by Arne Dahl
While the forensics team headed into the house from hell, Berger looked out at the crowd. And he was struck by a strange, fleeting feeling. He pulled the plastic glove from his left hand, got his mobile out and took a picture, then a couple more, but the feeling had already gone.
He glanced at his old Rolex. It felt unfamiliar against his wrist, because he changed his watch every Sunday. The hands were slowly ticking onward, and it was as if he saw the ingenious little mechanism tick out each second from nothingness. Then he turned to face Deer. At first she seemed to be looking at his watch, then he realised that her gaze was focused lower, that she was looking at his hands, the right one of which was still at least partially covered by the plastic glove.
‘You’re bleeding,’ she said.
‘It’s nothing,’ he said, pulling the glove off. He pulled a face.
She gave a brief smile and looked up at his face. She studied him carefully. Too carefully.
‘What is it now?’ he said irritably.
‘Again?’ she said.
He could hear the italics.
‘What?’ he said anyway.
‘When we were about to go into the house you said it was too late. “Again.”’
‘And?’
‘Ellen is our first case, isn’t she?’
He smiled. He could feel himself smiling. It felt wrong, there on the porch in front of the realm of the dead.
‘I’m pleased to hear you say “is”,’ he said.
‘Ellen isn’t dead,’ she said.
But her eyes didn’t waver.
‘Again?’ he repeated with a sigh.
‘Yes?’ she prompted.
‘I was thinking more existentially,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘“Too late” is my motto.’
It had stopped raining.
4
Sunday 25 October, 19.23
‘Booby trapped?’
Detective Superintendent Allan Gudmundsson had apparently decided to perform a parody of a reprimand. The performance made Berger’s stomach turn.
‘Yes,’ he replied innocently, ‘that bastard mechanism probably ought to be called a booby trap.’
‘That’s not what I was asking, as you’re perfectly aware.’
‘So what was your question, then?’
‘Why the hell did you warn the rapid response unit to look out for booby traps?’
‘Fat lot of good it did …’
‘That’s not the point. Why?’
‘Because the bastard hasn’t left any clues behind him. He’s smart, that’s all. Smart enough and dangerous enough to booby trap his abandoned hellhole.’
‘The address was a clue, wasn’t it?’ Allan roared. ‘The house.’
Berger stopped himself saying any of the things crowding on the tip of his tongue. He looked out of the window. The autumn rain had returned and it was pitch black. Most of the team had already left Police Headquarters. Deer was still there, he could just see her face in the light of her screen through two rain-streaked windows set at a ninety-degree angle to each other. The panes were separated by a slice of downpour.
‘No, Sam,’ Allan bellowed, unexpectedly combative. ‘You’re lying to me.’
Berger suddenly realised that could have fallen asleep at that precise moment. He could have closed his eyes and let Allan’s squawking lull him to sleep.
It was probably best not to.
‘Lying?’ he said, mostly to hide his detachment.
‘As long as it was nothing worse than little white lies I was prepared to let it go,’ Allan said in a considerably gentler tone; it was obvious that he was preparing for a crescendo. ‘But the fact that you’re telling bare-faced lies to your boss shows that you’ve elevated your conspiracy theory to a new and dangerous level.’
‘You became a bureaucrat far too early, Allan.’
‘You’ve gone off piste, and to cover it up you’re lying to your own boss. Do you think that’s sustainable in the long run?’
‘What should I have done differently?’ Berger asked with a shrug. ‘Not gone to the address? Not warned the team about potential booby traps?’
‘This is more about what you’re likely to do in the future.’
‘Catch a serial killer?’
Allan’s carefully prepared crescendo tailed off into a long exhalation which went way beyond a sigh and suggested an impressive lung capacity for a man of his age. He probably hadn’t smoked a single cigarette in his entire life.
