Marked for Life (23 page)

Because of the advanced state of deterioration the work was very arduous. It was almost impossible to lift up body parts with your hands. They used special lifting gear and soft bases so that the skin wouldn't fall off during the move. They had opened all ten containers and in every one had found human remains. There were only bones left, except in one, and that was the first container which had only been on the seabed about one year.

It was now just before 9:00 p.m. The team had been on Brandö for eleven hours. What had at first been a technical salvage operation had been transformed into a seething workplace for a lot of police officers, trainees and forensics. The work would go on all night. Perhaps for several days.

Gunnar got even redder in the face thinking about it.

“Not a single container must be emptied without supervision. Is that clear? We must check everything that comes into the docks. And I really mean everything.”

They all nodded.

On the table was some takeaway food well packed in aluminum dishes. Nobody had touched it. The stench from the decomposed body parts still hung over the area and because of that they all had a nonexistent appetite.

“The combinations on the containers are the same as those that Juhlén had in his computer,” said Ola.

“And that Lena Wikström deleted,” said Mia.

“Why did she do that?” said Ola.

“She had been given orders by somebody,” said Henrik.

“And we're going to find out who. We'll make her tell us,” said Gunnar.

“We're talking about loads of corpses here, there's like ten mass graves...” said Mia. “Who are these people? Or were?”

“Hans Juhlén must presumably have known,” said Henrik.

“And Lena Wikström must know his role in it all, they were working in the same department.”

They all nodded again.

“Are there any similarities between the containers?” said Gunnar.

“Well, all the containers were from Chile,” said Henrik.

“Yes, but apart from that. In which city were they loaded? Who loaded them?” said Gunnar.

“We'll find out,” said Henrik.

“According to the call log for Thomas Rydberg's mobile, it would seem that another load is to be expected. In a text he sent to Lena he wrote: Del. Tues.1,” said Gunnar. “She won't say what that means, but I'd guess that it's about a delivery due on Tuesday the first. Next Tuesday is the first of May and so I think we must check every nook and cranny on all freight ships that are going to dock here in Norrköping then,” said Henrik.

“But the message could just as well mean that there's a delivery to a house which is number one, or that it's a delivery to a person, or that the ship is number one, or...” said Mia.

“We get your point,” said Gunnar.

“But I'm just saying that perhaps we ought to widen the approach a little,” said Mia.

“Yes!”

“Were there any more texts? Similar ones I mean,” said Henrik.

“No, not from Rydberg, and nobody else either,” said Ola.

“Right then,” said Gunnar. “We'll interrogate Lena again. Get her to talk. Find out in what way the Migration Board is involved. Check all the employees.”

He rubbed his face and went on. “And check Lena's cell. Texts, conversations—everything! Then I want you to look for all the people who have ever had any contact with her. Classmates, boyfriends, aunties, uncles—all of them,” said Gunnar. “And ask Rainer to write down the ships that are going to dock there. Talk to every captain and ask them to start to open the containers onboard.”

“But it's impossible to open the containers onboard, a ship can carry more than six thousand,” said Henrik.

“And out at sea there can be high winds or storms,” said Mia.

Gunnar rubbed his hand over his face again.

“Well then, we'll simply have to open them all when they reach the port. The most important thing is to nail the people who've done this. And nobody, NOBODY, can let up until we've found the bastards!”

CHAPTER
THIRTY-NINE

PHOBOS DREW THE
gun from his hip. He got a good grip on the weapon. As always. With an accustomed hand he put the gun back into his waistband and covered it with his jacket. Then he drew it again. And again.

It was important to quickly switch from normal to emergency. Especially when he was on guard. Anything could happen, he had learned that. And it wasn't only darkly dressed men who were difficult. Even a lightly dressed woman could be a big problem.

On the roof he had a good view of the back street. He was only on the second floor and stood leaning against the concrete façade of the next-door building.

The premises under him were locked up, hidden behind a curtain of metal. A vertical advertising sign spread its flickering light over the cobbles. The fabric from a torn awning fluttered in the wind. An empty tin can noisily rolled along the pavement edge. Phobos had his gaze directed toward a steel door. The windows next to it had bars on. Nobody could imagine that there was trade going on behind them. But there was. And it had been going on for four hours. That was how long he had been standing there. In the dark.

As soon as the business was finished he would make sure that what he was protecting would be safely conveyed. But it would probably be at least another hour. Hopefully it would be quicker than that.

Phobos sincerely hoped so.

Because he was freezing.

So he drew his gun to keep himself warm.

* * *

He had been thinking of her all day.

Karl Berzelius sighed, turned off the television and went across to the window. Tried to look out over the garden. But out there it was as dark as down a deep well.

Karl met his mirror image in the mullioned window. He was in a somber mood and wondered why she hadn't answered.

