Dark Secrets (10 page)

“I dode—doe—”

“Don’t speak with your mouth full,” Ann-Charlotte interrupted. Lisa fell silent. She chewed mechanically, her gaze fixed on Vanja the whole time. Was she buying time? Why didn’t she answer before she shoved the spoon in her mouth? Vanja waited. Lisa chewed. And swallowed.

“I don’t know. I didn’t watch after the news.”

“What dances did they do? Do you remember that?” Lisa’s expression darkened. The questions were annoying her, for some reason. Vanja was sure of it.

“I don’t know what they were called. We weren’t watching that closely. We were chatting and reading and listening to music and so on. Flicking through the channels.”

“I don’t see how the content of a television program can be of any importance when it comes to finding whoever killed Roger,” Ann-Charlotte broke in. She put the cup down in front of her with a slightly irritated bang. Vanja turned to face her with a smile.

“It isn’t. I was just making conversation.” She turned back to Lisa, still smiling. Lisa didn’t smile back. She met Vanja’s eyes with a stubborn expression on her face.

“Did Roger mention anything that might have been worrying him during the course of the evening?”

“No.”

“No phone calls? No texts he didn’t want to talk about, or that he got upset about?”

“No.”

“He wasn’t behaving differently, didn’t seem to find it difficult to concentrate, nothing like that?”

“No.”

“And he didn’t say he was going to see anyone else when he left you at… about ten o’clock, was that what you said?”

Lisa gazed at Vanja. Who was she trying to trip up? She knew perfectly well that Lisa had said Roger left at ten. She was testing her. To see if she would contradict herself. But there was no chance of that. Lisa was well rehearsed.

“Yes, he left at ten and, no, he said he was going home to see who had been knocked out.” Lisa reached for the bread basket and took a slice of whole-wheat. Ann-Charlotte chipped in again.

“But she’s already told you all this. I don’t understand why she has to answer the same questions over and over again. Don’t you believe her?” Ann-Charlotte sounded almost hurt. As if the very idea that her little girl might tell a lie was deeply shocking. Vanja looked at Lisa; it might be shocking to her mother, but she knew Lisa was hiding something. Something had happened that evening. Something Lisa had no intention of telling her. Not with her mother there, at any rate. Lisa cut herself some cheese and placed the slices on the piece of bread with slow, almost exaggerated movements, glancing at Vanja from time to time. She would have to be careful. This one was considerably sharper than the police officer she had spoken to in the school cafeteria. She had to stick to the story she’d practiced. Keep repeating the times. She wouldn’t remember the details of the evening, if they asked her. Nothing special had happened.

Roger arrived.

Homework.

Tea.

TV.

Roger left.

After all, they wouldn’t expect her to remember every single detail of any other ordinary, boring Friday evening either. Besides which, she was in shock. Her boyfriend was dead. If she’d only been better at crying, she would have squeezed out a few tears right now. Made her mother put a stop to the conversation.

“Of course I believe her,” Vanja said calmly, “but Lisa was the last person we know of who saw Roger that evening. We need to get all the details right.” Vanja pushed her chair back. “But that’s enough for now. You need to get to school and to work.”

“I don’t work. Apart from a few hours a week in the community. But that’s voluntary.”

A housewife. That explained the impeccable home. At least as far as the cleaning was concerned.

Vanja took out her card and pushed it across to Lisa. She kept her finger on it for long enough to force Lisa to look up and meet her gaze.

“Give me a call if you think of anything you haven’t mentioned about that Friday.” Vanja shifted her focus to Ann-Charlotte. “I’ll see myself out. Leave you to your breakfast.”

Vanja left the house and drove back to the station. On the way she thought about the dead boy and was struck by a realization that made her feel slightly sad and uncomfortable at the same time.

So far she hadn’t met anyone who seemed particularly upset or sorry that Roger was dead.

Fredrik thought it would take ten minutes. Maximum. In, tell the police, out. He had known Roger was missing, of course. Everybody had been talking about it at school. In fact, people had never talked about Roger at Runebergs School as much as they had done last week.
Never paid him that much attention. And yesterday, after they found him: an emergency counseling service had immediately been put in place, and people who hadn’t given a shit about Roger during the short time he had been a pupil there had excused themselves from lessons, weeping copiously, and had sat in groups holding hands and sharing happy memories in subdued voices.

Fredrik hadn’t known Roger and wasn’t exactly grieving for him. They had passed each other in the corridors—familiar faces, no more. Fredrik could honestly say he hadn’t given Roger a thought since he’d left Runebergs in the autumn. But now the local TV station had turned up, and some of the girls who wouldn’t even have spoken to Roger if he’d been the last boy on earth had lit candles and laid flowers by one of the goalposts on the soccer field outside the school.

Perhaps that was a nice thing to do? Perhaps it was a sign that empathy and human kindness still existed? Perhaps Fredrik was just being cynical when he saw only falseness and people exploiting a tragic incident to draw attention to themselves. Taking the chance to fill some indefinable vacuum.

