The Final Word

by Liza Marklund

  The carriage leaned as they went round a bend, and he glanced up to reassure himself that the case had not moved. He felt the absence of his brother as a physical ache, and the train could do nothing to alleviate that.

  He avoided flying. Not just because of all the cameras, tickets and identity checks (occasionally it was necessary to leave a trail, and then, of course, he took a plane), but because there was something unnatural about leaving the ground. The train was better – you could pay for your ticket in cash at the counter without showing ID – although the best option was an inconspicuous car.

  But he preferred train travel. You could use the internet while you journeyed, which was another bonus. He had learned to surf on his smartphones, neither of which could be traced back to him or his brother, so he could roam freely around the net, which he found interesting and occasionally rewarding.

  He went on to the website of the Evening Post and scrolled down through the pictures and headlines. The news report about his brother’s trial had already been relegated to near the tail-end of things that were happening in the world, and would soon have faded from view. But the drama documentary was still there, glowing on the screen, an intrusive description of their lives and history. He let his finger rest on it, but didn’t click, and selected the news article instead.

  Police officer Nina Hoffman had given evidence about the arrest of the alleged murderer. Once again, the mistake they had made was explained: that baffling fragment of skin in Nacka. How on earth had it happened? And the information about investigations in other countries worried him. So much had changed in recent years and the rules of the game were different: everything was traceable. It was almost unsporting, but such was the way of the world now. He understood that, and his adversaries would have to as well. Why should he alone play by the rules? They couldn’t cause pain and assume that there was no price to pay.

  He closed his eyes. The case was secure above his head. Tomorrow he would be there, ready for the next step.

  The gentle rocking of the carriage took him back to their trips to Storblåliden with their father, going fishing on the lake, the wooden cabin where they used to sleep. That was where they had discovered the delights of their abilities, when the fish they had caught were lying in the bottom of the rowing-boat, gasping for oxygen, and they would stick the knife into their stomachs and empty them of life and guts.

  The sign on the door was made of brass, all four names engraved in black in the same font:

  HALENIUS SISULU

  BENGTZON SAMUELSSON

  Nina looked at it for a few moments before she rang the bell. There was something solemn about the little metal plaque: it was a declaration as much as a mere description of who lived there. They had decided it was going to work: you and I, my children and yours.

  Serena opened the door. Oh dear – weren’t the children in bed yet? Nina had delayed the visit as long as she could – she could hardly have turned up any later.

  ‘Hi, Nina,’ Serena said, and gave her a radiant smile. ‘Have you caught any murderers today?’

  She had grown tall, almost up to Nina’s shoulder, and was even wearing mascara. Hundreds of tiny plaits cascaded down her back.

  ‘I tried,’ Nina said, forcing herself to smile. ‘It didn’t go very well.’

  Serena laughed and skipped along the corridor that led to the bedrooms.

  ‘Hi,’ Annika Bengtzon said, coming out into the hall with a tea-towel in her hand. ‘Do you want something to eat? There’s some chicken stew left.’

  ‘Thanks, I’m fine.’

  ‘Decaf? From the machine?’

  ‘That would be great.’

  ‘Sit yourself down on the sofa. I won’t be long. Jimmy’s doing the kids tonight.’

  Nina kicked her shoes off and put them on the rack, then took her briefcase and went into the living room. She heard a tap running in the kitchen, then the characteristic whirr of one of those coffee-machines that swallowed expensive little metal capsules.

  She was always relaxed with Annika, partly because of everything they had been through together, the shared experiences they never spoke about, but also because there was something bruised about Annika that Nina recognized: she shared it.

  While she waited she took out the copy of the preliminary investigation into the Josefin Liljeberg case and put it on the coffee-table, a thick folder containing everything from pictures of the crime scene, forensic reports, the medical officer’s statement and details of witnesses to interviews with the two men who had been suspected of the crime: the minister for foreign trade at the time, Christer Lundgren, and Josefin’s boyfriend, Joachim Segerberg.

