“I suppose we should get going before Two-fer calls.” Molander moved on toward the kitchen. Lilja lingered, as if there were something inside her that wanted to stay in the closet and examine it more thoroughly. She tried to focus.
“Irene!”
She gave up and joined Molander.
“We can always check with Risk, but I’m pretty sure Glenn skipped his Home Ec classes.” Molander opened the kitchen door. “After you...”
Lilja stepped into the kitchen and immediately realized that Molander had a point. There was a pile of dirty dishes on the counter, and a small mountain of pizza boxes and half-eaten pizzas — all Hawaiian — on the table. There were two pots on the stove: one full of fuzzy green pasta and another of old meat sauce filled with a few worms. A swarm of flies buzzed around in bustling ecstasy, as if they didn’t know where they should start the party. Every breath of the thick air felt like a step closer to death, and Lilja tried to inhale as little as she possibly could while rushing to open the window.
“Let’s reason our way through this mess,” Molander said, scanning the room. Lilja cautiously opened the fridge but quickly closed it again.
“Since there’s no immediately visible safe, we can safely assume that it’s hidden away somewhere.”
“No, really?” Lilja said sarcastically.
“I’m not finished. Even if the safe is hidden, he probably wouldn’t want it to be too hard to access and open, wouldn’t you think?”
“You’re right. Let’s start looking.” Lilja dragged the fridge away from the wall so she could shine her flashlight behind it; there was nothing of interest.
“At least we know it’s not behind the fridge,” Molander said. “There would have been obvious marks on the linoleum if it had been there.”
Lilja looked down and saw the scrapes she had just made in the floor. She gave up with a heavy sigh. Molander wasn’t one of the best crime scene investigators in the country for nothing. He had never missed a clue for as long as she’d known him. Lilja had learned to interpret his very smile, the one that was now plastered across his face. The whole thing was just a game for him, a game at which he was brilliant. She was more than happy to allow him that joy, and she laughed.
“So where is it? You know, don’t you?”
“I have no idea.” He threw up his hands and paused artfully. “But remember what I just said: it would most likely be in a place that is as hidden as it is easily accessed.”
Lilja looked around. There were no paintings to check behind, just a Thai Airways poster with a picture of a beautiful beach. She ripped it down, but there was no safe there, either. Then she had an idea and turned to the cupboards.
“Why not?” Molander said. Lilja hurried to the turntable in the corner, emptying the two carousels of various pots and pans, a colander, and a couple of baking dishes. She crouched down and shone her flashlight inside. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for until she discovered a small door, painted the same shade of white as the wall, with a black keyhole. Lilja reached between the carousels, stuck in the key, and opened the small but thick door.
The cubby was more or less empty, except for a dark, square box. Lilja put on a pair of gloves and carefully lifted the compact box out of the safe and held it up to the light. Molander removed the tightly secured lid to see what was inside.
The box was full of homemade DVDs. Lilja started picking up one after the other, reading the handwritten labels: THAILAND ’97, DRUNK CHICK ’01.
“Look at this,” Molander said, holding up a disc. VISIT TO MJÄLLE’S ’93.
36
“WHAT DID YOU THINK?” Fabian asked as soon as they left their seats. He regretted his question at once. He personally abhorred being asked that right after seeing a movie. He still blushed whenever he thought of the TV4 reporter who had shoved a microphone in his face to ask his opinion after the unsubtitled premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs at the Stockholm Film Festival. Fabian had told her that he’d hardly understood any of the rapid-fire dialogue but he’d liked the music at least, and he followed up with an ooga-chaka-ooga-shaka.
“It was fine,” Theodor answered with a shrug. It was obvious that Theodor had enjoyed the movie, but Fabian didn’t mention it. Fabian had liked Inception a lot and had been looking forward to it for more than a year.
He’d had a weakness for action movies for as long as he could remember. But he preferred those that went deeper than just thrills. Some of his favourite films fit into that category — Star Wars, for example. He remembered seeing it for the first time, gasping during the opening scene as the nearly endless spaceship zoomed along. He had never seen anything like it. And the film only got better from there. When the final battle on the Death Star was over, twelve-year-old Fabian had staggered out of the movie theatre on shaky legs, forever changed.
Fabian looked around in confusion before he realized that they’d exited onto the back street of Smedjegatan instead of through the main entrance on Södergatan.
“How about a spin?”
Theodor looked at him quizzically, which was the very reaction Fabian was hoping for. He explained that a spin was one of the activities that made Helsingborg one of the best cities in the world. It involved getting on the ferry to Helsingør on a one-way ticket and then staying there, eating and drinking tax-free, until you didn’t know which country you were in. Theodor shrugged an uninterested okay.
*
FABIAN AND THEODOR WERE shown to one of the window tables in the restaurant area, where the tables were set with white cloths and candles. Fabian let Theodor order whatever he wanted and they both decided on hamburgers with fries and large Cokes. He asked Theodor how it felt to move to a new city, but he received only monosyllabic, uninformative answers. They felt like nails in the coffin of their relationship, lifeless and beyond salvation.
