The Ninth Grave

by Stefan Ahnhem

  It couldn’t be anyone other than the police.

  Finally, they’d managed to find her. She wasn’t forgotten after all. She’d never really believed that anyway, but only now did it occur to her that there were people working specifically on her case and maybe even working in shifts to find her. And if she knew her husband, he hadn’t given them a quiet moment until they started making progress.

  Once again, she imagined her face on every billboard and how her mysterious disappearance must have been the major topic of conversation around every water cooler all over Sweden. Maybe at this very moment reporters were crowding around outside, just waiting to rush in and interview her as she was rolled out towards the waiting ambulance.

  She let her thoughts run wild, even though she was fully aware that these were nothing but idle speculations. She really had no idea how much interest there was in her case, or whether the police had even chosen to report on their progress. It was actually more likely that they were keeping a low profile to keep the doctor in the dark about how close they were to locating the building.

  The only thing she knew for certain was that they were right outside, preparing to come in at any moment to rescue her. She heard hard, heavy cases being set down on the ground and opened, and tools being taken out and plugged in. Everything filled her with such warmth and energy that it no longer mattered that she didn’t understand why this had all transpired in the first place. Whatever the reason, the police got there first.

  She hoped that her husband would be there, too, ready to receive her. After all, he was the person who’d contacted the police. So, in a way, he’d rescued her – again. Her heart started beating faster as soon as he came into her thoughts.

  She already knew that she loved him, but this could mean nothing other than that he still loved her. She had doubted it, she really had, but now she knew for sure.

  An angle grinder started up right outside, and the sharp, malevolent sound was like music to her ears.

  She had probably never been this happy.

  53

  THE BLINKING BLUE LIGHTS were obvious from far away in the darkness and made the GPS instructions superfluous. They’re asking for attention, thought Fabian, as he turned off Huddingevägen and continued south on Magelungsvägen. He couldn’t understand why so many police kept their blue lights on after they’d parked their cars.

  He tried to call home again, but neither Matilda nor Theodor answered this time either. Theodor probably wasn’t home yet because it was only twenty to seven. Matilda, on the other hand, was probably upset, which he completely understood. He had promised to come home with Friday treats before the babysitter had to leave, but now found himself well south of the city. He wanted to put on the brakes, make a U-turn and drive home, but it wasn’t possible. Not after his conversation with Stubbs.

  He turned into the parking lot outside Shurgard and stopped by the ambulance and police cars. Some of the uniformed police officers were starting to cordon off the area outside the entrance and others directed him to park next to Aziza Thåström, his favourite medical examiner.

  She’d come to Sweden as a teenage refugee. Only a year or two later she spoke nearly fluent Swedish and had married her teacher. Now, at the age of thirty-five, she was without a doubt one of Stockholm’s best, most sought-after medical examiners. Whatever Stubbs had found, Edelman had given it the highest priority.

  ‘There you are.’ One of Hillevi Stubbs’ assistants came up to meet him. ‘We were almost starting to get worried.’

  ‘Worried? Stubbs called me half an hour ago,’ said Fabian, following past the response team that was packing up.

  ‘It’s not your style to be last to the ball. And you know how the Stub can get when she’s found something.’

  Fabian knew exactly what mood the assistant was highlighting. Hillevi Stubbs was one of the most impatient people he knew. Once she’d discovered a lead and made a decision on how to proceed, nothing could move quickly enough. ‘What’s she got?’

  ‘You should probably see it with your own eyes.’ The assistant held up the barricade tape and showed Fabian in through the open garage doors.

  Stubbs was standing by her van a little inside the building, dressed in blue protective overalls with the hood pulled down and going through the pictures on her camera. ‘You’re late,’ she said without raising her eyes from the camera screen.

  ‘What have you found?’

  ‘Put these on.’ She took a pair of folded-up protective overalls from a crate and threw them over to Fabian, who pulled them on as quickly as he could, before they went in.

  The storage room was about forty metres ahead of them. A bright light flooded out through the sawed-out opening in the louvre door and extended a good way out on to the concrete floor outside. Stubbs disappeared into the room and Fabian followed her. The air inside was several degrees warmer because of the strong searchlights. Once his eyes adjusted to the light, he realized that the storage room was bigger than he’d expected, almost thirty square metres and probably one of the largest in the facility. But Thåström and Stubbs covered most of his field of vision: he couldn’t see much more than a pair of bare feet at one end of a plastic-covered table that looked like the one in the condemned apartment. There were a number of different devices and gauges with cords and hoses that coiled like snakes on the floor and under the table.

  Only once he went around his colleagues and stood on the other side of the table was he able to completely see the naked body that was tied down to the table with a number of straps, pulled through drilled-out holes in the tabletop. The legs, torso, arms and throat were all so tightly lashed that several of the straps scraped off skin and penetrated into the flesh. And just like the Minister for Justice, there were two empty, bloody holes where the eyes should have been. Fabian noted some kind of dried pink porridge-like substance had bubbled out of the taped-up mouth, down across the throat and on to the floor.

  ‘What’s that?’ Fabian pointed towards the pink sludge.

