Without a Trace (10 page)

She leafed through the file and stopped when she reached the section about Chinese Triad gangs. Some passages had been underlined, and there was some illegible scribbling in the margins, things Jesper Wou had found worth following up. Maybe this was what he was working on at the moment. Perhaps he was in China. Stationed there for a while?

She was beginning to find the room cramped, even without him on the other side of the desk.

‘Welcome to National Crime.’

Nina jumped and quickly closed Jesper Wou’s file. A woman with big brown hair and a broad smile was standing in the doorway. Nina got to her feet and went over to introduce herself. The woman’s name was Maria Johansson, she was an operational analyst, and had been working on PLAYA for the past three years – she said it was driving her mad. Nina made an effort to smile naturally.

Once Maria had gone she put the report back in Wou’s bookcase. Then she slumped in front of her computer. Was she going to end up sitting there until she, too, went mad?

She had been on leave of absence from the Södermalm Police for the past four years. The plan was that she should return to her post as an inspector in the Katarina district when she had completed her studies, but she had conveniently managed to suppress that. When a woman from HR had called in February to discuss what date she would return to duty, Nina had been caught off-guard. The thought of sitting in a patrol car made her feel physically sick.

She had handed in her notice the following day, then applied for and got a job with an international security company, a good job with a decent salary, in their unit for crime prevention and the investigation of internal crime. Their offices were ultra-modern, glass, steel and black granite, and she had shivered every time she walked in. When the HR woman had called again to ask if she would be interested in working at National Crime, she had said yes without hesitation. The bosses of the security company were angry, not that she was bothered by that. But she had given a lot of thought to her own decisions: how considered had they been?

She woke her computer again.

Why had Lerberg been tortured? Because of something he knew? Why not shoot him?

She looked through an outline of torture during the Inquisition, then under Pol Pot and Pinochet, and eventually came to the United Nations’ definition of torture: ‘Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed …’

Punishment, information, confession.

Three motives for the use of torture rather than ordinary violent brutality. On the victim or ‘a third person’. Possibly the cruellest form of torture: tormenting a man’s wife or child to get him to talk, confess and be punished.

Outside, it had started to rain again.

As a source of information, torture was hopeless. People who were seriously motivated held out the longest but the innocent went to pieces almost immediately and would say anything to avoid further pain.

Why had the perpetrators carried on for so long? Because Lerberg was motivated and held out or because he genuinely didn’t know what they were trying to find out?

And where was Nora?

*

He had never been to Orminge shopping centre before. That was hardly a disadvantage – quite the contrary, in fact. Every suburban shopping centre in Sweden was constructed according to the same principles, and he regarded the idiosyncrasies of this particular example as an interesting challenge.

There was a footbridge above the entire car-park, an offset suspension bridge, the cables of which didn’t hang vertically but stretched out from the pylons towards the ground. Most peculiar! He stopped to study the construction for a while, trying to discern its origins and the reason for its use there. Then he strode quickly onto it, taking pleasure from being in the here and now.

The shop signs screamed at him. They were large and garish, which told him that the customer profile wasn’t the most sophisticated in Sweden. The possibilities on offer included food and makeup, dentists and hairdressers, chemists, florists and gymnasiums. People could live their entire lives in Orminge shopping centre without ever going short of anything vital.

He could hear a rumble in the distance, presumably from the motorway into Stockholm, or perhaps from some air-conditioning unit. He couldn’t tell the difference between such sounds any more – his hearing had suffered too many traumas over the years. He couldn’t see any benches, or any representatives from the shadier side of society, which prompted him to leave the footbridge.

He walked inside the temple of shopping. Food, makeup and hair-care on the ground floor, a beautiful glass dome above. He took the escalator to the next floor. There he found pale-wood benches, occupied only by a young mother, her pushchair and mobile phone. She pretended not to see him. He was unfamiliar and uninteresting, the sort of person young mothers avoided.

