Block 46

by Bragelonne

  ‘Why, don’t you have any?’

  ‘No.’

  She seemed horrified. Sacrilege.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course. Three children. Four grandchildren.’

  Olofsson’s fantasies melted away like snow in the sun.

  ‘And the last two?’ he asked sharply.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The final two Adams, Elena.’

  ‘Ah … Then we have Adam Strandberg – lives in Gothenburg; married, two children; journalist.’

  ‘Strandberg, the one from the telly?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  Olofsson whistled as he rocked his chair back and forth. ‘Shit, that’s not going to please Bergström … And what about the eleventh?’

  ‘Adam Berg. I still haven’t … Oh, there we are. I was waiting to find out his occupation. No wonder; he doesn’t have one. How lucky to have independent means. Probably has his dad to thank. Oh, no … he was registered under his mother’s name at birth. So sorry, Mr Adam Berg, for assuming that about you. He’s a bachelor, no children, no known job; lives in Särö.’

  ‘Will you send on all that information?’

  Olofsson hung up without even thanking Elena and rushed into Bergström’s office.

  Falkenberg police station

  Friday, 24 January 2014, 17.30

  HER HEART BEATING WILDLY, Alexis opened the e-mail Emily had just sent her. When the photo appeared on the screen, she couldn’t repress a tiny cry of victory. You could clearly see two men in the photograph, identified by Linda Steiner as Erich Ebner and his son, Adam. They were walking along a beach, wearing shorts and sleeveless vests.

  Alexis dialled Théodore Langman’s number and forwarded the photo.

  ‘Mr Langman, I’ve just sent you the photo,’ she told him.

  As he picked up, Alexis could hear Langman speaking to someone called Olivier.

  ‘My son is dealing with it,’ he explained to Alexis. ‘I’m not sure how to make it work, all this internet stuff, and I have no intention of learning…’

  A few moments of silence followed.

  ‘Mr Langman?’ Alexis asked.

  ‘I don’t … I don’t understand.’ Langman’s halting voice seemed to stumble over a rush of painful memories. ‘I don’t understand Madame Castells … The man in the photograph … it’s not Ebner…’

  Again, Alexis had to stifle her excitement. I knew it, she thought. I knew it.

  ‘Erich Ebner had a tattoo stretching all the way down from his right shoulder and along his arm. Verse by the German poet Theodor Storm. He’d explained to me why, one evening, when he told me I shared a first name with the great man: “So that we never forget that Germany has not always given birth to monsters like the Nazis, but also geniuses, like Storm,” he said…’

  It sounded as if the old man’s tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth for a moment.

  ‘The man in the photograph is not Ebner…’ he continued at last.

  ‘It’s Horst Fleischer, isn’t it, Mr Langman?’

  ‘Yes, it’s Horst Fleischer. The butcher. The torturer.’

  Linda Steiner’s home, Kungsbacka

  Friday, 24 January 2014, 17.45

  EMILY LEANED AGAINST THE CAR DOOR and breathed in a mouthful of glacial air.

  She’d been wrong.

  She puffed out a cloud of mist, savouring the bite of the cold.

  She’d been wrong, because she’d opted for the easy path. A lazy choice that had led to her mistake. A mistake that would have no lasting consequences for the investigation, but an error all the same.

  She should have harboured doubts, as had Alexis, Bergström and the young police officer. Not sought out the obvious. There was no way that Erich Ebner, a deportee, a survivor of the hell of the concentration camps, could have become a bloody killer. Erich Ebner, the prisoner of Buchenwald, could not be Erich Ebner, the Swedish citizen.

  She should have looked closer at the facts and questioned them, as she usually did. But she’d foolishly simply accepted them, ignoring the evidence by dredging up her theory about Stockholm syndrome, with some measure of intellectual arrogance to boot, she had to acknowledge. And that combination had done the trick: she had accepted her own morally revolting hypothesis.

  It was just fortunate that Alexis had been tenacious, resisted her interpretation and corrected the error she was promulgating.