To experience a sense of solidarity.

To experience
something
.

He remembered the images they had seen in Social Studies from the Nordiska Kompaniet department store in Stockholm when Anna Lindh was murdered. Mountains of flowers. Fredrik recalled that he had wondered even then. Where did it come from, this need to mourn people we don’t know? People we haven’t even met? It obviously existed. Perhaps there was something wrong with Fredrik because he was unable to feel and share this collective grief?

But he read the papers. After all, it was a contemporary of his, an acquaintance, whose heart had been cut out. The police wanted to hear from anyone who had seen Roger after he disappeared on Friday evening. While Roger was simply missing, Fredrik hadn’t seen the point in going to the police, because he had actually seen Roger
before
he went missing, but now they had said that any sightings on that Friday,
both before and after his disappearance, were of interest. Fredrik cycled down to the police station before school, pushed open the doors, and thought it probably wouldn’t take very long.

He told the uniformed woman behind the desk that he wanted to speak to someone about Roger Eriksson, but before she had time to pick up the phone a plainclothes officer carrying a cup of coffee limped up to him and told him to come through.

That was—Fredrik glanced at the clock on the wall—twenty minutes ago. He had told the limping detective what he had come to say, certain things he had gone over twice, the place itself three times, and the third time he had to mark it on a map. But now the detective seemed satisfied. He closed his notebook and looked at Fredrik.

“Thank you very much for coming in. Could you wait here for a little while?” Fredrik nodded and the man limped away.

Fredrik settled down and looked at the open-plan office where a dozen or so officers were sitting at desks, separated from one another by movable screens decorated here and there with children’s drawings, family photos, takeaway menus, and more work-related documents. The sound was a muted blend of the tapping of keyboards, conversations, ringing telephones, and the hum of the copy machine. Fredrik wondered how anyone could get anything done in an environment like this, in spite of the fact that he always did his homework with his iPod earphones firmly in place. How could you sit across from someone who was talking on the telephone and not listen in?

The detective was limping toward a door, but before he got there a woman came over to him. A blond woman in a suit. It seemed to Fredrik that the limping detective slumped wearily as the woman approached.

“Who’s that?” Hanser said, nodding toward the boy who was sitting watching them. Haraldsson followed her gaze, even though he knew perfectly well whom she meant.

“His name is Fredrik Hammar, and he has some information about Roger Eriksson.” Haraldsson held up his notebook as if to emphasize that it was all in there. Hanser did her best to remain calm.

“If it’s about Roger Eriksson, why isn’t Riksmord interviewing him?”

“I was passing the desk when he came in and thought it a good idea to speak to him first. To see if what he had to say was of any relevance. There’s no point in Torkel wasting his time on things that don’t contribute to the investigation.”

Hanser took a deep breath. She could imagine it must be difficult to give up the responsibility for a case. However you wrapped up the circumstances, at the end of the day it indicated a lack of confidence in him. The fact that she was the person who had made the decision didn’t make things any less sensitive. Haraldsson had applied for her job, she knew that. You didn’t need any great psychological insight to work out what he thought of her. Everything he did, all the time, radiated aversion and hostility. Perhaps she should be glad Haraldsson was sticking to this case with lunatic stubbornness. Praise his obvious dedication. His genuine commitment. Or maybe he just hadn’t grasped that he was no longer an active part of the investigation. Hanser tended toward the latter view.

“Deciding what is relevant or otherwise in this investigation is no longer your job.” Haraldsson nodded in a way that indicated he was simply waiting for her to finish the sentence so that he could correct her. And, indeed, she had barely started to make her next point before he interrupted.

“I know they’re responsible, but they did say very clearly that they wanted to work in association with me.”

Hanser cursed Torkel’s diplomacy. Now she would have to play the bad guy. Not that it would change anything in their relationship, but even so.

“Thomas, Riksmord has taken over the investigation, which means
that you are no longer a part of it, not in any way. Unless they expressly ask you to do something.”

There, it had been said. Again.

Haraldsson stared at her coldly. He knew what she was up to. Since she had found it necessary to call in Riksmord straightaway, with her nonexistent routine and her lack of leadership, naturally she didn’t want any of her staff working with them. They had to solve the case on their own. Prove to her superiors that she had made the right decision. That the Västerås police just didn’t have the ability.

“We can take that up with Torkel. He expressly said that I was to work in association with them. What’s more, the boy has some extremely interesting information that I was just about to pass on to them. I mean, I’d prefer it if we could get on with trying to solve the case, but of course if you’d rather stand here discussing the chain of command, perhaps we should do that instead. It’s entirely up to you.”

So this was how he intended to play it, making her out to be a desk jockey while he was the good police officer, interested only in the case and in solving it unselfishly. Hanser now realized that Haraldsson might be a more dangerous opponent that she had previously suspected.

She stepped aside. Haraldsson gave a triumphant smile and limped off, shouting in as familiar a tone as he could muster: “Billy, have you got a minute?”