Broken Mirrors (ARC)

by C S Duffy

  'Yes, you're bloody useless as well.'

  'If you had not been there tonight, Ola may have escaped,' Nadja said grudgingly. 'One of our colleagues has informed us that he had three flights booked for this evening. He may well have already left the country before we tried to arrest him.' She met my eye with a brief smile of apology, before her usual stern expression returned.

  'He must have already killed his ex when I spoke to him at the coffee shop the other day,' I said with a shudder. 'He was a bag of nerves. He mentioned her. They were still together when he first met Lotta Berglund.'

  Ola Andersson had confessed, lying in filthy snow in front of the bus, while an ambulance inched through the gridlocked traffic towards him. He blamed Lotta for supposedly luring him from a marriage he claimed had been happy until he met her, only to dump him weeks later. He had convinced himself that Lotta must then be evil, possessed of some preternatural power over him. When he discovered that Ulrika had met someone new, he realised that he could kill two birds with one stone by killing her and making it seem as though she were one of the serial killer's victims.

  'Does he genuinely believe Lotta killed Anna Essen and Mattius Eklund?' I asked.

  Nadja nodded. 'So he says. The state of Ulrika's body strongly suggests that she was not murdered by the same killer as the first two. There are indications of a first time killer.'

  Ola had injected his ex with insulin stolen from a diabetic colleague. Despite having worked in a funeral home, he hadn't thought of embalming her, had relied instead on rigor mortis. He had killed Ulrika almost two days before posing her, had hid her in his grandmother's allotment cottage next to the swimming pool while he worked up the courage to pose her, so her body had collapsed as rigor mortis began to pass.

  'If he has taken Lotta Berglund somewhere, he did not admit it,' Henrik added. 'He swore that he was as surprised as anyone when she disappeared.'

  'Couldn't he be lying?'

  'It is rare for people to lie when they think they are dying,' Nadja shrugged, her expression still stern, though worry tugged at her eyes. 'But —'

  'He's an unusual guy,' I supplied.

  I'd now completely lost my bearings and was climbing a hill which had a small church at the top. The pavement was steep and covered in fresh snow, and I could feel sweat freezing on the back of my neck. It was almost light, and the low mid-morning sun pierced between the buildings, glinting off the church's steeple and making the snow twinkle.

  There were people around, heading for work, checking phones, steaming travel mugs of coffee on the other hand, dragging solemn toddlers to nursery on sledges. Up ahead I saw two friends greet each other with warm hugs and laughter that rang through the air. I felt completely removed from it all, as I though I were invisible, able to see the outside world but trapped in a different dimension full of murder and hidden girlfriends and pelvises shattered by buses.

  What felt like hours later, I finally spied Nytorget up ahead and knew I was just a few blocks from home. The sun was high in the sky, and the trees lining the walkway I was tramping along were dripping icy water on me, but I didn't have the energy to care. When I reached the square, I decided to nip into the fancy deli, feeling suddenly that some kind of breakfast pastry that involved chocolate was crucial to my immediate survival.

  As I passed, I noticed a crowd of people gathered in the square itself, standing more or less where the fountain was in summer. I remembered Johan's mournful look when they covered it up sometime in October, and I'd laughed at him. 'It's just winter.' I'd rolled my eyes. 'It comes every year, and then it will pass.' How young I had been then.

  There was an elderly lady standing at the head of the group, addressing them. She was statuesque, with almost military-straight posture, long, pure white hair flowing down her back over her full length winter coat. A tour group, I wondered idly. There was something a little bit intense about her manner to merely be filling them in on the history of the neighbourhood, but perhaps she just took her job very seriously.

  As I approached the deli and the smell from the bakery made my knees wobble, a young guy, skinny and sort of angular with a mournful face exaggerated by long, poker-straight dirty blond hair stepped in my path. He held out a flyer with an oddly grave expression. I just glimpsed a photo of the white-haired lady on it as I made to go around him with a sigh of irritation and a muttered 'nej tack'.

