The Silenced
The Silenced
Литагент HarperCollins
WINNER SWEDISH CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR.The adrenaline-charged and suspenseful thriller set in a ruthless world where all means are permitted in the fight for power.When a savaged body is found in the waters outside the governing party’s conference centre, the case lands on detective Julia Gabrielsson’s desk. Who is the deceased and why has somebody gone to such trouble to make sure the body is unidentifiable?Officer David Sarac is a man haunted by demons. After a violent showdown that almost cost him his life, the policeman is being treated at a closed ward far from the capital. Soon he will permanently silence the accusing voices in his head. But a mysterious offer has David changing his mind.
Copyright (#ulink_d2b36e5e-2064-57c2-bd58-d61dfc32c484)
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © 2015 Anders de la Motte
Translation copyright © Neil Smith 2017
Published by agreement with Solomonsson Agency
Cover design by Richard Augustus © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photographs © Robert Jones / Arcangel Images (http://www.arcangel.com)
Anders de la Motte asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Originally published as UltiMatum in 2015 in Sweden
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008101138
Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008101145
Version: 2017-04-25
Dedication (#ulink_d6acb56d-669a-5d38-af53-ca4c53d25e7f)
For Anette
Contents
Cover (#ub3be3f14-b96a-57f9-ab37-7fde255cc0e2)
Title Page (#u3de62ae7-6c67-58d5-8ef0-63d4bbbeef08)
Copyright (#uba5327b5-fbbb-5c56-a5bd-4c24700641e1)
Dedication (#u386a39a0-ce8d-599a-8fa6-a773f7c3abb2)
Prologue (#u126ccfe4-3f13-570c-846f-851ede1f43d2)
Chapter One (#u127fb26c-c7d5-5c12-84b2-94cc92982c67)
Chapter Two (#u4bce44d3-460d-5bf2-a24c-94697f5e40db)
Chapter Three (#u503c0467-3315-51db-bbf4-231bc22c3a15)
Chapter Four (#u9d518176-28e9-50cd-bd5f-2742f6f72f4b)
Chapter Five (#uaa21cfa2-20bd-5787-ba0e-03bd0190c190)
Chapter Six (#u7a3f1c55-8461-5c99-83e9-8bf24c710c6e)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Thanks (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Anders de la Motte (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_d9abcdfc-ec73-5574-8820-5afda5211064)
Even though she was only just past thirty, Detective Inspector Julia Gabrielsson had seen plenty of dead bodies. Probably more than most police officers, with the exception of the bull elephants in the far corridor of the Violent Crime Unit. The old guys with minty breath who appraised her figure unashamedly, used password as the password on their computers, and could never be reached after two o’clock. But she doubted that the closet alcoholics in the Tic Tac club had ever seen anything as disgusting as the body lying on the autopsy table in front of her. If you could actually call it a body.
Nine years had passed since her earliest visit to the Forensic Medicine Unit in Solna. Her first body hadn’t wanted to make a lot of fuss. He lay there quietly in his apartment for a whole summer while the maggots slowly dissolved him onto the parquet floor, and she felt her knees wobble when the body bag was opened. The body on the slab in front of them was worse. Much worse.
She glanced at her colleague, Amante, who was standing beside her. His Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down frenetically in his freshly shaven neck. Not exactly a gentle introduction. As long as he didn’t actually throw up. She stepped back discreetly to remove her shoes and trousers from the danger zone.
Amante seemed to notice her looking. He turned his head and gave her an apologetic smile. The eyes behind his dark-framed glasses were brown and looked simultaneously friendly and mournful, which surprised Julia. Revulsion would have been much more expected. Or why not a hint of good old Get-me-out-of-here panic? That would have been perfectly understandable. After all, her new partner wasn’t a proper police officer but a civilian investigator. Infinitely more at home sitting in a cozy office surrounded by statistics than getting stuck in practical police work. The only question was why her fat boss had without warning foisted an oversensitive office clerk on her? She made up her mind to solve that particular mystery before the day was out.
The thin-haired pathologist in front of them leafed through his sheaf of papers but evidently failed to find the form he was looking for. Unless he was just searching for the right words with which to start his explanation. Somewhere in the depths of the Forensic Medicine Center an air-conditioning unit rumbled to life, making a subdued but ominous sound.
Amante swallowed again. Julia nodded at him and forced herself to summon up something that resembled an encouraging smile.
Just look away for a minute, she thought. That’s a perfectly understandable human response. The living don’t like to see the dead. Don’t like to be reminded of what lies ahead. Rich, poor, good or evil. Sooner or later we all end up lying there with cold, stiff limbs. All the same in death. That’s why most people look away from the dead, say something unrelated, or make some stupid joke simply to break the silence.
But not her. She belonged to a considerably smaller group of people. People who exploit the silence surrounding the dead. Observing. Listening. Understanding.
Everyone has a rhythm, a way they move through life. She learned that in her first year in Violent Crime. With some people you can see their rhythm fairly easily, but others require more concentration. Especially if you’re trying to work out that rhythm in hindsight. Reading it from homes, belongings, bodies, and—not least—crime scenes. It’s easy to let yourself be distracted. Do what most of her colleagues did and concentrate on the things that are yelling for attention. Weapons, accessories, blood, fingerprints. Obvious signs of violence and death.
That’s often enough to get them quite a long way, but sometimes it takes more than that. Sometimes it takes someone like her, who stands completely silent, just listening carefully. Seeking out the tiny details that disturb the rhythm. A glass missing from a cupboard, a belt that’s been fastened wrongly, a small bruise in an odd place, maybe just a lingering smell. Little things that appear to be utterly inconsequential to everyone except her, but that turn out to be the exact opposite when seen in context.
That was how Julia had built her reputation in Violent Crime. Not by talking, shouting orders, or cross-examining suspects. But by listening.
The dead body on the examination table hadn’t yet said anything to her, hadn’t revealed its identity or what sort of life it had lived. Which wasn’t terribly strange, seeing as someone had gone to great lengths to make sure the corpse would stay silent.
To start with, the body was naked. And it had been chopped into fourteen pieces. Twelve of them were on the metal table in front of them. The pathologist had put everything in the correct place. Head, torso, upper and lower arms, thighs, shins, and feet. But because the pieces weren’t joined together, the body looked like a macabre puppet, too absurd to be human.
The skin, which only partially covered the body parts, was gray and half-dissolved. In several places the bones jutted out. The fat, sinews, and muscles that ought to have been around them were either gone or transformed into a pale, soapy sludge out of which seawater was still oozing. It formed small pools on the stainless steel worktop before the law of gravity persuaded the water to start to make its way slowly toward the gullies at the corners of the table.
Where the corpse’s face should have been there was almost nothing left. Just a jagged mosaic made up of splinters of bone, skin, and gristle. The eye sockets gaped empty, the nose was missing altogether, and from the shattered jaw the minuscule stumps of a few teeth poked out. As if the dead body were smiling at them. Grinning at its own wretched condition.
Julia cast another glance at Amante. Stupidly, he had gone back to staring at the body. He seemed almost to be forcing himself to keep his eyes on the leering skull. She wondered if it was a macho thing, that he didn’t want to seem weak in front of her and the pathologist. In which case he was more stupid than he had seemed during their short conversation on the way there.
“The body was found in Lake Mälaren, just outside Källstavik, at a depth of twenty meters. But you already know that.” The pathologist with the Donald Trump hair finally seemed to have found what he was looking for. “Judging by the state it’s in, I’d say the body has been in the water for about four months. I’ll be able to say more after tissue analysis. The bottom-feeders have had plenty of time to do their thing. Most of it has been …”
He gestured toward the corpse as he appeared to consider his choice of words.
“Eaten,” Julia stated before he had time to make his mind up. Amante made a faint whimpering sound, then hid it quickly by clearing his throat.
“Male or female?” Julia said, even though she was already fairly sure of the answer.
“Hard to tell right now,” the pathologist said. “My first impression is that we’re dealing with a man. And the statistics back me up on that. But we won’t know for sure until we’ve taken a closer look at the pelvis.”
“And the t-tool …?” Amante’s voice sounded hollow. He licked his lips a couple of times but couldn’t bring himself to finish the rest of the sentence. In spite of the cool air in the room, a tiny droplet of sweat had formed on his right temple, just below the arm of his glasses.
“Can you say anything about the tool that was used to dismember him?” Julia said.
“A very powerful motorized tool with extremely sharp teeth.”
“A chain saw?” Amante said, making a fresh attempt, this time looking directly at the pathologist instead of down at the table, which seemed to help.
“A chain saw or possibly a reciprocating saw. I’ll know more once we’ve examined the surface of the cuts.”
The pathologist gestured toward the table again, but this time Amante was smart enough not to look down. Instead he quickly wiped the bead of sweat from his temple. He’s a fast learner: extra points for that, Julia thought.
“And presumably it isn’t possible to identify a cause of death as things stand?” she said, mostly as a statement of fact. As expected, the pathologist began shaking his head halfway through her question, which made his comb-over bob like a thin sail of hair.
“Considering the state of the body, it’s extremely doubtful that we’ll ever be able to identify the cause of death,” he said. “Whoever did this …”
The pathologist adjusted his hair as he appeared to ponder how best to continue.
Julia cast a quick glance at Amante to reassure herself that he wasn’t going to give in to the temptation to fill the gap in the conversation. But fortunately he kept his mouth shut and waited for the conclusion. A second bonus point: not bad for a civilian.
“Well …” The pathologist made a face, as if the words in his mouth tasted unpleasant. “I’ve worked here twenty-three years, Gabrielsson. Just like you, I imagine I’ve seen most of the things people are capable of, both toward themselves and others. Over the years I’ve had the dubious privilege of examining at least a dozen dismembered bodies. But this one … This perpetrator’s different. Different from pretty much everything else I’ve ever come across. Just look here, for instance.”
The pathologist pointed at the gap between the torso and one thigh, then at the corresponding gap between the upper arm and shoulder.
“No sign of hesitation on any of the cuts, not even when the perpetrator took the head off.” He moved his forefinger to the even stump above the shoulders. “Depriving someone of their humanity so brutally doesn’t normally happen without a degree of anxiety, and that’s usually clearly visible on the body. Superficial trial cuts, abandoned or failed attempts that demonstrate the technical difficulty of handling the saw, but also the reluctance of the perpetrator. Disquiet at the terrible thing he or she is doing. Do you understand what I mean, Gabrielsson?”
Julia nodded. “But not this perpetrator. He didn’t hesitate.”
The pathologist adopted his bitter expression again.
“No, see for yourself. Thirteen very decisive cuts, one for each joint. All the way through, right through muscle and bone. Whoever did this was in full command of himself and the situation.”
“What about the face, then?” Julia said with a frown, nodding toward the badly ravaged body. “The perpetrator seems to have been rather less in control there. How does that fit your theory?”
The pathologist shook his head hesitantly.
“This is purely speculation, but I’m fairly sure that the condition of the face doesn’t reflect any emotional outburst. The perpetrator simply wanted to make sure that there was no way the body could be identified.”
He pointed at one lower arm, then the grinning jaw.
“Both hands are still missing, and the facial features and teeth have been almost totally destroyed. Which, obviously, makes it impossible to check fingerprints or dental records, or circulate pictures of the victim’s face. Admittedly that does leave us with DNA identification, but—even if we do manage to get a reasonably clean tissue sample—that presupposes that the victim’s profile is already in the police database or that you’ll find another sample to match it against at a later point in the investigation.”
A few moments of silence followed. The air-conditioning rumbled in the background. The low sound was like thunder, gradually creeping closer.
“Add to that the black garbage bags the body parts were wrapped in,” the pathologist went on. “To start with, they were sealed with cable ties rather than tape. No sticky surfaces where forensics experts could find hairs or fibers. And as weights the perpetrator used ordinary gray stones found in any garden or stone wall. Nothing to go on there. And I found small holes here and there in the plastic, probably from a narrow knife blade. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say there are probably similar holes on the torso of the body. We’ll see once I’ve been able to stretch what remains of the skin across the stomach, but I’m fairly confident.”
“How can you be?” Amante’s voice sounded muffled. “How can you know that the perpetrator stabbed—”
“Because all the body parts were found in a limited area,” Julia said. “In one of the deepest parts of the inlet. Probably in exactly the same spot where the perpetrator dumped them last winter.”
The pathologist nodded.
“The gases given off by decomposition usually make bodies float to the surface after a week or two. A bit longer if the water’s cold; it can take a few months then. In contrast to what most people think, bodies dumped in water usually get washed up on a beach somewhere, and then they get found by a member of the public. Your perpetrator stuck holes in the bags and probably also the torso, where the decomposition is most noticeable. That way the gases were able to escape and the body parts stayed where they were down on the bottom. And the holes would also make it easier for scavengers to get in and do their thing. We’ve got half a bucket full of various bottom-feeders that made their way inside the bags. A few more months underwater and there wouldn’t have been much left.”
“You’re saying that our perpetrator is someone who knows exactly what they’re doing,” Julia said.
The pathologist held his hands up in front of him in a gesture that managed simultaneously to convey agreement and dissociation.
“Like I said, this is all speculation. All I can say is that this scenario is unlike anything I’ve come across before. If those two yachtsmen hadn’t lost their anchor in that inlet and decided to dive down to get it, this poor soul would never have been found.” He nodded toward the table. “Imagine the shock when they realized what they’d stumbled across down there in the darkness.”
Amante cleared his throat again and looked like he wasn’t having any trouble at all imaging the men’s horror.
Julia ignored him and looked back at the table again, where the dead body grinned at her with its wrecked smile. She had to admit that the pathologist’s theory was good. Logical, in light of the evidence. The perpetrator appeared to be extremely methodical, ice-cold in his thoroughness and attention to detail. But she still couldn’t shake the feeling the grimacing face gave her. A feeling of rage, of hatred.
Someone wanted you to disappear, she thought. Wanted to make sure you’d never be found. Someone you’d upset so badly that he destroyed your face. That’s what happened, isn’t it?
The dead body didn’t answer. Just went on smiling at her, as if her words amused him.
* * *
Twenty-two pills. Twenty-two white, oblong pills that he’d paid for with just as many nightmare-filled nights.
David Sarac had surreptitiously googled sleeping pills. Taking into account his emaciated body and generally poor state of health, he had worked out that twenty pills would be enough for what he wanted to achieve. But with twenty-five there would be no doubt, so he had another three nights to struggle through. Three nights of lying curled up in bed, drifting in the indistinct borderland between sleep and wakefulness, while everything that had happened out on the island replayed in his head. Always in the same order. First the snow. Heavy flakes falling on a frozen forest. A silent, dark old house. Then a low bass note, a threatening rumble on the horizon, growing louder and louder as the winter thunder approaches. Then suddenly beams of light from headlights cutting through the trees. The sound of powerful engines, of gunfire and shouted orders. Flashes from gun barrels creating a ghostly shadow play as the howls of anger, pain, and terror grow ever louder.
The thunder keeps building in intensity in the background, swallowing up all other sound until it transforms into the roar of the flames consuming the old house. A rain of sparks flies through the night sky, and the stench of gunpowder, soot, and burning flesh makes his throat sting. Just when he thinks it’s all over, when he thinks he’s finally on his way out of the nightmare, he finds himself in the middle of it again. Feels the heat of the pressure wave as it knocks him flying. The bullet hitting him in the neck, filling his airways with liquid iron. The blood on the white ground. His own blood. That of others. All of it sucked up by the snow crystals around him, until he’s lying on his back in a sea of carmine red. He hears himself laugh. A shrill laugh that sounds more like a sob. His head falls back on the snow. The world slowly starts to dissolve at the edges. Curling up like a burning photograph until it fades to black.
All this is your fault, David, the voices whisper.
It was your plan. Your fault.
Then the film starts over again. Unless he’s lucky enough to wake up, that is. Wake up locked away in a nursing home in the middle of nowhere. “For your own good, David,” as the senior consultant had said during their first conversation.
But he didn’t complain, couldn’t see any reason to do so. In a few days he was planning to leave it all behind: the island of Skarpö, the nightmares, and this place.
He scratched at the red scar running across his neck. Caught at it with his nails until it started to sting. The whispers were right. He should have died out there in the snow along with the others. Should have drowned in his own blood. It would have been a fitting punishment for his sins. Some things were simply too broken to mend.
But instead, against all the odds, he had survived. Had made a mockery of the justice he had tried to implement. David Sarac, heroic police officer. The hero who had to be kept locked away in a secure unit for his own good. But what was the alternative? For him to tell the truth about what had happened out on Skarpö? The reason why all those men had died out there in the snow? That was hardly an option, either for him or his superiors. A public relations disaster that must be avoided at all costs. That was why he was where he was. Planning his own escape.
It had taken time to build up the stock of pills. The staff had been very vigilant during the first week. They followed their routines to the letter, forcing him to open his mouth and stick his tongue out every time he took a sleeping pill. He had been careful. Played along and gained their confidence. He couldn’t afford to fail. If just one of the caregivers started to suspect, he’d find himself in the suicide wing and his plan would be thwarted.
He glanced out through the window. Between the trees he could just make out the little lake in the distance. He had explored the park during a couple of short walks when he was still considering other options beside the pills. But the light and all the sensory impressions out there had been too sharp. They exhausted his broken brain and forced him to stagger back into the safety of the building. But at least he knew that there was a fence and a heavy metal gate by the jetty. Floodlights, alarms, and cameras too, just as there were along the high brick wall by the road, and the double fence facing the dark forest on the other side. Barriers he wouldn’t have to confront. Because now he had the pills. He closed his hand around the plastic bag. Moved the pills one by one through his fingers. Counted them again. Even numbers, odd numbers.
Odds and evens.
Sarac shivered and pulled the blanket up over his legs. In spite of the heat in the gloomy little room, his fingertips and the end of his nose were always cold. He looked down at the notepad on his lap and tried to put his thoughts into words. But as usual they wouldn’t play ball. The senior consultant had suggested that he try to write down what he felt, and that was his task in advance of his next therapy session. Of course he could ignore the whole thing, tell the psychologist to go to hell and shut himself away in his room the way a couple of the other patients did. But he was keen to go on acting compliant for a few more days.
Janus, he had written. Not much to offer, really, and certainly not the sort of thing he was thinking of telling anyone.
I owe everything.
Debts I can’t escape till the day I die.
The loop of music was back in his head again. The lyrics that had helped him unpick his stroke-damaged brain last Christmas. Helped him reveal his own secrets. And his sins.
Anxiety tightened its grip around his heart and lungs.
Debts I can’t escape till the day I die.
He put the pad down and took the bag of pills out of the pocket of his cardigan. Moved the tablets around again like pearls on a strand.
Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. Only three more performances to go. Then the film of his life would be over at last.
* * *
Julia Gabrielsson turned the wheel and changed lanes abruptly as she put her foot down and with satisfaction felt the car respond instantly. It hadn’t driven more than a couple of thousand kilometers and still had that new-car smell, which was obviously preferable to the odors that would become ingrained in the seats over time. Fast food, various bodily fluids, and, not least, tedium. She had worked out a long time ago that you had to push yourself forward on Mondays, when jobs that had come in over the weekend were allocated. That way you could get hold of a decent car so you didn’t have to drive about in one of the worn-out old patrol cars that were parked in the far corner. So she always got in at six o’clock on Monday mornings and raided the key cabinet before going down to the gym. She made sure she was back in time for the morning meeting at a quarter past eight, alert, fresh from the shower, eager to get to work, and with the key to the best car in her pocket, while her bleary-eyed colleagues were sipping their first cups of coffee and wishing it was still the weekend.
She liked cars, liked driving fast. Dad used to practice his J-turns and controlled slides with her in the works parking lot every winter once she turned thirteen, and she had beaten the crap out of all the guys on the emergency response driving course. One of the many advantages of being the daughter of a police officer. It was just a shame Dad couldn’t see her now.
She finished overtaking and pulled back into the right lane.
“How long have you been back in Sweden?” Julia took her eyes off the traffic for a few seconds. High time for a bit of mundane chat with the civilian. Get him to reveal who he was and, more importantly, what he was doing on her team, in her murder investigation.
“Three weeks, give or take,” Amante muttered distantly.
“UN or Foreign Office?”
Amante shook his head. “Europol. Lampedusa. An Italian island in the Mediterranean.”
“Yes, I know. Where all the refugee boats from North Africa end up.”
Underestimating her general knowledge was a black mark, a big one that more than swallowed up the feeble plusses he had managed to scrape together so far. But she thought she’d give him a chance to correct his mistake. Or commit another one so that she could comfortably and guiltlessly file him away in the box marked Dry Academics, Type 1A.
“So you worked on refugee issues?”
“Yep. For two years,” he said with an awkward little smile. He seemed to have realized that he’d come across as patronizing.
“And now you’re here with us.”
She paused, waiting for him to explain why. But Amante merely sat there without speaking. Clearly she was going to have to try a different tactic.
“We could certainly do with some fresh blood in the Violent Crime Unit.”
That was perfectly true. The head of the unit, Pärson, held his protective hand over the old Tic Tac guys. He let them drink their way surreptitiously toward retirement at the end of the corridor. Or toward a fatal heart attack. The old men blocked the paths of other people’s careers as successfully as they did their own arteries, so the division was roughly fifty-fifty.
“We’ve been on our knees since Skarpö,” she added.
Amante looked up. “I was out of the country. Missed most of that. There were a lot of fatalities, weren’t there? Two police officers?”
“Nine dead in total. And even more injured. Several different criminal gangs clashed out there, and three of our colleagues got in the way. We still don’t really know why.”
“Oh.” Amante looked out of the side window. He wasn’t taking any of the juicy bait she was dangling right in front of his nose. He seemed more interested in the buildings swishing past along Sankt Eriksgatan.
Strange. Pretty much every police officer Julia knew wanted to talk about Skarpö. Tried to get the details out of her, anything that, against all odds, hadn’t yet been dissected and analyzed in the media or on the internal gossip network. About the gangsters and officers who had died out there, and above all about David Sarac, the heroic police officer who had survived.
“So what do you think of Eva Swensk, then?” she said in an attempt to find a fresh topic of conversation. “Our new national police chief,” she added, in a poorly disguised imitation of his dry tone of voice.
Amante turned his head toward her. “Do you know her?”
The traffic ahead of them slowed down. Julia changed lanes again and accelerated past a few more cars before skillfully pulling back into a gap. She gained five car lengths by the maneuver.
“No, I can’t really claim I do. We’ve only met a few times. I listened to a couple of her talks when she was regional police chief. She’s got a reputation for being tough and efficient. But I was still a bit surprised when Stenberg gave her the job. I thought it was going to be yet another man.”
Or, to be more accurate, one particular man, she thought. For some reason Deputy Police Commissioner Oscar Wallin had lost the race to Eva Swensk. Wallin had done all the dirty work of the reorganization only to find himself unexpectedly—and to the delight of many—pushed aside when it was time for the minister of justice to appoint a new national police chief. She still wondered what had actually happened. But Wallin wasn’t the sort of man you called up for a chat, so she’d had to contain her curiosity. It had been several months since she last heard from him, which left her feeling slightly disappointed.
Wallin was one of the few police officers she regarded as a role model. Someone who, even though he was only four or five years older than she was, had managed to make a rapid ascent through the otherwise sluggish police hierarchy. She had hoped to be able to follow him up to the top. But instead she was sitting here, babysitting an inexperienced civilian.
“The minister of justice doesn’t seem afraid to try new tactics,” Amante said, breaking her train of thought. “Did you read the article in Dagens Nyheter last week? Stenberg’s on the offensive.”
Amante’s tone was a bit more engaged now, less robotic. This subject clearly interested him more than a straightforward massacre and a couple of dead officers.
“It’ll certainly be interesting to see how many of Stenberg’s ideas can actually be put into practice,” he went on. “Anonymous witnesses, expanded possibilities to use infiltration, amnesties, or reduced sentences for perpetrators who stand witness against their fellow criminals.”
“You don’t believe in all that, then?” Julia said. “It already works that way in a ton of other countries. The police need more effective tools against organized crime; you have to admit that, surely?”
Amante shrugged his shoulders. “It doesn’t really matter what I think. But people are saying that the Bar Association is likely to try to stop a number of the proposals. And if the opposition wins the election this autumn—”
Amante broke off abruptly. He blushed slightly, as if he’d suddenly realized he was talking too much. Julia put her foot down and changed lanes again, gaining a few more places in the queue. The maneuver made Amante grab hold of the handle above the passenger door. Julia smiled to herself. Just wait until we get the lights and sirens on. But that presupposed he’d be sticking around, which she doubted. Amante clearly wasn’t an expert in either violent crime or murder investigations, and didn’t seem remotely interested in the subject. He must have been recruited to the unit for some other reason. Because someone wanted or needed him there. Superintendent Pärson was a keen adherent to the path of least resistance. Everyone knew that the fat little bastard supplemented his horse-racing pot by tipping off the evening tabloids about ongoing investigations at advantageous moments. Yet no one was ever able to catch him. He knew exactly how often he needed to change his pay-as-you-go cell phone and Western Union account. And, perhaps most importantly of all, which people to stay on the good side of: whom he ought to do favors for, and when.
She glanced surreptitiously at Amante as they approached the heavy gates leading down into the garage of Police Headquarters at Kronoberg. She couldn’t quite make sense of the rhythm she had picked up from him so far. His age was difficult to determine; she guessed at thirty-five or so. But he spoke in a rather stilted way, like someone considerably older, more like a politician than a cop. And the way he dressed was something else. A blue blazer with the gilded emblem of the Royal Swedish Yacht Club on top of a coral-colored sweater with a designer logo, just frayed enough at the collar to suggest that its owner had worn it when he sailed around Gotland. Pale slacks with a neat crease and hand-sewn boating shoes. But in place of the slicked-back, sun-bleached hair that would have matched his well-to-do summer wardrobe perfectly, Amante’s dark hair was cut short. And he didn’t have a salt-splashed suntan from Båstad or Sandhamn with lighter patches left by his sunglasses either. Amante’s skin was swarthy, like someone from southern Europe. Or even farther south. His whole rhythm was full of contradictions, a syncopated beat that was hard to follow.
“Your surname,” she said. “Is it Italian?”
“Spanish,” he replied, slightly too quickly.
An image flashed through her mind. Something on the news, a row of smartly dressed EU politicians, something about the legal system. An articulate man making critical remarks about the government and minister of justice.
“Victor Amante. The EU politician?” She guessed the answer as she saw her new colleague squirm uncomfortably in his seat.
“He’s my stepfather.”
* * *
The quiet knock made Sarac slip the bag of pills under his pillow in a flash. It was designated rest time, so no one should be disturbing him now. Had the staff begun to suspect something after all? But a search team would hardly knock and wait politely to be let in before they turned his room upside down.
“Come in,” he said as calmly as he could. He leaned back against the pillow so that the bag of pills ended up behind his back. Damn, he should have slipped the bag back into the gap he had carved out behind one of the baseboards instead of hiding it in the first place he thought of like a startled five-year-old.
One of the caregivers, a man in his late twenties whose name Sarac thought might be Eskil, came into the room. Sarac noted that he closed the door behind him in a different way from usual. Carefully, as if he were trying to be as quiet as possible. Whatever Eskil was doing there, it definitely wasn’t a search.
“Hello, David.” The nurse glanced at the closed door, then put his hand in the pocket of his uniform tunic and held out a small white envelope. “For you.”
Sarac frowned.
“Who from?” he said, without taking the envelope.
“The guy said his name was Frank.”
“Surname?”
“He didn’t say. Just that you were colleagues of some sort. That he’d been looking for you last Christmas but didn’t manage to find you.”
Sarac closed his eyes for a few seconds, searching his broken mind for an image that matched the name. He didn’t succeed.
“What did he look like?”
“Dark hair, short, bit like a cop.”
“Height, build? Other distinguishing features? You must be able to remember something?”
Eskil shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. Normal height, normal build. Looked a bit like you, but not as skinny.”
“And where did you meet this Frank?”
Eskil looked like he was getting fed up with all the questions. Instead of answering, he held the envelope out a bit farther. Waved it gently in front of Sarac’s nose.
Sarac didn’t move. He was trying to work out if the nurse’s nervousness was because he had been threatened into doing this, or because he was used to taking bribes and didn’t want to get caught.
“Just take it, for God’s sake.” Eskil glanced over his shoulder again as if expecting someone to throw the door open at any moment. So he’d been bribed, then.
Sarac still didn’t move. Could this be some sort of trap? Were they trying to trick him? Find out what he was planning to do? The distant rumble of his nightmares was suddenly back in his head. He put his hands over his ears and shut his eyes tight.
Eskil gave up his attempts to hand the letter over and tossed it onto the bed next to Sarac before heading for the door.
“I’ll look in again in an hour in case you want to send a reply. Don’t tell anyone, okay?”
“Sure,” Sarac mumbled. “Actually, hang on …”
But before he had time to say more, the nurse had left the room. Sarac quickly put his hand under the pillow. The feeling of the plastic against his fingertips was strangely reassuring. It made the roar in his head subside.
The letter was lying on his bed, beside his left foot. He could read his own name in Times New Roman on the front. Detective Inspector David Sarac; nothing else. Unless there was something on the back. He picked the envelope up, turned it over, and held it up to the light. The back was blank, the envelope smooth and flat. It couldn’t really contain anything but a sheet or two of paper.
He hadn’t had any visitors for a long time, no contact with the outside world except for TV and the Internet. Perhaps Frank was yet another reporter trying to arrange an interview with him, an unusually creative one who was willing to bribe a staff member.
He slowly opened the envelope with his forefinger and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. At the top was a message in the same impersonal font as the envelope. Four lines, seven sentences, forty-six words. More than enough to make his heart beat faster.
He betrayed you, David. Swapped his future for you and Janus. Then he moved on while we bled and died out there on the island. No punishment, no consequences, straight to the top. How about a swap? Your secret for mine? A chance to get justice.
Sarac unfolded the bottom part of the sheet of paper. Two photos fell out onto the bed, landing upside down.
He turned the first one over. Husband, wife, two teenage girls dressed up for some sort of premiere. A good-looking, happy family smiling assuredly toward the photographer with perfect, dazzling media smiles.
His heart beat even faster. Spread out from his chest and up into his throat. He turned the second photograph over. Felt his hand tremble. He swallowed hard a couple of times.
The dead blonde woman was lying on her stomach across the black hood of a car. The pool of blood formed a sort of aura around her naked body. The force of her descent had been so strong that it almost welded her body to the expensive car. Transforming it into a single horrifying sculpture of skin, glass, and metal.
* * *
“The dismembered body at Källstavik: What do we know?”
The waitress had barely put their plates down on the checkered cloth and walked off before Deputy Police Commissioner Oscar Wallin revealed the purpose of their meeting. Julia couldn’t help smiling. Wallin hadn’t changed. Straight to the point, no unnecessary beating around the bush. Just like her. That morning he had suddenly called after months of silence. Now she understood why. Or at least what he wanted to talk about.
“Aren’t you going to ask me how I am or what I’ve been doing for the past six months?” Julia smiled, but Wallin’s expression didn’t change. “Anyway, you didn’t have to ask me to lunch. Most of it’s already been in the papers.”
