by Arne Dahl
She paused and stared at him.
‘One metre sixty-nine,’ she said in the end.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The booby trap.’
‘What?’
‘The knives in the house in Märsta. They weren’t designed for a normal-height cop, not even a short one, like Ekman. They were meant for a slightly taller than average woman. Or possibly you specifically, Molly. If I’m allowed to use your first name …’
If it had been possible, she would have frowned. She thought for a moment.
‘OK,’ she nodded, taking her knife out once more. He could see her wrestling with her thoughts.
Then she sighed and cut through the zip tie behind his back.
Their eyes met. He gestured towards the picture frame.
‘So it doesn’t weigh a ton?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I carried it up with the help of just one other person when I moved in.’
He nodded and started to push the stained sofa out of the way. Then he pointed at the pink Post-it note bearing the words WL pl. surg. Saudi? ‘Just don’t tell me you left that on the floor on purpose?’
She went to other end of the frame. ‘That’s something you’ll never know.’
Then she slowly closed her end of the picture. He did the same. And what was hanging on the wall was nothing more than a very large picture of a gang of mountaineers heading up a snow-covered mountain. Together they gently lifted it down from the wall. It really wasn’t particularly heavy. It felt more like polystyrene, or perhaps balsa wood. They carried it out into the hall. She opened the door to the stairs and the autumn darkness. Yelling in the stairwell in the dead of the night would obviously be a terrible move, so Berger sat on all the things he wanted to say while Blom locked the door and they manoeuvred the picture down the stairs and hurried to get it into the van before the frame got too wet, then jumped in themselves.
They sat there for a while. The weak glow of the street lamps shifted in patterns down the windscreen, spreading out, disappearing, re-emerging.
Berger breathed in deeply and looked at Blom. Eventually she looked away from the play of light on the windscreen and met his gaze.
‘It’s not just that we’ve tried to destroy each other in our respective interview rooms,’ Berger said. ‘We also have backgrounds that make us deeply unsuitable for each other. Are you seriously suggesting that we work together?’
It felt like the first time she had truly met his gaze, without any role play. In the end she looked away and made an impatient gesture.
‘It’s our only chance,’ she said to the windscreen.
‘Is there really no chance we could explain this and go back? Make a proper police investigation out of it?’
She paused. ‘You and I are both guilty of disloyalty to our bosses. We’d be asked to hand over our IDs and weapons with immediate effect. We’d get the sack and a bunch of detached outsiders would take over our investigations. That’s not going to help Ellen Savinger.’
‘You’re thinking of Allan?’
‘I’m thinking of Allan, and I’m thinking of August. Allan and August. August doesn’t give a damn about all this. For him the Security Service looks after the security of the realm and nothing else; his only move would be to throw the book at me. You know Allan’s thoughts on the case better than I do. He’s fallen for the fine old Social Democratic adage that Sweden doesn’t have serial killers, and scarcely any intelligent killers at all. His desire to believe in Swedish innocence will turn William into a clumsy, mentally challenged kidnapper who is doing this sort of thing for the first time. And while you may not get fired quite as forcefully as I will, you’re hardly going to be trusted with particularly challenging work. The archive, perhaps? A junior clerk in the police archive?’
‘So you’re suggesting that we … freelance?’
‘Isn’t that supposed to be the next big thing?’ Molly Blom said, and even if it wasn’t the first time he saw her smile, and even if was an extremely wry smile, it was at least a smile aimed directly at Sam Berger. He smiled back, probably also rather wryly.
‘OK,’ he said after a pause. ‘I presume you’ve got some fancy Security Service hideout in mind for us? Some smart CIA safe house that’s conveniently off the grid?’
‘Sadly they’re very carefully controlled.’
‘We’re on the run with no idea of where we’re running to? And you were the one thinking I was smarter than I am? Not the other way round?’
‘It was hard enough to get this far,’ she said morosely. ‘We can go to a motel.’
Their eyes met and they stared at each other. It was strangely obvious that they both wanted the other to say what they were thinking. What they were both thinking.
