X Ways to Die

by Stefan Ahnhem

  ‘It’s certainly not far from it.’

  ‘Are you telling me Pontus Holmwik and Assar Skanås were in contact?’ Lilja said.

  ‘It could be a coincidence.’ Tuvesson shrugged. ‘But let’s do a search and see if we can get a home address.’

  Lilja sat down in front of her computer.

  ‘His personal identity number is 790825-3324,’ Tuvesson continued.

  Lilja typed in the numbers, but quickly looked up again. ‘There’s no one with that number.’

  ‘Odd.’ Klippan went over to see for himself. ‘Shouldn’t Hertz have discovered that when they put it into their system?’

  ‘You would have thought,’ Molander said. ‘But then again, we didn’t.’

  ‘That’s my fault,’ Lilja said.

  ‘They probably did the paperwork by hand, simple as that.’ Molander took the folder and flipped through it. ‘Besides, not a lot of people can tell a fake driving licence from a real one.’

  ‘What, it’s fake?’ Lilja exclaimed.

  ‘It has to be, doesn’t it, with that personal identity number? The best way to find out is to drop it from a few inches and listen to the sound it makes when it lands.’

  ‘What do you mean, listen to the sound? What sound?’

  ‘The plastic, it’s different. A real one sounds harder, more like metal.’

  ‘Fake or not, you have to have reached him somehow,’ Tuvesson said.

  ‘Yes, I contacted Hertz, who gave me his name and mobile phone number.’ Lilja pointed at her notes. ‘That’s it there.’

  Tuvesson, Klippan and Molander exchanged looks.

  ‘Are you telling me I should call him?’

  ‘No, it’s better to ping his location and surround him. Or what do you reckon?’ Tuvesson turned to Molander.

  ‘Sure, we can do that. But don’t expect too much. Given what he’s managed to pull off so far, he seems smart enough to get rid of that SIM card as soon as Irene was done with him. And also, I have a crime scene waiting to be processed, which is going to take hours.’

  ‘All right, but as soon as you have time, I want you to try it.’ Tuvesson turned to Lilja. ‘When you interviewed him. What reason did he give for being in Bjuv at the time?’

  ‘He was going to photograph various backgrounds, or some such.’ Lilja took the folder back and flipped through her notes. ‘Right, here it is. PetFrame. From what he told me, people send in pictures of their pets and he photoshops them onto another backdrop.’

  ‘And he has the audacity to charge four thousand kronor for it,’ Molander said, his eyes on his phone.

  ‘You found the website?’

  Molander nodded. ‘Unsurprisingly, there’s no organization number, address or phone number. The only thing I can see is an anonymous info@ email address.’

  ‘Maybe we can track his payments,’ Klippan suggested.

  ‘According to the website, he uses cash on delivery, which makes the payments difficult to track since we don’t know what name he uses to send the packages. The best thing would be if we could get access to the email account and start from the other end, his customers.’

  ‘That’s going to take at least a week,’ Klippan said. ‘The question is how many more victims and investigations we’ll have on our hands by then. I suggest we put out an APW.’

  ‘That would be tipping our hand, plus we run the risk of having him pick up and leave the country,’ Tuvesson countered. ‘I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have a feeling we’re getting really close.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Molander said. ‘We have a face and a fake personal identity number. And not much else.’

  ‘I’ll bring it up with Högsell and we’ll see what she thinks. But I’d be surprised if she didn’t agree with me that the best thing we can do right now is to keep things quiet.’ Tuvesson made as if to leave.

  ‘Just one more thing before we break this up.’ Klippan turned to Lilja. ‘That neighbour of yours, what was his name again?’

  ‘What neighbour?’

  ‘You know, the one next door to you whose name we both recognized but couldn’t place.’

  ‘Oh, right. P. Milwokh with a W and a silent H at the end. What made you think of that?’

  ‘It’s the same letters, just in a different order.’

