After several hours they came to Ronda, which resembled a fortress on a cliff. An unmarked police car was waiting for them at the main road into town. Moya exchanged a few words with the officer in the car before they continued into the center.
“We have an address,” Moya said and turned to Lindell. “According to our sources, Urbano is there.”
He was interrupted by a call on his cell phone and listened for a few seconds.
“Our colleagues have prepared a strike. Unfortunately you cannot play an active role. You will have to follow the events from a distance.”
They drove past the old bullfighting arena that Lindell had read about in the guidebook and entered an older residential area. The car slowed down and stopped at a street corner.
“On that street,” Moya said tersely and pointed. “That’s where Urbano is supposedly to be found. Stay here.”
Lindell nodded. Moya left the car and disappeared around the corner while the driver remained in his location. She really wanted to tag along. Instead she tried to strike up a conversation with Haver, who seemed both tense and uninterested at the same time. She knew that he wasn’t a morning person, but couldn’t he have tried to put on a slightly happier face?
It was a long wait. Lindell knew that the Spanish police were approaching Urbano’s supposed location with great care. Perhaps they were working in conjunction with plainclothes officers who were going to perform duties such as garbage collection or something else that fit into the everyday picture. She tried to imagine the scene but had trouble because the environment was too foreign.
Half an hour went by without any change. She was starting to become impatient. The driver’s cell phone rang, and he listened without saying anything to the caller, whom Lindell believed to be Moya. Then he hung up and started the engine.
“There’s nobody there,” he said.
They drove around the corner and then another hundred meters. The street was now full of police cars. Curious onlookers hung out the windows. Moya was standing in front of a building with a cracked facade. The closed shutters made it appear boarded up.
“The bird has flown the coop,” he said as they stepped out.
Lindell glanced up at the building. Outside a door that had been painted green hung a small handwritten sign: Camas. She knew that this meant beds.
“This was a very simple hostel,” Moya said.
A woman of about eighty was standing in the doorway. She was draped in black. Lindell’s thoughts went to witches. The woman’s tiny eyes in her wrinkled face glared with both fury and curiosity at Lindell. Behind her there were voices, and she turned and screamed something.
“Let’s go in,” Moya said.
Reluctantly, the woman let them pass. Lindell heard her muttering. The hall was dark, with only a naked bulb in the ceiling for lighting. A man of about fifty was standing at the foot of a staircase. He said something to Moya. He had a speech impediment and seemed extremely stupid. He smelled of the stable and was gesturing wildly with his large hands.
Moya turned to them to interpret what was being said. “He is the son of the house,” he said. “He has been in his barn about a kilometer outside of town, milking the cows.”
Lindell had seen a moped leaned up against a wall, with stainless steel containers in baskets on the back, and realized it was his.
“Mother and son rent out three rooms on the upper floor. We can go up,” Moya said.
The son followed him and his speech impediment made Lindell shiver. He sounded agitated in an unpredictable way.
The first room, the door to which was open, was very simply furnished. A bed, a chair, and a wardrobe, that was all. Next to the bed there was a chamber pot. A man with sunken cheeks lay on the bed, his thin gray hair standing on end. He had a coughing fit and immediately spit into the chamber pot, which was filled with gray-green mucus. The man coughed again, spit, and seemed completely untroubled by the fact that Lindell was standing at the door.
“He has bad lungs,” Moya said apologetically. Lindell had the impression that he was ashamed of this image of his country.
Lindell continued walking. A man on a bed occupied the next room as well. He was short, almost dwarf-like, and was missing part of his leg. It had been severed just below the knee.
“He sells lottery tickets,” Moya said. Lindell was struck by a feeling of unreality at the sight of these human wrecks.
The man nodded at Lindell and reached for his prosthesis, which lay on the bedcovers.
Urbano’s room was considerably larger than the rest.
“The suite,” Lindell said to Haver.
The floor was tiled in black and white. A print of Jesus during his long-suffering journey to Calvary dominated one wall, and on the wall opposite this was a double door that stood open to the street. When she walked up to it and leaned out, she became dizzy even though they were only a couple of meters above the ground. She grabbed the wrought-iron railing and closed her eyes.
Some children were playing noisily in the street, and Lindell opened her eyes again. The dizzy spell passed. On the other side of the street, in an equally dilapidated building, all of the windows were open. A woman was walking around in one of the rooms. What Lindell noticed most distinctly were the pink slippers she was wearing and her incredibly beautiful hair, which flowed all the way to her waist. A child of perhaps two was clinging to her robe. For some reason this was the image that she would remember. The woman, the child, the slippers, and the hair. This everyday scene in what to her was such a foreign land, plunked in the middle of a dramatic phase of this investigation, not to mention at a turning point in her life—this was what became etched in her mind’s eye.
Moya pulled her back to the matter at hand by placing a hand on her shoulder.
“The woman claims that Urbano left the house very early this morning. The son, whom I have trouble understanding, claims that Urbano left a couple of minutes before he arrived. That is to say, at around five o’clock.”
