The Man Who Watched Women (30 page)

The first three victims, the women from his past, gnawed away at him, but there was a limit to how far you could rewind the tape, how far back in time you could regret your actions. But Annette … that was different. She had got under his skin.

‘She had such low self-esteem, Annette. She was desperate for someone to make her feel good about herself. It was so easy …'

‘You've got a guilty conscience.' Once again a statement, not a question.

Sebastian had to think about that. It was so long since he'd had a guilty conscience he wasn't sure what it felt like. ‘I suppose so.'

‘Would you have felt like that if she hadn't been murdered?'

‘No.'

‘In that case, it doesn't count.'

Harsh, but true. The exploitation, the conquest didn't bother him at all. But she had died because he had had a bad day. That was difficult to ignore.

‘Are you in touch with any of the women you've been with?' Torkel took the conversation in a new direction. Moving forward.

‘There are almost forty years between the first and the last. I can't remember even a fraction of them.'

Torkel caught himself wondering how many partners he had had. Two wives, four or five girlfriends before the first wife. Four, really. A few between his marriages. And then Ursula. Maybe double figures. He didn't need to make much of an effort to remember all their names. But of course in Sebastian's case he would have to multiply that by twenty, perhaps thirty. Perhaps even more. Memory lets us down.

‘What I'm trying to say,' Torkel went on, ‘is that if you do what you can to prevent a repetition, that might help. Both you and us.' He got up, signalling that the conversation was over. ‘But if you don't remember them, it can't be helped.'

Sebastian stayed where he was, gazing into space.

Thinking.

He did remember some of them …

Vanja was gazing out over the centre. It could have been anywhere. But it was Hovsjö. One of the thirty-eight regions earmarked by the government in 2009 for ‘additional attention' in order to ‘combat a sense of exclusion', Vanja recalled. ‘An investment' in ‘vulnerable areas'. Which was all a more elegant way of describing a suburb where there were more problems than solutions. Vanja had no idea whether this additional attention had achieved anything, but it certainly didn't look that way.

Her GPS had guided her to Granövägen. A few metres up ahead it was possible to turn left into Kvarstavägen, which was where the pale blue Ford Focus had been stolen from six months earlier. José Rodriguez was suddenly a lot more interesting.

Vanja had parked, got out of the car and looked up at the brown eight-storey building. Found the right entrance and the right apartment. Rung the bell. No one answered, so she had tried the neighbour opposite on the same floor; Haddad was the name on the letterbox. A woman of about forty-five had opened the door. Vanja showed her ID and asked if the woman had seen José Rodriguez, or knew where Vanja might find him.

‘I should think he's probably in the square,' the woman said with hardly any trace of an accent.

‘Does he work there?' Vanja asked, picturing a lively market like the one in Hötorget in the middle of Stockholm.

The woman in the doorway smiled as if Vanja had said something really funny. ‘No, he doesn't work.' Her tone as she uttered those four words made it clear what she thought of her neighbour.

Vanja thanked the woman for the information and set off towards the centre on foot.

A hairdresser's, a restaurant, a food store, a van selling burgers and the like, a pizzeria, a newspaper kiosk and a clothes shop. All spread out, with an expanse of concrete between them. A real wind tunnel in the autumn and winter, Vanja suspected, but at the moment the sun was beating down, making the square live up to the concept of a stony desert. A few people were sitting on one of the benches in the shade outside the clinic. A skinny Alsatian dog lay panting on the ground and the two beer cans being passed between the men and women on the bench told Vanja this was probably a good place to start looking for Rodriguez. She headed towards the bench. By the time she was about ten metres away, all five occupants had turned their attention to her. The only one who seemed completely uninterested was the dog. Vanja got out the photograph of José Rodriguez as she took the last few steps into the shade beneath the overhanging building.

‘Do you know where I can find this man?' She held out the picture. There was no point in trying to conceal the purpose of her visit. They had probably sussed out the fact that she was a police officer as soon as she set foot in the square.

