‘Always Clean.’
‘And are you satisfied with them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very good, I’ll take this opportunity to say thank you and to wish you happy holidays.’
‘Are we finished already?’
‘As I said, there were only a few questions. Bye now.’
There was a click, and Carnela Ackerman sat there, looking at the receiver in her hand.
*
MALIN REHNBERG EXHALED AND set the cell phone down on the table beside the bed. The call had exceeded expectations. She knew she was good at lying, but not this good. If she ever decided to embark on a new career, she could always try acting; or, even better, be a professional poker player.
She brought the bed up to a seated position, then opened her computer, entered the cleaning company’s name in the search field of the browser and clicked to their website. It promised dazzlingly clean homes and offices and that they were both punctual and reliable. Unfortunately, there were no pictures of the staff or any information about whether they had male cleaners.
She had no choice but to assume another role, so she picked up the phone and entered the number. As the ring tones sounded, she used the opportunity to think about what she should do if they were already off for the holidays and didn’t answer. Maybe she could ask her sister who worked at the Social Insurance Agency to get her information about all the employees. The risk was that she would tell Anders, who would totally flip out. Niva Ekenhielm was a much better alternative, however much it grated her to admit it. She could get the information as quickly as she could destroy a marriage.
‘Welcome to Always Clean. How may I help you?’
‘Hello, my name is Malin Rehnberg.’ She was completely unprepared for anyone to answer and hadn’t thought up a pseudonym. ‘I’m looking for a cleaner to make my home as dazzlingly clean as you promise on your website.’
‘Absolutely. Do you live in a house or apartment? And how many rooms—’
‘It’s big and this will probably be really expensive,’ Malin interrupted. ‘I would prefer to have male cleaners. Do you have any?’
There was silence on the other end.
‘Let me underscore that this is only about cleaning. I’ve just had much better experience with men.’
‘I understand. We should have several. But—’
‘Marvellous! Perhaps you could email me a list?’
‘I don’t know. There—’
‘And one more thing: can you please include their names and pictures, so that I can see what they look like?’
92
THE SHELF IN THE dark hall was filled with gloves, hats and scarves, and some winter coats were hanging on the hooks. Boots and shoes were on the shoe rack below. There was the outline of an old-fashioned telephone on a hall table beside a wicker chair further inside, but it was too dark to see whether it was an authentic one with a dial.
The angle was adjusted and the search for clues moved down to the floor. Suddenly the light came on and a pair of bare feet were visible in the small round, reversed image. They belonged to an elderly man who was scratching his grey hair.
Fabian withdrew the dental mirror, carefully closed the mail slot and hurried down the stairs.
The geographic position that Niva had given them by triangulating the cell phone towers was anything but exact. Selmedalsvägen 38–42 included three different entrances with access to nine floors each with between three to five apartments on each level. Then again, she’d only counted on a radius of fifteen metres, which was the best-case scenario. Fabian didn’t dare think about how big it could be in the worst possible outcome as he glanced up at the light-brown concrete buildings that stood in a row; evidence of an architect’s bad day.
It had taken them twelve minutes to get there, even though Tomas had run red lights and used every bus lane. To ensure they didn’t lose any more valuable time, they split up with each of them taking a different entrance. Fabian had just finished the top two floors, and was on his way down to the seventh.
A mother disappeared into the elevator with her stroller. He waited until the elevator doors closed, before exhaling a big sigh of relief that he was finally alone. Fabian started studying the five apartment doors. There was another stroller and a tied-up garbage bag outside one of them. On the door beside it was a handwritten ‘We live here’ sign with all the family members’ names, including ‘Copper’ and ‘Old Boy’. The third door was not quite as easy to rule out. It said ‘M. Carlsson’ on the mail slot under the sticker that said ‘No flyers, please’.
Fabian rang the bell with one hand and felt the shoulder holster inside his coat with the other. The service gun he usually didn’t carry and that had never been used outside the firing range was in place. He couldn’t say why, but carrying it always made him feel uncomfortable, like the feeling of wearing a tie when everyone else was in T-shirts. But Tomas and the others insisted that they should be armed, and he agreed it was probably a good idea. At any moment they could be under fire – the perpetrator might be ready and waiting behind any one of the apartment doors.
As he rang the bell again, Fabian wondered whether he would pull out his gun and pull the trigger without hesitating. Somewhere deep down, he knew the answer and could only hope he was wrong.
He had taken out the dental mirror, pulled out the shaft and was carefully guiding it down through the mail slot, when his cell phone started vibrating. He picked it up with his free hand and put it to his ear while he adjusted the angle of the mirror.
‘Hi, Daddy,’ he heard Matilda’s voice at the other end.
‘Hi, Matilda. How’s it going out at Aunt Lisen’s?’ He scanned the hall and saw a dirty, illuminated terrarium containing something hairy with several legs, and a few guitars leaning against the wall.
‘It’s bad. Theo says I’m a piece of shit and that he’s going to hit me.’
‘Why would he say something like that?’
