by Arne Dahl
‘What sort of care home is Svalan?’
The odd thing was that the nurse laughed before replying. ‘It’s what used to be called long-stay.’
‘Senile elderly patients waiting to die?’
‘Not only them. We have a number of younger patients as well.’
‘Including Anton Bergmark?’
The nurse nodded and led them along the corridor until they reached a larger room with a view of the other apartment blocks. There were about a dozen people scattered around the room. A television was on, but no one seemed to be watching it. Everyone Berger and Blom saw looked elderly; they were in wheelchairs and weren’t doing much. The nurse walked past them to the window. There was a man sitting in a wheelchair, looking out through the rain. He had his back to them, but his posture was slumped, his arms were hanging down, and the reflection in the big window was too indistinct to tell them anything.
‘Anton?’ the nurse said.
That didn’t prompt any reaction at all.
The nurse grabbed the handle of the wheelchair and slowly turned it round.
And Berger was suddenly fifteen-year-old Sam, running like he had never run before, through meadow grass which reached up to his chest. The figure in front of him slowed down and slowly turned round.
The face that was turned towards Berger and Blom in Svalan Care Home in the centre of Sollentuna was crooked and misshapen. The bumps seemed to stick out in an almost cubist fashion from his head.
They stared at the deformed face. It stared back, dark, sceptical, dismissive.
Sam would rather have turned on his heel and fled before William saw him, but it’s too late now. All Sam can think as he moves through the curtain of girls is: It’s almost the summer holidays. All this crap will soon be over. But it isn’t over for Anton. Not by a long shot. He passes something to Sam, and it takes a few moments before Sam realises that it’s a towel, a damp towel.
‘Whip him!’
And only then does Sam see how badly William’s been whipped. And he suddenly sees the boathouse before him; he sees the girl’s tongue push at the duct tape, hears her wild screaming that cuts off abruptly after he takes off like a frightened rabbit through the grass that reaches up to his chest. And he whips and lashes out, and he sees William’s body shrink with pain, but not a sound emerges from his lips. He looks up for the first time and meets Sam’s gaze.
Sam goes closer, is standing very close now, and whispers: ‘That was for the boathouse, you fucking lunatic.’
William stares into his eyes. Sam has never seen such a black look in his whole life. Then there’s movement. It’s extremely slow. Sam sees it almost frame by frame. The long, blond hair lifts and is tossed back. The crooked, misshapen features emerge from below the hair, and out of that crookedness two rows of bared teeth emerge. They part. They approach Sam’s upper arm. He never feels the teeth penetrate his skin and then his flesh. He never hears the teeth meet, deep in his arm. He doesn’t hear it and he doesn’t feel it. And the pain radiating from his bicep doesn’t gain momentum before he sees the piece of flesh fall from William’s mouth, followed by a steady stream of blood. With distorted slowness the piece of flesh drifts down towards the dry grit of the football pitch.
33
Thursday 29 October, 14.54
Berger and Blom stared at the deformed face. It stared back, dark, sceptical, dismissive. Berger felt his insides lurch.
‘William?’ he said, and didn’t recognise his own voice.
He saw Blom out of the corner of his eye. He could see that she was shaking.
To her very core.
The figure in the wheelchair didn’t reply. He just sat still and stared at Berger, completely blank. A trickle of saliva slowly ran down his chin.
Had they been utterly wrong?
Had both Berger and Blom allowed themselves to be deceived by their damaged childhoods? Had they thrown away their careers on a whim?
Were they back to square one?
Traces of rationality returned to Berger. Was this really William? And why would he be sitting here, tucked away in a care home under the name of his former tormentor, Anton Bergmark?
There were signs of age, lines, wrinkles, redness to indicate the passage of years. But the swellings and lumps, all the jagged angles, were in the same places as twenty-two years ago.
In exactly the same places.
Blom came to her senses first. She looked at the nurse. ‘Can you fetch all the documentation you have about Anton?’
