The Final Word (17 page)

The woman at the other end paused before replying, ‘You can’t come and look for yourself?’

‘I’m at the National Crime Unit in Stockholm,’ Nina said. ‘I’d really appreciate it if you could help me with this.’

‘I’d be happy to. If you fill in the form on our website, we’re usually able to respond to requests for information in about two weeks.’

‘This concerns a murder investigation,’ Nina said. ‘The person I need information on is suspected of committing a murder in Nacka last year.’

‘Didn’t you say he was deceased?’

Nina took a deep, silent breath. ‘I’m happy to wait on the line.’

It took ten minutes. Then the woman returned. ‘I found the register of christenings,’ she said. ‘Arne Johan Berglund was born on the twenty-eighth of May. He’d have been fifty-five years old now. He died on the sixth of February at the age of thirty-five.’

Nina scribbled the information on the sheet of paper with Ivar’s birth details. ‘Thanks for your help,’ she said, and hung up.

She went straight to see Johansson and knocked on his door. ‘Have you got a minute?’

The secretary was hunched over his keyboard and looked up at her mournfully. She walked across to his desk, and concentrated hard on not seeming stressed and pushy. ‘I think I’ve got the answer to that DNA sample from Orminge,’ she said. ‘Ivar Berglund and his brother Arne were identical twins.’

Johansson looked up. She passed him the birth
details – Ivar Oskar Berglund, born 28 May, Arne Johan Berglund, born 28 May, same location and year.

Johansson studied the information.

‘Arne emigrated to Spain just before the Tax Office took over the population register in July 1991,’ she went on, trying to stick to the facts. ‘He was no longer in the main database, and it hasn’t occurred to anyone to check him out specifically.’

‘I don’t quite understand,’ Johansson said, handing back the printout.

Nina sat down on the chair opposite him. ‘That would explain the DNA result from Orminge. The profile is almost identical, but not quite, because our DNA is affected by environmental influences all the way through our lives, by illnesses, diet and substance abuse.’

‘Nina,’ Johansson said, ‘it doesn’t explain anything. The man’s been dead for twenty years.’

Nina tried to relax her shoulders. ‘I know he died in a car crash, but we ought to look into that accident. Which police force conducted the investigation?’

Johansson sighed. ‘What makes you think they were monozygotic?’

‘Mono . . .?’

‘Identical.’

He picked up the printout again, then looked quizzically at Nina. No, it wasn’t clear from the details on the database that they had been identical twins.

‘Their sister, Ingela Berglund,’ Nina said. ‘
They’re the same
. That’s what she said.’

Johansson looked at her thoughtfully over his glasses. ‘They’re the same?’

‘Ingela has problems with social interaction,’ Nina said. ‘Questioning her wasn’t all that straightforward.’

Johansson opened Ivar Berglund’s file. ‘I think you’re complicating this business of the DNA match,’ he said. ‘It’s as close at it can be, ninety-nine per cent.’

‘Could we check the circumstances surrounding that car crash in Spain?’ Nina asked. ‘Just to find out what really happened?’

The secretary sighed. ‘I’ll look into it, but don’t hold your breath. We should probably be happy if we get a reply before the year is out.’

Nina stood up and tried to smile.

‘A duty officer from Regional Crime tried to get hold of you earlier,’ Johansson said, pressing some chewing tobacco into a little clump. ‘Something to do with the search for a mobile phone?’

‘Thanks,’ Nina said, feeling as if she had just been reprimanded. She could be on the wrong track entirely, she was aware of that.

Maybe she was chasing ghosts.

The train had passed Ørestad and was approaching Tårnby. Annika glanced at her watch. Her flight back to Stockholm left at 18.05. She had four and a half hours. She looked down at her top. The coffee had almost dried, making the fabric hard and stiff. She would have to buy a new T-shirt.

The conductor was moving slowly through the carriage. Annika strained her ears to listen, and yes, thank God, he was speaking Swedish.

‘This train goes all the way to Malmö, doesn’t it?’ she asked, as he checked her ticket.

‘It goes all the way to Gothenburg, love,’ he replied.

