The Beige Man (28 page)

Irene tried to ring Krister and the girls once again. The only place in the cottage with any network coverage was upstairs by the window at the eastern gable end. With a sigh she concluded that none of them happened to be standing in that particular spot. She would just have to wait until they tried to call her.

She felt a pang of sadness as she thought about her family and what she was missing. They usually ate very well when
they were up at the cottage, which was why the refrigerator in Göteborg had been ransacked. They had taken everything that could be used; the only other option was to drive twenty kilometers to Sunne to buy whatever they didn’t have with them.

While she was eating, she glanced through the mail and the weekend papers. A short item in Sunday’s paper caught her eye: the police had picked up two young men for questioning. Both were eighteen years old and had escaped from Gräskärr juvenile detention center in January. They had been found at an address registered to the grandmother of one of the fugitives, just outside Gråbo. There wasn’t much more information, but Irene immediately suspected that this was about Niklas Ström and Björn “Billy” Kjellgren. They both had a lot of explaining to do: how they had managed to steal Torleif Sandberg’s car, for example.

Her eyes were beginning to feel heavy with tiredness. Before she went up to bed, the image of which was hovering temptingly on the edge of her consciousness, she made another vain attempt to reach Krister on his cell. She cursed their parsimony in refusing to have a land line in the cottage. Then she remembered to check the answering machine; they might have called and left her a welcome home message. She pressed the display, and when she saw the number that came up, she was suddenly wide-awake. Twenty-two messages since Friday! She had a really bad feeling as she pressed
PLAY
. The first four messages were for the twins. The rest were from Sahlgrenska Hospital.

With fumbling fingers Irene keyed in the number. A cheerful female voice answered, giving a ward number and her name, Sister Anna. Irene introduced herself and explained that she had been away all weekend.

“That’s what I thought. We’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday afternoon,” the nurse explained in a pleasant tone of voice.

“What’s this about?” Irene asked, dreading the answer.

“Your mother slipped and fell on the sidewalk outside her apartment yesterday. It was extremely treacherous! Unfortunately Gerd hit her head and was a little disorientated when she came in here. It took a while before we could get the name and phone number of her next of kin, and she didn’t remember your cell number until today. We tried to call you, but your phone was switched off.”

That must have been during the flight back from Tenerife.

“So she’s got a head injury. Is it serious?”

“No, no. It was just a mild concussion. The real problem is her hip.”

“Her hip?” Irene echoed in horror.

“Yes. She’s broken the femur and damaged the joint itself. She needs surgery as soon as possible; she’s booked for this Tuesday.”

“Will she … will she get through it?”

“The doctors don’t foresee any problem. Her vitals are good, and her heart and blood pressure are fine. Mentally she’s stable and fully alert.”

“What about after the operation? Will she be able to walk properly?”

“Absolutely. She might even be better than she was before. She’s had problems with that hip for quite some time. She told us how long she’s been on the waiting list for surgery. But there is a lengthy rehabilitation phase after an operation like this.”

“Will she be able to go up and down stairs?”

“No. Not at first, anyway.”

Irene remained silent for a moment, then said, “She lives on the second floor of an apartment block with no elevator.”

“Oh dear.”

Yes indeed. Oh dear. Irene decided to deal with one problem at a time. They would have to try to sort out the practical details eventually, but not right now.

“Can I come up and see her tonight?” she asked.

“No, it’s too late. She’s already asleep. She’s on quite a heavy dose of analgesics. She’s relatively pain free, but of course she gets extremely tired.”

“When can I visit?”

“Tomorrow, once the doctors have done their rounds. After ten o’clock.”

When Irene had thanked the friendly nurse and ended the call, she was overwhelmed by a feeling of weakness.
Not this as well! I can’t cope!
she thought. Which didn’t really help.

The phone rang again, and she quickly grabbed the receiver and answered.

“Hi, honey! I hope you’re missing me as much as I’m missing you,” Krister’s soft voice said, and he really sounded like he meant it.

“Yes … I … yes,” was all Irene could manage.

