“Six detectives watching the apartment, but Kassab’s sister-in-law and niece still manage to disappear. Not the force’s finest hour.” He popped a cherry in his mouth.
“They had help from outside,” Julia said. “Probably a woman dressed as a paramedic. We’re trying to find a potential suspect among Kassab’s acquaintances.”
“Description?”
“Average height, a little on the heavy side. Red hair, possibly, but that’s slightly unclear.”
“Is that all you’ve got? In that case Kollander’s probably clearing his desk already. Abu Hamsa, Gilsén, Kassab’s escape, and now this.”
He smiled and spat the stone out. Julia followed it with her eyes as it bounced over the pavement. She felt practically cross-eyed. She must have passed the overtime limit a good while back. All she really wanted to do was go home and get a couple of hours’ sleep before carrying on with her and Amante’s investigation. But Wallin had suggested meeting, and she hadn’t been able to say no.
“I’m actually more surprised that the details of Kassab’s escape haven’t leaked to the press. Pärson doesn’t usually neglect an opportunity to replenish the coffers,” Wallin continued.
“He wouldn’t dare leak it. Not right now, anyway.”
“No?” Wallin raised one eyebrow.
Julia shook her head. “Pärson himself was involved in questioning Kassab. Amante reported to him, not Kollander. And if heads start to roll . . .” She ran one hand across her throat.
“I see. Say what you like about Pärson, but at least he’s not stupid.”
Wallin shook the bag and then looked down, evidently searching for a particularly juicy cherry.
“Before we talk about Sarac, I’ve actually got a bit of information that I think could be helpful in the Abu Hamsa case. But it’s strictly confidential. You mustn’t let anyone know who you heard it from, is that clear?”
“Of course.” Julia leaned closer.
“It just so happens that I knew Abu Hamsa fairly well. You could say that we had dealings with each other.”
“You mean he was one of your informants?”
“Well . . .” Wallin smiled. “I never name my sources, but you could say that we had a mutually beneficial relationship.”
He picked another cherry from the bag and held it up to the light to inspect it.
“The murder was arranged by Abu Hamsa’s daughter, Susanna, and her husband, Eldar Jafarov. They did it to save themselves when Abu Hamsa’s deal with Gilsén was uncovered. Abu Hamsa and Gilsén had to die, and the money would be repaid to the defrauded gangsters. And in return Susanna and Eldar would be allowed to keep both their lives and control of Hamsa’s businesses. A purely commercial agreement. The only problem was that Kassab got in the way. Now Susanna and Eldar are in the shit. They need to get hold of Kassab—and Gilsén’s money—to fulfill their part of the bargain. Otherwise they’ll end up going the same way as Abu Hamsa. Keep an eye on Eldar and Susanna and eventually you’ll find Kassab. If he and his family haven’t already left the country, of course.”
He held the bag out once more.
“Nothing comes close to Swedish cherries. Are you sure you don’t want one?”
Julia shook her head and tried to take in what Wallin had just said. She needed to tell Pärson about this right away. Make it sound like it came from her own sources—which, in the strictest sense, was absolutely true. Then she had to get him to suggest and decide to authorize surveillance of Susanna and Eldar. That idea couldn’t come from her, not the way things stood at the moment, because he’d only reject it. But if Wallin’s tip-off turned out to be correct, Pärson would have no choice but to bring her back into the fold. An apprehended cop killer would trump any toes she was supposed to have stepped on.
“How’s your private detective work going, anyway? Are you any closer to solving the mystery?”
She put aside all thoughts of Pärson and gave Wallin the short version of what they’d found out. The abandoned office, the laptop, her phone call with Frank Hunter.
“Hunter and Sarac swapped identities and secrets?” Wallin sucked a cherry stone thoughtfully. “That explains a few things. But you still don’t know what was in the e-mail Sarac sent.”
“No. Except that it was sent to someone who wasn’t happy to be issued with an ultimatum.”
“No, evidently not.” Wallin spat the stone out. Then he methodically folded the paper bag into a little parcel. “I share your conviction that Pärson should be kept out of this for the foreseeable future. You need to go straight to Kollander. But obviously you need hard evidence before you do that.”
“We’ve got Hunter’s testimony,” Julia said tentatively. She already knew what the response would be.
Wallin shook his head. “You know as well as I do that all you’ve actually got is a short telephone conversation with an unidentified man who you think might be the individual who helped Sarac to escape. A man who can no longer be contacted and whose identity is probably fake.”
He looked at her for agreement. Reluctantly, Julia had to admit he was right. She had been hoping that the case would open up—that something would appear and move things along. But days had passed and Pärson had kept her fully occupied. Now over a week had passed since her conversation with Hunter, and they hadn’t made any more progress. In fact, it had been several days since she last spoke to Amante, which was almost enough to make her feel guilty.
“You’ll have to soldier on for a bit longer,” Wallin said. “Get ahold of some evidence that can’t be called into question. As soon as you’ve got it, call me. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Wallin tapped the folded bag against his thigh a couple of times.
“There’s one other thing that’s been bothering me slightly.”
