Broken Mirrors (ARC)

by C S Duffy

  I could just see a handful of silent freelancers typing industriously, some with noise cancelling earphones on. You had to wonder why someone would come out to a café only to block the world out which they could do at home for free, but each to their own. Ola Andersson was at the back of that room, sitting just under a high window, frowning intently at his laptop.

  An impatient voice pierced my thoughts. ‘Varsågod.’

  I belatedly realised that the young barista had been trying to hand over my hot chocolate, possibly for quite some time. I took it with a murmured tack, and spied someone just leaving the table next to Ola Andersson's.

  He didn’t show any sign of registering my presence as I sat down and faffed about a bit with my laptop and some notebooks. My laptop is about a thousand years old and waking it up can be like raising the dead with all the whirring and freezing and general panicking it needs to do before it allows me to work. I glanced over at his screen as I spooned up some whipped cream, but it was covered with some coding language that didn’t mean a thing to me.

  ‘You need to clear some disk space,’ said Ola Andersson and I jumped.

  ‘Sorry,’ I muttered, ‘a million miles away.’

  ‘Your memory is almost full. That machine is old and shit but it will perform a little better if you delete everything from it. Do you have an external drive?’

  ‘I do, somewhere.’ I did. I backed up to it at least once a decade.

  Ola Andersson shook his head as my laptop had a minor panic attack at the prospect of connecting to that newfangled internet. Up close, his hair and moustache were every bit as neat as they had been on TV. He was a few years older than me, late thirties, maybe forty. He wore a V-necked jumper over a T shirt and jeans that looked as though they had been ironed. Your standard quiet little man outfit. There was a ski jacket on the back of his chair, the arm printed with the logo of a Swedish ski resort. I frowned. Something about the name of the resort rang a bell, though I couldn't for the life of me think why.

  Ola Andersson was slouched against the back of his chair, giving me a slightly sardonic, patronising look as though he knew perfectly well how shit I am at bothering to back up my work. The superior effect was belied by the slight sheen of sweat on the back of his neck, the way his hand trembled a touch as he reached for his coffee. Well, he had just accused his girlfriend of being a serial killer, I thought. That was bound to cause a spot of inner turmoil. His eyes darted around the small room as he drank.

  ‘I suppose you recognise me,’ he said bluntly, putting his coffee down.

  ‘I didn’t at first,’ I lied, pointlessly.

  ‘If you are here to abuse me you might as well just fuck off now. I’m not interested in what feminists think of me.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Feminism isn’t about thinking every woman is perfect,’ he snapped.

  ‘No, I don’t think so either.’

  ‘Tell that to your friends.’

  ‘What, all the other women? Do you think we have meetings?’

  He shrugged and turned back to his work.

  ‘I want to help,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t want to help me. You just want to prove me wrong.’

  ‘I want to find the killer. If you are right about who it is then I want to help you.’

  He looked at me warily. I wondered when he’d last had a full night’s sleep.

  ‘I’ll be honest with you,’ I said, meeting his eye evenly. ‘Your accusation alone isn't enough to convince me. But if I’m wrong I want to know. What evidence do you have? Can you link Lotta to any of the victims?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m a journalist. I’m writing a book about the murders and I will share your story, if you tell me all of it. How long have you known Lotta Berglund?’

  ‘Two or three years. But we were only dating a few months.’

  ‘How did you meet?’

  ‘At a dinner party.’ He laughed, a sharp bark. ‘I was there with my wife.’

  ‘Did you become friends right away?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, she was just someone we ran in to occasionally for the first couple of years. Lotta is not somebody who has friends.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It is difficult to describe if you don’t know her.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘She is not a person one can connect with easily. She does not engage with the world. That first night, at the dinner party, everyone was talking about Melodifestivalen. Lotta had never even heard of it.’

  Melodifestivalen is the pre Eurovision singing competition that Sweden holds every year to pick their entry. As a country, they are more passionate about The Eurovision Song Contest than is strictly dignified, but their enthusiasm gave us ABBA, so I forgive them.

  ‘Not being interested in Melodifesivalen isn’t exactly a classic sign of a serial killer,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Not being interested, sure, I don’t give a fuck about it. But she had never heard of it. She was staring at us all like we were crazy. And that is just one example. She lives in a world inside her head. She does not have emotions like a normal person, she does not care about anyone. The only time I heard her laugh was at my uncle’s funeral when the pallbearers tripped and almost dropped the coffin.’

  ‘But you had a relationship?’

  ‘I would not exactly call it a relationship.’ There was a little tightness at the corner of his mouth, almost as though he wanted to say more but was trying to trap the words inside.

  ‘So what would you call it?’

  ‘Do you know the term fuck buddies?’

  Somehow I kept a straight face. ‘I’ve heard of it.’

  He gave a bitter smile. I had a sneaking suspicion that keeping things at fuck buddy level was Lotta’s choice. I nodded, disappointment slithering through me. His spite was almost palpable, it danced in the air between us.

