Trapped, page 46
Ruben cleared his throat and turned back to the CSI. ‘How sure are you about the cause of death?’
‘The canula was still in his arm,’ said the blue-haired woman.
‘Jonas probably picked up a drug habit while he was inside,’ said Christer.
He was still mourning his shoes and now the moisture was beginning to seep through them, right through and into his socks. This was the closest to the great outdoors he’d been in forever. And it wasn’t inspiring him to come back.
‘Tell me who doesn’t pick up a drug habit inside. And he did twenty years,’ said Ruben, his teeth chattering.
It was actually a warm day, but the damp and gloominess in the forest pulled the temperature down. The caravan, however, had been in the scorching sun all summer, which was guaranteed to have been a major contributory factor to what had awaited them inside.
The body was now being carried away in a black bag with a zip on it. A little fluid was dripping out through the zip and the stench hit them with full force. Christer pinched his nose shut but still had to fight against the nausea. To his satisfaction, even Ruben’s face had gone a green-white shade. It had been impossible to get a trolley into the forest clearing, so the body bag was being carried away on a stretcher. Milda didn’t have the pleasantest of tasks ahead of her. And the forensics team had an extensive task ahead of them at the caravan.
‘Well, there we have it,’ said Ruben, setting off with big strides towards the road where they’d left their police car.
Bosse was waiting for them in the car, with the window wound down and a big bowl of water on the floor. At least he’d be happy when they came back. Christer sighed at the state of things. Ruined shoes, wet socks – and yet another lead that had come to a dead end.
107
Dear God, she hated holidays. There were few words in the Swedish language she disliked quite as much, and just as few enforced behaviours she detested with the same fervour.
‘You need to take a bit of time off, same as everyone else,’ human resources had told her. ‘It’s August. Rest up. There are other investigators in the building who can man the fort for a week or two.’
That wasn’t how Mina saw things. There was a reason why their team had been created. And it wasn’t so they could use up their annual leave. But she strongly suspected that this eagerness for time off from the chiefs was actually the first step towards phasing them out and shutting them down. That wasn’t something she intended to let happen.
Despite all their work, they hadn’t even managed to locate Jonas Rask. It should have been a simple matter. Someone who’d got out after so many years inside ought to have been easy to find. Avoiding the police demanded resources and finesse. And the fact that people were creatures of habit was always advantageous for the police. But none of Rask’s old watering holes had turned up anything, and they hadn’t managed to find his caravan either. That had taken a randy fifteen-year-old.
Disaster.
She needed something to show for all her efforts. Something concrete. Mina took a step back and inspected her creation. The only positive thing about them forcing her to take time off was that she was able to go through everything she had on the case in peace and quiet without having to put up with colleagues interrupting her. Even if it was dull not seeing Vincent. In the last two weeks, he’d had a string of lectures to deliver – most of them not even in Sweden. Since they had seen each other at dolphin girl’s, Anna’s, he’d barely been in the country. And perhaps that was for the best. Partly because she had difficulty believing that Anna could stalk him abroad, since her money seemed to mostly go on new tattoos. And partly because Mina didn’t know whether she was ready to talk to him about what had happened when he had come round to hers. Soon, maybe. But not yet.
One of the long walls in the living room was covered in pinned-up pieces of paper and photographs. She had also taken the liberty of writing and drawing straight onto the wall with felt-tip pens. It would be easy enough to cover it with a fresh coat of paint later. Although she had heard that felt-tip pens needed three coats … But she always repainted the whole flat each autumn in a new, crisp shade of light grey – after a year it began to assume a slightly darker tone that testified all too clearly to the dirt clinging to the walls, no matter how much she scrubbed them.
She didn’t care whether she was the only one who could see that the walls were getting darker. Perhaps she wasn’t actually seeing it, if she was honest. But she knew it. She also found the act of painting itself to be therapeutic. Naturally she did the painting herself. There was no chance she was going to let a decorator with dirty shoes into the flat.
Tuva. Agnes. Robert.
They stared into space in her room. The photos were the same ones they had at the station – she had simply taken down everything they had, copied it, and put it back again. Since then, she had added further pieces at home. More notes. More pictures. She had drawn lines, circled some things and marked others that she considered to be particularly important.
In one corner, she had listed things she had come up with as possible and impossible connections between the victims. This offered a wealth of random words and contexts written straight onto the wall. Dentist. School. Grocery store. Related. And another ten or so words. If only people knew how easy it was to map their daily patterns. Facebook. Instagram. In certain cases, a few guesses and a follow-up phone call to confirm. If only she could work out what united them, she would be able to get closer to the truth – she knew that much.
But so far, her efforts had turned up no results. There was seemingly no connection whatsoever between the victims. Zero.
