The Ninth Grave

by Stefan Ahnhem

  ‘There you are.’

  ‘Dunja? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Didn’t you tell me to pop in if I was in the neighbourhood?’ Dunja came in with a bouquet of flowers.

  ‘How lovely. Are those for me?’

  ‘Of course.’ Dunja put the flowers in the vase on the nightstand.

  ‘Should I get some water for them?’ the cleaning woman asked.

  ‘Yes, thank you, that would be very nice,’ said Malin, making room on the bed for Dunja. ‘What a lovely surprise! Although you could have called to warn me. I would have put a little make-up on.’

  ‘Yes, you really need to.’

  ‘You should have seen me a few days ago. Actually you did. Why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In Denmark, when we met. I must have looked like a right sunfish.’

  ‘Oh, come off it, you looked fine. What happened to you?’

  ‘This,’ said Malin pointing to her pregnant belly.

  ‘Is everything okay?’

  ‘Yes, but come sit down and tell me what you’re doing here.’

  ‘It’s a long story.’ Dunja sat on the edge of the bed. ‘But the short version is that you were right.’

  ‘Of course I was. May I ask about what?’

  Dunja’s smile disappeared. She was just about to start talking but stopped herself when the cleaning woman came back in with a pitcher of water and started filling the vase.

  ‘It’s okay. You can tell me.’

  ‘It’s Carsten… It’s not going to work out for the two of us.’

  ‘Obviously it’s not. I could see that from a mile away. You weren’t even in love.’

  ‘No. But I thought I was. We almost never argued, and—’

  ‘Listen, that doesn’t mean a thing, I can promise you. My husband Anders and I fight all the time. Maybe fight isn’t the right word… We bicker. As soon as we see each other we start up. But, God, how I love him. More than anything.’ Malin stopped herself when she saw that Dunja had started crying, and hugged her. ‘Listen, I know it’s tough, but—’

  ‘I’m just so tired, and to be honest I don’t even know why I’m crying. I think I’m fine. In a way it feels like I’ve known all along and was just waiting to be humiliated enough to force me to leave him.’

  ‘You can be happy it happened now, and not when you look like me.’

  Dunja laughed and dried her tears. ‘Unfortunately, I have to head out now or I’ll miss my flight. It was really nice to see you.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch when I’ve got my head above water again – likely in twenty years!’

  Dunja laughed again, got up, and walked out the door. Malin leaned back in bed and wondered when she had last told Anders how much she really loved him. She decided to call him, but not quite yet. First she had to go through that personnel list from Always Clean.

  She opened the computer again, put in her password and started sifting through the information. As she expected, there weren’t many male cleaners. After a quick review she deduced there were only three. Three potential suspects, all of whom had access to both keys and codes to get into the Israeli Embassy and clean after office hours. Any one of them could have been the leak that Grimås and Edelman were so worried about. She wrote down their names and personal identity numbers in an email to Fabian. She was about to press send when her eyes locked in on the face directly beneath the picture of one of the men.

  She couldn’t really pinpoint what drew her to it, except that there was something familiar about the woman. Only once she enlarged the image did she realize that she actually recognized her. Was she a distant colleague? Or perhaps one of the thousands of witnesses she’d met? She just couldn’t identify her.

  Suddenly she realized how she knew the woman and every muscle in her body tensed. She’d seen her every day since she’d been in the hospital, sometimes several times in the same day. It had been so often that she no longer thought about it. She’d been here ever since Matilda turned on the doll she’d had with her.

  In fact, she was in the room right now, holding the mop in her hands and staring right at her.

  *

  THE STAFF IN THE ward were having a heated discussion about the open treasure chest that was bubbling out air to oxygenate the water. The question concerned how much money they should actually spend on brightening up the waiting room when the staff room was in an appalling condition.

  Dunja didn’t even notice the aquarium as she passed the waiting room on her way towards the elevators. She was completely absorbed in planning Carsten’s move out of the apartment. He would be coming home late that evening, which would give her several hours to change the locks and pack up his things.

  She pressed the elevator button and noted that it was twenty past twelve. It would soon be two hours since she’d seen Herman Edelman and he still hadn’t been in touch. She couldn’t say she was surprised. The chance that he would call before Christmas was negligible. In that respect, Sweden was exactly like Denmark: everything closed down for the holiday.

  Everyone except the perpetrator.

  She recalled the real reason she’d wanted to see Malin Rehnberg. She had wanted to tell her that their Minister for Justice’s car had shown up in her investigation in a strange coincidence. But the conversation had been all about Carsten instead, and perhaps that was just as well. Malin looked really worn out and was surely overworked. She needed to recover and gather her strength before the delivery.

  Or not?

  Suddenly she felt hesitant. Maybe she could go back quickly and tell her , if only to get a reaction. It wouldn’t take long, although it would mean she’d have to take a taxi to the airport so that she didn’t miss check-in.

  When the elevator doors opened a few seconds later, she was already on her way back to the ward. Right by the bubbling aquarium, she got the call she’d been waiting for.

