The Silenced

Wallin had continued to contact her every now and then: sometimes to find out how she was getting on, but more usually to give her a new challenge or ask for discreet favors. Most recently last Christmas.

“By the way, what happened about that trace of blood I found in Sophie Thorning’s apartment?” she said. “Did it help prove that someone else had been there the night she jumped?”

Wallin shook his head. “It turned out to be her own blood. I thought I’d told you that.”

“No, we haven’t spoken since I sent you my report. Not so much as a Christmas card by way of thanks.” She pretended to be upset. That would have made most guys blush and start to stammer their apologies. She knew she looked pretty good and that this could occasionally be used to her advantage. But that sort of trick never worked on Wallin, which was another reason why she respected him. The only way to get Wallin’s attention and respect was by delivering results.

“I’ve been busy,” he said, without sounding the slightest bit apologetic, but more like he was chastising her for not realizing something so obvious.

“And the post of national police chief …?”

Julia regretted saying it before it was even out of her mouth. Wallin’s mouth narrowed to a thin line.

“If I’m allowed to say what I think, the minister of justice picked the wrong person,” she added quickly.

Wallin sat silent for a few seconds, as if he was trying to work out how truthful her statement was. The thin line curved into a controlled smile.

“Thanks. Obviously, I’m aware that I’m being talked about. That people are saying I’ve been passed over, even that I’m heading toward the exit.” Wallin shook his head gently. “Success breeds enemies, Julia. You’ll find that out. Colleagues who are envious or bitter, who take pleasure in the few occasions when you fail, and who don’t hesitate to spread all manner of rumors.”

He leaned forward slightly and smiled more broadly, revealing his canine teeth.

“But I’m still here, as you can see. I’ve still got an office just a few meters from the minister’s, and sooner or later everyone who’s underestimated me will have to pay for that.”

He held her gaze for a few seconds. Then straightened up.

“Enough about that. There’s another reason why I wanted to talk to you. It’s about your new colleague …”

Wallin wasn’t the sort to do air quotes, but Julia thought she could almost see his fingers twitching on the checkered tablecloth.

“Omar Amante, lawyer, excellent grades at university, foreign service. If the predictions are correct and the opposition win this autumn’s election, his stepfather will replace Jesper Stenberg as minister of justice. Which makes Amante junior the golden boy. The question is: Why has he suddenly appeared from nowhere to join you in the Violent Crime Unit?”

“What do you mean?” Julia frowned. A police car drove past outside in the street. Flashing lights and sirens. The sound bounced between the buildings, drowning out everything else for a few seconds.

“Amante left his job with Europol last Christmas,” Wallin said as soon as the car had passed. “Six months before his contract was due to finish. One unconfirmed rumor is that he fell out with his boss. That there was some sort of scene that got hushed up. No one seems to want to talk about it. Either way, Amante disappeared off the radar for a few months. He wasn’t in Sweden, and he wasn’t at Europol’s offices in The Hague. Then he suddenly shows up in Stockholm and lands in the middle of a murder investigation that has vague connections to the party. The same party that his stepfather is doing his utmost to eject from power.”

Wallin leaned across the table again and lowered his voice.

“You’ve been saddled with Amante for a reason. And I’d dearly love to know what that reason is.”

* * *

Sarac zipped his jacket up and pulled his hat as far down on his forehead as he could before looking at his watch again. Thirty seconds. This was madness. He was mad. Which made it all the more ironic that he was trying to escape from a mental institution.

He put his fingers on the door handle. Five, four, three, two, one …

He stepped out into the corridor. Walked without hesitation straight toward the door to the stairwell, not falling for the temptation of looking up at the spherical camera above it. The change of shift was under way and the likelihood of any member of the staff looking at the picture from the camera for the few seconds it took him to pass it wasn’t very high. At least that was what he tried to tell himself to calm his pounding heart. Panic and fear were being temporarily held at bay by the tranquilizer he had swallowed just over half an hour ago.