The nurse nodded and went away.
It wasn’t William Larsson’s gaze. If it was, it was utterly wrecked. The eyes were watery, absent.
‘Are you William Larsson?’ Berger asked with exaggerated clarity.
The watery gaze rose through the cratered landscape of the face and latched onto him. Berger looked back, but didn’t know what he was seeing.
‘Hello, Sam,’ the figure said, and produced a crooked smile. When the left corner of the mouth turned upward a string of saliva dribbled from the right side.
Berger turned towards Blom. He had been recognised. The question was: what did that mean? He saw that Blom had stopped shaking. She was already deep in thought. What did it mean, if William Larsson had never left the country? Who was behind the kidnappings if William’s deformities had finally reached his brain and left him pretty much a vegetable? How had he come to assume Anton Bergmark’s identity? Blom’s shaking had been replaced by whirring. Berger could see her mind whirring – as clearly as if it were his own.
‘Hello, William,’ he asked. ‘How are you?’
The figure produced a hiss that was probably intended to be a laugh.
‘How are you, Sam?’ the figure said. ‘How’s your arm?’
Berger’s right hand instinctively reached for his left arm. Even through the fabric of his jacket he could clearly feel the indentation in his bicep.
‘You bit me,’ he said. ‘You bit me badly.’
Now the figure just stared at him, and somewhere in the midst of that stare his consciousness seemed to fade. The look in his eyes was no longer clear. It was somewhere else.
The nurse appeared with a bundle of medical notes. ‘There’s a police report here as well, from the Sollentuna Police. That’s in the bottom file.’
She handed the two files to Blom and left them. They took one each, went to the other end of the day room and read them standing up. After an indeterminate amount of time they swapped. When Berger was finished with the second file he looked over at Blom. Her eyes were closed.
In the end Berger said. ‘Fucking hell.’
‘We were wrong,’ Blom said. ‘But not as wrong as we thought.’
‘Less wrong than we feared,’ Berger said, and felt himself smiling wryly.
‘Aisha Pachachi wasn’t William’s first victim,’ Blom said. ‘Anton Bergmark was.’
Berger nodded and cleared his throat.
‘Let me try to summarise what we just read,’ he said. ‘One winter’s evening in February almost three years ago the recently divorced Anton Bergmark was sitting at home in his villa in Häggvik in Sollentuna, drinking. Someone came to the door, and all the evidence suggests that he let the visitor in voluntarily. The marks on his wrists and ankles, as well as on the legs of the dining table in the living room, indicate that Anton was strapped to the table, lying on his back. Further marks suggest that some sort of vice was attached to one end of the table, holding Anton’s head in place before the assault began. According to the medical report, the assault was carried out using four different hammers, all different sizes. The grotesque torture went on for almost two days. Somewhere during the process Anton Bergmark literally lost his mind. He was declared very obviously unfit to work, and was granted early retirement six months later. Because Bergmark had done business with numerous criminal gangs, the assault was assumed to be connected with unpaid debts. The investigation focused exclusively on those groups, and in the absence of evidence, ran out of steam. The
Sollentuna Police managed to keep it fairly quiet; the media barely mentioned the case and no pictures of Bergmark were ever published following the assault. There was no one who could draw any connection between William’s face twenty years before and Anton’s face today.’
Blom grimaced and nodded.
‘A reversal of roles,’ she said after a pause.
Berger summarised: ‘William smashed up Anton’s face in order to make it look like his own, the way it looked when he was being bullied; he probably doesn’t look like that now. The determination, precision and emotional detachment required to use a vice and four hammers to turn Anton into William means that we need to re-evaluate William. He’s a bloody professional. How can he be such a pro?’
‘Professional, yet still utterly mad,’ Blom said. ‘You’d have to be utterly mad to exact such an elaborate revenge on your old tormentor.’
‘He was sixteen years old, physically and mentally wrecked after years of the worst bullying you can imagine. Over the next twenty years he became some sort of professional torturer. How?’
