The Ninth Grave

by Stefan Ahnhem

  *

  ‘BUT DADDY, HOW LONG is this going to take?’ said Matilda from the back seat while Fabian turned into the parking lot at Stockholm South General Hospital.

  ‘Not long at all. Half an hour at most.’

  ‘But then we won’t make it to the water park. It opens at nine thirty. Daddy, you promised,’ Matilda continued as she reached for the plastic bag on the other side of the back seat that was wrapped several times around its contents.

  ‘But I couldn’t know that Malin would call and be so angry that I haven’t been to visit her. We’ll have time for everything, except maybe swimming,’ said Fabian, finally finding a parking spot. ‘The movie, McDonald’s, the whole rest of the programme – I promise.’

  ‘But then I want candy.’ Matilda got hold of the bag and pulled it towards her.

  ‘Today? But it’s Sunday.’

  ‘Yes. Sunday candy. And I want it now.’

  Fabian took the order from the back seat with a mute nod and got out of the car, while Matilda opened the bag and looked down at the porcelain doll with big eyes.

  *

  MALIN WAS IN A ward with five other patients. She was asleep. Her face was as pale as the sheets on the bed and patches of unruly hair were plastered to her sweaty forehead. One arm was connected to a drip and the half-unbuttoned hospital gown exposed far too much for his liking. Fabian put a bunch of flowers into a stainless steel vase on the wheeled table as quietly as he could.

  ‘Is she dead?’ Matilda whispered while he wrote a greeting on the card with the flowers.

  ‘No, she’s just tired. Come along, let’s go.’ Fabian took Matilda by the hand and went towards the door.

  ‘And where do you think you two are going?’

  Fabian turned and saw that Malin had opened her eyes. ‘I thought you were asleep, and didn’t want to…’

  ‘I see. Sit down and tell me about it instead. And, hi, Matilda. How nice of you to stop by, too. There’s another chair over there.’

  Matilda went over to get the chair.

  ‘Tell you about what?’ said Fabian.

  Malin rolled her eyes. ‘I have pre-eclampsia. I didn’t get a lobotomy!’

  Fabian pulled up a chair and sat down. ‘Malin, there isn’t much to tell other than what I’m sure you already know. After you passed out, Kremph managed to jump out of a window.’

  ‘That much I know. But then what happened?’

  ‘Not much since then. The investigation is closed and everyone is happy.’ He underscored it all with a smile, as he heard Matilda opening the bag of candy.

  ‘Did Anders tell you to act like this?’

  ‘What do you mean, “act”? I haven’t even spoken to Anders. Malin, I don’t understand what—’

  ‘Knock it off, before I get paralysed for real. Don’t come here and tell me that it’s all over. Do you think I can’t see from the frown on your face how much you’re struggling with the fact that it’s Sunday and you want nothing more than to work?’

  Fabian went through his options, even though he’d already decided what to say, and sighed. ‘I don’t think it was Kremph. I think he was only a decoy and that the perpetrator is someone else altogether.’ He expected the usual strong opposition and explanations that shot his ideas to the ground, but he got nothing – not even an eye roll. He couldn’t tell if she hadn’t heard him or if she was just too tired to react. ‘Malin?’ He waved one hand in front of her face. ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  ‘Yes, I heard. And, no, I’m not brain dead yet. I actually already suspected the exact same thing.’

  ‘You did? Since when?’

  ‘Some time after I woke up at the hospital. Right when it happened I thought he was just talking about his “other self”, but that’s not what he was doing at all.’

  ‘Yes?’ Fabian leaned closer to her.

  ‘In the middle of the visit to the crime scene, don’t you remember that he said something about someone who had suddenly appeared?’

  Fabian shook his head. He’d been so preoccupied with tending to Malin that he almost hadn’t heard a word of what Kremph had said. ‘And unfortunately the videotape is gone.’

  ‘What do you mean, “gone”?’

  ‘I was at the department last night because I wanted to go through all the investigation material, including Tomas’ video from the crime scene visit, but someone had already been there and cleaned up.’

