Tuvesson was about to ask if her husband could corroborate the call when she heard the marimba ringtone of her phone. She took it out, only to find that its screen was still dark.
“Speak of the devil.” The woman held up her phone. “Is it okay if I take this? He doesn’t usually call at this time. It’s the middle of the night over there.”
Tuvesson nodded.
“If you want to, you can speak to him yourself and ask how long we were on the phone. Although I can tell you right now he’ll say it was way too long,” the woman said with a chuckle.
The man put out his hand to greet Lilja. “Håkan Hansson. Don’t worry. I don’t bite.”
“I’m sorry, I thought Elisabeth and I were the only ones here,” Lilja said, shaking his hand as she tried to figure out whether the man before her could be Didrik Meyer.
“Didn’t I ask you to stay in there?” Elisabeth Piil said.
“But honey…I can’t just hide away in there. Especially not when you’re getting a visit from the police. You’ll have to pardon me, but Elisabeth is always afraid it’s going to get out. She and I aren’t exactly official yet.” He held up his left hand to show a wedding ring. “Soon this will be nothing but a memory. Right, honey?”
The woman nodded and the man walked over and sat down on the sofa beside her.
“Now, tell me, what’s going on?” he went on, placing his arm around her.
“I don’t know if I quite understand. But they’re saying that someone recently renewed my driver’s licence. See for yourself.” She handed the printout to the man.
“Why would anyone do that?”
“To take over her identity and drain her accounts,” Lilja said, watching for their reaction.
“Oh my God, that’s terrible.” She let the man embrace her. “I almost feel like I’ve been raped.”
Lilja was about to say that it could have ended much worse, but stopped herself. “I know this is unpleasant. Fortunately there’s no indication that they’ve already struck. According to the pattern, the driver’s licence is only the first step, and —”
“Only?” The woman’s face had lost all its colour.
“What she’s trying to say is that nothing has actually happened yet.” The man turned to Lilja. “Isn’t that right?”
Lilja nodded. “Yes, and to keep anything from happening we will put you under police protection until the perpetrators have been caught.”
“Police protection? You don’t mean to say that they would — oh my God, what is happening?”
Fabian looked around the bedroom on the second floor. A double bed, neatly made; a dressing table with a mirror; a wall of wardrobes. Nothing that made him stop and want to take a closer look. He had searched the entire upper level, as well as the living room, kitchen, and bathroom on the first floor, but hadn’t found anything suspicious.
To make sure that the woman wouldn’t get any ideas, he had handcuffed her and secured her in one of the easy chairs in the living room. She had protested loudly, only quieting down a few minutes before.
In many ways, her reaction had seemed genuine, and she’d had a relatively believable explanation for why she didn’t look like the photos in the album: she said she’d undergone a number of plastic surgeries in recent years. Not only had she had a breast enlargement, after breastfeeding made them look like potholders, she’d also had work done on her nose, mouth, and cheeks.
But whether this was the truth or whether it was just that she was a smooth talker, he had no idea. It was like all the different eyes, mouths, and cheekbones he’d seen in the past few days had blended together into one huge composite sketch.
Fabian left the bedroom and was walking down the stairs when Cliff called.
“Find anything?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Does that mean it’s not her?”
“No, it means that I haven’t found anything yet.” Fabian looked at the woman, who was sitting in the chair with her head lowered. “Best of all would be if you could send someone who can identify her. Her ex-husband, a sibling, or maybe a colleague. Anyone who’s known her for a long time.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“How are things going with everyone else?”
“Irene has a lead. Seems like we made it there in time for once. And Astrid is almost finished and should be heading back soon. What do you want to do with the task force? Should I send them in to help you search?”
“Not yet. But keep them nearby in case anything happens.” Fabian ended the call and walked over to the woman, who looked up and made eye contact.
“Is there a basement?”
“No, there isn’t,” the woman said in a tired exhalation. “Seriously. Aren’t we done yet?”
“Not quite.” Fabian had the sense that he’d missed something and let his gaze sweep the room one more time. “Right now I’m working on calling in someone who can identify you.”
“And when that’s done? Will you let me go?”
“The washing machine. Where is it?” It had suddenly struck him.
“What do you mean, the washing machine?”
“The washing machine. Where do you wash your clothes?” Why hadn’t he thought of it before now?
The woman was about to say something, but seemed to change her mind. “I don’t have one. My cleaning lady takes care of the laundry. Satisfied?”
His uncertainty had finally vanished. He could see it in her eyes. The lies shooting forth from them. Three minutes later, he found it across from the bathroom, wallpapered with the same blue stripes as the hall surrounding it.
The door to the laundry room.
Not only did it contain a stacked washer-dryer, a drying cabinet, and a mangle; behind a drawn curtain, under a couple of shelves of neatly folded towels, there was a chest freezer of a similar model to the one he’d found at Chris Dawn’s house.
