John had only met the chief commissioner of the county police once previously. With his oversized body and the straggling stubble around his mouth, the man was reminiscent of a walrus. All that was missing were two tusks, which he would undoubtedly have used today had he had them, given how angry he was.
“How the hell could you miss this?” he shouted, slamming his fist against the whiteboard so hard that it came loose from one of its fixings and hung at an angle.
“I don’t know,” Ruben tried to interject, staring down at the table. “It was a simple mistake. We thought we had the murderer since . . .”
“You thought, did you? So you didn’t bother to finish watching the video. Is that what happened?”
The chief commissioner’s hoarse voice bounced between the walls of the conference room. Even Mona looked subdued, though the dressing down wasn’t aimed at her. She and John had been on their way to the police station to prepare for the press conference when they had been summoned to the meeting along with Ruben.
“Do we know who this blogger is?” the Walrus said, wiping beads of sweat from his brow.
Ruben cleared his throat.
“IT are working on it, but so far they haven’t managed to identify which person or persons are responsible for the site.”
“And the CCTV footage . . . how the hell did they get hold of it?”
“We don’t know. One hypothesis is that someone at Löfbergs found the footage and sold it to them.”
“What’s to say the leak isn’t right here in the building?”
“I have difficulty believing that, but of course it’s a possibility,” Ruben said in a faint voice.
The Walrus shook his head so vigorously that his double chin wobbled. He began to pace back and forth. His shirt had come loose from his waistband, creating a gap between the material and his great belly.
John had been just as surprised as everyone else when he had seen the new sequence from the Löfbergs CCTV. Of course, it was a real howler that no one had watched more of the video. At the same time, John could understand why the mistake had happened. They had the murderer on camera leaving the scene of the crime and a handprint on the balustrade. Birger Falk quite literally had the victim’s blood on his hands.
The chief commissioner stopped by the paused image on the projector screen that captured the moment when the unknown figure left via the steel steps.
“It’s completely mad,” he said, reaching for a bottle of water on the table. “Every single news site is sharing this bloody clip. I should have brought Stockholm in from the very beginning—that way we might have avoided the dunce’s cap.”
He took out a snuff tin from his trouser pocket and used it to remove the bottle cap. Then he downed the room-temperature water in one go. John had never seen someone drink so fast. It was as if the man merely enlarged his gullet, rather than having to swallow.
“I want you to find out who this is—and do it fast,” said the Walrus, pointing to the projector. “In the meantime, I’ll try to work out what we should tell the reporters so that we can retain a shred of credibility.”
When the chief commissioner stormed out of the room, the others stayed behind. The atmosphere around the table reminded John of what it was like back at Homicide in the NYPD the day after the Rangers had been knocked out of the NHL playoffs. Gazes staring into the distance over coffee cups. The bitter taste of defeat.
He shook off that feeling and looked back to the projector. The blurry figure leaving Löfbergs was wearing a thick duffle coat with a hood covering their hair and most of their face. In their hand was a toolbox.
The first thought that had crossed John’s mind after he’d seen the sequence was still lingering.
Alicia Bjelke.
Was it possibly her closing the door and hurrying down those steps?
He remembered the caption from the end of the video on the blog. The blogger was annoying and injudicious, but was clearly not a moron. The alternatives offered were entirely plausible:
A would-be victim who got away: in that scenario, Alicia Bjelke had witnessed the murder of her sister, but for some reason didn’t want to contact the police.
An accomplice: that hypothesis turned everything upside down and presumed there was an alliance between Alicia and Birger Falk, with both determined to see Stella Bjelke dead. Afterward, they had fallen out and Alicia had knifed him.
The true murderer: the most dramatic interpretation of the video clip implied that Alicia was guilty of the murder of her own sister. Birger Falk was thus transformed either into an accomplice or someone who had tried to stop the murder. A witness who had to be got rid of.
