by Arne Dahl
‘Since he threatened to fire me.’
They exchanged a glance in the gloom. Deer pulled a face as Berger aimed the lamp so that it was shining on the latest photofit picture.
‘Erik Johansson?’ he said, putting his finger on the picture. ‘The most common name in Sweden.’
‘That’s the name on the rental agreement for the house in Märsta, yes,’ Deer said. ‘The estate agent has never met the tenant. The house is owned by some Swedes who live in Argentina.’
‘The estate agent …’ Berger said. ‘How does he explain the fact that he’s never met the tenant?’
‘Email. The estate agent claims he’s already deleted their correspondence. That could be true. The perpetrator has had the house for over two years, and emails that old tend to get ditched. But I’ve got a feeling the agent consciously deleted a paper trail. Samir compared the original advert with the tenancy agreement. There’s a difference of three thousand kronor per month. Our perpetrator probably added the three thousand to avoid having to show his face. The estate agent has no scruples about pocketing the difference before transferring the rest to Argentina.’
‘Can we get anything from the email address?’
‘Samir’s been working hard on that,’ Deer said. ‘And has probably exhausted all possibilities.’
Berger stared at the picture of Erik Johansson. ‘Play the recording again.’
Deer did as he asked. They listened intently to Lina Vikström’s agitated voice.
When it was finished Berger said: ‘If that is Erik Johansson himself talking – and I’m completely certain he doesn’t have any accomplices – then a simple call would have done the job. He didn’t need to act it out with such intensity.’
‘What does that suggest?’
‘I don’t know,’ Berger said, flicking the picture. ‘Nothing good, anyway.’
‘Well being a paedophile isn’t a great start.’
Berger was about to speak but stopped himself and looked at Deer.
‘I don’t think he is a paedophile,’ he said.
Deer fell silent and looked at him. Her brown eyes shone sharply through the gloom.
‘OK,’ she said eventually. ‘That was the moment when your secret investigation went off in a different direction from ours.’
Berger met her gaze.
‘There is no secret investigation,’ he said.
‘You don’t believe in this investigation,’ Deer exclaimed. ‘All along we’ve been assuming the bastard sitting outside a school waiting to kidnap a child is a fucking paedophile.’
‘As long as that assumption didn’t lead us astray it didn’t make any difference. I’m not sure that’s the case any more.’
‘And what’s changed?’
‘He’s being so damn precious.’
Deer was restrained, loyal; that was one of the things he liked about her. But the look on her face as she gazed out at the bad weather was neither restrained nor loyal.
‘I’m an ordinary cop,’ she said to the rain gods. ‘I haven’t got any other training except for Police Academy. Thanks to my Social Democratic working-class parents’ unshakeable optimism in the future, I’ve been cursed with the stupidly pretentious name of Desiré Rosenkvist. Even so, I’m the first person in my family to get any education beyond high school, and I’ve had to sweat blood to become a detective inspector. Can you, Supercop Sam Berger, please explain what you mean by “precious”?’
‘He’s precious, affected, pretentious, exaggerated. He packages his gift to the police as a beautifully wrapped parcel. He wants praise, he wants us to admire him. I agree, that sort of behaviour also exists within paedophile networks, but there we’re talking about hermetically sealed groups. People cross new and increasingly diabolical boundaries and want to boast about it to their peers, get a response, praise, admiration. But I’ve never heard of a paedophile who wants to boast about his transgressions to a wider audience, least of all the police. Outside that closed circle they get nothing but shame.’
Deer turned slowly back to face him. Her face was no longer streaked. ‘And then there’s the whole fifteen thing,’ she said. ‘Ellen was fifteen years and one month old when she disappeared. Which means it wouldn’t be sexual assault of a child – not technically paedophilia, in other words, as long as they’re not related. Which they’re not. We have at least managed to discount the Savinger family. That’s something we’ve achieved, anyway.’
‘Perhaps we could try thinking of it as an alternative hypothesis. That there could be other motives besides the two obvious ones, a ransom – which he hasn’t demanded – or paedophilia.’
