Trapped, page 39
‘But above all, your behaviour has a negative effect on your colleagues’ abilities too,’ Vincent continued, interrupting his train of thought. ‘I’m going to say what I’m about to say without any judgement. But your comments and your glances … the others react to them. You might think it’s a funny line to take, and what do I know? Maybe it is. But I see how it sets the others off-kilter. It makes them make mistakes. I pass no judgement. It’s just an objective observation.’
An objective observation? Who the hell talked like that?
‘Do you mean Mina?’ Ruben said.
A bearded man of retirement age emerged from what appeared to be a residence beside the actual farm. Good God, did the bloke live there? Practically on the mink farm? He could only hope the man had lost his sense of smell long ago.
‘As I said, it’s not my business,’ said Vincent. ‘But I think it’s unfortunate if you as a team aren’t at the top of your game, given the stage of the investigation you’re at.’
At least he hadn’t included himself and said ‘given the stage of the investigation we’re at’. That was something. There was white wooden garden furniture on the grass next to the house that the man was heading towards. Ruben could see from where he was standing that the paint was flaking off the furniture. A woman was sitting on one of the chairs. The man caught sight of Ruben and changed tack, heading towards him instead.
‘Can I help you?’ said the man, once he reached the police car.
Ruben pointed at his headphones to show the man he was in the middle of a call.
‘What’s more, Ruben, I’d personally much prefer to see you in a better place,’ Vincent concluded.
‘Vincent, just a second,’ he said, before turning to the man. ‘Is this your farm?’
‘Mine and my wife’s.’
The man pointed towards the woman.
‘Or it was, at any rate. There’s not much of it left now, I’m afraid. Activists broke in and “liberated” the minks. We never managed to recapture them. We had to lay off Göran and Martin – our employees, that is – and shut down operations. There’s still an unusually high density of minks in the woods on this island and the ones nearby. Minks are very good swimmers, see,’ said the man, laughing. ‘We reported it, but nothing happened. Are you here about that? It’s high time the police dealt with it. I’d really like to see those activists pay at some point.’
Ruben nodded.
‘Have you had any other uninvited guests here?’ he asked. ‘Apart from the activists?’
‘Out here?’ the man laughed, opening his eyes wide. ‘This is a small island. The ferry you took is the only way in, unless you have your own boat, of course. We would have heard if there were someone else here. So no, no wild parties, or whatever it was you had in mind.’
The man chuckled.
‘Without minks we’re no longer of interest to the activists,’ he continued. ‘No one comes to the island unless they have business here. We’re considering selling up and moving to Herrljunga. Family, y’know.’
Ruben acknowledged him and took notes. Yet another dead end. The most exciting thing to happen on this island was the paint slowly peeling from the facade of the house. But they really ought to do something about the smell.
‘If you do think of anyone who has been here, then please call me,’ he said, handing the man his card.
The man nodded and took the business card. Then he turned around and headed towards the garden furniture and his wife. She waved to Ruben.
He got back into the car and reactivated his headphones. He waved to the elderly couple, pulled out of the small car park and headed towards the road.
‘Vincent, I’m back,’ he said into his headphones. ‘What exactly is it you’re trying to say?’
It surprised him that he couldn’t hear any irritation in his own voice. Usually, rubbish about feelings, and people trying to dig into his private life were the worst thing he could think of. But that mentalist was competent, he had to give him that. Something in Ruben wanted nothing more than to continue talking to him.
‘I was starting to think you’d hung up,’ said Vincent. ‘Listen, I’m going to text you a phone number. It’s for someone who is good to talk to about stuff like this. One of the best, as it happens. Contact her. Or don’t. I won’t find out what you choose to do, and I don’t want to know either. But you should understand that you’re appreciated and liked by your colleagues. They care about you. When you’re not acting like an idiot.’
Ruben was quiet as he drove back down to the ferry. Vincent’s soft voice reached a place within him. He wanted to explain. He. Wanted. To. Explain.
‘It’s been almost eleven years,’ he said. ‘She was called Ellinor. It was the last time I trusted someone. Not that it has anything to do with you.’
He didn’t mean that last bit. But regular Ruben was floundering inside him, protesting at this chat that went against his entire being. Although at the same time, he was unable to go any further than this. Something would break. Something he had spent a decade protecting himself from.
He ended the call and drove onto the ferry. His head was full of thoughts triggered by Vincent – of what had once been. Thoughts that he rarely if ever dared to think, which were now overwhelming him in a way that was impossible to stop. Ellinor. Ell-i-nor. She had been his anchor, his rock and his safety. She had been perfect. But he had been young and hadn’t understood. So he’d carelessly lost the beauty he had. There it was. The truth he had tried to fuck away for ten years. Because after Ellinor there had been a string of pearls, Isabella and Jannika and Melissa. After Sanna, his contempt for women had been complete. And quite rightly so. If his experience had taught him anything, it was that women only wanted one thing – whatever his bank account had to offer. Which as it happened was embarrassingly low as an aim, given what he made as a police officer. But if that was what they wanted, then they couldn’t fucking complain when he was done with them either. And he had gradually learned that women liked the new, boorish Ruben. It turned them on. No one asked why he was the way he was, so long as he was fun, fresh, paid the bill and fucked them better than their actual husbands. No one had wanted to know what was behind it.
