The Last Lullaby (Hammarby Book 3)

by Carin Gerhardsen

  Hamad and Westman appeared in the doorway. Sjöberg waved them in.

  ‘Catherine Larsson did not have a mobile phone account,’ said Hamad.

  ‘And the calls she made,’ Westman continued, ‘were almost exclusively to the preschool and Vida Johansson. Vida’s home number and Vida’s mobile. Incoming calls we have from the Child Welfare Centre, the National Dental Service, preschool, Vida, naturally, and a few of the customers on the list we got from her. None of them is named Erik.’

  ‘You’ll have to keep researching those calls,’ said Sjöberg. ‘Especially the later ones. Considering Catherine’s narrow circle of acquaintances it’s probable that this Erik is there somewhere after all. Maybe he works at the Child Welfare Centre or the Dental Service.’

  Sjöberg turned to Sandén.

  ‘Have you been able to contact the customers on the list?’

  Sandén shook his head.

  ‘It wasn’t the easiest thing to find a translator. But I’ll get going on that. And as you said: somewhere there perhaps we have our man. I would rather look them in the eyes when I talk to them.’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ said Sjöberg. ‘Take Petra with you. Jamal, you can keep working on the phone calls on your own. Find out who called and what was discussed.’

  ‘And the chief inspector himself is fully occupied, do I understand?’ Sandén said with a roguish smile.

  Much too quickly Sjöberg answered that nothing out of the ordinary had emerged from either Göran and Vida Johansson’s private finances or the decorating company’s. Sandén’s face resumed a neutral expression as if on command, but a slight frown revealed his surprise.

  ‘I’ll make enquiries about Christer Larsson’s first wife. Was there anything else?’ Sjöberg asked, standing up decisively.

  Hamad and Westman left the office, but Sandén lingered.

  ‘You have something going on … ?’ he said hesitantly, making no effort to get out of the visitor’s chair.

  With a sigh Sjöberg let himself fall back into his chair. It rolled backwards a little, but he pulled it up to the desk and rested his chin on his palms. The drumming of his fingers over his temples possibly revealed to Sandén that something was not really as it should be. But he did not want to talk about his visit to Einar Eriksson’s apartment. Not yet anyway. Hopefully Einar would show up soon and then he could forget the whole thing. If on the other hand he did not reappear in the next few days, Sjöberg would involve his colleagues in the search. He decided to give it until Friday morning.

  ‘You’ve been gone the better part of the morning,’ Sandén pointed out, now with more concern than curiosity in his voice.

  Sjöberg did not like his tone – it suddenly struck him that Sandén perhaps suspected it was something personal that was preoccupying him, and that it had to do with Margit. That thought caused him to abandon his police instincts in order to clear himself of all possible suspicion in that direction.

  ‘This stays between us,’ said Sjöberg, raising a finger to underscore his seriousness.

  ‘Obviously,’ said Sandén with surprise. ‘But you don’t have to say anything if you don’t –’

  ‘You will not breathe a word of this,’ Sjöberg continued sternly.

  Sandén nodded soberly in response.

  ‘I was at Einar’s place,’ said Sjöberg in a low voice, casting a glance in the direction of the open door to the corridor.

  To be on the safe side he went over and closed it. Sandén followed him with his eyes, now with a slightly amused expression.

  ‘This is nothing to laugh at,’ said Sjöberg seriously. ‘The man’s been absent for three days now without getting in touch. He hasn’t called me or anyone else here either. He hasn’t phoned in sick or requested leave.’

  ‘So what explanation did he have for that?’ asked Sandén.

  ‘He wasn’t at home! I still don’t know where he’s hiding himself. I talked to one of the neighbours, who told me that he drives off in the car every Saturday morning and comes home late in the evening. As he did last Saturday, although the neighbour did not see him return that particular evening. But the car was there anyway, so he must have. So we can rule out a traffic accident.’

  ‘But he must be inside,’ Sandén interjected. ‘He just doesn’t feel like talking to you.’

