Babylon

by Camilla Ceder

  Tell didn’t reply, he just stared anxiously at the roundabout.

  ‘The ambulance will be here in two minutes. I’ll wait until then.’

  ‘No, you go,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  He pulled up at the same time as the patrol car and raised a hand in greeting. It was Marklund, an older officer he knew well, along with a younger colleague he hadn’t worked with before.

  The back-up hadn’t arrived.

  Once inside the building he stopped them from going up the stairs; he tipped his head back and listened. There wasn’t a sound from the third floor, but the stone walls were probably very effective at shutting the residents in and keeping the world out.

  Tell had phoned Annelie since leaving Donner’s apartment, but there was no response, and he didn’t know what that meant.

  ‘The woman’s name is Annelie,’ he whispered as they crept up the stairs. Marklund was completely focused. ‘The guy we’re after is Axel Donner. About thirty-five, knows how to use a gun. If he’s here, we can assume he’s stark raving mad.’

  The younger officer, Nilsson, suddenly looked ill. He was staring at his raised gun instead of looking for a possible threat. He had probably never had to use his gun before, not for real, away from the safety of the police-training facility.

  Tell noticed the spy-hole in Swerin’s door and pressed himself against the wall so that he couldn’t be seen. He nudged the letterbox open and listened. There were faint sounds, but they could have been coming from a television, from another apartment. He thought he could hear a voice, a whimpering . . . muffled. By a gag? He listened again . . . Yes, maybe.

  He gently pushed down the handle just to check that it was locked. There was a risk that Annelie Swerin was behind the door along with Axel. Her life might be in danger, even more so if he shouted into the flat. They could wait for back-up, but that would take time. Time they couldn’t necessarily afford.

  Tell stepped aside, making room for Marklund.

  It probably didn’t take very long to break the lock, but it would be a long time before Nilsson forgot how time ceased to exist both before and after, metamorphosed into just a few trembling seconds or minutes of action. He was pretty new to all this, used to hearing theoretically and hypothetically. In the real world, you could make a series of decisions that would turn out to be right only with hindsight. Or you could make the wrong decisions, with devastating consequences. An impossibly short space of time, which was also somehow endless, and only these few seconds mattered.

  She was kneeling on the floor with her hands tied behind her back, gagged and blindfolded. The apartment was in darkness, with the blinds drawn and blankets covering the windows. One single candle was burning on the windowsill, making the shadows in the room flicker.

  Tell became aware of laboured, wheezing breathing. He was at her side in a second, ripping the tape off her face and pulling the wet stocking out of her mouth. She threw up over his hands and a heart-rending sob welled up in her throat. There was only one other room and that must be beyond the kitchen.

  ‘Take her outside,’ he said to Nilsson, who immediately helped Annelie Swerin to her feet and out onto the stairwell.

  Tell turned to Marklund. ‘You take the living room.’

  A book lay open on the kitchen table, along with a pile of notes. A small television was on, the volume low; was that what he had heard from outside? The bedroom door was ajar, but all he could see was a dressing gown that had been dropped just inside, and the corner of a bed.

  Tell pulled one of the blankets from the window. He opened the door between the kitchen and living room wide so that he could see in all directions, then kicked open the bedroom door. A bed, a desk, a walk-in wardrobe. He tore the clothes off their hangers and peered into the darkness, groping along the wall for a light switch.

  Once he had established that the wardrobe was empty, he lowered his gun for the first time since they had entered the apartment. Axel Donner had left Annelie; had he changed his mind?

  Tell walked back into the living room just as the candle flame sucked in a corner of the curtain. He barely had time to react before the flames reached the ceiling.

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  Marklund came to the rescue; he threw a blanket over the fire, then got out of the way as Tell beat the same blanket against the burning curtain, but it wasn’t enough. The acrid smoke made him cough and his hands were smarting as he hurled one of the sofa cushions at the window, smothering the flames. Annelie Swerin came into view on the street below. No doubt she was yelling, but it looked as though she was miming, pointing up at the window. She was alone; he couldn’t see any sign of Nilsson.