  ‘What?’ Lilja looked from Klippan to the others and back.

  ‘It is. P. Milwokh and P. Holmwik.’

  ‘What, the rental car bloke? He spells his name with a W, too?’

  ‘Yes.’ Klippan went over to the whiteboard, wrote one name above the other and drew lines between each letter until they were all paired up.

  Lilja stared at the two names in disbelief as though it couldn’t possibly be true. But it was. Klippan was right. They had all the same letters. An H in each. A K. A W.

  No amount of wishful thinking could make that a coincidence.

  19

  GERTRUD MOLANDER HAD made herself perfectly clear. Under no circumstances did she want to meet or have any form of contact with him. Fabian had no trouble understanding why. He sought her out to ask questions that had shaken her entire existence to the core. She had gone from believing everything was right as rain to being forced to realize just who she was married to.

  Now she was home in bed, sick, and he was once again going to jam his foot in the door and barge in against her will. This was his chance – and maybe the last one he was going to get – to make her understand that she was no longer safe in her own home. That she had to get out of there as quickly as possible. So he had ducked out of work an hour earlier than planned.

  Ingvar Molander was bound to be using his phone to keep track of where Fabian’s car was, and it had to be assumed he was tracking his mobile as well. Consequently, he’d left the car at home with the phone safe in the glove compartment and arranged for Sonja to drive it down to the ferry for their first trip to see Theodor in Helsingør.

  Fabian himself had walked down to Kopparmölle Square, where he’d caught bus number 2, which he’d then disembarked twenty-five minutes later at Ramlösa Brunn. He’d continued across the tracks and past Ramlösa Wok-Express, where just over a week ago he’d run into Gertrud when he was interviewing her neighbour about the murder of his wife, Inga Dahlberg.

  It had been the worst possible timing. Gertrud had instantly reacted to the investigation having been reopened and questioned why neither she nor her husband had been told about it. Since then, it had only been a matter of time before Molander caught on to what was happening.

  Lindhultsgatan was only a few hundred yards away, and when he rounded the corner he realized he only had twenty minutes before he had to start heading back into town to meet Sonja.

  He continued up towards the house and noted that Gertrud’s car and bike were both missing from the driveway. Once he reached the front door, he rang the bell and waited. Maybe she was asleep. He leaned over the porch railing to peer in through the kitchen window. The lights were off inside and everything looked neat and tidy. No food sitting out, no plates or glasses. Nothing. The countertops were so spotlessly clean they’d pass for mirrors.

  Gertrud was the epitome of the dedicated housewife, always cleaning. Probably one of the last of her generation. And yet, something about the advertisement-clean kitchen made him feel uneasy. He pulled on his leather gloves and took out the keyring he’d found in Hugo Elvin’s desk drawer.

  He’d already found the doors that three of them unlocked, which meant the other four were possible candidates. Two of them were marked with green cloth tape inscribed with handwritten question marks. The other two were marked with white tape; there was a fish on one and a six-digit code – 759583 – on the other, and since a rectangular code lock with two columns of numbers was mounted on the wall next to the door, he started with the latter.

  It went in smoothly. At least at first. After a while, it seemed to get stuck, but with some wiggling, it went all the way in. But he couldn’t turn it. He tried both dir
ections, applying as much force as he dared, not wanting to risk having the key break in the lock. The other white key didn’t fit at all, and nor did either of the green ones.

  He gave up and instead went around to the back of the house and up onto the wooden deck, past the grill, which, in true Molander style, was meticulously covered up and sitting next to garden chairs that were propped against the table in case of rain.

  Nothing had been left to chance. Not even the electric whirring that abruptly started up underneath his feet. He instinctively reached for his gun before realizing it was a robot lawn mower emerging from its bespoke charging alcove under the bottom step of the deck.