  ‘She knows the drug,’ he said suddenly. ‘If you are researching the case then you know that the killer used a drug that causes an instant heart attack to murder her victims. Lotta switched her focus to genetics a few years ago when she moved home from the US.'

  'Where in the US did she live?'

  'Boston. She was working on a project at Harvard.'

  Excitement prickled over me and it was an effort to keep my expression steady. Maybe I'd been wrong about him. Just because he was spiteful didn't mean he wasn't on to something.

  'She quit the project with no warning and abandoned her field altogether,' he continued. 'She had been working on a new heart medicine that she was passionate about. It was rejected because it was deemed too volatile to have therapeutic use, and her team lost their funding. Lotta was furious, convinced that it was all political, that if they could have continued to develop it a little bit more they would have solved heart disease and won a Nobel prize. She was so angry that she stormed out and caught the next plane home to Sweden.’

  ‘I take it you told the police this?’

  He nodded. So Henrik would have made the connection with the victim in Boston too. ‘The idiot detectives said it was not enough evidence,' he spat, 'but they do not know Lotta like I do.’

  He turned to face me fully, his expression hard. ‘You have never met anyone as cold as she is,’ he said quietly. ‘She could kill a person and it would mean so little to her she would forget an hour later.’

  16

  I was coming home tonight on the T-bana. The carriage was busy and I was forced to stand. I was stuck face to face with a woman, one of the worst kind. An identikit, mass produced human. Dark blond hair scraped back from her face in a pony tail, little to no makeup, no jewellery, sensible winter coat.

  She met my eyes as she boarded the train, and she smiled briefly. A habitual twitch of the facial muscles. The most basic gesture of courtesy; the most insulting. I would have been impressed if she had recoiled. Snarled, screamed in horror, laughed in my face. Anything to suggest even a little authenticity. It is a compl
iment to call these people sheep. Sheep have more individuality than these humans who chose to dress alike and think alike and live alike.

  The woman took an e-reader from her bag and got lost in her book as the carriage rocked and swayed its way beneath the city. I watched her read, saw how her pupils raced back and forth, her eyes widening. She bit her bottom lip then glanced up, met my gaze with a guilty flush.

  She was reading something dirty, I realised with a heave of disgust. The hand that held her book bore a wedding ring. It was a plain gold band, the kind that is out of fashion now, probably inherited from a parent or grandparent. So she had a husband or a wife at home and yet she felt the need to read filth on her commute home.

  I hated her.

  Clarity bit at me and I nearly laughed out loud.

  I hated her.

  Of course I hated her, she was an asshole. It was to be expected. It was a natural reaction. The sheer joy of feeling something, something clear and obvious and real after so long swirled around me like a ribbon and I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to hold her face in my hands and thank her.

  Then I realised that what I really wanted to do was kill her.

  She got off the train at Slussen to change lines, and I got off too even though it wasn't my stop. As I followed her along platform, I thought about how easy it would be to pretend to stumble and push her into the path of an incoming train. Her scream would be swallowed by the roar of the engine. The driver would slam the brakes on but it would be too late. Her body would be crunched and crumpled under the unrelenting weight of the train. The driver would have nightmares for the rest of his miserable life.

  The platform was so crowded at peak commuter time that nobody could ever be certain it was me. I would become one of the crowd. I would scream and cover my mouth and shake my head sadly. I would pretend to care just like the rest of them. I might even hug or rub the back of somebody near me, feel how fragile their bones, how soft and pliable their flesh under the guise of comfort.

  But what if they could tell? What if, despite the crowd, someone happened to be looking in my direction when I pushed? What if they started to yell for the police, to point at me; what if some young, strong idiot took it upon himself to tackle me to the ground and shove my face into the stinking platform?

  That was when I got my idea.

  17

  The next day, I waited across the road from Lotta Berglund’s flat. She lived in an olive tenement building in the same style as Johan’s, but down at the other end of Södermalm, near Hornstull. Her road was quiet, behind the main road where the shopping centre was, and a church with striking twin steeples rose overhead at the far end. The sun was out again and the fresh snow from the night before was crackling as it melted a microscopic amount, but the air was still bitterly cold. I could feel my nose hairs start to freeze, which was a sensation I hadn’t known existed until a few weeks ago and probably could have lived without ever experiencing.

  I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing there. Even if I managed to slip into the building, there was no way a woman accused of several murders would just answer her door and invite me in for a chat. I had to start somewhere though, and often, a vague nose about was as good a start as any.

  The papers were full of the murders and Ola's accusation. The professional headshot most of the news outlets were using was of Lotta staring evenly into the lens. She was smiling faintly, with a slightly patient air, as thought the photographer had asked her to smile and she found it a ridiculous suggestion, but had decided to indulge him.

  I tried to picture Lotta Berglund going about her life in the midst of all of this. Did she just get up and go to work as normal this morning? Had she been swarmed by news cameras and reporters as she bought her morning coffee then headed into the T-bana station? Did she smile that patronising smile, refusing to dignify the babble of questions with so much as acknowledgment? Was she at work now, lost in her research, oblivious to anything but the data on the screen in front of her?

