Motive X

by Stefan Ahnhem

  As it was, he hurried down into the basement instead.

  58

  Irene Lilja turned into the driveway, put down her kickstand and got off the Ducati. She was late back, considering she’d left the station over two hours ago. And the reason wasn’t that she’d been stuck in traffic or that she’d run out of petrol.

  No, she had simply felt a need to be alone, which was why she’d given in to a sudden whim in Åstorp and instead of taking the 21 eastward had turned left on the 112 going north.

  It was the texts that refused to stop coming. She’d received six so far. Each more threatening than the last. She wasn’t just going to be raped when she least expected it. She was going to be whipped, stoned and fucked until her stinking fucking Jew cunt was nothing but mincemeat. She was going to be pissed and spat on and kicked, and it had carried on like that all day.

  She hadn’t told anyone so far. Neither Tuvesson nor anyone else on the team knew about the threats, except for the ones Sievert Landertz had delivered openly in the newspapers. It wasn’t that she didn’t take them seriously or find them disconcerting. On the contrary, she was deeply shaken and probably in some kind of shock.

  That thought had occurred to her when she suddenly burst into tears after driving all the way up to the Kullen lighthouse and taking a seat on one of the viewing benches to let the sea winds blow through her while she gazed out across a sea where the white-crested waves were wild and eternity could be touched.

  But under no circumstances was she going to give in to the fear and let it win. If she told Tuvesson, she would be forced to implement countermeasures, which in turn would lead to more headlines. Exactly what they wanted. They fed off the attention. Putting up a fight and having uniformed officers guard her door was tantamount to baring her throat, which would only make them stronger.

  What was the point of scaring people if no one was scared? What was the point of a demonstration with your right arms in the air if no one was watching? No journalists, no flashing cameras and no raucous counter-protests.

  She pulled off her helmet, locked her bike and continued into the garden, where Hampus was working to restore the lawns. Flies were buzzing around him, drawn by the sweat steaming from his vest top. He must have been at it for hours. The garden no longer looked like a construction site and the lawn was back in place.

  But the swastika was still visible, from some angles even more clearly than before. Whether because of the grooves in the ground or just because it was more trampled and muddied where Hampus had put in the most effort was impossible to say.

  It was as though the whole lawn had been branded forever. As though it didn’t matter how much they dug, raked and tried to level the ground. The swastika was there to stay, and the grass would always be slightly shorter or greener or have fewer dandelions there.

  ‘Oh, great, now you show up.’ Hampus stuck the shovel in the ground, turned to her and pushed his hair out of his face. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’

  ‘I’ve been at work,’ she said and spread her feet slightly wider to signal that she wasn’t in the mood for his bullshit. ‘We have a few things to get on with, in case you haven’t noticed.’

  ‘How busy can you be if you felt free to leave more than two hours ago.’ He gave her a smile and pushed some snus up under his lip. ‘That’s right. You see, I took the liberty of calling up and asking that little synth dweeb you have in reception. According to him, you left a long time ago.’

  ‘Fine, I took a little detour up past Kullen. I needed some alone time.’

  ‘You did, did you? Interesting. And it never occurred to you that maybe you should come home and help with this instead?’ Hampus gestured towards the lawn.

  ‘No, actually.’ She shook her head. ‘And why should it have? You’re the one who absolutely needed a house and garden, not me. Have you forgotten that this is your little project?’

  ‘Mine?’ Hampus jabbed his chest so hard with his index finger it must have hurt and took a step towards her. ‘What the fuck do you mean, mine? This is your fucking fault! If not for you and your bloody job, none of this would’ve happened!’

  Rage was pumping so hard through the veins on his neck she wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them had suddenly burst.

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ she said, even though she’d decided not to bring it up. ‘Personally, I fail to see how it’s my fault just because I’m doing my job in a murder investigation that happens to be leading me into brown waters.’ She had decided to not even mention it, but rather let all his other flaws and their destructive dynamic be the reason she left him. But she couldn’t hold back any longer.

