Authors: Liza Marklund
The media were out in force again that afternoon. Most of the nationals were in place: she could see Berit Hamrin of the
Evening Post
in the queue for security clearance to sit on the public benches. Nina showed her ID and was let into the cramped, windowless anteroom. The prosecutor and his legal assistant were already there. A low-energy lamp in the ceiling cast a subdued bluish-white light that seemed unable to reach the corners of the room.
‘Ready, Hoffman?’ Svante Crispinsson said, greeting her warmly. ‘His lawyer’s likely to go for you hard. Don’t take it personally.’
Nina gave a curt nod. She hadn’t been expecting anything else.
‘Just keep a clear head.’
Svante Crispinsson was one of the northern district’s youngest prosecutors, and Nina had had dealings with him before. He was regarded as a little disorganized, as far as investigative work was concerned, but in court he was a great asset, unafraid and combative.
‘Let’s see if we can keep the members of the jury awake,’ the prosecutor said. ‘The old boy at the far left has a tendency to doze off.’
Nina got herself a cup of coffee and sat on a chair close to the door. Crispinsson leafed through his papers, muttering inaudibly to himself. His suit was slightly too large and his hair too long; he gave the impression of being confused and artless, which made him seem honest and likeable.
She straightened her back and stared at the wall in front of her. Ivar Berglund was guilty. She was certain of it. His timid appearance was an act. There was something extremely disturbing just beneath that unassuming exterior, something impervious and untouchable that only deeply criminal people possessed. She had felt it before, had lived close to it, far too close, when she was far too young.
The coffee was insipid.
Giving evidence in court was the part of her job she liked least. The public hearing was a performance in the service of justice. The judge and jury needed to be convinced that the chain of evidence was strong enough for a guilty verdict. But she preferred the darkness behind the scenes, complex investigations, getting closer and closer, tightening the noose.
A bell rang and the parties were called for the continuation of the main hearing into the case of murder or assisted murder. The prosecutor and his assistant went into the courtroom. Nina sat in the anteroom and waited, motionless. Usual practice was for the accused to be questioned first, followed by the witnesses, but Berglund had asked to be questioned last. That was unusual, but the judge had upheld his request when Crispinsson was given an assurance that he could recall certain witnesses afterwards.
Control, Nina thought. He doesn’t want to speak until he’s heard what everyone else has to say.
The door to the courtroom opened. She stood up,
stepped into the dazzling daylight and walked straight to the witness stand without looking left or right. Everyone was staring at her as she crossed the floor: the spectators on the other side of the reinforced glass, Berglund, showing no emotion, his lawyer, openly provocative, and Svante Crispinsson, with the trace of a smile.
She raised her hand to take the oath, and her jacket strained across her back. She had put on a bit of muscle since she’d last worn the outfit, whenever that had been. The last time she’d given evidence, presumably. She, Nina Victoria Hoffman, promised and swore on her honour and conscience to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, with no embellishments or amendments.
Crispinsson coughed into his hand before he began to speak, and tugged at his hair. ‘Nina Hoffman, what is your job?’
She was standing absolutely straight. She didn’t really need her suit to make her look like a plain-clothes police officer: she knew she looked like one, restrained and correct, unambiguous but lacking colour. ‘I’m a trained police officer, criminologist and behavioural scientist. I currently work as an operational analyst for the National Crime Unit in Stockholm.’
The clerk typed, the sunlight reflecting off the strengthened glass. One of the peculiarities of the high-security court was the barrier that separated the public from those involved in the case. She was aware that the reporters behind her were hearing her words through a loudspeaker, with a tiny delay.
‘Can you give us a bit of background to your work last spring?’
She stretched her shoulders, and felt Berglund’s eyes on her. It was hugely important that he was convicted. He was dangerous, unpredictable; his impervious core meant that he lacked the usual human inhibitions. She could sense his inner self behind those blank eyes, like oil on a stretch of water.
‘New information came to light that led us to take another look at a twenty-year-old case, the disappearance of Viola Söderland, and examine all the evidence once more.’
Crispinsson nodded almost imperceptibly but encouragingly. ‘And what happened on Saturday, the seventeenth of May last year?’
