Motive X

by Stefan Ahnhem

  Yes, it did say Gertrud. But could that really be her or was it just chance having him on?

  He typed in her personal identity number and as soon as her information appeared on the screen, he understood why Elvin had been so interested.

  Gertrud Stenson had been born in 1956 at Ystad Hospital. At twenty-two, she had changed her surname when she got married in Hörby Church and since then, she had gone by the name Gertrud Molander.

  That made Einar Stenson Ingvar Molander’s father-in-law.

  There was no way that was a coincidence.

  20

  Early summer mornings, there really was nothing more beautiful, Lilja mused as she got the go signal over the radio and climbed out of the car, crossed the road and stepped into Landertz’s garden. Wisps of mist swirled a few feet above the ground like whipped cream, obscuring all the ugly cars, garden furniture and trampolines.

  But she wasn’t able to appreciate any of it. Not even the way the first faint light of the rising sun set everything sparkling, though the day had barely begun. There was a darkness in her mind that overshadowed everything, and deep down, underneath the imposed calm, she was seething with fury.

  A few hours earlier, she had woken up on the lawn in her own garden with one cheek pounding with pain. Her clothes had been soaked through and she was so cold she felt she might never warm up again.

  She’d gone inside to find Hampus passed out on the sofa with the TV on and one hand in his sweat shorts, and judging from the remnants on the coffee table, he had ordered pizza and knocked back far too many beers. But she hadn’t even had it in her to be irritated; she had simply continued to the bathroom to have a hot bath.

  And there, shrouded in hot steam, reality had slowly returned. Dumping her in her own garden had been a clear warning. A signal so she wouldn’t trick herself into feeling safe.

  We know where you live.

  After putting on some clean clothes, she had called Klippan from her home phone, convinced he was both awake and beside himself with worry. But the signals had rung out unanswered so she’d left an account of events on his voicemail and assured him she was okay and that she was planning to haul Landertz in for questioning as soon as she got the chill out of her bones.

  Fifty minutes later, she had woken up and listened to his terse reply on her answering machine. A reply she had no intention of heeding, responding to or even admitting she’d heard.

  No time to talk. Good to hear you’re okay. Landertz can wait. Better for you to rest. Talk later.

  The doorbell sounded like one of those annoying brightly coloured plastic toys you can’t turn the sound down on and whose batteries refuse to die. A minute later, the door was opened by a woman with tousled hair, wearing panda slippers and a dressing gown.

  ‘Good morning,’ Lilja said, noting that the hallway looked like any other hallway. ‘My name’s Irene Lilja. I’m looking for your husband.’

  ‘Eh… what?’

  ‘Your husband. Is he home?’

  ‘Yes, but…’ The woman looked her up and down. ‘What’s this about? It’s only just gone half six.’

  ‘6.33, to be exact.’

  ‘Hello there, what’s going on?’

  She couldn’t see him, though there could be no doubt who that nasal voice belonged to. When, moments later, he stepped outside with wet hair, dressed only in an unbuttoned shirt, underwear and socks, she felt like she’d stepped right into their bedroom.

  ‘So, we meet again.’ She fired off a smile, pretending not to notice the pain from the blow to her cheekbone.

  ‘Hold on a minute. You two know each other?’ The woman stared from Lilja to Landertz and back. ‘Sievert. Can you explain what this is—’

  ‘Why don’t you go back inside and get breakfast ready instead?’

  ‘Sure, but—’

  ‘I’ll have a double espresso and a glass of freshly squeezed juice with my yoghurt. And don’t forget to keep an eye on how much chocolate milk William drinks.’

  The woman gritted her teeth and went back inside without so much as another glance at Lilja.

  ‘What’s this about?’ Landertz said as he buttoned his shirt. ‘I thought we were done with each other.’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint.’

  ‘If you think I’ve changed my mind about our membership list, you’re mistaken. I’ve actually looked up what the law has to say about it. It classifies our membership list as “sensitive information”, which means, to put it plainly, that you can forget about extracting so much as a syllable from me.’

