The Final Word (3 page)

‘What about after that?’

Annika felt a degree of stubbornness alongside her insecurity, and her jaw tightened. ‘Birgitta and I don’t talk often.’

Why had she said that? Why not tell the truth?
My
sister and I have no contact at all. I don’t even know where she lives.

She heard her mother sniff.

‘What’s happened?’ Annika asked, making an effort to sound friendly (not scared, not angry, not nonchalant).

‘She didn’t come home from work yesterday.’

‘Work?’

‘She was doing a day-shift in MatExtra, the supermarket. Steven and I are really worried.’

Yes, they must be, if Barbro had taken the trouble to phone. Annika shifted position. ‘Have you called her work? Her friends? Have you tried Sara?’

‘Steven talked to her boss, and I’ve spoken to Sara.’

Annika was anxious now. ‘What about her old art teacher, Margareta? They used to stay in touch.’

‘We’ve called everyone.’

Of course Annika had been last on the list.

‘Have you any idea how worried we are?’ Barbro said, her voice rising.

Annika closed her eyes. It made no difference what she said or did. She could see her mother before her, rubbing her hands, fumbling with her wine glass, trying to find someone to blame. She might as well say what was on her mind. ‘Mum,’ she said slowly, ‘are you sure Steven’s telling the truth?’

A moment’s silence. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m not always sure that Steven is . . . well, very nice to Birgitta. I got the impression he was taking advantage of her, and she almost seemed a bit scared of him.’

‘Why would you say that? There’s nothing wrong with Steven.’

‘Are you sure he doesn’t hit her?’

Another pause. Her mother’s voice was sharp when she eventually replied, ‘Don’t mix yourself up with Birgitta.’ Then she hung up.

Annika brushed the hair from her face. She peered at the buildings. Up there was her old flat, where her former husband still lived. God, these streets were full of ghosts.

A police car passed and turned into Kronoberg Prison a little way along the street. She glimpsed a young man with matted hair in the back seat. Perhaps he was going to be arrested and remanded in custody, or possibly just questioned. He must have done something: if he wasn’t a criminal, then he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Unless he knew something he probably shouldn’t know.

She had found herself in the back of a police car once, on that summer’s day out at the old ironworks in Hälleforsnäs when Sven died. She had been clutching her dead cat in her arms, refusing to let go of him, little Whiskas, her lovely, sandy-coloured cat, and in the end they had let her take his body into the car with her, and she had spent the journey crying into his fur.

Birgitta had never forgiven her for Sven. Her sister had been crazy about him, in an irritating little-sister way. He used to grab Birgitta and tickle her until she screamed. There had been something uncomfortably
intimate about it – Birgitta was only two years younger than her, blonde and pretty. Annika hunched her shoulders and took a firmer grip of her bag, then looked up ‘Birgitta Bengtzon’ on the phone-directory app on her mobile. (She hadn’t taken Steven’s surname, Andersson, when they married.)

One result: Branteviksgatan 5F in Malmö.

Malmö? Hadn’t she been going to move to Oslo?

Thomas watched Annika put her mobile into that hideous bag of hers and hurry off towards Scheelegatan, a tiny bobbing head four floors below, dark hair flying. He watched her until she disappeared, just a few seconds later, swallowed by cars and treetops. His heart sank, his pulse slowed. He had caught sight of her by chance: she was standing on the pavement, her face turned up towards his bedroom window, and he’d assumed she was on her way to see him. He had made up his mind not to let her in: he had nothing to say to her.

Then she had turned away and walked off.

His disappointment turned to prickling rage.

He was
no one
to her, the sort of no one whose windows you walked past or stopped directly below to talk on your mobile for a while, maybe to your new man. He hoped she’d been talking to him because she had looked uncomfortable. Trouble in Paradise? Already?