  ‘Wait and you’ll hear,’ Sjöberg continued. ‘I asked the neighbour if Einar usually takes his wife along on those outings, but he just laughed and answered that Einar Eriksson doesn’t have a wife. Didn’t you have the impression that Einar is married?’

  Sandén thought for a moment before he answered.

  ‘Well, yes, he has mentioned a wife a few times, but he has never talked about her directly. Or about anything private, for that matter. Although I definitely recall that he wears a wedding ring.’

  ‘I broke in, Jens.’

  Sandén formed an inaudible ‘oh’ with his lips.

  ‘I picked the lock on the front door and went in.’

  ‘Yes, well, you’re not allowed to do that, of course. The police will come.’

  ‘Well, what the hell was I supposed to do? He has no friends that I know of, no family.’

  ‘So he doesn’t have a wife?’

  ‘Yes, he has a wife. But she’s in some bloody home in Fellingsbro, wherever that is. And she’s been there a long time. I found ten-year-old invoices from there. Ten years! No wonder he’s peevish.’

  ‘So you rummaged through his apartment. Naughty, naughty, Conny.’

  ‘I felt I had to. For Einar’s sake. We can’t just let him disappear; we’re the police, damn it. Who’s going to help him with whatever has happened to him if not us?’

  ‘But don’t you think it’s a bit early to –’ Sandén ventured.

  ‘I don’t think so. There were newspapers on the hall floor from Sunday morning. He’s been gone for four days and if he had anyone who cared, he would have been reported missing several days ago.’

  ‘If he weren’t so damned contrary, perhaps he would have someone who cared,’ Sandén pointed out.

  Sjöberg looked dejectedly out of the window, where snow was falling heavily from a grey sky. Neither of them said anything for a while.

  ‘Did you know that he plays golf?’ Sjöberg asked at last.

  Sandén shook his head.

  ‘Or has played, at least. The golf bag looked old.’

  ‘Where does he live?’ Sandén asked.

  ‘Over there,’ Sjöberg answered with a nod in that vague direction. ‘Eriksdalsgatan. In a small studio. Neat and tidy. All alone, without a wife. Single bed and one chair at the dining table. And the wedding photo was hanging on the wall. A very beautiful and happy couple, I would say.’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ said Sandén seriously.

  ‘And now you keep quiet about this. Go back to what you’re supposed to be doing, and I’ll devote myself a little to this on the side, so to speak.’

  Sandén nodded and stood up.

  ‘And listen,’ Sjöberg added. ‘No insinuations, please.’

  Sandén nodded compliantly and left the room.

  Christer Larsson’s first wife had not remarried. After the divorce she took back her maiden name and was now known as Ingegärd Rydin. She turned out to be registered at an address in Arboga, of all places. When Sjöberg heard this the first thing that occurred to him was that perhaps he should take the trouble to go there to question her. Then he rejected that thought. He realized that it would only be a pretext for investigating that property mystery, which was gnawing at him. He had enough on his plate as it was, with a butchered family and a colleague who had vanished off the face of the earth.

  He picked up the phone and dialled the number for Ingegärd Rydin, but got no answer. So he stood up and left the room. When he reached Eriksson’s office he peeked in, as he had so many times before during the past few days, but his colleague was not sitting at his desk now either. He looked quickly up and down the corridor. No one saw him he
sitantly take a step into the darkened room, but he moved with greater decisiveness after he had closed the door behind him. He turned on the ceiling light, which blinked a few times before drenching the office in inhospitable white glare. Sjöberg did as he usually did in his own office; he went over and turned on the desk lamp, then went back to the door and turned off the fluorescent ceiling light. Then he went over to the bookshelves that flanked the desk, and stood for a while letting his gaze run across the binders and book spines. He saw nothing there that did not appear completely ordinary. Eriksson’s desk chair stood properly pushed in under the desk and when Sjöberg pulled it out he discovered that although it had wheels like his own it lacked armrests. He asked himself whether that had to do with his colleague’s lower rank or if Eriksson simply preferred a chair without armrests. He sat down in the chair rather cautiously, partly so as not to change the setting in any way but mainly because he felt deeply uncomfortable. Once again he was trespassing on Einar Eriksson’s territory and this time too he felt a knot of unease in the pit of his stomach.

