Hunting Game

by Helene Tursten

  “Does it usually look this way in Jan-Eric’s room?” she asked.

  “Yes . . . most of the time.”

  It was unbelievable that a grown man could make such a mess. He must be used to having others pick up after him, Embla assumed.

  “Does von Beehn usually drink a lot during the hunts, too?”

  “No. I’ve never seen him drunk.”

  “But Cahneborg is not someone who’s shy when there’s alcohol,” she said, pointing at the bottles.

  That was not a question, but a statement. The manager grunted something that could be interpreted as agreement. She went over to the closet and picked up the rifle cases. They were heavy; there were rifles in both of them.

  “Do you know if he had more than two guns with him?”

  He simply shrugged his shoulders in response.

  Embla opened the cases and looked more closely at the rifles. One was the gun he usually had at the moose hunts, a caliber 30-06 Carl Gustaf. Naturally she took the opportunity to look more closely at the other rifle, too. It was double-barreled. It must have cost a fortune. The stock was artfully decorated with gold inlays and what looked like ivory. Illegal, but a very fine gun, she had to admit that. Reluctantly she put the rifle back in the case.

  As a matter of form they searched through the three remaining bedrooms before they went down to the ground floor.

  The kitchen was large and well-equipped, but clearly only breakfast was prepared there. The refrigerator was full of food, white wine, and beer. In the pantry were several unopened bottles of red wine and various kinds of alcohol.

  With some effort Stig opened a hatch in the floor and peeked down in the hole. “The food cellar.”

  They shined the flashlights down into the hole, simply to determine that there were only a lot of empty bottles and strangely active spiders. The webs were hanging like drapes all over the space.

  “It’s never used,” Stig explained, somewhat superfluously.

  “I can see why.” Embla shivered as she said that. Big spiders were the only creatures she couldn’t stand. Especially furry ones.

  Then they checked the hall behind the kitchen, where the hunting clothes were hanging. Stig explained to Embla that he could see that Anders’s and Jan-Eric’s boots were missing, but that their jackets were still hanging there.

  “They’ve gone out but haven’t put on their jackets. So they didn’t intend to go very far,” she said.

  “Hardly in the darkness.”

  “How do you know that it was dark?”

  “Two flashlights are missing.” He pointed at a shelf by the door where six flashlights were neatly lined up. “There are usually eight there.”

  Most signs indicated that they had disappeared on Thursday evening. The sparse quantity of dirty laundry at the bottom of the laundry basket suggested that, as well as the cold in the house. And there was a lot of food left in the kitchen.

  Her thoughts were interrupted when the two-way radio suddenly crackled.

  “Nisse here. Seppo . . . has got a lead on something. He swam out to the drop and refuses to come back. It seems like . . . there’s something in the water. But you need a boat to get out there. Over and out!”

  For once his voice sounded unsteady.

  “Embla here. Stay there! We’re coming. Over and out.” She turned toward the manager.

  “There’s a rubber boat in the shed,” he said before she had time to ask.

  They turned on their flashlights and ran out into the rain. When they got to the shed Stig took out a key from a bulky key ring. After some coaxing he managed to get the stubborn padlock open. He let the beam of his flashlight play across the room. Old tools and gardening equipment were hanging on the walls, along with a bundle of fishing rods and some broken crayfish pots. A single battered piece of outdoor furniture was in the middle of the floor, and there was a large, lumpy sack in one corner.

  “I cleaned this place up a little when I sealed the house against mice. I saw it then,” said Stig.

  With long strides he went over to the bundle in the corner and started pulling it toward the door. With combined forces they managed to compress the nylon sack enough to squeeze it through the door.

  Stig stuck his head back in the doorway and shined around his flashlight. “Anders and his buddies used the boat to catch crayfish. There should be an automatic gadget to inflate it . . . although I don’t see it in here . . .”

  They quickly searched through the outbuilding but didn’t see anything that resembled a pump. Working together they managed to pull off the bag that surrounded the rubber boat. Both sighed with relief when the pump and two paddles tumbled to the ground.

  The grass was slippery with rain and they fell a few times as they struggled to get the boat in the back of the car. Before they closed the hatch Embla threw in a rope that she had taken down from a hook on the wall.

  A sickly yellow-gray light started to cut through the darkness.

  “The worst remains,” Ekström said with a sigh.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s no road down to the water.”

  “But this vehicle is off-road, damn it!”

  Her voice sounded much sharper than she intended, but she got irritated when people complained a lot. They would have to work through the difficulties gradually and not get ahead of themselves. Without answering Stig got into the driver’s seat of the King Cab. He chose to drive to the left of the precipice. That was the way you usually took when you went down to the lake to fish or swim. It was obvious that no car had ever driven that route before and there was no doubt about why. The heavy vehicle lurched and rocked; sometimes it felt as if it would flip over.

  When they stopped by the lake, properly shaken, they saw Nisse and Sixten squatting in the rain a short distance away. Nisse called to Seppo, but the dog only raised his nose toward the sky and howled in response. He was at the foot of the drop where there was a narrow strip of beach with large stones. With his back to them he sat motionless on the biggest stone, staring at something in the shallow water.