The thought made him feel a bit better. He realized he was hungry, and he had some gourmet food in the fridge, ready to heat up. He was the sort of man who ate and
drank well, who put a bit of effort into making sure everyday life had a bit of style to it. He had been brought up to recognize the importance and advantages of a well-groomed exterior, correct behaviour, and an engaging, articulate manner. And that was why he was so ill-suited to this terrible flat, a mere three rooms on the top floor of a building in an old working-class district. He opened the fridge with the hook, got out the sole fillets with his hand – his only hand – and put the dish into the microwave. It was so fucking unfair that he of all people should have suffered such an affliction.

The microwave whirred. A light fish lunch because he would be having a substantial dinner, an official dinner, in the dining room on the ground floor of the government Chancellery. At least his job suited him. He had a high-profile role as a civil servant in the Ministry of Justice: he was secretary to a large inquiry with its own parliamentary committee, a prestigious assignment.

He was looking into online anonymity (a superannuated former minister was the official investigator, but Thomas was doing all the work). Online bullying was a growing problem. Society needed sharper tools to find people who insulted others on the internet, but who should be allowed to identify their IP-addresses, when, and in what ways? The police, prosecutors, or should it require a court order? How should international cooperation be coordinated, and what were the complications if the servers were in other countries? As usual, technology and criminality were several steps ahead of the authorities
and the police, and the law was without doubt lagging well behind.

The directives governing the inquiry had been worked out by the under-secretary of state, Jimmy Halenius, with the minister and the director general for legal affairs. It was an open investigation, rather than one with specific goals. Occasionally the government instigated an inquiry simply to confirm something that had already been decided, but that wasn’t the case this time. The result of the inquiry wasn’t predetermined, and therefore lay entirely in his hands. He was in charge of his own time, could come and go as he pleased, and now the report was practically finished, ready to be discussed at the next cabinet meeting, then sent out for consultation. Thomas was, in short, a representative of power, a man of responsibility, someone who was shaping the future.

The microwave pinged. The sole fillets were ready, but they would have to wait. Instead he made his way to his computer and logged in via a site whose IP-address could never be traced. He went on to the discussion forum where he had created an alternative identity for himself some time ago. He had called himself Gregorius (after Hjalmar Söderberg’s antihero in the novel
Doctor Glas
: betrayed by his wife, murdered by his doctor). He had started by posting something there, just to see what happened. The text had been about Annika’s boss, a pretentious bastard. To this day, people were still contributing to the thread he had started, and he found it interesting to see how the debate had developed.

His palms always felt a bit clammy when he read those lines. His pulse increased and he felt his top lip start to sweat. No further comments had been added since he had last checked, he noted, with a degree of disappointment. He scrolled down the existing comments. The first, ‘Hahaha, way to go man! U buttfuck him real good’, was representative of those that followed. The level of debate wasn’t particularly high, he had to admit. A number of contributors had questioned his choice of language, calling him a
vulgar idiot
and a
brain-dead amoeba
, but how tasteful was it of them to express themselves like that? He couldn’t claim to be particularly proud of it, but who hadn’t made mistakes along the way?

Besides, it was both interesting and justified, a way of gaining knowledge of the issue he was investigating. A democracy is based upon the fact that unpleasant things must be allowed to exist. As Voltaire said, ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’ (well, he hadn’t actually used those words, but that was the meaning of a letter he wrote to Abbot le Riche on 6 February 1770).

Thomas looked back at his post once more.

The words were there, expressed and eternal, commented upon and affirmed.

He took a deep breath and closed the site. A sense of calm spread through him. Annika was welcome to stand down there in the street with her mobile phone and her ugly bag.

He was properly hungry now, and the sole fillets were just the right temperature.

Admired, respected, feared.

Someone
.

Annika announced her arrival at the reception desk of the Public Prosecution Authority and was asked to take a seat in a waiting room that might have belonged to a dentist. It smelt of disinfectant and unspecified discomfort. She was alone, and for that she was grateful.

