by Peter Mohlin
The man hesitated again. He looked like he was thinking about how to make the best of the situation.
“I give it to someone.”
“Why?” Heimer asked, even though he knew the answer.
“I get money. All I do is collect package and hand on. Nothing else.”
“Did you look inside the bag?”
“No, not allowed. If I look, I not get money.”
Heimer took a deep breath before asking the only question he needed to know the answer to.
“Who did you give the bag to?”
The man got up from the bench. He pulled a half-smoked cigarette out of his jacket pocket and lit it.
“Is important for you,” he said, exhaling smoke. “I see you put up camera. You don’t do that if not important.”
“Yes, that’s right. It’s important to me. Can you describe the person?”
The man met Heimer’s gaze. He even dared to flash a gap-toothed grin at him.
“I have photo.”
“A photo?” said Heimer in surprise.
“Yes,” said the man. “I think someone maybe ask. So I take photo on phone, secret photo.”
Heimer couldn’t contain his excitement. This was better than he had dared to hope.
“Can I see the photo?” he said as neutrally as he could.
The beggar shook his head.
“Costs five hundred kronor,” he said.
Heimer dutifully protested, suggesting three hundred so that the man wouldn’t realize how much the picture was actually worth to him. The man stood his ground. His price was the only price. Heimer got out his wallet and handed over a five hundred kronor note. The man looked at it for a long time before pocketing it. Then he bent down and pulled a bundle from the inside compartment of the cart. It was a towel, which he unfolded to reveal a phone with a cracked screen. He entered the PIN and appeared to spend a while scrolling through photos.
“Look,” he said.
Heimer took the phone and contemplated the screen. The photo had been taken in profile, but the face was still clear enough that Heimer recognized it at once.
50
For the second day in a row, John parked the car near his childhood home. He realized that he ought to vary where he parked to avoid drawing attention, but it was late, and it would be hard to find somewhere new in the dark.
As he headed for the house, he summarized the day before for himself. Mona had been in high spirits. There’d been nothing but pats on the back from the prosecutor and the Walrus following the breakthrough in the case. Primer had been deeply disturbed by the encounter with Emelie’s father and hadn’t slept a wink all night.
The doctor they’d called in had more or less ordered them to postpone more questioning for at least twenty-four hours. The break gave John the time he needed to buy two prepaid phones. Giving one of them to his brother would be the surest way of avoiding any more risky calls to the police switchboard.
Billy really had a unique capacity for causing trouble for himself and others. It had always been like that and nothing seemed to have changed in the years the brothers had been separated.
When John entered the yard, he heard the characteristic sound of a hammer striking sheet metal emanating from the workshop. He remembered what Billy had said about the Impala that had crashed. John had thought it was a lie to get rid of him, but maybe there really was a car that needed repairing.
He was about to knock on the garage door when he realized that his brother would be wearing ear protectors, so he went on into the workshop.
Billy was bending over the hood of one of the cars. When he looked up, a wide grin appeared on his face. He put his hammer down and removed his ear protectors.
“There are some real idiots out there,” he said. “A beautiful set of wheels like this and the moron runs into a lamppost. And he must have been going fast too.”
Billy pointed at the car’s buckled bumper and John went to examine the damage. The metal was in a truly bad state.
“Surely you can’t just bash that back out?” he said.
“We’ll see,” said Billy with a blasé look. “A new one ain’t cheap, so it’s definitely worth a try.”
His brother was definitely more relaxed this time—he wasn’t at all on his guard as he had been during the last visit. There was a sudden thud from behind them and John turned around. Nicole had jumped down from a pile of tires. She waved at him as she went over to the fridge that was humming away. As usual, the red headphones were on her head and connected to the tablet.
“She likes hanging out here when I work in the evenings,” Billy explained.
The girl bent down and grabbed a cold Coca-Cola. She removed the cap using the edge of the work bench and put the bottle to her lips.
“No more of those tonight, Nicole. You’ve had enough.”
She looked up at him and nodded curtly before being reabsorbed by her screen.
“Did you want anything, by the way?” said Billy.
“No thanks, I’m good,” said John. “I can’t stay. Just wanted to give you this.”
He handed over a box with one of the phones in it. His brother took it and weighed it in his hands.
“There’s a prepaid SIM in it and I’ve saved my number to it. If you want to get hold of me then call it. And for the love of God, don’t contact anyone else using this phone.”
John could hear how condescending he sounded, and he thought his brother would be resentful. But instead, Billy took the phone out of the box, examined it for a while, and then put it in one of the many open drawers under the work bench.
“You don’t have a bathroom out here that I can use, do you?” said John, looking around.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Billy’s answer puzzled him. He looked at his brother. His eyes were oddly shiny and he looked as though he were miles away from the workshop.
“Dead?” said John. “Who?”
“Dad. He’s dead, right?”
Billy turned his faraway gaze toward him. John realized it was as he had suspected—his mother had said nothing.
