The Flood

by Kristina Ohlsson

  ‘She’s staying with a friend she hasn’t seen for over a year,’ Fredrika added. Alex had called her first, wanting her spontaneous reaction to what Tina had told him.

  ‘Let’s bring him in,’ she’d said, but Alex had disagreed. He preferred to put Ross under surveillance, tap his phone, see if he might lead them to Noah’s brother. If there was a chance that the family was alive, Alex had to find them.

  ‘He’s killing people to punish them,’ Alex said. ‘Malcolm Benke because he didn’t save his daughter. Lovisa Wahlberg because she let her boyfriend pay the price for their joint drug dealings. I’m assuming he’s taken Dan Johansson because he failed with one of his clients. Noah had to be silenced because he was kicking up too much of a fuss. Fuck knows how long the list will end up. It’s possible that Renata Rashid has another victim on her hands, but we don’t know for sure.’

  ‘But we still haven’t worked out why,’ Fredrika said. ‘Why is Ross the person who’s punishing them? And why now? Beata Benke’s been dead for ten years – why take revenge now instead of ten years ago?’

  Berlin’s face betrayed no emotion.

  ‘His daughter,’ she said almost inaudibly.

  ‘His daughter?’

  ‘She died back in the autumn.’

  Alex and Fredrika exchanged a glance.

  ‘Do we know how she died?’

  ‘He said it was the result of an illness.’

  Fredrika frowned. ‘I didn’t even know Ross had a daughter.’

  Nor did Alex, and he certainly hadn’t heard about her death.

  ‘So how old was she?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Berlin said.

  Fredrika went over to the computer in a corner of the meeting room.

  ‘I’ll check the register,’ she said as it hummed into life.

  Berlin didn’t speak or move. She was in shock, and it suited her even less than her usual truculence.

  ‘We need to put him under surveillance right away,’ Alex said.

  ‘I’ll sort it,’ Berlin said, then left the room with her head down.

  Two minutes later they had the answer to their question. Ross had two sons, but no daughter. He’d never had a daughter.

  *

  The surveillance team had eyes on Ross less than an hour after Berlin issued the order. It was essential not to arouse his suspicions, so he remained in charge of the investigation into the murder of Lovisa Wahlberg. It was almost four o’clock; people would soon be going home, but not Alex or Fredrika. They remained closeted in the Lions’ Den; they had a lot to do.

  Fredrika gave Spencer a quick call, while Alex made do with a text to Diana:

  Going to be late. Will be in touch. Xx

  He couldn’t stop thinking about the messages he’d received.

  I am doing what you cannot do.

  I am putting everything right.

  He didn’t understand what they were referring to, what Ross was getting at. He was absolutely convinced that Ross had written them, but why, for fuck’s sake? It was Ross – not Alex – who’d had knowledge of the cases that had led to the murders the police were now investigating. It was Ross and no one else who could have done something for Beata Benke in London, done something to ensure that Lovisa Wahlberg was prosecuted.

  So how can all this be my fault?

  Maybe he was misinterpreting the messages? Maybe they were nothing to do with those specific cases, but rather a more wide-ranging condemnation of Alex’s competence as a police officer? That made more sense; he and Ross had clashed on more than one occasion.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ Fredrika said when she’d finished her call.

  ‘The messages.’

  ‘I’ve been wondering about them too. They don’t seem to fit with what we think has happened.’

  ‘I want to know more about this daughter who’s supposed to have died,’ Alex said.

  ‘But she doesn’t exist. She never has.’ Fredrika was tense and stressed, almost distracted, which irritated Alex.

  ‘Maybe she exists for Ross,’ he said. ‘Or existed.’

  Fredrika shook her head. ‘No doubt he’s suffered some kind of trauma. We need to find out what it was. I’m not buying this business with the daughter.’

  The computer in the corner clicked and hummed, as if to protest that nobody was taking any notice of it.

