by Peter Mohlin
The phone’s display went black just as Mona reappeared and he quickly put it back on the table. She paid her half of the bill at the bar and then came over to him.
“I need to go,” she said, picking up her phone. “See you in the basement in the morning. Eight o’clock.”
“Sounds good,” John replied, raising his glass to her. “Thanks for the gift.”
“It was nothing. Hand it over.”
“What?”
“Give me the mug and I’ll bring it to work,” Mona said. “I don’t for a second trust you to do it.”
He laughed and handed it to her. She put it in her bag and vanished into the darkness, the collar of her coat turned up against the rain.
40
Heimer thought it was a taxi that he had let in through the gates to pick up Sissela. But when he looked out the window he saw the director of finance standing there waving at him.
“Is he here already?” said Sissela, sounding stressed. She seemed to be searching for something.
“Is Hugo going to Paris with you?”
Heimer made an effort to sound unconcerned. It always hurt the most when he wasn’t given any time to protect himself. He only needed seconds to assume his mask—he maintained it most of the time—but surprises like this were still hard to handle.
“I need my bean counter with me,” she said. “We’re going to check out some new opportunities.”
There was no trace of hesitation or guilt in her voice. A beginner would’ve oversold it. Provided lengthy justification of why it was so vital for Hugo to come along on this trip. Perhaps even lied about something that could be double-checked. But not Sissela. The lies came as naturally to her as rain did on Midsummer’s Eve.
We’re going to check out some new opportunities.
A claim so vague it was impossible to poke any holes in it.
Eventually, she found her scarf, pushed it into her hand luggage, and kissed his cheek. Then she disappeared out to the whoremonger and his silvery penis substitute of a Mercedes for a few days of romance in the capital city of love.
Heimer filled a large glass with water and drank as much as he could in one long gulp. He poured what was left at the bottom over his head. Small streams made their way through his hair and opted to trickle down his face or run down inside his shirt collar. He closed his eyes and fumbled after the dish towel double-folded over the oven door handle. The coarse fabric smelled a little funny when he rubbed it against his skin, but at least he was dry.
After a hundred push-ups and a cup of coffee he was back to himself. It was just after eleven o’clock in the morning, which meant the postman ought to have come. He put on a pair of old clogs in the hall. Then he opened the door and went down the drive toward the mailbox. It had been custom-ordered from Italy and was installed in an enclosed niche in the wall. He put the key in the lock, turned it, and opened the door to retrieve the contents of the metal box. There it was, on top of a boat accessories catalog that he had forgotten he had requested.
A new letter.
He held it up to the daylight to get a better look. The sender was the same as last time—there was no doubt about it. The address had been written in a mixture of upper- and lowercase letters using the same black ink pen.
Heimer left the catalog and locked the mailbox again. He looked around, as if expecting the sender to be lying in wait somewhere in the bushes, spying on him. It was a creepy, unpleasant sensation—but also completely irrational. The envelope was postmarked Karlstad, just like last time. The person who wrote it would hardly be here.
He hurried back inside and found himself locking the front door behind him. This was out of the ordinary. The front door was usually left unlocked when he was at home in the daytime. He went upstairs taking quick steps and put the letter on the kitchen island. Then he paused—he took a few steps back and looked at the envelope.
The sender hadn’t waited a week or a month to get in touch.
He or she had waited a day.
Heimer noticed his right hand shaking as he inserted his index finger under the flap and began to open the envelope. Part of him wanted to know what the letter said, while another part wanted to throw it in the trash and pretend it had never arrived. The sheet inside was folded in half like last time and he had to flatten the paper with his hand to make it lie flat on the surface. Then he read it.
Select the Lobby chatroom at chatta.se. Log on at 7:30 P.M. on Friday. Call yourself Froggy and search for Nadja6543.
Heimer tried to comprehend the meaning of those few sentences. Apparently he had to visit a chatroom and talk to the letter writer. He had never done that before. The word “chatroom” alone made him feel like he was a hundred years old. He took a deep breath in an attempt to reduce his heart rate but his heart continued beating even more wildly inside his ribs. It bothered him that he’d have to wait three days before he heard from the letter writer again.
Three days and the same number of nights.
During which he wouldn’t be able to sleep.
Nor eat.
He wouldn’t be able to think about anyone except Nadja6543 and what the person hiding behind the name had to tell him.
41
John leaned back in his chair with the sketch pad on his lap and his feet on the desk. The last few days had consisted largely of waiting, so this morning he decided to bring both the investigation piece and the pencil case with him to the musty basement.
Mona’s colleagues in Stockholm needed more time than expected to locate the seven potential perpetrators and take new DNA samples. But eventually everyone had been tracked down, with one exception—a former detective inspector who now lived in Frankfurt. Originally, they thought they’d ask the Germans for help. Germany’s Federal Police had turned out to be unreasonably bureaucratic. After spending a frustrating hour on the phone, Mona gave up and booked herself a plane ticket.
