The Last Lullaby

by Carin Gerhardsen

  ‘Are you finished with the computer?’ asked Sandén.

  ‘As good as.’

  ‘Let’s go. Make sure everything looks like it did when we came, then let’s get out of here. We have to call Petra.’

  Hamad turned off the computer; Sandén set the phone back on the floor, made a quick tour of the apartment, checked that the lights were off and listened for sounds in the corridor. It was silent. They quietly opened the door and slipped out.

  As soon as they were out on the street Hamad called Westman and asked her to search for The Ugly Duckling on the Internet. A task they realized could be impeded by the fact that, while she was still on the line, she got 45,000 hits with her first search. They filled her in on their café and preschool theories and then texted her the list of numbers from Rydin’s phone. Einar Eriksson’s absence felt tangible. In more than one way.

  ‘You don’t miss the cow until the barn is empty,’ Sandén summarized the situation.

  * * *

  When they came back from their outing, the after-school teachers had set out juice and popcorn in the cosy corner. The children who were left at school on Friday afternoon would get to watch a film before they left for the weekend. The two couches, like the armchairs, were occupied by other third-graders, so Johan and Max were lying on their stomachs next to each other on the floor, each with a pillow under their elbows, waiting for the movie to start. To compensate, they had a bowl of popcorn of their own in front of them. Johan reached his hand into the bowl to grab a fistful of Friday treats when Ivan suddenly appeared in the doorway. He had not been seen for a while, so Johan thought he had gone home. But now here he was, gesturing to Johan that he should come.

  Ivan pulled him out into the corridor, eagerly whispering about borrowing something from the woodworking class. At first Johan did not understand what he was talking about, much less when Ivan pulled out what seemed to be a rolled-up towel from his gym bag. But when Ivan revealed the giant pliers inside the towel the pieces started to fall into place.

  ‘It’s a bolt cutter,’ said Ivan secretively.

  Johan already had his suspicions about what Ivan intended they should use it for, and the thought appealed to him in a way but at the same time not at all. Rescuing the pig was one thing, but by breaking apart a lock … ? He was quite certain that was illegal. And to top it off, it was that nasty guitar man’s lock. Besides, he suspected that Ivan thought the break-in itself was more interesting than releasing the pig.

  ‘I went to the police anyway,’ he said in a lame attempt to get Ivan to give up his criminal plans.

  ‘I see, so the pig has been rescued by now?’

  Johan shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Admit that they didn’t care,’ said Ivan with conviction.

  ‘Yes, they did … Or … Ah, they did and they didn’t.’

  He did not want to reveal the thoughts that were going through his mind. That there had not been a real police report because he had not dared say who he was. That he had been afraid of what his mum and dad would say if they found out what he had been up to.

  ‘Then we’ll do it ourselves. Come on now, Johan, what’s the problem? Do you have to ask Mummy for permission first?’

  Ivan was apparently a mind reader.

  ‘Probably,’ Johan answered with a crooked smile.

  And so there he was again. In the clutches of Ivan, whom he barely even liked. He went back into the classroom and told the teacher he was going home. Which was okay if, like him, you had a note from your parents to say that you were allowed to walk home by yourself. Shit.

  When they got outside it was dark and gloomy and it had started to snow. Perhaps this adventure would have felt less scary if it had been a sunny spring day. Johan had misgivings, but he did not dare back out, did not want to appear cowardly in front of Ivan, who despite the concealed bolt cutter under his jacket was walking along with light, self-confident steps and presumably felt like a bank robber or something, like he was really cool.

  ‘So what will we do with the pig?’ Johan asked. ‘We can’t rescue it and then just let it freeze to death or be run over, can we?’

  Ivan had already thought about that and replied that they could call the cops and give an anonymous tip-off that a crazy pig was running loose on the streets and was dangerous.

  ‘And that bloke. What if he kills us?’

  Ivan delivered a smile straight out of an American action flick and patted his jacket.

  ‘He won’t do that,’ he said, dead certain as always.

