Plaster?
Her heart started to beat faster. She tried the nearest plaster wall. Pushed in the tip of the potato peeler and twisted it. The plaster was old and porous, and as she twisted the peeler, a small plug appeared in the middle of the curved blade. The hole it had covered was no bigger than her little finger, and it was almost impossible to see the opening if you didn’t know exactly where to look.
She looked around. Four walls, a finite number of square meters to search. But she knew from experience that people usually hid things as far from the door as possible. So she started in the far corner. She found the little round mark just above the baseboard after no more than a couple of minutes looking.
Her hand was shaking slightly as she inserted the potato peeler, but the plaster plug came out without resistance. She bent over and shone her flashlight in the hole. She could see something flat and blue in there. It took her a couple of tries before she managed to remove the object. A tiny memory card, no bigger than the nail of her little finger.
• • •
The penultimate trip to the Scout cabin. At least, that’s what Natalie hoped. It would all be over the day after tomorrow. She would dump the Golf in the extended-stay parking lot at Arlanda Airport and throw the parking ticket away without a backward glance. The apartment and her secondhand Ikea furniture were the landlord’s problem. She hadn’t decided if she was going to send her parents a postcard once she was settled or if she simply wouldn’t bother. Disappoint them one last time.
She had bought some candy and a comic book for Tindra while she was getting the rest of the shopping. She liked the girl; she reminded Natalie a bit of herself at that age. Plucky, inquisitive, a bit precocious. Not without a sense of humor. She had already known what she wanted to be. A doctor, just like Daddy had been in the old country. But things had turned out very differently. So now she’d given up. Her fate was in her own hands, and she was creating her own future.
She parked the car outside the cottage, unloaded the bags, and went around the corner. Cassandra was sitting on the bench outside the door, smoking. She nodded as Natalie approached.
“Have a seat.” Cassandra gestured toward the bench. “Cigarette?”
Natalie shook her head. “I’ve given up, but thanks anyway.”
She still hadn’t gotten used to Cassandra’s new hairstyle and color. She must have cut off at least half of her blonde hair before dying it. Cassandra seemed to know what she was looking at.
“You told me to try to look more common. So I tried to go for the same look as you.”
Natalie raised her eyebrows and tried to think of a suitably cutting retort. But Cassandra realized her mistake.
“Okay, I didn’t mean it like that . . . You’ve helped us so much, me and Tindra. I really do appreciate it. Please forgive me. I can be such a fucking bitch.”
Cassandra smiled warily. The hard expression on her face softened briefly.
“After Adnan died I was forced to do things so we could survive. And things didn’t exactly improve when Atif was sent to prison. But you keep going. Play tough.” She stubbed the cigarette out in the flower bed. “Am I forgiven?”
Natalie nodded. They sat in silence for a few moments. A group of magpies flapping about in the trees on the other side of the clearing caught their attention.
“Magpies . . .” Cassandra said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just an old nursery rhyme my grandmother used to tell me. ‘One for sorrow, two for mirth. Three for a wedding, four for . . .’ ”
She stopped.
“Four for what?” Natalie asked. “What do four magpies mean?”
Cassandra hesitated before replying.
“Death.”
One of the magpies let out a chattering call. The eerie sound echoed between the treetops.
Natalie stood up. “Where’s Atif?”
“He’s down by the lake with Tindra, swimming. I was thinking of joining them in a bit. Do you want to come? It would make Tindra happy; she likes you.”
Natalie shook her head again. Even if there didn’t seem to be any ulterior motive behind Cassandra’s offer, she had no desire to show off her love handles alongside Cassandra’s gym-trained figure and plastic tits.
“Time of the month,” she lied, aware that that would stop any attempt to persuade her.
“Ah. But you’ll come along anyway? Atif wants to talk to you about tomorrow.”
• • •
Atif was sitting on the jetty when they got to the lake. Tindra was racing in and out of the water and was evidently getting him to score her different jumps.
“What about that one, Amu? What score does that one get?”
“An eight.”
“An eight? But you gave the last one a nine!”
“Okay, nine, then.” He nodded to Natalie as she and Cassandra sat down beside him.
“Is everything set for Monday?”
“Yes, I’ll phone tomorrow and double-check that the passports will be ready. If I get the green light, I’ll pick them up in the afternoon and then come and get you. The plane takes off at nine o’clock. And we’ve got rooms booked at a hotel at the airport in Zürich.”
“Good,” Atif said. “What about the bank?”
“I’ve made an appointment to see someone on Tuesday, as soon as they open. We should be done by lunchtime at the latest. Your plane leaves at eight o’clock that evening. You’ll be in Abu Dhabi early the next morning.”
Atif nodded slowly.
“How about you? Where are you going to go?”
“Haven’t decided yet.” She shrugged and wondered why she was lying. Thailand—that was the plan. Buy a bar in Pattaya, somewhere like that. But suddenly the idea didn’t feel quite so appealing anymore.
She looked out across the small lake. The sun was going down as a couple of dragonflies danced across the surface.