Ellinor.
Until Vincent Walder had showed up. The bastard. Ruben adjusted the rear-view mirror and studied himself in it for a second. To his surprise, he discovered he was smiling. Just a little, but it was quite clearly a smile. A strange relief. There was a ping on his phone. He realized what it was. He decided to hold onto Vincent’s text for a while before he deleted it.
90
Mina removed her white cotton gloves, threw them in the bin and took a new pair out of the box. After sitting in front of the computer at work for a whole day without changing gloves she couldn’t bear to think about the hordes of bacteria that had now landed amidst the other rubbish. She hadn’t emptied the bin since her morning coffee. More than anything, she wanted to set it alight. She pictured in her mind’s eye the flames sterilizing everything within it. But that would set off the fire alarm. She pulled on the new gloves and leaned her head on her hands before realizing that the direct contact with her brow meant the gloves were unusable. She threw them on top of the old ones and got out another pair.
Then she stood up and got out a bottle of cleaning spray. It had been a whole week since she had last cleaned the walls of the room – it was high time. What was more, the act helped her to focus. But the smell of the cleaning fluid suddenly made her think of Grandma Ellen. Her safe place, her rock. The small one-bed flat by Mariatorget had always been freshly cleaned, and the smell of liquid soap had been mixed with the scent of freshly baked sponge cake just brought out of the oven. Every day after school, Mina had gone there instead of going home to the empty house. There, in Grandma’s embrace, was where she had grown up. She sometimes reflected that it had been when she had been fifteen and Grandma Ellen had died unexpectedly from a stroke that the gradual descent into loneliness had begun. She hadn’t really felt an affinity with any other person since then. Not even with the man Mina had lived with. Not until now. With Vincent. She looked at the spray in her hand, sighed and put it back in the drawer.
Outside the window it was high summer and the sun was shining directly in, making it almost insufferably warm in the room. But she refused to open the window. She knew the air would bring in not just coolness but also pollen, pollution, asphalt particles, cigarette smoke and all manner of dirt created down on the street. She would have preferred to be wearing a hazmat suit, but that probably wouldn’t have been appreciated. She would have to deal with the sweat instead. Clothes could be washed, knickers and socks could be thrown away.
She hadn’t got anywhere. Three victims. Three people killed by the same person. She couldn’t believe they had been chosen at random. They were too different for that. There had to be a common denominator. But since Robert there had been nothing. No new murder, no confession, nothing. It couldn’t be over – she knew that it wasn’t. The countdown wasn’t over yet.
Mina spun a half revolution on her chair so that she was looking at the wall where she had pinned up photos of Agnes, Tuva and Robert as well as the murder weapons. The illusions. The boxes. There was also a photo of Daniel and a newspaper clipping about Agnes’s father, Jesper. He had denied any involvement in Daniel’s murder. Granted, they had two suspects in custody, identified by witnesses at the scene. Previously known to the police, so it hadn’t taken any great effort to find the culprits. The men in custody insisted they had acted on their own. She would never find out what was true or not in relation to Jesper Ceci’s possible involvement. However, she had difficulty imagining that Sweden’s Future had anything to do with the other murders. Admittedly, Tuva was Jewish and Robert had learning difficulties. There wasn’t room for either of them in the world that Sweden’s Future wanted to build. But she had a hard time believing that a political party seeking to enter parliament would systematically organize a series of murders. Daniel seemed to have been the victim of testosterone-fuelled, racist individuals who had acted on impulse. Nothing more conspiratorial than that.
On the wall, thanks to Tuva’s grandparents, there was also a photo of Tuva’s ex-boyfriend in London. They hadn’t yet sought him out – Mina agreed with Julia that it was not a top priority. He wasn’t the killer.
Vincent had explained that the murderer had visited the cafe at Hornstull several times. He believed that Daniel had seen him there. The murderer had, in other words, chosen his victims with care. They hadn’t been abducted at random from the street, the way Jonas Rask used to take his victims. Rask was still at large and they had been unable to find him.
Mina stood up, went over to the wall and scrutinized the faces, as if she could compel them to answer. Why were they the chosen ones? What united them?
She went back to the computer and carefully cut a hole in the cotton at the tip of the right-hand index finger so that she could use the laptop’s trackpad. It was a sacrifice, but otherwise it would be impossible to use it. Always making compromises, always making exceptions – these things were cracks in her armour where all kinds of dirt might find its way in.
Mina took a deep breath and touched the trackpad with her uncovered finger. She looked up all the information available about Agnes, Tuva and Robert in the records, as well as printing the reports from the conversations with their families and friends. She needed to start from the beginning and go through it all. Somewhere there was a connection. All she had to do was find it. And it was urgent – the murderer wasn’t done yet.
It bothered her that Vincent was holding something back. He had asked about dolphin girl and it had sounded as if it were important. She didn’t like not knowing, but she had to trust that he would explain as soon as he could.
