‘Please, for me. I can’t take walking around not knowing any more.’
The windowless space behind the shelves was only a few feet across and furnished with an old desk chair, an overflowing bookcase and a desk on which sat a computer with a speaker on either side of the screen.
‘Please, Greta, I’m begging you.’
The screen showed the same audio software that was on Elvin’s computer. A programme that had been triggered by Matilda’s voice and was now recording what she was saying onto the computer’s hard drive.
‘You can’t just say A and then not bother with B. That’s really not okay.’
He studied the sound waves ebbing and flowing on the channel labelled Basement.
‘So I’m asking you one more time,’ Matilda went on. ‘After this, I promise I’ll never summon you again.’
The other channels were called Upstairs landing, Hallway, Living room, Bathroom, Kitchen, Bedroom, Child’s room 1 and Child’s room 2, and finally, Studio.
‘Who in my family… is going to die?’
Time, his thoughts, the room he was in. Everything was spinning; the ground disappeared from under him yet again and he had to sit down on the chair before his knees buckled.
‘Who, Greta? Just tell me who.’
He’d searched virtually the entire house, he’d been everywhere. Yet even so, he’d missed that practically every room was bugged. He tried to scroll back along the time axis to see how far back the recordings went. But that function seemed to be disabled while the programme was recording.
Instead, he noticed a camera symbol in the top right corner. He couldn’t recall seeing that in Elvin’s version of the software, and when he clicked it, a new window opened, divided into nine equal parts. Nine moving images that each showed a different room in his house.
45
WIKHOLM, SAID A sign on the mailbox outside the house in Påarp where Lilja stopped and parked her Ducati. This was where Pontus Milwokh’s parents lived. Or Pontus Hao Wikholm, as he’d been known back then. In a red-brick house with a satellite dish, a carport and a small, meticulously mown lawn, completely devoid of weeds.
Last spring, she’d come here to inform them that their daughter, papergirl Soni Wikholm, had been murdered. That was one of the worst parts of her job. Children should outlive their parents. Period. Now she was there to put them through something even worse by telling them their son was very likely a serial killer.
There was nothing normal about this case. Nothing. The seemingly random coincidences just kept happening, and even though it made complete sense for it to be her delivering the news, she fervently wished Tuvesson had asked one of the others.
It wasn’t the news itself she wanted to avoid, it was the parents; before she was even done lowering the Ducati’s kickstand and taking her helmet off, she was overcome with the same sense of unease she’d felt the last time she was here. The mood after she told them about their daughter’s death had made her want to crawl out of her own skin.
‘There you are!’ called a woman with powder-white skin and frizzy auburn hair, which looked like it had been brushed for hours in preparation for her visit. ‘Hi, welcome,’ she went on, waving from the doorway. ‘Börje’s waiting.’
‘Hi, Ing-Marie.’ She stepped into the hallway, where everything was a shade of brown.
‘So, we meet again.’ The woman squeezed past Lilja and reached for the door as if it couldn’t be closed fast enough. ‘You can leave your shoes here, and then please do come in.’ She chuckled nervously and wiped her forehead, which was noticeably shiny.
The living room was brown, too. The floor was covered in beige carpet that had seen better days, and plastic, faux-wood panelling lined the walls. The two windows were hidden behind enormous green plants that effectively shut out most of the natural light. A TV so large Lilja had to wonder how they brought it in was the natural focal point of the room.
The husband was slumped in an armchair and made no move to stand up and shake her hand. Instead, he pushed one of the buttons in the armrest to start the massage function, making the chair whir and vibrate.
‘Darling, the police are here.’ The woman turned to Lilja. ‘Well, then, please sit down and do help yourself.’
Lilja walked around the coffee table, which was set with coffee, cream and marble cake, and sat down at the edge of the plush sofa, unsure whether to cut to the chase or attempt to cushion the blow. ‘As I’m sure you’ve realized, this time I’m here about Hao.’
The woman nodded. ‘Yes. We haven’t heard from in a long time.’
