The Final Word (29 page)

‘The electricity was disconnected six months ago,’ the janitor said. ‘That’s what happens when you don’t pay your bills.’

She peered into the darkness, as anonymous and featureless as the men who had lived there. People couldn’t live their whole lives without leaving some sort of impression. There had to be something here, even if they had tried their utmost to remain invisible, non-existent. Even the absence of evidence meant something, if you could only understand what.

Nina pushed open the door to a small toilet, and the stench of sewage made her gasp. She pulled out her mobile and switched on its torch.

‘You need to look after your house,’ the janitor said. ‘Otherwise the stench trap dries out. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to explain that. This place has been empty for a long time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the owner, and I’ve been here almost two years now. It hasn’t been rented out either, and I can’t take responsibility for people who don’t—’

‘Señor,’ Inspector Rodríguez said. ‘Would you mind waiting outside?’

The janitor slipped out.

Nina positioned her mobile on the basin so it would illuminate the toilet. Using both hands, she teased off the lid of the cistern and looked inside. Dry and empty, its water had evaporated a long time ago. She replaced the lid, picked up her phone and looked into all the corners and beneath the basin.

Inspector Rodríguez shuffled restlessly behind her. He had had a long conversation with Commissioner Axier Elorza, and was aware of the cases in both Stockholm and San Sebastián. ‘To be honest, the idea that anyone living in such a state should be internationally renowned in any context is rather hard to believe,’ he said, from the living room.

By the light from her mobile Nina found her way into the kitchen. The furnishings were made of cheap woodchip, stained yellow. The kitchen smelt of sewage as well,
but not as strongly as the toilet. She opened the fridge and a waft of mould hit her.

‘Between three hundred and fifty and four hundred murders are committed in Spain each year,’ he said. ‘Half get cleared up, so how many of the remainder has Señor Berglund committed?’

‘At least one,’ she said. ‘Ernesto Jaka.’

Rodríguez sighed.

But not all the brothers’ killings were defined as such, Nina thought. A lot were recorded in official statistics as disappearances: Viola Söderland was one, Nora Lerberg another. The question was, what had they done with the bodies?

The fridge was empty. She closed its door. Inspector Rodríguez came into the kitchen, leaned against the door frame and watched her as she opened all the kitchen cupboards, which contained a small amount of dusty porcelain and kitchen equipment, glasses and mugs, various packets, jars, and a few tins of olives and chopped tomatoes, the latest best-before date six months ago.

Each year there were 22,000 murders in Europe, two-thirds of them in Russia and Ukraine. The Berglund brothers weren’t needed there: the Russian Mafia had their own thugs. The brothers’ services were probably in demand in environments where they could blend in, where they could move about unseen with their toolbox, presumably mainly in Scandinavia, but also the rest of Europe.

‘The body in San Sebastián had been sawn into small pieces,’ the policeman went on. ‘That strikes me as
personal rather than professional. Why make things more complicated?’

Nina searched shelf after shelf, shining her phone’s torch behind packets of spaghetti and jars of spice. She didn’t agree with the inspector. Brutal murders like that could certainly be personal acts of desperation, but also the exact opposite: cold, professional, well planned. And everyday implements could be used as terrible tools of torture. She had seen what the brothers had managed to achieve with saws and pliers, hammers, ropes and awls.

‘Down here on the Costa we’ve got every criminal gang in the world,’ Rodríguez said. ‘Four hundred and thirty, in fact.’

Nina pulled out drawers containing cutlery and aluminium foil, emptied them into the sink, then put the drawers upside down on the kitchen floor.

‘Which of them employs Señor Berglund?’ Rodríguez asked.

She crouched and shone her phone into the space below the bottom drawer. She found ants and some dead cockroaches. She stood up and straightened her back. ‘Probably one of the Russian groups,’ she said. ‘One that managed to grab sufficient assets when Communism collapsed to allow them to conduct criminal activities on an international level. That’s what the evidence suggests, from the first case as well the latest. Viola Söderland disappeared to Russia, and Ernesto Jaka was trading in Russian oil. Ivar Berglund’s company was officially registered as trading in Russian timber.’