  ‘Your job?’ Hampus shook his head and looked almost happy, as though he was about to burst out laughing any moment. ‘Far be it from me to tell you how to do your job.’ But the smile was nothing but a last feint before the decisive shot. ‘But hand on heart. Was holding Sievert Landertz for so long really warranted?’

  She couldn’t stop herself. Even though she knew it was wrong, it was too late.

  ‘I for my part can’t blame him for feeling hard done by,’ Hampus continued.

  ‘Of course you can’t. Why would you? You fucking voted for him!’

  ‘What?’

  Finally, that disingenuous smile was wiped off his face. Finally, the wall had cracked and he was standing there naked, fumbling for something to hold on to. ‘Why do you look so surprised?’ She didn’t give a toss about the consequences. ‘Yeah, I know you’re a member of the Sweden Democrats. You see, I took the liberty of having a look through their membership list and who did I find there if not Hampus the closet racist.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said and now she could see it. The blackness in his eyes.

  ‘Fuck me? I’m the one who should say that to you. You’re the one who’s been going behind my back, not the other way around. Don’t you get it? Don’t you get that this is what you voted for?’ She pointed to the swastika in the lawn. ‘So to be completely honest, I don’t understand why you’re working so hard to get rid of it. Frankly, you should be proud and stand out here Sieg-Heiling every morning when—’

  She couldn’t claim she wasn’t prepared.

  Even so, when his fist struck her face, she was surprised.

  59

  The album wasn’t easy to find, but it’s all about perseverance. I’ve taken pictures of all our Berlin photos, so you can see for yourself that my husband and I really were there. In case you were still in doubt. Best wishes, Gertrud.

  Attached to the text was a number of images of photo album pages, which looked to be filled with pictures of Ingvar and Gertrud Molander in Berlin. In one picture, they were holding hands in front of Checkpoint Charlie; in another, they were having pints at one of Berlin’s many beer halls. All the pictures bore the same kind of date stamp along their lower edge as the framed picture from the classic Berlin café.

  Fabian had similar pictures with date stamps in some of his albums, but they were all from the 70s and 80s, not from 2007. Most people, apart from perhaps the members of Celluloid, had long since stopped sending their photographs away to be developed and putting them in albums. And yet, that was what dyed-in-the-wool technology geek Molander had done.

  Doing so had given him an alibi that was virtually waterproof. At least at first sight. It wouldn’t surprise him if the Berlin getaway was nothing but misdirection orchestrated by Molander. An illusion that at first glance looked plausible, but that at the end of the day rested on nothing but smoke screens, mirages and thumping music.

  Like all magic tricks, the key was to pay attention to what the illusionist wasn’t pointing to. To the details outside the spotlight. For that reason, he’d transferred the pictures from his phone to his desktop computer, where he could use the bigger screen to scrutinize them down to the last pixel.

  Like the picture from the café, the rest of the Berlin pictures showed no obvious signs of tampering. No matter how much he zoomed in, he had to
conclude they were the genuine article.

  The same was true of the date stamps at the bottom of the white frame. A comparison with his own old pictures confirmed that they were identical. The dates ranged from 23 to 26 August 2007, and all days, including 24 August, when the murder took place, were represented.

  It wouldn’t be difficult to change the camera’s internal date and go to Berlin the weekend before or after instead. But that was unlikely since it would leave Molander in a position where he had to get Gertrud on board and trust her ability to lie about when they’d been there.

  That said, there was another angle as far as the time was concerned. An angle that only occurred to him now as he zoomed in on the picture from the Berlin café with its mirror walls, marbled columns and stately crystal chandeliers.

  It wasn’t Gertrud and Molander, with their cups of coffee and half-eaten apfelstrudel, that interested him; it was the man at the little table behind them. Or, rather, the man’s wristwatch. Its hands showed quarter to nine, and judging from the light and the prevalence of coffee cups rather than wineglasses on the tables, it was before noon.

