The Final Word (16 page)

Father had been a poor example of
Homo sapiens
, angry and bent-backed. Mother’s body was weak and she was a little soft in the head. He had thought about them a lot lately, now that he was on his own, but in truth he barely remembered them. Their faces had been erased over the years, dissolved, their voices faint and distant, but he remembered their frequencies, the vibrations of their souls. He remembered how they sounded inside him.

The landscape opened up around him. The water of the lake shimmered. Between the trees, he could make out the house. The land around it hadn’t been looked after with the same care as the forest, and had been allowed to fall into disuse, which was a shame, from a cultural point of view.

He was almost there now, in so many ways.

It would be nice to have everything finished.

Annika looked up at the building, Købmagergade 62. A publishing company was based on the top floor, an advertising agency at ground level, and the IT business where Robin Bertelsson worked was in the middle.

The entry-phone had three buttons. She pressed the one marked DOOMSDAY.

A woman answered, and Annika took a deep breath. ‘I’m looking for Robin Bertelsson,’ she said.

The woman’s reply was so fast and incomprehensible that she was baffled. Did Annika have an . . . something? She wondered what the last word might be in Swedish. It had to have been ‘appointment’, surely. ‘Er, no, I don’t have an appointment . . .’

‘You’re welcome to make a booking via our website.’

The telephone clicked. She took a step back.

Two young women came out of the door. She moved a few steps back and studied the window of a branch of H&M. There was probably no point in trying the entry-phone again: that would only make the people in the security firm suspicious.

She looked around. Copenhagen felt completely unlike Stockholm. The buildings were lower, more uniform, old and attractive. The cityscape felt genuine, somehow, although she couldn’t put her finger on why that was. Maybe it was just the absence of multi-storey car parks and ugly new buildings.

The young women went off in the other direction, laughing and chatting, Annika didn’t understand a word they were saying. She felt stupid: she had lived her whole
life under the delusion that Danish and Swedish were practically the same language. She had spent hardly any time in Denmark. Kalle had wanted to go to Legoland for years, but Thomas had thought he was setting his ambitions way too low. If you were going to go to an amusement park, it ought to be Disneyland Paris, in his opinion, but just as Annika was about to book the trip he’d decided it was too expensive, and they’d ended up staying with her parents-in-law out in the archipelago. Again.

She walked a short distance until she reached a large square, then turned and walked back. The heat had made the tarmac soft under her shoes, but she still felt frozen. Her throat was sore and her hands were shaking. Her panic attack in the psychologist’s armchair was lingering, like a damp fog.

Her bag weighed heavily on her shoulder and she dropped it on to the pavement. If Robin Bertelsson was at work today, he would have to come out of the building sooner or later. Her plane back to Stockholm didn’t leave until 18.05, so she had time to wait.

She brushed the hair from her face and concentrated on number 62.

A group of four middle-aged men, dressed in almost identical jackets, emerged from the door and headed towards her, giving her a chance to study them carefully. None of them was him. One gave her an encouraging wink. She turned away.

A man and a woman passed her, stopped at the
entrance to number 62 and tapped in the entry-code. He looked just about rumpled enough for her to guess that he worked in the advertising agency.

She looked around. There was a café on the other side of the street. Maybe she should get a cappuccino, but then she’d need a pee and might miss Robin Bertelsson.

She got her mobile out, no messages.

The door of number 62 opened and Annika held her mobile in front of her as she watched the doorway from the corner of her eye. A blond man in his mid-thirties, in a long-sleeved T-shirt and camouflage trousers, rushed out and half ran across the pavement. Was he Bertelsson?

The man turned towards the square, checked quickly for traffic, then crossed the street. Annika’s mouth opened. It was him – it must be. She took a few steps after the man, saw him go into the café, say something to the barista, and they both laughed. The Danes, the happiest people in the world, and among the highest consumers of antidepressants.

She turned her back on the café and stared into the window of H&M. In the reflection, she saw the man who had to be Robin Bertelsson step out on to the pavement with a large paper cup in his hand. He waited until a taxi had passed, then set off back towards number 62.

Annika raised her mobile and filmed him as he ran across the street, then walked quickly towards the doorway.

