They said he didn’t suffer.
Freezing to death was a painless way to die.
He had tried to get into the old inn, Värdshuset – it was still open in those days – but they hadn’t let him in. He was too drunk.
He didn’t actually drink that much. Not before the big cutbacks started, anyway. Hasse Bengtzon was the union representative at the works, the man who had led negotiations with the owners about who should lose their jobs and who should stay. He had fought like a tiger for his co-workers, was interviewed in the papers and on local television about the owners’ heartless policies. They wanted to close the site down and sell the machinery to Vietnam, sucking every last drop out of it at the expense of their own decency.
He had taken off his coat and boots. A man delivering newspapers found him, sitting in a snowdrift with an almost empty vodka bottle in his hand.
Annika didn’t believe there was any such thing as a painless death. She took a deep breath, let her pain blaze in her chest. Oddly, she didn’t cry. Maybe she had done all her grieving without realizing it.
The lightning was coming closer and she could hear the first rumbles of thunder.
She started the car, put it into reverse, listened to the wheels crunching on the gravel, then drove off towards the railway.
Birger Matsson still lived in the house on Källstigen where Sven and his elder brother, Albin, had grown up: a hundred-year-old wooden house that had been renovated beyond all recognition in the sixties, with big picture windows and cladding. The garden was dominated by a large garage with metal doors, while the house itself was tucked in beside a small hill at the edge of the forest.
Annika parked in front of one of the garage doors and pulled on the handbrake. She didn’t know if Birger was at home, but if he was, he would already have seen her.
Slowly she got out of the car and hung her bag on her shoulder.
She used to walk past here in her tightest jeans, hoping Sven would see her. He did, as it turned out. Annika was still a teenager when they’d got together. And they’d stayed together until his death.
She walked towards the house, feeling as if she was going to her own funeral. Discomfort was gnawing at her hands and stomach, and she was finding it hard to breathe. At least a four.
Her index finger shook as she rang the doorbell.
Birger opened the door at once. He had seen her coming. He towered above her, tall and skinny, his shock of white hair like a sail on top of his head. ‘Annika?’ he said. ‘Is that you?’ He sounded bemused, almost perplexed.
‘Sorry to turn up unannounced.’
He scratched his head with one hand, the way she remembered him doing, although in those days his hair was still steely grey. ‘Don’t worry, not a problem,’ he said.
‘I’d like . . . I’d like to talk to you,’ she said.
He took a step back, at something of a loss. ‘Of course. Come in.’
‘Thanks,’ she said.
He turned and went into the living room, his cardigan flapping around his thin frame. A commentator was babbling enthusiastically in German on the television. Annika stepped into the hall, took off her sandals, dropped her bag on to the floor and followed him.
They had bought a new sofa since she was last there. An Ektorp, from Ikea.
Birger sat on one of two new armchairs, reached to get the remote from a side-table and switched the television off, but not before Annika had caught a glimpse of a tennis match. Birger was very keen on sport, active in the indoor hockey club and the orienteering group, and he had passed on his interest to both his sons. Sven had been a star of the hockey team and, the last she’d heard, Albin was working as the assistant coach of an ice-hockey team in the Swedish Hockey League. Modo, maybe, or was it Frölunda?
A heavy silence settled over the room. Birger sat with the remote in his hand and gazed at her. He seemed to have pulled himself together: the look in his eyes was clear but watchful. ‘Please, have a seat,’ he said.
She sat in the armchair on the other side of the coffee-table. Her mouth felt dry as dust.
‘I don’t know how I managed to subscribe to German Eurosport,’ he said, nodding towards the television. ‘As luck would have it, I studied German at grammar school, because the contract’s for two years.’
She tried to smile.
He put the remote down.
‘I can understand if you’d like me to go,’ Annika said. The roaring in her head was so loud that she almost couldn’t hear herself speak.
The old man stared at her, and she made an effort not to look away, and to confront what she had done.
‘It’s okay, you can stay,’ he said.