  ‘I can’t argue with that, so I can understand if you haven’t changed your mind. But you will, and soon. By the way, did you have a good time yesterday?’

  ‘Yesterday?’ Landertz looked nonplussed. ‘If you’re referring to the fire in our offices, all I can say is that it was yet another clear sign of how incapable our country is of receiving more refugees. This is exactly what happens when you crowd too many ethnicities into one place. Increased conflicts breed violence that in turn breeds even more violence. So no, why would I have thought that was a good time?’

  ‘Wow.’ Lilja gave him a slow clap. ‘Impressive. That was a more or less verbatim excerpt from yesterday’s interview in Kvällsposten, and it’s not even quarter to seven yet. But I wasn’t actually referring to the fire the day before yesterday. I was talking about your little performance last night.’

  ‘Performance.’

  ‘How did you put it again? The refugees are nothing but vermin that need to be exterminated with poison?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘No? Well, you looked to be on fine form. And in case you’ve forgotten, I have it all on film. All the heiling, the swastika armband and every word of your lovely speech about rats and cockroaches.’

  Landertz’s face changed as the severity of the situation dawned on him. ‘So that was you.’

  Lilja nodded. ‘And now the ball’s in your court. Either I send the video to the newspapers, or the “Lügenpresse” as you like to call them. Or you give me a copy of your membership list, and the papers will have to miss out on this particular scoop.’

  ‘Well, that does sound tempting, but as far as I understand it, that mobile phone broke.’

  ‘Never heard of iCloud?’

  Landertz met Lilja’s eyes in an attempt to gauge whether she was bluffing.

  ‘We can stand around glaring at each other all morning. But if you don’t trot back inside and fetch what I want pretty soon, Jimmie’s going to be calling. And I can promise you he won’t be happy when he finds out what you get up to at night.’

  Without another word, Landertz turned his back on her and disappeared into the house, returning minutes later with a USB stick in his hand. ‘I hope you’re aware that this is pure, unadulterated blackmail.’

  Lilja countered with a smile, took the USB stick from him, slipped it in her pocket and pulled out her radio: ‘I’m done here.’

  ‘Roger,’ said a male voice on the other end, and soon after, three men in police uniforms materialized out of the morning mist.

  ‘What the fuck is this? We had a deal.’

  ‘We do, and you don’t have to worry. The video will stay in my possession, at least until further notice.’ She nodded for the officers to arrest him.

  ‘But, hey, no, hold on, calm the fuck down,’ Landertz said as he was manhandled and pressed up against the wall. ‘I haven’t done anything illegal! I’ve done fuck all to give you the right to just march in here!’

  ‘Personally, I would probably categorize your lovely little diatribe as hate speech, which can net you a maximum of two years behind bars. But you’re right. It wouldn’t really get you anything worse than a fine in reality. Inciting arson, on the other hand – that is, oddly enough, more generally frowned upon, even if it’s just your own office.’

  Landertz, who had just had his hands cuffed, looked completely uncomprehending.

  ‘You don’t have to act surp
rised. You know as well as I do it was your son and one of his mates.’ She turned to one of the officers. ‘By the way, you should probably head inside and get him, too, before he drinks too much chocolate milk.’

  21

  Gazing out through the bus window towards Hyllinge Mall with the ICA Maxi supermarket in the foreground, he noted that the sky had become overcast and there was rain in the air. But it didn’t matter. Given everything that lay ahead, this day would turn out amazing regardless.

  He couldn’t remember when he’d last had such high expectations of an individual day. Not even the time he ran away from home with all his money burning a hole in his pocket could hold a candle to today. Just seven years old at the time, he’d made it all the way to Påarp, across the sound and down to Copenhagen to go to the Tivoli amusement park.

  The feeling of being completely free to do whatever he pleased had filled him with such a sense of power he’d been walking on air and had stayed until his last coins were spent and the sun had long since set.