With exaggerated slowness, Allan said: ‘There isn’t even a killer, Sam. At most there’s a kidnapper. Every year eight hundred people go missing in Sweden, the vast majority of them entirely voluntarily. That’s more than two a day. You can’t just pick out a couple of those voluntary missing persons and claim they’ve been murdered by a serial killer that no one else can see. Christ, we don’t even have serial killers in this country. They only exist in the minds of corrupt prosecutors and overambitious cops. And overambitious cops are even worse than corrupt prosecutors.’
‘There isn’t a killer?’ Berger said pointedly.
‘There isn’t a victim, Sam.’
‘You weren’t in that cellar, Allan. I swear to you, there are victims.’
‘I’ve seen the pictures. And I’ve spoken to the pathologist. The blood dried in different stages, on different occasions. And it looks as if there’s more blood than there actually is. Three decilitres at most. That’s not enough to kill anyone.’
Berger stared at the wall behind Allan. It was completely blank. ‘Unless perhaps she wasn’t dead when she was moved, maybe she isn’t even dead yet. But she will be.’
Oxygen freezes at ‒218°C. Because both nitrogen and argon, the other major components of air, have a slightly higher freezing point, that means the air freezes when the oxygen freezes. So it must have been, if only very briefly, at least 218 degrees below zero in Detective Superintendent Allan Gudmundsson’s office in Police Headquarters in Stockholm, because there was no question that the two officers were separated by a block of frozen air.
Eventually Allan said: ‘Blood group B negative. The second most uncommon blood group in Sweden. Two per cent of the population. One of them is Ellen Savinger. But that wasn’t the only trace of blood we found.’
The frozen chunk of air was still hanging between them.
Berger remained silent.
‘There was a fair amount of A positive, which confused Forensics,’ Allan went on. ‘Is that your blood group, by any chance, Sam? It was found on the walls outside the cell, and on the floor inside it. There were also fragments of skin.’
Allan’s gaze moved down Berger’s right arm. His hands were hidden by the edge of the desk. Allan shook his head. ‘We’re awaiting DNA results in both instances, but we don’t actually need it. In either case.’
‘She’s fifteen years old,’ Berger said, trying not to raise his voice. ‘She’s fifteen years old, and she was down there for nearly three weeks. In a dark, stinking fucking cell with a bucket to shit in and only the occasional appearance of a lunatic for company. She lost plenty of blood. Am I really the only person thinking of the devil? And this devil isn’t some naive first-timer, he’s done this before. Probably plenty of times.’
‘But that’s not an argument, Sam. Evidence is an argument.’
‘Evidence doesn’t just pop into your head,’ Berger said. ‘You gather evidence by not ignoring clues, by following up unproven leads. You trust your gut feeling, have faith in experience. In the end the clues turn into evidence. Allan, for God’s sake, are we just going to sit and wait for evidence, is that your vision of police work?’
‘How come you didn’t know the layout?’
‘What?’
‘You didn’t know that there was a cellar. How come?’
‘The lead cropped up very suddenly, you know that. I asked you to pull together a rapid response team. Ellen shouldn’t have to wait a minute longer than necessary.’
‘Imagine if she had been sitting there, the
n,’ Allan said. ‘With the correct plans you could have broken into the cellar right away. Then you might have stood a chance of rescuing her. If she and the perpetrator had been there and everything unfolded the way it did, you would probably have killed her. By being so slow and underprepared. By being so fucking amateur.’
Berger looked at Allan. For the first time he was inclined to think he was right. And that bothered him. Allan would definitely have been right – if events had taken that turn. It would have been amateurish.
‘He gave us an invitation,’ he eventually muttered.
‘What are you on about now?’ Allan sighed.
‘Look at it in hindsight. A new witness all of a sudden, after almost three weeks. An address on the outskirts of Märsta, close to the forest, where someone had caught a glimpse of a young girl at the home of a bachelor no one knew. So those of us on duty had to act fast. And a lot of options weren’t available to us because it’s Sunday. The local council in Märsta failed, for instance – and in spite of my repeated efforts to encourage them – to find any plan of the building. The first thing we find when we get there is a mechanism – yes, a booby trap – which is far more subtle than anything you could have imagined. That’s fair, isn’t it, Allan?’