John sighed silently. There were too many alternatives and they were supported by nothing other than his lively imagination. What was more, it was far from certain that the indistinct figure on the steps actually was Alicia Bjelke.
John peered at Mona, wondering what was going on in her head. Until now, there had been no signs to indicate that the sister was on her list of suspects. It was of the utmost importance that it remained that way.
“Well,” said Mona, rising from her seat as if she could feel his eyes on her.
She righted the whiteboard and opened a window. John guessed she wanted to air out the odor left in the room from the chief commissioner’s visit. The man seemed to sweat like a pig—well, more like a walrus—whenever he was worked up.
“I assume it’s no use repeating how stupid we’ve been to miss this. Instead, I suggest we draw a line under the whole thing and crack on.”
She went over to the frozen image still being projected onto the screen.
“So . . . who is it?”
Ruben straightened up from the cowering position he had adopted during the chief commissioner’s verbal onslaught.
“It looks like a woman,” he said. “She’s short.”
“There are short men in this world too,” Mona objected.
“Yes, of course. But still, that was my first response.”
Mona turned to John.
“Do you agree?”
“I think we should be careful about drawing any unsupported conclusions,” he said. “All we can tell from the video is their height. Statistically, that makes it more probable that it’s a woman, but we can’t be sure.”
John realized he’d coughed up nothing more than dross, but what else was he supposed to say? He needed to keep his actual thoughts to himself.
“Can we go back to the moment Birger Falk leaves the building?” said Mona.
Ruben leaned over the keyboard on the conference table and dragged the cursor back along the timeline to when the now-dead man was standing at the top of the steps.
“If we look at the distance from the top of his head to the top of the door, how much difference would we say there is compared with the unidentified individual?” she said.
“Falk’s almost a head taller,” said Ruben.
Mona returned to the table and leafed through her papers.
“According to the autopsy report, Birger Falk was 185 centimeters tall. That means our unknown friend is around 155 to 165 centimeters.”
“That sounds reasonable to me,” said Ruben, fast-forwarding again so that the figure in the hood once again appeared on the steps.
John thought back to the visit to Alicia Bjelke’s home and tried to picture the woman. Just how tall was she? He wasn’t sure.
“According to her sister, Stella Bjelke was going on a date the same night she was murdered,” said Mona. “Could that be who we can see in the video?”
“Anything is possible,” said John. “But if the date witnessed the murder, or was attacked themselves and survived, wouldn’t he or she have contacted the police?”
“Perhaps she was seriously injured and is lying dead in a ditch somewhere,” Ruben said, continuing to refer to the unknown individual as a woman.
“I don’t think that seems likely,” said Mona. “The person in the video is moving without difficulty. On the other hand, Falk may have threatened them with death if they contacted us. Perhaps that’s why we haven’t heard anything.”
“Might the date have been an accomplice to Birger Falk?” she said. “Maybe they contacted Stella Bjelke online to lure her to the roastery under the pretext of an exciting Black Tantra meeting.”
“And when she arrived, there was Falk waiting for her with a chisel in his hand,” Ruben supplemented.
Mona shrugged.
“Well, that’s one theory at any rate.”
“It doesn’t add up,” said John. “The receptionist I spoke to at Raw’s office said that Birger Falk got really worked up when he found out that Stella had left by the back exit and got into a taxi. According to her, Falk asked her several times where Stella had gone. Surely he would have known that if he’d been in cahoots with the date?”
Mona nodded as if accepting the argument.
“Why do you think that person was there then?” she said.
“For me, ‘drug deal gone wrong’ is still the most reasonable explanation. The unknown figure in the video was presumably also mixed up in it and witnessed the murder. That explains why they haven’t contacted us.”
Mona seemed to think about this. Then she said, “Okay, but regardless of that I want us to speak to the possible dates that Stella contacted via Raw. Have you called them yet?”
“No,” John admitted. “I was about to.”
“You should have done that ages ago,” said Mona. “This investigation can’t afford any more mistakes.”
