The Golden Calf

by Helene Tursten

  “Did you know then that Kjell had also received a finger?”

  “No, not until yesterday.”

  “Why did he get one?”

  Sanna raised an eyebrow and looked directly at Irene. “I really have no idea.” Her surprise was genuine.

  “Was Kjell involved in ph.com?”

  “No, absolutely not! He was busy with the hotel and the two restaurants.”

  “Did he put money in Poundfix when Thomas Bonetti and Joachim Rothstaahl were in London?”

  “No. Kjell put all his money into the hotel. It was a money pit, according to him.” Suddenly Sanna leapt to her feet. “Oh my God! If you take the finger then I can’t send it back! Then it’s all over for me and Ludwig!”

  Tommy just looked calmly at her. “Who were you supposed to send it to?”

  Sanna took a huge breath, and fear shone in her eyes again. “I have no idea. They’re going to contact me.”

  “How?”

  “Through Edward. He is going to call tonight or tomorrow. If I find it, I’m supposed to get further instructions.”

  Irene and Tommy stood up at the same time. Tommy placed a hand on Sanna’s arm. “We’re going to help you look for it. Then you can tell Edward in good conscience that you’ve searched but didn’t find it. Kjell could have gotten rid of it, just like you and Edward. And remember, the press hasn’t found out anything yet about Thomas’s missing fingers. They also don’t know we found one of those fingers at Joachim’s place. Your blackmailers have no idea that the police already know about them.”

  A bit of what he said managed to reach Sanna and she visibly relaxed, but only a little, as if she wasn’t entirely convinced.

  TO IRENE’S GREAT relief, Tommy took it upon himself to go through the freezer. Sanna disappeared into a room that was probably her late husband’s bedroom. This cluttered apartment seemed to present a monumental task to search. Irene walked into the hallway and tried to think logically.

  Where would someone hide part of a dead body? In a box, a chest. Irene looked around and her eyes fell on an old-fashioned wooden chest with iron hinges set next to one of the walls. The key was in the iron lock, and Irene lifted the heavy lid. The only things inside this chest were a pair of rubber boots, a flashlight, and a set of blue Helly Hansen rain clothes.

  She searched carefully until she was convinced that the finger wasn’t there.

  Where’s another likely place? If not a chest, what would one use? A picture rose into her mind from her subconscious. The urn. Quite possible. She strode purposefully back to the library. The black stone urn was still in its place on the mantelpiece. The elegant handles still swirled up its sides, and its surface was polished until it reflected everything like a mirror. The stone had beautiful green veining with slight glistenings of gold. She lifted it and put it down on the lace cloth of the coffee table. She had to use both hands; the urn was deceptively heavy. The lid was difficult to remove. After a bit of twisting back and forth, it finally gave way.

  One glance into the dark was enough to see that a vitamin C tube was the only object inside.

  IN A FRIENDLY but firm way, Tommy convinced Sanna that she was in no state to drive. They decided that Tommy would drive her back to the house in Askim, but Irene suspected that Tommy was more interested in getting to drive a Mercedes Cabriolet. She wouldn’t mind acting the chauffeur in that car herself. As Tommy handed her the keys to their much more anonymous unmarked car, he also slid the key ring to Kjell B:son Ceder’s apartment into her palm. It was a smart strategy. While he kept Sanna occupied, Irene would have a chance to return the keys to Elsy without drawing much attention to them. They hoped Elsy would forget about it as soon as possible and not mention it to Sanna.

  Tommy followed traffic to Vasterleden. Irene had no trouble keeping up with him since she’d driven this route for fifteen years.

  So much new information had come to her just in the past few hours. She had much to think through. Could someone extort money simply by sending a severed finger in the mail?

  Probably not. The person might go to the police. If that person had nothing to hide, that is. So the finger must be a threat to reveal something.