‘Maybe,’ Deer conceded.
As Berger started to gather his things together from the next desk, Deer’s phone rang. She didn’t say much, and the conversation was over in twenty seconds.
‘Forensics have finished with the house,’ she reported. ‘No fingerprints, no traces of DNA apart from the blood. Disgustingly clean, according to Robin.’
‘Scrubbed clean,’ Berger nodded. ‘Shouldn’t you be home with your family now?’
‘Johnny and Lykke are at the cinema with Grandma. I’m out on licence. Beer?’
‘Tempting,’ Berger said. ‘But I actually had a couple of small jobs in mind.’
‘For me, presumably,’ Deer said with a wry smile. ‘While Supercop Sam Berger heads off on yet another dodgy internet date.’
Berger snorted. He wasn’t sure if it was a laugh. ‘There’s been one,’ he said. ‘Just one. A first stumbling step. And yes, it was a bit dodgy.’
‘What was it Madame X wanted to do, again?’
‘You just want to make me say it out loud.’
‘Oddly enough, it just gets funnier every time you say it.’
Berger tried not to smile and shook his head as he pulled his rucksack closed over the bulky files. Then he looked up at Deer not even a hint of a smile on his face.
‘You were the first person into that cell in the basement. How much blood would you say there was?’
Deer’s smile faded.
‘A lot,’ she said. ‘Back at the house I said I thought Ellen was alive. But I don’t know if I was just trying to console you, console both of us.’
‘An educated guess, then?’
‘I don’t know. Two litres?’
‘According to the pathologist’s preliminary evaluation, it was no more than three decilitres. First: a bit of homework. What would be the point of pumping Ellen Savinger full of blood thinners?’
Deer nodded, with a frown.
‘And my second job?’
‘You can do that one right now. Which hospital is Ekman in?’
‘Ekman?’
‘It would be useful to have a first name as well.’
6
Sunday 25 October, 21.54
Berger walked through the rain, all the way from Södermalm Hospital. It was strangely restorative, as if the walk were rinsing all the crap away. The grim darkness of the autumn night competed with the weakly illuminated softness of Södermalm, and somewhere in the tension between them was where the act of cleansing happened. As he took the last few steps over the brow of the hill on Bondegatan and turned into Ploggatan, it really did feel like he’d been given an opportunity to start again.
It didn’t feel anything like the way it usually did when he tumbled into the lift and was carried up four floors. Not the way it had recently. For over two years. Could that really be called recently?
As always, the front door announced that Lindström & Berger lived there. The fact that it still said that wasn’t because of inertia, but because it would have felt even more hopeless to walk in through a doorway bearing the name Berger alone. So it was still there; he told himself it was an active choice.
He stepped into the valley of the shadow of death. He stopped on the hall mat with his whole body dripping. He could feel water trickling down his face, neck, ears, scurrying downward. It was like his whole body was weeping.
&
nbsp; The damp chill had time to eat its way into him before he made his way to the bathroom. He pulled off his wet clothes and dropped them in the bath. Even his underpants were wet, and he was left standing naked in front of the mirror, towelling himself off.
Then he caught sight of himself in the mirror. That stopped him smiling. It made the silence of the flat echo extra loudly, a flat that had once received complaints from neighbours trying to sleep.
After picking up the post and his rucksack from the hall floor and grabbing a pair of underpants, he took another look at himself; it seemed somehow inevitable. This time, in the gloom of the hall, the sight was forgiving enough for him to feel like lingering on it. That was a delusion he always regretted. The full-length mirror in the hall showed a dishevelled, brown-haired character with a bit of stubble and traces of grey in both beard and hair. No baldness yet, though, thankfully. Apart from a slight protuberance than was the beginning of a pot belly, possibly even a beer gut, the tall, hairless, nearly forty-year-old male body looked relatively intact, with one exception. And that was only visible on closer inspection. There was a depression in his upper left arm, and when he ran his fingers over the edges of the five-centimetre-wide crater, the skin was just as insensitive to touch as usual. A dead patch on his body. Untouchable.