  He went over to the terrace door and used his hands to block out the light so he could peek inside. The living room looked like it always did. The rug, the furniture and the curtains, all different shades of beige, and on the walls nondescript landscape paintings jostling for space with pictures of birds and dried flowers.

  The white key with the six-digit code fitted into this lock, too, but this time he could turn it. After slipping inside, he quietly closed the door behind him and listened for noises. There was only silence.

  Gertrud’s collection of owls was set out on a shelf in the display cabinet, just like last time he was there. And in the middle of the crystal parliament, he spotted Elvin’s surveillance owl. In many ways, the location was far too obvious given that the objective was to bug a canny forensic scientist in his own home. But the owl collection was probably so entirely Gertrud’s domain that Molander hadn’t even thought to check it.

  He continued towards the bedroom and tapped the closed door gently while pondering what to say. When the only response was more silence, he eventually pushed down the handle and opened the door.

  He couldn’t say what he’d expected to find, except possibly Gertrud, asleep. The bed was made and the pillows fluffed like in a hotel room. No clothes on the chair in the corner, no tissues, no glass of water, nor anything else for that matter. And no Gertrud.

  In her message, she’d explicitly said she was home in bed. Was she resting somewhere else in the house or was it all just a— Had it actually been Molander texting him back? Had he taken her phone and sat there across the table from him, typing out replies to make sure no one noticed her missing?

  The place did look extremely clean.

  He went over to what looked like Gertrud’s side of the bed and pulled out the drawers in the nightstand. First the top, then the bottom one. Both were empty. Same thing with the chest of drawers and the two wardrobes on her side of the room. No clothes anywhere. The room smelled of cleaning products and when he dragged a finger across the bottom of the wardrobe he couldn’t see so much as a speck of dust.

  Had he cleaned her away? Was that what he was looking at? As though she never existed. But when would he have had the time? Less than two days had passed since their row in the living room, and if Molander was to be believed, he’d spent the entire night in the police lab.

  Judging from what he’d heard of their fight, Molander had been caught off guard by the extent of Gertrud’s knowledge, which made it less likely he’d had a plan in place for what to do with her and more likely he’d been forced to improvise.

  Fabian went over to the other nightstand. On it lay an old physics textbook he recognized from his school years. A piece of paper stuck out from among the pages. He flipped to the marked page, halfway through the chapter on electrical theory, with page upon page full of flowcharts, equations and all kinds of computations. There were also a few hastily jotted notes in the margin.

  Self-ionizing. Conductive. Hydronium: HO– (hydroxide), H3O+ (trihydroxide)

  It was definitely Molander’s handwriting.

  200l/24h=8.33l/h/60=0.14l/min

  But what it meant exactly was less easy to decipher.

  Impedance of human body = skin resistance + internal resistance = approx. 1000Ω

  Could it have something to do with his plan for Gertrud?

  >50mA. X sek → †

  Fabian hurried out of the bedroom and threw open every door he could find. One led to a small storage room crammed full of winter clothes, shoes and cleaning implements, another to a small guest bathroom with an old magnetic soap holder by the basin, a third to a small study cum guest room, complete with bed, desk and desktop computer.

  In the basement, he found a boiler room and a utility room with a door leading straight out into the garden. In addition to a washer and dryer, it also contained a sink that was as spotlessly clean as the rest of the house. A pair of thick waders for fly fishing hung on a hook on one of the walls and along another were shelves that housed an impressively large wine collection.

  The last door in the basement was made of metal and had neither handle nor keyhole.

  ‘Hello! Gertrud, are you in there?’ he shouted and banged the door as hard as he could. ‘It’s Fabian!’ He pressed his ear against the cold metal but heard nothing.

  Turning around, he discovered a small hole in the wall on his right; when he gingerly inserted a finger, he realized it was a flap that could be opened. Behind it was a keypad with numbers from 0 to 9.

  He pulled out the key with the six-digit code and after he punched it in there was a faint rush of air as the metal door slid open, disappearing into the wall. The room behind it was reminiscent of a small museum, full of shelves, display cases and glass counters.