  She’ll call the fire brigade, thought Tell. He spun around as he heard a thud.

  A second later, the door of the linen cupboard at the other end of the room flew open. As if in slow motion, Tell saw Axel Donner grab hold of Marklund, pressing his gun against his neck, and a feeling of unreality swept over him. The last few minutes flashed before his eyes. How the fuck had he fitted in the cupboard? Annelie managing not to choke on her own vomit, the fire.

  An eternity had passed since they entered the apartment, and yet it was just a few short minutes. And now the barrel of the gun was pressing into the loose skin beneath Marklund’s chin, his face deathly pale and his eyes teary as he wondered if this was how his police career was going to end.

  Tell had had the same thought a couple times himself.

  ‘Drop the gun,’ Donner hissed, his eyes ablaze. ‘Drop it.’

  Tell bent down slowly, placed the gun on the floor in front of him and kicked it away. He raised his hands in the air.

  ‘OK, Axel, I’ve dropped the gun. Now you let go of Christer Marklund.’

  He said Marklund’s name in order to make him seem human in Donner’s mind, but they were probably beyond any form of communication by now.

  Donner buried the barrel deeper into Marklund’s skin.

  ‘Move away from the door.’

  Tell moved away, hands in the air, and Donner backed towards the hallway using Marklund as a shield. When he reached the landing, he aimed a sharp blow at Marklund’s temple and kicked the back of his knees hard, sending him crashing head-first into the hall mirror. He landed on the floor in a cascade of broken glass. Donner hurled himself down the stairs.

  Tell jumped over Marklund and was halfway down the stairs when he heard Donner crash into Nilsson, who was ready and waiting. Nilsson used all his strength to knock the gun out of Donner’s hand and slam him against the wall. Taken by surprise, with Nilsson’s gun pressed against his stomach, Donner was no longer a threat.

  Tell just managed to make out the young officer’s trembling words, which would be quoted for years in the department: ‘Not one more step, you fucking scumbag!’

  Donner shuddered, leant forward and breathed very close to Nilsson’s face.

  The back-up team screeched to a halt outside.

  63

  Gothenburg

  As Tell walked up the stairs to his apartment – the lift was out of order yet again – his shirt sleeves were sticking to the blistered skin on his hands and wrists, but now a blessed, cooling evening breeze was blowing through the rooms. Tell had opened all the windows wide, and it provided welcome relief.

  When he had thrown his stinking clothes in the bin and showered away the worst of the soot, he realised that he had come off lightly from their incursion into Annelie Swerin’s apartment: his skin was red, blistered and sore, but would soon heal. He rummaged in the bathroom cabinet and found an old tube of ointment and a roll of gauze bandage; that would have to do.

  Bärneflod had taken over when he left to go home, since Beckman was off sick. That was fine. Donner was in custody and they had his gun, which would match the bullets retrieved from all three victims: Henrik Samuelsson, Ann-Marie Karpov and David Sevic.

  Donner hadn’t formally confessed to the murders, but he had been talking about them, and you could tell from how
he looked that he had lost all grasp on reality. He might well be sectioned. Tell had already heard the experts’ initial hypotheses, concepts such as the terrorising and destructive superego. Heightened impulses. Inadequate defence mechanisms. Lack of sublimation. Lack of empathetic ego functions. Inflexible but split superego.

  Those who had known Donner before his illness took over had described him as taciturn and odd. But he was no longer short of something to say. Dropping the façade of normality had opened the floodgates. He kept arguing with himself, veering between self-loathing and illusions of omnipotence. If anyone could bear to listen to him, they might eventually find explanations of sorts for what he had done.

  Tell had no intention of listening to him. As soon as incontrovertible proof was on his desk, his job would be done. And yet he couldn’t help being fascinated.

  ‘Is it possible to understand someone like that?’

