She left the bathroom and went out to the large, open kitchen. The sink was empty, no unwashed glasses or cutlery. Hardly unexpected, considering how tidy and minimalist Sophie seemed to prefer things. The dishwasher was concealed behind one of the white kitchen cupboards. She opened it and pulled out the two baskets. Empty, both of them. So how often did that ever happen? Usually you managed to build up a few things that hung around waiting on the countertops. A couple of glasses, some cutlery, the sort of thing you then put in the machine as soon as you’d emptied it. At least that was how it worked for her and Nilla.
She opened the kitchen cupboards and studied the even rows of differently sized glasses. One deviation caught her attention. There were two whiskey glasses missing. One of them was in the inventory; it had been on the desk in the study. Analysis had shown that it had contained the same sort of whiskey that was found in Sophie’s stomach. But where was the other glass? She sniffed the air. That faint, slightly acrid smell could very well be whiskey. A dropped glass, perhaps?
Julia took out her flashlight and shone it past the kitchen cupboards. She discovered some tiny yellow stains on one of the polished walls. She had a look in the trash can, but that too was empty.
The vacuum cleaner was in one of the hall cupboards, and after a bit of effort she managed to get the lid off. The bag was brand-new, but whoever had changed it probably wouldn’t have bothered to change the filter. She carefully loosened it, then shone her flashlight at it from the side. A faint shimmer from tiny fragments of crystal made her break into a satisfied smile.
She returned to the kitchen, lay down flat on her stomach, and shone the flashlight across the smooth, gray concrete floor. There was a light, even layer of dust on the floor, which was only to be expected. The apartment hadn’t been cleaned since the death. But apart from that there was nothing, not even the tiniest crumb. Except . . . Something stood out against the light. An uneven little deviation in one of the cracks in the concrete under the island unit. She wriggled closer, careful not to take her eyes off it. She couldn’t help smiling when she realized she had been right. A tiny splinter of glass, or crystal, to be more accurate. A splinter that, unlike the rest of the glass, hadn’t been sucked up by the vacuum cleaner and which had therefore not been removed from the apartment along with the trash, towels, and used bedclothes.
She got up from the floor. She couldn’t be sure, not until she had checked the cleaning company’s timetable. But her gut feeling told her that she was onto something.
The apartment had been cleaned, carefully and methodically, by someone who knew exactly what he or she was doing. Probably the same person who had been in the bed, used the towels, and drank from the shattered glass. The same person the neighbor thought he had heard earlier that evening. The only question was, who?
She held the splinter of glass carefully between her thumb and index finger and shone the flashlight on it from all angles. There was a hint of color in the reflection. A tiny touch of red, barely visible without a magnifying glass.
It looked like blood.
TWENTY-ONE
Atif had rung the doorbell, peered through the mail slot, and tried to detect any sign of life from inside the apartment. But all he had been able to make out were a dark hall and a stale, slightly acrid smell that was hard to identify. There was no one home and, to judge by the heap of mail on the hall floor, it had been a while since anyone had been there.
Bakshi had grown nervous when he had raised the subject of Adnan and the robbery. He had leaped at his phone and called Erik Johansson the moment the door had closed. But he hadn’t got through. So, why was he calling? Presumably because Erik J. was involved, and Bakshi wanted to warn him, or boast about how cool he’d been, staring down Atif and not giving anything away. No matter which, the trail pointed in one direction—toward Erik Johansson.
The cell number had been a dead end. No results in any search engine, which either meant that the number was unlisted or that it was a pay-as-you-go phone with no registered owner. He’d tried calling the number a few times from his own pay-as-you-go phone, but kept getting Erik’s voice mail. According to the telephone directory, there were more than three hundred Erik Johanssons in Stockholm alone, which was hardly a number he could work with.
