Third Voice (33 page)

‘It would be great to see them some time.’

‘Yes, maybe. Could I borrow your car for a while?’

‘Do you have a driver’s licence?’

But she was smiling as she handed over the car keys.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Out and about.’

‘Out and about?’

‘Yes.’

And off he went. Luna put down her magnifying glass and ran her hand through her thick hair. She was beginning to tire of Stilton’s attitude.

He didn’t give an inch.

Olivia peered along the edge of the beach. Not many minutes passed before she remembered the torch app on her phone. Fortunately her mobile was in her jacket and it hadn’t been affected by her floundering. She moved a few metres away from the wall towards the house, her phone lighting up the way ahead. She didn’t dare to face it upwards. She knew that she had to walk along the water for a bit before she reached the carved-out boathouse, but she had no idea how far. She went up a couple of metres and started walking. She stepped over driftwood and a washed-up piece of plastic. It couldn’t be far. She saw the large unlit house towering above her. The carved-out space should have been somewhere in the middle of the outer wall. The one with the glass. With the twin foetuses floating in it. She peered up and saw reflections in the large windows. Almost straight above her. I must be here now. She shone the light over the stones in front of her and she saw it. A low brick wall leading out of the water. One side of the entrance to the boathouse. She climbed up on the wall and shone the torch in front of her into a large cave. It stretched far into the rock. She couldn’t see a boat in there. Carefully she crept forward along one side of the rocky wall. A little way in, the wall was covered in wood. Tarred wood. She crept in a bit further and reached some wooden decking, which she saw ran along all three walls inside the boathouse.

This was a critical moment.

She was inside the carved-out rock now.

Did he have an alarm in here or not?

Slowly she moved the phone torch to scan the ceiling of the cave, the corners, the edges. No CCTV camera. Not that she could see anyway. It could have been hidden of course, but at least she couldn’t see one now. She did, however, see the door that was supposed to lead up to the ground floor.

According to the floorplans.

It was on the other side.

She started walking towards the door. Right in the middle of the narrow decking was a wooden cupboard that forced her to squeeze along the rocky wall. When she was halfway in behind the cupboard she saw the first one. A couple of centimetres from her face. A gigantic cave spider. Black. With thick bent legs. When she turned her phone around she saw the rest. All over the wall. Most of them were moving, disturbed by the light. She quickly made her way through and shook off a few of these crawling beasts from her hair.

Sayonara Kerouac, she thought to herself.

She was only a few steps from the door now. She shone her torch on it. An ordinary handle, an ordinary wooden door, not a metal one. Would she be able to open it? Or was it another one of those that only slid open on command?

It wasn’t.

But it was locked.

She’d expected that. But what kind of lock was it? If it was a seven-pin tumbler lock she was in trouble. She wasn’t going to be able to pick one of those. If it wasn’t, she could make use of her training. Thanks to those of her classmates who thought that picking door locks should be part of elementary police training. Without breaking them down as they did in films.

They’d taught Olivia how to do this, with the help of some small dangling tools. She took out the metal cluster and began working on the spikes in the door lock.

Borell was furious. The meeting had hit a wall. At first everyone agreed that the time period leading up to the next election needed to be milked to the max. Up to that point, things were running smoothly. Then came the conflict. There were two camps in the management team. One that wanted to expand and another that wanted to improve the organisation they were already running. Borell was part of the first group. After half an hour of discussion it was clear that they had reached a stalemate. So Borell ended the meeting. It came quite abruptly. Everyone had expected to be staying at the hotel overnight.

But the plans were changed.

Idiots, Borell thought to himself as he drove down the dark forest lane. Of course we need to expand as much as possible. That’s what this whole thing is about. He was so annoyed that he almost missed them, the tyre marks in the snow that turned off into the narrow logging road. First he just drove past them, then he put the brakes on, reversed and stopped. The tracks continued right in. Who the hell has been driving here? At this time? He carried on further down the narrow track and put his headlights on full beam. The tracks carried on further towards a small bend. He drove on a little further and stopped. His headlights were shining straight onto a white car that was standing just next to the road.