  According to Théodore Langman, he had brought along the final dinner to Ebner and Fleischer on the eve of the camp’s liberation. So Fleischer must have killed Ebner on the day the camp was rescued – the 11th of April 1945 – and travelled to Sweden using his identity.

  Her phone rang. Emily unzipped her parka and pulled it out of the inner pocket.

  Bergström’s breathless voice buzzed inside her ear. ‘We have our culprit, Emily; we have him.’

  Adrenaline raced through the profiler’s body like a surge of electricity.

  ‘His name is Adam Berg. His name appears on the manifests of a whole load of flights between Gothenburg and London, and he owns a property in Särö, twenty-five kilometres south of Gothenburg and fifteen minutes from Kungsbacka.’

  She thought of Linda, still living close to the man who had hurt her and whose name she could barely utter, thirty years later. A man who had no doubt affected the course of her later relationships with men.

  ‘Are you still with Martha Knudsen’s daughter?’ Bergström asked.

  ‘I’ve just left her place.’

  ‘Did you find anything out?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  The teenager in Linda’s photos didn’t look like any of Linnéa’s friends. Emily had assumed this would be the case; faces change over thirty years, but she’d needed to check.

  ‘OK … Anyway, all will become clearer soon. Olofsson and I will be on the road in ten minutes. I’ve called Gothenburg, but there won’t be any reinforcements available for an hour or so. They’re dealing with a hostage situation and a visit from the King. We’ll be there in under an hour. Best you go straight to Särö, as you’re closer. I’ll send you the GPS coordinates.’

  Ten minutes later, Emily was parking two hundred metres from Adam Berg’s house, on the crest of a small hill.

  She checked the map on her phone and stepped out of the car. She slipped her hat on, threw the backpack over her shoulders and began walking briskly up the snow-covered and badly lit street.

  Berg’s house was at street level, on the left, and the path leading to it was twenty metres away. Emily pulled her binoculars from her bag and observed the house carefully. It was completely dark. No car in the drive. Maybe Berg was in London?

  Bergström and Olofsson wouldn’t be here for another half-hour. It would be better to get off the street and wait.

  ‘Hej, Emily.’

  She swivelled around.

  It took her a few seconds to recognise the man. She froze, surprised.

  ‘Over here, they call me Adam Berg. But I reckon you’d already guessed that.’

  She looked down and saw the gun pointing at her. A 92 Beretta.

  ‘Come, my dear, I’ll give you a tour of the property. I’m sure you’re dying to see it.’

  London

  7 November 2013

  The light from the three electric torches stripes across the pit.

  A perfect rectangle. One metre thirty in length, fifty centimetres in width. Made to measure.

  He picks up the spade, gathers earth and spreads it out in the hole. A single shovelful and the legs are already covered; all that sticks out are the toes. Toes as smooth as pebbles, as cold as ice, that make him want to touch them with the tip of his fingers.

  Smooth and cold.

  He throws another pile of damp earth over the stomach. Some lands just below the thoracic cage, around the navel; the rest slides down the sides. A few more spadefuls and it will all be done.

  It had all been child’s play.

  All of a sudden, he lets go of
the spade and brings his muddy gloves up to his ears.

  ‘Just shut up, will you?’

  He spits the words out, his jaw frozen with anger.

  ‘No, no, no, no! Stop shouting. Stop!’

  He kneels down beside the pit and places his hands against the colourless lips.

  ‘Shh. Shh, I said…’

  His nose brushes across the ice-like cheek.

  ‘OK … OK … I’ll do it … I’ll sing your little song. I’ll sing you “Imse Vimse”, but you must remain quiet. Is that understood?’

  He stands up and shakes dirt from his trousers.

  ‘Imse Vimse spindel klättrar upp för trå’n…’

  He takes hold of the spade and throws another lot of earth across the torso. It sinks into the wide-open gash running down from the chin to the sternal notch.

