The address in Skattkärr was apparently on one of the shortest streets in the whole of Karlstad municipality. There were just a handful of houses and judging by the slushy street, the council wasn’t doing a good job of snow clearance here. The only plowing taking place was that performed by the residents’ own cars.
John parked and went over how to start his conversation with Elin Falk. The pretext for his visit was that he wanted to know more about her father’s drug dealing. He was going to let the daughter talk for a while and then—when the time was right—he would confront her with what he knew about the ID theft.
That was as far as his plan went. What he’d do if she confessed to being involved in the murder of Stella Bjelke, and in addition to that if she knew when and how her father died, was something he honestly had no idea about.
John got out of the car and tried to walk without ruining his Loake shoes. He stopped at the homemade gate and looked up toward the dark windows. The house seemed to be empty. Then he spotted the fresh foot-prints in the snow leading to the front door. Perhaps someone was at home after all.
John raised the latch, walked up to the porch, and rang the doorbell. When no one opened it, he pulled on his black leather gloves and tried the handle. The door was locked. When he turned around to retrace his steps, he noticed that the footprints in the snow continued along the façade and around the corner of the house. It looked like there were two sets of prints.
John gave up any hope of salvaging his shoes and trudged through the snow. The tracks led around the house to a wooden deck at the rear and a terrace door with a cat flap at the bottom. He climbed the steps to it and tried the handle. It didn’t budge an inch.
He put his hand into his coat pocket where his cell phone was and contemplated calling Elin Falk. He really did need to get hold of her. At the same time, it would ruin the element of surprise. If she got wind of the fact that the cops were after her, she might go to ground. Or even worse: she might decide to head to the police station and confess to everything.
John looked at the door handle again. It was a basic lock—the kind his older colleagues on the NYPD had called NKNs.
No Key Needed.
The idea of looking around inside was tempting. A home always disclosed a lot about the person who lived in it. John went back to the car and retrieved what he needed from the glove compartment: a paperclip holding together the bundle of papers from the dealership that had sold him the Chrysler in the fall.
Once back at the terrace door, he straightened the paperclip and inserted the piece of metal into the lock. Shortly afterward, it clicked and he was able to open the door.
Elin Falk’s living room looked like it was taken from an interior design catalog for housewives in Florida. The decorative cushions adorning the white leather sofa had been carefully chosen and the deliberately aged table bore a rusty metal bucket containing red roses.
John continued his tour of the house, and the feeling that he was in a home that had been prepared for sale by a realtor only intensified. The house might be ramshackle on the outside, but it was brand-new on the inside. The chairs and table in the kitchen appeared to be unused, and the walls bore framed posters offering various words of wisdom in ornate typography.
In the bedroom, John stopped by a white-painted wooden bureau. He pulled out one of the drawers and found a photo album that he couldn’t stop himself from opening. On the first page there was a picture of a bridal couple taken in a studio. A younger and decidedly more handsome version of Birger Falk was smiling at the camera. His hair was combed back and his sideburns were well-groomed. The woman he was holding hands with was strikingly beautiful and had white flowers in her hair.
John read the caption under the photo: Anette and me, August 3rd, 1983.
He leafed on and traced the couple’s journey through time. Drinks with umbrellas on a Spanish beach. Dinner with friends on New Year’s Eve. Out on the ski trail in big coats with backpacks. Fragments of a life that appeared rich and meaningful to any observer.
He lingered on a photo of the wife clutching a newborn child in her arms beneath an apple tree in bloom. John looked through the window and realized it had been taken in the garden outside.
On the pages that followed, the daughter was in almost every picture. On Santa’s lap. On a bicycle in front of the house. With her friends around a fire in the woods. On the steps of the university main building.
Then it stopped.
It was as if life, or at least the desire to document it, had stopped.
John thumbed past more empty pages until he found the next photo. A woman at a table. Two coffee cups and a cake visible, with the caption: Elin’s 25th—happy birthday!
John had to look twice to convince himself that it really was the daughter. All that remained of the beautiful young Elin Falk was the eyes. He remembered what the court judgment had said. That the accused had been seriously injured in the accident. Presumably she had undergone extensive surgery that had materially altered her appearance.
Birger Falk hadn’t written a year under the photo. John counted in his head and concluded it must have been taken just before his first conviction for possession.
The final photo in the album showed Birger and Elin together on a bench outside a sheltered housing facility. His arm around her shoulders; a sad smile on his lips.