That was barely twenty-four hours ago and she had only been in touch once—to say that the man in Frankfurt had given a sample and that the sample was being shipped by air courier to the lab in Linköping. Soon the wait would be over and they’d know whose DNA was a match to the semen.
John put the pencil between his teeth and reviewed the latest adjustments to the investigation piece. The question mark signifying the person that Emelie Bjurwall had agreed to meet the evening she went missing had been reshaped into a two-sided face. One half was friendly and inviting, the other was dangerous and aggressive. Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde—different sides of the same person, just like in the novel.
He closed the sketch pad and put it in the desk drawer along with the pencils. Mona would be back soon and he didn’t want her to see the piece. It had been bad enough being called “Picasso” in New York.
Outside the small windows it had stopped raining. A faint shaft of sunlight was seeping down through the dreariness and penetrating into the police station basement. John considered whether to go to the gym on the first floor and spend an hour on the treadmill. His gym bag was on the floor by his desk and he knew the exercise would make him less restless.
He thought about Trevor and the time in the safe house where they had hidden while waiting for the trial to begin. Each time John had tried to take him out for a run, his colleague had shaken his head.
“I’ve run enough this year,” he had said, referring to their escape from the container at the port.
Trevor had been certain that all those hours, days, and months in police gyms had been nothing but preparation for those few minutes when he had saved John’s life. Now that he’d passed the final test, he could quit working out, his conscience clear.
“That’s how it is for all us top athletes—we know when it’s time to quit,” he had chuckled.
John smiled at the memory and pulled his chair closer to the desk before logging on to the encrypted email service. He hadn’t checked it for a few days and he cheered up when he saw there was a new message. Trevor’s email had arrived early that
morning. To begin with, the tone was as lighthearted as before and he didn’t mention any paranoia or mysterious cars watching him. But when John reached the last few lines he got an unpleasant surprise.
My stomach has been causing me some trouble. It started around the time I got here. It’s hurt since then. I thought it was the food here and that my belly couldn’t deal with it, or a stomach ulcer or something like that. I’ve been doing nothing but popping pills lately. On Saturday it became unbearable. I went to the hospital and stayed there overnight. They did an X-ray and found three tumors in my large intestine. Bingo! Waiting for more tests to come back, but I guess it’ll be surgery. It’ll be fine—they seem pretty damn good at their jobs here. Just sick of hospitals. Our stay was enough and then some.
Just wanted to tell someone.
Take care. T.
John read the final sentences one more time. Cancer. The whole thing was a broadside. Not Trevor. Not now. Not after everything he had gone through.
John pounded the desk with his fist so hard that two files fell to the floor. Slowly, and suddenly feeling weak, he bent down to pick them up. It had to be okay, he thought to himself. Trevor had mentioned surgery. There was probably some way of getting rid of the shit in his stomach. There had to be. His friend couldn’t die. It would make him lonelier than he could imagine.
When Mona showed up in the basement an hour later, John had just about managed to collect his thoughts after the bad news. She had come straight from the airport with her wheelie case.
“The DNA analysis is done,” she said, hanging her coat on the chair. “I got the reports by email, but I wanted to wait until we were together to check them.”
She opened the computer and connected to the network. They’d been waiting for this for days. The man who buried Emelie Bjurwall’s body and blamed Billy would be given a face. She pulled up the report from Linköping on full screen. John stood behind her and read over her shoulder. He had made it halfway through the first paragraph when Mona threw her arms up in despair.
“What the hell is this?!” she shouted, jumping out of her chair so abruptly that John took a step back.
“What?” he said.
“No matches. This can’t be fucking possible!”
But it was. John leaned forward and double-checked the screen. None of the seven samples that had been analyzed was a match with the semen on the rock.
Mona called the forensic specialist responsible to check how the testing had been done. Only after he explained that all the samples had been analyzed three times and that none of the DNA profiles was even similar to that of the semen did she calm down and apologize for her angry tone of voice.
“We must have missed someone,” she said. “Someone who didn’t live in the area but was sampled anyway.”
“And are we sure that the population register was exhaustive?” John asked, hoping she wouldn’t take it as criticism.
“Yes, I think we can assume so. This is the state we’re talking about—not corner shops paying wages under the counter.”
Mona went up to the whiteboard with the two overlapping circles and turned to him.
“What was the name of the old lead investigator?”
John didn’t need to check any documents to answer that question. He had reviewed the investigation enough times to remember the name of the now-retired detective chief inspector. If there was anyone who knew who had given samples of their DNA and why they had been picked, it would be him.
“Why the hell did you let Billy Nerman go?”
John looked around Anton Lundberg’s apartment. The décor was more welcoming than that of the place he was staying, he thought to himself. However, it was no surprise that the conversation had started the way it had. Police who left unsolved cases behind rarely liked it when new investigators questioned established truths.