  ‘God, how strange. Who would—’

  ‘SePo, if you ask me,’ said Fabian, who had decided to keep the Edelman issue to himself for the time being. ‘I don’t know exactly how or why, but I have no doubt that this goes considerably higher up than our little department. I promise that it’s not just you and me who’ve realized that Kremph was innocent.’

  ‘It’s really lucky that I didn’t rely on Tomas and his film talents. Can you pass me the phone on that table?’

  ‘Did you record it yourself?’ Fabian asked, handing over the cell phone.

  ‘It was mostly so I could listen to it right away when I got home.’ She unlocked her cell and went to the audio files. ‘Listen to this.’

  ‘But that’s not good at all. It’s very bad. It doesn’t work, then everything goes wrong,’ Kremph’s rambling voice was coming through the microphone. ‘Everything has to be right, and if it’s not everything starts twirling round and round, and I get so tired. All of a sudden he’s there, the weird guy, although I’m the only one of course.’ Kremph swallowed and caught his breath. ‘He has the keys and is there anyway. He fixes and helps out. He doesn’t think I know, but I do, and then everything gets so dark and heavy, and then it’s like I just go away.’

  ‘Ossian, try to take it easy—’

  Malin paused the recording and met Fabian’s gaze. ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘Do you mean “the weird guy”? He’s just referring to his other self there. He even says that.’

  ‘I thought so too when I heard it the first time, but listen to it one more time.’ She started the audio file again.

  ‘Daddy, will you be done soon?’ said Matilda in her whiniest voice.

  ‘Everything has to be right, and if it’s not everything starts twirling round and round, and—’

  ‘But Daddy, this is boring.’

  Fabian hushed her without turning around, and didn’t see that she had the porcelain doll hidden inside her jacket, and was in the process of poking at the button on the back.

  ‘All of a sudden he’s there, the weird guy, although I’m the only one of course. He has the keys and is there anyway. He fixes and helps out. He doesn’t think I know, but I do, and then everything gets so dark and heavy.’

  ‘It’s the keys he’s referring to. “He has the keys and is there anyways. He fixes and helps out.”’

  Fabian nodded. Malin was right.

  ‘Another thing,’ Malin continued. ‘He’s not saying “weird”, but beard, which means that it must be someone else he’s talking about. Someone with a beard, who comes in, even though he doesn’t have keys. Listen to this.’ She started the recording again.

  ‘I lock up every day and I’ve even replaced the bolts. Lock, lock, and then I check whether it’s locked – always. Otherwise you can’t be completely sure.’

  ‘He’s even changed the locks, yet the “beard guy” is still there, helping out.’

  ‘You think it’s the perpetrator?’

  ‘Who else could it be?’

  Fabian thought about what Malin had said. A cleaning woman pushed in her cart and started mopping the floor.

  ‘Oh, how nice,’ said Malin. ‘As you can see, I spilled a little coffee last night.’ She pointed to the light-brown spot on the floor beside the bed.

  ‘There must be another way to get in to Kremph’s apartment,’ said Fabian, moving so that the cleaning woman could reach in.

  ‘I was coming to that: the scaffolding.’

  ‘No, there isn’t any. The other entrance from Östgötagatan has some— Matilda?’
Fabian hurried over to his daughter, who was playing with the doll. ‘What are you doing?’ He tore it out of her hands. ‘Did I say you could play with this?’ He searched for the tiny button in the back and turned it off as fast as he could. ‘Huh? Did I?’

  ‘I thought it was for me.’ Matilda burst into tears. ‘I thought it was a present because you’ve been gone so much.’ Her eyes filled with tears that started running down her cheeks.

  ‘Okay, then I understand,’ Fabian said, patting her on the head.

  ‘Are you really angry?’

  ‘No, it’s okay. You couldn’t have known that only Dad gets to touch this before Christmas Eve.’ He gave her a hug.

  ‘Fabian. Can you explain what’s going on?’ said Malin.

  He nodded. ‘But first we have to see about getting you a different room.’