‘A DNA sample was taken from the accused’s home in Täby.’
The house at the end of the cul-de-sac, a one-storey villa from the 1960s, red brick, closed shutters over the windows.
He had been there, surprised but amiable and accommodating. His eyes had been the same then as they were now, heavy and dark, untarnished by more than a year in custody. No normal person would react in that way. Isolation, twenty-three hours at a stretch, and with maximum restrictions at first: no newspapers, no television, no contact with the outside world. An hour of fresh air each day in the exercise yard on the roof of the prison, in a space the shape of a slice of cake, blocked off by wire netting. She knew he hadn’t received a single visitor, not
even after the restrictions were relaxed. She was aware of his hands from the corner of her eye, resting on the table, his watchful pose.
He was made of iron, bog ore from the marshlands where he had grown up.
‘Can you give us a brief summary of the main aspects of the Viola Söderland case?’ Crispinsson said.
‘Is this really relevant?’ Martha Genzélius, Berglund’s lawyer, interrupted. ‘My client is not accused of anything to do with Viola Söderland.’
‘The prosecution is based upon a chain of evidence,’ the prosecutor said. ‘We need to explain the nature of each link or the case will be incomprehensible.’
‘That won’t help. The entire case is incomprehensible, no matter how the prosecutor presents it.’
The judge struck his gavel. The lawyer, Martha Genzélius, fidgeted on her chair, the picture of frustration. Nina raised her chin and waited.
‘Viola Söderland, if you don’t mind,’ Crispinsson said, nodding towards Nina.
She made an effort to reply in a calm and factual way. ‘Viola Söderland disappeared from her villa in Djursholm on the night of the twenty-third of September almost twenty-one years ago. Her body has never been found. There was one witness, a neighbour who was walking his dog on the night in question, who saw a man get out of a car outside Söderland’s home. The neighbour made a note of the car’s number plate, but the owner had an alibi.’
‘Who was the owner?’ Crispinsson interrupted.
She swallowed what she was about to say and lost her flow. ‘The car was registered to Ivar Berglund.’
‘And there were signs of a struggle in the villa in Djursholm?’
She had spent hours studying the photographs, grainy and poorly lit, taken during the last shaky days of colour film, just before everything had gone digital, infinitely sharper and easier to work with. She had examined countless pictures of that sort, from hundreds of different crime scenes, and ‘struggle’ wasn’t the word she would have used, but this wasn’t the time or place to make pedantic points about the prosecutor’s choice of vocabulary.
‘There was a smashed vase on the hall floor, and strands of hair that didn’t belong to Viola, her children, or any of the staff in the house. That was as far as the original investigation got. DNA technology was in its infancy and it wasn’t possible to get a result from a few strands of hair – they would have needed a sackful to identify the entire sequence.’
‘But that is possible today?’
It seemed almost incredible that there had been a time before DNA. How had any crimes ever been solved twenty years ago?
‘It’s possible to extract so-called mitochondrial DNA from strands of hair now. That’s an alternative form of analysis that doesn’t give quite as much information as a complete DNA sequence, but it’s very reliable.’
‘So once you had the new information, you requested
a DNA sample from the car-owner under suspicion, a saliva sample. What happened?’
‘It was a perfect match.’
She couldn’t help looking at Ivar Berglund, and was aware of everyone around her doing the same thing, both inside the court and on the public benches. All eyes landed on the accused, who sat there, still as a statue, his hands resting heavily one on top of the other. He was looking straight at her and their eyes met. His were narrow and dark. She tried to see any depth in them, but failed.
‘Did you take the man in for further questioning?’
‘A colleague and I interviewed him at his home in Täby.’
‘What did he have to say for himself?’
A heaviness to his movements, superficial politeness and surprise, but she could sense hidden depths, the snakes within.
‘He stuck to his alibi, that he had been giving a lecture on the genetic modification of aspen trees up in Sandviken on the night in question.’
‘Were you able to confirm what he told you?’
‘There were about seventy people in the audience, but no one knows exactly when Viola Söderland went missing.’
‘Could he have been in both places? On the same night?’
