That he wasn’t going to get there in time.
That she would not allow him to prevent her from completing her task.
When he reached Eden’s floor, there was nothing but silence.
The absence of sound made him feel sick.
He grabbed the door handle. Pulled it. Hard.
And found that the door was open.
Surprise made him lose concentration, just for a second. Then he could see once more. With terrible clarity.
Eden’s husband was lying on his stomach in the hallway. Efraim crouched down automatically and felt for a pulse.
He felt the faintest throb against his fingertips.
Erratic, but it would have to do.
He stepped over the body and continued into the apartment.
He had expected a fight. An attack. Loud screams and vicious blows. To her head and neck, arms and knees. Whatever he had to do to put her out of action.
But she was one step ahead of him.
And Efraim realized he would never catch up.
She was standing in Eden’s bedroom.
He could see her in profile.
The main light was not switched on; only the streetlamps cast a faint glow into the room.
That was all the light he needed.
He could see what there was to see. The two girls, lying in their parents’ double bed. Fast asleep. As peaceful as only children can be when they are asleep.
“Don’t do it,” he said.
He saw the gun in her hand.
He tried to play for time.
“Was it you who murdered Gideon?” he said.
She was taken aback.
“He’s dead?”
“They say he killed himself.”
“I’m not surprised. I always thought he was weak.”
Efraim wondered how she knew. Was it Gideon she’d had an affair with, or Saul? He no longer cared.
Instead he looked again at the gun she was holding. Saw the extension to the black barrel.
A silencer.
That was why he had heard nothing when she shot Eden’s husband.
Surely she hadn’t already shot the girls, had she?
He took a step closer, his hand closing around the gun in his pocket.
Looked at the sleeping girls.
“Don’t do it,” he said again. “This has nothing to do with them.”
She turned to face him.
Slowly, as if she had all the time in the world. As if she knew, better than he did, that he would never be able to bring himself to shoot her.
“Indeed it does,” she said. “And you’re too late.”
He couldn’t stop himself.
He hurled himself at the bed, tore off the covers. And saw the blood on the children’s pajamas.
He stared at the darker of the two girls, the one who looked so much like his sister.
Tears filled his eyes, blurring his vision. He walked around the bed, positioned himself opposite her.
“For fuck’s sake. What’s the point of this?”
“You know that as well as I do. And now my work is done.”
Efraim shook his head.
Pulled out his gun. Took aim, knowing that she wouldn’t have time to shoot him first.
“You’re going nowhere,” he said.
“You think we should stay here? And do what? Wait to welcome home the rest of the family?”
He forced himself not to take his eyes off her, not to look at the girls again. Perhaps it would be just as well to wait for Eden, because what did she have to live for now? What was left when everything had been taken away?
“I don’t think so,” she said.
She raised her gun, and there they stood.
Two people who had once loved each other enough to create another person.
There was nothing left of what they had had.
Not one iota.
“I promised to take revenge,” Efraim said. “And I did.”
Nadia’s face contorted in sorrow.
“You imagined much less revenge than I did,” she said. “Much less. You wanted to spare Gideon’s daughter.”
“I believed in a just revenge. I didn’t know we thought so differently.”
The gun shook in her hand.
“You can’t do it,” she said. “You can’t shoot me, can you? Not even now.”
He opened his mouth to say that she was wrong.
He could do it.
But he didn’t want to.
She got there first.
“But I can, Efraim. I can.”
And she did.
Efraim twisted and fell, landed on his back on the bed, and automatically began to shuffle away. His strength quickly failed. He was unable to raise his gun and fire. The last thing he saw in this life was Nadia’s face as she bent over him. She appeared to be crying.
“Forgive me,” she said. “Forgive me.”
And with that, she rested her head on his chest and felt him draw his final breath.
AFTERWARD
The alarm was raised by the neighbor in the apartment opposite. He had been on his way out when he heard a door open—first once, and then again. Curious, he peered through the peephole. And saw Mikael Lundell, the priest, standing in the doorway, facing a woman.
Who took a gun out of her pocket and shot the priest in the chest.
Without making a sound.
The neighbor edged as far away from the door as possible, then called the police.
• • •
Alex Recht was still in his office, so he was informed about the call that had come in minutes earlier from Sankt Eriksplan. Suspected shooting in the stairwell. Could it have anything to do with his case?
“Why should it?” he wanted to know, thinking that enough was enough.
“The residents of the apartment in question are Eden and Mikael Lundell,” his colleague said. “Have those names come up in your inquiry?”
Four minutes later Alex was in a car heading from Kungsholmen to Sankt Eriksplan at speed, blue lights flashing and siren screaming.
Not Eden, he thought. Anyone but Eden.
He called Fredrika.
“Suspected shooting at Eden Lundell’s apartment on Sankt Eriksplan. Come if you can.”