That was more accurate than she would have liked. No more than a couple of days had passed since her visit to the Forensic Medicine Unit, but the public already knew almost as much as she did. The evening tabloids loved summer murders, and their reporting followed the usual pattern. Yesterday there had been a few grainy pictures of police boats and divers, and a map covering the whole centerfold. Where the body parts were found. Quotes from a source with inside knowledge of the investigation, obviously her own boss, and today she had just read the assortment of speculation and confident assertions from the usual academic detectives who had never seen a dead body in real life.
This could be connected to the criminal underworld. Statistically, the killer is likely to have been known to the victim, and her personal favorite: Dismemberment is a way for the killer to get rid of the body.
Wallin put what looked like a perfectly judged mix of beef patty, potato, sauce, and lingonberry preserve in his mouth. He chewed slowly as he raised his eyebrows quizzically.
“The victim, according to the latest we’ve got from the pathologist, is a white male between thirty-five and forty-five,” Julia said. “Just over one meter eighty centimeters tall, with short, dark brown hair. We may need to take that last bit with a pinch of salt. The crayfish didn’t leave much of his scalp.”
She fell silent. Wallin went on chewing, as implacable as ever. If the malicious rumors about his career contained any truth at all, there certainly wasn’t any sign of it in his behavior or appearance. His boyish features, emphasized by his perfectly combed side parting, formed such an abrupt contrast to his tailor-made three-piece suit that it almost jarred. He looked like a boy dressed up as a grown man, he always had. Previously only the most deranged of his colleagues had made fun of that. Only in recent months had she heard his nickname spoken out loud in the corridors of Police Headquarters. Even by some of her superiors.
Manboy.
She didn’t approve. Wallin was a talented policeman and an equally skilled administrator. But now others were enjoying the fruits of his labors, and the whole of his handpicked team had been transferred to the staff of the national police chief. All but Wallin himself, which most of his colleagues took to mean that he was going to be sidelined somewhere and never heard from again. She hoped that interpretation didn’t turn out to be correct.
“Have you been able to identify the body?” Wallin wiped his mouth on his napkin with exaggerated thoroughness.
“Not yet. We’ve checked for a match on the missing persons register: nothing there. His hands haven’t been found, so we haven’t got fingerprints. Same with teeth and dental records. We’re expecting DNA results from the National Forensics Lab by tomorrow at the earliest but probably on Friday, maybe even Monday. It’s not at all certain that they’ll be able to get any DNA. The body was in a very poor state.”
“And the face? Could you release a photograph to the press? Ask the general public to get in touch with tip-offs?”
Julia shook her head.
“The perpetrator had a go at the face with a chain saw. It’s completely unrecognizable.”
At least for the time being, she added to herself. She considered telling Wallin about her backup plan. Let him know how good she was at her job. Six months ago she would have done so without hesitation. But for some reason she decided to wait. Besides, she wasn’t even sure if what she was considering could actually be done.
“The experts in the tabloids are right, then,” Wallin said. “You’ve got a real challenge on your hands with this case. You know the statistics as well as I do. Only six out of ten dismemberments get cleared up. A sixty percent chance that quickly shrinks to single digits if you don’t manage to identify the body. And what would that do to your solving rate?”
The question seemed to be rhetorical, because Wallin turned his attention back to his food without waiting for an answer. Julia stuck her fork into her Caesar salad, took a mouthful, and discovered at once that something was missing from the dressing. It took her a few seconds to work out what. Anchovies. What chef would make a Caesar salad without using anchovies? Presumably one who thought he could get away with it.
The murmur of conversation in the restaurant rose in volume as more and more diners sat down at the tables. One or two suits, but mostly neon-clad laborers. People who, like Wallin, had a preference for traditional Swedish fare. Personally she preferred Asian. Lighter food: less flour, cream, and potato.
Wallin went on eating calmly. He was evidently planning to make her ask.
“So, tell me! Why is the minister of justice’s special investigator so interested in an old dismembered body?”
Wallin took a sip of his lingonberry drink and then carefully wiped his mouth again before leaning over the table.
“As you may be aware, the party has its training center in Källstavik. Several of the higher-ups rent houses on the grounds with access to the water, including the minister of justice’s father-in-law, Karl-Erik Cedergren. A dismembered body in the water they go swimming in, just in time for the holidays, is a little uncomfortable, particularly when the tabloids are wallowing in the details. The minister’s phone is going to start ringing, and when it does, I want to be prepared.”
“You want me to keep you informed?”
He smiled at her, a crooked, slightly mocking smile. Yet Julia still found herself smiling back at him. She’d missed this. Missed their rather peculiar sense of camaraderie.
The first time she’d met Oscar Wallin was around five years ago. She’d been part of the team investigating an unusually grisly murder in the southern suburbs of Stockholm. The victim was a small-time informer, and the method resembled another case that National Crime was investigating. Wallin was involved in his capacity as National Crime’s informant handler, and he was the only one who didn’t shake his head when she, unlike all the alpha males on the investigative team, declared firmly that they were dealing with two different perpetrators and that the second was simply a copycat. When the forensics experts proved her right a week later, Wallin bought her lunch. Over a meal of stuffed cabbage leaves he asked how she could have been so certain. She explained that the two crime scenes were just too different. The perpetrators had moved through the rooms in different ways and did things in a different order. And, unlike all the other police officers she knew, Wallin seemed to be in no doubt about her abilities.
Two months later he had called her and asked her to take a look at the security camera footage of a robbery and compare it with videos of various suspects and images from where they lived. She had found it relatively easy to point out those whose movements and rhythms matched the robbers’. Not long after that, she was suddenly promoted to detective inspector and given her own room in the front corridor of the crime unit, and she slowly began to make a name for herself within the force. And even if Superintendent Pärson claimed the credit for having discovered and coached her, Julia was well aware of who her real mentor was.
Wallin had continued to contact her every now and then: sometimes to find out how she was getting on, but more usually to give her a new challenge or ask for discreet favors. Most recently last Christmas.
“By the way, what happened about that trace of blood I found in Sophie Thorning’s apartment?” she said. “Did it help prove that someone else had been there the night she jumped?”
Wallin shook his head. “It turned out to be her own blood. I thought I’d told you that.”
“No, we haven’t spoken since I sent you my report. Not so much as a Christmas card by way of thanks.” She pretended to be upset. That would have made most guys blush and start to stammer their apologies. She knew she looked pretty good and that this could occasionally be used to her advantage. But that sort of trick never worked on Wallin, which was another reason why she respected him. The only way to get Wallin’s attention and respect was by delivering results.
“I’ve been busy,” he said, without sounding the slightest bit apologetic, but more like he was chastising her for not realizing something so obvious.
“And the post of national police chief …?”
Julia regretted saying it before it was even out of her mouth. Wallin’s mouth narrowed to a thin line.
“If I’m allowed to say what I think, the minister of justice picked the wrong person,” she added quickly.
Wallin sat silent for a few seconds, as if he was trying to work out how truthful her statement was. The thin line curved into a controlled smile.
“Thanks. Obviously, I’m aware that I’m being talked about. That people are saying I’ve been passed over, even that I’m heading toward the exit.” Wallin shook his head gently. “Success breeds enemies, Julia. You’ll find that out. Colleagues who are envious or bitter, who take pleasure in the few occasions when you fail, and who don’t hesitate to spread all manner of rumors.”
He leaned forward slightly and smiled more broadly, revealing his canine teeth.
“But I’m still here, as you can see. I’ve still got an office just a few meters from the minister’s, and sooner or later everyone who’s underestimated me will have to pay for that.”
He held her gaze for a few seconds. Then straightened up.
“Enough about that. There’s another reason why I wanted to talk to you. It’s about your new colleague …”
Wallin wasn’t the sort to do air quotes, but Julia thought she could almost see his fingers twitching on the checkered tablecloth.
“Omar Amante, lawyer, excellent grades at university, foreign service. If the predictions are correct and the opposition win this autumn’s election, his stepfather will replace Jesper Stenberg as minister of justice. Which makes Amante junior the golden boy. The question is: Why has he suddenly appeared from nowhere to join you in the Violent Crime Unit?”
“What do you mean?” Julia frowned. A police car drove past outside in the street. Flashing lights and sirens. The sound bounced between the buildings, drowning out everything else for a few seconds.
“Amante left his job with Europol last Christmas,” Wallin said as soon as the car had passed. “Six months before his contract was due to finish. One unconfirmed rumor is that he fell out with his boss. That there was some sort of scene that got hushed up. No one seems to want to talk about it. Either way, Amante disappeared off the radar for a few months. He wasn’t in Sweden, and he wasn’t at Europol’s offices in The Hague. Then he suddenly shows up in Stockholm and lands in the middle of a murder investigation that has vague connections to the party. The same party that his stepfather is doing his utmost to eject from power.”
Wallin leaned across the table again and lowered his voice.
“You’ve been saddled with Amante for a reason. And I’d dearly love to know what that reason is.”
* * *
Sarac zipped his jacket up and pulled his hat as far down on his forehead as he could before looking at his watch again. Thirty seconds. This was madness. He was mad. Which made it all the more ironic that he was trying to escape from a mental institution.
He put his fingers on the door handle. Five, four, three, two, one …
He stepped out into the corridor. Walked without hesitation straight toward the door to the stairwell, not falling for the temptation of looking up at the spherical camera above it. The change of shift was under way and the likelihood of any member of the staff looking at the picture from the camera for the few seconds it took him to pass it wasn’t very high. At least that was what he tried to tell himself to calm his pounding heart. Panic and fear were being temporarily held at bay by the tranquilizer he had swallowed just over half an hour ago.
This isn’t a good idea, the voices in his head whispered. But the happy pills had rendered them impotent. Easier to ignore. At least for the time being.
The doors to the ward were always kept locked, and he fiddled with the key, got it into the lock, but couldn’t turn it. He jerked and twisted it. For a fraction of a second he considered giving up. Going back to his safe little room, forgetting everything, and carrying out his original plan. Gulp down all those sleeping pills at once, tonight. Put an end to everything. But he knew that was impossible. He had to know the truth, had to know how everything fit together.
He suddenly felt the lock give with a clicking sound. The key Eskil had given him was evidently a cheap copy that took a bit of fiddling to make it work. He guessed that his new pen pal Frank had paid for it, just as he had paid for Eskil’s services.
Sarac headed down the marble staircase, all the way to the basement. He managed to unlock the heavy steel door almost at once and found himself in a bare, low-ceilinged corridor. Another glance at his watch. Two minutes and ten seconds had elapsed since he began his escape. He quickened his pace, trying to make use of the surplus adrenaline while it lasted.
He stopped at the door marked District Heating. Once again he used the copied key to unlock the door and stepped inside a large, warm room full of pipes and meters. He stood still for a couple of seconds to get his bearings. Then he identified the incoming pipes and followed them to the far end of the room, just as he had been instructed to do. Another heavy door, and behind it a tunnel where the pipes disappeared into the darkness. He took a few steps forward. Felt for the circuit breaker but couldn’t find it.
Suddenly the door behind him closed and everything went pitch-black. He was seized by panic as it broke through the chemical barrier protecting him from his anxieties and gripped his rib cage.
Why are you doing this, David? the voices whispered. Why?
He put his hand against the concrete wall, leaned forward, and took a couple of deep breaths. He caught the vomit when it was halfway up and forced it back down into his stomach. He stood there for a minute or so until the panic attack subsided. Then he straightened up and felt across the wall with his hand. His fingers nudged the circuit breaker and he turned it. A mechanical click echoed off the concrete walls of the tunnel and a sequence of fluorescent lights flickered slowly to life.
What if this is a trap? What if someone’s waiting for you out there? Someone who wants revenge.
Sarac stopped. He’d had time to think through that scenario over the past few days. That and a handful of others. The possibility that his secret pen pal, the man calling himself Frank, didn’t actually exist. That everything, the letter and photographs alike, was a fabrication intended to lure him from his hiding place. But for some reason during their brief correspondence he had become convinced that this wasn’t the case. Besides, he had managed to persuade Eskil to take a surreptitious photograph of Frank, and had studied it carefully on the cracked screen of the nurse’s phone.
Frank definitely existed. What he said was true. Someone had managed not to face up to his responsibilities so far. Had bought himself free from guilt. Had saved his own life and career by betraying Sarac.
Justice.
That was why he was now heading, for the first time in several months, out into the wide world. Exposing himself one last time to the frightening world that he no longer felt able to deal with.
Even if he was wrong, if all this turned out to be a trap after all and Frank or someone else was waiting out there in the darkness to kill him, then they’d only be doing him a favor.
He put his hand in his pocket and closed his fingers around the bag of pills. Twenty-five of them now. Enough for him to pull the emergency cord whenever he wanted to.
It took him seven minutes to make his way through the tunnel and climb up the steps to the boiler room at the other end. The combination of the exertion and the heat in there left him drenched in sweat. He hesitated a few seconds before cautiously nudging the door open. To his left lay the main building and the illuminated yard that he had just passed beneath. To the right was the staff parking lot, and beyond that the security lodge and main gate. Twelve minutes had passed, in another three the change of shift would be over.
He inhaled the cold evening air and tried to focus. Felt the slight tremble in his muscles that told him that the rush of adrenaline that had brought him this far was ebbing away. But he was almost there now. All it would take was one last burst of effort.
The car was exactly where Eskil had said it would be, all he had to do was open the unlocked trunk and crawl inside. Close it and make himself as comfortable as he could in the dark. Exhaustion took over his body, his head.
The picture of the attractive family popped into his mind again, then the dead woman on the hood of the car. They were replaced in turn by pictures of a dark forest where the flare of guns firing flashed among the trees.
Are you really sure about this, David? the voices whispered.
* * *
Julia was about to fetch her last cup of coffee for the afternoon from the unit’s staff room when her cell phone started to buzz. She answered with the phone clamped between her ear and her shoulder as she poured coffee into a chipped mug. For a moment she thought about being nice and getting a cup for Amante, then realized that the phone call gave her an excuse not to. She could carry only one mug back with her.
“Hello, this is Katarina Lindgren from the National Forensics Lab.”
Julia took hold of the phone with her left hand, then, with the mug in her right hand, started to walk back toward her office. She passed the closed door to the little cubbyhole that had been found for Amante. A claustrophobic, windowless room that was probably meant to be a janitor’s closet. But he hadn’t complained so far. Another tentative point.
Before her lunch with Wallin the day before, she had put Amante to work calling everyone who lived near where the body was found; there weren’t too many. The number of permanent residents with an open view of the water was limited to four or five, and she strongly doubted that any of them would have anything to contribute. But a murder investigation was in part just a long list of things that needed to be checked, whether or not you actually thought they might turn out to be useful. And, usefully, the task was a way of keeping Amante occupied. Pärson had decided not to let her have more detectives until they had something to go on. He had blamed the summer holidays and the fact that they had other cases that were higher priority. In fact he was actually counting on her managing on her own, so that he would later be able to report good results to his boss.
“I’m calling about the unidentified body that was found in the water at Källstavik,” the woman on the phone said. “I saw a note that you wanted to be informed the moment we found anything.”
“Absolutely.” Julie closed the door behind her, shutting out the voices of those of her colleagues who were already on their way home.
“We’ve found a match in the DNA register …” the woman began.
Julia put her cup down a little too hard, spilling some of the contents on the pale wood of the desktop.
“… but I’m afraid I can’t say much more than that.”
“No?” Julia slipped onto her chair.
“There’s a match in the register, referring to another case. It’s not a complete match, just sixty-five percent compared to the usual ninety-nine. The sample we received was badly degraded. What that means is—”
“You’ve matched it to DNA that was found in another case, but never identified,” Julia interrupted.
“Exactly. All I get on the screen is the fact that there’s a match in the register, the percentage of the similarity between the samples, and the number of the case in which the other sample was found.”
Julia got hold of a pen and paper. “Would you mind giving me the number?”
She wrote the digits and letters down, one by one, then stared at the familiar combination.
“Skarpö,” she said. As much to herself as to the woman on the other end of the line.
Her brain was working at high speed, already starting to process the consequences of what she’d just been told. But she still forced herself to ask one more time:
“Just so I know I’ve got this right. Our dismembered body was present at the shoot-out on Skarpö?”
“That’s certainly what the DNA sample suggests. The match came through a few minutes ago. I’m new here, so I don’t really know what the procedures are, but I thought you’d probably want to know as soon as possible. I mean, there’s been a lot in the papers and everything.”
“You did exactly the right thing. Thanks very much for letting me know.”
“No problem.”
Julia ended the call. And realized that she was smiling. A line of inquiry, she thought. For a moment she imagined herself as a sniffer dog with its nose pressed to the ground.
And what a line of inquiry …
* * *
Sarac cautiously opened the door to his apartment. He breathed in the stale air with its smell of newly constructed Ikea furniture. Then he took a long stride across the heap of advertisements and newspapers, snuck in, and lowered all the blinds before switching on the weak lamp above the stove. He rubbed his hands together, trying to get some warmth back into his frozen fingers.
Even though it was his home, the apartment filled him with unease and he had to sit down and take a few deep breaths to control his anxiety—the new and deep-rooted varieties alike. He was safe there, he told himself, at least for a few hours.
Everything looked just as he remembered, yet he was still convinced that the apartment had been painstakingly cleaned. That anything suggesting that he was anything other than the heroic police officer David Sarac had long since been removed.
The clock on the microwave said 14:50, which meant that at best he had about three hours before the staff in the nursing home realized that he’d escaped, and maybe as long as three and a half hours before the news reached the right people. Not long, but long enough.
The envelope containing his passport, banknotes of various currencies, and the credit card he only used when traveling was still in the bottom drawer of his desk. He breathed a sigh of relief. The people who had cleaned his apartment obviously didn’t think he was likely to want to run. He could hardly blame them. Only a few days ago he hadn’t even wanted to go outside. That he had managed to handle the train journey to Stockholm was largely because Eskil had given him a healthy dose of tranquilizers that had protected him against the sounds, the lights, and, not least, the voices in his head.
In the pantry he found a packet of ramen noodles. As the water boiled he emptied the pockets of his borrowed clothes and put the train ticket, key ring, and bus pass on the kitchen table. Then, finally, the bag of sleeping pills.
He undressed and stuffed the clothes into a plastic bag he found under the sink. There were surveillance cameras at the Central Station that he hadn’t been able to avoid. It wouldn’t take long for them to find him. And police photos showing what he looked like. He dug out a pair of black jeans and a cotton shirt from his wardrobe. They were both too big, reminding him of how much weight he had lost. He ate the noodles straight from the pan, then washed down another tranquilizer with tap water. Oddly enough, the food tasted considerably better than anything he had eaten in the nursing home.
When he had finished he washed everything up carefully and put the trash in the bag containing the clothes. He was planning to dump it in a bin by the entrance to the subway, so that at least there wouldn’t be any visible evidence that he had been in the apartment.
In the back of the hall cupboard he found a padded jacket and a black knit hat. Just as he had hoped, his own clothes made him look different. Just an ordinary Swede on his way to work.
He put the things on the kitchen table in his jacket pockets, turned out the light, and then slowly peered behind the blind. Everything looked quiet outside. He couldn’t help glancing at the windows opposite. That was where they had watched him from last year. Waiting for his next move.
All your doing, your fault, the voices whispered.
* * *
It was almost nine o’clock at night by the time Julia got all the boxes into her office. The corridor was deserted, its doors closed, half the fluorescent lights in the ceiling above the linoleum floor switched off. She liked working late. It meant she avoided unnecessary distractions, telephones ringing, colleagues knocking on her door when they didn’t actually want anything.
The pictures were all laid out on her desk. First their unidentified body with its silent grin. She looked at him. No matter who he was and what he had done, no one deserved to die like that. Someone had stripped him of everything. His name, his dignity, even his humanity.
Below the pictures of the body she had lined up the photographs from Skarpö.
First the burned-out wreck of a house surrounded by snow. Black beams, a solitary chimney stack sticking up toward the sky from the foundations. Then a number of pictures that were far worse: charred bodies among the ruins, others outside in the snow. Lifeless, some of them with visible holes in their torsos or heads. Spent cartridges everywhere. Short ones from pistols, longer ones from assault rifles, red or blue ones from shotguns. The photographs were an all-too-visible reminder of just how violent the shoot-out had been.
Superintendent Peter Molnar lay on his back with his mouth wide-open, several of his dazzlingly white teeth shot out. The blood around his head formed a red halo. His eyes were staring blankly up at the sky. She’d seen the picture before, enough times for the shudder in her stomach not to feel quite so strong. Poor Peter. He’d been a good officer, someone most people spoke well of. Admittedly, he and the men on his team were the same tiresome alpha males whom the force seemed to be awash with. The guys who tried it on with her, one after the other, on the few occasions she had been stupid enough to visit any of the police bars. But Peter was at least both smart and funny. He knew when it was time to give up and go and hunt easier prey. And now his wife was a widow and his children left fatherless. She turned the photograph over.
Detective Inspector Josef Almlund’s death looked more peaceful. She had known him too, of course. Peter socialized more with his second-in-command than with his own family. Josef had been a large man of few words, always ready to do exactly what Peter asked of him. Even lie to Peter’s wife, if that was called for. Which it probably had been on a fairly regular basis.
Josef Almlund was sitting at one end of the house, leaning back against the foundations with his head lolling on his chest. The fire had burned his jacket and the hair at the back of his neck, but apart from that it almost looked like he was asleep. Having a bit of a rest before the fighting started again. She turned the picture over, just as she had with the one of Molnar. She paused for a moment, trying to shake off the images of the two dead men. She only half succeeded. She thought about David Sarac. The horrors he must have experienced out there. Watching his friends die around him. The last she had heard about Sarac was that he was in a nursing home in an undisclosed location. Hardly surprising, really.
Her cell phone buzzed, but she ignored it, just as she had a few minutes earlier. She knew it was Amante. He’d have to wait until morning, when she had a better idea of things. Besides, her conversation with Wallin was still in the back of her mind.
She gathered all the photographs she needed and put the others back in the evidence boxes. Now at least she had a time and a location to work with. On January 2, 2014, the dead man had been on the island of Skarpö, just outside Vaxholm in the Stockholm archipelago. According to the pathologist, the body parts had been in the water for approximately four months, so since late February or thereabouts. That left a gap of six, eight weeks between the Skarpö shoot-out and the time when the body parts were deposited beneath the ice.
She looked at the photographs from the Forensic Medicine Unit again. Stared at the mutilated smile.
“I’m getting closer,” she whispered. “I’ll soon know who you are.”
Her cell phone started to buzz again, but she let it ring.
* * *
“Come in, David. I’m Frank.” The man who had opened the door held out his hand toward Sarac, but he didn’t take it. It was the same man from the grainy photograph Eskil had shown him. The nurse was right: they did actually look quite similar. They both looked like cops. Or criminals. Or both.
He walked past the man into a shabby little office. The room couldn’t be more than fifteen to twenty square meters in total. By one wall was a camping mattress and a sleeping bag, and there was a door that presumably led to a toilet. In the opposite wall was a dirty window facing the parking lot outside. Two overflowing Dumpsters were visible below, but, judging by the general state of the building, all construction work had been abandoned a long time ago. The whole of the run-down industrial estate felt badly neglected. Next to the bus stop Sarac had seen a couple of large signs proudly showing the future. Glass and concrete reaching for the skies. No 1970s barracks like this.
“It’s all ready, just as we agreed.” The man calling himself Frank gestured toward the two wooden chairs beside the camping table in the middle of the room. There was an open laptop on the table and, next to it, a camera mounted on a tripod.
Sarac took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair, then sat down. Frank put a photograph in front of him. The blonde woman on the hood, the same terrible image as the picture he had already seen, but from a different angle. Then a sheet of paper, a printout from the vehicle register with the name of the car’s owner clearly circled. Then another picture. The good-looking family again.
Sarac swallowed. His heart was pounding so hard that he was having trouble breathing.
“He called me straight afterward. Crying like a little child,” Frank said. “I went round and cleaned up. Got rid of all the evidence that he’d ever been there. And in return he told me about you. Who you met, how much you could remember after the accident. He was my source in the hunt for Janus. And he told me that you and Janus were out there on the island.”
Sarac took a deep breath. So it was true. He’d been betrayed. Betrayed by his ultimate superior.
“You understand what this means, don’t you?” Frank went on in a low voice. “What the consequences could be if you choose to go on with this? This sort of knowledge can be lethal.”
“If I d-didn’t …” Sarac cleared his throat. The bullet that had passed through his neck out on the island had damaged his larynx, making his voice unreliable. “If I didn’t, I’d hardly be here.”
Frank nodded, then went over to the small sink at the far end of the room and poured a glass of water, which he put down on the table. Then he sat down in front of the computer. Sarac took a couple of sips before looking up.
“Okay,” Frank said. “Your turn. Your secret in return for mine, like we agreed.”
The man pressed a key and a little red light lit up on the camera. “You can start talking whenever you like.”
Sarac cleared his throat again and instinctively scratched the scar on his neck.
“M-My name is David Sarac. I handle informants for the Stockholm Police, and I was responsible for a secret source, an undercover agent called Janus. I was also responsible for the shoot-out on Skarpö in the New Year. Everyone who died and was injured out there was trying to get hold of Janus, to uncover his true identity. None of them succeeded.”
He paused, then breathed in through his nose.
“I’m the only person who knows the truth. The only survivor who knows who Janus really is …”
* * *
Julia stood up from her chair. She hit her knee hard against the desktop and very nearly emptied the contents of her morning coffee across the collage of terrible images that had lain on her desk since the previous evening.
“Gone? How can a body just be gone?”
“Well …” The pathologist’s voice on the phone was dry as dust. “I didn’t say it was gone. I said it isn’t here. There’s a big difference. We aren’t in the habit of losing bodies here in the Forensic Medical Unit.”
The pain in her knee made Julia grimace. She was at the point of saying that she hadn’t had enough coffee to deal with semantic pedantry but managed to stop herself just in time.
“Do you feel like telling me what has happened to the body, then?” she said as calmly as she could.
“Your colleagues came and collected it last night. They brought their own van and everything.”
For a couple of seconds Julia’s brain stopped working.
“My colleagues,” she managed to say. “My colleagues moved our dismembered body?” She could hear how stupid she sounded.
“Exactly,” the pathologist said. “Your colleagues in the Security Police. According to the night staff, they seemed to be in quite a hurry.”
* * *
The door to Pärson’s room was open, but it wouldn’t have made any difference if it had been barricaded from the inside. No one stuck their oar into her cases—not the Security Police, nor anyone else.
“What the hell is going on? Why have the Security Police taken my dead body?”
“And good morning to you too, Gabrielsson. I was just about to call you, so you’ve saved me the trouble. Please have a seat.”
Pärson waved his fleshy hand toward one of the two chairs opposite his desk. Only then did Julia realize that Amante was already sitting in the other one.
“Well,” he went on, “the news I was going to share with the two of you, which Julia has evidently already heard, is that the Security Police, in their great wisdom, have decided to ease our burden.”
He smiled ever so slightly, just enough to crease his jowls.
“Apparently our dismembered body is connected to a suspected terrorism case. Some sort of defector. Syria or Iran or something.”
“That’s not true,” Julia said, rather less calmly than she had hoped.
“No?” Pärson’s happy smile faltered slightly.
Julia took a deep breath. “Our victim was involved in Skarpö. There’s a match with his DNA in the register. We already knew that at least one person got away, so that’s probably who we’ve found.”
Pärson straightened up. The movement made his chair whimper under his weight. “And how the hell do you know that?”
“I spoke to the National Forensics Lab late yesterday afternoon,” she said. She bit her lip and waited for the inevitable explosion.
Pärson’s face turned from pink to red. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me straightaway?”
Well, she thought. Partly because you’d already left several hours earlier; partly because you get annoyed if anyone calls you after work about things that aren’t a matter of life and death; but mainly because you would have seen a chance to make a bit on the side by calling the media, thereby making my job ten times harder. For a few seconds she actually considered saying all this out loud.
“We were going to tell you first thing this morning,” Amante said out of the blue. “We just wanted a chance to discuss it first. To be honest, neither of us believed that there was much urgency in a case where the victim had been dead for several months.”
Pärson glared at him, and even Julia got the evil eye before he threw himself back in his chair, which once again protested loudly.
“Bloody hell. This sort of thing needs to be reported at once; that should be obvious, surely? A connection to Skarpö changes everything. The media are going to lose it completely. The phones will be ringing off the hook. Those soft-shoed bastards must have got one of their hackers to flag up the case in the computer system. And got advance warning as soon as the lab found a match. The Security Police have been waiting for an opportunity to muscle in on the Skarpö case ever since last winter. It’s no wonder that they were so damn fast. I need to inform the head of Regional Crime right away.”
“Why do the Security Police want to get a foot in the door of the Skarpö investigation?”
Pärson glared at Julia.
“Are you hard of hearing? They want to stake out their position in the new police authority. Show that they’re worth their huge budget. If the Security Police manage to tie all the remaining loose ends in the Skarpö case and find the person who got away—the one we and National Crime have failed to find so far—it’ll make us look like incompetent idiots. Thanks a fucking bunch for that, Gabrielsson. I promise you now, I’ll be sure to tell the head of Regional Crime all about your exemplary work.”
Julia tried to control herself. She didn’t succeed as well as she usually did. And blamed it on the lack of caffeine.
“What about you, then,” she said, “just letting the Security Police stroll in and take over everything? Without so much as calling me, even though it was my case. Who did you talk to at the Security Police? What unit? What case number did he give?” She stopped herself, aware that she had crossed the line, actually way beyond it.
“Now listen,” Pärson said, leaning forward over his desk. “You’ve been in the force long enough to know that you have to take things as they come. Don’t try to blame this on me. If you’d kept me properly informed, I could have told them to go to hell—just like I want you and your little pal here to do now, before I resort to physical measures.”
As they were walking away from Pärson’s room, Amante drew her aside in the corridor. They stopped in front of a faded picture of an archipelago landscape.
“Explain what just happened to me,” he said quietly.
“I thought you’d worked it out,” she muttered. “Our work-shy boss allowed someone at the Security Police—whose name he can’t recall—to take over our case for reasons he can’t remember. And right now he’s calling his own superior and blaming the whole thing on us.”
“So we’re being taken off the case?”
“He didn’t actually say that in so many words. Not that it really matters. Without the body we haven’t got a case. No chance of making any progress. The National Forensics Lab has probably already received new orders to talk exclusively to the Security Police from now on, presumably for reasons relating to national security.”
She fell silent and nodded at a colleague walking past them.
“Okay, that’s pretty much what I thought,” Amante said when the man was out of earshot. “Just wanted to make sure.”
He leaned a bit closer to Julia as he glanced over his shoulder.
“I’ve got something I need to show you. It’s about our body.”
She raised her eyebrows and waited for him to go on. But Amante gave no indication of continuing.
“Okay,” she said. “Let me get a cup of coffee. Your room or mine?”
Amante shook his head. “Not here. In my apartment. I’ll make you coffee.”
* * *
Sarac got up from the camping mattress, switched the computer on, and sat down at the table. He stretched to shake off the half doze that had more or less replaced real sleep for him. Time was running out, his tranquilizers would last another four days, but he hoped everything would be over by then.