  All the things he’d done since then had been attempts at recapturing that same intoxicating exhilaration. Even if just one last time. He’d tried going to Tivoli again, more than once. He’d tried alcohol and drugs. He’d travelled around the world and experienced more than most people could ever dream of. But he’d never come close to that feeling of effervescent ecstasy that had almost made him fly.

  Not until now.

  Hyllinge Mall was not just his first stop, it was an amusement park that was more exciting than all the world’s amusement parks put together. The stakes were much higher and, consequently, the potential consequences more dire. Anything could happen and nothing was up to him. Thanks to the dice, he knew no more about what was going to happen over the course of the next hour than the first time he got on a roller coaster and pulled the cold metal bar down over his legs.

  The dice.

  He had the dice to thank for everything. For some inexplicable reason, it had brought him out here to Hyllinge Mall, of all places, and now it was going to lead him straight into the unknown and select his victim.

  The bus pulled over and stopped on Åstorpsvägen. After getting off himself, he helped a mother get her buggy off and then watched it for her until she had managed to collect a protesting three-year-old who was doing everything he could to scratch her eyes out. She had got on two stops after him and the brat had howled more or less constantly since then. Every one of her increasingly desperate attempts to calm him down, taking the form of colourful smoothies, had either ended up on the bus floor or all over her.

  To make matters worse, he’d also been forced to sit next to an obese woman in gym clothes who had terrible breath. He had never understood why people who clearly never worked out insisted on walking around in ill-fitting synthetic clothes in garish colours.

  But he was in too fine a mood to let it bring him down, even though he would have preferred the dice to have chosen car, Vespa or even bike instead of bus. The mall was built for motorists. They hadn’t bothered to put in a proper pedestrian path across the car park, where two-thirds of the spots were already taken even though it was only twenty past ten.

  He waited until the mother with the buggy had walked away before sitting down on the graffiti-covered wooden bench in the bus shelter and taking his six-sided precision dice out of its cloth bag. He weighed it in his hand and rubbed each of the sides with his fingers to warm it up.

  Hyllinge Mall consisted of three separate buildings. ICA Maxi and the home improvement store Bauhaus occupied one each and the rest of the shops jostled for space in the third. The first question was which of the three he should choose. ICA was represented by a one or a two, Bauhaus by a three or a four and the last building by a five or a six.

  He cupped his hands to make a space for the dice between them and shook it until he felt sure the dice had had enough time to make its decision.

  A two.

  It had started spitting, so he pulled his hood up, left the bus shelter, crossed the car park, slunk in through the automatic doors of the ICA Maxi supermarket and grabbed one of the red wheeled baskets.

  There were no customers in the first section, which contained kitchen things and meaningless plastic rubbish that no one ever bought. So he continued on to the vegetable section, which was his least favourite by some margin. In fact, he disliked it so much he’d started to avoid fresh vegetables altogether.

  Not only did you have to pick your own vegetables and put them in bags, it was also becoming increasingly common for customers to be required to weigh their wares themselves and put price tags on them. Like being suddenly press-ganged into unsalaried employment. Just finding the right kind of lettuce among all the options took forever.

  Then it was the other customers. Like the old lady squeezing and picking up mangos to sniff them, like some kind of dog.

  He went over to the new potatoes and put one after another in a bag while studying the old lady from afar. She was dressed all in blue. Blue raincoat, blue shorts and blue wellies. Even the frames of her glasses, which were dangling on her chest, were bright blue.

  In other words, the odds were on her side.

  Five out of six possible outcomes were in her favour. The only thing she wouldn’t survive was a five, since five represented blue.

  The order of the colours and which number should represent which one was something he’d had to ponder for quite a while before deciding that the only logical choice was to follow the order of the rainbow.

  That meant red was represented by a one. Then followed orange, yellow, green, blue and finally purple, represented by a six. White, black, brown and grey were neutral and therefore irrelevant.

  But in this case, it was all about the number five.

