‘Where could she be? Do you think she left of her own accord?’
The atmosphere in the room changed. Sabine’s eyes widened: the thought that something serious might have happened to Nora evidently hadn’t struck her before.
‘I … It’s terrible.’ She said no more.
Annika looked at Therese. ‘What do you think?’
Therese sat completely still. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking about Nora since I heard about it yesterday morning. She’s … a very serious person. Shy, perhaps. We usually see each other at the children’s morning playgroup at the church. None of our children goes to nursery …’
Annika was taking notes. ‘What do you usually talk about?’
Therese swallowed. ‘I don’t think Nora usually talks much with any of the other mums. She’s mostly preoccupied with her children and her audio books.’
‘Audio books?’ Annika said.
Therese put down her cup. ‘It’s actually a bit odd,’ she said. ‘Nora’s always listening to audio books. Streamed through her mobile. I once asked her if she’d like to join our book group, but she said she didn’t have time to read …’
Annika stopped writing.
Sabine had found her tongue again. ‘I know!’ she said. ‘Nora says such strange things. I asked if she’d like to join our cookery club on Wednesday evenings, but she said she went to yoga at the Studio then … but she doesn’t. My friend Bettan is the yoga leader for that class.’
Silence descended around the table again. Annika could hear the whirr of the little fan in the video-camera. This wasn’t going very well. She turned to Lovisa. ‘How do you know the Lerberg family?’
The young woman tucked her hair behind one ear in an automatic gesture. ‘I don’t know Ingemar, but Nora was in the same class at school as my younger sister, out in Gustavsberg. She used to come round to ours sometimes.’
Her hair fell forward again, and she tucked it back. ‘I used to feel sorry for her,’ she said quietly.
‘Why?’ Annika asked, writing again.
Lovisa hesitated for a moment. ‘She had a stammer.’
‘Did she?’ Sabine was surprised.
Lovisa picked up a bun and took a little bite. ‘She learned to hide it. The stammer, I mean. You can’t hear it now.’
Sabine looked genuinely concerned. ‘But why haven’t you mentioned it before?’
‘We moved to Saltsjöbaden and I didn’t see her again until we ended up in the same mothers’ group.’ Lovisa leaned back in the sofa and crossed her arms and legs, evidently done with being interviewed and talking.
Annika studied the young woman thoughtfully. She was just as blonde and thin as the others, with a big diamond on her left ring finger and a Rolex on her wrist, but she was pale, and her eyes were evasive. ‘Do you still see each other?’
‘No, not much.’
‘Where do you think she might be?’
She twisted a lock of hair between her fingers, an obvious sign of stress. ‘No idea. What do we ever really know about anyone?’
Sabine shifted uncomfortably, possibly unsettled by the idea that she had no real control over her neighbours.
Annika decided to try another angle. ‘Do any of you know how she met her husband, Ingemar?’
‘There’s a big age gap, obviously,’ Sabine said. ‘He’s – what? – twenty years older?’
‘Eighteen,’ Therese said, biting into a bun.
‘Nora was young when they got married, wasn’t she?’ Annika said. ‘Just a teenager?’
No one said anything.
It was a rhetorical question: Annika already knew the answer. Nora and Ingemar had got married the year Nora turned nineteen, on 25 May, just in time for Ingemar’s campaign for election to Parliament.
‘So the Lerbergs’ children don’t go to nursery?’ she tried instead. ‘Does Nora have a job?’
‘No,’ Sabine said. ‘Her husband’s a politician, after all, a Christian Democrat. He thinks women should be chained to the stove, have children and devote themselves to keeping their husbands happy and healthy.’
Therese stiffened. ‘It can actually be a conscious choice to stay at home with your children,’ she said.
Sabine stretched her back. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’m all in favour of choice in family life. I just think it’s odd that a modern individual would choose to ignore all aspects of personal development.’
Therese’s cheeks had turned bright red. ‘We don’t all have two Filipinas in the basement to do the washing and cleaning,’ she said.
Now it was Sabine’s turn to look upset. ‘Is there something you’d like to say about the way I live my life?’
