by Andy Maslen
Inger rocked back in her chair as if Stella had punched her. The colour left her face and she swallowed convulsively three times, then clamped her hand across her mouth. Stella half-rose, hoping she hadn’t just caused a helpful witness to have a heart attack.
She heard footsteps and half-turned.
‘What’s the matter?’
It was Erik, returning to the table with a couple of slim paperbacks in his right hand. He knelt in front of his wife. ‘Darling, are you all right?’ He turned to Stella, his eyes ablaze. ‘What happened? What did you say?’
‘Get her away, Erik!’ Inger hissed from between her fingers.
‘I think you should leave. Right now,’ he said. His voice was shaking as he took a step towards Stella.
Stella nodded, retreating without wanting to turn away from him. He was old but looked more than capable of landing a punch. Malin Holm wouldn’t take it well if her visitor became involved in a fight with an elderly Swedish citizen after almost poleaxing his wife with an ill-judged, if pertinent, question.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for upsetting your wife.’
‘If you have anything else to ask, come back with a warrant,’ he snapped as he knelt beside Inger and commenced patting her hand.
Back in her rental, Stella executed a hasty three-point turn during which she almost got the Volvo’s rear tangled in a hammock slung between two birches. She drove away, simultaneously ashamed and elated. She was onto the truth now. She could feel it.
Back in Umeå, she parked behind the police station. She’d drunk so much of the strong Swedish coffee the Swedes loved that her heartbeat felt fluttery and too fast, as if she were about to hold a press conference or give a speech. Instead of heading inside, she walked to the nearby park and pulled out her phone to call Garry.
‘Boss! I thought you’d gone dark on us. How’s it going?’
‘It’s going well, though I’m starting to miss the station coffee.’
‘Bloody hell! That bad, eh?’
‘Not so much bad as strong. Jesus, Gary, if I drink any more of it, I won’t need a plane to fly me home. I’ll just flap my arms.’
He laughed. ‘Did you need something, or is this just a social call? Not that I mind, of course.’
‘I did need something. Can you look into Brömly’s medical records for me? I need to know if he had dementia. Oh, and any history of mental illness. Something serious enough to have caused delusions.’
‘Blimey! You think he was losing it when he wrote the letter?’
‘In one. One of the people he wrote to suggested it today. I’m sceptical but we need to dot the i’s all the same.’
‘Leave it with me.’
‘Thanks, Garry. How are things there?’
She could hear the shrug in his voice as he answered. ‘No new cases this week, which is good. Callie’s on the warpath about cutting back on external consultants and forensics labs.’
‘Any news of Roisin?’ she asked, keeping her voice light.
‘It was the talk of the station,’ a beat, ‘for about five minutes. Then those muppets in Traffic won the station sweepstakes on the new Home Secretary and bumped her off the front page.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Haven’t seen her. Rumour is, she’s gone to the US on some jolly for the brass. As far as I know, she’s still out there.’
‘No emails on what she’s up to?’
‘Radio silence. Why?’
‘Just curious.’ Stella stared at a pigeon, hopping closer and closer to her left boot. She kicked out at it. She focused on the here and now. ‘Email me when you know about Brömly.’
The conversation with Garry had done her good. She felt calmer. The sun was hot on her skin and she turned to meet it head on, closing her eyes and allowing her upturned face to act as a solar panel.
‘You look happy.’
She opened her eyes, blinking away the blue afterimages that danced in her vision. Oskar was standing in front of her, carrying a takeaway cup and a brown paper bag.
She pointed. ‘Lunch?’
He looked down at his provisions. ‘Very late. Or maybe it’s dinner. I don’t know. How did you get on with Mattsson and Hedlund today?’
‘Do you mind walking while we talk? I really need the exercise.’
‘No. If you don’t mind me eating while you talk.’
He pulled out a filled roll from the bag and took an enormous bite. Stella could see a flap of smoked salmon poking out of the bread, which was dotted with poppy seeds.
