by Andy Maslen
She asked him to thank Simone. Requested that the SUV be retained should a British forensics team want to re-examine it if she managed to ever get any further forward with the case. Rolled her eyes. Huh! Fat chance! Felt the reassuring little lump of tissue-wrapped, chromed steel in her pocket all through dinner and on the cab ride back to her hotel.
In her room, she booked a flight back to London for the next day. She opened two miniatures of vodka from the minibar, added ice and sipped her drink reflectively as she watched an old movie starring Charles Bronson as a family man turned vigilante. Death Wish.
21
Umeå
Stella and Oskar arrived in Umeå at 4.20 p.m. that afternoon. Oskar rented a car and they drove straight to the police HQ on Ridvägen to introduce themselves to the locals. The building itself, an untidy design of brick, aluminium sidings and plate glass, was reached via a sprawling carpark.
The local cop assigned to help them was a Detectivinspektor William Ekland. Stella thought that if a Viking donned a blue suit and cut his plaits off, he’d look like Ekland. He was well over six foot, broad-shouldered and the possessor of red hair and a magnificent copper-coloured moustache.
The meeting was short. They agreed to keep Ekland informed of their actions in Umeå. He promised cooperation, though he didn’t miss the chance to complain about ‘those penny-pinchers in Stockholm’ starving his department of resources.
Stella and Oskar checked in at the Scandic Plaza on Storgatan. They agreed to meet in the bar for a drink then venture out to find somewhere to eat.
Stella unpacked, and put her clothes away. She ran a bath and while she waited for it to fill, she checked her messages. A text from Callie asking how she was getting on. Various emails from SIU team members. A Snapchat message from her niece Polly, now twelve and at secondary school. But nothing from Jamie.
A sense of melancholy washed over her. They’d been happy together. They did everyday things together. Loaded the dishwasher, and bickered about who did it ‘properly’. Went food shopping. Took walks in the countryside if they were at Jamie’s. A normal, everyday life. And now he was blanking her.
Anger surged through her. Not at Jamie, although she was beginning to feel as though he could at least have the decency to fob her off with an ‘I’m still processing it’ message. But at Ramage and the rest of his evil gang.
They’d started Stella down a very dark street, a street that had almost become one way with her own suicide at the end of it. Without them, there’d have been nothing to confess to Jamie.
And what about Gordon Wade, Callie and their political paymasters? Because Stella had no illusions on that score. Given what had very nearly blown up in their faces, Stella had pulled all their nuts out of the fire. And the first, and only, time she’d asked for help they’d basically walked away, tossing a casual, ‘Sorry, babe, you’re on your own on this one,’ over their collective shoulders.
She called Jamie. It went straight to voicemail. She cleared her throat.
‘It’s me. I understand if you can’t bear to talk to me, or answer my texts or emails. But can you at least let me know you’re all right and haven’t been attacked by one of your patients? Please.’ She hesitated, swallowed. ‘I love you.’
Sighing, she put the phone on the desk and undressed for her bath.
She stepped into the water, hissing a little as her toes entered the water. Little by little, she eased herself in. The heat made her inadvertently suck in her stomach muscles, still flat from running despite having hit the big four-oh two years earlier.
She’d left the bathroom door wide open and could see the blue sky outside the window. It struck her as funny that she should be inching her way into a painfully hot bath in midsummer.
And then she was in. She lay back and let the water close over her belly. She exhaled in a long, grateful sigh. She felt her breathing slowing, an enjoyable sensation. She relaxed deeply. Maybe for the first time since the case began. As sweat broke out on her forehead she let her eyes close.
She and Johanna were naked, and swimming underwater. Sunlight lanced down through the greenish lake water, painting flickering curves across Johanna’s pale skin as she kicked towards the bottom. ‘We’re going to kill Brömly and tear his tongue out,’ she said in a stream of silvery bubbles that wobbled their way to the surface.
Then she grinned and darted downwards. Stella followed her, then panicked as something reached up out of the dark and grabbed her right wrist. She was staring into Tomas Brömly’s ruined face. He was grinning at her from inside the cabin of a black SUV. Johanna was struggling to release her from Brömly’s grip.
He opened his mouth wide and a fat, muscular eel shot out towards Stella. In his free hand he held a long, curving knife. He swept it sideways, slicing Johanna’s head from her shoulders and releasing bright-red blood that curled away into the water like smoke.
She woke with a start, coughing up water, her hair soaking wet and cool bathwater streaming from her face. Gripping the twin chrome handles, she levered herself up to a seated position and got out.
Dry and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, she stepped out onto the narrow balcony and stared out across the city.
The dream was troubling her. She’d never solved a case in a dream, but she strongly believed they were a route to connections her subconscious might already have made. Ones that, if she could access them, might provide a new way of seeing things. What was this one trying to tell her? Was her working hypothesis off the mark? Should they be looking for someone Brömly had hurt, rather than one of his co-conspirators? Someone who’d waited until now to exact their bloody revenge?
She checked her phone again. Her pulse jumped. Jamie had replied to her text. She opened the messaging app.
No attacks so far today.
Five minutes later, he’d sent a second message.