“Yes, he’s dead. He died four years ago.”
Billy didn’t react to the answer. He picked up his hammer and put his ear protectors back on.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” he said. “If you need the shitter you’ll have to go inside. The door’s open—you know where to go.”
John left the workshop, followed by the sound of the hammer once again striking the bumper. His brother’s relationship with the man he insisted on referring to as his father was incomprehensible.
The door to the house was unlocked just as Billy had said and John used the bathroom, which had been adapted for disabled use. He was about to leave the house again when he glanced into the kitchen.
The light over the kitchen table was on, emitting a soft, pleasant glow. The two plates on the counter had obvious traces of ketchup and macaroni. Next to them were a few empty beer bottles and a half-finished glass of milk.
On the top shelf in the niche next to the pantry there was something that caught the attention of the investigator in John—the laptop that Billy had torn out of his daughter’s hands on the previous visit.
He listened for the sound of hammering from the workshop. His brother was still working on the bumper. John quickly considered the ethics of the situation. Billy had transparently lied to him about their mother’s visit, so it was perfectly reasonable for him to check out the laptop and see whether there was any plausible explanation why.
He took it down, opened it, and touched the trackpad. The screen lit up and the wallpaper—a field of lavender—appeared, along with a password prompt. John tried to remember how old the girl was. Then he typed in nicole2011 and pressed enter.
It didn’t work.
He fiddled for a while with the year and upper- and lowercase letters—and eventually he found the right combination. The flowers disappeared and it was open sesame.
He began by revie
wing the browser history. Billy’s interests were decidedly limited. His brother appeared to almost solely visit online retailers selling vintage cars or sites about American football. John tried to access the email account, but that needed a new password. He tried a few options, but once Outlook stopped letting him try again he gave up.
The sound of the hammer striking the buckled rear of the Impala was still just as frenetic. He clicked on the Microsoft Word icon and waited for it to open. He went to the menu and selected Open Recent. A sub-menu showed two options: letter.docx and letter-1.docx.
John was curious. Billy didn’t seem the type to write letters, but maybe there were more sides to his brother than he had shown to date. He opened the first document and stared at the screen, stunned.
The words were not new to him.
I know who killed your daughter. How much is that information worth to you? I’ll be in touch.
John hurried across the yard. The banging inside the workshop had stopped. If Billy stuck his head out, John wouldn’t be able to stop himself from shouting at him. He would tell him what an idiot he was, trying to con Emelie Bjurwall’s father. But a confrontation would be stupid and only make matters worse.
The leather seats in the Chrysler were cold when he got behind the wheel and headed out onto the road. John unbuttoned his coat and looked up Mona’s details on his phone. It irritated him to call her—he knew how pissed she would be. At the same time, he couldn’t keep the information from her.
Mona answered on the first ring, pounding music in the background.
“I’m in the middle of a spin class. Can it wait?” she panted.
“Afraid not. You’ll have to get off the bike.”
John waited while she made her way somewhere quieter. Then he told her about the visit to Billy and the letter on the computer’s hard drive.
“So, you’ve been lying to me,” she said. “I asked whether you’d been in contact with your half brother and you said no.”
“Come on, Mona. It couldn’t be helped. Sooner or later I was going to have to see him. No one saw me, I promise.”
“That doesn’t matter. For me, this changes everything.”
John stopped at a pedestrian crossing and stared absently at the elderly couple crossing the road. He understood and respected Mona’s position. Once a liar, always a liar—and that meant the trust required between colleagues in this line of work was gone.
“I’m sorry,” he said abruptly.
The silence between them was painful. There were occasional slamming sounds in the background. John suspected that Mona was in the changing room and that it was locker doors that he could hear.
“We need to meet. Where are you?” she said eventually.
“On the way home,” he said.
Mona’s face was still flushed red and glistening with sweat when they met outside the main door to his apartment building. Apparently she had skipped the showers to get here as quickly as possible. Once they were inside, John put a glass of water on the kitchen table for her while she took in his new abode.
He could tell it raised questions in her mind. How on earth could a police detective with a secret identity afford to live somewhere this expensive? At least he had a good answer to that one. The fact that he had visited his brother behind her back, and why, would be harder to explain.
Mona sat on one of the wooden crates and downed the water in one go.
“Surely you realize that I can’t continue to be your point of contact for your witness protection? When we’re done with this investigation, I’ll speak to my boss at National in Stockholm and ask him to appoint someone else. Until then, I’ll just have to trust that you’re not lying to me.”
“You can,” he said, knowing that to her ears, his words carried as much weight as Primer’s did during questioning.
Mona asked for more water and he got her a refill. Mona liked him, he knew that—because he felt the same about her. Maybe that was why she was more disappointed than angry.
“Did you take photos of the letters?” she said, when her glass was empty again.
John handed her his phone. She seemed to be ready to move on and focus on the investigation.
“We know the first one,” she said. “The wording and typography is identical to the one sent to Heimer Bjurwall.”
