Dark Secrets (13 page)

“Can they do that? Can they just drive off with him, without me? I mean, he’s still a minor.”

“How old is he?”

“Sixteen.”

“Then yes, they can do that.”

Sebastian went back to the deck and the morning sunshine and the Culture section. Clara stayed where she was, gazing at the corner around which Vanja had disappeared, as if she were expecting all three of them to leap out, smiling and laughing and telling her the whole thing was just a joke. A well-planned practical joke. It didn’t happen. Clara turned to Sebastian, who had just settled down in his white cane armchair once more.

“Can’t you do something?” she said pleadingly. Sebastian looked at her with a quizzical expression.

“Me? Like what?”

“You’re the Bergmans’ son, aren’t you? Sebastian? You work on this kind of thing.”

“Worked. Past tense. I don’t do anything these days. And even when I was working, I didn’t have anything to do with contesting arrests. I was a criminal psychologist, not a lawyer.”

Out in the street, the car taking away Clara’s only son started up and drove off. Sebastian looked at the woman who was still standing on his lawn. Totally at a loss. Deserted.

“What’s he done, your son? Why is Riksmord interested in him?” Clara took a few steps toward him. “It’s something to do with that boy who was murdered. I don’t know. Leonard would never do something like that. Never.”

“So what does Leonard do, then?” Clara looked at Sebastian, her expression one of complete incomprehension as he nodded at the fence. “When you came over the fence you were telling him off for ending up in trouble all the time.” Clara took stock. Had she done that? She didn’t know. So many questions. So much confusion in her head, but perhaps she had. Leonard had gotten into quite a lot of trouble, particularly of late, but this was something else entirely.

“But he’s not a murderer!”

“Nobody is until they kill someone.” Clara looked at Sebastian, who now seemed completely uninterested in and unmoved by the events that had played out in his garden. He was drumming his fingertips on a newspaper as if nothing unusual or important had happened.

“So you’re not going to help me?”

“I’ve got a copy of the Yellow Pages in the house. I can look up
L
for lawyer.”

The lump of anxiety and fear in Clara’s stomach was joined by rage. She had heard a few things about the Bergmans’ son over the years when Esther and Ture had been her neighbors. And none of it had been good. Ever.

“And to think I used to be convinced Esther was exaggerating when she talked about you.”

“That would surprise me—my mother was never one for grand gestures.”

Clara glanced briefly at Sebastian, then turned and left without a word. Sebastian picked up a section of the paper from the deck. He had noticed the article, but hadn’t been particularly interested. Now he turned to it once more.

“W
HY DID
you run?”

Vanja and Billy were sitting opposite Leonard Lundin in the impersonally furnished room. A table, three fairly comfortable chairs. Wallpaper in muted colors, the odd framed poster, a floor lamp in one corner behind a small armchair. Daylight through the window—which admittedly was made of frosted glass, but it was daylight nonetheless. It looked more like a room in a simple ramblers’ hostel than an interview room, minus a bed but with the addition of two surveillance cameras that recorded everything from an adjoining room.

Leonard was slumped on a chair with his bottom perched on the very edge, his arms folded across his chest, his shoeless feet sticking out at the side of the table. He wouldn’t look at the police officers and kept his gaze fixed on a point somewhere down on the left. His entire body exuded a lack of interest and perhaps a certain amount of contempt.

“Dunno. Reflex.”

“Your reflex when the police want to speak to you is to run? Why is that?” Leonard shrugged his shoulders. “Have you done anything illegal?”

“You seem to think so.”

The irony was that they hadn’t thought any such thing when they went to the Lundins to speak to him, but running in socks through the window definitely increased both their interest and the degree of suspicion. Vanja had already decided Leonard’s room would have to be
searched. Leaving via the window was pretty extreme. Perhaps there were items in the room he really didn’t want them to see. Items that linked him to the murder. All they had so far was that he had been circling around the victim on his moped on Friday evening. Vanja steered the conversation in that direction.

“You saw Roger Eriksson last Friday.”

“Did I?”

“A witness saw you together. On Gustavsborgsgatan.”

“In that case I expect I was there. So what?”

“ ‘In that case I expect I was there’—is that an admission?” Billy looked up from his notepad and stared at the boy. “Did you see Roger Eriksson last Friday?” Leonard met his gaze briefly, then nodded. Billy translated the nod into words for the tape recorder on the table: “Leonard’s answer to the question is ‘yes.’ ”

Vanja continued: “You and Roger used to attend the same school, but then he moved to another school. Do you know why?”

“You’ll have to ask him that.”

So stupid. So… disrespectful. Billy just wanted to grab hold of him and give him a good shake. Vanja could feel it, and discreetly placed her hand on her colleague’s forearm. Without a trace of irritation or the least sign that she had allowed herself to be provoked, she opened the folder in front of her on the table.

“I would like to do just that. But he’s dead, as you might know. Someone cut out his heart and threw him in a bog. I have some pictures here.”

Vanja started to spread out the shiny high-resolution photographs from the scene where the body was found and from the mortuary. Both Vanja and Billy knew that it didn’t matter one iota how much death a person had experienced in movies or video games. No medium could do death justice. Not even the most skillful expert in special effects could re-create the feeling of seeing a real dead body. Particularly if, like Leonard, you had seen the person alive just a week ago.