It was silent in the house. Margaretha had gone to bed early. He had silenced her at dinner, hadn't been able to talk. Even less able to eat. Margaretha had looked at him in astonishment. Her short and sinewy body had squirmed. She had fiddled about with her steel-rimmed spectacles. Taken small bites of food.

There was nothing that Margaretha needed to know. Absolutely nothing, he now said to himself.

He looked down at his hands and felt deep remorse.

Why hadn't he dealt with those carved letters straightaway? Why had he let the child keep them on her neck? He knew why—it had been too hard to explain to somebody why she might have had them or where they came from. If it had come out that she had marks carved on the flesh of her neck, she might have been called a freak. There would have been gossip.
Berzelius has adopted a freak.
She would probably have been classified as one of those people who cut themselves. Perhaps there would even have been talk of an institution for people with destructive behavior.

Karl felt how his anguish turned into anger. It was as if history was about to repeat itself. Again she would risk not only his good reputation, but also her own. Accursed child, he thought. It was all her fault!

He immediately became thankful that she hadn't answered the phone. He didn't want to talk to her any longer. From now on he would not take any steps to have contact with her again.

He nodded slowly, satisfied with that fateful decision.

He remained standing by the window quite a while. Then he turned off the table lamps in the living room, went into the bedroom and lay down beside Margaretha to sleep. After just over an hour he still lay there awake. He got up and put on his dark blue dressing gown and wide slippers. He shuffled across to the sofa, sat down with difficulty and started watching TV again.

* * *

The little wine fridge held twelve bottles.

Jana Berzelius grasped one of them, pressed the electric corkscrew and filled a crystal glass to the brim. She took a gulp and felt how the light yellow liquid ran down her throat.

It had been necessary to leave the salvage site. She had stood there a short while and looked into the container, then she had told Henrik she had to go. She quickly walked across the area, got into her car and drove home.

She couldn't stand still, had to occupy herself with something. She opened the big fridge and pulled out a cluster of tomatoes. With a knife in her hand, she started to cut them up, slowly cutting through the thin skin, putting the slices in a bowl, and swallowed yet another gulp of wine. Took out a cucumber, rinsed it and put that under the knife too. She thought about the container. Deep inside she had known that its contents would be important for her. The dream had shown the numbers, letters, the combination. She had seen it and known. But she had had no idea that she would find the mirror in there. She cut slice after slice of cucumber.
How could she know it was her mirror?
The knife worked faster with the cucumber.
Had she been inside it? She must have been inside it.
The slices were coming all the faster.
She had been inside it!
Now she was violently hacking away at the cucumber. Then she raised the knife and stabbed it right into the chopping board. The blade sank deep into the wood.

Jana thought about it from different angles. Started thinking about the carved name on her neck.
Why did she have a name carved there? Why had she been marked in that way?
She really did want an answer to all her questions. But there was nobody to ask. Except Lena. Jana immediately dismissed the idea of visiting Lena at the detention center. Someone could overhear the questions she would ask. Perhaps start to suspect something, or even find out that Jana was carrying out her own investigation on the side. She didn't want to risk anything, not unnecessarily. She took a deep breath. There really was nobody else to turn to. Nobody at all. Unless... Jana looked up and saw the knife sticking straight up from the chopping board. No...there was nobody. Or was there? Well, perhaps there was one person. A single person, but he wasn't alive. If he had been alive he would certainly have been able to tell her everything. But he wasn't alive, of course.
Was he? Could he...? No...or?

Jana grasped the wineglass and went to her computer. She emptied the glass in one gulp, sat down in front of the computer and went to a site where you could search for companies and people throughout the country. She hesitated a moment, then wrote the name
Hades
and pressed Enter.

Lots of company names showed up, but not a single person. She opened another search engine and wrote the same name. The search gave thirty-one million results.

She sighed. It was hopeless. He wouldn't be still alive. He couldn't be. It was simply impossible. But why had Lena implied that he was?

She changed her search to “Hades as a name” but that too resulted in a hoard of pages. She tried every possible combination of the name to try to find something that would lead to him.

She was close to giving up when it suddenly struck her. If you really wanted to find somebody then you ought to look in the police computers.

She needed to get into those databases.

And she needed to get into them without being found out.

CHAPTER
FORTY

FREDERIC “FREDDY” OLSSON
drummed on the garbage trolley. The music pumped away in his earphones. A rasping voice at high volume.

Billy Idol.

“Hey little sister, what have you done?”

Freddy nodded in time and sang along with the lyrics.

“Hey little sister, who's your only one?”

It was just before midnight and there was nobody on the platform.

Freddy parked his trolley routinely in front of a waste bin, opened the lid and lifted out the bag of rubbish. He had to exert himself, the bag was heavy.

Goddam, so much rubbish, he thought before he tied the bag and let it join the others on the trolley.

