by Andy Maslen
‘We can’t!’
‘We have no choice, Gordon. I’ll sort somebody out for the job.’
Wade finished the call. Pulled a bottle of single malt from a desk drawer and, with shaking hands, poured a very large glass.
8
London
Stella tugged on the end of her ponytail. Something about the murder said that she wasn’t looking for a psychopath. This was a murder committed for a specific reason. Against a specific individual.
The motive wasn’t in the present – their initial research had failed to find a shred of evidence anyone had a grievance against Brömly. So it had to be in the past. He’d been murdered because of who he was, or what he’d done, not because he fitted some psychopath’s idea of the perfect victim type.
Her PC pinged. An email from Lucian. Relieved to have something new to read, she opened it and scanned its contents.
Thorough as always, and blessed with imagination and creativity as well as analytical skills, Lucian had come up with something.
He’d used electrostatic detection apparatus on the blotter from Brömly’s desk. The ESDA had revealed traces of writing impressed into the soft paper. They’d been in Swedish, but Lucian had run them through Google Translate and then, in square brackets, added his own best guesses for the remainder.
[I’m going] to make a full confession of my involvement in the Project.
[This will] reveal your complicity as well as my [own]
[It’s nothing] compared to the evil in which we all [took part]
[I’m going to give a full] and frank account of our actions
[Then I’ll be] able to face my death, and my maker, with [acceptance/courage/grace?]
[listen to/consult] your own conscience
Lucian had also found three names on the blotter: Ove, Kerstin and Inger.
He also confirmed Stella’s initial opinion about the tool used to remove Brömly’s tongue. According to the Met’s toolmarks database, which Lucian had confirmed by buying a pair and using them on a pig’s tongue, the killer had used a set of Teng Tools 12” flat-jaw grips.
Stella looked Teng up on the web. Interesting. The company had been founded by a Swede and was the bestselling tool brand in Norway and Sweden. Of course the tools were available everywhere, but Stella didn’t believe in coincidences.
The CSIs had recovered a dark hair from the crime scene, picked up on adhesive tape from the carpet. Brömly was grey, which ruled him out. The hair had a root, which would be useful for obtaining DNA should they get a suspect in custody. For now, though, Lucian had filed it with the other exhibits.
They’d also pulled crumbs from the carpet that contained butter, flour, sugar, cinnamon and a single caraway seed. Now what did that suggest? Kannelbullar. The sweet buns every Swede seemed to have tasted along with their mother’s milk.
Of course, one could buy them all over London. Add the fact that they were found in the flat of a Swedish national and their evidential value looked even shakier. She herself had eaten one in the ambassador’s office. Although maybe the caraway seed would lead somewhere. She didn’t remember tasting any in the bun the ambassador had provided. She made a note to check into it.
The same went for Teng tools. She was sure the guys who maintained the Bonneville for her used them. She’d seen the distinctive scarlet tool trolley with the glaring yellow eyes logo in their workshop.
Despite all that, something was telling her the killer was Swedish. The five-year absence from his career was niggling at her. Too long for a standard period of volunteering. Yet Brömly had returned to Sweden and picked up where he’d left off. Given his spotless record and matching soul, as described by everyone they’d so far interviewed, whatever the project was, she thought it must have happened in that half decade.
She pulled the team together for a briefing and wrote up new lines of enquiry on the whiteboard. She pointed to the three Christian names Lucian had revealed with the ESDA machine.
‘I think I know who they are.’
She flicked a switch to display Lucian’s recreation of Brömly’s letter onto a large white screen pulled down over one section of wall.
‘Brömly refers to a project. He calls it evil,’ Stella said. ‘He tells the others he’s going to make some sort of confession, so he can die without it on his conscience. I think it happened between seventy-one and seventy-five.’
‘Do you think they were all involved in something dodgy?’ Def asked. ‘In Africa?’
‘Yes to the first question, no to the second. I’m not even sure he was in Africa. I think it was just a conveniently vague line on his CV.’
‘A smokescreen?’ Cam asked.
Stella nodded.
‘It’s going to be hard to find out anything more from here,’ Garry said.
Stella nodded. She’d already decided to visit Stockholm in the next couple of days, as soon as she could square it with Callie.
‘Lucian turned up twenty-nine murders where the murder weapon was a nine,’ she said. ‘Garry, I want you to pull the files and see what you can find out about the weapons in each case. We know some dealers do a roaring trade renting pistols out. Can you work with Lucian, please?’
He nodded. ‘Sure.’
‘Then there’s the pastry fragments the CSIs lifted from the carpet in Brömly’s flat,’ she said. ‘Baz, I want you to look into that. See if there’s any variation in recipe among local suppliers.’
Baz nodded.
‘Don’t start sampling them all for research purposes,’ Cam said with a smile.
‘Yeah, or the missus’ll have you on a diet till the end of the year,’ Garry added.
Over good-natured laughter, Stella ended the briefing. She had a couple of hours until her meeting with Brömly’s oncologist and she needed to update the murder book with the new lines of enquiry.
