Sara was really supposed to have started at nine, but she had been allowed take a half day in lieu to help Ebba with her move. Then Anna had called and Sara had picked up, which her friend had lauded her for – not without irony. Anna had asked her to come into work as quickly as possible because there had been a dramatic shootout with three dead and one hurt in Ekerö. Anna had sent her a map with a pin dropped on the location. Sara fetched her car from the car park on Slottsbacken. Martin had his big, bright yellow Lamborghini Urus, but Sara refused to share it with him – the shame of showing up in an inferiority complex on wheels would have finished her. Instead, she got behind the wheel of her nippy little Golf GTI and followed the directions out of the city centre towards the crime scene.
On the way, she realised that she felt a certain reluctance about going to work. She would have preferred to withdraw from it, to be together with her family or alone with her thoughts. But she was eager to make a good impression – more than anything else, she didn’t want her boss to regret approving her transfer. Now she got to work with her best friend, and quite honestly she had no idea how she would have managed otherwise. Family, Anna and solitude – those were the three things keeping her going.
She was struck by how rural the landscape became as soon as she had crossed the Nockebybron bridge, just a few minutes’ drive from the city centre. On the day that Stellan Broman had been murdered, Sara had gone to Brostugan, the café on Kärsön island, to gather her thoughts, but she had no memory of ever coming further this way than Drottningholm. After the palace, the road was lined with fields and meadows and woods.
But then the idyll was interrupted by a huge set of roadworks: the tunnelling project to build an underground motorway bypassing central Stockholm. Yet another pyramid built with the dynamite of the contemporary era; overgrown construction projects as monuments to the otherwise wholly anonymous bureaucrats of the age. A long tunnel, then several fields and a hillock covered in oak trees. After passing through central Ekerö, the road led up onto a ridge with Lake Mälaren far below. And a beautiful church. Inconceivably beautiful. How could people want to shoot each other dead here?
After passing the exit for Ekerö sommarstad and rounding a sharp bend, she spotted Anna standing on the verge halfway up a long straight section, waving. Sara pulled over and lowered her window.
‘I know,’ said Anna. ‘God, isn’t it beautiful?’
‘Isn’t it just?’ said Sara. ‘I had no idea.’
Anna jumped into her car and Sara drove behind her up a small slope and into the woods on a gravel track. First there were lots of slender, tall birch trees that must all have been planted at the same time, then an open section for power lines and a hand-painted sign that read ‘Unmetalled road, no HGVs’. Then the pine forest grew thicker and finally they reached a new open expanse with hunting towers visible at either end, a turning circle and a sign labelled ‘pothole’. Standing on the turning circle was a host of police cars and ambulances.
They got out of their cars and went over to the blue and white police tape and the forensics team in their overalls. On the far side of a wooded hillock, Sara glimpsed Mälaren through the trees, while to the right of her was a parked SUV. One of the few times a set of stockbroker’s wheels like this had been driven in proper terrain, she thought to herself.
Beyond the car, up the hill in the direction of the lake, were three bodies that were being photographed and examined by forensics. One of the bodies had been rolled up in several layers of black plastic that had been unwound by the police.
Sara had never been able to get used to the sight of dead bodies. So incomprehensible, so unnatural. Despite death actually being one of the most natural things in the world, there was something so alien about a dead body. A body was made to live – to work. And the thought that someone had intentionally put an end to a life was still so hard to grasp. Even now, when she herself had killed. That had been in extreme circumstances, and she knew that she had still not fully processed it. Perhaps she ought to talk to a psychologist? At any rate, this was a comprehensible case – an encounter between criminals. Probably drug-related.
‘The two not covered in plastic have a gunshot wound each in the centre of their foreheads,’ said Anna, putting an index finger to her own brow and nodding in a way that disclosed a certain admiration for the marksmanship.
‘Execution?’ said Sara.
‘Housewife,’ said Anna with a smile.
‘What?’
‘The two without plastic opened fire on three hunters who approached them on foot. One of the hunters was hit and is in hospital right now, one fled, and one shot back. Two shots. Bull’s eye.’
‘And it was a housewife who took the shots?’
‘Her first hunt,’ said Anna, pointing discreetly towards a police minibus where a middle-aged woman was sitting beside a female police officer. A little rotund, with a distinctive blunt cut fringe and purple-rimmed spectacles, khaki clothing and a cap with a bright yellow band around it.
‘Gunilla Larsson,’ Anna said. ‘She was out hunting with her husband’s group for the first time. Says she’s good on the range, but never thought she’d be able to shoot a person.’
