Take him to the scene of the crime?

  Eva Backman started on her first coffee of the day and felt a sudden wave of nausea.

  34

  They left Grærup around lunchtime on Tuesday 30 September. She had slept right through to ten and woken with a headache.

  She took three Treo and slept for another half hour. She had a strange dream about dead fish washing ashore on a little palm-fringed island, where she was abandoned all alone. Her dreams had been getting odder and odder since they first set off, and more vivid, too. They seemed more real than real life, somehow.

  Valdemar had been out to buy her coffee and fresh Danish pastries, but she found it hard to get anything down. As usual they had shared a pipe on the little balcony outside, but that hadn’t tasted very good, either. She decided to ask him to get her some cigarettes instead. Not right then, but later in the day. She was well aware that sharing a pipe with her felt special to him, but it made no difference. She was tired of it.

  Tired in general. She had slept for almost twelve hours solid again. That had never happened before in her entire life; seven to eight had been her usual dose, possibly rising to ten if she needed to catch up. But twelve? Thirteen, even? Never.

  Something’s wrong, she thought. Something happened to my head back there at Lograna. I don’t know what, but something must have come apart.

  She struggled with the pictures in her mind. Whether she was awake or asleep.

  But anything from that day which found its way into her dreams was never as clear as the rest. She couldn’t bring it up to the surface with her, except very occasionally, when she was sitting in the passenger seat beside Valdemar, or lying tucked up on the back seat . . . then an image would come to her, or a short film sequence; for a second or two it would swirl through her consciousness and then vanish.

  Steffo’s face. His fucked-up, deep-set eyes. His arm goes up, he’s got some long object in his hand, there’s no time to see what. Her own hand gripping the handle of the knife . . .

  But nothing stays with her. She can’t hold on to the images; it’s as if the headache drives them away, pushes them aside and takes their place as soon as they appear.

  Maybe she doesn’t want them to be clear, either?

  Maybe she doesn’t want to know what happened?

  What use would the knowledge be?

  But every now and then there were periods of lucidity. A different sort of truth.

  Moments of sudden clarity and sober, justified questions.

  What is happening? What am I doing?

  I’m sitting in a car with a man of almost sixty, who I’ve known for less than a month.

  We’re travelling south, staying at a succession of boarding houses and hotels, and we’ve killed somebody. We’re on the run.

  I’ve killed somebody.

  I was running away from the centre at Elvafors, now I’m running away from something else entirely. With this man who’s old enough to be my father. My grandfather, almost. We have no particular destination in mind.

  Where are you going, Anna Gambowska? Young girl, dumb girl.

  Do you really believe this can end well?

  But they were short, these moments of clarity. They were thinly spread over days and nights ruled by another disposition. A dreamlike, slightly unreal state, the past and future giving way to events unfolding in the present, meaning the only thing that existed was the here and now. The space they occupied, the growl of the engine, the cows grazing out there in the sunlit fields and the longing for a cup of coffee at the next stop. As if she was inside a glass bubble. Yes, that was exactly how it felt. Frosted glass, not entirely transparent, through which you couldn’t really get a clear idea of what was happening in the world around you. And nor did you want to.

  And there were good moments, plenty of good moments.

  When he was telling her stories from his younger years. He was reluctant to talk about them, she had to coax it out of him. He was that sort of person; a crabby old grumblebear whose tummy you had to tickle to get him on the right wavelength.

  You do see, don’t you Anna? he would say sometimes. I’ve kept mum all my life and then I go and meet a little rascal like you. You’ve got to forgive me being a bit slow.

  As slow as the elk, he said. The one standing out at Gråmyren. Never better than this.

  Hemming, she prompted him, because she didn’t really understand that bit about the elk. Your cousin Hemming, the one who died young when he was on military service. Why did the two of you raid Pålman’s garden centre?

  He sighed, dug about in his memory, and began the story.

  Your teacher Mr Mutti and his Volkswagen? she asked him a while later.

  Haven’t I already told you I wasn’t involved in that? he protested.