‘The distance between Sandviken and Stockholm is a hundred and ninety-one kilometres, so, yes. It’s theoretically possible for him to have been in both places on the same night.’
Berglund’s lawyer seemed amused, and whispered
something in her client’s ear. Nina clenched her teeth. She wouldn’t let herself be provoked.
‘But Ivar Berglund is facing charges regarding an entirely separate allegation, not Viola Söderland’s disappearance,’ the defence lawyer said, looking through her papers.
Nina reached for the glass of water on the table in front of her. It was refreshing, tasted earthy.
‘Can you tell the court how you and your colleagues at National Crime proceeded with the case?’
‘We compared Berglund’s DNA profile with every ongoing criminal investigation in Sweden.’
‘And what happened?’
‘We found another match.’
‘To an ongoing criminal investigation?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which one?’
‘The murder of Karl Gustaf Evert Ekblad in Nacka last year.’
It was as if a sudden wind had passed through the spectators’ benches on the other side of the glass, a soundless storm, rising and falling, hair fluttering, arms moving, lips talking, pens scribbling. The facts in the case were already public knowledge, but up to now they had been one-dimensional, words on a page. Now they came to life. The man was revealed as the monster he was.
The prosecutor looked at his notes. ‘You were coordinating that investigation at National Crime. Can you tell us in more detail about the case?’
Her first week in her new job. She hadn’t even had time to attend the induction course before real life got in the way.
‘Karl Gustaf Evert Ekblad, known as Kag, used to spend a lot of time sitting on the benches in Orminge shopping centre. He was tortured and killed in May last year.’
‘Tortured?’
Nina took her eyes off the prosecutor and looked directly at Ivar Berglund. She wasn’t scared of him: she knew what he was. ‘The victim was found hanging by his knees from a tree, above an anthill, naked and smeared with honey. His ankles and wrists were tied with duct-tape. His nails had been pulled out, his rectum had been severely damaged, and his nose broken. He had died from lack of oxygen, asphyxiated by a plastic bag.’
Ivar Berglund leaned back in his chair, as though he needed to distance himself from what was being said. He whispered something to his representative, who gave a quick nod.
The prosecutor held up a sheet of paper towards the judge. ‘The details of the forensic pathology report on the murder victim, Karl Gustaf Evert Ekblad, are in Appendix Fifty-three B.’
The judge made a note. Crispinsson turned back to Nina. ‘Did you visit the scene of the crime?’
The pine tree on a rocky outcrop, with a thick trunk and stubby crown. The lower branches were thick as a man’s thighs, long dead, and the wood had taken on
the colour and structure of driftwood, grey and silky smooth.
‘Yes, I did.’
‘While the victim was still . . . hanging there?’
The harsh white light of the forensics team’s lamps, police officers like shadows.
‘Yes.’
‘What did the crime scene tell you?’
‘It was carefully chosen. Isolated, relatively close to a built-up area, but out of earshot.’
‘And the victim?’
Nina looked at Berglund again. He gazed back at her as she answered, evaluating her certainty. ‘Hanging people from their knees like that is an established method of torture, known as
La Barra
, ‘the Parrot’s Perch’. It’s extremely painful, because the flow of blood to the legs is cut off. If the victim survives, the injuries often lead to gangrene and amputation. Smearing victims with honey and putting them on top of anthills is a tried-and-tested method in Africa, particularly Angola.’
‘Where at the crime scene was the perpetrator’s DNA found?’
She turned to Crispinsson. ‘A fragment of skin was found under the nail of the victim’s right index finger, and the DNA matched Ivar Berglund’s.’
‘Was that match confirmed?’
She replied in a forceful tone to camouflage the deficiency of her answer. ‘That was the information we received from the National Forensics Laboratory.’
The prosecutor looked down at his papers. The air in the court was quite still. She glanced at the jury. They were alert and wide-eyed. Even the man on the far left was awake.
‘The victim, Karl Gustaf Ekblad, where was he living?’ Crispinsson asked.
Dark wooden panelling that needed varnishing. The crooked letterbox, no flowerbeds. A pair of greyish-white curtains in the big picture window.