‘Why?' A grey-haired man of indeterminate age who was holding onto the dog's lead looked up at her after a quick glance at the photograph in her hand.

‘I need to speak to him,' Vanja replied, sticking to the direct approach.

‘Yes, but does he want to speak to you?' The grey-haired man again. Both front teeth were missing, so the question came out with a slight lisp. It made him sound almost sweet. It crossed Vanja's mind that it must be a little difficult to command respect when you sounded like a six-year-old with a deep voice. Perhaps that was why he had the Alsatian. To compensate.

‘I think he can make that decision.'

Obviously not the answer they wanted. As if on command they all went back to what they had been doing before she turned up. It was as if she had ceased to exist. Vanja sighed. She could walk around the square showing people the picture and asking questions until she got lucky, but it was hot, she was tired and she wanted to go home. She reached into the front pocket of her jeans and took out a hundred-kronor note. ‘I just want to know where he is. He'll never know how I found out.'

‘He usually hangs out down by the holiday camp,' a skinny, long-haired man in a denim jacket said immediately, reaching for the money with a grubby, shaking hand before the others even had time to exchange a glance to decide whether or not the price was right.

Vanja held the note out of reach. ‘Where's that?'

‘Down there.' The long-haired man waved his hand in the direction Vanja had come from. ‘Down by the lake – what's it called … Tomatstigen …'

The name of a street. That would have to do. Vanja gave him the money and he quickly stuffed it in his pocket, seemingly oblivious to the disapproving looks from the others.

In the car Vanja entered Tomatstigen into the GPS and saw that it was indeed fairly close by, but if she was going to take the car all the way it would mean a considerable detour.

Instead she drove down into Kvarstavägen, parked as close as possible, then walked through a small copse of trees down to the neighbouring residential area and the holiday camp. The buildings were more like summer cottages than basic chalets. The gardens were well cared for; these were not a collection of tool sheds stuck in a corner. Each house must have measured twenty square metres, with garden furniture, barbecues, hammocks and other comforts to enjoy when the occupants weren't busy with their plants. Vanja had no desire whatsoever to get closer to nature, at least not in that way. Growing things, weeding, digging, thinning out – none of that was for her. She just about managed to keep her pot plants alive. But a place like this was pretty at this time of year, with flowers and greenery everywhere, and bees buzzing behind every fence.

Vanja crunched along the gravel track leading down towards the lake, scanning the area as she went. This didn't feel like the kind of place that would tolerate down-and-out drunks wandering around and spoiling the idyll. Had she been conned out of a hundred kronor back in the square? She had reached the edge of the development and decided to go back to the car when she saw them. Several people on and around a bench on the tarmac path running along the edge of the forest. The distinctive bags from the state-owned alcohol monopoly lay on the ground. It was a fairly large group; eight or ten people, perhaps. Two dogs this time. Vanja quickly made her way towards them. As she got nearer she could see that the man and woman closest to her were eating apples, presumably stolen from some handy garden.

She took out the photograph and got straight down to business. ‘I'm looking for José Rodriguez; have any of you seen him?'

‘I'm José Rodriguez.'

Vanja turned to her right and found she had to look down to meet the eye of the man in the picture. She suddenly felt unutterably weary. Weary and furious. This just couldn't be happening.

‘How long have you been in that thing?'

‘Why?'

‘How long?'

‘I got hit by a car six months ago, maybe a bit longer …'

Vanja let out an audible sigh and stood there for a moment to gather her strength before she turned and left.

‘So what did you want?' the man shouted after her. Vanja merely waved dismissively without looking back, and kept on walking. She took out her phone and tried Torkel on speed dial. Engaged. She ended the call and tried Ursula instead.

Ursula was in the staff dining room staring blankly at a portion of fish gratin as it rotated in one of the microwaves. Late lunch. Or early dinner. So that she could say she'd already eaten if Micke called. For some reason she just didn't want to leave work and go home.