  ‘Turn the damned thing off, it’s getting on my nerves,’ Alex snapped.

  ‘I’m just going to look up one more thing,’ Fredrika said. Her fingers flew over the keys with her customary efficiency. She waited.

  The colour drained from her face. ‘Shit,’ she whispered.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Henry Lindgren. You asked me to check him out.’

  Alex held his breath.

  Fredrika turned to face him.

  ‘I know who he is. And so do you.’

  Once upon a time Henry Lindgren had been the train attendant on an X2000 express between Gothenburg and Stockholm. A young woman, Sara Sebastiansson, had got off the train when it stopped for a while in Flemingsberg. Fredrika couldn’t recall whether she’d wanted to have a cigarette or make a phone call, but anyway she’d left her little girl, Lilian, in her seat because she was fast asleep. The train moved off, leaving Sara behind on the platform, distracted by a woman pretending to need help with her dog. Henry Lindgren took it upon himself to keep an eye on Lilian until they arrived in Stockholm, and yet the unthinkable happened. When the train reached its destination, the child was gone. She was found a few days later, murdered by a lethal injection of insulin into the back of her neck.

  Just like Henry Lindgren.

  Fredrika was more shaken than she was prepared to admit.

  Insanity. This is insanity in its purest form.

  So far three people had been murdered in the same way as individuals to whom they had once had a connection and an obligation.

  Malcolm Benke and his daughter.

  Lovisa Wahlberg and her ex-boyfriend.

  Henry Lindgren and the child he was clearly perceived to have failed on the train.

  But he didn’t fail her, Fredrika thought. It wasn’t his fault that Lilian disappeared.

  She allowed herself to be absorbed by the ongoing investigation. This was about preventing more murders. It was about Torbjörn Ross. But above all it was about exonerating Spencer before anyone even considered him as a suspect. Those were Fredrika’s priorities.

  There was no escaping the fact that another thread ran through all the cases, a thread that the murderer himself had highlighted. Alex. Henry Lindgren’s ex-wife had found a note on the fridge in his apartment; she’d dropped it off at the station a couple of hours ago. It had reached Berlin immediately after the meeting with Fredrika and Alex, and from that moment things had happened very fast – so fast that Fredrika couldn’t remember all the details.

  She did, however, remember the note.

  Do you understand now, Alex? I am putting everything right.

  She broke down the brief message, trying desperately to grasp what the perpetrator wanted them to see.

  Do you understand now?

  He was looking for an answer to that question.

  Do you understand now?

  Now?

  Now?

  It had to be a reference to what the writer assumed had just happened: Alex had heard about Henry Lindgren’s death.

  Do you understand now – now that you know Henry Lindgren is dead?

  Yes, she wanted to yell. Yes, we understand.

  The whole thing made her skin crawl. The word ‘now’ was misleading; it was clear that Lindgren had been the first victim to die, not the last.

  And yet the killer had apparently been convinced that he would be found later, after the others. And of course there could be many more. They still had no idea what had happened to Noah Johansson’s brother and his family – except that Ross was somehow involved there too.

  Do you understand now?

 
; The frustration in that question was unmistakable.

  One dead, two dead, three dead. Surely you must understand now, Alex?

  Fredrika pushed away the message, smoothed down her hair. She never ran her hands through her hair; that would mess up her plait.

  I’m so uncontrollably fucking controlled.

  She wished Alex was there, but he was with Berlin, following the surveillance on Ross. Fredrika had been tasked with finding out why Ross had claimed to have a daughter. Had there ever been a child, and if so could her death have unleashed the killing spree to which they now had front-row seats?

  She’d devoted a significant proportion of her life to music. She had an unusually good ear, and could reproduce virtually any piece on her violin. She had made good use of this skill in her professional life too. She could hear when someone was lying or withholding part of the truth; something jarred. Exactly the same feeling came over her when she started looking into Ross’s dead daughter.

