Without a Trace (27 page)

He took a deep breath and coughed. ‘Henrik and Linda,’ he said.

Viola Söderland’s children had been born just a year apart – they must be around forty-five now.

He turned another page. More pictures of the two children, at the beach, next to Christmas trees, school photographs, the girl on a horse, the boy with swimming goggles standing on a podium, school graduation pictures. In all there were twenty or so photographs in the album.

‘The pictures were carefully chosen,’ Annika said.

He nodded. ‘She took the children with her when she left.’

He felt for the next item in the case, more confident now.

A pair of child’s shoes, white, with pink laces.

The girl’s, no doubt. She was the eldest: the first child’s first pair of shoes.

Next: a bundle of letters, tied with a red ribbon.

‘I read a few,’ Annika said. ‘They’re love letters from Olof to Viola when she was training to be a teacher.’

He ran his fingers over them, then put them down.

A plastic bag containing two locks of hair, one blond, the other ginger. He felt them through the plastic and they slipped out of his fingers. He looked at the items spread out on his desk. What would you rescue from a burning house?

‘There’s one more thing,’ the reporter said.

He turned the case upside down. A discoloured leather wallet fell onto the desk. He shook the briefcase, looked inside it, felt all round the lining. There was an internal pocket but it was empty.

He felt a pang of disappointment – was that all?

He picket up the wallet and sniffed it. What had he been expecting? A recent photograph and a note of her current address?

‘That must have been in water or a fire or something,’ Annika said.

He inspected the wallet. The leather was stained with something brown and dried-in, definitely a man’s. There was still money inside, five-kronor notes, with Gustav Vasa on one side and a capercaillie on the other, ten-kronor notes, with Gustav VI Adolf on them, a hundred-kronor note, with Gustav II Adolf, all long since obsolete, and all discoloured along the top edge. In another pocket a black sleeve contained a driving licence from the 1970s, with a red stamp to the value of thirty-five kronor, and a photograph of a handsome young man with shoulder-length hair. It had been issued in the name of Olof Söderland.

‘Viola was a widow,’ Schyman said. ‘Did you know that?’

Annika shook her head. Schyman looked at the picture of the young man, the bottom left corner covered with a red stamp that hid part of his chin.

‘Her husband died in a car crash when the children were small. This must be his wallet.’

‘She never remarried?’

Olof Söderland had a fringe and full lips. His eyes weren’t looking at the camera but at something to one side. Perhaps he had had his wallet in his inside pocket when he died.

‘No.’

‘You realize what this points to?’ Annika said. ‘All the things in this case that was left in that car?’

He closed the driving licence and put it back in the wallet, then gathered the things together and returned them to the briefcase.

‘This briefcase says several things,’ Schyman said, closing the brass lock. ‘Viola prepared for her flight and wasn’t planning to come back. She took her dearest memories with her and hid them in the car where no one would find them.’

Annika nodded. ‘True. But she didn’t take them with her when she abandoned the car.’

He put the case in the middle of the desk and didn’t respond.

‘She was planning to live, but I don’t think she succeeded,’ Annika added.

His whirring mind came to an abrupt halt. What if he had been wrong? What if everything had been a huge mistake, and she had been dead all along?

She shifted on her chair. ‘It’s difficult trying to work on this when I’m not being given all the facts.’

His mouth had dried. ‘What do you mean?’

Her eyes narrowed, the way they sometimes did. ‘You don’t have to tell me who the source was,’ she said, ‘just how you came to have the information.’

He shut his eyes and could see the man in front of him: his thin, dark-blond hair, his rather uneven front teeth, his bulging stomach. ‘I honestly don’t know his name,’ he said. ‘He never told me. He gave me the information on the condition that I never revealed I had got it from someone else.’

‘And you promised.’

He sighed. ‘I promised. And now I’m breaking that promise.’

‘And what did he tell you?’

‘Everything. The car, the coat lining, the Cayman Islands – the lot.’

‘And the picture from the petrol station?’

He looked at the floor. ‘And the picture from the petrol station,’ he conceded.

‘There’s someone standing to the right of the picture, in a pale jacket. Was that him?’

