Bim looked confused. “But what’s that got to do with me? Why would the police want to speak to me?”
“They didn’t say,” Elvinia replied. And then, very tentatively, “Can you think of anything?”
Bim shook her head. “Nothing. I really can’t. Nothing.”
“Nothing to do with drugs? Not you, of course, but if people around you are using them, maybe even dealing them, then the police might get things wrong and think you—”
Bim interrupted her. “No, Mother, no! You know that I don’t do drugs. I just don’t.”
“I know that, darling. I was just exploring possibilities.” She thought for a moment. “What about witnessing something? Have you witnessed anything recently that they might be interested in?”
Again Bim could think of nothing.
“In that case,” said Elvinia, “you’ll just have to go along and see what they say. No doubt all will become clear.”
And now Bim was at the reception desk in the Department of Sensitive Crimes, asking for a Mr. Ulf Varg, who had spoken to her mother on the telephone about her coming in for an interview that afternoon. The receptionist consulted a list in front of her and directed her to Interview Room 2. “There are seats directly outside it. Wait there until they call you in.”
Bim sat outside Interview Room 2. Elvinia had offered to come with her, but she had refused, saying that it was unnecessary. But it was not unnecessary, she had subsequently decided, and now she wished that she had accepted her mother’s offer. Being interviewed by the police was exactly the sort of experience that would be easier with some maternal support. All suspects should be given the chance to telephone their lawyers or their mothers, and it would not be surprising if they chose to call their mothers. After all, your mother is far more likely to believe in your innocence than your lawyer.
She did not have to wait long. At exactly the agreed time Anna opened the door, introduced herself, and invited Bim inside.
“This is my colleague Mr. Varg,” she said. “We work in the same department.”
Bim glanced nervously at Ulf. He smiled back at her warmly, in an obvious effort to put her at ease.
Anna invited her to sit.
“It’s good of you to come in,” said Ulf. “I know that you have lectures and so on at the university. So, thank you for making the effort.”
Bim inclined her head. “I thought I had to,” she said. “I thought you said I had to come.”
“No, we didn’t,” said Anna. “We’re not arresting you or anything. We just need to ask you some questions.”
Bim bit her lip. It was only dope, and everyone smoked dope now and then. She hardly ever touched it, and the last time had been at least six weeks ago when one of Signe’s boyfriends had offered her some. They’d have to arrest the whole university if they started.
Ulf was looking at her appraisingly, and under his gaze she shifted in her seat. If there were two of them, she thought, one will be nice and one will be nasty. That was how these things worked, did they not? Or was that only on film? In reality, were both likely to be nasty?
“What are you studying at the university?” Ulf asked.
The question was posed in a friendly enough tone, but that did not mean, she thought, that he was the nice one.
“Human geography,” she said. “I’m in my second year.”
“Human geography,” Ulf mused. “That, I suppose, is different from physical geography. Is that right? You don’t study...” He waved a hand in the air. “You don’t study mountain ranges and rivers and things like that? Maps and so on?”
“All those things may have an effect in the background,” Bim said. “But the focus of human geography—”
“Where people live is determined by physical factors,” interjected Anna. “You don’t get people living on the top of mountains.”
“Not right at the top,” said Ulf. “But you do get them living on the sides. What about Nepal?”
Anna frowned. “They live in valleys there, don’t they?”
“And up the slopes too,” said Ulf.
They both looked at Bim, as if to seek support. She said nothing.
“Have you been to Nepal?” asked Ulf.
Bim considered the question. Was this what they wanted to find out? Was this something to do with trafficking drugs from Nepal?
“No,” she replied. “Never.”
“I’d like to go some time,” said Ulf.
“So would I,” said Anna. “I’d like to do one of those hikes where they take you right up into the mountains. Somebody in Criminal Records did that. He took his children, but one of them came down with altitude sickness and had to be brought down to a lower level.”
“I hear that you can go to Base Camp on Everest these days,” remarked Ulf. “They take you in by helicopter and you spend a day or two there before they take you back down again.”
