After the policeman’s break-in, Alicia didn’t dare stay in Stella’s apartment. She had run down the stairs and called Ratko from the car. When he didn’t pick up, she had gone round to his place and pressed the intercom button repeatedly, like a madwoman. Eventually, an irritated neighbor had yelled at her to cut it out and she did. She had accepted the darkened row of windows on the second floor for what they were and driven away.
She had spent the rest of the night in a parking lot at a yachting harbor outside of town. It was an expanse of gravel covered in snow with boats tucked under tarpaulins where no one paid any notice to a car in the shadows between the hulls. If she hadn’t been woken by a stupid wrong number, she would have slept until morning.
When Ratko finally got in touch it had been in the form of a text message at half past seven.
Sorry, it was a late one and I needed to sleep.
She called back as soon as she read it, but still got his voicemail. She began to compose a message instead. Halfway through, she erased it. Alicia didn’t want to be subjected to the same radio silence as last night. It was better to go to him. She knew where he usually went in the mornings. Ratko owned a coffee shop not far from Palermo and he usually breakfasted there.
When she arrived, there was only one spot on the street outside. Alicia parked and hurried inside. Despite the fact that the place had just opened, most chairs were already occupied by the usual clientele: women on maternity leave spending half their child benefits on vegan lattes and hipster dudes riding their retro bicycles to work.
She sought out Ratko’s clean-shaven face among the beards, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t behind the counter, and he wasn’t at any of the tables. Alicia headed back to the Land Rover and was about to open the driver’s side door when she heard a voice call out her name. She turned around and almost managed to drop the car key down a storm drain.
It was the dark-skinned detective.
This time he wasn’t alone. He had a woman with him. Both were in civilian attire, and Alicia looked around for uniformed officers. If they were going to arrest her then surely there would be a police cruiser nearby?
“What a coincidence,” said the man, with the slight American accent that she remembered from their previous meeting. “We were actually just on our way to your place.”
Alicia tried to discern whether he was telling the truth—she did actually live nearby—or whether they’d been watching her overnight and this morning. But in that case, why wait until now to arrest her? She could find no reasonable explanation for it.
The woman proffered her hand without staring or averting her gaze—the two most common reactions Alicia encountered when she met new people. Her colleague had surely warned her about the facial disfigurement.
“Mona Ejdewik,” she said. “I’m with National Crime in Stockholm.”
Alicia was startled.
“Stockholm?”
“Yes, we support local forces for specific cases, and as of yesterday I’m heading up the inquiry into the murder of your sister. Do you have time for a chat?”
She didn’t.
Alicia needed to find Ratko.
“Sure thing,” she said. “Here, or . . . ?”
“No, I think it’s best if we go to yours, if that’s okay with you?”
The woman smiled kindly at her and Alicia tried to smile back at her while her thoughts spun. The bedroom and the writing Linda had daubed on the wall—how would she explain it? And the blood that might—or might not—have seeped into the seams of the linoleum . . . Surely that would be visible to the naked eye?
“Why don’t you lead the way in your car and we’ll follow,” said the woman before Alicia could protest.
The police officers got into a black sedan on the other side of the street. It was the same car she had seen in the forest by the crest of the hill above the trees where the Volvo had been at rest. They waited for her to take the lead and guide them to the house where she had stabbed Stella’s murderer in the throat.
Alicia drove as slowly as she could toward Gröna gatan. She needed time to think so that she could predict her visitors’ questions and figure out how to answer them. But her brain, so used to breaking down complex problems into strict logic, was boiling over.
She ought to be on her way to the clinic in Copenhagen with Stella.
But her sister was dead and Ratko wasn’t picking up.
Alicia sent him a message anyway.
Please call me!
Then they arrived at the house.
Alicia thought she ought to offer them coffee, but she didn’t since she was afraid her hands would shake as she poured it. The police hung their coats on the back of their chairs as they took seats at the kitchen table.
“You’re aware that we wanted to take a man into custody in relation to the murder of your sister?” the woman began.
She was running the show. Stockholm trumped Karlstad. In the police just as in life.
“Yes, Birger Falk. I know,” said Alicia.
“Then I can now tell you we’ve found him dead. He was in the trunk of his own car. This isn’t yet public, so I would be grateful if you kept it to yourself.”
Alicia tried to look surprised with the limited expressions the injuries to her face allowed.