The edge to her voice was unmistakable, and John wanted to defend himself. But the real reason—that Ganiru’s hitmen had prevented him from doing his job—was not an excuse he could share. He would just have to swallow his pride and apologize for the delay.
“There’s one thing I’ve been wondering,” said Ruben, reclining in his seat. “We only see when the woman—sorry, the unknown individual—exits the roastery. But how did she get inside?”
There was silence around the table. John assumed that Mona was reflecting on the same thing he was: that it was an important question that someone should already have asked. Ruben was clearly a better detective than he was a boss, and his promotion was the force’s loss.
At the same time, new anxiety awakened within John. If the figure on the steps was Alicia Bjelke, then perhaps she had got to Löfbergs in a car that was identifiable on tape.
“Good point, Ruben. I’ll look into it,” said Mona, going back to the head of the table to get her laptop and notepad.
There was renewed energy in her voice and her movements. Her reference to the case as a shit sandwich had been vanquished. If Mona had been on her way back to Stockholm before, she now had both her feet firmly planted in Karlstad.
That was bad news as far as John was concerned.
Really bad news.
Back in his office, John got the printouts that Alicia Bjelke had made for him when he’d told her about the death of her sister. On each piece of paper there was a name and photo of a person that Stella had been in contact with through Raw. Three men and two women.
After barely half an hour, he had spoken to four of the five on the phone. All confirmed they were active users of the dating site and that their profiles had been matched to Stella Bjelke. Each one had spoken to her using the voice feature, but none of them had met her in reality. Black Tantra was also seemingly an unknown term to all of them.
John downed the remainder of his coffee and rubbed his face. Then he dialed the final number on the list.
“Pernilla Cederholm.”
A chirpy voice answered after just one ring. According to the population register, the woman lived in Karlstad and was thirty-two years old, but she sounded more like fifteen.
John introduced himself as Fredrik Adamsson and repeated the questions he’d put to the others.
“Hang on, what are you talking about?” said the voice.
“I want to find out whether you’ve been in touch with Stella Bjelke via the dating service Raw. We’ve been told you’re a member.”
“No, I’m not.”
“No?”
“No. However, I’ve met Stella Bjelke a couple of times through work, but I don’t really know her and I definitely haven’t dated her.”
“Can I ask what line of work you’re in?” said John.
“I’m an influencer. Mostly in fashion, but sometimes in interior design and travel too.”
“Got it,” said John, trying to avoid showing his views about this too clearly. “And you’re absolutely certain that you’ve never registered as a member of Raw?”
“Yes, of course. I never date online.”
Even though the woman sounded genuinely surprised, John’s first inclination was to suspect that she was lying. Perhaps she thought it was embarrassing to discuss her love life, especially if that included encounters in dark warehouses.
“That’s a little strange since your banking details were used to create an account on that dating site. Do you have an explanation for that?”
There was a brief silence. Then Pernilla Cederholm’s high-pitched voice returned.
“That’s super weird,” she said. “If my bank ID has been used then I can promise you that it wasn’t me who used it.”
“Do you live with anyone who might have used your phone or computer?”
“No, I live alone.”
“And no one knows your password?”
“No, definitely not,” she said, hesitating a little on the final syllable.
“Hang on . . .” she said. “This is probably nothing to do with the dating site, but something did happen in the fall.”
“What?” said John.
“My credit card was cloned and the bank called me to let me know.”
“Your bank called you,” John clarified, sensing where this was going.
“Yes, exactly. The woman on the phone wanted me to identify myself using my bank ID credentials. I opened the app and input my code. Afterward I thought that was a stupid thing to do. I know how common that kind of fraud is. But I checked all my accounts and everything was as it should be.”
“So, you never double-checked with the bank or reported it to the police?”
“No—there was no money missing.”
“One last question,” John said, eager to end the call. “Are you absolutely certain the person you spoke to was a woman?”