‘No. And I’m afraid I have bad news.’ She paused, waiting for a reaction.
Just like her last visit, the man kept his eyes fixed on a spot about a foot or so from his face, and if he hadn’t blinked from time to time, she would have seriously suspected he was an incredibly lifelike wax figure. The woman, by contrast, kept swallowing hard, even though she hadn’t put anything in her mouth, and her eyes were darting this way and that. To her husband. To the coffee. The marble cake. The eczema under her wedding ring, which was several sizes too small.
‘I see,’ the woman said at length. ‘Has he been murdered, too, then?’
‘No,’ Lilja replied, taken aback by the question. ‘Though we’re not sure he’s still alive. But what I’ve come to tell you is—’
‘Börje, do you want Mummy to pour you a cup?’ the woman broke in, addressing the man, who gave a curt nod. ‘We don’t want it to get cold, do we?’ She let out another nervous laugh, wiped the sweat from her top lip with a napkin and filled a cup with coffee, a dash of cream and four cubes of sugar. ‘Here you go, darling.’ She pushed the cup over to him with a trembling hand. ‘I’m sorry, where were we?’
‘Your son,’ Lilja said, noting that she clearly wasn’t going to be served, which was just as well, since she no longer had any desire to drink coffee and marble cake wasn’t her favourite. ‘Everything points to him having killed five people in the past month.’
The woman swallowed again.
‘You might have read about some of the murders in the papers.’
‘We don’t really read the paper. Isn’t that right, Börje, we don’t, do we? They’re so full of nonsense and lies, it’s enough by half. Isn’t that what you like to say?’
The man slurped his coffee as though he wished nothing more than for this moment to end so he could return to his life in front of the TV.
‘Okay, well, still, that’s how it is. Your son has—’
‘We figured this would happen,’ the man said suddenly, and he pushed one of the buttons in the armrest, which made his chair fall silent once more.
Just like when she last visited, in the spring, Lilja reacted with surprise. Not at what the man had said, or because he’d spoken at all. No, it was the thin, reedy voice, so incongruous in a man of his considerable bulk.
‘Yes, that’s true,’ the woman agreed, pouring herself a cup of coffee.
‘Why is that?’ Lilja turned to the woman.
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ The woman raised the cup to drink but put it down again because her hand was trembling too much. ‘He was simply too… How do I—’
‘He was always a delinquent,’ the man cut in.
‘Right, delinquent was the word I was looking for.’
‘In what way was he a delinquent?’ Lilja pictured a tiny dwarf trapped inside the massive body that was positively welling out of the armchair.
‘He was always up to no good.’ He turned to her. ‘It was only a matter of time before it got serious.’
‘Yes, that’s absolutely true.’ The woman nodded eagerly. ‘No, we can’t say we’re particularly surprised. Don’t you want some coffee, by the way?’
‘No, thank you, I’ve already had too many cups today,’ Lilja lied, unable to understand how these two had ever been approved to adopt. ‘Does this mean you’ve suspected something for a while? Did you know your son was involved after the first murder, of the little boy in Bju
v?’
‘Like my wife said, we don’t read the papers.’ The man calmly put his cup down. ‘Could I have a slice of cake?’
‘Of course, darling. Mummy will get it for you.’ The woman put a slice of marble cake on a plate and handed it to the man. ‘No, we’re not big on the news.’
‘Well, then I can tell you that your son forced a young boy into a washing machine and started a rinse cycle, which meant he was centrifuged to death twenty minutes later.’
The woman remained silent, but her trembling bottom lip spoke volumes. The man still showed no reaction, just calmly munched away on his cake.
‘When did you last hear from him?’ Lilja continued. She regretted declining the coffee – not because she wanted any, but it would have been a signal that they weren’t done.
‘He disappeared the moment he was done with school,’ the woman said, serving herself a slice of cake.
‘So your son disappeared too, just like your daughter?’ She looked back and forth between the man and the woman, waiting for a response that never came.
‘I think I’m going to make a fresh pot.’ The woman made as if to get up.
