Saturday 21 November, 09.01
It was lying on the table when he woke up. He hadn’t put it there.
Woke up wasn’t quite the right way to put it. There was no longer any boundary between dreaming and being awake. Everything blurred together.
They got back in the middle of the night. When Kåbtåjaure finally broke the undulating landscape with its clean, flat darkness, they were both so tired that they parted without a word.
Berger collapsed onto his bed like a dead man, without even taking his jacket off. The only thing he did was to toss his mobile on the table before he instantly slid into clean, flat darkness, a darkness that was probably a lot like death.
But gradually things happen in the darkness. A pair of bright blue eyes appear from it. A half-illuminated block of wood sweeps quickly, raggedly past, leaving a patch of white behind it, but the centre remains dark. The darkness takes on shapes, and they’re the shape of a person, a bloody outline on a sheet. Then the moon reflects off a knife blade, a dagger, and the dagger sinks through skin, breaks the skin, and an image gradually emerges in glowing lines, a four-leaf clover whose leaves turn into the four wheels of a pushchair against the backdrop of light glinting between loosely bound tree trunks. When a pair of bound hands fades into ever increasing light a woman is sitting at a table, facing the other way. And in her mouth is a thick sock, as black as the darkness itself.
In a no-man’s land between dream and wakefulness his reptile brain sent his hand towards the bedside table. But what it found was completely different to a cold mobile phone. Different enough for him to sit up abruptly in the bed, switch the bedside light on and stare in a deranged state at the thick black sock that was lying across the bedside table.
It lay there like a lump of death.
His tongue felt dry; he had been sleeping with his mouth open. Anyone could just have stuffed the sock in his throat. He wouldn’t even have come round enough to put up any resistance.
He tried to think rationally. Had he left it there himself? When was the last time he had even touched a black sock like that?
But he had rummaged through the piles of clothes before their long drive down the Inland Highway, and Molly had brought an odd assortment of clothing when they first came up here.
The sock was there now, anyway. Laid out like a pennant across a fallen warrior’s coffin.
No, it was just his imagination. No one had been in his cabin, not at the Swedish pole of inaccessibility. No one could have been.
No one but Molly Blom.
He sat on the edge of the bed. What sort of world was he actually in now? Nothing was certain. Nothing was as it seemed, least of all himself. Images started to rise, forgotten, suppressed. The boys, the twins. Freja, his former partner, her long, sweeping hair. And what looked increasingly like their escape to France. A frightening figure chasing them at Arlanda Airport, a figure he only realised much later was himself. The failed father.
It was as if he were two people.
As if he lived two different lives.
He stood up unsteadily and felt his own unsteadiness as if from a peculiar distance.
Had he put the black sock there himself during the night?
In a different state, as a different person?
Longer than two weeks unconscious, as a result of a purely mental shock? There was no question that he felt guilty about Syl’s death, but was it actually even possible for shock to affect someone that severely? Had he really been unconscious all that time?
Had he been living a different life during that time?
He stumbled towards the toilet and switched on the weak battery-powered light. The cubicle was tiny and cramped, the composting toilet smelled rank, there was a half-full bottle of water perched on the edge of the grimy washbasin beside a lump of soap that had failed to repel the dirt; it lay like an island in a puddle of filthy, frozen water. And crowning all this misery was a mirror that was so dirty that he could only just make out his bizarre, grey-bearded reflection.
What was going on? So far Molly had persuaded him to believe everything – the weeks of unconsciousness, their crazy flight up the length of this stretched-out country, her whole hero-status thing – but now everything was starting to teeter.
He looked at himself in the mirror for a long while, managing to see through the grime for the first time. That beard really was bizarre, could it really have grown so much in two weeks? And his hair still looked extremely odd; he tugged at it above both ears, and it was clearly much shorter on the left-hand side. He was thinner than ever, which made the fateful bite mark on his upper arm stand out more clearly than usual. And it looked like his cheeks had sunk somewhere behind that beard.
No, he thought and flicked the mirror with his hand before walking out. No, it was time to restore a bit of order. And he instinctively knew that the only way for him to restore order was to work. Investigate, do detective work, dig as deeply as he could into an absorbing case.
And now he had a chance.
He looked out through the window. The sun hadn’t yet risen, but its rays were etching the mountaintops against the sky, making the ice-covered surface of Kåbtåjaure glisten; the rosy glow encouraged him to switch the bedside lamp off.
He quickly consulted the satellite timetable fixed to the wall and checked that none of them was due at the time shown on the wristwatch he had just pulled on, then he took a last glance at the grotesque sock and went outside.
Dawn came quickly. He left his cabin in semi-darkness and reached the other one in full daylight. He knocked. There was no answer, no obvious reaction. He opened the door, not the main one, but the narrow one. The skis were gone. He opened the main door to Molly’s cabin and walked in.
