The Disappeared (49 page)

Morgan Axberger pursed his lips.

‘Hardly. But Thea found out that I had made a film featuring her precious boyfriend as the killer, and unfortunately she told Elias. When there was all that fuss about the books later on, and it became known that he was the intermediary between the publisher and the author, he tried to blackmail me. He promised to leave the country if I gave him enough, said he would never set foot in Sweden again if I paid him what he was asking.’

‘But you killed him?’

‘It was best for all concerned. Once the film ended up in the hands of the police, the situation became untenable. Elias had to go.’

Peder wondered how someone could think that way, believing they had power over life and death like God Himself. Pointing the finger, you shall live and you shall die.

He could feel his mobile against his leg through the thin fabric of his trouser pocket. Hesitantly he took it out.

‘Excuse me, what are you doing?’ Morgan Axberger’s voice was deep and affronted.

‘I’m calling my boss to tell him I’ve had a tip-off about where Jimmy is,’ Peder said. ‘He doesn’t know what I know. That you were the one who took Jimmy. I went to see Thea on my own. If I call him, the police will be on their way at the same time as I let you go.’

Axberger looked unsure, but silently accepted what Peder had said.

Alex answered almost immediately. ‘Where the hell are you?’

Hearing Alex’s voice in his ear made Peder relax; he suddenly realised how exhausted he was.

‘I’ve been looking for Jimmy. I think I know where he is.’

Alex didn’t speak for a moment, then he said: ‘Peder, let’s not do this over the phone. Come back to HQ, please. Fredrika and I are waiting for you. Ylva is here too.’

Ylva?

‘Ylva? What’s Ylva doing there?’

‘She’s just arrived. Nobody has heard from you for hours, so of course we were worried.’

He was missing something. Peder pressed the phone close to his ear.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said nobody had heard from you for . . .’

‘Before that.’

‘I said let’s not do this over the phone. Can’t you tell me where you are? We’ll come and pick you up.’

‘What do you mean, let’s not do this? What is it you don’t want to talk about over the phone? I know where Jimmy is.’

He heard Alex sigh, then speak quietly to someone sitting beside him.

‘Peder, I’m so very sorry you’ve had to work this out on your own. If only I could have got hold of you, things would have been different.’

Morgan Axberger began to edge slowly away from Peder, who was rooted to the spot.

‘Alex, I don’t understand.’

‘Can’t you come back to HQ?’

‘I know where he is.’

His voice was thin. Weak. Like a child’s.

‘So do I,’ Alex said gently. ‘We opened up the grave and found Jimmy. Come back, Peder.’

No.

No no.

No no no.

Peder heard someone yelling, and saw Morgan Axberger break into a run. He realised that he was the one bellowing, loud enough to frighten the life out of all the birds that had been perched quietly in the trees. They rose in a panic, flapping furiously into the sky.

Peder dropped the phone as if it had burned his fingers. Alex disappeared, and so did Morgan Axberger.

‘Stop!’

Axberger stopped as he heard Peder’s pounding footsteps behind him.

‘Is it true?’

He couldn’t stop yelling, repeating the same phrase over and over again.

‘Is it true? Is it true? Is he dead?’

And there it was at last. Axberger’s weary expression.

‘Of course. What the hell did you think?’

For a moment, time stood still. There wasn’t a sound, nothing moved.

Jimmy. Was. Dead.

And as far as Peder was concerned, life as he knew it was over.

I will never learn to live with this.

Peder raised his gun, took aim at Morgan Axberger and fired two shots.

Then there was silence once more.

THE BEGINNING OF MAY

64

People didn’t appreciate Kronoberg Park nearly enough. That was Fredrika Bergman’s firm opinion. At first it seemed like a nightmare to anyone pushing a buggy, with its hilly, uneven terrain and its wealth of greenery. However, anyone who made the effort to reach the play area would definitely come back.

Fredrika and Alex each bought a salad for lunch at Café Vurma and wandered along through the trees.

‘Here,’ Alex said.

A park bench in the sunshine. They sat down and began to eat.

‘How are things with Spencer?’

Fredrika didn’t really know what to say.