‘This is all hypothetical,’ Blom said. ‘We’re fumbling in the dark. You don’t necessarily need training to excel at torture.’
‘You mean he was just a natural?’
‘I don’t know. Driven by a relentless desire for vengeance?’
‘I don’t buy that,’ Berger said, pointing towards the figure in the wheelchair ten metres away. ‘You’ve seen Anton, Molly. That was done by a man who’s tortured people before, probably on a regular basis. He’s been trained in either the criminal or military world, and I think what we’re looking at here strengthens the hypothesis that there really was a father called Nils Gundersen who was a mercenary in “some ruddy Arab country”. We need to find him.’
Blom looked troubled.
‘I don’t know,’ she said hesitantly. ‘But I’m worried that it’s time for a serious conversation …’
‘MISS?’
‘It’s not that simple …’
‘For fuck’s sake, just grab the bull by the horns,’ Berger said. ‘I promise not to listen.’
‘I need more than that,’ Blom said, taking her phone out. ‘You need to be out of earshot.’
While Blom went round the corner Berger walked around the day room. He counted fifteen people absorbed in absolute inactivity scattered around the room. The television was still on, showing a football match with no sound; no one seemed to be watching it. It was as if time had stopped, as if he was in a small gap in the violently rushing flow of time. As if a cog had fallen out of the clock.
Over by the window sat the figure in his wheelchair. The unseeing eyes stared out at the miserable apartment blocks, and he was lolling in a position that would probably leave him completely bedridden within a couple of years.
Berger crouched down beside him. ‘Anton?’
Anton Bergmark turned to look at him. Something resembling consciousness returned to his watery eyes. ‘Fuck, you really hit him.’
Berger jerked back.
‘What did you say, Anton?’ he said.
But the man in the wheelchair had already disappeared off somewhere.
Berger stood up and stroked Anton’s head gently. He saw his reflection in the window, streaked with rain, dissolving. It wasn’t that different from Anton’s.
Then he wandered the corridors, his mind elsewhere. On an isolated sofa Molly Blom was sitting with her laptop on her knees.
She was staring at the screen and said without looking up: ‘Well, that went better than expected.’
‘MISS remembered you with great fondness?’ Berger suggested.
She ignored him. ‘MISS actually has a Nils Gundersen in their register. Wanted internationally for various types of war crime. Born 1948. Norwegian citizen up to the millennium, when he became a Lebanese citizen. Said to live in the city of Jbeil, better known as Byblos.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Berger said.
‘Gundersen became an officer in the Norwegian army at the age of twenty-two, rose quickly through the ranks, then went off to the Foreign Legion in 1973 at the age of twenty-five. Disappeared two years later, abruptly, illegal desertion. Probably recruited as a mercenary by one of the many factions involved in the Lebanese Civil War at the time. Cropped up in a news report from Beirut around Christmas ’76, in a tank. Right tangle of foreign and domestic interest groups: the USA was involved, along with Israel, Syria, Iran, Iraq. And the Lebanese factions were Sunni, Shiite, Palestinian, Druze and Maronite. MISS doesn’t know which group Gundersen fought for. Because he was a wanted man, they paid attention to his subsequent trips to Europe. The general conclusion is that he was recruiting, and his presence was documented in ten European cities or so between ’76 and ’84. One of the first was Stockholm.’
‘Wow,’ Berger said. ‘1976?’
‘Gundersen never stayed long in the same place. Only afterwards was it confirmed that he had actually been in Stockholm for a little less than a week in the middle of April 1976. And William Larsson was born more or less exactly nine months later, on Monday 17 January.’
‘Fucking hell,’ Berger said.
‘That still doesn’t prove anything,’ Blom said. ‘And there’s no photographic evidence of the visit either. But there is this.’
Blom turned the computer round. The screen displayed a whole series of pictures. She clicked on the first, a fairly grainy portrait of a stocky, bearded, weather-beaten man in his fifties. He looked like he was walking through a bazaar.