The sleeping bag was laid out on top of the bed, the pillow perfectly plumped against the wall, it looked freshly laundered. Opposite was her makeshift whiteboard: a pine wall covered with pinned-up pieces of paper. The notes covered everything they knew, and he had a feeling that they had multiplied since yesterday.
How long had she been awake?
He stepped closer. There was a timeline of Jessica Johnsson’s life, a plan of a familiar house in Porjus, a list of people questioned in the Helena Gradén case, selected photographs from the case file, a very graphic photograph of the dead Lisa Widstrand and a man in a balaclava rushing up some basement steps. Beside the familiar photograph of Karl Hedblom was a new one, showing him eight years older and considerably more drug-addled. And that wasn’t the only new photograph; there was also one of a ramshackle storehouse, three pictures of the half-snow-covered shelter and even a fresh photograph of Allan in his Hawaiian shirt.
Blom had got even better at taking pictures without anyone noticing.
Berger pulled back from the wall slightly, looked out of the window and saw the sun glide above the mountains. He had no idea how long Blom had been gone. She could come back at any moment. Even so, he felt overwhelmed once more by the same feeling he had experienced in his own cabin, the feeling that order needed to be restored.
He stood there in the middle of the cabin, which was identical to his own, and saw the laid-out black sock before him as clearly as Blom’s sleeping bag. Then he got going. He went into her bathroom, which was obviously a lot cleaner than his. He tapped on the walls, ceiling, floor, got down on his knees and explored all potential gaps in and around the composting toilet. Only when he was certain that there was nothing hidden in there did he go back out into the main room of the cabin. He burrowed deep into the wardrobe without finding anything, and repeated the procedure from the bathroom. Nothing in the walls, no obvious differences in the sound when he tapped the ceiling, nothing under the mattress, which left just the floor. He got down on his knees and put his ear to the wooden boards, then tapped frenetically and increasingly disconsolately as he made his way across the relatively small area.
Until suddenly there was a different sound.
It was right beneath the head of the bed, tucked away in the corner. He stopped, listened, slipped out from under the bed, peered out through the window, opened the door and looked around. The world was cold, white, silent, there was nothing out there. He went back inside, pulled the bed away from the wall, crept in behind it, tapped carefully until he identified a small area in the corner, looked for gaps, found nothing but the natural cracks between the floorboards, pulled open his penknife, slipped it into one of the cracks, wiggled it. Repeated the process. The knife blade looked like it might break at any moment and fly up into his eye. But then something moved slightly, slipped sideways. He prised the board a little more, closed his eyes as if his eyelids might provide protection from the spinning blade of a knife, until he finally managed to slide the tip of one finger into the crack in the floor. He grabbed hold of the other side and pulled out an irregular section of pine floorboard no more than thirty centimetres square.
Darkness opened up beneath it, but also a shape. He stuck his hands through and took hold of it, and lifted out a lumpy object.
On the table, in between their laptops, stood the satellite phone they had been given by Deer. There was a small space beside it, and that was where he placed a second, largely identical but rather more modern satellite phone.
She had already had one.
Molly Blom had brought a satellite phone with her when they arrived here. During the two weeks when Sam Berger had been doing his Sleeping Beauty act she had had full access to both phone and Internet. It was her first flagrant lie.
He heard a muffled rattling outside on the cabin steps. He stiffened when the door opened.
But not this door. A smaller one, the door to the ski closet. A brief respite. Berger grabbed the satellite phone and slipped it as quietly as he could into the hidden compartment under the floor. He heard the door close again as he slid the floorboard back in place, pressed it down, then slid the bed back into position as silently as he could manage as the door handle was pressed down. He pulled up the screen of his laptop and adopted a thoughtful posture by the wall, staring at the collection of notes and photographs. When Blom walked in he threw his hand out towards the paper-covered wall.
‘You’ve extended it,’ he said, hoping he didn’t sound falsely jovial.
‘And you’ve been asleep for a long time,’ she said as she started to remove her ski boots.
‘I’m trying to figure out what’s new,’ he said, stepping closer to the wall and trying to keep his heartbeat under control; he wasn’t exactly born to be an undercover cop.
‘You won’t find the most important stuff there,’ Blom said, standing there in her socks.
‘Oh …?’ Berger said.
‘The most important thing is what I didn’t find.’
‘Namely?’
‘Anders Hedblom,’ Blom said, opening her computer.
‘Karl Hedblom’s brother?’ Berger said.
‘I found the father, he died two years ago in a hostel in Borlänge. Sure enough, he did drink himself to death. But Anders Hedblom, a salesman in Malmö, doesn’t appear to exist. There are around twenty other Anders Hedbloms in Sweden, and any one of them could be him of course. Sadly I haven’t managed to find out his date of birth.’
‘A bit of classic police desk work, then?’
