Motive X

by Stefan Ahnhem

  And he did understand, as soon as he saw the cable. The way it came out of the wall as expected and continued along the ceiling through a small box before disappearing out through another hole further in. Suddenly, everything made sense. All the talk about his call on Sunday and his own incoherent thoughts about a handyman with an extra set of keys, the cable and the protective plastic on the floor, the turned-up heat and those buckets he now noticed had the same warning triangles as the ones in the stairwell.

  ‘Now do you see?’ Molander said behind him.

  And he did see. He saw that his colleague had used that bloody cable to lure him into the bathroom so he could push him into the bath.

  Hydrofluoric acid. Wasn’t that so highly corrosive you couldn’t store it in glass jars, only in plastic buckets? So corrosive it could dissolve a human body into a bloody, viscous slime so you only had to remember to pick out the bones before flushing the rest down the toilet?

  He stuck his hand inside his jacket and closed his fingers around the butt of his gun. He didn’t know if he had enough evidence. But it didn’t matter. He couldn’t wait any longer. If he didn’t act now, Molander would be coming at him with some kind of syringe or chemically soaked piece of cloth.

  ‘Isn’t it odd?’ Molander stepped into the bathroom with him.

  ‘I think that’s putting it mildly,’ Fabian said as he started to pull his gun from its holster.

  ‘Right?’ Molander turned around and pointed at the ceiling. ‘I mean, why run a cable like that? My first thought was that it was completely pointless. Just drilling through that wall, which is load-bearing, by the way, requires a rotary hammer, and then out again through the same wall over there.’ Molander shook his head. ‘Completely incomprehensible. If not for that little box in the middle. Because that’s where the explanation is found.’ He suddenly turned to Fabian. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Well, your face has gone completely white and you look like you’re about to pass out.’

  ‘No, I’m okay, just a bit overheated.’ He let go of the gun.

  ‘I know, it’s a sauna in here. It’s Janos who keeps turning the underfloor heating up to see how warm it can get. Apparently, he’s planning to renovate his bathroom at home. But never mind that. Either way, I took the liberty of having a closer look at that box, and as soon as I opened it up, I knew what it was.’

  Fabian nodded and wiped the sweat off his forehead with his jacket sleeve.

  ‘So, if you haven’t figured it out yet, this is the time to ask.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know if I understand what—’

  ‘God, you’re really not yourself today.’ Molander shook his head. ‘It was the same thing in the morning meeting. I don’t know where you’d gone. But you certainly weren’t present.’

  ‘You’ll have to excuse me, but I have a lot of things on my mind right now and I would appreciate it if we could get back to what we’re here for. Which is to say—’

  ‘You mean the eye,’ Molander broke in.

  ‘Um, what?’

  ‘You heard me. In that box, there’s a tiny web camera, the smallest one on the market, and it’s looking straight down at whoever might be having a nice, cosy soak in the bath. Delightful, no?’

  ‘Okay, hold on. What, a webcam? Are you seriously telling me there’s a—’

  ‘Yep. And if that’s not bad enough, there’s another one exactly like it in the bedroom.’

  55

  Kim Sleizner parked his car in a disabled parking bay outside Restaurant Thai Pan on Thorupsgade, placed the permit he had wheedled out of his doctor when he had his hip operation on the dashboard and continued on foot along Korsgade. After about fifty yards, he took a right on to Blågårdsgade and immediately felt his gorge rising, bubbling like boiling bile.

  There were few places he disliked as much as Blågårdsgade. Granted, there was something picturesque about all the outdoor serving areas full of young people who didn’t know better than to waste their lives drinking yet another overpriced macchiato made with organic beans some fucking Indian cat had shat out. Sure, he’d been young once and could, if he really put his mind to it, dig up one or two positive memories from all the wet nights out he’d spent in this neighbourhood.

  But he had a very strong desire to tear the whole place down. Level it like a ground zero and build something new. A parking garage or whatever; it didn’t matter so long as no trace remained of the old. His hatred, because it really was hatred, did not spring from all the shootings that took place around here or the fact that one of the city’s criminal gangs had made the neighbourhood its base.

