Motive X

by Stefan Ahnhem

  ‘Rutger, is that your phone?’

  ‘No, it’s Dad’s,’ Rutger said without missing a beat on the controller.

  ‘I thought you said he wasn’t home.’ Fabian picked up the phone and read the text.

  ‘He’s not.’

  Could you tell Wilhelm to be home by dinnertime at the latest? Emilie.

  ‘All right, so it was you calling Wilhelm’s mum a while ago?’

  Rutger stopped playing and turned around. ‘How did you know that? Wille, did you rat me out?’ He turned to the other boy on the sofa.

  ‘Don’t look at me. I didn’t say anything.’

  Rutger turned back to Fabian as the Police song went down in flames behind him. ‘Did Dad send you? Okay, listen. My phone’s broken and I just had to borrow it to call Wille over.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Fabian held his hands up. ‘Your dad didn’t send me here to spy on you. As I said, I came to see him.’

  ‘Because I didn’t poke around in it, and I promise I’ll charge it and put it back in his office.’

  ‘That’s fine by me.’

  Rutger breathed a sigh of relief and handed the controller to Wilhelm. ‘Your turn.’

  ‘But there’s one thing I don’t get,’ Wilhelm said as he adjusted the strap so the controller would be the right height. ‘If you want to see his dad, why are you here when you know he’s not home?’

  ‘Yeah, actually, why are you here?’ Rutger chimed in.

  ‘See what this is?’ Fabian handed him his police ID.

  ‘You’re a police officer?’

  Fabian nodded.

  ‘Wow… Check it out.’ Rutger passed the ID to his friend. ‘So what, you’re, like, investigating a crime?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you could say that.’

  ‘What kind of crime?’ Wilhelm said. ‘Did someone get murdered?’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s confidential.’

  ‘And what do you want with my dad?’

  ‘I was hoping he could help me straighten a few things out. But maybe you two could help me instead?’

  Rutger lit up. ‘What do you want us to do?’

  Fabian held up the mobile. ‘First, we should, as you said yourself, put this back where it belongs. We don’t want your father to come home and find it has no charge. So if you could start by showing me to his office.’

  ‘Okay.’ Rutger jumped over the back of the sofa like he was doing parkour and jogged across the living room towards a spiral staircase.

  Fabian followed him down to the basement, past a spa section with reclining chairs, a sauna and sliding glass doors opening on to the pool area outside. A few doors and a short hallway later, Rutger stopped and turned to him.

  ‘But you have to promise not to tell him I have a key.’

  ‘I promise.’

  Rutger pulled a small bunch of keys from his pocket, found the right one, turned to one of the doors and put the key in the lock. Fabian noted that it was a proper lock, the kind you would normally see on a front door.

  ‘But hold on, Rutger,’ Wilhelm said as Rutger was about to turn the key. ‘What if your dad’s the suspect?’

  Rutger turned to Fabian. ‘Is he? Is my dad the suspect?’

  ‘No, he’s not.’

  Fabian didn’t like to lie. Especially to children. That said, Jacobsén had passed the stage where he was merely a suspect, so that should excuse part of the lie. ‘And as I’m sure you understand, I can’t tell you exactly what this is about.’

  The boys looked at each other and when Wilhelm finally nodded, Rutger unlocked the door.

  ‘Thanks.’ Fabian entered the room. ‘Why don’t you go back upstairs and play your game and I’ll let you know if I need more help.’

  ‘Or we can wait here until he’s done.’ Wilhelm crossed his arms.

  ‘Nah, come on, let’s play,’ Rutger said and disappeared with Wilhelm hard on his heels.

  ‘But do come down and tell me the moment one of your parents shows up!’

  ‘Okay!’ Rutger shouted back from the spiral staircase.

  Fabian turned on one of the two desk lamps and immediately noticed how neat and tidy the office was. Unlike the hallway and the living room, there was a kind of compulsive order in this room, with everything meticulously in its place.

  Apart from that, it looked more or less like a normal study. Desks with computers, filing cabinets and a printer, bookshelves filled with binders sorted according to colour and the inevitable piles of bills and unopened envelopes. The only thing that stood out was a small workbench strewn with electronics, soldering irons and circuit boards.

  He turned on the computer, which, as expected, asked for a password. He skipped the most common ones like 123456, password and football and instead tried Columbus.

  Incorrect password

  Too obvious. Jacobsén was smarter than that. It could be anything, of course, a random string of numbers and upper- and lower-case letters. In a way, randomness was an impenetrable wall. But Jacobsén seemed too structured and controlled to let randomness rule him. On the contrary, he’d talked quite a bit during their drive about the importance of seizing control and being in charge of your own life.

  Christofer1492.

  He considered it. That could absolutely be the password, but it could also be something else entirely. He did feel fairly certain about three things. If any of the letters was upper case, it would be the first one; if there were numbers, they would be at the end. That was almost always the way of it when people made their own passwords. He also felt convinced it would be connected to Columbus one way or another.

  Incorrect password

  Jacobsén had proudly told him about when he first started the company and no one had believed in him. Maybe he viewed that as the kind of conquest Columbus made in 1492. As the point when he seized the tiller of his life and started charting his own course.

