The Beige Man (8 page)

A vision of the scene flashed across Irene’s mind, and she felt nauseous. “That’s sick,” she said.

“But not all that uncommon. Do you really think a teenage
girl would choose a life in captivity, without any chance of stepping outside the temporary brothel? Being constantly ready to supply the most humiliating sexual services to men they don’t even know? Because it’s these sex slaves who have to deal with the worst perversions.”

“What kind of men are we talking about here?” Irene asked.

“All kinds. The age varies between seventeen and eighty. The majority are socially well-established men with families.”

“Do we know why they do it?”

“You mean why they pay for sex with a sex slave?” Linda Holm clarified. She paused for a moment before answering her own question. “I’ve given this a great deal of thought, and I think the answer is power. The power to be able to buy the total submissiveness of another human being. I think many of them find it easier because the girl can’t speak their language. She becomes nothing more than a mute object. A sex object. I believe that’s an important point for this socially well-established man with a family. He hasn’t really been unfaithful. He’s simply used a sex object that means nothing emotionally. The fact that at the same time he’s got a kick out of the power he has over the girl is something he doesn’t want to admit, of course. A lot of men also convince themselves they’re doing something positive by giving the girl money.”

“What happens to the girls? Do they ever get away?”

Linda shook her head. “It’s extremely rare. A very small number of girls manages to make it back to their home country. Things might be okay as long as the girl doesn’t tell anyone what she’s experienced, but the physical and mental damage is often so severe that she ends up having a complete breakdown or committing suicide.”

Linda fell silent and turned the laptop back to face her. She gazed at the small images on the screen showing this week’s offers on the sex market before she continued. “They’re consumable goods. Most of them succumb to illness and abuse.
Some are murdered by the pimps or the clients. There’s actually a separate market for that.”

“A separate market? You can buy a murder victim?” Birgitta exclaimed.

“Sure. When the girl is no use to him anymore, the pimp might sell her to someone who wants to pay to kill her. Although that’s expensive.”

Both Irene and Birgitta remained silent for a little while.

“Are you saying this is going on in Sweden?” Birgitta asked eventually.

“Probably, although we only have two suspected cases so far, both in the Stockholm area. Plus several girls who drowned when they were thrown overboard from a ferry, likely by their pimps. A cheap and easy way to get rid of girls who are no longer any use.”

“You mean the girl we have in the morgue could have been bought as a murder victim?”

“Yes. From your description, she sounds very sick and in a pretty bad way. Maybe she wasn’t able to bring in money for her pimp anymore. If he could just get a hold of the right buyer, he could make some decent cash out of her one last time.”

Linda Holm carried on scrolling through pages offering various sexual services. “Look at this,” she said. She turned the laptop around, pointing to one of the ads with her pen. The picture showed two smiling teenage girls wearing nothing but G-strings, their arms around each other’s shoulders.

“Heinz Becker has been running this ad for two years. The girls in the picture are long gone. But his clients recognize it. It tells them that Heinz is back in town, and he always has very young girls on offer. That’s his specialty.”

“Who is he?”

“A middle-aged ex-soldier from the former German Democratic Republic. His father was German and his mother was from Estonia, so he speaks Estonian as well. Went down for
narcotics-related offenses in the early nineties. When he got out of jail he turned to trafficking. He buys young girls from the Baltic states—with the emphasis on young. Most pimps are careful. If the girls are too young, it attracts attention. The police and border guards might start asking questions, and it can be hard to claim that the girls are there voluntarily if they’re underage. But Heinz is prepared to take that risk. He usually smuggles them in. He makes a huge amount of money while he’s on his tours, so to speak. It’s client demand that rules the market, and they’re prepared to pay more for really young girls.”

“And this Heinz is in Göteborg at the moment?”

“Yes. This ad has been on the net for three days. We’ve just located the apartment where he’s installed himself and his girls. We’re keeping it under surveillance, and we’ll try to go in tomorrow.”

“I suppose it’s difficult to get these girls to talk,” Irene said.