  What did all these people have in common that they would want to hide? Money. Large amounts of money. Cheating to get large amounts of money. Certainly lots of people felt cheated by the Bonetti-Bergman-Kaegler trio in the ph.com crash. Scandinavian businesses had been scammed by Bonetti and Rothstaahl in the Poundfix swindle. Now Rothstaahl and Bergman had started up a similar scam in Paris. How many people had they already managed to cheat? Bonetti was suspected of moving many millions out of ph.com before it went bust, but what about Sanna and Philip? They’d gotten through the dot-com crash relatively unscathed. They’d both had a lot of money three years ago. Then the plastic tubes with the fingers arrived, and four people were forced to pay up.

  Why didn’t Philip Bergman get a finger? Everything indicated that he’d been blackmailed, too; his fortune had also gone down rapidly. Same thing with Joachim Rothstaahl.

  And how did a finger suddenly show up in Edward Fenton’s mailbox? His investment bank dealt in risky capital. It was part of the game that some investments would go bust, according to Sanna. Why would he be of interest to an extortionist? Only if he, like the others, had something to hide.

  That’s where it went wrong. Five victims of extortion would mean five fingers, and there were only four.

  Irene decided it was high time to contact Edward Fenton.

  THEY WERE LUCKY. Elsy appeared at the door anxious and wringing her hands.

  “Ludwig has a tummy ache. He’s screaming and … has diarrhea,” she said breathlessly.

  Loud screaming in the background confirmed her story. Sanna rushed into the house to take care of her son.

  Irene smiled as she turned to Elsy and handed her the key chain.

  “Sanna was in the apartment, so we didn’t need these,” she said.

  “I see. Never mind. I mean … that’s good,” Elsy said.

  She opened her flowery bag and dropped them inside.

  “Has the boy been in pain since he woke up?” asked Tommy.

  “Yes. He often wakes up with a tummy ache. Maybe it’s colic. Poor little thing … he didn’t want anything to drink, either. And I’ve been changing diapers every fifteen minutes.”

  They stood in the hall and let Elsy chat on and on about her grandson with his stomach pains. When they finally thanked her for her time, it appeared she’d completely forgotten about the key chain.

  “HOW DO WE find Edward Fenton?” asked Tommy when they got back to the car.

  “I think I’ll give Glen a call,” Irene said.

  “Good idea.”

  Irene had met Glen Thompson in London when she was investigating a triple murder in Kullahult. It had been a complicated and high-profile case, written up in both the British and Scandinavian presses. Irene and Glen had become good friends. His mother was Brazilian and his father was Scottish, which made Glen one of the most exotic people at Scotland Yard. The Thompson family had visited Irene on their way to Nordkap. They’d driven up in an RV with lively six-year-old twin boys. Having twins was another thing Irene and Glen had in common, although Glen’s boys were identical.

  Irene knew she could count on Glen for help finding Edward Fenton.

  Chapter 18

  THE FIRST THING Irene did the next morning was to give Glen Thompson a call. She was in luck and reached him on her first attempt. They had a good long chat before they got down to business. When she finally began to tell him about the ins and outs of the difficult investigation, it took much longer than she thought, even though she didn’t include everything. Glen did not interrupt her once, even when, at times, her English was problematic.

  “A hell of a lot of problems you have there!” he said, laughing, once she’d finished her long-winded tale.

  She could only agree.

  “I’ll go ahead and contact this Edward Fenton and
tell him to call you in Göteborg. Are you reachable this afternoon?”

  “You have my cell phone number,” she said.

  “All right, I’ll call back later.”

  “SO, WHAT THE hell is going on here?” demanded Andersson.

  Irene and Tommy had just reported the latest twist in the case, which seemed to make the superintendent feel that things were just too complicated.

  “A talk with Edward Fenton might clear things up,” Tommy soothed.

  Irene had explained her theory of blackmail to the rest of the team, and both Birgitta and Kajsa agreed with it.

  “Extortion seems entirely consistent with what we know,” Birgitta said. “We’ve gone through all their finances again, and everyone involved seems to have spent their fortunes remarkably fast. Thomas Bonetti’s money went missing right after he did.”

  “Bonetti was the first victim,” Andersson said.

  “And he had the most money,” Kajsa pointed out.