Father and daughter.
But no mother.
Whether the mother who had been cradling her child beneath the apple tree had died before or after the accident, John did not know.
He put the album back in the drawer and went into the hallway. The daylight was dying away and he turned on the flashlight on his cell phone to avoid tripping on the stairs.
When he reached the upstairs landing, the house changed form again. Tatty, dark green textured wallpaper covered the walls, while the floor was laid with carpet that had come loose from its underlay and started to curl up in the corners.
The door closest to the top of the stairs was ajar and John gently nudged it with his foot. The room was stuffed with broken furniture from floor to ceiling. He continued along the landing and tried the next room. It was locked, which immediately increased his interest in what might be inside.
John pulled out the paperclip again and crouched by the keyhole. The resistance was greater than it had been on the door downstairs, but he eventually succeeded in conquering the lock. The door swung open, revealing a space the size of a large closet. It had no windows and there was a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. He fumbled for the light switch.
The room was furnished as an office with a desk and computer. But it wasn’t the furnishings that caught John’s immediate interest. It was the walls. They were covered in photographs stuck to the untreated plywood with thumbtacks. In each one of them there were two women in their twenties visible. The girl with the beautiful smile he recognized from the photo album in the bedroom: Elin Falk before the car crash. The other was a young Stella Bjelke. In several of the pictures they were kissing, closely entwined on a sofa or among friends at a party.
In one corner of the cramped room there was a video camera on a tripod. John went over to the recording equipment and noted that like all the other technology in the space it was brand-new and looked expensive.
All it took was him prodding it to wake up the camera. The extended screen lit up and showed a menu with options. John removed his gloves and tapped on Open last project.
A small video player in miniature appeared, with the date and time of the recording below. It was five days old. It had been recorded at 21:49 on the same evening that Stella Bjelke had lost her life.
John hit play and saw the video enter full screen mode as it began.
The first seconds comprised nothing but a grainy, flickering green blur. The recording had been made with the camera in night vision mode, and the lens needed time to find a suitable point of focus. Before long, the contours of a windowless room with two chairs facing each other emerged. Along the walls was construction material, and in the background he glimpsed a cement mixer.
It was the Löfbergs coffee roastery.
Less than a week ago, John had been in the same room examining Stella Bjelke’s dead body on the floor.
A figure in a padded coat appeared in the bottom of shot. It was without doubt the person who had snuck into the roastery in disguise as a contractor and who had left the murder scene later that night. The woman he now knew to be Elin Falk.
John saw her take a seat on the chair with its back to camera. For a long time, she sat immobile with her hands resting on her lap. It was as if she were meditating or otherwise deep in her own thoughts.
When the time code showed the recording had been going for almost ten minutes, there was the sound of a door opening and closing. Elin Falk quickly stood up and turned her head toward the camera. John saw that she was wearing a pair of thick glasses that presumably made it possible to see in the dark.
“In here,” she shouted with contrived shrillness.
“God, I can’t see a thing.”
It was the other woman speaking. Elin Falk disappeared out of shot, but reappeared a few seconds later. She was in the company of Stella Bjelke.
John felt the unease growing inside him. The coat, the dress, and the high heels matched the photos from the crime scene. Seeing her alive and filled with expectation was a surreal experience. He found himself wanting to shout at her to run.
“Christ, this is crazy, Pernilla,” Stella giggled as she was led to her chair.
John nodded quietly to himself. The name matched. Elin Falk had taken over Pernilla Cederholm’s identity on the dating site. It was Pernilla that Stella thought she was speaking to in the dark.
“Sit down here.”
The high voice again. Elin Falk was doing a good job of imitating the way that the fashion influencer spoke.
The women sat opposite each other in silence for a bit. Raw’s charismatic founder sat with one leg crossed over the other. Elin was just as immobile as she’d been before, with her hands on her thighs.
“I have to admit I was doubtful about this at first,” Stella said, tossing her blonde hair in the dark. “But at the same time, it’s so goddamn hot. I was going to try out Black Tantra a few years ago, but that was with a man. Maybe that’s why I wimped out.”
“You’re safe with me.”
“I know. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have come here. It feels as if I already know you, even though we’ve never met.”
“I know just what you mean.”
Stella laughed.
“I was shaking in the taxi coming here,” she said, sitting on her hands. “Jeez, I’m still shaking.”