  ‘Food,’ said Stubbs. ‘As you can see, he’s been tube-fed through this hose.’ She pointed at a tube that disappeared into his mouth. ‘I haven’t taken any samples yet, but my guess is it contains some laxatives to cleanse the body of various toxins and waste products. This is not unusual in cannibalism.’

  ‘So he was being kept alive. For how long, do you think? When did he die?’ Fabian couldn’t help thinking about how much pain Adam Fischer must have gone through before he finally passed away.

  ‘I’ll need to examine the body more thoroughly to give you an exact answer,’ said Thåström. ‘But if I was to make a rough estimate, I would say he died about three days ago.’

  So he’d been lying here, strapped down, for more than a week, hovering in total ignorance of what was to come, wondering if the police would find him in time – or if they were even searching. Fabian speculated how long he would have faith in a similar situation and how long it would take before he started hoping for death instead.

  ‘I guess that he died in connection with this incision.’ Thåström pointed towards the left part of his chest where there was a large, carved-out hole, just like Carl-Eric Grimås’ abdomen. It was round and a few inches in size, and looked as if an enormous printing press had punched out part of his body.

  ‘Why the heart?’ Fabian turned towards Stubbs and Thåström.

  ‘I guess he had to start somewhere,’ said Stubbs, shrugging.

  ‘Was there a heart in the freezer in the condemned apartment, where we found Grimås’ inner organs?’

  ‘No.’ Stubbs shook her head. ‘And it wasn’t in the freezer in his own apartment for that matter.’

  ‘Maybe he’d already eaten it,’ said Thåström.

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Stubbs. ‘But there’s nothing that suggests that here, in his apartment or in the condemned apartment.’

  The silence removed even more oxygen from the already warm, stuffy room. Fabian couldn’t bear to stay much longe
r, but somewhere deep down in the confusion of his subconscious, a thought had started to take shape: a thought so small and fragile that it risked disappearing for ever if he released it.

  First Grimås’ organs and now Fischer’s heart: maybe it wasn’t even about the eyes – they had already found those in the glass jar, but the heart, on the other hand, was missing. The question was whether it was in the freezer of the condemned apartment. He couldn’t quite figure out the connection just yet.

  ‘Those inner organs from the condemned apartment,’ Fabian said in an attempt to make it sound like an off-the-cuff comment. ‘Have you had time to examine them?’

  ‘I had just thawed them and was getting started when this came up,’ said Thåström. ‘Is there something in particular you’re wondering about?’

  ‘I think we can be pretty certain that they come from Grimås,’ said Stubbs.

  ‘It’s not that. I just want to know if he is missing anything else.’

  54

  DUNJA COULDN’T FEEL ANY immediate pain, but she didn’t know whether that was bad or good. The best thing to do was to stay as still as possible and wait for help. But she couldn’t help wondering if she should try to move, well aware of how common it was to be more injured than you think after an accident.

  If she could even move.

  The light from the street lamps above her streamed down through the broken skylight along with the sound from the occasional car. She estimated that she fell about four or five metres, and recognized that the outcome might have been quite different had it not been for all the empty boxes from stereo equipment that were in a large pile on the floor.

  She carefully turned on to her stomach and pushed herself up on all fours on the cardboard. So far she couldn’t feel much more than a pulsing soreness in her body. It wasn’t until she had moved on to the floor and tried to stand up that the pain in her left foot became so great that she was forced to breathe very quickly so as not to scream out loud. She had presumably sprained it and she could feel it starting to swell.

  As soon as the pain subsided a bit, she took out her phone to see if she had service and noticed that it had a serious crack in the screen. She’d just had it replaced after dropping it on the bathroom floor at home. It had still been possible to use, even if she’d cut her fingertips several times, but now it didn’t matter how many times she pressed the power button and tried to start it, it still wouldn’t work.

  She gave up and tried disconnecting an extension tube from a vacuum cleaner, so that she could use it as a crutch to make her way to the flashlight that was glowing weakly on the floor. She turned off the light and stuffed it into her jeans’ pocket. Then she heard the rumbling sound again. She stopped and listened. It seemed to be mixed with an angry howling now. She turned around completely, but couldn’t identify the source or location of the noise in the building. Then it stopped.

  She limped out into the increasingly dark corridor. Soon she was forced to grope her way along the wall in front of her with her free hand. Twice she bumped into framed posters, and after another few metres, a large hole opened up in the wall. She stopped and used her hand to feel along the edge. It was a doorway.

  She stepped in using the vacuum cleaner tube as a support, taking deep breaths in and out. She tried to think about something other than the intense pain in her foot, which was now so swollen that she would never be able to get her boot off. The sound had stopped, and there was dead silence apart from her own breath.

  She kept walking in the darkness with her one hand holding tightly on to the vacuum cleaner extension and the other stretched in front of her. After about ten metres she reached a wall covered in a soft, sound-absorbent material. The wall ended a few metres on the left, and she continued around a corner over to the other side of the room, where she could finally see something. A faint light ahead gave the impression of an open door.

