Tuesday 27 October, 16.24
Molly Blom stepped into a room where two men were sitting staring at computer screens. They nodded to her, as if to acknowledge that everything was under control.
‘I’ll be gone an hour,’ she said. ‘An hour and a half at most.’
The man closest to the wall glanced at a large, cheap diver’s watch on his wrist. ‘And Berger?’
‘Let him rest,’ Blom said. ‘Take him to the cell, Roy.’
Then she opened the other door in the small room and went out into a featureless corridor. She followed it until she came to a lift that blended in to the beige wall. Inside the lift she ran a card through a reader and tapped in a six-digit code, after which the lift began to rise.
Molly Blom looked at her reflection in the hopeless lift mirror. She had been involved in a lot of undercover jobs, played loads of roles, and on one level this was one of the simplest. She moved closer and looked into her own eyes, and actually thought that deep inside that blue stare she could catch a glimpse of the other level. The one telling her that this was the very hardest role she had ever played.
The lift reached the ground floor, G. There was no button below G.
She got out and found herself in a perfectly ordinary stairwell. On the other side of the door she could see Bergsgatan through the curtains of rain, but set off in the opposite direction, into a courtyard containing a dozen parked cars. She clicked her key fob and a dark van, a Mercedes Vito, flashed its lights. She jumped in and lifted up the passenger seat. In a compartment beneath the seat was a shoulder bag. She opened it and fished out a brown envelope and a mobile phone, which she switched on. She set a timer for one hour. She manoeuvred the bulky van around the small courtyard and drove out through the gates before they had opened fully. She headed down to Norr Mälarstrand, then to the hideous roundabout at Lindhagensplan and onto Traneberg Bridge. She carried on towards Brommaplan, then along Bergslagsvägen. She turned off towards Vinsta, one of Stockholm’s most soulless industrial estates, found a parking space in front of an anonymous and apparently dilapidated facade where a grimy sign announced that the building was the home of Wiborg Supplies Ltd.
She didn’t have time to get seriously wet before stepping into what was supposed to be the reception area. The few samples on display in the glass cabinets consisted of indefinable, dust-covered pieces of piping with unreasonable price tags. Taken as a whole, the reception area made a genuinely unwelcoming impression, which was only enhanced by the fact that the dour receptionist smelled of methanol. She caught sight of Blom and jerked her thumb towards the door to one side behind her. The lock whirred and Molly Blom walked through.
At first glance the industrial premises confirmed the impression made by reception. The combination of warehouse and workshop contained four men sitting at computers that only a very trained eye would have been able to distinguish from slow old desktops of the nineties. One of the men stood up and walked towards her.
‘Is it ready?’ she asked.
The man was wearing blue overalls, appeared to be in his forties, and the look in his clear blue eyes was very different from the rest of his appearance. He nodded. ‘Part-paid and ready for delivery. And no receipt?’
‘No receipt this time,’ Blom confirmed.
He nodded slowly, as if nothing could surprise him, and went over to his desk. He heaved a parcel out of a drawer and held it out towards her. She in turn handed him the brown envelope. He took it and put it back in the same desk drawer.
‘Thanks, Olle,’ she said, but he had already returned to his computer.
She drove back the same way, but at Lindhagensplan she carried on along Drottningholmsvägen, drove right across Kungsholmen, across Barnhus Bridge, and all the way along Tegnérgatan until she reached the narrow street that linked Engelbrektsgatan and Eriksbergsgatan.
She left the van double-parked and went into number 4, Stenbocksgatan. She took the stairs in just a few strides, undid all the locks, went in and soaked up the atmosphere. It felt defiled, dirty. As if the atoms of a nasty fight were still in the air. Then she went into the living room and looked at what had once been a brilliantly white sofa.
Four of the six cushions were spoiled, as was one armrest. Splatters of blood from Berger’s wounded right knuckles. It must have taken a hell of a lot of effort to produce that much blood.
Berger must have been clenching his fist very hard.