  70

  MAYBE MALIN WAS RIGHT when she accused him of being more paranoid than a private detective, but Fabian couldn’t have cared less. Paranoid or not, he didn’t feel relaxed until she’d been moved to another room, and the staff had agreed not to inform anyone other than the immediate family where she was under any circumstances.

  Matilda had started the camera in the doll, and no one knew how long or how much it had transmitted to its unknown recipient before Fabian turned it off. In the best-case scenario it was nothing, but there was a risk that everything from pictures of them and the room to large parts of their conversation had been transferred.

  He’d thought about destroying it, but decided that it was better to let Hillevi Stubbs look at it as planned. With a little luck there might be a way to find out what, if anything, had transmitted and maybe even to whom.

  Stubbs didn’t need to look at it for more than a few seconds before she could confirm his worst fears: Anbash Limited was a Chinese company that hadn’t existed for much more than three years, but it had already released a number of products that could be described as advanced espionage equipment. And absolutely anyone could order them online.

  The wireless camera was their latest creation. Just as Fabian suspected, it was equipped with a SIM card that used the 3G mobile network to transmit both images and audio as soon as the motion detector was triggered. Unfortunately, she had no idea how they could trace the recipient because the SIM card was from an anonymous prepaid phone. It was almost certainly connected to a proxy server that would allow the recipient to study the information without revealing his own IP address.

  But, Fabian, there’s one thing I don’t understand, she suddenly said as he stuffed the doll back in the bag and asked her about the keys to Kremph’s apartment. Isn’t this over? I mean, the perpetrator’s dead, no? He had nodded and said something about just wanting to tie up the final loose ends. Just make sure so you don’t fall, she called to him as he returned to the car where Matilda was waiting.

  Even though they’d deviated from the crammed schedule for most of the morning, Matilda was in a surprisingly good mood. The rest of the day, however, she governed with an iron fist and refused to agree to the slightest digression. The first stop was the SF cinema in Söderhallarna, where she insisted they see James Cameron’s 3D epic Avatar, which had just opened. Even if both Aliens and Terminator were among Fabian’s absolute favourite films, he did not have the slightest interest in seeing the ‘blue man movie’, as he chose to refer to it after seeing the trailer.

  Unfortunately, his misgivings were warranted, and the only positive aspect of the two-hour-and-forty-minute-long ‘walk in the woods’ was that he could close his eyes behind the 3D glasses and get some much-needed rest.

  Matilda, on the other hand, loved it, and thought it was the best film she’d ever seen – something she thought pretty much every time she went to the movies. This time she was prepared to go so far as to cancel the rest of the itinerary and go right back in and see it again. But hunger stepped in and they made a scheduled stop to the McDonald’s on Folkungagatan. Afterwards they took the car to Mariatorget and bowled until they arrived at the last item on the programme.

  7:15–8:00 Surprise Mum with coffee

  Fabian had hoped that this idea would run into the sand, or that they would simply not have time: there was nothing Sonja liked less than surprises. In this case it would mean disturbing her in the middle of her final work before an exhibition, and at a time when she’d been more stressed than ever.

  On the way to the car, which was parked further up on Hornsgatspuckeln, he tried to convince Matilda that they should just go and have coffee themselves instead, or call Theodor and see if he wanted to join them. But Matilda wouldn’t budge an inch. It would be coffee with Sonja, and it would be a surprise. Half an hour later they were standing down on Munkbrogatan 6 buzzing up from the entrance.

  ‘Why doesn’t she answer?’ said Matilda, with a steaming paper cup in each hand.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she’s out buying more paint.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Or else she just doesn’t want to be disturbed. You know how it is when she’s stressed.’ Fabian held down the button a little longer and waited. ‘Matilda, let’s go and sit down at the café, before your hot chocolate gets cold.’

  Matilda shook her head. ‘You’ll just have to use your keys.’

  ‘What keys?’

  ‘Yours. You have a way in too.’

  ‘No. Where did you get—’

  ‘Daddy.’ Matilda rolled her eyes.