Too late, Lindell thought. We were still sitting in the car. She was going to ask if the house had been under surveillance, but Moya anticipated her.
“It seems he managed to escape despite our precautions,” he said. “He may have used a back exit. There is a door that opens into a narrow passage between the buildings. There one could force oneself between the wall and an old chicken coop and reach an alley.”
The son of the house gurgled and stammered in the corridor, the man in the first room continued to cough, and the noise from the street grew louder. She heard laughter and the sound of an accelerating Vespa.
The surreal nature of the entire situation meant that Lindell was less upset than she would normally have been. She had been looking forward to putting her hands on this Urbano. He would—if he chose to cooperate—shed light on the Cederén investigation. So close, she thought, so damned close, and now the anger struck her with full force.
* * *
They left the building. Two policemen stayed behind in case Urbano returned. Lindell and Haver speculated about the possibility that he had been tipped off and decided to flee. They did not want to trouble Moya with questions. His body language indicated that he was ashamed and upset, and they did not want to add to his burden. He spoke quietly and tersely to his staff and colleagues from Ronda, but when he got into the car, his rage broke out. The officer from Ronda who had swaggered down the street was given an earful. Moya barked incessantly for a couple of minutes and then slammed the car door shut.
* * *
Lindell and Haver flew home the following day. Wanning and the data expert were staying on for another day or so. The good-byes between them and Moya were warm. Lindell again invited Moya to visit Sweden and Uppsala. Moya smiled and assured them that he would very much like to travel to Scandinavia, not the least so that he would see them again. Haver thought that Moya was really talking to Lindell.
On the plane on the way home they conversed in low voices, summarizing their visit and wo
ndering how best to make use of the information that they had acquired. They had already faxed home the facts about Urbano’s and Olivares’s trip to Sweden, and Lindell had called Ottosson on several occasions in order to keep him informed.
She knew that digging into the two Spaniards’ trip was already under way. The most pertinent questions were where they had stayed and how they had gotten around. Had they rented a car or was there a Swedish contact with whom they had stayed? The hotels in and around Uppsala would be checked as well as all of the car rental companies.
Overall, Lindell was pleased with the visit, despite the fact that Urbano had slipped out of their grasp.
Twenty-six
“So let’s see where we stand,” Ottosson said cheerfully.
He was standing in front of the flip pad that was hardly ever used in meetings but that now he seemed to feel was necessary in order to illustrate the current situation.
It was Lindell who should have given the overview, but she had asked him to step in, claiming a headache.
“Two Spaniards with criminal records, Urbano and Olivares, travel to Sweden and stay here for two days. During this time the Cederén family dies. Two of them are the victims of a hit-and-run, and the third dies in a most perplexing fashion,” Ottosson went on.
Sammy Nilsson gave Berglund an amused look. “Dies in a most perplexing fashion,” he wrote in his notebook and pushed it over to Berglund so he could read it.
Both of the names were written across Ottosson’s flip pad in big letters. After Olivares’s name there was a black cross. Ottosson had been in full pedagogical gear as he set up the meeting.
“We believe that they contributed to Josefin and Emily’s deaths. It may have happened thus: They picked up Sven-Erik Cederén somehow—we still don’t know how—take his car, drive to Uppsala-Näs to kill the first two, return to the forest in Rasbo, get Cederén drunk, and gas him to death.”
“But what about the note that says ‘sorry’?” Riis objected.
“It’s very possible to force someone to write a note like that,” Ottosson answered calmly. “Keep in mind that he had fifty centiliters of gin in his veins.”
He looked at Riis, who did not pursue this any further.
“But why did they do it?” Ottosson said.
“Cederén was the primary target in the trip to Sweden,” Haver said. “I don’t think we have to speculate too much about that.”
“How did they know that Josefin was taking a walk that day?” Ottosson asked.
“They drove out to Uppsala-Näs in order to kill Josefin and Emily in some way, intending to frame the husband. Perhaps they saw the mother and child leave the house and followed them to wait for the right spot.”
No one could understand why it had been so important to kill Sven-Erik Cederén to the point of murdering his wife and child and making it look like a family drama. What interests had Cederén posed a threat to?
A large part of the morning meeting was devoted to various lines of speculation. Everyone assumed that the actions had been directed from Spain, but nothing new had been heard from Málaga and Urbano was still missing. The murder of his companion Olivares was still unsolved, but everything pointed to Urbano being behind it. Perhaps Olivares had become shaky and started to pose a risk to Urbano.
Haver tossed out the theory that perhaps someone had intended to silence both Urbano and Olivares, but that the former had gotten away. In this case, there was another force to be reckoned with. Perhaps UNA Médico was the party that had the most interest in keeping the whole thing quiet.
In other words, the investigators were frustrated. The scrutiny of hotel and car rental companies had not yielded any results. The group was slowly becoming convinced that someone in Sweden had assisted the Spaniards.