Annika felt it was definitely time to round things off. ‘Valter,’ she said, ‘can you take some close-ups of everyone so I’ve got something to use in the editing?’
The women remained on the sofa for a few more minutes while Valter filmed them.
Then Annika stood up. ‘I won’t take up any more of your time,’ she said. ‘Thanks very much for letting us intrude.’
Valter switched off the camera.
Sabine got to her feet. ‘It’s a shame you didn’t get a chance to meet our kids,’ she said. ‘But perhaps there’ll be a chance for that another time.’
Annika quickly packed away her pen and notebook, then the video-camera and tripod, and shook their hands. They left the women standing by the door. Annika could feel their eyes on her back as they walked towards the car.
‘Christ,’ Valter said, as they set off along Silvervägen. ‘What are we going to do with that?’
‘There are some decent quotes we can edit together.’
‘You mean the clichés? “How could something like this happen?”’
She gave him a wan smile. ‘You’re a quick learner.’ She fished her notebook out of her bag and handed it to him. ‘Moberg & Moberg’s office is on the way back. Can you look up the address?’
Valter set about the task with great energy, but not even his youthful enthusiasm had any effect on the car’s complicated satnav system. Eventually Annika parked at a bus-stop and Googled the address on her mobile.
She called the office, found out that it was open until five o’clock, then drove off towards the motorway.
‘Why are we going there?’ Valter wondered. ‘To look at Ingemar Lerberg’s old accounts?’
‘Not just that,’ Annika said. ‘I want to know if Ingemar really was fiddling his tax.’
It had stopped raining, but the brown sludge from the tyres of the cars in front kept splattering the windscreen. Annika switched on the wipers. The cleansing fluid had run out, and the brown sludge smeared messily across the windscreen. She slowed down.
‘You shouldn’t underestimate the value of old accounts. Lerberg ran that last bankrupt company while he was an MP for almost a year. If he was doing business with Saudi oil sheiks at the same time as pushing for a trade embargo against Saudi Arabia, that’s kind of exciting, isn’t it?’
Valter Wennergren stared out through the windscreen. ‘We’d still have to give him the chance to comment before we published, though, surely.’
‘Of course,’ Annika said.
‘If he survives,’ Valter said.
The roadside was now lined with scrub, scrawny birches and hazels that should have been in leaf for several weeks now. Big out-of-town stores, car-repair workshops, plant nurseries, power lines. They passed Fisksätra, endless rows of concrete apartment blocks, a viaduct bearing a poster for an art exhibition in a gallery in Saltsjöbaden. Valter sat and stared out of the passenger window for a long while, then turned to Annika.
‘Shouldn’t the relatives be informed before we publish the name of a victim of crime?’ he asked. ‘His wife hasn’t been told, has she, seeing as no one knows where she is?’
Annika glanced in the rear-view mirror, then pulled into the right-hand lane. ‘Every situation is different,’ she said. ‘There’s no fixed template, sadly. It would be
much easier if there was.’
‘But this case isn’t that complicated, is it?’ Valter said. ‘The wife doesn’t know anything, but we’re still publishing the victim’s name and picture. Isn’t that in breach of press ethics?’
She was overtaken by a lorry that threw a cascade of water across the windscreen, washing off the worst of the sludge.
‘The local press in Nacka published Lerberg’s name and picture on their websites the moment the ambulance drove off,’ Annika said. ‘His neighbours and employees began to make statements. Practically everyone close to him already knew what had happened by the time we went public. It would have looked very odd if we had concealed his name under those circumstances, as if there were something dodgy about the whole situation.’
Annika indicated right and turned off onto the main motorway towards Stockholm.
‘But there is something dodgy about it,’ Valter said. ‘I mean, the bloke was almost killed.’