  'Do you like living in fear?' he asked in coldly precise English.

  'What?'

  'Don't you want to not be afraid any more?'

  He shoved the flyer in my face and I only just resisted punching him in his.

  'I'm fine, thanks,' I snapped and shoved open the door of the deli.

  24

  The city was filled with anger. She could feel it, fizzing and spitting like acid. It was everywhere, corroding the facade of civility and understanding and fairness. People were afraid and their fear was dragging them inexorably back to their true selves, warriors, hunters, fuelled by vengeance and violence.

  It was thrilling.

  She felt more alive than she could remember every feeling before. Every cell in her body glowed and vibrated with energy and light. Her eyes shone, her blood rushed, her body thrummed with fire and vitality.

  It was what she had been waiting for.

  For so many years, the teachers and the doctors and the social workers had tried to get her to be more like other people. It turned out, that what needed to happen was for the other people to become more like her. And now they finally were.

  All it took was for a few people to die, she marvelled. Random people, chosen with no rhyme or reason, to lose their lives, and the world began to change. It was the randomness that frightened them, she thought with satisfaction. When there was a pattern, when a misogynist killer targeted sex workers or a right wing fanatic took their inadequateness out on immigrants, it didn't disturb order. People tutted, they sympathised, they lectured colleagues over the morning coffee break about how the justice system had failed society, but they didn't truly care. The victim criteria did not apply to them. It was a terrible story to watch on the news, but not one that truly affected them.

  But not now. Now, no one knew who might be next. It could be that smug latte pappa with his baby in an organic hemp sling, the overweight woman pounding the pavements on her morning run. It could be a woman, a man, someone old or young. Maybe even a child.

  The thought stopped her short. A child. The death of a child would really set a cat amongst the pigeons.

  Even she would probably be troubled by the death of a child.

  The only person she had ever felt anything for was the little girl. It had been the strangest sensation, to look at this podgy, partly-formed human and — what was it, exactly? Had she recognised something in her? Some connection between them. Or was it simply that the little girl was the only person not to look at her with fear and suspicion? As soon as the door was opened, she would hear the little girl's footsteps scampering over the floor as she ran with delighted squeals into her arms, and she would feel — something.

  The teachers and the doctors and the social workers had all believed that she hated Lisbet and Mamma and Pappa, but she didn't. She felt nothing for them. Just an empty hole. Pappa had always been nice to her, so she had tried to make herself cry at his funeral, but nothing came. Eventually she had settled on a sort of low wailing which she found she enjoyed. She'd got really rather into it, keening and moaning, letting her voice go high and low, liking the feel of the ticklish vibrations in her throat. She had barely noticed the looks being exchanged on the other pews.

  But she hadn't cared that he was dead. She hadn't known how. Nobody ever taught her.

  The little girl, however, she would care very much if the little girl died. She wasn't sure she would miss her, exactly, she didn't see her very much any more after all, but she was almost certain that if the little girl became an ice statue in the snow it would upset her terribly. Just thinking about it made her wa
nt to wail like she had at Pappa's funeral, but she couldn't risk people noticing her right now.

  She had got so much better at blending in to crowds. Sometimes, she was so good at it that she wondered if she had become invisible. Then someone would hold a door or glance in her direction and she knew that they could see her. It was just that they couldn't see what she truly was.

  25

  My lungs were fit to burst and my cheek throbbed like it was on fire, but I kept running. I'd got home finally and collapsed so hard on the air mattress that it had skidded about a foot across the hardwood floor. I'd lain staring at the sun-dappled ceiling for goodness knows how long before I'd given up and headed out.

  I was too tired to sleep. Drained but buzzing. I wanted to sleep forever but I was afraid of what I'd see when I closed my eyes.

  I just needed to exhaust myself a bit more, I'd decided. A bit of bracing fresh air would send me over and then when I woke up I would be able to think straight again.