‘Mattsson denied ever getting Brömly’s letter. Hedlund got it but said it sounded like he was, I don’t know, mired in some fantasy.’
Oskar frowned. ‘Sorry, what was that word? Mired?’
‘Oh. Sorry. It means sunk in. You know, like up to your knees in soft mud.’
‘Tack. Go on.’
Stella took him through both interviews, mentioning that she was checking Brömly’s medical records. Oskar nodded and swallowed another mouthful of his roll, washing it down with a swig of coffee.
‘So when you asked her about the sterilisation programme she, what, fainted?’
‘Almost. I thought she was going to have a heart attack. Then her husband asked me to leave.’
‘We should take a look at their employment history. See if they have gaps for the same years Brömly did.’
‘Kerstin Dahl, too.’
‘Yes, of course. I’ll call Johanna and ask to her to get onto it. When are you seeing Dahl?’
‘The day after tomorrow.’
‘I may have to go back to Stockholm for a day or two. Will you be all right working solo up here?’
‘Sure. I’ve got plenty to do and I can always hit the gym.’
Oskar grinned. ‘Finding fika a bit much?’
‘It’s a national obsession! I mean, I know us Brits love our cups of tea, but the amount of cake I’ve had to eat! And that coffee! Do you get any sleep?’
He laughed. ‘You get used to it. I sleep pretty well. Apart from when the new baby wakes me.’
‘How old?’
‘Nine months.’
‘Boy or girl?’
‘Boy. We called him Gustav.’
‘He was the king, right?’
‘One of them. Six in total.’
Something caught at Stella’s memory. Something Mattsson had said about King Gustav the First. What was it? The banknote. That was it.
‘When I interviewed Mattsson, I asked him about Brömly and he said his memory wasn’t good. But then he told me this story about Brömly finding a ten-kronor note in the school playground and handing it in. It had a portrait of Gustav the First on it.’
‘You think he was lying?’
‘Old people can have deficient memories in one area and good elsewhere. But I would have thought long-term memory for a bank note would work the same as long-term memory for the schoolfriend who found it, wouldn’t you?’
Oskar nodded. ‘You going to talk to him again?’
‘I was going to anyway. I didn’t ask him for an alibi. Inger either, come to that. I’m sure one of them knows more than they’re saying. And they both called him “Poor Tomas”. It sounded off to me, staged. Like they’d agreed to refer to him that way.’
‘If there’s anything you need while I’m away, just call me. Or Johanna. She likes you.’
Stella scrutinised his face for a sign he knew what had passed between her and Johanna, but saw nothing.
They made their way to the station, where Oskar collected his stuff and headed back out, promising to return two days later.
Later that day, Garry emailed. The news was good. Brömly had enjoyed perfect mental health. No anxiety or depression, no psychotic illness and, at the time of his last consultation with his GP, no dementia.
The letter could still have been a fantasy of confession, forgiveness and redemption, but it was the product of an ordered mind. As such, Stella was inclined to dismiss the idea. He and his
former friends had been involved in something he came to regard as evil. Putting two and two together, she kept coming up with the same answer.
26
London
Roisin left Paddington Green, darted through a gap in the traffic on the Edgware Road, walked north for a couple hundred yards, then turned right into Church Street. Despite what she was about to do, she felt no nerves.
Instead, her heart rate had accelerated from pure adrenaline. She was closing in on the biggest case of her career. Hell, anyone’s career in living memory.
The serial killers always got the headlines. But a killer cop? That made headlines and careers. Principally, Roisin’s.
As she walked past dry cleaners, delis and shops selling everything from plastic laundry baskets to cans of fly spray, she turned to the question that had been plaguing her since she’d recognised Stella on the CCTV in Chicago.
Why?
What could Adam Collier possibly have done to Stella that would have warranted his murder? The risks she’d taken were off the scale. And yet she’d gone ahead and done it anyway.