‘He’s getting there.’

‘He must feel bloody awful. I know I would.’

‘I think it’s the fact that his colleagues let him down that upsets him most,’ Fredrika said, poking at her salad.

Spencer. Her beloved partner. Recent events had taken their toll, far more than last year’s car accident.

‘You have to get over this,’ she had whispered in his ear only last night. ‘For Saga’s sake, and for mine.’

He hadn’t responded, and his silence worried her.

‘It’s just as well he was cleared,’ Alex said dryly. ‘Otherwise, he would have felt even worse.’

That was some consolation, at least. The prosecutor had decided the evidence was too flimsy, and refused to take the case to court. Spencer was still on paternity leave. To Fredrika’s surprise, and despair, he had started talking about taking early retirement.

‘I just can’t let that happen,’ she had said to a friend as they were drinking a glass of wine a few days earlier. ‘If he gives up work, there’ll be nothing left of him.’

Fredrika pushed all thoughts of Spencer aside.

‘When is our friend Håkan Nilsson coming home?’

Håkan Nilsson, who had frustrated them since day one of the investigation, and had then disappeared from his motorboat. In today’s society it was much more difficult to flee the country than it had been thirty years earlier, when Johan Aldrin slipped into the shadows in Norway. Håkan had only got as far as Athens when he was picked up by the Greek authorities in connection with an assault.

‘They’re putting him on a plane at the weekend.’

What did he have to come home to, Fredrika wondered. An officer had travelled over to Athens to question him when he was arrested, mainly to find out once and for all why he had behaved as he had.

And Håkan had finally explained.

The day before Rebecca went missing, Håkan had confronted her with the ultrasound scan of the baby, demanding to know why she hadn’t said anything. That was when she had told him that she wasn’t sure he was the father. By his own admission, Håkan had gone mad when he found out that Rebecca had had a lover. He had gone on and on at her, but she had refused to reveal his identity.

Eventually, the situation had escalated beyond all reason. In his rage, Håkan had lost control of himself and yelled at Rebecca:

‘You’d better be careful, you fucking bitch! I’ll kill you, you filthy whore!’

He had regretted it later that same day, but Rebecca had refused to speak to him. And then she vanished. In order to avoid attracting the attention of the police, Håkan had done everything in his power to find Rebecca. For a while, he had almost been convinced that it was his words that had made her disappear. The fear of being accused of something he hadn’t done was replaced by sheer guilt.

When Rebecca’s body was found, he once again became afraid that he would be a suspect, and decided to say as little as possible. Ironically, this merely served to make him even more interesting to the police.

The officer who had interviewed him concluded that in his opinion, Håkan Nilsson looked like the very epitome of the walking dead, and he had asked the Greek authorities to put him on suicide watch; the risk that he might take his own life was deemed to be significant.

‘He must be dreadfully lonely,’ Fredrika said.

‘Håkan? That’s putting it mildly. I don’t think he had anyone apart from Rebecca,’ Alex said.

‘And she didn’t want him.’

Fredrika changed the subject.

‘What about Peder?’

Alex stiffened.

‘We won’t know anything until June. But things don’t look good, that much I can say.’

‘He insists it was self-defence.’

‘He also says that Thea Aldrin spoke to him, and we know she doesn’t talk. She wouldn’t say a word to the officers who went to see her at the same time as we were heading over to Storholmen. We have to accept that Jimmy’s death left Peder confused. Unwell.’

‘But if it wasn’t Thea Aldrin who told him that Morgan Axberger had taken Jimmy, how did he find out? How did he know that he needed to go to Storholmen?’

They had discussed this over and over again, always with the same outcome.

‘Let’s drop this before we fall out again,’ Alex said. ‘He must have worked out that Jimmy was buried at the grave site. Thought it through, just like you did. And come up with the idea that Morgan Axberger was the guilty party.’

The sun was making Fredrika feel too warm. She shrugged off her spring jacket.

‘So what about that other business? That thing Morgan Axberger is supposed to have said?’

‘The fact that he wasn’t the only one to blame for Rebecca Trolle’s death?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let it go, Fredrika. Just drop it.’