  ‘Ned faller regnet spolar spindeln bort…’

  A spadeful over the face. The earth spills across the forehead, obscuring the hair, dripping into the eye sockets.

  ‘Upp stiger solen torkar bort allt regn, Imse Vimse spindel klättra upp igen.’

  The dirt rains across the marble whiteness of the body to the rhythm of the nursery rhyme.

  He packs the final layer of earth tight and smooths it out, then arranges a bunch of brown winter leaves across the top with exaggerated, arrogant artistry. He walks away backwards, his eyes still fixed on the grave, then retraces his steps and kicks a few leaves around with his foot.

  He cleans down the spade with his gloved hand, replaces the electric torches in their bag, takes his gloves off, shakes them free of dirt, then one at a time places his tools inside the bag.

  Just as he pulls the bag over his shoulder, he hears the chatter of the parakeets. He’d heard somewhere that the exotic birds had escaped from the Shepperton film studios, in Surrey, during the making of Bogart’s Oscar-winning 1951 film The African Queen. But the truth was, no such bird was used on the set, and the film had actually been shot in the studios at Isleworth. So where had the damned birds come from, then?

  He stops for a moment and searches the depths of night for their apple-green plumage. All he can hear is a nearby rustle.

  He really needs a second pair of binoculars with night vision. Just can’t work by torchlight any more, much too dangerous. He has to get himself better organised and avoid such imprudence.

  He pulls one of the torches out of his parka pocket, and, keeping its beam low, gets on his way.

  He’s just begun a new chapter, he reckons, as he makes his way between the trees. A chapter he has written on his own, for the very first time. And he’s already eager to get writing again.

  He planned everything with the same rigour the Other taught him, and the whole operation has played out perfectly.

  Finding the right prey was easy: there was an embarrassment of choice around. As early as the second night of tracking, he had already selected three families who all met his criteria. For his initial London hunt, he had chosen Andy Meadowbanks. His father brought him up alone, since his wife had left them. Well, ‘bringing up’ was something of a euphemism: during the daytime, the father spent most of his time drinking in pubs, not even bothering to go pick his kid up from school. In the evening, around eight, he left for the north London club where he worked as a bouncer, without even preparing his kid’s dinner or saying goodbye on his way out.

  The hunt therefore took a very short time, and proved less pleasurable than Adam had expected. He organised the kidnapping very easily; it was child’s play, really. For the rest of the task, he had a specially modified van in his garage, similar to the one they used in Sweden.

  Then the unforeseen communion with nature happened. The Other would have gone raving mad to learn he ended up burying his prey. But the exercise proved so exciting, he didn’t even feel the slightest guilt.

  At first, he wondered how he would manage to conserve the body, until he realised he had no obligation whatsoever to do so.

  Here, in London, he only does what he wants to do.

  Here, in London, it is he, Adam, who makes the rules.

  Adam Berg’s home, Särö

  Friday, 24 January 2014, 18.00

  EMILY’S NAKED BODY was covered in goosebumps from the initial contact with the ice-cold dissection table. The chill had held her in its grip ever since.

  Peter Templeton had his back to her. He was busy preparing things on the metal trolley.

  She tried to move her fingers and toes and chase away the pain caused by the straps tightened around her wrists and ankles.

  He turned round, a metal disc approximately five centimetres in diameter held between the thumb and the forefinger of his left hand.

  His gaze swept over Emily’s naked body.

  ‘I bet I can guess what you’re thinking: how long it will take them to find me? Am I right?’

  His head moved from side to side.

  ‘They have to make it here all the way from Falkenberg. They’ll have to search the house. Find the reinforced trapdoor. Blow it up, or whatever way they think of. Or … or maybe they will just give up once they’ve searched the house and assume I’ve taken you somewhere else … And then…’

  He took a deep breath as he closed his eyes and then exhaled, as his hands drew spirals in front of his face.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure I have plenty of time to deal with you properly.’

  He looked into Emily’s eyes.

  ‘I see this raises another question in your mind, doesn’t it? How exactly is he planning to deal with me?’