A Mustang.

Olivia managed to open the lock. It took a while, but she did it. Before she opened the door she thought about the alarm again. If there is one it’s probably connected to a security centre, and then I’ll have about twenty minutes before the security guards arrive, she thought to herself and opened the door. Silence. No alarm after all. Good. She climbed up the stairs and knew where she’d emerge. Roughly. She’d memorised the floorplans as best she could, and photographed parts of them with her mobile. She’d be coming out onto the ground floor and then she’d go up the stairs to the right. Once at the top she’d be back on the floor where she’d been a couple of days ago.

The office floor.

She found the stairs. She held the mobile torch straight onto the steps in front of her, she didn’t want it casting too much of a beam. She didn’t want to risk it being seen from outside. Whoever might be out there. When she got upstairs she saw that she was in the right place. The only thing shining in the whole house was the aquarium in the large glass wall. The green light shone all the way over to the staircase where she stood. She quickly moved away. She knew where the office was. It’s so quiet, she thought, when that strange music isn’t on. She scurried through a narrow passageway and arrived at the office door. There was a small button on the wall. She pressed it. The door slid open just as silently as it had done last time. She stepped into the room and went straight over to the shelf where she’d seen the cork bag with the laptop and held her mobile up.

The bag wasn’t there.

On the art books.

Where it had been before.

Damn it!

Had he taken it with him? Have I come here for nothing?! She scanned the room with the torch.

There!

The cork bag was lying on the edge of the desk. She switched on the camera on her mobile and took several pictures of the bag. Then she used the video function to show her location, slowly moving the mobile around the room. She focused on a large painting by Jan Håfström on one of the walls for a few seconds.

She relished the moment.

He carefully rubbed his thumb over his glass eye. The other one was watching Olivia. She was moving just a couple of metres in front of him, in his office. Every time she faced the mirror with the large golden frame, he was able to look straight into her eyes. He was standing in the narrow room behind the
mirror. He’d had it built last year, secretly. It wasn’t on the floorplans. He relished standing behind the mirror watching his guests in his office. Some just sat and waited, others inspected the bookshelves or cast discreet glances over the desk. Most of them went up to the mirror to correct this and that, their hair or lipstick, right in front of him. He loved that.

Now he was watching the young and beautiful Olivia Rivera in front of him, the woman who had become a troublesome witness to the incident at Silvergården and had then sought to get in touch with him under false pretences. Now she’d broken into his house and was busy documenting his room with her mobile, in particular the laptop bag. The one made of cork.

I should have got rid of that, he thought.

It was too late now.

He spent a few seconds deliberating about what to do. This was more Thorhed’s domain, but he wasn’t here. Not this time. He’d have to deal with this himself.

Olivia lowered her phone, went towards the cork bag on the desk and unzipped it. There was a MacBook Pro inside it. She opened it up. On the right under the keyboard was a pink heart. Sandra’s sticker.

This is it!

Suddenly she heard a clicking noise behind her. She turned around. The door was about to slide shut! She lurched forward just as it closed. She scanned the walls next to the door with her mobile. No door button. What the fuck had happened?! Was it deadlocked? Was there a motion detector in here? She tried to push the door to the side.

It didn’t budge.

Stilton saw the same thing that Borell had seen just a short while before, clear tyre marks just as he approached the logging track. He took a chance and suddenly saw his headlights shining onto Olivia’s car. What was it doing here? Why wasn’t it parked
up by the gate? Olivia had told him about the gate, about the lantern-lined path, about the spaceship down by the water. But she’d parked the car here. Down a little logging track.

Stilton could imagine why and it was hardly a reassuring thought.

She’s trying to sneak into that house.

She’s nuts.

He looked in Luna’s glovebox and found a torch. He grabbed it and got out of the car. Which way had she gone?