So instead he had followed up the e-mail in which Bakshi discussed Erik J. with someone called Pasi. He had googled the e-mail address, Pitbull8U, and had discovered that it belonged to a one-man business registered to a Pasi Arvo Lehtonen, who was supposed to live behind this very door at number 62 Roslagsgatan.
Atif would have preferred to dig out Bakshi again and squeeze him until he revealed what he knew. But Bakshi was gone, probably hiding at one of his girlfriends’, with his pistol under his pillow. Or else he’d left the city. Either way, his apartment was dark and shut up.
So right now Pitbull-Pasi was Atif’s best lead, but judging by the available evidence, the man hadn’t had time to act on Bakshi’s advice that it was okay to come home. So what was Pitbull so worried about that—judging by the e-mail—it had made him leave the country? Did it have any connection to Adnan’s death? There was only one person who could answer that.
Atif stood up and brushed the dust from his knees. A little farther down the corridor the door to another apartment slowly opened. An elderly woman emerged, pushing a check-patterned shopping trolley. When she caught sight of Atif she stopped and seemed to be considering going back inside.
“Police,” Atif said quickly, pulling out his ID and holding it in the air. The woman was more than six yards away and, from the look of her thick-lensed glasses, would hardly be able to see any details beyond the little sleeve and shiny badge. He was right; the woman relaxed at once.
“Oh, what a relief,” she said. “I thought you were one of them, Officer . . .” She nodded toward the door behind him.
“That’s actually why I’m here. I was hoping to have a word with your neighbor, Mr. Lehtonen,” Atif said.
“Yes, I can understand that,” the woman said. Her voice was surprisingly melodic. “There’s a lot of coming and going in that apartment. Funny people.”
“Hmm.” Atif made an effort to sound polite and respectful. “You don’t happen to know if he’s at home, madam?”
“No, he’s probably away for Christmas, like most young people these days. My grandchildren usually go to Thailand, but I could never do that. Christmas without snow and cold wouldn’t be the same.”
Atif nodded. He put his hand in his pocket and took out a pen and a piece of paper. “Could I possibly ask you for a small favor, madam? You see, I really would like to get hold of him, ideally as soon as he reappears.”
• • •
Sarac was already feeling better. Even though he was spending all his time indoors, it was as if the air out on the island was making his head feel clearer. He had slept on the sofa in the living room, curling up in the green sleeping bag Molnar had left. A whole night of unbroken, dreamless sleep.
He would much rather have gone out and tried to get down to the edge of the forest to see what it was down there among the trees that held such a strong attraction for him. But he realized that in his current state he was hardly going to be able to wade through the snow. Instead he had gone for a walk inside the big house. His most recent memories of the place were probably from two summers ago. Elisabeth, Jeff, and the children had come over from Canada, and they had tried to work out what to do with the old house. Jeff had suggested in his usual tactful way that perhaps they ought to sell it, because the cost of renovating it would be too high. But he had managed to persuade his sister to wait, and said he could do most of the work himself and that it wouldn’t be too expensive. After all, the house was part of their childhood. The last thing they had left.
The upstairs was exactly as he remembered it. There was a large open landing at the top of the stairs, facing the entrance hall down below. A corridor with two small bedrooms on either side led to the upper floor of the veranda. B
ut the roof of the veranda and some of the windows were covered by large tarpaulins, which combined with the dirty windows made the whole upper floor seem dark and gloomy. The veranda was full of building materials. Sawhorses, rolls of insulation, tar paper, a couple of large gas cylinders, and a saw. The stack of planks had turned yellow and seemed to have been sitting there for a while.
Sarac opened one of the bedroom doors. He found a neatly made bed, a ribbed chair, and a little bedside table. The smell of damp fabric was unmistakable. In one wall there were two small doors with brass catches instead of door handles. One turned out to conceal a small wardrobe, the other led to a little bathroom.
Sarac turned on the tap in the basin. He felt the metal vibrating in his hand before it started to jerkily spit out discolored water. He let it run for a while until the water was clear and constant. Molnar seemed to have got the boiler going in the basement, because the water gradually heated up, or at least became tepid.