Three days had passed since their exchange. Frank had left shortly after the video was finished. Packed his things, gave him the key to the office, and showed him how the computer and encrypted e-mail worked before taking his leave. This time Sarac did shake his hand. He knew who Frank was now, and why he had gone to such lengths to find out the truth about Janus. But instead of trying to steal it the way he had last winter, he had offered something in exchange. A fair deal between two equal parties. Quid pro quo.
So there he was, in a shabby little office in a ramshackle building that was waiting to be demolished. A perfect hiding place.
By now they must be hunting all over for him. They’d have tracked him via the security cameras at the Central Station, and one way or another they’d have figured out that he’d been back to his apartment. But there the trail would go cold. He had taken three different buses to get out here, using a different travel card each time. All bought at different places and paid for in cash, according to Hunter’s instructions. He was safe here. Safe enough, anyway.
He had spent a whole day thinking about his next course of action. Then he made up his mind not to beat around the bush. He sent an encrypted e-mail revealing what he knew. What he wanted. But so far he hadn’t received a reply.
He logged into his online e-mail account and, as he waited for the program to load, wrapped his fingers around the bag of sleeping pills in his pocket. He counted them one more time. Odds and evens.
Debts I can’t escape till the day I die, the song in his head echoed, just as it had last Christmas.
The program opened up. There was a new message at the top of his in-box. He held his breath. Heard the music in his head get louder as he clicked to open the e-mail.
Curl your lip and make me want to live for one more day. Make me want to sleep through one more night.
An answer. One final task. His final task.
* * *
The apartment didn’t look anything like what Julia had been expecting. The lobby of the building in Östermalm was imposing, with high arches and a heavy limestone staircase with a polished teak handrail. But inside the heavy door of the apartment the furnishings were considerably more spartan.
She should really have said no. Should have made her so-called partner tell her whatever he had to say up in Police Headquarters instead of wasting time going home with him. That she went along with him without a word of protest or even asking any questions was entirely Oscar Wallin’s fault. Wallin’s and that of her own wretched curiosity.
Sadly, Amante’s apartment didn’t provide any immediate clues regarding either him or his intentions. There were three bedrooms, two of which were completely empty apart from a few dead flies on the windowsills. In the third was a folding bed, two open removal boxes, and a small, old-fashioned television on the floor. No photographs, pictures, or anything else that said anything about the person who lived there. The only rhythm echoing between the bare walls was loneliness.
“Divorce,” Amante said, confirming her impressions. “All my things are in storage. My ex-wife sent the wrong boxes here. Old vacation clothes.” He gestured toward his yacht club blazer and sweater. “She knows I hate this jacket, so she probably did it on purpose.”
He shrugged his shoulders as if to indicate that he’d said enough on the subject.
“There’s coffee in the kitchen. Hot water in the right-hand tap. I’m just going to …” He nodded toward the toilet door.
“Sure, I’ll sort it,” she said.
The kitchen was, if possible, even barer than the rest of the apartment. And expensive. Marble counters, a big wine refrigerator, a gas range with six rings. Stepfather’s money, she guessed. Maybe the apartment even belonged to him.
She couldn’t see a coffee machine but did find a jar of instant and a few mismatched mugs covered with advertising logos. One of the German taps was marked Heisswasser. She tried it and, sure enough, got scalding-hot water straight from the tap. What an idea. She filled two mugs with water, added some powder, and stirred them with a coffee-flecked chopstick she found in the sink. She shuddered. The smell from the mugs wasn’t enticing, but a splash of milk would make it bearable. She opened a large stainless steel door that she hoped belonged to the fridge. She found an open can of pea soup, a couple of greasy trays of Chinese food, and a can of low-alcohol beer. The huge kitchen was evidently completely wasted on Amante.
At the bottom of the fridge was a big yellow plastic cooler that looked brand-new. Amante had gone to the trouble of removing a couple of shelves from the fridge to make room for it, so at a guess it contained something that needed to be kept fresh. With a bit of luck there might even be some milk. She undid the straps on the side and opened the lid. She felt her heart stop for a few seconds.
She took a step back. Then another one. The fridge door slowly closed of its own accord and she was left standing with the lid in her hand.
Amante came into the kitchen.
“Did you find the coffee?” He caught her eye and stopped.
“Amante,” Julia said, trying her utmost to sound calm. “Would you mind explaining why you have the head of our dead body in your fridge?”
* * *
Sarac had pulled on his jacket and hat. Turned out the lights in the little room. He looked at the time. Ten past five, and darkness was already settling on the parking lot outside the window. Time to get going. For some reason he felt different. Almost excited. He put his hands in his pockets and felt the bag of sleeping pills. On a sudden impulse he took it out and held it up against the weak light from the window. Twenty-five oval pills. He went over to the tiny kitchen area, opened the cupboard, and tucked the bag away inside it. Then he walked out of the room and closed the door silently behind him. He was on his way now. On his way to put things right.
* * *
The coffee tasted just as disgusting as Julia had expected. But it was also the only thing in this whole situation that was remotely predictable.
“Sorry if I scared you,” Amante said. “Let me explain. I called the National Forensics Lab yesterday. Spoke to a very nice young woman who was about to finish for the day. She said she’d spoken to you about the link to Skarpö a few minutes before I called. She asked if we actually spoke to each other in Violent Crime.”
He took a sip of coffee and gave her a long look over the top of the cup. Julia said nothing, preferring to wait for him to go on instead.
“When the pathologist said we might not be able to identify our victim from DNA, I called a guy in Europol who I got to know on Lampedusa. He works as a forensics expert in Sarajevo. They’ve got a computer program that can create a three-dimensional image of a face from a layered X-ray of a skull. They use it to identify remains from the war. Obviously it’s not a hundred percent, but enough to get a photofit.” He took another swig of coffee. “The same thing must have occurred to you—that we could try to reconstruct his face some other way. That’s why you called the Forensic Medicine Unit this morning, isn’t it?”
She glared at him for a few seconds.
“The Museum of Medieval Stockholm,” she said. “They’ve got a forensic anthropologist who came up with a wax model of Birger Jarl’s face using just his skull a couple of years ago.”
“Ah, smart.” Amante nodded. “A proper model of the whole head probably works a lot better than just a photofit. But that would take longer. At least a month or so.”
“And you couldn’t wait that long. You needed to prove how smart you were.”
A hint of a blush spread across Amante’s neck. “I did actually try to call you yesterday evening. It wasn’t that hard to work out why you weren’t answering. You knew there was a link to Skarpö and you didn’t want to involve the civilian once the case started to heat up.”
Her turn to blush now, if she’d been the type. Which she wasn’t.
“I figured out that everything would change as soon as the connection to Skarpö became common knowledge,” he went on. “All manner of different police units and bosses would get involved. And the civilian would be the first person taken off the case. And I didn’t want that, not after seeing the body. After seeing what our perpetrator had done to him.” He stared at her; his anxious expression seemed to be looking for understanding.
Julia stifled a nod. Amante was saying the right things and he sounded entirely honest. But she wanted to hear the rest of the story before she made up her mind if he really was telling the truth.
Amante took a deep breath. “So, after I tried to call you last night, I drove out to the Forensic Medicine Unit. I paid the member of staff on duty two thousand kronor to let me borrow the head for twenty-four hours. I’d have gone as high as five, but he jumped at my first offer.”
He pulled a face that was probably meant to look amused.
“The plan was to get the skull X-rayed and have it back in place by now. No one would have noticed anything and it would all have been a lot quicker than filling out forms and waiting for them to be processed. But then the Security Police appeared out of nowhere to fetch the body. Without even opening the bag, apparently, which was lucky for me.”
“You must have realized that people were bound to ask questions about your photofit. Wonder where it had come from?”
He shrugged. “One thing at a time. A photofit would have been a big step forward. Paperwork can always be sorted out afterward, and it’s not as if I’ve done anything illegal.”
“Apart from bribing a public official, you mean?”
Amante smiled, a cryptic little smile that she couldn’t really make sense of. Like so much else about him. If Wallin hadn’t warned her, by this point she would have been convinced that Amante was telling the truth. But for now she still had her doubts.
“Two, actually, if we’re being strictly accurate. An X-ray operator too—a guy I know from the yacht club. But I doubt either of them would be prepared to testify. All I did was pay what the Italians call a tangente. A sort of service charge, you could say.”
“Did you learn that on Lampedusa? You know, that Italian island in the southern Mediterranean,” she added, unable to stop herself.
He looked at her for a few seconds. His smile faded. He walked over to the sink and put his cup down.
“I learned lots of things on Lampedusa. More than I would have wanted.” He turned his back on her as he rinsed the cup under the tap. Julia waited for him to go on, but Amante seemed to have clammed up.
“What do we do now?” The question was aimed at herself as much as him.
He turned the tap off and turned around.
“That was what I was thinking of asking you. As soon as the Security Police open the bag and discover that the head’s missing, all hell’s going to break loose. The smart option would be to go out to the Forensic Medicine Unit right away, pay the guy to sneak the head into one of the cold storage units, and forget the whole thing.”
She looked at him, aware that he could easily have done that without her involvement.
Amante smiled faintly again and glanced at the time. “Or we wait until ten o’clock before we decide what our next step’s going to be.”
“Why ten o’clock?”
“Because that’s when we get to see what our dead man looked like.”
* * *
Sarac was standing perfectly still in the darkened doorway. He resisted the temptation to reach out for the light switch he could see on the wooden wall. The forest behind him was dark and silent. The narrow unpaved track he had followed from the main road was only just visible at the edge of the trees on the far side of the turnaround. In the distance he could hear a raven call. The ghostly sound echoed between the trees, fading into a distant rumble. Unless it was just in his head.
The wind blowing off the ice-covered inlet cut straight through his clothes. He shivered and stepped in through the door. The soles of his boots scraped against the concrete floor. The smell inside made him think about the house on the island, and he waited for the usual accusing whispers. But for the time being the voices seemed to have fallen silent. Maybe the dead were huddled together in the darkness. Waiting for whatever was going to happen.
What was going to happen?
He didn’t really know. All he knew was that he had reached the end of the road. That the whole Janus affair was going to end here, this evening, one way or another. That everyone involved would finally have to face up to the consequences of their actions.
The rumbling in his head grew louder. The winter thunder was getting closer. Then his thoughts were interrupted by another sound. A real one this time. It sounded as if someone was approaching. Taking cautious, creaking steps through the snow outside on the path. Sarac felt his heart beat faster.
Soon, he thought. Soon it will all be over.
A dark shape appeared in the doorway. Clearly visible against the white snow.
“David Sarac?” he heard a low voice say. And at that moment he knew how it was all going to end. The voice was firm, clear, not unfriendly. This was someone who had made up their mind. Then he saw a weapon aimed toward him. Saw it being raised. He closed his eyes.
Debts I can’t escape till the day I die.
Time to pay his debts. Pay for his betrayal. Some things were simply too broken to be fixed.
“H-Here,” he whispered. “I’m here.”
A lightning flash, a frozen gust of wind right through his chest. The roar of winter thunder drowning his thoughts. Then nothing more.
* * *
The face on the screen looked real. Everything was where it should be, the proportions looked right. The nose, neither large nor small. The mouth with its hard, pursed lips, and the skin stretched across the cheekbones. The short, dark hair, the thin eyes. Even the eyelashes and brows were perfect, down to the last hair. Yet there was still something about the picture that wasn’t quite right, something Julia couldn’t put her finger on. But that didn’t really matter. A clump of ice had formed in her stomach, its chill spreading throughout her body.
“A computer simulation will never be entirely accurate,” Amante said over her shoulder. “The program uses measurements from the CAT scan—the size and angles of the bones in the face, eye sockets, and nose. Then it adds supplementary information such as hair and skin color. It all comes together to form an image that ought to be fairly close to reality. The only thing the program can’t provide is—”
“Humanity,” Julia said, turning toward him. “You’re right: it’s not a hundred percent. But I still recognize him.”
She took a deep breath. All hell is going to break loose now. A shit-storm of biblical proportions.
“That”—she tapped the screen where the photofit of their dead man stared back at them with empty eyes—“that’s Detective Inspector David Sarac.”
One (#ulink_19a603d5-1269-562b-ad15-f918fcb520be)
The smell coming from the kitchen woke Minister of Justice Jesper Stenberg. Bacon and eggs, freshly brewed coffee. Those thick American pancakes that the girls loved to drown in maple syrup.
He got out of bed and pulled on his robe. It was just past ten o’clock. He had slept for almost eight hours. Eight hours of deep sleep, just the way it should be. It had been several months since he last had any nightmares, which was as good a sign as any that his brain had moved on. That he’d put everything that happened last winter behind him.
In the bathroom he splashed his face with water. Tried out some of his most reliable facial expressions. Interest, concern, pensiveness. Everything seemed to be working and he winked at his own reflection.
As he walked down the stairs he heard voices from the kitchen. Karolina and the girls, of course, but among them a male voice that he’d hoped to avoid. But after the previous evening that was obviously a vain wish.
“Good morning, Jesper,” his father-in-law said.
“Good morning, Karl-Erik. Morning, darling.” He glued on a polite smile, kissed his wife on the cheek, and took the cup of coffee she held out to him.
“We thought you deserved to sleep in,” Karolina said. “You did well yesterday—didn’t he, Daddy?”
“Absolutely. The papers are unanimous in saying you did an excellent job. Even the opposition papers’ lead articles express reluctant admiration.”
Stenberg took a sip of coffee. Walked around the kitchen and kissed his two children on the head.
“We saw you on television yesterday,” his youngest daughter said, looking up from her iPad.
“And what did you think?”
“You were really good. Mom let us play on our pads so we wouldn’t wake you up.”
Stenberg pulled out a chair and sat down opposite his father-in-law. Decided to preempt any criticism.
“I could have been more aggressive with the opposition. I could have made it even clearer that they’re soft on crime and terrorism.”
His father-in-law made a soothing gesture.
“You’ll have plenty of opportunities to do that over the next few weeks. The main thing is that people saw you can handle a tough line of questioning. That you can keep a cool head and come across as solid and dignified under pressure and without a script.”
“Statesmanlike. He was, wasn’t he, Daddy?”
Karolina put a plate of bacon and eggs in front of Stenberg, half as much as he would have liked. He noticed her exchanging a quick glance with her father.
Karl-Erik got to his feet and patted him on the shoulder. “High time for me to get going.”
“Don’t you want breakfast?” Karolina sounded slightly disappointed.
“Thanks, but I haven’t got time to stop. I just wanted to call in and congratulate Jesper on his performance. Boman’s waiting out in the car.”
“But why didn’t you ask him in? Nisse’s always welcome; he’s one of the family. Isn’t he?” Karolina gave Stenberg an encouraging glance as she followed her father out of the room.
“Of course, absolutely. Nisse’s always welcome,” he muttered after them.
Nisse Boman had been his father-in-law’s driver and right-hand man for the past thirty years, if not more. Before that, sometime in the Stone Age, he had been Karl-Erik’s orderly in the military. Karolina had grown up with him around, thought of him as an extra dad. The sinewy little man was always polite, never behaving with less than military correctness toward those around him. He only spoke when he had something important to say, which wasn’t very often. He was also considerate, almost protective toward Karolina and the girls. Yet there was still something about Boman that irritated Stenberg. Something about his eyes that was, in the absence of a better description, actively unpleasant. They were pale blue, cold. Almost like a fish’s. They always seemed to be watching and judging him. And not in a way that did him any favors.
His wife came back into the kitchen.
“Daddy doesn’t want to say anything to you yet,” she said, and he could hear the excitement in her voice. “But he’s having an informal meeting with the prime minister this afternoon. He’s worried about the opinion polls. And the likelihood that people regard him as old and tired, especially now that he has to walk with a stick since the operation. Yesterday’s interview was the final test, and you passed. The prime minister is going to ask if you’re ready to stand by his side for the last part of the campaign. His unofficial crown prince.”
Stenberg nodded. He could feel his face automatically delivering the right expression as his wife went on talking.
“All our dreams are coming true. After all our hard work. And sooner than we could ever have hoped. Prime Minister Jesper Stenberg—how does that sound? I’ve booked us a table at the Diplomat this afternoon to celebrate. Lina will stay on for a couple of hours to look after the girls.”
Stenberg went on smiling at his wife. Nothing can spoil this moment, he told himself. Nothing and no one.
* * *
“Good afternoon, Minister,” Oscar Wallin said in an exaggeratedly cheery voice as he walked into Stenberg’s spacious office.
He stopped obediently behind one of the leather armchairs that were positioned at just the right angle for visitors to be able to see both the City Hall and the water of Riddarfjärden through the large windows facing Rosenbadsparken.
“Congratulations on your excellent performance on television last night. You looked like you owned the whole studio. That vicious little journalist really didn’t have much luck. The lead article in my paper declared that you’re the future of the party, possibly even our next prime minister.”
“Hello, Oscar. Have a seat.” Stenberg nodded toward the chair on the other side of the desk. “You wanted to see me?” he added before Wallin had a chance to go on with his predictable flattery.
Wallin opened the blue folder he had been carrying under his arm and put it down on the table between them with a flourish. Stenberg did his best to maintain a neutral expression.
“Well, I just wanted to update you on the body that was found in Källstavik last weekend. I thought it would be good for you to know. The body was found just a stone’s throw from your father-in-law’s country retreat. My guess is that sooner or later someone will start asking questions.”
Stenberg waved one hand. “Of course. But keep it brief, if you don’t mind.”
Wallin started to talk, but Stenberg was only half listening. He knew that Wallin would let his secretary have a detailed memo. To show how clever he was, how industrious. The problem with Oscar Wallin was that he tried too hard, not least when he’d done something wrong, which made him look slippery and ingratiating rather than reliable and trustworthy.
He had begun to get seriously fed up with Wallin. His boyish appearance, the little water-combed curl in his hair, the breezy tone of voice. Not to mention that tired old thing he did with his folders. Wallin was intelligent—very intelligent, even, at least in some respects. But in others he was a complete idiot. Wallin had made a serious mistake last winter, biting the hand that fed him. But he didn’t actually seem to realize that he ought to have handed in his resignation instead of prancing about in the corridors, trying to find things to do and look important.
For a couple of days last Christmas, Stenberg had been worried. Wallin indicated that he had found a trace of blood in Sophie Thorning’s apartment. He had kept the documentation inside one of his blue folders and intimated that he could link Stenberg to Sophie, possibly even to her suicide. At first he had considered giving in to Wallin’s demand and appointing him as the new national police chief. But then he calmed down. Realized that Wallin was actually playing poker and was bluffing. Wallin had seen to it that dozens of prominent police chiefs had lost their jobs and privileges. Without political protection his career in the police authority was doomed. Probably within the entire justice system, actually. And the only person protecting Wallin was Stenberg himself.
So he had seen through the bluff and consequently deprived Wallin of his dream job. And there was nothing Wallin could do to stop him. It was three days until he appeared in Stenberg’s office with a servile smile and a blue folder under his arm. But by then Stenberg had begun to doubt that there had ever been a trace of blood at all.
He had contemplated going whole hog and firing Wallin. Or, even better, giving him a tedious job in some inquiry and letting his career gradually wither away. He had already slashed Wallin’s budget and seen to it that he had lost his colleagues. All it would take was a single stroke of the pen, and he’d be gone.
But that blue folder Wallin was carrying was still a signal. If Wallin was utterly humiliated, there was a risk that he’d start talking to John Thorning, reveal that Stenberg had been having a secret affair with John’s daughter for years and that Wallin strongly suspected that Stenberg had been there when she killed herself.
Stenberg daren’t take the risk of his former mentor becoming his enemy. He still needed John’s support, not least because he was general secretary of the Bar Association. So Wallin was allowed to keep his office, at least for the time being.
Wallin was still talking. He was halfway through a lengthy description of how bodies decompose in water. Something about bottom-feeders eating the dead bodies.
Stenberg couldn’t help thinking of Sophie, of how her beautiful, slender body was lying in a coffin deep below the ground. Skin and tissue slowly turning to wax. If the worms hadn’t gotten there first.
He felt suddenly nauseous. He stood up abruptly and went over to one of the windows. The smoke from the steamers by the City Hall was drifting on the breeze above Riddarfjärden.
Just a few meters outside his window a seagull hung in the air, almost motionless. It stared at him with empty, dead eyes.
* * *
When Oscar Wallin closed the door of his office his watch struck the handle with an alarmingly loud noise. It had been a Christmas present to himself, a Patek Philippe, exactly the same as the one Jesper Stenberg wore. Before he sat down behind his desk he anxiously checked to make sure the diamond-polished glass wasn’t damaged. His mother had commented on the watch when they had dinner recently. A gift, he had told her, for professional accomplishments. “From the minister?” she had asked, but her tone revealed that she already knew the answer. He had managed to avoid the trap.
Six years ago he helped organize an apartment on Gärdet for her, just a stone’s throw from his own. He moved her out of the dull suburb where his father had exiled them to a three-room apartment, ninety square meters with a view of the city center. He’d had to pull a lot of strings to get it, but obviously the apartment wasn’t the same thing as a grand villa, which it hadn’t taken her many minutes to point out.
All through the years when he was growing up she had waited. Every evening she had forced him to dress for dinner. “Your father will call soon, you’ll see, and you must promise to be a good boy this time.”
The fact that the professor had replaced her with a woman fifteen years her junior, and that the villa was now inhabited by his new family, appeared to make little difference. She had gone on waiting, hoping, and nothing he did could possibly replace what had been taken from her.
As a teenager, he had sometimes gone back to their old home, creeping through the garden gate and standing there in the darkness, looking in through the big windows. The home where he was no longer welcome. The perfect family he wasn’t part of. Dad, mom, daughter, son. Even a golden retriever that didn’t have the sense to bark on the occasions it found him out there in the garden. It just licked his hand and waved its tail stupidly, as if it expected him to play with it.
He still looked up his father’s family from time to time. His half brother and half sister had gone to fancy schools, had traveled the world and studied abroad. Unlike him, they had no student debt and hadn’t had to do part-time work and evening courses with sweaty cheese sandwiches and thermos-flask coffee. Even so, they were no more than drones. Idiots with no ambition to achieve anything, to make a lasting impression.
He had always known that he was different. That he was destined to achieve things. Great things. In that way he and Jesper Stenberg were pretty similar. They weren’t content merely to exist, but knew they were meant for something more than just an ordinary life. They set ambitious goals and did whatever it took to achieve them. Not long ago Jesper had been his role model. A man he regarded as his mentor. Now everything had changed. He hadn’t understood that Stenberg had appointed Eva Swensk as national police chief in order to gain support within the party. Instead he felt let down, overlooked, just as he had as a teenager. And he had been stupid and clumsy enough to try to force Jesper to change his mind. And since then their friendship had soured badly.
All Wallin had wanted to do was prove the extent of his loyalty. That he was the right man to keep Stenberg’s secrets, and that he could do so even better as national police chief. But Stenberg had misunderstood his intentions and stripped almost everything he had built up away from him. His privileged access, his staff, all the power that made his colleagues fear him. The same colleagues who used to beg and plead for a five-minute meeting now kept their distance from him or openly mocked him.
His relationship with the minister of justice had been seriously damaged; he couldn’t deny that, even if he was doing his best to improve things. In a number of discreet ways he was trying to get Stenberg to realize that his secrets were still in safe hands and that he could be trusted. Evidently that tactic had failed, judging by the conversation they had just had.
But he still had his job in the Ministry of Justice. That meant he still had a chance. He looked up at the framed quote from Robert Kennedy on his wall:
Only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly.
He had failed. That was all there was to it. But he wasn’t beaten yet. One way or another he would make his way back to the top. He would climb higher than anyone could imagine. His colleagues and everyone else who had underestimated him over the years would have cause to think again. He had licked his wounds long enough, playing the role of obedient lapdog. It was high time for a new strategy.
He pulled a business card out of the top drawer of his desk, picked up the phone, and dialed the direct number written on the back.
A male voice answered on the second ring. A short, confident bark.
“John Thorning.”
“Hello, this is Detective Superintendent Oscar Wallin. I was wondering if you had time for that meeting we talked about.”
Two (#ulink_da461cfb-7870-58ad-9c92-98f593308042)
Superintendent Pärson’s office was twice the size of Julia’s. But it felt smaller. Possibly because of the physical bulk of the room’s occupant, or the stacks of documents covering practically every available surface. Or simply because of the distinct smell of sweat that seemed to force out all the oxygen.
“That isn’t David Sarac.” Pärson tapped the photofit picture with the yellow nail of his index finger.
“How can you be so—”
Pärson interrupted Julia by holding up one fleshy hand.
“To begin with, unlike certain other people in this room, I’ve been a police officer long enough to know that photofit pictures can never be trusted. I must have seen hundreds over the years, and when we eventually get our hands on the culprits, they never match.”
“But this one’s different,” Amante said. “This isn’t based upon witness statements but X-rays and measurements of the skull—”
“Which you bribed your way to get ahold of out at the Forensic Medicine Unit,” Pärson interrupted again. “I must say, that part of your little presentation is of particular interest to me. That’s a fair number of notations in your record already, Amante. Misconduct and two cases of bribery. Not bad for your first week.”
Pärson grinned and leaned back.
“Don’t worry. You meant well, and besides, I’ve got an arrangement with your stepfather. But keep your nose clean from now on, is that understood? There are limits to the amount of protection I can give you.”
Amante moved his head in a way that could be interpreted as a half nod.
“But Amante is actually right: this is nothing like an ordinary photofit.” Julia didn’t manage to say more before Pärson held his paw up once again.
“The second and possibly more significant reason why our photofit phantom can’t be David Sarac is that I happen to know exactly where Sarac is.”
Julia sat with her mouth half-open. “Okay,” she managed to say. She exchanged a quick glance with Amante.
“Sarac has been in a home for patients suffering from PTSD since he left the hospital last winter,” Pärson said. “He’s barely capable of walking and talking on his own, and then only for short periods. That’s why you haven’t seen any interviews with our heroic detective. He’s incapable of going anywhere without suffering panic attacks, pissing and shitting himself.”
“And we’re completely sure about that?” Julia said.
“Yep. Secure psychiatric care. Sarac won’t be out of the nuthouse for years, if ever. So he couldn’t have been at Källstavik in February, which means he wasn’t murdered, chopped up, and dumped under the ice. Besides, I’ve had time to check the DNA match that made the Security Police get such a hard-on about taking over the case. A sixty-five percent match is crap. That means there’s only a slightly greater probability that the victim was at Skarpö than that he wasn’t. Both I and the head of Regional Crime are more than happy to hand that sort of speculation and guesswork to our spook friends.”
Julia bit her top lip. She had been expecting Pärson to fall off his chair with shock when he heard their revelation. Instead he was sitting there on the other side of the desk, grinning at them in an unpleasantly supercilious way. As if they were two crazies in tinfoil hats.
She looked at the photofit again, then at Amante. He avoided her gaze. Could they really be that wrong? But the grinning skull in her head didn’t agree. The dead man was David Sarac, no matter what Pärson claimed. She just couldn’t prove it at the moment.
“Listen, Gabrielsson.” Pärson sounded more friendly now, almost paternal. “You’re a good police officer—one of the very best, I’d say. I’ll be retiring in a couple of years, selling my apartment and moving to Thailand to drink myself to death with garish cocktails. If you play your cards right, this lovely desk can be yours. But if the head of Regional Crime gets the slightest whiff of this business with the skull, well, you’re smart enough to work out the rest for yourself. Kollander’s paranoid about his reputation, especially now that he’s expecting the national police chief to reward him for his efforts. He’d get rid of you quicker than you can say ass-kisser.”
Pärson tilted his head slightly.
“I know you, Gabrielsson, I know what this is about. If it would make you happier, I can give the case a new code. Make it look like it was being investigated by one of the alcoholics in the end corridor until the Security Police took over. That way your solving rate won’t get messed up.”
She didn’t respond.
“Good, that’s all sorted, then. Now, make sure you get that fucking head back to the Forensic Medicine Unit as quickly and discreetly as you can. Send our intrepid bribemaster general in while you wait in the car.” Pärson grinned at his joke. “As soon as the skull’s back, start the weekend early and go home. On Monday I promise you’ll have a nice new murder to get your teeth into. And with that, I think we can put this whole episode behind us. What do you say, Gabrielsson?”
* * *
The bodyguard—Stenberg thought his name might be Becker—opened the car door. The man was looking away the whole time, focused on their surroundings. Stenberg got out of the car and stretched gently. He shaded his eyes with his hand and gazed out across the water, toward the Vasa Museum and Gröna Lund amusement park. A couple of young women in short summer dresses and high heels walked past on the pavement. One of them smiled at him and he couldn’t help smiling back. And why not? It was Friday afternoon, the working day was over, the sun was shining, and Stockholm was looking at its most beautiful.
Inside the restaurant Karolina was waiting at their table.
“Hello, darling,” he said, and leaned forward to kiss her. She tilted her head to one side and let him kiss her on the cheek instead of the lips.
“I’ve already ordered. Veal for both of us. Salad rather than potato gratin.” She looked up and noted his expression. “You’ve let your belt out a notch, and the camera added a few more kilos yesterday.”
She nodded gently toward his stomach and revealed a row of perfectly white pearly teeth between lips red with the lipstick she had just stopped him from spoiling. Karolina was his rock, the only person he could trust unconditionally. She was strong in every sense of the word.
He sat down, spread the large linen napkin over his lap, and took a sip of water.
“How has your day been?” he asked.
“Fine. The phone keeps ringing. Two different charities are trying to recruit me, and I’m inundated with lunch invitations. If it carries on like this, I’m soon going to need an assistant.” Karolina winked at him.
“I could put someone onto that if you like.”
“It’s too soon. An assistant would make it look like we’re taking developments for granted.”
The waiter appeared with their starters. The thick carpet and subdued conversation of the other guests almost drowned the sound of him approaching.
“You’re right,” Stenberg said once the waiter had left them. “I’m just worried about you.”
Karolina patted his hand. “I’ll manage. Now eat; the veal is supposed to be wonderful.”
Stenberg returned her smile, then glanced up briefly as two familiar men walked in through the doors facing Strandvägen and stopped at the maître d’s little podium. One was Oscar Wallin, the other John Thorning. The men were laughing, as if one of them had just said something amusing. They were behaving like old friends and Stenberg felt his good mood sink.
“How lovely to see you,” John Thorning said with a surprised smile.
“Yes, what a surprise.” Karolina repeated the trick with her cheek so that Thorning could kiss her on both sides. “It’s been ages. How are you and Margareta?”
John Thorning replied something that Stenberg didn’t hear. He was fully occupied trying not to glare angrily at Wallin.
“I didn’t know that you and John knew each other,” he said.
“Oh, we’ve had a few dealings. John suggested we get a bite to eat together, and as luck would have it he had a gap in his schedule today.” Wallin nodded toward Thorning.
“Yes, I wanted to thank Wallin personally for his efforts last winter. That supplementary investigation into”—Thorning made a slight gesture with his hand—“Sophie’s tragic passing. You told me that Wallin helped to iron out the question marks that had been troubling me. So I thought that the least I could do was to offer a bite to eat in return.” John Thorning patted Wallin’s shoulder. “And it’s a good idea anyway, having an early dinner on a Friday. It makes the weekend feel longer, don’t you think? And the boat to Sandhamn leaves from just outside here, so I’ll be sure of getting home okay.”