“Just one?” Julia couldn’t help smiling, but Wallin didn’t respond.
“Amante,” he said, and her smile quickly faded.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve done a bit of discreet research among some old colleagues of mine in The Hague and eventually managed to find out what happened. It wasn’t easy: someone’s tried to put a very tight lid on it, and for good reason. Did you know that Amante set fire to his office down on Lampedusa?”
Julia swallowed. “No.”
“His wife left him for a close friend of theirs. Apparently she and the friend had been having an affair while Amante was down in the Mediterranean. When he found out, he lost it completely. He set fire to his room and tried to commit suicide by hanging himself with his belt. But a couple of his colleagues saved him. His stepfather sent him to an expensive clinic in the Alps. He pretty much came straight from there to the Violent Crime Unit.”
Julia didn’t know what to say. She could see Amante’s face in front of her. The miserable look in his eyes, his pathetically empty apartment. His tone of voice when he spoke of what had happened on Lampedusa.
“So his appointment to the unit was simply because his stepfather wanted to keep him occupied? No hidden agenda?”
Wallin pulled a face that was hard to interpret. “Right now I’m not sure I’d rule anything out. Amante has undoubtedly shown himself to be pretty useful. Without him you wouldn’t have got this far, would you?”
“No,” Julia said, then realized that it was completely true.
“My suggestion is that you keep working together. At least for the time being.” Wallin stood up, looked at the time, and then up toward Rosenbad. “But I’d advise you to be careful. In my experience, people like Amante usually go to pieces completely, sooner or later.”
Wallin smiled at her, and for a moment looked almost human.
“I’d think it would be a great shame if he dragged you down with him, Julia.”
• • •
When Oscar Wallin got back to his office, he put down the cup of c
offee he had picked up on the way, opened the GPS website, and logged in. A large map of Stockholm opened on the screen. There were a number of thin red lines across it that flashed up time and date symbols when he moved the cursor over them. A little red dot indicated where Natalie’s car was at that moment.
He’d already compared the car’s movements with the locations of the cash machines and, to his disappointment, hadn’t found any conclusive matches. He had hoped she had more credit cards in his mother’s name that she would continue to use. Give him some firm evidence to hand over to the Fraud Unit. So far he hadn’t been as lucky as that. But the thought that he knew where she was, that he had her under observation, was still strangely satisfying.
He sipped the coffee and clicked at random over Natalie’s tracks. The previous day she had been out in the western suburbs but hadn’t been anywhere near an ATM dispenser. He moved the cursor again and the name of a street appeared in a little box. Grimstagatan.
It took him a second or two to remember where he had heard that name before, but when he did he almost choked on his coffee. Of course. A woman dressed as a paramedic had helped Kassab’s family to escape. Average height, rather heavily built, possibly red hair. It was too good to be a coincidence.
He quickly pulled up the report of Kassab’s disappearance. The bridge where the prison van had gone through the railings was only a kilometer or so from Natalie’s apartment. The trail of blood had led in that direction, and Kassab had needed someone to patch him up. Someone who had done it before . . .
Bloody hell!
Wallin pushed his chair back, put his feet up on his desk, and folded his hands behind his head. Natalie hadn’t been alone in her apartment the other day, but the company she had been keeping was almost too good to be true. All he had to do was pick up the phone and then his mother’s worries—and those of Regional Crime, perhaps even the national police chief too—would be over. The question was: How did that benefit him?
He looked at the red dot again. Saw it start to move across the screen.
“Where are you off to now, Natalie?” he whispered to himself. “And who have you got in the car with you?”
• • •
Natalie turned into the narrow unpaved road and drove down it for five hundred meters or so until it ended in an improvised parking lot between some trees. She parked the car and let Atif out of the backseat. She led the way down the path toward the cabin. The sun was high in the sky, the birds were singing, and the only sign of human activity was the distant sound of a motorized lawn mower.
“Not bad, eh?” She opened a window to let out the stale air inside the main room. She took the chance to quietly brush some dead flies from the windowsill.
Atif remained silent, just stretched and massaged his neck. The drive had taken ten minutes, which was at least eight too many for his long frame to be bent double in the backseat of a Golf.
“ ‘Be prepared.’ ” He pointed at the large plank of wood above the stove into which someone had carefully burned the Scouts’ motto, flanked by two fleurs-de-lis.
“Exactly. I was at a party here a few years ago. You just have to call a guy and book it. The nearest house is a couple of hundred meters away, on the other side of the trees. Not overlooked by anyone, no nosy neighbors, and plenty of space for Tindra to run around.”
She pointed at the water glittering beyond the pine trees.
“I seem to remember that there’s a little jetty down by the lake if you feel like taking her for an evening swim.”
She smiled. The girl was the best way to get at Atif; she’d figured that out the moment she saw them together. His normally stony face softened in a way she rather liked. His body language and voice got softer too.
Cassandra had made the same observation. Her first meeting with Atif had been frosty in the beginning, but as Atif warmed up, so did Cassandra. She had even sat down on the sofa with him and Tindra. For a while they looked like a proper family, and for some reason that bothered Natalie more than the smell of smoke Cassandra spread through the apartment. Another reason to get them out of there as quickly as possible.