  This isn’t right.

  She found phone numbers for both his current wife and his ex, as well as the two sons he’d had with his second wife.

  This isn’t right.

  She tried to shake off the conviction that she was heading in the wrong direction, mainly because she couldn’t work out where it had come from. Ross was the only person who tied up the whole package, the only unifying link between the victims. She felt sick when she thought about what Alex had told her Ross had said about the scars on Alex’s hands.

  A low blow, to say the least.

  It wasn’t our fault that Lilian Sebastiansson died. And it certainly wasn’t Henry Lindgren’s either.

  At the same time she felt a bizarre gratitude for Ross’s comment, because otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to link him to Lindgren’s murder. They still needed forensic evidence, of course, and so far they’d found nothing. Nothing. She’d never known a situation like it: a perpetrator who left the scene so clean, yet so striking. She kept on coming back to the same thought. The forensic evidence was negligible. No prosecutor would take Ross to court on the flimsy grounds they had so far.

  She looked at her watch; she really wanted to go home.

  She had dug and dug, but there was no trace of Ross’s alleged daughter. The next move was to contact his family, but that would have to wait. They mustn’t reveal that there was any kind of ongoing investigation into Ross, not under any circumstances.

  So how could they move forward?

  There had to be someone they could call, someone who would talk.

  Fredrika went back to the notes Alex had made after his meeting with Tina Antonsson. She’d mentioned a security firm, Solid Security, said that Noah’s brother Dan had asked them to deal with threats from a difficult client. Alex had wondered if it was the same firm Noah had used, the one Peder had talked about. With a sense of relief she decided to contact the security firm rather than one of Ross’s relatives in the hunt for a non-existent daughter. Well, for the time being at least. They had taken action against Ross because of what Tina had told them, and her only connection was with Noah’s brother and sister-in-law.

  Which meant Tina was both their weakest and their strongest card.

  Fredrika wasn’t happy with that.

  It didn’t take her long to check out Solid Security: a Swedish-owned company that had started up in Stockholm almost fifteen years earlier. They operated nationwide, and as far as she could see, their customers were very satisfied. As she read she felt the darkness descend once more, because the more she found out, the more convinced she became that she’d heard about this firm before.

  Spencer had mentioned it.

  Spencer.

  Again.

  We ought to get a burglar alarm. Everyone else in inner-city Stockholm has one.

  She could see him in her mind’s eye, tall and straight-backed, absolutely certain that the best he could do for his family was to install an alarm system. He had waved a brochure at her, said that Solid Security had an excellent reputation.

  It was only a brochure, what the hell is wrong with me?

  Pure coincidence. Anything else was unimaginable, so once again Fredrika ignored the sense that something was wrong with the Torbjörn Ross line of inquiry, ignored the knot of fear in her stomach. She called Solid Security’s customer-service department and asked to speak to the boss.

  ‘What’s it about and where are you calling from?’ asked the woman who answered.

  ‘I’m calling from the police, and I think two of your clients have come to serious harm.’

  *

  The outcome was entirely predictable. The boss wasn’t prepared to say anything over the phone, and requested a meeting instead. Fredrika decided to head over to the office in the Freeport; she could go straight home from there.

  Home to Spencer.

  Who regardless of anything to do with the murders was not the person she’d thought he was.

  How could you run over a young woman, then simply drive away?

  She popped in to see Alex on her way out.

  ‘Anything new?’ she asked.

  ‘You first.’

  His voice was rough, his face set.

  Fredrika summarised what she’d done and explained where she was going. On her own, for once – there wasn’t time to bring in a colleague.

  ‘Then I’ll go home, if that’s okay?’

  ‘Fine. We’ll carry on looking for Ross’s daughter tomorrow.’

  ‘So you believe she existed?’ Fredrika couldn’t hide the doubt in her voice.

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  Fredrika backed out of Alex’s office; she really didn’t want to talk about this now.

