Babylon

by Camilla Ceder

  But now she had done it. One day the strength had simply been there. She packed her things and the children’s, answered an ad for a sub-let and hired a van. Göran helped to carry the boxes, his expression grim.

  He stroked her cheek before she drove off to return the van. The sensation was like fingernails scraping down a blackboard, but she gritted her teeth.

  Afterwards, she was surprised by the positive reaction of her friends. And it quickly became clear to Beckman that her colleagues had opinions on the matter too. Renée had given her a big hug when she had mentioned in passing that she was looking for somewhere permanent to live with her children.

  ‘I’m so pleased, Karin,’ she had said, almost in tears. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’

  This enthusiasm bothered her, chipping away at her self-esteem. Perhaps it was because people assumed she was the victim. She wasn’t a victim, not in relation to Göran nor in any other area of her life.

  But, in spite of everything, she understood why people stayed in destructive relationships. Her marriage had been extremely destructive, even if Göran had never raised a hand to her, and the shame she felt was the same as that of a woman who has suffered physical abuse. She was ashamed at having settled for less, for not believing, deep down, that she was worth more than what she had ended up with.

  But then again, there was that one evening. She and the children had driven over to Fiskebäck after nursery to fetch a toy which Sigrid insisted she absolutely must have, and Göran made spaghetti bolognese. The kids sat down to watch Bolibompa on TV and Göran opened a bottle of red – surely she could have one glass, even if she was driving. They talked as they hadn’t talked for such a long time.

  The kids were delighted that things were back to normal again, and after a few glasses of wine it was just like the old days for Beckman too. The way it had been long ago, before everything became tainted and toxic.

  In the morning she was woken by the sound of Göran’s heavy breathing. She was devastated.

  So much for her newly won independence, her determination to put the turmoil behind her and think clearly for a change.

  The divorce had just gone through; she was free, and now this. She had sensed it for a while. The nausea. The tiredness, the aching breasts, the cramp in her calves, the dizziness. And yet she had put off doing a test. And, of course, the longer she left it, the more difficult it would be to do anything about the problem. On a rational level, she couldn’t keep this child. How would that work? She could only just cope as it was. Always late, always inadequate. Not to mention the thought of going through pregnancy again, alone, with two kids to look after. Hauling herself up three flights of stairs to their rented apartment with heavy bags of groceries and a huge belly. She was too old, over forty; the idea of waddling around work, her belly leading the way, almost made her blush.

  ‘Beckman.’ Karlberg shaded his eyes with his hand. ‘Catching a few rays?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How are things?’

  The secretaries gathered up their cigarette packets and lighters and went back inside.

  ‘OK. I didn’t notice you before. You don’t smoke, do you?’

  ‘No,’ Karlberg said in a surprised tone of voice, as if his smoking habits were common knowledge. ‘I just needed a bit of . . . Well, you know. A change of scene. A chance to gather my thoughts.’

  Beckman couldn’t stay annoyed with Karlberg for long.

  ‘I’m glad I’m not the only one with things on my mind.’

  Karlberg smiled and crossed his chino-clad legs. ‘No, you’re definitely not. I went on a totally disastrous date the other day . . . It was . . . Well, it was a complete disaster, that’s the only way to describe it.’

  Beckman couldn’t help laughing; her laughter relieved the tension and Karlberg soon joined in.

  ‘That does sound bad. What happened? Did you fall out over who should pay the bill?’

  ‘It was one of those blind dates.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A blind date. You know. On the Internet you can . . . Oh, fuck. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.’

  Beckman pushed her sunglasses up onto her forehead. ‘No, come on. Sorry I laughed, it’s just that I didn’t even realise you were looking.’

  He shrugged. ‘Not seriously. But maybe we’re always looking. One way or another.’

  ‘So tell me, what happened?’

  Karlberg turned his head away, embarrassed. ‘She met a guy she knew at the restaurant.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She went home with him. After she’d left me waiting for over an hour.’

  He laughed again, harder this time. ‘Talk about a disaster.’

  ‘What a bitch.’

  He shrugged again. ‘Oh, I guess that’s just how it is, but I’m not used to the meat market these days, or whatever you call it. And I’m not exactly a catch, or so it would seem.’

  Beckman gave Karlberg’s wrist a quick squeeze. ‘That’s rubbish, Andreas. You just happened to come across a rotten egg; they’re always out there. Come on, let’s get back to work.’

  As they stood up to go back inside, Tell rang on his way back from Copenhagen with the news that Karpov’s assistants had been taken into custody. Sørbækk had admitted that she and Iversen had hired Torsen, who had conned them. He had contacted them after the break-in and insisted that he had found only one small clay statuette, in spite of the fact that there were supposed to be several, along with a quantity of gold jewellery.

  As Beckman listened, she stopped dead. A vague idea formed at the back of her mind. She ended the call and ignored Karlberg’s impatient questions, perching on the edge of the table and pressing her fingers to her temples. The sculpture Henrik had photographed next to the necklace, which they assumed he had planned to show to dealers, was clearly the only item the burglars had found. They had turned the entire house upside down. As soon as she and Tell had seen the devastation, Beckman had become convinced that the burglars had not found everything they were looking for. They had smashed open a stud wall upstairs. This wasn’t a slapdash job. And she had searched the place herself after the formal police search, but had been unable to find a single nook or cranny that had been left untouched. But wait . . .