Any day now, another innocent person might get trapped inside one of the dreadful things Vincent had told them about. She needed to beat them to it.
91
Vincent crossed the footbridge, heading for the Gondolen restaurant. The place was almost full when he entered, a mixture of tourists and holidaying Stockholmers thronging around the tables despite the fact it was only half past seven. Ulrika was nowhere to be seen.
‘Hi, have you got a booking?’ asked the maître d’.
‘No, I’m not staying long. I’ll sit at the bar.’
With a little luck, the conversation with Ulrika would be over and done with fairly quickly. He was going to focus solely on Rebecka’s needs, ignoring all jibes about his marriage and Ulrika’s sister. He had also told Maria that a restaurant was a neutral location for them to meet, and while that might have been true, it was also true that Ulrika couldn’t try anything in a public setting. He didn’t want a repeat of their last encounter.
He took a seat at the bar and ordered a cup of filter coffee. It wasn’t really what his stomach needed. It was smarting with hunger; he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. But he had no intention of staying longer than necessary. As soon as he and Ulrika were finished talking, he’d grab a kebab from the place on the corner.
He’d drunk half the cup of coffee when a glass was placed down in front of him, amply filled with red wine. Standing next to him with a similarly well-filled glass was Ulrika. He looked at her questioningly.
‘You’ll need it,’ she said, by way of explanation.
‘Oh, is it suddenly that serious?’ he said, spinning the glass and making the wine splash up the sides. ‘When are your friends arriving?’
He contemplated the wine as it swirled ever more slowly and ran back down into the glass like raindrops on a window.
‘We’ve got an hour before they show up,’ said Ulrika, sitting down next to him and nodding at his glass. ‘Are you checking how alcoholic it is or what?’
Vincent sighed. An hour. Sixty minutes. Three thousand six hundred seconds. The kebab would have to wait for a while. He took a big gulp of the wine.
‘The thing about being able to assess the alcoholic content by sight is a myth,’ he said. ‘Alcohol evaporates quicker than water, which means the surface tension increases and forms drops on the inside of the glass. That’s what you see. A chemical phenomenon. But obviously that tells us nothing about the wine’s quality or what it tastes like. It mostly looks good.’
Only 3,510 seconds to go.
‘I didn’t know you’d become a wine buff,’ she said curtly.
‘No, I don’t know a thing about wine. But I know how liquids work. Right, I’d rather not be here when your friends arrive, so let’s talk.’
‘There’s no rush,’ she said softly. ‘How are things at home? What are Rebecka and Benjamin actually like when they’re with you?’
That was the last thing he’d been expecting. Ulrika only grudgingly talked about their children – presumably it didn’t fit with her career-driven lifestyle that she was also the mother of two teenagers. Above all, she never talked about how the kids were with him, except when she had something to complain about. That she was forced to share the children with her sister was a wound that might never heal.
He looked at her, trying to see what her agenda was – what exactly lay behind the question. But the cocked head and the expectant gaze betrayed no hidden plans. Based on what he could tell, she was genuinely curious. This was far from the aggressive Ulrika he had seen before the summer. He let himself relax a smidge. Perhaps they’d be able to have a civilized conversation after all.
‘Well, for starters they call your sister “aunt” all the time,’ he said.
Ulrika had raised her wine glass to drink from it, and she laughed straight into it, almost making the wine splash over the brim. It was a raw laugh filled with schadenfreude, but her hoarse voice still made it sound interesting. That was what was so annoying about her. She had it all. Looks, money, drive. An incredible competitive instinct. Even when she laughed she dazzled him.
The only thing he wasn’t sure she really had were emotions.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But that’s what she is. An aunt.’
Over the years, he had become increasingly convinced that his ex-wife had disrupted empathy. At first he had believed that she was merely cold. Uninterested in others. But he had realized that it ran deeper than that. She was mentally incapable of putting herself in someone else’s shoes or empathizing with their emotions. On the other hand, she was a good actor. She knew exactly what to say to get others on her side when she needed it. That was presumably why she was such a success as a lawyer.
‘I still think she prefers being called Maria,’ he said. ‘Other than that, Benjamin hasn’t left his room for about a fortnight, and I’m beginning to suspect trolls have built their lair in the heaps of dirty laundry in there. Rebecka has loads of friends and says everything is great, so it’s a dead cert that she feels awful. She still won’t show her forearms …’
‘Maybe she thinks she’s bloated?’
He fell silent. There it was. The reason why it had eventually been impossible to live with Ulrika. It was one thing for her to have unreasonable – even unhealthy – demands on herself. She was a grown woman. That was none of his business. But it became a problem when she demanded that everyone around her be measured by the same yardstick. And when she eventually began making the same demands of the children, explaining how much money they ought to earn or how they ought to look to be accepted, it had been enough. That was when the rows had begun.
‘If Rebecka has a body complex then she got that from you,’ he said sharply. ‘But it’s worse than that. I didn’t get the chance to say it last time. But I think our daughter is cutting her arms. With a razor. Or a knife. Until she bleeds. OK?’