  Fabian actually did have a set of keys in case Sonja lost hers, or if he needed to get into the studio for some reason. But bursting in and surprising her was not what they were supposed to be used for, and the fact that Matilda even knew they existed made him wonder how much more she knew.

  ‘Well, look at this, here they are.’ He stuck one of the keys in the lock and turned it.

  They took the elevator and walked up the last flight of stairs to the studio, where Matilda pressed the doorbell with one finger.

  ‘Okay, unlock it,’ she said after just a few seconds.

  ‘Shouldn’t we wait a little before—’

  ‘Daddy, unlock it now.’

  Fabian reluctantly opened the door. ‘I’m going in first. You wait here.’ To his surprise, Matilda actually nodded, so he went in alone and looked around.

  He didn’t know what he’d expected: Sonja lying in a foetal position shaking, totally incapable of filling all the empty canvases with new, meaningless underwater motifs, which was the theme of her last four exhibitions. Or what he encountered: Sonja wearing headphones, blasting ‘Shout’ by Tears for Fears on full volume, and singing along while she worked on several parallel stretched canvases.

  Fabian exhaled, but felt a growing worry about what might happen as soon as she noticed him. She would almost certainly lose her flow and rightly blame him, he thought and decided that the best thing to do would be to sneak back out and convince Matilda that they should let her mother work in peace.

  But just as he turned around, the light flicked on and off rapidly, which made Sonja turn around with a start and pull off the headphones. ‘What are you two doing here?’ The look on her face was just as cold and hard as he had expected. ‘I thought I’d been perfectly clear about—’

  ‘We’re bringing you coffee,’ Matilda interrupted, letting go of the light switch at the doorway.

  Sonja stopped short and tried to smile.

  ‘Sonja, I really tried, but you know how persistent Matilda can be.’

  Sonja nodded and sighed. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘You sure?’

  She nodded again and crouched down in front of Matilda. ‘And what kind of goodies have you brought?’

  ‘Coffee and Lucia buns.’

  ‘Mmm, just what I’m hungry for.’

  To Fabian’s surprise, the coffee break far exceeded expectations. His premonition of trying silence and corrosive comments came to nothing.

  Matilda had planned everything down to the slightest detail. Sonja was instructed to take out some fabric that could serve as a
tablecloth in the middle of the floor, and he had to turn off the overhead light. Then he was told to light as many tea lights as he could find, and set them in a circle on the floor around the cloth. Matilda went over to the stereo and put on the CD he’d made with Prince’s ‘I Would Die For U’ on it nineteen times in a row.

  The coffee had cooled down long before and the Lucia buns had started to get dry, but that didn’t matter. Matilda was enjoying herself immensely and steered the conversation through everything from what she wanted for Christmas to where they should go on vacation next summer. And like a piece of modern choreography, Fabian and Sonja helped to avoid the worst pitfalls.

  Fabian found himself laughing several times, while he was struck by how Sonja’s stiff smile seemed increasingly more relaxed and natural. The frown, hunched-up shoulders and tense mouth seeped away as he remembered how she had looked when they first got together, before the years with small children and performance anxiety in the studio, and before all the fights. If only it was that simple.

  He noticed that it was well past eight. ‘Matilda, we have to leave Mum alone so she can keep working,’ he said, attempting to leave.

  Matilda shook her head. ‘Can I stay here instead?’

  ‘No, how would that work?’ Fabian reached for her hand. ‘You know how much Mum has to do. Besides, the schedule says that we’re supposed to leave here at eight o’clock, and it’s almost eight-thirty.’

  ‘Pleeeease.’

  ‘No, let’s go now.’ He took hold of her arm and pulled her up.

  ‘I said I don’t want to!’ she screamed, tearing herself out of his grasp.

  ‘Fabian, it’s fine,’ said Sonja. ‘She can stay. Christmas vacation starts tomorrow anyway.’

  ‘Yay!’ Matilda exclaimed, hugging Sonja. ‘I promise not to bug you, even a little bit.’

  Fabian looked Sonja in the eyes to see whether she really was okay with it.