“Good shaking or bad shaking?”
“Good. Very good.”
“Are you turned on?”
Stella left a long pause before she replied.
“Yes.”
Despite the small size of the screen, John was able to sense the immediate charge between them.
“Say that you want me,” said Elin.
“I want you.”
Stella gasped and began to gently caress herself through her dress.
Elin slowly rose from her chair.
“I love you,” she said.
“What?”
“I love you. Say that you love me too.”
The voice was deeper now, and Elin no longer seemed bothered about disguising it. She got closer and stopped just a few inches from Stella. She stroked Stella’s cheek with one hand while rummaging in the pocket of her coat with the other.
“Finally, Stella . . . finally,” she said.
A moment later, Elin made a lunge with her arm. Stella screamed so loudly that John recoiled from the camera. He realized it must be the nitric acid burning her skin.
Elin moved toward the edge of shot and then the contrast changed. She must have turned on the construction lights in the room because the screen went completely white before it adjusted to the new lighting.
Stella was now in the fetal position on the cement floor. She had her hands to her face and was writhing in pain. Elin removed her night vision glasses and crouched beside her.
“There, there, it’ll pass,” she said comfortingly. “It’ll be better soon.”
After a while, the shrieks became a protracted whimpering. Stella was breathing irregularly and her body was jerking with convulsions.
“Do you understand who I am now?” said Elin. Her voice was gentle and affectionate, as if talking to a child. “Oh, Stella, how I’ve longed for this day. There have been times when I doubted it would ever come. But I’ve never stopped believing in us. We belong together. That’s just how it’s meant to be.”
Stella reached out with her hands toward the woman leaning over her.
“Who . . . ?” she whimpered.
“Oh, Stella, it’s me. Elin. Elin Falk.”
John saw the panic written across her acid-burned face. Stella tried to get up from the floor but was held down on the cement by the same hand that had just caressed her cheek.
“Take it easy,” Elin shushed her. “I’m not mad at you. Not at all. The opposite, actually. I get why you left me. I could barely look at myself in the mirror after the accident. My appearance was an obstacle to us. But now it’s going to be different.”
“Let me out of here.”
Stella’s voice was powerless and she was gasping for air with each word that crossed her lips.
“Of course. I’m going to let you go,” said Elin. “I just need to be sure that you understand why I was forced to do this. The liquid on your face is nitric acid. It’s corrosive and will destroy the cell tissue in your skin. The wound will heal in a few months, but your appearance will be altered forever.”
Elin sounded elated and sympathetic all at once. She got up from the floor and sat down on one of the chairs.
“Of course, it takes time to accept it, and I’m not so dumb that I don’t get how it must feel for you right now. But one day, you’ll realize I did this for us. So that we can be together again.”
Her voice choked and she turned away to wipe her tears. Stella took her chance and began to crawl on all fours toward the wall. John saw her feeling her way with her hands across the floor. At the same time, she turned her head to hear where in the room Elin Falk was. When she reached the cement mixer, she pulled herself to a standing position and continued to fumble for the door.
“Sorry I’m crying,” Elin sobbed. “But it moves me so much when I think about all we’ve been through together. Even if you never visited me in the hospital or prison, you’ve always been by my side.”
She stopped short when she realized that Stella was heading for the exit.
“Where are you going?” she said, hurrying to the doorway to block it.
“Let me out!”
Only now did John spot that Stella had a long, slender object in her hand that she had raised into the air. The chisel, he thought to himself. She must have found it on the floor.
“You can’t leave now,” said Elin. “We need to talk about how . . .”
“Get out of the way, you crazy cunt!”
Stella brandished the chisel and Elin had to step to one side to avoid being hit.
“What are you playing at? Quit it.”
“Give me my phone! It’s in my coat pocket.”
“Please, Stella . . .”
“Give it to me or I’ll kill you.”
“You’ve got to realize how much I’ve been through for our sake. For us to finally be together again.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” Stella yelled.
She lunged with the chisel again, missing badly.
“You don’t know what you’re saying, Stella. You’re not yourself. But it’ll pass. Everything will be fine. I promise. Do you remember what you said to me at that party?”
“What bloody party?”
“At the manor. Before the crash. Earlier that night you said: ‘We’re an unbeatable couple.’ Those were your exact words. And everyone heard it. Do you remember?”
“No, I do not! All I remember is being embarrassed by you.”