Molly Blom shook her head. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to get the sofa replaced. And she wouldn’t be able to stay there as long as it was present.
She went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, took out two protein drinks, gulped them down, and ate half an apple that she unwrapped from its cling film.
Then she did a quick search of her own home. She would have preferred to go through it more thoroughly, but what had she said to the guys in the observation room? ‘I’ll be gone an hour. An hour and a half at most.’ It would have to do. She hated when things didn’t work perfectly. The way she did. These days.
The kitchen. OK, no obvious peculiarities. Nothing in the fridge, nothing in the cupboards, nothing on the worktop, nothing in the bin. He had evidently been in a hurry. The blood was hardly planned. Obviously it could have happened during his fight with Kent and Roy, but her gut said Berger had clenched his fist hard enough to reopen his wounds because he was livid and stressed. When he saw his knuckles and saw the whiteness of the sofa, temptation got the better of him. OK, she could buy that. He wasn’t a man who appreciated the finer things in life. When he saw the sofa he reacted instinctively. White things need messing up.
The bedroom. Quickly. Yes, the photographs on the chest of drawers had been moved. He had picked up or at least moved the pictures of her climbing. What had he been thinking? He had believed that she was a fundamentally damaged person – the Nathalie Fredén she had wanted him to see – and then he was confronted instead with this new personality. A mountain-climbing personality. The opposite of losing control.
That was probably Berger’s reaction. She changed from someone who had lost control to someone in complete control. And vice versa, in his case: from full control to losing control. Everything he had assumed about his suspect had turned out to be the exact opposite.
He must have been surprised to get so much out of her when he himself was being questioned. But she really did need him to know about Aisha Pachachi and Nefel Berwari.
Otherwise there wouldn’t be any point to any of it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to draw any conclusions at all. Otherwise she wouldn’t have had any use for him.
And she really did need him.
Precisely how he had managed to find her real identity remained something of a mystery. Yet at the same time it was promising. This was a man who knew what he was doing. Had he also known what he was doing when he had been wandering recklessly through her apartment? Or had he been panicking?
He was looking for the most important things, trying desperately to find the essentials. Trying to think things through with a knife to his throat.
Just as she had planned.
He must have put down the picture of her hanging from a rope beside a sheer rock face – that seemed most likely, seeing as that photograph had been moved furthest – and then gone back into the living room. There he had turned to the bay window containing a desk. What could he have seen there?
The six pads of Post-it notes in assorted colours. Had he actually been able to draw any conclusions from those? If he had, then he really was sharp.
She turned and stared at the huge photograph of the climbers heading up a snow-covered mountain. She looked at their black silhouettes against the colourful sunset. Had he stood there? Had Berger walked this way, out into the bay window, and then turned round?
A sharp, intense ringtone broke the silence. Molly Blom was jolted from her reflections and eventually managed to pull her mobile out of her bag. An hour had passed. And she still had one more stop to make.
Even though the rush-hour traffic had started to build up, she managed to get back to Kungsholmen in reasonable time. She parked in the usual courtyard and opened up the parcel from Wiborg Supplies Ltd. Inside lay something that looked like an ordinary white smartphone, but when she switched it on the screen looked completely different. She gave a quick nod, then headed out onto Bergsgatan. She walked up towards Police Headquarters, went in through the main entrance on Polhemsgatan and tapped in codes to get through a number of doors until she reached the domain of the Security Service. It took a few more codes, swipe cards and fingerprints before she reached the headquarters of the various departments. Eventually she reached the right place, the Intelligence Unit, and, as the sign on his door suggested, Steen, the head of the unit. She knocked. After an appropriate interval there was a dull whirr to indicate that the door had been unlocked.
She went in. Behind the desk sat a well preserved, steel-grey man in his sixties. He pushed his reading glasses up onto his forehead and looked at her.
‘Well, I never,’ Steen said. ‘Miss Blom. How have you been getting on?’
‘I’m reporting as agreed,’ Molly Blom said stiffly. ‘Questioning is proceeding according to plan.’