  ‘Hi, it’s Herman Edelman. I don’t know if you remember me.’

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’

  ‘You’ll have to excuse my tardiness, but getting your information turned out to be more complicated than you might have anticipated. This is how it fits together: just a few weeks before Grimås was murdered he sold his Porsche 911.’

  ‘Who did he sell it to?’

  ‘I’m getting to that. I don’t know how it works in Denmark, but here in Sweden the seller is responsible for sending in the change of ownership to the Transport Agency. Normally it only takes a few business days before the notification is registered, but in this case it didn’t come in until yesterday.’

  ‘Do we know why?’

  ‘Apparently two numbers in the postal code were reversed. There’s your connection.’

  ‘So, who was the buyer?’

  ‘Björn Troedsson at Arkitektgatan 2 in Malmö. Apparently he’s no more than a stone’s throw from Konsultgatan where Benny Willumsen lived.’

  ‘The car was stolen?’

  ‘Exactly. The police report should have come in to the Malmö Police on Monday, 14 December, but since the owner information didn’t match, it was set aside. It arrived only while I was rooting around. I’ll email you all the papers so you can see them with your own eyes, and if anything is unclear all you have to do is contact me again.’

  Dunja thanked him for the help, hung up and decided not to bother Malin Rehnberg.

  *

  TIME HAD SLOWED DOWN and seemed about to stop entirely. Malin was sure that if she’d dared move her gaze to the clock on the wall, she wouldn’t even have been able to discern the plodding movement of the second hand.

  Normally she wasn’t someone who got scared. It almost never happened. Even in the most stressful circumstances, facing a gun held in shaking, drug-addled hands, she would react contrary to most of her colleagues and become more calm and collected, which was often what was needed.

  But this time she was scared.

  And, for the first time ever, for her life.

  Her ch
ildren’s lives.

  Her hospital gown was soaked with sweat, and she couldn’t move. Terror had drilled its claws so deep into her that all she could do was lie in bed, staring back at the woman. She didn’t even try to reach the alarm button that was hanging down on its cord only a foot or so away.

  Neither of them said anything. There was no need for words. The eyes said enough.

  They both understood.

  That there was no return.

  Aisha Shahin, Malin repeated in her head. She was struck by how lovely it was – almost as lovely as the woman who was standing before her with golden-brown skin and clear blue eyes.

  Fear started to release its hold on her. Maybe it was because the whole situation seemed so surreal. It should be against all the laws of nature that something so beautiful could cause something so horrific. It reminded her of the images from a little over eight years ago. They were so unbelievable that they almost looked like an action movie. Both she and Anders had to sit in front of the TV and watch the planes crashing into the Twin Towers over and over again, far into the night, to understand that it had really happened.

  She mustered up the courage to reach one arm out towards the alarm button without taking her eyes off the woman. But she missed it and had no choice but to turn around and try to grab the swinging button again. With her hand trembling convulsively, she finally got hold of the plastic and was about to press in with her thumb.

  But it was too late.

  The cleaning woman was already on top of her and tore the call button out of its socket. Malin’s arms started waving and tried to claw wherever they could reach. They’d never been in a fight for life and death, and were soon overpowered and locked against her chest. How strong was this woman?

  A respiratory mask was pressed against her face. She hadn’t noticed it before she heard the gas start hissing. She’d never been good at holding her breath and was always the first one up to the surface. But now there was no place to go. She was forced to stay down, despite the growing pain in her chest. She wouldn’t manage much longer, and could already picture how soon she would be forced to give up.

  Her lungs were about to burst. In a final desperate lunge she tried to get loose, but her arms were still pinned down. All she could move was her head, so she tried first in one direction, then in the other. She repeated the action with more force, which created a gap between the mask and her face.

  She took a few desperate breaths, while she threw her head in every direction until the mask fell off. Without thinking she sank her teeth in the hand restraining her arms and bit down until she tasted blood.

  The woman shrieked and eased her grip on Malin’s arms. Malin rolled on to her side away from the woman, over the edge of the bed, and down on to the floor. She felt a pain in her hip, but what did that matter now? All she could focus on was getting out of there, away from the beautiful monster, and into the corridor where she could scream for help.

  She tried to stand up, but something in her hip wasn’t working properly. She slid forward on all fours, using her arms and one leg with the other dragging behind. She did everything she could to block out the pain in her hip even though it got more intense, and concentrated on pulling herself towards the door.

  Once she got there, she started screaming for help as loud as she could, while she reached for the door handle to open it, but she couldn’t get all the way up.

  The hands that grasped her ankles were so strong and pulled her back across the floor like a newly slaughtered animal. She resisted, kicked the hands loose and managed to make her way back to the door to open it.

  But only in her mind. Her body had given up.

  With her broken hip, all the woman needed to secure her was a hard knee to the back.

  ‘You should have taken the mask. It’s not certain that they’re going to survive,’ said the woman behind her.

  Malin didn’t understand what she was talking about until she felt a stab between her vertebrae and a numbing sensation spread across her body, down into her legs and up over her belly.

