In Harm's Way

by Viveca Sten

  “If Alice had been my daughter,” she said quietly, “I’d have set very different priorities. I’d have stayed home with my child.”

  “You don’t have any children of your own, as I understand it.”

  She shook her head and turned away. “Unfortunately it hasn’t happened—not yet anyway.”

  The longing for a baby could consume your soul. He knew that, and so did Pernilla.

  “But Micke and I have been talking about moving in together now,” Petra went on in a voice full of a thousand hopes.

  Thomas couldn’t help noticing that little word at the end of the sentence: now. It seemed strange, given the circumstances. He searched her face for some kind of clue, some explanation.

  “Is that a recent decision?” he asked.

  Petra didn’t answer his question; instead she stood up and said: “Do you mind if I go and fetch my cup of tea? I hadn’t finished it when you rang the bell.”

  “Not at all.”

  She disappeared into the kitchen, and Thomas looked around the room. Cushions and curtains in earthy tones that fit perfectly with the sofa, a large shaggy rug covering most of the floor.

  Most men were drawn to one kind of woman. That was the usual pattern; they stuck to the same type, even if the object of their affections changed over the years. However, the two women in Michael Thiels’s life seemed to have little in common. Their appearance, personality, and drive were poles apart. It was as if the bitter divorce had manifested itself in Michael’s choice of a new partner.

  Jeanette must have been affected by that, and so must Alice. Surely Alice wouldn’t be happy with the idea of her father moving in with his girlfriend.

  Maybe she’d tried to get her mother to intervene, speak to Michael on her behalf. That might explain Petra’s tone of voice when she talked about Jeanette. It had been a long time since the divorce, and yet the spirit of his ex-wife still hovered over Petra’s relationship with Michael.

  Petra came back with a large pale-blue mug of tea and a plate of ginger cookies and chocolates, which she placed on the table.

  “Help yourself!”

  Thomas reached for a cookie.

  “You seem to have an opinion about how Jeanette lived her life,” he said. “What did she think about you and Michael?”

  A weary sigh that seemed to come from the heart.

  “Where do I start? Jeanette had an opinion about most things. About Micke and the way he chose to raise Alice, about the fact that he spent too much time with me. She interfered constantly, even though she wasn’t home. She was very good at sending emails and telling him off.”

  She shuddered; was she feeling guilty?

  “I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but it wasn’t easy to get along with Jeanette—neither for me nor Micke.”

  “It sounds as if the relationship between Michael and his ex-wife wasn’t great,” Thomas said tentatively.

  Petra opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. After a moment she said: “They just couldn’t agree on anything, but it really wasn’t his fault. Jeanette was a difficult person—totally uncompromising. She wanted things done her way, which affected everybody. Me included.”

  Petra smiled, showing white, slightly irregular teeth. She leaned forward, seeking understanding. Thomas had seen it many times, this desire to establish empathy with the representative of law and order. Either the police were regarded as an enemy, in which case the interviewee closed down and withdrew, or tried to show his or her best side.

  Petra was clearly going for the latter option.

  “You’ve no idea how often we had to change our plans because Jeanette came back to Sweden unexpectedly, or announced that she was going away at short notice.”

  A fleeting grimace sharpened her features, deepening the lines between her mouth and nose. They were roughly the same age, he recalled; she was almost forty, and he was forty-one.

  “Jeanette had no interest in the fact that we’d already made arrangements. It was all about her—nothing else mattered.”

  Thomas listened and made notes. According to Michael Thiels, Petra was his alibi for Christmas Day; he decided to dig a little deeper.

  “Michael said he was here on Christmas Day,” he said, changing the subject. “Can you confirm that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Could you give me the exact times when he arrived and left?”

  Petra shifted in her seat opposite him.

  “Why are the exact times important? Surely you don’t suspect Micke of anything?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Micke would never do anything like that; he’s not the type. I know that for sure.”

  “What do you mean by ‘anything like that’?”

  “I . . .”

  Petra didn’t know what to say. She opened her mouth, but couldn’t find the words.

  Thomas waited, determined not to fill the silence.

  “He’d never hurt someone,” Petra managed eventually. “He told me Jeanette didn’t die of . . . of natural causes.”

  She looked terrified, almost pleading. Why was she so worried?

  “Are you afraid he might have harmed her, since you brought it up?”

  “No, you misunderstood—that’s not what I meant.” She hesitated, then exclaimed: “You can’t possibly believe that Micke’s done something to Jeanette.”

  CHAPTER 29

  It was almost midday by the time Thomas walked into the meeting room. Aram was at the table, surrounded by the documents from Jeanette Thiels’s study. His pad was filled with scribbled notes, and the sleeves of his checked shirt were rolled up. When he saw Thomas, he put down his pen.

  “Welcome back,” he said. “How did it go with Thiels’s girlfriend?”

  Thomas took the chair beside him.

  “Well, she wasn’t too fond of Jeanette. She claimed that she was impossible to deal with, and drove them both crazy.”

  “How impossible? Impossible enough to murder?” Aram’s grin took the sting out of his words. “Seriously—was it useful?”

