptibly but encouragingly. ‘And what happened on Saturday, the seventeenth of May last year?’

  ‘A DNA sample was taken from the accused’s home in Täby.’ The house at the end of the cul-de-sac, a one-storey villa from the 1960s, red brick, closed shutters over the windows.

  He had been there, surprised but amiable and accommodating. His eyes had been the same then as they were now, heavy and dark, untarnished by more than a year in custody. No normal person would react in that way. Isolation, twenty-three hours at a stretch, and with maximum restrictions at first: no newspapers, no television, no contact with the outside world. An hour of fresh air each day in the exercise yard on the roof of the prison, in a space the shape of a slice of cake, blocked off by wire netting. She knew he hadn’t received a single visitor, not even after the restrictions were relaxed. She was aware of his hands from the corner of her eye, resting on the table, his watchful pose.

  He was made of iron, bog ore from the marshlands where he had grown up.

  ‘Can you give us a brief summary of the main aspects of the Viola Söderland case?’ Crispinsson said.

  ‘Is this really relevant?’ Martha Genzélius, Berglund’s lawyer, interrupted. ‘My client is not accused of anything to do with Viola Söderland.’

  ‘The prosecution is based upon a chain of evidence,’ the prosecutor said. ‘We need to explain the nature of each link or the case will be incomprehensible.’

  ‘That won’t help. The entire case is incomprehensible, no matter how the prosecutor presents it.’

  The judge struck his gavel. The lawyer, Martha Genzélius, fidgeted on her chair, the picture of frustration. Nina raised her chin and waited.

  ‘Viola Söderland, if you don’t mind,’ Crispinsson said, nodding towards Nina.

  She made an effort to reply in a calm and factual way. ‘Viola Söderland disappeared from her villa in Djursholm on the night of the twenty-third of September almost twenty-one years ago. Her body has never been found. There was one witness, a neighbour who was walking his dog on the night in question, who saw a man get out of a car outside Söderland’s home. The neighbour made a note of the car’s number plate, but the owner had an alibi.’

  ‘Who was the owner?’ Crispinsson interrupted.

  She swallowed what she was about to say and lost her flow. ‘The car was registered to Ivar Berglund.’

  ‘And there were signs of a struggle in the villa in Djursholm?’

  She had spent hours studying the photographs, grainy and poorly lit, taken during the last shaky days of colour film, just before everything had gone digital, infinitely sharper and easier to work with. She had examined countless pictures of that sort, from hundreds of different crime scenes, and ‘struggle’ wasn’t the word she would have used, but this wasn’t the time or place to make pedantic points about the prosecutor’s choice of vocabulary.

  ‘There was a smashed vase on the hall floor, and strands of hair that didn’t belong to Viola, her children, or any of the staff in the house. That was as far as the original investigation got. DNA technology was in its infancy and it wasn’t possible to get a result from a few strands of hair – they would have needed a sackful to identify the entire sequence.’

  ‘But that is possible today?’

  It seemed almost incredible that there had been a time before DNA. How had any crimes ever been solved twenty years ago?

  ‘It’s possible to extract so-called mitochondrial DNA from strands of hair now. That’s an alternative form of analysis that doesn’t give quite as much information as a complete DNA sequence, but it’s very reliable.’

  ‘So once you had the new information, you requested a DNA sample from the car-owner under suspicion, a saliva sample. What happened?’

  ‘It was a perfect match.’

  She couldn’t help looking at Ivar Berglund, and was aware of everyone around her doing the same thing, both inside the court and on the public benches. All eyes landed on the accused, who sat there, still as a statue, his hands resting heavily one on top of the other. He was looking straight at her and their eyes met. His were narrow and dark. She tried to see any depth in them, but failed.

  ‘Did you take the man in for further questioning?’

  ‘A colleague and I interviewed him at his home in Täby.’

  ‘What did he have to say for himself?’ A heaviness to his movements, superficial politeness and surprise, but she could sense hidden depths, the snakes within.

  ‘He stuck to his alibi, that he had been giving a lecture on the genetic modification of aspen trees up in Sandviken on the night in question.’

  ‘Were you able to confirm what he told you?’

  ‘There were about seventy people in the audience, but no one knows exactly when Viola Söderland went missing.’

  ‘Could he have been in both places? On the same night?’

  ‘The distance between Sandviken and Stockholm is a hundred and ninety-one kilometres, so, yes. It’s theoretically possible for him to have been in both places on the same night.’

  Berglund’s lawyer seemed amused, and whispered something in her client’s ear. Nina clenched her teeth. She wouldn’t let herself be provoked.

  ‘But Ivar Berglund is facing charges regarding an entirely separate allegation, not Viola Söderland’s disappearance,’ the defence lawyer said, looking through her papers.

  Nina reached for the glass of water on the table in
front of her. It was refreshing, tasted earthy.

  ‘Can you tell the court how you and your colleagues at National Crime proceeded with the case?’

  ‘We compared Berglund’s DNA profile with every ongoing criminal investigation in Sweden.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘We found another match.’

  ‘To an ongoing criminal investigation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The murder of Karl Gustaf Evert Ekblad in Nacka last year.’

  It was as if a sudden wind had passed through the spectators’ benches on the other side of the glass, a soundless storm, rising and falling, hair fluttering, arms moving, lips talking, pens scribbling. The facts in the case were already public knowledge, but up to now they had been one-dimensional, words on a page. Now they came to life. The man was revealed as the monster he was.

  The prosecutor looked at his notes. ‘You were coordinating that investigation at National Crime. Can you tell us in more detail about the case?’

  Her first week in her new job. She hadn’t even had time to attend the induction course before real life got in the way.

  ‘Karl Gustaf Evert Ekblad, known as Kag, used to spend a lot of time sitting on the benches in Orminge shopping centre. He was tortured and killed in May last year.’

  ‘Tortured?’

  Nina took her eyes off the prosecutor and looked directly at Ivar Berglund. She wasn’t scared of him: she knew what he was. ‘The victim was found hanging by his knees from a tree, above an anthill, naked and smeared with honey. His ankles and wrists were tied with duct-tape. His nails had been pulled out, his rectum had been severely damaged, and his nose broken. He had died from lack of oxygen, asphyxiated by a plastic bag.’

  Ivar Berglund leaned back in his chair, as though he needed to distance himself from what was being said. He whispered something to his representative, who gave a quick nod.

  The prosecutor held up a sheet of paper towards the judge. ‘The details of the forensic pathology report on the murder victim, Karl Gustaf Evert Ekblad, are in Appendix Fifty-three B.’