  He grabbed one more potato, tied up the bag and put it in his basket. Then he stuck his hand in his pocket, pulled out his dice and started shaking it in his cupped hand, while walking over to the crate of red onions. Once he reached it, he opened his hand and looked.

  A three.

  The dice had said yellow, and as far as he could see the old lady didn’t have a speck of yellow anywhere, which meant she would live to eat her mango, provided she actually managed to pick one eventually.

  A man who looked to be around forty was standing by the mountain of strawberries, rooting around and swapping out berries in a quest for the perfect punnet. He wore a purple polo shirt and white shorts. Unfortunately, his boat shoes were brown. But the sweater whose sleeves were tied around his neck had red and white stripes, which at least gave the dice two colours to play with. A one and a six. Compared to the mango lady his odds were, in other words, halved.

  Maybe that was why he so abruptly wrapped up his strawberry selection and hurried off into the meat section. As if that would save him.

  He went over to the herring fridge from where he had a good view of the man, who was evidently having a barbecue tonight. Once again, he shook his dice and felt that palpable, familiar shudder of pleasure when he opened his hand.

  A five.

  In some ways, it was a relief. This was actually a lot more fun than he had expected. It became even more fun when a boy of about ten walked up to the marina bloke and slipped a gaming magazine in a plastic sleeve into his basket.

  ‘Dad, there’s a mobile phone shop in the mall. Can we please go after we’re done here?’

  ‘No, I’ve already told you you’re not getting a new phone.’

  ‘Why not? How am I supposed to—’

  ‘Because it’s the third one you’ve lost in two months.’

  ‘But please… I promise I’ll be more careful.’

  ‘Rutger, what have I told you about nagging?’

  ‘I can pay for it myself, if you could just lend me—’

  Rutger. The name alone was gold.

  ‘If you don’t stop pestering me, you’ll have to go and wait in the car.’

  Oh Dad, there’s no need to get worked up. If the odds are anything to go by, that na
gging will soon be a faint memory.

  Rutger clearly liked colours. In addition to a green baseball cap, he wore a red raincoat with a blue hood and blue piping around the pockets. His grey trousers broke the pattern a little, but it was made up for by his gold-studded purple belt. Maybe the belt matched the shirt under his jacket, or maybe Rutger was just a little bit rebelliously queer and had topped his outfit off with a pink glitter top? Or maybe not even queer – after all, the upper classes had always had a soft spot for pink, which made about as much sense as their second favourite colour, mint green.

  But whatever. With his yellow shoes with built-in wheels under the heels, five of the six colours were represented, and poor Rutger would likely never have a chance to let his sexual orientation blossom.

  If not for the lack of orange, it would have been game over for Rutger already. Now he had a one in six chance. A two was what he needed to keep breathing. No more, no less. Was this it? Third time lucky.

  He took out his dice and shook it in his hand, giving it extra time now, even though that obviously had no effect on the result. Contrary to popular belief, the dice had no memory; each individual throw was isolated from all previous throws and the result was simply the whim of the dice. Or, put differently, pure chance.

  That said, chance was always constrained by the odds. No matter how badly chance wanted to roll ten sixes in a row, it wasn’t particularly likely to succeed. And right now, neither chance nor the odds were on little Rutger’s side.

  ‘Are you getting something or what?’

  He squeezed the dice and turned to the short but muscular man with a beard, dressed in a motorcycle outfit. ‘Oh, I’m sorry—’

  ‘No worries. But if you wouldn’t mind moving.’

  ‘Of course, absolutely.’ He quickly stepped aside and felt his pulse begin to race. Soon, he would break into a sweat, too. Also, he hadn’t picked up a single jar of pickled herring, even though he’d been standing there, blocking the fridge, for several minutes. Talk about making yourself conspicuous. Damn.

  He turned away, only to discover that both the boy and his father were gone. Fuck. He looked around; it was all he could do not to start dashing wildly around the shop. The CCTV cameras had probably started zooming in on him already. The whole thing would be over before he’d even warmed up.