‘Unless you were planning another car trip,’ Blom said, picking up a small bundle of paper from the table and coming over to stand beside him in front of the note-covered wall. He looked down at her; her cheeks were glowing as if they had been exposed to a long dose of sunshine.
‘The sun rose something like twenty minutes ago,’ he said. ‘So it can’t be that that’s given you such a fetching rosy glow. You must have been out skiing for a long time. Did you set out while it was still dark?’
‘The satellites don’t appear before dawn,’ she said. ‘And don’t worry, I keep a head torch in the ski store. It hasn’t snowed recently, so the existing tracks were still there. Any more questions?’
‘When are you going to shower?’
‘When I’ve stopped sweating,’ Blom said indifferently, and started to pin small notes with numbers on them up on the wall. ‘One: look into the missing years in Jessica Johnsson’s life. Two: get hold of more forensic results from the house in Porjus from the NOD. Three: go back to the Helena Gradén case and look through all the interview transcripts from eight years ago. Four: contact Dr Andreas Hamlin at Säter to make sure he keeps an eye out for letters sent to Karl Hedblom. Five: keep working on Gothenburg and Lisa Widstrand. Six: scour every police database in the country for any four-leaf clovers drawn anywhere on any bodies. Seven: find Anders Hedblom. What do you think?’
Berger sighed. ‘What’s the best option for the Gradén case? For you to look at it with fresh eyes, or me with my new-old ones?’
‘You with your new-old eyes, I think. You’ve always had trouble dealing with the past; if you’re forced to go back to it, maybe something you’ve suppressed might come to the surface.’
‘That’s one of the main tasks,’ Berger said. ‘The other one is investigating the missing years of Jessica Johnsson’s life. That feels more like Security Service work. I take it you still have contacts there?’
He hoped he didn’t sound too heavy-handed.
‘I might well have,’ Blom replied simply. ‘So you take two, three, four and six. If I carry on with Widstrand, you can look for four-leaf clovers. OK?’
‘OK,’ Berger said.
Gentle steam rose from the gently undulating surface. He lifted the bucket carefully towards the end of the cabin, and a hand shot out from round the corner and grabbed it. A voice said, ‘Hot water? Seriously?’
‘I warmed it up a bit,’ Berger said.
Instead of gratitude there was a splashing sound, then a gasp. The bucket came back, empty. He took it and started to mix some of the water from the saucepan with snow and said, ‘One, then?’
The unmistakable sound of hasty washing was accompanied by an indistinct voice.
‘No progress so far. Those secret years of Jessica Johnsson’s life are still secret. I haven’t managed to get anywhere with the Security Service, it’s got top-level confidentiality. Two?’
‘No more DNA in Porjus,’ Berger said, passing the bucket round the corner again. ‘But Robin, the lead forensics officer, has found evidence to suggest that someone was actually living in the boiler room. He’s vacuumed the whole of that deafening room with a hyper-modern bit of kit borrowed from the FBI. Deer says they’ll be getting results back about the tyre tracks some time today.’
‘What about three?’ said the voice as the empty bucket was passed back.
‘I’ve read through the Helena Gradén case carefully,’ Berger said, mixing more water. ‘You were right about it stirring up a whole load of old memories. Deer and I were never at the centre of the investigation, we just dealt with peripheral figures on the edge of the case. One thing that has struck me is just how good Allan was back in the day. He asks all the right questions, in the right way. His colleague, Robertsson, on the other hand, made a number of basic mistakes.’
‘Have you contacted him?’ Blom asked from round the corner.
‘I’ve managed to track him down, at least. Not entirely unexpectedly, Richard Robertsson has sunk through the ranks, he’s now a lowly desk jockey in the police store. I’ll give him a call. In the meantime I’ve been reading through his interviews, there are a couple that look promising.’
‘What sort of people did you actually talk to?’
‘I don’t imagine you want names, but I’ve had time to memorise a lot of them by now.’
‘I want names. And why they were questioned.’
‘Four main categories. I’ll take the names I can remember. Possibly responsible for building the shelter: Lennart Olsson, Magnus Bladh, Peter Öberg. Care-home residents: Linnéa and Elin Sjögren, Reine Danielsson, Johan Nordberg and obviously Karl Hedblom. Care-home staff: the manager Sven-Olof Lindholm, Juana Galvez, Lena Nilsson, Sofia Trikoupis. Neighbours, friends, et cetera: Per Eriksson, Göras Egil Eriksson, Elisabeth Hellström, Grop Åke Ek, Olars Fredrik Alexandersson …’
‘I didn’t really mean in that much detail…’
‘Seriously, though, what is it with those Dalarna names? Göras, Grop, Olars …’
‘I’m getting a bit cold here …’
‘Ah,’ Berger said and handed her the bucket again; most of a naked female arm came into view.