  So they tramped on through the slushy snow, over towards Tantolunden, Johan feeling increasingly uneasy with a lump in his stomach. He felt no enthusiasm for smashing someone’s head with a bolt cutter, animal tormentor or not.

  * * *

  The snow meant that the trip home took longer than he had hoped, but Sjöberg continued driving after the call with Sandén feeling greatly relieved. Finally he had his team on his side, finally they were all striving in the same direction. They were no longer in a state of ignorance either about who had committed the murders. Now it was only a matter of time before they would arrest the killer. On the other hand, concern for Einar was gnawing at him. They must assume that he was still alive and they must find him quickly. For that reason he felt frustrated when he ground to a halt in a queue of cars at the King’s Curve. He felt convinced however that Sandén’s, Hamad’s and Westman’s work would sooner or later result in something substantial, and so he called the police commissioner and asked him to put the national SWAT team on alert. Then he could only keep his fingers crossed that the team would be available. He stretched in his seat, longing to get out of the car and shake the stiffness out of his joints.

  From Einar and the dead children in his wake Sjöberg’s thoughts wandered against his will to the tragic death of his own sister. He felt an urgent need to confront his mother as soon as possible with his new discoveries. No, ‘confront’ was the wrong word. He would tell her that he had met his paternal grandmother, that he knew the whole story and that he admired his mother for the strength she had shown over all these years. But he would also force her to tell him everything, from beginning to end. I have a right to my own history, thought Sjöberg. Just as Ingegärd Rydin thought her son had. In the end you have to know the truth about your background, but he would express his reaction differently from Mikael Rydin.

  What would this weekend look like? If the hunt for Mikael Rydin and the search for Einar were over in the near future, he would take the opportunity to visit his mother. Åsa would not be happy about it, but she would understand. She would also be eager to know the truth about the Sjöberg family. He should have phoned her. She was probably dying of curiosity about his visit to his grandmother that morning. He ought to call her now, but it was the wrong moment. She taught until late on Friday afternoons and then she would be in a hurry to pick up the kids from preschool and after-school care.

  He yawned. He was tired as hell after a quiet night at the hotel without noisy kids to wake him. But if it wasn’t one thing it was another. He’d had a hard time falling asleep after the call from Jenny. That little nutcase, thought Sjöberg, smiling to himself. Calls in the middle of the night after lying sleepless in bed for hours. She could just as well have waited a couple more hours so that he could sleep. But Jenny was Jenny, and it was probably just as well that everyone was different. She was a newfound supporter of animal rights. Someone should be.

  The pig’s rights in society. The pig’s right to potatoes. Where did that come from? He shook his head, stepped lightly on the accelerator and moved forward another few metres. Sjöberg happened to think of a children’s song he used to listen to when he was little, The Old Man in the Box. A song by Gullan Bornemark about a little pig. A breath of nostalgia wafted past him, and he started singing to himself: ‘Hurry up, little piglet, hurry up, little piglet. Small potatoes you will get, small potatoes you will get.’ Yes, perhaps pigs ate potatoes. ‘Potato pigs,’ Sjöberg mumble
d to himself as the phone started vibrating in his pocket.

  It was Sandén calling from the metro. He and Hamad were on their way back to the station and he gave an account of their activities on Öregrundsgatan.

  ‘You’re absolutely sure you didn’t leave any traces? And no one saw you go in, I hope?’

  ‘Don’t worry. The Ugly Duckling – do you know what that is?’

  ‘A fairy tale by –’

  ‘Hans Christian Andersen, I know. But Rydin had a picture of a sign with that name on his mobile. It was on a gate. We’re thinking cafés or preschools; do you have any better ideas?’

  ‘What type of gate is it?’

  ‘Classic, white, even though the paint has flaked. A good old-fashioned gate, in short.’

  ‘Then perhaps it’s sitting outside a good old-fashioned house?’ Sjöberg suggested.

  ‘Wait a minute. Looks like Hamad just thought of something here.’

  Sjöberg waited; the traffic was moving a little faster now. Was it starting to free up? Sandén came back on the phone.

  ‘He says that Lotten or Jenny mentioned that café. Or whatever it is. The Ugly Duckling. He’s calling reception now.’

