Authors: Liza Marklund
Now he was looking at her again, his eyes tired and red-rimmed. ‘Maj-Lis used to worry about you,’ he said. ‘She always thought you took too many risks, that you never let up on yourself. When you were stuck in that tunnel under the Olympic Stadium, or almost froze to death in that shed up in Norrbotten, or when your house burned down . . .’
‘I’ve never looked at it like that,’ Annika said.
‘All the things you put yourself through, Maj-Lis sometimes wondered if that was because of Sven, if he’d done lasting damage.’
She glanced towards the hall and the flight of steps leading upstairs to the bedrooms. Sven and Albin had had separate rooms. She had lost her virginity up there one Sunday afternoon when the rest of the Matsson family were at a quarter-final of the Swedish indoor hockey championship. Hälleforsnäs had lost. ‘Sven isn’t the only person responsible for that,’ she said.
Another flash of lightning lit the room briefly.
‘Maj-Lis will have been dead four years this autumn,’ he said. ‘It’s so lonely sometimes. I wonder how long I’ll be left here without her.’
They sat in silence. Annika’s legs felt as if they were made of lead. She couldn’t help wondering how she would ever stand up.
‘We’ve been here for many generations,’ he said. ‘Your family and ours. We’ve been shaped by hard work. It’s left us all a bit battered.’
The first heavy raindrops hit the window.
‘We’ve got iron in our blood,’ Birger went on. ‘It doesn’t matter if we stay or go somewhere else, it’s there inside us.’
The discomfort inside her eased.
She gazed at Sven’s father, alone in an ugly house in a godforsaken industrial town, with a dead son and a dead wife, and German Eurosport as his main source of company.
He nodded to himself. ‘It’s happening quickly now,’ he said. ‘Everything keeps changing. Just look at the works – have you seen what they’ve done there? Shops and cafés.’
A clap of thunder made the house shake.
‘Thanks,’ Annika said. ‘Thank you for seeing me.’
Birger heaved himself to his feet, walked over to her and took her hand. His grip was dry, but not hard.
The moment she stepped out on to the porch the heavens opened. She rushed to the garage and threw herself into the car. The house at the edge of the forest disappeared behind the torrent of rain.
She pulled her mobile from her bag: one missed call. The number was familiar but it took a few seconds to place it: the National Crime Unit. Good grief! National Crime had tried to reach her and she hadn’t answered
because she was busy clearing up her own mess. Fingers trembling, she pressed redial.
The man named Johansson answered, and Annika explained breathlessly who she was and why she was calling.
‘It’s about the mobile phone that’s under surveillance,’ Johansson said. ‘The operator has been in touch: the phone in question was switched on half an hour ago.’
Everything went quiet around Annika. She was dazzled by flashes of lightning but didn’t hear the thunder. ‘Switched on? Are they sure?’
‘The operator’s triangulation shows that the signal is coming from an area of forest in Södermanland, a kilometre or so from Highway 686 in the council district of Katrineholm. The closest point of reference is a lake called . . . Hosjön.’ He paused.
‘Birgitta’s at Hosjön? Now?’
‘Her mobile is, and has been for half an hour. Or, to be more precise, for the past thirty-four minutes.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Thank you!’
She heard the man sigh. ‘Don’t mention it,’ he said.
Annika clicked to end the call, then rang Birgitta’s number. The storm above her head was making the car shake.
The call was put through, one ring, two, three, four . . .
Someone answered.
‘Hello?’ Annika said. ‘Birgitta?’ The thunder was so loud that she had to stick a finger in her other ear to hear anything. ‘Birgitta? Are you at Lyckebo?’
The line crackled and whistled. Someone was trying to say something.
A flash of lightning lit the buildings and there was another thunderclap. The phone crackled and went silent. She’d lost reception. The lightning must have knocked out one of the masts.
She rang Birgitta again but the call didn’t go through. She tried Steven’s number, but that didn’t work either. She quickly typed a text message to Steven, hoping it would get through eventually:
Birgitta’s at Lyckebo. I’m going there now.
The industrial estate was huge, with endless rows of corrugated-metal warehouses. It lay on the outskirts of Algeciras, about an hour’s drive from Marbella.
