The Final Word (7 page)

Once they had helped clear up after the meal, the children disappeared into their rooms to play with various electronic gadgets. Annika sat down at the kitchen table, the dishwasher humming in the background, and dialled Birgitta’s number. She put her hand over her eyes as she waited for the call to be connected, then listened to the hissing silence. She steeled herself to be friendly and polite to her sister, but found herself listening to her voicemail message instead:
Hi, this is Birgitta, I’m afraid I can’t take your call, but if you leave me a message after the tone, I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Bye!

The bleep that followed was long and piercing. Oddly Annika felt rather let down, and hesitated for a moment before she spoke. ‘Yes, er, hi,’ she said, into the silence. ‘It’s Annika. I’ve heard you didn’t go home after work
yesterday, and, well, we’re wondering where you are. Get in touch, okay? Bye for now.’

She clicked to end the call, relieved to have passed responsibility for any further communication to her sister. At that moment a minor tussle broke out along the corridor leading to the children’s rooms. ‘Time to brush your teeth!’ she called.

The noise got louder, and there was shouting and crying. She made her way to the boys’ room, where a catastrophe had evidently occurred. Jacob had lost his mobile phone. He didn’t think anyone had taken it, just couldn’t remember where he’d put it or when he’d last seen it.

Together they turned the flat upside down, to no avail. But at the bottom of an old removal box she found her own old one. It wasn’t a smartphone, but it would be usable with a new battery. She explained that you couldn’t expect to get a replacement smartphone straight away if you lost yours.

Through the careful use of gestures, words, hugs and a bit of rough and tumble, along with reference to the general rules, she got the situation under control, succeeded in uniting sworn enemies against a common foe (her) and, with some appreciative noises about YouTube videos of songs about foxes and a short collective reading from one of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, she brought peace and harmony to the children’s department.

Then she went and sat on the sofa in the living room and watched the evening news, which included a debate
about internet privacy and who should take responsibility for it. One of the participants was a representative of Feminist Initiative, who thought everyone should be allowed to be anonymous on the internet at all times. Her adversary was a representative of the music industry, who reckoned that people sharing files ought to be traced and given the same punishment as if they had stolen a CD from a record store. Annika agreed with each of them while they were talking, which told her that she was very tired but also that they were probably both right, albeit in different ways.

That was what Jimmy was doing this evening. There was a meeting of the parliamentary committee that was looking into the issue, the inquiry that Thomas was working on. She couldn’t help wondering how on earth that could happen. Thomas and Jimmy were far enough apart within the ministry that they didn’t bump into each other very often, but in this instance they couldn’t avoid one another.

She dozed off on the sofa and woke up to find Jimmy stroking her hair. Overjoyed, she wrapped her arms round his neck, breathing in his scent. ‘How did it go?’

Jimmy pulled her upright, then sank down beside her on the sofa. She ended up on his lap, his breath in her ear. ‘Semi-okay,’ he said.

She looked at him over her shoulder.

‘I haven’t read Thomas’s report properly,’ he said, in response to her quizzical expression. ‘There are details I missed. If his proposals go through, it would be
impossible for the police and prosecutors to track down IP-addresses on the internet.’ He fell silent.

‘I saw a discussion about it on the news,’ Annika said. ‘I agreed with both sides.’

Jimmy sighed. ‘This sort of stuff isn’t easy,’ he said, his stubble catching in her hair. ‘Even the members of the parliamentary committee are having trouble getting to grips with it. Several of them think that freedom of expression means being able to say whatever you like anonymously online. And I wasn’t well enough prepared. I should have kept myself better informed of how the work was going . . .’

She turned her head. ‘What’s Thomas done?’ she asked.

He kissed her hair. ‘I’ll have to have a chat with him about it tomorrow. How did you get on with the psychologist?’

She sat up. ‘I don’t really know. She asked me a bit about my childhood, and how it
felt
to talk about it . . .’

‘So how
did
it feel?’

‘Unpleasant.’ She looked across the room with half-closed eyes. ‘Why is it so important for people to have the right to spew out hatred without anyone knowing who they are?’