She took several deep breaths through her mouth. ‘I’ve come to . . . to talk about what happened,’ she said.
He folded his hands in his lap.
‘To hear how it was for you and . . .’ She could feel tears burning in her eyes.
She had never talked much to Birger when she and Sven were together. Maj-Lis was the one who had organized the family. Birger was often away at club meetings, or off training in the forest. One year he’d come third in the Swedish national veterans’ tournament. She remembered him as being quiet and difficult to reach.
‘I’ve thought about you a lot over the years,’ Birger said.
She steeled herself. She wasn’t going to duck the issue. Doing that would mean she hadn’t moved on: she would still be stuck, trying to escape the swirling darkness. ‘I never thought about you,’ she said. ‘Almost never, anyway. And as soon as I did, I forced myself to do something else.’
The old man turned to the window. Then he nodded. ‘We thought about contacting you, but we always came up with the excuse that you probably didn’t want us to. It was cowardly of us. We should have asked.’
Annika’s head was howling. She clasped her hands together and forced herself to listen to what he was saying. She went on, ‘I’ve been avoiding lots of things. I stopped off at the turning to Tallsjön on my way here. I haven’t done that since . . . well, since Dad died there.’
‘That was a real tragedy,’ Birger said, ‘what happened to Hasse. We weren’t friends, exactly, but we did work together.’
Annika felt air fill her lungs. Birger had been one of the managers at the works. He’d left school with good grades. He’d stayed at the ironworks until the end, when he’d retired.
‘Hasse was a good worker,’ Birger said, ‘one of the best. It was a shame he never wanted to be a foreman.’
She was taken aback. ‘A foreman? Dad?’
‘Mind you, he was doing a good job for the union, I can’t deny that. He was an excellent negotiator, combative but good at formulating arguments. If the times had been different he would have gone a long way.’
‘Is that true? Was he really offered the chance to be a foreman?’
‘He turned it down, said it wasn’t for him. He was one of the workers, that’s how he saw himself.’
‘But,’ Annika said, ‘could he have stayed on at the works? After the cutbacks?’
‘Of course. We needed good people in charge. But I respected his position, choosing to remain one of the collective. It was an honourable decision.’
Her father could have gone on working, needn’t have taken to drink.
A flash of lightning lit the room, and there was a distant rumble of thunder.
‘So how can I help you, then?’ Birger asked.
Annika tucked her hair nervously behind her ear. ‘I’ve come to apologize,’ she said.
Birger looked down. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But you don’t have to.’
Calm breaths, in and out, not dangerous. ‘I’m so sorry about what happened. I understand how badly I hurt you. I’ve got children of my own, a boy called Kalle. If anyone hurt him I’d never forgive them.’
Birger rubbed his face in a weary gesture of resignation. ‘I don’t think you understand,’ he said. ‘We didn’t attend the trial, but that wasn’t to distance ourselves
from you.’
She waited for him to go on.
‘We thought it would seem as if we were condoning what Sven had done if we went to see you sitting in the dock, and we didn’t want that. It felt wrong. We had failed so horribly . . . Maybe we should have been the ones sitting there.’ He glanced at her, as if to make sure she was listening. ‘What sort of mistakes must someone have made as a parent if their son turns out to be a monster? It’s difficult to accept. Sven died twice – as the person he had become, and the person I’d thought he was.’ He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t until afterwards that we saw how our actions could be interpreted. That our not going to court was seen in town as a judgement on you, a lack of faith in the legal system, but that wasn’t the case.’
‘You realized before . . . what he was like?’ Annika asked.
Birger shook his head. ‘Well, the thought certainly crossed my mind. I mean, I saw the bruises. But I couldn’t believe it. I might have had my suspicions, but I didn’t want to see. And I did nothing. That shame is something I have to live with.’
She had to wipe her nose.
‘Do you know,’ Birger said, ‘why he ended up like that?’
She shook her head.