“Yes, it was a woman’s voice. Should I report it?” she said anxiously.
“No, not now. I’ll look into it for you and be in touch.”
“Okay, thanks.”
John put the cell phone down on his desk and immediately searched online for the next number he needed to call: the company responsible for the electronic identification service jointly owned by all the major banks. After waiting on hold for tech support, a slow-spoken man with a Stockholm accent answered his call. John explained that he wanted to know which device the bank identification creds were installed on, but also which phone or computer had logged into the dating site during the identification process.
The man asked to call back not once but twice. Only once he was fully satisfied that he was really speaking to a police officer did he note down the questions and promise to get back to him.
“It’s a murder inquiry, not just a regular support ticket,” John informed him before ringing off.
While he waited for the wheels of tech support to turn, his eye was caught by the fresh printout of Pernilla Cederholm’s photo. If someone wanted to match with Stella Bjelke’s profile, then the woman in the photo was the ideal identity to steal. A successful fashion influencer, the same age, living in the same town. And with an appearance so strikingly like Stella’s. The probability that the love algorithm would bring them together sooner or later was very great.
It struck John how badly the theory of ID theft tallied with the idea of Birger Falk as a lone wolf, or even as the driving force behind the murder at Löfbergs. The idea that a former junkie would be able to think up such an advanced plan seemed unlikely.
It would be a simple matter for Alicia Bjelke, however. She had built the dating site from the ground up and had access to the system from the inside. If she wanted two profiles to match, it presumably took no more than a couple of clicks for her.
John opened his top desk drawer. He put the sketchpad with the investigation drawing on his lap and selected a pencil from the metal case. The woman’s body that he sketched out had two heads: one belonged to Pernilla Cederholm, and the other to Alicia Bjelke. If his mother could have seen him now, she would have been proud of his drawing ability. The women’s very different faces almost looked like black-and-white photographs.
Perhaps the idea that Alicia Bjelke was the brain behind the murder wasn’t so far-fetched after all. It wouldn’t be the first time that conflict between siblings had ended in deadly violence. Stella and Alicia had also built a highly valuable company.
John could just picture it: Alicia arranging the date using a fake identity and Birger Falk clutching the chisel. But what was the connection between them? If there was one . . . Perhaps Alicia had merely trawled the web looking for a suitable Stella Bjelke hater whom she could exploit, and had found him by chance.
Still, it didn’t make sense. At the meeting, John had objected to the theory that Birger Falk had been an accomplice to the date, since he hadn’t known where Stella Bjelke had gone in the taxi.
When he heard a knock on the door, he put his sketchpad back in the drawer and shouted that the door was unlocked. Mona stepped in carrying a transparent plastic cup in her hand, half-filled with a green mush.
“Been to the video suite by any chance?” said John.
“Yes, how did you know?”
He shrugged and let her continue.
“You need to come and see something,” she said. “We now know how the unidentified person got into the murder scene.”
It was a challenge not to let himself be distracted by the double slurping taking place in front of the displays in the video suite. John felt like tearing the cups from the hands of Mona and the young officer in the seat beside her.
At the same time, he was relatively calm. Mona had said the unidentified person when she had come to get him. In other words, the CCTV footage hadn’t revealed anything about who the person was.
Ruben was also there. Like John, he was relegated to standing at the back of the cramped room.
“Here, it’s just before eight o’clock in the evening and the contractors are packing up for the day,” said the officer, letting the video from Löfbergs play on the screen. “That’s pretty much exactly two hours before Stella Bjelke arrived in her taxi.”
John saw men in helmets and work clothes loading tools and left-over construction materials into three trucks on the sidewalk. The vehicles obscured parts of the steps, but the entrance was fully visible. Time after time, the contractors went in and out of the door.
“Pay attention,” said Mona.
The steady stream of contractors continued. Out of the door, down the steps, over to the trucks, and back inside again.