He turned the tap off and went back to the landing. He looked down toward the front door. The feeling was getting stronger with each passing second, strengthened by the peeling walls and damp-stained ceiling. The whole of this imposing old building was in an inexorable state of decay.
His stomach was rumbling and he suddenly remembered that he hadn’t eaten any breakfast. Josef had stocked the fridge up and he pulled out a few things at random. He sat down at the kitchen table while he waited for the coffee to filter through. He put his right hand on the table and wiggled his fingers. They felt better now, considerably less spongy than before. His right leg too, even if he still needed to use the crutch. If it carried on like this, he’d soon be ready to go back to work. The moment he thought that, it occurred to him that he no longer had a job, at least not properly. The property store was a final stop, somewhere you dumped people you couldn’t put anywhere else. People who were no longer fit for good, honest police work.
He gulped and carefully scratched his woolly hat. The bandage was gone; the only thing he’d kept was the plaster covering the hole in his skull. He had touched it, gingerly feeling his way to the edge of the bone. Underneath, his brain was still more or less unprotected. But he still didn’t seem to be able to get at the things it was hiding. He had to try to make sense of things. Find a way to fill in the gaps and show that the people trying to push him out of the way were wrong.
He hadn’t yet managed to shake off the flashes of memory that had arisen in Molnar’s car. The room, the men with the harsh looks on their faces. The red lines that linked them, like a spiderweb with that symbol in the middle. A pattern that both scared and intrigued him. But another feeling was starting to develop. He had felt it back in his hospital bed, but his conversation with Molnar had made it accelerate. Shame. He was ashamed of something, not just the pathetic state he was in or the fact that he was being left out in the cold, but something else. Something he had done, something unforgivable.
Who was the man in the snow-covered car, the one whose death he had witnessed? Who had fired a bullet into the back of the man’s head in cold blood like that? Someone he knew, someone he worked with? Maybe even Janus? Was that why Molnar hadn’t wanted to show him the list of calls, because he didn’t really trust him? Did he doubt Sarac’s objectivity?
The unmistakable sound of a car door closing roused him from these circular thoughts. He twisted around and looked out through the window, and saw a little red Golf with some bad patches of rust parked out in the drive. He hadn’t heard it arrive, presumably because the snow had muffled the sound of the engine. It looked familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.
He could see the driver’s back heading toward the front door. Sarac stood up, his heart racing. No one but Molnar and Josef knew he was here. So who was the person outside the house?
He pulled the kitchen drawers open, trying but failing to find some sort of weapon. There was a knock on the door, firm, decisive, as if the person outside had no desire to be kept waiting. Sarac crept into the hall, pressing against the wall and trying to peer out the window to the porch. But all he could see was a thick padded jacket. In the corner, just behind the door, he discovered a baseball bat with long, sharp spikes hammered into it. Was it his? He didn’t recognize it. What would have made him construct such a terrifying weapon?
There was another knock, harder this time. Sarac hesitated for a moment. Then he snatched up the baseball bat, turned the lock, and yanked the door open. The person on the porch didn’t seem surprised and slowly looked him up and down. Then pointed at the spiked club in Sarac’s hand.
“We have to stop meeting like this, David.” Natalie smiled.
“W-what the hell are you doing here?!” Sarac tried to hide the baseball bat behind his back.
“What you really mean is: Thank you, Natalie, for waiting outside Police Headquarters for three hours yesterday, all for no reason. And thanks for going back home and tidying up my squalid junkie’s apartment while you were waiting in vain for me to show up. And a particularly big thank-you for coming out to the archipelago to deliver my medication.” Natalie smiled again and waved a bag from the drugstore.
Sarac shook his head. “H-how did you find your way here? I mean, who, the house . . . ?” His thoughts were getting tangled up.