‘According to MISS, this is the last known picture of Nils Gundersen,’ Blom said. ‘Taken by the CIA in Marrakesh. He was only identified when he was already long gone. At that point he was already wanted for war crimes in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq.’
‘The CIA,’ Berger said coolly.
Blom clicked through a number of pictures of an increasingly young Gundersen in various settings. They got more and more warlike.
‘Yes,’ Blom said, pointing at the screen. ‘Gundersen on the side of the Iraqis in the first Gulf War. Operation Desert Storm.’
‘The Gulf War?’ Berger asked, staring at the picture of the now moustachioed and very blond officer in front of his men.
‘Yes,’ Blom said. ‘This picture’s from ’91. If they’ve got the rank right, he’s a colonel.’
‘Brought in by Saddam Hussein?’
‘Looks that way. And this colonel showed up two years later to collect his son from Sweden.’
‘You’re actually saying son?’
‘Hang on,’ Blom said, clicking through the pictures. Nils Gundersen kept on getting younger. In the first picture he was standing in a mountainous landscape, had a full beard and was leaning against a bazooka.
‘Afghanistan?’ Berger said.
‘The Mujahedin,’ Blom said. ‘It looks like Gundersen had links with the CIA and trained Mujahedin fighters in the eighties. The Soviet Union’s last war.’
‘Hmm,’ Berger said.
The slideshow went on. Nils Gundersen as a stylish young officer with the Norwegian flag neatly sewn onto his breast pocket. As a high-school student with a sparkling smile. As a rosy-cheeked adolescent on skis. In one yellowed black-and-white photograph he was sitting in a sandpit throwing sand. And he was in his mother’s arms on a sturdy armchair. Behind the chair stood a man.
‘This is the only known photograph of Gundersen’s father,’ Blom said, and began to zoom in on the man’s face. ‘Genetic traits often skip a generation.’
Eventually Berger could see that the man’s chin was crooked, and there was a bony protrusion on one side of his forehead.
William Larsson’s grandfather had a very angular, misshapen face. It bore a strong resemblance to a cubist sculpture.
34
Thursday 29 October, 16.12
That afternoon the hedgehogs went into hibernation. The whole family withdrew to the far corner of the boathouse. It was apparent that the mother had constructed a winter abode for them. She wandered over
towards the unhappy figures by the whiteboard, as if to say: Goodnight, we’re off for the winter, into the infinite world of dreams, so much better than your world.
Then she went back and settled down with her little ones.
One of the unhappy figures by the whiteboard was half undressed. The second was touching the first one’s arm.
‘You can see teeth marks,’ Molly Blom said.
‘I know,’ Berger said. ‘They don’t seem to want to fade.’
As he pulled his top back on, Blom turned round and attached another photograph to the board. Beside the picture of the fifteen-year-old William Larsson there was now a new snap of Anton Bergmark. The facial deformities were amazingly similar.
‘A precision job,’ Berger said.
Blom stood next to him, looking at the two pictures. Eventually she said: ‘If we assume that William managed to leave Sweden with the help of his father, a blond mercenary active in the Arab world, then we can probably assume that was where he underwent pretty comprehensive plastic surgery. That would have been 1993, the Lebanese Civil War had ended a few years before and the Gulf War was over. In those slightly more peaceful times, maybe Nils Gundersen finally found out he had a son, and discovered the sort of life he was living. He heard about the bullying, decided to rescue his son and took him back to his own world, a secret world below the radar. Off in the badlands.’
‘But wouldn’t Gundersen have needed some sort of help in Sweden?’ Berger said. ‘I mean, he was an internationally wanted war criminal. It can’t have been that easy to remove an injured and highly conspicuous sixteen-year-old from Sweden to Lebanon without anyone noticing.’
‘He probably had contacts in Sweden from his visit here in ’76, when William was conceived.’
Berger walked closer to the board and looked carefully at the picture of the young William Larsson.
