The Final Word (13 page)

Annika emptied her mug and put it down. ‘What happens with the ones who don’t show up?’

‘They’re officially registered after sixty days,’ Nina said. ‘That functions as a sort of control, because someone might have forgotten to report a person coming home. And asylum-seekers who’ve gone missing are also discounted.’

‘How many don’t show up again?’

‘A hundred or so, and they’re entered in the central police database of missing people. That’s when we make sure we’ve got a current description, dental records – that’s done through the Forensic Dental Unit in Solna.’

Nina had paid it a visit when she was studying, a red-brick building with blue awnings; it was kept in a state of constant readiness because a mass casualty situation could occur at any time. The machinery was able to swing into action at once, identifying the dead and injured.

‘And then what?’

‘There are usually about thirty left on the register after a year.’

They sat without speaking for a while.

‘And how many are there now? In total?’

‘In the entire register? Thirteen hundred.’ Nina’s brother, Filip, was among them.

‘All Swedes who’ve just disappeared?’ Annika exclaimed. ‘Like they’ve been swallowed by the earth?’

‘Some of the cases are old, dating all the way back to the fifties.’

‘When are they declared dead?’

‘That’s a judicial formality. It used to take a minimum of ten years, but after the tsunami that was reduced by half. So, for instance, if you see someone drown but their body is never found, that person can be declared dead after just a year or so. It’s all to do with judicial and economic factors, getting bank accounts closed, claiming on insurance policies . . .’

‘What if no one misses them or wants them declared dead?’

‘They remain on the register, as non-existent persons . . .’

‘Well, she’ll probably turn up soon,’ Annika said, looking down into her empty mug, as if it might miraculously have refilled itself.

‘If she’s been reported missing in both Stockholm and Malmö, her disappearance may end up being coordinated by National Crime,’ Nina said. ‘I can have a word with the duty officer at Regional Crime and see what we can do.’

‘That would be great,’ Annika said.

Nina stood up. ‘I won’t disturb you any longer.’

‘You could never do that,’ Annika said, ‘as you know.’

Nina went out into the hall. Jimmy Halenius was
standing there in his socks, looking for something in a jacket pocket. ‘Hi, Nina. All right?’

‘Fine, thanks. You?’

‘The opinion polls could be better, but otherwise everything’s great. You haven’t got any chewing tobacco, have you?’

She smiled apologetically and bent down for her shoes. Jimmy evidently found what he was looking for because he let out a sigh of relief and went into the kitchen with a small tub of tobacco in his hand.

‘What are you doing for Midsummer?’ Annika asked from the doorway to the living room.

Nina’s answer came automatically. ‘Working. How about you?’

‘Don’t really know. Kalle and Ellen are going to be with Thomas this year, and Jimmy’s kids are off to see their mum in South Africa as soon as school breaks up. We were wondering about getting a group of friends together and going off somewhere. Shame you’re working.’

Nina tied her shoelaces and stood up, her hair falling over her face. ‘I’ll be in touch if I hear anything from the duty officer at Regional Crime.’

The door closed behind her and she found herself standing in the stairwell in her silent rubber-soled shoes. Why had she lied about having to work at Midsummer? It might have been fun to go away with a few friends, on the condition that it was just adults. There was nothing wrong with Annika Bengtzon and Jimmy Halenius’s
children; they were a decent bunch: Ellen a fair-skinned blonde, Serena as dark as her mother, Kalle with Annika’s green eyes, and Jacob a swarthier version of his dad. But she had trouble dealing with families: she felt uncomfortable with the whole dynamic.

She ignored the lift, walked down the stairs and out into the street. She stood there for a while. It was still warm, almost muggy. Sometimes she missed her brother and sister so much that it hurt. She had never really lived with them – they had been so much older than her, and only appeared in her life at irregular intervals. Yvonne, with her sun-cream, the one that smelt of coconut, rubbing it into Nina’s shoulders, nose and knees:
You mustn’t let her burn like that! What sort of mother are you?
Filip, with his books, reading to her in Swedish, Spanish and German:
Es war einmal ein Mädchen, das mit seinem Vater und Stiefmutter lebte . . .