  I'd kept to busy roads, pounding pavements so well-trodden that the tarmac showed through gritty ice. I'd headed up Folkungagatan, where traffic inched and pedestrians swarmed in and out of the T-bana station. I'd done a loop around Medborgarplatsen. I'd passed Johan's old school, then headed down a little side street to avoid Mariatorget, emerging on to Hornsgatan and nearly colliding with a gaggle of bikes waiting at the traffic light to cross Slussen.

  It was about then I finally admitted I was dizzy and one of my calf muscles had seized up, so I slowed to a walk to cross Slussen and climb Katrinavägen. I paused at the top of the hill to look over the cliff at the city laid out below me. The harbour shimmered in the sun and the cramped little buildings of the old town looked like the cover of a box of chocolates, their bright colours peeking out from beneath a blanket of snow.

  'It's always the most obvious solution,' Archie MacLean, my old pal at the Met police in London had told me once. He'd been a detective since the year dot, and when I knew him he was cheerfully old and bitter, spending more time in the pubs around Fleet Street bitching about the state of the force than he did solving any crimes. He was a giant of a man, with a bulbous nose covered with broken capillaries, who'd park himself at the bar and wait for the inevitable stream of crime reporters who would buy him Islay malts all day long in exchange for his insights on whatever story they were working on. A grumpy old lush of an investigative genius, he tripped and drowned in the Thames on the day he was supposed to officially retire. His funeral had been heaving and three fights broke out between detectives and reporters who had broken cases they were working on.

  'Them dramas on the telly are all about the twists and shocks, but in real life, people do horrible things for the most obvious of reasons,' he told me once. 'No matter how complicated a case seems, boil it down to the basics and follow it along to the logical conclusion.' He'd belched and I got a whiff of the smoky peat of his whisky that made my eyes water. 'Keep focussed on logic. If someone is making a song and dance to get you to look in one direction, it will serve you very well to look in the other.'

  'Ellie.'

  I had run to Johan's without even noticing. He was just about to open the front door, a cloth bag of groceries under his arm, when he spotted me.

  'What happened to your cheek? Are you okay?'

  I touched my cheek instinctively. It felt hot around the bandage. 'I'm fine, it was — it was an icicle.' That was true, strictly speaking.

  Johan came closer and inspected the dressing, touched it gently. He had been a nurse for several years before Mia got him fired. They had offered him his job back, but he had decided to stay working at the bank for the time being.

  'The dressing needs changed,' he said critically. 'You shouldn't go running with fresh stitches. I will fix it.'

  Hours later I woke. The shadows were long across the floor and I could feel Johan's breath hot against the back of my neck, his arm heavy around my waist. He had changed my dressing gently, expertly as I muttered as succinct an account of the night before as possible.

  'You were alone in the dark with him?' he'd asked, his voice curiously formal. He was dabbing antiseptic cream on my cheek, watching his work intently, so I couldn't quite see his expression without crossing my eyes.

  'Yeah, but —'

  'Ellie, what if he had —'

  'But I didn't,' I'd grinned, affecting a cheer I didn't feel. I could feel something uncomfortably trembly deep inside my stomach, but I was fairly confident that my smile remained steady. 'I'm right as rain, give or take a few stitches.'

  'Ellie —'

  'I don't think he was going to,' I cut him off quickly. 'Hurt me, I mean. He had every opportunity. We were up there alone in the pitch dark, but he chose to run away instead. I got a fright when I saw him there, of course, but I don't think I felt a true, deep threat. I'm not sure I would have chased him if I had. There was something fundamentally cowardly about him.' I yawned.

  'Could he still be right about Lotta Berglund? According to the news report he was only charged with the murder of his ex wife.'

  'It's possible,' I said carefully.

  'But you don't believe it.'

  He finished with the dressing then, and led me to the bed, tucked me up with a gentleness that brought a lump to my throat. 'I don't think I do,' I said slowly. 'But I don't know. It's frustrating, but I just don't know. I feel as though I have to start again from the beginning.'