She turned her attention once more to the two questions she was sure held the key to solving his murder. What was the precise nature of the ‘evil’ project Brömly had taken part in? And what were the identities of the other three Swedes? She sat back and rolled her shoulders, frowning as the joints in her neck clicked.
Closing her eyes, she strove to imagine how things might have played out, and smiled as a picture started to emerge.
Brömly had written to three people announcing his imminent confession. It felt to Stella like he’d kept the secret all the way from the seventies until now.
So, including Brömly, those four people were the only ones who knew of The Project. He’d written to them spelling out his plans. If it was as evil as he seemed to think, his confession, and presumably the bad publicity that would follow, would drag them down into the shit with him. Easy to imagine at least one of them preferring to stay out of it.
The conclusion was obvious. One of the other three had murdered Brömly: Ove, Inger or Kerstin. Unless Jamie was right, and they should be looking for someone Brömly had abused in the past.
9
Stockholm
Tracking down Kerstin Dahl had been easy. And now Annika sat a few tables away from the elderly woman in her local cafe. Dahl had ordered her usual, a strong black coffee and a slice of chocolate and almond cake. Annika was nibbling on a lemon and poppy seed muffin while sipping from a latte.
Both women were nose-deep in their laptops. But whereas Dahl was engrossed in whatever she was reading, Annika was merely hiding behind her screen. Dahl’s face betrayed her feelings. Her forehead was creased and her left hand covered her mouth.
Annika rose from her table and asked her neighbour to watch her laptop for her. The young girl agreed with a friendly nod then went back to her own screen. Annika wove between the tables in the direction of the restrooms.
The route she chose took her directly behind Dahl’s table. She paused to check her phone, using the opportunity to look over the older woman’s shoulder to see what she was looking at.
She was on the website of Svenska Dagbladet, the newspaper so many Swedes
turned to for their daily update on matters domestic and international. The headline told Annika all she needed to know.
Former ambassador found murdered in Mayfair flat
Beneath the headline a large colour photo of Brömly took up the rest of the laptop’s screen. A kindly, smiling, elderly man, obviously once handsome. Annika felt revulsion knotting her insides.
In the toilet, she leaned on the counter housing the sinks and splashed cold water on her face. She shook her head, sending droplets flying left and right, then went to dry her cheeks with a paper towel.
On the way back to her table, she paused again behind Dahl. She imagined holding a loaded gun to her head. What she had planned for Dahl would be infinitely sweeter. For Annika, at least.
10
London
The meeting with Brömly’s oncologist was brief. She told Stella that, thanks to inoperable prostate cancer, Brömly had only a few months to live.
‘And when you spoke to him last, how did he strike you?’ Stella asked.
The woman looked up for a few seconds before returning her gaze to Stella.
‘Philosophical. Some people go to pieces when they get a terminal diagnosis. Understandably. But Tomas seemed resigned to his fate. Almost as if he’d been expecting it.’
‘Did he say anything at all that struck you as odd?’
The doctor pursed her lips. ‘Only once. About a month ago. I mentioned, as I had to, that there were risks to fertility with surgical interventions.’
‘He was a bit old to be worrying about that,’ Stella said.
The oncologist nodded. ‘We still have to explain to a patient all the potential side-effects and complications following treatment. Anyway, when I mentioned fertility he grew, well, I would call it agitated. He said, “How ironic,” or something like that. He didn’t elaborate and I didn’t ask him to.’
From the meeting with the oncologist, Stella rode back to Jamie’s place. After dinner that night, they curled up on the sofa together. While he watched a football match on TV, she pondered the implications of what the oncologist had told her.
A dying man, correction, a devout dying man, wanting to set his mind at ease before going to meet his Maker. She could understand that quite easily.
But what was it specifically about the mention of fertility that had unsettled him?
Jonasson had mentioned that Brömly and his wife were childless. Was that it? Even after all these years, could his infertility have been causing him pain? She resolved to check his medical records. And those of his wife.
Maybe they weren’t child-free by choice. But if they were, something else had agitated the old man.
Midway through the following morning, Stella managed to get hold of Brömly’s British GP. As far as he knew, Brömly had never enquired about his own fertility. He’d inherited, if that was the right word, Brömly’s Swedish medical records, and they told the same story. As for Mrs Brömly, Stella would have to contact the Swedish authorities.
She’d just made herself a coffee and taken it to her desk when Callie called her in to her office for a chat.
Stella knocked and entered. Callie looked up when she came to sit down opposite her, but she didn’t smile. In fact, she looked as if she might be about to throw up. Her skin, always pale, had acquired a sickly cast. Every muscle in her face appeared to be straining to stay still.
Callie swallowed. ‘They found Adam.’
Stella gripped the arms of her chair. Her stomach churned and now it was she who felt she might need to excuse herself and rush to the ladies.
She’d been expecting blowback from her kicking Roisin out of the team. Or pressure from the brass to solve the case. But not this. Never this.
‘How?’ she croaked out.
