“What?”
“An archive search with the criminal police. It’s about the disappearance of Joel’s brother in 1970. I want to know if there’s anything about crime scene evidence in the investigation file. Things they found at the place where he disappeared. A champagne cork, among other things.”
“Sounds strange. What’s it all about?”
“I don’t know. Can you just check for me?”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can find.”
“Great. Talk to you later.”
“Poka, Danya!”
“Poka!”
It occurred to Katz later that Julin had planted a small seed of doubt, but it never received the sustenance it needed to sprout. Because what he found in the apartment on Skeppargatan changed the rules of the game.
He had called Angela again after his conversation with Julin, in order to move his thoughts in a different direction. But she hadn’t answered.
He realized he was going to arrive more than an hour before they had planned to meet, and if she wasn’t there he had decided he would wait for her. He needed to talk to her, to get rid of any suggestion that she was involved.
Katz had no problem remembering the entry code.
He thought of Jan Klingberg as he took the elevator up to the apartment. The panic that had sneaked up on him when he suddenly realized he had left his son with a total stranger, the suspicion that had started to gnaw at him, saying that something wasn’t right. Katz felt vaguely nauseated as he listened to the creak of the wires in the elevator shaft; he had the sense that something was wrong, but he didn’t know what.
The security gate and the door to the apartment were wide open.
He called her name as he walked through the servants’ passage he’d followed her through just a day earlier. He was aware of the bitter taste of fear when he saw the overturned furniture in the dining room, the sheets pulled down on the floor in the bedroom he passed, and the wide-open doors that seemed to be inviting him in to look at everything he didn’t want to see.
Spatters of blood on the stairs up to the top floor. Bloody streaks on the wall, made by human fingers.
The silence in the flat was broken only by his breathing. A cold sweat erupted on his forehead. He heard someone moaning, a high, cat-like whine, and he realized that it had come from him.
It took an eternity to walk up the stairs. Light was streaming into Klingberg’s office from the terrace windows. The computer was on; it was displaying a slideshow from the photo album. Angela and Joel were in most of the shots: holiday pictures, everyday pictures, pictures from a crayfish party accompanied by classical music that sounded like Wagner.
More blood, on the oak parquet: a broad track of blood, as if someone had dipped a rag in red paint and dragged it across the floor. A door was open beyond it, leading to another room.
Everything swam before Katz’s eyes as he stepped in.
Her body was in an unnatural position, as if it had been tossed on the rug. She had her cellphone in her hand, as if she had wanted to make one last call to say good-bye.
He nearly vomited. The reflex was so powerful that he had to hold his hand to his mouth when he discovered the bite marks on her neck. Like Eva Dahlman that time. A sort of bloody necklace, from her throat and around to her nape. Her skin was torn to shreds. Those bites had been wild; the force and the hate behind them had been incredibly strong.
He seemed to be able to absorb only one detail at a time. His own clothes spread through the room. Her naked lower body. He saw the curl of her grayish pubic hair. Recognized the handle of the knife that stuck out of her chest. His kitchen knife. That was how she had died. Like an animal to slaughter. The knife had gone straight into her heart.
Never checked the laundry basket in the bathroom. Never checked the kitchen drawers to see if anything was missing.
Without realizing it, he had sunk to his knees beside her body. The screen of her phone showed the list of missed calls. His own number was at the top—six missed calls from his phone, the last one from his attempt to call her just half an hour before.
He looked around the room. There were bookcases on each wall: the Klingbergs’ library. He suspected that there were more objects in the apartment that belonged to him, planted there by whoever had done this, more of his clothes, perhaps, in the bedroom on the lower floor.
The raincoat on the surveillance tape from the garage, he realized now, must have been his too.
He backed out of the room, returning to Klingberg’s office. He retched again and couldn’t hold it back this time; he threw up on the floor next to the desk.
What did it matter? His fingerprints were already in the room, on the computer and the desk, on the door handle and the handrail of the staircase, on the security gate in the hall, in the car that was probably still in the garage.
He touched the mouse. Her Hotmail account was open on another tab. The mail she had sent, asking him to come, and his reply, which could be taken to suggest that they were having an affair.
Katz heard distant sirens. He looked around again at what would soon be transformed into the cordoned-off crime scene of a murder. He ought to wait for the patrol car, explain himself, just stick to the truth—but he knew that he wouldn’t. It was too perfectly executed, the whole set-up, the whole scene; it would point straight at him.
The sirens were getting closer. They were in the neighborhood now, and it sounded as if there were several cars.
Katz left the room, almost running down the stairs and back to the hall. His hands shook as he locked the security gate. There were three locks; the key was in the top one. Had she opened the door to her own murderer?
The sirens had stopped. The first patrol officers must be in the stairwell already.
He locked all three locks. Then he closed the door to the apartment, bolted it, and threw the key away. How much time would this buy him—fifteen minutes before they forced the gate and the door?
He went over to the glass door that led to the roof terrace, opened it, and stepped into the fresh air. There wasn’t the smell of blood anymore, that sickly-sweet scent of slowly congealing blood, from the clotting film like the thin skin on a sauce. No more smell of mortal fear.