The man looked dutifully around the shops, his gaze passing over shoes and watches, vitamins and fried food. On the way down a different escalator he read: ‘So much to experience! Two floors full of shopping and personal service.’ He nodded. Experiencing things was important. And he always went for personal service, if he had a choice.

He stopped for a moment, focused on his breathing, his anchor to the here and now.

But, naturally, he wasn’t actually there.

At that moment he, or rather his mirror-image, was evaluating a forestry project up in Storuman, where rather too many young trees had been stripped out when the area was cleared. There were four witnesses who could attest to his presence, as well as a debit card receipt for coffee, mineral water and five freshly baked Danish pastries.

He stopped outside the Orminge Grill for a few seconds, momentarily at something of a loss. The smell of food turned his stomach. He hurried up the concrete steps leading to the local parish hall of the Swedish Church, without any great expectation of finding what he was looking for, but he rarely left any stone unturned.

Lo and behold, the parish hall was right next door to the state-run alcohol store, and on the benches provided by the faithful, out in the Lord’s lovely fresh air, sat a whole gang of them. So practical! They didn’t have to go more than a few metres before they could start drinking.

He walked over to them, pulled a full bottle of Koskenkorva vodka from his inside pocket, and asked, in a singsong Norrland accent, if anyone would like a drink.

Thirty seconds later he was a member of the gang.

*

Annika had her feet on the desk and was eating a prepacked salad containing vegetables that had been shipped halfway round the planet and tasted accordingly. Valter had gone out to get a hamburger, so she took the opportunity to Skype Berit, who was sitting in her hotel room in Norway, writing something as they talked. The camera on her computer was slightly crooked and all Annika could see was one wall and a bit of Berit’s hair.

‘Today I interviewed a girl from Norrköping, a literary scholar, who moved to Oslo six months ago,’ Berit said. ‘She spends eight hours a day sitting in a fruit factory peeling bananas.’

At least a hundred thousand Swedes worked in Norway, most of them doing jobs that the Norwegians refused to do. Berit was writing a series of articles about the new Swedish underclass.

‘My brother-in-law is there this week trying to find a job,’ Annika said. ‘I doubt he’s even going to get one peeling bananas.’

‘Maybe I should talk to him about his dreams and ambitions,’ Berit said.

‘It would be a very short interview,’ Annika said.

Tore, one of the caretakers, appeared beside her desk, evidently keen to talk to her. He seemed so cross that Annika wondered if he was personally acquainted with Steven, her hopeless brother-in-law. ‘You’ve got a visitor,’ he said.

‘Who is it, and what do they want?’

‘A Marianne Berg-Something. Says she wants to talk to you.’

Berit adjusted her camera so Annika could see her chin, hands and chest.

‘She’s the CD woman from yesterday,’ Annika told Berit, but at that moment she realized that Marianne Berg-Holmlund had followed Tore into the newsroom and was standing right behind him.

‘I’ve got to go,’ Annika said, clicking to close the connection with Berit and standing up to greet the woman.

Tore wandered back to the caretaker’s desk.

‘The seedy woman,’ Marianne Berg-Holmlund repeated. Annika felt herself blush.

She had looked her up after their meeting: the woman was a member of the Christian Democratic Party committee, their International Council, and the executive board of Stockholm City Council. ‘You did seem rather isolated among all those seedy men,’ Annika said, gesturing her to Berit’s chair. ‘What can I do for you?’

The woman sat down cautiously and fiddled with her handbag. It was a multi-coloured Louis Vuitton, so vulgar that it was probably genuine.

‘I’d like to talk to you about Ingemar. Lots of us feel really desperate about what’s happened.’

Annika looked at her thoughtfully. She was clearly very uneasy. ‘What do you mean? Weren’t your colleagues telling the truth during yesterday’s interview?’

Marianne Berg-Holmlund took a handkerchief out of her bag and twisted it between her fingers. ‘I don’t know how to say this … My friends in the party, they don’t know Ingemar …’

Annika picked up a pen and notepad.

‘They talk about what happened as if they knew him,’ the woman said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘As if they cared. They’ve got no idea, and they can’t imagine …’ She blew her nose loudly.