  Annika brought two mugs in and sank on to the sofa. Her eyes opened wide when she saw the bundle of papers. ‘All of it? Really?’

  ‘Q said you could see it,’ Nina said. ‘It might help the investigation. But source confidentiality applies, so you can’t quote from it.’

  ‘Wow!’ Annika put the mugs down and grabbed the papers. She flipped through them and stopped at the photographs of the crime scene. They were colour photocopies and the quality wasn’t great.

  Nina waited for her to speak.

  Eventually Annika said, ‘I was there. I saw her lying there. But I was outside the railings, of course.’

  Nina hadn’t thought about that: the police pictures of the crime scene had been taken at a different angle from the media’s.

  ‘I went up there yesterday,’ Annika went on. ‘It’s almost a shame that they’ve cleared away the bushes and sorted out the headstones. Some of the magic of the place has gone.’ She closed the folder. ‘Thank you so much. I’ll read it through carefully, but I won’t quote directly.’

  They reached for their mugs at the same time.

  ‘I heard the defence lawyer gave you a hard time yesterday,’ Annika said.

  Nina kept a firm grasp on her mug: her failure in court still stung. If Berglund was released, she would never forgive herself. She blew on the drink. She didn’t much like coffee, but it gave her something to do with her hands. ‘It wasn’t that bad,’ she said, and sipped. ‘Exchanges in the high-security courtroom are usually like that. They’re much harsher in tone than other trials.’

  Annika’s eyebrows rose, as they did when she didn’t understand something.

  ‘It’s all to do with the courtroom,’ Nina said. ‘The parties start off in separate rooms and enter the court through different doors. The prosecutors and defence lawyers never meet outside the courtroom.’

  ‘So they don’t bump into each other at the coffee-machine?’ Annika said, raising her mug.

  ‘Exactly. They never exchange pleasantries, never talk about the weather. The atmosphere in court can get very fractious.’

  ‘So, what do you think? Will he be convicted?’

  Nina warmed the palm of her hand against the bottom of the mug. ‘If the DNA evidence is accepted, then he was there. Even if he wasn’t the perpetrator, he helped. But the match isn’t a hundred per cent, although they very rarely are . . .’

  Annika looked down at her lap. ‘I need to ask you about something else,’ she said. ‘Birgitta, my sister, didn’t come home from work the day before yesterday. No one knows where she is, and she sent me two text messages asking for help, but I don’t know what with. I’ve spoken to the duty officer at Regional Crime and she’s filed a missing-person report, but is there anything else I can do?’

  Nina took two large gulps of coffee, and decided she could leave the rest with a clear conscience. ‘I presume you’ve tried calling her?’

  Annika nodded.

  ‘Could something have happened to her?’

  Annika hesitated. ‘Something doesn’t make sense,’ she said. ‘The texts asking for help were sent on the twenty-fifth and thirty-first of May, but she hadn’t gone missing then. The second was sent just before half past four on Sunday morning, and she disappeared on Sunday evening.’

  ‘What does her husband say?’

  ‘
He’s reported her missing as well, with the police in Malmö – that’s where they live. He’s really worried.’

  ‘Most people who go missing turn up again fairly quickly.’

  Annika gave her a fleeting smile. ‘I know.’

  ‘Seven thousand people are reported missing each year,’ Nina said, ‘and that includes short-term disappearances, teenagers running away from home, asylum-seekers who go off the radar, people snatching their own children . . .’

  Annika emptied her mug and put it down. ‘What happens with the ones who don’t show up?’

  ‘They’re officially registered after sixty days,’ Nina said. ‘That functions as a sort of control, because someone might have forgotten to report a person coming home. And asylum-seekers who’ve gone missing are also discounted.’

  ‘How many don’t show up again?’

