by Peter Mohlin
Jesus Christ.
Someone had glued his mug to the cupboard. This silent war was getting out of control and John was beginning to have serious regrets about starting it. He now realized that his protest against the kitchen schedule had been seen as so much more than that. It was an attack on the Swedes’ perceptions of solidarity and fairness. No one was above taking part in the kitchen chores. John expected even the damn prime minister was probably giving the tables “an extra wipe” in the government break room right now.
He sighed, filled two paper cups with coffee, and took them back to the basement.
“Where’s the beautiful mug I gave you?”
John put the cups on the table. He blew on his hands, which were stinging after the ride in the elevator.
“You don’t want to know.”
She shrugged and turned the TV back on. A new car was arriving at the gas station, but it didn’t even make it to the pump before she paused the video.
“Actually, I do want to know,” she said with an amused smile.
John sighed and told her the whole story. Mona didn’t even try to control herself. She threw her head back, howling with laughter—if they hadn’t been in the basement everyone in the building would have heard it.
“And this was your plan for maintaining a low profile?”
John didn’t answer—he just looked at her, annoyed.
She laughed even more and put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’ll deal with the problem for you—I promise.”
“How?”
“Just trust me, okay?”
She pressed play. The cars continued to flicker by. The same tedious procedure repeated over and over: park at the pump, get out of the car, insert credit card, fill up, and then pull away. The only variation came from those customers who chose to pay at the counter and had brought some unnecessary purchase out with them.
As the evening got later, the cars became less regular. John checked the time counter in the bottom corner of the screen. When Mona paused for an Opel Estate it was 10:46 P.M.—about an hour until Emelie Bjurwall would leave the party to meet Mister Hyde.
An old man got out of the car with difficulty and approached the pump.
“Hundred kronor says he pays cash,” said John.
“Two hundred kronor says he buys some ciggies,” Mona countered.
In silence, they watched the man stumble into the shop and emerge with an ice cream.
“He’s got the cigarettes in his pocket,” she said, hitting fast-forward.
The time counter moved on. John saw it turn eleven and watched the manager close up. He took the windshield washing fluid and garden toys that had been outside into the shop before locking the door. Then he vanished out of view on a bicycle.
There couldn’t be many cars left to check up on now, and so far they’d scored no wins. John stared at the screen. If it hadn’t been for the time counter moving on, he would have thought Mona had paused again. Absolutely nothing was happening—just time passing at a deserted gas station ten years ago. An episode in history that was so trivial and meaningless that it barely deserved to be kept on file for posterity.
Then the camera captured a Subaru pulling up to the forward pump. The driver seemed busy with something in the car and stayed at the wheel. Maybe he wanted to wrap up a phone call or finish listening to a song. John checked the time. It was 11:42.
“Is he just going to stay inside?” Mona sighed.
At that moment, the door opened and the driver went up to the card terminal. He was wearing a cap, which together with the angle of the camera made it impossible to see his face. He put a card in the terminal and chose his pump. Then he unhooked the hose and began to fill up. While gasoline flowed into the car he unintentionally turned toward the camera. In that movement, he also pushed the cap up, making his face visible.
Mona paused.
She seemed as mesmerized by the screen as John was.
Could it really be?
The man on the screen was ten years younger and considerably less heavy than the person they had gotten to know at the police station.
The years had not been kind to Bernt Primer.
The hit in the motor vehicles registration database confirmed what they already knew. The owner of the black Subaru Impreza in August 2009 had been Bernt Gunnar Primer, resident at Löwenborgs väg in Karlstad, where he still lived.
If it hadn’t been so far to the coffee maker, John would’ve fetched a refill. Or even better, put a nip of whiskey in his paper cup. The irony was not lost on him. The man who had thrown him off the AckWe case due to his relationship with Billy was a potential suspect. Rules about conflict of interest apparently didn’t apply when you were investigating yourself.
“What the hell do we do now?” John asked, as much to himself as to Mona.
“What we would do if it were any other police officer in this video,” she said, pointing at the TV where Primer’s frozen face was still staring at them. “Talk to him nicely. Ask what he was doing on the island at that time of night and ask for a DNA sample.”
“And the commissioner?”
“Not a word to him until we’ve run Primer’s sample against the semen.”
John liked what he was hearing. Mona was no politician—she was a cop just like him. There was no reason to pull the top dog in until they had more to go on.
“Why didn’t Lundberg say anything?” said Mona. “He must surely have remembered that one of his own officers was in the footage from the gas station. Especially given the time. Primer filled up half an hour before Emelie Bjurwall left the party and went missing.”
“Yes, but I didn’t tell him we were looking for one of our own. And back then Primer was just one of many who gave DNA samples as a matter of course. Nothing back then suggested a police officer was mixed up in this.”
She nodded and seemed to accept his reasoning. What was more, a decade had passed. If anyone had asked him questions about investigations he had been involved in or even led in New York City years ago, he probably wouldn’t be able to remember a thing.
