Trapped, page 8
‘I promise I’ll speak to them,’ said Vincent.
He put the phone in his pocket and stood up.
‘On the subject of leaving me, when are you going to say something about that cop?’ said Maria.
He sat down again. The tone betrayed that she had deliberately waited until he had his guard down.
‘What do you mean?’ he said.
‘I know you saw her at the Rival,’ she said.
‘Yes, I told you I had a meeting,’ he interjected.
‘Don’t interrupt me!’ she hissed.
The new subject didn’t seem to make her any less angry.
‘You’re not truly present when you’re here. What is it you’re thinking about, Vincent? Where you’re going to fuck her next time? How good it was last time? Or weren’t the sofas at the Rival the right height for taking her from behind? I suppose I’m meant to be grateful that you’re not bringing her here. Yet.’
He put his face in his hands in an attempt to calm down. The first few times Maria’s jealousy had reared its head, he’d been thrown into a rage. The jealousy hadn’t been there from the beginning, but it had grown as their relationship had deteriorated. Soon enough, he had learned to rein in his reactions, but it still provoked a strong response within him. He couldn’t help it. The accusation of betrayal triggered something primal, something deep down, even though he knew the jealousy wasn’t about him. It was about her. Like everything else.
‘Darling,’ he said, controlling his breathing in an attempt to subdue the adrenaline that was flooding through him, ‘if that’s what you think then it’s lucky for you that you’re studying with a bunch of twenty-five-year-olds. All you have to do is pick and choose. But the last time I saw Mina was at police headquarters. I’m helping her. Them. The police team. On an investigation. If you’re going to be like this every time, then it’ll be impossible for me to do it. What do you think I should tell them?’
Maria looked at him and sobbed again.
‘I want a phone number for this team,’ she said.
‘Good God— OK. Phone number. Fine. Now I really do have to go. I’m sorry I messed up about the party. I’ll make it up to you somehow.’
He got to his feet and patted her awkwardly on the cheek. She let him. Vincent went into the hallway, put his feet in his shoes and bent down to tie the shoelaces again. Naturally they weren’t as perfect as last time. But it would have to do. He went outside and managed to get almost all the way down the path through the snow blanketing the grass before he stopped to undo the laces and tie them again. Some things had to be done right.
12
Mina was in a taxi on the way to the National Board of Forensic Medicine, which was otherwise known as the RMV and was based in Solna. She wasn’t coming straight from police headquarters but from a private meeting. None of her colleagues were aware that once a week – or whenever the need arose – she went to AA: Alcoholics Anonymous. There was no reason for them to know about it, especially since she wasn’t an alcoholic. For her it had been about something else. For a period. A long period which had cost her a lot. And she was still paying the price for her mistake every single day. But that was her business.
The venue was in Kungsholmen, a few hundred metres from headquarters, and that was why she opted to go to AA instead of … the other place. The other location wasn’t as convenient, and for her they fulfilled the same purpose. The ideology was effectively the same. And if she bumped into a colleague en route then she could just say she was on her way home from work.
When she got out of the taxi, she wrapped her coat even more tightly around her to ward off the chill. There was no reason why her colleagues should know anything about her – she found it incredibly difficult to get to grips with the sharing of snippets of personal life that some people engaged in simply because they worked together. And her colleagues had learned after a few initial attempts that it wasn’t worth asking her questions about anything other than work.
She was admitted into the forensic premises, put on her protective overalls and face mask and stood expectantly outside the autopsy room. She knocked on the door and heard ‘come in’ in response.
Milda Hjort didn’t look towards Mina as she came through the door – she knew Mina was on her way and she was fully focused on the body in front of her. Mina went over and stood by her. She took in the box beside the body on the shiny, sterile table with fascination.
The box itself, however, was far from sterile. Blood, tufts of hair, brain matter and a string of other human materials were to be found here and there on the pale wood. A man in his fifties whom Mina assumed to be a forensic specialist was working on it in deep concentration. He was documenting and examining the box, while Milda was focusing on the body. The RMV was merely the first port of call for the box; it had been brought here because it would have been impossible to extricate the body without destroying evidence. It should really have gone straight to the National Forensic Centre, NFC, in Linköping via the police. As if he could hear her thoughts, the man nodded and took a step back from the box.
‘I’m done. I’ll make sure it’s picked up and sent on to Linköping.’
‘Thanks,’ said Milda, without looking up from the body.
The man left the room, leaving the two women behind with Milda’s assistant, Loke, an extraordinarily inhibited young man with whom Mina had never exchanged a single word, despite years of attending autopsies.
‘This is a complete mess,’ said Milda. ‘It wasn’t the easiest job getting her out of the box. The body had stiffened in position. Do you know who she is yet?’
‘No, but we’re working on it. Worst case, we’ll have to put out an appeal in the media, but I’d rather avoid setting off that circus for as long as possible.’
‘Understood.’
Milda turned her eyes towards the box. Mina slowly walked around it and took it in from every angle.
‘Have you ever seen anything like this before?’ she said.
‘I’ve seen a lot in my time,’ said Milda, ‘but this is something new to me. Your colleague Ruben also stopped by earlier.’