Tuvesson hadn’t seen Sandra Gullström since her husband called. Five minutes had passed, but of course that wasn’t the end of the world. In fact, it had been quite pleasant to look around the house on her own, undisturbed. And she considered it a bonus that she didn’t have to make chit-chat. The woman might claim that she loved living in the middle of nowhere with horses as her only companions, but her motormouth proved that this was sheer nonsense. She was more starved for company than a hungry cat.
Tuvesson hadn’t found anything of interest on the ground floor, in the large bookcase or in the bathroom. Nor in the bedroom, where there was a whole wall of framed photographs depicting Sandra Gullström, her husband, or the two of them together.
She hadn’t found a second floor, and when Cliff informed her that Elisabeth Piil hadn’t been aware that her driver’s licence had been replaced, she responded that she was ready to leave as soon as Gullström was done talking to her husband.
Meanwhile, she took the opportunity to have a look in the basement. It was like stepping into another world. None of the tasteful renovations upstairs had found their way underground. She found the very opposite of what she was expecting — no wine cellar, home gym, or home spa. There weren’t even any tidy storage areas in sight.
Instead, the basement was absolute chaos, far worse than any mess she’d ever made during her worst meltdowns. The low ceiling was propped up by wooden pillars that seemed to have been erected at random. A bare bulb dangled here and there, creating pools of light in the otherwise impenetrable darkness. She couldn’t see any interior walls, just one huge room full of construction materials and general junk. It must have come from the renovation. She turned around to head back upstairs.
That was when she heard it. Or, more accurately, she had already heard it — probably ever since she came down the stairs — but now she noticed it for the first time.
That humming.
“You lied when I asked about the washing mach
ine. Why?” Fabian asked as he wrote a message to Cliff and asked him to send in the task force.
The woman sighed and shook her head. “Because I wanted this to end. And now I want my lawyer before I say another word.”
“First I want you to tell me where I can find the key to the freezer.”
“If that’s what this is all about, I’m not the one —”
“The key! Where is it?”
“No idea. Ask my ex-husband. The freezer was his, for all his fancy moose and venison. I’ve asked him to come get it more times than I can count. Now, I want to know what this is all about.”
Fabian couldn’t help but be impressed by how well she was playing the part, staying in character until the very end. She was doing it so well that he felt uncertainty creeping up on him again. At the same time, he could hear the task force entering the hall, and without giving her an answer he went to meet them and showed them to the chest freezer in the laundry room. “It’s locked. We have to get it open as soon as possible.”
The leader of the task force waved over one of the team members who, with the help of a battery-powered angle grinder, went to battle with the handle. Fabian didn’t want to leave the room, so instead he turned his back and held his ears to drown out the piercing sound. A few minutes later, the machine went quiet and he approached the freezer to open the lid.
There she lay, at the bottom of the freezer, curled up in a fetal position, her wounded hands clasped as if in a final prayer. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were coated in frost, as were portions of her hair. Her eyes were closed as if she had decided to stop fighting. And tucked in one corner was the obligatory bottle of liquor.
Despite the frost in her hair and on her face, there could be no doubt who it was. Sandra Gullström looked like herself even without the glasses. And just as Nova Meyer claimed, she had a new hairstyle.
“Here you are, snooping around without asking permission.”
Tuvesson let go of the freezer lid and turned to the woman emerging from the shadows behind her.
“Pretty bad manners, don’t you think?” the woman went on, taking a step toward her.
“Well, this isn’t your home,” Tuvesson said, quickly drawing her gun and aiming it at the woman. “Face down on the ground, spread your legs, and put out your arms.”
She had recognized the sound of her own extra freezer, which Gunnar had insisted they needed; these days it just lived in her garage taking up space and wasting electricity. It made the very same humming noise as this one.
“Face down on the ground, I said!”
It hadn’t been easy to locate the sound, and once she did it turned out she had walked by the spot several times. What looked like a table with a red cloth, overloaded with moving boxes, stacks of books, and demijohns filled with liquid, had in fact been a freezer. A top-loading Electrolux, with no built-in lock.
She should have called Cliff and asked him to send in the task force as soon as she discovered it. But there had been only one thing on her mind — getting there in time. Turning the freezer off as quickly as possible and opening the lid. Saving someone’s life, for once.
Tuvesson could hear a faint moaning sound, barely audible, coming from the freezer. She turned her back on the woman, lifted the lid, and found that Sandra Gullström had opened her eyes.
And then everything went black.
100
Cliff squeezed the stress ball he’d made out of assorted rubber bands. He was stressed out, and to be perfectly honest he didn’t think the ball helped all that much. It wasn’t like Tuvesson not to answer after this many rings. When she was sober, that is.
She was probably in her car on the way back to the station, although that shouldn’t stop her from answering. What’s more, she of all people knew that an unanswered call would suggest she was having some sort of problem.
And problems were the last thing they needed right now.
“Hi, Cliff…” came Tuvesson’s choppy voice. “Sorry it took so long…”
“I was starting to worry.”
