Trapped, page 47
Vincent nodded and swallowed hard. This was the only photo from Kvibille Primary that he’d been in before he’d moved and changed schools. But he saw no similarities between the boy in the picture and himself today. How could that boy have become him? And was it good or bad that he didn’t recognize himself? Didn’t he want to recognize himself?
‘I didn’t know your name was Boman,’ said Mina, as he read it in the list of names under the picture.
Vincent Adrian Boman.
Boman. That was a name he hadn’t heard in a long time.
‘The Walders were my foster family,’ he said, nodding to himself. ‘I took their name. I was called Boman before that. But how did you find my old class photo?’
‘A little honest police work. The Walders were easy to find in the electoral register. There are only a few of them, and only one took in an orphan by the name of Vincent. The social services paperwork said the child’s original surname had been Boman, and that you lived in Kvibille. The rest was easy. But that’s not why I’m showing you the photo.’
Mina pointed at one of his classmates.
‘This girl is called Jessica Widergård. She’s Robert’s mother. She looks the same. I recognized her straight away from the news reports on Bobby.’
Vincent went pale. He looked at the picture for a long time. Then he pointed at two other girls who were sitting next to Jessica.
‘There were three of them. Jessica, Malin and Charlotte. Sickan, Malla and Lotta.’
‘Were they good friends?’ she said, her eyes widening.
‘Yes, you might say that. They always hung out together. As if they were sisters. But why do you ask?’
‘Because Malin Bengtsson and Charlotte Hamberg are the mothers of Agnes and Tuva.’
The silence that followed was deafening.
‘Did you know them?’ Mina said eventually.
‘Sickan, Malla and Lotta?’ he said tonelessly. ‘Absolutely. The four of us spent a lot of time together the summer after this picture was taken. Before I changed schools.’
Memories he had suppressed for the majority of his life suddenly came hurtling towards him with the force of an express train. His magic workshop out in the barn. The box he’d built with the stars on it.
They were going to surprise Jane.
Mum was so happy that day.
Seven children in each row of the class photo, three rows in total. 7 + 3 = 10. The picture was taken in the spring of 1982. 1 + 9 = 10. 8 + 2 = 10. 10 + 10 + 10. Three sides of an equilateral triangle. Like Mum’s cut-up toasted sandwiches. It was important that they were exact. No matter how much he tried, his thoughts led him back to Mum.
Half a minute tops.
They had got on their bikes and gone for a swim.
‘I don’t understand. I should have reacted to their names right away if they were in any report, but I haven’t seen them anywhere so far as I know. I don’t understand.’
‘Because they haven’t been part of the investigation. Charlotte passed away shortly after giving birth to Agnes. Malin is Tuva’s mother, but she left for France with her husband when Tuva turned sixteen. She hasn’t been back to the country since. Jessica, Bobby’s mum, you’ve read about in the report. But it’s not surprising that you didn’t give it any thought, because she’s no longer called Widergård. Like all the others she changed her name when she got married. As you have, for that matter. Changed surname, I mean.’
He stared at the photo. His old friends. The summer when they had gone swimming. The others. Not him. He had sat there looking at the lake. And he felt how the dark, deep shadow was big enough to reach into the present day and consume him.
‘Anyway,’ Mina continued, ‘this class photo proves that the victims’ mothers knew each other. And now you’re saying that they also knew you. That you played together. That can’t be a coincidence.’
Mina stood right in front of him and rather incredibly placed her hands on his. She was deadly serious right now.
‘Vincent, what’s your involvement in this?’
‘Me? But … Do I have to be? There’s guaranteed to be other people who also knew them. Give me ten minutes and I’ll prove that Malin, Jessica and Charlotte all bought sweets in the same shop. Or snogged the same boy in their teens. Or worked at the same place in adulthood. Are you going to cross-examine anyone who might have met all three?’
Mina removed her hands, taken aback by the attack. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. He had just been so unprepared for what she said. And what she hadn’t said. Yet.
‘Sorry,’ he said, reaching out his hand towards her.
She didn’t take it.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s unlikely this is a coincidence, given that I’m helping with the investigation. None of their other potential mutual friends is doing that. I just don’t want you to think that I’m somehow involved in this, that I know something I haven’t told you. Especially given the message in the book. I really don’t understand what all this means.’
He pointed at the class photo.
‘Unless … Do you think I’m the fourth victim? Or rather, my son Benjamin? Are you going to find him compressed into an origami box with a number carved into his forehead?’
It felt as if he was standing outside his own body and watching himself. As if it was all a film. But Mina shook her head.
‘I think your role in this is a completely different one,’ she said, standing up and going over to the desk. She fetched a laminated sheet from the desk and handed it to him. It was an article from an old issue of the Hallandsposten newspaper. The article was a double-page spread, complete with a sensational headline ending in exclamation marks. However, the majority of the space was taken up by a photo. He had only seen it once previously before his foster parents had thrown out the newspaper. But he would never forget it. The picture showed a young boy standing in a farmyard. It was impossible to tell which farm it was, but Vincent knew. A bigger newspaper would have chosen a different photo – or omitted it altogether. But the editor at Hallandsposten hadn’t had any objection to publishing photos of children. The eighties had been a different time.
