Without a Trace (8 page)

Nina looked at the blonde doll-woman for a moment, then down at her own papers. She leafed through them intently: where was all this information?

‘We’ve requested credit-card records, information from her bank and passenger lists,’ Lamia went on. ‘Our colleagues in Nacka are talking to the neighbours.’

‘We should get their report today,’ Q said, then turned to Johansson. ‘Forensics?’

Johansson finished writing something, which took almost a minute. They all waited in silence. Nina’s hands felt as if they were growing in her lap. Then the man cleared his throat.

‘The upper floor of the house, where the victim was found, is probably also where the assault was carried out. There are traces of blood and saliva in several locations up there, on the landing, in the bedroom, on the stairs, and possibly also in the children’s rooms.’

Johansson got a paper handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose. Nina thought it almost looked like he was wiping a tear from the corner of his eye.

‘We’ve found prints from six individuals all over the house,’ he continued. ‘Three adults and three children.’

‘In the parents’ bedroom as well?’ Q asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Did they have a home-help? A cleaner, an au pair?’

‘Not known at present.’

Johansson turned a page of his pad. ‘We haven’t found any evidence on the outside of the property. No sign of a break-in. All the doors were locked when the patrol arrived, so the perpetrator locked up afterwards when he or she left. It’s difficult to determine whether anything has been stolen, but items that are usually of interest to thieves, such as passports, computers, iPads, mobiles and so on, all seem to have been left. Obviously some individual items may have been taken, but that can’t be confirmed right now.’

‘Lerberg’s business?’

Johansson bent over a different bundle of papers and looked through them slowly. ‘The company has three main clients who account for ninety per cent of the turnover – a shipping company in Panama, another in the Philippines, and a transport business in Spain.’

‘Can you check them out?’ Q said to Lamia.

Johansson glanced up at them over his glasses. ‘Forensics were finished by three o’clock this morning, but we’re keeping the cordon in place for the time being.’

‘What about his political activities?’

Johansson coughed. ‘Lerberg was a member of the Committee for Social Services and Care of the Elderly, which is responsible for funding youth and children’s services, financial support, refugee centres, psychiatric and addiction issues, as well as care of the elderly and disabled.’

‘Quite a few loaded issues there, then,’ Q said. ‘Distribution of money, refugees, not to mention drug addicts, alcoholics and the mentally ill. Any specific threats against Lerberg?’

‘Nothing the Security Police are aware of,’ Lamia said.

‘Was he in favour of any particularly controversial policies? Open-door immigration? Slashed benefit payments?’

‘Our colleagues in Nacka are looking into that.’

Q turned to Nina. ‘How’s the victim doing this morning?’

‘I spoke to his doctor a little while ago. His condition is unchanged. He’s still sedated after the operation.’

‘Can you give us an account of his injuries?’

Nina looked through her notes, then at Lamia. The woman was peeling an orange. She pulled out a segment and offered it to Nina with a smile.

‘Er, no, thanks,’ Nina said. ‘The assault appears to have taken place between Thursday evening and Friday morning last week. It looks as if the perpetrators – there were probably at least two – stuck to tried and tested torture methods. How much detail should I …?’

‘Go for it,’ the commissioner said.

She straightened her back.

‘
Falaka
, or foot whipping, is one of the oldest torture methods we know of … Blows with batons or sticks cause extreme pain that starts in the soles of the feet and travels all the way up to the head.’

Johansson took notes, shaking his head. Lamia ate her orange, licking her fingers. Q was watching Nina intently.

‘Ingemar Lerberg was beaten on the soles of his feet with a hard, thin object, probably a whip or a telescopic baton … Well, that’s just my supposition. Both his arms were out of their sockets, so he could have been subjected to a spread-eagle …’

Johansson’s shoulders began to shake. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought he was crying.

‘That means the victim’s hands are tied behind his back, then he’s lifted up by his wrists. The strain on the shoulders is immense, and the victim soon passes out from the pain.’

‘Where at the crime scene could that have been carried out?’ Q asked.

Nina visualized the interior of the house. There were lamp-hooks in the ceilings, but nothing strong enough to hold the weight of a grown man. And she couldn’t recall any items of furniture solid enough. ‘Possibly the upstairs landing. There’s a wrought-iron railing at the top of the stairs. It seemed a bit loose – they could have fastened the rope there.’