Sorry for blanking you. Give me time. Still struggling.
She smiled. That wasn’t a final brush-off. That was a holding message. Feeling happier than she had done since Jamie had left her alone in the flat, she headed out of the door.
Oskar was sitting up at the bar, a bottle of beer by his right elbow. He was chatting to the bartender, a mixed-race guy with ginger dreadlocks tied into a complicated knot on top of his head and wound round with strings of multicoloured plastic beads.
Stella slid on the neighbouring stool and ordered a glass of Sauvignon blanc for herself.
Oskar took another swig from his beer, emptying it. He gestured to her glass. ‘You want another for after that one?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
He ordered another beer. Then turned to Stella. ‘I’ve been thinking about the five-year gap he erased.’
‘Me too. He was in charge of children’s homes. In the UK there’ve been a spate of allegations of historic sexual abuse. A lot of it took place in children’s homes,’ she said. ‘Kids who were already vulnerable put under pressure by people who had power over them, almost of life and death.’
Oskar was nodding as she spoke. ‘We have the same problem here although the authorities were slow to admit it. Do you think he abused a child in the seventies and for some reason they decided to kill him after all that time?’
‘Could be. Say you were ten in seventy-five. You’d be fifty-six now. No reason why you couldn’t be capable of the physical side of it,’ Stella said.
‘We should look into this.’
‘I agree. First thing tomorrow.’
He nodded and smiled, and Stella realised he was halfway to getting drunk. She was catching up fast as the wine hit her empty stomach.
‘This wine’s going to my head,’ she said. ‘Let’s find somewhere to eat. Why don’t you take me to somewhere typically Swedish?’
Oskar smiled. ‘I was hoping you would say that. I already booked us a table at Sjöbris. It’s pretty cool, actually.’ He pointed out of the window. ‘You see that row of birch trees down by the water’s edge?’
‘Yes
.’
‘It’s just on the other side.’
‘What would you have done if I’d said I fancied Thai?’ she asked.
He grinned lopsidedly. ‘I don’t know. Tried to win you over with descriptions of their succulent pickled herrings?’
She laughed. It was the unlikeliest line of persuasion she could imagine.
A three-minute stroll took them to a gangplank that led up to a white-painted boat acting as the reception area. A smiling waitress in a black polo shirt bearing the restaurant’s white and orange logo showed them to their table, right by a huge window that gave onto the Ume River.
Stella asked Oskar to order for both of them, a task he accepted with an enthusiastic nod. After scanning the menu for a few minutes he signalled to the waitress and spoke to her rapidly in Swedish. She smiled widely, revealing pretty turquoise braces, and left.
‘I ordered their chef’s seafood platter,’ Oskar said. ‘We get a little of everything. Lots of herring, plus salmon, trout, crab, shrimps. It is very traditional.’
The food, when it came, did not disappoint. Stella tried some herring cured in lime juice with lingonberries. The combination of sweet, tart and the sea-fresh taste of the herring made her exclaim with pleasure. ‘God, that’s good!’
‘I’m glad you like it,’ Oskar mumbled through a mouthful of shrimps.
Later, after Oskar had settled the bill by explaining he’d claim it on his expenses, they walked the short distance back to the hotel.
Stella declined his invitation to a nightcap in the hotel bar and headed up to her room. She undressed for bed and lay back against the cool cotton pillows. She checked her phone. No more messages. Not ready for sleep, but equally not ready to try calling Jamie again, she called Vicky instead.
‘Hola!’ Vicky said. ‘How are you?’
‘A bit drunk. I’m in Sweden. A lovely little place called Umeå,’ she said. ‘Also known as,’ she inhaled, ‘Bee-yer-car-nas-stad.’
Stella gave the pronunciation her best attempt, though from Vicky’s laughter it appeared she’d come off more like the Swedish chef from The Muppets.
‘And that means?’ Vicky asked.
‘The City of Birches. It’s very pretty.’
‘Are you still on the Brömly case?’ Vicky asked. ‘That’s what took you to Sweden?’
‘Yeah. We think the killer’s here somewhere.’
‘We?’
‘Me and Oskar.’
‘Oskar, eh? Who’s he? Some tasty Swedish detective?’
‘He’s my colleague,’ Stella said, ‘and he’s not, actually, very good-looking.’
‘Jamie’s got nothing to worry about then?’
Stella felt sudden hot tears running down her cheeks.
‘Oh shit!’
‘What is it?’
Stella sniffed. ‘I didn’t want to say anything before. But I told him, Vicky. I told Jamie I killed Ramage. And I was going to tell him about the rest, but stopped myself because he was so freaked out.’
‘Oh my god! What did he say?’
‘Not a lot. He basically walked out of my flat and that was that. He texted me, but it was just a holding message. I think I’ve really blown it and I don’t know what to do.’
She heard Vicky sigh at the other end of the line.
‘I don’t think there’s anything you can do. Not right now. But you said it was a holding message. So he hasn’t broken up with you?’
‘No. But—’
‘Give him time. It’s not the sort of thing you hear every day, is it? That the woman you love shot a High Court judge dead. Like you said, good job you didn’t tell him about the other eleven.’