‘Ing-Marie, I would prefer if you stayed here and answered my questions.’
‘I don’t know about disappeared,’ the man said. ‘He’d read some book about a man throwing dice. He tried it himself, and the dice told him to leave us and never come back. And good riddance, if you ask me.’
‘But I’m not asking you, I’m asking your wife.’ Lilja turned to the woman, whose lower lip was trembling again. ‘You haven’t heard from him since?’
The woman swallowed and looked around for something safe to rest her eyes on.
‘Shouldn’t you tell her about when he contacted you and how you were about to transfer him all our savings?’ the man said. ‘Or have you chosen to forget that? He was in Asia at the time, playing poker.’
‘Right.’ The woman nodded. ‘But—’
‘Like I said, we have no idea where he is now. We didn’t even know he was back in the country,’ the man went on, cutting her off.
‘And what you don’t know can’t hurt you,’ the woman added. ‘Isn’t that right, Börje, isn’t that what you always say?’
Lilja wanted to ask the woman how she endured spending more than an hour in the same house as her husband. Whether he hit her. Whether he’d molested their children. And if so, why she hadn’t reported it. She wanted to keep digging until she found something sufficiently serious to have him put away for a long time.
‘This is my number, in case he decides to contact you.’ She pushed her business card across the table to the woman. ‘Or if you think of anything else you want to tell me.’
‘Oh no, I’m not going to think of anything else.’ The woman looked at her husband. ‘But I suppose one never knows what thoughts might pop into one’s head. Or what do you say, Börje?’
‘Unless you want the box in the basement with his things. Feel free to take that.’
‘Yes, that’s a good idea, Börje.’ The woman clapped her hands together. ‘Now that we’ve finally got rid of Soni’s things, we can get rid of Hao’s, too. Wonderful. What is it they say? Win-win.’
46
WE’RE IN INTERVIEW. The reply came after Fabian’s third attempt to reach Theodor’s lawyer, Jadwiga Komorovski. Will call as soon as we’re done. We have a lot to talk about.
Fabian was already deeply worried about how things were going for Theodor, and Komorovski’s messages did nothing to allay his concerns. If there had been anything he could do, anything at all, he would have done it in a heartbeat. Without so much as a second thought, he would have dropped everything and run to the rescue. But he could do nothing. Other than wait for her to call back.
He turned into the car park next to the red three-storey buildings on Skaragatan. A little way away, he spotted Stubbs’s plump silhouette under a big oak tree. Judging from the way she was pacing back and forth with her arms crossed, she was in a bad mood.
Exactly how many feet away this was from the flat on the second floor of number 12, where Mattias Larsson’s girlfriend, Hanna Brahe, lived with her parents, Fabian didn’t know. His interview with her was his official reason for being here. That said, he had no idea how accurate the GPS tracker between his shoulder blades was, so ultimately he could only hope Molander wouldn’t think his position curious.
He backed into a visitor parking bay and was turning the engine off when his phone began to vibrate.
The number was unknown, but he recognized it from the night before, when he’d been in touch with the coastguard. He declined the call, climbed out of the car and walked over to Stubbs, who had stopped pacing and was glaring at him.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what the coastguard were calling about, and he had no problem understanding why they were upset and probably in the process of reporting him to the police. It would be odd if they weren’t. Even though he hadn’t taken the safety off his gun at any point, he’d certainly committed a serious crime when he threatened the crew of KB 202.
‘Hi,’ he called out. ‘I’m sorry I’m late, but—’
‘Hi,’ Stubbs cut him off. ‘Do I look like a confession booth to you or something?’
‘Eh, what?’
‘No, that’s right. So do us both a favour and spare us the forgive-me-my-sins bit. Unlike what some people seem to think, we don’t have all the time in the world. Here’s the deal. I’ve just been to—’
Even though his phone was on vibrate, it managed to interrupt Stubbs, who threw up her hands in silent protest as he once again declined the call from the coastguard.
‘Continue.’ Fabian put the phone back in his pocket.
