At least when it came to her art, if she was to be believed, she was done with it. She was nothing but a talentless bluff anyway. It wasn’t something they’d talked about, just something that had trickled out in throw-away subclauses; whenever he brought it up, she shut him down. Just like she had every time he’d broached the subject of their future.
The past few weeks had, granted, been one long crisis, and all their energy had been spent sitting by Matilda’s bedside; maybe everything would change now that she was coming home. Maybe things would finally return to normal.
He pulled out Gone to Earth with David Sylvian and studied the cover. It was the second CD he’d bought, after Sign o’ the Times with Prince, and he could still remember playing it for Sonja in the flat they’d just moved into together.
She had liked it so much she had improvised a dance, and he had turned it up so loud their neighbour had eventually rung their doorbell. But they had simply stuffed the bell with cotton wool and opened another bottle of wine. As though no problems would ever find them, so long as they stood united.
He connected the speakers in the kitchen, turned the volume up and started making dinner to the sound of old Japan members Steve Jansen and Mick Karn’s sophisticated groove in ‘Taking the Veil’.
Since Sonja was spending the night with Matilda, it was just him and Theodor. Which meant last night’s leftover pasta, fried crispy in olive oil with some finely sliced garlic, a few chopped tomatoes and olives, would have to do.
The door to his son’s room was closed, as usual, so he tapped it gently before opening it, only to see Theodor startle violently in his desk chair and quickly turn on the screensaver on his laptop.
‘Dinner’s ready.’
‘All right, I’ll be right there.’
Fabian nodded and turned to leave but stopped mid-motion. ‘Actually, what are you up to?’
‘Nothing. I said I’ll be right there.’
Fabian remembered his own teenage years all too well. Like Theodor, he had been prone to shutting himself up in his room, driven by an overwhelming need to be left alone, always worried about the door being thrown open at any moment by a curious parent.
Now he was the annoying parent who put his foot in the door and asked endless questions. The difference was that in this case, it wasn’t about a packet of cigarettes or a few well-thumbed porn rags, but the gun Theodor had brought home. About his broken nose, which even though the surgery was weeks ago, was still swollen and a yellowish blue colour. About what had really happened before he came home that night almost four weeks ago.
He had tried, but his attempts had amounted to nothing more than a few awkward enquiries met with an explanation that, in short, Theodor had been walking, completely innocently, through Slottshagen Park on his way to meet up with some friends when he was attacked and robbed at gunpoint. A man had walked by with his pit bull, and that had made the perpetrators drop the gun and run. Theodor had decided to bring the gun home to give to Fabian, the only part of the story that wasn’t clearly a bald-faced lie.
‘It sounded like you and Mum were fighting today,’ he said halfway through dinner. ‘She said something about finding two—’
‘Yes, she found two packets of cigarettes.’ Theodor sighed. ‘Like that’s worth making such a fuss about.’
‘No, I suppose it’s not, though you’re well aware of how your mother and I feel about you smoking. But there’s something else you and I need to talk a bit more about, and that’s that gun of yours.’
‘Why? I’ve already told you everything.’
‘You have, have you?’
‘Um… yes. You’ve asked me, like, a thousand times.’
‘Then how come I feel I’ve had no answers?’
‘How should I know? Don’t ask me.’ Theodor shrugged and helped himself to seconds.
‘As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I’m doing, and just so you know, I’m not going to give up until you tell me exactly what happened that night.’
‘But I already did. What is it you want to hear?’
‘The truth. How about giving that a go? Like who those robbers were, and why they went for you of all people. If there even were robbers. What friends you were going to meet, you who always claim you don’t have any friends. And this man with the pit bull, who you can’t give a description of either. Was he masked, too? And why didn’t he react when you ran off with a gun in your hand? The truth, Theodor. It’s all I ask.’
‘The truth?’ Theodor got up from his chair, bright red in the face. ‘You want the truth? Huh? Do you?’ His voice was breaking. ‘The truth is you should thank your lucky fucking stars I brought the gun home that particular night. If not for the gun, you would have had to watch your family get executed, one after the other. But maybe that would have been better, because then I wouldn’t have had to put up with this shit.’
Fabian had to agree. Even though Theodor’s words stabbed like knives, every last one of them was unequivocally true.
9
The locksmith checked the new locks were working properly, handed the keys over to Molly Wessman and packed up his tools. After he disappeared down the stairs, she entered, closed the door behind her and stood waiting in the dark for a minute before turning the lock and latching the chain she normally never used.
It didn’t make her feel safer in the slightest. Her beloved flat down in Norra Hamnen, which had cost a fortune, had turned into a place that made her feel nothing but pure, unadulterated fear. But what was she supposed to do, she thought to herself, and continued in through the hallway without turning on the lights.
The living room looked the same, and yet not.
Nothing felt like hers any more. The TV, the sofa, the shelf with all her things. The whole flat. It was as though she had entered a strange country, having ignored every sign asking her to turn around and go somewhere else.
The problem was that she had nowhere else to go.
Pretending to be working late and sleeping on the sofa in the office would never work. Her colleagues would instantly know something was amiss.