Walking through a street market, the backs of the stalls clad in green-and-white striped sheeting, she thought harder about the woman she was sure had murdered the Colliers. What did she know about her? Really?
Stella was tough, Roisin gave her that. If Adam had tried anything that smacked even faintly of sexual misconduct, she’d have slapped him down, probably literally. Any professional slights she’d have sucked up and worked her way past. So not professional, then. That meant it was personal.
Nobody knew much about Stella’s private life. She wasn’t standoffish. But she didn’t regale the canteen with tales of emotional disaster – or triumph – either. It wasn’t her style. Not since that dreadful business with her family.
They knew she had a new squeeze, but that was about it. By all accounts, Jamie Hooke was her first relationship since that little toe-rag Edwin Deacon had killed Richard and Lola in a hit and run.
She stopped at a crossroads. A lunchtime drinker stumbled out of a pub on the northeast corner and swerved to avoid crashing into her.
‘Sorry, love,’ he said.
She waved him away with a smile. That was interesting. She knew a version of herself that would have had to fight down an urge to hit him, or swear at him for his clumsiness at the very least.
She turned right into Lisson Grove, enjoying the play of sunlight on her skin through the shade cast by the plane trees. The drunk had interrupted her thoughts. She regathered them into a coherent sequence.
Stella had killed Adam for a personal reason.
Hooke was her first relationship since Richard died.
Edwin Deacon had killed Richard and Lola in a hit and run.
That had to be it, didn’t it? The single worst moment in Stella’s life. She was a fast-track, graduate-entry girl. Promoted and promoted and promoted, over Roisin’s head in the end. Yes, she’d made mistakes, and had setbacks. But only the kind that stiffened a copper’s sinews and made them stronger for the next time.
Had Adam been mixed up in Richard’s and Lola’s deaths somehow? If he had, and Stella found out, wouldn’t that give her plenty of motive for murder?
Roisin knew it would if she’d been the grieving wife and mother. Da’s words would have bounced off her steely resolve like plastic arrows. ‘Slow and steady?’ Fuck that! She’d have wanted blood.
But what could Adam have done that Deacon hadn’t done already? The guy had confessed and gone down for it. The sentence was a joke, but he’d been arrested, charged and convicted in record time.
Unless Adam had set Deacon up. But now the story started taking on unimaginable dimensions. Why would Adam have commissioned Deacon to murder Richard and Lola? It didn’t make sense.
She turned off the pavement and approached the front door to the block of flats where Stella lived. Without a second thought, she pressed three buttons on the intercom panel in rapid succession. After a few seconds, a woman answered.
‘Police. Open the door, please,’ Roisin said in a stern, authoritative voice.
The latch clicked and she pulled the handle towards her. Inside, the building was a few degrees lower than the humid air outside. Roisin rested her forehead against a painted wall, letting its smooth surface cool her skin.
She called the lift and stepped in as soon as the doors opened. She caught a wisp of another woman’s perfume. Better than the smell of piss that usually greeted her whenever she had to venture into a lift in a block of flats. But then, she thought, as she ascended to Stella’s floor, they weren’t usually swanky blocks in an expensive tree-lined street in central London.
The doors opened. A man made to step in, then noticed Roisin, smiled and stood back.
‘Thank you,’ she said with a smile.
She turned and waited until the lift doors had closed and the machinery in the shaft emitted a refined hum. Then she walked along the corridor to Stella’s flat.
The conference on genetics and mental health was fascinating, but after an hour-long speech by a Hungarian psychologist on genetic factors affecting psychopathy, Jamie felt the need to get out into the real world for a bit.
Lunch was scheduled for an hour and a half: he decided to check on Stella’s flat. He knew she was in Sweden, and as he was in town it seemed the least he could do. Her plants would need watering and although he felt sure she would have asked a neighbour to pop in, he felt a tug to be in her space.
