Third Voice (43 page)

‘Where are we going?’

Welander’s voice was hoarse and broken.

‘To the police.’

‘Because you recognised my voice?’

‘Because you have witnessed a crime.’

‘It wasn’t intentional.’

‘You’ll have to explain that to the police.’

‘But don’t you understand what that will mean?’

Olivia saw tears running down Welander’s cheeks.

She was repulsed.

‘Don’t you understand what will happen if this gets out?’

‘I couldn’t give a shit about that.’

‘But my congregation does! I am their shepherd! I am the one who comforts and supports them! Many of them live miserable lives and the only thing that keeps them going is my words! I am the one who gives their lives hope and love.’

‘Maybe you should have thought of that before indulging in hardcore pornography.’

Welander stared at Olivia. He was breathing heavily. His eyes narrowed. His voice became lower, tighter.

‘And who are you to pass moral judgement over me?’ he hissed. ‘You come to me asking for help, because you can’t cope with telling Sandra the truth. You’re a coward.’

‘Shall we go now?’

‘The door is locked.’

Olivia looked at Welander. She took a couple of steps towards the door and pressed down the handle. It was locked.

‘Open it,’ she said.

‘Do you like music? Classical music?’

‘Open the door!’

Welander reached over to his music player on the book-shelf and turned it on. The music came blaring out, the whole room was reverberating. Olivia hunched over and got out her mobile. Welander was standing over by the bookshelf watching her.

‘It’s
Scheherazade
!!’ he screamed through the blaring music. ‘My favourite piece!’

Olivia called Mette.

While she was waiting for her to answer, she saw Welander pulling out a thick book from the bookshelf.

Charlotte had given them Tomas Welander’s address.

Mette and Bosse held on tightly as Lisa sped past a bus. Mette had tried to call Olivia again. She wasn’t answering. In the middle of a crossroads, she received a call. The number display was clear: OLIVIA RÖNNING. When Mette picked up, all she could hear was blaring music and Olivia’s voice shouting: ‘I NEED HELP!’ Then the voice disappeared, but the music carried on.

The line wasn’t broken.

Mette tried to shout into the phone.

No response.

It was a small gun. It didn’t take up much space behind the book. As he held it in his hand it felt almost light, but he knew what it could do. He had inherited it from his father and had used it a couple of times at Lundsberg. To scare those in need of a good scare, teach them a lesson. One time he’d fired it, just after midnight, somewhere not too far from the school, during a punishment ritual. One of the younger boys had not been following the rules, and had actually even threatened to go to the housemaster. That could not be tolerated. He was taken out to an old stone cairn and stripped naked. He liked animals. Jean had got hold of a little white rabbit. He held it up by its ears in front of the young pupil. It was squirming. Then it was shot through the head right in front of the terrified, wayward little boy.

After that he followed the rules.

The woman facing him now was not following the rules. She was making her own. She was disregarding a divine messenger. She was a Pharisee, consumed by arrogance.

A wayward little girl.

‘Sit down!!’ he yelled, pointing at the armchair with the little gun.

Welander shouted so loudly that his voice could be heard above the music. Olivia tried to assess the situation. The music was roaring in her ears and she realised that the man in front of her was probably very unwell. Or at least totally off balance.

She sat down in the armchair.

Welander went and stood right in the middle of the room, a couple of metres away from her, in the middle of the acoustic intersection. He took off his smoking jacket with the gun pointing at the armchair.

He was naked underneath.

‘If you move I’ll shoot you!’ he screamed. ‘Like a rabbit!’

Olivia looked at his white, wrinkly body. Online porn? It’s men like him who pay to see women being degraded and sexually exploited. Men with bodies like that. She knew that she was generalising. Sadly men with far more lithe bodies did the same thing.

Like Borell.

Why?

She followed Welander’s movements across the floor. She saw that the music permeated his body, consuming him, his naked, bony body writhing as the music escalated. She saw that he had scratch marks on his forearms, the gun in his hand was pointing at her chest. His head started moving, back and forth, searching, as though looking for more music.

Then it stopped, in the middle of a crescendo, and his eyes closed shut.

When Lisa slammed the brakes on outside the building on Banérgatan, Bosse jumped out first. They’d got hold of the door code and he was in the stairway just seconds later. Lisa rushed in after him. Mette moved as quickly as she could. She recalled when she stayed outside Forsman’s building and what had happened then.

Now she wanted to go inside!

Upstairs!

Bosse had stopped outside Welander’s front door. The music was blaring out into the stairway. Nevertheless he rang the doorbell.