He got out a new bag, turned up the volume on his Walkman and sang: “It's a nice day to start again.”

Then he stopped, drummed on the trolley and bellowed out: “It's a nice day for a white wedding.”

He smiled to himself, lined the bin with the new bag and locked the lid with a click.

When he steered the garbage trolley toward the next rubbish bin he caught sight of a leg sticking out from a little space behind a bench. He went up to it and saw a little girl sitting there, leaning against the wall. She was fast asleep.

Freddy looked around as if he was looking for her parents. But the platform was empty. He slowly took off his earphones, went up to the girl and prodded her.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, you!”

She didn't move.

“Hey little girl, wake up!”

With his fingers he prodded her cheek. Once again, a bit harder. Her dark eyes stared straight into his, and in a fraction of a second she was on her feet. She shouted and waved her arms, trying to get away from him as quickly as possible.

“Easy,” said Freddy.

But she didn't listen. She backed away from him.

“Hey, stop there,” he said when he saw where she was going.

“Stop! Oh hell! Watch out!”

The girl continued to back away.

“Stop! Watch out!” he shouted and threw himself forward to catch her.

But it was too late. The girl stepped right over the edge onto the track. The last thing she saw was Freddy's terrified look.

Then everything was black.

CHAPTER
FORTY-ONE

ANNELI LINDGREN TOOK
off her gloves. She was feeling rather faint. It had been an incredibly demanding day and she hadn't eaten anything all those hours she'd been working. She longed to get home to her flat and to get some sleep. But first she'd have to pick up her son from her mother's; Anneli had had to call her in to look after him when she realized how much work she had ahead of her.

It was eleven in the evening when the last marks had been made in the area and in the containers. The camera contained more than one thousand photos and the battery was almost empty. The team had left the salvage site, there were just a few uniformed police officers left, and Gunnar Öhrn.

He came up to her.

“Time to call it a day?” said Gunnar.

“Yes.”

“Can I give you a lift?”

She looked at him with suspicion.

“You look tired,” said Gunnar.

“Thanks.”

“No, I didn't mean it like that...”

“I know. I'm tired and I just want to get home but I've got to go to the station first and leave the camera there and some other stuff.”

“Then we'll drop in there on the way.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, sure. Come on.”

* * *

Jana Berzelius stood close to the wall with her briefcase in her hand and looked out over the open office landscape. There was just one woman sitting at one of the desks typing away with her eyes fixed on the screen in front of her. The office was otherwise empty. It was 11:00 p.m. and presumably the rest of the night shift was out on calls. Or they had been sent to the salvage site.

Perfect
, Jana thought.

Thanks to the lie about having to visit the detention cells, it had been easy to get into the police building. She walked determinedly toward the woman who immediately looked up from her work when she heard Jana approaching. She was young, twenty-something. Blue eyes, pearl earrings.

“Hello, I'm Jana Berzelius. Prosecutor.”

“Hi, I'm Matilda.”

“I'm working with Gunnar and his team and we usually meet in here,” said Jana and pointed toward the conference room.

“Oh yes?”

“And I need your help. During our last meeting I happened to leave my notebook in the conference room and I wonder if you could open it for me.”

Matilda looked at the clock and then at Jana, hesitant.

“I'm going to the arrest unit,” Jana explained. “And I've got to have something to write my notes on if somebody is arrested tonight.”

Matilda swallowed the lie, smiled and got up from her chair.

“Of course I can open for you.”

Matilda got up.

Jana glanced quickly at her computer screen and saw that the police register was open. So Matilda was logged in.

She followed her down the corridor to the conference room. Matilda opened the door with her key card and held it open for Jana.

“Here you are.”

“Thank you,” said Jana. “Now I'll manage.”

“Close the door after you when you've found your notebook.”

“Yes, of course. It must be here somewhere,” said Jana and stepped into the room.

She heard Matilda returning to her desk and computer, and walked round the conference table to make the search more credible. Then she opened her briefcase, took out her notebook and closed the door behind her.

“Here it is,” she said when she went past Matilda. “Thanks for your help.”

“You're welcome. No trouble,” answered Matilda and waved absentmindedly to the prosecutor when she left the office landscape.

* * *

It was silent again around Matilda. Now the hard disk sounded loud and the ceiling fan buzzed.

She liked working on her own and especially at night when you didn't risk being interrupted by questions from colleagues or being disturbed by all the telephones ringing that could be heard throughout the day.

She heard the ping from the lift and how the doors closed again.

She picked up her cell and was just about to phone her boyfriend when she heard something. It sounded like metal, and it came from the kitchen. She listened carefully to see if she could hear it again. Had she imagined it? No, there it was again.