Once they were done eating, silence lay across the table like a wet blanket, sucking up most of the oxygen in the air. The waitress came over, asked if they were finished, and started clearing their table.
“Would you like any dessert?”
“Theo? What do you think?”
“No, that’s okay. I’m full.”
“Nothing more to drink either? Another Coke?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“I’m going to have a beer, please.”
The waitress nodded and disappeared. I’m sure she gets it, Fabian thought, gazing out the window. Helsingør Harbour was approaching far too slowly. And they still had half the journey left.
He regretted giving in to Sonja’s pressure to take out Theodor. This whole plan had been her idea — talk about making a chore out of something that should be fun. It was doomed to fail.
He probably would have refused to speak if he were in Theodor’s place.
“You’re not still upset about Sweden Rock, are you?”
Theodor rolled his eyes and appeared to be looking for somewhere to escape to.
“Just so you know, we only said no out of concern. I’m sure you can go next year or the year after.”
“Sure.” Theodor’s eyes were glued to his empty Coke glass.
“So how does it feel?”
“What?”
“You know... the move and everything.”
“You already asked me that question.”
“I know, but I didn’t get much of an answer. Are you happy with your room?”
Theodor shrugged mutely.
“Well, you’ve certainly spent a lot of time shut away in there recently, so it must not be that bad.” He sighed and wondered what else he should say. “I know it must be tough with your friends and everything, but I’m absolutely certain that —”
“Oh my God, stop bugging me about that! Did I say it was tough? Huh? Did I?”
“Theo, take it easy. That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what the hell did you mean? You and Mom are the ones having a tough time, which is why we moved in the first place. You don’t t
hink I get that?”
The arrival of his beer three minutes later broke the silence and was like a slap in the face. It felt like definitive proof of his failure as a father, a role he apparently couldn’t handle without alcohol. He decided not to touch his drink and prepared himself for a long trip home.
37
MORTEN STEENSTRUP, THE COP who refused to die, was easier to find than he had initially hoped. He overheard a journalist from Politiken asking the receptionist on the first floor where Morten was in the hospital.
He followed the journalist, took a seat in the waiting room with all the other members of the media, and waited for his chance. Three hours later, he had all the information he needed to complete his task: Steenstrup’s room number, his condition and the treatment, and — most importantly — confirmation that he was under guard.
A female police officer arrived and preoccupied most of the reporters. No one even noticed when he put down the health magazine he had been pretending to read for the last hour and walked over to the bathroom as the journalist from Politiken came out. He went in, locked the door behind him, and quickly realized that the journalist was having stomach issues.
He took the opportunity to relieve his bladder and to top up his water bottle with a few cups of cold water; he was struck by how bad the tap water tasted as soon as you took one step outside of Sweden. He stuffed the legs of his pants into his socks, tightened his bootlaces, and took a rope with a hook on one end from his backpack. He then took out a pair of thin gloves, put them on, and smoothed them out until they fit like an extra layer of skin.
He was ready.
He grabbed the toilet brush, which was leaning against the wall in the corner, closed the lid of the toilet with one boot, and climbed up on the handicap bars, balancing with legs spread wide. He pushed aside one of the tiles of the drop ceiling with the toilet brush, fastened the hook onto a wire duct, hopped back down to the floor, replaced the brush, and unlocked the door, well aware that he was courting danger with his actions. He had decided that a toilet cubicle locked for an excessively long time would attract unnecessary attention and as a result could pose an even greater risk than an unlocked door.
He had no trouble climbing up the rope, thanks to the heavy physical training regime he had been doing for the past two years. Fitting through the small gap at the top was more difficult; there was less space than he had counted on between the tiles and the actual ceiling, and he had to take off his backpack in order to fit on top of the air duct. He gathered up the rope and shoved it into his outside pocket, replaced the ceiling tile, put on a mask, and cautiously began to use his hands to pull himself along the duct, which showed no signs of giving way despite his weight.
He pulled himself out so he was over the waiting room. The ceiling height was much more generous here, and he could get up and crawl along the duct on all fours, passing humming air handlers. He heard the annoyed voices of the journalists below him as they protested the scanty information they had received from the female police officer, who could do no more than repeat the response from her superiors: “In light of the ongoing investigation we have no comment at the present time, but we will hold a press conference as soon as we...” He knew exactly what that meant.
They didn’t know a goddamn thing.
He crawled on top of a dusty section of the duct and arrived at a split going ninety degrees to the left and the right. He took out his Neofab Legion II, the world’s most powerful flashlight. Despite the swirling dust that reflected most of the light back at him, he could see about sixty metres to the right and thirty to the left. In other words, he had arrived at the corridor that led out to the exit on the right and into the guarded ward on the left.
He followed the duct toward the ward. When he was directly above the entrance, he took out a spool of fishing line, which he had marked with measurements down to a half-metre, using bits of tape. While he was attaching the end of the line to the wall above the door, he heard two police officers walking just underneath him.
“Hello? Where the hell did you go?”
“Shut your trap, we’re on our way,” a voice said through a crackly two-way radio.