‘Because I told Mummy he sneaked out through the window last night.’
‘What did you say?’ asked Fabian, as he watched someone go past a guitar and walk up right towards him. He pulled the mirror up again, but it was stuck.
‘He left, and wasn’t back until—’
‘Matilda, I have to go now. We’ll talk later.’
The door opened and a man in his mid-thirties came rushing out in tracksuit bottoms and a bare torso. ‘I saw what you were up to!’ The man reeked of beer and pushed Fabian up against the wall. ‘Fucking peeping Tom.’
‘I’m a police officer,’ said Fabian, finally managing to dig out his identification and hold it up in front of the man. ‘We’re looking for a suspect in one of the apartments here and when you didn’t answer I assumed you weren’t at home.’
‘So you started spying through the mail slot. Is that even legal?’ The man let go of Fabian and grabbed his identification.
‘We’re in a race against time and this is the only chance we have.’ Fabian coaxed the mirror out and took back his ID card.
‘I see, and what happens now? Do I have to go in for questioning?’
‘No, if anything comes up we’ll be in touch again. One last thing: what do you know about your neighbours?’
‘Basically nothing.’ The man seemed almost disappointed that nothing more would happen. ‘Although the kids in there shriek like pigs every fucking day starting at five thirty in the morning. It’s so bad, I’ve thought about reporting them. Can I do that with you?’
‘No, but as I said we’ll be in touch if we need you.’
In order to make it clear that they were finished, Fabian turned around and rang the doorbell of the apartment next door. He waited for the sound of footsteps and the door being closed behind him, but when he didn’t hear anything he turned around again to face the tenant.
‘Like I said, we’ll be in touch.’
‘It’s not illegal to watch, is it?’
‘No, but I’d prefer it if you… Oh, forget it.�
�� Fabian gave up with a sigh, and returned to the neighbour’s door and rang the bell again. When no one answered he took out the mirror and guided it down into the mail slot.
‘Is that thing allowed?’
Fabian tried to block out the man and focus on what he saw in the mirror.
‘Well, there you go. You learn something new every day.’
The hall looked similar to the elderly man’s apartment above, except the doors were open and let in enough light so that he could study the furnishings.
‘Do you see anything cool?’
‘No. It’s just boring things,’ said Fabian, slowly turning the mirror.
There were colours everywhere. The walls were painted red and a thin yellow cloth with tiny mirrors and sequins sewn in was hanging over a larger mirror with a gold frame. There were small shelves with tea light holders in various colours on the opposite wall and the rug that stretched through the entire hall was green and blue. Other than a grey sweater and a heavy black jacket, most of the clothes hanging on the hat shelf were bright.
He angled the mirror down to study the shoes on the shelf, but was met by one eye of a gas mask. The shock startled him and made him lose his hold of the mirror, which disappeared through the mail slot.
‘Hey! What the hell was that?’
‘I have to ask you to go back into your apartment now.’
‘Did you see something important?’
‘I said get into your apartment.’
‘Nice and easy now.’ The man backed up a few steps and stood on his own threshold without closing the door.
Fabian took out a picklock and a small bottle of lock oil and started working.
‘So that’s how it’s done.’
After a minute or two he was able to turn the picklock around like a key and carefully open the door.
‘Jesus, that can’t have been the first time.’
Fabian looked around the hall of the apartment. There was a gas mask hanging on a hook in the far corner. It could be a coincidence, but who had a gas mask hanging in their hall? He continued further inside. The first door led into a bedroom, which was painted a rich hue, just like the hall. The walls were warm yellow and the bed in the middle of the room had a pink duvet cover spread over it and couldn’t be wider than a metre. Fabian tried to put together the image he had of the perpetrator. He really wasn’t sure what he had expected, but one thing was certain: it wasn’t this.
A shimmering red silk cloth with several dozen candles and some incense burners were placed on top of a dresser along one wall across from the headboard. Right in the middle of the dresser was a framed photograph of a stone embedded in the ground and just beside it was an old record player with At Last: The Best of Etta James on the turntable. He pressed play. The record started turning, the arm lowered, and Etta James’s most famous and haunting song, At Last, sounded through the speaker.
Fabian picked up the framed photograph to inspect it more closely. He realized that there was something written on the stone in small, unintelligible letters, but he could only understand two dates.
It wasn’t Arabic, that much he could decipher. And it didn’t look like an Asian language either. He figured it could be Hebrew; at any rate, the text reminded him of the embroidered letters that Edelman had hanging on the wall of his office. In order to be completely certain and to rule out Georgian, Armenian and all the other languages he didn’t know, he would have to have someone look at it.
On the other hand, he was convinced that he was looking at a gravestone. But whose? And who was the grieving person? Was he even in the right place? He took a picture of the photograph with his phone and sent it to Niva, and then went back out into the hall and went into the next room.
One step across the threshold was enough for all doubt to disappear. The room differed markedly from the rest of the apartment. There were no warm colours or decorative objects to make it feel pleasant. The walls were more reminiscent of how it looked right now in his own living room, yet no investigative work had gone on here.