Lindell was having trouble maintaining her concentration. She participated only sporadically in the discussion. The experience outside Gabriella Mark’s cottage had left an impression. Her thoughts kept circling back to the injured elk calf. What was going to happen to it? She had even thought about trying to get someone to catch the calf and take it to the animal hospital in Ultuna but realized that this was impractical. Who was concerned about an injured elk calf?
But it wasn’t simply the sight of the animal that had shaken her. She had experienced some of Gabriella’s terror in the brief time that she had spent at the cottage. Lindell had no trouble identifying with her. They were almost the same age and were both single, and there was an aspect of deliberate isolation to Gabriella’s life that both attracted and repelled her.
The source of her uneasiness was probably the fear of loneliness, but it was also the thought of the life that Gabriella had created for herself: the process by which a woman with significant problems had slowly transformed herself into a strong and solitary figure. The vegetable garden seemed to Lindell to promise a way out. Did she herself want to flee to the country and carrots? Not really, but perhaps in another form. To choose a life other than the one she was currently living was becoming her goal.
She tried to pull herself together and listen more carefully to the comments her colleagues were making, but she soon realized that the discussion was faltering. Ottosson had also seen this, and his previously optimistic commentary had switched to the occasional words of encouragement to get the team to engage in creative thinking.
The meeting ended after three-quarters of an hour. Lindell, who did not want to hear any comforting words from Ottosson, hurried to her office.
* * *
On the desk there was a note from Fredriksson. He had been working for about a month on a stabbing case that was starting to unfold into an unpleasant chain of events with connections to the so-called Uppsala mafia. Lindell had hardly seen him for the past two weeks.
“Call Adrian Mård,” the note said, accompanied by a telephone number. “Animal lover,” Fredriksson had added at the very bottom.
Lindell stared at the note and wondered when Allan had dropped it off and how he had come across this “animal lover,” but she decided not to worry about any of this. She dialed the number.
Adrian Mård picked up on the first signal as if he had been waiting for the call. Lindell introduced herself.
“I’m glad you called,” Mård said.
From his voice, Lindell judged that he was in his mid-twenties.
“I have some thoughts about MedForsk,” he went on. “Isn’t that what you’re working on?”
“Who are you?” Lindell asked.
“I work at a publication called Alternative Animal. We cover information on animal factories, the food industry, and alternative lifestyles.”
“I see, and why do you want to talk to me?”
Mård eagerly started to describe the typical living conditions of the most common household animals. He spoke a great deal about chicken farming, which he had apparently given a lot of thought to.
“You mentioned MedForsk,” Lindell interrupted. “Perhaps we could meet and talk about that?”
“Sure,” Mård said. “That was why I reached out.”
They decided to meet up in town. Lindell suggested the Savoy, but Mård had no idea where that was, so they agreed on Hugo’s instead.
* * *
Adrian Mård was close to forty and did not match any of Lindell’s expectations. He was short and portly—if not outright fat—and had unruly red hair.
He was sitting at the very back of the café, chain-smoking. Alternative lifestyles indeed, Lindell thought.
“Cheers,” he said, smiling widely and holding out a chubby hand.
“Hi,” Lindell said, finding it hard not to like this unusual character.
She sat down after she had bought herself a cup of coffee with milk. While she was busy getting herself settled, Mård took out a stack of papers.
“Here is a little information on what we do,” he said and pushed it over. The magazine that he had mentioned lay on top.
Lindell shoved the stack into her bag and sipped her co
ffee.
“MedForsk,” she said.
“I have a good friend in Save the Animals. It doesn’t matter what his name is. I wouldn’t reveal his name even if I was tortured.”
“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” Lindell said.
“Well, he’s worried. Ever since the business at TV4, your friends have been on him like hawks. They’re pretty shook up even if they’re trying to look cool. A lot of them are kids who aren’t completely clear about what they’re doing. It’s fun to save foxes and hamsters, but now things are starting to feel uncomfortable.”
He lit a new cigarette. Lindell was starting to get more interested. It’s when things get uncomfortable that we come into the picture, she thought.
“My contact says that they have evidence that MedForsk is engaged in illegal animal experimentation.”
“Where is the evidence coming from?”
Mård looked at her appraisingly. “From inside the company,” he said finally.
Lindell tried not to reveal her excitement. She took another sip of her coffee and adopted a neutral expression.
“Who was it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Mård said, but Lindell could see that he was lying.
“Who was it?” she repeated.
Mård looked disappointed, as if she hadn’t lived up to his expectations.
“Please respect what I’m telling you,” he said. “What is important is the information my contact received.”
His voice took on a sharp note that Lindell did not associate with his almost jovial appearance. She always found herself assuming that heavyset people would also be friendly and communicative, but it was clear that Adrian Mård knew how to stand up for himself.
“Okay,” she said and smiled. “Keep going.”
He returned her smile and resumed his narrative. The leak inside MedForsk had apparently come across a document proving that experiments had been carried out on primates. What tests these might have been, it did not specify. When Lindell asked if the tests could have been conducted abroad, Mård said that the document neither proved nor disproved this.
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