“There,” she said, and the officer paused the video.
John looked at the figure who had appeared in shot from another direction carrying a toolbox. This person was wearing the same coat they’d seen leaving the building after Stella’s murder. The only difference was the contractor’s helmet on the figure’s head.
“Blow me down,” said Ruben.
The officer hit play again and they watched the person enter the building.
“The height matches,” said Mona, pointing to the gap between the helmet and the top of the door.
A couple of minutes later, one of the contractors locked up and the trucks drove away without the person in the coat having reappeared.
“You’ve got to hand it to them—it was smoothly done,” said the officer, who seemed a little impressed by this stratagem.
He dragged the cursor to later that evening when Stella Bjelke’s taxi arrived at Löfbergs. They watched her cross the street, go up the stairs and through the door.
“See that—the door’s unlocked again. The person in the coat must have unlocked it from inside,” said Mona, finally tossing the empty cup into the trash can.
“Which means she knew that Stella was coming. She’s an accomplice, not a witness,” said Ruben.
Mona shook her head.
“We can’t be sure of that. They . . .”
She emphasized the word a little more in what John guessed was an attempt to get Ruben to drop his absolute certainty about the gender of the person.
“. . . might still be no more than an innocent date who isn’t mixed up in this. In that case, all they did was open the door for what they assumed to be a potential partner.”
Ruben scratched his chin, not entirely without frustration if John was any judge of his body language.
“If they were going to engage in Black Tantra, surely they could have gone somewhere else?” he said. “They could have rented a garage or a lock‑up or just about anything if they wanted darkness. Why risk breaking into Löfbergs?”
“Perhaps that was part of the kick,” said Mona. “But you definitely have a point.”
John kept what he knew about the ID theft at Raw to himself. He wanted to know which way the evidence pointed first before he decided whether to share that information with his colleagues or not. Once again, he repeated the mantra from the night before to himself: under no circumstances can Alicia Bjelke be suspected of murder.
His cell buzzed and John pulled it out of his pocket. On the display it said Unknown number and he could guess where the call was from.
“I’ve got to take this,” he said, heading into the corridor.
“Am I speaking with Fredrik Adamsson?”
The man with the Stockholm accent didn’t sound quite as slow this time.
“Yes, that’s me,” said John, hurrying toward his office to speak privately.
“Sorry it took me a while, but I have got answers to your questions.”
“Okay, I’m listening,” said John as he shut the door.
“On November sixth last year, a login took place on the Raw service using a mobile bank ID application associated with Pernilla Cederholm.”
John wrote down the name and underlined it in his notebook. After the call to the fashion influencer, this was hardly surprising news. It was the other question that interested him more. The one about whose computer or phone had connected to Raw when Pernilla Cederholm had been tricked into using her bank ID app.
“The device that requested ID verification was a computer: an Acer Aspire TC-886. It only logged in using that ID once, which makes the chances that it’s fraud likelier.”
Once, John thought to himself. Surely that couldn’t be right? The fake profile must have been in contact with Stella Bjelke on several occasions before she’d agreed to meet. But then he remembered what Alicia Bjelke had told him. The mobile bank ID was only needed when registering an account and giving Raw consent to use all the data they needed to match you to your future partner. After that you could change to a regular password.
“Who owns the computer?” he said.
John could hear the man going through his notes. After a moment, he came back onto the line.
“I checked that, and according to the IP address, the network is associated with an address in Värmland—more specifically in Skattkärr outside of Karlstad.”
“And who lives there?”
“No idea,” said the man with a laugh. “Why don’t you do a bit of work too?”
John asked for the address and ended the call. His hands were trembling as he inserted the address into the population register search field on his computer. When he got a response, it wasn’t just his body that trembled—the whole room seemed to quake.
The person who had registered the fake account on the dating service was no stranger. John had spoken to her on the phone just a few days earlier.
It was Elin Falk—Birger Falk’s daughter.