  No, it was all Dunja The Cunt Hougaard’s fault. She’d ruined his sleep and drawn dark circles under his eyes that no concealer in the world could hide, and the closer he got to her flat on Blågårdsgade 4, the darker his mood became.

  After the events in Helsingør the month before, when he managed to prevent her from getting the credit for solving a case about homeless killings, he had decided he wasn't going to have anything more to do with her. He had successfully stymied her career progression, and now he would keep as far away as he could, observe her from a safe distance and watch as she shrivelled up and eventually died in a pool of her own failure.

  But her deafening silence had given him no peace. No matter how dearly he wanted to, he could no longer sit on his hands, content not to rock the boat, while attempting to convince himself that all was well.

  Vanishing without an electronic trace was considerably harder than people might think. Getting an anonymous pay-as-you-go SIM card for your phone and closing your accounts on social media was one thing. Cutting up your credit cards and not touching the money in any of your accounts was something else.

  At best, he had nothing to worry about. A month was, after all, not a very long time. Perhaps she was just curled up in the foetal position at home, trying to comprehend how he’d managed to best her yet again.

  It did still say Carsten Røhmer & Dunja Hougaard on the entry phone. But there was no need to call up and give her advance warning. He had been sure to make a copy of her house keys as soon as she started in his department in 2009. He had done that with all of his employees, but, with very few exceptions, Hougaard’s had been the only keys he’d ended up using.

  This time, the door to the building wasn’t properly closed, so he could walk right in and climb the stairs to her front door, where his key slid into the lock as if into a willing virgin. Two silent seconds later, he was standing in her hallway, breathing in the air.

  It smelled of clothes that hadn’t dried completely and of frying grease. This was exactly what he’d pictured and how he’d hoped she lived. In misery.

  But it didn’t look like he remembered. Or did it? Hadn’t she had a number of framed Louisiana posters in the hallway? Now it was hung with pictures of the Great Wall of China, elephants and various temples at sunset. It was unbearably tacky; a red Chinese lamp with tassels and things hung over the kitchen table, which was covered in a red elephant-print oilcloth.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing in here?’

  The words came from a short, slightly pudgy Chinese man with a squeaky voice and wild hair.

  ‘Good day, my name is Kim Sleizner.’ He walked up to greet him, even though he could still hear the toilet flushing in the bathroom and was well aware that hygiene was not a priority for Chinese people.

  ‘I don’t care what your name is, Kim Sleizner or Kim fucking Sleizner.’ The Chinese man waved his index finger in the air. ‘I want to know what the hell you’re doing in my flat.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m an old friend of Dunja’s.’ Sleizner tried hard not to laugh. ‘I was just in the neighbourhood.’

  ‘Hm, interesting.’ The Chinese man stroked his little goatee and nodded in an over-the-top display of thoughtfulness. ‘Then maybe Kim fucking Sleizner can tell me how it is that you “happen” to wander straight into my flat?’ He crossed his arms
and fixed Sleizner, who gave him one of his patented smiles in return.

  ‘I apologize, it wasn’t my intention to intrude. The thing is that my very good friend Dunja Hougaard used to live here, at least until about a month ago. And since she’s trusted me with her keys—’ He waved the keys around. ‘—and no one opened when I rang the door, I just wanted to make sure everything was—’

  ‘Rang the door. How odd. I certainly didn’t hear it ring.’

  ‘Maybe I accidentally hit the light button.’ Sleizner shrugged and could feel his patience hanging by a fragile thread. ‘But let’s get to my reason for stopping by. You wouldn’t happen to know where Dunja is, would you?’

  ‘And why would I know that, when I don’t even know who she is? That’s like asking an elephant if it can fly to the moon.’

  ‘But you do have her name on your door, so you must know something.’