Tårnby was a modern station of stone and grey concrete, ice-cold, clean Scandinavian design. She’d never been to Malmö. The paper had its own newsroom there, so violent crimes, riots and fights between football supporters were covered by local reporters. She knew little about the city, and what she did know was restricted to fragments of old headlines and stories that probably weren’t true: Sweden’s Most Dangerous City, the ghetto of Rosengård, the football team that had qualified for the Champions’ League, hostility to immigrants, shut-down shipyards – and, of course, Zlatan Ibrahimovic´.

Why had Birgitta moved there? No one in their family had any connection to Malmö. Perhaps Steven had friends or contacts there. She could understand them trying to move to Norway – loads of Swedes did that to earn a bit of money – but Malmö?

She had lived with the vague but straightforward conviction that she knew her sister: she knew when Birgitta had had her first period, what food she hated, how she hummed to herself when she was painting, and what she sounded like when she cried in her sleep.

Why had she chosen Malmö? What was she doing there? Who had she become?

The train set off with a jolt.

Annika got out her mobile, no messages, then discovered that there was Wi-Fi on the train. She opened Birgitta’s Facebook page, which was dominated by photographs of its owner, selfies and pictures in mirrors, Birgitta’s beautiful face and glossy blonde hair; she was almost always smiling, always nicely dressed. Annika lingered over a summer photograph taken on a restaurant terrace, the wind tugging at Birgitta’s long hair. Her eyes were sparkling and she was laughing. Annika scrolled down, and found a number of childhood pictures, including one with herself in it, from the beach at Tallsjön. She and Birgitta were sitting side by side on a blue rug, wrapped in towels, each eating an ice-cream. Birgitta was smiling coquettishly at the camera, Annika was looking away, her face in profile. Dad had taken it.

Annika clicked to the personal information section. Birgitta hadn’t mentioned that she’d moved to Malmö.

The sign at the end of the carriage lit up: next station Kastrup.

People around her gathered their belongings, closed cases, checked their passports and tickets. The train slowed and stopped. The man beside her groaned and got to his feet.

She stayed where she was.

The carriage was quiet once most of the passengers had got off, and the train stood at the platform for another minute or so, as a breeze that smelt of warm
rubber swept through the open doors. The floor of the carriage rumbled and vibrated.

The doors closed.

She knew nothing about Birgitta and Steven’s relationship, not even how they had met. She had already moved away, leaving Hälleforsnäs behind her, and Sven was dead. She had met Steven just once, on that night when he and Birgitta had missed the last train after a Rammstein concert. They had both been seriously drunk, and Steven had dozed off on Annika’s sofa. Birgitta had pleaded with her to leave him alone, or he’d get angry. Halenius had got them out of the flat by saying he was a police officer, which had had a sobering effect on Steven. The situation had told Annika that her sister was frightened and her brother-in-law some sort of criminal, but that was hardly an objective interpretation.

Was she confusing herself with Birgitta? Did she see an abuser in every man who couldn’t hold his drink?

The sky broadened and the waters of Öresund surrounded her, sky and sea a vast expanse of blue, with just a narrow strip of mainland on the horizon. She could make out blocks of flats, roads and a power station, presumably Barsebäck – but that had closed down, hadn’t it?

The boundary between Denmark and Sweden was around here – maybe she was crossing it at that very moment. She looked out over the water and let her thoughts run free.

Birgitta had visited her flat on Södermalm twice, when
she’d dropped off and picked up Destiny, her daughter, at either end of her trip to Oslo to look for work. She had seemed tired, and there was an edginess that Annika recognized from herself but had never seen in her sister before. Birgitta, who had always loved nice things, had looked at the crystal chandelier, the paintings and the hand-woven rug on the living-room floor and said, ‘Clever Annika and her lovely job. Now she’s got the perfect home too.’

The only thing she knew about Steven was that he had never had a proper job and was on sickness benefit, but did undeclared building work, which wasn’t unusual in dying industrial communities.

Her eyes fell on a sloppily folded newspaper on the seat opposite, a copy of the early edition of the
Evening Post
. She reached for it and turned to pages six and seven. The spread was dominated by her interview with Kjell Lindström. They had chosen to focus on his comment that Gustaf Holmerud’s convictions were a miscarriage of justice. The police thought they knew who had killed Josefin but the night editors had played that down: it was in the article, but not the headline. From a news perspective, she could hardly object – a fresh mass murderer was more interesting than a girl who had been dead for fifteen years – but it still rankled.