“We’ll talk to him down here, right? Out of sight, away from his colleagues on the corridor,” said John.
“Yes, but we don’t want him to suspect anything. If he has time to prepare we might miss his spontaneous reaction.”
“So, we need a pretext?”
“Something innocent. Preferably administrative.”
John watched Mona’s cogs turning.
“What about money?” she said.
“Money?”
“Yes, a budgetary issue. I’ll call him and ask him to come down to discuss a request from Stockholm for county CID to cover part of my expenses. He’ll buy that. If I stay somewhere for a long time, the boss usually wants to try to send the bill to someone else.”
“Won’t he be suspicious if I’m here in that case?”
“Not if you stay in the background. We need two of us keeping an eye on him.”
John listened as she called Primer. He took the bait and promised to come right away. The cops in Stockholm wouldn’t get the better of him.
“As the old jungle saying goes,” she said with satisfaction when she had hung up, “if you want the boss’s attention, tell him something costs money.”
“Jungle saying?” said John in confusion.
She looked at him.
“Sometimes I forget you’ve not been in Sweden long.”
Just a few minutes later, Primer thundered into the big office, ready to fight for every last krona of his budget.
“We’ll have to sit down and sort this out,” he said, looking at Mona.
“Absolutely. There was just one other thing I wanted to check with you first, if that’s alright?”
“Of course,” he said, crossing his arms across his large stomach.
John didn’t know whether the distancing gesture was part of his financial negotiation or whether Primer already sensed something was wrong. It fell to him to observe the former lead i
nvestigator. To search for the shifts in his facial expression and hesitations in his voice. It wouldn’t be easy—especially not when the man they were about to confront knew every trick in the book.
“It’s about the DNA samples,” said Mona. “We’ve managed to re-create the lists and make a file with the names of everyone who gave a sample during the last investigation—and we’ve run these against the personnel lists from the law enforcement agencies.”
“Oh?” he said, cautiously.
“But we’ve not found any hits.”
“No?”
John listened for undertones but found none. Primer sounded genuinely surprised.
“No, and that’s very strange. Everything suggested the perpetrator gave a DNA sample and then swapped their own sample for Billy Nerman’s. For them to have been able to do that, they would have needed knowledge of the investigation and access to the DNA samples. Yet we’ve turned up nothing. Do you have any ideas?”
Only now did Primer sit down on the chair Mona had pulled over for him.
“I don’t know what to say. It sounds strange.”
“Our conclusion is that we must have missed some of the people who gave samples ten years ago. That’s why John and I decided to visit Anton Lundberg.”
Primer perked up and looked at John.
“Lundberg—it’s been a while. How was he?”
If he was acting, it was impressive. There was no tremor in Primer’s voice and no signs of nervousness.
“He seemed well.”
John paused for a long time before moving onto the more sensitive issue.
“Lundberg said there was a gas station near Tynäs back then.”
“Yes, that’s right, but it didn’t break even. People out there were always complaining about bad service and they tended to go elsewhere.”
“There was CCTV on the forecourt and according to Lundberg you took DNA samples from everyone who filled up there in the hours before and after the disappearance.”
John met his gaze. This was a crucial moment. If Primer was innocent and had simply forgotten the video, he would confirm Lundberg’s account and say that he had given a sample.
The talkative Värmlander fell silent and seemed to be thinking.
“Yes, that’s right. We reviewed the footage and followed up on the male drivers to get samples. I’d forgotten about that.”
John gave him space to keep going, but when the silence became uncomfortable he knew Primer wasn’t going to say anything else. There were only two reasons why that might be. Either the man had a very selective memory that allowed him to remember the CCTV footage but not that he had featured in it. Or—and this seemed more probable—he was coolly reckoning that the footage would never be retrieved.
John glanced at Mona who nodded discreetly at him. She wanted him to bring in the heavy artillery.
“We checked the archived investigation files for the CCTV footage,” he said, thinking about the boxes in the archives that he had gone through after his visit to Anton Lundberg just to be sure. “According to the contents list there should be two DVDs, but just like the list of DNA samples, they’re missing.”
“Stolen?” said Primer with a frown.
“Yes, it would seem so.”
“So, you think the perpetrator took the DVDs because he’s one of the people who filled up at the gas station?”
“It’s a theory at least, but it’ll be hard to get anywhere with it if the videos are missing,” said Mona.
“Yes, of course,” said Primer.
John thought he saw a flash of relief in his expression, but it might have just been his imagination.
“But this time we got lucky,” he said. “Really lucky, actually.”
Primer looked interested.
“Oh, how so?”
“Lundberg made copies of the DVDs to watch at home. He’s kept them all these years and he let me have them. Mona and I have been watching them all afternoon.”
Primer’s expression didn’t change. His insides were presumably a chaotic mess of stress and tactical considerations of what he should and shouldn’t say, but none of this showed on his face.
“We thought we’d play you a clip,” said John, turning on the TV.