“Yes. And we always have to use interpreters. Of course the ironic thing is the only person the girl can talk to when she’s in a foreign country is her pimp. Occasionally one of her sisters in misfortune might speak the same language, but there’s no guarantee. The girls might well be from different countries, and the pimps often keep them apart so they don’t get to know each other. This means the pimp becomes the only fixed point in the girl’s existence and, as I said, the only person she can talk to.”

“I imagine the pimps also tell them horror stories to make sure they’re scared of the police.”

“Of course. As a rule they clam up and refuse to speak. We always have a female officer present when we question them. No male officer is ever allowed to be alone with any of the girls.”

Irene thought hard for a moment. The case involving the dead girl in the root cellar was just beginning to take shape. “Would it be possible for us to sit in when you’re questioning Heinz Becker? It would be interesting to find out if he knows anything about our murder victim. And of course it would be
helpful to speak to the girls in the apartment. They might know something.”

“Sure. No problem,” Linda said with a smile that never really reached her eyes. Perhaps she had seen too much human misery. It struck Irene that the weary look in Linda’s eyes was pretty common among her colleagues.

I
T WAS HIGH
time for lunch after the meeting with Linda Holm, although neither Irene nor Birgitta had much of an appetite.

“How about sushi?” Irene suggested as they were riding down in the elevator.

“Um … no,” Birgitta said, looking slightly uncomfortable.

“You usually enjoy it.”

Birgitta glanced at Irene, then broke into a big smile. “Pregnant women aren’t supposed to eat raw fish,” she said happily.

It took a fraction of a second for Irene to make the connection. “Are you pregnant? I mean … congratulations!” she exclaimed in some confusion.

“Yes, I’m pregnant again. And thank you. Although somehow I don’t think Sven will be congratulating me,” Birgitta said, pulling a face.

No, he wouldn’t. He would be furious. On the other hand, soon it wouldn’t be his problem any longer since he was moving across to the Cold Cases team. But Birgitta knew that just as well as she did, so Irene didn’t bother pointing it out.

Instead she asked, “When are you due?”

“In the middle of July.”

They reached the ground floor and walked out through the entrance hall. Outside, the snow was falling heavily, as it had done all morning. Irene stopped and turned to Birgitta.

“July. Good thinking. You won’t be pushing a stroller in the snow,” she said, waving her hand to encompass all the snowy misery around them.

I
T WAS ONLY
four o’clock, but Irene was already hurrying toward the parking lot at police HQ, battling her way through a blizzard with the wind whipping her face. Her colleagues had muttered about all the work that was piling up, but Irene had stuck to her decision to leave early for once. She had accrued a lot of paid leave, and she needed some of those hours right now. She had things to do before this evening’s dinner.

Of course it would have been better if they could have had it on Friday or Saturday, but Krister was working all weekend. Waiting until the following weekend felt like too long, so it would have to be this Thursday evening. The whole family was gathering to celebrate Katarina and Felipe’s safe return after four months in Brazil. Irene hadn’t seen them yet because they had spent the night at Felipe’s apartment, which was a small sublet on Frölunda Square. Katarina was also talking about leaving home, but she wanted to live on her own for a while before she moved in with anyone. And if she and Felipe were going to live together, she definitely didn’t want to live in his one-room apartment. Her other major problem was she had yet to work out what she wanted to do with her life. Her grades were reasonable, but not good enough to enable her to train as a physiotherapist, which was her dream job. She had no desire to try to improve her grades; three years at high school was enough.

At least that had been Katarina’s point of view when she set
off for Brazil four months earlier. Irene was quietly wondering whether anything might have changed. She was also curious to hear more about her daughter’s experiences in the vast country on the other side of the Atlantic. Neither Irene nor Krister had visited that part of the world. In fact they had never ventured outside Europe. Nowadays young people traveled all over the globe, backpacking their way through Thailand and Australia with the same nonchalance as Irene and her boyfriend at the time had cycled around the island of Gotland twenty-five years ago.