‘Or two. Who are the dead guys?’
‘So far: muscular and tattooed. But no Swedish tattoos. Lots of crosses and Madonnas, and some football team, I think. The car has Polish plates, so I guess that’s where they’re from. We’ve sent the registration number and photos of them to Interpol and the Polish police. And we’re checking cameras at road tolls to see whether we can find them. But the really awful bit is the guy in the plastic. Young lad who’s really been worked over, must be at least fifty cuts and stab wounds. And – wait for it – his fingers have been cut off.’
‘Charming.’
‘There’s still a gold chain around his neck and a mobile in his pocket, so they weren’t after money.’
‘Were they going to dump him in the lake?’
‘We think so. Body wrapped in plastic, and they had chains and other stuff in the car to weigh it down. And one of them had a key to a boat that’s down by the shore.’
‘They’ve got a boat tied up? Maybe they’ve done this before.’
‘Shit – thank goodness you said that. We would never have thought of that ourselves. Lucky for us you came to Västerort, otherwise we’d have been scratching our heads.’
It took Sara a moment to recognise the irony.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean . . . Well.’
Anna grinned at her.
‘Did it go OK?’
Chief Inspector Axel Bielke, neatly turned out as ever in a well-fitted suit and a tie with a Windsor knot, as well as shiny black shoes, was suddenly beside them. His grey-flecked hair was cut short in a military style, and his pale blue eyes were surveying Sara intensely. It was a penetrating gaze – Sara had always thought so. But she liked it. It made her feel seen. Scrutinised, but above all seen. Bielke had a strong presence. The only thing that disrupted the overall positive impression was the signet ring on his little finger. She knew it to be a family ring, but it still bothered her. Or perhaps that was why. What family did she have to brag about? A horrible rapist for a father, and a mother who seemed to think she did most stuff wrong. For a brief moment, her thoughts turned to Agneta, Stellan’s wife and a deadly double agent. On so many occasions, Sara had dreamed that she and Stellan were her real parents during the summers she had spent in their luxurious home in Bromma. And the dream had actually turned out to be half true. Sometimes the worst thing that could happen was to get what you wished for, Sara thought to herself.
‘What?’ she said, pushing these thoughts aside as Bielke looked at her encouragingly.
‘The move.’
‘Oh, yes. She’s finally out. We now have a spare room. Need somewhere to stay? I can offer you a good price.’
There was no laugh from Bielke. Not even a smile. He wasn’t the sort to engage in small talk – instead he left it to ring out unanswered and said what was on his own mind. When other people did that, it was all too easy to feel stupid, bleating and frivolous, but with Bielke it was somehow all right. It felt more like he was focusing on what actually mattered.
Bielke was basically the direct opposite of Sara: controlled, thoughtful, faultless. And he was a good boss. Not at all like Sara’s last boss, Lindblad, who had more or less managed to get her fired. Sara was grateful that Bielke had approved her application for a transfer to Västerort, despite her being on the receiving end of a disciplinary action for getting her headstrong self mixed up in the murder of Stellan Broman. If she hadn’t managed to stop Abu Rasil, she would probably have been dismissed. Perhaps the move to Västerort was a way of getting back to her roots, given everything she had found out about her own childhood. She had grown up in the west of Stockholm – in Bromma and then Vällingby. Or perhaps it was working together with her best friend from the police academy, Anna, that had been the lure. Her BCFF, as they usually put it. Best Cop Friends Forever.
‘Might it have anything to do with the motorbike club that’s based that way?’ said Sara, with a gesture.
‘None of them look much like bikers,’ said Anna. ‘But the guy in the plastic wrap apparently had gang tattoos of some kind.’
‘The two meatheads don’t look like gangsters.’
‘They don’t look like maths teachers either. Let’s guess a drug lord turf war? Competing criminals, anyway.’
‘Do you think the woman who shot them is in any danger? That anyone will want revenge?’
‘She’s going to receive police protection,’ Bielke said.
‘For how long?’
‘As long as we can.’
Sara knew that wasn’t very long. They would just have to hope that the groups the two heavies belonged to wanted to maintain a low profile.
‘We were talking about the fact that they seem to have done this before,’ said Sara, turning to Bielke. ‘Dumping bodies, I mean. Given that they had a boat tied up.’
‘I’ve requested divers. But it’s a big lake to search.’
Sara stared across Lake Mälaren beyond the hillock. She wondered what they would find beneath that innocent, mirror-smooth surface.