The terrace was sunken for better shelter, but he could get up on the roof over by the railing. He caught hold of the snow guard and pulled himself up. Roof tiles covered in years’ worth of shit from the gulls of Nybroviken. He was six floors up, and the pitch of the roof was steeper than he could have imagined. Katz was afraid of heights; he always had been, and the feeling of dizziness had only gotten worse as the years went by.
He closed his eyes and realized that he wasn’t going to make any progress, that he was paralyzed with fear.
He forced himself to look again.
Five meters to his right was a ladder that led up to one of the chimneys. Katz braced his foot against the top part of one roof tile. It ought to be able to take more weight at the lath.
He stretched as far as he could, fumbling until he could grab a couple of tiles, then lifted his right foot and shoved his body sideways.
He slowly got closer. Three meters away. Two meters. He couldn’t go back now. With his stomach pressed against the roof, he pulled himself the last little bit until he reached the ladder.
Then he climbed up.
He reached the ridge and peered down. He saw police cars on the other side of the street—a van and a regular patrol car. Onlookers had started to gather on the pavement. Straddling the ridge, he slid toward the next building.
Fifteen meters on, he found what he was looking for: an attic window. He managed to get it open and he slipped through the gap feet first.
Five minutes later, he walked out through the front door of the neighboring building. He didn’t look at the police vehicles or the people assembling nearby; he just walked purposefully up the street to his parked car.
How much time did he have? One hour at the most, before suspicions would alight on h
im. This isn’t happening, he thought, yet happen it had.
The headache was like a sort of shimmering fairy-tale color in the back of his head, yellowish-red with hints of baby blue. He felt strange stabbing pains in his chest. His throat was as dry as a bone. As he drove past Gallerian toward Jakobsgatan he searched the glove compartment for a bottle of water. He pinched his arm to feel something other than his internal pain. The evening had a denseness he’d never noticed before. The rain was falling strangely. There was a parking ticket on his windshield; he discovered it when he turned on the wipers, but the wind took it and it fluttered away in the sparse evening traffic.
A sudden burst of tears came over him, first as stomach cramps, then as a bestial sob as the tears forced their way into his eyes.
He turned right on Vasagatan. He felt as if he were seeing the world in telegram form. Happy-hour pubs. Illegal cab drivers. Russian and African prostitutes. A junkie was standing outside 7-Eleven, crouching with his back against the window as if he were about to fall asleep on his feet, but Katz knew it was the other way around: the heroin made him feel very much present, but it carried him miles into his own body. He felt a sudden thirst for the drug. He felt his body screaming for heroin, and the thought made him break out in a cold sweat because it had been several years since he’d felt that way.
A red light just before Norra Bantorget. He breathed slowly so as not to hyperventilate. In the rearview mirror he saw a man stagger across the street with his belongings in a shopping cart, waving his free arm at honking cars like a bullfighter. The heroin addict slowly slid down the window of the 7-Eleven as if he were melting.
He couldn’t shake the image of her body. She had been put to death, he thought. Put to death and thrown away.
He didn’t understand it.
Every detail. Even the bites around her neck. It would all point to him.
He drove on, toward the Barnhus Bridge, drove across to the Kungsholmen side, and took Fleminggatan toward Fridhemsplan.
If he stuck to the truth, told them exactly where he had been and what he had done, why would anyone doubt him?
And yet he knew they would. He felt it instinctively—he would be nailed for this.
Katz was out on Drottningsholmsvägen. His brain had started working again; his thoughts had started to organize themselves according to a functional grammar. He knew what he ought to do, or at least where he would start.
He stopped the car two hundred meters from the apartment and approached on foot. The lights were off in the stairwell. There were no police cars outside the door. To be safe, he went around the back. No strange movements. The first-floor neighbor was standing at the kitchen window, looking through an advertising flyer.
Katz went in via the basement and walked quickly up the stairs to the second floor. His legs were still shaking; his heartbeat felt irregular. His nausea had come back.
It took him only a few minutes to gather up what he needed: a bag with a change of clothes, a flashlight, an old cellphone and its charger.
He locked the door behind him and went down to the office. He dug a hammer, pliers, and a screwdriver out of his toolbox. The street outside was still empty. No vehicles, no people. Without warning, he started to sweat and felt it dripping along his armpits and his back.
He opened the safe and took out one of the small hard drives, a laptop, and his passport and put them in the bag. He had five thousand kronor in cash in an envelope. He stuffed it into the inner pocket of his jacket. He looked around in the dark. He didn’t need anything else.
Then he went outside again, crossed the street, and walked to a nearby parking lot.
His fingers trembled as he pressed the screwdriver against the rubber along the side window of a silver Ford Sierra. He pulled on the shaft until the window came down five centimeters. Just like before, he thought, with Jorma Hedlund. With both hands in the opening, he pulled down with all his strength until he could fit his arm in to open the lock from the inside.
A man walked by on the other side of the pavement with a dog on a leash. Katz stood stock-still until the man had disappeared from sight. Then he got into the driver’s seat, placed the tip of the screwdriver in the ignition, and struck it with the hammer.