  In another picture from the same day, Gertrud was standing with her glasses pushed up into her hair, studying a tourist map in something that looked like a hotel lobby with clocks showing the time in New York, Tokyo and Berlin. The hands showed eleven minutes past seven, which was probably just before they left for the café.

  There were three more pictures from 24 August. In one, they were posing in front of the bombed church spire rising from the asphalt, roofless and hollow, a reminder of how present the Second World War still was in the German capital.

  The only thing that looked renovated was the clock face, which shone like newly polished gold, in sharp contrast to the sooty stone façade. Its hands showed twenty past nine, and here, there could be no doubt it was in the evening. Both Gertrud and Ingvar were now dressed up for a fancy outing, having shed the windcheaters and ergonomic shoes they’d been wearing that morning. She wore a purple evening gown, high heels and a leather jacket, he a blue suit with a bow tie and patent leather shoes.

  In the second picture, they were sitting at a bar raising their cocktails to the camera, and in the third, they were eating plateaux de fruits de mer in a restaurant. The rest of the pictures were from the other days and showed them doing touristy things in Berlin.

  The pictures more or less documented their days from morning to night and were taken reasonably regularly, no more than a few hours apart. At least as far as Thursday night, when they arrived, Saturday and Sunday were concerned. The Friday, on the other hand, was a different matter. It had a gap of no less than twelve and a half hours. Between the café visit at quarter to nine in the morning and twenty past nine in the evening, there wasn’t a single picture.

  What had they been up to during all those hours?

  Granted, it was their anniversary, but he found it hard to believe they’d spent the whole day between the sheets in their hotel room.

  He clicked over to Momondo and did a search travelling from Berlin to Copenhagen and back on a random Friday in August. The list of departures showed that the route was primarily served by SAS, Norwegian, easyJet and KLM. Norwegian had no flights under four hours since their routes required a stopover in either Stockholm or Oslo, and KLM didn’t have a single flight in the twelve-hour window.

  With SAS, on the other hand, leaving Berlin at 1.30 p.m. would put you in Copenhagen exactly one hour later. If you travelled without check-in luggage, you should be able to leave the airport by car twenty minutes later. The drive across the bridge up to Ramlösa Brunn Park, where Inga Dahlberg was allegedly attacked, took exactly an hour, according to Google Maps.

  There was an easyJet flight from Copenhagen to Berlin at 7.05 p.m. If Molander had checked in online and printed his boarding card, he wouldn’t have needed much more than half an hour to get through security and reach his gate.

  That left him two hours to attack, drug and transport Inga Dahlberg from the park to the secluded spot by the Rå River, rape her and screw her arms and legs to the freight pallet, push her into the river and clean up after himself before getting back into his car and racing to Copenhagen Airport.

  It was tight, unbelievably tight. Theoretically speaking, it could work. In practice, a thousand and one things could go wrong. An accident on the E6 motorway and he would have been stuck in traffic and missed his flight. A passer-by straying too close, or just an unexpected reaction from Dahlberg. But as was so often the case with Molander, the difference between theory and practice was virtually non-existent.

  60

  Gertrud brushed some more blush on her cheeks and studied the result in the mirror. She wanted to look beautiful and appealing but under no circumstances too dressed or made-up. It was a hard balance to strike since she was not in the habit of using anything beyond mascara and a bit of eyeliner on an ordinary Monday like this one.

  To make sure Ingvar didn’t start asking questions, she dressed down in a pair of blue jeans and a white shirt, which she left untucked. Same thing with her hair. No washing, blow-drying or styling. Instead, she put it up with two chopsticks, as though she was in the middle of cleaning and her appearance was the last thing on her mind.

  It was the same with dinner. She couldn’t remember when she’d last fussed this much over tiny details. Not just with the cooking, but the ingredients and above all, the planning. It mustn’t come off as too lavish or festive. At the same time, it had to be both delicious and take a long time to eat so she wouldn’t feel rushed.

