Watching You

by Arne Dahl

  She was very visibly drugged, but beyond the drugs, beyond the small body’s emaciated condition, there was a flash of stubborn survival instinct. The young Thai girl, Sunisa Phetwiset, had clearly decided to survive. She hadn’t been murdered by Axel Jansson, the paedophile, who was serving a prison sentence for her murder, and she hadn’t even been murdered by William Larsson.

  She was alive.

  Sam clenched his fist but managed to stop himself punching the wall. Instead he went out into the living room and opened all the windows wide. Cool, fresh night air poured into the flat from hell.

  Then he went past Molly and Sunisa and kicked in another door. On a similar mattress, next to a similar drip stand, lay a young girl with piercings whom he recognised as Jonna Eriksson. She stared at him in astonishment and made some indistinct noises.

  He crouched down beside her, stroked her cheek gently and said: ‘Believe it or not, Jonna, you’re free.’

  He stood up, encouraged her to lie still, and carried on. He kicked in door after door, found girl after girl, and they were all alive. By now there were five of them.

  Sometimes he would find Molly in a cell when she had come from the other direction.

  ‘It’s much bigger than it used to be,’ he said.

  ‘He must have bought the neighbouring flat as well,’ Molly said.

  He looked at her for a moment. Then he said: ‘Call them in.’

  In the end there were just two doors left. He kicked in the first of them.

  It looked the same as the other cells. A crumpled mattress on the floor, the tube from a drip stand leading under the covers. But when he pulled the covers aside there was no girl lying there.

  One of the cells was empty.

  There was one girl missing.

  He moved towards the last door. He gulped hard and kicked it in.

  A girl with long blonde hair was sitting on her mattress. Around her neck she had an Orthodox cross on a pink leather strap. Judging by the expression on her face, she had heard what was going on inside the other cells. Even though her eyes were cloudy with drugs, she produced a reserved a smile that hinted at a future of unlimited possibilities.

  ‘Ellen,’ Sam said, crouching down beside the mattress.

  ‘Are you the police?’ Ellen Savinger asked.

  Sam laughed. ‘Yes,’ he lied.

  Then he hugged her and felt the fresh rainy air find its way into the innermost cell of the labyrinth.

  They walked round for a while, soothing and reassuring the girls as best they could, counting the seconds until the paramedics arrived. They found themselves standing in the empty cell for a time. And suddenly they couldn’t feel the fresh rainy air any longer. Everything was rancid again.

  ‘Who’s missing?’ Molly asked.

  ‘It must be Aisha,’ Sam said. ‘Aisha Pachachi.’

  ‘The very first victim,’ Molly said. ‘The girl who lived here.’

  ‘And whose brother is probably sitting dead at the kitchen table.’

  When they heard banging at the front door they looked at each other.

  ‘This isn’t over,’ Molly said.

  Then they made their way out of the labyrinth. They heard Kent and Roy in the kitchen, saw them emerge from the corridor with their weapons and torches raised. Their faces were completely white.

  ‘Lower your weapons,’ Sam said. ‘We’ll go with you voluntarily. But look in there first. And call in everyone you have.’

  They did actually lower their weapons. Roy started to retch and Kent only just moved out of the way before he threw up.

  Sam went over to the wide-open windows. He stared out into the darkness. Something came towards him from out there. It may have been sullied by Aisha Pachachi’s absence, but six girls were still alive, and even if he tried to fend it off, what came at him through the night could only be called happiness.

  When the paramedics stormed into the flat Molly came and stood beside him.

  He put his arm round her.

  She put her arm round him.

  It had stopped raining.

  40

  Friday 30 October, 16.42

  Detective Superintendent Allan Gudmundsson of the Stockholm Police smelled of smoke. He was sitting at his uniquely impersonal desk, and he looked like a pensioner. He adjusted his reading glasses for the eighteenth time as he read the thick document, before eventually looking up at the odd couple on the other side of the desk. She was blonde and had a snub nose, he had brown hair flecked with grey and a week’s worth of beard.

  ‘I had been thinking of starting my weekend,’ Allan Gudmundsson said.