No stop lock on this model; easy to hotwire. Only the Saab 900 is easier to steal. Worthless locks; if they get worn out you could start them with a popcicle stick.
Jorma’s voice in his head, from twenty-five years before, when this was an average day for them.
Katz grabbed the wheel and pulled it toward him as hard as he could until he heard it come unlocked.
Then he turned the screwdriver, using the pliers, and heard the engine start.
He came across the first police car two hundred meters from his place. He saw it slowing down, saw the cop in the passenger seat looking at his license plates before they turned onto his street, with lights but no sirens. He kept driving calmly, stayed below the speed limit, and met two more police cars going in the same direction. The Sierra purred like a cat.
Julin’s house was in Smedslätten in Bromma—not more than a few kilometers from where Katz lived and yet in a completely different world. Things had gone well for Capitol Security in the past few years, so well that Julin had been able to leave his old military rental in Solna and purchase a luxury home: three hundred square meters, daylight basement, a view of Lake Mälaren. It was obvious that this man was in the security branch. A three-meter-tall garden wall surrounded the property. A modern security gate led into the grounds.
Katz parked the car on the darker side of the street, walked up to the gate, and rang the bell. He heard a dog barking from a distant building. It took a minute or two before Julin answered the gate intercom.
“It’s Katz,” he said. “I need help.”
It took him an hour to explain what had happened. He noticed his hands starting to shake as he came to the scene that had greeted him in the apartment on Skeppargatan. He stopped talking and looked out of the window.
“What are you going to do now?” Julin asked cautiously.
“I don’t know.”
“I think you should call the police and say that you’re here at my house. They’ll come and pick you up, take you into the city and question you, and all you have to do is stick to the truth. I’ll come with you if you want. Shall I call the company’s lawyer?”
“Maybe later. There’re a few things I have to check up on first.”
“Like what?”
“There’s a witness . . . from the parking garage. A young guy who saw who parked Klingberg’s car. I need to get hold of him.”
Julin sighed.
“This is crazy. Call the police now.”
“But what if this is what I think it is?”
“A conspiracy? Forget it, you’re imagining things. It’s the shock. I remember it from the Balkans, when you see people dead . . . it does something to you, shakes up your thoughts.”
“There were a lot of my things there.”
“All kitchen knives look the same.”
“Believe me, it was done perfectly. Strands of hair. DNA. My clothes. The murder weapon.”
“Listen to me. They’re going to determine the exact time of death, and you’ll tell them you weren’t at the apartment then.”
“Wasn’t I? How do you know? My fingerprints are everywhere—on Klingberg’s computer, on the security gate, the stair rail . . . in their car.”
Julin sighed and got up from his chair. Katz suddenly noticed the silence in the house.
“Should I leave?” he said. “Am I going to wake the kids?”
“They’re not here. They left for Skåne with my wife a few hours ago, shortly after we talked on the phone. They’ll be there for a week. We have an old half-timbered house down there. You should visit sometime.”
“How did things go with the dog?”
“The Ovcharka? Didn’t you hear it? It’s in the garage. Totally impossible to deal with. We’re going to send it bac
k to Moscow.”
Julin opened a glass cabinet, poured cognac into two snifters, and handed one to Katz. He shook his head dismissively.
“I don’t get it . . . whatever it is, behind all this. Why go to all the trouble? Why not just arrange a car accident to bump her off?”
“Call the police, Katz, that’s my advice.”
“Did you find anything out, by the way? About what I asked you to check . . . the circumstances surrounding his brother’s disappearance?”
“Sorry, haven’t had time. Do you think it has something to do with this?”
“Klingberg was on the trail of something. He had started to put things together . . . his brother’s disappearance and the death of his parents nine years later. Officially, it was suicide, but he seemed to have reason to doubt that. He was contacted by someone who had information about the kidnapping and maybe about his parents’ death. But then something went wrong, or maybe he was lured into a trap.”
“Good God, Katz . . . that’s all speculation.”
“I know when I’m right.”
He stood up and looked through the window at the dark lake and the distant lights in Mälarhöjden, on the other side of the sound. He felt the panic sneaking up on him again.
“Can you do me one last favor, Julin? Print out a picture of Klingberg from the Internet?”
Julin nodded and disappeared into an adjacent room. Katz heard the buzzing sound of a printer. Then Julin was back again with a picture, the same one Katz had seen online, from the company’s annual meeting.
“So, your old army friend . . . it’s unbelievable.”
Katz nodded and tried to capture a brewing thought, but he missed it.
“I’m going to disappear for a while,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone that I was here.”
“What if I need to get hold of you?”
“You can’t. Not if I don’t want you to.”
PART 2
Scheduling the handover for Monday evenings had not been well thought out. The kids were out of sorts, tired from the first school day of the week and emotionally unstable after a weekend in the company of Ola and Erika. Their baby took attention away from its older half-siblings, and she didn’t like the way this kept them outside the new family constellation. She had said as much to Ola, but his only reply was that she shouldn’t interfere in his life.
The Boy in the Shadows Page 8