  In a series of rapid images she saw a scene from that afternoon in her mind’s eye. Rebecca Nykvist, spinning around to face her on the chair at her desk in the study. The red hair, covering her face and the telephone receiver. The formal, professional tone of voice. The boiler: it hadn’t been half as much trouble to instal as getting rid of it appeared to be.

  She didn’t know if the Danish junkies – or, for that matter, the crime scene investigation team – had somehow missed the boiler. She didn’t know why they would have missed it. But suddenly she was certain: if anything was still hidden inside Rebecca Nykvist’s house, then it was inside the boiler, which had been drained.

  Henrik had found the perfect hiding place.

  Forty-five minutes later, Beckman and Karlberg arrived at the house on Kungsladugårdsgatan. A van belonging to a company they had found on the Internet was parked on the cycle track. The engineers had already got out. Rebecca’s voice could be heard all the way out on the street.

  ‘I have absolutely no intention of letting strangers into my house without a search warrant! I couldn’t give a toss if you’re not the police, if you’re doing a job at the request of the police, or if God the father himself sent you. I—’

  ‘Rebecca!’

  Beckman pushed her way past two confused young men dressed in overalls.

  ‘Rebecca, you’re absolutely right in principle, but getting a formal warrant will take time. You’re welcome to ring my boss if you want to verify this.’

  Rebecca didn’t look happy, and muttered something about a lawyer, but eventually gave in. She waved impatiently, as if to say that if they were going to do the job, then they might as well get on with it. She walked into the house cursing to herself.
/>
  Beckman nodded to the two men. One of them reversed the van up onto the lawn and they started to unload their tools. She wondered whether to go after Rebecca, or to oversee the opening up of the boiler. Hesitantly, she made her way down the cellar steps and found the narrow boiler room, cluttered along one side with cardboard boxes and a rail of winter clothes. In the corner was a kind of alcove, hidden from view by black plastic; she couldn’t help being curious. As she pulled the plastic aside, she discovered what looked like an amateur darkroom, although there was also a stereo with headphones and loudspeakers.

  Karlberg looked distinctly out of place in the boiler room.

  The workmen were now wearing their heavy protective visors pushed up onto their foreheads, still unsure of their role but ready to follow orders.

  ‘OK, so what exactly do you want us to do here?’

  Karlberg attempted to look as if he knew what he was talking about. ‘Search it, check . . . er, anywhere that something could be hidden. Dismantle it if necessary.’

  ‘That’s a hell of a job, mate.’

  ‘Drill it open then.’

  ‘What? The actual tank?’

  ‘Yes, why not?’

  The workman, who Beckman noticed was wearing black nail varnish, nodded and pulled the visor down over his eyes. He waved to them to leave the room, then suddenly stopped in mid-movement.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said, turning back to Karlberg. ‘It’s bolted at the top. If it’s empty, someone might have sunk whatever it is you’re looking for.’

  ‘As I said, check out every possibility.’

  ‘But what about the actual boiler?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, if you’re looking for something hidden, why don’t you check inside the boiler first? Just inside the little door.’

  Karlberg desperately wanted to say that he wasn’t completely stupid, it was just that he had a different system at home. ‘And where might that be?’

  The man pushed up his visor and tapped on two small doors to the right of the enormous tank. ‘Here. And here.’

  ‘Do you think you can get them open today?’

  He snorted. ‘They open like this.’

  Only now did Karlberg notice that the doors had handles. The top one opened creakily, revealing a pile of ash which might, at a pinch, be concealing something shapeless, but it seemed unlikely. Karlberg moved forward quickly; the workman naturally couldn’t help peering inside.

  ‘Thank you, we’ll take it from here.’

  Beckman accompanied the engineers out to their van. When she got back to the darkness of the cellar a couple of minutes later, she saw that Karlberg was holding a soot-blackened bag.

  ‘Is this what we were looking for?’

  Beckman gulped. A dirty bag made of colourful fabric with a zip along the top; it didn’t look like anything special. It looked like a gym bag. She took it, trying to keep her excitement under control. It was surprisingly heavy.

  She and Karlberg slowly made their way up the cellar steps and out onto the lawn. There was something solemn about the occasion. She opened the bag and peered into it. She immediately recognised the necklace from Samuelsson’s photograph. They breathed in the smell of old sand, metal and dust.

  45

  Stenared

  Seja dismissed the idea of riding into the village and tying Lukas up outside the library while she did her shopping. She had to keep her bohemian tendencies in check, otherwise she would become the village eccentric. Instead she decided to walk. She put on her well-worn trainers, shrugged her leather rucksack onto her back and ambled slowly down the hill. The gravelled section was dusty while the tarmac gave slightly beneath her feet, smelling of liquorice and petrol.