  I think I must have dropped off before the end, she begged him.

  Hmm. Well, Mutti’s VW was a right old saga, he admitted. If they’d got caught they’d have been expelled, all three of them.

  Some good moments. Valdemar Roos had no stories of any great note to tell – sometimes they were no more than trivia, for which he apologized – but they came from a forgotten world that was all but lost.

  Maybe his father, for example, would have done better in his suicide’s heaven to remain untouched and undisturbed on his pillow of cloud, and contemplate eternity from the viewpoint he had reserved for himself, or had been allocated by wiser and more senior decision makers. That was exactly the way he put it – been allocated by wiser and more senior decision makers. Sometimes she had to laugh at his slow and ponderous words.

  But Valdemar subjected his father to endless scrutiny. He returned to him with a doggedness that Anna could not always understand. Can you imagine, my girl, he said, I can still see his eyes in front of me. They were blue, so very blue, and my mother used to say those eyes were their misfortune, his and hers. And mine. They should have been in someone else’s head, and without them I would never have come into this world. That was what she said and I had no conception of what it really meant, I was only a little child. But I remembered the words and gradually, as I grew up, they took on some sort of meaning . . . right, that’s enough, I’m talking too much. It’s your turn now, your grandma in Poland, I’d like to hear more about her.

  And she told him. About Babcia and pierogi and beetroot soup, the smell of coal in Warsaw and the ducks in her grandmother’s backyard; Anna didn’t even know if she was still alive, because they no longer had a mobile phone. It got broken when Valdemar hurled it into the glove compartment that Sunday, and it was just as well, really. Just as well to be without.

  So they couldn’t be tracked down that way.

  She told Valdemar about her mother, too, her touchiness and bouts of depression. The sudden swings between light and dark, her moodiness. She had always loved her mother but there had been times when it wasn’t easy. She told him about Marek, her little brother, and in the end about herself, too: how she came to slip further away from home life and that school up in Örebro; how she became a kind of mall rat at a local shopping centre and started truanting and smoking hash and drinking stronger beer, a second-generation-immigrant mall rat in a no-man’s-land that . . .

  Mall rat? Valdemar asked. Whatever is one of those? She laughed at him. Oh, they didn’t exist in your time, Valdemar.

  Some good moments.

  But something else had happened. The good moments were surrounded by others. They were green islands in a swamp. Something was wrong with her head. She was constantly taking painkillers and sleeping away half the day.

  And her hand, the whole of her right arm in fact, wasn’t obeying her as it should. It felt strangely heavy and stiff. If she clenched her hand and closed her eyes, she couldn’t tell after a while whether the hand was still clenched or not.

  But it would pass. Hospital was out of the question, she and Valdemar were in agreement on that. They had left a dead body behind them at Lograna and they were on the run.

  It was something they scarcely spoke of.

  Valdemar told her, that first day in Halmstad, that he had found her in the grass, brought her round and carried her into the house. He had pulled the knife out of Steffo’s stomach and buried the bloodstained weapon out in the forest. Along with the iron bar.

  After that, they didn’t return to the subject. She could not remember what had happened; her memory was blank from the point where she caught her foot on that root and fell over on the grass. Occasionally he asked her directly whether any memories had come back, and she answered that they hadn’t. He seemed content to leave it at that.

  No point digging about unnecessarily.

  By evening they were in Germany. They crossed the border while she was asleep, so now there was a whole country between them and the dead body at Lograna.

  Valdemar drove into a town called Neumünster and they checked into a hotel in the centre. From their window they could see a cobbled market square, some attractive gabled roofs, a town hall, a church. The peal of the church clock sounded every quarter of an hour and she liked it very much. Valdemar went out to buy them a few little treats.

  A few little treats, he said that virtually every time.

  Yes, they had put a whole country between themselves, Steffo and Lograna, and she didn’t really know how he had managed to get hold of a Swedish newspaper. Perhaps he had bought it at the railway station; she had an idea they tended to sell foreign papers at stations.