  ‘See you tomorrow.’

  She hurried down to the car park and sped away towards the Freeport.

  Solid Security had a visitors’ parking area. She slammed the car door and almost ran into the building. A man of her own age came to meet her and introduced himself as Jussi. They shook hands, and he led her into a windowless room. White walls, grey fitted carpet. Someone with a serious lack of interest in interior design must have been given the job of choosing colours and materials.

  ‘This is about two of our clients, if I’ve understood correctly?’ Jussi began.

  Fredrika liked the fact that he wasn’t wasting time on small talk.

  ‘Noah Johansson and Dan Johansson.’ She handed him a piece of paper on which she had written down their ID numbers and company names.

  Jussi frowned. ‘I remember Dan only too well, unfortunately. A total disaster. Not for us, but for the man who’d been threatening him. But I don’t understand why you mentioned his brother.’

  ‘We have information suggesting that Noah might also have been threatened.’

  ‘Who told you that? He’s never been our client – only Dan.’

  Shit. Fredrika and Alex hadn’t known for sure which firm Peder had been working for when he was dealing with Noah. Alex would have to call him back, pin down the facts – and remind Peder that he needed to contact the police and tell them everything he knew about the funeral director who’d met an untimely end, because he’d clearly failed to do so.

  Why?

  Jussi leaned forward.

  ‘The press haven’t released a name, but I’m assuming Noah Johansson is the funeral director who was murdered yesterday?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘I’m glad you called. Obviously we’re happy to help in any way we can.’

  Fredrika wasn’t sure how much help was to be gained from a security firm who hadn’t worked with Noah, but she didn’t want to offend Jussi.

  ‘How did you view the threats against Dan Johansson?’ she asked.

  ‘Everything happened within a very short time, but when he came to us we immediately assessed the situation as dangerous. He needed protection right away, and that was what he got. Not from the police, of course, but from us.’

  ‘Hard to provide protection when he never even reported the problem t
o the police,’ Fredrika countered, giving Jussi a long look. He lowered his gaze, embarrassed.

  ‘Was anyone else involved in these threats apart from the man who killed himself?’ she went on.

  ‘Not as far as we know.’

  Fredrika wondered how to dig deeper without revealing confidential information.

  ‘When were you last in touch with Dan?’ She wasn’t prepared to admit that they thought Dan might be missing.

  ‘Just before New Year. I tried to call him when I heard about his brother, but I haven’t managed to get hold of him.’ He paused briefly. I hope nothing’s happened to him too? That was what worried me when I realised Noah had been murdered.’

  Fredrika hesitated.

  ‘We have reason to believe that Dan and his family may have been abducted.’

  Jussi frowned. ‘But the person who was harassing him is dead.’

  ‘Exactly, so if he has been abducted – and we don’t know for sure if that’s the case – then it’s down to someone else. Can you tell me the name of the guy who killed himself?’

  ‘Of course – Fredrik Mannerberg.’

  Fredrika made a note, and Jussi supplied her with all the details he had.

  ‘I’m glad you called,’ he said again. ‘I was going to contact the police yesterday, but I spoke to a former employee who was responsible for Dan’s case, and he thought we should wait until Noah’s name had been confirmed.’

  ‘That was probably good advice. Who was this former employee, by the way? It might be interesting to hear what he has to say.’

  ‘No problem. He used to be a police officer.’

  Fredrika frowned.

  ‘A police officer?’

  ‘Peder Rydh – maybe you two know each other?’

  Fredrika made a huge effort to control every muscle of her face, not to show her surprise.

  ‘Rydh? Yes, we were part of the same team at one point, but that was quite a few years ago.’

  Jussi reacted with interest.

  ‘What was he like back then?’

  ‘What was he like? Competent, hardworking – possibly a little hot-headed, but definitely one of the good guys.’

  Jussi didn’t respond right away; he seemed to be thinking about what to say.