A gust of wind tugged at Annika’s hair. ‘What made you sound the alarm on Monday?’
‘The art society,’ he said. ‘Birgitta’s been painting all spring so she could take part in an exhibition. Two men from the society came round on Sunday to look at her pictures.’
‘What did they say?’
‘It was probably lucky she wasn’t home, really. They talked a load of crap, said the pictures were too superficial, that they lacked depth, they didn’t want them in their exhibition. Birgitta’s been talking about it for ages, that they were going to come and look at her stuff. She wouldn’t have missed that. Something’s seriously wrong.’
‘Have you called her work?’
‘They say they can’t put calls through to the tills.’
‘So you haven’t been down there?’
The little girl said something in the background and Steven put the phone down again.
‘Do you know what she was doing in Hälleforsnäs?’ he asked, when he came back.
‘She was asleep in a car, a Ford or a Nissan, something anonymous, outside the Konsum supermarket in Malmköping last Friday.’
‘Asleep?’
‘She must have been there with someone. Do you have any idea who?’
He said nothing. The silence echoed. She sat there, gazing at the lake and listening to the trees.
Eventually he sighed. ‘I’m coming up,’ he said. ‘I’ll rent a car straight away.’
‘She’s probably not here any longer,’ Annika said. ‘Her last text was sent from Luleå.’
‘Luleå?’ The surprise in his voice was unmistakable. ‘What’s up there?’
‘I don’t know,’ Annika said.
‘I’ll come anyway,’ Steven said.
‘That might be as well,’ Annika said. ‘It doesn’t sound like she’s in Malmö, anyway.’ She took a deep breath. ‘There was one other thing. I know you hit Birgitta. Why did you lie about that?’
A few seconds’ silence.
‘Let’s talk about that when I get there.’ He hung up.
Annika put the phone back into her pocket.
If you fell asleep in someone’s car, you had to feel comfortable with them. Who had she driven off with?
She looked towards the lake. The birches rustled; the ripples sparkled with shards of silver. She took out her mobile again, opened the web browser and found the website of an online business directory. She typed in matextra malmö. She found the details of the company’s board and MD, Anders Svensson. Then she called Directory Enquiries and asked to be put through to MatExtra in Malmö.
A receptionist answered.
‘I’d like to speak to Linda, the store manager.’
She was on the line almost immediately.
‘My name is Annika Bengtzon, and I’m the sister of Birgitta, who used to work for you,’ Annika said.
‘I see,’ Linda said warily.
‘I’ve been wondering what happened on Saturday, the sixteenth of May.’
‘I don’t understand what—’
‘Something happened,’ Annika said. ‘Birgitta was very upset about something, and I’m wondering what it was.’
Silence.
‘Either you tell me what it was,’ Annika said, ‘or I go straight to Anders Svensson and tell him what a useless manager you are.’
The woman gasped. ‘What are you talking about? Who did you say you were?’
‘Birgitta’s elder sister. I want to know what happened. If you tell me, you’ll never hear from me again.’
There was the sound of a door closing.
‘Well,’ Linda said, ‘it was nothing much. I just told Birgitta that she couldn’t have the permanent job we’d talked about. Other people had been here longer than her, and I had to think about the morale of the other staff.’
‘So you withdrew the promise of a permanent job?’
‘I wouldn’t call it a promise. We’d certainly talked about it but—’
‘Thank you,’ Annika said, and hung up.
Elin, or one of the other cashiers, had complained to the boss, and Linda had backed down. Birgitta had evidently taken it badly and, instead of going home, had gone to a bar and started drinking.
But why was she staying away? And why had she lied about getting another job?
Annika’s hair blew across her face, and she brushed it aside with her newly polished nails. She found herself looking at the front door of the cottage and her mind stood still. There was a pale patch of wood beside the lock. The strip at the side was slightly crooked.
Someone had broken in. The marks were barely visible, but they were there.
