by Arne Dahl
‘Me too,’ Blom said. ‘I’ve been working on this for a long time, considerably longer than you. I wanted to find him, at any cost. But he ceased to exist after Year 9. I managed to break out of that mechanism of his before it pulled me apart, quite by chance, but I never said anything to anyone. Not a word to a single person. It was too painful; I was eaten up with shame and anxiety. And then he vanished. I’ve looked everywhere, but he flew away. Like Charles Lindbergh.’
‘Do you think it’s really William, then?’ Berger said. ‘Is that possible?’
‘It’s possible, if he’s undergone plastic surgery abroad. And now he’s back, externally patched up, but more warped than ever inside. And with an appearance that no one recognises.’
‘I understand you wanting to punish me,’ Berger said. ‘There’s nothing in my life I’ve regretted as much as that moment when I fled from you and the boathouse.’
Blom looked at him. ‘You took something from my flat, didn’t you?’
Berger blinked hard. Then he opened his mouth and managed to extract a rolled-up piece of paper from the innermost crevice between his top teeth and right cheek. A pink, rather damp piece of paper.
A Post-it note.
‘It was on the floor,’ he said. ‘Next to the sofa.’
Blom leaned forward and read it out loud: ‘WL pl. surg. Saudi?’
‘It made me suspect a thing or two about you,’ Berger said. ‘WL had to be William Larsson. Then the rest: “pl. surg. Saudi?” Plastic surgery in Saudi Arabia?’
‘Yes. The Saudis are very good at plastic surgery, which might seem odd in light of Wahhabism and in a society where women aren’t even allowed to drive. But behind the veil there’s a lot of scope for plastic surgery. Because it’s unofficial it would be very difficult to trace. Hence the question mark.’
‘But you must have got further than that. Otherwise you wouldn’t have written it down.’
‘Think about where it started. But our time’s up. I can tell they’re starting to wonder over in the control room.’
‘So what the hell happens now?’ Berger asked.
‘I honestly don’t know,’ Blom said. ‘It’s possible that you are actually William Larsson’s accomplice. You were very close. Perhaps you are just being remote-controlled by your master, Sam Berger. You were his only real friend. But we have to stop now. Sit still.’
Her hand slipped beneath the file again.
Just before she clicked the white remote control Sam Berger said: ‘I became a cop because I had a guilty conscience.’
She smiled grimly; the red light on the recording apparatus flickered. Then Molly Blom said, loudly and clearly: ‘OK, this is getting us nowhere. We’ll take a break.’
23
Tuesday 27 October, 18.43
Molly Blom watched him being taken away. When Roy and Kent dragged Sam Berger out she wondered what had disappeared with them. Her career?
She pulled the fake mobile phone towards her and dropped it into her bag with a silent prayer that it had worked. Everything from Wiborg Supplies Ltd always worked. That was the whole point.
She looked at her real mobile phone. The day was completely out of joint. It was almost seven o’clock. Molly Blom had a feeling she wasn’t going to get any sleep that night either. But on the other hand she was used to that; she’d arranged her life around it. She compensated for her irregular professional life with an extremely disciplined private life.
What mattered right now was re-establishing a degree of control. Order and structure. She had laid it all on the table for Berger, but there wasn’t much chance of him saying anything, partly because he had enough of his own to hide, and partly because he was in fact locked up. It looked like everything hinged on Molly Blom.
No, don’t go there. Not now. Don’t fall into that pit. Not until it was clear what the next step would be.
And of course that was precisely the pit she fell into.
Life. She had tried so hard to suppress it. Suppress everything. She had tried to pretend everything was normal, that her past was completely unremarkable. It had worked well: the end of the school year, then Year 9, without William Larsson, without gorgeous Samuel Berger, the embodiment of betrayal. Everything was fine, good grades, nice-enough friends, good parents, nothing out of the ordinary.
At the time, she had no idea where they had gone next, either William or Sam. They just disappeared.
She remained seated in the interview room off the top-secret passageway, buried deep within Police Headquarters. She opened her laptop and stared at the screen. She went through the case, both the official and unofficial versions, and found nothing that she didn’t already know.
Instead the past came back with inexorable force.
She had told Berger the truth: from the moment he snuck away from the boathouse she hadn’t been able to trust anyone in the whole world.
There was only one person to trust. Herself. Everything depended on Molly Blom. No one else would help her succeed in life. There was nothing to fall back on.
Except herself.
Her life became a miracle of control and self-control. She played the part of a successful person. She did it so well that she realised she had a genuine talent for playing roles. In Year 9 she started acting, most likely to keep her real self at a distance, and when she took a gamble and applied to the Royal Dramatic Theatre’s vocational school after finishing her studies she was accepted, and was one of their youngest students ever. She appeared in some short films, student projects; she played a couple of the biggest female theatrical roles, Ophelia and Masha, during her final term. Everyone predicted a bright future for her. And she loved the theatre. But other forces had begun to take over. Playing roles was no longer enough, the result was never anything that bore any resemblance to justice. And justice was what she wanted in life, tangible justice. It was becoming increasingly clear what she wanted to do: she wanted to join the police. She wanted to protect the world from every imaginable type of William Larsson. And Sam Berger too, for that matter.