  At any event, he was pale in the face as he showed her.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘They’ve found him. They’ll be looking for us now.’

  She was barely awake and there was a persistent dull ache in her head, but even so she could hear that he sounded rather worked up. They’ll be looking for us now.

  ‘Do you want me to read it out to you?’ he asked.

  No, she thought. No, I don’t want to know.

  ‘Yes, Valdemar,’ she said. ‘Would you, please?’

  35

  ‘We can’t have DIs in plaster mixed up in murder investigations,’ said Asunander. ‘Barbarotti, you’re to keep your focus on the graffiti.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘I might need to call on him for assistance,’ said Eva Backman. ‘It’s a complicated business.’

  ‘Use him sparingly,’ said Asunander. ‘You have DI Borgsen at your disposal. And Toivonen. And masses of back-room assistance and foot soldiers. Got that?’

  ‘Got it,’ said Eva Backman. ‘Gerald’s wife is expecting a baby any day now, but I understand the situation.’

  ‘Gerald?’

  ‘DI Borgsen.’

  ‘Well he’s not the one who’s pregnant, is he?’

  ‘No, indeed,’ said Backman, closing her notebook. ‘It’s his wife. Was there anything else?’

  ‘Not for the moment,’ said DCI Asunander. ‘But I’d be bloody surprised if we didn’t get a bit of help from the newspaper-reading public on this one.’

  ‘We’ve every reason to be optimistic,’ agreed Barbarotti.

  Asunander’s surmise proved more or less right. When Eva Backman called them all together at 3 p.m. on the Tuesday afternoon – present: herself, DI Sorrysen (whose confinement was still awaited), DI Toivonen, assisted by Tillgren and Wennergren-Olofsson, plus DI Barbarotti (who had temporarily escaped from the graffiti case) – she opened the meeting with a summary of what had come to light as a result of the appeal for information in several of the major dailies and on radio and TV.

  The first thing she was able to confirm was that Valdemar Roos really was in the company of a young woman and that they had evidently left the cottage at Lograna on the evening of Sunday 14 September, or on the morning of the following day.

  They had checked into Hotel Amadeus in Halmstad around 2 p.m. on Monday the fifteenth. Under the names Evert and Amelia Eriksson. Father and daughter, the receptionist reported with ill-concealed excitement – but he had the newspaper open in front of him at the page with Valdemar Roos’s picture and there was absolutely no doubt it was him. No doubt at all. The receptionist said his name was Lundgren and he had a good memory for faces.

  They had stayed in Halmstad for three days and taken the opportunity of withdrawing half a million kronor from a bank account Valdemar Roos had opened six weeks earlier, of which his wife Alice said she was totally unaware. Despite the size of the withdrawal there were still 600,000 kronor in it. Where Valdemar had got the money was also completely beyond her, Alice informed the police with tears catching in her throat.

  Where Valdemar Roos and his female companion had spent the night of the eighteenth was unclear, but on the nineteenth they had checked into Hotel Baltzar in Malmö and stayed for three nights. After that date, there was no further sign of them.

  ‘Denmark?’ said Eva Backman. ‘It’s not too wild a supposition that they crossed the Sound, is it?’

  DI Sorrysen flicked through his diary. ‘Last Monday,’ he noted. ‘They could have got as far as Malaga by now.’

  Eva Backman nodded. ‘It’s one of those times when I wish we still had a few passport controls in Europe. But we are where we are.’

  ‘No chance of tracing them via their mobile phones, then?’ asked Wennergren-Olofsson.

  ‘Afraid not,’ said Eva Backman. ‘The last time Valdemar Roos used his mobile seems to have been when his wife called him on that Sunday.’

  ‘Smart,’ said Wennergren-Olofsson. ‘They’re not using mobiles or plastic. That means we can’t trace them. Was it half a million he took out?’

  ‘Correct,’ said Backman.

  ‘How the hell must that feel?’ Wennergren-Olofsson wondered aloud. ‘Having so much cash, I mean.’