He left the police behind and moved into the ward. At times he had to wriggle his way through a narrow passageway or heave himself over an air handler. He lay down fishing wire as he went, noting the tape marks. He stopped at the twenty-three-metre mark, turned on the flashlight, and was met by a tangle of cables, tubes, and pipes of various sizes that branched down through the ceiling like a climbing plant that had been allowed to grow unimpeded. Whether this was a sign that he had reached his destination, he didn’t know. The air duct didn’t branch off to the left, which it should have done if there was another corridor or an examination room in that direction. All he had been able to see through the glass doors in the waiting room was that the police officers and doctors turned left somewhere around this point. He had counted their steps, starting at the door to the ward, and calculated that the turn had to come around twenty-three metres down the corridor.
He turned off his flashlight and pulled himself over to an air handler, from which he could reach a fluorescent light. He tried to lift off the casing but it was firmly attached. Why hadn’t he brought tin shears? He let out a long sigh and felt the moisture in his mask turning to drops, which ran down his chin. He needed to think and go through his options. He made his way back to the duct, lay down on his back, and closed his eyes.
He didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until he heard the voices of police officers beneath him. It was uncharacteristic of him. He followed them from above, discovering that he had misjudged the distance of the left turn by two or three metres. At that point, the duct branched off as well, and he could easily follow them another ten metres or so before they stopped. On the way he heard the officers discussing Morten Steenstrup’s heroic deed; they were in agreement that it had been more foolhardy and stupid than anything else.
“Aw, shut up, he’s going to get a ton of pussy when he’s back. Hell, he could probably bathe in pussy if he wanted.”
In all probability, the officers were on their way to guard the entrance to Morten Steenstrup’s hospital room, but there were several rooms in the vicinity, and it was impossible for him to know exactly which one Morten was in. The duct split in several different directions. The only thing he could do was wait for a lead.
He overheard the policewoman from earlier standing outside one of the rooms. She was apparently going to Morten’s room for the second time, against the doctor’s wishes. The officers on duty asked for her ID, unlocked the door, and let her and the doctor in, unaware that by doing so they had just signed their colleague’s death warrant.
38
Irene Lilja wiped away her tears right before walking into the conference room with the rest of her colleagues. Who were they really after — the perpetrator or the victim? She felt like hitting something or someone, or maybe sticking her fingers down her throat and vomiting. But instead, she had to dry her tears and push her feelings aside and act like a professional. She glanced over her notes quickly before summarizing them aloud for the team:
VIDEO 1: MID-1980S
— Clearly been transferred from a videotape, poor quality. Handheld camera.
— Glenn and Jörgen are mostly having vanilla sex with various women. Not sure if they’re girlfriends or prostitutes. All acting like porn stars.
— Some group sex with Glenn, Jörgen, and Jörgen’s wife, Lina.
— Everyone’s drunk and giggly.
— All for fun with different positions.
— Jörgen forces his member into Lina’s mouth. She gags. A blow to the face. Glenn laughs and masturbates.
VIDEO 2: MID-1990S
— More sex and violence.
— Better camera on a tripod.
— It looks like Thailand, and the girls look underage.
— Anal.
— Urine.
— A drugged young woman, conf
used and chained up. A bag over her head and a cigarette pressed to her nipple.
“And that was just the beginning,” Lilja said, looking up from her notes.
“So Glenn and Jörgen systematically raped and abused women?” said Tuvesson.
Lilja nodded.
“What sorts of women?” Klippan asked. “Prostitutes?”
“I don’t know. In some of the videos from the early nineties, Jörgen’s wife, Lina, is involved, but she isn’t in them anymore after he hit her and forced her to have oral sex on camera. It looks like they would bring home pretty much anyone, drug them, and then leave them somewhere to sober up.”
“They filmed everything?” Klippan asked, and Lilja nodded.
“And transferred the videotapes onto DVDs afterward.”
“It’s just sick,” Klippan said, shaking his head.
“What’s so sick about it?” said Molander. “It’s just a way to relive and remember events. The videos functioned as a collection of trophies for them.”
Klippan looked at Molander in disgust. “Ingvar, the whole thing is sick.”
“In any case, I want you to look at the footage from one tape,” Lilja interrupted, holding up one of the DVDs. “It’s different from all the rest.”
“In what way?” Tuvesson asked.
“First, there are no women in it, only our victim... our killer.” She inserted the DVD into the machine and pressed play. A shaky, grainy picture projected onto the white wall; it had been filmed with a handheld camera. The first shot showed a stairwell with bare, flickering lights on the ceiling and graffiti on the walls. There was a time-stamp in the lower right-hand corner.
1993-04-13 6:17 p.m.
Jörgen enters the frame. He is wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt and is obviously drunk. He has a beer in one hand, and lifts it toward the camera as he rings the doorbell of one of the apartments. His lips are moving, but the sound on the video recorder has been turned off. He drains the last of his beer and points at the floor. The camera follows his finger and zooms in on a blurry view of Jörgen opening his fly and taking out his penis. The automatic focus moves in and out between the label on the bottle and Jörgen’s penis as he urinates into the bottle...
Victim Without a Face Page 19