He reached for the remote and a moment later they watched a Subaru Impreza pull onto the forecourt. The former lead investigator followed what was happening on the screen attentively, but said nothing about the car being his. John played the video all the way up to the moment when the man at the pump pushed his cap up and turned toward the camera. Then Primer began to laugh.
“Fuck me, I’d forgotten about that. Dementia is apparently well and truly on the way.”
“So that’s you in the video?” said Mona.
“Yes, of course it’s me. A bit less ballast, but definitely me.”
More laughter. Not nervous, booming. The way Primer sounded when he was amused.
“Did you give a DNA sample?” she said.
“Of course. Lundberg made no exceptions. I had to give a sample like everyone else.”
“And what were you doing out on Hammarö just before midnight?”
“Checking on my boat. There had been some shenanigans in the harbor that summer. Some trifles and other valuables had gone missing.”
“Did you meet anyone?”
“No, it was late at night and there are no guest berths out there.”
John listened attentively. His body language was still relaxed, but Primer had started making mistakes. His account of the evening was emerging too rapidly and it was too detailed. From not even remembering the visit to the gas station, he had suddenly remembered why he had been on the island that late and that the harbor had been deserted.
“I hope you’ve no objection to us taking a new DNA sample,” said Mona, sounding at once friendly and formal.
“Of course not. Now?”
She nodded at John, who unscrewed the lid from a plastic tube, pulled out the swab and waited for Primer to open his mouth. He leaned forward and ran the swab against the tissue on the inside of Primer’s cheek a couple of times. Then he put the swab back in the tube and screwed the lid back on.
“There we are then,” said Mona neutrally.
“And the expenses that Stockholm wanted us to cover—what are we going to do about those?”
John’s amazement at Primer’s brazen manner did not cease. If the sample matched the semen on the rock then he had just handed over the crucial evidence. Such an outward display of cool composure at the very moment the roof was caving in was something few people could’ve pulled off.
“I’ll talk to Stockholm and see whether we can resolve it internally. If there’s a problem, I’ll get back in touch,” said Mona.
It was a bad lie that Primer saw straight through.
“Well, that’s fine,” he said with a smile as he got up. He uttered a dutiful good luck and then they were alone again in the basement.
“So, what are we supposed to make of that?” said John.
“It’s strange,” said Mona. “The harder I pushed, the nicer he got. Not exactly the response you usually get from suspects.”
“He didn’t react at all when I played the video,” John said. “It’s almost superhuman.”
“Assuming he’s not in fact innocent.”
John raised his eyebrows.
“Do you think that?”
“I don’t think anything. I’m trying to be professional. As you may recall, this investigation has already hit a wall once thanks to police with tunnel vision.”
John was about to object and point out that it was different this time when he realized that it wasn’t. Everything had pointed to Billy then—just like it was pointing to Primer now.
“Okay, you have a point,” he conceded. “So what do we do?”
Mona stood up.
“I’ll make sure this gets analyzed as soon as possible,” she said, taking the plastic tube from John’s desk. “And you keep an eye on our suspect. I wan
t to know what he does next.”
“Bernt Primer has gone home.”
John twitched and turned on his heel in the management corridor on the second floor. The woman speaking to John was the same one who had escorted him to the meeting with the Walrus. She seemed to divide her time between the reception desk and administrative tasks for management.
“When?”
“Just now. Said he felt off.”
John peered through the blinds again. The desk chair was pushed under the table and he couldn’t see a jacket or bag in the room.
“Not to worry—it’ll keep until tomorrow,” he said, hurrying back to the stairs. There was a big window with a view of the parking lot. He cast his gaze over the expanse of asphalt and managed to spot Primer squeezing his large body into a blue Nissan SUV.
John wouldn’t make it downstairs in time to follow him. It would also be a bad idea to do it in the Chrysler. It drew too much attention. Instead, he took the elevator to the garage in the basement. They issued him a civilian surveillance car with an automatic transmission—a white Volkswagen Passat.
He took a chance on Primer having headed straight home and entered Löwenborgs väg into the GPS. The mapping software instructed him to take the E18 highway west and then exit just before the big shopping center he could never remember the name of, even though he had been there countless times as a child.
As he got close to the address, John slowed down. He saw identical red brick houses in neat rows with well-tended hedges bordering small front lawns.
Primer’s house was on the left-hand side of the road. The blue Nissan was on the drive and John stopped at a safe distance.
John got his phone out of his jacket pocket and called Mona, who picked up after one ring.
“Where are you?”
“Outside Primer’s house,” he said, explaining that the former lead investigator had feigned illness and gone home for the day.
“Interesting. Considering how calm he was, I would’ve thought he’d keep working.”
“Maybe it’s starting to dawn on him what’s going to happen.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Mona. “But it’s a good idea to keep an eye on him. What time shall I relieve you?”
John smiled to himself. Clearly she wasn’t unaccustomed to working at uncomfortable hours of the day.