‘Has Berger confessed his involvement?’
‘No. But the picture is getting clearer.’
‘And is it as we anticipated?’
‘To a large extent, yes.’
‘Imagine that something planted so long ago could bear fruit,’ Steen said. ‘That gives us something to think about.’
‘Berger is a police officer, in spite of everything,’ Blom said. ‘That means we have to be doubly sure of everything.’
‘As agreed,’ Steen said. ‘Nothing goes to the prosecutor until we’re sure.’
‘Then, August, there’s something that you might have forgotten.’
‘And what might that be?’
‘Ellen Savinger.’
August Steen looked astonished. ‘What?’ he said.
‘Ellen Savinger,’ Molly Blom repeated, holding her ground.
‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ Steen declared.
‘The missing fifteen-year-old,’ Blom clarified in a neutral voice.
‘Oh. Yes. Of course. But presumably the Islamic line of inquiry now looks considerably cooler?’
‘It does. But Ellen is still alive.’
‘She’s at least the fifth victim,’ August Steen said. ‘Of course she isn’t alive.’
‘We can’t make that assumption. On the contrary, the situation is in all likelihood urgent.’
‘But that’s a matter for the regular criminal police. Once the jihadist trail vanished and the whole thing mutated into an internal investigation, we became hired hands. With one specific task: to investigate Berger’s involvement.’
‘On the other hand, we’ve been hiding things from the criminal police,’ Molly Blom said. ‘They’ve had to work from false assumptions.’
‘The Islamic trail may have gone cold,’ Steen said, ‘but the internal one is red hot. We’re red hot. If we can get Sam Berger to confess his involvement, we will have made a significant contribution which will make any earlier cover-ups conveniently disappear. We’ll look like heroes. Especially you, Molly.’
‘And Ellen Savinger?’
‘Dead,’ Steen said. ‘But the final victim.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘I know you’re deeply engaged in this, Molly,’ Steen said in a different tone. ‘I know you’ve been trying to flush out the killer since the third murder. I know that the whole bicycle project was your baby. It was an ingenious but, in my opinion, rather too protracted and even fanciful method of attracting the perpetrator’s attention, but of course it turned out to be an exemplary piece of planning. He found you in the end. And now you’ve made it, Molly. The seed has borne fruit. Because you’re an internal resource, you won’t be able to bask in the glory, but here, within the service, you’ll be a hero. Berger is, however, not a threat to Sweden’s democratic system, its citizens’ freedoms and rights, or national security.’
‘Then I request permission to bring this project to a close as soon as possible.’
‘Request granted. Thank you for your verbal report. In this time of change I need you on other cases, cases which really threaten Sweden’s democratic system, et cetera.’
Molly Blom left her boss’s office and walked down the corridor. She wasn’t entirely happy with August Steen’s tone. It implied an indifference towards Ellen Savinger’s fate that couldn’t only be attributed to Steen’s trademark professionalism.
When she reached the lift a man was already waiting, someone she vaguely recognised. They nodded to each other. When the lift arrived the man pointed questioningly at the button marked G. She gave a brief nod. He pressed G. The lift sank through Police Headquarters. They got out at G, and the man walked towards the exit. She took her time, tied her shoelace, and waited until he was out of sight. Then she got back in the lift, ran her card through the reader and tapped in the six-digit code. The lift started to move down.
When it arrived she made her way along the beige corridors until an almost invisible door emerged from the homogeneity. She went in. The two thickset men were no longer staring at their computers. One was eating a banana; the other was taking a nap.
She nodded to the banana-eater and called out sharply: ‘Wake up, Roy.’
The sleeping man jerked awake in front of his computer, and his diver’s watch knocked against the wall.
‘Get him,’ Molly said.
They went out.
Molly Blom sat down on one of the chairs in the control room and pulled the white smartphone from her bag. She looked at it for a while. Then she calibrated it, stood up, took a deep breath and thought: It’s time.
It really is time.