  As always when she walked around the area, she became aware of the disparity between the world high up towards the forest and the pastel-coloured houses on the hill leading down to the main road. Even nature seemed to have been tamed here, with cypresses forming perfect ovals against the sky. Behind the perfectly clipped hedges surrounding a mint-green bungalow, a little girl in an orange swimsuit was jumping from a trampoline into an inflatable paddling pool. She popped up gasping for breath and waved.

  Seja waved back and quickened her pace until she reached level ground and the bend by the farmer’s house. She stopped at the side of the road and gazed out over the summer pasture. Beyond the cycle track, which had once been a railway line, the boxy former station building and the road to Gothenburg, the fields had been cut. The horses spent most of their time in the valleys formed by the river Lärje, which couldn’t be seen from the road.

  She spent a while trying to spot Lukas, but had to give up. She was disappointed. She’d only just moved him to the summer grazing, and it already felt desolate and empty up at the house.

  The cycle track was lined with lupins and cow parsley, and later it would be possible to pick crab apples and sour cherries. Seja liked the overgrown hedgerows. Nobody bothered to look after the plants, nobody tried to tame them. She noticed that the surface of the track had changed from the muddy slop of early spring to a hardened moonscape.

  Walking helped. She tried clearing her mind of trapped, unwelcome thoughts as she gazed down at her scruffy shoes.

  It took so little for old doubts to surface once more. How could she imagine it would be possible to live in an old summer cottage without a shower and toilet? Surely it would be better to take the sensible option and buy the Melkerssons’ house – but then how would she afford it? Down in the Glade she could live ridiculously cheaply and, at the moment, she did just enough shifts at the care home to make ends meet. She would need to rethink her lifestyle completely if she did accept their offer.

  In her better moments, she liked to think that she had dealt with her wobbly self-confidence by making a decision about the way she wanted to live her life and seeing it through. By finding her place in the world.

  And now there was Christian, on top of everything else. It was his incomprehensible mood swings that were slowly eroding the sense of security she had previously felt, awakening a fear that she never acknowledged because it would put further pressure on his vulnerabilities. And what were those vulnerabilities, a sharp little voice inside her wanted to know: was he afraid of being trapped in a cloying, cosy twosome, afraid of losing his freedom? Or was it the idea of living his life with her that scared him? They had agreed that their differences didn’t matter – but what if they suddenly did?

  She wasn’t honest, that was one thing. She made a big point of treating his fears with equanimity, of being the stronger partner; she was the epitome of independence out there in her cottage in the forest, with her horse and her cat and her studies and her freelance work and her reluctance to accept help. She knew that. It was quite deliberate. It was a way of approaching the person she wanted to be. The person she thought she ought to be. A strategy for holding onto Christian – keeping him at arm’s length in order to keep him close, adapting to his intimacy problems.

  Suddenly she was furious. She had to be strong where he was weak; it was a role she had adopted because it seemed to be the only dynamic he could cope with. And yet her own vulnerability was ignored.

  But Christian didn’t know the extent to which his doubts affected her. When they first met, Seja had been living in the shadow of a recent break-up. She had been tied to a house in need of renovation, on an income consisting only of a student loan. On her way out of a period of debilitating confusion, she had chosen to turn things around completely. It was the only way to survive. Make the Glade a symbol of her own innate strength.

  Christian had met a woman who was slowly building a life around herself; a self-sufficient, capable individual who attracted him. By falling in love with the woman she wanted to be, he had drawn out more of that integrity and independence. Now she was afraid that she was as emotionally dependent on Christian as she had been on Martin. That, if he left her, she would fall straight back down into the black hole she had only rece
ntly crawled out of. Relationships were strange.

  But still, you know you’re not going to die, she mumbled to herself as she walked past the school playground.

  A group of people were standing outside the local museum chatting animatedly about things Seja couldn’t quite hear. She walked past quickly, wishing she was back in the isolation of her garden. She didn’t like crowds. When the 520 bus pulled into the stop outside the preschool, she took a detour. Lyckåsvägen ran along the low stone walls of the community centre.

  As long as the dependence wasn’t practical or financial, she wasn’t particularly disturbed by the idea of being dependent on another person – in theory, at least. In fact, emotional dependence had to be the only real form of love. It was just so bloody risky.

  This isn’t good for me, she realised. It isn’t good for me to be in a relationship with a man who isn’t sure what he wants, whether he wants me or not. That’s not what I need. This relationship is not what I need.

  Seja nodded to the librarian. The place was empty apart from her.

  ‘I’m looking for information on the Iraq war.’

  ‘Did you have anything more specific in mind?’

  He turned the screen so that she could see the innumerable hits.

  ‘Well . . .’ She hesitated. ‘It’s partly to do with thefts from museums. And I was thinking of writing something about what the country looks like today, maybe something to do with ethnic conflict. Or criminality in the post-war era. I could . . .’

  The question made her think. What did she actually want to write about? Her article about the illegal trade in cultural treasures wasn’t even half finished. She thought about what she had read so far. ‘Perhaps I could write something about the effect on civilians, especially on women?’

  The librarian glanced at Seja before turning his attention back to the screen. ‘We do have a number of articles . . . quite a lot has been written about the political prelude to the war, if that’s any use?’