  The desk was just as tidy as his own. There were a few piles of paper in a neat row in the upper-right-hand corner; picking up the top few papers from each of the piles he could quickly tell that they had to do with the cases Eriksson was working on or had recently worked on. He pulled out the top drawer in the pedestal under the desk and found only office supplies: pens, rubbers, stapler, tape, scissors, hole punch, a can of colourful plastic paper clips and a few notepads in various sizes. The two bottom pads were blank, the one on top contained notes from a number of meetings that Sjöberg himself had led. The next drawer contained a variety of other things, such as a mobile charger, a few packs of CDs, a tin of metal paper clips and a torch. The bottom drawer was locked, but it took Sjöberg less than a minute to pick the simple lock with the help of a paper clip.

  What first drew his attention was the little card with one-time codes from Nordea that stuck out from under a plastic folder in the drawer. He picked it up and studied it while his thoughts churned in his head. So did Eriksson pay his bills at the office? But Sjöberg quickly realized that it would be completely natural for him to do that. Einar Eriksson was a computer person and as such he would use the Internet and nothing else to pay his bills. Sjöberg had not seen a computer in Eriksson’s apartment, so consequently he must manage his affairs from here. He cast a furtive glance over at the computer, then another at the credit-card-sized rectangle he held in his hand. Eriksson had used only two of the four-digit codes, so there were lots left to scratch off.

  Then he decided. With his free hand firmly gripping the desktop he moved the wheeled chair over to Einar Eriksson’s computer. The green light on the screen indicated that it was on and the dull hum from somewhere under the desk convinced him that the computer was on too. He moved the mouse a little to activate the dark screen and a log-in icon with the text ‘Einar’ against a sky-blue background appeared for him. With low expectations he clicked on the icon, only to be met by the request to enter a password. Sjöberg let out a deep sigh and slumped down in the chair. Naturally Eriksson was not logged into the computer; you were automatically logged out if you did not show it proper attention for half an hour or so.

  He clasped his hands behind his neck and looked around the room. It was impersonal, like everything else that had to do with Einar. The office was considerably smaller than his own, and because two walls were taken up by bookshelves and the door and a third by windows, only one wall remained to hang anything on. But nothing was hanging there, except a jumper on a traditional institutional hook.

  He rolled back to the pedestal and dug deeper among the objects in the bottom drawer. Under a bundle of papers from an old course he found a small metal trophy with the inscription ‘PISS, 1st Div. VI 1976’. The sport concerned was obviously football, for on the side of the engraved plaque at the foot of the trophy stood a little man with arms robustly crossed over his chest and a ball under his right foot. Sjöberg thought that the team couldn’t have been that piss-poor if they had won the division. He drew the conclusion that PISS must have stood for ‘Police Interdepartmental Sports Society’ back then. He didn’t actually know where Eriksson had had what would have been his first job, back in the mid-seventies. In any event Eriksson had evidently once been an athletic type who played both golf and football, and Sjöberg had a hard time imagining that. Eriksson was not actually overweight, like many men his age, but he definitely made a rather unhealthy impression with his pale skin, poor posture and sunken eyes that testified to too little sleep.

  He put the trophy back in the drawer and pulled out a plastic folder that seemed to contain bills, the bills Eriksson had not yet paid or had paid recently, Sjöberg assumed. He set the folder in front of him on the desk and pulled out the contents: a rent notice from HSB for the apartment on Eriksdalsgatan, a deposit card from the ICA bank, a minimal phone bill and the familiar and considerably larger bill from the Solberga nursing home. He had a sudden inspiration and rolled back to the computer, whose screen was still illuminated and still ordered him to enter a password. He typed in ‘Solveig’, and bingo! He was in.