Stenberg forced a smile. This meeting was obviously no coincidence. Wallin must have checked his diary with Jeanette. He would have to talk to her about that.
“We won’t disturb you any longer, Jesper,” John Thorning said. “You and Karolina need a little time to yourselves, and Oscar and I have a lot to talk about. I’m very interested in how things are going with your plans. We should meet again. Soon. I’ll ask my secretary to call Jeanette.”
They shook hands, and with an effort of will Stenberg managed to squeeze out another smile.
“John’s looking brighter,” Karolina said as they sat back down. “He seems to have put that sorry business with Sophie behind him.”
Something in her voice made Stenberg start. An undertone, a trace so insignificant that he wasn’t even sure that he’d really heard it. He stared at his wife, but she looked exactly the same as usual. She smiled at him. Bright red lipstick, white teeth. For a millisecond he got it into his head that Sophie was sitting on the chair opposite him. Looking at him with her shattered eyes. He shuddered and blinked hard a couple of times to make the image disappear.
“Aren’t you feeling well, Jesper?” his wife asked.
* * *
Julia sat with her lower arms resting on the wheel as she fiddled with her cell phone. Both side windows were wound down to keep the summer heat from turning the car into an oven. Even so, she could feel her blouse sticking to her lower back, and she started the engine and air-conditioning the moment she saw Amante emerge from the Forensic Medicine Unit.
She’d had time to make four calls while he was in there, all with similarly disappointing results. No one could tell her where David Sarac was being treated. Or, to be more accurate, where he had been treated before someone murdered, dismembered, and dumped him in Lake Mälaren. Because she was still convinced that they were right and Pärson was wrong.
“All sorted out?” she said.
“Yes.” Amante sat heavily in the passenger seat and closed the door. “My good friend in there promised to put the head in an empty compartment in cold storage. One of his colleagues will find it within the next few days and call the Security Police. A regrettable mistake, blah, blah, blah …”
“And how much did that cost you, then?”
“Do you really want to know?”
Julia didn’t answer. She just took the hand brake off and let the car roll slowly out of the parking lot. Suppressed an urge to put her foot down and force Amante to grab for the handle above the door.
“Are you planning on telling me what Pärson meant earlier?” Amante said after several minutes’ silence.
“Which bit?” she muttered.
“What he said about your solving rate.”
She glanced at Amante, but nothing in his tone of voice or expression suggested that he was teasing her. The best idea would obviously be to keep quiet. Follow Pärson’s advice, get shot of this mess, and put the whole case behind her.
“I’ve got the best clearance rate when it comes to murder investigations,” she found herself saying instead. She heard the note of pride in her own voice.
“In Violent Crime?”
She shook her head. “In the whole country, actually. Almost all the cases I’ve investigated have ended up solved.”
He turned toward her and she could sense his skepticism.
“We’re talking solved from a police perspective,” she added. “Not necessarily guilty verdicts. In two of the cases the perpetrators are dead. And in two more they’ve fled abroad and can’t be brought to justice because of that. And in one … in one the perpetrator was released on appeal, unfortunately.”
She bit her top lip gently. Thought about saying that the appeal was successful because of an unusually sloppy prosecutor, but decided against it.
“Either way, I’ve concluded all my investigations. Answered all the questions and worked out what happened, who did what and why.”
“I get it. So Pärson’s going to shuffle a few papers to keep this from affecting your statistics.”
“Something like that,” she mumbled.
“Great,” Amante said in a tone that suggested he meant the exact opposite. Silence fell inside the car as he studied her.
Julia pulled up at a red light. She went on staring straight ahead to avoid meeting his gaze. Even so, he seemed to have read her mind.
“You still think Sarac is our victim, don’t you?”
She realized she was biting her lip again and made a mental note to stop doing that.
“I haven’t seen any evidence to prove that he isn’t. The fact that Pärson says Sarac is locked up is one thing, but I know him well enough to assume he hasn’t called to check. If he even knows where to start. I’ve made a few calls myself, but no one seems to know where Sarac is.”
She turned to look at Amante.
“What about you? What do you think?”
“I was actually thinking of asking if you had any plans for the weekend.” He smiled that cryptic little smile again, and for a moment she thought he was going to ask her out.
“Why?” she said, more abruptly than she intended.
“Well, if you’re free, I wondered if you fancy a little trip up north.”
“Where to?”
“Pick me up at one o’clock tomorrow and you’ll find out.”
The car behind them blew its horn and Julia realized the lights had turned green.
Three (#ulink_bbf2eec2-8ede-5e8d-a748-6745ae2b5a49)
A monotonous four-hour drive—that was what Julia’s Saturday afternoon had consisted of so far. Back roads, fir forests, and wildlife fences.
This wasn’t how she had imagined the weekend. She had been planning to work out, finish the book she never seemed to get to the end of, go to the movies, or do one of the other things that got her through weekends when she wasn’t working. Instead she was sitting behind the wheel, glancing at Amante as he watched the GPS bubble on the screen of his smartphone.
“Turn right here.” Amante pointed toward an anonymous-looking side road. “One kilometer of country road, then we’re there.”
“Okay.”
She wondered how he’d found out the address of the nursing home; she’d even asked him about it when she picked him up outside his apartment. But, as usual, all she got in response was that tentative little smile.
About half an hour earlier they had stopped at a gas station to look at the map and see what Amante’s smartphone could tell them about their destination. The satellite picture showed what looked like a manor house with two wings. Surrounding the main building was a large park that stretched all the way down to a small lake. If you zoomed in really close, you could just make out the walls and fences surrounding the entire property. But as they approached the facility, none of that was visible apart from a section of wall, a security lodge, and a large metal gate. All you could see from the gate was tall, well-established trees in the park beyond.
Julia drove slowly into the visitors’ parking lot and turned the engine off.
According to Google, the home had originally been built as a sanatorium. Over the years it had been an adult education college and an old people’s home. According to one five-year-old article, it had been sold and turned into a nursing home, but that was about it. It wasn’t even possible to find a phone number for the main switchboard, so, whatever they were doing there, they were keen to avoid publicity—which seemed fairly logical if they were treating patients with PTSD. The female security guard behind the glass hatch was similarly welcoming.
“Sorry.” The speaker fixed in the reinforced glass gave the guard’s voice a metallic clang. “All visits need to be authorized in advance. Those are the rules.”
Amante raised his ID higher, pressing it against the glass.
“Like I said, we’re police officers, and we’re conducting an investigation. It’s extremely important that we see David Sarac.”
“If it’s that important, then you should have spoken to the senior consultant and got him to arrange a visit. Anyway, you’re not a police officer; it says you’re a civilian investigator on your ID.”
Amante took a sharp breath, but Julia put her hand on his shoulder before he could say anything else. Arguing with a guard was never a good idea. She recognized the type all too well. Low-level employees who were given a tiny bit of power and made the absolute most of it. She stepped forward and held her own ID up against the glass just as Amante had done.
“I’m a police officer,” she said. “And, like my partner just said, it’s very important that we see one of the patients here. His name is David Sarac.”
The guard leaned closer to the glass. Read her name on her ID. “Look here, Detective Inspector … Gabrielsson. You see those signs?”
She pointed to a yellow rectangle with black lettering hanging above her head. Then at another one a short distance away on the heavy metal gate.
“This is a secure site. That means no unauthorized access. Under any circumstances. And seeing as neither you nor your colleague appear on the list of names, that means you aren’t authorized, whether you’re police officers or not. Those are the rules. People have lost their job for less.”
“What sort of nursing home gets classified as a fucking secure site?”
Amante’s sudden outburst took Julia by surprise. She squeezed his arm and got him to shut up. The guard glared at him.
“We look after soldiers here: people who have been in wars. According to the Security Police, that makes it a potential target.”
Amante opened his mouth to reply, but Julia squeezed his arm again, harder this time. What was wrong with him?
“Rules are rules,” she said to the guard. “Obviously we appreciate that you’re just doing your job. You’ll have to excuse my colleague: the case we’re investigating is pretty serious. A lot of pressure.”
She looked over toward the metal gate. The sign on it was bright yellow, but it was already bleached by the sun. And the barbed wire on top of the wall didn’t look new.
“We’ll call the senior consultant and come back tomorrow.” She bustled Amante a couple of steps toward the car before she turned round again. “By the way, how long has the home been classified as a secure site?”
“Since sometime last winter,” the metallic voice replied.
“Do you remember which month?”
The guard glared at Julia, then at Amante.
“Early March. Why?”
“Oh, no reason. Just curious. Thanks for your help.” She nodded to Amante to get in the car. She didn’t say anything until the doors were closed. But he beat her to it.
“Coming here was a long shot—I said that before we set off—but maybe if we wait until it gets dark—”
“And do what?” Julia interrupted. “Climb over the wall? Break in through a door? Smash a few windows at random?” She shook her head. “We have no idea what the inside of the building is like. And if our suspicions are right and Sarac is our dead body, then we’re looking for someone who isn’t even in there.”
Amante looked suddenly sullen. “Sorry I dragged you up here for nothing. We could have waited till Monday, I could have asked my contact to get hold of the senior consultant’s number. I got carried away …”
Julia held up a finger to get him to stop talking. The metal gate was slowly swinging open. A car drove out, followed by another one. Then a motorcycle. The vehicles stopped and a man in uniform emerged from the security lodge to check the backseats and trunks. He even insisted on looking behind the motorcyclist’s visor and seeing some ID before he allowed them to leave.
The vehicles passed their parked car. Two men in the first car, a lone woman in the second one. It wasn’t possible to determine the gender of the motorcyclist. All three vehicles turned left at the junction a short distance away.
“They’re very conscientious with their exit checks,” Julia muttered. She looked at the time. Quarter past five. Probably a change of shift. Suddenly she had an idea. She turned the key in the ignition and roared off, following the three other vehicles.
They caught up with the motorcycle just before the small village that consisted of little more than a cluster of bungalows and a gas station. The motorcycle turned off at the gas station and pulled up at its little hot dog stand. Without saying anything to Amante, Julia got out of the car. She walked toward the stand, but when she was almost there she pulled out her phone and pretended to take a call. The biker, a man in his fifties, had taken his helmet off and was chatting to the attractive woman in the stand—she was maybe half his age—before she put together his order. The smell of fast food reminded Julia that it had been a while since she had eaten anything.
She waited until the man had gotten his food, put his helmet back on, and driven off before walking up to the window.
“Hello,” she said.
The woman behind the counter returned the greeting.
“Regulars, eh?” Julia said, nodding toward the disappearing motorbike. “I’ve just come from the nursing home. It was the staff who told me to come here.”
She smiled, trying to come across as friendly and unthreatening as she read the menu.
“Well …” The young woman hesitated over her reply, but Julia’s smile seemed to convince her. “You could say that. Some of them stop off here practically every night.”
“Best place for an evening burger, the girl in the gatehouse said. You probably know her: fair hair, keeps herself in shape. Maybe a little grumpy?”
“Mia. Yes, she can be a bit sullen.” The young woman gave a wry smile and Julia reflected it back to her.
“Mia—that was it. Smart too. You seem to know what’s going on as well. Who works where and so on.”
“This is a pretty small place: everyone knows everyone else. The doctors live in town, but most of the other staff up there come from around here.”
“You don’t happen to know if anyone’s left recently?” Julia said. “Someone who maybe lost their job last winter, something like that?”
Another long shot, based on something Security Mia had said. People have lost their job for less. But Julia could tell from the evasive look in the young woman’s eyes that she’d guessed right.
She leaned over the counter and held out her police ID. She saw the woman’s eyes open wide.
“It’s vital that we talk to that person, right away.”
* * *
The man looking out from the gap in the door was wearing underpants, a T-shirt, and a grubby dressing gown, even though it was late afternoon. His eyes were red and a cloying, burned smell that Julia recognized all too well drifted out across the crooked front steps. She cautiously took hold of the door handle from the outside.
“Eskil Svensson?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Food delivery from Isa in the kiosk.” She held up the plastic bag and let it dangle from her forefinger. The smell from it made her stomach rumble.
The man in the robe seemed just as hungry as she was. He reached out one hand for the bag without letting go of the door with the other.
At that moment Julia tugged the door toward her, which made the man lose his balance and tumble out onto the porch, where he landed at their feet. Before he had time to react, she put one knee against the back of his neck and twisted his arm behind his back. Then she winked at Amante.
“Police,” he said, sounding rather breathless. “We’d like to ask you some questions.”
Four (#ulink_e01d0cd2-0f8d-5966-8c52-f6142ce841b7)
“The girls are watching television. I was thinking of going for a run round the Altorp track. I’ll be gone an hour at the most. Then I thought we could have a nice, cozy evening together.”
Stenberg’s wife came into his study with a cup of coffee in her hand. She put it down at a safe distance from the keyboard, leaned over, and kissed him on the head.
“You look tired.” She ran her hand through his hair, forcing him to look up from the screen. “Is it anything in particular? Anything you want to talk about?”
“No,” Stenberg muttered. “Just a lot going on.”
“Is the prosecutor general causing trouble again?”
He nodded absentmindedly and looked at the screen again.
“The prime minister trusts you, Jesper, now more than ever. The fact is that the whole party trusts you, so you can’t let little things like that get in your way. We need a modernized justice system; we’ve needed one for ages. Otherwise people will gradually lose faith in the system. The contract between citizens and the state, all the things we discussed ad infinitum at law school. You already had a vision back then, a conviction that made people take notice of you. It made me notice you.”
“I know, darling. But trying to reform state institutions is a constant uphill struggle: various government and other entities everywhere having their say on things, with everyone terrified of losing influence.”
“What about Wallin? Can’t you let him do some of the heavy lifting?”
Stenberg felt his jaw tighten. Even here at home in his study, his inner sanctum, Wallin cast his baleful shadow.
Karolina raised her eyebrows. “Is it Wallin who’s the problem?”
Damn. She knew him far too well. Noticed the slightest change in his expression. She could even hear things he didn’t say. Keeping his affair with Sophie Thorning secret all those years had taken all his willpower and concentration. Yet he knew he probably wouldn’t have been able to lie if Karolina had confronted him, if she’d asked straight out if he was being unfaithful and looked at him the way she was right now. Fortunately she never had.
He filled his lungs, then slowly breathed out through his mouth.
“What’s this all about?” Her tone of voice was perfect, a fitting combination of concern and empathy. Karolina would have been a brilliant lawyer, but instead she had put his career ahead of her own. Taken on the role of supportive wife and mother to his children. Her grandfather had been foreign minister; her father, Karl-Erik, was a member of the party’s inner circle. She had opened doors for him that he could never even have dreamed of. And how had he thanked her? With betrayal, lies, and infidelity.
For a couple of moments the feeling he had had last winter was back, the conviction that he ought to tell her everything. Beg for her forgiveness. But he couldn’t ask that of her. It wasn’t Karolina’s responsibility to lighten his burden.
“Oscar Wallin …” He took a sip of his coffee to make what he was thinking of saying sound less loaded. “He’s very ambitious. You saw him with John Thorning. Wallin is forming new alliances, and, to be honest, I’ve started to have doubts about his loyalty.”
Karolina leaned against the edge of the desk.
“Wallin couldn’t be national police chief. We agreed on that. You, me, and Daddy. Appointing Eva Swensk gained you support within the party, support you’re going to need in the future. We’re going to need …”
She paused and stroked his hair again. He liked her hands, even though she herself didn’t. Those long, strong fingers. The hands of a person who could be practically anything she wanted to be.
“Right now it’s more important than ever to think strategically. You have to see things in a longer perspective, not just focus on the present. If you’re convinced that the goal is the right one, you mustn’t hesitate to make unpalatable decisions. Keep your eye on the prize.”
He shut his eyes. He’d seen this trick before and was starting to get a bit tired of it. Karolina’s lips were moving, but the voice coming out of her mouth belonged to someone else.
“If we win the election, the prime minister will probably step down at the next party conference. Go out at the top. And if we lose …”
She pulled out a chair and sat down next to him.
“If we lose, he’ll have to accept the consequences and resign at once. Either way, the party will be looking for a younger, more energetic successor. Someone whom can reform politics the way he’s reforming the justice system.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Stenberg said, but more and more often these days he wasn’t sure whom he was replying to: Karolina, or her father.
* * *
Julia Gabrielsson held up the little plastic bag of marijuana she’d found on Eskil Svensson’s coffee table. Waved it slowly in front of his pallid face.
“So, to sum up: a mysterious man calling himself Frank contacted you early in February and paid you to take messages to and from Sarac inside the home, and then a bit more for helping Sarac escape. But that’s as much as you know.”
Eskil was sitting on the sofa between her and Amante, shaking his head.
“And you don’t know where this Frank came from or what he wanted with Sarac?”
“Like I said, he showed up in the pub one evening and started buying me drinks. Then he asked for a favor. It didn’t sound too difficult and the money was good. Then it sort of grew …” He pulled a pained expression and seemed to be avoiding looking at the bag of marijuana between Julia’s fingers.
“And you started to acquire a taste for the money. I get that.” She put the bag down on the table in front of Eskil. “This is quite a stash. I’d guess about a year in prison, wouldn’t you say, Amante?”
“Maybe two,” he said somberly as he stared at Eskil. “Possession with intent to supply—that’s serious stuff.”
Julia was having trouble keeping a straight face. Amante was a fast learner.
Eskil turned even paler. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.
“Come off it. That’s my weed. I’m not some fucking dealer. Look, I’ve told you all I know. The only thing I did was get the master key copied. Then we decided what time was best if you wanted to escape without being spotted. Sarac got out and hid in the trunk of my car during the shift change. Then I let him out at the railway station and gave him a train ticket, a travel card for Stockholm, and a bit of cash. That’s all.”
“And then you got caught,” Amante said.
“No, for fuck’s sake! Haven’t you been listening?” Eskil threw his arms out. “They accused me of stealing drugs.”
“The sleeping pills and tranquilizers that you gave Sarac.”
“That’s right. I understand the tranquilizers. I mean, the guy wasn’t well. But he already had a bag full of sleeping pills, so I can’t see why he wanted two more. But he said it was important—that he needed to have exactly twenty-five before he left. Otherwise he wasn’t going anywhere.”
“So it was the pills that got you the sack?” Julia said.
“Shit, you two are unbelievable,” Eskil groaned. “Aren’t there any entrance requirements for joining the police? I’ve already told you what happened. No one fired me. They couldn’t prove anything, so I was given six months’ wages in return for handing in my resignation. I didn’t want to work there anyway. You’ve seen what it’s like there. It’s a fascist setup. The staff have to give urine samples, all kinds of crap like that …”
“This mysterious Frank,” Julia said. “Tell us about him again.”
Eskil let out a theatrical sigh.
“Like I’ve already said a thousand times: he and Sarac had been on that island together last winter. Where a load of people got killed. That’s why he wanted to talk to Sarac.”
“And you don’t remember anything else about Frank apart from the fact that he might have had a slight accent, paid well, and acted like a cop?”
“No. I mean, it’s several months ago now. Actually, he did have a bit of a limp, even though he looked like he was in good shape.”
Julia started waving the bag of weed again. “What do you think about getting a sniffer dog out here?” she said to Amante. “Turn this apartment upside down. Maybe ask the neighbors if they’ve noticed drug dealing going on here.”
“Do you want me to call right away?”
“Probably just as well. Eskil here isn’t exactly a rocket scientist. I doubt we’re going to get anything else useful out of him.”
She turned toward Eskil and could almost see the cogs turning inside his head. Amante slowly got to his feet and pulled out his cell phone.
“Wait,” Eskil said. “Wait, for fuck’s sake! I’ve got something you might want to see.”
He started to dig about in the pockets of his dressing gown. He fished out a smartphone with a cracked screen and started to look through it.
“Here,” he said eagerly, holding the phone out to Julia. “Sarac made me take a picture.”
The screen showed a grainy photograph of a man with sharp features. He was half facing away and seemed unaware that he was being photographed.
“That’s Frank. See what I mean about him looking like a cop?”
Five (#ulink_d2d908f3-8031-5b5b-8e53-162cc6263634)
The rain started falling just as they passed the sports ground on the edge of the village. Tiny drops to start with, barely enough for Julia to switch the windshield wipers on. But gradually the rain got harder, wiping out the distinction between the summer’s evening and the forest spreading out on either side of the road.
“What do we do now?” Amante said. “Call Pärson and tell him that Sarac isn’t in the home after all? That we’ve got a picture of the man who lured him out and probably killed him?”
Julia shook her head.
“It’s too soon to talk to Pärson. This is the Security Police’s case now, and you heard me promise to let go of it completely. And seeing as it was Pärson who tried to convince us that Sarac was in that home, I’m not entirely sure where he stands. But regardless of who we go to with all this, it would be better to wait until we’ve got something more definite than a grainy digital photograph and a first name.”
“So what are you thinking, then?”
“I don’t know yet. I need some time to think.”
Besides, I’m still not entirely sure where you stand either, she thought. You seem a bit too eager to press on with this case.
“Sure,” Amante said. “We’ve got at least a four-hour drive home, so take as much time as you need.” He started fiddling with the car radio and managed to find three different commercials before he ended up with a soppy Whitney Houston ballad.
They were approaching a junction beside an old house. From a distance it looked almost abandoned, but as they drove past, Julia could see the ghostly glow of a television in one of the windows.
“Just think, people choose to live out here,” she said, mostly to give her brain something else to think about for a few minutes. “So far away from absolutely everything.”
“A surprising number of people are prepared to die for the chance to do that,” Amante muttered.
“What did you say?”
He looked up. Didn’t seem to have noticed that he’d spoken out loud.
“Just that a surprising number of people are prepared to risk their lives to get here. Hundreds of thousands of them.”
Julia saw an opening and decided to make the most of it.
“Lampedusa must be a nightmare. Isn’t it? I can understand if you’d rather not talk about it.”
“At its worst, there were two boats arriving each week.” Amante’s voice was lower all of a sudden, more monotonous. “Well, maybe not boats, exactly. Some of them were little more than a small hull and an engine. The bigger ships were even worse. No food, no toilets, hardly any drinking water. Cargo holds so packed that the air sometimes ran out down there. Did you know …”
The words seemed to catch in his throat.
“Did you know that dead people can stay on their feet if they’re packed together tightly enough? Rigor mortis turns them into statues. Men, women, children, whole families. If you listen carefully you can almost hear them still calling for help.”
He turned away. The radio went on playing the slushy song.
“Three thousand dead each year, but the EU is reducing the funding. They’d rather spend billions of euros rescuing banks than spend a few million saving people who happen to have the wrong color skin.”
“And you said that out loud to someone who didn’t like it?”
He smiled that little smile again. “More times than I should have. A lot more.”
“So what happened?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Not a damn thing. The boats kept coming, people kept dying.”
“And you were transferred?”
“You could put it like that.”
Something in his voice told her the conversation was over, and she resisted the temptation to ask any more questions. At least for the time being.
They passed a road sign. Just under three hundred kilometers until they were home. Sooner or later she would have to make her mind up. It would be difficult to carry on with this case on her own. Besides, she was starting to appreciate Amante’s company, albeit slightly reluctantly. The smile that was so hard to read. The unconventional way he went about tackling problems. The way he quickly adapted to different situations. But, perhaps most of all, the way he talked about the victims, the dead.
“My dad was in the police,” she said. “My grandfather too. They didn’t really talk that much about police work at home. Mom didn’t like it. She probably didn’t want me to hear their stories. But I still realized—worked out that what they did was something different, something you couldn’t really understand if you hadn’t experienced it yourself. That was probably what made me want to become a police officer. To start with, I thought it was all about adrenaline. About putting yourself in danger. It took me several years to realize that it was actually about something else entirely. About seeing people when they’re at their very worst. Drunk, distraught, furious, humiliated, beaten up, raped, or dead. About seeing that and trying to do something about it. About failing more often than succeeding, but still not giving up.”
She fell silent, thinking about Sarac’s mutilated body. And his distorted grimace.
Amante said nothing. But she was sure he was listening carefully—that he understood exactly what she meant. The light of the car’s headlights reflected off a pair of eyes at the side of the road. She noticed a fleeting movement and switched her foot from the accelerator to the brake, but the animal was gone. A cat, or maybe a fox?
“You said you didn’t know all the details about Skarpö,” she said. “There were two other people who were found out there with Sarac. Right beside him, to be more accurate.”
Amante turned to look at her. “Who were they?”
“The first one was a woman, Natalie Aden. She worked as Sarac’s personal assistant after his car accident. Her intervention saved Sarac’s life. We should at least talk to her. Show her Frank’s picture and see if she recognizes him. But I think we ought to start with the second person. If anyone can identify Frank, it’s probably him.”
“Who are we talking about?”
“Atif Kassab. Seven years ago he was a notorious member of the Stockholm underworld. A nasty bastard. He retired and left the country with his mother. Didn’t show up again until last winter, at his brother’s funeral. Looks like someone managed to persuade him to go back to work.” She dimmed the lights as a car came toward them. “Kassab blew Superintendent Peter Molnar’s brains out on Skarpö, along with another three people, and took a couple of bullets himself. It looked like he wasn’t going to make it for a while, but thanks to Natalie Aden’s actions he survived as well.”
Unfortunately, she added to herself.
“Kassab said nothing when he was questioned, and kept quiet all the way through his trial: never said a word about why he was on the island or who had hired his services. He was given a life sentence—didn’t even bother to appeal against it.”
“Strange.”
Julia nodded. “Very. But there are plenty of things about Skarpö that are strange. Atif Kassab is being held in one of the ‘phoenix’ high-security units south of the city. It’s a long shot, but I suggest we go and see him as soon as possible.”
“So we’re going to ask a cop killer for his help?”
“Yes, to track down another one,” Julia said. “What do you think?”
Amante didn’t answer, but from the corner of her eye Julia caught another glimpse of that cryptic smile.
Six (#ulink_8dcfce41-2375-5b3a-8153-e3ed3d257530)
Phoenix. The bird that catches fire, dies in the flames, and is then reborn out of its own ashes with shimmering new plumage.
The name couldn’t be more inappropriate. No one in the prison was transformed into a better version of himself and emerging as a new, well-adapted individual with sparkling new feathers, ready to be embraced by society. The majority would end up back behind bars within a couple of years, for crimes just as bad as the first time around.
Maybe that was the cycle of repetition that the name hinted at? A sort of ironic wink: We all know how this is going to turn out, don’t we?
Atif Kassab pushed his breakfast tray aside and laid three cards facedown on the table in front of him. He noticed himself looking up at the camera in the ceiling above him. One of several hundred. The phoenix units were built to house the most dangerous prisoners in the country, those deemed most likely to try to escape. No doors or gates led to the outside world; the only way out was through an underground tunnel that led to another unit. A prison inside a prison.
He looked at the men at the other tables in the dayroom. Fifteen of them in total, an interesting mix of murderers, drug dealers, and bank robbers. They weren’t all particularly dangerous or likely to abscond. The state had overestimated the capacity needed in the phoenix units and had had to dilute their occupants with ordinary criminals to keep the smart new facilities from sitting half-empty.
But a number of the men had no boundaries at all. In the wrong situation they could be lethal, both to themselves and those around them. The big, square guy at the table in the middle, the wall-eyed one called Rosco, was the current unofficial boss of the unit. Rosco had come over and introduced himself in the first few days. Shook hands gangster-style, spouted a load of names of people Atif didn’t know and gangs he’d never heard of. In here he was a cop killer, someone viewed with respect. But the conversation was about more than mere pleasantries. Rosco was evaluating him, trying to work out if he was a threat, if he was going to upset the balance of power.
Atif had no interest at all in prison politics. He kept himself to himself, read books, and worked out in the small gym. Rubber straps and Pilates balls. No weights, nothing that could, according to Prison Service regulations, turn already dangerous criminals into mountains of muscle. But the exercise on offer was enough for his body to recuperate gradually from its injuries. The doctors had removed four meters of gut, drained almost a liter of blood from his torso, and patched up a number of less serious injuries. He had survived, and he knew whom he had to thank for that. He hoped he would be able to convey his thanks in person one day.
Atif stared blankly at the cards in front of him, then closed his eyes. He tried to conjure up an image of his house back home in Iraq. The scent of the almond tree in the back garden. The starry sky up above. But in spite of the fact that he regularly tried to keep the memory alive, it was getting hazier, losing its color, like the old pictures in his mother’s well-thumbed photo albums. Pale imitations of what had once been. Something that was now lost. He wondered how she was. If she was still in the nursing home in Najaf, or if his aunt had moved her farther south, away from the fighting in the north. He’d written a couple of times, hoping to hear if the money was arriving each month. But he hadn’t yet received a reply.
Atif turned the first card over. The seven of hearts. Tindra had turned seven three weeks ago. He’d sent her a card. He came close to writing that he missed her, that he’d do anything to hear her voice, no matter how briefly. But he didn’t want her to come here. To have to go through all the security checks just so they could sit on opposite sides of a table. He still wouldn’t be able to hold her.
Besides, her mother would never let her visit him. Cassandra needed to keep him as far away from her as possible, a decision he couldn’t blame her for. He had wounded and killed people last winter, people who had families, friends, and business acquaintances outside the prison walls. People who were waiting for a chance to get their revenge. But as long as Abu Hamsa was protecting Cassandra and Tindra, no one would dare do anything. Which was rather ironic, to put it mildly, given that the old man was his worst enemy. Abu Hamsa had manipulated him, commissioned him to track down a ghost when it was actually the old man himself who had had Adnan killed, leaving Tindra without a father.
Abu Hamsa had sent him a message via Cassandra. Don’t tell the police anything, serve your sentence, follow my instructions. She hadn’t needed to say more than that. Didn’t have to utter the words that were hanging in the air.
Or else …
So Atif had played along. He followed Abu Hamsa’s instructions obediently, played patience and waited to be dealt the right cards. Something that changed the field of play.
Atif moved his hand to the card next to the seven of hearts. But before he could turn it over, the door of the dayroom opened and the head screw, Blom, walked in. He looked like a cover boy from Men’s Health. High cheekbones, spray tan, and short, tinted hair in a gentle wave across his forehead. Right behind him, between another two gym-pumped screws, Atif could just make out a birdlike little man in prison clothes that were too big for him.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” the head screw said, as always slightly louder than necessary. “This is our latest resident. Perhaps you’d like to introduce yourself, Gilsén?”
Blom stepped aside. The little man remained where he was between the two guards, clutching the paper bag he was holding in his hands. The smell of his fear managed to overpower Blom’s body lotion.
The senior guard waited another few seconds. Exchanged a malicious glance with his colleagues.
“Well, I daresay you’ll all have time to chew the fat later on. Follow me, Gilsén, and we’ll get you installed in your suite. It’s probably not quite up to the standard you’re used to.”
The guards lumbered out of the dayroom with Gilsén between them. Atif watched the men over at Rosco’s table lean closer to each other, covering their mouths so that the cameras and microphones wouldn’t pick up what they were saying.