“I’d love that,” said Anna. “Imagine getting out of your tent in the morning and looking up at Everest.”
Ulf said he would like that, but thought that you might not get a good view of the summit because of cloud. Bim said nothing.
Ulf cleared his throat again. “You may be wondering why we asked you in,” he said.
Bim nodded. “Yes, I was.” Surely they had not asked her in to talk about Everest.
“Does the name Sixten mean anything to you?” Ulf asked.
Bim felt a sudden cold within her. That was dread. They were asking about her lies. And yet it was not a crime to tell a few lies, was it? You don’t have to tell the truth all the time, surely?
Her voice was small as she answered. “Sixten?”
“Yes,” said Anna. “A young man of about your age. A young man who works as a paramedic.”
Bim transferred her gaze from Ulf to Anna. She had no idea how these people had got to hear of her invention of Sixten. It was bizarre. It was as if they had all stepped out of reality into a work of fiction—which was, of course, what Sixten was. And as she thought this, she was suddenly filled with shame and embarrassment.
“I knew him,” she said. “I knew a boy called Sixten. And yes, he was a paramedic.”
She had no real idea why she had chosen to perpetuate the lie. Shame, perhaps, lay behind it, but it was also to do with fear. She only wanted to get away, and it would be too complicated to explain what had really happened and why she had chosen to deceive her friends with that ridiculous story. And the original lie, in some strange sense, still had momentum.
“Have you seen him recently?” asked Ulf.
Bim shook her head. “No. We’ve split up.”
Ulf waited for a few moments before he asked the next question. “So, where is he now?”
“He’s gone up north. To the North Pole. There’s a research station up there. A government place.”
Ulf nodded. “Yes, so we heard.”
“And you haven’t heard from him since then?” asked Anna.
“No. I told you: we split up.”
“Acrimoniously?” asked Ulf.
“A bit. He didn’t discuss it with me, you see. He just announced that he was going to the North Pole.” Why am I telling these lies? This is ridiculous. Stop now.
“Not very considerate,” Anna remarked. “I would have felt rather annoyed, if I were in your position.”
“I did. Yes, I did.”
Ulf’s next question came quickly. “You felt angry?”
“Annoyed rather than angry. But anyway, I was getting fed up with him. You get bored with people sometimes. You just do.”
Ulf now asked whether she had any means of getting in touch with him. Did she have a mobile number?
Bim smiled. “I don’t think there’s any reception at the North Pole.”
Anna now joined in. “If that’s where he is. If.”
> Bim stared at her. This was the way out. “I thought that too,” she said. “I thought that he could be making it up.”
“To get rid of you?” asked Anna.
“Yes, it could have been a story. I’ve been thinking about that—it could all just have been an excuse.”
Ulf tapped the table with his pencil. “Very possibly. In fact, highly likely. You see, somebody has checked with that research station, and there’s no paramedic there. There’s a doctor, as it happens, but no paramedic.”
Bim looked away. “So he wasn’t telling the truth.”
“So it would seem,” said Anna.
“You definitely don’t know where he is?” Ulf asked.
“No, I don’t. I haven’t seen him since we split up.”
Ulf tried another tactic. “Where did he live? Did you ever go to his place?”
Bim shook her head. “No, never.” She paused. “He didn’t tell me where he lived.”
“So where did the two of you go, then?”
It was too late to confess. She had lied inexplicably—and profusely. She would have to continue with the whole farce. She had done nothing wrong, after all—not in the legal sense.
“We met in cafés,” she said. “We went to clubs at night. Meals out. That sort of thing.”
Ulf made a note. “But never at his place?”
“No, never. I told you. I didn’t know where he lived.”
“Or what sort of place he lived in?” Ulf pressed. “A shared flat? His parents’ house?”
“I just don’t know. We never talked about...about that sort of thing. And he worked a lot of the time. He was studying too, and doing his ambulance work.”