  With rising pulse he double-clicked on the icon for Internet Explorer, made his way to the Nordea website and on to the page for private customers, where he was asked to provide civil registration number and yet another password. He tapped in the civil registration number he had got from the woman at the payroll office, tried ‘Solveig’ again, and finally scratched off a four-digit one-time code from Eriksson’s little card. This time too luck was with him and he suddenly found himself in the middle of Einar Eriksson’s personal finances. A shiver passed through his body as he started systematically going through his colleague’s financial transactions over the past year, which was as far back in time as he could access.

  Every month a sum of over 5,500 kronor – which Sjöberg decided must be Eriksson’s wife’s disability pension – was deposited in Eriksson’s account by the National Agency for Social Insurance. In addition he took home about 20,000 kronor in salary. Of this money about 11,500 kronor went on his wife’s stay at the nursing home, 4,500 on rent and 2,500 on other fixed expenses. The remaining 7,000 kronor he took out via ATMs and used for day-to-day expenses, Sjöberg assumed. Eriksson did not have a credit card connected to the current account at Nordea, nor did he seem to have taken out any loans. Einar Eriksson’s finances were easy to understand to say the least, and as far as Sjöberg could see he lived exactly according to his means and had nothing saved for the future.

  He made sure that Eriksson’s computer was set up to use the same printer that he himself always used and checked that the queue was empty. Then he printed out all the information from Eriksson’s Nordea account and logged out of the bank’s website and the computer. He put the card and folder of invoices back in the bottom desk drawer, locked the drawer with the paper clip and pushed the chair back in under the desk. After turning off the desk lamp he groped his way over to the door in semi-darkness, opened it and slipped unseen back into the corridor.

  Quickly he made his way to the printer, which was located in an alcove off the little kitchenette where the coffee machine was. Instead of waiting until all the pages had printed out he picked them up one at a time so that no passer-by could happen to see what they were. When all the pages had printed out he folded them twice and quickly slipped them into his back pocket.

  * * *

  It was really windy now and the clouds were hanging heavily over the city, apparently prepared to release their contents at any moment over the already freezing inhabitants of Stockholm. The blanket of clouds also effectively prevented the promising rays of the March sun from peeking through, and even though it was only just after three o’clock in the afternoon it already felt like twilight.

  Jamal Hamad walked with his shoulders hunched up and his hands in his pockets. Not so much due to the weather as to how he felt. He was making a fuss about nothing. He hoped. This little excursion was a real
long shot; it was an odds-on bet that he would have to trot back to the station without having accomplished anything. But that didn’t matter, because in this particular case he wanted nothing more. Besides, it was nice to get out. Westman’s march past in reception, not even condescending to look at him, gave him cold shivers. There was certainly an ice age at the office. Why, he did not really understand, but it was annoyingly unsettling.

  The whole thing had started about six months earlier when he sat and lied to Westman for an entire evening at the Pelican. As usual they had lots to talk about and the mood was crude but hearty. It was late, almost midnight, by the time they’d left. She’d suggested they could carry on drinking, but he had steeled himself and declined, because he was going to get up and play golf early the next morning. That it was Bella Hansson he was playing with, and that she was waiting for him in her car a block or two away besides, had nothing to do with anyone. Not even Westman. There was a slight possibility that she had put two and two together and suspected that there was something between him and Bella. Rightly so, there had been too. It had started as a semi-serious pentathlon, comprising bowling, golf, tennis and whatever, and, yes, it had developed into something a little more. Which was now over, no more to it than that, for those involved in any case. But perhaps Westman felt there was more to it? Because she had not said a friendly word to him after that evening, and he could not interpret that as anything other than jealousy.

  Not that he had ever noticed her showing any interest in him – although that could have something to do with the fact that he had been married until rather recently. But wasn’t she smart enough to notice that she was special to him? And when she did not show any interest herself, she could hardly expect him to live in celibacy. Or was that maybe exactly the way it was? She just wanted to own him, would not share him with anyone else?