He walked closer to the mirror to defeat the gloom. When he got close enough he could see that something was trickling below the crater, like red, glowing lava down the side of a volcano. A brief second of horror was followed by the realisation that the blood was coming from his fingers. He tore the bandage off and wiped the stubbornly bleeding right knuckles with the white parts of the bandage, then looked down his left arm instead. On a leather strap round his left wrist sat his Rolex Oyster Perpetual Datejust from 1957. Eighteen carat gold.
He looked down at it, took it off, failed to read the time. It was the second time that day that he had forgotten to protect it from the wet.
He went into the bedroom, dropped his rucksack beside the bed, put the post down on the desk, switched the desk lamp on and pointed it at his watch. For a moment he thought he could see condensation, possibly even some droplets inside the glass, but after using his underpants to wipe the face he realised it was just an illusion. The water had been on the outside. He breathed out.
In pride of place on the desk – next to a photo frame that was turned away, presenting its bright blue back to the room – stood a rectangular wooden box. He opened it, revealing six velvet-lined compartments. He put the Rolex in one of the empty compartments, briefly ran his fingers over all five watches, then shut the lid and closed the gilded catch. That was when the feeling returned at last, the cleansing feeling, the feeling that he had been given a chance to begin again.
There wasn’t really any rational explanation. On the contrary: Allan had blocked his way more effectively than ever, and his encounter with Christoffer Ekman at Södermalm Hospital hadn’t inspired much hope.
Berger pulled the underpants on, now annoyingly damp from wiping the watch, and was suddenly back in the dismal hospital room. He wouldn’t have recognised Ekman if it hadn’t been for the heavily bandaged arms sticking out at an odd angle. His face looked pretty much unfamiliar – just one colleague among many others – but as he got closer and Ekman opened his eyes, he recognised those strangely bright green irises. The two men said hello, communicating in clipped, polite – almost official – tones. Berger noted that Ekman’s injuries were lower down his arms than he remembered from the drenched porch, close to his elbows, in fact. From the outline under the sheets he quickly calculated Ekman’s height and came up with one metre seventy-five, no more.
The first officer going through a smashed-in doorway would usually have his weapon raised. No torch, not the first officer, that came later. At the moment of entry he’d have both hands on the pistol, arms slightly bent, usually held off to one side of the body. So the knives must have flown past Ekman’s raised pistol. Just above it. While Berger went on talking to Ekman on autopilot, he figured out that a reasonable estimation of the average height of an officer would be around one metre eighty-five, possibly slightly more, in which case the knives would definitely have passed below most officers’ arms if they were bent.
Somewhere a seed started to germinate and finally took root when Berger left the hospital. It was watered and nourished during his purposefully meandering walk through the rain-soaked backstreets of Södermalm, only to blossom fully now, by the desk in his bedroom in Ploggatan.
Had Berger just noticed the first sign of a possible mistake?
Christoffer Ekman had produced one single memorable remark during their conversation. It was right at the end; Berger was already on his feet.
Ekman fixed him with his bright green eyes and hissed: ‘This is pure evil. You’ve got to catch the bastard.’
A cliché. But true. As clichés all too often are.
He had to start again.
Berger went over to his bed and lay down. He piled the pillows up against the wall, pulled the covers over him and leaned over to dig about in his rucksack. He pulled out three bulky folders. He put the one marked Ellen Savinger to one side and placed the other two on his thighs. The one on his left was marked Jonna Eriksson, the right-hand one Julia Almström.
Start again. Look with fresh eyes. Find more tiny mistakes. Where the execution didn’t quite match up to the ambition.
If a man of Berger’s height had been first into the house the knives would have passed below his arms. The scum hadn’t actually considered that. Berger detected a sudden crack in his perfect facade.
In his head he always called the perpetrator the Scum.
Start again. He moved ‘Jonna Eriksson’ to one side and opened ‘Julia Almström’. The first one.
Then he fell asleep.