“So, what do you say? I can go and get some food, then call home and pick the girls up. You spend the weekend lying low here, I pick up the passports on Monday, then we’re back on track.”
Atif walked around the house and peered out through the little leaded windows, one after the other. He grunted something she didn’t catch. But she decided to interpret it as a yes. Three days, she told herself. Then it would all be over.
Thirty-Six
Julia parked behind the run-down office building, in the same place as when she and Amante were there together. She had picked the keys up from him but made it very clear that she wanted to be alone in Hunter’s hideout this time. The main reason was that she needed to concentrate, to shut out all distractions, and right now that was what Amante was, especially after what Wallin had told her the day before.
Inside the neglected premises everything looked exactly the way it had when she and Amante had first found it. The sleeping bag and camping mat on the floor, the table and chairs in the middle of the room. The only thing missing was the laptop. Both Hunter and Sarac had stayed there at different times. That explained why she had had trouble detecting a rhythm before. There were two of them overlapping, and neither of them was particularly obvious, seeing as both men had regarded this place as a temporary hideout.
She pulled out one of the rib-backed chairs and sat down gently. Pärson seemed to have believed the information she gave him about Abu Hamsa’s murder. He had gone off to see Kollander about putting together a surveillance team, just as she had hoped. But he hadn’t included her in the operation, not that she had been expecting him to. He had at least been good enough to let her have Saturday off, though.
And she had nothing better to do than come out here. Amante had said he’d conducted a thorough search of the room. This wasn’t a crime scene, and there was no external memory device containing the picture they were looking for. So, what was she really hoping to find? Peace of mind, perhaps? Sarac wasn’t just anyone. He was a colleague, a famous police officer, but also someone who had sacrificed everything in the hunt for what he thought was justice.
Someone had stripped Sarac of everything he possessed, even his humanity, and she was determined to look under every stone, follow the tiniest clue, until she found the culprit. But the truth was that they were stuck. This was all that remained.
She stood up, switched the light off, and lowered the blinds. As she did so, she glanced out at the big parking lot, where grass was already poking through cracks in the asphalt. Everything seemed quiet outside.
She crouched down in the gloom and lit her flashlight. Shone its beam over the floor.
There were plenty of footsteps in the dust, most of them around the table and chairs in the middle of the room and over by the mattress. Two clear tracks heading to the toilet, the little kitchen, and the front door, but no individual prints.
If she closed her eyes she imagined she could almost see Hunter moving around in there. To start with, mostly shuffling between the mattress, toilet, and kitchen. Then, as his injured leg healed, moving more smoothly. Daring to go out to buy food. And then a laptop. Then he was gone long enough to recruit Eskil at the nursing home. But she was after Sarac, not Hunter. She needed to find his rhythm.
Julia squeezed her eyes shut a bit more, so she could just see the outline of the room. The table where he had sat in front of the computer, the kitchen cupboard where he left his sleeping pills. She shut her eyes completely, tried to think.
If Sarac was really planning to kill himself, why had he left the pills in the cupboard?
Because he no longer needed them.
Sarac left the room to do something where he was expecting to be killed. Perhaps that was even part of his plan—one last sacrifice to make the killer ste
p out of the shadows.
She summoned up the image of Sarac’s body again. His grinning skull. And suddenly she imagined she could hear a faint sound. A thin, emaciated Sarac knocking tentatively on a door. Hunter opening it. Then Sarac sitting on one of the chairs, listening carefully as Hunter reveals his secret. Then it’s his turn. The camera on the tripod is rolling, Sarac stares into its lens. His mouth moves. Weak yet still very focused, he says what Hunter wants to hear.
Your secret in exchange for mine.
The next sequence in her head shows Sarac alone at the little table. Hunter has gone, Sarac has moved in, is using Hunter’s computer, his sleeping bag. Looking at the picture or pictures Hunter has given him as he toys with the bag of sleeping pills. She sees him sitting at the table, typing on the computer. Pressing “send” . . .
You betrayed me. Pay your debt.
Julia kept her eyes tightly shut for a few seconds more. Then she opened them and was back to reality.
Sarac would have kept a digital backup. A cloud account or something like that. But so far the IT guy hadn’t found any trace of one on the laptop. She’d begun to doubt that Sarac would rely on digital storage. The more time she spent in that spartan room, the more convinced she became that what she was looking for was there after all. That Sarac had left something else behind besides the sleeping pills.
She got to her feet and went over to the little kitchen. Pulled out the top drawer. She found some mismatched cutlery and cooking utensils.
She stood still for a few moments staring down into the drawer. On top of the cutlery there was an old potato peeler. The garbage bag had contained packaging from noodles, but she hadn’t seen any trace of potatoes. But the peeler was on top in the drawer. She shone her flashlight at it.
There was a trace of fine white powder at the end of the curved blade. She frowned and ran her finger over it. It left a small streak of white powder on her fingertip. She rubbed her thumb against her finger. Lifted them to her nose.
Ultimatum Page 26