‘You don’t want to talk about the psychologist?’

She leaned her head back, looked into his eyes, and tried to smile. There was something wrong with her. Healthy people didn’t collapse on the hall floor, frightening the life out of their children. ‘My mother called
today,’ she said. ‘And Steven, my brother-in-law. Birgitta’s gone missing. She didn’t come home from work yesterday.’

‘What happened?’

Annika shut her eyes, and saw in her mind’s eye the rented flat on Odendalsgatan in Hälleforsnäs, the bunks, her on top, Birgitta underneath, as close to each other as any two people could be but without having anything in common. Annika was always wanting to get away and Birgitta just wanted to stay at home.

‘She was frightened of everything when we were little,’ Annika said. ‘Ants, wasps, ghosts, aeroplanes . . . She could never stay with Grandma in Lyckebo, because there were snakes in the grass . . .’

‘Didn’t she buy a place of her own out there somewhere?’

‘She only rented it one summer.’ She screwed her eyes shut and took a deep breath. ‘The print edition of the paper is being closed down,’ she said. She could feel him staring at her and opened her eyes. ‘I got called in to see Schyman today. The board took the decision last Friday. It’s going to be made public next week.’

‘What’ll happen to the staff?’

‘A lot of them will have to leave, but not all. They’ll need people on the newsdesk who can deal with the digital side of things.’ He didn’t ask the obvious question, but she answered it anyway. ‘Schyman wants me to stay on, to help invent the future with wish-list layouts.’

Jimmy sighed. ‘Sometimes I can’t help wondering what’s going to become of humanity,’ he said.

‘We’re really nothing but a load of fish who crawled out of the sea a hundred and fifty million years ago,’ Annika said.

‘Come here.’ He pulled her towards him.

Nina walked into her office at a quarter past seven. The sun was nudging above the roof of the inner courtyard, making the stacks of paper on her desk glow. It would be very warm and muggy later in the day.

She shoved her gym bag under the bookcase and put the day’s papers and a bottle of mineral water on the desk. She took a sandwich and a bottle of orange juice from the bag and put them into the top drawer – she’d need something to eat after she’d been to the gym.

She sat down at the desk and listened to the silence around her. Most of her colleagues didn’t arrive until around eight o’clock, and some didn’t appear until the meeting at nine. Johansson, the oversized secretary, was already there, though: she could hear him coughing further down the corridor. Fortunately the guy she shared her office with, Jesper Wou, was off on another of his long business trips. She enjoyed having the room to herself.

She logged on to her computer. Nothing much had happened overnight – no one had emailed. With a sense of relief, she pulled the newspapers towards her. She paged through them, but they contained nothing she hadn’t already seen on teletext. The
Evening Post
had an article about one of the princesses on its front page, speculating about whether she would fly back to Sweden to celebrate National Day. Nina ignored the story: the royal family weren’t her problem. Her colleagues in the Security Police were responsible for them. At the bottom of the page was a reference to ‘the Timberman’: Ivar Berglund. She turned to pages six and seven, and found herself staring into Berglund’s blank eyes. The picture ran across both pages. It had been taken with a long lens through an open doorway. Berglund must have glanced in the photographer’s direction for a fraction of a second, and she (according to the credit) had been ready. It must have happened very quickly, Berglund might not even have been aware of it, yet the picture had captured his cool, unruffled demeanour, his impenetrable inner life. Nina stared at it for a few seconds before she saw the headline above it:

The implications of the headline struck her in an almost physical way, leaving her breathless. With her palms flat on the newspaper, Nina leaned forward and skimmed the article in the vain hope that things weren’t
as bad as she feared. It turned out to be a forlorn hope, of course . . .

According to Nina Hoffman, an operational analyst with the National Crime Unit in Stockholm, there are a number of unsolved murders in other countries that bear similarities to the case in Orminge. Ivar Berglund’s DNA profile has therefore been examined in light of these other investigations, in both the Nordic countries and across the rest of Europe. This collaboration has been going on for the past year and is still not complete, although the National Crime Unit has not yet found any matches . . .