Mina tugged at her ponytail in frustration. She regretted that immediately and reached for the hand sanitizer. She dispensed a big dollop and began to rub it briskly into her hands. She took a step back. She took in the whole collage as one, before shifting her gaze to the right. To Vincent’s column. Obviously she had checked everything she could on him too. Especially since he’d become personally involved in the investigation. But back in March she’d chosen to trust his judgement in a sensitive murder inquiry without knowing much more about him than it said on Wikipedia. That had been a little irresponsible, she thought in hindsight, even if it had been fortunate that she had done so. Her knowledge gap about Vincent Walder had been filled in recent weeks. She still didn’t have a great deal of information about him compared with the others pinned to her wall, but then he was neither a murder victim nor a suspect.
Yet.
She looked at the portrait of Vincent – an advertising poster from one of his shows. She had only known him for a bare six months, but it felt like it had been much longer than that. It was rare that she experienced that kind of connection with another person. It hadn’t happened since—
She quickly pushed away the thoughts and forced her brain to focus on Vincent. His picture was looking straight at her. Sometimes it felt as if his eyes were following her around the room.
She had gone through the same factors for Vincent as she had for the others. Painstakingly working her way through the words she’d written on the wall just as carefully as she had for the others. Which meant she had also learned more about him. Which dentist he went to. Where he bought his groceries. Where he had grown up. She had even managed to get hold of a class photo showing Vincent in primary school, thanks to a company that specialized in digitizing and offering old class photos online. The photo was lying on the desk. He had been amazingly sweet with a cute gap-toothed smile which had been visible because he had been smiling so broadly in the photo.
Personally, she had hated school photos. And she had hated her classmates. All except one: her best friend Pia. So during her high school years – which had been the worst – she had quite simply crossed out the others’ faces. And names.
All the names were listed in order under the picture, based on which row the pupils were in. And there was always the name of someone absent. She and Vincent came from completely different parts of Sweden and there was more than ten years’ gap between them. And yet their class photos were so similar. She wondered for a moment what Pia was doing now. Their friendship had lasted for a long time, into their adult years. But Pia hadn’t been able to understand the choices that Mina had made. So they had gone their separate ways. And she hadn’t had many new friends since then. Friends imposed. Wanted too much. Asked too many questions. Demanded that you cared, showed an interest. She hadn’t felt able to commit the energy to anyone else – not until she had met Vincent. And the question was whether she really wanted him in her life. She had created an existence that worked. Where she kept the pieces of herself in place. Vincent disturbed those pieces, forcing his way in, and she had a completed Rubik’s cube on her table to prove it.
Mina sighed, turned around and was about to head out of the living room to fetch coffee when her mobile rang. The display showed it was Christer.
‘Hello! Bosse and I thought we’d check in and see how it’s going with … your holiday,’ he said, emphasizing that last word with slight irritability. ‘Bosse is a bit out of sorts today, so we’re staying in.’
He was apparently not entirely satisfied with the imposed leave. She was still struggling to get used to this new, happy Christer. Who also seemed to love animals. She had known him ever since she had arrived at police headquarters and hadn’t seen him so much as smile at a goldfish.
‘Do you do everything with that dog?’ she said.
‘Funny you should say that – Ruben said the same thing. Bosse doesn’t like it when he hasn’t got company. He needs the security and stability of my presence. But I guess that’s hard to understand for someone who’s never had to take care of anything more advanced than a yucca plant.’
‘What?’
‘Ruben, I mean,’ he added quickly. ‘The palm. Not you.’
She looked at the wall with all the pictures and notes. Her holiday. Was she going to lie to Christer and tell him that she was at a vineyard in Tuscany, on a shopping adventure in New York or on a beach in Las Palmas?
‘When I say holiday, I obviously mean the investigation,’ Christer added.
Mina felt as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
‘Am I that transparent?’ she said.
‘Only to anyone who looks. And it’s not as if I’m out sailing the archipelago myself.’
‘Frankly, I’m getting nowhere,’ she sighed. ‘I’ve even started looking into the victims’ parents. But I’m not finding anything there either. They live in different places. They have different jobs. They’re not related. I’ve been on the lookout for anything, big or small. But I’m not finding any factors that tie them together. Right now I’m mostly hoping the murderer has given up.’
She sat down on the desk, moving Vincent’s class photo to avoid creasing it.
‘And what about the Halland connection? That didn’t turn anything up either?’ Christer asked as Bosse barked in the background. ‘Sorry, I’m just going to feed him.’
The loud rustling of dry food landing in a metal bowl forced her to hold the phone away from her ear. Then there was the sound of intense chewing from a happy golden retriever. Bosse was excessively happy at a base level – she didn’t dare imagine what he must be like when he’d just been fed.
‘What Halland connection?’ she said, when Bosse had calmed down with his eating.
‘Ack, well. Connection and connection. Perhaps that’s too strong a word, but you have to agree that it’s a funny coincidence.’
‘I genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about.’
Christer’s sigh was clearly audible down the line.
‘For God’s sake. Well, it took a while for me to make the connection too, but once you’ve spotted it, well … I’m sure I mentioned it, but maybe not …’
‘Christer,’ Mina said impatiently. ‘Out with it. What are you talking about?’