Pointless.

‘What do we do now?!’

Lisa had made her way up the stairs.

‘The caretaker?’

‘A locksmith!’

‘That’ll take for ever,’ Mette said.

She was gasping as she walked up the last step and stopped outside the door. All three of them realised that none of them would be able to break it down. The police only did that in films. And none of them were keen on shooting the lock off either.

Suddenly the music stopped. The noise of a gunshot broke the silence.

Followed by a muffled scream.

Bosse pulled out his gun. Mette and Lisa backed off. Just as he raised the gun and pointed it at the lock the door opened. A naked man was standing in the doorway. A dark smoking jacket was hanging over his shoulders and his hands were holding his crotch. He was obviously in pain, as though he’d been kicked. His hair was hanging down over his eyes. Bosse pointed the gun at this head.

‘Where is Olivia?!’

‘Here.’

The voice came from behind Tomas Welander. It was Olivia’s. She pushed past the man standing in the doorway. He stumbled
out a couple of steps into the stairway. Lisa got out some handcuffs. Olivia stepped forward holding a little gun in her hand.

‘We were just on our way,’ she said.

Tomas Welander was wearing a clean white shirt and a pair of dark of trousers. The collar was unbuttoned and exposed a thin chain with a gold cross around his neck. Mette and Lisa sat opposite him in an interrogation room at the National Crime Squad headquarters. There was a laptop on the table. Bosse was following the interrogation from an adjoining room.

They’d gone through the formalities.

Mette went through the sequence of events in Welander’s flat. She’d heard Olivia’s version, and now she wanted the man sitting opposite her to confirm it. He did not object to her description as such, but he did react to Mette’s interpretation of the situation.

‘I never threatened Olivia,’ he said.

‘You pointed a gun at her and said that you’d kill her if she moved. “Like a rabbit.”’ Mette had to contain a smile, it sounded quite ridiculous. ‘Is that incorrect?’ she said.

‘It is correct that I pointed a gun at her, but she’s fabricated the rest.’

‘Why did you point the gun at her?’

‘Because I was afraid. She’d attacked me. I was acting in defence.’

‘In what way had she assaulted you?’

‘She knocked me down.’

Mette knew that this was true, Olivia had admitted that. She also knew why it had happened and had a certain understanding of why Olivia had reacted the way she did.

But it was indeed assault.

And without any witnesses there was nothing that contradicted Welander’s version.

So she let it go.

For now.

‘I’m going to show you a film,’ she said.

Lisa opened up the laptop and started the film that Jean-Baptiste had sent them. Welander reacted strongly after a few
seconds. He realised what he would be forced to watch. The murder he’d witnessed via the webcam. He held up a hand to cover his face. Mette paused the film.

‘Take your hand down,’ she said. ‘You are going to watch this film from beginning to end.’

Mette’s voice signalled that there was no room for objections. Welander lowered his hand. Mette started the film again. Welander squinted, he knew what was coming, and when it did he was forced to avert his eyes. But he could not avoid the woman’s piercing scream. It bounced off the walls of the small interrogation room. Welander clenched his hands on his lap, his arms were shaking all the way up to his shoulders. Mette and Lisa were watching him the whole time. Welander looked up again.

‘There are three voices to be heard on the film,’ Mette said. ‘Two of them belong to Bengt Sahlmann and Jean Borell, the third one belongs to you, is that correct?’

Welander nodded.

‘I want you to answer the question loud and clear.’

‘That’s correct,’ Welander said.

His voice was hardly audible, very thin and dry, as though he’d swallowed a load of altar bread. Lisa poured him a glass of water and passed it to him. He drank half of it.

‘Can you tell me about the background to this?’ Mette said.

‘To what?’

‘To what we’ve just seen?’

Welander’s body sank down in his seat. He knew he’d have to tell them, he knew he wouldn’t get out of this room until he had.

‘It started at Lundsberg. Jean and I and Bengt had a very strong connection there. We stuck together. We had lots of fun. Then we went our separate ways, but we stayed in touch.’

‘You met up?’

‘Yes, but only once a year or so.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘We relived some of the happy times at school. We drank alcohol and talked about old memories.’

‘And watched porn on the Internet?’

‘It was something of a tradition, from the old school days, to watch pornography, quite innocent, the online porn thing came later. It was – I don’t know how to describe it – some kind of forbidden male thrill, as though we were young again.’

Mette and Lisa peered at each other.

Welander drank up the rest of the water.

