Without a Trace (36 page)

Nina held her breath and walked through the door, taking in the room as she did when she was securing a crime scene.

Jesper Wou was leaning back in his chair with his feet up on the desk. Johansson was sitting in her place, and Lamia was perched on Jesper’s side of the desk. Her skirt had ridden up, exposing almost the whole of her thigh. All three turned towards her, laughing. No one showed any sign of moving.

‘Hi, Nina,’ Lamia said. ‘Q was looking for you earlier. He wanted to talk to you.’

She turned in the doorway and went towards the commissioner’s office, her colleagues’ laughter ringing in her head.

‘Are you coming for a beer later, Nina?’ Jesper Wou called after her.

She increased her pace and the length of her stride, and breathed out when she turned the corner at the end of the corridor. The door to the head of the Criminal Intelligence Unit’s office was open, and the commissioner was typing on his laptop.

‘Ah, Analyst Hoffman,’ he said, as she tapped on the door. ‘Come in. You get a gold star for finding that computer. How are you enjoying National Crime?’

He went on writing, not taking his eyes off the screen. She walked into the room and sat on the uncomfortable visitor’s chair – had he chosen that one on purpose? Subtle psychological game-playing?

‘Fine, thanks,’ she said, as she tried to make herself comfortable.

‘What do you think of the work? Is it what you expected?’

She sat for a few seconds, silent and uncertain: what
had
she been expecting? The commissioner went on writing.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s very … interesting.’

‘From what I’ve understood, you’ve slotted into the team well.’ Her boss tapped a last key with a flourish and pushed the laptop away. ‘I pulled out everything we’ve got on the Viola Söderland case yesterday evening,’ he said, leaning forward across the desk. ‘After that programme was broadcast on television, it was assumed that she’d fled to Russia. For the first few years the matter was raised at ministerial level, largely as an extradition issue, but the Russians claimed she had never crossed the border, and had never lived in the country. Eventually the case was dropped.’

‘Do we believe them?’

Q sighed. ‘The Russians didn’t really have any reason to lie. In marked contrast to the Bergling case, for instance, where he really had been spying for them – but what had Viola done? Tried to avoid paying tax in Sweden and bought a load of Russian forest. Why would they protect her?’

‘Maybe she was living under the radar – they might not have known she was there.’

‘Theoretically possible. If you’ve got enough money you can buy pretty much anything in Russia.’

‘Is she dead?’

Q scratched his navel. ‘When she disappeared there was some evidence of a struggle in her villa out in Djursholm, a broken vase on the hall floor, and a strand of hair was found among the fragments. What was interesting about the hair was that it didn’t belong to Viola, her children, or any of the staff in the house. But that was as far as it went.’

Nina nodded. Twenty years ago it wasn’t possible to extract DNA from a strand of hair. The technology was too new, and required a whole bagful. Now, in contrast, mitochondrial DNA could be identified from a single strand. That didn’t provide as much evidence as an ordinary DNA sample but it was a start.

‘I asked for a mitochondrial DNA test on the hair yesterday evening,’ Q said, handing her a rather grainy printout of a biotechnical protocol.

Nina took the paper and looked at it. It was like any other DNA result, and didn’t mean anything to her. She put it down. Now it could be checked against various databases: the evidence register that consisted of DNA profiles from unsolved cases, the database of DNA from suspects and, of course, the one containing the DNA of convicted criminals.

‘We had a man in for questioning about Viola’s case almost twenty years ago,’ Q said. ‘There was a witness, a neighbour who was out walking his dog when he saw a man getting out of a car outside Viola’s house on the night in question. He thought he could remember the registration number, but that turned out not to be the case. The owner of the car he identified had a watertight alibi: he was giving a lecture on the genetic modification of aspen trees up in Sandviken that night … He lives out in Täby, so I’ve asked our colleagues there to go and get a DNA sample from him first thing tomorrow morning.’