  He couldn’t ask Beckman, who was usually on hand to answer his questions about the more obscure corners of the human psyche. Tell sat down to go through the material Karlberg had put together.

  A number of years ago, during a trip abroad, Axel Donner had had a relationship with a twenty-three-year-old Englishwoman, Carla Burke. He had been held on suspicion of depriving Burke of her freedom, of making illegal threats, and of actual bodily harm. The fact that he had not been found guilty was largely due to Carla Burke’s own testimony. She had stubbornly insisted that a stranger wearing gloves had broken into her house immediately after Donner had left, and had dragged her down to the cellar. Everything she said contradicted the relatively insubstantial evidence against Donner.

  They hadn’t been able to pin anything on him, despite repeated interviews where it was put to Burke that she was protecting her ex-boyfriend because she was afraid of him.

  Tell had tried looking up the case on the Internet. He found a couple of articles from British newspapers and a short interview with Carla Burke, plus a picture of her holding her hand up in front of her face. After four days imprisoned in the cellar, she had been rescued by a workman who was insulating a wall on the ground floor.

  The image of Annelie Swerin, on her knees with her hands tied behind her back, came into his mind. He shuddered. If they’d arrived any later, Annelie Swerin could well have been dead.

  The next article was about Carla Burke having married the workman who had saved her life.

  He shut down the computer and headed straight for bed, without turning on the television.

  64

  Gothenburg

  The following morning, Höije managed to arrange a long overdue chat with Tell. He spelled out their respective areas of responsibility, and where the exact demarcations lay. With the more pressing aspects of the Donner case behind him, Tell could afford to sit back and listen. There was nothing noteworthy or unreasonable in Höije’s words, apart from the fact that he was couching the blindingly obvious in the most pretentious terms possible.

  ‘We’ll get there in the end,’ Höije concluded. ‘We simply have to ensure that we respect each other’s professional roles. I can tolerate you pushing the boundaries from time to time, if you can tolerate the fact that I’ll have to intervene now and again.’

  ‘I can indeed.’

  ‘Good. And we’ll soon be able to put this case behind us.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They were interrupted by a text message from Gonzales, which said that he and Karlberg and a couple of crime scene technicians were at a house in Pennygången in Högsbo. There had been a stabbing and they needed Tell to come over.

  Tell remembered that Beckman lived not far away.

  He drove towards Majorna with mixed feelings. He didn’t want to think about the blood, about how his colleague had avoided looking him in the eye as if she was ashamed. At the time he hadn’t been able to . . . it would have been impossible to take the time to . . . do what? Go home with her, console her, ask all the right questions. Miscarriage – the word didn’t sit comfortably in his mouth. And he hadn’t even known that Beckman was pregnant.

  They didn’t have that kind of relationship. They were colleagues. But something had happened when they had worked together closely the previous year, when their former boss Ann-Christine Östergren had told them she was suffering from an incurable and aggressive form of cancer. Their mutual fear had brought Tell and Beckman closer, and at times they had acted almost like friends.

  He usually preferred to mind his own business, as did Beckman; she demanded openness and honesty from those around her, while at the same time shielding her own life from public view, terrified of revealing that she needed anyone.

  But he was her boss. It was his duty to make sure she was all right.

  Tell found Beckman’s address on a street of interchangeable three-storey apartment blocks. He parked on the street and went inside. The window in the stairwell looked old and draughty. On the second floor he found a piece of paper stuck to a door: K. Beckman.

  She answered his knock almost immediately, wearing a blue shirt over a pair of trousers. He felt relieved; stupidly, he had expected to see her in the bloodstained clothes. He was also relieved that she looked cheery and didn’t seem particularly surprised to see him.

  ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘What have you done to your hands?’

  Tell waved his bandaged hand dismissively. ‘I’ll tell you some other time.’

  He followed her into a small, lime-green galley kitchen. Before he had the chance to ask about the miscarriage and the fact that she had moved out of her family home after ten years of marriage, she asked him to tell her about the Donner case.