Instead this was where all the planning had taken place.
The wall to the left was covered with old newspaper clippings and photographs. He spotted Ossian Kremph at various ages and the security guard with the mannequins. Carl-Eric Grimås was also there, both as a minister wearing his typical hat and fur-collared coat, and as a young man when he worked with Herman Edelman at the National Bureau. Semira Ackerman and Adam Fischer were on the wall, too.
But there were also other faces that Fabian didn’t recognize: a well-groomed woman with brown hair who Fabian could have sworn looked just like the wife of a Danish celebrity; and a muscle-bound man with bright blue eyes and a strong jaw. Connected to each person was everything from extracts of court reports and newspaper clippings to medical records and detailed notes, such as their work hours and commutes, as well as entry codes, where they did their grocery shopping, whom they socialized with, their favourite TV shows and taste in clothing. It was everything a stalker might need to inhabit these people’s world.
The whole thing was linked with red, tacked-down bands that branched out over the wall. There was a timeline that ran horizontally along the top of the wall, starting on 8 December with Adam Fischer’s kidnapping and moving day by day until 24 December.
Today was the twenty-second.
Fabian followed the two red bands towards the last two days, but both were incomplete. The nails were still in the wall, so the perpetrator must have torn off all the pictures and notes before he left the apartment.
Two days left.
Another two to go.
It couldn’t mean anything else.
Fabian turned to the rest of the room. Rolls of protective plastic were leaned against one long wall and there was a shelf lined with gas tubes and another with scalpels and all kinds of surgical tools. A clothes rack was filled with various get-ups, including Joakim Holmberg’s security guard uniform, and a bunch of wigs, fake beards and a moustache were piled on top of a vanity.
He spotted a number of keys and pass cards hanging in a key cabinet. None of them was marked, so he focused his attention on a work table with a pile of document folders and a large screen that was connected to a desktop computer under the table. He tried to start it, but once he realized there was no keyboard or mouse, he thought it might be best to take it home to Niva. Instead he opened up one of the folders.
It contained printouts from the pathology institute in Abu Kabir. There was page upon page of long tables. The first column consisted of a five-digit number, and the second contained a blood type. The third column listed every transplantable organ associated with the five-digit number, and the fourth column ranked the quality of each organ using a ten-point scale.
Another folder contained documentation on the organ buyers. Thousands of people must have been in contact with the Institute. Each file contained their medical records, which organ had been transplanted, and from whom they had received it. That is, which five-digit number.
A number of folders later he found the final link: the pictures of the dead. His heart sank as he turned the pages, seeing horror after horror. All those people who had been opened up and emptied without their consent, and then renamed with a five-digit number that was stapled to their forehead.
‘Wow. This is what you might call the jackpot.’
Fabian turned around to face the bare-chested neighbour, who was standing right behind him.
‘Imagine having this kind of neighbour. It’s unbelievable,’ the man continued, throwing out his arms.
Fabian was about to order him back to his apartment, and even made a move to draw his gun to show how serious he was, but he didn’t get that far.
‘Okay, I know, I know. I shouldn’t be here. You just get so curious. It’s not every day you realize you have a psycho for a neighbour. Stay calm. I’m leaving now,’ the man said, disappearing back out into the hall.
‘Wait a second!’
‘Yes?’
‘What do you know about your neighbour?’
‘Pretty much nothing.’ The man shrugged. ‘But she’s damned good-looking, that’s for sure.’
‘She?’ Fabian was convinced that he’d heard wrong, until he saw the man nodding.
93
GOD KNEW, IT HADN’T been easy. Malin Rehnberg had used the whole range of her acting abilities before she managed to convince the woman at Always Clean to email her both names and pictures of their male cleaners. She’d even been forced to solemnly swear to have them clean her house once a week for at least six months. I’ll have to see what Ursula says about this, she thought, clicking on her email’s envelope icon to see if anything had arrived yet.
She’d been rapidly pressing on the icon for the past ten minutes, like a gambling addict in front of a one-armed bandit. Each time her inbox showed up empty she was on the verge of calling back Always Clean to show them who they were dealing with. She didn’t need to restrain herself this time, though, because it had finally arrived.
Hi Malin,
I hope you find someone suitable. Six months is a fairly long time. ;-)
Kind regards,
Åsa
Malin typed out a quick response promising to get back to her as soon as she’d looked over the list.
The attached file turned out to be several megabytes, which meant that she must have included all the personnel. It wasn’t that much of an issue other than it would be time-consuming. Then again, they couldn’t have that many male cleaners.
She preferred to be left alone when she was working. The hospital staff had already given her two warnings about needing rest and threatened to confiscate both her phone and computer. Fortunately, she didn’t think that the cleaning woman who was doing her daily round would tattle on her; otherwise she would have done it long ago, considering the number of times she must have seen her reclining with her computer.
She started at the top of the list, but she didn’t get much further than halfway down the first page when the door opened and she had to quickly close her computer and hide it under the covers.
The Ninth Grave Page 38