The man was about to tap in the door-code when
Annika caught up with him. ‘Robin?’ she asked, making her voice sound surprised and happy.

He looked at her in surprise.

Yes, it was him. No question. She gave him a broad smile. ‘God, Robin, it is you!’ She threw herself forward and wrapped her arms round his neck, pressing her body against his. The man took half a pace back, clearly horrified, and held out his arm to protect his coffee.

‘Wow!’ Annika said. ‘What are you doing here?’

A mass of thoughts were flying round in the man’s eyes, and he tried to smile, but without quite succeeding.

‘Don’t you recognize me?’ Annika asked, surprised but not upset.

She held her arms out. ‘I’m Annika! From the club! On Hantverkargatan! God, it’s so long ago – it must be fifteen years! I was on the roulette table, used to wear a sequined bikini . . .’ She thrust out her breasts and pretended to look seductive.

A tentative light flickered in the man’s eyes. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘I was getting worried.’

Annika laughed loudly. Robin Bertelsson still had no idea who she was. ‘Oh, sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to scare the life out of you. How are you?’

He gave her a crooked smile and shrugged uncomfortably. ‘I live here now,’ he said. ‘You know, wife and kids . . .’

A clear message: don’t expect anything.

‘It’s great to see you again!’ Annika said. ‘Are you still in touch with any of the others?’

He took a step back. ‘Others?’

‘From the club. By the way, did you hear about Ludde?’ She pulled a sad face and he looked confused.

‘About . . . what?’

‘Did you go to the funeral?’

He brushed his hair back. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘No, I didn’t. I . . .’

‘So tragic,’ Annika said, with a sniff. ‘Bastard cancer.’

He nodded hesitantly. Three women were heading towards the door, and Robin Bertelsson grasped the handle as if he were about to go inside, but Annika stepped in the way. ‘Have you heard anything from Joachim lately?’ she asked.

Robin Bertelsson looked at her warily. ‘No, it’s been a while.’

Annika sighed. ‘The last I heard, he was in Croatia,’ she said, ‘working as an estate agent. Can you imagine? It was just after that young girl withdrew her complaint.’

‘Well, I’d better be—’ Robin Bertelsson said.

‘I think about it sometimes,’ Annika said quietly, moving a step closer to him. ‘The way everyone lied to protect him from the police.’

Robin Bertelsson stiffened.

Annika smiled and shrugged. ‘That was a bit of a problem, back at the start, of course,’ she said. ‘Protecting a criminal, that’s the name of the offence, but it passed the statute of limitations a long time ago. Today everyone’s free to say what really happened that night. There’s no risk any more.’ She moved even closer to him.
‘Haven’t you ever thought about the fact that Josefin never got any justice, that Joachim got away with murder, and that it’s the fault of the witnesses, your fault, for giving him an alibi?’

The man’s face drained of colour. He was clutching the cup hard. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘What are you doing here?’

She waved vaguely towards the entry-phone, where the logo of the publishing company shone out from a brass sign. ‘I’m going to write about it,’ she said. ‘About Josefin and everything that happened that night.’

Robin Bertelsson backed away from her. ‘You can’t drag me into this.’

‘You must have thought about it,’ Annika said. ‘You could give her justice. If you contact the police in Stockholm, or the prosecutor, Sanna Andersson, and tell them what really happened . . .’

Robin Bertelsson turned on his heel and stalked off along the pavement.

Annika hoisted her bag on to her shoulder and ran after him. ‘Robin,’ she said loudly. ‘Think about it. You can—’ She collided with a large woman who swore at her angrily, but she hurried on and grabbed hold of his sleeve. ‘Robin, wait!’

He stopped abruptly, spun round, his lips pressed together in a thin line. He tore the lid off the cup of coffee and threw the contents at her. She took a step back but wasn’t quick enough, and the coffee hit her chest and left arm. She lost her breath – it was still very hot. She
opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out, as she felt the coffee run down her fingers and drip on to the pavement.

Robin Bertelsson headed off into the crowd. For a while she saw his head bobbing between other people’s, but then he was gone.