  It was surprisingly easy to inflate the rubber boat. You only had to put the mouthpiece of the pump into the hole and press a button.

  Before long Embla and Nisse paddled off. The rain poured down and felt just as cold as the lake water. It did not take long before their fingers were stiff and numb. As they got closer they saw there was a person lying below the drop. Judging by the shape of the body it was Jan-Eric Cahneborg. He was lying face down in the shallow water. One arm had been wedged firmly between two stones and was bent at a strange angle.

  The dog got lively when he saw that they were headed in his direction. Excitedly he started barking.

  “Yes, yes, calm down. That’s a good boy. Swim in now so we can take care of this,” Nisse said to his dog.

  Seppo fell silent as if he understood what his master said, jumped down into the water and started swimming toward the shore. Thinking ahead, Embla pulled out her cell phone and took a few pictures of the body from different angles—just in case. In case of what, well, she didn’t want to think about that just yet. Just as the dog reached land, Peter and Björn came up to the lake, and a few minutes later Tobias and Einar arrived. Silently the men stood and watched as Nisse and Embla struggled to get Jan-Eric’s arm loose. Once they succeeded, it was just a matter of piloting the body to shore. It was difficult to move in the unsteady craft, and the boat nearly capsized several times, but after a while they managed to throw the rope around the torso. Nisse tied the other end around his own waist since there was nothing else in the rubber boat to attach it to. When that was done they started slowly rowing to shore.

  When they were almost there, Sixten shouted, “Which of them is it?”

  “Cahneborg,” Embla answered.

  “You saw no trace of the other one out there?”

  “No. We’ll have to keep searching. But first I intend to call for reinforcements.”

  In order to get cell phone
coverage Embla was forced to climb the steep slope. Alongside the lantern by the edge of the precipice she was able to get two bars at least.

  At first the on-duty commander in Trollhättan was extremely doubtful that any crime scene investigators were needed since it sounded like an accidental fall. A man was peeing in the dark, slipped on a wet rock, and fell down the precipice . . . no, he didn’t think that sounded like a situation for a crime scene investigation. But Embla stood her ground and told him about Anders von Beehn’s mysterious disappearance. She emphasized the fact that the two men were well-known and influential in the world of finance, and she could hear the commander start to waver. After a little more convincing he gave in and promised to send CSIs and a patrol car.

  While they were waiting for the police the search for Anders von Beehn continued. Embla underscored that he was armed, and because they didn’t know what had played out between the two men, they should have that information in the back of their minds.

  The men divided into pairs and went in different directions to resume the search. Both of the dogs they had with them were good at searching. Embla chose to stay by the lake. It was clear that none of the men relished the thought of watching over a corpse alone. She could see their point; it wasn’t much fun to stand idle in the semi-darkness, trying to protect yourself against the damp and cold.

  The only positive thing that happened was that the rain stopped after a while, but the dense cloud cover remained and prevented more light from shining through.

  Jan-Eric’s head shimmered like white marble in the gloom and the rigor mortis started to disappear. That confirmed her suspicion that he had already fallen down the precipice on Thursday evening or night. She noted that his fly was open, which supported the theory that he slipped as he was pissing into the darkness. He had no jacket on, only a thick green wool sweater with a short zipper on the collar. His boots were untied. Maybe he had stumbled on the laces.

  It felt frustrating not to have anything to cover the body with, but she decided to let it be. Later she could go up to the house and find a blanket.

  She did not want to move the corpse again; she would leave that to the medical examiners. When she had concluded her visual inspection, she climbed back up the steep slope. There she took out her phone and called her boss, Göran Krantz. After several rings he answered, and she could hear the sound of a TV in the background.

  “Hi. It’s me. Where are you?” she asked.

  “At home. But I’m probably the one who should ask where you are,” he answered good-naturedly.

  She took a deep breath and told him the whole story about what had played out during the morning hours. The superintendent did not interrupt her a single time.

  “Can von Beehn be behind Cahneborg’s death?” he asked when she was done.

  “I haven’t seen or found anything that indicates that they were enemies. But I thought of something out here in the middle of nowhere with the corpse. There is one more dead friend.”

  Göran Krantz was silent for a fraction of a second before he exploded. “One more! Who? Where is he?”

  “Probably in a cemetery in Oslo. He died almost exactly one year ago. And here comes the bombshell: he drove off the road when he was going home after the moose hunt here. I know because I was on that hunt. And he was friends with Anders von Beehn. Just like Cahneborg.”

  “Hmm. What’s the guy’s name?”

  “Ola Forsnaess. He was big in the oil industry, I think.”

  After a moment of thoughtful silence he asked, “What do you intend to do now?”

  “Wait for reinforcements. Colleagues from Trollhättan are on their way.”

  “Good. Be careful. This actually sounds serious.”