  ‘I vaguely remember the word,’ Sam Berger said. ‘But otherwise I’m drawing a complete blank.’

  Allan slowly looked over at Molly Blom and stared at her critically above his reading glasses.

  ‘So the whole Nathalie Fredén story was just an act?’ he said.

  ‘It was necessary,’ Blom said curtly.

  ‘I’m trying to understand why,’ Allan said. ‘Because you needed Sam’s help with your own unofficial investigation? Because you realised that you had both begun to suspect that you knew the murderer? From when you were young?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Blom said. ‘But that might not be the most important thing right now.’

  Allan adjusted his glasses again and adopted a stern-uncle expression.

  ‘I think I’m the one who decides what’s important, young lady. Your futures are the subject of immediate investigation, and at present neither of you are even police officers. That decision rests with the Security Service and the head of the Intelligence Unit, Steen, and you’ll both be called to an official meeting, probably tomorrow, Saturday. So now isn’t the time to get on your high horse.’

  ‘How are they?’ Berger asked.

  ‘Sam, Sam, Sam,’ Allan said, still in uncle mode. ‘As you know, I shall be retiring in just a few days’ time. Everything was lined up for you to succeed me. If you hadn’t been so damn stubborn.’

  ‘Who’s it going to be now?’

  ‘Rosenkvist, of course,’ Allan Gudmundsson said. ‘Desiré Rosenkvist.’

  Berger laughed. ‘Good job I’ve trained Deer so well.’

  ‘You haven’t trained her at all,’ Allan said bluntly.

  ‘You’re right,’ Berger finally acknowledged. ‘She’ll be a better boss that I could ever have been.’

  ‘How are they?’ Blom echoed.

  ‘I presume you mean the girls,’ Allan said. ‘On the whole, they’re as well as can be expected under the circumstances. But I want some answers to my questions first. So, the reason you both took off like that was because the pair of you had been running separate unofficial, unsanctioned investigations that didn’t comply with the lines taken by either the Security Service or the National Crime Unit?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Blom said. ‘No one would listen to our apparently vague theories. We had no evidence. We had to find the girls. When I was caught tampering with the recording equipment in the interview room, I realised that the only option was to break Sam Berger out of custody and disappear.’

  ‘I’m very relieved that I’m not the one who’s going to decide your futures,’ Allan said, tapping the bundle of papers against his knees. ‘There’s no doubt that you’ve conducted a very thorough investigation. The man you shot and killed, whose body was found on waste ground at Edsviken in Sollentuna, has been identified as a civil engineer and unofficial contractor for the Security Service going by the name of Olle Nilsson. But you claim that he was actually a murderer and serial kidnapper whose name was William Larsson. According to your story, he kidnapped seven fifteen-year-old girls over the course of two and a half years, with the intention of eventually killing them?’

  ‘We believe that the weight of evidence is overwhelming,’ Blom said. ‘But what we really want to know is how the girls are.’

  Allan nodded and said, with a degree of reluctance: ‘What is interesting – and of course gratifyin
g – is that there don’t appear to be any signs of torture. I don’t understand how that can fit with the bloodstains and nail marks in the cellar in Märsta. Or with those infernal clocks.’

  ‘We don’t understand that either,’ Blom said. ‘But we think William was saving the clock for Sam. Because he was the one he was after, when it came down to it.’

  ‘He wasn’t a serial killer,’ Berger said. ‘He was just trying to communicate with me. The traitor with a capital T.’

  Allan looked at him for a while. Then he leafed through his papers and said: ‘One of the girls has already made a statement about the blood. Let’s see … Yes, the one who was kidnapped last, Ellen Savinger. She thinks she saw the perpetrator take blood from her, in a test tube, but she was drugged at the time.’

  ‘That sounds promising,’ Blom said. ‘That means the blood could simply have been aimed at us, me and Sam. To put us on the right track. Maybe there never was a clock in the cellar in Märsta, and the nail marks in the floor were just one of William’s special effects. But their witness statements will obviously clear that up later.’