Nina looked at Q, who nodded for her to continue. ‘He was also subjected to a
cheera
, or tearing, as it’s also known. That means that the legs are pulled apart until the muscles tear. Lerberg had suffered severe bleeding in his groin.’

The secretary blew his nose again. Yes, he really did seem to be crying. Nina glanced at Lamia and Q, but neither of them seemed to have noticed the man’s emotional state. She picked up the third page of the forensics report. ‘The plastic bag that was found in the children’s room could have been used for a dry Submarino. That’s an asphyxiation technique – Lerberg showed signs of oxygen deprivation. He had also been severely beaten, primarily in the face – one eyeball had split.’ She was feeling slightly sick.

Q nodded in encouragement. ‘What does this tell us about our perpetrators? Is it possible to trace their methods to a particular geographic area?’

‘
Falaka
is especially popular in the Middle East.
Cheera
is used in India and Pakistan, among other places, and the spread-eagle is also known as Palestinian hanging. It’s used in Turkey and Iran, for instance.’

Johansson made more notes.

Q stood up. ‘So a relatively uneducated guess would suggest that we’re dealing with an area south-east of Sweden?’

‘Not necessarily,’ Nina said. ‘These are tried and tested methods everywhere. The Submarino is also known as La Bañera, which suggests south-west rather than south-east.’

‘Unpleasant,’ the commissioner said. ‘What business was Lerberg in? Something to do with shipping?’

‘Coordination of maritime transport,’ Lamia said.

‘What the hell could he have been shipping that would have warranted such an excess of violence? Drugs? Money? Children? Nuclear weapons?’

‘He didn’t ship anything himself, just arranged the loading of different vessels and made sure they weren’t travelling empty between harbours,’ Lamia said.

Q looked at the rain-streaked windows and sighed. ‘This is getting ridiculous. How the hell can there be so much water up there?’ He turned back to Nina. ‘I want you to find out what this is all about,’ he said. ‘You’re right, there must have been at least two perpetrators, but what drove them to this insane torture? Lamia, put in a request to see his accounts. And where on earth is the wife? Did they take her with them? If so, where, and why?’

Nina quickly noted down what the commissioner was saying. When she looked up Lamia was typing again. Johansson blew his nose. Q was on his way out through the door.

Nina assumed that the meeting was over. It had lasted exactly twenty-two minutes.

The newsroom was suffused with the same grey light that had characterized it all year. Not just because of the climatic conditions outside the windows. Since the centre of journalistic activity had slipped from print to the online edition, the sharp edges of the newsroom had faded and dissolved. The daily cycle had disappeared – the room seemed to have stopped breathing. There were no longer any deadlines – or, rather, every moment was a new deadline.

Annika put a plastic mug of coffee from the machine on her desk and caught sight of her reflection in the rain-streaked glass.

Back in the Stone Age, when Annika had first been taken on at the
Evening Post
, two editions had been published on normal days: the early one, commonly known as the backwoods edition, and a later version, which reached the suburbs and areas around major cities. Under extreme circumstances an even later updated edition was occasionally published, but only for central Stockholm. The entire editorial machinery had lived and worked according to those deadlines. Mornings were a time for staff to catch their breath, for contemplation, planning and, hopefully, reflection. The noise began to rise in the afternoons. Chair legs scraped across the linoleum floor. What to lead with? Was there anything from the regions? What did the news agencies have? And the mix! The mix had to be right! Entertainment? Sport? And something funny! Any amusing animals for page sixteen? A cat that had walked a hundred and eighty kilometres to get home? Pictures! The name and age of the cat!

When darkness fell and the daytime staff had gone home, the light would shrink to islands around the newsdesk, the sports desk and the entertainment section. The noise was lower, more intense and focused. Heartbeats rose, the pace of activity increased and everyone was focused. As the clock approached 04.45, the deadline for deliveries to the Norrland flight, the atmosphere was tense. Hair on end, shirt-tails flapping, howls of rage at crashing computers, crisis calls from the print-works, always about the failure of the yellow plate to arrive on time, and could they try sending it again? Then, as the deadline passed, the sense of release once the night-editor had sent the last colour file and the message arrived telling them that the presses had started to roll in Akalla. Shoulders slumped and keyboards were pushed away. All of that was ancient history, these days. She didn’t understand why she even remembered it.