Behind the boy, striped police tape denoted a cordoned-off area. And behind the tape, in front of a barn, there was a glimpse of a box painted in stars.
The boy was looking straight into the camera. His gaze contained all the grief and pain in the world. Vincent recognized the look without difficulty. It was still the same every morning when he looked in the bathroom mirror.
‘How many of your colleagues know?’ he whispered.
‘None as yet,’ Mina said.
He paused for a long time.
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ she said. ‘Seriously, fuck you.’
She tilted her head backwards and blinked, but he’d heard the emotion in her voice.
‘What am I supposed to think, Vincent? I trusted you.’
‘I was a child, Mina.’
The tears were openly flowing down her cheeks now, and she brushed her face with the sleeve of her jumper.
‘I make it a rule never to trust anyone,’ she said. ‘But I made an exception for you. And I got the others to trust you too. Fuck you for showing me I was right. Surely you realize that you’ll be our prime suspect as soon as I tell the others?’
Vincent looked down at the floor.
‘And what do you suspect?’ he said. ‘Do you think I murdered them?’
Mina snuffled and gathered herself together. She studied him with a look that was nothing but professional.
‘That’s a good question,’ she said flatly. ‘Did you?’
109
The summer evening was darker than it should have been. Clouds that hadn’t been there when he’d driven over to Mina’s were now covering the sky. It looked like it might rain at any moment. Vincent was struggling to concentrate on the drive home, but fortunately there weren’t many other cars on the roads. People weren’t back from their summer holidays yet. Lucky for them, given how he was driving.
At the same time, he didn’t want to get home too quickly. Once home, he wouldn’t have the headspace he needed to process everything that Mina had said. Maria had already sent a text warning him that Aston wanted to build a ‘gigantic-enormous Lego spaceship’ and that she was benevolently delegating this to Vincent. Or as she put it: ‘to you boys’. Maria often said it was important for her to feel equal. That apparently did not include building Lego with her son. Not that it bothered Vincent. She didn’t know what she was missing.
This time, however, it meant he took the long route home to clear his thoughts first. Perhaps he would drive by the car park at Partihallarna where they’d found Robert. See whether that got his thoughts going. On the other hand, it might not look good if he visited a crime scene, now that he was on the way to being a murder suspect. Mina had probably already called Julia and told her everything. He wondered who they’d send to take him into custody if she had. Christer? No. Not Christer. Ruben. Of course they’d send Ruben. A light rain began to fall and he switched on the windscreen wipers.
Mina’s information was a box that needed to be unpacked in the right order. He needed to start from the beginning. His classmates: Malin, Jessica and Charlotte. Or Malla, Sickan and Lotta. His friends when he was little. Who had then become the mothers of Tuva, Robert and Agnes. But surely that didn’t have to mean it was about him. Right?
The rain increased in intensity and he sped up the windscreen wipers. The patter on the car roof had a slightly hypnotic effect; his thoughts wanted to fly away but he had to make an effort to line them up in a logical order.
What if Mina’s discovery was not specifically about him? Was someone murdering the children of all his old classmates? And why their children in particular? Why not the offspring of the other class in the same school year?
No, not the children of all of them. The countdown spoke its own clear language. There were only going to be four murders. And the killer was keeping something in store for when when the countdown reached zero – he was convinced of that. Something that tied Malin, Jessica and Charlotte together specifically. Had they had a common enemy? But once again, if they’d had a common enemy then they ought to have been the ones who’d been murdered, not their children, who hadn’t even known each other.
And who was the fourth person – murder number one – if it wasn’t him? Because despite the book with the message from the murderer, he was still not prepared to accept that it could be him, Vincent, who was the common denominator. Admittedly, the four of them had been a fixture for a brief period. A summer. But when he had moved away from there, they must have found someone else. The fourth person could be him, but it wasn’t certain. It could be another friend. After all, they had spent a long time without him and only a short time with him. They hadn’t been that important together. He couldn’t make it add up.
What was more, there was no one in the present who knew about his past. Following the newspaper article, his foster family had done everything they could to bury what had happened. And they had done a good job. He was honestly surprised that Mina had managed to dig it up. Vincent Walder hadn’t existed then. In Kvibille he’d just been plain old Vincent Boman.
Boman.
Bo-man.
Wait
wait
wait
He floored the accelerator and sped into a roundabout. Someone honked angrily at him. Then the heavens opened and the rain began to pour with full force. It wasn’t important. Nothing was important. Except the dates. He knew what they meant. He needed to double-check with Benjamin, but he had cracked the code. He saw the numbers in the air in front of him, hovering a few inches above the bonnet and glittering in the rain as they were transformed into letters. And what they revealed filled him with horror.
110
She was sitting on the cold floor, staring at her wall. The picture of Vincent was staring back at her. She had pinned the newspaper article above the class photo in the middle of the spider’s web that she had built. Mina had her Rubik’s cube in her hand – the one that Vincent had solved for her. She tossed the cube back and forth between her hands. She was tempted to twist it, but didn’t dare. She wasn’t sure whether she’d be able to get it back to its finished state. As if she would be triggering an unstoppable chain reaction by a gentle twist, where each subsequent attempt to make it right again would only create more and more disorder. Just like her life.