  Tell gratefully took the ball and ran with it. ‘He’s definitely our man. He’s babbling away, and a whole load of people can’t wait to interpret what he’s coming out with.’

  ‘Aren’t you curious?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Who he is and why he did it?’

  ‘Not any more, to be perfectly honest. Are you?’

  ‘I am. I think just wanting to understand broken people who do desperate things makes the job easier.’

  She was talking quickly, her voice tense. ‘For me, anyway. It protects me against burn-out. It stops me being so cynical.’

  ‘I didn’t mean—’

  ‘No, sorry, I know.’ Beckman fell silent and shook her head, embarrassed, as if she’d been caught out. She changed the subject: ‘And what was the story behind Ann-Marie’s computer? Was there anything on it to explain why Donner took it?’

  ‘Well, there was a message sent from an anonymous Hotmail address just before the murders, telling her to leave Henrik alone otherwise their affair would become common knowledge.’

  They sat in silence for a while. ‘I just meant that now he’s safely behind bars, he can’t cause any more trouble,’ Tell said eventually. ‘There are explanations for everything. Victims become perpetrators and all that jazz. A story behind every crime. But that’s not something we need to worry about.’

  ‘A violent, verbally abusive father who had some kind of affair. An isolated, rural environment. A small community heavily influenced by old-fashioned values.’

  Beckman smiled wanly at his surprise and leant back against the draining board before she went on.

  ‘His kidnapping of Carla Burke and his breakdown led to short-term psychiatric care. He was eventually deemed to have made a good recovery and fled to Gothenburg, where he met Henrik. Perhaps their relationship was a sexualisation of his desire for his father? Henrik became the father figure who accepted him at last, a father who accepted him as he was and made him feel valued.’

  Tell’s bewilderment was obvious. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but how the hell do you know all this?’

  She smiled. ‘I had a quick look at Axel’s notebook just before . . . before I had the miscarriage. But mostly I’ve filled in the gaps with my own interpretations. Just for the sake of it.’

  ‘Feel free to carry on.’

  ‘When Axel became aware that h
e was expendable – when Henrik fell in love with Ann-Marie, and was therefore “unfaithful”, just as his father had been – his feelings changed from hero worship to contempt. Axel couldn’t bear the betrayal; it reminded him of how his father had betrayed him. His anger at Henrik became mixed up with suppressed rage towards his father, perhaps Henrik might even have triggered forbidden homosexual impulses, how should I know? At any rate, Henrik had to go. Henrik, and everything else that reminded Donner of his past disappoinments.’

  Tell was silent for a moment, then he burst out laughing. ‘You’re good at this stuff, you really are. But what about David Sevic?’

  ‘Aha.’ Beckman nodded eagerly. ‘I think Axel identified himself with Sevic’s son. According to Annelie, he was totally opposed to infidelity, possibly as a result of his own experience. As far as Annelie is concerned, she was also a rival for Henrik’s attention, and I think Axel believed she had seen through his façade in Istanbul. Plus David almost certainly knew more than was comfortable. He was Annelie’s confidant, after all.’

  ‘Although I’ve got a feeling that Axel liked Annelie,’ Tell said. ‘He didn’t kill her, even though he had the chance. He imprisoned her, but why? So that he could talk to her. He wanted to explain himself, perhaps he even wanted her for himself. And that’s why he killed Sevic. Is that possible?’

  Beckman looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Well . . . I think you’re right in one respect. Axel Donner was a lonely person who’d invested deep emotions in this small group of students. When he was around them, he became someone. He couldn’t cope with the feeling of being excluded. And he was afraid of change. He wanted things to stay the way they were, but he didn’t know how.’

  ‘I’m lost for words,’ said Tell.

  ‘It’s just speculation.’

  He shook his head, but then his smile slowly faded and he looked at his shoes.

  Beckman knew why he had come, and she also knew he hadn’t a clue what to say.

  ‘I lost the baby,’ she said softly. ‘I’d just got used to the idea that maybe I was going to have another child, but now it’s gone.’