“I smell coffee,” Natalie said, pointing toward the kitchen. “If you invite me in for a cup, I’ll tell you.”
• • •
“Nice place, must have cost a fair bit.” Natalie looked around the kitchen, clearly impressed.
“It belonged to my grandmother. My sister and I inherited it,” Sarac muttered as he fumbled with the coffee cups. To his own surprise, he realized he was pleased to see Natalie. A normal person in the middle of the nightmare surrounding him.
“Elisabeth Matilda Sarac, now Wilson. Emigrated to Canada in 2001. The house is in her name, not yours. Wise move if you want to avoid capital gains tax.” Natalie dug about in the bag from the drugstore. “You medication was on the kitchen table in the apartment, so when morning came and you still hadn’t shown up I started to get worried. There was a key ring hanging in the hall with the word Skarpö written on it, so I guessed there was a summerhouse out here. My friend in the Tax Office did a bit of looking. Your records are confidential, so at first he didn’t find anything. Then he tried looking for other people with the same surname.”
“And you found my sister, and then this address?” Sarac noticed how his words suddenly sounded rather slurred.
“Yep, all I had to do was find the number of a talkative neighbor and ask if there was any smoke coming from the chimney, and bingo!”
Sarac sat down at the table and gently pinched the bridge of his nose, then his lips. His face felt strangely numb.
“When did you last take your migraine medication?” Natalie said.
“Yesterday, I think,” Sarac mumbled. “Unless it was the day before yesterday . . .”
TWENTY-TWO
There was a glint of light from the peephole, then Atif heard the rattle of the security chain. He noted that she had used all the locks.
“Come in!” Cassandra said. She was trying to make her voice sound firm, but he immediately noticed the fear that lay hidden beneath her composed exterior. As usual, he could smell it, right through the heavy cloud of her perfume.
He stepped into the hall and closed the front door behind him.
“Lock the door!”
Atif did as he was told, then waited for her to invite him further inside the apartment. But instead they remained standing in the hall.
“Tindra?” he said.
“She’s asleep.”
He nodded, trying not to show his disappointment. He waited for her to tell him what this was about. Then he realized that she was going to make him ask.
“You wanted me to come around as fast as I could. Well, here I am.” Atif shrugged his shoulders.
He had called Cassandra a couple of days before, to tell her he was staying in Sweden for a bit longer, and had give
n her his number. She hadn’t sounded pleased, and pointedly hadn’t invited him to spend Christmas with them, as he might have hoped. But, little more than an hour ago, she had called and asked him to come around. She’d said it was urgent.
Cassandra put her hand in the back pocket of her jeans, pulled out a folded piece of paper, and waved it in front of his face.
“What the fuck is this, Atif? Huh?!” Her voice had risen almost to falsetto.
He took the piece of paper. A Christmas card with a cheerful Santa Claus on the front. Someone must have dropped it on the ground, because there was a clearly visible shoe print on the back. The marks from a heavy sole that reminded him of his own military boots. Inside the card was the usual printed greeting, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and beneath it some handwritten lines in black ink.
Hello Tindra.
Hope you’ve been a good girl this year. Because you know what happens if you aren’t good, don’t you?
Just ask your Uncle Atif!
Best wishes,
Santa
“It was on her shelf,” Cassandra hissed. “On her fucking shelf at preschool. Get it? She was over the moon, thought the card really was from Santa. That he’d written to her and her uncle. I didn’t know what to say.”
Atif nodded; he knew exactly what had happened. He could see it in front of him. The doors of the preschool were usually left unlocked; you could just walk in. Don’t ask the staff, ask one of the kids which way to go. Children always knew all about one another and were useless as witnesses. The rest was easy. Just leave a little greeting. It didn’t really matter what, the message would be clear enough. We know where the most valuable thing in your life is, and we can get at it whenever we want to.
MemoRandom: A Thriller Page 15