‘What did forensics say about the box itself?’
‘Not much. Plywood. Nailed and glued into a cube. A few odd details about the structure – it seems it ought to have been built differently. I’m afraid you’ll have to ask them, because it made no sense to me. Apparently the small slits in the sides are a precise fit for the width and thickness of the swords. And then of course there are the swords themselves.’
Milda nodded towards a different table where a number of see-through plastic containers were lined up in a row with a sword inside each one. Mina went over and looked at them in grim wonderment. All the swords were identical. They were made entirely from metal, with a long blade and a handle equipped with a shield to prevent the hand from slipping onto the blade. The swords were bloody and stained with various substances from the victim. Mina took out her phone and photographed them. She tried to capture them both as a whole and with as many individual details as she could through the plastic. She then returned to the body and proceeded to photograph it from every angle.
‘Does it take a lot of force to drive a sword through a body?’
Milda nodded.
‘Granted, the swords are pretty sharp. But still, driving them through the body so precisely that they lined up with the hole on the opposite side … Well, that would have taken both strength and precision.’
‘There’s nothing out of the ordinary? Apart from the obvious, that is? No detail on the box or swords that might prove useful?’
‘Dead bodies are my department,’ said Milda. ‘You’ll have to ask forensics about the box once NFC have taken a look. But if you’re careful you can take a look now – it’ll be here until it’s picked up.’
Mina nodded and looked around the room. She shivered with delight at the sterile setting – cleanliness everywhere. Other than the box, there was no clutter, no dirt, no bacteria. The smell of disinfectant lingered astringently and delightfully in her nostrils. She would quite happily have lived in this room. The ever-present anxiety in her breast gave way and instead a relaxing warmth spread throughout her body. Was this how normal people felt when wandering around the dirty outside world?
She pulled up the photos she had taken of the swords on her phone and looked at them. It was easier than dealing with the containers. One detail made her zoom in.
‘Where are the marks from?’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘The marks?’ she repeated. ‘There are marks on the hilts of the swords. Where you hold them, I mean.’
Milda joined her alongside the containers and bent down to look at the hilts close up. Mina had opted to ignore the body on the autopsy table, but out of the corner of her eye she could see Loke continuing his work.
‘You’re right,’ said Milda. ‘It looks as though they were attached to something. No idea what it could be.’
‘You don’t have a theory?’
‘No, like I said: dead bodies are my department, not objects. You’ll have to wait for the report from Linköping.’
Mina took a few final pictures of the box.
‘Will you call me if they find anything useful?’ she said.
‘Of course.’
‘How long do you think the box will be here for?’
‘A few hours. They need to find someone to drive it down.’
Mina nodded.
She trusted Milda. Reluctant as she was to admit it, even Ruben, who had been tasked with gathering information about the box, was good at his job. He had an almost photographic memory, which had on many occasions proved an invaluable asset. The reason for his assignment to the team had nothing to do with incompetence. It was all to do with #MeToo. But both he and Milda lacked a crucial frame of reference. To them, the box and swords were merely murder weapons. Vincent could tell them something important about its connection to magic. They’d had him in the meeting and not even asked him. But she trusted Vincent’s expertise more at this stage than anything that Ruben might come up with. Ruben could say what he wanted – she needed to get Vincent in the same room as the box before it vanished off to NFC.
Taking a deep breath, she grasped the door handle and turned it slowly. Part of her didn’t want to leave the lovely sterile environment and head out into the grime. But she knew she had no choice. This shit couldn’t be avoided.
13
The taxi meter stopped at 437 kronor.
‘Sorry,’ said Vincent, leaning forward to speak to the taxi driver. ‘Would you mind driving another few metres?’
‘But I’ve stopped right outside the entrance,’ said the cabbie a little sullenly.
‘Yes, and that’s great. But I’d like you to drive another few metres.’
The driver, whose name was Yusuf according to the official ID stuck to the windscreen, shook his head and did as Vincent asked. He pulled forward a few metres. When the meter moved up to 444 kronor, Vincent told him he could stop. Yusef shrugged, shook his head, and pulled to a halt.
‘You’re the customer. Happy to do it your way. Is this better?’
‘This is perfect,’ said Vincent, before paying.
He got out and took a big step to avoid the puddle of slush that the taxi had stopped in.
Mina was visible through the glass inside the entrance of the forensics lab. She met him with a nod. No handshake. Presumably she didn’t have wet wipes with her.
‘Thanks for coming so quickly,’ she said.
‘Not a problem,’ he said politely. ‘Where’s the box?’ he asked, looking around. He had never been here before. ‘And is Ruben meeting us, given that he’s the team member responsible for checking out everything to do with the box?’
‘Ruben’s back at HQ, following up on leads. I wanted you to see the actual box, not just photos, so you can examine it properly. It might even give you some data for that profile Julia asked you to compile.’
As they took the stairs to the third floor, Vincent glanced at Mina from the corner of his eye. She was the most interesting person he had met in a very long time – mutilated bodies or not.
‘Over here,’ she said.