Olivia was standing pressed up against a wall in the office. Her brain was in overdrive. Just a minute ago she’d realised that the battery on her mobile was running out. It was about to die and she was locked in the office of one of Sweden’s richest financiers.

She was trapped.

Borell was probably spending the night in Vaxholm. Was she going to be stuck in here until he got back tomorrow? She scanned the room with her mobile torch again and tried to find something to pry the door open with, her mind racing. What will he do if he finds me here tomorrow? Ring the police? But if the police come then I can explain what I’m doing here, I can show them the laptop, I can say that Borell has to be involved in the murder of Bengt Sahlmann, and that he’s stolen his laptop!

So he’s unlikely to call the police, she thought.

Maybe he’ll build a new green aquarium with a naked woman’s body floating around in formalin.

Then her mobile died.

She tried to edge her way forward in the dark.

Suddenly she heard another clicking noise. Behind her. The door was about to open. She ran towards it and squeezed through before it was halfway open, out into the corridor. Now it was really dark. Pitch black. She remembered that she’d come from the right. She felt her way along the wall. Then it was left, wasn’t it? She tried to recollect the floorplans in her head. Or
was it right? Then she saw a faint light at the other end of the corridor. A light that was moving along the door, slowly. He’s home! Olivia fumbled her way along in the other direction as quickly as she dared. She knew that there were small sculptures and vases all over the place, she could easily have tripped. She turned around a corner and pressed herself up against a wall. Silence. Deadly silence. She could no longer see the light. She strained to hear footsteps. She couldn’t hear any.

Then the music started.

That electronic music, in the speakers, not loud.

She moved away from the wall and continued straight ahead. The whole time she held her hand up against the wall to try to feel where she was going. Then the light returned. In front of her. The cone of light was just moving around a corner and down the corridor, towards her. She turned around. She couldn’t see anything. She stepped across onto the other side of the corridor and thought she would reach another wall, but she didn’t. She found herself in a room. She pressed herself up against the wall inside the door and held her breath. She didn’t dare to look out. From the corner of her eye she could see the cone of light on the floor moving along outside past the room. She exhaled. Then she heard a faint clicking noise again. The door she’d come in through slid shut. A couple of seconds later she heard the whirring noise coming from the ceiling ledge.

She was locked in the vacuum room.

Stilton had taken roughly the same route as Olivia through the forest. Towards the wall. Through darkness and marshy terrain. He presumed that she’d have tried to get over the wall and into the house. Completely insane, but it wasn’t his idea. He’d tried to call her twice. Either she’d turned her phone off or put it on flight mode. Or maybe she’d lost it? Perhaps she couldn’t talk right now? The last option was the most positive. That would mean that she was somewhere over there, in control.

But she wasn’t in control. She’d sunk down onto the floor a while ago. Now she was slowly crawling along the cold concrete floor, in the dark, towards the door. The oxygen in the room had almost run out, she struggled to inhale the air, her lungs were being compressed, her throat was a thin, wheezing hole. She clawed the floor with her hands, her head was spinning, eight silent works of art looking down at her cramping body. Finally she turned over onto her back just by the door, gently scratching at the skirting, her eyes closed. Just a second away from going numb, she opened them again. The whirring sound coming from the ceiling had suddenly stopped. The door started to open. Slowly, one centimetre at a time. The room was about to be filled with air again.

Too late.

Her head sank down onto the floor.

Jean Borell was standing in the doorway. He was very pleased. The vacuum system had cost a fortune, but it worked.

Perfectly.

He leant over the lifeless body and fished out a mobile phone.

Stilton had reached the wall. He shone the torch onto it. It was high. Too high for Olivia to have been able to get over. So he followed it out towards the water. When he reached the end of the wall he stood still. He could have waded out and made his way around the iron trellis, he assumed, but he didn’t know where Olivia was. He didn’t know what the fuck she was doing. Bloody fool! He turned off the torch and looked out over the gently rocking sea. Suddenly he saw a flickering light, far off along the edge of the shore.