The Beige Man (15 page)

“Perhaps. Since it was Heinz Becker who brought the girls here, I suspect he made them a few years older in their passports than they actually are, and I’m sure he gave them false names.”

“Sven Andersson has asked the police in Varberg to send over any papers and passports found in the wreckage of the car. I’ll make sure you get copies right away.”

As she was about to leave, Irene remembered something she had forgotten to pass on to Linda. “According to Anders Pettersson, Heinz Becker told him that the little Russian and Sergei had already gone to Tenerife. Do you know of anyone called Sergei?” she asked.

Linda Holm thought for a moment before replying. “Sergei is a common Russian name. And there are plenty of Russians involved in trafficking. Tenerife is definitely a lead; I’ll see what I can find out.”

“Do you really think they were intending to go on to Tenerife?” Irene asked.

“More than likely. Where there’s money, there’s prostitution. The clients are the most important thing. Wherever they are, the sex trade will flourish.”

“Yes, but I mean … Tenerife is a tourist destination. Families go there on vacation, and—”

“Sure. That’s the image the tourist industry wants us to see. But the fact is there’s a huge sex industry in the Canaries, both legal and not so legal. The East European mafia have established themselves very firmly on the islands. They provide whatever the clients want. As I said, the demand from the clients rules the market. If they’re ready to pay, then everything is for sale, and I mean everything.”

Irene stared at Linda Holm, not really knowing what to say. No doubt Linda was hardened and cynical after all her years with the Trafficking Unit, but on the other hand she knew what she was talking about.

Irene thanked her for her help and headed for the door. When she glanced back over her shoulder, Linda was once again absorbed in her computer screen.

“V
ARBERG CALLED
,” A
NDERSSON
said. “They’ve found three passports in a bag in the car. One was in the name of Heinz Becker, and everything matches the information we already have. It looks like he was traveling under his genuine passport. The other guy who died was called Andres Tamm, according to his documentation. An Estonian citizen aged forty-two. The third passport is also Estonian, and is in the name of Leili Tamm; she’s allegedly eighteen years old. They were presumably meant to look like they were father and daughter. I’ve asked our colleagues in Varberg to send over everything they found in the car.” Andersson was walking around the room rubbing his hands with satisfaction.

“I’ve spoken to Linda Holm, and she’s going to help us find out whether this Sergei really exists, so she’d like copies of all the documents and passports when they come through,” Irene explained.

“Sure. I’ll take care of that as soon as they arrive,” the superintendent promised.

A
T EXACTLY ONE
o’clock the officer at reception informed Irene that she had a visitor by the name of Stefan Sandberg. She went down in the elevator to collect him. When they reached the department she asked if he’d like a coffee.

“Yes, please. I had a hamburger at McDonald’s for lunch, and I could do with something to wash it down.”

“A veggie burger?”

“A veggie …? No, an ordinary cheeseburger.”

“So you’re not a vegetarian like your dad?” Irene asked. She couldn’t help noticing the shadow that passed over his face. She didn’t say anything, but pressed the buttons on the machine to produce two cups of coffee.

They went into her office and sat down. Tommy’s desk was unoccupied; he had gone over to pathology to see if he could find out anything about the autopsy on the girl from the root cellar. Neither of them had started referring to the dead girl as either Katya or Tanya; “the little Russian” was too well established.

“There’s something I ought to clarify. I’m Torleif’s heir; he has no other close relatives. However, he wasn’t my biological father. When he and my mother got married, she was pregnant. I was born a month later, and he adopted me.”

“Right,” was the best Irene could come up with.

That explained why Stefan and Torleif bore no resemblance to each other. It was probably a picture of Torleif himself as a child that Irene had seen on his desk. Something was nagging away at the back of her mind, and eventually it managed to force its way into the light: why hadn’t there been a single photograph or anything else in the apartment to indicate that Stefan even existed? Her curiosity had been aroused, but she had no intention of asking him questions on that point just yet. He was here to report a stolen car, first and foremost.

“Am I correct in assuming you didn’t realize the car had been stolen until this weekend?” she asked instead.

“Yesterday, to be precise. I’m a doctor, and I live in Umeå. I was informed of Torleif’s death last Thursday, but I wasn’t able to fly down until Saturday. I arrived late in the afternoon; it was already dark, and I didn’t even think about the car. There was so much else …” He fell silent, looking uncomfortable.

Irene decided to follow her instincts. “Were you close?”

He shuffled even more awkwardly, and quite some time passed before he answered. “No. I wouldn’t say that. We had very little contact over the last few years.”

He looked tense, and Irene decided to leave what was clearly a very sensitive topic for the time being.

“But you’re sure he had a car? I mean if you had very little contact …” she said, deliberately leaving the question hanging in the air.

“He had a car. It was his only indulgence, really. A good car and one foreign vacation every year. And I happen to know he had a two-year-old Opel Astra. A white one.”

Stefan seemed very sure of his facts, but Irene would check with the vehicle licensing authority.

“How do you know that? The year and the make, I mean.”

“He told me. We spoke on the phone. He called me a few days before Christmas Eve, two years ago. As I said, we didn’t have much in common, so he spent most of the time talking about his new car. And these are the spare keys; I found them in the drawer of his desk.”

Two keys on a ring landed on Irene’s desk with a jangle. She noticed that the Police Sports Association emblem was on the key ring.

“Did you speak to each other after that conversation?” Irene went on, looking at the gold crown glistening on the emblem.

Stefan sighed heavily and shook his head. “No. It was the same old thing. We … quarreled and hung up on each other.”

A flush spread up toward his right cheekbone. Irene caught
herself thinking how good-looking he was. The fact that Muesli wasn’t his biological father wasn’t exactly a disadvantage; quite the reverse, in her opinion. But she kept that to herself.