‘Are you referring to Ingemar’s resignation?’ Annika wondered.

She nodded. ‘Among other things. Do you have to tell anyone that I’ve been here? Can I be anonymous?’

Annika glanced around. Marianne Berg-Holmlund was sitting in the middle of the newsroom of the largest evening paper in Sweden (if you were counting printed copies, of course), talking to a reporter, and she thought no one would notice? ‘If you want to give me information anonymously, then that’s your prerogative. I’ll never tell anyone what you’ve told me, if you don’t want me to. On the other hand, I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to publish anything.’

Berg-Holmlund nodded eagerly and took a deep breath. ‘They make out that they’re supporting Ingemar now, but I know they called the papers. Ingemar’s a brilliant politician, he’s got a natural flair for it, and he was a threat to the party leadership. They wanted to get rid of him, I know. Hypocrisy, that’s what it is. It’s immoral. Stabbing someone in the back and then not taking responsibility for it.’

Annika studied her. ‘Do you know this for certain, or is it just a suspicion?’

She clasped her handbag tighter. ‘The party leadership knows nothing at all about Ingemar. It’s all getting rather ridiculous …’ All of a sudden she seemed almost amused. ‘Like that bit about him being such a good businessman. Ingemar was a wonderful person and a brilliant politician, but he’s always been a terrible businessman. How he manages to keep that company going is beyond me.’

As Annika was taking notes, she saw from the corner of her eye that Valter had appeared. He stopped about ten metres away, unsure of where to sit.

Marianne Berg-Holmlund sighed and wiped her eyes. ‘I’d say that Ingemar is the only person who is capable of steering this party’s policies in the right direction,’ she said.

Annika rocked gently on her chair. ‘So your sympathies are with him, as far as politics are concerned?’ she asked.

The woman nodded vigorously. ‘Absolutely. There’s a small but close-knit group of us who rate his political opinions very highly.’

‘So, you think homosexuality is an abomination?’

Marianne Berg-Holmlund stiffened. ‘That’s not my opinion. It’s in the Bible.’

Annika put down her pen and notepad and pulled her laptop towards her, searched the internet and read the results. Then she looked up. ‘It’s an abomination to eat shellfish too. It says so in Leviticus chapter eleven, verse ten. Which do you think is worse? Homosexuality or prawns?’

The woman sighed.

‘Sorry if I seem to be labouring the point,’ Annika said, ‘but I find political Biblical references fascinating. In Leviticus twenty-five, verse forty-four, it says that you can own both male and female slaves from neighbouring countries. Tell me, how do you interpret “neighbouring country”? Norway and Finland, or would it have to be somewhere outside the European Economic Area?’

‘It’s easy to make fun of the Bible,’ Marianne Berg-Holmlund said. ‘You’re not the first to do it.’

Annika smiled briefly and pushed away her laptop. ‘So, you think Ingemar was treated badly by your colleagues in the party?’

The woman was wary now. ‘You wrote terrible headlines about the accusations, but nothing when he was found not guilty.’

Annika raised her eyebrows. ‘Not guilty?’ she said. ‘I haven’t read about that.’

‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

‘But if he was completely innocent, why did he resign?’

Marianne Berg-Holmlund jerked her head back. ‘It isn’t easy to resist when there’s a mob demanding you go.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ Annika asked. ‘Write that we were wrong? That Ingemar was the victim of a conspiracy among his party comrades?’

The woman glared at her. ‘You crushed his political ambitions. Now someone’s crushed him physically. I just wish that one or other of you could be held responsible for what you’ve done.’

She stood up and made for the door.

Valter stared at her as she passed him. ‘What was all that about?’ he asked, looking rather unsettled.

Annika watched the woman leave. ‘Internal political intrigue inside the Christian Democratic Party,’ she said. ‘She just sold out her friends in the party because they sold out her friend in the party. And she’s angry that we wrote about his tax fiddle.’

Valter sat down. ‘What about all the Bible stuff? Are you a Christian?’