The motorway, blasted through rock, ran past cliff-faces and noise-dampening barriers. Annika thought back to the women in Solsidan, to the big house with its ice-cold stone floor, all the effort that went into hair-colouring, bun-baking and finding the right curtains to match the sofas. Some time ago she had read an article about scientific research that showed it was possible to shop your way to a better quality of life, but only in three specific areas: food; travel and new experiences; charity and gifts. Eating, doing new things, and giving things away. So how come everyone put so much effort into the rest of it? Were the researchers wrong? How else could sofas and fingernails be so important?
‘Do you think the evening papers are obsolete?’ Valter asked out of the blue.
Annika glanced at him. ‘Do you mean the print media in general or …?’
‘Investigative journalism used to balance out the gossip, but that’s pretty much been taken over now by documentaries and books.’
‘But we’re the ones who draw attention to the documentaries and books. Their message only gets across because of the established media.’
‘Impoverished freelancers and underpaid film-makers spend years working on a story, then the evening papers write one article and appropriate the glory for themselves. Talk about getting a free ride!’
Annika couldn’t help smiling. ‘Are you sure you’ve chosen the right place to do your work placement?’
The young man glared through the windscreen. Annika slowed down and turned off towards Hammarbyhamnen, leaning forward to peer through the filthy windscreen. ‘So, are you ready for this?’
The office was in Södra Hammarbyhamnen, not the fashionable new residential area, but next to the old light-bulb factory in the industrial district. The accountancy firm of Moberg & Moberg was located on the ground floor of a three-storey apartment block from the seventies.
The door was opened by a woman with lipstick on her teeth. ‘I’m afraid Robert isn’t here,’ she said, and was about to close the door again, but Annika walked into the office, forcing her to stand aside.
‘We’d be just as happy to see Henrik,’ she said.
The office was based in an ordinary three-room apartment. It was very obvious that Moberg & Moberg didn’t spend their profits on interior design. The bookcases and desks looked as if they had come from Ikea’s starter range at the time the place was built.
‘Have you booked an appointment?’
Annika smiled. ‘I called from the car, Annika Bengtzon. We’re from the Evening Post newspaper, and we’ve got a few questions for either Robert or Henrik Moberg.’
The assistant glanced uncertainly behind her. ‘I don’t know if he’s got time to—’
At that moment Henrik stepped out from what would once have been a bedroom. He was tall and heavy, dressed in a jacket and shirt that was open at the collar. He didn’t seem particularly pleased to see them. ‘What can I do for you?’ he said curtly, as he shook their hands.
‘We’ve got a few questions about one of your clients, Ingemar Lerberg, and his businesses,’ Annika said.
‘And we’re governed by the law of confidentiality, as I’m sure you’re aware,’ the accountant said.
He was clearly finding the situation extremely uncomfortable, Annika thought. His face was dark and he had a fixed set to his mouth.
‘First and foremost, I’d like to know what happened with the tax-office investigation into Ingemar Lerberg’s business seven and a half years ago,’ she said.
The man’s eyes widened slightly – that clearly wasn’t the question he had been expecting. ‘Why?’ he asked.
‘I couldn’t find any details in the media archives,’ she said breezily.
‘That’s not particularly strange,’ Henrik Moberg said. ‘Nothing was ever written about it. I told Ingemar he ought to release a press statement after the investigation was over, but he didn’t want to. He said, “They’ll still twist it to make me look like the tax offender of the century.”’
‘So they found him innocent?’
‘He was late with his VAT return on two occasions, and was given a fine totalling one thousand kronor.’
A thousand kronor, less than two parking tickets outside her front door on Södermalm would cost her. But that wouldn’t have made any difference. Ingemar had been right: the media would indeed have turned it into a crime comparable to high treason. Annika nodded and smiled. ‘We’d also like to look at the accounts of his older companies, the ones that went bankrupt,’ she said.
Henrik’s face closed. ‘What for?’
Annika continued to smile. ‘I don’t have to tell you that. Those documents are public files.’
The assistant shuffled anxiously in the background.
‘We don’t have the resources to look through the archive right now,’ Henrik said. ‘But if you could specify exactly what you’re after, we’ll see if we get a chance next week.’
Annika’s smile was still firmly in place. ‘No need. We can go through the archive ourselves. Where is it?’