To her horror she burst into tears. Soon she was weeping helplessly. Everything that had happened during the weekend had caught up with her, and she couldn’t stop. Krister tried to console her, but she had to put the phone down. She sobbed her way into the kitchen and tore off a length of paper towel. She wiped her face and blew her nose.

Feeling a little calmer, she went back to the phone. It was the longest telephone conversation they had ever had in the twenty-two years they had been together. Irene talked nonstop, getting the events of the last two days off her chest. When she eventually paused to catch her breath, Krister quietly asked if it was all really true, and not some American gangster movie that had been shown on the plane. He meant it as a joke, but she almost started crying again.

Afterward she felt completely exhausted, but at the same time she was considerably calmer. She fell into bed just before midnight.

She didn’t wake up until the alarm went off; she discovered she had spent the night in her robe. Presumably she had felt the need to be wrapped in something that reminded her of a safe embrace.

“M
ORNING
! Y
OU’VE GONE
a bit overboard with the sunbathing!” Jonny greeted her with a grin.

Irene didn’t even have the strength to reply; she merely glared wearily at him.

“Oh, come on! We taxpayers foot the bill for your weekend in the sun, and you walk in and give me a dirty look!”

Irene stopped dead in front of him in the corridor. Without taking her eyes off him she began to remove her clothes. First of all she took off her jacket, then the thin cotton polo neck. Eventually she was standing there in nothing but her bra and camisole. She pointed to the white dressing which contrasted sharply with her red, sunburnt shoulder.

“This is a bullet wound from a Smith and Wesson 357 Magnum. I was lucky to survive. One other person made it, but he’s seriously injured. The other four people who were in the room with us are all dead. And the Spaniards are paying for the whole trip. Not one öre is coming from the Swedish police authority or from taxpayers in any other way.”

The truth was that she couldn’t remember the exact make and caliber of the gun the killer had used, but a Magnum sounded good. And she had no intention of telling Jonny that she had been hit by a ricochet. To her annoyance she realized that her voice was unsteady as she delivered her dramatic riposte. Jonny didn’t notice; he was too busy staring at the dressing with grudging fascination. When Irene saw his eyes
start to move toward her décolletage, she slipped her poloneck back on. At least her unexpected outburst had shut him up for a while.

When she turned around to head for the coffee machine, she found herself face-to-face with the chief.

“What are you two up to?” the superintendent said, sounding extremely confused.

“Irene was just showing me the fantastic tan she got in Tenerife. She’s been sunbathing topless,” Jonny replied before Irene had the chance to speak.

He had recovered remarkably quickly after her performance.

“I was actually showing him my bullet wound,” she said with an air of assumed nonchalance as she skirted the superintendent before he had time to block her retreat.

Behind her back she could hear him yelping. “Topless? Bullet wound? What the hell is going on here?”

“If you go into the meeting room I’ll be along shortly, and I’ll explain everything,” Irene said without turning around.

I
RENE HAD HAD
the foresight to bring home a copy of the newspaper with
MASACRE
!
in thick black letters on the front page. She used it as her starting point when she began to report back on the dramatic events of the weekend. She spoke for over an hour without being interrupted once.

In conclusion, she said, “As far as I can make out, this gang war is about far more than the fact that the transportation of two girls from Sweden to Tenerife went wrong. The girls can always be replaced, but there’s a lot of money involved in human trafficking. A source within the local police also told me there are drugs in the mix. ‘Obviously,’ I almost said. After all, drugs are the basis of all organized crime these days.”

Andersson gazed thoughtfully at Irene. Eventually he said, “Okay. So we sent you down there at the Spaniards’ request. By
the time you left Tenerife, the body count in the case had risen by one hundred percent. Instead of four homicides, they now have eight. I suspect that wasn’t exactly what they were hoping for.” He frowned and went on. “My question is: What did they actually want from us? And did we find out anything useful as far as our investigation into the murder of the little Russian goes?”