When he woke up an indeterminate amount of time later – because Julia Almström had fallen to the floor with a thud – he was still in a swirling world where a fancy school building merged into a load of oily, rattling chains and revolving cogs, where a truck waiting on Kommendörsgatan in Östermalm somehow became a sweaty man’s torso above which a pair of twin boys aged about eleven hovered like cherubs, where an artist’s drawing verified by two independent witnesses suddenly came to life and slowly opened its mouth until it became unfeasibly large, then, as scarily as every other time over the past few weeks, when it bared its teeth and got closer to his bicep, it merged with another drawing and the two faces became one, their features distorted, skull-like, as the merged teeth started to snap all around them, sinking into raw flesh until the faces faded away and were replaced by a bucket of stinking urine and excrement that bubbled and boiled and overflowed, suddenly leaving just a naked concrete wall, with a brown stain that grew redder and redder as it spread, and when the bright red stain covered the whole wall he woke up as the folder hit the floor.
Crap dream, he had time to think. Then he opened his eyes and stared out at nothingness. Or – even worse – into nothingness.
He felt the same distaste as usual about the cherubs. They shouldn’t be there. This was a work dream, a typical procedural dream; he’d had so many of them over the years, always along the same lines. And the twins definitely shouldn’t be there.
Yet that wasn’t what lingered. Berger leaned over the edge of the bed. The contents of Julia Almström’s file lay strewn across the floor – photographs of notebooks, Post-it notes, receipts, newspaper cuttings – but that wasn’t what he was after. He reached for his rucksack and managed to dig out a very small plastic bag. The documents from the investigation stuck to his feet as he walked over to the desk.
The box of watches sat there is splendid isolation. He opened the gilded clasp, stared down at his five watches and briefly ran his fingers over the empty compartment. His eyes hadn’t regained their focus, everything was still dreamily blurred. He took hold of a couple of the velvet-lined dividing walls and lifted them. The entire row of watches came loose, revealing a cubbyhole underne
ath. It contained a number of small plastic bags, each one bearing a label. He opened one of the desk drawers, took out a pack of tiny labels, wrote Ellen Savinger on it in shaky handwriting, then pulled it off and stuck it to the little plastic bag he had taken from his rucksack. He held it up to the light and examined the tiny cog. It was no more than a centimetre in diameter. He adjusted the order of the other bags – the names Jonna Eriksson and Julia Almström were visible on a couple of them – and then put the new evidence bag in alongside them.
Berger stood there for a while. Half-formed ideas swirled around him until one of them dived down and grabbed hold of him. He hurried over to the bed, reached for the file labelled Ellen Savinger and opened it. Hunched over, he spread out the police photographer’s pictures from inside the house in Märsta. The cell in the basement, the overturned bucket, the bloodstain that wasn’t quite as big as he remembered it. Plenty of angles, but not much else. He slammed his hand down on the pictures and bowed his head. Then another idea grabbed him. He pulled out his mobile phone and sat down on the edge of the bed. Eventually the photographs appeared.
The twins were the fixed point. The pole star, the still point of the turning world. Everything stemmed from there. Even though he was on his way back into the revolving world he stopped himself there. To get his bearings. Marcus and Oscar. They were about eight years old there, in a ditch full of coltsfoot. He felt the peculiar calm that reigns in the eye of a hurricane. Perhaps their presence was his attempt to stop the passage of time. Stop the constant rotation.
But time did exist. As did chaos. Beyond the pole star was the revolving world. All that we really have.
He scrolled through the photos. At the end were a couple of pictures he had taken from the porch in Märsta, looking towards the ambulance, police vans and cordon. He paused and felt himself frown, then scanned backwards to the cellar again.
He couldn’t recall having taken so many photographs. The light was considerably worse than in the police photographer’s professional efforts. In fact the pictures were pretty useless. He scrolled back and forth through them. He paused a couple of times at pictures of the wall, with the bloodstain towards the bottom of the frame. He zoomed using his fingers, the way Deer had taught him. Then he returned to the still point. Marcus and Oscar. Paris. He could never just scroll past them, no matter what else he might have on his mind; it was impossible. But in the end he swiped his finger across the screen and brought up the next photograph, the first one from inside the house.