  ‘A hundred or so, and they’re entered in the central police database of missing people. That’s when we make sure we’ve got a current description, dental records – that’s done through the Forensic Dental Unit in Solna.’

  Nina had paid it a visit when she was studying, a red-brick building with blue awnings; it was kept in a state of constant readiness because a mass casualty situation could occur at any time. The machinery was able to swing into action at once, identifying the dead and injured.

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘There are usually about thirty left on the register after a year.’

  They sat without speaking for a while.

  ‘And how many are there now? In total?’

  ‘In the entire register? Thirteen hundred.’ Nina’s brother, Filip, was among them.

  ‘All Swedes who’ve just disappeared?’ Annika exclaimed. ‘Like they’ve been swallowed by the earth?’

  ‘Some of the cases are old, dating all the way back to the fifties.’

  ‘When are they declared dead?’

  ‘That’s a judicial formality. It used to take a minimum of ten years, but after the tsunami that was reduced by half. So, for instance, if you see someone drown but their body is never found, that person can be declared dead after just a year or so. It’s all to do with judicial and economic factors, getting bank accounts closed, claiming on insurance policies . . .’

  ‘What if no one misses them or wants them declared dead?’

  ‘They remain on the register, as non-existent persons . . .’

  ‘Well, she’ll probably turn up soon,’ Annika said, looking down into her empty mug, as if it might miraculously have refilled itself.

  ‘If she’s been reported missing in both Stockholm and Malmö, her disappearance may end up being coordinated by National Crime,’ Nina said. ‘I can have a word with the duty officer at Regional Crime and see what we can do.’

  ‘That would be great,’ Annika said.

  Nina stood up. ‘I won’t disturb you any longer.’

  ‘You could never do that,’ Annika said, ‘as you know.’

  Nina went out into the hall. Jimmy Halenius was standing there in his socks, looking for something in a jacket pocket. ‘Hi, Nina. All right?’

  ‘Fine, thanks. You?’

  ‘The opinion polls could be better, but otherwise everything’s great. You haven’t got any chewing tobacco, have you?’

  She smiled apologetically and bent down for her shoes. Jimmy evidently found what he was looking for because he let out a sigh of relief and went into the kitchen with a small tub of tobacco in his hand.

  ‘What are you doing for Midsummer?’ Annika asked from the doorway to the living room.

  Nina’s answer came automatically. ‘Working. How about you?’

  ‘Don’t really know. Kalle and Ellen are going to be with Thomas this year, and Jimmy’s kids are off to see their mum in South Africa as soon as school breaks up. We were wondering about getting a group of friends together and going off somewhere. Shame you’re working.’

  Nina tied her shoelaces and stood up, her hair falling over her face. ‘I’ll be in touch if I hear anything from the duty officer at Regional Crime.’

  The door closed behind her and she found herself standing in the stairwell in her silent rubber-soled shoes. Why had she lied about having to work at Midsummer? It might have been fun to go away with a few friends, on the condition that it was just adults. There was nothing wrong with Annika Bengtzon and Jimmy Halenius’s children; they were a decent bunch: Ellen a fair-skinned blonde, Serena as dark as her mother, Kalle with Annika’s green eyes, and Jacob a swarthier version of his dad. But she had trouble dealing with families: she felt uncomfortable with the whole dynamic.

  She ignored the lift, walked down the stairs and out into the street. She stood there for a while. It was still warm, almost muggy. Sometimes she missed her brother and sister so much that it hurt. She had never really lived with them – they had been so much older than her, and only appeared in her life at irregular intervals. Yvonne, with her sun-cream, the one that smelt of coconut, rubbing it into Nina’s shoulders, nose and knees: You mustn’t let her burn like that! What sort of mother are you? Filip, with his books, reading to her in Swedish, Spanish and German: Es war einmal ein Mädchen, das mit seinem Vater und Stiefmutter lebte . . .