‘But seriously – there is
nothing
in the case notes to explain how Morgan Axberger knew how far Rebecca had got with her research.’

‘For God’s sake!’

Alex put down his salad and wiped his mouth. Glanced at the woman reading a book on the next bench along, and lowered his voice.

‘Morgan Axberger was twisted. Perverted. When the police confiscated the film, Axberger murdered Elias Hjort, who knew the name of the real author behind the books. Who knows, perhaps Axberger was a co-author? The years go by and suddenly a young girl starts poking about into the whole tangled mess. Axberger finds out through Malena Bremberg, his spy at the care home. Believe me, he was keeping a close eye on that place even before he managed to get his claws into Malena. Anyway. Since Rebecca had reached the point of going to visit Thea and even showing interest in Axberger himself, he thought it was time to put the brakes on.’

Alex picked up his salad again.

‘That can’t be right,’ Fredrika objected. ‘He can’t have murdered Rebecca just because she went to visit Thea. He must have had more concrete information about what she’d found out. And how did Morgan know that Rebecca wanted to speak to him, unless someone told him? We’ve gone through her phone records and emails, and we haven’t seen one single word to indicate that she made contact with him herself.’

‘Just forget it, Fredrika. Morgan Axberger is the only killer. Rebecca found out from Janne Bergwall, our own esteemed colleague, that Axberger had been caught at a porn club with a snuff movie in his inside pocket that could be linked to
Mercury
and
Asteroid.
From then on, she’d had it.’

Fredrika dropped her salad in the waste bin next to the bench.

‘That’s entirely possible,’ she said. ‘But Axberger couldn’t have worked that out for himself. Someone put him on the right track. Somebody who wanted her dead even before Axberger did.’

Johan Aldrin, who was still calling himself Valter Lund for the time being, and who was tipped to be Axberger’s successor as managing director, had claimed that Morgan Axberger had allowed him into his empire because he owed Thea a favour. That could be true, but given Johan’s immense drive and energy, Fredrika doubted that he was a man who needed his mother in order to get on in life.

That was the first aspect of the case that bothered her. Why hadn’t Johan moved away from a man like Morgan Axberger when he came back to Sweden?

The second aspect was Johan Aldrin’s identity. Why had he continued to pretend he was Valter Lund and not Thea Aldrin’s son? Why hadn’t he stood up for his mother, explained the somewhat extreme circumstances that preceded the murder of his father?

The third aspect was his relationship with Rebecca Trolle. She had been seeing Thea Aldrin’s son over a period of several months, initially as a student and then as his lover, while spending more and more of her time looking into Thea’s past. Not once had Johan Aldrin even considered telling her who he was. He had actually embarked on a relationship with her after he had realised what the subject of her dissertation was. That couldn’t be explained away as ‘curiosity’, as he had claimed.

But what Fredrika found the most difficult to grasp was why Rebecca Trolle had insisted, with the stubbornness of a lunatic, that Thea Aldrin was innocent. Thea had confessed to a murder she hadn’t committed. Why had Rebecca reached that conclusion, after all her research?

Fredrika requested a copy of the case notes relating to the stabbing of Manfred in Thea’s garage. Something had made Rebecca suspect that things weren’t right, and Fredrika wouldn’t rest until she saw what it was.

It took almost an entire working day, but eventually she found something, an odd detail that hadn’t really attracted much attention in the notes. When the crime scene was examined,
three
sets of fingerprints had been secured. One set belonged to Thea, one to Manfred, and one to an unknown person. Fredrika called Torbjörn Ross, who was currently under suspension while internal affairs considered his future within the police service. Fredrika was hoping they would kick him out.

‘The fingerprints,’ she said. ‘Who was the third person in the garage when Manfred was murdered?’

‘Some guy who used to mow the lawn for Thea. But we didn’t bother following it up. The prints could have been left there at any time; they didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the murder.’

Fredrika leafed through the case notes.

‘How did you establish that the prints belonged to the guy who mowed the lawn?’

The silence at the other end of the phone told her everything she needed to know.

‘You never checked, did you?’

Ross became defensive.

‘It wasn’t necessary. We had all the proof we needed.’