  He stepped towards the wall, which was covered with sketches. He pointed with his finger to the image of a man raping a stretchedout woman, who was tied to a table as the man cut her throat open. There were two black holes where her eyes had once been.

  ‘Like this, maybe? Or…’ His finger spun like a drunken insect and landed on another illustration. A woman, again stretched out, whose breasts had been severed and deposited either side of her head. ‘…like this…?’

  Urine leaked under Emily’s backside and along her thighs.

  Peter watched as the liquid flowed all the way down to the table’s recessed corners.

  ‘Interesting. This must be the first time a woman has peed over herself here. Not quite how I expected it to flow.’

  He turned to look at the sketches.

  ‘Actually, I must confess, Emily, that this one is more of a temptation…’ His middle finger glided over another drawing. The woman’s nipples had been cut away and placed inside her eye sockets.

  ‘I know what you must be thinking: that this is so different to what we’d been doing, the Other and I. Me and Father. True, it is different. But you in particular should know how much one’s conditioning holds back one’s instincts. And one’s inspiration.’

  He stared at Emily, observing her feverishly.

  ‘Do you want to know why I was with Linnéa?’

  He set the metal disc down on the trolley and picked up a switchblade.

  ‘Because, at the end of the day, I’m just a sentimental sort of guy…’ He laid the blade down against Emily’s sex and began to carefully shave her pubis. ‘…Something of a romantic. To meet a woman in London who owned a house right where I was born and spent the most important part of my life was … was as if the universe was handing me the future on a plate. Such a woman would have to play a crucial part in our work. Naturally.’ He brushed the smooth pubis with his fingers.

  ‘When we came face to face in Gothenburg, I was on my way back from tracking down a possible victim and wasn’t in disguise. Despite the darkness of the night and the hood that I wore, she recognised me right away. I reckoned it was a twist of fate – time for me to finally invite her into my world.’ His mouth was contorted, expressing his disappointment. ‘But it turned out I’d been completely wrong, barking up the wrong tree altogether.’

  He took hold of the metal disc again and placed the edge against Emily’s arm. The tool cut into the flesh as if it were butter.
>
  A scream rose from Emily’s throat. She closed her eyes, visualised the pain, a black stone whose red heart was incandescent, and attempted to banish it as far as she possibly could.

  She tried to control her breathing and collected her thoughts.

  ‘A swastika … in honour of your father?’ she said.

  He shook his head and laughed, still carving. ‘You’re the one I should have met, Emily. You. Not Linnéa.’

  Bile rose in Emily’s throat. She focused on the black-and-red stone, and mentally crushed it underfoot. It crumbled under her heel.

  ‘Each boy displayed a branch. They … they were all constituent parts of your work…’

  ‘It was a dismantled swastika. Never actually reassembled. The cross Father had to wear.’

  The adrenaline she had managed to release revivified Emily’s body, chasing the pain away. So Peter was unaware of his father’s true identity. This was something she could definitely take advantage of.

  ‘No, Peter. Horst Fleischer, your father, chose to wear that cross of his own free will.’

  Peter’s arm froze, suspended over Emily’s body.

  ‘What? Who are you talking about? Father was called Erich Ebner.’

  She feigned surprise. ‘Erich Ebner? No, Peter. Erich Ebner was the German medical student who worked for Horst Fleischer; your actual father was a decorated Nazi officer.’

  Peter straightened up and blinked.

  Emily continued, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘Your father, Horst Fleischer, killed Ebner just as the Buchenwald camp was being liberated. He pretended to be him and fled to Sweden.’

  ‘No. No. You must be wrong.’ His words rushed out of his mouth as he brandished the now-bloodstained metal disc. The thin, deadly crest of the blade passed just a few centimetres from Emily’s face.

  ‘Father told me about Buchenwald. How it was liberated and he travelled to Sweden and ended up here.’

  He turned his back on Emily and stood, legs apart, facing the wall full of drawings.

  ‘Father would have told me. He would have been truthful.’