  ‘Let’s get on,’ said Barbarotti, a touch impatiently. ‘What do we know about the girl and the victim?’

  ‘Not much,’ conceded Eva Backman. ‘Naturally we’re trying to match them both up with people reported missing, but we’ve had no luck so far. We haven’t got good descriptions, either. We know next to nothing about the girl’s appearance. Karin Wissman, the witness who saw her at Ljungman’s, says she has no clear recollection. The girl was thin, not particularly tall, dark-brown hair, around twenty and . . . well, that’s basically all she can remember. But the guy from the hotel in Halmstad is coming here tomorrow, and we’ll try to get an identikit picture done.’

  ‘The victim?’ said Barbarotti.

  ‘As for him, we’ve got any amount of data of course: height, weight, blood group, dental status . . . but his face isn’t in a fit state for us to give the papers a photograph.’

  ‘I don’t really follow you,’ said Wennergren-Olofsson.

  ‘Hungry wildlife,’ said Backman.

  ‘God, no, ugh,’ spluttered Wennergren-Olofsson.

  Barbarotti scraped his club foot irritably across the floor. ‘Örebro?’ he said. ‘That scooter was stolen in Örebro, wasn’t it? That’s some indication, surely?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Backman. ‘Perhaps he has some kind of link to the place, and possibly the girl does, too. It’s likely of course that there’s some link between the two of them, but remember this is just speculation. We’ve no idea what lies behind this murder; all we can do is carry on with our enquiries and hope things become clearer. Establishing the identity of the victim is our number one priority, of course.’

  ‘And the identity of the girl,’ said Sorrysen.

  ‘And the identity of the girl,’ sighed Backman.

  DI Toivonen, who tended not to open his mouth unless the subject was fly-fishing or Greco-Roman wrestling, cleared his throat and adjusted his spectacles.

  ‘I heard,’ he said, ‘that our dead man had puncture marks. Have we been able to confirm whether he was an addict?’

  ‘You’re right there,’ said Eva Backman. ‘Various substances were found in his blood . . . what was left of it. Yes, he was a user, I forgot to mention that.’

  ‘Were there any other signs of drugs out at the cottage?’ asked Toivonen.

  Eva Backman shook her head. ‘No, nothing.’ She paused and leafed through some papers. ‘We’ve also put out an alert for the car, of course. We can probably assume they’re still driving around in his Volvo. But as they could basically be anywhere in Europe, we ought not to pin too many hopes on finding them that way.’

  ‘They stayed in Sweden for a whole week before they went over to Denmark,’ Sorrysen pointed out. ‘Pretty risky, don’t you think? I mean, they can’t have reckoned it would be all that long before the body was found.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Eva Backman. ‘I think we need to be clear that we’re not dealing with out-and-out professionals here. A lot of what’s happened seems have been irrational or pure chance . . . or maybe it just seems that way inside my head. OK then, can we leave it there, or does anyone want to say anything else?’

  Tillgren, who had only been in the assistant role for a month, plucked up his courage and summed up the situation:

  ‘This is a pretty tricky case, isn’t it?’

  Yes, thought Inspector Barbarotti once he was back in his office with his foot propped on the desk. He’s not wrong there, young Tillgren.

  A tricky case.

  Ultra-dull fifty-nine-year-old bales out of his life.

  Goes missing with an unknown young woman.

  Leaves behind an unknown young man, stabbed.

  It was all in a kind of haiku format, you might say. He actually sat there for a few minutes, trying to make it into a formally correct haiku – seven syllables, five syllables, seven syllables, if he remembered rightly – but when he realized what he was doing, he scrunched up the sheet of paper and threw it in the bin.

  It was just a question of patience, presumably. Give it time, and the reports would start to pour in. Witnesses would come forward. They would speak to people who could provide snippets of information about one thing and another, and gradually things would become clear and comprehensible. That was usually the way, and in fact the process was not at all as tricky as the reality it could potentially uncover.

  And while he waited for those mills to finish grinding, there were other things to be getting on with.