Snowdrift

by Helene Tursten

  The third picture was a recently taken photo of the three children; it looked as if it might have been the family’s Christmas card to friends and relatives. Miranda was twelve years old, Adam ten, and Julian six. The girl had her father’s coloring, with long, straight hair and blue eyes. The studio lights made her dark hair shine like a soft mink coat. Her smile was a little restrained, as if she were trying to live up to the formality of the occasion. She was going to be a real beauty.

  Adam was grinning at the camera, revealing several gaps where his baby teeth had fallen out. Blue eyes like his sister, but his dark-brown hair was curly and a little messy.

  Julian also had blue eyes, but unlike his siblings, he was blond. His hair was curly, like his brother’s. He was laughing at the photographer, showing the gap where two front teeth were missing on his lower jaw.

  Where do you hide with three children of school age? Or had the murderer already found them and killed them? It was a terrible thought, because the children bore no responsibility for what their father and his brothers had done.

  The last picture was of Kador and Mirja. A stylish bridegroom looking very proud. Mirja’s head was tilted slightly, her Mona Lisa smile just like her daughter’s. Restrained, dignified, a little mysterious.

  The realization hit Embla hard, as if a horse had kicked her in the solar plexus. Breathe! She couldn’t breathe! Her chest hurt, she could hear the pounding of her heartbeat in her ears. She heard Göran’s voice in the distance, felt him touch her arm.

  Then everything went black.

  Blurred figures were bending over her. Was she in the hospital? Had she had surgery? Why was someone pressing a paper tissue to her forehead? It hurt. Had her eyebrow split open again? A blow . . . someone must have hit her hard. Out for the count. Or . . . ?

  “Embla? Are you okay?”

  She recognized the voice, but couldn’t remember the guy’s name. And why was she lying on the floor? It was cold against her back.

  The faces became clearer. Göran. It was his voice she’d heard. His deputy, Sabina Amir. The two CSIs, Linda and Bengan. Why were they here? Instinctively she tried to push away the hand pressing the tissue against her eyebrow, but another hand gently seized her wrist.

  “No, Embla. You hit your head on the corner of the desk when you fainted. It’s bleeding quite badly.”

  Göran. What was he talking about? Had she fainted? Why? Slowly the memory of the wedding photograph came back to her.

  She felt so dizzy that she had to concentrate hard in order to focus on Göran’s eyes. Her lips were stiff and dry; she licked them several times and finally managed to utter a few comprehensible words.

  “The bride . . . it’s not Mirja. It’s Lollo. Louise Lindqvist. My friend who . . . disappeared.”

  He looked confused, then realized what she was trying to say.

  “The girl in the picture is Lollo?”

  “Yes.”

  He let out a low whistle. “I’m not surprised you fainted!”

  Embla saw the other three exchange puzzled glances. Presumably Göran noticed, too, but he made no attempt to explain. Instead he took charge.

  “Sabina, fetch the first aid kit—you know where it is. Linda, keep the pressure on that eyebrow. I’ll call an ambulance.”

  “There’s no need,” Embla protested.

  “There is—you’ve got a nasty gash.”

  Embla made a clumsy attempt to get to her feet, but the dizziness was too much for her and she sank back down.

  “There’s some surgical tape in my locker. My eyebrows are weak, especially the left one, because it’s taken a lot of punishment. I’ve taped it up myself dozens of times,” she said, trying to sound brighter than she felt.

  Sabina Amir raised a perfectly shaped eyebrow.

  “That explains a great deal,” she said with the hint of a smile.

  With Sabina’s help, Linda managed to clean and tape up the wound, which was smaller than expected given the amount of blood. However, when Embla tentatively touched the area around it, she knew it would swell significantly. Meanwhile Bengan had brought her a cup of tea from the machine. She took it gratefully; it was more or less tasteless, but at least it was hot and got her circulation going again.

  Göran turned to the others. “Thanks for your help. Embla was shocked because a completely unexpected individual has turned up in our investigation with the Stavic brothers.”

  With a dramatic flourish he moved the screen and brought up the wedding picture.

  “Kador’s bride is not in fact Mirja Hervonen, a Finland-Swede. Her name is Louise Lindqvist, and she disappeared almost fifteen years ago. She and Embla grew up together. They lived in the same apartment block and were friends. Some time ago Embla told me about the trauma she still carries, all the unanswered questions about what really happened when Louise went missing.”

  He paused for effect before continuing.

  “And now we have the answer to those questions. Louise ran away to Croatia with Kador Stavic and married him.”

  At first Embla almost panicked when Göran began to talk about her and Lollo, but her feelings changed to gratitude when she heard the version of her story he’d chosen to tell. Of course it was necessary for their colleagues to know about the relationship between her and Lollo; it would play a key role in the continuing investigation, and Embla wanted to make sure she was a part of that investigation.

  Sabina looked at her, wide-eyed. “What a shock for you!”