“The forensic evidence against him no longer holds up,” he said, sticking to what the papers had said.
“You mean it wasn’t Nerman’s semen on the rock?”
“Yes, that’s what I meant.”
Lundberg fell back into his chair and grinned superciliously.
“Bullshit,” he snorted. “There must be another reason.”
“It’s not bullshit,” said John. “It’s fact.”
He had started to grow weary of this bitter old man with the big birthmark on his forehead.
“There’s one thing you should know,” Lundberg added, jabbing his index finger in the air. “I spent two whole weeks trying to crack that bastard—and I’d bet my grandchild’s life it was him.”
His eyes were burning with contempt. This was what his brother had encountered from day one in the investigation. The forensic evidence and how well Billy fit into the role of perpetrator had blinded the investigators. They hadn’t been interested in hearing anything from him except a confession.
“I’ve got a few questions for you,” he said in an attempt to move on. “Is that alright?”
Lundberg shrugged his shoulders as if he didn’t care. John didn’t allow himself to be provoked, simply steering the conversation on to the new topic.
“How did you decide who to take DNA samples from?”
“ Doesn’t it say in the investigation?”
“I’m asking you.”
“As I recall, all men living in the area around the crime scene had to provide their DNA. We used postal code areas.”
“Anyone else?”
“Yes, close family and several of her male acquaintances. Including ones who didn’t live on the island.”
John sighed silently. So far, the retired detective chief inspector had offered no new information.
“Can you try to remember what you did before you got the DNA match? What was the investigation focused on?” he said coaxingly.
“Hmm, well,” said Lundberg, at any rate looking as if he was trying to think. “We talked to the parents, obviously. Tried to establish a picture of the girl. We worked on the timeline. I remember we questioned several of the kids who were at that party the night Emelie disappeared.”
“Okay, anything else?”
Lundberg shut his eyes and put his hand over his birthmark, as if digging deep into his memory.
“We watched videos.”
“Videos?”
“Yes,” he said, opening his eyes again. “Hours of CCTV footage from a gas station. It’s gone now, but it was on the road out to Tynäs. We hoped that the perpetrator had stopped to fill up or buy something. We took the registrations of all the cars that stopped there in the hours before and after the disappearance. Then we found the owners. If they were men and hadn’t already given their DNA, we took samples from them too. But it didn’t turn up anything.”
John felt his hope reignited and extinguished all within the same conversation. If Lundberg was right, there were other people who had given DNA samples. But finding out who they were would require the CCTV footage. Given the thorough cleanup job the perpetrator had done, the likelihood of it still being in the archives was pretty much zero.
“What format were the videos in?” John asked.
“DVDs. I remember that because I made copies of them. We were working long hours at the time and I thought it would be useful to watch them at home in the evening too. That way at least I could drink some coffee with the wife during my breaks.”
“You don’t still have the videos, do you?”
Lundberg looked at him suspiciously.
“Does it matter? The originals are in the archives with all the other stuff. All you have to do is get them from there.”
“It’s been a bit of a mess lately,” said John. “Some material went missing in a move.”
“The archive has moved?”
“No, but some older materials have been archived differently to how they were before. Lack of space.”
John might as well have been telling him about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. He had lost his touch since his days as a field agent when the lies had co
me naturally to him. Lundberg got up and disappeared out of the room. When he returned he had two DVD cases that he handed over to John.
“You’re lying, obviously. I just need to point that out, so you don’t go away thinking this old man is completely past it. But if the videos are of any use then I won’t stand in your way.”
Police work according to the assembly line principle—that was how they structured their afternoon in the basement. They used a big old-school TV they’d wheeled in from one of the abandoned conference rooms. Mona handled the remote, pausing the videos at the right moments, when people’s faces were visible as they filled up with fuel. John ran the license plates against the motor vehicles register and found the names of the men who lived at the addresses. Then Mona would step in and compare them with the personnel lists from the law enforcement agencies. Once they had gotten into the swing of it, the procedure took barely a minute for each car. Henry Ford would have been proud.
On the computer John looked at the spreadsheet filled with rows of license numbers and names. After two hours of staring at screens and searching databases, his eyes needed a break.
“I’ll get coffee,” he said, getting up.
“Thanks, you do that. I’m going to try not to think about how many cars we’ve got left to check,” said Mona.
John took the elevator up to the first floor, where the kitchen was. It was the afternoon, but there were still a few hours left of the working day. The atmosphere was sleepy and most of the office doors were shut. He could see the blueish light of the computer screens and the silhouettes of detectives sitting in front of them through the thin blinds covering the windows onto the corridor.
When he reached the small kitchen, he opened the cupboard door over the counter to get out the mug Mona had given him as a gift. It wouldn’t budge.
Glue.