Nina stepped out on to the red-painted landing. The lift doors closed behind her with a sigh. Her workplace had its own unique sounds and smells; the sealed building murmured and echoed. Above her was Kronoberg Prison, in all its impenetrable inhumanity; buried in the ground below were the culverts and the large high-security courtroom, used when the smaller one up near the roof wasn’t big enough; between the two sat all the police officers and detectives. Together they formed an integrated whole, an organism that ground criminal acts of violence down to a manageable structure of process and formality, all of it archived in ring-binders.

She held her pass card up to the magnetic reader and tapped in the code. The lock clicked and the glass doors of the National Crime Unit slid open. On her way to her office she fished her mobile out of her jacket pocket and dialled the duty officer at Regional Crime, but got no answer. She held her breath as she peered into her office, then noted with immense relief that Jesper Wou still hadn’t returned from his trip abroad. She breathed out, took off her jacket and hung it on the back of her chair. Her T-shirt was wet with sweat across the back.

She sat down at her desk, drank some mineral water, and thought.

She began by conducting a basic search on her computer, and logged into the national identity and address database. She searched for anyone with the surname Berglund who was born on 28 May fifty-five years ago.

One result: Ivar Oskar Berglund, born in the Älvsbyn council district, currently registered as living in Täby.

No Arne.

She clenched her jaw, then filled her lungs with air.

It had to be true. She just needed to find a different way to check. An historical search, same criteria . . .

The circle on the screen turned.
No result.

She logged out of the database, and let her fingers rest on the keyboard as she thought some more.

Her unit had access to a large number of different databases, both Swedish and international (all of them not necessarily legal), but she shouldn’t need any of the confidential ones here. Instead she jotted Arne Berglund’s details on a sheet of paper, then took it, with a printout of Ivar Berglund’s record and her pass card, and headed out into the corridor. She went down one floor to the blue landing and the communications centre on the seventh floor. The room was gloomy, lit only by the flicker of computer screens and the indirect daylight from the next room. A number of officers, some in plain clothes, two in uniform, were concentrating hard at their terminals.

‘Hello, Nina. Do you need help with something?’
asked a man in plain clothes with a moustache. She couldn’t remember his name.

She smiled and handed over the sheet of paper with Arne Berglund’s name and place of birth. ‘Is there a way of finding this individual in the registers?’ she asked. ‘He’s fallen out of the main population database. He emigrated in the late eighties or early nineties, and died about twenty years ago.’

Moustache Man took the sheet of paper and sat down at a terminal. Nina scanned the room in the hope of finding something with the guy’s name on it, but there was nothing. She held her breath as he logged in and conducted the search, as his computer whirred and flashed.

‘Are you sure about the date of birth?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said.

‘But he’s dead, you say? You know that for certain?’

‘He died in a traffic accident in Alpujarras twenty years ago.’

‘Alpu-what?’

‘The mountains south of Granada, in Andalucía, the southernmost part of Spain.’

She waited quietly while he logged out of one system and into another. The page loaded.

‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s no Arne Berglund with those details here.’

‘Can you try Ivar Berglund, same birth details, and see if he has any family listed?’

The computer whirred.

‘Yes, here we go. Parents Lars Tore Berglund and Lilly Amy Berglund, died 1975, province twenty-five, council district sixty, parish two.’

The province of Norrbotten, and the council district and parish of Älvsbyn.

‘Is there anything about siblings?’

Moustache Man shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’d have to check the National Archive.’

Church records, in other words.

Moustache Man handed the details back to her. As she took them, he didn’t let go of them straight away. ‘Anything else I can do for you?’

The corners of her mouth tensed. ‘Thanks very much,’ she said, snatched the sheets of paper and went back the way she had come.

The province of Norrbotten was covered by the National Archive office in Härnösand. She looked up the number on the internet, called, asked to be put through to their research office, and found herself in a queue. It didn’t take long to get through: people had better things to do on a hot day in June than genealogical research. She introduced herself with her name and title, and explained that she was after the birth details of an Arne Berglund, deceased. They would be in either the register of births and christenings or the book of deaths and funerals covering province 25, council district 60, parish 02.