  'Then that's what we'll do,' he said softly, and I fell into a deep sleep.

  26

  The next evening, Johan took my hand as we left the cinema and stepped out into the cold. I was still feeling a bit woozy, so I'd had a quiet day while he was at work, scribbling up my notes from the past few days and starting to form them into something that might eventually make sense. There was something soothing about writing it all down, simply recording the events as they had happened. I'd start puzzling again the next day, but the rest had done my little brain the power of good.

  We'd watched a Swedish film, a pleasantly mindless screwball comedy that even I managed to follow the basics of. A shared tub of popcorn and bag of pic 'n mix, which Johan insisted on calling 'small candies' even though they were entirely standard sized sweets, and the horror of the night before receded more than you'd think.

  It's a bizarre thing, living through something so enormous, so extraordinary and yet also eating toast and going to the cinema. A little part of my mind was tied up in what possessed Ola Andersson to accuse his ex girlfriend, with flashes of Mattias Eklund's blue-tinged face, even memories of the skeleton that had been all that remained of Sanna, and yet I could also order coffees and be annoyed when I left my season travelcard at home and had to buy a more expensive day ticket. I supposed that was all you could do. Just sort of crack on and hope you don't get murdered.

  Now, as we turned up Åsögatan towards his flat, Johan put his arm around me.I snuggled into the soft wool of his winter coat as he did an absolutely shocking impression of the lead actor in the film and I snorted with laughter.

  I felt my phone buzz in my pocket with a text and reluctantly pulled my glove off to read it. It was from Corinna.

  I had met her back in the summer. Through Mia. We'd got chatting at a dinner Mia had arranged to celebrate the launch of some product or other, and she ended up sending me in the direction of the wife of one of the suspected victims — who had since herself died in questionable circumstances.

  Can we talk? Are you free now?

  'Tove's mother found these a few days ago,' Corinna explained an hour or so later. We'd nabbed a little table in the corner of the small bar, next to the steamed up window. It was cosy but stuffy. I'd taken off about seven layers and still felt as though I were being slowly poached alive. The bar had some kind of Moroccan tavern theme going on. There was a tassel from the cushion I was sitting on digging into my bum as I looked through the photos on Corinna's phone.

  'Tove must have taken them on an actual camera, then uploaded them onto her mother'
s laptop sometime before she died,' Corinna said. 'They were in a folder marked abcde inside another folder of holiday photos, so she never noticed it until she got a new laptop last week and went through the old one to decide what to transfer over. Even then, she didn't think they were important, but a few of us from Tove's office have been visiting her now and then. She mentioned it to us today.'

  Tove Svensson had been married to Björne Svensson, a young man who had suffered from chronic pain. His death was initially declared an accidental overdose of painkillers, but Tove refused to accept that, and continued to ask questions until she too died in a car crash having taken a sleeping pill before getting behind the wheel. In the course of her investigation she had discovered that a woman had befriended Björne shortly before his death, but Tove had never managed to identify her.

  I had believed it to be Mia.

  The pictures on Corinna's phone were of a woman walking down a road somewhere in Stockholm. There were dozens, apparently taken seconds apart. They reminded me a little of the kind you see on celebrity gossip sites that I obviously never visit, that always strike me as spectacularly pointless. Actual gossip I'm all over, but what would I want with a billion pictures of some actor walking along a road with a caption specifying that he is wearing jeans an a T shirt?

  'Do you think this is the woman Tove was searching for?' Johan asked.

  Corinna shrugged. 'It must be. I don't know why Tove never told anyone she had these. Maybe she did not get the chance.'

  Although Tove's mother had no idea when they appeared on her laptop, given that there was no snow on the ground they certainly hadn't been taken in the past few months. The dullness of the light suggested autumn or spring. Most of the photos were taken from behind, then some from a little to the side, as though the photographer had run along the opposite pavement to overtake her and catch her face. She wore a light grey coat that was pinched at the waist, and black leather knee-high boots.