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Литагент HarperCollins
WINNER SWEDISH CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR.The adrenaline-charged and suspenseful thriller set in a ruthless world where all means are permitted in the fight for power.When a savaged body is found in the waters outside the governing party’s conference centre, the case lands on detective Julia Gabrielsson’s desk. Who is the deceased and why has somebody gone to such trouble to make sure the body is unidentifiable?Officer David Sarac is a man haunted by demons. After a violent showdown that almost cost him his life, the policeman is being treated at a closed ward far from the capital. Soon he will permanently silence the accusing voices in his head. But a mysterious offer has David changing his mind.
Copyright (#ulink_d2b36e5e-2064-57c2-bd58-d61dfc32c484)
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © 2015 Anders de la Motte
Translation copyright © Neil Smith 2017
Published by agreement with Solomonsson Agency
Cover design by Richard Augustus © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photographs © Robert Jones / Arcangel Images (http://www.arcangel.com)
Anders de la Motte asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Originally published as UltiMatum in 2015 in Sweden
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008101138
Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008101145
Version: 2017-04-25
Dedication (#ulink_d6acb56d-669a-5d38-af53-ca4c53d25e7f)
For Anette
Contents
Cover (#ub3be3f14-b96a-57f9-ab37-7fde255cc0e2)
Title Page (#u3de62ae7-6c67-58d5-8ef0-63d4bbbeef08)
Copyright (#uba5327b5-fbbb-5c56-a5bd-4c24700641e1)
Dedication (#u386a39a0-ce8d-599a-8fa6-a773f7c3abb2)
Prologue (#u126ccfe4-3f13-570c-846f-851ede1f43d2)
Chapter One (#u127fb26c-c7d5-5c12-84b2-94cc92982c67)
Chapter Two (#u4bce44d3-460d-5bf2-a24c-94697f5e40db)
Chapter Three (#u503c0467-3315-51db-bbf4-231bc22c3a15)
Chapter Four (#u9d518176-28e9-50cd-bd5f-2742f6f72f4b)
Chapter Five (#uaa21cfa2-20bd-5787-ba0e-03bd0190c190)
Chapter Six (#u7a3f1c55-8461-5c99-83e9-8bf24c710c6e)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Thanks (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Anders de la Motte (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_d9abcdfc-ec73-5574-8820-5afda5211064)
Even though she was only just past thirty, Detective Inspector Julia Gabrielsson had seen plenty of dead bodies. Probably more than most police officers, with the exception of the bull elephants in the far corridor of the Violent Crime Unit. The old guys with minty breath who appraised her figure unashamedly, used password as the password on their computers, and could never be reached after two o’clock. But she doubted that the closet alcoholics in the Tic Tac club had ever seen anything as disgusting as the body lying on the autopsy table in front of her. If you could actually call it a body.
Nine years had passed since her earliest visit to the Forensic Medicine Unit in Solna. Her first body hadn’t wanted to make a lot of fuss. He lay there quietly in his apartment for a whole summer while the maggots slowly dissolved him onto the parquet floor, and she felt her knees wobble when the body bag was opened. The body on the slab in front of them was worse. Much worse.
She glanced at her colleague, Amante, who was standing beside her. His Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down frenetically in his freshly shaven neck. Not exactly a gentle introduction. As long as he didn’t actually throw up. She stepped back discreetly to remove her shoes and trousers from the danger zone.
Amante seemed to notice her looking. He turned his head and gave her an apologetic smile. The eyes behind his dark-framed glasses were brown and looked simultaneously friendly and mournful, which surprised Julia. Revulsion would have been much more expected. Or why not a hint of good old Get-me-out-of-here panic? That would have been perfectly understandable. After all, her new partner wasn’t a proper police officer but a civilian investigator. Infinitely more at home sitting in a cozy office surrounded by statistics than getting stuck in practical police work. The only question was why her fat boss had without warning foisted an oversensitive office clerk on her? She made up her mind to solve that particular mystery before the day was out.
The thin-haired pathologist in front of them leafed through his sheaf of papers but evidently failed to find the form he was looking for. Unless he was just searching for the right words with which to start his explanation. Somewhere in the depths of the Forensic Medicine Center an air-conditioning unit rumbled to life, making a subdued but ominous sound.
Amante swallowed again. Julia nodded at him and forced herself to summon up something that resembled an encouraging smile.
Just look away for a minute, she thought. That’s a perfectly understandable human response. The living don’t like to see the dead. Don’t like to be reminded of what lies ahead. Rich, poor, good or evil. Sooner or later we all end up lying there with cold, stiff limbs. All the same in death. That’s why most people look away from the dead, say something unrelated, or make some stupid joke simply to break the silence.
But not her. She belonged to a considerably smaller group of people. People who exploit the silence surrounding the dead. Observing. Listening. Understanding.
Everyone has a rhythm, a way they move through life. She learned that in her first year in Violent Crime. With some people you can see their rhythm fairly easily, but others require more concentration. Especially if you’re trying to work out that rhythm in hindsight. Reading it from homes, belongings, bodies, and—not least—crime scenes. It’s easy to let yourself be distracted. Do what most of her colleagues did and concentrate on the things that are yelling for attention. Weapons, accessories, blood, fingerprints. Obvious signs of violence and death.
That’s often enough to get them quite a long way, but sometimes it takes more than that. Sometimes it takes someone like her, who stands completely silent, just listening carefully. Seeking out the tiny details that disturb the rhythm. A glass missing from a cupboard, a belt that’s been fastened wrongly, a small bruise in an odd place, maybe just a lingering smell. Little things that appear to be utterly inconsequential to everyone except her, but that turn out to be the exact opposite when seen in context.
That was how Julia had built her reputation in Violent Crime. Not by talking, shouting orders, or cross-examining suspects. But by listening.
The dead body on the examination table hadn’t yet said anything to her, hadn’t revealed its identity or what sort of life it had lived. Which wasn’t terribly strange, seeing as someone had gone to great lengths to make sure the corpse would stay silent.
To start with, the body was naked. And it had been chopped into fourteen pieces. Twelve of them were on the metal table in front of them. The pathologist had put everything in the correct place. Head, torso, upper and lower arms, thighs, shins, and feet. But because the pieces weren’t joined together, the body looked like a macabre puppet, too absurd to be human.
The skin, which only partially covered the body parts, was gray and half-dissolved. In several places the bones jutted out. The fat, sinews, and muscles that ought to have been around them were either gone or transformed into a pale, soapy sludge out of which seawater was still oozing. It formed small pools on the stainless steel worktop before the law of gravity persuaded the water to start to make its way slowly toward the gullies at the corners of the table.
Where the corpse’s face should have been there was almost nothing left. Just a jagged mosaic made up of splinters of bone, skin, and gristle. The eye sockets gaped empty, the nose was missing altogether, and from the shattered jaw the minuscule stumps of a few teeth poked out. As if the dead body were smiling at them. Grinning at its own wretched condition.
Julia cast another glance at Amante. Stupidly, he had gone back to staring at the body. He seemed almost to be forcing himself to keep his eyes on the leering skull. She wondered if it was a macho thing, that he didn’t want to seem weak in front of her and the pathologist. In which case he was more stupid than he had seemed during their short conversation on the way there.
“The body was found in Lake Mälaren, just outside Källstavik, at a depth of twenty meters. But you already know that.” The pathologist with the Donald Trump hair finally seemed to have found what he was looking for. “Judging by the state it’s in, I’d say the body has been in the water for about four months. I’ll be able to say more after tissue analysis. The bottom-feeders have had plenty of time to do their thing. Most of it has been …”
He gestured toward the corpse as he appeared to consider his choice of words.
“Eaten,” Julia stated before he had time to make his mind up. Amante made a faint whimpering sound, then hid it quickly by clearing his throat.
“Male or female?” Julia said, even though she was already fairly sure of the answer.
“Hard to tell right now,” the pathologist said. “My first impression is that we’re dealing with a man. And the statistics back me up on that. But we won’t know for sure until we’ve taken a closer look at the pelvis.”
“And the t-tool …?” Amante’s voice sounded hollow. He licked his lips a couple of times but couldn’t bring himself to finish the rest of the sentence. In spite of the cool air in the room, a tiny droplet of sweat had formed on his right temple, just below the arm of his glasses.
“Can you say anything about the tool that was used to dismember him?” Julia said.
“A very powerful motorized tool with extremely sharp teeth.”
“A chain saw?” Amante said, making a fresh attempt, this time looking directly at the pathologist instead of down at the table, which seemed to help.
“A chain saw or possibly a reciprocating saw. I’ll know more once we’ve examined the surface of the cuts.”
The pathologist gestured toward the table again, but this time Amante was smart enough not to look down. Instead he quickly wiped the bead of sweat from his temple. He’s a fast learner: extra points for that, Julia thought.
“And presumably it isn’t possible to identify a cause of death as things stand?” she said, mostly as a statement of fact. As expected, the pathologist began shaking his head halfway through her question, which made his comb-over bob like a thin sail of hair.
“Considering the state of the body, it’s extremely doubtful that we’ll ever be able to identify the cause of death,” he said. “Whoever did this …”
The pathologist adjusted his hair as he appeared to ponder how best to continue.
Julia cast a quick glance at Amante to reassure herself that he wasn’t going to give in to the temptation to fill the gap in the conversation. But fortunately he kept his mouth shut and waited for the conclusion. A second bonus point: not bad for a civilian.
“Well …” The pathologist made a face, as if the words in his mouth tasted unpleasant. “I’ve worked here twenty-three years, Gabrielsson. Just like you, I imagine I’ve seen most of the things people are capable of, both toward themselves and others. Over the years I’ve had the dubious privilege of examining at least a dozen dismembered bodies. But this one … This perpetrator’s different. Different from pretty much everything else I’ve ever come across. Just look here, for instance.”
The pathologist pointed at the gap between the torso and one thigh, then at the corresponding gap between the upper arm and shoulder.
“No sign of hesitation on any of the cuts, not even when the perpetrator took the head off.” He moved his forefinger to the even stump above the shoulders. “Depriving someone of their humanity so brutally doesn’t normally happen without a degree of anxiety, and that’s usually clearly visible on the body. Superficial trial cuts, abandoned or failed attempts that demonstrate the technical difficulty of handling the saw, but also the reluctance of the perpetrator. Disquiet at the terrible thing he or she is doing. Do you understand what I mean, Gabrielsson?”
Julia nodded. “But not this perpetrator. He didn’t hesitate.”
The pathologist adopted his bitter expression again.
“No, see for yourself. Thirteen very decisive cuts, one for each joint. All the way through, right through muscle and bone. Whoever did this was in full command of himself and the situation.”
“What about the face, then?” Julia said with a frown, nodding toward the badly ravaged body. “The perpetrator seems to have been rather less in control there. How does that fit your theory?”
The pathologist shook his head hesitantly.
“This is purely speculation, but I’m fairly sure that the condition of the face doesn’t reflect any emotional outburst. The perpetrator simply wanted to make sure that there was no way the body could be identified.”
He pointed at one lower arm, then the grinning jaw.
“Both hands are still missing, and the facial features and teeth have been almost totally destroyed. Which, obviously, makes it impossible to check fingerprints or dental records, or circulate pictures of the victim’s face. Admittedly that does leave us with DNA identification, but—even if we do manage to get a reasonably clean tissue sample—that presupposes that the victim’s profile is already in the police database or that you’ll find another sample to match it against at a later point in the investigation.”
A few moments of silence followed. The air-conditioning rumbled in the background. The low sound was like thunder, gradually creeping closer.
“Add to that the black garbage bags the body parts were wrapped in,” the pathologist went on. “To start with, they were sealed with cable ties rather than tape. No sticky surfaces where forensics experts could find hairs or fibers. And as weights the perpetrator used ordinary gray stones found in any garden or stone wall. Nothing to go on there. And I found small holes here and there in the plastic, probably from a narrow knife blade. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say there are probably similar holes on the torso of the body. We’ll see once I’ve been able to stretch what remains of the skin across the stomach, but I’m fairly confident.”
“How can you be?” Amante’s voice sounded muffled. “How can you know that the perpetrator stabbed—”
“Because all the body parts were found in a limited area,” Julia said. “In one of the deepest parts of the inlet. Probably in exactly the same spot where the perpetrator dumped them last winter.”
The pathologist nodded.
“The gases given off by decomposition usually make bodies float to the surface after a week or two. A bit longer if the water’s cold; it can take a few months then. In contrast to what most people think, bodies dumped in water usually get washed up on a beach somewhere, and then they get found by a member of the public. Your perpetrator stuck holes in the bags and probably also the torso, where the decomposition is most noticeable. That way the gases were able to escape and the body parts stayed where they were down on the bottom. And the holes would also make it easier for scavengers to get in and do their thing. We’ve got half a bucket full of various bottom-feeders that made their way inside the bags. A few more months underwater and there wouldn’t have been much left.”
“You’re saying that our perpetrator is someone who knows exactly what they’re doing,” Julia said.
The pathologist held his hands up in front of him in a gesture that managed simultaneously to convey agreement and dissociation.
“Like I said, this is all speculation. All I can say is that this scenario is unlike anything I’ve come across before. If those two yachtsmen hadn’t lost their anchor in that inlet and decided to dive down to get it, this poor soul would never have been found.” He nodded toward the table. “Imagine the shock when they realized what they’d stumbled across down there in the darkness.”
Amante cleared his throat again and looked like he wasn’t having any trouble at all imaging the men’s horror.
Julia ignored him and looked back at the table again, where the dead body grinned at her with its wrecked smile. She had to admit that the pathologist’s theory was good. Logical, in light of the evidence. The perpetrator appeared to be extremely methodical, ice-cold in his thoroughness and attention to detail. But she still couldn’t shake the feeling the grimacing face gave her. A feeling of rage, of hatred.
Someone wanted you to disappear, she thought. Wanted to make sure you’d never be found. Someone you’d upset so badly that he destroyed your face. That’s what happened, isn’t it?
The dead body didn’t answer. Just went on smiling at her, as if her words amused him.
* * *
Twenty-two pills. Twenty-two white, oblong pills that he’d paid for with just as many nightmare-filled nights.
David Sarac had surreptitiously googled sleeping pills. Taking into account his emaciated body and generally poor state of health, he had worked out that twenty pills would be enough for what he wanted to achieve. But with twenty-five there would be no doubt, so he had another three nights to struggle through. Three nights of lying curled up in bed, drifting in the indistinct borderland between sleep and wakefulness, while everything that had happened out on the island replayed in his head. Always in the same order. First the snow. Heavy flakes falling on a frozen forest. A silent, dark old house. Then a low bass note, a threatening rumble on the horizon, growing louder and louder as the winter thunder approaches. Then suddenly beams of light from headlights cutting through the trees. The sound of powerful engines, of gunfire and shouted orders. Flashes from gun barrels creating a ghostly shadow play as the howls of anger, pain, and terror grow ever louder.
The thunder keeps building in intensity in the background, swallowing up all other sound until it transforms into the roar of the flames consuming the old house. A rain of sparks flies through the night sky, and the stench of gunpowder, soot, and burning flesh makes his throat sting. Just when he thinks it’s all over, when he thinks he’s finally on his way out of the nightmare, he finds himself in the middle of it again. Feels the heat of the pressure wave as it knocks him flying. The bullet hitting him in the neck, filling his airways with liquid iron. The blood on the white ground. His own blood. That of others. All of it sucked up by the snow crystals around him, until he’s lying on his back in a sea of carmine red. He hears himself laugh. A shrill laugh that sounds more like a sob. His head falls back on the snow. The world slowly starts to dissolve at the edges. Curling up like a burning photograph until it fades to black.
All this is your fault, David, the voices whisper.
It was your plan. Your fault.
Then the film starts over again. Unless he’s lucky enough to wake up, that is. Wake up locked away in a nursing home in the middle of nowhere. “For your own good, David,” as the senior consultant had said during their first conversation.
But he didn’t complain, couldn’t see any reason to do so. In a few days he was planning to leave it all behind: the island of Skarpö, the nightmares, and this place.
He scratched at the red scar running across his neck. Caught at it with his nails until it started to sting. The whispers were right. He should have died out there in the snow along with the others. Should have drowned in his own blood. It would have been a fitting punishment for his sins. Some things were simply too broken to mend.
But instead, against all the odds, he had survived. Had made a mockery of the justice he had tried to implement. David Sarac, heroic police officer. The hero who had to be kept locked away in a secure unit for his own good. But what was the alternative? For him to tell the truth about what had happened out on Skarpö? The reason why all those men had died out there in the snow? That was hardly an option, either for him or his superiors. A public relations disaster that must be avoided at all costs. That was why he was where he was. Planning his own escape.
It had taken time to build up the stock of pills. The staff had been very vigilant during the first week. They followed their routines to the letter, forcing him to open his mouth and stick his tongue out every time he took a sleeping pill. He had been careful. Played along and gained their confidence. He couldn’t afford to fail. If just one of the caregivers started to suspect, he’d find himself in the suicide wing and his plan would be thwarted.
He glanced out through the window. Between the trees he could just make out the little lake in the distance. He had explored the park during a couple of short walks when he was still considering other options beside the pills. But the light and all the sensory impressions out there had been too sharp. They exhausted his broken brain and forced him to stagger back into the safety of the building. But at least he knew that there was a fence and a heavy metal gate by the jetty. Floodlights, alarms, and cameras too, just as there were along the high brick wall by the road, and the double fence facing the dark forest on the other side. Barriers he wouldn’t have to confront. Because now he had the pills. He closed his hand around the plastic bag. Moved the pills one by one through his fingers. Counted them again. Even numbers, odd numbers.
Odds and evens.
Sarac shivered and pulled the blanket up over his legs. In spite of the heat in the gloomy little room, his fingertips and the end of his nose were always cold. He looked down at the notepad on his lap and tried to put his thoughts into words. But as usual they wouldn’t play ball. The senior consultant had suggested that he try to write down what he felt, and that was his task in advance of his next therapy session. Of course he could ignore the whole thing, tell the psychologist to go to hell and shut himself away in his room the way a couple of the other patients did. But he was keen to go on acting compliant for a few more days.
Janus, he had written. Not much to offer, really, and certainly not the sort of thing he was thinking of telling anyone.
I owe everything.
Debts I can’t escape till the day I die.
The loop of music was back in his head again. The lyrics that had helped him unpick his stroke-damaged brain last Christmas. Helped him reveal his own secrets. And his sins.
Anxiety tightened its grip around his heart and lungs.
Debts I can’t escape till the day I die.
He put the pad down and took the bag of pills out of the pocket of his cardigan. Moved the tablets around again like pearls on a strand.
Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. Only three more performances to go. Then the film of his life would be over at last.
* * *
Julia Gabrielsson turned the wheel and changed lanes abruptly as she put her foot down and with satisfaction felt the car respond instantly. It hadn’t driven more than a couple of thousand kilometers and still had that new-car smell, which was obviously preferable to the odors that would become ingrained in the seats over time. Fast food, various bodily fluids, and, not least, tedium. She had worked out a long time ago that you had to push yourself forward on Mondays, when jobs that had come in over the weekend were allocated. That way you could get hold of a decent car so you didn’t have to drive about in one of the worn-out old patrol cars that were parked in the far corner. So she always got in at six o’clock on Monday mornings and raided the key cabinet before going down to the gym. She made sure she was back in time for the morning meeting at a quarter past eight, alert, fresh from the shower, eager to get to work, and with the key to the best car in her pocket, while her bleary-eyed colleagues were sipping their first cups of coffee and wishing it was still the weekend.
She liked cars, liked driving fast. Dad used to practice his J-turns and controlled slides with her in the works parking lot every winter once she turned thirteen, and she had beaten the crap out of all the guys on the emergency response driving course. One of the many advantages of being the daughter of a police officer. It was just a shame Dad couldn’t see her now.
She finished overtaking and pulled back into the right lane.
“How long have you been back in Sweden?” Julia took her eyes off the traffic for a few seconds. High time for a bit of mundane chat with the civilian. Get him to reveal who he was and, more importantly, what he was doing on her team, in her murder investigation.
“Three weeks, give or take,” Amante muttered distantly.
“UN or Foreign Office?”
Amante shook his head. “Europol. Lampedusa. An Italian island in the Mediterranean.”
“Yes, I know. Where all the refugee boats from North Africa end up.”
Underestimating her general knowledge was a black mark, a big one that more than swallowed up the feeble plusses he had managed to scrape together so far. But she thought she’d give him a chance to correct his mistake. Or commit another one so that she could comfortably and guiltlessly file him away in the box marked Dry Academics, Type 1A.
“So you worked on refugee issues?”
“Yep. For two years,” he said with an awkward little smile. He seemed to have realized that he’d come across as patronizing.
“And now you’re here with us.”
She paused, waiting for him to explain why. But Amante merely sat there without speaking. Clearly she was going to have to try a different tactic.
“We could certainly do with some fresh blood in the Violent Crime Unit.”
That was perfectly true. The head of the unit, Pärson, held his protective hand over the old Tic Tac guys. He let them drink their way surreptitiously toward retirement at the end of the corridor. Or toward a fatal heart attack. The old men blocked the paths of other people’s careers as successfully as they did their own arteries, so the division was roughly fifty-fifty.
“We’ve been on our knees since Skarpö,” she added.
Amante looked up. “I was out of the country. Missed most of that. There were a lot of fatalities, weren’t there? Two police officers?”
“Nine dead in total. And even more injured. Several different criminal gangs clashed out there, and three of our colleagues got in the way. We still don’t really know why.”
“Oh.” Amante looked out of the side window. He wasn’t taking any of the juicy bait she was dangling right in front of his nose. He seemed more interested in the buildings swishing past along Sankt Eriksgatan.
Strange. Pretty much every police officer Julia knew wanted to talk about Skarpö. Tried to get the details out of her, anything that, against all odds, hadn’t yet been dissected and analyzed in the media or on the internal gossip network. About the gangsters and officers who had died out there, and above all about David Sarac, the heroic police officer who had survived.
“So what do you think of Eva Swensk, then?” she said in an attempt to find a fresh topic of conversation. “Our new national police chief,” she added, in a poorly disguised imitation of his dry tone of voice.
Amante turned his head toward her. “Do you know her?”
The traffic ahead of them slowed down. Julia changed lanes again and accelerated past a few more cars before skillfully pulling back into a gap. She gained five car lengths by the maneuver.
“No, I can’t really claim I do. We’ve only met a few times. I listened to a couple of her talks when she was regional police chief. She’s got a reputation for being tough and efficient. But I was still a bit surprised when Stenberg gave her the job. I thought it was going to be yet another man.”
Or, to be more accurate, one particular man, she thought. For some reason Deputy Police Commissioner Oscar Wallin had lost the race to Eva Swensk. Wallin had done all the dirty work of the reorganization only to find himself unexpectedly—and to the delight of many—pushed aside when it was time for the minister of justice to appoint a new national police chief. She still wondered what had actually happened. But Wallin wasn’t the sort of man you called up for a chat, so she’d had to contain her curiosity. It had been several months since she last heard from him, which left her feeling slightly disappointed.
Wallin was one of the few police officers she regarded as a role model. Someone who, even though he was only four or five years older than she was, had managed to make a rapid ascent through the otherwise sluggish police hierarchy. She had hoped to be able to follow him up to the top. But instead she was sitting here, babysitting an inexperienced civilian.
“The minister of justice doesn’t seem afraid to try new tactics,” Amante said, breaking her train of thought. “Did you read the article in Dagens Nyheter last week? Stenberg’s on the offensive.”
Amante’s tone was a bit more engaged now, less robotic. This subject clearly interested him more than a straightforward massacre and a couple of dead officers.
“It’ll certainly be interesting to see how many of Stenberg’s ideas can actually be put into practice,” he went on. “Anonymous witnesses, expanded possibilities to use infiltration, amnesties, or reduced sentences for perpetrators who stand witness against their fellow criminals.”
“You don’t believe in all that, then?” Julia said. “It already works that way in a ton of other countries. The police need more effective tools against organized crime; you have to admit that, surely?”
Amante shrugged his shoulders. “It doesn’t really matter what I think. But people are saying that the Bar Association is likely to try to stop a number of the proposals. And if the opposition wins the election this autumn—”
Amante broke off abruptly. He blushed slightly, as if he’d suddenly realized he was talking too much. Julia put her foot down and changed lanes again, gaining a few more places in the queue. The maneuver made Amante grab hold of the handle above the passenger door. Julia smiled to herself. Just wait until we get the lights and sirens on. But that presupposed he’d be sticking around, which she doubted. Amante clearly wasn’t an expert in either violent crime or murder investigations, and didn’t seem remotely interested in the subject. He must have been recruited to the unit for some other reason. Because someone wanted or needed him there. Superintendent Pärson was a keen adherent to the path of least resistance. Everyone knew that the fat little bastard supplemented his horse-racing pot by tipping off the evening tabloids about ongoing investigations at advantageous moments. Yet no one was ever able to catch him. He knew exactly how often he needed to change his pay-as-you-go cell phone and Western Union account. And, perhaps most importantly of all, which people to stay on the good side of: whom he ought to do favors for, and when.
She glanced surreptitiously at Amante as they approached the heavy gates leading down into the garage of Police Headquarters at Kronoberg. She couldn’t quite make sense of the rhythm she had picked up from him so far. His age was difficult to determine; she guessed at thirty-five or so. But he spoke in a rather stilted way, like someone considerably older, more like a politician than a cop. And the way he dressed was something else. A blue blazer with the gilded emblem of the Royal Swedish Yacht Club on top of a coral-colored sweater with a designer logo, just frayed enough at the collar to suggest that its owner had worn it when he sailed around Gotland. Pale slacks with a neat crease and hand-sewn boating shoes. But in place of the slicked-back, sun-bleached hair that would have matched his well-to-do summer wardrobe perfectly, Amante’s dark hair was cut short. And he didn’t have a salt-splashed suntan from Båstad or Sandhamn with lighter patches left by his sunglasses either. Amante’s skin was swarthy, like someone from southern Europe. Or even farther south. His whole rhythm was full of contradictions, a syncopated beat that was hard to follow.
“Your surname,” she said. “Is it Italian?”
“Spanish,” he replied, slightly too quickly.
An image flashed through her mind. Something on the news, a row of smartly dressed EU politicians, something about the legal system. An articulate man making critical remarks about the government and minister of justice.
“Victor Amante. The EU politician?” She guessed the answer as she saw her new colleague squirm uncomfortably in his seat.
“He’s my stepfather.”
* * *
The quiet knock made Sarac slip the bag of pills under his pillow in a flash. It was designated rest time, so no one should be disturbing him now. Had the staff begun to suspect something after all? But a search team would hardly knock and wait politely to be let in before they turned his room upside down.
“Come in,” he said as calmly as he could. He leaned back against the pillow so that the bag of pills ended up behind his back. Damn, he should have slipped the bag back into the gap he had carved out behind one of the baseboards instead of hiding it in the first place he thought of like a startled five-year-old.
One of the caregivers, a man in his late twenties whose name Sarac thought might be Eskil, came into the room. Sarac noted that he closed the door behind him in a different way from usual. Carefully, as if he were trying to be as quiet as possible. Whatever Eskil was doing there, it definitely wasn’t a search.
“Hello, David.” The nurse glanced at the closed door, then put his hand in the pocket of his uniform tunic and held out a small white envelope. “For you.”
Sarac frowned.
“Who from?” he said, without taking the envelope.
“The guy said his name was Frank.”
“Surname?”
“He didn’t say. Just that you were colleagues of some sort. That he’d been looking for you last Christmas but didn’t manage to find you.”
Sarac closed his eyes for a few seconds, searching his broken mind for an image that matched the name. He didn’t succeed.
“What did he look like?”
“Dark hair, short, bit like a cop.”
“Height, build? Other distinguishing features? You must be able to remember something?”
Eskil shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. Normal height, normal build. Looked a bit like you, but not as skinny.”
“And where did you meet this Frank?”
Eskil looked like he was getting fed up with all the questions. Instead of answering, he held the envelope out a bit farther. Waved it gently in front of Sarac’s nose.
Sarac didn’t move. He was trying to work out if the nurse’s nervousness was because he had been threatened into doing this, or because he was used to taking bribes and didn’t want to get caught.
“Just take it, for God’s sake.” Eskil glanced over his shoulder again as if expecting someone to throw the door open at any moment. So he’d been bribed, then.
Sarac still didn’t move. Could this be some sort of trap? Were they trying to trick him? Find out what he was planning to do? The distant rumble of his nightmares was suddenly back in his head. He put his hands over his ears and shut his eyes tight.
Eskil gave up his attempts to hand the letter over and tossed it onto the bed next to Sarac before heading for the door.
“I’ll look in again in an hour in case you want to send a reply. Don’t tell anyone, okay?”
“Sure,” Sarac mumbled. “Actually, hang on …”
But before he had time to say more, the nurse had left the room. Sarac quickly put his hand under the pillow. The feeling of the plastic against his fingertips was strangely reassuring. It made the roar in his head subside.
The letter was lying on his bed, beside his left foot. He could read his own name in Times New Roman on the front. Detective Inspector David Sarac; nothing else. Unless there was something on the back. He picked the envelope up, turned it over, and held it up to the light. The back was blank, the envelope smooth and flat. It couldn’t really contain anything but a sheet or two of paper.
He hadn’t had any visitors for a long time, no contact with the outside world except for TV and the Internet. Perhaps Frank was yet another reporter trying to arrange an interview with him, an unusually creative one who was willing to bribe a staff member.
He slowly opened the envelope with his forefinger and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. At the top was a message in the same impersonal font as the envelope. Four lines, seven sentences, forty-six words. More than enough to make his heart beat faster.
He betrayed you, David. Swapped his future for you and Janus. Then he moved on while we bled and died out there on the island. No punishment, no consequences, straight to the top. How about a swap? Your secret for mine? A chance to get justice.
Sarac unfolded the bottom part of the sheet of paper. Two photos fell out onto the bed, landing upside down.
He turned the first one over. Husband, wife, two teenage girls dressed up for some sort of premiere. A good-looking, happy family smiling assuredly toward the photographer with perfect, dazzling media smiles.
His heart beat even faster. Spread out from his chest and up into his throat. He turned the second photograph over. Felt his hand tremble. He swallowed hard a couple of times.
The dead blonde woman was lying on her stomach across the black hood of a car. The pool of blood formed a sort of aura around her naked body. The force of her descent had been so strong that it almost welded her body to the expensive car. Transforming it into a single horrifying sculpture of skin, glass, and metal.
* * *
“The dismembered body at Källstavik: What do we know?”
The waitress had barely put their plates down on the checkered cloth and walked off before Deputy Police Commissioner Oscar Wallin revealed the purpose of their meeting. Julia couldn’t help smiling. Wallin hadn’t changed. Straight to the point, no unnecessary beating around the bush. Just like her. That morning he had suddenly called after months of silence. Now she understood why. Or at least what he wanted to talk about.
“Aren’t you going to ask me how I am or what I’ve been doing for the past six months?” Julia smiled, but Wallin’s expression didn’t change. “Anyway, you didn’t have to ask me to lunch. Most of it’s already been in the papers.”
That was more accurate than she would have liked. No more than a couple of days had passed since her visit to the Forensic Medicine Unit, but the public already knew almost as much as she did. The evening tabloids loved summer murders, and their reporting followed the usual pattern. Yesterday there had been a few grainy pictures of police boats and divers, and a map covering the whole centerfold. Where the body parts were found. Quotes from a source with inside knowledge of the investigation, obviously her own boss, and today she had just read the assortment of speculation and confident assertions from the usual academic detectives who had never seen a dead body in real life.
