Ralph immediately calmed down. Realised that he had probably gone too far. Asked for too much.
‘Sorry. I just wanted . . .’
‘I know what you want. You’re keen. But remember: patience.’
Ralph nodded obediently.
‘I shall await your report,’ Edward said, then turned and went back to his table, to Letizia Bonaparte and her son.
Ralph wheeled his trolley into the lift and went down.
The second guard walked in less than a minute later.
Perfect timing.
Jennifer Holmgren yawned.
Not because she was tired, nor because of a lack of oxygen. She was just seriously bored, standing there on the lawn sloping down towards Lejondal Lake. She was facing not only the leader of the police search team, who was just going over the key points, but also a large yellow two-storey house with an enormous veranda facing the lake. Next to her were several police officers, most of them from Sigtuna, like her. Jennifer suppressed her yawn and silently went over the points she needed to remember.
Lukas Ryd.
Six years old.
Missing for several hours. Three, his mother hoped. More, his father thought. At any rate, Lukas had not been in his bed, nor anywhere else in the house, when his parents woke up that morning, about three hours ago. They had gone to bed at half past midnight, so the truth was that the kid could have been gone all night. Nobody knew. The doors had been closed when they woke up. Closed but not locked.
Jennifer could feel herself beginning to sweat in her uniform. The sun was beating down mercilessly on her back. This was her first missing person. After four terms at the police training academy, she was now in her second month as a trainee in Sigtuna. The town wasn’t what you might call crime central. There was plenty to do, that wasn’t the problem. She had checked the statistics. During 2009 the crime rate in Sigtuna had been higher than the average throughout the country: 19,579 reported crimes per 100,000 inhabitants. The national average was 10,436. But it still didn’t feel like the most exciting place in Sweden to be a police officer. And Jennifer wanted excitement. Obviously she wanted to make a contribution to society and to help people, but that wasn’t her main reason for joining the police. When she applied she had toned down her dreams of action and excitement and demonstrated a more mature, realistic view of the profession, but during the entire course of her training she always excelled when it came to activities that were physically demanding and/or involved some kind of close combat or the use of guns. There hadn’t been much of that since she arrived in Sigtuna. She had stopped speeding drivers in the thirty zone outside a school. She had dealt with reports of break-ins, criminal damage, theft and minor assault. She had carried out random breathalyser tests, sat in reception, and produced more passports than she would have thought possible.
Police work, absolutely.
Action and excitement, not so much.
Two months that felt like two years. That was why she had felt a small surge of excitement when she first heard about Lukas Ryd. A little boy. Missing. He might have been abducted. She had silently nurtured that hope until they arrived and established the facts.
Lukas’s little Bamse the Bear rucksack was missing. Two cans of Coca-Cola and a packet of alphabet biscuits had also disappeared.
The kid had run away from home.
Or maybe it wasn’t even that exciting.
He had woken up, felt like a picnic, and hadn’t wanted to wake his parents.
So ordinary. So banal. So boring.
Jennifer Holmgren knew that this was probably the wrong attitude, but come on! He’d come home when he got too cold or too bored.
Unless he got lost, of course. There was plenty of forest around here. But at this time of year that thought didn’t exactly produce a rush of adrenaline either. As far as the temperature was concerned, finding him wasn’t a matter of urgency. That left quarries and lakes. Jennifer had thought of that as soon as she saw the garden. The boy could have wandered down to the lake and fallen in, but the family didn’t have a jetty and the lake wasn’t tidal, so if he had drowned he ought to be lying there in the shallow water.
Jennifer was allocated a search area a kilometre away. A small forest track on the other side of the main road. She felt a faint stirring of hope again. She had dismissed the idea of a planned kidnapping. The parents didn’t seem to be rolling in money, in spite of the relatively large house overlooking the lake, but what about a random abduction somewhere along the main road? A little boy walking along in the ditch. A dirty old man. A paedo.
