Watching You

by Arne Dahl

  In the interview room he had never seen her smile. Only now did he realise just how beautiful she was.

  Berger put the rock-face photograph down with a bang. Why the hell would anyone have pictures of themselves lined up in the bedroom?

  He went back to the living room and felt that his image of Molly Blom was growing clearer. Fucking Security Service. He’d vaguely heard about these teams. Half-external elite units that could just as easily be deployed against corrupt police officers as international mafias. Only used when they were truly needed.

  And now they were evidently needed.

  Against Sam Berger, of all people.

  The living room bulged out in a bay window. There was a desk in it. It was just as tidy as the rest of the flat. No computer in sight. A few pens, six pads of Post-it notes, different colours. He spent a while looking at them. Then he turned round to get an overview of the room.

  Above the white sofa hung a piece of art two metres wide, an astonishing photograph of a group of mountain climbers heading up a snow-covered peak. You could just see their black silhouettes against the extraordinary sunset, its colours reflecting off the snow. What occurred to Berger, apart from the breathtaking beauty of the picture, was how bulky it was: it stuck out almost ten centimetres from the wall.

  Just as he was struck by the irrelevant thought that it must have been very heavy for the removal men, he heard a muffled noise from the street door, as if someone was trying to move around very quietly. He let out a deep sigh and scanned the room again in the hope of spotting something, anything at all.

  Beside the sofa, beneath the picture, he saw a crumpled Post-it note. Pink. He darted over and picked it up, saw that there was handwriting on it. He scanned it and thought for a couple of seconds. There was no time for anything more.

  But it was enough to make him clench his right fist so hard that the scabs opened up again.

  Then he heard footsteps on the stairs.

  Two men, no more.

  He pulled a tiny plastic bag from his pocket, the smallest type of evidence bag, tucked the little pink note inside and tugged his jeans down. Then, with a certain degree of force, he pushed the bag into his rectum. He heard the locks on the door open, one after the other, and only just had time to do up his jeans before they stormed into the flat.

  He purposefully splashed blood from his wounded knuckles over the white sofa, and finished off by wiping his bloody right hand on it. Then they were on him. One of them punched him in the solar plexus and he buckled – the pain leaving him unable to breathe – and countered the blow by headbutting the man in the groin. The man flew backwards with a heavy groan, hitting the small of his back against the doorframe. As Berger straightened up and managed to draw breath again, he was struck from behind, a heavy punch to his kidney that made him kick out furiously behind him. His foot found nothing but air and he lost his balance. As he fell, his flailing foot managed to connect with something, and the second attacker staggered back. The other one stood up in the doorway and rushed at Berger, intending to accomplish something as elegant as stamping on his face. Berger rolled out of the way, grabbed the raised leg and punched the shin hard, sending this attacker off on one leg as well. Berger got to his feet and threw himself at the second man, aiming for a classic armlock. He succeeded and heard pain spread through the flat, along with a cry that sounded like: ‘Roy!’

  But with more of a sob.

  Berger saw an arm sporting a big, cheap diver’s watch sweep past with a syringe in its hand. Then he felt a prick in his neck. His field of vision collapsed in a peculiar way, and the last thing he saw before his consciousness was cut off was the pattern of bloodstains on the lovely white sofa.

  19

  Tuesday 27 October, 14.37

  Even before he opened his eyes, Berger knew he was in an interview room.

  Sight is our most instinctive sense. When we wake up, we want to open our eyes at once. It’s a gut reaction, and our newly woken consciousness is rarely sharp enough to make us disobey a gut reaction.

  But on this occasion it was.

  Berger had been awake for a couple of minutes and was trying to gather as much information as he could without opening his eyes. His whole body ached, but that didn’t really matter.

  First and foremost, he was sitting up. He had been placed, unconscious, on a hard chair, and his arms were resting on what felt like metal armrests. It took him a while to realise that they were held in place by leather straps around his wrists. The chair felt so stable that it might well be fastened to the floor, and a faint cellar smell was finding its way into his nose.

  And everything was spinning. The world was spinning.

  Just before Berger’s synapses settled down his brain was overwhelmed by the chill suspicion that he had been captured by the Scum.

  That he was sitting in a cellar, waiting for some extreme form of torture.

  That Ellen Savinger’s mutilated corpse was nailed to the wall in front of him.

  But then he remembered.

  The last thing he grasped before he decided to open his eyes was that there was someone else in the room, someone who in all likelihood was watching him carefully.

  ‘Molly Blom,’ he said and waited three seconds before opening his eyes.

  Sure enough, she was sitting in front of him. The same blonde hair, the same snub nose, the same blue eyes, but with a very different expression in them.

  ‘Sam Berger,’ she replied, staring hard at him.

  The woman he had had in the interview room under the name Nathalie Fredén was now sitting before him in a very different sort of interview room. Were they even in Police Headquarters?

  ‘A syringe in the neck?’ he said. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Apparently you were fighting like a three-term jailbird,’ Molly Blom said quietly. ‘And you were in the process of demolishing my home. What would have been more appropriate? A quiet telling-off?’