Annika dropped her bag and raincoat on the floor and hooked her laptop into the wireless network. Her homepage was set to the
Evening Post
’s online edition: the paper’s surveillance of modern society was governed now by clicks. Not that that was anything to complain about. Active participation by the country’s citizens in its ultimate form. Give the people what the people want. Want to know who slept with whom in the
Big Brother
house last night? Click here! Watch grainy footage of a cheap duvet bouncing up and down in one corner, and remember to like us on Facebook! Or watch the car-chase right up to the crash! Watch an Indian man pop his eyeballs out! Must read – RIGHT NOW!

The online updates happened in a constant, arrhythmic torrent, made up of every conceivable colour, all mixed together, meaning that the end result was inevitably brown. There was no day, no night. Just a constant howl of stress.

She looked over at Schyman’s glass bunker. He was reading something on his computer, something very important from the look of it. It was ironic, really. He had turned the
Evening Post
into the biggest printed newspaper in Sweden just as that had ceased to matter, when the printed edition was merely an advertisement for the digital edition. The internet was what mattered, and online they were hopelessly outclassed in spite of all the infrastructure projects, high-tech digital solutions and android-based platforms. Their competitors owned the internet, not as a result of their journalism but because of their flashy adverts, street pictures and traffic information.

‘Good morning.’

Annika looked up. Valter was disgracefully alert.

‘Can I sit here?’ He had already put his rucksack in Berit’s place.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Welcome to another day in the citadel of free speech.’

Valter Wennergren put a copy of the declining print edition of the paper on the desk, took off his jacket, laid it on top of his briefcase and sat down. ‘What are you doing today?’ he asked, sounding genuinely interested.

‘The Lerbergs,’ Annika said. ‘We’ll have to keep an eye on Ingemar. Whether he dies or not, it’s a story. And there’s an alert out for his wife now. “Where is Nora?” You know the sort of thing … If anyone releases pictures of the kids, we’ll change that to “Where’s Mummy?” Or, even better, “Mummy, where are you?”’

She handed him a copy of the picture of Nora that the police had issued, a portrait from the family album, with a description attached: ‘Nora Maria Andersson Lerberg, twenty-seven years old, 1 metre 68 centimetres tall, long, ash-blonde hair, grey-blue eyes, normal build, weight approximately 65 kilos. Probably wearing a crucifix round her neck, plus wedding and engagement rings, plain, eighteen-carat gold. Clothing at time of disappearance: unknown. Healthy skin, doesn’t use makeup. Takes Levaxin for thyroid problems. No other medication, no allergies.’

‘I’d be happy to tag along,’ he said, taking the picture and studying it for a moment. ‘I’ve just got one question first.’

Annika logged into Facebook. At the top of her newsfeed she read that Sjölander, a colleague who was sitting on the other side of the partition, had eaten breakfast with a secret source at the Sheraton. (If you really wanted to describe a source as secret, why write on Facebook where and when you met them?)

Valter Wennergren opened the paper again. ‘On page thirteen.’

Annika looked away from the screen.

‘It’s about Gustaf Holmerud,’ Valter said.

She pushed the laptop away and grabbed a copy of the paper. Entire mornings could pass now without her ever leafing through it. ‘What is it you’re wondering about?’ she asked, turning to pages twelve and thirteen. Twelve was an advert for a new type of scratch-card. Thirteen was dominated by two pictures. One showed a man smiling, wearing a crayfish-party hat and bib, and the other a young woman in a school-graduation cap.

Annika looked at the photograph of the blonde girl, Hanna Josefin Liljeberg, from Täby kyrkby, nineteen years old when she was found murdered on Kungsholmen in Stockholm. Suddenly the past fifteen years vanished and Annika was back there, her first summer temping job at the
Evening Post
, that scorching Saturday afternoon at the end of July, peering in at the crime scene through black iron railings. Josefin’s eyes staring straight into hers, clouded and grey, her head thrown back, mouth open in a silent scream. The bruise on her right breast, the green tinge to her stomach. The blunt grey of the stone behind her, the muted vegetation, the shadow play of the foliage, the closeness and heat, the nauseating smell.