“What did you quarrel about?” she asked.

“The usual. My mother … he was always trying to pump me for information about her. And then he started talking crap about her, like he always did.”

“So what did he say?”

“Like I said … the usual. That she’s disloyal. That she should never have been allowed to have children. Same old same old.”

Stefan looked troubled as he talked about his last conversation with Torleif. Irene would have liked to probe further into the toxic relationship between Stefan and his adoptive father, but they were supposed to be talking about the stolen car.

Suddenly Stefan braced his shoulders and looked Irene straight in the eye. He said firmly, “No doubt you think it was unreasonable of me to break off contact with Torleif. He had no close relatives left, and he was something of a recluse. But he could be so nasty. For example, two years ago I told him I was going to be a dad. I thought he’d be happy, but instead he started going on about my mom and her bad genes, and saying that my dad—my biological father—was probably the same.”

His voice clearly revealed how difficult it was for him to talk about his fractured relationship with Torleif.

“Do you know who your real father is?” Irene asked.

He nodded. “Yes. Mom told me everything when I was fifteen. We lived in Warsaw for the first six years after the divorce. Mom thought my biological father was still living there, but it turned out that he had died the year before we moved back. It was the usual story: he was much older than her, and married. She was working as an office clerk, and he was her boss. She got pregnant. Her whole family is Catholic,
so she refused to have an abortion. My biological father fired her because he was scared that she would start to show and people would guess. Her situation was desperate. She didn’t dare tell anyone in the family she was pregnant, so she answered an advertisement from someone who was looking for a wife. A Swedish man. Torleif.”

He grimaced slightly as he spoke his adoptive father’s name. Irene didn’t know what to say. Torleif had advertised for a wife in Poland, and he wasn’t the boy’s father!
I wonder if Andersson knows about this
, she thought. She would have to ask him.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Twenty-nine. I’ll be thirty in April. And Amanda will be two. In April, I mean.” His face lit up when he mentioned his daughter, and the sorrowful look in his eye disappeared for a moment.

“My twin daughters will be twenty in March, but my dog will be thirteen in April,” Irene said.

They smiled at each other, and the atmosphere in the room lightened. Which was just as well because Irene realized that things could soon get tricky again. She had started to “poke her nose in,” as Andersson usually put it, so she might as well see it through.

“How long were Torleif and your mother married?” she asked.

“Four years. According to Mom, that was four years too long.”

His attractive smile faded, and the sadness returned to his eyes. There was a hint of something else too. Hatred? Anger? Fear? It was difficult to decide, but it was definitely there.

“Why did she say that? Was he abusive?”

“No … well, not physically. But mentally. The age gap was pretty wide: fourteen years. She was only twenty when I was born. He almost broke her with his controlling behavior. He gave her hardly any money, but he still insisted that it was her job to run
the household.
Buy food and clothes for nothing
, as she used to say. She prefers not to talk about Torleif these days.”

“Do you remember anything about those years with Torleif?”

He thought for a long time before replying. “Virtually nothing. Except he beat me when he found out I’d been playing with his cars. He collected miniature police cars. But that was probably the only time he hit me; it was the final straw for Mom. She packed up her things, which included me, and we went back home to Warsaw. She told me later that she’d had to borrow money from my grandmother to pay for the journey. I’m sure my grandmother had realized that Mom wasn’t happy in her marriage over in Sweden, but even today none of my relatives in Poland knows that Torleif isn’t my real father.”

“Did you have any contact with Torleif while you were living in Poland?”

“No. None at all. Mom got a good job because she could speak and write Swedish pretty well. She worked for a Polish company, and after a few years she became their Swedish representative, which was why we moved to Stockholm. She met someone new, a Swede, and remarried. I have a half-sister who’s sixteen. And Mom is still married to the same man, still living in Stockholm. But for those first few years after we came back, she was scared. I didn’t really understand much at the time, but since then I’ve realized … she was afraid Torleif would contact us again. That he would make trouble. Which he did.”

To Irene’s surprise, he started to laugh. He could probably see what she was thinking because he quickly became serious once more.

“It’s pretty funny, thinking back on it now, but it certainly wasn’t funny at the time. He found out somehow that Mom and I had moved back to Sweden, and he managed to get a
hold of her telephone number. I suppose he made use of his position as a police officer. You know more than I do about the methods of tracking people down.”

Irene nodded but didn’t say anything. She wanted him to carry on talking.

“He insisted on seeing me; he claimed he had access rights. But Mom was no longer the vulnerable little Polish girl he had taken pity on, as he used to put it. She came right back at him, told him that in that case he could pay her all those years of alimony that he owed her. And then she told him to go to hell. They argued until I said I wanted to see Torleif. I was fifteen at the time, and I still thought he was my real dad. I suppose I was yearning for a father, somewhere deep inside. I’d never really had another male role model. Except … I guess there was my grandfather and Uncle Jan, but they were back in Warsaw. And Mom’s second husband has always been good to me. But still … I suppose every child has an idealized picture of the parent who isn’t around. If only we could get to know each other, then everything would be terrific.”

He smiled and raised his eyebrows, a wry expression on his face.

“I guess you know what happened. I caught the train from Stockholm to Göteborg, all by myself. Full of anticipation. It was the beginning of July, and all the way there I dreamed about what a great time we were going to have. Me and my dad. We’d go to the amusement park at Liseberg. Get a hamburger. Drive out to the sea and go swimming. Go to a soccer match. That particular weekend an English league team was playing against IFK Göteborg at Ullevi. I was desperately hoping he’d bought tickets for the game because I’d told him about it when we spoke on the phone the previous day. Eventually I managed to convince myself he’d definitely gotten those tickets.”