  Or had she stayed home? Maybe she was up there, beyond one of those dark windows, shivering under her duvet, streaming mindless soaps from the 90s and eating cereal straight from the box. Would she replay Ola’s accusation over and over in her mind, trying to understand how he could do such a thing after what they had? Was she wondering desperately where her life had taken such a horrifying turn, trying and failing to imagine a time when things were normal again?

  I thought about what Maddie had said about how the significant other is both the best and worst person to judge guilt, and I wondered how Lotta Berglund had felt when she saw Ola’s speech. Had she felt stunned, numb, betrayed, furious? Had she wanted to cry, scream or smash something? Or had she simply nodded, accepting the objective fact of his accusation and knowing that the evidence would disprove it?

  A police patrol car pulled up in front of Lotta’s building. Two uniformed officers got out and approached the door, their breath visible in the fading afternoon sun. Was this it? Had they found evidence that implicated Lotta and were here to arrest her?

  I shook my head, feeling my neck stiff with the cold. Two young uniformed officers wouldn’t be bringing in a suspected serial killer. The street would be crawling with police, radios crackling and lights flashing. Henrik and Nadja would be in charge.

  I’d been standing still long enough for the cold to penetrate the gigantic coat my mum gave me for Christmas.

  ‘They’re hundreds of pounds normally,’ she’d told me gleefully as I unwrapped the bulky package, ‘but Lesley and I went to that outlet place where Lesley’s daughter got her wedding dress, and got it for practically nothing. They even knocked another tenner off for that wonky zip. You don’t even really need a zip on the pocket, do you?’

  She’d done her little dance of joy and Johan had watched in bemusement.

  I was already living in my little flat by Christmas, but for the week we spent in London it was as though everything evaporated and for a few brief, precious days, we were just us again. Johan had given me a gorgeous pair of vintage earrings for Christmas, and a Swedish phrase book he had annotated to include swear words and dirty jokes.

  I watched now as the two police officers emerged from Lotta Berglund's building and headed back to their car with a decidedly unhurried air. This wasn’t right. The woman had been accused of up to ten murders. There should be tension. Guns poised. Sweating brows.

  When the patrol car crunched off over the packed snow, I slipped across the road. There was a thin coating of frost over the code keypad, so I could see quite clearly which buttons had been pressed lately. After two tries, I got the combination right and was buzzed into Lotta Bergland’s building.

  The brass-plated list of residents announced Bergland on the fourth floor. It somehow felt too brazen to take the lift when I had no right to be inside the building, so I jogged up the stairs, grudgingly thanking Maddie for dragging me to her fitness hellholes enough that I made it to the fourth floor without bursting a lung. There were four flats on the landing. I could hear high pitched children’s voices squealing behind the one to the far left, but the other three were shrouded in silence.

  Lotta Berglund’s flat was to the far right. A strip of crime scene tape had been placed at a neat diagonal across it, but there was no other sign of activity, no one guarding the door. I crouched down, and briefly crossing my fingers that I wasn’t about to come eye to eye with either a serial killer or detective, I pushed up the brass letter box covering and peered inside.

  I couldn’t see much. The hallway was shadowy, each door leading from it carefully closed. The hardwood floor was covered in a rug I recognised as IKEA, a coat stand in the corner was heaving with the usual assortment of winter coats, hats, scarves, gloves. There was a pile of snow boots and shoes beneath it. Something about their arrangement made me think they had been scattered by the search and put back haphazardly by a careless officer.

  There was no sign of life. If her flat had been designated a crime scene, she m
ust have gone to stay with family or friends. I pictured myself knocking on my mum’s door with a rueful grin. Just been accused of a few murders. Mind if I stop in my old room a night or two while they search my flat?

  I walked back down the stairs slowly, feeling vaguely as though I were missing something. I was inside Lotta Berglund’s apartment building. I didn’t want to leave without taking full advantage, but without being able to get inside her flat, what else could I do?

  I hovered in the lobby, pretending to read the noticeboard, which was full of the usual fire escape maps and notes from irritated residents imploring neighbours to please keep the noise down after 10pm. Just as I was about to give up, I spied an elderly lady heading downstairs with a basket of laundry, and impulsively followed her.

  She unlocked the laundry room door and I darted forward to hold it open for her. She gave me a brief smile and I fumbled in my bag for a pen as though I were going to sign up for a laundry time. Swedish apartment buildings all have basement laundry rooms like this, which residents reserve for time blocks of a couple of hours, sometimes weeks in advance. Booking your desired time is a matter of stiff competition, and I have heard of lifelong grudges started by one resident’s things being left still in the dryer when their neighbour's tvättid had begun.

  I ran my finger through the calendar. Lotta Berglund had booked a laundry time two weeks from now. So she hadn’t been poised to go on the run.

  ‘Stackars Lotta,’ murmured the old lady, glancing over my shoulder as she separated her whites. She was heavyset, with long grey hair in a plait wound round her head like a Alpine milkmaid, and wore the kind of flowery housecoat normally found on housewives in sitcoms from the seventies. She tutted and shook her head.