Nina nodded. If the man’s DNA matched the mitochondrial DNA from the strand of hair, or from any other investigation, ongoing or concluded, it would show up in the search. It didn’t necessarily mean anything, but it could be of decisive importance.

‘Have you been in touch with Dr Kararei today?’ Q asked.

‘No,’ Nina said, and blushed – she had forgotten.

‘I spoke to him this afternoon. Things don’t look good for Ingemar Lerberg. He’s going to survive, but he’s suffered severe brain damage. He could live for years as a vegetable in long-term care.’

‘What will happen to the children?’ Nina asked, thinking of Isak, the artistic little boy who talked out loud as he drew things.

‘There’s still a fully functional social-services unit out in Nacka, in spite of Ingemar Lerberg’s attempts to get it shut down.’

‘But who’s going to look after them?’

‘Apparently they’ve been placed in foster-care with a single mother-of-two in a three-room flat in Fisksätra.’

Nina looked out through the window, imagining the cramped space. Five children in two rooms? It might turn out okay. Or it might not.

‘That was pretty much the only policy Lerberg managed to get through the social-services committee,’ Q said. ‘New criteria for the recruitment of foster-parents. Anyone’s allowed to make an offer, and whoever bids lowest gets the children.’

Her boss’s body language indicated that they were done. Nina cleared her throat. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘there is one more thing. Would it be possible to have a room of my own? Maybe not straight away, but eventually.’

‘Don’t you like Jesper?’

She squirmed uncomfortably. ‘Yes, but …’

He smiled at her. ‘Good work on the Lerberg case,’ he said. ‘And I’m glad you’re happy here.’ He turned back to his computer, and she went out into the corridor. It was deserted. She walked cautiously back to her room.

Empty. The desk had been wiped clean and the chairs were tucked in.

*

From a short-term perspective, it’s incredibly boring to be successful. Monotonous and predictable. Doing the right thing demands so much consideration, anxiety and worry, so much doubt and frustration. Success is a tedious balancing act, walking the high wire without falling, concentrating the whole time, muscles tense, eyes focused straight ahead.

It’s so much more fun to let yourself fall, tumble through space, plummet, feel the wind fill your head with freedom all the way down to the ground, swirling, swirling …

And then …

And then?

The residential area lay to the north-east of Moscow. As the crow flew it was only thirty-five kilometres from the Kremlin, but in practice it was many light-years away. The tiles on the façades of the buildings had fallen off in great clumps, exposing the concrete beneath to wind and rain. The buildings stretched from there to eternity, from the railway station all the way to the marshes, identical except for their varying states of dilapidation: fourteen floors, eight entrances, twelve flats on each floor. To begin with she regularly got lost. Her flat was in one of the blocks in the middle of the district: on a couple of occasions she ended up trying to stick her key into the door of the wrong flat before she realized her mistake. Now she couldn’t understand how she had ever managed to get lost. Every building was distinctive. By her doorway the tiles had come off entirely, and someone had scrawled Путин навсегда on the cement.
Putin navsegda
, ‘Putin for ever’. The name of her street was счастливый улице, Sčastlivy Ulitsa. Happy Street. She’d almost found herself singing the Swedish hit from the sixties when she learned what it meant.

They would look everywhere for her, she knew that. Everywhere, but not here. Not in their own backyard.

The few people who spoke to her knew she came from Ukraine. She was Irina the piano teacher from Kiev, who made her living giving lessons. She had adopted her old speech defect once more – all those years of hard work to get rid of it actually made that fairly straightforward: she used the same techniques, just in reverse. That kept contact with neighbours and shop assistants to a minimum: she could see people literally squirming as she stammered whenever she tried to speak. No one could bear to talk to her long enough to find out how limited her Russian really was, or detect her hopeless Swedish accent.

Naturally she didn’t actually give any lessons. She didn’t think the neighbours she had introduced herself to suspected anything – she was so rusty at first that she could well have passed as someone taking lessons. Now she chose harder and harder pieces, a lot of Satie and Boulez, Stravinsky’s
Petrushka
. She had bitten off more than she could chew with Maurice Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, but it was a very pleasant torment.