Berger rubbed his forehead and decided that it was up to him. ‘Sure, we could go to a motel. Of course we could.’
Blom just looked at him.
He groaned. ‘Or we could go straight for William …’
The look in her eyes didn’t change. She wasn’t about to make this easy for him.
‘The boathouse,’ he said.
She went on staring at him.
He continued: ‘The situation changed after Märsta. Now he knows we’re on to him. Doesn’t everything we know about this case tell us that he’s got Ellen in the boathouse?’
Molly Blom finally turned away from him. She gazed off into the distance, far beyond Stenbocksgatan.
Eventually she said: ‘There’s no way I’m ever going back there.’
Berger waited a while before going on. ‘We’ve both suspected William Larsson for a while. We both know that there’s a place directly connected to our suspicions. Don’t try to tell me you haven’t been there.’
She was silent, still gazing far into the distance.
‘Well, I’ve been there. It was quiet. Dead and deserted for God knows how many years.’
She nodded slowly and said reluctantly: ‘I’ve been there too. It was empty.’
‘Do you know anything about it?’
‘It’s still there, on the shore of Edsviken,’ she said. ‘It’s fenced off, untouched. There’s some kind of drawn-out legal dispute between two companies that both claim to own it.’
Berger looked at her. ‘Isn’t there a mad, perverse logic in the idea that William would go back to where it all started? And hasn’t he actually invited the two of us? Isn’t he sitting there with Ellen strapped to that clock he once tied you to? Sitting there waiting for us?’
Once again, so much emotion was coursing through Blom’s body that it was visible everywhere except her forehead, which she was now resting against her left hand.
‘Well, then,’ he went on. ‘Let’s go to the boathouse. To pick up William Larsson.’
She looked at him for a little too long before starting the engine. The windscreen wipers began to move. She carried on along Stenbocksgatan and out into Engelbrektsgatan, past the pitch-blackness of Humlegården. The van had almost reached the junction with Birger Jarlsgatan when she pulled halfway up onto the pavement and stopped. Apart from a few sporadic taxis there was no traffic at all on the streets around Stureplan. Berger pointed towards the junction.
‘This really is Hercules at the crossroads,’ he said.
She pulled a face.
He went on: ‘Left to Kungsholmen and Police Headquarters, where we’ll have to fight impossible odds to keep our jobs and force our bosses to confront the truth. Right towards Sollentuna and the boathouse, towards William Larsson, towards Ellen Savinger. Towards terrible freedom.’
She stared out through the windscreen. The wipers were sweeping across the windscreen feverishly. Some of the time it was perfectly clear, some of the time completely impenetrable. But she could see the choice of routes.
An unusually tangible life choice.
‘Left or right?’ Berger said. ‘Last chance. Safe territory or … the badlands?’
She put the van in first gear and accelerated away from the pavement.
Then
she turned right and roared off northwards up Birger Jarlsgatan.
Towards the badlands.
III
25
Sam gathered up his schoolbooks, dropped them in his rucksack and ran out so fast that dust flew up from the fitted carpet. He saw just the backs of his parents’ heads as they huddled in front of the television in the kitchen. It was shouting the news that someone called Bill Clinton had won the US presidential election. He called out a quick bye and just glimpsed their raised hands before he shut the back door with a thud and saw that the first snow of winter had settled on his bicycle. And he only had eight minutes. He sighed and shook the bike as best he could, then slid down the garden path as the snow beneath his buttocks melted. He was going to look like shit at school. Out on the road it was seriously slippery, cars were parked along the road, abandoned. As he cycled under the railway bridge the train roared above his head. That wasn’t good; now he was properly late. He emerged onto Sollentunavägen and raced along the pavement, turned in to the school, rode straight into the bicycle rack and quickly locked up his bike. He rushed through the deserted hall and heard the bell ring as he took the stairs three at a time. The door to the chemistry room was about to close, and just as he got his stiff, frozen fingers in the gap he saw a figure a few metres off, facing away from him, someone staring out through the window at the building next door. All he managed to see before he was sucked into the chemistry room was a long mane of blond hair. He sat down at one of the desks, next to Pia, who gave him a smile that meant the day had got off to a good start after all.