Roland had said there had been a wave of break-ins into summer cottages recently.
She took hold of the handle and the door opened, the hinges squeaking. Her heart was pounding. She took a step into the hall. ‘Birgitta?’ she said.
The place smelt mouldy and stale. The floor was covered with a thin layer of dust that swirled up when Annika moved.
No one had been inside: their footprints would have shown in the dust.
The door slammed and Annika screamed. The wind whistled through the gaps in the wood. She threw herself at the door, which opened instantly, and stumbled outside. It was just as empty and deserted as before. The wind had blown it shut.
She stood there until her heart had slowed down.
Then she closed the door properly.
For the time being she still had a job to go to and work to do. Back to Gustaf Holmerud. She set off towards the car.
He heard the woman long before he saw her.
She moved through the forest like a threshing machine, crushing twigs under her feet, pulling at branches, the fabric of her coarse trousers pushing through the vegetation. She was walking fast, approaching at speed. She was heading in his direction.
Quickly and silently he made his way across the abandoned meadow towards the edge of the forest. He straightened the grass behind him with a small branch. He never left a trail.
He waited behind a pine until he saw her emerge into the clearing and stop.
It was her. He recognized her at once.
She was panting slightly, and stopped to catch her breath as she looked at the house. Perhaps she was in the habit of coming here. That would make things easier.
He studied her movements as she walked up to the cottage and looked in through the kitchen window. She was wiry, a bit skinny – she could probably move quickly. She stood at the window a little too long and, for a moment, he worried that she had seen something odd. Perhaps her mind was on other things because suddenly she pulled a phone from her trouser pocket and made a call. She leaned against the wall and looked out across the lake as she talked. He couldn’t hear what she said, but that didn’t matter.
Then she ended the call, went to the steps and sat down, fiddled with her phone, and talked again, read something, talked.
Then something happened. He looked more closely through the branches.
She had noticed that the door had been forced.
Well, perhaps that didn’t matter either. He watched with interest as she inspected the lock, then took hold of the handle. She stepped into the hall and said something, he couldn’t hear what. She might have been calling for someone, Is anyone here? or Hello? Fortunately he wasn’t as hard of hearing as his brother. His mirror image had been a little too fond of percussive weapons at the start, before they had realized how impractical it was to drag guns around when you could take a toolbox instead. But his hearing had suffered lasting damage. He never complained, accepted the situation and lived with the injury.
He knew his brother was doing his mental exercises in prison. He himself had tried to devote himself to them more actively over the past year, had tried to feel that it bound them together, but hadn’t succeeded.
It had been a terrible year, an annus horribilis, as the British queen had once put it. He had lived his shadow life more or less as usual, the way they had when they were both in Sw
eden and one of them was in the villa in Täby, or when they were both in Spain and one was in the terraced house – the other would rent a flat in a shabbier neighbourhood, under an assumed name, and live as the Shadow, the featureless man who didn’t exist. He was still able to live quite openly: even though his brother’s picture had been in the press countless times, no one reacted when they saw him. It was easiest to get lost in a crowd; they had always lived by that motto. A woman had lain dead in a flat in the stairwell next to his for three years and no one had missed her. No one would miss him.
A gust of wind blew through the forest, and he watched it slam the cottage’s door. The woman screamed and rushed out into the meadow. He had been right: she was quick. She looked at the door, and for a moment she turned in his direction, but didn’t see him, he was sure. She stood like that for a minute or so, then turned back, closed the door and set off towards the path through the forest.
He waited without moving for seven minutes, the length of time he estimated that it would take her to reach Highway 686, then thought he heard a car start.
He waited another half-hour before emerging from his hiding place and getting on with his business.
The arrest warrant from the Spanish Prosecution Authority was presented to Stockholm District Court late in the afternoon. It requested Ivar Berglund’s extradition to Spain, on suspicion of the murder of businessman Ernesto Jaka in San Sebastián eighteen years ago.