  As she put the phone back in the front pocket of her jacket she looked at the body down by the edge of the lake. It looked pitiful there alone. Very cold and dead, she thought with a shudder.

  She jumped when she suddenly heard a faint squelching of footsteps approaching her from behind. Realizing she was barely a meter from the edge of the drop, she spun around with lightning speed, her fists ready in defense.

  “Oh! I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Peter took a step backward and raised his hands in a defensive gesture. When she saw that it was him she didn’t know if she was relieved or enraged.

  “No? You have one hell of a talent for sneaking up on people!” she snarled.

  He bowed his head and looked down at the ground. He cleared his throat several times before he raised his head and looked at her with a steady gaze. “Listen, I want to apologize for my behavior toward you yesterday morning. That was not okay. I’ve been stressed about the big transaction I negotiated. And I’m so fucking tired of all the bullshit that’s being spread about me in the area. It felt like you had been sent to spy on me . . . paranoid, I know. But when you work with highly classified material all the time you get occupationally injured.”

  She didn’t know how to respond. In truth, she actually had been out to snoop, but she wasn’t about to admit it. Instead she tried to collect herself and answer as naturally as possible.

  “I can see that. And if it hadn’t been for the Veteran running out of gas, I wouldn’t have come and disturbed you.”

  “But I wanted to be disturbed by you,” he said with a faint smile.

  She did her best to seem unmoved but knew she wasn’t doing a good job of that. “Yes?” was the only thing she got out.

  His smile got broader. “We didn’t get off on the right foot. I think we should start over. What do you say about dinner tomorrow night?”

  What a completely absurd situation. Here they were, two people in the middle of the woods with a dead person a few feet away and another man missing. And yet . . . she felt herself getting warm all over. But that was not something her more reasonable self intended to show because she too was occupationally injured. “We’ll have to see if we find Anders,” she answered curtly.

  “Okay. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”

  He turned and started walking toward the Hunting Castle. Before she thought to ask what he was going to do in the house, he looked back and said over his shoulder, “We’re about to starve to death. No one’s had a real breakfast. I’ll make coffee and some sandwiches. Stig said that everything is in the kitchen. The others will be here before long.”

  “Okay. Sounds good. I’ll try to find something to put over the body. It may take a while before the technicians arrive.”

  She thought about the case for the rubber boat that was still lying outside the shed. Perhaps that would do the job.

  The first three police officers who had been dispatched got stuck in the mud on the logging road, so Tobias went out with his pickup and towed them. A few minutes later two CSIs came in a Volvo Cross Country, which could easily make it all the way.

  The police from Trollhättan joined the group of hunters inside the big hall of the Hunting Castle. Stig Ekström had lit a fire in the stove to try to warm up the house. While the five colleagues had coffee and sandwiches, Embla recapped the morning’s events.

  The commander introduced himself as Superintendent Roger Willén. He was just over forty and appeared to be in decent shape. His uniform sat well across his broad shoulders and the crease in his trousers was razor sharp. His hair was cut so short that it was impossible to say what color it was. Willén looked thoughtfully around the table before he continued to speak.

  “So you started searching for these two men at about six o’clock this morning. That guy in the lake . . . Canne . . . Cahneborg, yes . . . you found him around eight. It took a while to recover the body and then you called us,” he said, nodding toward Embla.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  It felt good to have some colleagues to reinforce the group. Besides, it was surely a relief for Sixten that a male authority took over, she thought.

  “It’s almost eleven. Because Anders von . . . what was his name again? . . . thanks . . . Beehn hasn’t moved his
car. He ought to be around here. But you’ve already been searching for several hours. You suspect he’s lying injured or unconscious out in the woods, or in the worst case, dead or on the run. Time is an important factor in these kinds of cases and for that reason I intend to call for more men. Unfortunately right now we’re short-staffed because we had a homicide last weekend, but we’ll request reinforcements from the rest of Fyrbodal. But it’s going to take at least two hours before anyone else can get here and it gets dark quickly.”

  “Perhaps you can call for a helicopter with a heat camera.” Peter suggested.

  Superintendent Willén looked at him seriously and hesitated with the answer. “You can’t just order a helicopter; it costs lots of money. But I’ll do what I can to get one here.”

  After that he sent them off in various directions with strict instructions to maintain contact with each other.

  At two o’clock a group of volunteer national guardsmen arrived, along with two police officers from Åmål. An appeal on Facebook to Missing People had not produced any results yet. Perhaps reinforcements would come from that group tomorrow, but Embla knew that was not something they could count on. There was no major metropolitan area nearby.

  It had started to rain again but everyone was properly clothed. They walked in tight ranks with short gaps and poked their staffs into thickets and used them to feel the bottom of creeks and puddles.

  The only result was that the game in the area got upset and started wandering around. Seppo was overjoyed when he managed to chase a wild boar out of its den. He was also the only one who was satisfied with the results of the search.

  They found no trace of Anders von Beehn.

  When the organized search was called off it had been dark for several hours and Roger Willén was noticeably dejected, but he tried to conceal it under a professional surface.