This could be connected to the criminal underworld. Statistically, the killer is likely to have been known to the victim, and her personal favorite: Dismemberment is a way for the killer to get rid of the body.
Wallin put what looked like a perfectly judged mix of beef patty, potato, sauce, and lingonberry preserve in his mouth. He chewed slowly as he raised his eyebrows quizzically.
“The victim, according to the latest we’ve got from the pathologist, is a white male between thirty-five and forty-five,” Julia said. “Just over one meter eighty centimeters tall, with short, dark brown hair. We may need to take that last bit with a pinch of salt. The crayfish didn’t leave much of his scalp.”
She fell silent. Wallin went on chewing, as implacable as ever. If the malicious rumors about his career contained any truth at all, there certainly wasn’t any sign of it in his behavior or appearance. His boyish features, emphasized by his perfectly combed side parting, formed such an abrupt contrast to his tailor-made three-piece suit that it almost jarred. He looked like a boy dressed up as a grown man, he always had. Previously only the most deranged of his colleagues had made fun of that. Only in recent months had she heard his nickname spoken out loud in the corridors of Police Headquarters. Even by some of her superiors.
Manboy.
She didn’t approve. Wallin was a talented policeman and an equally skilled administrator. But now others were enjoying the fruits of his labors, and the whole of his handpicked team had been transferred to the staff of the national police chief. All but Wallin himself, which most of his colleagues took to mean that he was going to be sidelined somewhere and never heard from again. She hoped that interpretation didn’t turn out to be correct.
“Have you been able to identify the body?” Wallin wiped his mouth on his napkin with exaggerated thoroughness.
“Not yet. We’ve checked for a match on the missing persons register: nothing there. His hands haven’t been found, so we haven’t got fingerprints. Same with teeth and dental records. We’re expecting DNA results from the National Forensics Lab by tomorrow at the earliest but probably on Friday, maybe even Monday. It’s not at all certain that they’ll be able to get any DNA. The body was in a very poor state.”
“And the face? Could you release a photograph to the press? Ask the general public to get in touch with tip-offs?”
Julia shook her head.
“The perpetrator had a go at the face with a chain saw. It’s completely unrecognizable.”
At least for the time being, she added to herself. She considered telling Wallin about her backup plan. Let him know how good she was at her job. Six months ago she would have done so without hesitation. But for some reason she decided to wait. Besides, she wasn’t even sure if what she was considering could actually be done.
“The experts in the tabloids are right, then,” Wallin said. “You’ve got a real challenge on your hands with this case. You know the statistics as well as I do. Only six out of ten dismemberments get cleared up. A sixty percent chance that quickly shrinks to single digits if you don’t manage to identify the body. And what would that do to your solving rate?”
The question seemed to be rhetorical, because Wallin turned his attention back to his food without waiting for an answer. Julia stuck her fork into her Caesar salad, took a mouthful, and discovered at once that something was missing from the dressing. It took her a few seconds to work out what. Anchovies. What chef would make a Caesar salad without using anchovies? Presumably one who thought he could get away with it.
The murmur of conversation in the restaurant rose in volume as more and more diners sat down at the tables. One or two suits, but mostly neon-clad laborers. People who, like Wallin, had a preference for traditional Swedish fare. Personally she preferred Asian. Lighter food: less flour, cream, and potato.
Wallin went on eating calmly. He was evidently planning to make her ask.
“So, tell me! Why is the minister of justice’s special investigator so interested in an old dismembered body?”
Wallin took a sip of his lingonberry drink and then carefully wiped his mouth again before leaning over the table.
“As you may be aware, the party has its training center in Källstavik. Several of the higher-ups rent houses on the grounds with access to the water, including the minister of justice’s father-in-law, Karl-Erik Cedergren. A dismembered body in the water they go swimming in, just in time for the holidays, is a little uncomfortable, particularly when the tabloids are wallowing in the details. The minister’s phone is going to start ringing, and when it does, I want to be prepared.”
“You want me to keep you informed?”
He smiled at her, a crooked, slightly mocking smile. Yet Julia still found herself smiling back at him. She’d missed this. Missed their rather peculiar sense of camaraderie.
The first time she’d met Oscar Wallin was around five years ago. She’d been part of the team investigating an unusually grisly murder in the southern suburbs of Stockholm. The victim was a small-time informer, and the method resembled another case that National Crime was investigating. Wallin was involved in his capacity as National Crime’s informant handler, and he was the only one who didn’t shake his head when she, unlike all the alpha males on the investigative team, declared firmly that they were dealing with two different perpetrators and that the second was simply a copycat. When the forensics experts proved her right a week later, Wallin bought her lunch. Over a meal of stuffed cabbage leaves he asked how she could have been so certain. She explained that the two crime scenes were just too different. The perpetrators had moved through the rooms in different ways and did things in a different order. And, unlike all the other police officers she knew, Wallin seemed to be in no doubt about her abilities.
Two months later he had called her and asked her to take a look at the security camera footage of a robbery and compare it with videos of various suspects and images from where they lived. She had found it relatively easy to point out those whose movements and rhythms matched the robbers’. Not long after that, she was suddenly promoted to detective inspector and given her own room in the front corridor of the crime unit, and she slowly began to make a name for herself within the force. And even if Superintendent Pärson claimed the credit for having discovered and coached her, Julia was well aware of who her real mentor was.
Wallin had continued to contact her every now and then: sometimes to find out how she was getting on, but more usually to give her a new challenge or ask for discreet favors. Most recently last Christmas.
“By the way, what happened about that trace of blood I found in Sophie Thorning’s apartment?” she said. “Did it help prove that someone else had been there the night she jumped?”
Wallin shook his head. “It turned out to be her own blood. I thought I’d told you that.”
“No, we haven’t spoken since I sent you my report. Not so much as a Christmas card by way of thanks.” She pretended to be upset. That would have made most guys blush and start to stammer their apologies. She knew she looked pretty good and that this could occasionally be used to her advantage. But that sort of trick never worked on Wallin, which was another reason why she respected him. The only way to get Wallin’s attention and respect was by delivering results.
“I’ve been busy,” he said, without sounding the slightest bit apologetic, but more like he was chastising her for not realizing something so obvious.
“And the post of national police chief …?”
Julia regretted saying it before it was even out of her mouth. Wallin’s mouth narrowed to a thin line.
“If I’m allowed to say what I think, the minister of justice picked the wrong person,” she added quickly.
Wallin sat silent for a few seconds, as if he was trying to work out how truthful her statement was. The thin line curved into a controlled smile.
“Thanks. Obviously, I’m aware that I’m being talked about. That people are saying I’ve been passed over, even that I’m heading toward the exit.” Wallin shook his head gently. “Success breeds enemies, Julia. You’ll find that out. Colleagues who are envious or bitter, who take pleasure in the few occasions when you fail, and who don’t hesitate to spread all manner of rumors.”
He leaned forward slightly and smiled more broadly, revealing his canine teeth.
“But I’m still here, as you can see. I’ve still got an office just a few meters from the minister’s, and sooner or later everyone who’s underestimated me will have to pay for that.”
He held her gaze for a few seconds. Then straightened up.
“Enough about that. There’s another reason why I wanted to talk to you. It’s about your new colleague …”
Wallin wasn’t the sort to do air quotes, but Julia thought she could almost see his fingers twitching on the checkered tablecloth.
“Omar Amante, lawyer, excellent grades at university, foreign service. If the predictions are correct and the opposition win this autumn’s election, his stepfather will replace Jesper Stenberg as minister of justice. Which makes Amante junior the golden boy. The question is: Why has he suddenly appeared from nowhere to join you in the Violent Crime Unit?”
“What do you mean?” Julia frowned. A police car drove past outside in the street. Flashing lights and sirens. The sound bounced between the buildings, drowning out everything else for a few seconds.
“Amante left his job with Europol last Christmas,” Wallin said as soon as the car had passed. “Six months before his contract was due to finish. One unconfirmed rumor is that he fell out with his boss. That there was some sort of scene that got hushed up. No one seems to want to talk about it. Either way, Amante disappeared off the radar for a few months. He wasn’t in Sweden, and he wasn’t at Europol’s offices in The Hague. Then he suddenly shows up in Stockholm and lands in the middle of a murder investigation that has vague connections to the party. The same party that his stepfather is doing his utmost to eject from power.”
Wallin leaned across the table again and lowered his voice.
“You’ve been saddled with Amante for a reason. And I’d dearly love to know what that reason is.”
* * *
Sarac zipped his jacket up and pulled his hat as far down on his forehead as he could before looking at his watch again. Thirty seconds. This was madness. He was mad. Which made it all the more ironic that he was trying to escape from a mental institution.
He put his fingers on the door handle. Five, four, three, two, one …
He stepped out into the corridor. Walked without hesitation straight toward the door to the stairwell, not falling for the temptation of looking up at the spherical camera above it. The change of shift was under way and the likelihood of any member of the staff looking at the picture from the camera for the few seconds it took him to pass it wasn’t very high. At least that was what he tried to tell himself to calm his pounding heart. Panic and fear were being temporarily held at bay by the tranquilizer he had swallowed just over half an hour ago.
This isn’t a good idea, the voices in his head whispered. But the happy pills had rendered them impotent. Easier to ignore. At least for the time being.
The doors to the ward were always kept locked, and he fiddled with the key, got it into the lock, but couldn’t turn it. He jerked and twisted it. For a fraction of a second he considered giving up. Going back to his safe little room, forgetting everything, and carrying out his original plan. Gulp down all those sleeping pills at once, tonight. Put an end to everything. But he knew that was impossible. He had to know the truth, had to know how everything fit together.
He suddenly felt the lock give with a clicking sound. The key Eskil had given him was evidently a cheap copy that took a bit of fiddling to make it work. He guessed that his new pen pal Frank had paid for it, just as he had paid for Eskil’s services.
Sarac headed down the marble staircase, all the way to the basement. He managed to unlock the heavy steel door almost at once and found himself in a bare, low-ceilinged corridor. Another glance at his watch. Two minutes and ten seconds had elapsed since he began his escape. He quickened his pace, trying to make use of the surplus adrenaline while it lasted.
He stopped at the door marked District Heating. Once again he used the copied key to unlock the door and stepped inside a large, warm room full of pipes and meters. He stood still for a couple of seconds to get his bearings. Then he identified the incoming pipes and followed them to the far end of the room, just as he had been instructed to do. Another heavy door, and behind it a tunnel where the pipes disappeared into the darkness. He took a few steps forward. Felt for the circuit breaker but couldn’t find it.
Suddenly the door behind him closed and everything went pitch-black. He was seized by panic as it broke through the chemical barrier protecting him from his anxieties and gripped his rib cage.
Why are you doing this, David? the voices whispered. Why?
He put his hand against the concrete wall, leaned forward, and took a couple of deep breaths. He caught the vomit when it was halfway up and forced it back down into his stomach. He stood there for a minute or so until the panic attack subsided. Then he straightened up and felt across the wall with his hand. His fingers nudged the circuit breaker and he turned it. A mechanical click echoed off the concrete walls of the tunnel and a sequence of fluorescent lights flickered slowly to life.
What if this is a trap? What if someone’s waiting for you out there? Someone who wants revenge.
Sarac stopped. He’d had time to think through that scenario over the past few days. That and a handful of others. The possibility that his secret pen pal, the man calling himself Frank, didn’t actually exist. That everything, the letter and photographs alike, was a fabrication intended to lure him from his hiding place. But for some reason during their brief correspondence he had become convinced that this wasn’t the case. Besides, he had managed to persuade Eskil to take a surreptitious photograph of Frank, and had studied it carefully on the cracked screen of the nurse’s phone.
Frank definitely existed. What he said was true. Someone had managed not to face up to his responsibilities so far. Had bought himself free from guilt. Had saved his own life and career by betraying Sarac.
Justice.
That was why he was now heading, for the first time in several months, out into the wide world. Exposing himself one last time to the frightening world that he no longer felt able to deal with.
Even if he was wrong, if all this turned out to be a trap after all and Frank or someone else was waiting out there in the darkness to kill him, then they’d only be doing him a favor.
He put his hand in his pocket and closed his fingers around the bag of pills. Twenty-five of them now. Enough for him to pull the emergency cord whenever he wanted to.
It took him seven minutes to make his way through the tunnel and climb up the steps to the boiler room at the other end. The combination of the exertion and the heat in there left him drenched in sweat. He hesitated a few seconds before cautiously nudging the door open. To his left lay the main building and the illuminated yard that he had just passed beneath. To the right was the staff parking lot, and beyond that the security lodge and main gate. Twelve minutes had passed, in another three the change of shift would be over.
He inhaled the cold evening air and tried to focus. Felt the slight tremble in his muscles that told him that the rush of adrenaline that had brought him this far was ebbing away. But he was almost there now. All it would take was one last burst of effort.
The car was exactly where Eskil had said it would be, all he had to do was open the unlocked trunk and crawl inside. Close it and make himself as comfortable as he could in the dark. Exhaustion took over his body, his head.
The picture of the attractive family popped into his mind again, then the dead woman on the hood of the car. They were replaced in turn by pictures of a dark forest where the flare of guns firing flashed among the trees.
Are you really sure about this, David? the voices whispered.
* * *
Julia was about to fetch her last cup of coffee for the afternoon from the unit’s staff room when her cell phone started to buzz. She answered with the phone clamped between her ear and her shoulder as she poured coffee into a chipped mug. For a moment she thought about being nice and getting a cup for Amante, then realized that the phone call gave her an excuse not to. She could carry only one mug back with her.
“Hello, this is Katarina Lindgren from the National Forensics Lab.”
Julia took hold of the phone with her left hand, then, with the mug in her right hand, started to walk back toward her office. She passed the closed door to the little cubbyhole that had been found for Amante. A claustrophobic, windowless room that was probably meant to be a janitor’s closet. But he hadn’t complained so far. Another tentative point.
Before her lunch with Wallin the day before, she had put Amante to work calling everyone who lived near where the body was found; there weren’t too many. The number of permanent residents with an open view of the water was limited to four or five, and she strongly doubted that any of them would have anything to contribute. But a murder investigation was in part just a long list of things that needed to be checked, whether or not you actually thought they might turn out to be useful. And, usefully, the task was a way of keeping Amante occupied. Pärson had decided not to let her have more detectives until they had something to go on. He had blamed the summer holidays and the fact that they had other cases that were higher priority. In fact he was actually counting on her managing on her own, so that he would later be able to report good results to his boss.
“I’m calling about the unidentified body that was found in the water at Källstavik,” the woman on the phone said. “I saw a note that you wanted to be informed the moment we found anything.”
“Absolutely.” Julie closed the door behind her, shutting out the voices of those of her colleagues who were already on their way home.
“We’ve found a match in the DNA register …” the woman began.
Julia put her cup down a little too hard, spilling some of the contents on the pale wood of the desktop.
“… but I’m afraid I can’t say much more than that.”
“No?” Julia slipped onto her chair.
“There’s a match in the register, referring to another case. It’s not a complete match, just sixty-five percent compared to the usual ninety-nine. The sample we received was badly degraded. What that means is—”
“You’ve matched it to DNA that was found in another case, but never identified,” Julia interrupted.
“Exactly. All I get on the screen is the fact that there’s a match in the register, the percentage of the similarity between the samples, and the number of the case in which the other sample was found.”
Julia got hold of a pen and paper. “Would you mind giving me the number?”
She wrote the digits and letters down, one by one, then stared at the familiar combination.
“Skarpö,” she said. As much to herself as to the woman on the other end of the line.
Her brain was working at high speed, already starting to process the consequences of what she’d just been told. But she still forced herself to ask one more time:
“Just so I know I’ve got this right. Our dismembered body was present at the shoot-out on Skarpö?”
“That’s certainly what the DNA sample suggests. The match came through a few minutes ago. I’m new here, so I don’t really know what the procedures are, but I thought you’d probably want to know as soon as possible. I mean, there’s been a lot in the papers and everything.”
“You did exactly the right thing. Thanks very much for letting me know.”
“No problem.”
Julia ended the call. And realized that she was smiling. A line of inquiry, she thought. For a moment she imagined herself as a sniffer dog with its nose pressed to the ground.
And what a line of inquiry …
* * *
Sarac cautiously opened the door to his apartment. He breathed in the stale air with its smell of newly constructed Ikea furniture. Then he took a long stride across the heap of advertisements and newspapers, snuck in, and lowered all the blinds before switching on the weak lamp above the stove. He rubbed his hands together, trying to get some warmth back into his frozen fingers.
Even though it was his home, the apartment filled him with unease and he had to sit down and take a few deep breaths to control his anxiety—the new and deep-rooted varieties alike. He was safe there, he told himself, at least for a few hours.
Everything looked just as he remembered, yet he was still convinced that the apartment had been painstakingly cleaned. That anything suggesting that he was anything other than the heroic police officer David Sarac had long since been removed.
The clock on the microwave said 14:50, which meant that at best he had about three hours before the staff in the nursing home realized that he’d escaped, and maybe as long as three and a half hours before the news reached the right people. Not long, but long enough.
The envelope containing his passport, banknotes of various currencies, and the credit card he only used when traveling was still in the bottom drawer of his desk. He breathed a sigh of relief. The people who had cleaned his apartment obviously didn’t think he was likely to want to run. He could hardly blame them. Only a few days ago he hadn’t even wanted to go outside. That he had managed to handle the train journey to Stockholm was largely because Eskil had given him a healthy dose of tranquilizers that had protected him against the sounds, the lights, and, not least, the voices in his head.
In the pantry he found a packet of ramen noodles. As the water boiled he emptied the pockets of his borrowed clothes and put the train ticket, key ring, and bus pass on the kitchen table. Then, finally, the bag of sleeping pills.
He undressed and stuffed the clothes into a plastic bag he found under the sink. There were surveillance cameras at the Central Station that he hadn’t been able to avoid. It wouldn’t take long for them to find him. And police photos showing what he looked like. He dug out a pair of black jeans and a cotton shirt from his wardrobe. They were both too big, reminding him of how much weight he had lost. He ate the noodles straight from the pan, then washed down another tranquilizer with tap water. Oddly enough, the food tasted considerably better than anything he had eaten in the nursing home.
When he had finished he washed everything up carefully and put the trash in the bag containing the clothes. He was planning to dump it in a bin by the entrance to the subway, so that at least there wouldn’t be any visible evidence that he had been in the apartment.
In the back of the hall cupboard he found a padded jacket and a black knit hat. Just as he had hoped, his own clothes made him look different. Just an ordinary Swede on his way to work.
He put the things on the kitchen table in his jacket pockets, turned out the light, and then slowly peered behind the blind. Everything looked quiet outside. He couldn’t help glancing at the windows opposite. That was where they had watched him from last year. Waiting for his next move.
All your doing, your fault, the voices whispered.
* * *
It was almost nine o’clock at night by the time Julia got all the boxes into her office. The corridor was deserted, its doors closed, half the fluorescent lights in the ceiling above the linoleum floor switched off. She liked working late. It meant she avoided unnecessary distractions, telephones ringing, colleagues knocking on her door when they didn’t actually want anything.
The pictures were all laid out on her desk. First their unidentified body with its silent grin. She looked at him. No matter who he was and what he had done, no one deserved to die like that. Someone had stripped him of everything. His name, his dignity, even his humanity.
Below the pictures of the body she had lined up the photographs from Skarpö.
First the burned-out wreck of a house surrounded by snow. Black beams, a solitary chimney stack sticking up toward the sky from the foundations. Then a number of pictures that were far worse: charred bodies among the ruins, others outside in the snow. Lifeless, some of them with visible holes in their torsos or heads. Spent cartridges everywhere. Short ones from pistols, longer ones from assault rifles, red or blue ones from shotguns. The photographs were an all-too-visible reminder of just how violent the shoot-out had been.
Superintendent Peter Molnar lay on his back with his mouth wide-open, several of his dazzlingly white teeth shot out. The blood around his head formed a red halo. His eyes were staring blankly up at the sky. She’d seen the picture before, enough times for the shudder in her stomach not to feel quite so strong. Poor Peter. He’d been a good officer, someone most people spoke well of. Admittedly, he and the men on his team were the same tiresome alpha males whom the force seemed to be awash with. The guys who tried it on with her, one after the other, on the few occasions she had been stupid enough to visit any of the police bars. But Peter was at least both smart and funny. He knew when it was time to give up and go and hunt easier prey. And now his wife was a widow and his children left fatherless. She turned the photograph over.
Detective Inspector Josef Almlund’s death looked more peaceful. She had known him too, of course. Peter socialized more with his second-in-command than with his own family. Josef had been a large man of few words, always ready to do exactly what Peter asked of him. Even lie to Peter’s wife, if that was called for. Which it probably had been on a fairly regular basis.
Josef Almlund was sitting at one end of the house, leaning back against the foundations with his head lolling on his chest. The fire had burned his jacket and the hair at the back of his neck, but apart from that it almost looked like he was asleep. Having a bit of a rest before the fighting started again. She turned the picture over, just as she had with the one of Molnar. She paused for a moment, trying to shake off the images of the two dead men. She only half succeeded. She thought about David Sarac. The horrors he must have experienced out there. Watching his friends die around him. The last she had heard about Sarac was that he was in a nursing home in an undisclosed location. Hardly surprising, really.
Her cell phone buzzed, but she ignored it, just as she had a few minutes earlier. She knew it was Amante. He’d have to wait until morning, when she had a better idea of things. Besides, her conversation with Wallin was still in the back of her mind.
She gathered all the photographs she needed and put the others back in the evidence boxes. Now at least she had a time and a location to work with. On January 2, 2014, the dead man had been on the island of Skarpö, just outside Vaxholm in the Stockholm archipelago. According to the pathologist, the body parts had been in the water for approximately four months, so since late February or thereabouts. That left a gap of six, eight weeks between the Skarpö shoot-out and the time when the body parts were deposited beneath the ice.
She looked at the photographs from the Forensic Medicine Unit again. Stared at the mutilated smile.
“I’m getting closer,” she whispered. “I’ll soon know who you are.”
Her cell phone started to buzz again, but she let it ring.
* * *
“Come in, David. I’m Frank.” The man who had opened the door held out his hand toward Sarac, but he didn’t take it. It was the same man from the grainy photograph Eskil had shown him. The nurse was right: they did actually look quite similar. They both looked like cops. Or criminals. Or both.
He walked past the man into a shabby little office. The room couldn’t be more than fifteen to twenty square meters in total. By one wall was a camping mattress and a sleeping bag, and there was a door that presumably led to a toilet. In the opposite wall was a dirty window facing the parking lot outside. Two overflowing Dumpsters were visible below, but, judging by the general state of the building, all construction work had been abandoned a long time ago. The whole of the run-down industrial estate felt badly neglected. Next to the bus stop Sarac had seen a couple of large signs proudly showing the future. Glass and concrete reaching for the skies. No 1970s barracks like this.
“It’s all ready, just as we agreed.” The man calling himself Frank gestured toward the two wooden chairs beside the camping table in the middle of the room. There was an open laptop on the table and, next to it, a camera mounted on a tripod.
Sarac took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair, then sat down. Frank put a photograph in front of him. The blonde woman on the hood, the same terrible image as the picture he had already seen, but from a different angle. Then a sheet of paper, a printout from the vehicle register with the name of the car’s owner clearly circled. Then another picture. The good-looking family again.
Sarac swallowed. His heart was pounding so hard that he was having trouble breathing.
“He called me straight afterward. Crying like a little child,” Frank said. “I went round and cleaned up. Got rid of all the evidence that he’d ever been there. And in return he told me about you. Who you met, how much you could remember after the accident. He was my source in the hunt for Janus. And he told me that you and Janus were out there on the island.”
Sarac took a deep breath. So it was true. He’d been betrayed. Betrayed by his ultimate superior.
“You understand what this means, don’t you?” Frank went on in a low voice. “What the consequences could be if you choose to go on with this? This sort of knowledge can be lethal.”
“If I d-didn’t …” Sarac cleared his throat. The bullet that had passed through his neck out on the island had damaged his larynx, making his voice unreliable. “If I didn’t, I’d hardly be here.”
Frank nodded, then went over to the small sink at the far end of the room and poured a glass of water, which he put down on the table. Then he sat down in front of the computer. Sarac took a couple of sips before looking up.
“Okay,” Frank said. “Your turn. Your secret in return for mine, like we agreed.”
The man pressed a key and a little red light lit up on the camera. “You can start talking whenever you like.”
Sarac cleared his throat again and instinctively scratched the scar on his neck.
“M-My name is David Sarac. I handle informants for the Stockholm Police, and I was responsible for a secret source, an undercover agent called Janus. I was also responsible for the shoot-out on Skarpö in the New Year. Everyone who died and was injured out there was trying to get hold of Janus, to uncover his true identity. None of them succeeded.”
He paused, then breathed in through his nose.
“I’m the only person who knows the truth. The only survivor who knows who Janus really is …”
* * *
Julia stood up from her chair. She hit her knee hard against the desktop and very nearly emptied the contents of her morning coffee across the collage of terrible images that had lain on her desk since the previous evening.
“Gone? How can a body just be gone?”
“Well …” The pathologist’s voice on the phone was dry as dust. “I didn’t say it was gone. I said it isn’t here. There’s a big difference. We aren’t in the habit of losing bodies here in the Forensic Medical Unit.”
The pain in her knee made Julia grimace. She was at the point of saying that she hadn’t had enough coffee to deal with semantic pedantry but managed to stop herself just in time.
“Do you feel like telling me what has happened to the body, then?” she said as calmly as she could.
“Your colleagues came and collected it last night. They brought their own van and everything.”
For a couple of seconds Julia’s brain stopped working.
“My colleagues,” she managed to say. “My colleagues moved our dismembered body?” She could hear how stupid she sounded.
“Exactly,” the pathologist said. “Your colleagues in the Security Police. According to the night staff, they seemed to be in quite a hurry.”
* * *
The door to Pärson’s room was open, but it wouldn’t have made any difference if it had been barricaded from the inside. No one stuck their oar into her cases—not the Security Police, nor anyone else.
“What the hell is going on? Why have the Security Police taken my dead body?”
“And good morning to you too, Gabrielsson. I was just about to call you, so you’ve saved me the trouble. Please have a seat.”
Pärson waved his fleshy hand toward one of the two chairs opposite his desk. Only then did Julia realize that Amante was already sitting in the other one.
“Well,” he went on, “the news I was going to share with the two of you, which Julia has evidently already heard, is that the Security Police, in their great wisdom, have decided to ease our burden.”
He smiled ever so slightly, just enough to crease his jowls.
“Apparently our dismembered body is connected to a suspected terrorism case. Some sort of defector. Syria or Iran or something.”
“That’s not true,” Julia said, rather less calmly than she had hoped.
“No?” Pärson’s happy smile faltered slightly.
Julia took a deep breath. “Our victim was involved in Skarpö. There’s a match with his DNA in the register. We already knew that at least one person got away, so that’s probably who we’ve found.”
Pärson straightened up. The movement made his chair whimper under his weight. “And how the hell do you know that?”
“I spoke to the National Forensics Lab late yesterday afternoon,” she said. She bit her lip and waited for the inevitable explosion.
Pärson’s face turned from pink to red. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me straightaway?”
Well, she thought. Partly because you’d already left several hours earlier; partly because you get annoyed if anyone calls you after work about things that aren’t a matter of life and death; but mainly because you would have seen a chance to make a bit on the side by calling the media, thereby making my job ten times harder. For a few seconds she actually considered saying all this out loud.
“We were going to tell you first thing this morning,” Amante said out of the blue. “We just wanted a chance to discuss it first. To be honest, neither of us believed that there was much urgency in a case where the victim had been dead for several months.”
Pärson glared at him, and even Julia got the evil eye before he threw himself back in his chair, which once again protested loudly.
“Bloody hell. This sort of thing needs to be reported at once; that should be obvious, surely? A connection to Skarpö changes everything. The media are going to lose it completely. The phones will be ringing off the hook. Those soft-shoed bastards must have got one of their hackers to flag up the case in the computer system. And got advance warning as soon as the lab found a match. The Security Police have been waiting for an opportunity to muscle in on the Skarpö case ever since last winter. It’s no wonder that they were so damn fast. I need to inform the head of Regional Crime right away.”
“Why do the Security Police want to get a foot in the door of the Skarpö investigation?”
Pärson glared at Julia.
“Are you hard of hearing? They want to stake out their position in the new police authority. Show that they’re worth their huge budget. If the Security Police manage to tie all the remaining loose ends in the Skarpö case and find the person who got away—the one we and National Crime have failed to find so far—it’ll make us look like incompetent idiots. Thanks a fucking bunch for that, Gabrielsson. I promise you now, I’ll be sure to tell the head of Regional Crime all about your exemplary work.”
Julia tried to control herself. She didn’t succeed as well as she usually did. And blamed it on the lack of caffeine.
“What about you, then,” she said, “just letting the Security Police stroll in and take over everything? Without so much as calling me, even though it was my case. Who did you talk to at the Security Police? What unit? What case number did he give?” She stopped herself, aware that she had crossed the line, actually way beyond it.
“Now listen,” Pärson said, leaning forward over his desk. “You’ve been in the force long enough to know that you have to take things as they come. Don’t try to blame this on me. If you’d kept me properly informed, I could have told them to go to hell—just like I want you and your little pal here to do now, before I resort to physical measures.”
As they were walking away from Pärson’s room, Amante drew her aside in the corridor. They stopped in front of a faded picture of an archipelago landscape.
“Explain what just happened to me,” he said quietly.
“I thought you’d worked it out,” she muttered. “Our work-shy boss allowed someone at the Security Police—whose name he can’t recall—to take over our case for reasons he can’t remember. And right now he’s calling his own superior and blaming the whole thing on us.”
“So we’re being taken off the case?”
“He didn’t actually say that in so many words. Not that it really matters. Without the body we haven’t got a case. No chance of making any progress. The National Forensics Lab has probably already received new orders to talk exclusively to the Security Police from now on, presumably for reasons relating to national security.”
She fell silent and nodded at a colleague walking past them.
“Okay, that’s pretty much what I thought,” Amante said when the man was out of earshot. “Just wanted to make sure.”
He leaned a bit closer to Julia as he glanced over his shoulder.
“I’ve got something I need to show you. It’s about our body.”
She raised her eyebrows and waited for him to go on. But Amante gave no indication of continuing.
“Okay,” she said. “Let me get a cup of coffee. Your room or mine?”
Amante shook his head. “Not here. In my apartment. I’ll make you coffee.”
* * *
Sarac got up from the camping mattress, switched the computer on, and sat down at the table. He stretched to shake off the half doze that had more or less replaced real sleep for him. Time was running out, his tranquilizers would last another four days, but he hoped everything would be over by then.
Three days had passed since their exchange. Frank had left shortly after the video was finished. Packed his things, gave him the key to the office, and showed him how the computer and encrypted e-mail worked before taking his leave. This time Sarac did shake his hand. He knew who Frank was now, and why he had gone to such lengths to find out the truth about Janus. But instead of trying to steal it the way he had last winter, he had offered something in exchange. A fair deal between two equal parties. Quid pro quo.