  ‘I’ll hang on. Jenny, yes. She called me last night.’

  ‘Last night?’

  ‘Three-thirty in the morning,’ said Sjöberg with a sigh. ‘She couldn’t sleep. It was something about a pig. And you clearly hadn’t been much help.’

  ‘Oh, that. They were both babbling on at the same time, her and Lotten, and I really didn’t have time. Or the energy. But now Hamad is saying something … Wait a moment.’

  That children’s song lingered. ‘Small potatoes you shall get, you shall get.’ Potatoes, thought Sjöberg. Pigs. Police, police, potato pig, like the children’s chant. A pig that rolls in its own shit, Jenny had said. It could mean anything at all. Anyone at all. Pig was a term of abuse. A pig could be a dirty person, perhaps a person forced to answer the call of nature where they sat or were lying. Police, police, potato pig. What if it wasn’t a pig this was about but a cop? Could it be the mistreatment of a policeman the boy that Jenny talked about had witnessed? Sjöberg stiffened in the driver’s seat and then Sandén was back in his ear.

  ‘Lotten says that it refers to a summer house or something like that. According to the boy, it’s the address of the place where the pig is being held prisoner. Where exactly it was she and Jenny didn’t have time to find out. He disappeared as fast as your pay packet when they started asking him for personal information.’

  ‘This is no pig,’ said Sjöberg, convinced now. ‘Jenny was talking about potatoes. A potato pig, Jens. It’s Einar this is about.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  Sandén was talking faster now. In the starting blocks, raring to do something. The question was simply what.

  ‘And Petra is not finding anything about The Ugly Duckling on the net,’ he continued. ‘So it’s not an address. It must be the name of the house itself. A summer cabin perhaps.’

  ‘How old was that boy?’

  ‘The girls guess about eight to ten years old.’

  ‘Then it’s unlikely that he would have made his way out to the countryside on his own,’ Sjöberg stated. ‘The shack is not that far away. Within walking distance or close to public transport. I’m guessing a house or an allotment garden.’

  ‘So how the hell do we move ahead?’

  ‘Keep calling Rydin’s contacts,’ said Sjöberg, suddenly struck by a far-fetched thought. ‘But first I suggest you call Barbro.’

  ‘Barbro?’

  ‘If it concerns an allotment garden, there is one person who has seen more of those than anyone else. Barbro Dahlström.’

  Their paths had crossed about six months earlier, in connection with the discovery of an infant in a serious condition and a dead woman in Vitaberg Park. Barbro Dahlström was seventy-two years old and if anyone put a face to the expression ‘an everyday hero’, it was her.

  ‘Of course! I’ll track her down.’ Sandén ended the call.

  Only a short time ago Sjöberg had considered pulling off somewhere and buying himself a sausage, but now circumstances had changed. With his pulse rate considerably higher, he decided to step on it all the way to Stockholm. He turned on the siren, rolled down the side window and put the flashing light on the roof of the car.

  * * *

  They sneaked the last stretch up to The Ugly Duckling, crouching behind the hedge. The padlock on the gate was in place, but the gate was old and hanging on one hinge.

  ‘Idiot,’ whispered Ivan. ‘What good is that padlock? A dwarf could climb over that little gate. Or kick it apart,’ he added, while trying to do just that.

  But Johan took hold of his arm.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he hissed. ‘Do you want us to get caught before we’ve even started?’

  ‘Does it look like there’s a lot of people here?’ Ivan countered, unconcerned.

  ‘You don’t know that. Maybe he’s inside there,’ Johan replied, nodding towards the shed.

  ‘Do you see the padlock on the door? It’s locked, so he isn’t in there,’ Ivan answered with a snort. ‘And the lights are off in the house itself. Come on now.’

  He set his foot on a crossbar and easily swung himself over the gate and down into the snow on the other side. Johan stayed where he was for a moment and listened for sounds, but heard none so he too climbed over. Ivan sneaked up to the door of the outbuilding, pulled out the bundle he had been carrying under his jacket and dropped it on to the path with a thud. Johan listened again and looked worriedly around, but there was not a soul to be seen and only a faint hum from the traffic somewhere in the distance could be heard. While Ivan took the bolt cutter from the towel, Johan put his ear to the door, but he could hear nothing from inside.