‘He rents this entire run of buildings,’ Rodríguez said, gesturing towards the warehouses on either side of number 738.
They hadn’t bothered trying to get hold of a caretaker: Nina was confident that the key she had found in the miserable little house would fit. Just to be on the safe side, in case
la observatora
was wrong, Inspector Rodríguez had put a crowbar into the back of the car.
The warehouse was anonymous from the outside. No sign to show what sort of business was based there, just the number of the building on a tarnished scrap of metal above the door. The façade was made of sun-bleached corrugated metal that had once been blue. No windows, just a large entrance for trucks and a smaller door alongside.
Nina pulled on her gloves again, took the key out of an evidence bag and went to the door of the warehouse to the right of number 738. She held her breath as she inserted the key into the Assa lock. It slid in easily. She tried turning it to the left. It wouldn’t go. She clenched her teeth, tried turning it to the right. The key went round, once, twice – and clicked.
She let the air out of her lungs without a sound.
The door swung open silently on well-oiled hinges.
The warehouse was pitch-black. Nina stepped over the high threshold and stood in the darkness. The air was hot and stagnant. She switched on the little torch on her mobile, shone it around her and discovered a light switch to the left of the door.
With a whooshing sound, the lights in the roof went on, one neon light after another, illuminating the warehouse with an intensity that made Nina squint. The electricity bills had evidently been paid here.
‘What does this mean?’ Rodríguez said, stopping beside her.
The warehouse was completely empty, a metal shell with no contents. The layer of dust on the cement floor was undisturbed. The building measured maybe ten by fifteen metres, and was approximately six metres high.
Nina walked slowly around the walls. If there had been anything to examine she would have done so, but there was no point even in looking. The powerful lighting revealed the utter absence of life and activity.
When she got back to the door, and Rodríguez, she
switched the lights off and they stepped out into the street. Nina locked the door behind them. Rodríguez walked over to the door of number 738, but Nina went towards the warehouse on the left. The same thing happened there: the key fitted and the door swung open.
Empty.
For once, Inspector Rodríguez was silent.
Nina did a circuit of the warehouse, inspecting the floor in case there were any concealed hatches, but there was nothing. She peered at the roof above the lights, but could see nothing unusual. She switched off the lights and locked up, then went back to the warehouse in the middle.
‘Looks like this has seen more use,’ Rodríguez said. ‘Look here – the paint’s been worn off.’
She unlocked the small door and sensed immediately that something was different. The air that met her inside was full of sawdust and turpentine. She switched the lights on.
The warehouse was full of planks and machinery.
‘Why rent three warehouses and only use the one in the middle?’ Inspector Rodríguez asked himself. ‘What purpose do the others serve? Buffer zones?’
Nina planted both feet squarely on the floor and took in her surroundings.
The warehouse was the same size as the other two, ten by fifteen metres, six metres tall. Along the right-hand wall was a rack of timber containing planks sawn to various sizes, sorted by thickness, thin at the top, thick at the bottom. To the left she saw what looked like a
shipping container, a sort of building within a building, approximately five metres long and two metres high, with a closed door in the middle.
In front of them was a large industrial saw, a workbench and, in the middle, a tall, stainless-steel cylinder.
Rodríguez, who had pulled on a pair of sturdy gloves, pointed at the floor. ‘Looks like he normally drives his car in here.’
Nina looked down at the concrete. Beneath their feet she saw faint tyre-tracks from a small car. So, the Berglund brothers didn’t park in the street.
There was a pile of offcuts beyond the end of the rack of timber; the stainless-steel machinery was attached to various pipes, and ran off into a drain.
‘What’s this?’ the inspector asked, walking over to the cylinder.
A row of tools was arranged on the bench. Nina picked up a saw in her gloved hand. The steel blade shone under the bright lighting. She put it down and picked up a pair of pliers.
No marks whatsoever.
Inspector Rodríguez had opened the cylinder and stuck his head inside it.
‘It’s a dishwasher,’ he said, his voice sounding tinny.
‘A sterilizer,’ Nina said. ‘They wash their tools here, to get rid of any traces of DNA.’ She tried the door of the shipping container, but it was locked. She got the key out again, but it didn’t fit. ‘Inspector Rodríguez,’ she said. ‘The crowbar.’