Ulf reached into a folder before him and took out the picture given them by Signe. He slid it across the table towards Bim. “Is this Sixten?” he asked.
Bim could not conceal her shock. “How did you get that?”
“It was passed on to us,” said Ulf. “We can’t reveal how. It just came into our possession. So, is that him?”
Bim gazed at the photograph. She felt confused. Her mobile was in her pocket—she had had it with her all the time. Nobody could have got the photograph from it. It was impossible.
“Yes. That’s him.”
“So let’s get this straight,” said Ulf. “You broke up with Sixten. He said he was going off to the North Pole. It looks as if he didn’t. Since then, you haven’t seen him. And nor has anybody else. We contacted the ambulance people, you see, and they deny all knowledge of him. Was he lying about that too?”
Bim answered quickly. “He must have been. Maybe he wasn’t a paramedic at all. Maybe he just told me that, for some reason... I don’t know. Maybe he thought I’d be impressed.”
They sat in silence. Then Ulf, speaking very slowly, asked, “So you definitely haven’t seen him? And you have no mobile number for him?”
“No. And no, I don’t have a number.”
Anna smiled. “Are you telling us that you never called him? That you never texted him?”
Bim looked momentarily flustered. “We did, of course we did. But...but then, when he said he was going off to the North Pole, I deleted him.”
Ulf looked up sharply. “You deleted him?”
“I deleted his number. His number. Not him.”
The silence returned.
“Not him,” said Anna eventually. “He wasn’t deleted?”
“His number,” said Bim.
* * *
—
Afterwards, when Bim had been seen out, Ulf looked at Anna and waited for her to say something.
“That young woman’s lying,” she said.
“Yes,” said Ulf. “It’s obvious.”
“Do you think she deleted him?” Anna continued. “In the final sense, that is?”
Ulf hesitated. “Possibly,” he said.
“Of course, he was lying as well, wasn’t he?”
Ulf agreed. “That business of the North Pole. That was very evidently a lie.”
“But you think that he really did tell her that?”
Ulf thought for a moment. “That at least is true,” he said. “I think he did.”
Anna looked puzzled. “Where do we go from here? Put out a missing person appeal?”
“We’ll probably have to,” said Ulf. “Unless a body turns up.” He paused. “She lives at her mother’s place, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Then we can get a search warrant for that. And the car as well. We can get a forensic report on the car. Beyond that...we’ll have to hope that some of his other friends come forward.”
Anna asked whether Ulf thought Sixten was the young man’s real name. “If he lied about being a paramedic, then perhaps he lied about his name.”
“So many lies,” observed Ulf. “There are so many lies that it’s difficult to tell which ones are worth investigating.”
“That’s exactly what I feel about this case,” said Anna. “There’s something very odd about it, but I can’t put my finger on it.”
Ulf shrugged. “Do you think she did it?”
“I don’t know,” Anna answered. “Unless it was that other young woman—Signe. What if he’d been leading her on as well? What if young Sixten was playing the field?”
“You mean that he was seeing Signe too, and then dumped her? So she killed him and is trying to get us to think it’s Bim?”
Anna developed her theory. “In other words, Signe is framing Bim for a crime that she committed herself.”
“This is becoming complicated,” said Ulf.
“Life is complicated, Ulf. That’s the problem.”
“And we exist to un-complicate it?”
Anna smiled. “Yes. And isn’t it nice to know why you exist?”
* * *
—
Bim seethed.
It was not the interviewers who had made her seethe—the man, she thought, had been kind and sympathetic, and the woman had been polite enough; no, it was not them so much as the fact that they had the photograph of Sixten. As she travelled home on the bus, she reviewed all the possible explanations she could think of as to how the two detectives had obtained the picture. At no point had she printed it, and at no point had she put it on social media. As far as she could remember, the only people to whom she had shown it were Linnea Ek, Signe Magnusson, and Matilda Forsberg, her three closest friends. Nobody else had seen it—nobody at all. Except her mother, of course, and the boy himself; he had looked at it after he had taken the selfie, but he had immediately handed the phone back. And his friends, of course—the one with the choirboy haircut and the other one who’d made the snide remarks—she assumed they’d been snide, although she had not heard what he’d said. That was the sum total of those who’d seen the photograph, and yet it had somehow ended up in the hands of the police—of the Department of Sensitive Crimes, or whatever it called itself.