  Kajsa’s shudder-inducing bruises had begun to fade to green in certain spots, although light purple still dominated. Her stitches had been taken out the day before, and she no longer had a bandage around her head—just a small one over the actual wound. She didn’t appear to worry too much about how the colorful display affected her appearance. Irene had to admire her stubbornness and her endurance. She also noted that Tommy was sitting next to her. Had they gotten together over the weekend? She didn’t dare ask.

  “But why a sudden rush to kill Ceder, Bergman, and Rothstaahl?” asked Andersson.

  “If we knew the answer to that, maybe we could wrap this up.” Irene sighed.

  “Someone panicked for some reason. Or perhaps they just decided to get rid of all the leads back to them,” Tommy said, thinking out loud.

  Irene nodded. She had also been struck by a thought. “Everything in this investigation is tied to money. Even the extortion, which led to murder. Oh, and some narcotics in Paris, so many that it suggests dealing. Enough to be a felony.”

  “Oh, Paris,” Andersson said. “I almost forgot. Where did I put it.…” Andersson was huffing as he searched through his stacks of papers on the table. “Here it is!” He put on his reading glasses and looked down at the sheet of paper. “We’ve gotten the results on the hair samples you found in the Rothstaahl apartment.”

  Andersson paused for effect and looked at Irene over the top of his glasses. Irene was surprised to see the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth. “As we expected, most belonged to Rothstaahl and Bergman. We put those aside right away. That left samples from four people; two of whom we know, of course, Irene and Kajsa. We put those aside as well. So there are two left and”—he broke out into a real smile as he let the bomb fall—“one of them, with a high degree of probability, is Ludwig’s father!”

  Andersson had really created dramatic scene with his information, and he couldn’t complain about the effect it had on his team. Irene realized she was sitting there with her mouth open. She’d known instinctively that it would be important to identify Ludwig’s father, but it was a twist that he would be a person of interest in the case. It took a few seconds for the wheels in her mind to begin turning again. One thing was clear: the unknown man in New York was a fake. Now they must really locate Ludwig’s father. They had good reason to go back to Sanna and lean on her for the truth, and she couldn’t weasel out—Ludwig’s father was tied up in the murders!

  “So, Ludwig’s father was probably in the apartment. There is one more hair sample, and it seems to come from an older person, since it’s gray,” Andersson continued.

  “The man who shot at me was blonde! Is he Ludwig’s father?” Irene asked. She thought a moment. “We have to press Sanna hard. Who is the father of her son? What kind of hold did the extortionist have on her? I know that she’s reluctant to talk to us, but how much pressure can she take? She was beside herself with fear yesterday. She’s afraid for her life.”

  With a shudder, she remembered how the whites of Sanna’s eyes had glittered in terror when she’d been caught in the hallway. She feared being killed, and with good reason, considering how many people had been murdered that she knew.

  Fredrik Stridh asked to speak. “Jonny and I have tried to find out why Bergman and Rothstaahl had to go to Göteborg at the same time. It’s now clear they went to meet a third party, but we haven’t found out who that is. I tested the theory that it might have been Kjell B:son Ceder, but no. An interesting sidelight is that Ceder was having an affair with his secretary, Malin Eriksson. She finally confessed everything to me when I asked her one more time what Ceder had been doing that Monday evening before he was killed. Eriksson finally decided to tell us the truth. They were supposed to meet at Ceder’s apartment. Malin Eriksson had a key, and she waited there all evening until midnight. She’d made dinner for him, but he never came. For obvious reasons.”

  “So, Ceder knew that Sanna and Ludwig would be away at her sister’s apartment that evening. In his own apartment, his mistress was waiting for him with a candlelit dinner. So he decided to meet the killer in the empty house. That’s why he was shot in Askim! And unfortunately, he never told Malin Eriksson who he was meeting,” said Irene.

  At last they knew why Ceder had been killed at Askim instead of in his apartment. Everyone, even Sanna, had been mystified why he’d been killed in a house he seldom visited.

  “Goddamn woman, this Malin! Why didn’t she tell us sooner?” growled the superintendent.

