The Bucket List

by Peter Mohlin

  “Yes.”

  “And you went there?”

  “I got there just before midnight, after filling up at the gas station. But she was late. At first I thought she might have forgotten. I waited for a while and eventually … well, she turned up and we went to the rocks and sat down.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I don’t know. I might have waited twenty minutes or so.”

  “And was it at this time that your semen ended up on the rock?”

  Primer sighed in resignation and ran his hand over his face.

  “Yes, I suppose it was.”

  “Could you tell us what happened out there after Emelie arrived?” said Mona after a brief silence.

  “I don’t know if there’s much to tell.”

  There was suddenly a distance in his voice, John noticed. They were approaching a minefield.

  “I’d still like you to tell us what happened,” she said. “Was there any particular reason Emelie wanted to see you there and then, so late at night?”

  “Yes, I guess there was,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “And what was it?”

  “She wanted to have sex.”

  “Okay,” said Mona. “And what happened?”

  He snorted and glowered at her, as if what she just said was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.

  “She sucked me off, if you want to put it plainly.”

  In a flash, Primer’s embarrassed demeanor vanished, replaced by a chilly shrug of the shoulders. John recognized the behavior. He’d seen similar transformations when interrogating suspects back in New York, pushing them to put their actions into words. Nonchalance was a defense—a way of distancing themselves from the crime and making their feelings of guilt more bearable.

  “I’m sorry, Bernt, but I need to ask these questions and you know that. So Emelie performed oral sex on you, but you didn’t have penetrative intercourse. Is that how I should take it?”

  Primer said nothing but nodded.

  “Is that how I should take it,” Mona repeated, pointing at the microphone.

  “Yes, that’s how you should take it. We didn’t have penetrative sex.”

  “And what did you do next?”

  “We talked for a bit. I said I wanted to end it.”

  “You wanted to end the relationship?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did she react to that?”

  “She was upset. Angry. Mostly upset I think. She claimed it was a shock. But it couldn’t have been. We talked a lot about how impossible our relationship was.”

  “And this conversation was after you’d had sex?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then what happened?” said Mona.

  “She cried and started shouting at me. We weren’t getting anywhere and in the end we decided to talk again the next day. Then I went back to the car and left.”

  John felt a shiver run through his body. Maybe this wasn’t a straight line to a confession after all. But he couldn’t show his frustration or disappointment—that would give off the wrong signals. Instead, he concentrated on Primer. Gone was the shifting, uncertain gaze.

  The eyes that met his were decisive now.

  “So Emelie was alive when you left her?” said Mona.

  John could hear her making an effort to sound neutral.

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t hear from her again?”

  “No.”

  Primer picked up the empty plastic cup and sucked up the final drops of water. John looked at Mona. Her face looked relaxed, almost amused. As if she wanted to show Primer that his bullshit was entertaining, but that she didn’t believe a word of what he had said.

  “Where did you go once you had parted ways?”

  “Home,” Primer said curtly.

  “Why didn’t you say you had been with her? I think you must’ve been the last person to see her alive—apart from the perpetrator, that is,” she added in a tone that couldn’t be interpreted as anything other than ironic.

  “It was impossible. No one would’ve believed me. You don’t know what the mood was like in Karlstad back then. Emelie wasn’t just anyone. There was pressure from every fucking direction and those of us working on the case were getting more and more frustrated when we weren’t making any progress. All we had to go on was the semen. If I had said it was mine, then it would have been over.”

  “So, the fact that Emelie was murdered the same night and in the same place where you’d had sex with her is just an unlucky coincidence?” said John, making no great effort to conceal his sarcasm.

  “Yes, you might say that.”

  John clenched his fist under the table. Primer’s obvious approach of playing innocent was infuriating. His thoughts kept returning to Billy and the hell that his brother had been forced to go through because of this man.

  “You must have panicked when you appeared in that CCTV footage from the gas station and realized that you would have to provide a DNA sample. Was that when you came up with the idea of swapping the labels to cast suspicion on Billy Nerman?” he said.

  “No, I didn’t do anything like that.”

  John waited to see whether there was anything else to come. But when Primer sat there quietly with his arms crossed, Mona took over again.

  “But if you didn’t switch the labels, how could your sample get mixed up with Billy Nerman’s?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So, you don’t have a theory about what might have happened?” said Mona, who no longer had it in her to maintain her amused expression. Now she mostly sounded tired and irritated.

  “No, I’ve thought about that all these years. I gave a sample and assumed it would be pinned on me. But when Billy Nerman was arrested instead, I was very surprised. The only explanation I can think of is that there was some kind of bungle with the samples.”

  “What kind of bungle do you mean?” said John.

  “Well, they got mixed up. There were hundreds of samples that were collected. From what I remember, most of us were working twenty-four seven and were completely exhausted. It’s not impossible that someone made a mistake.”