Staying over with friends was not an option either. Having gone through her entire contact list, she had been forced to conclude it didn’t contain a single person she was close enough with to just turn up on their doorstep.
Friends had never been her thing. She had always preferred to be alone. Especially to being in a couple. She couldn’t see the point of chafing against the same old person every day, while the sex grew more and more uninspired. Especially when she had a sex life most people would cut off their little finger for.
At least, that’s what she’d had, in that previous life that had ended the moment she woke up this morning, a previous life that was increasingly feeling like a dream. Like a before and an after, in which loneliness was breaking her down like an injected poison.
She went into the room that had been her bedroom and saw that it looked exactly like when she left it to go to the office. She’d tried to act normally there. She’d hidden her shorn fringe under a wide headband and after a few minutes’ practice in front of the bathroom mirror, she’d been able to squeeze out a tolerably natural-looking smile.
But it had been like walking around in a bubble in which her paranoid thoughts bounced back and forth, drowning out all other sounds.
She had seen guilty people everywhere. Janne in IT, who undoubtedly knew how to hack into a phone. Anders who had been fired, but who still had a month left of his notice period. Not to mention all the people who had already been let go. At every turn, she had been greeted by false smiles, searching eyes and insinuating questions about how she was feeling.
Panic had crept nearer and nearer and peaked in the middle of her presentation to the board. Suddenly, she’d been unable to get a word out, had just stood there in silence, watching everyone’s confused looks. In that moment, she’d felt convinced the perpetrator was there among the sea of suits and ties. Someone who despite all the cutbacks was unhappy
with the numbers and wanted her gone at any cost.
You could have cut the silence with a knife before she finally regained her ability to speak and finished her presentation. After that, she had cancelled the rest of her meetings, left the office and gone straight to the police to file a report.
Unfortunately, they hadn’t taken her seriously. Instead, they had forced her to give a urine sample and implied that she must have been under the influence of alcohol or drugs and had simply forgotten bringing a visitor home.
But she had insisted and told them about the people at her work who might hold a grudge on account of the restructure. About how certain members of the board had always been against her. About the old man working the tills at her local supermarket who always undressed her with his eyes and insisted on rolling out his mat right next to hers at yoga practice.
They hadn’t listened, though, and in the end, she had got up and left the police station without another word. She hadn’t even got to telling them about all the people she met at the clubs she liked to frequent.
And somewhere on her way out of the police station, it had dawned on her that checking in to a hotel, staying over at the office or forcing herself on some distant acquaintance wouldn’t make any difference. Because no matter how much she wished to, this wasn’t something she could run away from, since the perpetrator could be just about anyone.
10
Accompanied by Sylvian’s soaring ‘Sunlight Seen through Towering Trees’, Fabian grabbed the handle of the Pavoni portafilter while simultaneously raising the lever to release the hot steam. Then he lowered it again in a slow, smooth motion and soon the coveted drops of espresso began dripping into his cup.
His conversation with Theodor was far from over. The whole thing was so inflamed it was impossible to bring it up without it leading to a big row. At the same time, he had to admit that Theodor was right. If he hadn’t had a gun tucked into the waistband of his trousers on the night Matilda was shot, they would all likely have been killed.
He added foamed milk to his coffee and took the cup with him to the basement, where he continued past the washing machine, the drying rack and the storage shelves behind the curtains he had hung up as a partition.
On the other side a completely different, cosier vibe prevailed. The lighting was warmer and rag rugs made from fabric scraps covered the floor. A threadbare armchair stood next to a floor lamp and an end table in one corner and along the outer wall stood his old desk with the avocado-green drawers, which for some reason he just couldn’t part with. A larger screen was connected to his laptop; in the pool of light from the floor lamp lay an unused notepad, Post-it notes of various hues and a clutch of newly purchased pens.
Sonja had offered him her studio in the attic. But he was convinced she would eventually find her way back to her art and had instead set up his study at the back of the basement. Not to pay bills, surf the web and order takeaway. No, this was a space dedicated to one single purpose. The investigation of his own colleague, Crime Scene Technician Ingvar Molander. It was an investigation their late colleague, Hugo Elvin, had initiated and secretly worked on for years. Now the responsibility was Fabian’s.
Had Elvin’s unexpected death just over a month ago not in fact been suicide but rather the inevitable consequence of having come too close to the truth about Molander? If so, Molander had not only killed his best friend and colleague, he had also arranged a detailed staging of it as a tragic suicide prompted by Elvin’s supposed long-standing gender dysphoria and secret desire to become a woman. He had not only strung him up by a swag hook, he’d put him in a dress and made his face up with lipstick, powder and eye shadow.
But that was far from all. If Elvin was to be believed, two years ago, in the middle of an ongoing investigation of several murders among a group of old classmates from Helsingborg’s Fredriksdal School, Molander had drugged Ingela Ploghed from that same school class, surgically removed her uterus to mimic the perpetrator’s signature method and left her to bleed to death in Ramlösa Brunn Park. She survived, only to jump from a building a few weeks later.