‘The last few years we’d been using a service called porn-online,’ he said.

‘Livestreamed pornography,’ Lisa said.

‘Yes.’

‘Like the one we just looked at.’

‘Yes. It was Jean who’d asked Bengt to order it.’

‘A BDSM session.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you order a recording of the session too?’

‘Yes. Jean wanted it. He is – he was interested in that sort of thing.’

‘BDSM?’

‘Yes. Like in that film there, I believe?’ Welander pointed at the laptop.

‘Yes,’ Mette said. ‘What happened that night?’

Welander was breathing heavily. He tried to recall the night it happened. How they had all met up out at Jean’s house on Värmdö, drunk booze, hooked up to the online session at the agreed time and started watching. More and more aroused, more and more drunk. How they had spurred them on more and more to perform more advanced and perverted sex acts. Finally the naked, tied-up woman in the room had reacted, started screaming, but the act continued.

‘Even though she didn’t want it to?’ Mette said.

‘Yes.’

‘So, in practice, it turned into rape?’

‘It could be described that way.’

Mette and Lisa looked at each other. Their thoughts were clearly visible in their expressions.

‘Then that awful thing happened that you saw in the film,’ Welander said.

‘The man in the room killed the woman.’

‘Yes.’

‘How did you react to that?’ Mette asked. ‘You’d just witnessed a sex act that you had ordered and paid for ending up as murder?’

‘We were terribly shocked. We just sat there. When we came to our senses we started discussing what to do, whether we should call the police.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘We didn’t know what to say. We couldn’t do anything about what we’d seen, we didn’t know who the people in the room were, we didn’t know where it had taken place, just a room somewhere in the world.’

‘Hypocrites,’ Mette said calmly.

‘Sorry?’

‘The only thing you worried about was making sure that no one found out about what you’d been doing.’

Welander didn’t reply.

‘So you decided to keep quiet?’ Lisa said.

‘Yes, but it was very tortuous, I felt absolutely terrible afterwards.’

‘You did?’

‘Yes, absolutely.’

Mette looked at Welander in disgust. She’d talked to many people with different crimes on their conscience. This man was one of the most pitiful she’d seen. She opened a brown file in front of her.

‘I want to spend some time talking about the murder of Bengt Sahlmann,’ she said. ‘How did you find out about it?’

‘First I heard that it was suicide.’

‘Who told you?’

‘Jean. He rang me at lunchtime and said that Bengt had been totally off balance and was threatening to go to the police and tell them about the irregularities in Jean’s company and about what had happened that night. Jean was freaked out. Then he rang later that evening and said that he’d been to Bengt’s house to talk some sense into him and that he’d hanged himself. Then I found out that Bengt had been murdered.’

‘What did you think then?’

‘I was shocked. At first I didn’t want to believe it. Then I got scared and started thinking about Jean.’

‘Whether he was the one who murdered Bengt?’

‘Yes, it was an unbearable thought. That one of my friends would have murdered another of my friends? It was awful.’

‘I understand. But you received two phone calls from Borell that same day, first one telling you about Bengt’s threats and then one stating that he’d been to Bengt’s home. Is that correct?’

‘Yes.’

Mette looked in the brown file.

‘We’ve been going through Borell’s call lists for that day,’ she said. ‘It was indeed the case that he rang you twice that day.’

‘Like I said.’

‘The only problem is that he was in India.’

‘India?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t get it?’

‘Neither do I. Unless of course you’re lying.’

‘I’m not lying. I’m a priest. Jean made those calls.’

‘We know that. But he was not at Bengt’s house that night, we know that too.’

‘So how did he know that Bengt had hanged himself?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I have no idea. It sounds very strange? How could he have known that?’ He paused.

‘Yes?’

‘Maybe he found out about it from someone else?’

‘Who’d been at Bengt’s house?’

‘Yes. And then called Jean in India?’

‘Who might that have been?’

‘I don’t know, I have no idea. Yes! Magnus Thorhed perhaps?’

‘Why him?’

‘I saw his blue BMW there!’

‘At Bengt’s house?’

‘Yes! It must have been him! Who saw Bengt hanging there and then called Jean and then Jean called me!? From India?’

‘That’s possible.’

‘Yes.’

‘The only thing I’m wondering is how come you were there?’

‘Where?’

‘At Sahlmann’s house? Where you saw Thorhed’s car?’

Lisa couldn’t help but admire Mette’s interrogation technique. She’d intentionally increased the pace of the dialogue so that Welander didn’t have time to think before he spoke. And then he’d tripped up without even realising what he’d said.

