Dark Secrets (7 page)

“No.”

Hanser suddenly felt stupid. As if her comment was meant as some kind of comparison when it came to suffering.
Look, I’ve lost someone too, so there you go.
But Lena didn’t appear to give it another thought. She turned back and looked at her own son once more.

So many years when he had been the only thing she had to be proud of.

Or so many years when he had been the only thing she had.

Finished.

Is this your fault?
the little voice in her head began to ask. Lena withdrew her hand and took a step back. The headache was relentless.

“I think I’d like to go now.”

Hanser nodded. The bald man turned up the sheet as both women headed for the door. Lena took a packet of cigarettes out of her bag.

“Is there someone you can call? Perhaps you shouldn’t be alone.”

“But I am. I am alone now.”

Lena left the room.

Hanser just stood there.

Exactly as she had known she would end up doing.

The conference room in the Västerås police station was the most modern in the building. The pale birch-wood furniture was only a few weeks old. Eight chairs around an oval table. The new wallpaper on three walls was in a discreet, relaxing shade of green, and the fourth wall was a combined whiteboard and screen. In the corner nearest the door the latest technology was linked to a projector on the ceiling. In the middle of the conference table a console controlled everything in the room. As soon as he set foot on the gray fitted carpet Torkel had decided that this would be the team’s base.

He gathered up the papers in front of him on the varnished surface of the table and emptied his bottle of water. The meeting to review the progress of the investigation so far had gone more or less as he’d expected. There were really only two occasions during Haraldsson’s account when something surprising had come up.

The first was when they were going through the investigation chronologically. Vanja looked up from her papers and asked, “What did you do on the Sunday?”

“The investigation got under way in earnest, but led nowhere.”

The answer came with some speed. Practiced speed. Unconvincing speed. Torkel made a note of it and knew that Vanja had done the
same. She was the closest thing to a human lie detector Torkel had ever encountered. He looked at her with a certain amount of anticipation as she gazed at Haraldsson for a long time, then glanced back at her papers. Haraldsson let out a long breath. They were on the same side, sure, but there was no need for his colleagues to know that there might have been the odd mistake in the initial stages. They had to focus on the future now. He was therefore slightly irritated—and a little worried—when Vanja waved her pen once more. Billy smiled; he was also well aware that Vanja had picked up something in Haraldsson’s voice that didn’t ring true. She had no intention of letting it go. She never did. Billy leaned back in his comfortable chair and folded his arms. This could be fun.

“When you say ‘got under way,’ ” Vanja went on, her tone somewhat sharper, “what did you actually do? I can’t find any interviews, neither with the mother nor anyone else, no reports from door-to-door inquiries, nobody putting together a timeline from the Friday.” She looked up and stared straight at Haraldsson. “So what exactly did you do?”

Haraldsson shuffled uncomfortably in his seat. Why the fuck did he have to sit here defending other people’s mistakes?

“I wasn’t on duty that weekend. I didn’t pick up the case until the Monday.”

“So what happened on the Sunday?”

Haraldsson glanced at the two men in the room, as if seeking support for his view that looking backward wasn’t particularly helpful. No support was forthcoming. Both of them were gazing expectantly at him.

“As I understand it, uniformed officers went to see the mother.”

“And did what?”

“Took down information about the boy’s disappearance.”

“What information? Where is it?”

Vanja didn’t take her eyes off him. Haraldsson realized they weren’t going to get anywhere until they found out everything that had happened. So he told them. The truth. Afterward there was a different kind of silence in the room. A silence that Haraldsson at least interpreted
as the kind that might arise when a group of people is busy digesting what might well be the finest example of incompetence they’ve ever heard. Eventually Billy spoke.

“So the only thing that happened on the Sunday was that someone wrote another report about the same disappearance?”

“Well, yes, technically.”

“Okay, so the boy disappeared on Friday at ten p.m. When did you actually start looking for him?”

“On the Monday. After lunch. When the report was passed on to me. Well, we didn’t actually start looking then, but we did speak to his girlfriend, the school, witnesses…”

The room fell silent once more. Experience told them that in all probability the boy was already dead by then, but if not—if he’d been held captive somewhere…
Three days! Good God!
Torkel leaned forward, gazing at Haraldsson with earnest curiosity.

“So why didn’t you tell us this when we asked what happened on the Sunday?”

“It’s never pleasant to admit that mistakes have been made.”

“But it wasn’t your mistake. You didn’t pick up the case until the Monday. The only mistake you’ve made is not telling us. We’re a team. We can’t afford to be anything less than honest with each other.”

Haraldsson nodded. He suddenly felt as if he were seven years old and had been sent to the headmaster for silly behavior in the playground.

During the remainder of the briefing he told them everything (apart from the lunchtime quickie with Jenny and the fake visit to the emergency room), which meant they didn’t finish until after 9:00 p.m.

Torkel thanked him. Billy was stretching and yawning and Vanja had started to pack away when the second surprise of the evening came.

“Just one more thing.” Haraldsson took a small but effective pause. “We haven’t found the boy’s jacket or watch.” Torkel, Vanja, and Billy all straightened up; this was interesting. Haraldsson could see Vanja fishing for her folder in her bag.

“I didn’t put it in the report—you never know who gets to read them, where a piece of information like that might end up.”

Vanja nodded to herself. Clever—it was precisely that kind of detail they didn’t want leaked to the press. It would be worth its weight in gold in an interrogation. Perhaps Haraldsson wasn’t completely hopeless after all, even if most of the indications were to the contrary.

“So he was robbed?” Billy said.

“I don’t think so. He still had his wallet, with almost three hundred kronor in it. And his cell in his trouser pocket.”

Everyone on the team considered the fact that someone—presumably the murderer—had taken selected items from the victim. That meant something. That and the missing heart.