And even that wasn’t the end of it. Three years before that, Molander had supposedly also been behind the so-called Ven Murder, in which a certain Inga Dahlberg was attacked while out running, also in Ramlösa Brunn Park, and subsequently raped and sent naked down the Rå River with both hands and feet screwed to a wooden freight pallet.
These crimes, and potentially more, Molander had allegedly committed while they were all working together. While they were having each other over for dinner, visiting crime scenes and at times working such long hours they spent more time with the team than with their own families.
And yet no one but Elvin had suspected him, and since the methods used had drawn inspiration from their ongoing investigations, suspicion had naturally fallen on other perpetrators instead of the real serial killer, who was sitting at the same lunch table and sipping coffee from the same thermos as them.
It was almost too much to take in, and the most convenient explanation was that Elvin had simply been wrong. Somehow, the whole thing just seemed too far-fetched. At the same time, he couldn’t think of anyone who’d be better placed to produce a crime scene with misleading clues than Molander.
He had considered involving Tuvesson so there would be someone for him to bandy ideas around with, but had in the end decided that her alcohol problems constituted too big a risk. True, she had managed to stay sober for a month now, but it was anyone’s guess how long it would last. If she were to fall off the wagon, it would only be a matter of time before Molander found out. Besides, he was the one who had found the key to the desk drawer where Elvin had kept his secret investigation.
It had already been two years since the day he borrowed Elvin’s desk during the investigation of the Fredriksdal Murders. A spilled cup of coffee had made him peer under the desk, where he spotted a key taped to the underside. A key that turned out to unlock the biggest of the three desk drawers. He had opened it out of sheer curiosity and realized it was full to the brim with folders and thick envelopes.
He had closed the drawer again without examining the contents and not given it a second thought until he bumped into his old colleague from Stockholm, Crime Scene Technician Hillevi Stubbs. As it happened, she knew both Elvin and Molander because the three of them had done their police training together. She had laughingly dismissed the claims that Elvin had wanted to undergo gender reassignment, which put the entire suicide theory in a new light.
Fabian put his coffee cup down and went over to the whiteboard, which was completely empty, waiting to be filled with pictures, hunches, clues and theories. He didn’t want to put any of Elvin’s conjectures and clues up; he was going to fill the board with his own conclusions and facts he had verified himself.
From now on, this was his investigation. Not Elvin’s. And as though to underline that, he put up one of the pictures he’d taken of his former colleague after finding him hanging from his own swag hook, wearing a floral dress, earrings and bright red lipstick.
The first step was to examine every last detail relating to Elvin’s death to determine whether there was the slightest possibility Molander was behind it. He pulled out his phone, found Stubbs’s number and waited while it rang.
In the best of worlds, he would come to the conclusion that Elvin really had taken his own life and that everything was a big misunderstanding. That way, no one ever had to find out what he had been up to in his basement, and they could all continue working together like the close-knit, efficient team they were.
‘Well, well, if it isn’t Fabian Risk.’ To Fabian’s great relief, Stubbs sounded almost happy.
‘I hope this isn’t a bad time.’ He knew no one who disliked being called up more than Stubbs. During their years together at the Stockholm Police, she’d always been the one to call if she wanted something. For him, and everyone else for that matter, contacting her had always been out of the question.
‘Of
course it’s a bad time. What other kind is there?’ she said without any trace of irony in her voice. ‘But I’d be lying if I said I was surprised, though I had expected your call straight after the funeral. And speaking of which, what happened to you? You just disappeared.’
‘I don’t know if I had time to tell you, but my daughter, Matilda, was seriously injured. It was actually so bad we didn’t know if she was going to pull through.’
‘That’s right, you did mention something like that. How is she now, then?’
‘She’s getting there, and she’s actually being discharged this weekend.’
‘Thank goodness. It must have been awful.’
‘You can say that again. And you? Enjoying Malmö? Or do you miss fast-paced Stockholm?’
‘As you know, they’re pretty trigger-happy down here, so we keep ourselves busy. But correct me if I’m wrong. You didn’t call to catch up, did you?’
‘Maybe you remember talking to me about Hugo Elvin at the funeral?’
‘Yes, you mentioned something about him being depressed and wanting a sex change.’
‘That’s the official explanation, though I have to admit I feel more and more doubtful, personally.’
‘It sounds insane, if you ask me. I don’t understand where they got that from. Did he leave a suicide note?’
‘No, but there was quite a bit of women’s clothing in his flat. Knickers, bras, all sorts. And he was wearing make-up and a dress when we found him. His browsing history was full of various sites with information about gender reassignment and—’
‘Okay, that’s enough,’ Stubbs broke in. ‘That Hugo was a woman trapped in a man’s body is nonsense. Suicide, maybe. He was in his head a lot even back when we knew each other, and if I’m not mistaken, it’s not something that eased with time. But that stuff about his gender identity doesn’t hold water. It’s as likely as me going vegetarian.’
‘But how can you be so sure?’
‘Let me make myself absolutely clear. Both during and after our student days, Elvin and I were more than just friends, and without going into salacious detail, let me simply assure you that the last thing he doubted in this life was his manhood.’
Motive X Page 6