  Christofer2001.

  Incorrect password

  But when he thought about it, the company might not be the most life-changing part of Jacobsén’s life. Money, success and above all the opportunity to ogle women he didn’t know, absolutely. But the most pivotal event should have been when he became Columbus. According to the woman at the swingers’ club, the rumours about him had started circulating about two years earlier.

  Christofer2010.

  The screen went dark for a few seconds and then lit up again, showing a desktop picture of an oil painting of three ships on the open sea. He immediately realized they must be Columbus’s ships, the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María.

  He was in.

  68

  Assar Skanås pulled the cloth bundle out of his backpack, unrolled it on the table next to the little girl and made sure the tools were all neatly ordered and within easy reach. There were pruning shears, two kitchen knives of different sizes, an awl, a hatchet, a hammer and a hacksaw. Lined up like that, they looked scary, they did, and he didn’t really like them. But once he got to them, she wouldn’t be feeling anything anyway.

  He looked out of the window, down at the people scurrying about like crazed ants far below him. No one even seemed to have time to stop and look at the police cars with the flashing blue lights that were pulling up in the middle of the square.

  What if they were looking for him? Could that really be the case? No, it must be someone else. Either way, they wouldn’t find him. Ever. He didn’t need to worry. Not even one bit, actually.

  The little girl’s navy-blue tights with white horses slipped off with a crackling of static electricity. Her legs were white like mother-of-pearl, which made the three bruises below her right knee stand out more. Why hadn’t he brought something to cover them up with?

  Her dress, also with a horse motif, he cut off. Same thing with her panties. One snip on one side, one on the other and they were gone with a little tug.

  Apart from the bruises, the sight before him was the most beautiful he’d ever seen, and it made his desire grow so strong he felt certain
it had never been stronger. He wanted to be inside her, and he wanted it now. Immediately.

  But that was bad. He knew it would be bad and too quick if he didn’t check himself. Instead, he took it in his hand and started pulling back and forth. First with calm, careful movements. But the sight of her soft ivory skin made him go faster and harder and in the end, he couldn’t hold it back.

  Catching his breath, he could feel it soften as the blood left it, swollen and half-erect after the rough treatment. He looked out of the grimy window and noted the arrival of another flashing car as the police officers fanned out in different directions.

  He cut out a piece of fabric with the pruning shears and used it as a rag to wipe her clean. Then he opened her mouth and counted five moist breaths before he balled up the rag, pushed it in and covered the whole thing with two large strips of tape.

  The girl switched to breathing just as calmly through her nose, without any reaction. Had he really hit her so hard she was in some kind of coma? It had its advantages, but it reminded him too much of death, and he didn’t like death. Not at all, as a matter of fact.

  He picked up her right arm and pulled it to turn her lifeless body 180 degrees, which made her head brush against him. Then he rolled her on to her stomach and pulled on both arms until her head dangled free over the edge of the table.

  Then he picked up the bowl with the lavender scented water and eased it down and in underneath her head. He held it with both hands to avoid spilling, knelt down and raised it until her whole face was under water.

  Please, don’t let her be in a coma. If she was, he’d have to hurry before she turned cold and stiff. Because he’d heard about that. Dead people went all cold and stiff; he didn’t like that at all.

  Then she finally coughed and came to with a violent jerk. He could see the muscles between her shoulder blades tense up like springs as she pulled her head out of the water and looked at him.

  He smiled at her, his warmest smile, so she would understand that this was something beautiful. Something for her to be happy about. But she didn’t look happy. Even though he was stroking her hair ever so gently, she managed to spit out the rag and scream at the top of her lungs. And he didn’t like screaming.

  Not one bit, as a matter of fact.

  69

  After twenty minutes in front of the two computer screens, clicking through folders and files, Fabian had found nothing more sinister than accounting, client lists and myriad pictures of Jacobsén himself, his friends and family by the pool and on various holidays.

  Nothing from his alter ego Columbus. Nor any external servers, either physically present in the office or in the cloud, and the search history showed only innocuous visits to Facebook, Google and news sites.

  He started closing down all the open windows to turn his attention to the contents of the bookshelves and cabinets instead, when one of the windows marked Docs archive caught his attention.

  It contained all the files on the hard drive, the ones he’d just been going through. But it wasn’t an item in the list that had made him react, it was one of the settings in the top right corner that controlled what was being shown. He’d never reflected on there being such a setting, but there it was.

  Hidden items, it said, under Details and Current view.

  He ticked the little box next to it and started scrolling through the list again; at first glance, it seemed unchanged. But a minute later, he noticed a folder he was sure hadn’t been there before. It was called Santa María and was one of the largest folders on the hard drive with its three hundred gigabytes. He opened it, which made a number of subfolders appear in a new window. He chose the top one, marked TAT, whose contents had last been changed three days earlier.

  A long list of subfolders opened up, all labelled with a number. He chose one at random, which turned out to contain pictures of a woman sprawled on a leather sofa. There were clamps on her nipples, and in another picture, she looked straight up into the camera while taking the man who was holding it into her mouth.