  Allan nodded and consulted his screen. ‘The current state of the girls. Perhaps it would be as well if we did a full debrief. All six girls are still in hospital, but in some cases that’s largely for observation and final detoxification. They’ve all been given a daily dose of a very strong sedative. According to the doctors, the shorter the time the girls have been subjected to that, the easier it should be for them to return to normal life. Victim number two, Nefel Berwari, is suffering from serious muscle wastage, but it should only be a matter of weeks before she’s up on her feet again. Her psychological condition is rather worse, deep depression, but her cognitive and intellectual abilities are unaffected, and her family is ready to take care of her. Victim number three, Julia Almström, has – against all the odds – managed to keep herself in reasonable physical shape, and in spite of having spent a year and a half in captivity, seems almost ready to return to normal life in Västerås. Victim number four, the Thai citizen, Sunisa Phetwiset, seems to have suffered least psychological damage from captivity. Apparently she’s claiming that she was looked after better in Larsson’s captivity than before. She’ll be given Swedish citizenship and offered protection to keep her safe from the Albanian mafia. In contrast, Jonna Eriksson, victim number five, is in the worst state. Her body is badly run-down, and she’s having difficulty coming to terms with the death of her boyfriend Simon Lundberg, whose remains were found in a cave outside Kristinehamn at your direction. But Jonna too should make a full recovery, and a highly supportive foster family in the Stockholm area has opened its doors to her. The sixth victim, Emma Brandt, has been reunited with her father and will be able to leave hospital in a couple of days. She’s genuinely astonished that she was stopped from committing suicide by a murderer. They’re going to be moving down to Skåne to start a new life. And finally Ellen Savinger has her family around her, and it even looks like she might be able to go back to school in Östermalm before the end of term. The Forensic Medical Unit is, however, saying that the long-term effects of the sedative are unclear.’

  Blom and Berger exchanged a look; the situation was even better than they had dared to hope.

  Blom said: ‘And what do the girls have to say about the question of William Larsson’s guilt?’

  ‘So far questioning has been kept to a minimum,’ Allan said, ‘out of consideration for the girls’ state of health. But the statements taken are unanimous, and match yours. All the victims have identified Olle Nilsson, and his DNA has been found in both the Bålsta house and the flat in Helenelund. The fact that Nilsson was guilty of all seven kidnappings is therefore beyond all reasonable doubt now – as well as three murders, Simon Lundberg, Yazid Pachachi and Rayhan Hamdani, and the aggravated assault of an Anton Bergmark in Sollentuna.’

  ‘So the body sitting in the kitchen was Aisha’s brother Yazid,’ Berger said. ‘But the name Rayhan Hamdani doesn’t mean anything to me.’

  ‘Another young man from Sollentuna who went off to fight for IS. They both died of gunshot wounds, and had serious amounts of heroin in their bodies, according to initial analysis. They both returned to Sweden on 20 August this year. The preliminary forensic examination indicates that they’ve been dead just over two months, which suggests that they went to the flat more or less straight away.’

  ‘Where a complete lunatic was busy building a labyrinth,’ Berger said.

  ‘What happened to the rest of the Pachachi family?’ Blom asked. ‘There’s definitely a mother and father. I questioned both of them around the time of their daughter’s disappearance.’

  Allan nodded. ‘Ali and Tahera Pachachi, yes. They’ve vanished into thin air as well, just like their daughter.’

  ‘Strange,’ Blom said.

  ‘Not really,’ Allan said with a shrug. ‘They’re presumably dead, cleared out of the way by Olle Nilsson. Because there’s nothing to support your theory that his real name is William Larsson, and that he underwent plastic surgery somewhere in the Middle East. We can’t find any connection to a mercenary called Nils Gundersen living in Lebanon. And your own childhood memories obviously don’t count as evidence. But the Security Service are currently going through the whole of your unofficial investigation. Some evidence may of course arise from your material or from the professional scrutiny it’s being subjected to – the van, or DNA from the sixteen-year-old Larsson, for instance. And the most vital work of all is still ongoing: analysis of Olle Nilsson’s computers from Stupvägen, which will hopefully provide answers to a lot of questions. Mind you, it doesn’t really matter who he was. Whether his name was William Larsson, Erik Johansson, Johan Eriksson or Olle Nilsson, he’s been neutralised now.’