  ‘Appropriate? You mean like appreciating the effect of a deliberate red herring in a serial murder investigation?’

  ‘Nicely formulated,’ Molly Blom commended coolly.

  ‘If you hadn’t sent a decoy into the system, the time could have been spent trying to rescue Ellen Savinger.’

  ‘And why do you suppose we sent a decoy into the system?’ Molly Blom asked.

  The room detached itself from her. He had been focusing so hard that the rest of his field of vision hadn’t existed until now, not until the need to think arose. The room was featureless and bare, and apart from the cellar smell there was no indication of where it might be. Berger could see a side table that was exactly the same as the one in his interview room, including the recording apparatus and red light.

  The light was on.

  His eyes moved past his wrists, which were indeed held down by leather straps. The table he couldn’t reach or touch. On it were – apart from his watch, a laptop, a number of files and various documents and notes – two picture frames, facing away from him, one of them bright blue, and a box. A rectangular wooden box with a gilded catch.

  A box for watches.

  He smiled grimly. ‘An eye for an eye?’

  She didn’t smile. And she didn’t say anything.

  He went on: ‘I went into your home, so you went into mine?’

  ‘You spattered blood over my sofa. Why did you do that?’

  ‘Because it was so disgustingly white. It needed messing up.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Whereas you yourself are as black as sin. The Security Service’s unofficial “internal resource”. Bloody hell. And then you broke into my home and snooped about.’

  ‘But unlike you, I didn’t demolish anything.’

  He was still thinking of her as Nathalie Fredén. He had to stop that. Apart from their appearance there were very few similarities between Nathalie Fredén and Molly Blom. Above all, the power balance was completely different.

  ‘You’ve demolished my life,’ he said. ‘That’s possi
bly rather worse that a stained sofa.’

  ‘But not worse than a stained and demolished fifteen-year-old,’ Molly Blom said.

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Everything, of course. Everything that all this is about. But I don’t think you want to start there, Sam Berger. I think you’d rather start somewhere else instead. “Although I can promise that we’ll come back to it”.’

  ‘Undercover operatives always borrow other people’s words,’ Berger said. ‘Because they have no identity of their own. Now you’ve proved that you can borrow mine. Clever. But where is your identity, Nathalie Fredén?’

  ‘You’re in good shape considering you were unconscious a minute ago,’ Molly Blom said. ‘Clever. But watch out, dizziness can strike at any moment. And your eyelids are thin.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘“What?” is good. “What?” is a reasonable attempt to buy more thinking time. Especially if you thought I might provide a fairly long answer. Have you had enough time, Sam?’

  ‘No. Talk some more.’

  ‘Your eyelids aren’t just thin, they’re also revealing. You were awake for three minutes and eight seconds. Did you manage to work out where you were?’

  ‘Yes,’ Berger said. ‘In the badlands.’

  ‘In a way, yes,’ Molly Blom said. ‘Nothing’s official any more. We’re in a different place now. A different time. But you realised that before you opened your eyes.’

  ‘Even so, there’s a whole group, a whole fucking police force even, that must have started to miss me by now.’

  ‘“Miss” is a very loaded term, Sam. Are you sure that Allan Gudmundsson and Desiré Rosenkvist miss you?’

  ‘Allan probably won’t miss me. But Deer will.’

  ‘The detective inspector you consistently undervalue? She’ll miss you? With that doe-eyed look of hers, full of longing?’

  ‘OK, I’m tired of this now,’ Berger said, tugging at the straps. ‘It’s been fun, a very successful prank, but now we’ve got a fucking serial killer to catch. Let me go.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Molly Blom said. ‘So I have to let you go now, do I? Now that my prank is finished?’

  Her eyes were darker than ever.

  He opted for silence. It seemed simpler than choosing words.

  ‘Yes,’ she said eventually. ‘We really do have a serial killer to catch. As quickly as possible. And the quickest way to do that is through you, Sam Berger. We’ve been watching you very closely ever since you secretly pulled the investigations into Julia Almström and Jonna Eriksson.’

  ‘But that was only a few weeks ago,’ Berger exclaimed. ‘You’ve been fucking about at crime scenes on that damn bicycle since Sollentuna, two years ago.’

  ‘I wasn’t in Sollentuna,’ Blom said. ‘I just told you I was.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that was where it started. I needed to figure out exactly what you, Sam Berger, knew about that. Analyse your reactions.’

  ‘But I don’t know anything.’

  ‘You were very quick to identify Helenelund shopping centre, Stupvägen. As if you already knew about it.’

  ‘I know about Helenelund,’ Berger said. ‘I grew up near there.’

  ‘And that’s one of the things that makes it so interesting,’ Blom said, leafing through her papers.

  ‘What happened there?’ Berger asked. ‘Two summers ago?’

  ‘In April that year a gang of Iraqi rebels crossed the border with Syria to join in the civil war. The group had already started calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.’

  ‘ISIS,’ Berger said, astonished.