  Every last folder turned out to contain pictures of women in various positions. It was everything from Asian to dark-skinned women, blondes to redheads. Some wore knee-high boots, others vinyl and leather, but most were completely naked. Of Jacobsén, if it was him, nothing more than a hand, a sculpted torso and from time to time an erect penis adorned with a tattooed arrow could be seen.

  All the women seemed to be alive. Some had their eyes closed, true, and some looked worried or even scared. But nowhere did he see anyone who seemed drugged or generally out of it. On the contrary, most of the eyes he zoomed in on were glazed with desire, lust and unadulterated horniness.

  One picture united them all. A close-up of the women’s exposed pubic mounds, which had just been shaved and tattooed with a line penetrated by an arrow and a number.

  He scrolled down the list to folder number 28. As expected, it was Molly Wessman. She was lying on a rough wooden table with both arms and legs tied, being whipped. But in none of the pictures did he see anything fundamentally different from the others that might explain why she had to be poisoned and killed.

  He closed the window and opened the folder marked DATE. It contained only a programme called Opera, which turned out to be a browser. Fabian used Internet Explorer, even though he’d heard there were several others that were much better.

  He couldn’t find any bookmarks, but the search history showed a number of different dating sites.

  He chose Badoo, where a number of women’s profile pictures had been selected as favourites. They were all better-looking than average, though some of them had enlarged their breasts and lips a bit too much.

  Ingela Kjellson had, among other things, listed sex as one of her main interests. Another was role play and a third threesomes. The same was true of Tina Frej, Hanna Idun and Sofia Öhman. Apart from films, romantic dinners and music, all the women Jacobsén had selected listed different forms of sex among their interests.

  It didn’t look like he’d been in contact with them at all. He did, however, keep extensive notes about each of them. Among other things, he’d found out their home addresses, whether they rented or owned, who their landlords were or who was on the board of their housing cooperatives, and finally, what kind of internet service they had.

  So this is where Jacobsén trawled for victims.

  He went back to the original folder Santa María and opened one of the other subfolders, which was labelled TOR. The Onion Router, it said at the top of the browser-like window. He’d never visited before, but he instantly knew it was the dark net.

  Of course this was where Jacobsén hung out. Anonymous and impossible to trace among the illegal weapons dealers, people traffickers, paedophiles and so-called Red Rooms, which featured live executions.

  One of the bookmarks was marked Live; when he clicked it, both screens went dark. But then, as the transfer speed caught up, the pixels came back to life and a grid of five-by-five squares appeared on either screen. What he was looking at was live feeds from around fifty different bed- and bathrooms.

  Each square was marked with a first name like Stina, Greta, Ingela, Fia, Ylva and so on. The square marked Molly was black and marked with a red X.

  Most of the squares showed empty rooms, but then it was the middle of the afternoon. Lisa was home, though, and in the process of getting out of the bath, scraping water off her breasts before wrapping herself in a towel. Carina seemed to be asleep, and Amanda was reading in the bath. Kelly, on the other hand, was hosting two men in their thirties who were taking her in both holes.

  Despite the grainy image, he almost felt like he was hiding behind the curtain in her bedroom. Before the cloying feeling of aversion and shame had a chance to grow too overwhelming, he closed the TOR browser and instead opened the folder labelled MOV.

  It contained a list of around fifty subfolders, also labelled with first names. He scrolled down to Molly and opened it. It contained videos that looked like they had been culled f
rom the hidden webcams in her bedroom and bathroom, in which she was either pleasuring herself or having sex with one or several men and sometimes women as well.

  The most recent clip was almost exactly two years old and showed a man wearing nothing but a leather waistcoat, a cowboy hat and a hip holster with a revolver in it, taking her from behind in what looked like an act of very rough anal sex.

  In order to get as deep as possible, the cowboy was holding her hips with both hands and thrusting so hard his revolver slapped against her every time he hit bottom. But Molly didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, her pleasure seemed predicated on his roughness.

  After a while, he pulled out, grabbed her hair with one hand and pulled her towards him. With the other hand, he pulled out the gun and put it to her temple while she took him in her mouth.

  From time to time, he pushed her head so far down that Fabian could clearly see her gagging, and he only pulled her up by the hair when he came and—

  ‘What the hell is going on here?’

  Fabian turned around to see a woman standing in the doorway, staring from him to the violent sex on the screen and back again.

  70

  Lilja was standing in the middle of the square, letting her eyes rove across the façades. Assar Skanås’s phone turning on had seemed almost too good to be true. Molander had received the news in the middle of their meeting, after which they’d hastily wrapped things up and hurried off. Finally, they were going to catch him.

  But her joy had been short-lived. Not long after, word about Ester Landgren disappearing without a trace from the playground up in Slottshagen near Kärnan reached them.

  Molander had narrowed it down to a circular area centred on the eastern part of Stortorget Square, between the Trygg-Hansa building and the Elite Hotel. With a radius of a hundred and fifty feet, the circle stretched from the statue of Magnus Stenbock all the way up to Kärnan, which in turn meant the two events were too geographically close not to be connected.