‘Knife blades in the bicep. I have imagined it.’
‘Two points. One: it was aimed at police officers, specifically at police officers wearing protective vests – the mechanism was aimed at the side of the vest. Two: not at head height. It wasn’t intended to be fatal, it was intended to mock us. Tough officers rolling around on the floor terrified out of their wits. And everything was set up perfectly. Our man seems to like precision.’
‘I don’t believe you’ve asked how Ekman is.’
‘Ekman?’ Berger exclaimed.
‘The officer who ended up with knives in his arms.’
‘How is he?’
‘Don’t know. Go on.’
‘The booby trap is the bow on a big parcel. A parcel with several layers, like pass the parcel. After the ribbon we have to get through the first layer, the hidden hatch in the kitchen floor. Then down into that labyrinth of a cellar. Then there’s another parcel to unwrap: breaking through the wall. Only when we’ve untied the bow and opened two parcels does he let us into the inner sanctum.
‘I see what you mean,’ Allan said. ‘But this is all with the benefit of hindsight, as you say. You didn’t know any of this then. So you should have had the plans, so you could have struck with maximum efficiency.’
‘I had a feeling it was a present,’ Berger said.
‘Of course you did. Supercop Sam Berger. In that case, why was there such a damn rush?’
‘Because there was a microscopic chance that the tipoff was genuine. That we could have rescued Ellen and caught the kidnapper.’
Detective Superintendent Allan Gudmundsson stood up in his sparsely furnished office. ‘Thinking things through isn’t your strong point, Sam, but I’m going to let you off this time. I can’t control what you feel. But I can give you clear orders regarding the line of inquiry which is to be the focus of this investigation. And that line is that Ellen Savinger was kidnapped outside her school in Östermalm, right here in Stockholm, over two weeks ago. That’s all. You and your entire team haven’t got any further than that. You haven’t managed to find a single thing to go on.’
‘Which suggests very clearly that he’s done this before, Allan.’
‘But there’s nothing to support that, Sam. Just wild guesses that you are strictly forbidden from sharing with your team. That ban just got even stricter. Thanks to this so-called raid. If you choose to disregard your orders and this ban, you’ll be fired.’
‘I’m going to assume you’re joking.’
‘Do I look like I’m joking?’
Their eyes locked. And didn’t move. If Allan was joking, he was hiding it very well. In the end he looked away from Berger, sighed deeply and shook his head. ‘So what’s your next move?’
‘I’m going to go through the case with Deer, as soon as I can. We need to get back to basics.’
‘You can’t go round calling a female colleague “dear”, that’s just weird, Sam. I’ve already heard people complaining about sexism around here.’
‘Her name is Desiré Rosenkvist,’ Berger said. ‘And no fucking way can a cop be called Desiré Rosenkvist. Deer is short for Desiré, and is spelled with two e’s. Deer as in not an elk. She’s got a deer’s eyes, after all.’
‘Oh well, that makes it much less sexist,’ Allan said, and shepherded him out.
5
Sunday 25 October, 19.37
Berger realised he was smiling as he walked down the dimly lit corridor and turned off at the pillar that marked the start of the open-plan office. And sure enough, Deer was the only person left. She looked up at him.
‘A bollocking?’ she asked.
‘Big bollocking,’ he confirmed. ‘For instance, I have to stop calling you Deer.’
‘He could have asked me first.’
‘Because, of course, it’s all done out of consideration for you.’
Laughter. Weak, though.
‘Listen,’ she said.
An agitated female voice rang out: ‘Look, I’m pretty sure I saw her just now, you know, her, that girl, through the window … Well, I’m not sure it was her, but she had that thing, I don’t know, that pink leather strap round her neck with that crooked cross, the Greek one, I don’t know if it’s Orthodox, but she’s a genuine blonde, for God’s sake, can’t have any Greek roots.’