  “I assume you don’t have an explanation for why the list of everyone who gave a sample was deleted from the investigation files either?”

  “No.”

  “Yet another occasion when your guardian angel stepped in?”

  “Yes, it would seem so.”

  John leaned back in the chair and clasped his hands behind his neck.

  “You must hear how stupid this sounds. Why would anyone delete files from the investigation if it wasn’t to save their own skin?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have an answer,” said Primer.

  “It’s clear as day that it was you.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything about the list of samples.”

  Primer sounded like a robot repeating preprogrammed answers. John sighed and shook his head. Mona put her elbows on the desk. She leaned forward so that her face was just a few inches from Primer’s.

  “Supposing it was all as you say,” she said. “You got dragged into this by an unfortunate coincidence and you don’t have anything to do with Emelie Bjurwall’s death. So how come you tried to run?”

  “I panicked,” he said. “This is a small town. Even if I told the truth, everyone would think I was lying. I booked a ticket to Thailand and I was going to dump the car in the staff parking garage. I got a pass card as part of an investigation years ago.”

  “But you didn’t have any problem with Billy Nerman being accused when he was innocent?”

  John regretted it the moment he said it. He saw Mona react from the corner of his eye. She had warned against him letting the ties to his brother get in the way of the investigation.

  “You heard what I said,” Primer replied. “I’m completely aware that I didn’t do the right thing ten years ago. And it’s unfortunate that your brother had a tough time. But things went th
e way they did, and you can’t turn back time.”

  John felt Mona’s hand on his arm. He had to calm down, otherwise he risked being sent out of the room.

  “So, to summarize,” she said. “You’re saying that Emelie Bjurwall performed oral sex on you at Tynäs on the night she was murdered, but that she was alive when you left her.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And you don’t know who swapped your DNA sample for Billy Nerman’s. Or how the list of DNA samples and the DVDs from the gas station disappeared from the investigation files.”

  “No, not a clue.”

  Mona closed her notebook and stared at him for a long time.

  “I’m going to be honest with you, Bernt. There are slightly too many coincidences for your story to seem credible. I know it must be hard, but wouldn’t it be easier for everyone if you just confessed to what you’ve done—here and now? You had sex with Emelie Bjurwall and somehow it went wrong and you killed her.”

  Primer shook his head.

  “No, it wasn’t like that.”

  “You must see that the evidence against you is very strong. Maybe there are mitigating circumstances we’re not aware of. I think you’d feel better for telling us.”

  “There’s nothing else to tell,” he said. “When I left Tynäs, Emelie was alive.”

  Mona put her pen down. John thought she was going to suggest a short break, but instead she merely stared at Primer. The sweat had soaked through her white blouse and left damp patches at her armpits. The room was stifling and the whirr of the ventilation system in the metal ducting on the ceiling was neither adding nor removing air.

  John straightened up in his chair.

  “Can I ask something?” he said, reaching for the folder on the table.

  He took out the picture that had been posted on Emelie’s Facebook page—the one they now knew was anything but a bucket list.

  “When you left her at the rocks, did her arm look like this or was the final square still empty?”

  He held the picture up in front of Primer, who merely glanced at the photo.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “So you don’t remember whether the final tick—the one that wasn’t tattooed but was carved into the skin—was on Emelie Bjurwall’s arm when you left?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think she could have done it to herself?”

  Primer looked at the picture again and this time he stared at it.

  “Given how she felt, I imagine she might have, yes.”

  “Did you consider her to be self-destructive?”

  “Yes, I think most people who use drugs are.”

  Mona took the photo from John and put it back in the folder.

  “According to witnesses, Emelie claimed she was leaving the party to obtain drugs—specifically cocaine,” she said. “Why do you think she said that, if she was going to meet you?”

  Primer immediately looked worried and John took note.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you think? Why would she have said that?”

  “The only thing I can think of is that she wanted to keep her friends in the dark. Or she met someone else before she came to see me. Maybe that’s why she was late.”

  “So it wasn’t you who gave her the drugs?” said Mona.

  Primer looked shocked and then laughed.

  “Me? No, absolutely not. Why would I do that? I wanted to keep her off that stuff.”

  Mona balanced a pair of reading glasses on her nose and took a sheet out of the folder.

  “You worked in narcotics at the time and you were …”

  “Hang on just a second, Mona,” Primer interrupted her, holding up his hand. “I know what you’re doing, but you can drop it. It’s ridiculous to try that line.”

  “As an officer in narcotics, you had access to …”

  “Aren’t you listening to me?!” Primer bellowed, pounding the table with his fist. “I didn’t give or sell drugs to Emelie or anyone else. Full stop.”

  Mona closed the folder and took her glasses off.

  “I think we’ll take a short break and continue in …” She looked at her wristwatch. “… let’s say twenty minutes?”

  John nodded curtly and they got up from the table.