Leonard glanced at the photos. Tried to appear unmoved, but both
Vanja and Billy could see that it was difficult, if not downright impossible, for him to look at the pictures. But that meant nothing; it could be shock just as easily as guilt. Pictures like these had the same impact on perpetrators and on those who were innocent. Almost without exception. So the reaction was not the important thing. The important thing was to make him take this interview seriously. Get past that truculent, evasive attitude. Vanja carried on laying out the pictures one by one, slowly and calmly, and Billy was struck by the fact that he never ceased to be impressed by her. Even though she was a year or so younger than him, she was like his big sister. A big sister who had top marks in everything, but still managed to be cool rather than a geek. And who stuck up for her younger siblings. She leaned forward.

“We are here to catch the person who did this. And we will. Right now we have only one suspect, and that’s you. So if you want to get out of here and boast to your mates about how you ran away from the cops, you’d better drop the attitude and start answering my questions.”

“I told you I saw him last Friday, didn’t I?”

“But that wasn’t what I asked you. I asked you why he moved to another school.”

Leonard sighed.

“I suppose we might have been a bit unpleasant to him. I dunno if that was why. But it wasn’t just me. Nobody at school liked him.”

“Now you’re disappointing me, Leonard. The real tough guys don’t blame other people. You were one of the main culprits, weren’t you? That’s what we’ve heard, anyway.” Leo looked at her and was presumably just about to answer when Billy chipped in.

“Nice watch. Is it a Tonino Lamborghini Pilot?”

The room fell silent. Vanja looked at Billy with some surprise. Not because he had identified the watch on Leonard’s arm, but because he had suddenly jumped in. Leonard shifted the position of his folded arms so that the watch was concealed by his right arm. But he didn’t speak. There was no need. Vanja leaned forward again.

“If you don’t have a receipt for that, you’re in serious trouble here.”

Leonard looked up at them.

Registered their grave expressions.

Swallowed.

And started to tell them. Everything.

“He admits he stole the watch. He was out on his moped and saw Roger here.” Vanja made a cross on the map on the wall. The whole team was there. Ursula and Torkel were listening attentively to Billy and Vanja, who were going over the key points from their interview with Leo.

“He says he was just messing about and started riding around Roger on his moped. Then, according to Leonard, Roger knocked him over. They started quarreling properly, fighting. Roger’s nose started bleeding. After a few blows Leonard got Roger down on the ground, and he took the watch as some kind of punishment.”

No one spoke. The only thing they had on Leonard at the moment was the watch. There was nothing in the witness statement or forensic evidence to suggest that what he was saying couldn’t be true. Vanja went on.

“But, of course, this is only what Leonard is saying. The fight could just as easily have gotten out of hand, and he pulled a knife and stabbed Roger.”

“More than twenty times? On a fairly central street? Without anyone seeing anything?” Ursula sounded justifiably skeptical.

“We don’t know what the area looks like. He might have panicked. One blow with the knife, Roger’s lying there screaming. Leo realizes he’s in deep shit, drags him behind some bushes, and carries on stabbing. Just to shut him up.’

“And the heart?” Ursula still sounded far from convinced.

Vanja understood her doubts.

“I don’t know. But whatever happened, it happened just after nine. Leo confirmed the time. He looked at the watch when he took it off
Roger’s wrist. Which means that Roger wasn’t with Lisa until ten, as she insists.”

Torkel nodded.

“Okay, good work. Anything from where the body was found?” He turned to Ursula.

“Not much. The tire tracks we found are from a Pirelli P7. Not exactly a standard tire, but fairly common. And obviously we don’t know for sure that the tracks come from the car that brought the body.”

Ursula took a sheet of paper and a picture of the tire tracks out of her folder and handed them to Billy, who went over to put the new information in the right place on the board.

“Does Leonard Lundin have access to a car?” asked Torkel as Billy pinned up the picture and fact sheet about the Pirelli tire.

“Not as far as we know. There wasn’t one parked in the driveway this morning.”

“So how did he move a dead body to Listakärr, then? On his moped?”

Everyone fell silent. Of course not. An already weak theory about how the murder might have been committed suddenly became even weaker. But it had to be investigated before it was written off completely.

“Ursula and I will take a couple of uniformed officers and search the Lundin house. Billy, can you go over to Gustavsborgsgatan and see if there’s any possibility that the murder could have taken place there? Vanja, I’d like you to—”

“Go and talk to Lisa Hansson again,” Vanja finished for Torkel with ill-concealed glee.

Clara was standing outside the house smoking. Some other officers from Riksmord had turned up about half an hour ago, along with a couple of uniformed colleagues. When Clara had asked if she could go to the station to speak to that Vanja Lithner whose card she had,
she was told tersely that they were still holding Leonard while they checked the information he had given them. And while they searched her house. So if she wouldn’t mind… Clara was standing in the garden, driven out of her own house, smoking and shivering in spite of the spring warmth as she tried to gather her thoughts. Or, rather, to push aside the thought that kept on coming back, the one that frightened her more than anything: that Leonard might actually have had something to do with Roger’s death. Clara knew they weren’t the best of friends. Oh, come on, who was she trying to kid? Leonard had bullied Roger. Hassled him. Resorted to violence, on occasion.