  “She’s a married woman—and to a policeman!”

  Andersson looked crestfallen. “She is? I see.… Anyone we know?”

  “Not really. It’s a new guy in PO 1,” Fredrik explained. “He’d been working in Stockholm and came here last spring with his wife. They’re both originally from Göteborg. She wanted to move back home, and she’d gotten a job with Ceder.”

  So Kjell B:son Ceder had wasted no time in starting another affair with his new secretary. Sanna and Ludwig meant nothing to him—just as he meant nothing to Sanna. So why on earth did they ever get married? Another question for Sanna.

  Jonny cleared his throat so that everyone would pay attention to him. “I’ve found a lead on Thomas Bonetti’s missing boat. Remember, after he was declared missing, there was a huge search for it but it was gone without a trace? Do you also remember that last summer our colleagues in Malmö told us about the gang which dealt in stolen pleasure boats? They would falsify the numbers on the motors and the boat’s registration to sell them abroad. I had a hunch and called our friends in Malmö and asked if they’d come across a Storebro Royal Cruiser 420. They sent me a fax yesterday. One of those boats was sold to a guy in Karlskrona about two years back. The motor number had been forged, so they’re going to get back to me with the secret number they’ve retrieved from inside it.”

  “Wonderful!” exclaimed Andersson. “Now we finally know what happened to that luxury boat.”

  Irene was surprised that Jonny had taken some initiative, although she knew he could be quick on the uptake when he made an effort. Perhaps that was what had been wrong with him the past few years—he hadn’t really wanted to make an effort. Irene asked for the floor.

  “This still indicates that at least two people must have been involved in killing Thomas. A boat that big requires two people to handle it—one to steer and the other to moor it and cast off again. Plus Thomas had to be kept under guard. After they killed him, they had to get the boat to where the gang of boat thieves could pick it up. Perhaps they used two boats, one following the other, to make the delivery. Or, alternatively, the murderers had a car near that location, or perhaps they even used public transportation to get home afterward.”

  “Hardly,” said Birgitta. “That would be too big a risk. After something like that, you’d want to keep low. So he took a boat or a car.”

  “Maybe he jogged,” said Tommy.

  “Jogged?” repeated Andersson as his brow furrowed even farther. He looked surprisingly like a bulldog whenever he
did that. Irene recognized the other similarities he had with bulldogs—once he got hold of an idea, he had trouble letting go of it again. His stubbornness had helped them get to the bottom of many an investigation over the years.

  “Yes, jogged. A jogger was seen out in Askim at the time of the murder. We’ve had no replies to our many calls to come forward, even after we’ve put it in the newspaper. We also found a jogging reflector inside the house,” Tommy reminded them.

  Irene had almost forgotten about the man running in the pouring rain, who’d been seen by the dog walker. Of course talking to the jogger would be important; if nothing else, he might have seen something vital so near the house at the time of the murder. Tommy was right; the jogger was a person of interest.

  “I’m also concerned about Sanna,” Tommy said. “According to her, someone has threatened both hers and Ludwig’s lives. Of all the people who received a finger, she’s the only one still alive.”

  “Edward Fenton has one,” Irene said.

  “Or so he told Sanna. We won’t know the truth until we’ve talked to him.”

  Irene had to agree. Besides, she thought it was odd that the head of HP Johnson’s European office would be the victim of blackmail.

  “The killer is still active. He’s threatened Sanna via that Fenton guy,” Tommy said. “The next question should be: What can we do to insure her safety?”

  “If an officer is posted at her door, the killer will know that she’s squealed,” Fredrik said.

  Andersson sucked air into his cheeks like a chipmunk and then let the air out again, lips sputtering. All of his subordinates knew this meant their boss was deep in thought. Finally, he clapped his hands. “Surveillance! Twenty-four-hour surveillance on Sanna and the boy. We have two reasons: to protect their lives and the chance to grab the killers when they try.”

  “What if she’s lying?” Jonny complained. “Then we’ll have a meaningless surveillance team that will cost a huge amount of—”