Irene felt quite upset that Andersson was making it sound as if it was her fault that another four people had been shot dead. She decided to ignore his sarcastic summary of her visit and answered his question with apparent unconcern. “They found proof that Sergei Petrov hadn’t disappeared with Tanya. It was important for Jesus Gomez’s gang to be able to prove that Petrov hadn’t killed her, and it was vital for one of our colleagues within the Policía Nacional to be able to show that the Gomez gang couldn’t be blamed for Tanya’s death. This has nothing to do with concern for the girl’s well-being; she was worth a lot of money. Gomez is in debt to Saar, and Tanya was supposed to pay off part of that debt. Lembit Saar has no scruples when it comes to exploiting these girls. He was just angry because Tanya went missing. All the cash she would have made in the back rooms of the sex club would have gone straight into Lembit Saar’s pocket. And now that wasn’t going to happen.”

“And what did we get out of it?” Andersson persisted.

“We know that Tanya and Leili were due to be taken to Tenerife. We know where they were going to be kept when they reached the island. We also know that neither of them had a passport of their own. Both were going to be smuggled out of Sweden by Sergei Petrov. The little Russian was found dead late on Tuesday night. The Swedish press didn’t get the news until Wednesday. The interesting thing is that Petrov flew out of Tenerife early on the following Thursday as Andres Tamm, so it seems like the human traffickers over there didn’t
know that Tanya was no longer with Becker. The question is whether Heinz Becker and Sergei Petrov knew even on Friday that Tanya was dead. Neither of them could read a Swedish newspaper or understand a Swedish news broadcast. And the overseas media were hardly likely to carry the story of an unknown young girl found dead in Göteborg.”

“How was Petrov intending to get the girls to Tenerife?” Andersson asked.

“He was booked on a late flight from Kastrup the following day, that Friday, together with Anne and Leili Tamm. We can assume that he brought his own passport and the girls’ fake passports with him. We’ve found Andres and Leili Tamm’s passports, but not Anne’s. It’s highly likely that Anne is Tanya, our little Russian,” Irene said.

“And that’s not her real name either,” Andersson sighed.

“No. And I don’t suppose Leili is called Leili. Has she regained consciousness, by the way?” Irene directed the question to Tommy, who shook his head.

“I called just before the meeting. Her condition has deteriorated,” he informed the team.

“That’s strange. Irene hasn’t been anywhere near her,” Jonny said.

He is definitely in top form this grey Monday morning, Irene thought.

“In that case perhaps I could get an update on what’s been happening on the home front,” she said.

“Sure. Shoot!” Fredrik said cheerfully.

“Did you manage to track down Anders Pettersson?” she asked.

“I did. He’s safely under lock and key.”

“Has he said anything?”

“Not a word. I picked him up on Friday night. He was lying flat on the floor in a pub on Linnégatan; all I had to do was scoop him up. I tried to talk to him twice over the weekend,
but he refused to say anything. I’ll have another go this afternoon.”

Fredrik sounded optimistic, but Irene knew Pettersson was a hard nut to crack. Perhaps a little female cunning was needed in order to pierce his shell.

“I’d like to sit in, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure.” He nodded.

“And I saw in the paper that Billy and Niklas have been found. Have you questioned them yet?” she asked Jonny.

“No. I thought the little bastards could sit and sweat for a while longer,” he said.

The truth is you couldn’t be bothered to come in and interview them over the weekend
, Irene thought.

“Tommy and I are going to speak to them as soon as we’re done here,” Jonny added, glancing over at Andersson.

The superintendent’s face brightened and he nodded approvingly. He looked at Irene over the top of his reading glasses, his eyes twinkling. “You’ve got a busy morning writing a report on all your adventures down south. And this afternoon you’re in with Fredrik, questioning Pettersson. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: give him hell! He’s up to his ears in this whole goddamn mess!”

The last comment was delivered with grim determination. Irene agreed with him on every point, apart from the first one.

“I can’t write my report today. I have to go to the hospital.”

Andersson opened his mouth and looked as if he were about to object, but when he met Irene’s gaze he immediately closed it again.

“Stay away from that place! They’re bound to amputate your arm. That’s a serious injury you’ve got there! It must be so painful,” Jonny said spitefully.