‘Point four then,’ he volunteered. ‘Dr Andreas Hamlin at Säter is going to keep an eye out for post for Karl Hedblom. And he’s going to get Karl’s blood checked. Five?’
‘They’re farms,’ Blom said.
‘What?’ Berger said.
‘It used to be fairly common in Dalarna for people to add the name of their farm to their given name. A lot of people have started to revive the old tradition.’
‘Right,’ Berger said, nonplussed.
‘Point five then,’ Blom said from round the corner. ‘Lisa Widstrand. I’ve been in touch with a Superintendent Sjölund in Gothenburg, who as good as admitted it was a sloppy investigation. No one cared about the four-leaf clover on the victim’s buttock because no one really cared about the victim. It was during the run-up to the book fair, and the instruction to sweep the murdered prostitute under the carpet was unspoken but very clear. I’ve got a Skype session booked with Sjölund in a few minutes’ time.’
‘Might be as well to finish showering then,’ Berger said.
‘Pass me my towel and give me point six.’
‘Number six,’ Berger said, passing the towel round the corner of the cabin. ‘The four-leaf clover. To start with I tried to expand the search parameters. Not just “four-leaf clover” but “clover”, “ballpoint drawing”, “drawing on body”, “ink sketch”, “buttock”, “arse cheek”, “backside” and so on. I’ve got a couple of promising leads. Can I come round there yet?’
The muttering from beyond the corner of the cabin could possibly be interpreted as positive, and he walked round. Her blonde hair was sticking up, she had the towel wrapped around her body and a pair of bright-blue Crocs on her feet. He stared at them.
‘All serious cold comes from below,’ she said.
‘Old Siberian saying,’ he said.
‘Go on.’
‘The search is still running,’ he said. ‘I got a couple of hits on “four-leaf clover”, but I don’t know where they’re going to take me. I turned into a shower assistant just as I was about to look them up.’
They went back inside the cabin. The radiator was working away doggedly, spreading heat that had never felt so welcome. The thermometer on the outside of the window read minus eighteen degrees: the winter chill had arrived in the interior of the country with a vengeance.
Berger crouched down beside the radiator and held his hands up so they were almost touching the hot surface.
‘Who is he? What does he want?’ she said.
‘We won’t know who he is,’ Berger replied, ‘until we find out more about Jessica Johnsson’s past; that’s where he is. As for what he wants …? I think this has the feel of someone who kills for pleasure. I doubt the motive will match Karl’s – hatred of mothers, revenge for past wrongs. No, this is too structured, too planned. This is about pleasure. He abuses and murders because he gets a kick from it. There’s a lot that suggests we’re dealing with a genuine sexual sadist. Are we absolutely certain that there’s no trace of semen at any of the crime scenes?’
‘Not as far as I’ve seen, not even in Gothenburg, where the victim was a prostitute.’
‘Strange,’ Berger said. ‘Because everything seems to be pointing to one single thing. Sex.’
Blom nodded. ‘Point seven. I think I’ve found Karl Hedblom’s older brother Anders. He’s the only one in the right age range. According to the files he lives nearby. But I haven’t managed to get hold of him.’
‘Nearby? Does every fucker live in the interior of the country these days?’
‘Sorsele. So it’s possible to imagine a potential sequence of events. Eight years ago Anders Hedblom was living in Malmö and went up to Orsa to visit his brother, sees a woman with a pushchair walking down the road through the forest, and it rouses his killer instinct. He does some planning, builds a shelter in the woods – he trained to be a carpenter but ended up selling work tools – then kidnaps the mother and child. After the double murder he cleans the shack of his own DNA but leaves his brother’s and the victims’. Somehow he comes into contact with Jessica Johnsson, who’s living under an assumed identity in Porjus and has a tendency to pick the wrong men; they start a relationship, he moves nearby, to Sorsele, but then he lets slip what he did, maybe tells her about the four-leaf clover and threatens her. Jessica dumps him but doesn’t actually want to report him, so instead she gives the police little clues in the form of conspiracy theories. Until reality catches up with her. Just when we happen to be there.’
Berger nodded.
‘Not entirely impossible. But that doesn’t explain why Jessica sent her letter specifically to Deer. I don’t really buy her explanation about seeing Deer on television and thinking she seemed trustworthy.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that too,’ Blom said. ‘We should try to find that film clip. Do you remember when it might have been?’
Berger shook his head slowly and said, ‘There was a lot of media attention at the start of the case, then it tailed off. I can try to find out. But I still think your hypothesis about Anders Hedblom justifies a trip to Sorsele.’
Blom nodded.
‘I’ve got a Skype session first, though.’
‘Are you going to sit face to face with Superintendent Sjölund in Gothenburg dressed like that?’ Berger asked, gesturing towards the towel she was still wrapped in.
‘I wasn’t planning to, no,’ Blom said and let the towel drop.