• • •
The apartment door was closed but not locked when they arrived. The stairwell was quickly filled with police officers and a team from the National Task Force, who by chance happened to be on exercise nearby when Eden’s neighbor called the emergency number.
They had their guns at the ready, heavy boots thumping on the hard surface of the stairs.
Alex waited outside, the snow falling on his face and clothes.
He didn’t even feel the cold.
He stood there without moving a muscle.
Until someone shouted that the apartment was clear.
He could come up.
There were two children and a man in what must be the master bedroom. The children were lying in the man’s arms.
Alex Recht, the inspector who thought he had seen it all up to now, dropped his gun on the floor and wept.
His prayer had been heard.
Eden Lundell had not been shot. But her entire family was dead.
• • •
Eden arrived.
No one could stop her.
And why should they?
She must be allowed to see with her own eyes.
Because Alex didn’t have the words to tell her.
She was carrying a violin case. She put it down on the floor. It remained there after she had left, when they discovered that one of the children was still alive. The other child was dead. Just like her father.
• • •
Eden disappeared.
According to the officers on the street, she might as well have gone up in smoke.
At the same time, Alex realized that the man who had been lying on the bed with the children didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to the man posing
with Eden in the photographs on the bedside table.
“Listen to me, there’s a man missing here!” he shouted. “Eden Lundell’s husband, the priest who was shot. We have to find him! Fast!”
The angels had shown Eden their mercy for a second time tonight, because Mikael Lundell was found in a closet in the hallway, carelessly hidden under a pile of blankets. The CSIs had missed the fact that the bloodstains smeared across the floor led to the closet door. Eden’s husband was tall and well-built; whoever had shot him had only just managed to push him inside.
“He’s lost a lot of blood,” the paramedic said. “We don’t even know if he’ll survive the trip to the hospital.”
“Do what you can,” Alex said.
He hoped the priest had God on his side.
And he wondered why Eden hadn’t said anything.
Because she must have known it wasn’t her husband lying on the bed.
• • •
Alex called the morgue where the bodies were being kept overnight.
“The man who was brought in a little while ago—did he have any ID on him?”
“I thought you knew who he was.”
“We were wrong.”
He waited while the technician went off to check what had been found among the man’s belongings.
At that moment Fredrika Bergman walked into the apartment, ashen-faced and with tears in her eyes.
“Sorry I didn’t get here earlier. I should have realized; I heard the sirens when I was walking home.”
Alex reached out and stroked her arm.
The technician came back.
“I found a passport,” she said. “He’s not Swedish.”
“Israeli?”
“Yes, his name is Efraim Kiel.”
Alex let out a long breath. Slowly he lowered the hand holding the phone.
“We’ve found Efraim Kiel,” he said.
Fredrika looked bewildered.
“What was he doing here?”
Alex shook his head. He knew that Eden had kept a vital piece of the puzzle from him.
He knew that he still didn’t have it.
And that terrified him.
Because now he understood why Eden had refused to go to the hospital with her daughter.
“Eden knows who did this,” he said. “She’s going to take this city apart if we don’t stop her.”
“According to the neighbor, it was a woman who shot Eden’s husband,” Fredrika said.
They looked at one another, both well aware of who that woman must be.
“Mona Samson,” Alex said.
He immediately sent a patrol to the office on Torsgatan and her apartment on Hantverkargatan.
“She won’t be there,” Fredrika said.
“I don’t think so either,” Alex said gloomily; he still didn’t understand what had happened. If Gideon was the killer who had taken the boys, did that mean Mona Samson was his partner? The person who had lain on the roof and tried to shoot Polly Eisenberg? Who was still missing . . .
Alex pressed both hands to his head.
“I’m going mad,” he said. “What the hell is all this about?”
Fredrika looked at the blood on the sheets.
“It’s as if this doesn’t concern us at all,” she said. “As if the players in this game are following their own rules, with their own referee and linesmen.”
“I can’t accept that. I want to know what happened.”
“So do I, but who’s going to tell us?”
“Eden,” Alex said.
“Do you really think she knows? If she does, then surely she would have been able to prevent this.”
Alex spread his hands in a gesture of resignation.
He felt like crying, but managed to hold it together.
“Where do we think Mona Samson might be? She can’t have got very far,” Fredrika said.
Alex forced himself to think.
Where would someone like Mona Samson go?
“She’s on her way out of the country,” he said, unexpectedly sure of himself.
“By plane?”
“Yes.”
He ran out of the apartment, sent a patrol car straight to the airport. Fredrika followed him.
“Alex, we have to be prepared for the possibility that we might not find her. We know her name isn’t Mona Samson, for a start.”
“We’ve got a sketch. We’ll put that out.”
Fredrika had seen the sketch and knew it was worthless. So did Alex.
“We have to find her,” he said. “We have to.”
They looked at one another, both at a loss. They reached a silent mutual agreement: they didn’t want to wait in Eden’s apartment.