Nina was sitting on the terrace of a café by La Concha beach when the news reached her. It appeared on her phone in the form of a text message from Johansson, just minutes after the petition was handed in. She read the short message twice, then put away her phone. She looked out at the Bay of Biscay. If he wasn’t convicted in Sweden, he would be extradited to Spain and found guilty there. The Spaniards weren’t in the habit of letting their murderers out in a hurry. The minimum sentence was twenty years, and the maximum double that.
She beckoned over el caballero and asked for the bill, paid and began to walk back towards the police station.
San Sebastián, Donostia in Basque, was a disappointment. Not because there was anything wrong with the city, either the architecture or the setting – on the contrary, the beautiful city centre curled along the famous beaches of the bay – but it wasn’t Spain. Not her country, her streets, not her language. The Basque being spoken around her bore no resemblance to Castellano. The architecture could be French, or Swiss, with its heavy ornamentation and grey stone façades radiating affluence and solidity. There was no trace of the Moorish inheritance that dominated the landscapes of her childhood, with their sun-drenched white stucco buildings and terraced olive plantations.
She returned to the police station as a Swedish police observer: Europol had verified her status during the afternoon.
Commissioner Elorza was waiting for her in his little room. ‘I heard that our request for the extradition of Señor Berglund has been registered with the Swedish authorities,’ he said. ‘That was quick. You have a very efficient administration.’
‘Sweden has many good points,’ Nina said, settling on her chair. ‘Productive bureaucracy is one of them, as is a humanitarian view of criminals.’
‘And the bad points?’
Nina reflected for a moment. ‘The tyranny of welfare,’ she said. ‘The constant need for more without having to do more to get it. Small-minded whining about any change or development, and a deep-seated conviction that we’re the best in the world at absolutely everything.’
The commissioner laughed. ‘I’ve had a long conversation with Javier Lopez, my colleague in Albuñol,’ he said.
Nina waited for him to go on.
‘It’s funny the way some events stay with you,’ the commissioner said. ‘Lopez still remembers the accident when a Swedish man got himself killed nearly twenty years ago. It happened during his first year in the force, so that may go some way to explaining it.’
Nina’s hands were clenched in her lap, anticipation growing in her stomach.
‘Lopez pulled out the old file, just to make sure, and it confirmed what he remembered.’
Commissioner Elorza ran his fingers over his notes. ‘It was a Wednesday night at the start of February and it had been raining earlier in the evening. That makes the roads up in the mountains slippery, and with bad tyres it’s easy to find yourself aquaplaning. The car containing Señor Berglund drove straight into a ravine above Albondón. It caught fire on impact and was burned beyond recognition.’
Nina tried to imagine the scene in her mind’s eye. ‘Beyond recognition? In spite of the rain and the wet ground?’
‘That’s how it was described to me.’
‘So how did they know it was Arne Berglund’s car? And that he was driving it?’
‘The number plate was still readable. The car, a Volvo 164, was registered in Arne Berglund’s name. An overnight bag was thrown out of the car when it crashed, and contained Arne Berglund’s wallet. The body that was found strapped in the driver’s seat was a man of Berglund’s size and age. A watch and a necklace that were burned on to the corpse were identified as belonging to Arne Berglund.’
‘By whom?’
Commissioner Elorza looked down at his notes. ‘The victim’s brother, Ivar Berglund.’
Nina clenched her fists tighter.
‘Arne Berglund was registered as a resident of Marbella,’ the commissioner continued. ‘He owned a small house there and ran a business trading in timber.’
‘What happened to the house and the business?’ Nina asked.
Axier Elorza looked at her with a twinkle in his eyes. ‘I had a feeling you might ask that. They were both bequeathed to his brother, who went on running the business from Sweden, albeit on a smaller scale. The house still belongs to the brother.’