She wanted to protect the world from injustice.
It didn’t take long at Police Academy for her to realise that that wasn’t quite what was on offer. Police Academy promised something very practical: the ability to arrest suspects, catch crooks, but there was far too little about moral labyrinths.
Yet for the first time since the boathouse she wasn’t playing a role. She was a police officer. She was a trainee police officer, then a police officer; she went on courses; she specialised and became a detective inspector. She was given a number of indications that her theatrical background made her highly attractive to the Security Service, and it didn’t take long for her to be recruited personally by August Steen and transformed into the perfect undercover agent. By this point she had been doing the job for almost a decade. And it was obviously taking its toll.
Time passed at that lonely interview-room table. She had been awake for so long; she had played Nathalie Fredén for so long. That really had taken its toll. And it was as if time had caught up with her, grabbed hold of her, and she fell asleep in front of her computer, her face slumped onto the keyboard.
When she saw, much later, the immense document that her sleeping head had written, she wondered for a moment if it had sprung from the depths of her unconscious.
She had no idea how long she had been asleep when her mobile began to shout at her. Half-asleep, she couldn’t remember having set the alarm clock.
She hadn’t.
It was ringing. Unknown number. As always.
All calls of any importance came from unknown numbers. The story of her life.
She woke up, quickly, as ever. Ever ready.
‘How’s it going?’ asked a voice that she’d recognise anywhere. It ran like a thread through her life. But it was also slightly alarming that the head of the Security Service’s Intelligence Unit was calling her in the middle of the night. It was the middle of the night, wasn’t it?
‘We
’re moving in the right direction, August,’ she said tentatively.
‘Good to hear it,’ August Steen said. ‘Can you come up to my office for a bit, Molly?’
‘Are you in the building?’ Blom couldn’t help sounding surprised.
‘There’s quite a lot happening on other fronts,’ Steen said. ‘I’m not here for your sake, if that’s what you’re thinking. But I’d like a briefing, if it’s not too much to ask.’
‘On my way,’ she said, standing up and wishing she could still frown. She stopped and thought for half a minute. Then she packed away everything from the table. She stopped abruptly with her hand in her bag. The fake smartphone had caught her attention. She took it out and looked at it, then put it in the back pocket of her black sweatpants, tossed her bag over her shoulder and headed out into the corridor via the control room. Kent was sitting there immersed in the recordings of the interview.
‘Where’s Roy?’ she asked.
‘He’s gone to the toilet,’ Kent said, pausing the film. ‘We didn’t want to wake you.’
‘OK. Tell him we’re taking a break for a couple of hours. You look pretty wiped out too.’
Kent gave her a quick glance, nodded curtly and went back to the recording.
Molly Blom wasn’t at all happy about that look. She took a right in the corridor instead of a left and soon reached a different lift. Before it came to a halt she slid her hand into her back pocket, pushed one of the lift’s ceiling panels aside and placed the fake mobile phone inside. She slipped the panel back before the lift had climbed up into the public realm of Police Headquarters. Then she started the process of coding her way forward, closer and closer to the absolute centre of power.
The leadership area seemed completely empty until she entered the last corridor. There she saw a figure sweep into one of the toilets. All she could see of the figure as the door closed was a wrist bearing a large diver’s watch.
Too much fell into place too quickly. She was good at infiltration, used to taking quick, improvised decisions, and a strategy had already begun to form. It was almost ready by the time she knocked on the door marked with Steen’s name and position, and heard the cold whirr of the lock.
August Steen looked up from his computer, impassive, clicked his mouse, pushed his reading glasses up onto his forehead and looked at her.
Molly Blom said: ‘Considering that there’s quite a lot happening on other fronts the corridors are surprisingly empty. And you’ve got toothpaste at the corner of your mouth.’
Steen wiped the left side of his mouth instinctively.
‘Right,’ she said.
He wrinkled his nose and cast a sharp glance at her. Then he wiped the right side of his mouth.
There was no toothpaste there.
‘So, you rushed over here,’ she said. ‘What for?’
‘I felt that we needed to talk,’ August Steen said.
‘About what?’
‘About the most recent session. You pushed Berger hard.’
‘I thought that was the point.’
‘“I’m sure they’d love to come back to their serial-killer father” was perhaps a little extreme …’
‘You didn’t rush here all the way from Äppelviken at this time of night because of a clumsy choice of words, August.’
‘Very true, Molly,’ Steen said, watching her carefully. ‘I rushed here because something seems to have disturbed our recording equipment. And that sort of thing disturbs me as well. Possibly even more, actually. We are, after all, the Security Service. If someone disturbs our equipment, that’s a definite threat to the security of the realm.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have to acknowledge that the long staring contest at the end of the session was ingenious. Absolute silence. What was it you said? “Now we’re just going to sit here and stare at each other until you tell the truth, you pathetic piece of shit. I don’t care if it takes half an hour.” Then the two of you really do sit there for more than ten minutes and just stare at each other. And then you conclude with the phrase “OK, this is getting us nowhere. We’ll take a break.” Splendid. Now he knows that there are no limits to our patience.’