‘Twelve.’
‘Eh, eleven, twelve. Once you pass ten it’s just a number.’
‘Vicky!’
‘Sorry. Bad joke. I’ve had wine, too.’
‘Hey, did you just say he loved me?’
‘You did know, right?’
‘I hoped he did. We’ve not said it yet. To each other, I mean. It’s only been a year. But he said we should move in together. He’s got this new job in London.’
‘There you go, then.’
‘That doesn’t mean much these days.’
‘Maybe not. But he told me.’
‘When?’
‘Last month when we had that drunken dinner. You, me, Jamie and Damien.’
‘What did he say? The exact words.’
‘He said, “Vicky, I really love Stel, but I don’t want to frighten her off. Do you think it’s too early to tell her.” Word for word.’
Stella swallowed down the lump in her throat that felt as big as an avocado stone.
‘I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse.’
‘Look. Give him time. I’d have thought, with his job, it wasn’t the facts that he was struggling with so much as that it was you. You told him why you had to kill them, right?’
‘I did! Probably in too much detail, but yes. I explained everything.’
‘There you are, then. He just needs to wrap his head around it, like I did.’
‘I hope you’re right. I really do.’
‘I am. Now, it’s late. You’ve got a murderer to catch and I’ve got a deadline to meet.’
‘Thanks, mate.’
‘Laters.’
Stella fell into a dreamless sleep. She awoke with a hangover, took two painkillers with a pint of water and went for breakfast.
At the police station, she started calling children’s homes in Umeå.
22
Umeå
Initially, the people Stella spoke to were quick to point out that releasing records would be an infringement of the children’s human rights. Once she explained why she was calling, and that the records she and Oskar needed related to the seventies and not the present day, they became less defensive.
With one exception, they promised to start digging out the records, although, as they all pointed out, records back then were all paper. It might take a few days to find the relevant files.
Stella leaned back in her chair. If Brömly had been an abuser, it would certainly provide a strong motive for someone to kill him. Maybe they’d read the business with the tongue all wrong.
It didn’t take a forensic psychiatrist to explain it. Anyone who’d ever had a French kiss, whether or not they enjoyed it, could relate to the idea of the tongue as a sexual organ. Maybe that had been Brömly’s ‘thing’ and his killer had torn out his tongue as a final, horrific statement of his guilt.
She went to find Oskar. He was holed up in a corner of the CID main office, head in hands, staring at a computer screen.
‘I need to look up records of any prosecutions for child sexual abuse in children’s homes in Umeå,’ she said.
‘What year?’
‘Same as our missing gap for Brömly: 1971 to 1976.’
Oskar nodded. He opened a new window on the PC screen. A few moments later, he leaned forwards as an SPA-branded database screen brightened in front of him.
‘This is the Swedish Police Authority database on historical sexual abuse of children,’ he said.
He typed in a couple of search terms and hit return. The hourglass symbol spun for perhaps ten seconds, then stopped.
NO MATCHES
‘It doesn’t mean no abuse occurred,’ he said.
Stella nodded her agreement. But in the absence of prosecutions, they couldn’t identify whether Brömly was a perpetrator.
‘I’ve asked for lists of children who were resident at the homes for that period,’ she said. ‘They’re all paper. It’s going to take a few days for them to arrive and god knows how long to go through them all.’
Oskar sighed. ‘By the way, William says we have a press conference in thirty minutes. Can you be there?’
Stella nodded. ‘Of course. Maybe we could put out an appeal for people who were in care for that five-year period to contact us.’
Unlike the Stockholm media centre, the room allocated for th
e press conference in Umeå was plainer, shabbier, and a lot smaller. Still, it currently held around twenty journalists, all hoping for an angle on the case they could make their own.
It smelled strongly of pine. Stella wondered whether the cleaners used it to mask the stink generated by crowded media briefings in badly ventilated conference rooms.
As William introduced the speakers, Stella swept her gaze over the journalists. A familiar face peered round a tall, bearded male journalist in the centre of the room. Pale-blue eyes and the intense stare of a bird of prey. The woman who’d asked about Brömly’s politics at the Stockholm press conference. Must be following me and Oskar, she thought.
When Oskar turned and introduced Stella, she issued her appeal, which she’d agreed with William and his boss.
‘Tack, Inspektör Eklund,’ she said, earning a few smiles from the journalists, before appealing for people to come forward if they’d been in the system in the first half of the seventies.
The sixtyish woman didn’t ask any questions this time. Stella decided to speak to her.
Stella excused herself once William wrapped up and hurried outside. She found the female journalist standing off to one side of the main entrance to the station tapping on her phone’s keyboard.
She looked up, startled, when Stella approached her.
‘You were at the press conference in Stockholm,’ Stella said. ‘Are you following the case?’
‘Yes.’
‘You called the victim Brömly. Everybody else I’ve spoken to called him either “Mr” or “Ambassador”. Why is that?’
‘Because he did not deserve that level of respect from me. Or anybody else,’ she added with a bitter twist to her mouth.
‘Why is that?’ Stella asked, feeling a familiar sensation: that she was on the brink of a breakthrough.
