I get home late.
The disappointment over Olle Berg not being our killer has drained me of energy and I feel depressed and despondent.
Yes, I know.
Berg can still be the lion, he could still have killed Rachel’s son, if we are to believe the poem. But he could hardly have killed Ahonen and Carlgren because his body was in the water considerably longer than theirs.
No, either the lion isn’t Olle Berg, or the lion is not involved in the deaths of Ahonen and Carlberg.
When I get into the hall I carefully close the door so as not to wake Afsaneh, but she comes from the kitchen to meet me. Wraps her arms around my neck and gives me a light kiss. Then she announces that she has made my favourite dish – chicken with saffron rice – and decided to stay awake and wait for me.
We eat and make small talk about our days.
I don’t tell her about Olle Berg. I don’t have the energy to dwell more on that today.
We talk about silly, shallow things for the first time in forever. We open a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine, that we really should be saving for a special occasion, and quickly drain the bottle.
Then we make love, tipsy on the living-room floor. As if we were clueless teenagers without responsibilities.
As if our daughter had never fallen onto the hard tarmac.
Afterwards I take a shower.
I let the hot water stream across my body. Wash away the frustration lingering in the dust from the campsite. Head off the thoughts of Igor’s so-called book, the one that only contains two words – Lorem ipsum – the only purpose of which is to launder drug money.
When I come out of the bathroom Afsaneh is standing outside, naked.
‘I think I need one too,’ she says and squeezes past me into the bathroom.
I go into the bedroom and sit on the bed. Glance out through the window, where the sky is getting dark behind the sheer curtain.
Afsaneh’s computer is open next to her pillow. My eyes fall on a photo of a young man in a bed. The picture is both scary and beautiful at the same time and I can’t help but look.
I reach for the laptop and pull it closer. The headline is written in blue, old-fashioned cursive: STRUGGLE FOR LIFE. My gaze moves further down, I let it slide across the page.
It catches on a stanza of a poem at the beginning of the latest post.
I cried myself a sea of tears
and lay down to die
on the soft tuft of grief
But the lion emerged anew
and in his giant maw he held
an untarnished dove
My body freezes and my heart skips a beat.
It isn’t possible.
It is not bloody possible.
Afsaneh comes in with a towel wrapped around her hips.
‘What’s this?’ I ask and turn the laptop so that she can see the screen.
She wrinkles her eyebrows.
‘A blog, why?’
‘Who wrote it?’
Afsaneh takes her towel off and hangs it over the back of a chair. Then she puts on one of my old T-shirts.
‘Not a clue. She has a brain-damaged son. That’s all I know. And she is quite active on the forum too. Posts a lot of stuff.’
Afsaneh sits on the bed and strokes my cheek.
‘I’m tired,’ she says, yawning.
I don’t answer. I pull the laptop back towards myself. Scroll down the page.
Photos of the guy in the bed flicker past. There are close-ups of a hand, a face that is turned away, and a lone rose in a vase with drops of dew on its petals. And pictures of nature where one can see the ocean, smooth rocks and a lighthouse.
There is no face to be found anywhere, but in a few places I can see a side-view of a woman’s face. The pictures are blurry and the long hair fluttering in the wind partially obscures her features.
‘Is she big?’ I ask.
‘What do you mean, big?’
Afsaneh crawls into bed next to me.
‘Can we turn out the lights?’ she mumbles sleepily and puts her hand on my thigh.
‘Do a lot of people read her blog?’ I clarify.
‘A hundred thousand at least. You can see for yourself how many comments the posts get. Honey, I am sorry, but I have to get some sleep.’
‘Can I borrow your computer?’
‘Sure,’ she says, turning off the light.
I sit in the living room reading the blog for a long time, despite my head aching with tiredness and my body crying for sleep. The posts deal with everything from the grief over her son’s accident, to the daily trials and tribulations involved in caring for a brain-damaged person in the home.
At three in the morning I call Malin. It rings five times before she picks up.
‘Can you come into the station now?’ I ask.
It takes her a few seconds to answer.
‘Do you know what time it is?’
‘I know what time it is.’
She sighs.
‘Is it important?’
‘It’s very important.’
*
A few hours later Malin and I have gone through the blog in detail, comparing it to our own timeline. We have inspected the pictures and read countless posts and comments from followers.
The sun has risen and the station has come to life. Doors have been walked through and stairs run up and down. A scent of freshly brewed coffee has spread across our floor. Letit has arrived, listened to our conclusions, hummed and lumbered off again.
‘Show me the introduction again,’ Malin says and I do what she tells me.