  As always, her makeup was flawless. She was wearing an emerald-green scarf around her neck, bringing out the green flecks in her honey-brown eyes. She had always reminded Embla of the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti. She was thirty-six, but looked younger. Many of their male colleagues had asked her out over the years, but she had always said no, pleasantly but firmly. As is the way with men who are frustrated, certain people began to spread the rumor that she was a lesbian, but there was nothing to suggest that this was the case. She was extremely competent and often worked overtime. You could say she was married to the job.

  She and Linda and Bengan left Göran’s office to resume the tasks that had been interrupted by Embla’s collapse.

  Embla sat down on the chair again and stared at the screen, hypnotized by the wedding photo. So many suppressed emotions came rushing to the surface—shame and guilt at not having been brave enough to tell the truth, at having let Lollo down. All the years of nightmares about what might have happened to Lollo, each scenario worse than the one before.

  The reality was that Lollo had married only a few months later. She was due to turn fifteen a few weeks after she disappeared, which meant she was fifteen in the picture. Not eighteen, as the personal details held by the police in Split claimed. If you looked closely you could see that she looked very young, but of course many eighteen-year-olds can seem much younger than they are. Had she willingly gone with him and married him? Or did she not have a choice? Embla really wanted answers to all her questions. All she could see was that her childhood friend appeared to be blissfully happy.

  “So she ran away with Kador.”

  The sound of her own voice brought her back to the moment. Had she said that out loud? Apparently she had because Göran was nodding.

  “Possibly, but it’s not so strange that you thought she was in love with Luca. He was closer in age to her.”

  Embla nodded toward the screen and swallowed hard a couple of times before she dared to trust her shaky voice.

  “It was always Milo and Luca who were seen around. I never even thought about Kador. No one mentioned him. I didn’t connect Lollo with . . .” Her voice failed her, and she tried to fight back the tears.

  “We have to find her and the children—they could be in mortal danger,” Göran said energetically. “And I need to contact Boris Cetinski again. This information puts things in a completely diffe
rent light.”

  Embla glanced at him but couldn’t speak.

  “I think this is a classic gangster war, Embla. A takeover, clearing out the old guard. The Stavic brothers have been removed from the scene and the new gang is now running their well-established business empire. It’s essential that we find Louise before they do. She might know who killed the brothers,” Göran continued. He got to his feet and paced up and down the room, then stopped and stared at her, his expression grave.

  “So that’s why all the computers and cell phones are missing. They wanted to access secret information.”

  “What . . . What do you mean?”

  “Coded email traffic. The dark net.”

  Of course she knew what the dark net was. The place where most criminal activity takes place these days, the place where child pornography is traded, along with other types of illegal sexual activity, drugs, passports, false documents, and even murder. Everything is for sale on the dark net, and communications are virtually impossible to trace.

  “Why is it so hard to penetrate the dark net?” she asked.

  The world of IT was one of Göran’s areas of expertise, and she knew he’d explain it clearly.

  “Ordinary search engines can’t reach the encrypted network. You have to use a special piece of software, which is usually called Tor; this allows you to surf the net anonymously. You keep moving between different accessible servers until you reach the one you want to communicate with.”

  He paused to see if she was keeping up. No problems so far—she nodded to show that she understood.

  “The really clever part is that each individual server knows only the latest link in the relay, a so-called node. The server also knows which node you’re sending to, but that’s it. No one knows the origin or final destination of the message. The trail can end anywhere. A year or so ago there was a retired couple in Varberg whose son had given them a secondhand computer so he could email them and vice versa, but they hardly ever used it. The operating system was old-fashioned and all the firewalls were out of date. Both necrophilia porn and several kilos of cocaine had been ordered via that computer.” He sighed and shook his head.

  “Were you able to find the person behind it?”

  “No. It’s impossible to find the original sender via logs or network surveillance unless they make an error along the way. All you can do is use Tor yourself to see if you can find that error.”

  The fact that the murderer, or murderers, had taken all the IT equipment but no valuables suddenly made sense. Although they might have helped themselves to Milo’s eye-catching watch and Luca’s pistol. The computers could contain damning evidence against one or more of the Stavic brothers’ contacts, and of course if someone was planning to take over their empire, having access to their contact network would be extremely useful. Or maybe they already had that information and wanted to make sure it didn’t end up in the hands of the police. “By the way, I’ve heard back about that call you got from Louise. It was made from a burner phone and can’t be traced, but we know it came from central Gothenburg.”

  Embla felt her heart rate increase. “That means she’s here. Maybe she needed protection? Why else would she contact me? If she wasn’t in the country, I’m sure she wouldn’t have bothered.”

  Göran nodded and began to scroll down his screen. Suddenly he stopped and pointed at the numbers.