  Because that was the aim of the game. To draw things out for as long as possible so she could find out what Ingvar’s colleague Risk was up to.

  Somehow, he’d managed to hit a few nerves she had only realized were raw in hindsight.

  Like that weekend in Berlin five years ago.

  Ingvar had really bowled her over that time, when in the middle of making dinner he’d asked her to come with him to the car, where a packed bag and plane tickets had been waiting for them. It certainly wasn’t the norm for him to surprise her with a getaway. Or anything, for that matter. The few times he’d remembered to buy her flowers on their anniversary could be counted on one hand. Consequently, it was with a sense of wonder and anticipation that she’d sat down in the seafood bar at Copenhagen Airport and ordered a glass of champagne.

  The weekend had been lovely. Not only had they eaten well and seen too many attractions to count. They’d also had time to take lots of pictures, something they normally never did. And for once, Ingvar had even developed them and put them in an album.

  And yet there was something that chafed at her when she thought about that Berlin trip. An unsettling dissonance she’d never been able to put her finger on, which had made her almost repress the memory of that weekend. In the past few years, she actually hadn’t given it a thought, until this afternoon, when Fabian Risk stopped by with his ambiguous questions.

  Looking back, it was so hazy. She had suddenly felt ill, that much she remembered. She had suspected that apfelstrudel at Café Einstein, and after that they’d been forced to go back to their hotel where she had gone to bed, trembling and clammy.

  She’d felt so stupid; anxiety at being ill when they were travelling and were supposed to be having a nice time had completely overwhelmed her. But Ingvar had been so understanding and lovely, reassuring her that she probably only needed a lie-down and that she would be back on her feet in no time.

  Afterwards, she’d pondered the strangeness of his behaviour. It had been so unlike him. He, who was usually anything but gracious about her being ill. He, who always behaved like it was his world falling apart, not hers. As though she had deliberately come down with something or was just too lazy to get up.

  In Berlin, he’d been completely different. He’d been tender and kind and not annoyed in the slightest. He’d helped her get undressed, tucked her in and brought her water. As though he wasn’t really surprised.

  She
hadn’t realized she’d dozed off until she woke up. In fact, she’d been so out of it, she was confused about where she was at first. Her memories hadn’t started drifting back until Ingvar had come and sat down on the edge of the bed and told her she was in a hotel room in Berlin. It had taken her several minutes to accept that she’d been ‘out’ for over ten hours.

  Ingvar, on the other hand, had just sat there on the bed like everything was fine and asked her how she was feeling, and if she felt like hitting the town and celebrating their anniversary. And to her own great surprise, she’d felt surprisingly fine after drinking a few glasses of water and taking a shower. After that, they’d had an amazing evening together; she’d even been hungry and dared to tackle a plateau de fruits de mer.

  It was only a year or so later when she’d had her appendix removed that she was struck by how similar her sleep in the hospital had been to the one she’d experienced in Berlin. Synthetic and jet-black, as though someone had simply switched her off without her being aware of it. The only difference was that for the surgery, she’d been out for a fraction of the time.

  ‘Well, well, what’s all this?’ Ingvar exclaimed the moment he stepped into the hallway and noticed the set dinner table, the bowls of raw chicken, pork and beef, aioli, garlic butter and chilli mayonnaise, and in the middle, the pot being kept warm by the blue flames underneath. ‘Fondue. Can’t remember the last time we had that. What are we celebrating?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ she said and tried to accompany her reply with a carefree laugh. ‘No need to panic.’ The napkins. It must have been the napkins. Why hadn’t she just brought out the kitchen roll instead?

  ‘That’s a relief. I was worried there for a second.’ Ingvar hung up his coat and came in. ‘I thought I’d forgotten our anniversary or something.’

  ‘No, I was just cleaning the kitchen cupboards and I found our old fondue pot and thought, why not?’ She shrugged. ‘Sit down and I’ll get the rest.’