So there he was, in a shabby little office in a ramshackle building that was waiting to be demolished. A perfect hiding place.
By now they must be hunting all over for him. They’d have tracked him via the security cameras at the Central Station, and one way or another they’d have figured out that he’d been back to his apartment. But there the trail would go cold. He had taken three different buses to get out here, using a different travel card each time. All bought at different places and paid for in cash, according to Hunter’s instructions. He was safe here. Safe enough, anyway.
He had spent a whole day thinking about his next course of action. Then he made up his mind not to beat around the bush. He sent an encrypted e-mail revealing what he knew. What he wanted. But so far he hadn’t received a reply.
He logged into his online e-mail account and, as he waited for the program to load, wrapped his fingers around the bag of sleeping pills in his pocket. He counted them one more time. Odds and evens.
Debts I can’t escape till the day I die, the song in his head echoed, just as it had last Christmas.
The program opened up. There was a new message at the top of his in-box. He held his breath. Heard the music in his head get louder as he clicked to open the e-mail.
Curl your lip and make me want to live for one more day. Make me want to sleep through one more night.
An answer. One final task. His final task.
* * *
The apartment didn’t look anything like what Julia had been expecting. The lobby of the building in Östermalm was imposing, with high arches and a heavy limestone staircase with a polished teak handrail. But inside the heavy door of the apartment the furnishings were considerably more spartan.
She should really have said no. Should have made her so-called partner tell her whatever he had to say up in Police Headquarters instead of wasting time going home with him. That she went along with him without a word of protest or even asking any questions was entirely Oscar Wallin’s fault. Wallin’s and that of her own wretched curiosity.
Sadly, Amante’s apartment didn’t provide any immediate clues regarding either him or his intentions. There were three bedrooms, two of which were completely empty apart from a few dead flies on the windowsills. In the third was a folding bed, two open removal boxes, and a small, old-fashioned television on the floor. No photographs, pictures, or anything else that said anything about the person who lived there. The only rhythm echoing between the bare walls was loneliness.
“Divorce,” Amante said, confirming her impressions. “All my things are in storage. My ex-wife sent the wrong boxes here. Old vacation clothes.” He gestured toward his yacht club blazer and sweater. “She knows I hate this jacket, so she probably did it on purpose.”
He shrugged his shoulders as if to indicate that he’d said enough on the subject.
“There’s coffee in the kitchen. Hot water in the right-hand tap. I’m just going to …” He nodded toward the toilet door.
“Sure, I’ll sort it,” she said.
The kitchen was, if possible, even barer than the rest of the apartment. And expensive. Marble counters, a big wine refrigerator, a gas range with six rings. Stepfather’s money, she guessed. Maybe the apartment even belonged to him.
She couldn’t see a coffee machine but did find a jar of instant and a few mismatched mugs covered with advertising logos. One of the German taps was marked Heisswasser. She tried it and, sure enough, got scalding-hot water straight from the tap. What an idea. She filled two mugs with water, added some powder, and stirred them with a coffee-flecked chopstick she found in the sink. She shuddered. The smell from the mugs wasn’t enticing, but a splash of milk would make it bearable. She opened a large stainless steel door that she hoped belonged to the fridge. She found an open can of pea soup, a couple of greasy trays of Chinese food, and a can of low-alcohol beer. The huge kitchen was evidently completely wasted on Amante.
At the bottom of the fridge was a big yellow plastic cooler that looked brand-new. Amante had gone to the trouble of removing a couple of shelves from the fridge to make room for it, so at a guess it contained something that needed to be kept fresh. With a bit of luck there might even be some milk. She undid the straps on the side and opened the lid. She felt her heart stop for a few seconds.
She took a step back. Then another one. The fridge door slowly closed of its own accord and she was left standing with the lid in her hand.
Amante came into the kitchen.
“Did you find the coffee?” He caught her eye and stopped.
“Amante,” Julia said, trying her utmost to sound calm. “Would you mind explaining why you have the head of our dead body in your fridge?”
* * *
Sarac had pulled on his jacket and hat. Turned out the lights in the little room. He looked at the time. Ten past five, and darkness was already settling on the parking lot outside the window. Time to get going. For some reason he felt different. Almost excited. He put his hands in his pockets and felt the bag of sleeping pills. On a sudden impulse he took it out and held it up against the weak light from the window. Twenty-five oval pills. He went over to the tiny kitchen area, opened the cupboard, and tucked the bag away inside it. Then he walked out of the room and closed the door silently behind him. He was on his way now. On his way to put things right.
* * *
The coffee tasted just as disgusting as Julia had expected. But it was also the only thing in this whole situation that was remotely predictable.
“Sorry if I scared you,” Amante said. “Let me explain. I called the National Forensics Lab yesterday. Spoke to a very nice young woman who was about to finish for the day. She said she’d spoken to you about the link to Skarpö a few minutes before I called. She asked if we actually spoke to each other in Violent Crime.”
He took a sip of coffee and gave her a long look over the top of the cup. Julia said nothing, preferring to wait for him to go on instead.
“When the pathologist said we might not be able to identify our victim from DNA, I called a guy in Europol who I got to know on Lampedusa. He works as a forensics expert in Sarajevo. They’ve got a computer program that can create a three-dimensional image of a face from a layered X-ray of a skull. They use it to identify remains from the war. Obviously it’s not a hundred percent, but enough to get a photofit.” He took another swig of coffee. “The same thing must have occurred to you—that we could try to reconstruct his face some other way. That’s why you called the Forensic Medicine Unit this morning, isn’t it?”
She glared at him for a few seconds.
“The Museum of Medieval Stockholm,” she said. “They’ve got a forensic anthropologist who came up with a wax model of Birger Jarl’s face using just his skull a couple of years ago.”
“Ah, smart.” Amante nodded. “A proper model of the whole head probably works a lot better than just a photofit. But that would take longer. At least a month or so.”
“And you couldn’t wait that long. You needed to prove how smart you were.”
A hint of a blush spread across Amante’s neck. “I did actually try to call you yesterday evening. It wasn’t that hard to work out why you weren’t answering. You knew there was a link to Skarpö and you didn’t want to involve the civilian once the case started to heat up.”
Her turn to blush now, if she’d been the type. Which she wasn’t.
“I figured out that everything would change as soon as the connection to Skarpö became common knowledge,” he went on. “All manner of different police units and bosses would get involved. And the civilian would be the first person taken off the case. And I didn’t want that, not after seeing the body. After seeing what our perpetrator had done to him.” He stared at her; his anxious expression seemed to be looking for understanding.
Julia stifled a nod. Amante was saying the right things and he sounded entirely honest. But she wanted to hear the rest of the story before she made up her mind if he really was telling the truth.
Amante took a deep breath. “So, after I tried to call you last night, I drove out to the Forensic Medicine Unit. I paid the member of staff on duty two thousand kronor to let me borrow the head for twenty-four hours. I’d have gone as high as five, but he jumped at my first offer.”
He pulled a face that was probably meant to look amused.
“The plan was to get the skull X-rayed and have it back in place by now. No one would have noticed anything and it would all have been a lot quicker than filling out forms and waiting for them to be processed. But then the Security Police appeared out of nowhere to fetch the body. Without even opening the bag, apparently, which was lucky for me.”
“You must have realized that people were bound to ask questions about your photofit. Wonder where it had come from?”
He shrugged. “One thing at a time. A photofit would have been a big step forward. Paperwork can always be sorted out afterward, and it’s not as if I’ve done anything illegal.”
“Apart from bribing a public official, you mean?”
Amante smiled, a cryptic little smile that she couldn’t really make sense of. Like so much else about him. If Wallin hadn’t warned her, by this point she would have been convinced that Amante was telling the truth. But for now she still had her doubts.
“Two, actually, if we’re being strictly accurate. An X-ray operator too—a guy I know from the yacht club. But I doubt either of them would be prepared to testify. All I did was pay what the Italians call a tangente. A sort of service charge, you could say.”
“Did you learn that on Lampedusa? You know, that Italian island in the southern Mediterranean,” she added, unable to stop herself.
He looked at her for a few seconds. His smile faded. He walked over to the sink and put his cup down.
“I learned lots of things on Lampedusa. More than I would have wanted.” He turned his back on her as he rinsed the cup under the tap. Julia waited for him to go on, but Amante seemed to have clammed up.
“What do we do now?” The question was aimed at herself as much as him.
He turned the tap off and turned around.
“That was what I was thinking of asking you. As soon as the Security Police open the bag and discover that the head’s missing, all hell’s going to break loose. The smart option would be to go out to the Forensic Medicine Unit right away, pay the guy to sneak the head into one of the cold storage units, and forget the whole thing.”
She looked at him, aware that he could easily have done that without her involvement.
Amante smiled faintly again and glanced at the time. “Or we wait until ten o’clock before we decide what our next step’s going to be.”
“Why ten o’clock?”
“Because that’s when we get to see what our dead man looked like.”
* * *
Sarac was standing perfectly still in the darkened doorway. He resisted the temptation to reach out for the light switch he could see on the wooden wall. The forest behind him was dark and silent. The narrow unpaved track he had followed from the main road was only just visible at the edge of the trees on the far side of the turnaround. In the distance he could hear a raven call. The ghostly sound echoed between the trees, fading into a distant rumble. Unless it was just in his head.
The wind blowing off the ice-covered inlet cut straight through his clothes. He shivered and stepped in through the door. The soles of his boots scraped against the concrete floor. The smell inside made him think about the house on the island, and he waited for the usual accusing whispers. But for the time being the voices seemed to have fallen silent. Maybe the dead were huddled together in the darkness. Waiting for whatever was going to happen.
What was going to happen?
He didn’t really know. All he knew was that he had reached the end of the road. That the whole Janus affair was going to end here, this evening, one way or another. That everyone involved would finally have to face up to the consequences of their actions.
The rumbling in his head grew louder. The winter thunder was getting closer. Then his thoughts were interrupted by another sound. A real one this time. It sounded as if someone was approaching. Taking cautious, creaking steps through the snow outside on the path. Sarac felt his heart beat faster.
Soon, he thought. Soon it will all be over.
A dark shape appeared in the doorway. Clearly visible against the white snow.
“David Sarac?” he heard a low voice say. And at that moment he knew how it was all going to end. The voice was firm, clear, not unfriendly. This was someone who had made up their mind. Then he saw a weapon aimed toward him. Saw it being raised. He closed his eyes.
Debts I can’t escape till the day I die.
Time to pay his debts. Pay for his betrayal. Some things were simply too broken to be fixed.
“H-Here,” he whispered. “I’m here.”
A lightning flash, a frozen gust of wind right through his chest. The roar of winter thunder drowning his thoughts. Then nothing more.
* * *
The face on the screen looked real. Everything was where it should be, the proportions looked right. The nose, neither large nor small. The mouth with its hard, pursed lips, and the skin stretched across the cheekbones. The short, dark hair, the thin eyes. Even the eyelashes and brows were perfect, down to the last hair. Yet there was still something about the picture that wasn’t quite right, something Julia couldn’t put her finger on. But that didn’t really matter. A clump of ice had formed in her stomach, its chill spreading throughout her body.
“A computer simulation will never be entirely accurate,” Amante said over her shoulder. “The program uses measurements from the CAT scan—the size and angles of the bones in the face, eye sockets, and nose. Then it adds supplementary information such as hair and skin color. It all comes together to form an image that ought to be fairly close to reality. The only thing the program can’t provide is—”
“Humanity,” Julia said, turning toward him. “You’re right: it’s not a hundred percent. But I still recognize him.”
She took a deep breath. All hell is going to break loose now. A shit-storm of biblical proportions.
“That”—she tapped the screen where the photofit of their dead man stared back at them with empty eyes—“that’s Detective Inspector David Sarac.”
One (#ulink_19a603d5-1269-562b-ad15-f918fcb520be)
The smell coming from the kitchen woke Minister of Justice Jesper Stenberg. Bacon and eggs, freshly brewed coffee. Those thick American pancakes that the girls loved to drown in maple syrup.
He got out of bed and pulled on his robe. It was just past ten o’clock. He had slept for almost eight hours. Eight hours of deep sleep, just the way it should be. It had been several months since he last had any nightmares, which was as good a sign as any that his brain had moved on. That he’d put everything that happened last winter behind him.
In the bathroom he splashed his face with water. Tried out some of his most reliable facial expressions. Interest, concern, pensiveness. Everything seemed to be working and he winked at his own reflection.
As he walked down the stairs he heard voices from the kitchen. Karolina and the girls, of course, but among them a male voice that he’d hoped to avoid. But after the previous evening that was obviously a vain wish.
“Good morning, Jesper,” his father-in-law said.
“Good morning, Karl-Erik. Morning, darling.” He glued on a polite smile, kissed his wife on the cheek, and took the cup of coffee she held out to him.
“We thought you deserved to sleep in,” Karolina said. “You did well yesterday—didn’t he, Daddy?”
“Absolutely. The papers are unanimous in saying you did an excellent job. Even the opposition papers’ lead articles express reluctant admiration.”
Stenberg took a sip of coffee. Walked around the kitchen and kissed his two children on the head.
“We saw you on television yesterday,” his youngest daughter said, looking up from her iPad.
“And what did you think?”
“You were really good. Mom let us play on our pads so we wouldn’t wake you up.”
Stenberg pulled out a chair and sat down opposite his father-in-law. Decided to preempt any criticism.
“I could have been more aggressive with the opposition. I could have made it even clearer that they’re soft on crime and terrorism.”
His father-in-law made a soothing gesture.
“You’ll have plenty of opportunities to do that over the next few weeks. The main thing is that people saw you can handle a tough line of questioning. That you can keep a cool head and come across as solid and dignified under pressure and without a script.”
“Statesmanlike. He was, wasn’t he, Daddy?”
Karolina put a plate of bacon and eggs in front of Stenberg, half as much as he would have liked. He noticed her exchanging a quick glance with her father.
Karl-Erik got to his feet and patted him on the shoulder. “High time for me to get going.”
“Don’t you want breakfast?” Karolina sounded slightly disappointed.
“Thanks, but I haven’t got time to stop. I just wanted to call in and congratulate Jesper on his performance. Boman’s waiting out in the car.”
“But why didn’t you ask him in? Nisse’s always welcome; he’s one of the family. Isn’t he?” Karolina gave Stenberg an encouraging glance as she followed her father out of the room.
“Of course, absolutely. Nisse’s always welcome,” he muttered after them.
Nisse Boman had been his father-in-law’s driver and right-hand man for the past thirty years, if not more. Before that, sometime in the Stone Age, he had been Karl-Erik’s orderly in the military. Karolina had grown up with him around, thought of him as an extra dad. The sinewy little man was always polite, never behaving with less than military correctness toward those around him. He only spoke when he had something important to say, which wasn’t very often. He was also considerate, almost protective toward Karolina and the girls. Yet there was still something about Boman that irritated Stenberg. Something about his eyes that was, in the absence of a better description, actively unpleasant. They were pale blue, cold. Almost like a fish’s. They always seemed to be watching and judging him. And not in a way that did him any favors.
His wife came back into the kitchen.
“Daddy doesn’t want to say anything to you yet,” she said, and he could hear the excitement in her voice. “But he’s having an informal meeting with the prime minister this afternoon. He’s worried about the opinion polls. And the likelihood that people regard him as old and tired, especially now that he has to walk with a stick since the operation. Yesterday’s interview was the final test, and you passed. The prime minister is going to ask if you’re ready to stand by his side for the last part of the campaign. His unofficial crown prince.”
Stenberg nodded. He could feel his face automatically delivering the right expression as his wife went on talking.
“All our dreams are coming true. After all our hard work. And sooner than we could ever have hoped. Prime Minister Jesper Stenberg—how does that sound? I’ve booked us a table at the Diplomat this afternoon to celebrate. Lina will stay on for a couple of hours to look after the girls.”
Stenberg went on smiling at his wife. Nothing can spoil this moment, he told himself. Nothing and no one.
* * *
“Good afternoon, Minister,” Oscar Wallin said in an exaggeratedly cheery voice as he walked into Stenberg’s spacious office.
He stopped obediently behind one of the leather armchairs that were positioned at just the right angle for visitors to be able to see both the City Hall and the water of Riddarfjärden through the large windows facing Rosenbadsparken.
“Congratulations on your excellent performance on television last night. You looked like you owned the whole studio. That vicious little journalist really didn’t have much luck. The lead article in my paper declared that you’re the future of the party, possibly even our next prime minister.”
“Hello, Oscar. Have a seat.” Stenberg nodded toward the chair on the other side of the desk. “You wanted to see me?” he added before Wallin had a chance to go on with his predictable flattery.
Wallin opened the blue folder he had been carrying under his arm and put it down on the table between them with a flourish. Stenberg did his best to maintain a neutral expression.
“Well, I just wanted to update you on the body that was found in Källstavik last weekend. I thought it would be good for you to know. The body was found just a stone’s throw from your father-in-law’s country retreat. My guess is that sooner or later someone will start asking questions.”
Stenberg waved one hand. “Of course. But keep it brief, if you don’t mind.”
Wallin started to talk, but Stenberg was only half listening. He knew that Wallin would let his secretary have a detailed memo. To show how clever he was, how industrious. The problem with Oscar Wallin was that he tried too hard, not least when he’d done something wrong, which made him look slippery and ingratiating rather than reliable and trustworthy.
He had begun to get seriously fed up with Wallin. His boyish appearance, the little water-combed curl in his hair, the breezy tone of voice. Not to mention that tired old thing he did with his folders. Wallin was intelligent—very intelligent, even, at least in some respects. But in others he was a complete idiot. Wallin had made a serious mistake last winter, biting the hand that fed him. But he didn’t actually seem to realize that he ought to have handed in his resignation instead of prancing about in the corridors, trying to find things to do and look important.
For a couple of days last Christmas, Stenberg had been worried. Wallin indicated that he had found a trace of blood in Sophie Thorning’s apartment. He had kept the documentation inside one of his blue folders and intimated that he could link Stenberg to Sophie, possibly even to her suicide. At first he had considered giving in to Wallin’s demand and appointing him as the new national police chief. But then he calmed down. Realized that Wallin was actually playing poker and was bluffing. Wallin had seen to it that dozens of prominent police chiefs had lost their jobs and privileges. Without political protection his career in the police authority was doomed. Probably within the entire justice system, actually. And the only person protecting Wallin was Stenberg himself.
So he had seen through the bluff and consequently deprived Wallin of his dream job. And there was nothing Wallin could do to stop him. It was three days until he appeared in Stenberg’s office with a servile smile and a blue folder under his arm. But by then Stenberg had begun to doubt that there had ever been a trace of blood at all.
He had contemplated going whole hog and firing Wallin. Or, even better, giving him a tedious job in some inquiry and letting his career gradually wither away. He had already slashed Wallin’s budget and seen to it that he had lost his colleagues. All it would take was a single stroke of the pen, and he’d be gone.
But that blue folder Wallin was carrying was still a signal. If Wallin was utterly humiliated, there was a risk that he’d start talking to John Thorning, reveal that Stenberg had been having a secret affair with John’s daughter for years and that Wallin strongly suspected that Stenberg had been there when she killed herself.
Stenberg daren’t take the risk of his former mentor becoming his enemy. He still needed John’s support, not least because he was general secretary of the Bar Association. So Wallin was allowed to keep his office, at least for the time being.
Wallin was still talking. He was halfway through a lengthy description of how bodies decompose in water. Something about bottom-feeders eating the dead bodies.
Stenberg couldn’t help thinking of Sophie, of how her beautiful, slender body was lying in a coffin deep below the ground. Skin and tissue slowly turning to wax. If the worms hadn’t gotten there first.
He felt suddenly nauseous. He stood up abruptly and went over to one of the windows. The smoke from the steamers by the City Hall was drifting on the breeze above Riddarfjärden.
Just a few meters outside his window a seagull hung in the air, almost motionless. It stared at him with empty, dead eyes.
* * *
When Oscar Wallin closed the door of his office his watch struck the handle with an alarmingly loud noise. It had been a Christmas present to himself, a Patek Philippe, exactly the same as the one Jesper Stenberg wore. Before he sat down behind his desk he anxiously checked to make sure the diamond-polished glass wasn’t damaged. His mother had commented on the watch when they had dinner recently. A gift, he had told her, for professional accomplishments. “From the minister?” she had asked, but her tone revealed that she already knew the answer. He had managed to avoid the trap.
Six years ago he helped organize an apartment on Gärdet for her, just a stone’s throw from his own. He moved her out of the dull suburb where his father had exiled them to a three-room apartment, ninety square meters with a view of the city center. He’d had to pull a lot of strings to get it, but obviously the apartment wasn’t the same thing as a grand villa, which it hadn’t taken her many minutes to point out.
All through the years when he was growing up she had waited. Every evening she had forced him to dress for dinner. “Your father will call soon, you’ll see, and you must promise to be a good boy this time.”
The fact that the professor had replaced her with a woman fifteen years her junior, and that the villa was now inhabited by his new family, appeared to make little difference. She had gone on waiting, hoping, and nothing he did could possibly replace what had been taken from her.
As a teenager, he had sometimes gone back to their old home, creeping through the garden gate and standing there in the darkness, looking in through the big windows. The home where he was no longer welcome. The perfect family he wasn’t part of. Dad, mom, daughter, son. Even a golden retriever that didn’t have the sense to bark on the occasions it found him out there in the garden. It just licked his hand and waved its tail stupidly, as if it expected him to play with it.
He still looked up his father’s family from time to time. His half brother and half sister had gone to fancy schools, had traveled the world and studied abroad. Unlike him, they had no student debt and hadn’t had to do part-time work and evening courses with sweaty cheese sandwiches and thermos-flask coffee. Even so, they were no more than drones. Idiots with no ambition to achieve anything, to make a lasting impression.
He had always known that he was different. That he was destined to achieve things. Great things. In that way he and Jesper Stenberg were pretty similar. They weren’t content merely to exist, but knew they were meant for something more than just an ordinary life. They set ambitious goals and did whatever it took to achieve them. Not long ago Jesper had been his role model. A man he regarded as his mentor. Now everything had changed. He hadn’t understood that Stenberg had appointed Eva Swensk as national police chief in order to gain support within the party. Instead he felt let down, overlooked, just as he had as a teenager. And he had been stupid and clumsy enough to try to force Jesper to change his mind. And since then their friendship had soured badly.
All Wallin had wanted to do was prove the extent of his loyalty. That he was the right man to keep Stenberg’s secrets, and that he could do so even better as national police chief. But Stenberg had misunderstood his intentions and stripped almost everything he had built up away from him. His privileged access, his staff, all the power that made his colleagues fear him. The same colleagues who used to beg and plead for a five-minute meeting now kept their distance from him or openly mocked him.
His relationship with the minister of justice had been seriously damaged; he couldn’t deny that, even if he was doing his best to improve things. In a number of discreet ways he was trying to get Stenberg to realize that his secrets were still in safe hands and that he could be trusted. Evidently that tactic had failed, judging by the conversation they had just had.
But he still had his job in the Ministry of Justice. That meant he still had a chance. He looked up at the framed quote from Robert Kennedy on his wall:
Only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly.
He had failed. That was all there was to it. But he wasn’t beaten yet. One way or another he would make his way back to the top. He would climb higher than anyone could imagine. His colleagues and everyone else who had underestimated him over the years would have cause to think again. He had licked his wounds long enough, playing the role of obedient lapdog. It was high time for a new strategy.
He pulled a business card out of the top drawer of his desk, picked up the phone, and dialed the direct number written on the back.
A male voice answered on the second ring. A short, confident bark.
“John Thorning.”
“Hello, this is Detective Superintendent Oscar Wallin. I was wondering if you had time for that meeting we talked about.”
Two (#ulink_da461cfb-7870-58ad-9c92-98f593308042)
Superintendent Pärson’s office was twice the size of Julia’s. But it felt smaller. Possibly because of the physical bulk of the room’s occupant, or the stacks of documents covering practically every available surface. Or simply because of the distinct smell of sweat that seemed to force out all the oxygen.
“That isn’t David Sarac.” Pärson tapped the photofit picture with the yellow nail of his index finger.
“How can you be so—”
Pärson interrupted Julia by holding up one fleshy hand.
“To begin with, unlike certain other people in this room, I’ve been a police officer long enough to know that photofit pictures can never be trusted. I must have seen hundreds over the years, and when we eventually get our hands on the culprits, they never match.”
“But this one’s different,” Amante said. “This isn’t based upon witness statements but X-rays and measurements of the skull—”
“Which you bribed your way to get ahold of out at the Forensic Medicine Unit,” Pärson interrupted again. “I must say, that part of your little presentation is of particular interest to me. That’s a fair number of notations in your record already, Amante. Misconduct and two cases of bribery. Not bad for your first week.”
Pärson grinned and leaned back.
“Don’t worry. You meant well, and besides, I’ve got an arrangement with your stepfather. But keep your nose clean from now on, is that understood? There are limits to the amount of protection I can give you.”
Amante moved his head in a way that could be interpreted as a half nod.
“But Amante is actually right: this is nothing like an ordinary photofit.” Julia didn’t manage to say more before Pärson held his paw up once again.
“The second and possibly more significant reason why our photofit phantom can’t be David Sarac is that I happen to know exactly where Sarac is.”
Julia sat with her mouth half-open. “Okay,” she managed to say. She exchanged a quick glance with Amante.
“Sarac has been in a home for patients suffering from PTSD since he left the hospital last winter,” Pärson said. “He’s barely capable of walking and talking on his own, and then only for short periods. That’s why you haven’t seen any interviews with our heroic detective. He’s incapable of going anywhere without suffering panic attacks, pissing and shitting himself.”
“And we’re completely sure about that?” Julia said.
“Yep. Secure psychiatric care. Sarac won’t be out of the nuthouse for years, if ever. So he couldn’t have been at Källstavik in February, which means he wasn’t murdered, chopped up, and dumped under the ice. Besides, I’ve had time to check the DNA match that made the Security Police get such a hard-on about taking over the case. A sixty-five percent match is crap. That means there’s only a slightly greater probability that the victim was at Skarpö than that he wasn’t. Both I and the head of Regional Crime are more than happy to hand that sort of speculation and guesswork to our spook friends.”
Julia bit her top lip. She had been expecting Pärson to fall off his chair with shock when he heard their revelation. Instead he was sitting there on the other side of the desk, grinning at them in an unpleasantly supercilious way. As if they were two crazies in tinfoil hats.
She looked at the photofit again, then at Amante. He avoided her gaze. Could they really be that wrong? But the grinning skull in her head didn’t agree. The dead man was David Sarac, no matter what Pärson claimed. She just couldn’t prove it at the moment.
“Listen, Gabrielsson.” Pärson sounded more friendly now, almost paternal. “You’re a good police officer—one of the very best, I’d say. I’ll be retiring in a couple of years, selling my apartment and moving to Thailand to drink myself to death with garish cocktails. If you play your cards right, this lovely desk can be yours. But if the head of Regional Crime gets the slightest whiff of this business with the skull, well, you’re smart enough to work out the rest for yourself. Kollander’s paranoid about his reputation, especially now that he’s expecting the national police chief to reward him for his efforts. He’d get rid of you quicker than you can say ass-kisser.”
Pärson tilted his head slightly.
“I know you, Gabrielsson, I know what this is about. If it would make you happier, I can give the case a new code. Make it look like it was being investigated by one of the alcoholics in the end corridor until the Security Police took over. That way your solving rate won’t get messed up.”
She didn’t respond.
“Good, that’s all sorted, then. Now, make sure you get that fucking head back to the Forensic Medicine Unit as quickly and discreetly as you can. Send our intrepid bribemaster general in while you wait in the car.” Pärson grinned at his joke. “As soon as the skull’s back, start the weekend early and go home. On Monday I promise you’ll have a nice new murder to get your teeth into. And with that, I think we can put this whole episode behind us. What do you say, Gabrielsson?”
* * *
The bodyguard—Stenberg thought his name might be Becker—opened the car door. The man was looking away the whole time, focused on their surroundings. Stenberg got out of the car and stretched gently. He shaded his eyes with his hand and gazed out across the water, toward the Vasa Museum and Gröna Lund amusement park. A couple of young women in short summer dresses and high heels walked past on the pavement. One of them smiled at him and he couldn’t help smiling back. And why not? It was Friday afternoon, the working day was over, the sun was shining, and Stockholm was looking at its most beautiful.
Inside the restaurant Karolina was waiting at their table.
“Hello, darling,” he said, and leaned forward to kiss her. She tilted her head to one side and let him kiss her on the cheek instead of the lips.
“I’ve already ordered. Veal for both of us. Salad rather than potato gratin.” She looked up and noted his expression. “You’ve let your belt out a notch, and the camera added a few more kilos yesterday.”
She nodded gently toward his stomach and revealed a row of perfectly white pearly teeth between lips red with the lipstick she had just stopped him from spoiling. Karolina was his rock, the only person he could trust unconditionally. She was strong in every sense of the word.
He sat down, spread the large linen napkin over his lap, and took a sip of water.
“How has your day been?” he asked.
“Fine. The phone keeps ringing. Two different charities are trying to recruit me, and I’m inundated with lunch invitations. If it carries on like this, I’m soon going to need an assistant.” Karolina winked at him.
“I could put someone onto that if you like.”
“It’s too soon. An assistant would make it look like we’re taking developments for granted.”
The waiter appeared with their starters. The thick carpet and subdued conversation of the other guests almost drowned the sound of him approaching.
“You’re right,” Stenberg said once the waiter had left them. “I’m just worried about you.”
Karolina patted his hand. “I’ll manage. Now eat; the veal is supposed to be wonderful.”
Stenberg returned her smile, then glanced up briefly as two familiar men walked in through the doors facing Strandvägen and stopped at the maître d’s little podium. One was Oscar Wallin, the other John Thorning. The men were laughing, as if one of them had just said something amusing. They were behaving like old friends and Stenberg felt his good mood sink.
“How lovely to see you,” John Thorning said with a surprised smile.
“Yes, what a surprise.” Karolina repeated the trick with her cheek so that Thorning could kiss her on both sides. “It’s been ages. How are you and Margareta?”
John Thorning replied something that Stenberg didn’t hear. He was fully occupied trying not to glare angrily at Wallin.
“I didn’t know that you and John knew each other,” he said.
“Oh, we’ve had a few dealings. John suggested we get a bite to eat together, and as luck would have it he had a gap in his schedule today.” Wallin nodded toward Thorning.
“Yes, I wanted to thank Wallin personally for his efforts last winter. That supplementary investigation into”—Thorning made a slight gesture with his hand—“Sophie’s tragic passing. You told me that Wallin helped to iron out the question marks that had been troubling me. So I thought that the least I could do was to offer a bite to eat in return.” John Thorning patted Wallin’s shoulder. “And it’s a good idea anyway, having an early dinner on a Friday. It makes the weekend feel longer, don’t you think? And the boat to Sandhamn leaves from just outside here, so I’ll be sure of getting home okay.”
Stenberg forced a smile. This meeting was obviously no coincidence. Wallin must have checked his diary with Jeanette. He would have to talk to her about that.