‘It was only when we read the verdict that we understood the extent of what you’d gone through. Why didn’t you ever say anything?’
A five now, maybe a six. ‘I thought it was all my fault,’ she managed.
‘It wasn’t. Not the way you were treated.’
‘But it was my fault he died.’
‘Maybe not even that.’
‘I didn’t have to hit him so hard.’
‘It was an accident,’ Birger said.
She forced herself to look him in the eye. ‘But what if it wasn’t? What if I wanted him to die?’
‘Wishing someone dead is one thing,’ he said. ‘Most of us do that at some point.’
‘But if I really hit him and hoped he’d never get up again?’
The silence sucked all the oxygen from the room. Birger rubbed his eyes with one hand. She could barely breathe at all now. A seven, maybe more.
‘Then you’ll have to live with that,’ he said.
An eight. Hard to breathe.
Out in the hall her mobile rang, the sound bouncing off the walls.
‘Aren’t you going to . . .?’ Birger began.
‘It’ll stop in a moment,’ Annika said.
The silence afterwards made the air feel even thicker.
Birger cleared his throat. ‘I read everything you write,’ he said. ‘You’ve covered some terrible stories.’ He nodded towards the bookcase. ‘Maj-Lis saved all your articles in a scrapbook – it’s in a drawer somewhere. I did plan to carry on after she died, but that never happened.’
Now he was looking at her again, his eyes tired and red-rimmed. ‘Maj-Lis used to worry about you,’ he said. ‘She always thought you took too many risks, that you never let up on yourself. When you were stuck in that tunnel under the Olympic Stadium, or almost froze to death in that shed up in Norrbotten, or when your house burned down . . .’
‘I’ve never looked at it like that,’ Annika said.
‘All the things you put yourself through, Maj-Lis sometimes wondered if that was because of Sven, if he’d done lasting damage.’
She glanced towards the hall and the flight of steps leading upstairs to the bedrooms. Sven and Albin had had separate rooms. She had lost her virginity up there one Sunday afternoon when the rest of the Matsson family were at a quarter-final of the Swedish indoor hockey championship. Hälleforsnäs had lost. ‘Sven isn’t the only person responsible for that,’ she said.
Another flash of lightning lit the room briefly.
‘Maj-Lis will have been dead four years this autumn,’ he said. ‘It’s so lonely sometimes. I wonder how long I’ll be left here without her.’
They sat in silence. Annika’s legs felt as if they were made of lead. She couldn’t help wondering how she would ever stand up.
‘We’ve been here for many generations,’ he said. ‘Your family and ours. We’ve been shaped by hard work. It’s left us all a bit battered.’
The first heavy raindrops hit the window.
‘We’ve got iron in our blood,’ Birger went on. ‘It doesn’t matter if we stay or go somewhere else, it’s there inside us.’
The discomfort inside her eased.
She gazed at Sven’s father, alone in an ugly house in a godforsaken industrial town, with a dead son and a dead wife, and German Eurosport as his main source of company.
He nodded to himself. ‘It’s happening quickly now,’ he said. ‘Everything keeps changing. Just look at the works – have you seen what they’ve done there? Shops and cafés.’
A clap of thunder made the house shake.
‘Thanks,’ Annika said. ‘Thank you for seeing me.’
Birger heaved himself to his feet, walked over to her and took her hand. His grip was dry, but not hard.
The moment she stepped out on to the porch the heavens opened. She rushed to the garage and threw herself into the car. The house at the edge of the forest disappeared behind the torrent of rain.
She pulled her mobile from her bag: one missed call. The number was familiar but it took a few seconds to place it: the National Crime Unit. Good grief! National Crime had tried to reach her and she hadn’t answered because she was busy clearing up her own mess. Fingers trembling, she pressed redial.
The man named Johansson answered, and Annika explained breathlessly who she was and why she was calling.
‘It’s about the mobile phone that’s under surveillance,’ Johansson said. ‘The operator has been in touch: the phone in question was switched on half an hour ago.’