The accountant exchanged a quick glance with his assistant. ‘In the basement. But …’
‘Excellent,’ Annika said. She walked out into the stairwell and began to go down the stairs.
Henrik and his assistant hurried after her.
‘The accounts from Ingemar’s first two companies have been destroyed,’ Henrik said, ‘so we can’t help you with those.’
Annika tilted her head to one side. ‘We’ll take the other two then, please.’
Henrik nodded to his assistant, who disappeared into a dimly lit corridor. ‘The media has become an arena for gladiatorial combat,’ he said. ‘You send people out into the spotlight, cheer and applaud them, then shoot them down and watch them bleed to death.’
Annika looked at him calmly. ‘The gladiators were the big celebrities of the Roman empire. It wasn’t just slaves and Christians who were forced to fight in the ring. Upper-class boys would apply to get in too. Things went so far that they had to impose a lower age-limit for gladiators …’
Henrik turned on his heel and disappeared back upstairs.
Valter was looking round, wide-eyed, his ethical doubts seeming to have dispersed in the dry basement air. ‘What a strange place to keep an archive of bankruptcies,’ he whispered.
Annika peered into the darkness of the corridor. It reminded her of the basement in the block of flats on Tattarbacken in Hälleforsnäs where she had grown up, a three-storey brick block like this one, with a communal laundry and drying rooms, and storage areas divided by chicken wire. Proximity to Stockholm meant that properties like this one had aged considerably more gracefully than their cousins in the backwaters of Södermanland. The stairwell had been painted recently, and the stone floor was polished to a shine. At the end of the corridor there was a small desk, with a chair and a reading lamp.
The assistant wheeled out a trolley with the files balanced on top. There weren’t many: four covering one bankruptcy, and three the other. ‘Just leave them here when you’re finished,’ sh
e said. She still had lipstick on her front teeth.
‘Which ones relate to Lerberg Consulting?’
She pointed to the files on the left of the trolley. Then she trotted back upstairs, her heels clicking on the stone steps. Valter looked at the files with a degree of horror.
‘Have a seat,’ Annika said, pointing to the chair by the little desk. Then she took off her jacket, folded it and laid it on the stairs. She grabbed three of the files and sat down.
‘Why do you want to look at those in particular?’ Valter asked.
‘This is the company that was investigated by the tax office,’ she said, opening the first page.
Valter sat down warily on the old office chair. ‘Where shall I start?’
‘At the beginning, perhaps?’
Valter read the labels on the back of the files and opened one. He checked each page before moving on. ‘Lerberg Investment,’ he said. ‘Offices on Strandvägen in Saltsjöbaden. Three employees, Ingemar Lerberg and two secretaries.’ He let out a whistle. ‘Ingemar was paying himself a quarter of a million kronor a month, while the secretaries got twenty thousand.’
‘A generous employer,’ Annika said. ‘At least towards himself.’
She flipped through receipts and invoices, sorted by date. Each receipt was stapled to a sheet of A4 and categorized according to strict criteria. They included office supplies, office furnishings, entertaining, IT equipment, taxis, parking costs, travel, expenses, wages, pension …
She paused over a large bill from the Operakällaren restaurant in Stockholm: 7,900 kronor. Carefully she lifted the receipt, and the names of those in attendance were written on the back. None meant anything to her.
Valter read out: ‘Conference trip to Monaco, five nights at the Hôtel de Paris.’ He looked up at Annika. ‘Isn’t that …?’
‘The casino in Monte Carlo? Yep. Carry on.’
He turned a page. ‘Yacht hire. Lease of helicopter for transport between Monaco and the airport in Nice.’
Annika moved on to the next file. The documents rustled. She came to another bill for entertaining at Operakällaren, no names she recognized. Christmas lunch at the Grand Hotel. This time there were several old acquaintances: Kristine Lerberg, Nora Andersson and Helmer Andersson, among others. Ingemar’s elder sister, his future wife and possibly her father. A little family dinner at the company’s expense.
Without a Trace (Annika Bengtzon 10) Page 10