  But Yvonne had been shot and killed by the police in the forest north of Örebro six years ago. Filip, her saviour and big brother, registered missing, would never be coming back. She had shot him on the family’s hash farm outside Asilah in northern Morocco. In two weeks’ time it would be exactly five years ago.

  She held the moist air in her lungs until it hurt.

  Then she walked home through the stone-lined streets of the city.

  The sound of an American sitcom with a laughter track filtered into the kitchen from the living room. Jimmy was talking on the phone, presumably to the minister – Annika could hear his voice as a wordless melody, rising and falling. The children were asleep – she could almost sense their breathing as a gentle breeze through the rooms.

  The preliminary investigation into Josefin’s murder lay spread out across the kitchen table in front of her. She had picked out the sections dealing with Joachim’s alibi for the night of the murder and had read them twice, all the way through.

  She remembered some of it from before.

  Joachim claimed he hadn’t seen Josefin on the night in question. He hadn’t been to Studio Six at all but had been drinking with his friends at the Sture Company nightclub until it closed. Just after five o’clock in the morning, he and six friends had gone in a limousine taxi to a private after-party on Rörstrandsgatan. There, he had fallen asleep on the sofa.

  She leafed through the witness statements. His alibi really did look watertight.

  All the young men backed up Joachim’s story. A waiter at Sture Company confirmed that Joachim had been there. The driver of the limousine taxi stated that he had driven a group of intoxicated young men from Stureplan to Birkastan. Joachim had the receipt. The woman who owned the flat on Rörstrandsgatan said that Joachim had fallen asleep on her sofa.

  But Annika knew that Joachim had been at the sex club just before five o’clock that morning. He and Josefin had had a violent row: Josefin’s friend had overheard them.

  And the waiter hadn’t been able to say exactly what time it had been when he saw Joachim that night. It might have been as early as two o’clock. The driver of the limousine could neither confirm nor deny that Joachim had been in the taxi because he couldn’t see who was sitting right at the back. Robin Bertelsson had paid for the ride. A number of the friends who had been in the limousine were so drunk that they probably didn’t know what was going on during those critical hours.

  She could still remember Commissioner Q’s conclusions that summer fifteen years ago: the witnesses had been prepared, coached in what they had to say. She had managed to get hold of two. The first had ended the call as soon as she introduced herself, then switched off his phone. The second had denied that he had been involved in the case at all, despite indisputable evidence to the co
ntrary.

  The woman who owned the flat had been extremely drunk. She was sure she had seen Joachim asleep on her sofa, but she didn’t know what time he’d got there.

  Annika pushed aside the preliminary investigation and took out a picture she had managed to get hold of from a contact at the Driver Licensing Agency in Strängnäs. She had spent over an hour trying to find Robin Bertelsson, but this was the only photograph she had been able to track down. He seemed to take the surveillance society very seriously, and had no Facebook account under his own name, nothing on Twitter or Instagram, no blog. He didn’t appear anywhere on the internet.

  She looked at his symmetrical features, blond hair, sharply cut jaw.

  He knew.

  Robin Bertelsson had paid for the limousine. And then he had given the receipt to Joachim. If any of them had coached the others and got them to synchronize their stories, it was him. He had been in charge of ‘security’ at the sex club, and protecting its wretched owner was probably part of his job description.

  These days, he was married and living in Denmark. Neither he nor his wife had a listed phone number, no businesses. They had been registered as emigrants by the Swedish Population Register, but trying to find someone’s address in Denmark was considerably more difficult than it was in Sweden. Asking the Danish Population Register had been hopeless: they had referred her to the local council, but she was pretty sure that to get hold of someone’s address you had to know either their name, previous address and date of birth, or their ID number, past or present. She wasn’t entirely sure, though, because she hadn’t really been able to understand the woman’s Danish. The only information she had managed to uncover was that he worked for Doomsday Denmark, listed as a consultancy firm specializing in ‘internet security, analysis and programming’.