To the relief of the CSIs, they left the building and went and sat in one of the patrol cars which was parked with its engine idling.
Alex thought about what Peder Rydh had said: that they were looking for two perpetrators who couldn’t agree, who had fallen out.
He told Fredrika as she leaned back against the headrest, utterly exhausted.
“So what we saw here tonight is the result of two killers who couldn’t agree?”
She sounded dubious.
“I don’t know what we saw here tonight,” Alex said. “How does Eden fit into all this? Why did her daughters have to die?”
“Because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time? This is such a mess; I can’t see a single clear thread that runs through the whole case.”
“You think it’s a coincidence?” Alex said, gazing out of the window. “That there was no logical reason for the murderer to come to Eden’s apartment? There just happened to be some kind of confrontation?”
It was his turn to sound hesitant now.
Fredrika pulled off her hat, dotted with snow crystals.
“I think we missed Efraim Kiel’s part in all this,” she said. “Given what I learned on my visit to Israel, I’m wondering if the Israelis know more than they’re letting on and if Efraim Kiel was on some kind of mission over here.”
“You mean the Israeli police might have asked him to look into the murders, as he was here anyway?”
She nodded.
“Something along those lines. That would explain why he was so interested and why he asked so many questions. And why he’s been avoiding the Swedish police: since all those involved have an intelligence-related background, he wanted to run his own race.”
She threw down her hat.
“I’m not saying that’s definitely the case,” she went on. “It’s just an idea, and it could explain things.”
Alex shifted in his seat, feeling a fresh surge of energy.
“I think it’s a damn good idea,” he said.
For the first time a coherent picture was slowly beginning to emerge. Eden had said that Säpo had its own reasons for keeping Efraim under surveillance. Could that have led him to Eden’s apartment? Had Mona Samson followed him there?
That must be what happened.
He was just about to share his thoughts with Fredrika when a colleague yanked the car door open and shouted:
“A woman’s just been killed on Odenplan. She stepped out in front of a car—there was nothing the driver could do. We think it’s Mona Samson. In fact we know it is: she had a gun fitted with a silencer in her pocket, and several Samson Security AB business cards. Plus her appearance matches the sketch.”
Alex didn’t know what to feel; every emotion drained away, leaving him empty.
“So she’s gone,” Fredrika said.
“Yes,” their colleague replied.
“Good.”
There was nothing more to say.
Fredrika and Alex simply sat there in the car, waiting for life to begin again.
During the first week in February, a little girl came wandering into the Swedish embassy in Helsinki. She was crying so hard that at first it was difficult to work out what she was saying, but eventually they managed to get her name.
Polly Eisenberg.
&
nbsp; She had been driven to a street nearby and told which way to go.
Nobody knew who had dropped her off, including the child.
Nor did she know where she had been.
Carmen Eisenberg had been sitting in her apartment overwhelmed by apathy, having lost both her husband and children within a week; Polly’s return brought her back to life.
Gideon’s parents came to Stockholm to collect their son’s body. He was laid to rest in the country he had left ten years earlier. Carmen and Polly were there, too; Polly wore a pretty dress and played with her doll. Her mother sat beside her, pale and silent. She didn’t move a muscle throughout the entire ceremony.
• • •
Slowly the truth emerged, until eventually the only thing missing was the murder weapon.
Through Gideon Eisenberg’s employer, they learned that he had had two meetings with the woman known as Mona Samson. The meetings had taken place a few months earlier and, as far as the employer knew, had not led to any definite collaboration.
At least, not on a professional basis.
When the police went through Gideon’s computer and personal diary, it turned out that he had met Mona on numerous occasions afterward. In bars and restaurants. Outside working hours.
“Gideon had a lot to apologize to his wife for when he died,” Fredrika Bergman said acidly. “He was cheating on her.”
“So Mona was having relationships with both Saul and Gideon,” Alex said. “Can we draw that conclusion?”
Fredrika thought so. “Perhaps she and Gideon wanted us to think that Saul was the perpetrator. And we almost fell for it; if we hadn’t managed to discredit Gideon’s alibi, we would never have believed Saul’s story.”
Two Israeli passports were found on Mona Samson, one in the name of Mona Samson, the other in the name of Nadia Tahir. They didn’t know why she had two passports, and the Israelis couldn’t—or wouldn’t—explain it. Around her neck she wore a pendant with the inscription “Benjamin’s mom.” They had no idea what that meant either.
They also found out that Gideon had been on a business trip to Israel during the week when Abraham and Simon were exchanging emails with the Lion.
“He was responsible for the email correspondence,” Fredrika said. “He came up with ‘the Lion’ probably to distract attention from himself in a subsequent police investigation. I don’t suppose we’ll ever find out who picked up the boys on their way to their tennis coaching session; it could have been Gideon or it could have been Mona Samson.”
The Chosen Page 38