“What? Why?”
Elin sounded uncertain, as if she was allowing herself to doubt Stella’s feelings for her for the first time.
“You face-planted to the goddamn floor in there and we had to drag you out to the car. It was humiliating.”
“Stop it. Don’t say that. You love me.”
John heard Elin’s voice struggling against tears. Stella did too, and it gave her renewed strength.
“My cell phone! Bring it to me and get out of the way so I can leave.”
Elin stood still in the doorway with her arms at her sides. If John hadn’t known that she was going to kill Stella, he would have thought she was going to let the woman with the acid burns leave.
“What do you mean I face-planted?” said Elin.
“What?”
“You said I face-planted and you had to drag me to the car.”
John saw Stella recoil, as if she regretted what she’d just said.
“You were just tired and drunk. But when we got outside you perked up and wanted to drive. We were idiots for not stopping you.”
Elin left her position by the door and staggered into the middle of the room.
“Hello? Are you there?” Stella said, her voice trembling.
When there was no answer, she stabbed at the air with the chisel at random again. On the screen, John saw Elin creep closer, catch her arm in midair, and wrench the tool from her hand.
“It wasn’t me who was driving, was it?” she said.
“Stop it. Just stop it,” Stella groaned.
Elin grabbed her blonde hair. She pulled Stella’s head backward and pressed the metal blade to her throat.
“Tell me! Who was driving?”
John didn’t need to hear the reply to realize that what he had read in the court papers was not true.
“Alicia,” Stella stammered.
“And then you blamed me,” said Elin. “Is that how it went down?!”
She pressed the chisel even harder into the other woman’s throat until Stella began to retch and wave her hands in panic.
“It was Alicia’s idea,” she sobbed. “She didn’t want to get arrested so she suggested we move you to the driver’s seat.”
“But why didn’t you say anything? The woman who got hit died, and I went to prison.”
John felt the woman’s anger through the screen. It was there in her voice, in her eyes, and in her hand clasping the tool.
“You lied at the trial and everyone believed you—including me!”
When Stella gurgled in reply, Elin eased the pressure on her throat.
“Well, say something! How could you do that to me?”
“Alicia,” Stella hissed. “I didn’t want to, but Alicia forced me.”
Elin’s arm shook as she raised the chisel toward the roof.
“You’re lying,” she shouted, and cut Stella’s throat.
The metal blade was blunt and it took several attempts for the sinews and cartilage protecting the carotid artery to collapse and the first cascade of blood to be visible onscreen. John glanced away and when he looked back, he saw Elin straddling Stella on the floor. He counted eleven stabs with the tool before Elin stopped and collapsed over the lifeless body.
Elin just lay there like that for a long time, absolutely still, as if in a final embrace.
After a while, her upper body began to shake, first gently and then increasingly violently. When she got up to switch off the camera, her face was so close that it filled the screen. Her eyes were red from crying and her cheeks were wet with tears and blood.
John sat at the desk breathing heavily. Now he knew what had happened when Elin Falk had murdered Stella Bjelke at the coffee roastery. However, it remained unclear what role her father had played, and it was also unclear whether the daughter knew when he had died.
The camera had been switched off exactly twelve minutes before Birger Falk arrived at Löfbergs in his Volvo, presuming that the time code on the CCTV camera outside the building matched that in the video he’d just watched.
John wondered what to do next. The most certain way of finding Elin Falk was probably to wait in his car in the street. Sooner or later, she had to come home. If it took time and Mona wondered where he’d gone, then he’d have to come up with an excuse later.
He rolled the chair closer to the desk. His eye was caught by a stack of papers to the right of the mouse. Most of them were receipts from online stores. John was taken aback by the sums Elin Falk had spent. Tens of thousands of kronor on furniture and interior design—all on credit. The smart lower story of the house and its tragic meaning began to make sense. She had been renovating the house for a future together with Stella Bjelke.
He put down the unpaid bills and scrutinized a recent Airbnb booking confirmation. At first, he assumed it related to a vacation in Sweden or abroad. But when he spotted that the address was in Karlstad and that the booking was for a whole month, he was confused.
Why was Elin Falk renting an apartment in her own town? Might she be there right now?
John didn’t know, but it would be easy enough to find out. He decided to change his plan. According to his cell phone, the address was in the Norrstrand neighborhood, and it would only take him ten minutes to drive there.