The policeman went out to the car, and Nina heard him open the boot, then close it. He came back to the sealed door, inserted the end of the crowbar, held it in place, then pushed. The lock snapped at once.
Rodríguez opened the door. A dull smell of old rubbish hit them. The Spaniard felt for a light switch. A lamp in the ceiling flickered, considerably weaker than the lighting out in the warehouse. ‘It’s a little den,’ he said.
Nina stepped inside the container. A small kitchen, two chairs, a table and two beds. A toilet and shower cubicle faced each other at the far end. The smell was coming from a bag of rubbish that had been left beside the sink. It couldn’t have been there for more than a week, two at most.
So this was where Arne Berglund had been hiding while his brother was in custody in Sweden. Unless it was the other way round. Had Ivar been here while Arne was in custody?
Rodríguez went over to the beds. ‘Señor Berglund prefers blondes,’ he said.
Nina joined him. On the wall above one of the beds a number of pictures of a beautiful young woman had been taped up. The quality was fairly poor – they looked as if they’d been taken with a mobile phone, then printed on an inkjet printer.
‘It’s the same woman in all the pictures,’ Rodríguez said.
Nina looked hard at the largest, on a sheet of A3. The
woman was wearing summer clothes and was sitting on an outdoor terrace, looking into the camera. She was laughing, and her hair was blowing in the wind. There was also a map of Malmö, pictures of a shop named MatExtra, and a block of flats in what appeared to be a suburban setting.
‘Do you know who she is?’ Inspector Rodríguez asked.
Nina looked at the other photographs, some of which had evidently been taken by the woman herself, using her mobile. Towards the corner, the character of the pictures changed: they were clearly of the same woman, but showed her as a young girl. One had been taken on the grassy fringe of a sandy beach: the blonde girl was sitting on a blue rug with an ice-cream cone in her hand, wrapped in a large towel, and beside her sat another girl, slightly bigger, with darker hair. The blonde was smiling at the camera with her head slightly tilted; the darker girl was looking away so only her profile was visible.
Nina gasped. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know who the woman is.’
The rain stopped abruptly, as if a tap had been turned off.
Annika parked on the forest track that led to Lyckebo, and the car’s wheels sank into the waterlogged ground. She hesitated, then decided to leave her bag on the front seat: no one was likely to steal it out there. Her mobile hadn’t picked up a signal since the lightning strike, but she put it into her back pocket anyway.
She locked the car. The countryside around her was
dripping, the air clean and clear as glass. She passed the barrier, moving quickly through the vegetation, her feet and shins soaked almost instantly. There was still lightning off to the north-east, but she could no longer hear the thunder.
She wondered why Birgitta had gone to Lyckebo. She had never really liked being there, always moaning about the ants, wasps, stinging nettles, the lack of ice-cream and television. Maybe she had decided, like Annika, to confront her demons. Maybe her relapse and Steven’s ultimatum had made her reconsider her life, sort things out and start again.
Annika hoped so.
Together they could put their sibling rivalry behind them, come together and move on. They had so much in common: their background and childhood, experiences that had made them who they were. She quickened her pace. The rocks were slippery as soap. She lost her footing and almost fell.
The cottage came into view in the clearing and Annika felt a warm glow spread through her. It looked as unremarkable and abandoned as before, the gutters dripping. Was there anyone else in the world who felt as she did about the place?
She strode across the old meadow towards the closed door. Tentatively she reached for the handle, and the door swung open on squeaking hinges.
‘Birgitta?’
She stepped into the semi-darkness of the hall, and
blinked to get used to the gloom. She kicked off her muddy sandals and walked into the kitchen.
It was empty.
Surprised, she stopped in the middle of the floor. The kitchen was as bare as it had been when she was last there. And there was no trace of her sister.
‘Birgitta, where are you?’
She caught sight of an old yellow suitcase in one corner. It hadn’t been there earlier in the week, she was sure. Was it Birgitta’s?
She began to walk towards it, but before she could reach it the front door closed with a slam. She spun round, but wasn’t afraid: she knew it was just the wind.