Everything went quiet around Annika. She was dazzled by flashes of lightning but didn’t hear the thunder. ‘Switched on? Are they sure?’
‘The operator’s triangulation shows that the signal is coming from an area of forest in Södermanland, a kilometre or so from Highway 686 in the council district of Katrineholm. The closest point of reference is a lake called . . . Hosjön.’ He paused.
‘Birgitta’s at Hosjön? Now?’
‘Her mobile is, and has been for half an hour. Or, to be more precise, for the past thirty-four minutes.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Thank you!’
She heard the man sigh. ‘Don’t mention it,’ he said.
Annika clicked to end the call, then rang Birgitta’s number. The storm above her head was making the car shake.
The call was put through, one ring, two, three, four . . .
Someone answered.
‘Hello?’ Annika said. ‘Birgitta?’ The thunder was so loud that she had to stick a finger in her other ear to hear anything. ‘Birgitta? Are you at Lyckebo?’
The line crackled and whistled. Someone was trying to say something.
A flash of lightning lit the buildings and there was another thunderclap. The phone crackled and went silent. She’d lost reception. The lightning must have knocked out one of the masts.
She rang Birgitta again but the call didn’t go through. She tried Steven’s number, but that didn’t work either. She quickly typed a text message to Steven, hoping it would get through eventually: Birgitta’s at Lyckebo. I’m going there now.
The industrial estate was huge, with endless rows of corrugated-metal warehouses. It lay on the outskirts of Algeciras, about an hour’s drive from Marbella.
‘He rents this entire run of buildings,’ Rodríguez said, gesturing towards the warehouses on either side of number 738.
They hadn’t bothered trying to get hold of a caretaker: Nina was confident that the key she had found in the miserable little house would fit. Just to be on the safe side, in case la observatora was wrong, Inspector Rodríguez had put a crowbar into the back of the car.
The warehouse was anonymous from the outside. No sign to show what sort of business was based there, just the number of the building on a tarnished scrap of metal abo
ve the door. The façade was made of sun-bleached corrugated metal that had once been blue. No windows, just a large entrance for trucks and a smaller door alongside.
Nina pulled on her gloves again, took the key out of an evidence bag and went to the door of the warehouse to the right of number 738. She held her breath as she inserted the key into the Assa lock. It slid in easily. She tried turning it to the left. It wouldn’t go. She clenched her teeth, tried turning it to the right. The key went round, once, twice – and clicked.
She let the air out of her lungs without a sound.
The door swung open silently on well-oiled hinges.
The warehouse was pitch-black. Nina stepped over the high threshold and stood in the darkness. The air was hot and stagnant. She switched on the little torch on her mobile, shone it around her and discovered a light switch to the left of the door.
With a whooshing sound, the lights in the roof went on, one neon light after another, illuminating the warehouse with an intensity that made Nina squint. The electricity bills had evidently been paid here.
‘What does this mean?’ Rodríguez said, stopping beside her.
The warehouse was completely empty, a metal shell with no contents. The layer of dust on the cement floor was undisturbed. The building measured maybe ten by fifteen metres, and was approximately six metres high.
Nina walked slowly around the walls. If there had been anything to examine she would have done so, but there was no point even in looking. The powerful lighting revealed the utter absence of life and activity.
When she got back to the door, and Rodríguez, she switched the lights off and they stepped out into the street. Nina locked the door behind them. Rodríguez walked over to the door of number 738, but Nina went towards the warehouse on the left. The same thing happened there: the key fitted and the door swung open.
Empty.
For once, Inspector Rodríguez was silent.
Nina did a circuit of the warehouse, inspecting the floor in case there were any concealed hatches, but there was nothing. She peered at the roof above the lights, but could see nothing unusual. She switched off the lights and locked up, then went back to the warehouse in the middle.
‘Looks like this has seen more use,’ Rodríguez said. ‘Look here – the paint’s been worn off.’
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