‘I can certainly try.’ Stubbs gave him a very thin smile. ‘I spent the morning at Fosie Prison, speaking to Conny Öhman. And the rest of the day I’ve been kicking my heels, waiting around for you.’
‘And who is Conny Öhman?’
‘A wife-beating alcoholic from Munka-Ljungby, who is in prison for killing his wife last spring. At least, that’s what he was convicted of. But in reality, Molander was behind the murder.’
‘And what’s Molander’s connection to this Conny bloke, or his wife, for that matter?’
‘There probably isn’t one.’ Stubbs shrugged. ‘Other than that he was the perfect fall guy since his wife had already made several reports of aggravated assault to the police. The thing is, I’ve managed to make Conny see that he’s been used, and he has agreed to testify against Molander.’
‘Fine, but I still don’t understand. If there’s no connection, why—’
‘Maybe he was experiencing withdrawal, what do I know?’ Stubbs shrugged. ‘Like with Ingela Ploghed. As far as I’m aware, he’d been on his best behaviour for almost two years, so he probably couldn’t curb his urges any longer. Had to vent his pent-up energy and internal frustration. With children, they call it having ants in one’s pants. But why don’t we leave that to the psychiatrists. The point is, we have enough to bring him in. So I want you to head straight over to the station and get in a room with Tuvesson so you can—’
‘I’m sorry,’ Fabian broke in, shaking his head. ‘I can’t.’
‘Why? What do you mean you can’t? Of course you— That bloody thing of yours is going off again.’ Stubbs pointed to his pocket, where the illuminated screen of his phone was visible through the fabric.
The coastguard again. ‘It can wait,’ Fabian said. ‘Now listen to me. The thing is that Molander—’
‘No, I’m not going to stand here vying for your attention with some bloody phone. Either you turn it off completely or you take the call and get it over with.’
Fabian nodded and took a deep breath before answering. ‘This is Fabian Risk.
‘And this is Gert-Ove Helin from the Helsingborg coastguard.’
‘Yes, I pretty much figured, and before you launch into it, I just want you to know that I understand if you’re upset about what happened las
t night.’ He turned his back on Stubbs in an attempt to block out her angry sighs.
‘Yes, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything like it in all my years here at—’
‘Gert-Ove,’ Fabian cut in. ‘I don’t want to seem rude. But I happen to be in the middle of an important meeting, so unless you have something else to say, I think you should just go ahead and file that police report and you can count on my full cooperation. Okay?’
‘Yes, yes, I’m sure that will all be fine. Look, I know Bengan and Sylen pretty well after twenty-two years of working with them, and those particular blokes can be proper whingers when they’re in that mood. I like to call them the true climacteric threat. Get it? Not climate, climacteric. You know, menopause.’ He could hear Gert-Ove chuckle at his own joke.
Stubbs walked back into Fabian’s view and tapped her watch impatiently. Fabian replied by signalling with one hand that the man on the other end wouldn’t stop jabbering on.
‘The thing is that I contacted our Danish colleagues to get a clearer picture of what happened,’ Helin continued. ‘And you can say many things about the Danes, but I happen to be on first-name terms with Ingolf Bremer, the head honcho over at the Naval Operative Command, and reading between the lines, the order to deny you access to Danish territorial waters came from higher up the food chain.’
‘I am perfectly aware of who issued the order, which was why I acted the way I did. It’s not an excuse, but I didn’t see any other way at the time.’
‘I hear you. But you have to understand my position.’
‘Look, Fabian, enough.’ Stubbs heaved a demonstrative sigh. ‘This is ridiculous. You keep doing whatever it is you’re doing and I’ll go back to doing my stuff.’
‘No, hold on.’ Fabian grabbed Stubbs’s arm.
‘Otherwise, where would we be?’ Gert-Ove continued.
‘Exactly, which is why I suggest you do what you feel you have to do.’
‘Yes, until fifteen minutes ago, I couldn’t really see a way around reporting you. But when it turned out you were right all along, I decided to stick the whole thing in a drawer. That’s what I wanted to tell you.’
X Ways to Die Page 25