Adrenalin was coursing through her. ‘It may not have been the brother who identified the dead body,’ Nina said. ‘What if he did it himself? He identified himself. He didn’t die in that accident. Someone else did. I don’t know how they did it, but it wasn’t Arne Berglund who was burned beyond recognition in that car crash.’
‘That will be hard to prove. The body was cremated.’
Nina had to force herself to remain seated. ‘It’s not the dead body we should be focusing on,’ she said, ‘but the living man.’
‘You seem very sure about this.’
She straightened in her chair. ‘I’m not certain, but it’s a possibility that ought to be investigated. The men are identical twins. They could have carried on living two lives, in Sweden and in Spain, under the pretence that they were the same person. As long as they were never seen together, they were safe.’
Commissioner Elorza nodded thoughtfully, with a degree of amusement. ‘Today one brother is in custody in Sweden, charged with murder. Which of them is it? And where might the other be?’
‘I don’t know which of the brothers is which,’ she said. ‘For the time being it doesn’t really matter, because if I’m right, they’re both guilty. The one who’s free must have been lying very low for more than a year, so they must have access to homes or refuges that we don’t know about.’
‘Here, or in Sweden, or somewhere else on the planet?’
Nina took a deep breath. ‘One last question,’ she said. ‘You didn’t happen to get the address of the house in Marbella?’
Commissioner Elorza smiled.
Disappointment burned in Anders Schyman. He had intimated to the chairman that something big was in the works, that he could see an appeal to the Supreme Court. But Bengtzon’s terse text message after her meeting in the Bunker – No interview today, Holmerud obstructive. Still possible, details this afternoon – had led him to draw the wrong conclusion. He had believed that the interview would take place the following day, that something had to be negotiated higher up the food chain. He certainly hadn’t been expecting this.
Albert Wennergren put the printout of Bengtzon’s notes on the desk. ‘Well, well,’ he said sardonically.
>
Schyman chose to ignore the sarcasm. ‘You sound surprised.’
The chairman of the board smiled. ‘Positively surprised,’ he said. ‘First you got him convicted as a serial killer, and now you’re going to get him released. That’s what I call proactive journalism.’
Schyman looked at his boss, with his supercilious attitude, his designer sweater and hand-stitched leather shoes. Proactive journalism had paid for it all. ‘We need to check the terrain carefully, see what interest there is in the rest of the media,’ he said. ‘We have to build alliances and synchronize publication. It could get a bit complicated.’
Wennergren nodded thoughtfully. ‘I wonder how long the others are going to struggle on with their print editions,’ he said. ‘We live in interesting times.’
Anders Schyman had nothing to add on that point, so he kept his mouth shut. Wennergren picked up the printout again. ‘I’d like to talk to the reporter, find out what Holmerud said. Word for word.’
Schyman looked out at the newsroom. Annika Bengtzon was packing away her laptop. A brightly coloured picture of an old man was propped against the wall near to her desk, and he wondered what it was doing there. ‘You’ll have to hurry,’ he said. ‘She’s getting ready to go home.’
Wennergren got to his feet, opened the glass door and headed out into the newsroom. He said something to Annika, who looked up in surprise, then they headed for Schyman’s glass box.
‘He said exactly what I wrote in my notes,’ the reporter said, as she walked into the room and Wennergren closed the door. ‘He’s bored with being locked up and wants to get out. Men who kill women don’t have an easy time of it in prison, so maybe his friends are being nasty to him at mealtimes.’
‘This is interesting,’ Wennergren said, waving the printout. ‘I’m on the board of the family’s television channel and publishing company. I could stir up my contacts and we could make common cause with this, the same reporter presenting a series of articles, a television documentary and a book-length study. There’s a lot of profit to be made from that sort of blanket coverage.’
‘What a great idea,’ Annika Bengtzon said. ‘But why restrict our synchronization to Gustaf Holmerud? If we collaborate closely enough, we’d need only a single journalist in the whole of Sweden.’
The Final Word Page 21