The young chemistry teacher, also their form teacher, cleared his throat and said: ‘We’ve got a new pupil joining the class today. It’s very important that you’re nice to him.’ Anton called out from the back row: ‘We’re always nice, what the hell’s wrong with you?’ and gave the chemistry teacher his typical, wide Anton smile.
The chemistry teacher frowned. ‘It’s more important than usual that you’re nice now. He has a … deformity …’
As the teacher abandoned his sentence and left the classroom, leaving the door open, the class started chattering. What’s he talking about? A deformity? What’s going on? Then the chemistry teacher returned. He had with him a boy with long blond hair.
‘This is William,’ the chemistry teacher said in a loud voice.
The class fell silent. So silent that the ticking of the clock on the wall sounded like the ringing of a church bell.
‘Hello,’ William said.
It was break. She wasn’t very fond of breaks. Apart from the outsiders, the girls gathered in two groups. Molly would rather have hung out at the smoking corner, but if there was even a whiff of smoke about her when she got home her mum would have gone mental at her, and she couldn’t handle that, not again. And she didn’t want to be one of the outsiders, the swots or outcasts or few brave souls who simply couldn’t be bothered with the whole social game; she wasn’t strong enough for that. So she headed towards the same old group loitering on the bench right outside the school doors. Even though it had snowed for the first time that winter, the gang was outside without coats. It was as if their bodies were wiser than they were, as if they instinctively realised that they needed oxygen to get through the day. And maybe cool down. It was noisy and playfully combative and all pretty pointless. But Linda had got a mobile phone from her rich dad, and after a while everyone was staring at it.
‘It’s a Nokia 1011, with GSM,’ Linda said with genuine pride. No one understood what she was saying, but they all wanted to hold the magnificent dark-grey gadget. It went from Alma to Layla to Eva to Salma, and then suddenly it was in Molly’s hand, and she needed to come up with something funny, she couldn’t just stand there looking lost. So she raised the mobile phone to her ear and said: ‘Yes, this is Linda Bergting, I’d like to order a gigolo.’
And they laughed and Maria cried out: ‘Bloody hell, Molly!’
Linda snatched it back and yelled: ‘Now it’s going to stink of your sex-starved breath all fucking day’.
They laughed, all of them, but then Molly suddenly saw Alma stop laughing and open her eyes wide. ‘Wow,’ she said so quietly it was just a movement of her lips.
The group fell silent, one by one, as head after head turned towards the doors. The guy with the long blond hair stopped for a moment and turned his face towards them. It was all misshapen. His chin was crooked, a horn-like bulge stuck out from one side of his forehead, his right cheekbone poked up, the left was sunken. Then he turned and walked away.
‘Shit,’ Linda said, and dropped her mobile phone.
When the pupils gathered in the school hall stupidly early in the morning, the coolest of them still smelled of drink. It had been a long Lucia night. But not for Sam. He had been invited but hadn’t bothered to go. He couldn’t be bothered with much these days, had given up most things. He’d stopped playing football, no longer practised the guitar, and had even given up his electronics. Everything was boring these days, including school. He couldn’t even really be bothered with girls, he realised when he looked down at Pia sitting next to him. And soon it would be Christmas, not that that felt very exciting, celebrating with Grandma and Granddad and Dad and Mum and his brother all playing happy families. The Year 9s sat right at the front of the hall, waiting for the Lucia procession. Another fucking Lucia procession, with candles and singing and shit. Sam just wanted to sleep. The curtain behind the stage began to move, presumably the headmaster on his way to give yet another meaningless speech. But the person who came out onto the stage was Anton from Sam’s class. He grabbed the microphone, and at the same moment Sam saw their chemistry teacher stand up a few rows away.