‘Why do I detect a note of sarcasm in your voice?’
‘Because this happened,’ Steen said, turning his screen. He clicked the mouse and fixed his gaze on Blom’s face, which was lit by the glow of the monitor.
What she saw was a fairly long clip of her and Berger sitting and staring at each other. A minute and a half passed, then the picture jumped, and Berger and Blom’s body language was suddenly very different, considerably more active. Voices emerged from the computer.
Molly Blom said: ‘… back, externally patched up, but more warped than ever inside. And with an appearance that no one recognises.’
Sam Berger said: ‘I understand you wanting to punish me. There’s nothing in my life I’ve regretted as much as that moment when I fled from …’
The film cut out abruptly, and Berger and Blom returned just as abruptly to their staring.
August Steen turned the screen back, and looked at Blom with absolute neutrality. ‘I’m trying to understand this. Can you explain it to me, Molly?’
Blom quickly evaluated the amount of information in the short clip. At least it played to her advantage.
‘That’s very odd,’ she said.
‘I think so too. And so did Kent and Roy when they called me. Need I tell you that I was in the middle of my very deepest beauty sleep?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was in the middle of my very deepest beauty sleep.’
‘Shame. Now that I come to think about it, Berger did break the long silence once. But it was more than that. Is the rest missing?’
‘That’s how it looks,’ Steen said, opening his hands.
Blom nodded and her eyebrows frowned.
‘Berger was completely exhausted,’ she said. ‘I’d pushed him hard, after all. Suddenly he came out with some weird story about how he suspected that his ex, Freja, had come back to Sweden in secret, with a new appearance. Then he claimed that I was in league with her and that was why I wanted to punish him. There was some story about him having walked away from his family during one of the twins’ football matches, and that he regretted it more than anything else in his life. Is the rest really missing? I could have done with some help interpreting it. Was he on the point of losing his grip completely? Or was he just playing a game? If the equipment’s on the blink, the technicians had better examine it closely. Don’t tell me I’ve been wasting my time.’
‘Anders Karlberg, our senior technician, has just been down to collect it,’ Steen said. ‘He seemed to agree with you, not for the first time, I might add. Are you still seeing each other?’
‘What did he say about the equipment?’
‘That it looks like some sort of technical fault. Not necessarily a disruptive transmitter.’
‘Good,’ Blom said. ‘But we lost quite a bit there. Mostly crazy talk from an overtired suspect, but, still, things that could be important.’
‘I’m convinced of that,’ Steen said with a sideways glance. ‘He didn’t seem crazy before.’
‘I assume I stared him to pieces.’
Steen frowned, nodded, then drummed his fingers on his desk.
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘This doesn’t feel good at all.’
‘I completely agree,’ Blom said.
‘It feels odd that Berger should enter some sort of psychosis without any warning, and then just go back to staring. And not least because you conclude by saying wearily “this is getting us nowhere”.’
‘I don’t think it was a psychosis, exactly …’
‘I’m not at all convinced that we’re hearing a mentally unstable man here,’ Steen said. ‘I’m not happy with your explanation, Molly.’
‘It’s the truth,’ Blom said, as calmly as she could. ‘And it’s hardly my fault that the equipment didn’t work.’
August Steen ran a ha
nd over his neatly combed grey hair, then eventually nodded. ‘OK, this sequence will be analysed in minute detail. And Karlberg says his technicians might be able to restore the rest. I’m sending Kent and Roy to the technical team now, they’ll have to spend all night working on it.’
‘I’ll go with them,’ Blom said, making a move towards the door.
‘No,’ Steen said, raising his hand.
‘No?’ Blom said.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea, Molly. I think it would be best if you went home at once and got some sleep. Be here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’
She looked at him and conjured up her most insulted expression.
‘What the hell?’ she said. ‘You think I’m that exhausted? I’ve been through considerably worse.’
‘I know,’ Steen said distantly. ‘But this is what’s happening. No argument. Straight home, Molly. Bed. Nine o’clock sharp tomorrow morning. OK?’
She made a suitably indignant exit and wandered through the corridors with suitably slumped shoulders. Only when she was back at the lift did she raise them again.
OK, she thought, trying to cool down her brain. OK, you’ve always known you really didn’t want to be on the wrong side of August Steen. Rarely had she been on the receiving end of so many passive-aggressive threats. With icy clarity she realised that he had come very close to asking to look in her bag.
She nudged the ceiling hatch aside and retrieved the device. Then she turned to the mirror, looked deep into her eyes and thought: Is it over now? Is my career over? Who would touch a disgraced cop?
She looked down at the fake smartphone. How the hell was it possible that the fucking gizmo hadn’t worked the way it should?
The lift stopped. She stepped out into the corridor and resumed the same miserable posture. She passed the door of Berger’s cell, the door to the interview room, then, round a corner in the corridor, the door to the control room.
She took a deep breath, it was unavoidable. She opened the door.
Kent and Roy were gone, sure enough. There was no one to check the images from the surveillance cameras. They had taken almost all the technical equipment with them. Which meant there was a tiny sliver of hope for the drastic plan she had come up with.