  ‘I do not have her name on my door. Why would I? The fact is that there’s no name at all on my door right now, and that’s none other than Kim Sleizner’s fault.’ The man, who was at least two heads shorter than Sleizner, was now standing very close to him, jabbing his index finger into his chest. ‘Because if you hadn’t come bumbling in here, babbling nonsense, it would have been up by now.’ He walked over to the hallway table, pulled a brass sign from a small plastic bag and held it up in front of Sleizner.

  Qiang Who, it read, and Sleizner could only nod. ‘All right, but on the entry phone downstairs, it does say Dunja Hougaard, that much I know.’

  ‘And how is that my fault? I’ve been on to the landlord about it more times than there’s letters in the word elephant.’

  ‘Okay, okay, okay,’ said Sleizner, who’d had enough of the bickering. ‘So you don’t know anything about Dunja Hougaard?’

  ‘Only that she seems to have a habit of handing my keys out to any passing stranger.’ The man ripped the keys out of Sleizner’s hand.

  ‘Well, that’s that, then.’ Sleizner was about to take a step back. But he couldn’t bring himself to back down from a short fucking elephant Chinese guy. He just couldn’t. ‘Then the keys have found their way home at least. That’s good to know.’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ said the Chinese man, who insisted on standing so close to Sleizner he could smell his foetid breath, despite the height difference. ‘I prefer “Bye, not at all nice to meet you. See you never.”’

  This idiot was worse than a goddamn mutt whose brain was too small to work out that instead of barking, it should run away as fast as it could.

  There was very likely no one else in the flat, and he would have no problem surprising and incapacitating the pudgy little Chink with a forceful kick to the shins. But he wasn’t quite there yet, though he was already looking forward to accidentally using slightly too much force when he locked the Chinaman’s arms behind his back and hearing the crunch of a shoulder dislocating.

  ‘Absolutely, no need to worry. Of course I’m leaving,’ he said, surprised at his own patience. ‘But before I do, I just want to ask you something. We can think of it as you returning the favour since I brought you your keys. Would it be all right if I looked around? Just for a bit, five, six minutes, no more.’

  The man looked up at Sleizner, picked his nose, rolled his findings into a small ball between his thumb and forefinger and flicked it away. ‘You’re slower than a retarded elephant. What part of “goodbye” don’t you understand?’

  ‘I understand perfectly,’ Sleizner said, and caught himself already planning how to clean up the blood spatter on the walls and get the body out of the flat. ‘But the thing is, she borrowed a CD and some other things off me and she might have left them here.’

  ‘A compact disc of what?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You said she’d borrowed a CD. What CD?’

  ‘Well, um…’ Why had he said that? He didn’t even like music. ‘Huey Lewis and the News. Some best-of collection. But it was signed, from the last time I saw them live, so it had a lot of sentimental value.’

  Surprisingly, the man seemed to ponder that. Instead of just spitting out a no, he stood there scratching his pathetic goatee.

  ‘Wow,’ he said at length and nodded. ‘Huey Lewis and the News, that’s one of my absolute favourite bands.’ He held out his hand and smiled. ‘And you’ve seen them live. That’s more than I can say.’

  Sleizner reluctantly took the bogey hand in his and hoped the handshake wouldn’t be followed by a hundred idiotic questions he couldn’t answer. ‘Sadly, I haven’t seen any of their albums around. Except my own, of course. But I did find a shoebox on the top shelf of the wardrobe. Something in that might be yours. Wait here, I’ll go get it.’

  The man disappeared into the flat. Sleizner seized the opportunity to poke his head into the living room and concluded that the bloke was obsessed with elephants. Everything, from the curtains and the rug to the cushions on the sofa, was covered with elephants of various colours. The same thing with the souvenirs in the bookcase and the figurines next to the TV. Elephants, elephants and more elephants. Even the legs of the coffee table were in the shape of elephant feet.

  ‘Here.’ The man handed him a shoebox.