Anton smiled his usual big Anton grin, and his voice rang out around the hall: ‘You’re expecting a Lucia procession, you fucking peasants, but here comes the real Lucia.’ A couple of Anton’s friends, Micke and Freddan, dragged a Lucia out through the curtain. This Lucia had on a fluttering white dress, and wax candles were burning from the crown perched on long blond hair, which had been combed to cover the whole head. The chemistry teacher pushed his way forward, more urgently now, while Anton laughed loudly and brushed the hair away from the Lucia’s face. The mouth was covered by duct tape, and the face was crooked, misshapen. It was now apparent that the Lucia’s arms had been tied with more tape.
Anton smiled again and said into the microphone: ‘Come on then, sing, for fuck’s sake, don’t be shy.’
As the chemistry teacher tumbled onto the stage, Freddan pulled the tape from the Lucia’s face and Anton held out the microphone. The only sound that echoed round the hall was long, drawn-out whimper. The chemistry teacher was there now. He pushed Anton and Micke and Freddan out of the way and tried to lift the burning Lucia crown, but it had been glued onto the blond hair. The chemistry teacher blew out the candles and tried to tease the crown off, but only ended up pulling at the hair as wax ran down into it. William screamed loudly, straight into the microphone. And while Anton and Micke and Freddan ran laughing down the side aisle and out of the hall, Sam realised just how sick he felt.
Sam was sitting on a bench some way into the schoolyard, and he took out the little radio he had got for Christmas and tried to find the new station. He had actually been hoping for a Sony Discman – it would have been brilliant to be able to take your CDs with you – but his parents had given him a radio. He pretended to be more annoyed than he was, because he actually quite liked listening to the radio. He adjusted the dial but kept getting it wrong and didn’t even notice when someone sat down on the bench beside him. He only turned round when he heard someone clear their throat. Even though a couple of months had passed, he was taken aback. He had never stopped being astonished, would never stop being astonished. And he had probably never seen William’s jagged face this close before.
‘Radio?’ William said.
‘P4 is starting to broadcast today,’ Sam managed to say. ‘I don’t really know which frequency.’
Wil
liam nodded. ‘You like technical things, don’t you?’ And then he held something out to Sam.
It was a circle, almost ten centimetres in diameter, and inside a large number of cogs and pinions were moving in remarkable patterns. Instinctively, Sam put the radio down on the snowy bench and looked closer. It was a magical feeling, seeing all those little wheels spin at different speeds.
‘What it is?’ he asked.
‘A pocket watch from the turn of the century,’ William said. ‘I’ve taken the back off. Do you want to hold it?’
Sam nodded.
William carefully placed the watch in his frozen hands. ‘It’s American,’ he said. ‘An Elgin. Otherwise all the best watchmakers are from Switzerland.’
Sam just stared.
William went on: ‘I’ve got lots.’
‘How the hell can you afford that?’
‘I buy broken ones and repair them. You just need to understand how they work.’
‘Cool,’ Sam said. ‘Why me?’
‘I heard you were interested in technical stuff, electronics.’
‘I’ve given that up,’ Sam said sullenly.
‘This was before electronics. You have to wind this watch, but there are also self-winding watches.’ Sam looked up from the hypnotic cogs and for the first time met William’s gaze in that jagged face.
‘OK,’ William said, instinctively retreating. ‘That’s not the only reason I showed you this.’
‘OK. Why, then?’
‘Because you’ve never been mean to me.’
Sam sat motionless for a while. Then something happened; he didn’t understand what. The watch flew from his hand, and he was left holding nothing but snow. He heard giggling and saw several of the tiny cogs roll across the snow before being swallowed up by it. He looked up and saw a gang of girls scattering. He recognised the girl at the front, the one who appeared to have thrown the snowball. She was one of the toughest in Year 8; he thought her name might be Linda. Before she ran off she shouted: ‘Why don’t you give the abortion a blow job instead?’ Sam shook his head and saw William sink to his knees, searching the snow for the vanished cogs. Their eyes met. Sam had never seen such a black look in all his life. Then they hunted through the snow together.