  Then she heard the sound again. This time it sounded like a distant tractor engine that roared and rumbled on idle. But why would anyone be driving a tractor around indoors? It was only once the furious, howling began again that she realized this wasn’t the first time she’d heard something like this. It was a familiar part of her visit to her grandparent’s car repair shop.

  Her grandfather had told her it was called a tiger saw, explaining that the teeth of the saw were like a tiger’s and could bite through basically anything.

  She took out her pistol, chambered a round, and hurried as quickly as she could towards the sound, despite the searing pain in her foot. On the way, she stumbled over a microphone stand, but was quickly on her feet again. Then she saw it.

  Aksel Neuman’s BMW.

  Benny Willumsen was here, just as she’d suspected all along.

  The hatch was open and there were some tied-up garbage bags in the baggage compartment on rolled-out protective plastic that hung over the edge like a tail. A gas-powered electrical generator was rumbling close to the car and an electric cable disappeared along the floor. She followed it with her pistol in one hand and the vacuum cleaner extension in the other, moving closer to the sound that brought forth images she didn’t want to see.

  The cable disappeared through a crack in the door, which Dunja realized was the source of the faint light. She pressed her ear against the wall. The roaring sound was intermittently working its way down into something so close that she instinctively recoiled.

  Thoughts about what she should do and what was waiting on the other side of the door rushed through her mind like an aggressive spring flood. But her body had a mind of its own and she started running her hand across the door. She couldn’t find a handle so she stuck her fingers into the crack and pulled on it.

  She should have closed her eyes. She should have turned around and run away. But it was too late. What she saw would be etched in her memory fore ver.

  He stood with his back to her in the middle of the vacated sound studio, glowing in the light from the single bulb hanging down from the ceiling. At last, the man who had got away with raping and torturing a series of innocent women to death.

  He had earplugs in and was wearing a gas mask that was pulled back on his head, as if he were staring at her. He looked smaller than she’d imagined, and on top of his heavy, dark clothing he was wearing a transparent plastic apron that took the worst of the blood spray.

  He was holding the tiger saw in both hands. The sound cut through the air as the toothed-saw blade worked its way through the groin of the naked body on the plastic-covered table. Dunja wanted to scream as loud as she could to make him stop – and make it go away – but all she could do was stare.

  At the groin that opened up as the saw penetrated deeper.

  At the neck, where there should have been a head.

  At the leg that fell to the floor with a thud.

  At the blood that sprayed.

  At her.

  At Katja Skov.

  Everywhere.

  55

  ON THE WAY HOME from the Shurgard storage facility in Högdalen, Fabian stopped at a McDonald’s on Folkungagatan and bought a McFeast with mineral water for himself, a Big Mac with a Coke for Theodor and a Happy Meal for Matilda. Even though he was so tired that his whole body ached and he couldn’t shake the image of Adam Fischer’s mutilated body, he intended to keep his promise to Matilda about Friday treats. He also hurried by the 7-Eleven store on the corner of Ölandsgatan and bought a big bottle of Christmas cider, rustic potato chips with garlic dip and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough ice cream.

  It was already nine when he stuck the key in the door twenty minutes later, which meant that the kids had been alone for two and a half hours. It wasn’t ideal, but not a catastrophe either. Besides, he could hear a Christmas special on the TV, so it clearly wasn’t that bad.

  He hung up his coat, went into the kitchen and set the hamburgers on real plates, before putting the ice cream in the freezer. He noticed that every lamp in the apartment was on. ‘Matilda! Theodor! I’m home. Now
we can eat,’ he called without getting an answer. He walked into the living room where a Coca-Cola commercial was streaming out of the TV in a desperate attempt to compete against Christmas cider. He went around the sofa and saw Matilda lying all alone, sleeping with her red teddy bear close beside her.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. He might have shed a few tears when he saw a sad movie like Steel Magnolias, but otherwise he almost never wept. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to – sometimes he really tried to let his feelings come loose, but it usually amounted to little more than a lump in his throat.

  He was quite unprepared for the tears that suddenly started dripping from his eyes on to the floor. Matilda lying alone in a foetal position on the couch with her teddy bear was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen – and also the saddest. He dried his face with the back of one hand and pinched his eyes shut, but the tears continued to flow and he realized that his whole body was shaking.

  It couldn’t go on like this with his job, which consumed everything in its path, and Sonja, who was more or less living in the studio. They needed to talk. He just didn’t know what he should say or if he even wanted it to work out any more.

  He called for Theodor, but didn’t expect an answer. It wasn’t much past nine, but he was only thirteen and shouldn’t be running around town all night, or whatever he was doing. He tried phoning him, but it went to the voicemail message where Theodor tried to pretend that he answered before the beep. Instead he sent a text message asking his son to come home as soon as possible. Then he turned off the TV, took a few deep breaths, then sat down on the couch with Matilda and tried to wake her. But even though he enticed her with McDonald’s, chips and ice cream she didn’t want to get up.

  He finally gave up and carried her to her room, where he tucked her in under the blanket, kissed her on the forehead and whispered an apology in her ear. Then he sat down in the kitchen to eat the cold, tasteless hamburger while he wondered whether he should call Sonja.