She left the kitchen, went into the small living room, and shone her torch towards a sagging sofa and a television as bulky as a small washing-machine. The inspector had been right in his comment about the state of the place. The question was: what did they do with all the money they must have made from their activities? Home furnishings certainly didn’t appear to be a priority.

She passed her phone to Rodríguez, who took it without protest. He held it up while Nina pulled all the cushions from the sofa, to find some crushed crisps and something that looked like a butterfly pupa. She took her phone back, shone its light under the sofa, then behind the television and curtains. Nothing.

‘Didn’t you say the owner is in custody in Sweden? And has been for the past year?’

She went out into the hall and up the narrow marble staircase.

‘Or are we looking for someone else?’ Rodríguez said, following her. ‘The man who’s been dead for twenty years?’

Neither the dead man nor his brother had been in this house for the past year, that much was obvious. Nina looked around upstairs. There were two bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms. The smaller room had a single bed, the slightly larger one a double. Nina began her search in the larger room. The bed was made up with yellow sheets. Nina felt them: they weren’t cotton. She pulled off the bedclothes and lifted the mattress, shining her phone’s torch at the ribbed base. She moved on to
the wardrobe, which contained a few jackets, pairs of trousers, and three shirts, and quickly checked the pockets and linings. Nothing there either. The bathroom didn’t smell as bad as the toilet, but it wasn’t far off. Empty.

‘I’ll wait outside,’ Rodríguez said, and slid back down the stairs.

Nina stood where she was in the silence, her mobile in her hand, its light shining down at the floor.

Maybe they really
were
giants, Nina, disguised as windmills. Always try to see the truth!

Now she had searched the brothers’ homes in both Täby and Marbella, so what wasn’t she seeing? There was something in the gaps, behind the scenery, a lack of ambition in what was both visible and concealed. Her own family been engaged in criminal activity for the same reason as most other people, as a short cut to imagined happiness and success, but the Berglund brothers weren’t like that. They were driven by something else.

The daylight from the front door stretched up the wall in the hall. The insight that slowly dawned on her was like a low-energy lamp being switched on, weak and murky at first, then icily clear and unavoidable.

The brothers hadn’t chosen their path to earn money. Maybe they weren’t after the rewards of violence, but acted out their brutality for the hell of it.

She could see Ingela Berglund’s hunched frame in her mind’s eye: what exactly had happened to the paws of Arne and Ivar’s dog?

Had she been mistaken in the outline she had given to Commissioner Elorza? Did evil actually exist? Perhaps it didn’t always arise as a consequence of powerlessness.

If that was true, then it was like this bedroom, dirty yellow and musty, dusty and lonely.

She shivered, in spite of the heat.

She walked slowly into the other bedroom. The sheets were the same polyester mix. She lifted the mattress and found some huge dust-balls.

In the wardrobe there was just one item: some pale green work overalls with lots of pockets. Nina looked through them, and found a folding rule, a screwdriver, a pair of work-gloves. And, at the bottom, a key.

She shone her torch at it and the metal shimmered in her latex-clad hand. It was a copy, no key-ring, no address label, no inscription.

The Berglund brothers ran timber businesses in Sweden and Spain, with yearly accounts and genuine activity, part of the stage scenery.

‘Inspector Rodríguez?’ she called.

The policeman’s head appeared.

‘Señor
Berglund’s Spanish timber business, does it have any registered storage facilities?’

Annika dropped her copy of the newspaper on Berit’s desk with a light thud. The front page consisted of a single photograph and four words: a portrait of Ivar Berglund looking like a statue, and the headline SUSPECTED OF ANOTHER MURDER.

‘Do you know when they’re going to restart the trial?’ Annika asked.

Berit didn’t answer but glanced towards the newsdesk, where a number of television cameras had been erected and reporters from other newspapers were talking to Patrik. Bosse from the other evening paper, Annika’s least favourite person, was there.

