Dark Secrets Page 15

  Yes, why didn’t he? Fortunately the truth worked, for once.

  “I only started today, and I haven’t been given my username and password and so on.” Sebastian gave her his most captivating smile, but could see from Martina’s expression that it wasn’t working. She fingered the envelope on the desk and shook her head.

  “So why don’t you ask somebody on your team to do it, then? They’ve got access to the entire system.”

  And why aren’t you just happy to be able to help out a high-profile murder investigation? Why don’t you find what I’m looking for and stop asking so many fucking questions? Sebastian thought as he leaned a little closer. Confided in her.

  “To be perfectly honest, it’s a bit of a long shot on my part, and you know, it’s my first day, I don’t want to make a fool of myself.”

  “I’d be happy to help you, but I just need to check it out with your boss first. We can’t just look people up when we feel like it.”

  “It’s not a matter of…”

  Sebastian broke off as he saw Torkel emerge from the conference room and gaze around the office. Evidently he found what he was looking for: Sebastian. Torkel was heading straight for him. Sebastian grabbed the envelope and straightened up quickly.

  “Never mind. Forget it. I’ll get someone on the team to help instead. That’s probably the easiest thing to do. Thanks anyway.”

  Sebastian started walking before he had finished speaking. He wanted to put enough distance between himself, Torkel, and Martina so that she wouldn’t decide to ask Torkel in passing if it was okay to look up Anna Eriksson from 1979. That would make Torkel wonder why, call into question Sebastian’s motives for wanting to join the investigation, and put Torkel on his guard for no reason. So Sebastian kept on walking away from Martina. Step by step. Until… “Sebastian.”

  Sebastian conducted a quick debate with himself. Did he need to give a reason for his conversation with the female officer? Perhaps it would be best. He decided to go for the explanation Torkel probably had in mind anyway.

  “I was just on my way to read this, but I was distracted by a tight, well-filled top.”

  Torkel wondered if this was the time to explain to Sebastian that starting today he was part of Riksmord. That everything he did reflected on the whole team. And that it was therefore not a good idea to try to get married colleagues from the local force into bed. But Torkel knew that Sebastian already knew that. Knew and didn’t care.

  “We’ve had an anonymous tip directing our attention back to Leo Lundin. Ursula and Billy have gone to check it out, but I wondered if you wanted to go over there and have a chat with the mother.”

  “Clara?”

  “Yes, you seemed to be getting on well.”

  Well, yes, you could say that. Extremely well. Clara was another woman who would not only put Torkel on his guard but get Sebastian kicked out before he knew what had hit him. You didn’t go to bed with the mother of a boy suspected of murder. Sebastian was pretty sure Torkel would be firm on that particular point.

  “I don’t think so. It’s probably better if I read up on the case, see if I can come up with something new.”

  For a moment it looked as if Torkel might object, but then he nodded.

  “Okay, you do that.”

  “Just one more thing—could you arrange for me to have access to the computers here, please? Criminal records, the whole lot.”

  Torkel looked genuinely puzzled.

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re well known for running your own race.” Torkel moved closer. Sebastian knew why. There was no reason to let curious ears know there were potential rifts within the team. To the outside world they were united. That was important. It also meant that whatever Torkel was about to say, it was unlikely to be entirely positive. And it wasn’t.

  “You are not a full member of the team. You are a consultant. Any investigations you wish to carry out, any leads you want to follow up, everything goes through one of us. Billy, preferably.”

  Sebastian tried not to show his disappointment. He didn’t quite manage it.

  “Do you have a problem with that?”

  “No. Not at all. Your decision.”

  Fucking Torkel. Now it was going to take longer than he’d thought. He had no intention of being part of this investigation for too long. And definitely not an active part. He was not about to speak to, interview, or analyze anything or anyone. Nor was he going to come up with possible scenarios or perpetrator profiles. He would get what he had come here for—an updated, current address for Anna Eriksson, or whatever her name might be these days—and then he would quickly and efficiently disentangle himself from the team, leave town, and never come back.

  Sebastian held up the folder.

  “In that case I’ll start reading.”

  “One more thing, Sebastian.”

  Sebastian sighed. Couldn’t he just go and sit down somewhere with a cup of coffee and pretend to read?

  “You’re here as a favor to a friend. Because I believed you when you said you really needed this. I don’t expect gratitude, but now it’s up to you to make sure I don’t end up regretting my decision.”

  Before Sebastian had time to respond, Torkel turned and left. Sebastian gazed after him.

  He felt no gratitude.

  Of course Torkel would end up regretting his decision.

  That’s what happened to everyone who let Sebastian into their lives.

  Billy opened the garage door. No car at the moment, although there was plenty of room for one. Which was unusual. Over the years Billy and Ursula had been inside a number of garages. Most of them were full of just about everything, apart from a vehicle. But in the Lundins’ garage they were faced with an empty expanse of floor, dirty and stained with oil, and with a drain in the center. Billy pushed the door all the way up as Ursula reached for the light switch.

