Trapped, page 10
Ruben had his back to her and was working his way voraciously through meatballs and salad. He’d dropped carbs since the first hint that he was beginning to pile on the pounds around his belly. A fact that he often shared at lunch.
‘You handled a suicide two and a half months ago,’ Mina said to his back. ‘Thirteenth January. Agnes Ceci. Twenty-one years old.’
Ruben stopped with the fork halfway to his mouth.
‘Er, yeah. Rings a bell. What about it?’
He raised his eyebrows when she pulled out a chair and sat down opposite him. He rolled his eyes and put down the fork. She tried not to think about how dirty the canteen chair must be. All the things now crawling over her trousers. She had to master herself at work in order to function, but it took so much of her strength that when she got home of an evening she usually collapsed from exhaustion. She couldn’t resist the urge to discreetly pull down her sleeves so that her skin didn’t have to come in contact with the tabletop when she leaned towards Ruben and stared at him hard.
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Wellll … there’s not much to tell. It was me and Lindgren, one of the younger lads, who were first on the scene and it was pretty obviously suicide from the word go.’
‘Why?’
Ruben sighed again. He looked longingly at his meatballs, which were slowly going cold and beginning to look gelatinous. Mina ignored his hunger. He really shouldn’t eat that – she was very dubious about the food hygiene procedures in the police canteen. She was actually doing him a favour.
‘One shot in the mouth. Weapon right beside her. Her fingerprints. No coat, even though it was winter. All signs that she wasn’t completely in her right mind.’
‘Was there a note?’
‘No, no note. But Agnes had a long history of depression and mental illness. She’d been in St Göran’s hospital several times and none of the people we spoke to seemed all that surprised. Not even the friend she shared her flat with.’
‘Was the flatmate considered a potential suspect?’
‘Initially, given that there was no suicide note. People who are so dramatic that they shoot themselves often leave a message. Plus he was the one who called it in, which always rings faint alarm bells. We pushed a little during questioning, but it was pretty obvious that it was suicide. Probably a spur-of-the-moment thing – if you were planning on killing yourself, you’d do it at home rather than on a park bench. Why are you asking?’
‘Do you have any photos? From the autopsy? The crime scene?’
‘Crime scene? Like I said, it was a suicide.’
Mina ignored him. She would explain in due course. Right now she wanted to see the pictures.
‘Come on,’ said Ruben, getting up with a sigh.
She noted that he didn’t return his tray. She considered asking whether his mother worked there, but decided to refrain. Men rarely seemed to appreciate that comment and Ruben was slightly more easily riled than the average bloke. What was more, she needed his help. He headed for the lift and she followed. What she’d been told over the phone had piqued her interest, but the pictures would give her more to go on. If she was right, it would change everything.
17
‘What is it that’s so urgent?’ Julia came into the room with a coat over her arm. ‘I was just heading out when I got the message, but there were no details.’
‘No idea,’ said Christer sullenly, a coffee cup in one hand and a big bun in the other.
‘You didn’t happen to bring any more buns, did you?’ said Ruben in a longing tone.
Mina ignored them and concentrated on attaching the contents of the file to the whiteboard alongside the existing items.
‘Where’s Peder?’ she said once she’d turned around. ‘I want everyone to be here.’
Ruben shrugged. He took an apple from the fruit bowl on the table and bit into it loudly. Mina couldn’t look at him when he was eating. The apple had been there for days. In her mind’s eye, she pictured germs crawling all over the apple, enveloping it, and now it was disappearing straight into Ruben’s mouth. She didn’t want to think about where Ruben’s mouth had been either. Or on whom. No doubt that would be a bacteria-fest of monumental proportions. She swallowed, trying to suppress the nausea. Somehow she needed to try to pretend everything was fine.
‘He didn’t pick up,’ said Ruben, taking another loud bite.
‘Did you check his desk?’ she asked, unable to conceal her irritation.
Ruben shrugged.
Mina put down the folder, which was now empty. She left the meeting room and found Peder at his desk, fast asleep. His head was tipped back against the headrest and he was snoring gently. Some joker had drawn a moustache on him.
‘Peder!’
She shook him hard. He jumped and looked around drowsily.
‘Come on, we’ve got a meeting,’ she said.
She returned to the meeting room without waiting for him, but she could hear his shuffling footsteps behind her. When she got back to the team, she saw that they were all intently examining what she had put up on the board. She knew they wouldn’t see what she’d spotted without her help. It was only thanks to the call from Milda, who’d carried out the autopsy, that she’d found it. That and Vincent’s clue. She knew that the group were still sceptical about him. But hopefully not for much longer. He’d already shown himself to be invaluable.
Peder entered the room and collapsed into a chair, exhausted. He rubbed his eyes, but mostly seemed to be moving the bags under them around. His colleagues giggled at the moustache, but no one told him it was there.
Mina turned to them. She fixed her gaze on each one in turn. She needed to persuade them all of what she now believed. She took a deep breath. Then she pointed at the board.
‘I think Vincent was right. We’re dealing with a serial killer.’
Silence. They were doubtful. But she’d expected that.