“Dead?” she repeated.
“Yes. We don’t know what happened as yet,” said the woman. “But everything indicates a serious crime has taken place.”
The silence that followed was unbearable. Alicia waited for one of the detectives to produce a Q-tip and ask her to open wide. Or to wave a piece of paper around from the public prosecutor’s office and open the door to a bunch of forensic specialists in white coveralls.
“We need to ask you some questions that may seem upsetting. But we can leave no stone unturned—I hope you understand that?”
It was the man who had spoken, and Alicia nodded at him.
“Of course. I understand,” she said.
“Good. We have reason to believe that the murders of your sister and Birger Falk were drug-related. Do you know whether Stella used narcotics?”
Alicia didn’t know what to say. Just a few hours ago she had seen the policeman enter Stella’s apartment and hide a bag of cocaine—and now he was asking about her drug habits.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It wasn’t something we discussed.”
“What about earlier in life? Have you ever seen her take drugs? It’s important that you’re honest with us. We need to know this so that we can understand why your sister died.”
The man’s eager voice dispersed any doubts Alicia had. He wanted her to say yes—in the same way that he wanted the bag in the speaker to be found. Why else would he have put it there? For some unfathomable reason, he wanted to sabotage the investigation.
“Yes, in our student days,” she said.
“Which substances?”
“Pretty much anything. Whatever she could lay her hands on. Weed, obviously. But ecstasy and cocaine too.”
That was a half-truth verging on a lie. Sure, Stella—and Alicia too, for that matter—had tried drugs at university. But it had been on a handful of occasions and it had always been offered to them by others. But the detective’s planted evidence meant she might as well exaggerate her sister’s partying. All evidence leading in the wrong direction was worth encouraging.
“Do you think she might have continued after her studies?”
“As I said, I don’t know, but . . .”
She paused and allowed the policeman to help her along.
“We need to bring clarity to this—for everyone’ sake,” he said.
“Stella has been under a lot of pressure. It would be no surprise if she needed to ease that pressure occasionally, and she’s always liked to party.”
The longer the conversation continued, the easier it became for Alicia to find the words. She was no longer teetering on the brink of a panic attack—she had put a couple of reassuring meters between herself and the precipice.
She glanced at the woman, who was sporadically taking notes. Alicia wondered what she was writing. Judging by her facial expression and body language, she wasn’t as convinced by the drug motive as her colleague was.
The woman produced a folder from her bag and pushed a photograph across the table to Alicia.
“Do you recognize him?” she said.
Alicia examined the photo of the man. The man’s face was pockmarked and the nose was the size of a potato. It was a bit crooked, and she guessed it had taken more than one blow over the years.
“No, I’ve never seen him before.”
“He was a hitman for a Nigerian drug cartel and was shot dead at a shopping mall here in Karlstad. Maybe you’ve read about it or seen it on the news.”
Alicia nodded. She had seen the incident at Bergvik flit past but hadn’t paid it any particular attention. She’d been rather preoccupied for the last few days.
“We have indications that Birger Falk was the person who killed him,” the woman continued.
Alicia looked at the photograph again. She had to fix her gaze somewhere to conceal her surprise.
“When was the shooting?” she said.
“About ten o’clock on Sunday night.”
Alicia continued to feign indifference while trying to understand how the police could have got everything so muddled. By then, Birger Falk was already dead in the trunk of his disgusting old Volvo.
The policeman looked at her attentively. He fixed his gaze on her, as if scrutinizing the test subject in a psychological experiment.
“When you say indications, what exactly do you mean?” said Alicia, conscious that she was perhaps fishing for more detail than the police wanted to disclose.
“We’ll be giving a press conference later today,” said the woman. “We found a weapon in Birger Falk’s car that we were able to tie to the shooting at the mall.”
Her colleague continued to look at Alicia. He was observing the slightest change in her expression. Somehow, he had his finger in this pie. The step from planting drugs to manipulating forensic evidence wasn’t a big one.
“Do you think my sister’s murder is connected to the shooting at Bergvik?” said Alicia, handing back the picture.
“In our view, all three deaths are connected,” said the policeman.
“But obviously the investigation is still at an early stage,” the woman interjected. “We’re keeping an open mind and ruling nothing out.”
There it was again, Alicia thought to herself. The gap between them. He was running determinedly in one direction, while she was resisting.