Now it was caught on tape.

He was at Sahlmann’s house himself the night of the murder.

‘What were you doing there?’ Mette asked again.

‘I got worried after Jean’s phone call and wanted to hear how Bengt was doing myself.’

‘And how was he then?’

‘No one opened the door, so I left.’

‘And that’s when you saw Thorhed’s car.’

‘Yes.’

Mette opened up the file in front of her. Lisa gave her a look. Welander was fiddling with the gold cross hanging around his neck. He assumed there’d be some kind of legal penalty due to the murder he’d witnessed and his failure to inform the police about it. A penalty he was willing to accept. He hoped it could all be handled discreetly, with his congregation in mind.

‘Are we done with the questioning?’

‘Yes,’ Mette said. ‘You’ve told me what we needed to hear. Now we’ll take some swabs and then you’ll be done.’

‘Swabs? From my mouth?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why are you going to do that?’

‘Do you have anything against it?’

‘No, I’m just wondering why.’

‘To compare your DNA to the DNA of skin fragments found under Bengt Sahlmann’s nails. He struggled for his life and scraped off quite a bit of skin from the person he wrestled with. It’s a routine procedure. You’re a priest and you don’t lie, so there won’t be a match, of course.’

Mette and Lisa got up. Welander remained seated. Mette picked up the file from the table and looked at him. His white shirt had sweat stains all the way down to his waist.

‘By the way, Olivia told me that you had some pretty nasty scratch marks on your arms?’ Mette said.

It was dark by the time Mette left police headquarters, satisfied, but not done. She could have listened to her body’s signals and gone home, but she wanted to finish what she needed to. She called Olivia and Abbas, and asked them to come to the barge where Stilton was staying. She didn’t want them all up at the National Crime Squad headquarters.

They all gathered in the lounge.

The three of them were very impatient. Curious, excited. The interrogation of Welander affected them all, in one way or another. They knew Mette and that she wouldn’t want to tell the story more than once.

When she’d finished, Olivia asked the first surprised question.

‘He confessed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Just like that?’

‘No. Not until we told him about the fragments of skin found under Sahlmann’s nails. He realised that it was over and just collapsed into a pathetic, blubbering mess on the floor.’

‘What a creep.’

‘But he did see Magnus Thorhed’s car at Sahlmann’s house?’ Stilton asked.

‘Yes, he claims so. As he was leaving. Thorhed had presumably been sent there to do the same thing that Welander had set out to do.’

‘To bring Sahlmann to his senses.’

‘Yes. And then he found Sahlmann hanging from the ceiling and took the laptop to ensure that any dangerous information on it would be kept hidden.’

‘But why did Welander lie about that telephone conversation?’ Olivia said. ‘That Thorhed had called and told him that Sahlmann had hanged himself. When it was Borell who called?’

‘I don’t know, maybe he wanted to lay the blame on Thorhed? He’d just seen his car there, after all.’

‘Not very clever.’

‘Murderers are seldom as clever as they think.’

‘What was his motive?’ Stilton asked.

‘Partly to prevent the scandal that would come out of what these gentlemen had been up to at Borell’s, and partly because he was afraid of the murderer in Marseille, as he called him. He knew that he’d sent a threatening email detailing what he intended to do if they snitched to the police. And Sahlmann had just threatened Borell with doing just that.’

‘Going to the police?’

‘Yes. Welander was terrified that Mickey Leigh would find out somehow.’

‘So he murdered Sahlmann to try to prevent that from happening.’

‘According to Welander it was manslaughter. An argument that spiralled out of control.’

‘And ended up with him hanging Sandra’s dad from the ceiling and her finding him when she got home,’ Olivia said. ‘And then he pretended to care about how bad she was feeling and she almost ended up taking her own life. Fucking hideous!’

Olivia got up, she couldn’t sit still. The thought of that empathetic priest spending sleepless nights worrying about that poor young Sandra made her feel sick. The memory of that deeply moved priest by the coffin, who’d expressed himself so fondly about a person he himself had killed made her tremble with rage.

She regretted not kicking the shit out of him in the flat.

Everyone looked at her, everyone understood what she felt.

Welander really was a loathsome human being.

‘We’ve run some checks on him,’ Mette said. ‘He was expelled from Lundsberg, because of some serious incident, and then he tried to kill himself and ended up in a psych ward, and when he got out he started training to be a priest. He seems to be a pretty broken individual. But now he’s locked up. Is there anything else you want to know?’