‘What’s going on?’ Annika asked.

‘Schyman’s called a press conference,’ Berit said. ‘Do you know what it’s about?’

Annika felt her knees go weak and sat down. The time had come. It was all over now. In a way it felt like a relief that everyone was going to know.

‘Here he comes,’ Berit said, nodding towards the glass box.

Anders Schyman walked over to the newsdesk, said hello to some of the reporters from state television – probably former colleagues from his days as a presenter. He exchanged a few words with Patrik, put a hand on his shoulder, then perched resolutely on the desk. ‘Can I have your attention for a moment?’ he said.

The hubbub that had built up in the newsroom died away. People got to their feet, moved closer. The television cameramen stared intently into their lenses, and a few photographers took pictures.

‘Thanks for coming at such short notice,’ he said.

The members of the audience held their breath. Berit stood up to see better, and Annika steeled herself to follow suit.

‘I have some serious news to share with you today,’ the editor-in-chief said. ‘Last Friday, the twenty-ninth of May, the newspaper’s board, led by chairman Albert Wennergren, took the decision that the print edition of the
Evening Post
will cease to be published.’

A uniform gasp spread round the room. Annika studied the reactions of the people around her: that must have been how she had looked when Schyman told her – suspicious, affronted, shocked.

‘The exact date for the closure of the paper has yet to be decided,’ the editor-in-chief went on, slowly and clearly, his feet planted firmly apart. He looked out across the sea of people, without directing his attention to anyone in particular. Annika realized that he was speaking to posterity, for the history books, as he announced the end of an era.

‘The members of the board have asked me to wind down publication of the print edition of the
Evening Post
,’ he said. ‘I have been asked to examine various time-frames and ways of going about it, both rapid and more protracted.’

‘This is completely mad,’ Berit whispered, then looked hard at Annika. ‘Did you know about this?’

Annika shook her head. There was no way she was going to become an accomplice. ‘Mind you, I’m not surprised,’ she whispered back. ‘Sooner or later it had to happen.’

‘As things stand, I’m unable to make any comment about what aspects of the organization will remain after
the closure of the print edition,’ Schyman went on emphatically. ‘But what is clear, however, is that this marks the end of the sort of journalism and media coverage to which I have devoted my career. No doubt something new will come in its place, but I’m not the man to determine what that should be.’

‘But why do we have to be first?’ Berit said, in a stage-whisper. ‘Couldn’t we have waited for the other papers?’

Annika shrugged her shoulders.

‘I accept that this development is unavoidable,’ Schyman said, no longer talking to anyone in the room, but to future YouTube viewers. He was making history, his gaze already focused far into the digital eternity. ‘I respect the decision of the board, but I am not going to carry it out. Someone else will have to do that.’ He stared out across the crowd, his chin raised. Everyone was holding their breath. ‘I’m not going to be the one who hammers the nails into the coffin,’ he said. ‘That isn’t me. I’m not going to shut down Swedish journalism. That’s not what I’ve stood for, not what I’ve worked for, and it isn’t what I’ve taught my colleagues. As a result of this, half an hour ago I informed chairman of the board Albert Wennergren that I am resigning as editor-in-chief and legally responsible publisher of the
Evening Post
with immediate effect. As of today, I am a free agent, and I wish the board every success in their efforts to recruit my replacement. Thanks very much.’

He got down from the desk and the newsroom exploded into a chaos of voices. Everyone rushed towards
him – Annika had to press herself against her own desk to avoid being swept along. A young reporter from Entertainment was shoved sideways and knocked over Berit’s coffee.

‘There’s no point staying here,’ Annika said. ‘I’m going out for a while.’

Without waiting for Berit to reply, she picked up her bag and walked towards the office manager’s office to get the keys to one of the paper’s cars.

Thomas logged on to his computer, his fingers vibrating with anticipation and trepidation. His head was buzzing as the site loaded.

His post had moved down slightly – other opinion-shapers had felt the need to exercise their democratic rights – but it was still there.