  Ivan started working on the lock, which was hard to cut through, even though the tool was made for the job. It required a certain amount of arm strength, and Johan was about to lend a hand when he suddenly had a mental image of how the yard had looked when they arrived. He interrupted himself mid-motion and looked down at the snow between them. Footprints, that was what he thought. How stupid could you be? With his eyes he followed a set of clear footprints, large ones, in the snow, leading from the shed to the house itself, but only in one direction. So someone had come to the shed before it started snowing – which must have been a couple of hours ago – and then left during the snowfall. And that person was without a doubt now inside the house. He glanced towards the door and noted that it seemed to have been forced open. His heart started beating very fast.

  ‘You’ve got to stop, Ivan! He’s inside the house. Check out the footprints.’

  Ivan stopped and looked over towards the house.

  ‘Damn! Do you think he’s noticed us?’

  ‘Maybe not, but we’ve got to get out of here. Quick!’

  Johan got up suddenly and started to run in the direction of the gate. Right then the door of the house opened and the guitar man threw himself down the steps and came rushing towards him. Johan took hold of the gate with both hands and jumped up, and he was still straddled over it in an excruciatingly uncomfortable way when the man took hold of his arm, tore him down from the gate and dragged him over towards the tool shed. During all this Ivan stood as if frozen, with big eyes, and the cursed bolt cutters in his hand, witnessing the scene that was playing out before him. He dropped the tool, whereupon his hands with outstretched fingers went up level with his ears.

  ‘It’s cool,’ he said pitifully, and that was the only thing said during the whole surprising attack.

  Johan saw with dismay how a terrifying set of tattooed biceps seemed about to burst out of the guitar man’s T-shirt, as with a blank face he dragged the two boys up the stairs and into the house.

  ‘What do you say?’ he said, after throwing them down into a sitting position in a dusty corner of the only room in the cottage. ‘Who should I get rid of first, the two of you or the fellow over t
here?’

  ‘We won’t say anything to anyone,’ said Ivan, trying to sound convincing. ‘We’ll just forget about that damned pig.’

  ‘Yes, exactly. You’re probably here to steal the garden hose?’

  ‘We promise not to say anything,’ Johan repeated, embarrassingly close to tears now. ‘Please, just let us go; we’ll never come back again.’

  ‘I bet you won’t. But there’s plenty of room for all three of you.’

  He smiled in a strange way, not looking the least bit happy. And then he started kicking.

  * * *

  With Sjöberg, Sandén, Hamad and above all Eriksson gone, Petra Westman was fully occupied going through all of Mikael Rydin’s contacts at a furious pace. Long, tedious explanations about what she wanted, embedded in plausible lies about why, were interspersed with unanswered calls to Barbro Dahlström’s home phone. Unfortunately she did not have a mobile. And no one that Westman got hold of knew whether Rydin might have access to a house somewhere. Or knew where he was or what plans he had for the immediate future.

  The screen still showed, as if to mock her, her most recent failed search. She had searched countless words in combination with The Ugly Duckling: restaurants, cafés, preschools, playgrounds, allotment gardens, libraries, theatres and on and on, but with no pay-off. While she sat and waited out Barbro Dahlström’s customary five rings she considered the possibility of calling all the sign makers in the region, but a search on Eniro came up with 228 hits so that was impractical in the short term. Besides, according to Hamad they were looking for an old gate and therefore presumably also an old sign.

  Instead she came up with the idea of searching for other fairy-tale titles in combination with businesses she had already tried, in case all the buildings in the neighbourhood were named after fairy tales. This too was without success however. Suddenly it struck her that the basic idea was not so dumb after all. If The Ugly Duckling was in an area where all the houses have fairy-tale names, the street itself ought to have a name that reflects that. After a number of searches, some more wildly imaginative than others, in Eniro’s maps she struck gold. She entered Sjöberg’s number.