  They stepped inside. The two bare fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling flickered to life but they both took out their flashlights anyway. Without needing to say a word they each began to examine one side of the garage. Ursula took the right, Billy the left. The floor on Ursula’s side was virtually bare. There was an old croquet game and, in the corner, a plastic bocce set with one ball missing. And an electric lawnmower. Ursula picked it up. Empty. Just like last time. The shelves lining the walls were crowded, but there was nothing to indicate that there had ever been a car in the garage. No oil, spark plugs, lock deicer, or lightbulbs. There was, however, plenty of gardening equipment: edging tools, half-empty seed packets, gloves, and weed-killer sprays. Nowhere to hide a jacket. Ursula would be very surprised if the information in the e-mail proved to be correct. If the jacket was in here, she would have found it the first time.

  “Did you check the drain?”

  “What do you think?”

  Billy didn’t reply. He started shifting the three bags of compost piled up along one wall, next to the white plastic garden furniture. Stupid of him to ask. Ursula didn’t like being called into question. Without knowing much about their previous relationship, Billy thought that was why she disliked Sebastian Bergman so much. The little Billy had heard about Sebastian suggested that he constantly questioned everything and everyone. Questioned and knew better, if not best. It didn’t matter to Billy, as long as Sebastian knew what he was doing. Every single day Billy worked with officers who were better than him. No problem. Billy hadn’t really formed an impression of Sebastian yet. A slightly off-color joke could be ascribed to nerves as much as anything. But Ursula didn’t like him. Neither did Vanja, so the odds were pretty good that Billy would end up in the same camp.

  He reached the corner on his side. There were a number of garden tools in a rack on the floor and various other tools hanging neatly from hooks on the wall.

  “Ursula…”

  Billy had stopped by the garden tools. There was a large white plastic bucket containing Leca aggregate clay next to the wooden rack that held a
rake, a hoe, and something resembling a pickax that Billy didn’t know the name of. Ursula came over and Billy shone his flashlight down into the bucket. Something green was clearly visible among the balls of burned clay.

  Immediately Ursula started taking photographs. After a while she lowered the camera and turned to Billy. She had no trouble interpreting the look on his face as skeptical, even though he thought it was neutral.

  “I wouldn’t miss a jacket half hidden in a bucket in a suspect’s garage. Just so you know.”

  “I didn’t say a word.”

  “I can see the look in your eyes. That’s enough.”

  Ursula took out a large evidence bag and carefully fished the jacket out of the bucket with a pair of tongs. Both of them stared at it, their expressions serious. Most of the jacket was covered in congealed blood. At the back the material was barely holding together. It became very clear to both of them how it must have looked with a living body wearing the jacket. Without another word Ursula slid it into the bag and sealed it.

  At the station on Västgötegatan Haraldsson was sitting at his computer waiting for messages. He was still in the game.

  No doubt about it.

  They were all doing everything they could to get rid of him, but he was hanging on. Thanks to his foresight, his ability to realize who was privy to the most information in this building. The people most of his colleagues simply greeted in passing every day: the staff at reception. Haraldsson had realized at an early stage in his career that the people who worked in the lobby found out the most. From both inside and outside. For that reason he had made a point of having coffee with them from time to time over the years, asking about their families, taking an interest, and occasionally covering up for them if necessary. So now they automatically got in touch with him if someone connected to Roger Eriksson turned up. Whether it came via the telephone or the form on the local police authority website that members of the public with information could fill in, it came to Haraldsson too. When the anonymous tip about the jacket in the Lundins’ garage came in they had phoned him from reception and, a second later, the forwarded message landed in his in-box. All he had to do was print it out and deliver it.

  Good, but not good enough. Anybody could turn up with a printout.

  That was a job for an intern.

  Somebody with no qualifications.

  Tracing the sender, though—now, that was police work. There was nothing in the message to suggest that the person who had supplied the information was guilty of anything. But if it turned out to be accurate, then this person had some knowledge of the crime; the murder squad was bound to be interested, and Haraldsson would be able to point them in the right direction.

  The station’s IT department was a joke. It consisted of Kurre Dahlin, a man in his fifties, whose main skill lay in pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del, shaking his head, then sending the offending machine away to be fixed. It would probably have taken Kurre Dahlin less time to learn to fly than to trace an incoming e-mail.

  The computer from which the message had been sent had an IP address, and Haraldsson had a seventeen-year-old nephew. As soon as Haraldsson received the message he forwarded it to his nephew, then texted him and offered him 500 kronor if he could come up with an actual address for the sender. Yes, he knew that his nephew was in school, but as soon as possible, please.

  His nephew read the text, put his hand up, excused himself, and left the classroom. Two minutes later he had picked up the message from his in-box on one of the school computers. As soon as he saw the sender’s address on the original e-mail he leaned back in his chair, his expression troubled. Haraldsson thought his nephew was some kind of whiz kid when it came to computers, and usually the things he asked about were ridiculously simple, but this time he was going to have to disappoint his uncle. There was no problem tracking down an IP address, but it could have been sent via one of the big Internet operators, in which case it would be impossible to find anything really usable. Oh well, he might as well give it a try anyway.