But Yvonne had been shot and killed by the police in the forest north of Örebro six years ago. Filip, her saviour and big brother, registered missing, would never be coming back. She had shot him on the family’s hash farm outside Asilah in northern Morocco. In two weeks’ time it would be exactly five years ago.

She held the moist air in her lungs until it hurt.

Then she walked home through the stone-lined streets of the city.

The sound of an American sitcom with a laughter track filtered into the kitchen from the living room. Jimmy
was talking on the phone, presumably to the minister – Annika could hear his voice as a wordless melody, rising and falling. The children were asleep – she could almost sense their breathing as a gentle breeze through the rooms.

The preliminary investigation into Josefin’s murder lay spread out across the kitchen table in front of her. She had picked out the sections dealing with Joachim’s alibi for the night of the murder and had read them twice, all the way through.

She remembered some of it from before.

Joachim claimed he hadn’t seen Josefin on the night in question. He hadn’t been to Studio Six at all but had been drinking with his friends at the Sture Company nightclub until it closed. Just after five o’clock in the morning, he and six friends had gone in a limousine taxi to a private after-party on Rörstrandsgatan. There, he had fallen asleep on the sofa.

She leafed through the witness statements. His alibi really did look watertight.

All the young men backed up Joachim’s story. A waiter at Sture Company confirmed that Joachim had been there. The driver of the limousine taxi stated that he had driven a group of intoxicated young men from Stureplan to Birkastan. Joachim had the receipt. The woman who owned the flat on Rörstrandsgatan said that Joachim had fallen asleep on her sofa.

But Annika knew that Joachim had been at the sex club just before five o’clock that morning. He and Josefin
had had a violent row: Josefin’s friend had overheard them.

And the waiter hadn’t been able to say exactly what time it had been when he saw Joachim that night. It might have been as early as two o’clock. The driver of the limousine could neither confirm nor deny that Joachim had been in the taxi because he couldn’t see who was sitting right at the back. Robin Bertelsson had paid for the ride. A number of the friends who had been in the limousine were so drunk that they probably didn’t know what was going on during those critical hours.

She could still remember Commissioner Q’s conclusions that summer fifteen years ago: the witnesses had been prepared, coached in what they had to say. She had managed to get hold of two. The first had ended the call as soon as she introduced herself, then switched off his phone. The second had denied that he had been involved in the case at all, despite indisputable evidence to the contrary.

The woman who owned the flat had been extremely drunk. She was sure she had seen Joachim asleep on her sofa, but she didn’t know what time he’d got there.

Annika pushed aside the preliminary investigation and took out a picture she had managed to get hold of from a contact at the Driver Licensing Agency in Strängnäs. She had spent over an hour trying to find Robin Bertelsson, but this was the only photograph she had been able to track down. He seemed to take the surveillance society very seriously, and had no Facebook account under his
own name, nothing on Twitter or Instagram, no blog. He didn’t appear anywhere on the internet.

She looked at his symmetrical features, blond hair, sharply cut jaw.

He knew.

Robin Bertelsson had paid for the limousine. And then he had given the receipt to Joachim. If any of them had coached the others and got them to synchronize their stories, it was him. He had been in charge of ‘security’ at the sex club, and protecting its wretched owner was probably part of his job description.

These days, he was married and living in Denmark. Neither he nor his wife had a listed phone number, no businesses. They had been registered as emigrants by the Swedish Population Register, but trying to find someone’s address in Denmark was considerably more difficult than it was in Sweden. Asking the Danish Population Register had been hopeless: they had referred her to the local council, but she was pretty sure that to get hold of someone’s address you had to know either their name, previous address and date of birth, or their ID number, past or present. She wasn’t entirely sure, though, because she hadn’t really been able to understand the woman’s Danish. The only information she had managed to uncover was that he worked for Doomsday Denmark, listed as a consultancy firm specializing in ‘internet security, analysis and programming’.

Security again.

Annika heard Jimmy laugh in the living room, but
couldn’t tell if it was at something the minister had said or the television programme.