How could she have been so incredibly stupid? Without any reflection, she had given honest answers to the lawyer’s questions. It had been a crazy thing to do. She had played right into the hands of the defence team. She had revealed that they had nothing else to offer, that they had searched and searched and searched, but hadn’t found the slightest suspicion to pin on Ivar Berglund. She had revealed their fundamental failure to the court and the whole of the assembled media. She was so stupid, she ought to be locked up.

She stood up but had nowhere to go, so sat down again.

In her mind she replayed the scene again, saw the
smartly made-up lawyer standing there:
What have you all been doing during the protracted period of time that my client has been in custody?
And she heard herself answer, shooting herself in the foot:
Ivar Berglund’s
DNA
profile has been compared against other open investigations both in the Nordic countries and elsewhere in Europe . . .

If they lost the case, and Berglund was released, it would be her fault. She pressed her hands to her cheeks. Her fingers were icy: adrenalin had made the blood vessels in her extremities contract to prepare for a fight.

She forced her shoulders to relax:
focus!
Her eyes roamed across the table, and she saw Berglund’s file. She pulled it to her and opened the section on the DNA traces. Had there really been anything wrong with the results of the DNA sample found at the crime scene in Orminge? The match was almost perfect, 99 per cent. The defence lawyer had tried to make out that it was contaminated – could that be so? Was it possible that the sample had been impure? Could something have gone wrong when it was taken, or during the analysis?

She leafed through the report from the National Forensics Laboratory, her fingers warming.

There was nothing new. She knew all the answers off by heart.

She heard Johansson cough again, hesitated, then stood up with the file in her arms.

The secretary’s office was five doors away. He had a room to himself, a luxury granted to few in the
department. It was possible that he had privileged status because he had once been part of the National Rapid-Response Force, but after some traumatic incident (exactly what was unclear) he had been transferred to an office job. He might have trouble dealing with the cruelty of the world, but he was a formidable administrator.

Nina knocked on his door frame and he looked up at her over his glasses. Without saying anything, he nodded to the chair on the other side of his desk.

‘I’ve got a question,’ Nina said, as she sat down. ‘How many more unsolved cases are out there for us to cross-check with the Berglund case?’

Johansson took off his glasses. ‘Just the bottom of the barrel,’ he said. ‘Our colleagues are dredging through samples taken when DNA technology was in its infancy.’

‘Eighteen, twenty years ago?’ Nina said.

‘Something like that.’

‘What are the chances of finding anything?’

Johansson looked out of the window and thought for a moment. ‘Slim, but not non-existent. The technology was completely new back then, and the criminals were still making basic mistakes, hadn’t learned how to get rid of DNA . . .’ He turned back to her. ‘Something bothering you?’

She flushed. ‘Have you had a chance to look at the
Evening Post
?’ she asked.

He held her gaze. ‘You answered the questions,’ he said. ‘To do anything else would have been against the law.’

Nothing but the truth, with no additions or amendments.

She straightened her back. ‘I’ve been thinking about the DNA results from Orminge. Could something have gone wrong? Could the sample have been manipulated or contaminated?’

‘If there was anything wrong with the equipment, the results wouldn’t have shown a match at all,’ Johansson said.

Nina opened the DNA report.

‘If someone
did
manipulate the sample,’ the secretary went on, ‘it would have to have been someone at the National Forensics Lab, or one of the officers at the scene.’

Nina held her hand still on the folder. Planting DNA evidence at a crime scene was a fairly easy thing to do, much easier than falsifying fingerprints, she knew. Anyone could plant some saliva, or a drop of blood, a trace of semen. ‘Could someone switch the DNA in a sample? Tamper with it to make it look like it came from someone else?’

Johansson took a sip of coffee and sighed. ‘If you get rid of the white blood cells in a centrifuge, the DNA disappears. Then you just have to add some different DNA, from a strand of hair, for instance. Are you suggesting that someone at the lab might have . . .?’