She wondered if her phone had some sort of virus. A computer virus could do extraordinary things, and it was possible, she supposed, that it might instruct a phone to transmit information, or images, without the knowledge of the owner. That was perfectly possible, given the cunning of the people who engineered such things. And so, by some sort of highly irregular process, an innocent selfie taken in the street might end up on the desk of some isolated hacker in Detroit, or some secret agency in Moscow, or even the Department of Sensitive Crimes rather closer to home in Malmö.
Bim quickly discounted this fanciful thought. The only feasible explanation was rather more prosaic: somebody had somehow taken possession of her phone and...It came to her in a moment of stark insight. Somebody who had borrowed her phone had discreetly emailed the image to himself. And here came the devastating insight: it was not himself—it was herself. It was Signe. She was the only person, other tha
n Bim and her mother, who had handled the phone: she had asked to borrow it in the university café and it had been in her possession for ten minutes or so. And Bim remembered a further detail: during those ten minutes, she had been at the counter, ordering a Danish pastry. That was it; that was when Signe had sent the photograph to herself. All that was required was a few deft clicks on a few buttons—something that nobody would see unless they were watching very closely. Linnea and Matilda had been there, but they had their own phones to peruse, and they would not have seen Signe’s disloyal, cheating fingers tapping out the instructions for the theft.
Cheating fingers...How apt, thought Bim. Somebody who had two boyfriends, neither of whom realised that he was in a relationship with a consummate two-timer, would, of course, have cheating fingers—and a cheating heart, and a cheating face...in fact, a cheating everything. Signe was a cheat; she should have spotted that a long time ago and realised that she was no friend.
Then came the even more difficult part. Why would Signe pass the photograph of Sixten to the police? Presumably she imagined that this would in some way cause difficulties for Bim—and it had, because the police obviously thought that she was somehow connected with Sixten’s disappearance. But he had never existed, and therefore it was hard to see how he could disappear. Be that as it may, Signe had obviously wanted to hurt her, and that led on to the question as to why she should harbour that desire.
Jealousy, thought Bim. Signe wanted her not to have a boyfriend. She wanted her to envy her with her two boyfriends, neither of whom amounted to very much, in Bim’s view at least. One of them had a slight lisp, which made him sound effeminate, and the other had very fair skin, so fair that you could almost see the veins underneath. If she—Bim—had a real boyfriend, then she would at least have the good taste not to have one with visible veins. Bim allowed herself to smile as the thought occurred to her that perhaps the reason why Signe had two boyfriends was that if you put them together, with their obvious defects, you would end up with one, complete boyfriend. She could say that to Signe one day and see what her reaction was.
By the time she reached home, she had decided what to do. Now that she knew that it was Signe who had betrayed her, she could very easily turn the tables on her. She could tell the police that she had seen Signe with Sixten, after his alleged disappearance, and that the report of that disappearance—which could only have come from Signe—was a stupid prank designed to hurt her: Bim. That would amount to wasting police time, which was, she knew, a crime. It was not a terribly serious crime, but Signe would nonetheless be subjected to the same sort of interview that she herself had undergone, and that would teach her to steal other people’s selfies. Perhaps they would fine her, which would be good, as a lesson accompanied by a fine was always better learned. Even if Signe could never be punished for having two boyfriends, then at least she could be punished for this. And at the end of it all, Bim decided that she would give Signe a piece of her mind into the bargain. She would say, I always knew you were a false friend. That sounded rather good. A false friend. Yes.
The Department of Sensitive Crimes Page 10