Tindra clambered up the steps. She focused for a few moments, then jumped again. Feetfirst, with her hands flapping in the air. For an instant the girl hung in the air like the dragonflies. Hovering between the evening sky and the surface of the water. Then gravity caught up with her and pulled her down into the dark water. One second, two. Then the little head surfaced.
“What about that one, Amu? What score?”
“A ten,” Natalie said before anyone else had time to say anything.
• • •
Julia stuck the memory card in the socket, then waited as the cursor turned into a little hourglass. For a moment she worried that it wasn’t going to work, that the memory card was protected by a password, or that the reader she had bought from the Elgiganten store minutes before it closed wasn’t the right one. But then a new window opened. Three small, unnamed JPEG files. She clicked the first one.
The picture filled the screen and made her gasp for breath. A naked woman’s body lying facedown across the hood and windshield of a car. The metal had buckled and the window had shattered, showering the inside of the car with glass.
The next picture was taken from the side. The woman’s injuries were visible: crushed white skin, shattered eyeballs.
Julia knew exactly who the woman was. She’d seen the pictures when she was going through the case last winter. Sophie Thorning, moments after she jumped from the window of her penthouse apartment. The same apartment she herself had searched as a favor for Wallin.
But why had Hunter given Sarac pictures of Sophie’s body? Okay, so the two pictures made for uncomfortable viewing, but there had to be fifty similar photographs in police records. Sophie Thorning had jumped and was found by a guy delivering newspapers as she lay dead on the hood of a dark-colored Volvo. End of story.
So why had Sarac been murdered? Whose secret had cost him his life?
She opened the third picture. The same angle as the first, Sophie’s
dead body on the hood, but this time taken from a greater distance. Disappointed, she looked at the picture for a few seconds without seeing anything that she hadn’t already seen in the other photographs. She tried to concentrate on one detail at a time. The body, the blood, the car.
And then she suddenly noticed what it was that wasn’t right.
Fuck!
Thirty-Seven
Atif lay quietly listening to the small breaths from the bunk below his.
If he ignored the drama that had preceded them, the past two days had been among the best of his life. He and Tindra had played croquet out on the grass and gone swimming several times each day, and in the evenings the little girl curled up on his lap and wanted him to read her favorite story, the one about the princess who vanquished the dragon and rescued the prince. And when the story was over, he and no one else got to put her to bed in the bunk bed she had decided they should share.
Sometimes, mainly when she didn’t want to do as she was told, Tindra was so like her father that it made Atif’s heart ache. The same dark look in her eyes, the same stubborn expression, the same ability to somehow manipulate her way to a tiny victory before giving in. But Tindra also resembled her mother. She had her hair, her cheekbones. Cassandra was a beautiful woman when she let her guard slip. She was still angry with him, blamed him for everything that had happened—which wasn’t altogether fair, given that she had been Abu Hamsa’s mistress. But, for the sake of domestic harmony, Atif was prepared to shoulder the blame.
Cassandra had done what she had to in order to protect her family, just as he had. She was already starting to thaw, especially when she saw him together with Tindra.
He carefully changed position and looked over the side of the bed. Tindra was lying curled up with her teddy bear close to her cheek. Her blonde hair was draped across her pillow. He loved her so much, it actually hurt.
In just over twenty-four hours they’d have their passports and would be on their way. On their way to a place where none of them would have to be scared anymore. A place where they’d be safe.
• • •
Oscar Wallin studied the little red dot on the GPS map, as he had done in practically every spare moment in recent days. Natalie’s car was currently stationary a block or so from her apartment, in the same place it had been parked since late yesterday evening. It was only just after nine o’clock, so at a guess Natalie was spending her Sunday morning in bed. She had mostly been shuttling between her home and one and the same address, with just one detour to a supermarket.
He had looked up the address on Google Earth. It was a Scout cabin in the southern suburbs, fairly remote. The perfect place for an escaped killer and his family to hide.
Wallin was actually rather surprised that they hadn’t already fled, hadn’t left the country as soon as Natalie got them out of Cassandra Nygren’s apartment. But there could be any number of reasons why they were still there. It certainly made the whole thing considerably more interesting for him.
He still hadn’t told his colleagues where to find their escaped convict. Naturally, he would be happy to see Natalie behind bars, but the longer Kassab was on the run, the worse things were getting for Kollander and, by extension, the national police chief. That bitch Swensk was more than welcome to sweat a bit longer. So he was biding his time, watching the red dot on the map. Enjoying the feeling of complete control.
• • •
Julia Gabrielsson was having trouble hiding her eagerness.
“Do you see what’s wrong?”
“You mean apart from the fact that the pictures depict a woman’s shattered body?” Amante turned pale and looked away from the five photographs Julia had spread out on the kitchen island.
He really didn’t look well: his robe was threadbare and the smell from his vest suggested that he probably hadn’t showered for a while. Perhaps she shouldn’t drag him into this, but after careful consideration she had realized that she couldn’t go to Wallin without talking to Amante first. She owed him that much.
“No, I can’t.”