“We won’t disturb you any longer, Jesper,” John Thorning said. “You and Karolina need a little time to yourselves, and Oscar and I have a lot to talk about. I’m very interested in how things are going with your plans. We should meet again. Soon. I’ll ask my secretary to call Jeanette.”
They shook hands, and with an effort of will Stenberg managed to squeeze out another smile.
“John’s looking brighter,” Karolina said as they sat back down. “He seems to have put that sorry business with Sophie behind him.”
Something in her voice made Stenberg start. An undertone, a trace so insignificant that he wasn’t even sure that he’d really heard it. He stared at his wife, but she looked exactly the same as usual. She smiled at him. Bright red lipstick, white teeth. For a millisecond he got it into his head that Sophie was sitting on the chair opposite him. Looking at him with her shattered eyes. He shuddered and blinked hard a couple of times to make the image disappear.
“Aren’t you feeling well, Jesper?” his wife asked.
* * *
Julia sat with her lower arms resting on the wheel as she fiddled with her cell phone. Both side windows were wound down to keep the summer heat from turning the car into an oven. Even so, she could feel her blouse sticking to her lower back, and she started the engine and air-conditioning the moment she saw Amante emerge from the Forensic Medicine Unit.
She’d had time to make four calls while he was in there, all with similarly disappointing results. No one could tell her where David Sarac was being treated. Or, to be more accurate, where he had been treated before someone murdered, dismembered, and dumped him in Lake Mälaren. Because she was still convinced that they were right and Pärson was wrong.
“All sorted out?” she said.
“Yes.” Amante sat heavily in the passenger seat and closed the door. “My good friend in there promised to put the head in an empty compartment in cold storage. One of his colleagues will find it within the next few days and call the Security Police. A regrettable mistake, blah, blah, blah …”
“And how much did that cost you, then?”
“Do you really want to know?”
Julia didn’t answer. She just took the hand brake off and let the car roll slowly out of the parking lot. Suppressed an urge to put her foot down and force Amante to grab for the handle above the door.
“Are you planning on telling me what Pärson meant earlier?” Amante said after several minutes’ silence.
“Which bit?” she muttered.
“What he said about your solving rate.”
She glanced at Amante, but nothing in his tone of voice or expression suggested that he was teasing her. The best idea would obviously be to keep quiet. Follow Pärson’s advice, get shot of this mess, and put the whole case behind her.
“I’ve got the best clearance rate when it comes to murder investigations,” she found herself saying instead. She heard the note of pride in her own voice.
“In Violent Crime?”
She shook her head. “In the whole country, actually. Almost all the cases I’ve investigated have ended up solved.”
He turned toward her and she could sense his skepticism.
“We’re talking solved from a police perspective,” she added. “Not necessarily guilty verdicts. In two of the cases the perpetrators are dead. And in two more they’ve fled abroad and can’t be brought to justice because of that. And in one … in one the perpetrator was released on appeal, unfortunately.”
She bit her top lip gently. Thought about saying that the appeal was successful because of an unusually sloppy prosecutor, but decided against it.
“Either way, I’ve concluded all my investigations. Answered all the questions and worked out what happened, who did what and why.”
“I get it. So Pärson’s going to shuffle a few papers to keep this from affecting your statistics.”
“Something like that,” she mumbled.
“Great,” Amante said in a tone that suggested he meant the exact opposite. Silence fell inside the car as he studied her.
Julia pulled up at a red light. She went on staring straight ahead to avoid meeting his gaze. Even so, he seemed to have read her mind.
“You still think Sarac is our victim, don’t you?”
She realized she was biting her lip again and made a mental note to stop doing that.
“I haven’t seen any evidence to prove that he isn’t. The fact that Pärson says Sarac is locked up is one thing, but I know him well enough to assume he hasn’t called to check. If he even knows where to start. I’ve made a few calls myself, but no one seems to know where Sarac is.”
She turned to look at Amante.
“What about you? What do you think?”
“I was actually thinking of asking if you had any plans for the weekend.” He smiled that cryptic little smile again, and for a moment she thought he was going to ask her out.
“Why?” she said, more abruptly than she intended.
“Well, if you’re free, I wondered if you fancy a little trip up north.”
“Where to?”
“Pick me up at one o’clock tomorrow and you’ll find out.”
The car behind them blew its horn and Julia realized the lights had turned green.
Three (#ulink_bbf2eec2-8ede-5e8d-a748-6745ae2b5a49)
A monotonous four-hour drive—that was what Julia’s Saturday afternoon had consisted of so far. Back roads, fir forests, and wildlife fences.
This wasn’t how she had imagined the weekend. She had been planning to work out, finish the book she never seemed to get to the end of, go to the movies, or do one of the other things that got her through weekends when she wasn’t working. Instead she was sitting behind the wheel, glancing at Amante as he watched the GPS bubble on the screen of his smartphone.
“Turn right here.” Amante pointed toward an anonymous-looking side road. “One kilometer of country road, then we’re there.”
“Okay.”
She wondered how he’d found out the address of the nursing home; she’d even asked him about it when she picked him up outside his apartment. But, as usual, all she got in response was that tentative little smile.
About half an hour earlier they had stopped at a gas station to look at the map and see what Amante’s smartphone could tell them about their destination. The satellite picture showed what looked like a manor house with two wings. Surrounding the main building was a large park that stretched all the way down to a small lake. If you zoomed in really close, you could just make out the walls and fences surrounding the entire property. But as they approached the facility, none of that was visible apart from a section of wall, a security lodge, and a large metal gate. All you could see from the gate was tall, well-established trees in the park beyond.
Julia drove slowly into the visitors’ parking lot and turned the engine off.
According to Google, the home had originally been built as a sanatorium. Over the years it had been an adult education college and an old people’s home. According to one five-year-old article, it had been sold and turned into a nursing home, but that was about it. It wasn’t even possible to find a phone number for the main switchboard, so, whatever they were doing there, they were keen to avoid publicity—which seemed fairly logical if they were treating patients with PTSD. The female security guard behind the glass hatch was similarly welcoming.
“Sorry.” The speaker fixed in the reinforced glass gave the guard’s voice a metallic clang. “All visits need to be authorized in advance. Those are the rules.”
Amante raised his ID higher, pressing it against the glass.
“Like I said, we’re police officers, and we’re conducting an investigation. It’s extremely important that we see David Sarac.”
“If it’s that important, then you should have spoken to the senior consultant and got him to arrange a visit. Anyway, you’re not a police officer; it says you’re a civilian investigator on your ID.”
Amante took a sharp breath, but Julia put her hand on his shoulder before he could say anything else. Arguing with a guard was never a good idea. She recognized the type all too well. Low-level employees who were given a tiny bit of power and made the absolute most of it. She stepped forward and held her own ID up against the glass just as Amante had done.
“I’m a police officer,” she said. “And, like my partner just said, it’s very important that we see one of the patients here. His name is David Sarac.”
The guard leaned closer to the glass. Read her name on her ID. “Look here, Detective Inspector … Gabrielsson. You see those signs?”
She pointed to a yellow rectangle with black lettering hanging above her head. Then at another one a short distance away on the heavy metal gate.
“This is a secure site. That means no unauthorized access. Under any circumstances. And seeing as neither you nor your colleague appear on the list of names, that means you aren’t authorized, whether you’re police officers or not. Those are the rules. People have lost their job for less.”
“What sort of nursing home gets classified as a fucking secure site?”
Amante’s sudden outburst took Julia by surprise. She squeezed his arm and got him to shut up. The guard glared at him.
“We look after soldiers here: people who have been in wars. According to the Security Police, that makes it a potential target.”
Amante opened his mouth to reply, but Julia squeezed his arm again, harder this time. What was wrong with him?
“Rules are rules,” she said to the guard. “Obviously we appreciate that you’re just doing your job. You’ll have to excuse my colleague: the case we’re investigating is pretty serious. A lot of pressure.”
She looked over toward the metal gate. The sign on it was bright yellow, but it was already bleached by the sun. And the barbed wire on top of the wall didn’t look new.
“We’ll call the senior consultant and come back tomorrow.” She bustled Amante a couple of steps toward the car before she turned round again. “By the way, how long has the home been classified as a secure site?”
“Since sometime last winter,” the metallic voice replied.
“Do you remember which month?”
The guard glared at Julia, then at Amante.
“Early March. Why?”
“Oh, no reason. Just curious. Thanks for your help.” She nodded to Amante to get in the car. She didn’t say anything until the doors were closed. But he beat her to it.
“Coming here was a long shot—I said that before we set off—but maybe if we wait until it gets dark—”
“And do what?” Julia interrupted. “Climb over the wall? Break in through a door? Smash a few windows at random?” She shook her head. “We have no idea what the inside of the building is like. And if our suspicions are right and Sarac is our dead body, then we’re looking for someone who isn’t even in there.”
Amante looked suddenly sullen. “Sorry I dragged you up here for nothing. We could have waited till Monday, I could have asked my contact to get hold of the senior consultant’s number. I got carried away …”
Julia held up a finger to get him to stop talking. The metal gate was slowly swinging open. A car drove out, followed by another one. Then a motorcycle. The vehicles stopped and a man in uniform emerged from the security lodge to check the backseats and trunks. He even insisted on looking behind the motorcyclist’s visor and seeing some ID before he allowed them to leave.
The vehicles passed their parked car. Two men in the first car, a lone woman in the second one. It wasn’t possible to determine the gender of the motorcyclist. All three vehicles turned left at the junction a short distance away.
“They’re very conscientious with their exit checks,” Julia muttered. She looked at the time. Quarter past five. Probably a change of shift. Suddenly she had an idea. She turned the key in the ignition and roared off, following the three other vehicles.
They caught up with the motorcycle just before the small village that consisted of little more than a cluster of bungalows and a gas station. The motorcycle turned off at the gas station and pulled up at its little hot dog stand. Without saying anything to Amante, Julia got out of the car. She walked toward the stand, but when she was almost there she pulled out her phone and pretended to take a call. The biker, a man in his fifties, had taken his helmet off and was chatting to the attractive woman in the stand—she was maybe half his age—before she put together his order. The smell of fast food reminded Julia that it had been a while since she had eaten anything.
She waited until the man had gotten his food, put his helmet back on, and driven off before walking up to the window.
“Hello,” she said.
The woman behind the counter returned the greeting.
“Regulars, eh?” Julia said, nodding toward the disappearing motorbike. “I’ve just come from the nursing home. It was the staff who told me to come here.”
She smiled, trying to come across as friendly and unthreatening as she read the menu.
“Well …” The young woman hesitated over her reply, but Julia’s smile seemed to convince her. “You could say that. Some of them stop off here practically every night.”
“Best place for an evening burger, the girl in the gatehouse said. You probably know her: fair hair, keeps herself in shape. Maybe a little grumpy?”
“Mia. Yes, she can be a bit sullen.” The young woman gave a wry smile and Julia reflected it back to her.
“Mia—that was it. Smart too. You seem to know what’s going on as well. Who works where and so on.”
“This is a pretty small place: everyone knows everyone else. The doctors live in town, but most of the other staff up there come from around here.”
“You don’t happen to know if anyone’s left recently?” Julia said. “Someone who maybe lost their job last winter, something like that?”
Another long shot, based on something Security Mia had said. People have lost their job for less. But Julia could tell from the evasive look in the young woman’s eyes that she’d guessed right.
She leaned over the counter and held out her police ID. She saw the woman’s eyes open wide.
“It’s vital that we talk to that person, right away.”
* * *
The man looking out from the gap in the door was wearing underpants, a T-shirt, and a grubby dressing gown, even though it was late afternoon. His eyes were red and a cloying, burned smell that Julia recognized all too well drifted out across the crooked front steps. She cautiously took hold of the door handle from the outside.
“Eskil Svensson?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Food delivery from Isa in the kiosk.” She held up the plastic bag and let it dangle from her forefinger. The smell from it made her stomach rumble.
The man in the robe seemed just as hungry as she was. He reached out one hand for the bag without letting go of the door with the other.
At that moment Julia tugged the door toward her, which made the man lose his balance and tumble out onto the porch, where he landed at their feet. Before he had time to react, she put one knee against the back of his neck and twisted his arm behind his back. Then she winked at Amante.
“Police,” he said, sounding rather breathless. “We’d like to ask you some questions.”
Four (#ulink_e01d0cd2-0f8d-5966-8c52-f6142ce841b7)
“The girls are watching television. I was thinking of going for a run round the Altorp track. I’ll be gone an hour at the most. Then I thought we could have a nice, cozy evening together.”
Stenberg’s wife came into his study with a cup of coffee in her hand. She put it down at a safe distance from the keyboard, leaned over, and kissed him on the head.
“You look tired.” She ran her hand through his hair, forcing him to look up from the screen. “Is it anything in particular? Anything you want to talk about?”
“No,” Stenberg muttered. “Just a lot going on.”
“Is the prosecutor general causing trouble again?”
He nodded absentmindedly and looked at the screen again.
“The prime minister trusts you, Jesper, now more than ever. The fact is that the whole party trusts you, so you can’t let little things like that get in your way. We need a modernized justice system; we’ve needed one for ages. Otherwise people will gradually lose faith in the system. The contract between citizens and the state, all the things we discussed ad infinitum at law school. You already had a vision back then, a conviction that made people take notice of you. It made me notice you.”
“I know, darling. But trying to reform state institutions is a constant uphill struggle: various government and other entities everywhere having their say on things, with everyone terrified of losing influence.”
“What about Wallin? Can’t you let him do some of the heavy lifting?”
Stenberg felt his jaw tighten. Even here at home in his study, his inner sanctum, Wallin cast his baleful shadow.
Karolina raised her eyebrows. “Is it Wallin who’s the problem?”
Damn. She knew him far too well. Noticed the slightest change in his expression. She could even hear things he didn’t say. Keeping his affair with Sophie Thorning secret all those years had taken all his willpower and concentration. Yet he knew he probably wouldn’t have been able to lie if Karolina had confronted him, if she’d asked straight out if he was being unfaithful and looked at him the way she was right now. Fortunately she never had.
He filled his lungs, then slowly breathed out through his mouth.
“What’s this all about?” Her tone of voice was perfect, a fitting combination of concern and empathy. Karolina would have been a brilliant lawyer, but instead she had put his career ahead of her own. Taken on the role of supportive wife and mother to his children. Her grandfather had been foreign minister; her father, Karl-Erik, was a member of the party’s inner circle. She had opened doors for him that he could never even have dreamed of. And how had he thanked her? With betrayal, lies, and infidelity.
For a couple of moments the feeling he had had last winter was back, the conviction that he ought to tell her everything. Beg for her forgiveness. But he couldn’t ask that of her. It wasn’t Karolina’s responsibility to lighten his burden.
“Oscar Wallin …” He took a sip of his coffee to make what he was thinking of saying sound less loaded. “He’s very ambitious. You saw him with John Thorning. Wallin is forming new alliances, and, to be honest, I’ve started to have doubts about his loyalty.”
Karolina leaned against the edge of the desk.
“Wallin couldn’t be national police chief. We agreed on that. You, me, and Daddy. Appointing Eva Swensk gained you support within the party, support you’re going to need in the future. We’re going to need …”
She paused and stroked his hair again. He liked her hands, even though she herself didn’t. Those long, strong fingers. The hands of a person who could be practically anything she wanted to be.
“Right now it’s more important than ever to think strategically. You have to see things in a longer perspective, not just focus on the present. If you’re convinced that the goal is the right one, you mustn’t hesitate to make unpalatable decisions. Keep your eye on the prize.”
He shut his eyes. He’d seen this trick before and was starting to get a bit tired of it. Karolina’s lips were moving, but the voice coming out of her mouth belonged to someone else.
“If we win the election, the prime minister will probably step down at the next party conference. Go out at the top. And if we lose …”
She pulled out a chair and sat down next to him.
“If we lose, he’ll have to accept the consequences and resign at once. Either way, the party will be looking for a younger, more energetic successor. Someone whom can reform politics the way he’s reforming the justice system.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Stenberg said, but more and more often these days he wasn’t sure whom he was replying to: Karolina, or her father.
* * *
Julia Gabrielsson held up the little plastic bag of marijuana she’d found on Eskil Svensson’s coffee table. Waved it slowly in front of his pallid face.
“So, to sum up: a mysterious man calling himself Frank contacted you early in February and paid you to take messages to and from Sarac inside the home, and then a bit more for helping Sarac escape. But that’s as much as you know.”
Eskil was sitting on the sofa between her and Amante, shaking his head.
“And you don’t know where this Frank came from or what he wanted with Sarac?”
“Like I said, he showed up in the pub one evening and started buying me drinks. Then he asked for a favor. It didn’t sound too difficult and the money was good. Then it sort of grew …” He pulled a pained expression and seemed to be avoiding looking at the bag of marijuana between Julia’s fingers.
“And you started to acquire a taste for the money. I get that.” She put the bag down on the table in front of Eskil. “This is quite a stash. I’d guess about a year in prison, wouldn’t you say, Amante?”
“Maybe two,” he said somberly as he stared at Eskil. “Possession with intent to supply—that’s serious stuff.”
Julia was having trouble keeping a straight face. Amante was a fast learner.
Eskil turned even paler. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.
“Come off it. That’s my weed. I’m not some fucking dealer. Look, I’ve told you all I know. The only thing I did was get the master key copied. Then we decided what time was best if you wanted to escape without being spotted. Sarac got out and hid in the trunk of my car during the shift change. Then I let him out at the railway station and gave him a train ticket, a travel card for Stockholm, and a bit of cash. That’s all.”
“And then you got caught,” Amante said.
“No, for fuck’s sake! Haven’t you been listening?” Eskil threw his arms out. “They accused me of stealing drugs.”
“The sleeping pills and tranquilizers that you gave Sarac.”
“That’s right. I understand the tranquilizers. I mean, the guy wasn’t well. But he already had a bag full of sleeping pills, so I can’t see why he wanted two more. But he said it was important—that he needed to have exactly twenty-five before he left. Otherwise he wasn’t going anywhere.”
“So it was the pills that got you the sack?” Julia said.
“Shit, you two are unbelievable,” Eskil groaned. “Aren’t there any entrance requirements for joining the police? I’ve already told you what happened. No one fired me. They couldn’t prove anything, so I was given six months’ wages in return for handing in my resignation. I didn’t want to work there anyway. You’ve seen what it’s like there. It’s a fascist setup. The staff have to give urine samples, all kinds of crap like that …”
“This mysterious Frank,” Julia said. “Tell us about him again.”
Eskil let out a theatrical sigh.
“Like I’ve already said a thousand times: he and Sarac had been on that island together last winter. Where a load of people got killed. That’s why he wanted to talk to Sarac.”
“And you don’t remember anything else about Frank apart from the fact that he might have had a slight accent, paid well, and acted like a cop?”
“No. I mean, it’s several months ago now. Actually, he did have a bit of a limp, even though he looked like he was in good shape.”
Julia started waving the bag of weed again. “What do you think about getting a sniffer dog out here?” she said to Amante. “Turn this apartment upside down. Maybe ask the neighbors if they’ve noticed drug dealing going on here.”
“Do you want me to call right away?”
“Probably just as well. Eskil here isn’t exactly a rocket scientist. I doubt we’re going to get anything else useful out of him.”
She turned toward Eskil and could almost see the cogs turning inside his head. Amante slowly got to his feet and pulled out his cell phone.
“Wait,” Eskil said. “Wait, for fuck’s sake! I’ve got something you might want to see.”
He started to dig about in the pockets of his dressing gown. He fished out a smartphone with a cracked screen and started to look through it.
“Here,” he said eagerly, holding the phone out to Julia. “Sarac made me take a picture.”
The screen showed a grainy photograph of a man with sharp features. He was half facing away and seemed unaware that he was being photographed.
“That’s Frank. See what I mean about him looking like a cop?”
Five (#ulink_d2d908f3-8031-5b5b-8e53-162cc6263634)
The rain started falling just as they passed the sports ground on the edge of the village. Tiny drops to start with, barely enough for Julia to switch the windshield wipers on. But gradually the rain got harder, wiping out the distinction between the summer’s evening and the forest spreading out on either side of the road.
“What do we do now?” Amante said. “Call Pärson and tell him that Sarac isn’t in the home after all? That we’ve got a picture of the man who lured him out and probably killed him?”
Julia shook her head.
“It’s too soon to talk to Pärson. This is the Security Police’s case now, and you heard me promise to let go of it completely. And seeing as it was Pärson who tried to convince us that Sarac was in that home, I’m not entirely sure where he stands. But regardless of who we go to with all this, it would be better to wait until we’ve got something more definite than a grainy digital photograph and a first name.”
“So what are you thinking, then?”
“I don’t know yet. I need some time to think.”
Besides, I’m still not entirely sure where you stand either, she thought. You seem a bit too eager to press on with this case.
“Sure,” Amante said. “We’ve got at least a four-hour drive home, so take as much time as you need.” He started fiddling with the car radio and managed to find three different commercials before he ended up with a soppy Whitney Houston ballad.
They were approaching a junction beside an old house. From a distance it looked almost abandoned, but as they drove past, Julia could see the ghostly glow of a television in one of the windows.
“Just think, people choose to live out here,” she said, mostly to give her brain something else to think about for a few minutes. “So far away from absolutely everything.”
“A surprising number of people are prepared to die for the chance to do that,” Amante muttered.
“What did you say?”
He looked up. Didn’t seem to have noticed that he’d spoken out loud.
“Just that a surprising number of people are prepared to risk their lives to get here. Hundreds of thousands of them.”
Julia saw an opening and decided to make the most of it.
“Lampedusa must be a nightmare. Isn’t it? I can understand if you’d rather not talk about it.”
“At its worst, there were two boats arriving each week.” Amante’s voice was lower all of a sudden, more monotonous. “Well, maybe not boats, exactly. Some of them were little more than a small hull and an engine. The bigger ships were even worse. No food, no toilets, hardly any drinking water. Cargo holds so packed that the air sometimes ran out down there. Did you know …”
The words seemed to catch in his throat.
“Did you know that dead people can stay on their feet if they’re packed together tightly enough? Rigor mortis turns them into statues. Men, women, children, whole families. If you listen carefully you can almost hear them still calling for help.”
He turned away. The radio went on playing the slushy song.
“Three thousand dead each year, but the EU is reducing the funding. They’d rather spend billions of euros rescuing banks than spend a few million saving people who happen to have the wrong color skin.”
“And you said that out loud to someone who didn’t like it?”
He smiled that little smile again. “More times than I should have. A lot more.”
“So what happened?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Not a damn thing. The boats kept coming, people kept dying.”
“And you were transferred?”
“You could put it like that.”
Something in his voice told her the conversation was over, and she resisted the temptation to ask any more questions. At least for the time being.
They passed a road sign. Just under three hundred kilometers until they were home. Sooner or later she would have to make her mind up. It would be difficult to carry on with this case on her own. Besides, she was starting to appreciate Amante’s company, albeit slightly reluctantly. The smile that was so hard to read. The unconventional way he went about tackling problems. The way he quickly adapted to different situations. But, perhaps most of all, the way he talked about the victims, the dead.
“My dad was in the police,” she said. “My grandfather too. They didn’t really talk that much about police work at home. Mom didn’t like it. She probably didn’t want me to hear their stories. But I still realized—worked out that what they did was something different, something you couldn’t really understand if you hadn’t experienced it yourself. That was probably what made me want to become a police officer. To start with, I thought it was all about adrenaline. About putting yourself in danger. It took me several years to realize that it was actually about something else entirely. About seeing people when they’re at their very worst. Drunk, distraught, furious, humiliated, beaten up, raped, or dead. About seeing that and trying to do something about it. About failing more often than succeeding, but still not giving up.”
She fell silent, thinking about Sarac’s mutilated body. And his distorted grimace.
Amante said nothing. But she was sure he was listening carefully—that he understood exactly what she meant. The light of the car’s headlights reflected off a pair of eyes at the side of the road. She noticed a fleeting movement and switched her foot from the accelerator to the brake, but the animal was gone. A cat, or maybe a fox?
“You said you didn’t know all the details about Skarpö,” she said. “There were two other people who were found out there with Sarac. Right beside him, to be more accurate.”
Amante turned to look at her. “Who were they?”
“The first one was a woman, Natalie Aden. She worked as Sarac’s personal assistant after his car accident. Her intervention saved Sarac’s life. We should at least talk to her. Show her Frank’s picture and see if she recognizes him. But I think we ought to start with the second person. If anyone can identify Frank, it’s probably him.”
“Who are we talking about?”
“Atif Kassab. Seven years ago he was a notorious member of the Stockholm underworld. A nasty bastard. He retired and left the country with his mother. Didn’t show up again until last winter, at his brother’s funeral. Looks like someone managed to persuade him to go back to work.” She dimmed the lights as a car came toward them. “Kassab blew Superintendent Peter Molnar’s brains out on Skarpö, along with another three people, and took a couple of bullets himself. It looked like he wasn’t going to make it for a while, but thanks to Natalie Aden’s actions he survived as well.”
Unfortunately, she added to herself.
“Kassab said nothing when he was questioned, and kept quiet all the way through his trial: never said a word about why he was on the island or who had hired his services. He was given a life sentence—didn’t even bother to appeal against it.”
“Strange.”
Julia nodded. “Very. But there are plenty of things about Skarpö that are strange. Atif Kassab is being held in one of the ‘phoenix’ high-security units south of the city. It’s a long shot, but I suggest we go and see him as soon as possible.”
“So we’re going to ask a cop killer for his help?”
“Yes, to track down another one,” Julia said. “What do you think?”
Amante didn’t answer, but from the corner of her eye Julia caught another glimpse of that cryptic smile.
Six (#ulink_8dcfce41-2375-5b3a-8153-e3ed3d257530)
Phoenix. The bird that catches fire, dies in the flames, and is then reborn out of its own ashes with shimmering new plumage.
The name couldn’t be more inappropriate. No one in the prison was transformed into a better version of himself and emerging as a new, well-adapted individual with sparkling new feathers, ready to be embraced by society. The majority would end up back behind bars within a couple of years, for crimes just as bad as the first time around.
Maybe that was the cycle of repetition that the name hinted at? A sort of ironic wink: We all know how this is going to turn out, don’t we?
Atif Kassab pushed his breakfast tray aside and laid three cards facedown on the table in front of him. He noticed himself looking up at the camera in the ceiling above him. One of several hundred. The phoenix units were built to house the most dangerous prisoners in the country, those deemed most likely to try to escape. No doors or gates led to the outside world; the only way out was through an underground tunnel that led to another unit. A prison inside a prison.
He looked at the men at the other tables in the dayroom. Fifteen of them in total, an interesting mix of murderers, drug dealers, and bank robbers. They weren’t all particularly dangerous or likely to abscond. The state had overestimated the capacity needed in the phoenix units and had had to dilute their occupants with ordinary criminals to keep the smart new facilities from sitting half-empty.
But a number of the men had no boundaries at all. In the wrong situation they could be lethal, both to themselves and those around them. The big, square guy at the table in the middle, the wall-eyed one called Rosco, was the current unofficial boss of the unit. Rosco had come over and introduced himself in the first few days. Shook hands gangster-style, spouted a load of names of people Atif didn’t know and gangs he’d never heard of. In here he was a cop killer, someone viewed with respect. But the conversation was about more than mere pleasantries. Rosco was evaluating him, trying to work out if he was a threat, if he was going to upset the balance of power.
Atif had no interest at all in prison politics. He kept himself to himself, read books, and worked out in the small gym. Rubber straps and Pilates balls. No weights, nothing that could, according to Prison Service regulations, turn already dangerous criminals into mountains of muscle. But the exercise on offer was enough for his body to recuperate gradually from its injuries. The doctors had removed four meters of gut, drained almost a liter of blood from his torso, and patched up a number of less serious injuries. He had survived, and he knew whom he had to thank for that. He hoped he would be able to convey his thanks in person one day.
Atif stared blankly at the cards in front of him, then closed his eyes. He tried to conjure up an image of his house back home in Iraq. The scent of the almond tree in the back garden. The starry sky up above. But in spite of the fact that he regularly tried to keep the memory alive, it was getting hazier, losing its color, like the old pictures in his mother’s well-thumbed photo albums. Pale imitations of what had once been. Something that was now lost. He wondered how she was. If she was still in the nursing home in Najaf, or if his aunt had moved her farther south, away from the fighting in the north. He’d written a couple of times, hoping to hear if the money was arriving each month. But he hadn’t yet received a reply.
Atif turned the first card over. The seven of hearts. Tindra had turned seven three weeks ago. He’d sent her a card. He came close to writing that he missed her, that he’d do anything to hear her voice, no matter how briefly. But he didn’t want her to come here. To have to go through all the security checks just so they could sit on opposite sides of a table. He still wouldn’t be able to hold her.
Besides, her mother would never let her visit him. Cassandra needed to keep him as far away from her as possible, a decision he couldn’t blame her for. He had wounded and killed people last winter, people who had families, friends, and business acquaintances outside the prison walls. People who were waiting for a chance to get their revenge. But as long as Abu Hamsa was protecting Cassandra and Tindra, no one would dare do anything. Which was rather ironic, to put it mildly, given that the old man was his worst enemy. Abu Hamsa had manipulated him, commissioned him to track down a ghost when it was actually the old man himself who had had Adnan killed, leaving Tindra without a father.
Abu Hamsa had sent him a message via Cassandra. Don’t tell the police anything, serve your sentence, follow my instructions. She hadn’t needed to say more than that. Didn’t have to utter the words that were hanging in the air.
Or else …
So Atif had played along. He followed Abu Hamsa’s instructions obediently, played patience and waited to be dealt the right cards. Something that changed the field of play.
Atif moved his hand to the card next to the seven of hearts. But before he could turn it over, the door of the dayroom opened and the head screw, Blom, walked in. He looked like a cover boy from Men’s Health. High cheekbones, spray tan, and short, tinted hair in a gentle wave across his forehead. Right behind him, between another two gym-pumped screws, Atif could just make out a birdlike little man in prison clothes that were too big for him.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” the head screw said, as always slightly louder than necessary. “This is our latest resident. Perhaps you’d like to introduce yourself, Gilsén?”
Blom stepped aside. The little man remained where he was between the two guards, clutching the paper bag he was holding in his hands. The smell of his fear managed to overpower Blom’s body lotion.
The senior guard waited another few seconds. Exchanged a malicious glance with his colleagues.
“Well, I daresay you’ll all have time to chew the fat later on. Follow me, Gilsén, and we’ll get you installed in your suite. It’s probably not quite up to the standard you’re used to.”
The guards lumbered out of the dayroom with Gilsén between them. Atif watched the men over at Rosco’s table lean closer to each other, covering their mouths so that the cameras and microphones wouldn’t pick up what they were saying.
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Литагент HarperCollins
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: WINNER SWEDISH CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR.The adrenaline-charged and suspenseful thriller set in a ruthless world where all means are permitted in the fight for power.When a savaged body is found in the waters outside the governing party’s conference centre, the case lands on detective Julia Gabrielsson’s desk. Who is the deceased and why has somebody gone to such trouble to make sure the body is unidentifiable?Officer David Sarac is a man haunted by demons. After a violent showdown that almost cost him his life, the policeman is being treated at a closed ward far from the capital. Soon he will permanently silence the accusing voices in his head. But a mysterious offer has David changing his mind.