My name is Rachel. My son Jonas was a completely normal teenager when he was in a traffic accident. I was over the moon when I realised he would survive. I didn’t understand at the time that the battle for a decent life had just begun, because after the accident my son was badly brain-damaged and fell into a deep coma. But I decided to NEVER give up! Now I care for my son at home. Follow our struggle on this blog.
‘According to the poem the lion killed the son,’ Malin says. ‘But the son is still alive.’
She nods at the computer where we can see the picture of the young man in bed.
‘I know,’ I say. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t take the poem literally. Maybe it’s symbolic. Perhaps it feels as if he is dead, although he’s really just completely out of it.’
The door opens and Letit comes in.
‘We’ve found her,’ he says. ‘I spoke to the prosecutor. And with forensics. The IT forensics are going to over it all in detail, but they have traced the blog to Susanne Bergdorff.’
The room falls silent.
‘Susanne?’ I ask.
‘It appears that she goes by Rachel,’ Letit grunts. ‘Susanne Bergdorff was born and raised in Flen, in Sörmland. She was a promising swimmer well into her teens. She is a widow and has a disabled son, Jonas. Her husband suffered from MS and died after a bout of pneumonia four years ago. Susanne worked as a pharmacist until her son’s accident. He was in a hit-and-run. Her parents are long dead and their family estate has been sold. Her father was a pastor in the church of Sweden and her mother was a housewife. They divorced when Susanne was little.’
‘How do you know all this?’ Malin asks.
‘I got the name of Susanne Bergdorff’s therapist from one of her friends. Apparently, she was in some kind of therapy.’
‘Where is Susanne now?’ I ask.
‘That’s the problem,’ Letit says, exhaling loudly as he sinks into the chair next to mine. ‘We can’t find her anywhere. It seems she is still getting mail at her old address, where she is still registered, but that house has been empty for over a year. She’s been collecting the money she gets from social security and her private insurance every month. The withdrawals have been made at an ATM in Haninge Centrum. We are going to get the film from the surveillance camera there.’
‘Well,’ I say, and go up to the whiteboard. Pick up a pen and begin to write. ‘We can link our three victims to one another through DNA.’
I write ‘Johannes Ahonen’, ‘Victor Carlgren’ and ‘Olle Berg’ on the board and circle each name.
‘And Olle Berg can be connected to Rachel, also known as Susanne, thanks to a witness statement,’ I continue, writing ‘Susanne/Rachel’, circle that too and draw a line to Olle Berg’s circle.
‘The bodies were found in the southern archipelago. They could very well have been killed in Stuvskär, where the woman who wanted to report a missing person claimed that Rachel lived.’
‘The one who was scared off by the pregnant bimbo with the trout pout?’ Letit asks.
‘Yes. She did say that her son worked in or in the vicinity of Stuvskär. And that’s not too far from Haninge where the cash was withdrawn?’
‘Definitely,’ Letit nods. ‘But Susanne and Jonas Bergdorff aren’t registered there. That was the first thing I looked into.’
‘There’s no Rachel either. I’ve already checked,’ Malin says.
‘They could be living in Stuvskär without being registered there,’ I say.
Letit’s gaze fastens on Olle Berg’s mugshot. He sticks a toothpick in his mouth and his jaws begin to grind mechanically.
I draw a circle next to Rachel’s name, write ‘The Lion’ inside of it and draw a line to Rachel.
‘Susanne is the key to all of this. If we find her we’ll also find the man she calls the lion.’
‘If he exists,’ Letit snorts.
‘The forensic psychologists believe the killer to be male,’ Malin says. ‘The extreme violence, moving the bodies. It all points to that.’
‘In any case,’ I say, ‘we’ve got to find Susanne.’
I go back to the computer, scroll down so that an image becomes visible.
Dark sea, foam washing across shiny worn rocks. A lighthouse, illuminated from the side by the sun that is low in the sky. Silhouettes of thin pines reaching for the sky.
‘I will try to find that therapist,’ I say. ‘Gunnar, can you see if Malik can find out where those photos on the blog might be taken?’
‘The lighthouse,’ Letit nods, leaning closer into the computer and taking the broken toothpick out of his mouth. ‘I think he should focus on the lighthouse.’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘It’s visible in several of the photos. There can’t be that many lighthouses in the vicinity of Stuvskär. Ask Malik to see if it is possible to determine where the photos were taken. And check with some of the colleagues if they can go out to Stuvskär and knock on some doors. Somebody has to know her.’
Letit nods, flicks the toothpick toward the bin and ambles off down the hallway.