  So the little slut had left something behind after all. He didn’t know what to expect. But with luck, it might be something of interest. An address, a phone number, a receipt from Netto or discount stamps from Joe & the Juice. It didn’t matter what, so long as it was an embryo of something that could point him in the right direction.

  At the top were a number of unused postcards that were really advertisements in disguise. A wristwatch had stopped at seven minutes to eleven on the twenty-first. There were also some pens, a chewed-up eraser and a box of Ga-Jol that rattled when he shook it. At the bottom, he found a notepad with about half its pages torn out; when he held it up to the light, he finally reaped the rewards of his labour.

  Just as he’d hoped, she had scribbled something down and then ripped the page out, thinking she was leaving no trace behind. That stupid fuckwit had pushed down so hard on her pen he could read the grooves in the paper without difficulty. It was a ten-digit number. Probably a personal identity number or a mobile phone number. It didn’t matter which. Regardless, it would move him forward.

  ‘Thank you very much. You’ve been extremely helpful.’ Sleizner tore out the page and was just about to hand the shoebox back when he discovered even more notes on the next page. And these were fully visible in ink.

  You can try if you want

  But this is neither a personal identity number nor a mobile phone number

  Just a random string of numbers

  So for your own sake, stop looking

  Because you’re never going to find me

  But I’m going to find you

  When you least expect it

  Where it hurts the most

  56

  Fabian climbed out of his car, noted that the rain had stopped and locked the doors with a feeling of being precariously balanced on the edge of a cliff with his eyes blindfolded. He was alive but he didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed that Molander hadn’t shown his true colours. Everything was in flux again.

  Even the murder of Inga Dahlberg had turned into a giant question mark in the form of an alibi from Berlin, and until he could break that, he had no choice but to try to go about his business as usual, just like Molander.

  The hidden webcams were without doubt a very significant lead in the investigation. His first thought had been that Wessman must have chosen to instal them in her bathroom and bedroom herself. An exhibitionist streak would hardly be surprising, given her tattoo and membership of Spades. According to Molander, considerable time and money had been spent on concealing the cameras, but that could have been to avoid disturbing potential visitors.

  But since Molander had been unable to locate the server the cameras sent their information to, and hadn’t managed to turn them off, short of cutting the wires, they had agreed
that Wessman was most likely unaware she was being watched.

  It was also clear that the cameras had been installed together with the building’s high-speed internet cables. A job that, according to the chairman of the housing cooperative, had been completed over the course of a week in the autumn of 2009 by Fiberbolaget AB.

  He had called the company, trying to reach the owner, Eric Jacobsén, but according to the woman at the switchboard, he was out conducting an inspection and wasn’t expected back until sometime that afternoon. She had declined to give them a mobile phone number. She had, however, offered to pass on a message and ask him to call them back.

  Eric Jacobsén was a common name, but only one of them had an income that allowed him to live on Slottsvägen in Laröd, just north of Helsingborg. It was on the right side of Larödvägen, in the old part of town, by the water. Judging from the cars parked in the driveways in front of the houses, Jacobsén wasn’t the only one in the neighbourhood doing well for himself, though it did appear he was slightly ahead of the pack.

  There were no fewer than four cars parked in the driveway of number ten. Next to the black van with the Fiberbolaget logo was a large, dark blue Lexus, a shiny red Lamborghini and a well-maintained, pale yellow Volkswagen Beetle.

  On the front door was a classic old knocker in the shape of a brass fist, but before Fabian could grab it, the door was thrown open by a broad-shouldered man in a suit and white shirt exiting with a briefcase in his hand.

  ‘Excuse me, you wouldn’t happen to be Eric Jacobsén, by any chance?’

  ‘I am.’ The man stopped and gave Fabian a puzzled look. ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘My name is Fabian Risk, from the Helsingborg Police.’ He held up his ID. ‘Do you have a minute?’

  ‘Not really.’ The man ran a hand through his blond hair. ‘I’m actually running late for a meeting with a client. Apparently, I’m an incurable time optimist. Can it wait until tomorrow or, even better, the end of the week?’