‘As you know, I was pretty much convinced that the symbol carved on our victim’s body was a Roman numeral three,’ she continued. ‘Hence it was natural to consider whether there were any other numbers on previous bodies that we might have missed. I checked with Milda, who couldn’t remember anything like that offhand but agreed to go through her recent cases. She called an hour ago to tell me about Agnes – Agnes Ceci.’
Mina pointed at the photographs she had put up on the board. The photo she was pointing at depicted a young, red-haired woman, slumped on a park bench, with blood forming a red shadow in the snow around her feet. Despite the fact that it was the middle of winter, she wasn’t wearing a coat. There was a pistol lying beside her right hand as if it had fallen from her grasp.
‘This was taken at Berzelii Park, right outside the China Theatre,’ she said.
‘Doesn’t exactly look like a musical,’ Christer quipped.
His other colleagues looked at him in surprise, but he merely shrugged.
Mina moved her finger to another picture showing the sterile, grey surface of the autopsy table. The woman who had been sitting outside the theatre was lying on it, naked. On her right thigh there were three lines clearly visible. One straight one and two leaning into each other to form a V joined together by horizontal lines at the top and bottom.
The Roman symbol for four.
‘A Roman numeral. Just like Vincent said,’ she clarified. ‘The thing you didn’t believe. And that we simply missed.’
Her colleagues leaned in. Interested. But still not wholly convinced. Ruben’s raised eyebrow indicated scepticism. Peder blinked his eyes and tried to focus. She drew their attention back to the photo of Agnes on the autopsy table.
‘The marks were noted during the autopsy and are in the report, but due to Agnes’s history of poor mental health they were written off as signs of self-harm. Something she’d done to herself.’
‘Which is still a likely explanation,’ said Ruben dismissively, leaning back in his chair again.
He crossed one leg over the other and swayed gently on the chair.
‘Certainly. It could very well be. Stranger things have happened,’ said Mina calmly. ‘It might not be a serial killer – if it weren’t for this.’
She pointed at another photo. And then another at the far end of the whiteboard where the photos of their first victim were pinned up. She said nothing else, letting the photographs speak for themselves. Julia stood up. She went over to the board. She carefully studied the pictures that Mina had pointed out.
‘Smashed wristwatches.’
Mina nodded.
‘Yes, exactly. Both victims had watches that had been smashed so that they stopped right on the hour. Our first victim had a watch that had stopped at three o’clock – 15:00. And Agnes’s watch had stopped at 14:00. I’ll buy one random coincidence, but not two.’
Silence descended on the room. Everyone seemed to be taking in what Mina had just shown them.
‘Do you think it’s the same person?’ said Ruben.
He now seemed to be reluctantly open to Vincent’s theory.
‘Do you think that it isn’t?’ Mina countered.
Ruben was about to say something but then shut his mouth. Julia’s face was grave as she took in everything that Mina had put on the board.
‘We need to review everything from the start,’ she said. ‘Every single detail. We’re in this for the long haul. Call home if you need to let them know you’ll be working late. Mina – good job.’
Everyone nodded. Then Peder cleared his throat.
‘If there’s a victim marked with a three,’ he said, his voice thick with tiredness, ‘and a victim marked with a four … Does that mean this serial killer has been at it for a while without us realizing?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering too,’ said Mina.
She fiddled with the folder. There was something about this case that bothered her. Something that she ought to see but that slipped away when her consciousness tried to grasp it. She shook her head. It would come to her sooner or later.
She removed a pack of wet wipes from her pocket. She pulled out several and passed them to Peder.
‘Here. There’s something around your mouth – wipe it off with this.’
18
Vincent opened his eyes with an effort. He had been up for most of the night searching for information on the manufacture and sale of both the box and the swords that had penetrated it. The task seemed overwhelming, but he’d been driven to work on through the night by the pressure of needing to live up to Mina’s expectations and deliver something new.
Now, after far too few hours’ sleep, he had been woken by a sound that he couldn’t identify. It seemed to be coming from far away. There was a clear dissonance. Singing. But in different keys. It was so off that he wished he was tone deaf. It annoyed him that the term was mostly used jokingly, even though it was a genuine phenomenon. It described someone who was unable to identify differences between sound frequencies. The direct opposite of tone deaf was absolute pitch, which was the ability to perceive and state the exact key without a reference point. A variant of this was relative pitch – the ability to perceive intervals between keys, but unlike absolute pitch being unable to recognize a specific key unless you had something to relate it to. Right now he was indescribably pleased that his sense of pitch was decidedly under-developed.
‘… tooooo yooouuuuuuuuu …’
The song finally ended. He sat up and squinted. The whole family was standing at the foot of the bed. Maria and Aston shared the same expectant expression, while Benjamin and Rebecka looked like they were en route to their own execution. Vincent spontaneously felt more sympathy with his two eldest children. He hated birthdays. Well … Not birthdays as such. The kids’ birthdays were fun. It was his birthdays that were the problem.
‘Three cheers – hip-hip … ow!’
Aston yelled and grabbed his leg. He turned around angrily and glowered at Benjamin, who shrugged and pointed at Rebecka. Aston stared at her as angrily as he could but eventually gave up. The family hierarchy was clear to Vincent’s youngest son. Rebecka was crueller than Benjamin – she was both capable of and prepared to inflict pain if he didn’t do things her way.