  94

  3 April 2000

  IT HAD BEEN THREE years since Aisha Shahin crossed the border out of Palestine. She’d managed to get all the way to Sweden using her mother’s savings. It turned out that she had a talent for Swedish and was one of the best students in her language class for immigrants. She wasn’t able to transfer her medical training, so she started working at a cleaning company instead. Slowly but surely, she built up a secure life for herself. But she’d never stopped dreaming about the day when she and Efraim would be reunited, leave everything behind and never let go of each other again.

  It was the reason why she was back again.

  She’d taken many risks on her way over the border to get to her old village of Imatin. But the letter had given her no other choice. The hand of God must have helped the letter find its way to her. She knew all the words by heart.

  Aisha, it feels like you’re here and reading every word over my shoulder. I don’t want to stop writing but strength has run out of my body. I must save my last bits so I can fold this up, put it in the envelope and drop it in the night.

  It told her so much, but nevertheless ended in a question greater than anything else.

  Was he alive?

  Had he succeeded in the impossible? Or had it ended the way she had feared? The weight of the uncertainty rested on her chest and she felt as if it would suffocate her if she didn’t get an answer soon.

  God was with her in any event. She could feel it in her whole body, like the heavily loaded backpack that chafed across her shoulders, yet she hardly seemed to notice. The half moon in the clear night sky gave off just enough light so that she could keep her flashlight off, which was a major advantage. Although she could see from a distance that all the houses in the village were dark, it was far from certain that everyone was asleep.

  As a little girl she had gone there a lot. She and her friends had loved to run around and play hide-and-seek among the trees and stones. Her mother warned her that she would be punished for playing there one day because there were strong forces that were hard to resist. But she’d continued without giving a second thought to what lay below her bare feet.

  She’d only understood what her mother was talking about the morning after the electricity had been turned off and darkened the whole village. They had woken to find three dead bodies lying in a heap outside the wall, right at the spot where she would sit in the shade and count out loud with her hands over her eyes while the others ran and hid. She recognized all three of them, but the youngest she had known personally. They had played together after school almost every day, and she had never met anyone else who was as good at throwing stones as him.

  It looked exactly as she remembered it: the trees that had provided shade and were so much fun to climb in, the benches on the inside of the stone wall, and the graves that were scattered all over the place. There were a few old ones with worn, overturned stones, but others were quite new.

  It took no more than a few minutes to find what she was looking for. They were in a row at the far end of one corner. Even though it had been almost two years ago, the moulding in the ground was still clearly visible.

  Rasin. Mihayr. Zakwan. Tamir. Muzaffar. Altair. Safi. Wasim.

  Every name was familiar. Five of them were her brothers. The other three were neighbours.

  But they weren’t the reason she’d come back.

  She was here for the last one.

  The one that didn’t even get a stone with an inscription.

  The ninth grave.

  She wriggled out of the backpack, unfolded the spade, and started digging. The ground was hard and dry. An hour later she got on her knees and brushed aside the dry earth from the thick industrial-strength plastic that had been wrapped several times around the body and fastened with heavy tape. With the help of a safety knife, she cut through layer after layer of plastic. When the body was finally exposed below her she saw exactly
what she’d feared.

  She had expected that the cut-open and emptied body would make her start crying. The sight of the gaping, empty eye sockets and heavy stitches from the throat all the way down past the navel would make her tears drip down over his mutilated body. But she did not shed so much as a tear, not even when she noticed the label with the five-digit number in black ink that was attached to his forehead with a staple.

  All she could feel was hate.

  She hated her father and brothers who had forced him out on the mission, and her mother who had stood by and watched. She despised the Israeli soldiers who had fired the shots and the doctor who had opened him up and deprived him of everything that made him whole. But most of all, she felt hatred towards everyone who walked around with blood on their hands and Efraim inside them; those people who had refused to accept the judgment of God. She carefully pulled loose the label from his forehead and folded it up.

  Whoever they were.

  Wherever they were.

  They would all get their punishment.

  95

  FABIAN GOT IN THE car to drive the desktop computer over to Niva. On his way into the city his thoughts were whirling around as quickly as the snowflakes outside. After turning right on to Hornsgatan on a red, and coming within a centimetre of a collision, he put Kraftwerk’s Computer World into the CD player in an attempt to regain focus.

  It’s not that he wasn’t prepared for surprises. He’d realized long ago that this was an unusual investigation that required thinking outside the box. After all, they were dealing with a perpetrator who had devoted years to meticulous preparations and hadn’t left anything to chance.

  Yet the fact that a woman was behind it all had come as a total surprise. And to be honest, he still had a hard time imagining it, even though it was the reality. According to her neighbour, Aisha Shahin was both unusually pleasant and extremely beautiful.

  So far they hadn’t succeeded in locating a picture of her. But he was convinced that it was only a matter of time before Tomas and Jarmo, who were searching the apartment, would find one and send it over, even if it wasn’t the highest priority. They were focused on producing leads to the next two victims as quickly as possible, even if the perpetrator’s careful planning indicated that it might already be too late.