Without a Trace (32 page)

She felt her frustration growing. ‘What do you want me to do? Get Holmerud’s convictions quashed against his own wishes?’

Schyman scratched his beard. ‘Maybe you could get him to agree with you? Get him to retract his confession?’

‘And why would he do that? He probably did murder Lena, so he’d still get a life sentence. He’ll end up in Kumla as a wife-killer, way down the food-chain. But if he carries on claiming all those murders, he’ll be a legend.’

‘So you don’t want to do it?’

Annika sighed. Of course she wanted to do it, she really did. Those verdicts needed to be scrutinized: the police investigation had been sloppy and biased and ought to be examined, and the prosecutor who hadn’t bothered to look into the case properly should be confronted, the relatives’ grief and despair acknowledged.

Schyman’s intercom crackled.

‘You’ve got visitors,’ Tore said, from the caretaker’s desk.

Annika stood up to leave. ‘I want you to stay,’ Schyman said.

On the other side of the newsroom she could see a confused-looking middle-aged couple.

‘Henrik Söderland and his sister Linda,’ the editor-in-chief said. ‘I thought they should have the briefcase back.’

Braxengatan was on the outskirts of Fisksätra. The area was part of the so-called Million Homes Programme, housing that was erected at the cheapest possible cost on the edges of the big cities between 1965 and 1975, creating a whole raft of social problems.

Nina parked next to a garage door and climbed a flight of steps to get to the entry level. The blocks were brown and white, five storeys high, and hundreds of metres long. Nina walked past door after door until she finally reached number twenty-two.

The stairwell was cool and light and smelt of disinfectant. She went up the stairs, silent in her rubber soles. Various sounds filtered out of the flats she passed, cartoon characters chasing each other, the hum of a fan, a man coughing. On the fourth floor she stopped outside a door marked ANDERSSON. There was no letterbox she could peer through, and no sound of activity inside. She stood there for a minute or so, arms by her sides, then reached out her finger to the doorbell and pressed it.

Nothing happened.

She tried again.

Still no response.

She banged on the door. Hard.

‘Open up,’ she said loudly. ‘This is the police.’

She rang again, three times in succession. The flats around her fell silent, until only the fan was audible.

Shit, shit, shit
.

She wasn’t going to be defeated now she had found her way here. She would wait until the little woman came home, or until she was on the brink of starvation and had to go out to buy food. Or until the landlord came to evict her because Nora hadn’t paid the rent.

‘If you don’t open the door within ten seconds, we’ll break it down,’ she shouted.

The lock clicked. The handle was pressed down, and the door opened. The short woman from the train, and from Isak’s drawing, was standing before her in the doorway: curly hair, slightly bowed legs. She was in her fifties, dressed in dark trousers and a brown cardigan.

‘Please, don’t shout on the landing. Come in.’

Her English was perfect, her accent British.

Nina stepped into the flat and looked around the hall: two cupboards, a door that presumably led to the bathroom. She darted quickly over to it and pulled it open. Yes, shower and toilet, empty. She closed the door.

‘How can I help you?’ the woman asked.

Her face was in deep shadow, but Nina could still tell that she was very frightened. She moved quickly into the larger room: no one. The woman probably lived alone – she recognized the reflection of her own solitude. Nothing jarred. A narrow bed stood along one wall, with a table and two wooden chairs by the window, and a tiny kitchen area towards the bathroom.

‘My name is Nina Hoffman. I’m from the Swedish National Crime Unit,’ Nina said, showing her ID. The woman took it and studied it carefully.

‘What’s your name?’ Nina asked.

The woman gave the ID back and looked at the floor. ‘Irina,’ she said. ‘Irina Azarova.’

Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t.

The woman was making an effort to seem calm and collected, but was fiddling nervously with the buttons of her cardigan. Irina Azarova. She must come from the east, even if it wasn’t clear from her accent. Either she had grown up in a Communist dictatorship, or she had fled from one, or had relatives or some other personal connection to the old Soviet bloc. It seemed likely that she would have great respect for the authorities, hopefully rather too great.