A wrecked boat appeared in the water just to the right of the bridge. Annika gasped and dropped the paper. It was a fishing-boat, which had run aground and toppled over. She sat up higher to get a better view. The hull,
navy blue and white, had split open, and the mast was gone. She glanced around, but the remaining passengers were staring down at their phones or blankly at the sky. That boat must have been there for a long time, she thought. A familiar tragedy aroused neither alarm nor fear.

Embarrassed, she picked up her phone again and went back to Facebook. Birgitta Bengtzon hadn’t posted any updates all year. When she lived in Hälleforsnäs she had been fairly active on Facebook. Why had she stopped?

The train halted at the first station on the Swedish side – or the last, depending on where you were going.

Her mobile buzzed: Kalle, wondering if he really had to go to Dad’s that evening. Guilt flared inside her, sharp and irrational: no matter what she did, someone was always disappointed. As the train pulled away she sent a reply to Kalle, explaining that these were his dad’s days, that was what had been arranged. ‘But I’ll see you at Sophia’s later,’ she wrote, adding a cheerful smiley at the end.

She sat back and let herself be jolted along as the train entered a tunnel.

It stopped at Triangeln Station, blasted into a huge cavern in the rock, all stone and concrete, a world of varying shades of grey.

A mother with a little girl got on and settled down next to Annika, the woman glancing at Annika’s coffee-stained top. The child was blonde and blue-eyed, and looked a bit like Destiny.

‘Hello,’ the little girl said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Annika. What’s yours?’

The little girl hid her face against her mother’s arm, as the woman tapped at her mobile.

Destiny must have grown a lot by now. She was about the same age as this child, almost three. The last time Annika had seen Birgitta, her sister had implied that there was something wrong with her daughter, that she was a slow developer. That ought to have become more apparent now, if it was true.

Four hours and fifteen minutes until her plane took off.

The train rolled into Malmö Central Station. She stood up, clambered past the mother and daughter, and the little girl waved as she got off. The mother didn’t look up from her phone.

She went up a long escalator to the station building. In contrast to the granite and concrete stations, it was old and warm, light and beautiful, red bricks and painted ceiling. Shops and cafés lined the passageway that led to the various platforms, warm air pouring out of the open doors. She stopped in the middle of the gangway and people streamed past her, everyone on their way somewhere. She felt suddenly dizzy so she went into a café, ordered coffee, then sat down at a table and took out her phone. She pulled up a map of Malmö and looked for Branteviksgatan 5, and a branch of MatExtra supermarket in a place called Värnhem, Birgitta’s home and work.

She found them straight away. Branteviksgatan was in Östra Sorgenfri, which sounded familiar. Wasn’t that
where Zlatan Ibrahimovic´ was from? The ‘hooligan from Sorgenfri’: wasn’t that what he was called as a child? Värnhem was a square that seemed to be a hub for local traffic, and MatExtra was located in a shopping centre alongside. It looked as if it was within walking distance, almost directly south-east from the station.

She drank her coffee.

It wasn’t against the law to leave home. Adults were allowed to come and go as they pleased. Maybe Birgitta
did
want to be left alone for a while.

She sent a message to Nina Hoffman, to see if she’d heard anything about the tracing of Birgitta’s phone.

But there was another reason too, one that lurked in the back of every editor’s mind: the person who appeared in the local press calling for information about someone who was missing was usually the one who had killed them.

Life was so fragile that killing someone was simple. Suddenly she could feel the iron pipe in her hand, cold and rough, the flakes of rust.

She rubbed the palm of her hand on her jeans and finished her coffee.

The wind outside the station was hard and hot. She crossed a canal and entered part of the city that felt medieval, low buildings with heavy façades, windows that seemed to bow in the sun. She passed squares lined with half-timbered buildings, and came to a row of clothes shops. She went into H&M, bought a new T-shirt and threw the old one away.

She crossed another canal and found herself in Rörsjöstaden, with taller, more ornate buildings, and boulevards lined with chestnut trees.