She got up to go and see what it was. With her phone in her hand she walked toward the kitchen, turned on the light and glanced around at the sink and the dining table. It was cold in there and she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. The sound returned. She turned her head toward the windows and saw that one of them was open. She relaxed and went across to close it. The very moment she shut the window, she heard a loud noise behind her. She was scared and it gave her a start. The kitchen door had slammed shut.

“Oh, it's only the door, from the draft,” she mumbled to herself when she felt how fast her heart was beating.

She pressed the handle on the window frame to the locked position. She glanced at the well-filled fruit basket on the sideboard but decided she'd rather have something sweet. In a striped tin she found what she was looking for and immediately popped a round biscuit into her mouth. With another one in her hand, she closed the lid and decided to go back to work. She took hold of the kitchen door handle but...nothing happened. It wouldn't budge. The door was locked! Hell!

She felt the door handle again. How could it lock itself? She couldn't fathom it at all. She knocked lightly on the door but realized immediately that it was a waste of time.

She was the only person in the department.

* * *

Jana Berzelius heard Matilda knock on the door when she quickly sat down on the office chair and pulled the keyboard toward her.

Now she would have to work quickly.

* * *

Gunnar Öhrn opened the door for Anneli Lindgren who yawned widely. She had dozed off during the drive from the salvage site to the police building.

“Are we already there?” she said.

“Yes. Shall I take it all up for you?”

“No. I'll come with you.”

Gunnar opened the boot, lifted out a large, heavy bag and grasped the camera bag too, which he handed over to Anneli.

She hung it over her shoulder and yawned widely again. Then they walked side-by-side to the lifts, pressed the button and waited to go up to the third floor.

* * *

Matilda didn't know what on earth she should do. She pounded on the door. Felt the handle again and tried to push against the door with all her weight. But it didn't help. She banged on the door, once, twice and a third time.

“Hello!” she called out. “Hello!”

Yet again she reminded herself that there wasn't a single person in the department apart from her. Then she realized she had her mobile in her pocket. But who could she phone? Her first thought was to ring her boyfriend. But he wasn't authorized to get into the police building, she almost laughed at the silly idea. The reception? They could send somebody up, a maintenance man or something. But then she remembered that she only had her private mobile in her hand. And that she didn't have any direct numbers or internal numbers to the various departments.

“Oh Christ, this is so stupid,” she said out loud and kicked the door.

* * *

Jana heard how the elevator started up. And how Matilda hit the door. Although it sounded more like a kick.

She had done the search but...nothing. No results when she tried “Hades.” What else could she try? She thought frantically. Think up something! Think! Think! Think!

The elevator had stopped. Probably on the floor below but just as she sighed with relief she heard it starting up again. On the way up.

Jana was still thinking. What else could he be called besides Hades? What? She bit her lip, her thoughts spun round. Then a name floated up from her memory. Something beginning with Dan...

She wrote “Dan” and got lots of entries for various people with that name. But it didn't feel right. Dano... Daniel... Danilo... Danilo! She immediately entered that name.

The elevator was close now.

Come on! Give me something!

Jana looked up over the screen then quickly down again. Then she saw the result. There were several Danilos. But her eye fell on Danilo Peña. In Södertälje.

Jana pulled out her mobile, took a picture of the screen and then immediately exited from the register. Then she grabbed her things, quickly took off her shoes and ran in her stockinged feet with them in her hand toward the elevator. She pressed the button and the doors opened immediately. She sneaked up to the staff kitchen, carefully pulled the chair away from under the door handle, before rushing back to the now open elevator, and pressing the button for the garage.

The doors closed slowly and just as they did so she heard the neighboring elevator give a ping as the doors opened and somebody stepped out.

* * *

The heavy bag rubbed against his hip, and Gunnar changed his hold on it when he entered the lift.

Anneli went in after him.

The department was empty and silent, as it usually was at night. They both went along to Anneli's room, turned on the light and left the two bags inside.

* * *

“Hello!” Matilda called out. “Is someone there? Hello?”

She banged on the door and felt the handle which...easily went down. She pushed open the door and almost bumped into an astonished Gunnar.

“Oh, God!” said Matilda. “Lucky that you're here. I've been locked in.”

“What did you say? Locked in?” said Anneli who had just come out from her room.

“Yes, in the kitchen! The door locked itself. I couldn't get out.”

Gunnar went up to the door and felt the handle. Up and down, no problem at all.

“Strange. This door can't lock itself. You can't lock it at all,” he said.

“But... I couldn't get out,” said Matilda.

“Well, how did you open the door now?”

“Well, I...opened...”

“So it was unlocked?”

“No, it was locked. I couldn't open it.”

“But then you could.”

“Yes.”

Matilda felt like an idiot. How could she explain to them? She
had
been locked in! But now she couldn't face having to explain the whole thing to them.

“Well I couldn't get out,” she mumbled to herself and walked off with a grumpy expression back to her desk.