This isn’t a good idea, the voices in his head whispered. But the happy pills had rendered them impotent. Easier to ignore. At least for the time being.

The doors to the ward were always kept locked, and he fiddled with the key, got it into the lock, but couldn’t turn it. He jerked and twisted it. For a fraction of a second he considered giving up. Going back to his safe little room, forgetting everything, and carrying out his original plan. Gulp down all those sleeping pills at once, tonight. Put an end to everything. But he knew that was impossible. He had to know the truth, had to know how everything fit together.

He suddenly felt the lock give with a clicking sound. The key Eskil had given him was evidently a cheap copy that took a bit of fiddling to make it work. He guessed that his new pen pal Frank had paid for it, just as he had paid for Eskil’s services.

Sarac headed down the marble staircase, all the way to the basement. He managed to unlock the heavy steel door almost at once and found himself in a bare, low-ceilinged corridor. Another glance at his watch. Two minutes and ten seconds had elapsed since he began his escape. He quickened his pace, trying to make use of the surplus adrenaline while it lasted.

He stopped at the door marked District Heating. Once again he used the copied key to unlock the door and stepped inside a large, warm room full of pipes and meters. He stood still for a couple of seconds to get his bearings. Then he identified the incoming pipes and followed them to the far end of the room, just as he had been instructed to do. Another heavy door, and behind it a tunnel where the pipes disappeared into the darkness. He took a few steps forward. Felt for the circuit breaker but couldn’t find it.

Suddenly the door behind him closed and everything went pitch-black. He was seized by panic as it broke through the chemical barrier protecting him from his anxieties and gripped his rib cage.

Why are you doing this, David? the voices whispered. Why?

He put his hand against the concrete wall, leaned forward, and took a couple of deep breaths. He caught the vomit when it was halfway up and forced it back down into his stomach. He stood there for a minute or so until the panic attack subsided. Then he straightened up and felt across the wall with his hand. His fingers nudged the circuit breaker and he turned it. A mechanical click echoed off the concrete walls of the tunnel and a sequence of fluorescent lights flickered slowly to life.

What if this is a trap? What if someone’s waiting for you out there? Someone who wants revenge.

Sarac stopped. He’d had time to think through that scenario over the past few days. That and a handful of others. The possibility that his secret pen pal, the man calling himself Frank, didn’t actually exist. That everything, the letter and photographs alike, was a fabrication intended to lure him from his hiding place. But for some reason during their brief correspondence he had become convinced that this wasn’t the case. Besides, he had managed to persuade Eskil to take a surreptitious photograph of Frank, and had studied it carefully on the cracked screen of the nurse’s phone.

Frank definitely existed. What he said was true. Someone had managed not to face up to his responsibilities so far. Had bought himself free from guilt. Had saved his own life and career by betraying Sarac.

Justice.

That was why he was now heading, for the first time in several months, out into the wide world. Exposing himself one last time to the frightening world that he no longer felt able to deal with.

Even if he was wrong, if all this turned out to be a trap after all and Frank or someone else was waiting out there in the darkness to kill him, then they’d only be doing him a favor.

He put his hand in his pocket and closed his fingers around the bag of pills. Twenty-five of them now. Enough for him to pull the emergency cord whenever he wanted to.

It took him seven minutes to make his way through the tunnel and climb up the steps to the boiler room at the other end. The combination of the exertion and the heat in there left him drenched in sweat. He hesitated a few seconds before cautiously nudging the door open. To his left lay the main building and the illuminated yard that he had just passed beneath. To the right was the staff parking lot, and beyond that the security lodge and main gate. Twelve minutes had passed, in another three the change of shift would be over.

He inhaled the cold evening air and tried to focus. Felt the slight tremble in his muscles that told him that the rush of adrenaline that had brought him this far was ebbing away. But he was almost there now. All it would take was one last burst of effort.

The car was exactly where Eskil had said it would be, all he had to do was open the unlocked trunk and crawl inside. Close it and make himself as comfortable as he could in the dark. Exhaustion took over his body, his head.