  He had seen inside it two years ago. Molander and Gertrud had invited the whole team and their partners to a barbecue, even though they were in the middle of a very demanding investigation. Lilja had taken him down to the basement and the metal door had been open. Inside was everything from handguns to knives and small glass phials full of toxic substances. She’d even shown him a collection of mangled bullets that had killed their victims.

  He opened a built-in freezer and found that it was full of plastic containers, small, transparent plastic bags and various other sundries, all labelled with combinations of letters and numbers.

  Lilja had told him it was all stuff from closed investigations, and she’d claimed it was the urge to collect, coupled with unadulterated geekiness, that made Molander such a capable forensic scientist. There was probably truth in that, but it also explained why he’d become a serial killer.

  It would take him hours to go through it all, and right now his priority was Gertrud. Unfortunately, she wasn’t in the room and, as far as he could tell, there was no trace of her anywhere.

  He was too late. He could feel it. The only question was when Molander had found the time to move her from the house. If that was what he’d done.

  The garage. Why hadn’t he thought of that?

  The thought triggered a flood of images, each more gruesome than the next. Whatever Molander had done to his wife, he’d obviously done it in the garage. That was where his workshop was. That was where he kept his tools, and that was where he could work late into the night without drawing suspicion.

  He hurried back out of the room and up the stairs, through the living room towards the terrace door, all the while picturing Molander backing his car just far enough into the garage to load up the black bin bags full of body parts without being seen.

  After locking the door behind him, he hurried across the deck and down onto the lawn, where the robot was still attacking the grass. The side door to the garage turned out to be unlocked, and just as he’d suspected, there was a worn workbench with a vice inside. There were also saws, hammers and pliers, all hanging on their designated hooks, and on a shelf he saw a drill next to a circular saw and a few rolls of black bin bags.

  But there was no visible blood. Not on the workbench, not on the floor and not on any of the saw blades. Not so much as dry spatter anywhere. What he did see was a crumpled sheet of paper on the workbench, next to a roll of white electrical cord. He went over, smoothed it out and started to read.

  Ingvar,

  I didn’t know where to put this letter to make sure you’d find it as quic
kly as possible. You’ve been so busy lately we barely see each other, and the few hours you’ve been home you’ve spent either in the basement or out here in your workshop.

  Right now, you’re probably thinking what a coward I am for not being brave enough to say what I have to say to your face. But the truth is that I’m afraid. Yes, I’m afraid what you might do to me.

  You always had this darkness inside you, a temper whose short fuse has at times had you on the verge of violence. That’s something I’ve been well aware of ever since we first met. My father warned me about it and wanted me to leave you. But I dismissed his concerns, and I want you to know that I’ve never felt threatened. Not until last Sunday.

  You didn’t do anything, but you thought about it. I could see it in your eyes, and I’ve never been more afraid. You probably think I’m exaggerating and being hysterical. Be that as it may, but I’ve come to realize it was probably exactly what I needed to finally take this step.

  It might come as a surprise to you, but it’s actually something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot over the past few years. But as with the concern my father expressed, I just dismissed it and kept pretending everything was fine. That the constant, nagging worry about who the man I’m married to really is was exactly that, exaggerated and hysterical.

  But I can’t turn a blind eye any more. Despite all the good years we’ve had together, you and me. Even though you’ve been the most important man in my life and a part of me still loves you, I’ve decided to leave you.

  So I’m going away for a while. It doesn’t matter exactly where to. The important thing is that I need time and space to find my way back to who I am. So please, Ingvar, I beg you. Don’t try to find me so you can ‘set me straight’.

  Believe me. I know what I’m doing.

  Gertrud

  20

  IT WAS ONLY when he got down on all fours and started scrubbing that he realized just how dirty they really were. That they weren’t white any more, but rather speckled with filth. He liked things clean and tidy.