  ‘Or IS, as we call them these days. Or Daesh, which they hate being called. Sunni Muslim youths had already been heading there to fight against the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad. We regarded them mostly as naive freedom fighters. But with the appearance of IS it became clear that the young men going down there were jihadists, and we received the first indications that IS was recruiting in Sweden. One such indication was found in Helenelund, in the Pachachi family, to be precise. A twenty-one-year-old man, Yazid Pachachi – born in Sweden to Sunni Muslim, Iraqi parents – was one of the very first confirmed links to IS. It looked like his fifteen-year-old sister Aisha had gone with him. We infiltrated the neighbourhood and figured out that that probably wasn’t the case, and that Aisha was actually missing, here in Sweden. The parents were paralysed by Yazid’s unexpected radicalisation and militarisation, and Aisha’s disappearance got caught in the shadow of the son’s, not altogether surprisingly. But all the evidence suggests that she disappeared on Friday 7 June two and half years ago, after the last day of school. She simply never came home from the celebration to mark the end of the school year.’

  ‘But you didn’t realise that until it was too late?’

  ‘Far too late, yes. At first we spent several weeks thinking she was living in Syria as the child-bride of some IS monster. Then we wasted far too much time on the hypothesis that it was some sort of honour killing. But now I’m sure Aisha Pachachi was this serial killer’s first victim.’

  ‘But why the hell didn’t you let us know, in the real Crime Unit?’

  ‘Because the next victim was also a Muslim girl.’

  ‘Oh fuck.’

  ‘The Berwari family in Vivalla, Örebro. Kurdish. At the end of November that same year, the daughter, Nefel Berwari, fifteen years old, vanished without a trace. But her parents didn’t report it to the police either, they hushed it up – apparently for reasons of honour – and tried to solve it among themselves. After all, Vivalla already had one of the highest Muslim populations in Sweden, and it was as a result of our infiltration of Örebro mosque that we heard that Nefel Berwari was missing. Only then did we look back at Helenelund and Aisha Pachachi and start to suspect that we were dealing with one and the same perpetrator. Either a serial kidnapper or a serial killer. Or both.’

  ‘Who was either …’

  ‘Racist or Muslim, yes. Either it was something internal – honour-related or Islamist – or something to do with the far right – a lone John Ausonius-style nutter or something more organised. In both instances there was good reason for the Security Service to classify the investigation.’

  ‘Six months between Aisha and Nefel,’ Berger said. ‘Then four months before Julia Almström in Västerås. Quick – and accelerating. But then a break, almost a year until Jonna Eriksson in Kristinehamn. And then eight months until Ellen Savinger. Don’t serial killers usually speed up their activities once they get a taste for what they’re doing?’

  ‘Unless we’ve missed a victim,’ Molly Blom said.

  Berger paused and leaned back as best he could. He looked at the woman on the other side of the table. She was wearing different clothes, a tight, sporty white T-shirt, black trousers that were practically sweatpants, and bright pink trainers.

  A completely different person.

  One who bore a far greater resemblance to the mountain climber in the photographs in her flat.

  He decided not to mention that. ‘Is that what you think? That there are other victims?’

  ‘Yes. And that’s why you’re sitting here, Sam Berger.’

  He let out a laugh. ‘And there was me thinking this was starting to sound like a productive conversation between two talented police officers. But that was obviously too good to be true …’

  ‘Your contribution to the conversation has been pretty negligible so far. But that’s about to change. So, a tentative premise: let’s pretend this is the first time you’ve heard about Aisha Pachachi and Nefel Berwari. What would your conclusion be, Sam Berger?’

  Berger looked deep into Molly Blom’s eyes and said, after prolonged reflection: ‘Up until Ellen Savinger it’s a matter of concealing the fact that a girl has gone missing at all. It’s perfectly possible that there are other victims; it was sheer coincidence that you found Nefel Berwari and picked up on the possibility of a recurrent offence. I didn’t know about either of
them – on that point your “tentative premise” is correct – but I still managed to grasp that we were dealing with a serial killer. Yet working from your assumptions – five victims – the conclusion has to be that there are two separate series. Up until Ellen the crimes have to be concealed. For some reason the Scum starts murdering fifteen-year-old Muslim girls specifically – why, we don’t know. It’s possible that he’s got something to do with an ancient, patriarchal, honour-based culture, but it’s more likely that he just figured out that that’s a good way to conceal the crimes; the most successful crimes are always the ones that no one knows have been committed. It’s even possible to see poor Aisha Pachachi and Nefel Berwari as practice. The next step is more difficult. The Scum has realised that if a girl from an immigrant family disappears there’s no media frenzy; prejudice suggests that any such disappearance is “honour-related”, and not even the evening tabloids have the stomach for that. But if a blonde fifteen-year-old Swedish girl goes missing, things liven up considerably. Everything is easier for the public to deal with. Which means it’s harder to hide. How do you hide the fact that a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl disappears? By making it look like she’s run away. Which is what happens to Julia Almström. Have you found the young man who was emailing her? The one who’d done time and wanted to move abroad?’

  ‘No,’ Molly Blom said. ‘He doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Roughly six months between Aisha and Nefel. Not quite four months until Julia, a temporary increase in pace. Then what?’

  ‘Almost a year until Jonna Eriksson. I know. It doesn’t make sense. What happens in between?’