‘I have a long list of questions for you, Irina Azarova,’ Nina said, in a loud, authoritative voice. ‘Do you want to answer them here, or do you want to come with me to the National Crime Unit and answer them in an interview room?’

The woman seemed to shrink, and her hands began to shake.

‘
Please
,’ she said, sounding as if she was about to cry. ‘I haven’t done anything. Nothing illegal.’

‘So where’s your work permit?’ Nina asked. ‘You work for the Lerbergs on Silvervägen in Saltsjöbaden. And you were at a crime scene where a man was found very badly assaulted. You alerted the police by sending a text message from Solsidan railway station …’

Irina Azarova sank onto one of the wooden chairs and started to cry. Nina stood where she was, in the middle of the floor. People were always upset to receive an unannounced visit from the police, but this outburst of sobbing was out of all proportion. It had to be a response to something else.

She let the woman cry for a few minutes. When she spoke again, her voice was soft. ‘We could talk here for a while,’ she said, ‘and see if that will do. How does that sound?’

The woman fished a handkerchief out of the pocket of her cardigan, carefully blew her nose and nodded. Nina sat down on the other chair. In the light from the only window she could see some knitting, pink wool.

‘What’s that going to be?’ Nina said, nodding towards it.

Irina Azarova grabbed it and put it into a plastic bag that contained several other balls of wool. ‘For the girl,’ she said. ‘For little Elisabeth.’ Nora’s youngest child.

‘How long have you worked for Nora Lerberg?’ Nina asked, putting her mobile phone on the table with its recording device switched on.

‘One year,’ she said.

‘And what have your duties been?’

Irina glanced up at her.

‘I know you’re there secretly,’ Nina said. ‘No one knows you work for Nora. She’s very careful to say she does everything herself.’

Irina nodded. ‘She’s a politician’s wife, and credibility is important to politicians. Setting a good example to the voters. She wants to be popular among the wives in the area. She wants them to like her, accept her.’ She nodded to underline her words.

‘So Nora brought you in to take care of her duties as a housewife.’

The woman looked frightened again.

‘Can you describe a typical day at work to me?’ Nina said gently.

Irina cleared her throat. ‘Her husband leaves home to go to work at a quarter to nine. Nora takes the children to the church playgroup at nine o’clock. I arrive on the train that gets into Solsidan just after nine and I take the path through the woods so I can arrive at the house the back way. No one sees me. I let myself in through the kitchen door and work until one o’clock …’

‘What do you do in the house?’

‘Clear breakfast away, clean, do the washing and ironing. I bake cakes and bread, get the evening meal ready so Nora only has to heat it up …’

‘You fit a lot in.’

The woman blushed. ‘Not really. In the afternoons I usually work here, in the flat. Anything that takes a long time to cook I prepare here and take it to Nora the next morning, stews, roast elk, stuffed cabbage, the bread and cakes as well.’

She pronounced the Swedish dishes in an almost perfect Stockholm accent.

‘And the knitting?’ Nina said.

‘Nora thinks handicrafts are important.’

‘Do the children know that you work in the house?’

She nodded again. ‘Sometimes I stay later, when the children are having their afternoon nap. The boy has seen me several times, the elder one, Isak. He’s very bright. Nora said I was an angel who watched over them. He spoke to me, in Swedish, but I never answered. It hurt me, having to lie to the boy. I don’t really know what he thinks of me.’

‘That you’re an angel,’ Nina said. ‘At least, that’s how he refers to you.’

‘Has he mentioned me?’ she asked anxiously.

Nina studied her carefully. ‘Do you know where Nora is?’

The woman’s face closed. She didn’t answer.

‘Do you know anything about her business abroad?’

Still no answer.

‘What happened a year ago, when Nora employed you? Something must have happened because until then she managed to look after the house and take care of her husband’s accounts on her own. Then all of a sudden she couldn’t do it any more. She started to run out of time, began to plan her escape, and got you to help her …’

The woman stared at her hands.

‘Where are you really from?’ Nina asked.

‘I don’t know if I want to say any more now.’