  “He’s lying,” John said as he tried to wander around the limited floor area. “He’s going to fight us with every last ounce of strength.”

  Mona hadn’t said a word since they left the interview room and once again went into the adjacent room. She was leaning forward in the chair in front of the monitors, drinking from her water bottle as if she were in the dugout during an ice hockey match.

  “Yes, it seems that way,” she said, between swigs.

  John could see that she was grappling with the same disappointment that he was.

  “Obviously he was the one who swapped the DNA samples and got rid of the list,” he hissed. “And the story about Emelie—I don’t buy it.”

  “You don’t think he had a relationship with her?”

  John shook his head.

  “The sense of Emelie you get from the witness statements is that she was a girl who could have anyone she wanted. The idea that she’d fall for a man twenty-five years her senior who isn’t much of a looker doesn’t seem at all plausible.”

  “So, you think she performed oral sex on Primer not because she was in love with him but because she was self-destructive?”

  “Yes, maybe. And for some reason they started to fight, and she fell and cracked her head on the rocks.”

  Mona watched him pace.

  “How about you sit down and breathe deeply for a minute? I’m as frustrated as you are, but we’ll get there. We’ve just begun. We’ll break him down.”

  John reluctantly sat down.

  “How can you be so certain? We need a confession and he knows it. Primer won’t give up—not at first.”

  “He won’t be able to hold out forever. Now we know his attitude to the accusations, and we’ve got enough to hold him, on remand. We’ll crack him with time.”

  John still didn’t feel convinced. He looked at the black-and-white monitor, his gaze lingering on the man hunched over a cup of coffee while munching on a cheese sandwich.

  It struck him that Primer had what Billy had always lacked.

  An explanation for why the semen had been on the rock.

  45

  Heimer looked around. The office in the basement of the police station was full of desks but devoid of people. He thought about one of those popular zombie series that he’d tried to watch on TV. It felt as if this place had been hit by the apocalypse and he was about to encounter a horde of shambling, bloodthirsty creatures. He glanced at Sissela. She was reading emails on her phone and didn’t seem to have noticed the surroundings.

  “We’ve got issues with damp—that’s why there’s no one down here,” the female detective who fetched them from reception said, when they got out of the elevator and she saw Heimer’s reaction.

  They’d met once before when she picked up that confounded letter from the house in Tynäs. Her name was Mona Ejdewik and she was the new lead detective who had taken over after Primer. Heimer tried to guess her age. The woman was definitely older than he had first thought. Her hands gave her away too—that was something she had in common with Sissela. Fit bodies, but slack and wrinkly sections of skin on the back of the hand.

  She got a tray with the mandatory coffee cups and put it down on the desk in front of them. Heimer saw Sissela look up from her phone to check that there was milk. And there was. Small packets of milk were set out in a bowl along with sugar in eco-friendly paper packaging.

  Heimer saw that something important was happening. The whole situation oozed importance. The fact that they were here in the basement of the police station rather than on the sofa at home. The way the woman carefully pushed the cups toward them and the patience with which she waited for Sissela to put her phone in her handbag. And then, of course,
there was the language. The formal tone that people relied upon when important things had to be said. Like an anchor on the TV news reporting a tragic accident—two tones lower on the scale than usual.

  “Thank you for coming in so quickly. I want to update you on the latest events in the investigation,” she said.

  “We appreciate that,” said Sissela. “Over the years it’s been a bit hit-and-miss when it comes to information from the police.”

  It bothered Heimer that in every new encounter with a person, Sissela would try to induce guilt in the other party to gain the upper hand. However, the new lead investigator wasn’t drawn into making apologies, merely continuing with her formal tone.

  “I’m about to share confidential information with you and must request that you don’t discuss what’s said here today with anyone else. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Heimer said quickly, before his wife had time to ask any follow-up questions.

  “Well then—it’s my duty to inform you that this morning, the prosecutor took an individual into custody, and there’s reasonable suspicion that they murdered your daughter.”

  The room was silent. Heimer felt his heart pounding. Sissela had just picked up a packet of milk but now she put it back in the bowl.

  “Who is it?” she asked, in a voice that he thought sounded steadier than she probably felt.

  “Before I tell you, it’s important that you understand the full picture. Sooner or later, the press is going to learn who’s been arrested, and I think once that happens it would be wise for you to go away or at least be unreachable.”

  Sissela looked at her with that look that Heimer knew gave AckWe employees stomachaches.

  “I appreciate the thought, Mona. That was your name, wasn’t it?”

  A new show of power. His wife never forgot the name of anyone she met.

  “Yes—last name Ejdewik.”

  “My husband and I are quite capable of dealing with any reporters who may not honor the boundaries of our private life. But right now, all I want to know is who did this to Emelie.”

  Heimer put his hand on Sissela’s shoulder to show that he agreed with every word she said. This was a conversation between two women used to getting their way and the best thing he could do was keep quiet and show loyalty to his wife.