“You’ve previously told us that Stella was going to meet someone the night she was murdered,” the woman said.
“Yes, I mentioned it to your colleague,” she said, nodding to the policeman. “I gave him the name of the users on our platform that she’d been in touch with.”
“Were any of those people known to you?”
“No, I’m afraid not. But the date doesn’t have to have been among them. Stella met lots of people—and not just through Raw. She used other dating sites and hooked up with people in real life too.”
“I understand. Now that you’ve had some time to think about it, do you remember whether Stella said anything else about the person she was meeting? The smallest detail might be of interest.”
“No, nothing other than what I’ve already said.”
The policewoman made a couple more notes and closed her notebook.
“Okay, we won’t take up any more of your time. Thanks very much—you’ve been a great help.”
Not until the black car had disappeared from sight did Alicia sit back down at the kitchen table again. Her legs were shaking, her arms too. Instead of arresting her, the detectives—at least one of them—had floated an insane theory about drug dealing and turf wars with the Nigerian mafia.
Although she was grateful that the policeman was sabotaging the investigation, she wanted to know why. What did he have to gain from the wrong person being fingered for Birger Falk’s murder?
Alicia hadn’t eaten since she’d had the macarons from Stella’s freezer, so she inserted some slices of bread into the toaster. Four sandwiches later, she was full enough to get back to the question. But this time she tackled it from a different angle and a different starting point.
For her, the murder of Birger Falk was at the heart of it all. But perhaps it was different for the policeman. What if the shooting was the sun around which everything else orbited? By planting a gun in the Volvo, he’d delivered a scapegoat for the murder at Bergvik. Birger Falk was dead and could hardly contest the false accusations.
But she could, Alicia thought to herself. She knew that Birger hadn’t fired the shots on the roof that had killed the hitman.
A flash of anxiety passed through her body and lingered in her chest. That cop—she needed to find out more about him.
Alicia fetched her cell phone from her coat pocket in the hallway. She saw that Ratko had tried to call while the police had been there. He hadn’t left a voicemail, but had sent a text.
I’ll try again later.
She called back but her call went straight to voicemail this time too. Her disappointment was at least alleviated by the fact that he had called and promised he would do so again. Alicia turned the volume up on her cell, as high as it would go. The next time he called she didn’t want to miss him.
She tried to remember the policeman’s full name. He’d given her his business card on his first visit—it was probably somewhere in the kitchen. Alicia found it in a drawer by the stove and searched for Fredrik Adamsson Karlstad Police in her browser.
The results were a letdown. Not a single one of the links was related to what she wanted to know about. It was as if he didn’t exist in the digital world.
Instead, she searched for Stella Bjelke murder to see whether she could find him that way. There were several hundred hits and Alicia filtered them in chronological order. The article at the top had been published just half an hour earlier.
The police’s big mistake in the Stella Bjelke case.
She clicked on the link and was redirected to the “Police Leaks Sweden” website. It was a blog that Alicia had never heard of, but which seemed to have it in for the police in Värmland.
The headline was true to its word. The article underneath an embedded video clip saw the anonymous blogger claim to have found unique material from the investigation. It was footage from a CCTV camera at the crime scene that the police had failed to watch fully.
Alicia hit play and let the video run. To begin with there was nothing that was new to her. While the same blog might have been first to publish the clip showing Birger Falk leaving the coffee roastery, it had been the tabloids that had disseminated it to a wider audience. Personally, she had seen the grainy recording on the Aftonbladet website believing it had been the paper’s own journalists that had dug it up.
The video stopped when Birger Falk put his hand on the balustrade outside of Löfbergs, and a text box appeared overlaying the image.
Here we see the man identified as Stella Bjelke’s murderer leaving the scene of the crime. The time is 22:39. Unfortunately, the police never watched to the end of the footage. A big mistake, so it turns out.
The text disappeared and the video fast-forwarded before freezing again to allow for another annotation from the blogger:
The time is now 23:04 on the same evening in the same place.
The video continued at normal speed. After a bit more than ten seconds, the door of the roastery opened. Alicia’s heart skipped a beat as she saw an indistinct figure step onto the stairs.
The image paused again and another caption appeared:
Who is this? A would-be victim who got away? An accomplice? Or Stella Bjelke’s true murderer? The Värmland Police have no clue. Until now, they didn’t even know this person existed.