“The jacket was Diesel,” Haraldsson went on. “Green. I’ve got pictures of the relevant style on my desk. The watch was a…” Haraldsson consulted his notes. “A Tonino Lamborghini Pilot. Same applies—I’ve got pictures.”

Afterward Torkel sat alone in the windowless room, trying to think of a reason not to go to the hotel. Should he start drawing up the timeline on the whiteboard? Put up the map? The pictures? Go through what Haraldsson had told them again? But Billy would do all that much more quickly and efficiently tomorrow morning, probably before anyone else had even arrived at the station.

He could go out for something to eat. But he wasn’t that hungry—not enough to sit alone in a restaurant. He could ask Vanja to keep him company, of course, but she was going to spend the evening reading up on the case in her hotel room. He knew that. Extremely ambitious and conscientious, Vanja. She probably wouldn’t say no if he asked her to join him for dinner, but it wasn’t what she wanted, and she would feel slightly stressed all evening. Torkel dismissed the idea.

Billy? Torkel thought Billy had many excellent qualities, and his knowledge of computers and technology made him an invaluable member of the team, but Torkel couldn’t remember their ever having dinner together, just the two of them. The conversation didn’t flow as
easily with Billy. Billy just loved a night in a hotel. There wasn’t a single TV show on any channel between ten o’clock at night and two in the morning that Billy hadn’t seen, and he liked to chat about them. TV, movies, music, games, computers, new phones, and foreign magazines, which he read online. When he was with Billy, Torkel felt like a dinosaur.

He sighed. It would be a walk and a sandwich and a beer in his room, with the TV for company. He consoled himself with the thought that Ursula would be coming tomorrow. Then he would have a companion for dinner.

Torkel switched off the lights and left the conference room. Last to leave as usual, he thought as he walked through the empty office. Hardly surprising that his wife had had enough.

I
T WAS
dark by the time Sebastian paid the cabdriver and got out of the car. The driver also got out, opened the trunk, lifted out Sebastian’s bag, and wished him a nice evening. A nice evening in his parents’ house?
Well, there’s always a first time
, Sebastian thought. And the fact that both of his parents were dead certainly increased the chances significantly.

Sebastian crossed the road; the cab, which had turned around in the neighbors’ drive, passed behind him. He stood by the low white wooden fence that needed painting and noticed that the mailbox was overflowing. Didn’t some kind of central notification go out when someone died, stopping all the mail? Evidently not.

On his arrival in Västerås several hours earlier, Sebastian had gone to the funeral director’s office to pick up the house key. Apparently one of his mother’s oldest friends had organized the funeral when he’d refused to have anything to do with it. Berit Holmberg. Sebastian couldn’t remember ever having heard the name. The funeral director had offered to show him some kind of album of the ceremony, which had allegedly been very beautiful, atmospheric, and well attended. Sebastian had declined.

He had gone to a restaurant afterward. Spent a long time over a good meal. Lingered over coffee, reading a book. He had fingered the card the woman on the train had given him, but decided to wait. Tomorrow or the following day he would call her. Interested but not desperate—that was always the best approach. He had gone for a walk.
Thought about seeing a movie but decided against it. There was nothing he found appealing. Eventually he had been unable to put off the real purpose of his visit any longer and hailed a cab.

Now he was standing in the street staring at the house he had left the day after his nineteenth birthday. Well-tended flower beds lined both sides of the stone garden path. At the moment they consisted mainly of low, neatly pruned conifers, but soon the perennials would be in flower. His mother had loved her garden and had cared for it tenderly. At the back there were fruit trees and a vegetable patch. The stone path led to a two-story house. Sebastian had been ten years old when they moved in; it had just been built. Even in the faint light of the street lamps Sebastian could see that it really needed some attention now. Lumps of plaster had fallen off the facade, the paint on the window frames was flaking, and in two places the roof was a shade darker. Missing tiles, probably. Sebastian overcame his sheer physical reluctance to go inside and walked the few steps to the front door.

He unlocked it and stepped into the hallway. It smelled musty. Stuffy. He dropped his bag and remained standing in the archway leading to the rest of the house. Just on the other side were a dining table and chairs, and farther to the right the living room opened out. Sebastian noticed that a wall had been knocked down and that the ground floor was now what was known as “open plan.” He moved a little farther inside. He recognized only a fraction of the furniture. A bureau that had belonged to his grandfather was familiar, and some of the paintings on the walls, but the wallpaper behind them was new to him. So was the flooring. How long was it since he had been here? Sebastian refused to think of this house as “home.” He had moved out when he was nineteen, but he had visited after that. Nurtured a vain hope that he and his parents might be reconciled when they were all grown up. But no. He remembered visiting the week after he turned twenty-five. Was that the last time? Almost thirty years ago. It wasn’t surprising that he hardly recognized a thing.

There was a closed door in one wall of the living room. When
Sebastian lived there it had been a guest room. Rarely used. His parents had a wide circle of acquaintances, but they were almost all from the town itself. He opened the door. One wall was covered in bookshelves, and where there used to be a bed there was now a desk. With a typewriter and an old-fashioned calculator with a roll of paper in it. Sebastian closed the door. Presumably the entire house was full of shit like that. What was he going to do with it all?

He went into the kitchen. New cupboards, new table, same old car dealer’s floor made of vinyl. He opened the door of the fridge. Full. All rotten. He picked up a carton of milk from the door. Opened.
Best before March 8.
International Women’s Day. Even though he knew what to expect, Sebastian stuck his nose in the opening. Pulling a face, he put the carton back and took out a can of beer that was next to a bag containing something he guessed might once have been cheese, but that now resembled a successful research project in a laboratory specializing in mold.