  “Too early to say. Petra Lundvall is adamant that Michael had nothing to do with Jeanette’s death, but she seemed very anxious for some reason.”

  Thomas took the top document from the nearest pile; it was about a secret women’s organization in Iran.

  “So how are you getting on?”

  Aram flexed his fingers. “I’m just plugging away. It’s taking a while to get everything in some kind of order; Jeanette doesn’t seem to have had anything resembling a system.”

  “I’ll give you a hand,” Thomas offered.

  Two hours later they still hadn’t gotten very far. Each piece of paper had to be examined and sorted. Much of the documentation was in English: articles that had been printed out, letters, texts that Thomas assumed were source material or research for various articles.

  One large pile contained information about victims of torture, detailed descriptions of different ways of causing pain to the human body. Electric shocks, whipping the soles of the feet, mock executions—nothing that Thomas hadn’t heard of before, but it still made for depressing reading.

  “Jesus,” he burst out when he came across a particularly repulsive account of the treatment of a young boy, only fifteen years old, in a prison camp in Afghanistan.

  Aram looked up, and Thomas pointed to the article, which was in English. Down at the bottom someone had written Amnesty? in blue ink, presumably Jeanette.

  “This turns my stomach,” he said.

  “Believe me, it happens everywhere.”

  Thomas noticed that Aram lingered over the photograph of the boy, who had deep scars on his arms and chest. The pensive expression on his colleague’s face reminded him of an evening toward the end of November, when they’d gone to a handball game. Afterward they’d had a couple of beers in an English bar, with the rain hammering against the windows. They’d sat there in the warmth until well after midnight and had a little bit too
much to drink. Gradually, Aram had opened up about his past and how his family came to be in Sweden.

  “My grandfather was a political activist in Iraq,” he’d explained. “One day he just vanished without a trace. A month or so later, he was found dead. His body was covered in blood; he’d been so badly beaten that they didn’t even want to let my grandmother see him. That was in 1985; I’d just turned ten. My eldest brother had already been killed in the war against Iran, and my parents were afraid that my other older brother would be called up, too. They decided to flee the country with us and my little sister.”

  The survival instinct is the strongest impulse, Thomas had thought. It was difficult—no, impossible—to imagine the desperation Aram’s parents must have felt back then.

  “So you came here?”

  A fire crackled close by, the glow of the flames flickering on the walls where the flags of English football clubs were displayed.

  “No, we reached Turkey first, but it was impossible to stay there. We couldn’t find any food, and there was nowhere to live.”

  Aram’s eyes had darkened.

  “We slept in empty shipping containers, sheltering from the rain,” he continued. “Ate gravel when we had nothing else.”

  He broke off and shook his head as if to chase away the memory, then said, with an ironic smile: “I wouldn’t advise it. You get sores in your mouth, and they take forever to heal. When Mom and Dad did get ahold of some food, chewing and swallowing was really painful.”

  He took a swig of his beer, his eyes fixed on some distant point in the past.

  “So how did you end up in Sweden?” Thomas asked.

  “My sister died in Turkey.”

  The brief response left so much unsaid. Thomas waited.

  “She contracted jaundice,” Aram said after a while. “One morning she was just lying there dead. Mom almost went crazy with grief. Dad decided we had to get out of there, whatever it took. We had a relative, a cousin, who lived in Sweden—in a place called Södertälje, near Stockholm.”

  “Your father wasn’t the first Assyrian to make his way there,” Thomas said, raising his glass to Aram.

  “I still remember how weird the name sounded,” Aram continued. “Södertälje. It was almost impossible to pronounce. Dad’s cousin helped us; my dad came over first, then we followed.”

  “How long did it take you to get here?”

  “Almost eight months.” Aram’s hand moved to his stomach. “I was always hungry while we were waiting. Every single day.”

  Logically, Thomas knew he wasn’t to blame for having been born in a country that hadn’t been at war for about two hundred years, but hearing Aram’s story gave him a different perspective.

  “What was life like after you arrived?” he asked tentatively.

  “Confusing. Strange. We started off in Gävle, but my parents didn’t like it there—too much snow, maybe. After a few years we moved to Norrköping. Mom and Dad are still there, just like Sonja’s parents. Her whole family is in Östergötland.”

  “Was it difficult to learn the language?”

  “Well, there aren’t many similarities between Swedish and Assyrian, but it wasn’t too bad. You know what kids are like—you pick things up quickly if you have to.”

  Thomas sensed what lay behind Aram’s answer, but didn’t want to dig deeper.

  “Why did you decide to join the police?” he said instead.

  Aram looked down at the table; he seemed embarrassed.

  “I think it was out of gratitude. I don’t want to make myself out to be something I’m not, but I wanted to . . . say thank you for letting us come here, for giving my family a place of refuge.”

  Life and death. So close and so different, depending on where you were born. We don’t know each other very well, Thomas thought. I hope we become really good friends.

  “Do you remember anything about Iraq?”

  Aram shook his head. “Not much, just the odd fragment. It was a lot warmer than here, and the sun shone almost all the time.”

  He ran a hand over his forehead.