  After two minutes he leaned back in his chair again, this time with a broad grin on his face. He’d been lucky. The message had been sent from a freestanding server. He would get his five hundred. He clicked on Send.

  At the station Haraldsson’s computer pinged. He quickly opened the new message and nodded to himself with satisfaction. The server from which the original message had been sent was just outside town.

  At Palmlövska High, to be exact.

  “Next left.”

  Sebastian was sitting in the passenger seat of an unmarked police car. A Toyota. Vanja was driving. She glanced quickly at the small screen above the dashboard.

  “The GPS says straight ahead.”

  “But it’ll be quicker if you go left.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Vanja decided to go straight. Sebastian sank down in his seat and looked out the dingy side window at the town, feeling nothing but a great emptiness toward it.

  He had been sitting in the conference room with Torkel, Vanja, and Billy, having failed to come up with a good reason for why he couldn’t be there, when Torkel came to tell him they had new information on the case. He learned that they had found the victim’s jacket. True, the blood had yet to be analyzed, but none of them really believed it could be anyone else’s jacket or anyone else’s blood. Which meant that Leo Lundin was once again a person of interest in the investigation. Vanja was to question him again after the meeting.

  “Feel free, but it’s a waste of time.”

  They had all turned to face Sebastian, who was sitting at the end of the table tipping his chair back and forth. He could have sat there in silence, letting the others make whatever mistakes they liked while he worked out a way to gain access to the computers and the information he needed. Or, to put it more accurately, while he found another woman in the department who was more susceptible to his charms than Martina had been. It couldn’t be that difficult, surely. On the other hand, nobody liked him anyway. He might as well be true to his inner know-it-all.

  “It doesn’t fit.” Sebastian allowed the front legs of his chair to make contact with the carpet again. Ursula came in and sat down on one of the chairs nearest the door without saying a word.

  Sebastian went on.

  “Leo would never hide the victim’s jacket in his garage.”

  “Why not?” Billy seemed genuinely interested. Not at all defensive. He might be someone worth cultivating.

  “Because he wouldn’t even remove it from the body.”

  “He took the watch.” Vanja’s tone wasn’t defensive either. It was more a question of being on the offensive. Keen to put him right. Break down his argument. She was like Ursula. Or, indeed, like him, the way he had been when he’d actually cared.

  Competitive.

  Focused on winning.

  Unfortunately, she wasn’t going to win this particular match. Sebastian met her gaze calmly.

  “There’s a difference. The watch was valuable. We have a boy of sixteen, single mother who works in the care industry. He’s constantly trying to keep up in the materialistic race that’s going on around him all the time. Why would he struggle to remove a ripped, bloodstained jacket and take it with him when he left Roger’s wallet and cell? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Sebastian is right.” They all turned to Ursula, Sebastian with an expression that suggested he was finding it difficult to believe his ears. Those were three words Ursula had rarely uttered in her life. In fact, Sebastian couldn’t ever remember her saying them.

  “It pains me to say so, but it’s true.” Ursula quickly got to her feet and took two photographs out of an envelope.

  “I know you think I might have missed the jacket the first time. But look at these.” She placed the first picture on the table, and they all leaned forward.

  “When I went through the garage yesterday, I was particularly interested in three things: the moped, for obvious reasons; the drain, in case
there were traces of blood, or in case someone had rinsed the moped or a weapon in the garage; and then the garden tools, since we don’t have a murder weapon. I took this photograph yesterday.”

  She placed her finger on the picture, which showed the garden tools stacked in their wooden rack. The picture was taken at an angle from above, and the white bucket containing the Leca aggregate was clearly visible in one corner.

  “I took this one today. Spot the difference.” Ursula put down the second picture. Almost identical to the first one. This time, though, the green fabric was clearly visible in several places through the thin layer of aggregate. The room fell silent for a moment.

  “Someone put the jacket there overnight.” Billy was the first to articulate what they were all thinking. “Someone wants to frame Leo Lundin.”

  “That’s not the main reason.” Sebastian caught himself looking at the pictures with a degree of interest. There was something energizing about what had just happened. The murderer had taken items belonging to the victim and was now using them to plant evidence. And not at random, but in the house of the main suspect. This indicated that the murderer was closely following the progress of the investigation and was acting accordingly, with deliberate planning. He was determined to get away with it. He probably didn’t even regret what he’d done. A man entirely after Sebastian’s own heart.

  “The main reason for placing the jacket in the garage is to divert suspicion from himself. He has nothing personal against Leo; it’s just that Leo fitted the bill because we’re already focused on him.”

  Torkel looked at Sebastian with a certain amount of satisfaction. His earlier doubts faded slightly. Torkel knew Sebastian better than Sebastian liked to think. He knew that his colleague was incapable of getting involved in something that didn’t interest him, but he also knew how absorbed Sebastian could become if he encountered a challenge. When that happened, he was a real asset to an investigation. Torkel had a feeling they were on the way to something good. He gave silent thanks for the e-mail and the discovery of the jacket.