Robin Bertelsson had left the club after the murder. Why hadn’t he wanted to carry on working there? Did he think Joachim had gone too far? She put her hand on his face. The photograph felt cold beneath her palm.

The room looked the same as before, apart from a chrome-plated fan in one corner. It moved slowly back and forth with a gentle hum, and every fifteen seconds the air hit Annika in the face, making her blink.

‘You mentioned that you don’t have much contact with your sister. Why is that?’ The psychologist had switched to her summer uniform, a knee-length denim skirt and white T-shirt. She was looking down at her notepad, which made Annika feel anxious: what had she written in it? Was it like other medical notes? What if the pad got into the wrong hands, if someone else read it?

Annika gulped. The fabric covering the armchair was so scratchy that she rested her forearms on her lap. ‘Birgitta and I are totally different.’

‘In what way?’

Annika squirmed on the chair, defiance spreading within her. ‘Birgitta’s got no drive, no ambition. She just wants to be liked. Her goal in life is to sit in the pizzeria
in Hälleforsnäs drinking beer with the cool kids from the nineties.’

There, she’d said it, revealing her snobbish, big-city attitude. She readied herself for criticism and derision, but the psychologist wasn’t even blinking. Annika felt almost disappointed.

‘Does your sister still live in the town where you grew up?’

‘Apparently she’s moved to Malmö . . .’

Should she mention Birgitta’s disappearance? The thought got no further and she said nothing. This wasn’t Birgitta’s hour. For once, everything wasn’t all about her.

‘Do you have any contact with anyone else from when you were growing up?’

Annika sat in silence for a moment, mostly to give the impression that she was thinking. ‘Not really . . .’

‘Your boyfriend, the one who died, what about his family, friends, his parents, perhaps?’

‘No!’

The answer was so abrupt that it surprised even her. The psychologist scribbled in her pad.

The darkness was swirling, and a shiver of unease ran down Annika’s spine. She saw Sven’s parents in her mind’s eye, his beautiful mother and well-built father, Maj-Lis and Birger. She hadn’t seen them since Sven’s death: she hadn’t gone to the funeral, and they weren’t at the trial. Maj-Lis was dead, she knew that, breast cancer, a few years ago.

‘Your father died when you were seventeen. How did that make you feel?’

The fan reached the psychologist, making her short hair quiver and the tissues in the box flutter.

‘Terrible,’ Annika said.

‘How have you dealt with it?’

The air grew heavier.

‘I don’t think about it.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘He was drunk, and froze to death in a snowdrift.’ By the turning for the beach at Tallsjön, where she always looked the other way when she drove past.

‘Were you close to him?’

She had been Daddy’s girl, Birgitta Mummy’s. ‘I guess.’

The psychologist looked at her. ‘You felt “terrible” when he died?’

Because he had abandoned her. Because she was left all alone. Because he had done it in such an embarrassing way, like an old alcoholic. People felt sorry for her, not because her dad had died but because he’d been stupid and weak, a disgusting old drunk. To begin with she wished he’d died of cancer or in a car crash. She’d imagined it would have felt different, that she would have experienced a higher class of grief, and people would have felt sorry for her for the right reasons. It didn’t matter now, but she could still remember how she had felt.

‘I remember that it felt terrible,’ she said simply. ‘I was very sad, but it passed.’

The psychologist frowned, but dropped the subject. ‘You said last time that your mother doesn’t like you. Can you expand on that a bit?’

Annika forced herself not to look at the clock on the wall: it would be disrespectful to start checking when she had only just sat down. ‘Well, what can I say?’ she said, and looked at the clock anyway. ‘It’s no secret. Mum tells anyone who’s prepared to listen.’

It really was incredibly hot in the room. The breeze as the fan swept over her left a stillness behind it that made the air feel thicker.

‘What does she say, your mum?’

Annika tried to concentrate. She had to make an effort, or why was she here? And it was only words. If she tried hard enough she could summon a story she had heard about someone else she barely knew. ‘That I’ve ruined her life. She and Dad and Birgitta would have been a happy family if it hadn’t been for me.’