“The reception down here is…had to stand on a…and…”
“Astrid, hold on. I can barely hear you. Where are you? Are you okay?” All he heard was choppy static. “Astrid, can you hear me?”
“Is this better? Can you hear me now?”
“Much better,” he said, although the line was still crackly and uneven. “Where are you? Aren’t you in your car, on your way back?”
“I had a look through the house and found the basement.”
“Are you still there?”
“Yes, it’s pretty big, and full of —” Her voice was cut off by a loud burst of static.
“Astrid, did you find something?”
“No, nothing.”
“So you don’t want me to send in the task force?”
“No, no, it’s fine. There’s nothing here.”
“Fabian didn’t find anything either. At least, nothing but a few frozen venison steaks and one Lydia Klewenhielm who was as miffed as Berit sometimes is at me.” Cliff laughed at the joke, and to his surprise he heard Tuvesson laughing along with him. “Anyway, I’ll send them home.” She never laughed at his jokes. But she was probably just feeling relieved that the evening had gone well. They were certain that the twins planned to strike Elisabeth Piil next.
“So you should be back here in twenty minutes or half an hour?” came Cliff’s voice on the line.
“Something like that,” Nova Meyer said into the headphone mic as she lifted the second of the two water-filled demijohns and placed it on top of the red cloth, which trembled now and again, as if someone underneath were trying to get out.
“Great, the others ought to be on their way back too. We can work on a strategy for what to do about Elisabeth Piil.”
“Absolutely.” Nova Meyer ended the call, then lifted one of the moving boxes and placed it beside the jugs. Then she lifted another box and placed it on top of the first. She had to climb onto the freezer to stack the third one on top. The fourth and last box barely fit under the low ceiling, and when she was done lodging the boxes between the freezer and the ceiling, she jumped down and left the basement.
There was no sign, anymore, of those earlier movements. At least not from a distance. If you got right up close, though, it was possible to make out the very tiny ripples in the water in the demijohns, as well as Tuvesson’s muffled cries for help.
101
The phone lit up in the dark trunk of the car — one attempt remaining. Twice Sonja had failed at entering the four-digit PIN code with the tip of her nose, and now she decided to take a short break to gather her wits before she tried one last time. If she didn’t succeed, her cell phone would be unusable.
She took a few deep breaths and tried to move around to get her blood flowing. Just a few minutes ago, her arms, bound behind her back, had hurt so badly that she would have screamed out loud if only her mouth weren’t taped. The pain was turning into numbness, and soon she wouldn’t even be able to tell she had arms. It was as if her brain had already given up on them and decided that they were no longer part of her.
But she wasn’t about to sit idly by as her life ebbed away. She was going to fight. For the first time ever she felt that she had too much to live for to let everything go dark. Matilda, Theodor, Fabian…This couldn’t be the end. Not like this.
The car turned onto a much more uneven and pitted road than the previous ones. If she had to guess, it was a gravel road, although she had long ago given up trying to figure out where they were going.
Instead she focused all her energy on her phone. Getting it out of her overalls had sapped so much of her strength that she was damp with sweat when she was done. Then, as she used her nose to type in the four-digit code and call Fabian, her hope had started to return. The battery was at sixty-three percent, and the signals were clear and strong
. She had been convinced that he would answer and come to rescue her.
Unfortunately she was wrong. Fabian hadn’t answered the phone or rescued her. It took her several minutes to recover from her disappointment, and then, when she tried again to make a call, she happened to enter the wrong code twice in a row.
Now the phone was lying there before her, waiting for her third and final attempt. 5-8-9-5. Four digits in the right order. She took a deep breath and leaned toward her phone. The five was no problem. Same with the eight, which she’d missed on her two earlier attempts. But now she was getting nervous, and she could feel herself starting to shake as she aimed for the nine. To her great relief, she hit it accurately, and now all that remained was the five. Sonja had never missed it before, and it shouldn’t be any trouble this time either, she thought, collecting herself before bending forward.
If only the car hadn’t braked suddenly, she almost certainly would have hit the right number. But instead she hit the two, and the screen went dark immediately. The car stopped at the same time, and an instant later the engine cut out.
102
Sannie Lemke wasn’t sure whether her eyes were open or closed. She couldn’t see anything, at any rate. She had just regained consciousness and had no idea how long she’d been out. In one way, she was still out. Where was she? What had happened? Why was she so cold?
More importantly, what awaited her?
The last thing she could remember was their laughter. Their schadenfreude had reverberated in her mind ever since the attack on her brother. They had been out to kill him. With her, it was different. Yes, their kicks had knocked her unconscious. But she wasn’t dead, and that was what worried her most.
She was sitting down on something hard and uneven. Asphalt. Outdoors. No clothes. That must be why she was freezing. She tried to hug herself but realized that her hands were bound, as were her feet.
She could hear their voices now. They were coming closer, giggling, excited.
Eighteen Below Page 42