Occasionally she would wake up during the night. She imagined she could hear Ingemar breathing beside her, or smell little Elisabeth. At times like that the pain closed around her, like a coffin, and she would gasp in the darkness with her mouth wide open, panting with her head thrown back until the screaming inside her exploded and died.

She caught sight of herself in the little mirror above the washstand, but she no longer flinched. Instead she stared into the heavily made-up eyes, brown now, the lenses still irritating. The optician had promised the discomfort would pass, but he was wrong. She ran a hand through her short, brownish-red hair – she actually liked it. She examined her firm, slender body. Eating nothing but protein had been easier than she had expected, and the effect had been striking. She had lost fifteen kilos in the months since she had arrived.

A playwright lived in the flat next to hers. He hadn’t done very well since
glasnost
and
perestroika
, and these days he mostly wrote melancholy poetry and drank a little too much vodka. He would come round to hers sometimes, putting up with her stammering in return for a free meal.

‘When I was a little girl, I saw a television programme about a woman in Sweden who disappeared,’ she told him on one occasion. ‘It was just after my mother died. She was gone and I was left all alone, and I saw that programme about the woman who had done bad business with the wrong people, and had been forced to disappear for good. The story made a very deep impression on me. She had stashed some money away, assets no one else knew about, and she planned everything very carefully. She changed her name well in advance, and got hold of a new passport. Whenever she wanted to go out without anyone noticing her, she would wrap a scarf round her head, the way Muslim women do. She bought a second-hand car and paid cash for it, but never posted the change of ownership form. She got her money out of the bank before she left, and hid it inside the car. In the middle of the night she left her house and drove the old car across the border at Haparanda, then straight across Finland. She reached the Russian border before anyone had time to notice she was missing. The border guards were tired and hungry, and she had so many dollars with her that she was able to get in without her arrival being recorded anywhere. And then she made her way to Moscow, and left her old life behind without ever looking back. Some people might say she was heartless, that she was letting down everyone close to her, but she had no choice. If she hadn’t left, she would have died, over and over again …’

‘Did she have children?’

She opened her mouth to reply, but found that her voice was breaking. She nodded instead.

‘What happened to them? How did it end?’

Irina the piano teacher smiled through a wall of pain.

‘She never saw them again.’

This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real people, alive or dead, are purely coincidental. Even if places, times and events in the novel might feel familiar, everything takes place in an alternative reality.

I would like to thank:

Peter Rönnerfalk, head of Södermalm Hospital in Stockholm, for allowing me to bother him with the strangest (i.e. macabre) medical questions.

Varg Gyllander, head of information at the National Criminal Police, for letting me visit National Crime, and for assistance with all manner of questions about police procedure, both sensible and impossible.

Helena Bergström, actor and director, for years of discussion about what happened to Ibsen’s Nora after she walked out of the doll’s house and slammed the door behind her.

Lawyer Thomas Bodström, for legal expertise and advanced fact-checking.

My daughter Annika Marklund and my husband Mikael Aspeborg for editorial checks.

Niclas Salomonsson, my agent, and his colleagues at the Salomonsson Agency, and of course all the staff at my Swedish publisher, Piratförlaget.

And, above all, Tove Alsterdal, author and dramatist, who is always the first to read everything I write, and who discusses and analyses every part of the text, who supports and encourages me, and makes me feel I can carry on. I’ve said it before, and this time it’s more true than ever: without you there would be no books.

The source for the descriptions of the very worst of human atrocities was Amnesty International.

Any eventual errors and peculiarities are entirely intentional.

Liza Marklund
’s crime novels featuring the relentless reporter Annika Bengtzon instantly became an international hit, and Marklund’s books have sold over 15 million copies in 30 languages to date. She has achieved the unique feat of being a number one bestseller in all five Nordic countries, as well as the USA.