Not that she wished the child ill, or wanted him dead. Absolutely not. She really did hope that nothing had happened to him. But a bit of action, a bit of excitement . . . A tip-off about a suspect vehicle, the search, gradually closing in, the discovery, the strike, the arrest.
That was why she had joined the police. Not so that she could go for a brisk walk in the forest on a hot summer’s day, searching for some kid who fancied a snack. She might as well have been a classroom assistant in a nursery, in that case. Okay, that was unfair, they didn’t lose kids. Well, not often, but the principle . . .
She set off along the forest track. It looked as if it ended at a gravel pit or something similar, according to the map. Perhaps Lukas had got stuck in the gravel. Clambered up one of the heaps, then the loose stones underfoot had begun to shift. Slide. The more he tried to gain a foothold, the lower he sank. Could that even happen in a gravel pit? She didn’t know, but the thought of heroically seizing the tiny hand that was the only thing protruding from the immense gravel canyon, of pulling the boy free, clearing his mouth and blowing life into him as her colleagues finally arrived . . . She lengthened her stride. She glanced distractedly among the trees on either side. His parents thought he was wearing blue cotton trousers and a yellow T-shirt with a short-sleeved blue checked shirt over the top. That was what he had been wearing yesterday, at any rate. Like a little Swedish flag running around in the forest. Jennifer suddenly wondered why the kid had run away from home. If it wasn’t just a case of a six-year-old fancying a little adventure, of course. Had he run away for a reason? Jennifer had been furious with her parents on a number of occasions while she was growing up, who hadn’t, but she had never run away from home. Could there be something exciting there? If she found the boy, she could pump him for information. He was only six. Children were still afraid of the police at that age, weren’t they?
Jennifer reached the gravel pit. She was thirsty. Drenched in sweat. Flies buzzing all around her. The others were calling in via the radio on a regular basis. She didn’t really see the point of reporting in every five minutes to say you hadn’t found anything; surely it would have been better if they’d agreed that whoever found the boy would shout.
She hadn’t found him, anyway. She was just about to turn back when she caught a flash of metal behind the heap of gravel furthest away, on the edge of the forest. She screwed up her eyes and shaded them from the sun with her hand. She could see a windscreen and a broken headlight. A car. It seemed an odd place to park a car. Very odd. Suspicious.
A prostitute who had brought a client here?
Someone dealing drugs?
A body that had been dumped?
Jennifer undid her holster and slowly approached the car.
Billy had showered and got himself a coffee. He glanced over at Vanja when he came back to the office, but she didn’t even look up when he walked through the door, so he decided not to disturb her again. He hoped she wouldn’t bear a grudge; he didn’t actually know if she did that kind of thing or not. They had never fallen out before, as far as he could remember. Disagreed, discussed, but never quarrelled. He decided to leave it for a while, then if the worst came to the worst he would just have to apologise later. It wasn’t the end of the world.
He sat down at the computer, logged on, put on his headphones and started Spotify on his mobile as he brought up a text document. He had written it last night when he couldn’t sleep. It was just a series of points, a way of structuring his thoughts. It was the case, from the beginning right up to now. Ideas and theories. He had never tried working like this before; he just wanted to see if it would get him anywhere. He leaned back and looked through what he had written.
One possibility was that someone was killing Sebastian’s former lovers and copying Hinde as he did so without there being any link whatsoever between the murderer and Hinde. It might just be an idea that some lunatic had had in order to get his revenge on Sebastian.
Highly unlikely.
Because Hinde was involved in these murders in some way. Sebastian seemed sure of it, and Vanja had also had a distinct feeling that this was the case after she had met Hinde. So they could probably assume that Hinde was involved.
But he couldn’t carry out the murders himself. That was completely out of the question. In which case, as far as Billy could work out, that left two alternatives.
The first was that Hinde had asked someone to do it. On some occasion. Someone he had met only once. He had told this person that he wanted all the victims to have something in common, explained what that was, and subsequently the killer had acted entirely alone. He had followed Sebastian, and that was how he had found Annette.
Possible, but not really credible.