  “There. The night Kador disappeared there was a call from Mirja Stavic in Split to Milo in Gothenburg at one-fifteen. We don’t know what she said because we didn’t have a tap on his phone at the time. The conversation was short—only forty-three seconds. Immediately afterward there was a call from a burner phone in Gothenburg to a burner in the area around Split. An hour and a half later Kador’s family left their home and went underground.”

  “So Milo organized the whole thing.”

  “I think so, yes.”

  A thought struck Embla. “Do we know if the children speak Swedish?”

  “We have no information on that.”

  Since the Stavic brothers had been involved in trafficking for many years, Milo was probably familiar with various routes across European borders, and he’d also know how to provide Lollo and the children with new passports. The biggest challenge would be finding a place where they would feel safe. Where do you hide a woman with three children of school age who probably don’t speak Swedish very well? The most logical thing would be to choose an area where they could blend in—a place where there are plenty of people from different ethnic backgrounds. If the children could speak Swedish, it would make it easier for them to start school. If not, things would be trickier.

  Gothenburg is a segregated city, like most big cities these days. The family would stick out like a sore thumb in certain districts, while in others they wouldn’t attract any attention at all.

  “I think she’s in one of the suburbs where there’s a high density of immigrants,” Embla said.

  “You’re right—if she’s still in Gothenburg, that’s the most-likely scenario. I’ll speak to Tommy about it this afternoon, see if he can get someone to check recent school applications. The two eldest will have to be registered.”

  “And the six-year-old.”

  Embla knew this because she was the one who’d accompanied Elliot on his first day in the reception class, the obligatory year that’s meant to prepare children for Year One.

  “Oh really? My boys didn’t start until they were seven.”

  Quite a lot has happened within the Swedish education system over the past eighteen years, Embla thought.

  After lunch Embla decided she’d fully recovered from the shock. There was a vague feeling inside her, and it took her a while to identify it: relief. She was so relieved that Lollo was alive and that she hadn’t been forced into prostitution or addiction. Judging by the photographs, she seemed to have had a good life with her family in the beautiful city on the shore of the Adriatic.

  Embla was basing her view of Split on what her parents had told her; they’d taken a bus trip around Croatia four of five years earlier, and couldn’t stop talking about all the wonderful sights they’d seen. Her father had been particularly enthusiastic about a national park called Plitvice, with its spectacular waterfalls and emerald-green lakes—and they’d walked straight into a brown bear! This was always the highlight of his account, and every time he was delighted when people gasped in horror. Embla’s mother would whisper out of the corner of her mouth that in fact it was the bear who’d been most frightened, and gone lumbering off into the undergrowth.

  Göran had spoken to Tommy Persson and passed on the information that Kador’s wife, Mirja, was in fact Louise Lindqvist, who had vanished fourteen and a half years ago. He explained that they’d made this discovery by pure chance because Embla had recognized her old friend in the wedding photo they’d received from the police in Split. Tommy immediately promised to give someone the task of digging out everything they had from the investigation into Louise’s disappearance. Another officer would go through all recent applications to schools across the city and would check on new residents in various districts.

  Finally Göran had told Tommy that he would contact Boris Cetinski again to discuss Mirja’s real identity. He’d also arranged to meet Embla later for coffee and a debrief.

  Embla glanced at her phone; two hours to go. She had received a text message from Elliot, excitedly telling her that he’d been picked for the football team and that his first training session was that afternoon. His friend Love’s mom was giving them a ride, and he was looking forward to wearing the cleats Embla had given him for Christmas.

  She’d also missed a call from Harald in Herremark; she’d had her phone on silent during the Skype call with Boris Cetinski, and had forgotten to switch it back on. She went into the office she shared with Irene Huss; as usual, her colleague was out and about. It had been almost two hou
rs since Harald had called; he must be wondering why she hadn’t been in touch. He answered almost immediately.

  “Embla! I’ve found something in the cottage where that man was murdered, although I don’t know if it’s important.”

  Since the cottage had been thoroughly examined by the CSIs, it seemed highly unlikely that anything significant could have been missed, but she didn’t want to rain on Harald’s parade.

  “Sounds exciting—tell me more.”

  “I went down to make sure the place had been cleaned properly, and I noticed that the cleaner had put the pack of tourist information in the wrong place. When I picked it up to move it, I realized that one of the maps hadn’t been folded correctly. I took it out to fix it, and that’s when I made the discovery.”

  He fell silent, unsure whether he was simply wasting police time.

  “Go on,” Embla said encouragingly.

  “An area about twenty kilometers from here was clearly marked on the map—heading west toward the Norwegian border. It’s in the middle of nowhere. Monika and I have gone out there to pick lingonberries a few times, so I know it’s more or less a wilderness.”

  Weird. Why would Milo mark a place like that?

  “Are you sure it was Milo who made the mark?”

  “It must have been. The day he called up to make the reservation I put brand-new maps in the pack.”

  This could be interesting. No other guest had had access to the new maps. It was certainly worth following up, even if it might not be top priority right now.

  “Could you scan the map, or fax it to me?”