She ran her index finger across the screen to bring up the next photo-—the one showing the second, hitherto unknown letter. Mona read aloud:
“Select the Lobby chatroom at chatta.se. Log on at 7:30 P.M. on Friday. Call yourself Froggy and search for Nadja6543.”
“Do you think he sent this one too?” said John.
Mona brushed the hair from her forehead. The sweat had dried on her body and she shivered.
“Wouldn’t the Bjurwalls have been in touch if he had?”
“You’d think so, but …” he said, his voice trailing off.
“But what?”
“There was something about Sissela Bjurwall’s voice,” he said. “When she asked about the first letter and found out that her husband hadn’t handed it over to us. I think she sounded surprised. Almost angry. I didn’t give it any more thought at the time, but maybe I should have.”
“You think he wanted to keep the letter a secret?”
“Maybe. It’s possible that the Bjurwalls had different views on the matter, isn’t it?”
“True. In that case I suppose we need to pay them another visit.” Mona went back to the photo of the first letter and read it again.
“Do you really think your brother knows something about the murder?” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
“No, because if he did, then surely he would have said something to the police. He was almost charged with the crime twice.”
“So, it’s just as we suspected all along—it’s a con,” said John.
Mona looked at him.
“You tell me—he’s your brother.”
John remembered the money his mother had given to Nicole, which his brother had then taken away from her.
“He’s hard up at any rate—so that much makes sense,” he said. “And Billy is definitely no saint, even if he didn’t kill Emelie Bjurwall.”
“Did you check when the letters were created?”
John shook his head. He cursed himself for not checking that detail. Adrenaline had been coursing through him when he had realized exactly what he’d found on the laptop.
“Okay, we know when the first letter arrived at least,” said Mona. “And if Billy sent the second one, it should have arrived soon after, right?”
“Yes, it must’ve been written before it came out that Primer had been arrested. Afterward, every person in the country who could read would have known who killed Emelie Bjurwall—it wouldn’t have been possible to con the dad out of any money.”
“We need to find out whether or not they made contact in this chatroom,” she said.
Mona got up, as if she were about to leave the apartment.
“I’ll pay Billy a visit early tomorrow morning.”
“Do you want me to speak to Heimer Bjurwall?”
“No, you’re not going to talk to anyone,” she said sharply. “You need to stay out of this. Billy is part of the investigation again, and he’s still your brother.”
Half brother, John thought to himself, but he kept quiet.
He knew there was no point protesting.
51
Heimer looked at the time. He knew that it was crazy to take the rain personally, but right now that was how it felt. As if all the forces of the universe were working against him. The water was lashing the windshield and the wipers were working at full capacity.
He saw the sign on the right. Nerman’s Autos –24/7 towing –garage –service. He slowly passed the entrance and parked out of sight by a gravel pit a few hundred meters away. After checking that the car couldn’t be seen from the road, he began to walk toward the garage. The hood of his jacket, which he had pulled up, wasn’t
enough to keep the rain off his face. Drops found their way through the small opening he needed in order to navigate in the darkness.
Billy Nerman appearing on the homeless man’s phone had been a complete surprise. It didn’t add up with the man depicted in the media, the outsider who repaired American cars. Sending the letter showed a level of resourcefulness he hadn’t known Billy Nerman possessed. But what did he really know about other people? Presumably, no one thought that he—Sissela Bjurwall’s obedient lapdog—could think for himself either.
He made his way to the yard, where he saw that there was a light on in one of the windows of the house. He knew that Billy had a daughter; she couldn’t get mixed up in this. If she was awake, he would need to wait until she went to sleep.
Heimer crept up close to the house, where he was harder to spot. He leaned toward the window and caught a glimpse of the kitchen. Billy was sitting at the table with a bowl of cereal or something in front of him.
He quickly withdrew his head and continued to the back of the house. All the windows there were dark. The daughter was presumably in one of the upstairs rooms, asleep.
Heimer turned his face to the sky, closed his eyes, and let the rain fall onto his eyelids. He stood like that for a few seconds before putting his hand to his face and wiping away the raindrops.
He quietly crept around the end of the house and back to the front of the building. He crouched under the kitchen window and continued to the front step. There was a snapping sound under his feet as he broke several wooden sticks wedged into a crack in the concrete.
He stopped and listened. The snapping sound was deceptive. It had sounded like a bomb blast to his ears, but the likelihood of anyone inside having heard it was bordering on zero. Especially on a night like this, with the rain pattering against the roof and windows.
He slowly tried the door. It was unlocked. After a gentle nudge and a low creak from the wooden frame, it opened.
He was in.
52
It had been a long time since he had checked the clock on his phone so often. Mona had forbidden him from being there when she met Billy but promised to call as soon as she was finished. John knew she planned to visit Billy at around seven in the morning because his brother would still be at home. As if he wouldn’t be, he thought to himself. The only places that Billy seemed to move between were his house and the workshop. A stretch of less than one hundred meters.