They entered a long corridor. Mina led the way and he followed her dark ponytail with his eyes as it swung from side to side, almost as if it wanted to hypnotize him. They went into a changing room where they put on overalls, and then she opened the door into a sterile space with shiny metal tables inside. It was clean, deserted, and looked like forensic labs did on TV. And at the very rear of the room was the box.
Vincent stopped in his stride. It had been a long time since he’d seen one in reality. Mina was right: it was completely different to seeing it in photographs. It awakened memories – memories he had thought were long gone. Although in practice he knew better than that. He of all people knew about the brain’s capacity to retain information. Nothing disappeared. Everything was still there in the convolutions of the brain, waiting to resurface when you least expected it. He had simply not believed that these particular memories would ever need to resurface.
‘It looked smaller in the pictures,’ he mused. ‘But that’s also part of the illusion. The box is meant to look smaller than it actually is because it’s supposed to seem impossible for the assistant to avoid the swords. Not that it made any difference this time around …’
The box was positioned on a fairly low metal table and he crouched in front of it.
‘Can I touch it? Or will I destroy evidence if I do?’
‘That depends on whether you want us to find your fingerprints when it undergoes another round of analysis by the defence team’s forensics experts,’ she said.
‘Good point,’ he said, taking a step back. ‘Someone has done their research at any rate. The sword box is considered to be one of the earliest stage illusions out there. Colonel Stodare performed with one at the Egyptian Hall in London in 1865, and published details of how it worked a year later. Although in his version it was of course a basket. The box came later. But Jesus Christ, imagine having to crawl into something like this.’
‘You don’t like confined spaces?’
‘You could say that. Inherited from my mother. The mere thought of it gives me nightmares.’
He stuck his head in the box and carefully examined the slits for the swords without breathing too hard through the mask. The holes were in completely the wrong places. Assuming you wanted the assistant to live, that was.
‘Some conclude the illusion by showing that the box is empty,’ he said. ‘And then the assistant pops up somewhere in the audience. Personally, I’ve never seen the point.’
He’d been afraid that the box would smell. Bodily fluids. Blood, sweat, maybe even piss. But thanks to the mask he was wearing it was completely odourless, despite the large bloodstains that had permanently marked the untreated timber.
‘I don’t get it, surely that’s an even better trick?’ said Mina.
‘Think about it. The illusion is based on the assistant being penetrated by swords and surviving. But if the box is then shown to be empty because she’s somewhere else, that eliminates the first effect. She was never in the box. Hence the swords were unnecessary. No chance of doing that with this box, obviously,’ he said, pointing at the back, where there would ordinarily have been a secret door. ‘There’s no way out of this one.’
He stood up and stretched his legs.
‘Aren’t you overthinking it?’ said Mina. ‘It’s only magic.’
‘Exactly. It’s when you don’t think about it that it becomes “only” magic. Nice to look at, but you’re not really sure whether you understood what it involved. Where are the swords?’
‘They’re here,’ said Mina, pointing to some transparent plastic cylinders on a nearby table. ‘The swords are inside the containers to preserve evidence and to prevent anyone cutting themselves on the blades. NFC are running DNA checks and they’ve lifted a few partial fingerprints. But it may take time to get the results.’
‘NFC?’ said Vincent.
‘National Forensic Centre. The building we’re in,’ Mina clarified.
‘I don’t think this is going to get us anywhere much in pure profile terms,’ he said, picking up a cylinder. He examined the sword inside carefully from every angle. ‘It’s a Condor Grosse Messer. At first I thought it might be a Falchion – they’ve got quite small blades – but unlike the Falchion, the Messer has a scaly structure on the hilt. Take a look.’
He held up the cylinder towards Mina so that she could see better. She leaned forward, studied the sword intensely and nodded. Then she looked at him.
‘Dare I even ask how you know this? Illusions are one thing – that’s pretty much your world. But this?’
He laughed.
‘I had a period of LARPing in my youth.’
‘LARPing?’
‘Live Action Role Playing. There was a bunch of us who got together and played a medieval LARP game.’
‘Hmm, you can’t have been getting much action as a teenager.’
Taken by surprise, Vincent let out a laugh that echoed uncomfortably in the sterile space.
‘More than the guys with the foam swords got. Anyway, what woman doesn’t love a valiant knight?’
‘True – I can see how valiant you were,’ said Mina, and he felt himself beginning to blush. ‘But OK. So it’s a …?’
‘Condor Grosser Messer. Manufactured in Ecuador. Weighs about two kilos. The blade is 1075 carbon steel, the handle is made from hickory and walnut.’
‘OK, so now you’ve gone from LARPing to being a living version of Wikipedia … What makes you so sure it isn’t going to help with the profile?’
Vincent balanced the cylinder in his hand. He felt the weight of the sword. Then he placed it back on the table next to the other identical swords in their cylinders.
‘It’s not an unusual sword in any regard. There are loads on the market. And in addition to new ones, there’s also a big second-hand market – they may have been bought used. So it’ll probably be difficult to trace them back to a specific buyer or seller. Anyone who does something this thoroughly isn’t going to fall on their sword over that.’