Seven-year-old Vincent Boman was looking at her from the wall with sorrowful eyes.
She had confided in him. Good God, he’d been here while she was asleep.
The cube flew from one hand to the other.
He had been allowed to get to know part of her innermost self. And all along he had been lying to her.
The cube flew in an arc through the air, back to her other hand.
If only he’d said something about it. About what had happened to his mother. He claimed he’d suppressed it. That he couldn’t remember. And she wanted to believe him. But she didn’t know whether she’d ever be able to do that again.
Why couldn’t she just have settled for being alone?
She looked at the cube. Then she threw it as hard as she could at the wall. The cube hit young Vincent on the forehead and broke into several pieces. She wrapped her arms around her legs and began to rock back and forth, sitting there on the floor as she quietly cried.
111
Vincent hurtled into Benjamin’s room without knocking. His son was, as usual, lying on the bed with headphones on and his computer perched on his ribcage. He jumped when Vincent stormed in.
‘What are you doing?’ Benjamin said, shutting his laptop. ‘And look out for my books on the floor – you’re leaving a puddle!’
Benjamin was right. Water was running off Vincent. He hadn’t bothered to remove his outerwear but had headed straight into Benjamin’s room. He had been drenched by the rain on the brief stretch between the garage and the front door, and he could feel water dripping from the tip of his nose. He reached for a towel that was slung over the back of the desk chair, but Benjamin stopped him.
‘You really don’t want to use that one.’
Vincent withdrew his hand. He wasn’t going to ask.
‘The murders,’ he said, taking off his jacket. ‘Pull up the dates.’
‘That again,’ Benjamin sighed, slowly getting out of bed and heading over to the desk where the computer was. ‘You know that uni starts again this week, right? I’ve got quite a lot of lectures to be concentrating on.’
‘I need to see all the dates in front of me,’ said Vincent, not caring about his son’s objection.
‘OK, but can you dry off first?’ Benjamin said in annoyance, moving a few painted Warhammer figurines to a safe distance. ‘You’re soaking everything.’
Vincent quickly fetched a towel from the bathroom while Benjamin opened the Excel spreadsheet.
‘Do you remember the first time we tried to crack the code?’ Vincent said on his return.
‘You mean when we translated the dates to letters? 1 is A, 2 is B, and so on. The simplest cipher there is. And it got us nowhere.’
‘Let’s do it again,’ said Vincent, rubbing the towel through his hair. ‘In numerical order.’
‘If that’s what it takes to get you to chill out, fine. But I don’t understand why.’
Benjamin pulled up the pictures of Agnes, Tuva and Robert showing the dates and times.
‘The first murder, Agnes’s so-called suicide, took place on the thirteenth of January at 14:00,’ said Benjamin. ‘So 13-1-14. That gives us M-A-N.’
He changed the numbers under the image to letters as he spoke.
‘Tuva was murdered in the sword box on the twentieth of February at 15:00. So 20-2-15. That gives us T-B-O. And according to the anonymous tipster, Robert was chopped up on the third of May at 14:00. Ergo 3-5-14. Which makes C-E-N.’
He changed the last figures and pushed his chair away from the desk so that Vincent could see properly.
‘M-A-N-T-B-O-C-E-N. Still doesn’t mean anything. But we knew that.’
‘It doesn’t mean anything because that’s the order of the murders,’ said Vincent, standing on the towel in an attempt to minimize the puddles on the floor. ‘The chronological order. But the numerical order is the other way around. Agnes had the number four carved onto her. Tuva a three. Robert a two. Put them in numerical order, i.e. two-three-four. Robert-Tuva-Agnes.’
Benjamin swapped Robert and Agnes on the screen and looked at the new combination of letters.
‘C-E-N-T-B-O-M-A-N. I still don’t understand it,’ he said, frowning. ‘It’s still nonsense.’
‘Far from it,’ said Vincent. ‘It tells us when the next murder – murder number one – will take place. On the twenty-second of September at 14:00. In a month’s time.’
Benjamin looked at him in astonishment.
‘How do you reach that conclusion?’
‘Because the twenty-second of September at 14:00 makes 22-9-14. The letters V-I-N. And murder number one should appear first in sequence, before the others. Don’t you see?’
Vincent stretched across Benjamin in frustration and tapped in the letters V-I-N on the keyboard. The keys got wet, but that was too bad.
‘One, two, three and four. Four murders,’ he said.
V-I-N-C-E-N-T-B-O-M-A-N glared at them from the screen.
‘Vincent Boman is my real name. The murders have been a message to me all along.’
112
Why couldn’t the bloody Sunday drivers on Essingeleden learn to keep out of the way? Ruben shifted down to second. Admittedly, it was a Thursday, but the point still held. What business did they have being out on the roads? He shifted up into third again and wondered whether he’d make it to fourth if he pushed it. But things up ahead didn’t look too good. A white Toyota Auris had just changed lanes and was right in his way.