The sticking point was that the murderer had deviated from his MO when it came to Annette’s murder. Women from Sebastian’s past were suddenly abandoned in favour of his latest conquest. Why? If you toyed with the idea that Hinde had supplied a list of relevant women, would the copycat really have deviated from that list? Started to improvise?
Again it was possible, but not credible.
The only remaining alternative was that Hinde was in constant contact with the murderer. That they were somehow able to exchange information. With the murder of Annette Willén, it became clear to Billy that this had to be the case. The murderer followed Sebastian, saw Annette and told Hinde, who gave the order to kill her. Or Hinde had given the murderer the task of finding a woman who was more recent, so to speak. So that the link to Sebastian became clear.
Credible, but unfortunately not possible.
Because Hinde had no contact with the outside world. Or did he? Billy had spoken to Victor Bäckman at Lövhaga and had been given the details of Hinde’s internet activity over the past few days. He was intending to start there. It was possible that someone had inserted coded information into the pages Hinde visited – a code only Hinde could interpret. Like in some old spy thriller.
But how did he reply, if that were the case? He couldn’t use chat rooms, comment, or send anything at all from the computers in the library. Which meant there was only one alternative . . .
Someone patted Billy on the shoulder. Torkel. He took off the headphones.
‘Can we make a start?’ Torkel said.
Billy gathered up a pile of papers from his desk, stood up and left the room. Vanja stayed where she was and closed her eyes tightly for a few seconds. She massaged her forehead with her index finger and thumb. The painkiller hadn’t helped. She opened the drawer and took another tablet. Rinsed it down with coffee that wasn’t even lukewarm any longer, and walked out into the corridor, where she almost bumped into Ursula. Sebastian was lumbering along a few steps behind her. Vanja ignored him.
‘Good morning,’ she said to Ursula.
‘Hi. You look tired.’
Vanja nodded as she tried to come up with a suitable response. She didn’t really want to advertise her midweek drinking binge. She went for an acceptable explanation for the dark circles under her eyes. Worry.
‘My grandmother is ill.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Ursula said sympathetically. ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’
‘No. Anna’s gone to see her. I’m sure she’ll call . . .’
Sebastian smiled to himself. Anna had gone. Left the city. One less thing to worry about. He had thought about it a lot. What he had done. What he ought to have done. What he was going to do. If he had made a mistake and possibly led the murderer to Anna’s apartment, the best thing would have been to post two police officers there to wait for the perpetrator. Smuggle them inside. Let Valdemar go out so that it would look as if Anna was home alone, then wait for the copycat to turn up. That would have been the best thing, the right thing, but it was impossible. How could Sebastian say that he was afraid that Anna might be next, when the victims had only one thing in common? It was out of the question. He would have to rely on Trolle. Who wasn’t answering his phone. He hadn’t picked up all morning. This was a cause for concern. Sebastian took out his mobile and tried Trolle again as he followed the others into the Room. No reply.
‘Sebastian . . .’ Torkel was giving him a meaningful look. ‘We’re ready to start.’
Sebastian put the phone in his pocket with a sigh.
Vanja reached for one of the bottles of water in the middle of the table; she opened it and drank deeply.
‘Okay,’ Torkel began. ‘A quick update. Vanja, would you like to begin?’
Vanja quickly swallowed the last of the water with a little cough.
‘I’ve managed to eliminate Rodriguez from the theft of the car. The blue Focus was stolen two days after he cut across the E4 without looking where he was going. Drunk as a skunk, apparently.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Not as far as Rodriguez is concerned. There’s nothing to indicate that he’s involved in any way.’
Torkel nodded. A possible lead that had turned out to be a dead end. There had been a lot of those in this investigation. Too many. He turned to Billy. ‘Billy?’
Billy straightened up in his chair and more or less continued his musings aloud, starting from where he had been interrupted earlier. ‘I think someone is helping him.’
‘Congratulations, Einstein.’ Sebastian brought his hands together in a slow clap. ‘It’s pretty obvious that someone is helping him, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t mean with the murders. I mean with information. Contact. I think he has help inside Lövhaga.’