The picture of the attractive family popped into his mind again, then the dead woman on the hood of the car. They were replaced in turn by pictures of a dark forest where the flare of guns firing flashed among the trees.

Are you really sure about this, David? the voices whispered.

* * *

Julia was about to fetch her last cup of coffee for the afternoon from the unit’s staff room when her cell phone started to buzz. She answered with the phone clamped between her ear and her shoulder as she poured coffee into a chipped mug. For a moment she thought about being nice and getting a cup for Amante, then realized that the phone call gave her an excuse not to. She could carry only one mug back with her.

“Hello, this is Katarina Lindgren from the National Forensics Lab.”

Julia took hold of the phone with her left hand, then, with the mug in her right hand, started to walk back toward her office. She passed the closed door to the little cubbyhole that had been found for Amante. A claustrophobic, windowless room that was probably meant to be a janitor’s closet. But he hadn’t complained so far. Another tentative point.

Before her lunch with Wallin the day before, she had put Amante to work calling everyone who lived near where the body was found; there weren’t too many. The number of permanent residents with an open view of the water was limited to four or five, and she strongly doubted that any of them would have anything to contribute. But a murder investigation was in part just a long list of things that needed to be checked, whether or not you actually thought they might turn out to be useful. And, usefully, the task was a way of keeping Amante occupied. Pärson had decided not to let her have more detectives until they had something to go on. He had blamed the summer holidays and the fact that they had other cases that were higher priority. In fact he was actually counting on her managing on her own, so that he would later be able to report good results to his boss.

“I’m calling about the unidentified body that was found in the water at Källstavik,” the woman on the phone said. “I saw a note that you wanted to be informed the moment we found anything.”

“Absolutely.” Julie closed the door behind her, shutting out the voices of those of her colleagues who were already on their way home.

“We’ve found a match in the DNA register …” the woman began.

Julia put her cup down a little too hard, spilling some of the contents on the pale wood of the desktop.

“… but I’m afraid I can’t say much more than that.”

“No?” Julia slipped onto her chair.

“There’s a match in the register, referring to another case. It’s not a complete match, just sixty-five percent compared to the usual ninety-nine. The sample we received was badly degraded. What that means is—”

“You’ve matched it to DNA that was found in another case, but never identified,” Julia interrupted.

“Exactly. All I get on the screen is the fact that there’s a match in the register, the percentage of the similarity between the samples, and the number of the case in which the other sample was found.”

Julia got hold of a pen and paper. “Would you mind giving me the number?”

She wrote the digits and letters down, one by one, then stared at the familiar combination.

“Skarpö,” she said. As much to herself as to the woman on the other end of the line.

Her brain was working at high speed, already starting to process the consequences of what she’d just been told. But she still forced herself to ask one more time:

“Just so I know I’ve got this right. Our dismembered body was present at the shoot-out on Skarpö?”

“That’s certainly what the DNA sample suggests. The match came through a few minutes ago. I’m new here, so I don’t really know what the procedures are, but I thought you’d probably want to know as soon as possible. I mean, there’s been a lot in the papers and everything.”

“You did exactly the right thing. Thanks very much for letting me know.”

“No problem.”

Julia ended the call. And realized that she was smiling. A line of inquiry, she thought. For a moment she imagined herself as a sniffer dog with its nose pressed to the ground.

And what a line of inquiry …

* * *

Sarac cautiously opened the door to his apartment. He breathed in the stale air with its smell of newly constructed Ikea furniture. Then he took a long stride across the heap of advertisements and newspapers, snuck in, and lowered all the blinds before switching on the weak lamp above the stove. He rubbed his hands together, trying to get some warmth back into his frozen fingers.

Even though it was his home, the apartment filled him with unease and he had to sit down and take a few deep breaths to control his anxiety—the new and deep-rooted varieties alike. He was safe there, he told himself, at least for a few hours.