The man who had been in charge of the preliminary investigation into Josefin’s murder, Chief Prosecutor Kjell Lindström, had retired, and the matter was now in the hands of Deputy Prosecutor Sanna Andersson. Discreetly, she took out her camera. She filmed the room and the signs on the walls for a minute or so: they might be good as inserts. She put the camera away and started to read a two-year-old issue of
Illustrated Science
, which featured an article about how fish had crawled up on to
land 150 million years ago, developed legs and turned into reptiles, carnivores and humans.

‘Annika Bengtzon? Deputy Prosecutor Andersson can see you now.’

She put down the magazine, picked up her bag, and was shown along a corridor to a cramped office. The woman who met her, hand outstretched, was barely thirty. ‘Welcome,’ she said, in a thin, high voice.

Fifteen years had passed, so obviously Josefin had sunk like a stone down the list of the justice system’s priorities.

‘Sorry you had to wait,’ Sanna Andersson said. ‘I’ve got a case in court in forty-five minutes. It was Liljeberg you wanted help with, wasn’t it?’

Annika sat down on a chair and waited until Sanna Andersson had gone back round her desk and taken her seat. ‘I’ve put in a request to see the preliminary investigation into the murder. She was found in Kronoberg Park on Kungsholmen on the morning of the twenty-eighth of July, fifteen years ago.’

‘Of course,’ the deputy prosecutor said, opening a drawer and taking out a thick file. ‘It was looked into again last year. A man confessed to the murder.’

Annika nodded. ‘Gustaf Holmerud,’ she said. ‘The serial killer. He confessed to the murders of a number of other women as well.’

Sanna glanced at her, then went back to the file. ‘Yes, he confessed to pretty much all the murders we’ve got, and was actually found guilty of five before someone
pulled the emergency brake. I know that the prosecutor general is looking into several of those convictions, to see if he can order a retrial. Here it is.’ She ran her hand over one page in the folder. ‘Josefin Liljeberg. Death by strangulation. I went through this last night. It wasn’t a particularly complicated case.’ She turned the first page and looked at the headings. ‘You’ve asked to see the whole file?’

‘I covered the case at the time and followed all the developments.’

Sanna Andersson leaned over the documents. ‘There are some pretty sensational ingredients here: a notorious porn club, a government minister brought in for questioning. Is that why you’re interested in the case?’

She shot Annika a neutral, expressionless look, and Annika opened her mouth but found herself unable to reply.
No, that’s not why. Josefin got too close to me. I became her, she became me. I took a job in the club where she worked. I wore her bikini, her underwear.
‘As I understand it, the police regard the case as cleared up,’ she said eventually. ‘Joachim, her boyfriend, killed her. The reason he was never prosecuted was that six people gave him an alibi.’

Sanna Andersson closed the file. ‘Correct,’ she said. ‘Violence within relationships ought to be classed as a public-health problem.’ She checked the screen of her mobile phone.

‘Can I quote you on that?’ Annika asked.

The woman smiled. ‘Sure,’ she said, standing up. ‘I’ve
decided you can have the names of the six witnesses who gave Josefin’s boyfriend his alibi.’

Annika, too, got to her feet, astonished at the young woman’s authority and efficiency.

‘They lied to the police,’ the deputy prosecutor said, ‘which could well mean they were guilty of protecting a criminal. That passed the statute of limitations a long time ago now, so they’re not risking prosecution if they change their minds. Maybe they feel like talking now – if not to us, then perhaps to you.’ She held out a document as she reached for a brown briefcase that looked extremely heavy.

‘Can I quote you on what you said about the prosecutor general as well?’ Annika asked. ‘That they’re looking into the possibility of asking for a retrial of Gustaf Holmerud’s cases?’

Sanna laughed. ‘Nice try! If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to run.’

Annika hurried after her, jogging to keep up.

Maybe Josefin wasn’t at the bottom of the priority list after all.

The small high-security courtroom of Stockholm District Court was located on the top floor of the Stockholm City Law Courts, a strategic choice to make escapes and rescues more difficult. Nina Hoffman strode breathlessly up the last flight of steps. Defendants would have a long labyrinth of corridors and floors to negotiate on the way out, if they tried to escape. She looked towards the entrance to the secure chamber.