Her revelation to him over dinner had unnerved him so thoroughly that he’d bolted rather than try to explore it with her there and then. Was it because his relationship with Stella was personal – no, say it, Jamie, romantic – rather than professional that he’d reacted so emotionally?
After all, he spent his days talking to men who had done things just as bad, and, sometimes, considerably more deviant than murder people in revenge for the death of their family. In fact, compared to their warped psychology, Stella’s actions had been those of an entirely rational being.
And, as she’d said, she’d been suffering from grief-induced psychosis. The literature was full of such cases. Hell, he’d written a paper on it himself: Brief Psychotic Disorder With Obvious Stressor: Grief, Loss of Control and Homicide in Women under Thirty.
A niche subject, to be sure, but one of the first he’d had published and a rung on the ladder that stretched ever-upwards in front of every ambitious clinician.
Yes, those afflicted were more likely to be women already suffering from a serious mental illness. And Stella was older than thirty when Richard and Lola were killed. Nevertheless, she was still in the central hump of the bell curve for that type of breakdown.
He hailed a cab outside the university hosting the conference. With a hum from its electric motor, the cab pulled away.
The silence inside the spotless interior seemed tailor-made for thinking. Jamie returned to the problem of Stella’s behaviour.
A high-level conspiracy had snuffed out the lives of her husband and baby daughter because Richard was getting too close. Stella had secretly re-investigated and discovered the truth. And then, the part he struggled with emotionally, though not intellectually, she had killed its leader in cold blood. Jamie shook his head.
The trouble wasn’t that he couldn’t understand why she’d done it. The trouble was that he could.
He looked at the back of the taxi driver’s head. Saw ripples of flesh between his shaved scalp and the white collar of his polo shirt. Imagined if the driver had been responsible for murdering Stella. Saw his right hand gripping a pistol, pressing its muzzle to that sun-reddened flesh and pulling the trigger.
Not only could he understand what Stella had done. On some primal level, he approved.
27
Umeå
In the end, Erik’s fussing drove Inger to her sewing room. He meant well. But because he didn’t know what had upset her so badly that she’d almost passed out, he ended up getting on her nerves. Which were hardl
y capable of functioning as it was.
She shut the door behind her, sat at her sewing table and massaged her temples with the pads of her fingers.
How much longer could she go on ignoring what they’d done? For the rest of her life? She wasn’t old. Not really. These days, seventy-three was counted as late middle age. Her mother had died aged ninety-nine. Inger might have another two decades with a monstrous secret eating away at her. Two decades to add to the four and a half so far.
They said stress could cause cancer. She believed it. But even if she didn’t get cancer, living with the secret was turning her soul into a pitiful, blackened, diseased thing. She could feel it, squatting inside her like a troll under a bridge waiting to devour the unwary traveller.
When Tomas’s letter had arrived, it was as if a perfect Swedish Sunday afternoon in midsummer had been ravaged by a storm. She hadn’t told Erik, explaining away her depressed mood as news of a schoolfriend’s death.
‘Will you go to the funeral?’ he’d asked.
‘No. She lived in England. We lost touch a long time ago.’
Then, a miracle. She’d read online that Tomas had been murdered. The killer had done something dreadful to his body. They weren’t specific. Just a nasty phrase including the word ‘mutilated’. Somehow imagining what might have been done to him was worse than knowing for sure.
But maybe Tomas was right after all. Maybe confession wasn’t just good for the soul, but essential for its very existence.
Oh god, why had they done it? They’d all been intelligent, democratically-minded citizens of a country widely regarded in international circles as enlightened to the point of soft-heartedness.
She couldn’t remember. They’d just got on with it, swept along on the tide of memos from central government and, she admitted, their own fervour.
She felt sick as she remembered the detailed records they’d kept, the reports she herself had written for the national leadership of the party and the government. Sicker still as she remembered the hospital visit she’d made to see for herself what was being done at their behest.