Deer stopped the torrent. ‘What does “pink” mean here?’
Berger shrugged. ‘It was vital. That was what got us moving.’
‘Yes,’ Deer said thoughtfully. ‘It was a Russian cross, not a Greek one, but Orthodox all the same. She could have seen that in the media. But not the fact that the leather strap was pink, that’s never been made public. But I’m thinking more about, I don’t know, proximity. How close would you have to stand to see that a strap round someone’s neck is pink?’
‘She wasn’t standing anywhere,’ Berger said. ‘Because she doesn’t exist.’
Deer looked at him for a few moments, then restarted the audio file: ‘Yes, er, the address. It’s the last house up by the edge of the forest, the derelict one. I don’t remember the name of the road, but the guy who lives there’s a real weirdo, you never see him and if you do he hurries away. He could easily have …’
Deer stopped the playback. ‘Then of course she remembers the name of the road and gives us a full address. Forensics estimate that it’s been at least two days since the cellar was emptied, probably longer. So this witness can’t have seen Ellen through the window this morning. The woman claimed to live nearby, and there really is a Lina Vikström at the address she gave. The reason we haven’t been able to get hold of Lina Vikström is that she’s travelling in south-east Asia. One of those get-in-touch-with-your-real-self holidays without a mobile. Lots of yoga.’
‘Really?’ Berger said. ‘That’s new.’
‘Claiming to be this unreachable Lina Vikström suggests in-depth knowledge of the area.’
‘And rather more than that, actually.’
‘Obviously this raises a number of fundamental questions,’ Deer said. ‘Is there a female accomplice? Is this witness’s voice actually the kidnapper’s, run through a voice changer? Or is our perpetrator in fact a woman?’
‘Nothing from the audio experts?’
‘Not yet, no. But if we’re dealing with some sort of distortion device, these days there’s a chance of recovering the original voice.’
‘I’m not holding out much hope of that,’ Berger said. ‘If Forensics did manage to come up with the original voice, that would be a deception as well. One way or another. He only leaves clues that he wants to leave. If they fulfil a function.’
‘No woman involved, then?’
‘That’s my guess. He’s working alone.’
‘But he’s done it befo
re? You got there “too late again”?’
Berger bit his tongue. He twisted Deer’s desk lamp so that it shone on the nearby whiteboard. It contained the entire case. Which wasn’t much. Almost three weeks and not a single decent lead; Allan had been right about that. But they did have a jumble of dead ends.
Purely because they refused to see the case from a historical perspective.
Berger moved the beam of light across the confusion of Post-it notes, photographs, receipts, documents, drawings and arrows. It was all manual, old-fashioned, no gadgets. The dull cone of light came to rest on two pencil drawings.
Deer pointed at the photofit on the right. ‘We’ve had this one since day one. A man in a van seen outside Ellen Savinger’s school in Östermalm, just before the end of the school day. Two independent witnesses agree on this likeness. And then this more recent picture, produced by a neighbour in Märsta, the only person so far to have seen the “weirdo” on the edge of the forest.’
‘And what conclusions do you draw?’ Berger asked.
‘If it’s the same man, his face doesn’t have any distinguishing features. This is just a standard picture of a white man of about forty. On the other hand, it does give us an age and ethnicity. Although it has to be said, neither of those comes as much of a surprise.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Nothing else,’ Deer said, shaking her head.
‘Does he look like a novice?’
‘It’s hard to say.’
‘If this is the right person, then he’s done it before, I know you can see that too, Deer. It’s written all over his face.’
‘You really are piling up the sort of firm evidence that Allan loves. So tell me, what have you been keeping to yourself while you’ve been conducting an entirely separate investigation?’
Followed by that Bambi look.
Berger was well aware that rather than a sign of weakness it was actually one of Deer’s greatest assets.
‘Allan expressly forbade me from discussing that,’ he said. ‘And our investigation is covering all lines of inquiry supported by the evidence.’
‘Since when do you care what Allan says?’