‘I don’t know. Possibly.’

‘Did you know that the car had been found at the Russian border?’ she said.

‘I did,’ Schyman said, ‘but I never got it confirmed. The car had been scrapped by the time I made the programme. Abdullah Mustafa claimed he didn’t know what had happened to it, so I left that detail out.’

‘He sold the car twice,’ Annika said. ‘He was terrified he’d done something wrong and was going to be thrown out of Sweden.’

He could feel her eyes drilling into him.

‘You realize you could have been the victim of a planted story,’ she said. It was a statement of fact.

‘There was a very active search for Viola Söderland in those first few years, wasn’t there?’ she went on. ‘After all, she owed the state loads of tax. Could the police have been getting close to the truth? Was there someone who didn’t like that? Could your television programme have been a way to get the authorities to look in the wrong place?’

The possibility had occurred to him – he wasn’t born yesterday. But the logical conclusion had reassured him: if someone wanted to stop the authorities looking for Viola Söderland, they would have tried to persuade him that she was dead, not that she was still alive.

Annika stood up and put her hand on the briefcase. ‘What are we going to do with this?’

He remained seated, clutching the arms of his chair with his hands. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think we should contact Viola’s children and ask if they want it. Unless we should give it to the police?’

Both options made his brain short-circuit, and he flew up from his chair. ‘Not the police, and not Viola’s children!’ he shouted. ‘All of this is their fault! They’re saying I made the programme to stop them getting their inheritance! Have you seen what they’ve said today? That I caused Linda to have a miscarriage – that I killed her baby!’

She was staring at him again, with those narrowed eyes. ‘I haven’t seen them make any statement anywhere,’ she said. ‘Maybe they aren’t behind this at all. Maybe it’s all the invention of that lunatic. His name’s Lars, by the way.’

Schyman lost his train of thought and realized he was quite breathless. ‘His name’s Lars? How the hell do you know that?’

Annika leaned across the desk. ‘He’s calling round all your sources and introducing himself. Is what you said to the TT news agency true, by the way? That it’s all bollocks?’

He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. ‘I know I should have managed that a bit more professionally.’

She shoved Viola Söderland’s briefcase across the desk. ‘You decide what to do with it!’

She walked out through the glass door, closing it hard behind her.

*

Annika sat down at her desk, grabbed her notepad and pen and called Commissioner Q’s direct line.

‘Bengtzon,’ he said, when he answered. ‘It’s been several days since you last called. I thought you’d broken up with me.’

‘I like to play hard to get,’ she said. ‘Have you got much going on?’

‘I’m not going to say a thing about Nora,’ he said.

‘I don’t give a damn about Nora,’ she replied. ‘I’m after another missing woman now. Do you remember Viola Söderland?’

‘Golden Spire? What about her?’

‘Were you involved in the search for her?’

He chuckled. ‘Your faith in me is so great it’s almost touching. No, Bengtzon. Twenty years ago I was a duty officer in the Southern District. I never had anything to do with Viola Söderland.’

She made her voice bright and cheerful. ‘I was thinking that maybe you could look up what happened in the case? If you haven’t already got too much to do, of course …’

He laughed again. She could imagine him shaking his head and scratching his navel. ‘I thought your boss told the nation where she’d gone?’ he said. ‘Didn’t she run away to Russia?’

‘It looked like it,’ Annika said. ‘She planned her escape very carefully, bought a car without anyone’s knowledge, changed her name a year before she disappeared, managed to get hold of two passports, picked up a load of cash from the Cayman Islands, sewed the money into her clothes, packed a case with her dearest memories … She must have ended up somewhere. You lot must have something after all these years. Haven’t you?’

Q was quiet at the other end. She could hear him breathing. ‘She changed her name?’ he said at last.

Annika looked back through her notes. ‘She added her mother’s maiden name and started using her middle name. Viola Söderland became Harriet Johansson.’

‘What did you say about her having two passports?’

‘She reported the first one stolen and got a new one. She left the new one in the house when she fled, but the old one would still have worked as long as no one checked it with the official Swedish register.’

She heard Q tapping at his computer.