Everything looked just as he remembered, yet he was still convinced that the apartment had been painstakingly cleaned. That anything suggesting that he was anything other than the heroic police officer David Sarac had long since been removed.

The clock on the microwave said 14:50, which meant that at best he had about three hours before the staff in the nursing home realized that he’d escaped, and maybe as long as three and a half hours before the news reached the right people. Not long, but long enough.

The envelope containing his passport, banknotes of various currencies, and the credit card he only used when traveling was still in the bottom drawer of his desk. He breathed a sigh of relief. The people who had cleaned his apartment obviously didn’t think he was likely to want to run. He could hardly blame them. Only a few days ago he hadn’t even wanted to go outside. That he had managed to handle the train journey to Stockholm was largely because Eskil had given him a healthy dose of tranquilizers that had protected him against the sounds, the lights, and, not least, the voices in his head.

In the pantry he found a packet of ramen noodles. As the water boiled he emptied the pockets of his borrowed clothes and put the train ticket, key ring, and bus pass on the kitchen table. Then, finally, the bag of sleeping pills.

He undressed and stuffed the clothes into a plastic bag he found under the sink. There were surveillance cameras at the Central Station that he hadn’t been able to avoid. It wouldn’t take long for them to find him. And police photos showing what he looked like. He dug out a pair of black jeans and a cotton shirt from his wardrobe. They were both too big, reminding him of how much weight he had lost. He ate the noodles straight from the pan, then washed down another tranquilizer with tap water. Oddly enough, the food tasted considerably better than anything he had eaten in the nursing home.

When he had finished he washed everything up carefully and put the trash in the bag containing the clothes. He was planning to dump it in a bin by the entrance to the subway, so that at least there wouldn’t be any visible evidence that he had been in the apartment.

In the back of the hall cupboard he found a padded jacket and a black knit hat. Just as he had hoped, his own clothes made him look different. Just an ordinary Swede on his way to work.

He put the things on the kitchen table in his jacket pockets, turned out the light, and then slowly peered behind the blind. Everything looked quiet outside. He couldn’t help glancing at the windows opposite. That was where they had watched him from last year. Waiting for his next move.

All your doing, your fault, the voices whispered.

* * *

It was almost nine o’clock at night by the time Julia got all the boxes into her office. The corridor was deserted, its doors closed, half the fluorescent lights in the ceiling above the linoleum floor switched off. She liked working late. It meant she avoided unnecessary distractions, telephones ringing, colleagues knocking on her door when they didn’t actually want anything.

The pictures were all laid out on her desk. First their unidentified body with its silent grin. She looked at him. No matter who he was and what he had done, no one deserved to die like that. Someone had stripped him of everything. His name, his dignity, even his humanity.

Below the pictures of the body she had lined up the photographs from Skarpö.

First the burned-out wreck of a house surrounded by snow. Black beams, a solitary chimney stack sticking up toward the sky from the foundations. Then a number of pictures that were far worse: charred bodies among the ruins, others outside in the snow. Lifeless, some of them with visible holes in their torsos or heads. Spent cartridges everywhere. Short ones from pistols, longer ones from assault rifles, red or blue ones from shotguns. The photographs were an all-too-visible reminder of just how violent the shoot-out had been.

Superintendent Peter Molnar lay on his back with his mouth wide-open, several of his dazzlingly white teeth shot out. The blood around his head formed a red halo. His eyes were staring blankly up at the sky. She’d seen the picture before, enough times for the shudder in her stomach not to feel quite so strong. Poor Peter. He’d been a good officer, someone most people spoke well of. Admittedly, he and the men on his team were the same tiresome alpha males whom the force seemed to be awash with. The guys who tried it on with her, one after the other, on the few occasions she had been stupid enough to visit any of the police bars. But Peter was at least both smart and funny. He knew when it was time to give up and go and hunt easier prey. And now his wife was a widow and his children left fatherless. She turned the photograph over.