‘Well, Agnes’s father comes from Halland. You can tell right away from his dialect,’ he said. ‘And Robert’s parents mentioned that the father had a background in the cheese industry, which makes you think of Kvibille cheese from Halland right away. And as for Tuva … Her grandfather is a birdwatcher and he had a big poster on his wall at home, of the peregrine falcon. That’s Halland’s county bird. It’s all in my reports. I thought the connection was so obvious that no one could have missed it.’
She pictured how pleased with himself Christer was. It was a pity she’d have to take him down a peg or two.
‘Did Tuva’s grandfather have any other bird posters?’
‘Perhaps,’ Christer said reluctantly.
‘And how many other cheese makers are there in Sweden? Kvibille is far from the only one.’
‘OK, so shoot me. The connection might not be completely crystal clear. But it’s a feeling. I think they’re from Halland. If that means anything. Anyway, I’ve got to go now. Bosse wants to watch TV.’
She didn’t intend to ask how Christer knew that, or what a dog could possibly want to watch on TV. Animal Hospital? In Nature maybe? Or that movie Hachi with Richard Gere? She had great difficulty picturing Christer as Richard Gere.
What was it she’d been about to do when Christer had called … That was it. Coffee. She hopped off the desk, put the mobile phone to one side and took a step towards the kitchen. Then she spun on her heel. She stared at the collage. At the new pictures she had pinned up – the ones no one else had seen. She held up the photo lying on her desk. Looked at the list of names under the class photo. Then she turned it over. And read.
She could kiss Christer. He’d been right about Halland. But he’d made the classic masculine mistake of simply focusing on the men. The solution was obviously something completely different.
She knew what the connection was.
She finally knew what the connection was.
108
The rug inside Mina’s front door hadn’t got any bigger since the last time he’d been there. He had taken off one shoe and was balancing on one leg while trying to remove the other. Vincent didn’t dare be the first person to leave a shoe print on the clinker floor. He wobbled and put his hand on the door to support himself.
Mina looked at his hand but averted her gaze when she noticed that he had seen her doing that. He knew she was already obsessing about the greasy marks his fingertips had left on the door and wondering how long she could control herself before they were sanitized away. He forestalled her by producing a pack of single-use wipes from his pocket and wiping the door. Then he looked at the pack and feigned concern.
‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘These are the used wipes. That I used to wipe the handholds on the underground.’
Mina’s expression transformed into one of pure horror in a split second.
‘Ha ha,’ she said, punching him on the shoulder – hard enough for him to realize how not ha ha she found it. ‘Welcome back to Sweden. Have you recovered from your close encounter with your stalker, Anna? I noted that you didn’t hypnotize her to forget that you existed or anything like that. Perhaps it flattered your ego a little bit after all?’
Vincent stared at her. She apparently thought that story was far funnier than he did. He had done his best to try to forget the heart tattoo, but it still kept appearing in his mind’s eye when he least wanted it to.
He brushed a hand over his face and followed Mina into the living room. The flat had been cleaned with the same precision as last time he had been here. The only thing disrupting order was the chaos on the living room wall. That was new. A few paintings were lying on the floor. He guessed they’d been taken down to make space for what was now covering the wall. It seemed to be all documents and photos that Mina had access to as part of the investigation. There were some that he hadn’t even seen before. Everything was laminated.
‘It’s happened to me before,’ he said. ‘Stalkers, that is. Just not so extreme. Usually it’s bored housewives or young men confused about their identity, who for some reason believe all their problems will be solved if they can be with me.’
‘Look at you, Casanova.’
‘Not at all. If they hadn’t found me they would have projected their emotions onto someone or something else. But Anna is a little different. Unlike most of the others, she isn’t satisfied with letting it be a fantasy. The only thing that seems to help is to maintain as great a distance between her and me as is possible. With the help of the police, should it be needed.’
‘Are you asking me to protect you?’ said Mina, smiling.
‘You’re doing that already.’
‘Ruben would love to hear about Anna,’ she laughed.
Vincent looked at her wall again. He had never understood why they put everything up on a wall in all the crime dramas – except that it looked good on camera. But when he saw Mina’s wall, he suddenly understood why. It was a reverse approach to making a mind map. Instead of working from a central idea and then forming branches, she already had the branches and was now searching for what tied them together. And in the middle of this creation there was a photo. He went closer and nodded at the picture.
‘Is that …?’
‘That’s why I called,’ she said.
Mina’s voice was not altogether steady. As if she were afraid of how he would react. He didn’t need to look closely at the photo to know what it was – he had seen the picture many times before. Even if it had been a long time ago. Such a very long time. He reached out to take the laminated photo off the wall, but stopped himself when he heard Mina’s sharp intake of breath. He should have known better. Lying on the desk behind them was a box of single-use cotton gloves. He took a pair from the carton, put them on and then reached for the photo again. No reaction this time.
The picture was a class photo. He turned it over.
Kvibille Primary School, Class 1b, it said on the reverse. He turned it face up again. The clothes divulged that it was the early 1980s.
‘That’s you standing in the back row, right?’ said Mina, pointing at a smiling boy with a gap between his front teeth, half-concealed behind a stout schoolmistress.