‘Okay, Bengtzon,’ he said. ‘Could you tell one of our operational analysts what you’ve just told me, about Viola Söderland, and I’ll see if I can’t find some way to help you?’

Annika was lost for words: this was too good to be true.

‘What are you up to now?’

‘Who, me?’ She straightened in her chair. ‘You never give in this easily.’

‘One of our analysts will call you later this afternoon.’

Then he hung up.

Annika was left holding the receiver, astonished.

Nina had been waiting in the road outside the villa in Vikingshill for twenty minutes when Kristine Lerberg finally drove up in her Nissan Micra and turned into the drive. The woman got out with jerky, abrupt movements, her mouth set.

‘Thanks for seeing me at such short notice,’ Nina said, as she walked over and shook hands. ‘I could have come to your workplace.’

‘We’re busy with the budget,’ Kristine Lerberg said curtly. She dug in her handbag for her keys as she walked towards the house with short, quick steps. Her neatly cut hair bounced against her collar each time her heels hit the ground. ‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked, without looking at Nina. She turned on the light in the hall, hung her coat on a hanger, brushed off the shoulders, then took off her boots and put on a pair of indoor shoes. She went into the kitchen.

‘Don’t go to any trouble on my account,’ Nina said, taking her shoes off.

‘Well, I’m going to have a glass of wine,’ Kristine Lerberg said, filling a long-stemmed glass from a box in the fridge. She sat at the kitchen table and took a large sip. Nina sat down opposite her and discreetly put her mobile on the tablecloth with the recording app switched on.

‘I heard that social services are looking after the children now,’ she said, checking that their conversation was being recorded.

Kristine Lerberg smoothed a crease from the cloth. ‘I can’t have them,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a job to go to.’

Nina wasn’t sure if the woman meant short- or long-term, so she didn’t respond.

‘Ingemar’s got worse,’ Kristine went on. ‘They don’t know if he’s ever going to wake up again.’

‘So I heard,’ Nina said.

Kristine nodded to herself. ‘You never know what plans the Lord has,’ she said. ‘Have you found him?’

Nina was unsure what she meant.

Kristine gestured with her hand. ‘The man who did it?’

‘Not yet, but we’re exploring a number of lines of inquiry. That’s why I wanted to talk to you again.’

Nina took a small notebook from her inside pocket and read out loud from it. ‘Friday, the third of May,’ she said. ‘Do you remember what you were doing that day?’

The woman sat perfectly still and shut her eyes. She hadn’t touched her glass of wine since the first sip. ‘I have Fridays off,’ she said, in a toneless voice, ‘so I must have been at home …’ She seemed to slump in her chair. ‘The third of May … That’s, what, last week? I was looking after the children. Ingemar was away on business and Nora had one of her thyroid appointments at Södermalm Hospital.’

Nina studied her carefully. She seemed to be telling the truth. She certainly appeared to believe what she was saying. ‘Do you often look after the children at times like that?’

She nodded again, then swallowed. ‘I try to help whenever I can. And I like the children, I really do.’

‘How often would you say it happens?’

‘Me looking after them? Once a month, something like that, and sometimes in the afternoon if Nora has to do the accounts … She does the bookkeeping for Ingemar’s company, and she’s very particular about it. It takes a lot of her time.’

‘Is she often busy all day?’

‘Thyroid treatment isn’t an easy procedure, Nora usually wants to rest afterwards, which can make the days rather long, but obviously …’

‘You told me before that Nora put a lot of effort into her family, looking after the children and the house.’

Kristine Lerberg put her face into her hands, then sat up and looked at Nina defiantly. ‘We all do the best we can, don’t we?’

She had taken the question as criticism. Nina concentrated on keeping her face expressionless and tried not to feel irritated. ‘Are you sure Nora didn’t have any help in the house?’

‘Absolutely,’ Kristine said. ‘Ingemar would never have allowed it. I don’t have any help with the cleaning either – it’s unnecessary. It’s a privilege to have a home to take care of.’ She lifted the glass, but took only a small sip.

Nina turned a page in her notebook. ‘So the children spend quite a lot of time with you,’ she said. ‘What do they usually do when they’re here? Do they like drawing?’