‘Happy birthday, darling!’
Maria placed a large, home-made gateau on a silver platter on the bed. Vincent felt the nausea rising. Cream in the morning wasn’t a favourite of his. But it was a tradition in Maria’s family. Which meant he hadn’t avoided the mandatory stodgy cake in the morning in his years with Ulrika either. He realized the cake was intended as a sign of affection and wasn’t meant as an attack on his digestive system, so he forced his mouth into a big smile.
‘Aston! The parcels!’
Maria’s eyes were glittering as she carefully sat down on the bed. She loved birthdays. Primarily her own, but those of others too. With a heavy thud, Aston leapt up onto the duvet with two parcels in his arms, nearly making the cake topple off.
‘Mum and me made the cake last night!’ his son said, bursting with pride. ‘We were like pros at making cake. I ate soooooo much cream!’
Aston’s pronunciation of ‘pros’ was in cocksure American. Definitely something he had picked up from YouTube. Vincent looked at the cake. For a moment, he wished it would simply slide off the platter onto the floor and meet an early demise. But he knew that the cost of an incident like that would be dearer than the pleasure it brought. Maria would consider it an omen and regard the rest of the day as doomed, which would mean one disaster after another in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
‘Here, Dad,’ said Aston cheerfully, handing over the parcels while continuing to bounce up and down in excitement.
He kept glancing joyfully at his mother.
The first parcel had been carelessly wrapped with pieces of tape that were coming off and scrunched-up wrapping paper that looked like the contents had found their way inside by accident. Monster Trucks. Leftover paper from Aston’s birthday in February. Vincent grinned and hugged his son. Who didn’t love Monster Trucks?
‘Oh, thank you!’ he said, pulling out a tie.
Maria ruffled Aston’s hair proudly. Vincent noted that it was the third identical tie he had been given. The children had no doubt been given money to shop for a gift for him and children’s reasoning could be so straightforward. If their parent liked the present last year, they would surely like it again this year. There was something loving in that which he was completely able to embrace. What was more, he had the perfect riposte. He was going to give them all a tie each when they turned twenty.
‘Next! Do the next one!’
The cream began to slide off the top tier of the cake as Aston bounced again.
‘Take it easy, sweetheart,’ said Maria, putting a firm hand on her son.
She still had her eyes fixed expectantly on Vincent. It was a thin, flat parcel. This one had been more thoroughly wrapped, so he guessed it had been done by Maria. This was confirmed by the glittery sticker – a peace symbol in the shape of a heart on the top. He undid the paper.
‘We’re going on a boat, Dad! All of us!’
Vincent looked at the card: his worst nightmare was about to be realized. A Baltic cruise to Finland. Fifty thousand tonnes of anxiety with a stench of beer to boot. He looked up at Benjamin and Rebecka. The same pain that was probably written all over his face was reflected in theirs. They exchanged a look of understanding. All three of them knew that once Maria had decided something was going to be ‘amazing to do together as a family’, there was no turning back. In the near future, they would spend twenty-four hours trapped inside a steel vessel with an unsafe bow door. He checked the back of the folder. The gift card was valid for a year. He had twelve months to flee the country.
‘Have some cake, darling,’ said Maria warmly, proffering a side plate with a huge slice that she had just cut. ‘Aston is right. We are total pros at cake. And there’s loads of cream.’
Vincent swallowed and smiled. He knew that it was all done out of affection. And meant well. He tried to play along as best as he could.
‘Thank you, darling. Perhaps we can all eat cake together at the kitchen table?’
They gathered up the presents, paper and cake and headed into the kitchen. On the way, he retrieved his birthday present to himself. The double album Xerrox 4 by Alva Noto. He untied the red ribbon he had attached himself, carefully opened the cellophane with his nail and removed the first vinyl record from the sleeve to the gentle sound of static. He inspected the grooves carefully to establish a visual understanding of what he could expect before he put it on the record player in the living room. It looked good.
He picked up the tub of fish food, poured a little into the palm of his hand and went over to the aquarium. Then he held his hand right above the water and waited. He had chosen central mudminnows for a reason. They might not be the most beautiful fish, but they were the only fish he knew of that would actually eat from your hand. He didn’t have to wait long before four fish were merrily guzzling the flakes out of his hand.
‘Things might get a bit noisy today,’ he whispered to the fish. ‘Apologies in advance. You know how it is.’
Then he went into the kitchen.
When the first track began to play, he relaxed a little. Maria, on the other hand, seemed to have the opposite reaction – he could see her shoulders tensing. Not her thing. She usually grumbled over his insistence on playing obscure vinyl records when they could be listening to Ed Sheeran on Spotify. Which also took up less space. But she’d seen the red ribbon – this was his. This was his moment. For now.
He sat down and helped himself to a slice of cake while quickly performing a calculation in his head. It was eight o’clock on the dot. Sixteen hours. Nine hundred and sixty minutes. Fifty-seven thousand six hundred seconds. Then his birthday would be over.