Nina considered her options. ‘Under Swedish law, you’ve committed a crime by working here without a work permit,’ she said. ‘You could be fined or spend up to a year in prison for what you’ve done. And that’s if I choose to ignore the fact that you might have assaulted Ingemar Lerberg.’

The woman looked up at Nina and her eyes filled with tears again. ‘I never met her husband, not until I saw him lying there on the bed.’

Nina believed her. She wasn’t responsible for the assault: she didn’t have the physical strength. But she might have been an accomplice, in either word or deed: she could have provided information about the Lerbergs’ habits and routines – even unlocked the door.

‘If you’re honest with me, I won’t report you,’ she said. ‘But for that to work, I need you to tell me everything you know about Nora Lerberg and her business dealings. What do you say?’

The woman nodded.

Nina gulped. She didn’t have the authority to make that sort of promise. She would just have to break it if she had to. Or not.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Ukraine,’ Irina Azarova said quietly. ‘From Chernobyl. My husband is dead, but my daughters are still there, studying in Kiev. Nadia’s going to be a doctor, Juliana a lawyer. I support them.’

Nina checked her mobile phone to make sure their conversation was still being recorded. ‘How did you first come into contact with Nora?’

‘I put an advert on the internet, saying I could give language tuition. She replied to the advert.’

‘Language tuition?’

The woman wiped her nose and tucked her handkerchief back in her pocket. ‘Nora wanted to learn Russian. I used to teach Russian and English in Chernobyl, at the high school. It was a good job but very badly paid, and my husband was ill for years, ever since the girls were little. When he died and the girls were going to university, I had to get a different job, a job in the West …’

‘So Nora wanted to learn Russian?’

Irina Azarova nodded. ‘She studied with me, private lessons every Wednesday evening. That was how we started. And she spent a lot of time listening to a Russian-language course on her headphones. She was clever, a quick learner.’

‘If you were teaching her Russian, how come you started to do housework for her?’

‘Nora had a lot of work to do with the businesses. She was sometimes up all night, and didn’t have time for the washing and cleaning.’

‘Do you know what those businesses were?’

The woman paused. ‘She looked after the accounts of different companies,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what they were. She never had any meetings with clients in the house.’

‘Where did she see them?’

‘In Switzerland. I used to have the house to myself on those days. I would change the curtains, clean the place from top to bottom …’

‘How did she do the accounts? On paper, or on a computer?’

‘On computers, two different ones. She spent a lot of time every day working on them.’

Two computers. Two mobile phones. Two passports. Two identities, and at least three addresses: Marbella, Fisksätra, and Silvervägen. Were there any more? Five businesses in Spain. More? She laundered money. Her own? Or someone else’s? If so, whose? And where did she get the money from?

‘Why?’ Nina said quietly. ‘Why did she start all this?’

‘She once said that she had borrowed money.’

Nina waited. When Irina said nothing, she prompted, ‘Borrowed money? Who from? The bank?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘But why? Ingemar’s business was doing well. Did she have expensive tastes? Did she use drugs? Was she a gambler?’

Irina Azarova looked almost insulted on Nora’s behalf. ‘Definitely not. She was very careful with money, and she barely drank, not even wine. And I never saw her show any interest in betting.’

Nina looked out of the window at a ragged treetop, and behind it an identical brown and white building. Somehow it all fitted together: Nora had borrowed money from the wrong people and was running an international money-laundering operation. Over the past year she had got into financial difficulties.

The Spanish authorities tightened the laws, the construction industry collapsed, and the money-laundering machinery began to break down
.

But whose money was she laundering? Hardly her own: she didn’t have the resources for that. Was she a smurf for some international syndicate, the people she had borrowed money from, perhaps?

‘I don’t understand,’ Nina said. ‘How could she get involved with something like this?’

‘She wanted to save his life.’

‘Whose life? Ingemar’s? He wasn’t dying, was he?’

‘He needed a platform from which he could influence society, to gain respect.’

‘But isn’t he afraid of being found out?’

Irina looked horrified. ‘Oh, no! Her husband doesn’t know anything – he mustn’t! He doesn’t know that I work in the house. Nora always arranges her meetings in Switzerland for when he’s away on business.’