“Look again!” Julia pointed at the photographs. “Four of the pictures are from the police investigation. The fifth is from Sarac’s memory card.”
Amante shut his eyes for a few seconds and seemed to pull himself together. Then he looked at the pictures again, longer this time.
“The body’s lying slightly differently in this one.” He pointed to one of the pictures. “One arm is a bit higher up the windshield, at a different angle.”
“Good. Ignore the body for a bit and concentrate on what’s around it.”
Amante did as she said, then suddenly stiffened.
“It’s not the same car,” he said. “That’s a BMW. Very similar, but it’s not the same car as the one in the other pictures.”
Julia mimed applause. “Bravo! If you look through a magnifying glass, you can also see that the car’s parked on concrete rather than asphalt. In a garage, not on the street.”
“But what does it mean?”
“To begin at the beginning, Detective Superintendent Oscar Wallin asked me to have a look at this particular case. It was last winter, toward the end of November. A young woman, Sophie Thorning, had jumped from her window and landed on a car twenty meters below. She had a history of mental illness, and Sophie’s stomach was full of whiskey and psychoactive drugs. But her father evidently wasn’t happy with the investigation. And because John Thorning was both the minister of justice’s erstwhile mentor as well as general secretary of the Bar Association, they humored him. I looked through the case and discovered a few little things that didn’t seem to make sense.”
“Such as?”
“It looked like someone had cleaned Sophie’s apartment very recently: the sheets and towels had been changed but the old ones couldn’t be found, that sort of thing. I got the feeling someone had been there either just before or maybe even as Sophie jumped, and that the presence of this person had been carefully wiped away. I found a fragment of glass with some blood on it. I hoped that might lead somewhere, but it turned out to be Sophie’s own blood, so that was as far as I got.”
“Nothing else unusual?”
“No. I went through the autopsy report with a fine-tooth comb, but there was nothing but a hell of a lot of cuts and injuries caused by the fall. An unusually large number, in fact. Now that I’ve seen these pictures, I understand why.”
She tapped the photograph of the BMW gently.
“Sophie fell twice. The first time she landed on the wrong car. This car. A car that belonged to a person who shouldn’t have been there. So someone moved her.”
“Who?”
“Someone who was fast, discreet, and who had no moral objections to doing a thing like this.”
“You think it was Frank Hunter?”
Julia nodded. “It must have been. Hunter was a security consultant, so presumably cleaning up someone else’s mistake was nothing new for him. He took some before-and-after shots of Sophie and kept them in case they ever became useful.”
Amante scratched his stubble.
“And once Sarac had exchanged his secret for Hunter’s, he contacted whoever had been driving the car, to make him accountable. He sent him the note and pictures, and then he was murdered.” Amante held up the photograph. “The registration number of the BMW is visible. I’m guessing you’ve already run it through the system.”
“The car is leased to Thorning & Partners. John Thorning’s law firm.”
Amante started. “What, you mean her father was in the apartment? How does that work?”
Julia shook her head.
“I was just as confused as you. But then I called the leasing firm down in Hammarby Harbor. Thorning & Partners leases a total of fifteen executive cars from them. They’re all BMWs and they get changed every other year. This particular one is last year’s model, so it’s
still in use. It’s currently being driven by the company’s head of finance, but at the time of Sophie Thorning’s death it was being used by one of the firm’s other employees.”
She paused and took a deep breath.
“Who?” Amante said. “Who was driving the car?”
“Jesper Stenberg. Sweden’s minister of justice and our ultimate boss.”
Thirty-Eight
“Fantastic that you could come at such short notice.” Stenberg’s father-in-law squeezed his hand and gestured toward the interior of the restaurant. “We’ll sit inside where we can talk in peace and quiet.”
Karl-Erik had called him in person just an hour or so ago. Had asked for an urgent meeting, said it was important. And even if Stenberg had considered saying no, mostly to point out that he wasn’t at his father-in-law’s beck and call, there was something in Karl-Erik’s tone that made him ask his secretary to rearrange his schedule. Now he was even more curious. A lunch meeting at short notice at a ridiculously expensive restaurant on a Monday definitely wasn’t his father-in-law’s usual style.
Karl-Erik turned to Boman, who, as usual, was standing just a meter or two behind him.
“Nisse, take care of the gentlemen from the Security Police. Make sure they get something to eat, will you?”
“Of course. Good morning, Jesper, nice to see you looking a bit brighter.” Boman winked at him in passing. Stenberg ignored him.
Karl-Erik opened the double doors leading to a private dining room. Another of Karl-Erik’s little chambres séparées.
Inside, Karolina was already waiting at the table. Stenberg was brought up short, but recovered quickly and leaned over to kiss his wife. He was expecting her to turn her cheek to protect her lipstick, but to his surprise she kissed him on the mouth and held her lips there for several seconds. Her eyes were twinkling and she seemed to be in an excellent mood.
“Do you want to tell him or shall I, Daddy?” she said as soon as Stenberg had sat down. “You don’t think we should order first? Poor Jesper hasn’t even gotten anything to drink.”
Ultimatum Page 27