To Micke.

To yet another evening of playing happy families.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of her mobile, which she had placed on the table. She walked through the dining room; someone had worked very hard to make it less impersonal and sterile. There were red checked cloths on the six oblong tables, matching the curtains and woven wall hangings. The white plastic chairs had been furnished with cushions, and a border stencilled with flowers ran all the way around the walls. The same floral pattern was repeated here and there on cupboard doors and on the white goods in the kitchen area. The harsh fluorescent lights had been replaced by individual lamps suspended above each table, along with a certain amount of spot lighting. Three troughs containing houseplants, plus an aquarium by the door, vouched for the fact that the room was ‘not only a place to eat, but a space which can provide a period of harmony and restoration', as it had said in the staff bulletin following the renovations. How much had that cost? Ursula had never felt particularly harmonious or restored after eating in the dining room. Full, perhaps, but that applied to the old room too.

She picked up her phone and looked at the display. Vanja.

‘Hi.'

‘It's me,' she heard Vanja say; she sounded slightly out of breath, as if she was walking fast.

‘I know. How's it going?'

‘It's not.' Vanja almost spat out the words. ‘The locals who checked out Rodriguez managed to tell us that he was an alcoholic, but they missed the tiny detail that he's in a fucking wheelchair.'

Ursula couldn't help smiling. Her confidence in the local police was virtually non-existent. This merely served to confirm her impression that in those cases where they didn't actually hamper an investigation, they certainly didn't do anything useful. She wondered if this was a good time to tell Vanja that they had already eliminated Rodriguez as a possible perpetrator. Neither his fingerprints nor his DNA matched those found at the crime scenes. She decided to leave it till later. It sounded as if her colleague had had enough setbacks for one day.

The microwave pinged; her fish was ready. Ursula went to get it.

‘Look on the bright side – you had a nice little trip to Södertälje.'

As Ursula opened the door of the microwave and took out her plate, she heard someone come into the dining room. She turned around and saw Sebastian leaning on the doorpost. Her expression remained unchanged as she went back to her dinner and the phone call.

‘I'm not coming back in today,' Vanja said. ‘Can you let Torkel know?'

‘Of course. See you tomorrow.'

Ursula ended the call, slipped the phone into her pocket and went back to the table with her plate. She glanced at Sebastian in passing. ‘That was Vanja. She said hello.'

‘No, she didn't,' Sebastian said matter-of-factly.

‘No, she didn't,' Ursula confirmed, sitting down. Sebastian didn't move. Ursula started eating in silence, wishing she had something to read, something to look at. Why was he just standing there? What did he want? Whatever it was, she was sure she wouldn't be interested. She was convinced he should no longer be a part of the team. She didn't even dare to think about what would happen if the press made the connection between the victims and a person who was participating in the investigation. There was no way Torkel could have cleared his decision with the top brass, she was sure of it. If this went wrong, he might not keep his job. He was risking a great deal for Sebastian. She wondered whether Sebastian felt any kind of gratitude, whether he was even aware of the gamble Torkel was taking. Probably not.

She had things she wanted to think through. Private things. Like why she didn't want to go home. Whether Torkel was an option tonight as well. She was hesitant. After their last night together, while they were lying in his bed, Torkel had talked about Yvonne and some new man in her life; Ursula had forgotten his name, but she had got the feeling that Torkel was fishing, sounding her out to see if there could be something more between them.

Something more permanent.

No doubt she had only herself to blame; she had broken two of the rules she had established for their relationship, so perhaps it was hardly surprising if he thought she might be willing to revise her attitude to the third rule as well. But he was wrong.

‘How are things with Micke?' Sebastian asked in a casual tone of voice, as if he had been reading her mind. Ursula gave a start and dropped her knife, which fell onto her plate and then the floor with a clatter.

‘Why do you ask?' she snapped as she bent down to pick it up.

‘No reason.' Sebastian shrugged. ‘Just making small talk.'