Irene had spoken to Katarina on the phone earlier in the day, and her daughter had requested the Swedish food she had been missing: her father’s blinis with red onion and whitefish roe, and stuffed cannelloni with Gorgonzola sauce and smoked ham. For dessert she wanted crème brûlée. These were all among Krister’s signature dishes. He laughed out loud when Irene relayed Katarina’s desire for “Swedish food.”

“Russian blinis and Italian cannelloni,” Krister said. “And for the grand finale, a dessert with its origins in Spain’s crema Catalana, which was refined in New York by the restaurant owner Sirio Maccioni. From there it was taken to Europe and France by the illustrious chef Paul Bocuse.”

“Wow! Really?”

“Absolutely. Talk about globalization. Within the restaurant world it’s virtually complete. We happily blend cuisine from all over the world. But the truth is we’re all cosmopolitan in our everyday eating habits. Take pizza, for example. I had my first when I was about twelve years old. The whole family had been to Liseberg, then we went to one of the first real pizza restaurants in Göteborg. La Gondola is still there today. The fact is that the taste and aroma of that very first calzone made a much deeper impression on me than our visit to the amusement park. Then we went back home to Säffle, and I told all my friends about the delicious pizza I’d had in Göteborg. Only
a year or so later there was a pizzeria in Säffle, too, and these days there are several. Pizza has become part of the Swedish staple diet.”

This was one of Krister’s favorite topics. Since Irene was at work and had a limited amount of time, she had to cut him off.

“Can you sort out the food if I get the wine?” she quickly interjected when he paused for breath.

“Sure. Jenny’s usually happy with a plain tomato sauce with pasta, but I’ll need to do some shopping. Mushrooms and black olives, at least. And fresh basil.”

He had sounded happy, looking forward to dinner. It had been a long road back from his burnout eighteen months ago. Sometimes he could still sink down into a darker mood, but these days the episodes didn’t last as long. Irene had just started to hope that he would be himself again one day. He would probably never be exactly the same, but his pleasant temperament and his sense of humor had slowly returned and were often in evidence. Their sex life was also back on track. Sometimes Irene thought that in many ways things were better now that Krister wasn’t working such long hours. He usually did the shopping and cooking, and sometimes he would run the vacuum cleaner before she got home. And old Sammie didn’t have to spend as much time with the dog sitter. In spite of everything, their daily life was working out pretty well, Irene thought.

I
RENE DROVE HOME
via Guldheden to pick up her mother. Although it was snowing heavily, Irene could see her mother from some distance away as she drove along Doktor Bex gata. Wearing a fur hat and a bright red padded coat, she was waiting outside the main door of the apartment block, leaning on her stick. Irene parked and got out of the car to help her mother, more or less carrying her over the pile of snow the plow had left on the side of the road.
They both cursed the appalling snow-clearing standards of the Göteborg sanitation department.

My mother weighs next to nothing
, Irene suddenly realized. Gently she put her mother down next to the passenger door and opened it for her. Gerd laboriously edged into her seat. One hip was completely worn out, and according to Gerd’s doctor, it needed to be replaced. Almost three years ago he had referred her to the hospital. A year later she had an appointment with an orthopedic specialist who had given her a thorough examination and had confirmed that surgery was required. She still hadn’t been given a date for her operation.

The weight loss could be due to the fact that Gerd was worried about her partner, Sture. He would be eighty-two in May. Six months ago he’d had major heart surgery, and it had taken its toll on him. Irene had invited him to the family dinner this evening, but he had declined; he was too tired. Nor had he been well enough to stay past five o’clock on Christmas Eve. When Irene had driven him home early, he had been totally worn out, and had fallen asleep in the car. She had had to wake him when they got to his apartment. Fortunately he and Gerd lived only a couple hundred meters from one another, which was probably one of the reasons they had never moved in together.

Irene was very grateful that her mother had had Sture over the past few years. It had made her feel much less guilty about neglecting Gerd. And there was no doubt that Gerd and Sture had a lot of fun together. They had gone on a number of vacations and excursions. But now they were both starting to grow noticeably old and frail. Neither of them could walk very far. There were days when even the short distance between their apartments was too much.