  ‘William was a lot of people,’ Berger said.

  The other two looked at him for a few moments.

  ‘Your statements have made for extremely interesting reading. But it’s clear that you don’t have any detailed information about how the kidnappings took place. How did he get to know the girls? How did he know that they existed? How did he plan his actions?’

  Blom cleared her throat. ‘We don’t actually know anything except that he seems to have snatched Aisha Pachachi right after the celebration to mark the end of the school year, broke into Julia Almström’s house in the middle of the night to take her, and simply picked a blonde girl at random from the high school in Östermalm. We don’t know how Nefel Berwari disappeared. The other aspects that remain unclear are how William knew that Sunisa Phetwiset, who had been forced into the sex trade, would be visiting a paedophile on a particular evening, how he found Jonna Eriksson and Simon Lundberg at their hideaway in the cave full of bats, or how he knew precisely when Emma Brandt was going to commit suicide at Midsummer. I imagine a lot of that will become clear after William’s computers are analysed. The whole thing reeks of social media.’

  Allan nodded. ‘I also need to get to grips with your plan to capture him in the boathouse. Once you had received the message in the Bålsta house – “I’m coming for you soon” – you still went back to the boathouse. Then everything gets a bit hazy. You set up four new security cameras in the vicinity. One of them was pointing out across the water. You were anticipating that Larsson was going to come that night. You had predicted that he would strap Berger to his clock at the scene of the original crime. So you were prepared to sacrifice yourself, Sam?’

  ‘My shoulders still hurt,’ Berger said.

  ‘We found the parts of the clock hidden under the floor,’ Blom said. ‘We realised that he wanted to attach Sam to the contraption. And Sam was prepared to go through that if I could render William harmless without killing him. We needed him to tell us where the third house was. The third labyrinth. Everything hinged on that.’

  ‘We had a number of different strategies, depending on which direction he came from,’ Berger said. ‘But the mannequin that we’d dragged back from Bålsta was part of all of them.’

&
nbsp; ‘He came from the water,’ Blom said. ‘In a rowing boat. That was unexpected, but not unmanageable. At best he would regard me as so irrelevant that he would merely get rid of me without closer inspection.’

  ‘That was obviously an element of uncertainty,’ Berger said. ‘But we would have stuck to the plan even if he had discovered the dummy.’

  ‘Then what?’ Allan said.

  ‘We picked him up on the jetty camera,’ Blom said, ‘as the rowing boat glided in. We quickly got ready; the dummy was already inside my sleeping bag. The fact that William was wearing a bulletproof vest led us to choose an option where I had to crawl underneath the boathouse; it’s raised up on pillars, of course. We waited as long as we dared, and because it was possible that he was listening to us, we pretended that I was going to sleep. The last thing I did was disable the security camera covering the jetty. I disconnected it from the computer, because if William had discovered we had a camera there, he would have realised we had some sort of plan.’

  ‘We worked out more or less where he would be standing to enjoy watching me die,’ Berger said. ‘Then we had to wait until he was within firing range.’

  ‘And you can get a good idea how people are moving above you,’ Blom said, ‘through the tiniest cracks in the floor. But we only wanted to hit his feet. He wasn’t supposed to die, under any circumstances.’

  ‘And yet he did,’ Allan Gudmundsson said.

  Blom merely looked at him. Time passed.

  In the end Allan closed the bundle of documents. ‘The most important thing is that the monster has been rendered harmless. The shooting in the boathouse has already been classified as self-defence. As a police operation, your efforts were outstanding. There’s every reason to believe that you saved the lives of these six girls. For that you have our unanimous gratitude and admiration.’

  Berger caught Blom’s eye. That wasn’t really a conclusion.

  Eventually Allan continued: ‘But your future is now in the hands of the Security Service.’

  41

  Friday 30 October, 19.37