‘A kid practising BMX stunts over water, if ye can bloody believe it. He called the local cops and they called the FBI. Jesus, Stel, I’m sorry.’
Stella opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. Sorry? Sorry for what? OK, so the FBI had discovered Adam, and presumably Lynne, in that lake in the snowy wilds of the Minnesota countryside. But that was a long way from its coming back to bite her in the arse. Wasn’t it?
‘Why are you sorry?’ she asked in a quiet voice, suddenly fearful.
‘The FBI asked for a liaison officer from the Met. AC Fairhill’s sending Roisin. There was nothing I could do,’ she said. ‘She went over my head, or behind my bloody back. Either way, the damned woman’s outflanked me. Us.’
‘Fuck!’
‘Stel, I have to ask. Did you kill Lynne Collier? Because they found her bones in the water alongside Adam’s.’
Stella closed her eyes. Felt the chill of the icy wind blowing off the lake outside Preston. The snow, thick underfoot, compressing with a soft crump with every step. A faint tang of wood smoke in the air.
She’d lured Adam Collier out there by kidnapping his wife. Now she stood facing him across a few dozen feet, with Lynne in front of her as a shield.
She’d pushed her towards Adam, expecting her to run, giving Stella enough time to run for cover before shooting him. But things had taken a shocking turn. Collier had shot his own wife dead to give himself a clear field of fire.
Eyes open, she looked Callie straight in the eye. ‘No. I didn’t. That was him.’
‘Why? Why would he do that?’
‘I think he was desperate. He would have killed me if he could, then fled. Probably gone over the border into Canada.’ Stella sighed. ‘He was backed into a corner, Callie. By me. I didn’t pull the trigger, but Lynne’s death is on me, just the same.’
Callie inhaled deeply and let the breath out in a rush. ‘Oh, Jesus, Stel, what a fucking great slaister!’
The stress, and the glitch in her understanding caused by Callie’s sudden drop into low Edinburgh slang, unhooked something in Stella’s mind. For the first time since she’d arrived back in England after killing Collier, she experienced a feeling of
unreality
she knew she was sitting in the visitor chair
opposite Callie, in Callie’s office and
beyond that, the open-plan
space occupied by SIU
the floors of administrative staff and detectives in other units and
forensics
the armoury exhibits room
custody
suite
and all the other
functions a
busy central london police
station
needed
but right now she felt herself
becoming detached from all of that hard-edged reality and floating
NO! not now not ever
she would never allow that to happen again
collier was dead lynne’s death was tragic but she was not going to allow
either of them to reach out from beyond the
grave
and drag her down with them all the way to—
Stella ground her jaws together until a high-pitched whine in her ears pulled her back to reality. No. Not going to happen. She was a survivor.
She sat straighter. Below the level of Callie’s sight, blocked by the desk, she was pinching the skin between her left thumb and forefinger with the nails of her right hand. The pain was intense, but it was keeping her focused on the here and now.
She had no desire to witness herself from a vantage point up on the ceiling. Her days of out-of-body experiences while Other Stella committed murder were behind her.
‘Can you help at all? Or have you been warned off?’ she asked, as reality asserted itself in sharp edges and rubbish odds.
Callie looked sad. ‘I’ll try. But I’m in the wrong place to run interference. Too senior to be monkeying around at the detailed level, too junior to steer the investigation in the wrong direction.’
‘It’s fine,’ Stella said at last. ‘I’ll handle it.’
Callie frowned. It wasn’t hard to read her thoughts.
‘Don’t worry,’ Stella ad
ded. ‘I won’t go after Rosh with a meat cleaver, if that’s what’s worrying you.’
She went for a smile but it felt as though someone had injected Botox into her cheek muscles. She wasn’t sure they’d responded the way she meant them to. Callie’s expression suggested they hadn’t.
‘It had crossed my mind.’
‘I’ll be a good girl. Look, if it all goes to shit, you’ll back me though, won’t you? I mean, I appreciate you can’t interfere in the investigation,’ she said. ‘But if she comes looking for me, you can put a word in higher up the food chain. After all, it was you and Gordon Wade plus some very important people who let me get on with everything.’
Callie was avoiding Stella’s gaze, fidgeting with a stapler. A spring popped out and a slide of staples shot across her desk, pinging off the base of a lamp. Callie looked up guiltily.
And in that moment, Stella saw with great clarity the nature of the world she’d moved into after expunging PPM from the face of the earth.
‘You’re going to throw me under the bus, aren’t you?’ she said, hardly believing she was hearing the words her lips were forming.
Callie appeared to be in physical pain. Her face twisted and her lips, coloured their usual deep red, narrowed to a thin line of discomfort.
‘I tried to protect you, wee girl—’
‘Don’t you dare “wee girl” me! Gordon Wade sent you after me and you told me I was in the clear to carry on,’ Stella said, struggling not to shout. ‘I murdered for you, Callie,’ she hissed. ‘I cleaned up the whole shitty lot of them. Ramage, Fieldsend, Howarth, Ragib and Collier. And you let me. You bloody well let me!’