  “I remember that my siblings and I used to lift up a drain cover outside our house. There were cockroaches under there; we’d pour oil on them, then throw in a match, and they’d run in all directions while we tried to hit them with our sandals. My grandmother always shouted at us, of course.”

  He smiled, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes.

  By this time the place was virtually deserted. The bartender was wiping down the counter with a damp cloth, glancing in their direction to see if they were thinking of making a move.

  “She’s dead now,” Aram said. “She stayed in Iraq; she was too old to flee. Plus they’d already murdered my grandfather; I guess she thought things couldn’t get much worse.”

  He paused as if he thought he might have said too much, and finished off his beer. “I don’t usually talk about this. There are plenty of people who’ve suffered far more than me.”

  Thomas contemplated his colleague, felt the pain he kept hidden. Aram’s parents had lost a daughter, as had Thomas. Had they had any idea of the high price they would pay when they made the decision to leave Iraq? Maybe they would have done it anyway, in order to save their other children.

  Would he have done the same for Elin?

  The answer was self-evident.

  Once again he felt ashamed, but this time the emotion was mixed with deep warmth toward the man sitting across from him.

  “I appreciate your telling me about your family,” he said before they went their separate ways. “Thank you.”

  “Thomas? Did you hear what I said?”

  Aram was looking inquiringly at him. Thomas came back to the present, to the piles of documents from Jeanette’s apartment. Clippings and photocopies.

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m going to get a coffee—would you like one?”

  “Please.” Thomas’s attention returned to the article about the boy who’d been tortured. If only they could find Jeanette’s computer.

  CHAPTER 30

  Oscar-Henrik Sachsen pulled on his work clothes and hung his own in the blue locker in the changing room.

  Gunilla hadn’t protested when he’d told her he had to go to the lab, even though it was Saturday. Admittedly she was used to him disappearing at short notice, sometimes in the middle of dinner or early on a Sunday morning, but he missed her sighs, the objections she used to raise back in the day. They’d made him feel as if she cared, that he was missed when he wasn’t there.

  Now she barely noticed when he put on his overcoat and scarf. She didn’t bother to ask when he thought he might be back.

  I should have gotten myself a dog, he sometimes thought when the air at the dinner table was so thick with silence that he lost his appetite and could hardly swallow his food.

  But the idea had never gone beyond a thought. Instead he stayed longer at work; he was often the last to leave at the end of the day, switching off the lights after everyone else had gone home.

  Sachsen closed the locker door and made his way to his office so that he could go through all the information and the photographs in the file. He needed to get his head around the case, understand the circumstances.

  Then he went to fetch the body.

  Thomas Andreasson had pushed him harder than usual, he thought as he walked along the deserted corridor. He had tried to hurry the autopsy along by bringing up the dead woman’s young daughter.

  Was he taking this investigation personally because of her?

  It was no secret that Andreasson had lost his own daughter due to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Sachsen knew he’d found it difficult to come back from that devastating blow, but now he had another little girl.

  Sachsen had quietly rejoiced; he’d wanted to warn him not to throw away his time as a parent by working late nights and putting in too much overtime. However, he held his tongue on the subject and simply offered the standard congratulations.

  He found the
right drawer number in the cold room and opened it up. He slid Jeanette Thiels onto the metal gurney and wheeled her along to the lab. Only then did he remove the sheet covering her naked body.

  She was lying on her back, one hand above her head, just as she had been when they’d found her. Her eyes were closed, her graying hair brushed back. In the harsh fluorescent light, her skin had a bluish tinge; it reminded him of milk that was just about to turn.

  Sachsen gazed at her in silence, lingering over each body part, each indentation. There was a scar on the stomach, a pinkish-red line just below the navel. The marks of the sutures were still clearly visible.

  Relatively recent, Sachsen observed. Who had cut her open there?

  Soon he, too, would be slicing into her flesh, making a Y-incision from the shoulders to the center of the sternum, then all the way down to the pubic bone. Later he would investigate the contents of the skull, chest cavity, and stomach.

  But not yet.

  She hasn’t been attacked, he said to himself. There are no defensive wounds on the forearms, nothing under the nails, no blood or traces of skin.

  Slowly he continued his visual assessment, taking his time to study the deceased. In the background was the constant hum of the air-conditioning unit, a soporific sound that he hardly noticed anymore.

  “There wasn’t much of her,” he murmured.

  Jeanette Thiels had already been measured and weighed: she was five foot six, but only 108 pounds. That was at the lower end of the acceptable range, and Sachsen could see her ribs protruding below her flat breasts. He could just make out a series of lilac-colored nodes next to the lymph glands.

  He heard the sound of a door opening, followed by a breathless voice behind him: “Sorry I’m late. There was some kind of problem on the subway.”

  Sachsen turned to greet his assistant. Axel Ohlin’s cheeks were still bright red from the cold.

  “I’ve made a start,” Sachsen said, focusing on the body once more.

  Andreasson had explained that the woman had been found dead in the harbor area near the Sailors Hotel.

  “We need to know whether she froze to death or whether she was already dead when she ended up in the snow,” he’d said in his initial phone call. “It’s urgent. We have to find out if she was murdered.”