Detective Inspector Josef Almlund’s death looked more peaceful. She had known him too, of course. Peter socialized more with his second-in-command than with his own family. Josef had been a large man of few words, always ready to do exactly what Peter asked of him. Even lie to Peter’s wife, if that was called for. Which it probably had been on a fairly regular basis.

Josef Almlund was sitting at one end of the house, leaning back against the foundations with his head lolling on his chest. The fire had burned his jacket and the hair at the back of his neck, but apart from that it almost looked like he was asleep. Having a bit of a rest before the fighting started again. She turned the picture over, just as she had with the one of Molnar. She paused for a moment, trying to shake off the images of the two dead men. She only half succeeded. She thought about David Sarac. The horrors he must have experienced out there. Watching his friends die around him. The last she had heard about Sarac was that he was in a nursing home in an undisclosed location. Hardly surprising, really.

Her cell phone buzzed, but she ignored it, just as she had a few minutes earlier. She knew it was Amante. He’d have to wait until morning, when she had a better idea of things. Besides, her conversation with Wallin was still in the back of her mind.

She gathered all the photographs she needed and put the others back in the evidence boxes. Now at least she had a time and a location to work with. On January 2, 2014, the dead man had been on the island of Skarpö, just outside Vaxholm in the Stockholm archipelago. According to the pathologist, the body parts had been in the water for approximately four months, so since late February or thereabouts. That left a gap of six, eight weeks between the Skarpö shoot-out and the time when the body parts were deposited beneath the ice.

She looked at the photographs from the Forensic Medicine Unit again. Stared at the mutilated smile.

“I’m getting closer,” she whispered. “I’ll soon know who you are.”

Her cell phone started to buzz again, but she let it ring.

* * *

“Come in, David. I’m Frank.” The man who had opened the door held out his hand toward Sarac, but he didn’t take it. It was the same man from the grainy photograph Eskil had shown him. The nurse was right: they did actually look quite similar. They both looked like cops. Or criminals. Or both.

He walked past the man into a shabby little office. The room couldn’t be more than fifteen to twenty square meters in total. By one wall was a camping mattress and a sleeping bag, and there was a door that presumably led to a toilet. In the opposite wall was a dirty window facing the parking lot outside. Two overflowing Dumpsters were visible below, but, judging by the general state of the building, all construction work had been abandoned a long time ago. The whole of the run-down industrial estate felt badly neglected. Next to the bus stop Sarac had seen a couple of large signs proudly showing the future. Glass and concrete reaching for the skies. No 1970s barracks like this.

“It’s all ready, just as we agreed.” The man calling himself Frank gestured toward the two wooden chairs beside the camping table in the middle of the room. There was an open laptop on the table and, next to it, a camera mounted on a tripod.

Sarac took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair, then sat down. Frank put a photograph in front of him. The blonde woman on the hood, the same terrible image as the picture he had already seen, but from a different angle. Then a sheet of paper, a printout from the vehicle register with the name of the car’s owner clearly circled. Then another picture. The good-looking family again.

Sarac swallowed. His heart was pounding so hard that he was having trouble breathing.

“He called me straight afterward. Crying like a little child,” Frank said. “I went round and cleaned up. Got rid of all the evidence that he’d ever been there. And in return he told me about you. Who you met, how much you could remember after the accident. He was my source in the hunt for Janus. And he told me that you and Janus were out there on the island.”

Sarac took a deep breath. So it was true. He’d been betrayed. Betrayed by his ultimate superior.

“You understand what this means, don’t you?” Frank went on in a low voice. “What the consequences could be if you choose to go on with this? This sort of knowledge can be lethal.”

“If I d-didn’t …” Sarac cleared his throat. The bullet that had passed through his neck out on the island had damaged his larynx, making his voice unreliable. “If I didn’t, I’d hardly be here.”

Frank nodded, then went over to the small sink at the far end of the room and poured a glass of water, which he put down on the table. Then he sat down in front of the computer. Sarac took a couple of sips before looking up.