A Death in Sweden(27)
“There’s nothing else you need to see up here?”
Dan shook his head and said, “Every single aspect of Jacques Fillon’s existence is under that garage. Everything else is just window dressing, a distraction. The house, the area, even the accident—they tell us nothing about him. He could have been living on the moon, because his entire life is down in that shelter.”
“Jack Redford.” He looked at her, questioning. “You called him Jacques Fillon.”
“Of course.” He swigged from his beer. “I’ve been thinking about it too. I’ve got a clean cell to call Patrick, but I’ll ask him to meet me in Stockholm the day after tomorrow. I’d prefer to give him most of this in person.”
“You mean so that you can see his face, and how he reacts?” She clearly sensed that he didn’t entirely trust Patrick, that he probably didn’t entirely trust anyone.
Dan smiled, admitting there was some truth in that, and said, “He’ll stay at the Grand so I’ll need to be staying somewhere nearby but not obvious.”
She nodded, thinking it over, then said, “Actually, there’s quite a cool hotel on Skeppsholmen.”
“That’s good—it’s been a while since I’ve been with the cool crowd.”
She laughed but said, “No, it’s the location. You know if you walk past the Grand, across the bridge, that’s Skeppsholmen, so it’s kind of close and out of the city at the same time, quiet.”
“Okay, yeah, I know where you mean. That could be good.”
“So you have been to Stockholm before?”
She was a master of deadpan delivery.
He smiled and said, “We should get back to work.”
The afternoon continued in the same vein, without either of them finding anything that promised to narrow their search or provide leads. It also didn’t help that Redford had obviously been a linguist. There were sheets in French, German, Spanish. Dan spoke very little German, better French, and Inger spoke some German, but neither of them were really fluent enough to look through documents at speed.
Late in the afternoon, Dan booted up the computer again and used it to search for information on some of the stories pinned to the corkboards. He didn’t bother looking for material on Harry Brabham because he knew he’d be swamped by all the public domain information surrounding a congressman, but he searched on the other two children, and on the allegations of fraud and favors, seeing if he could find a link between them.
Finally, he looked at the Paris murder. Most of the news stories pinned around the map of Paris were in French, but he was able to pull out the victim’s name, Sabine Merel, and a date. He typed it in and hit Search and scanned the results. The third story he clicked on had a picture of the girl who’d been murdered and, as soon as it popped onto the screen, Dan felt his heart kick up a gear. Could this be it, the key to everything Redford had done here?
“Inger, you might want to take a look at this.”
“What is it?” She was looking over, her fingers holding her place in the filing drawer she was working through.
“The murder in Paris that’s on that board over there, I’ve just searched on it and found a picture of the victim.”
She was reluctant to lose her place among the documents, so she pulled one proud of the others to mark her progress, and then came over saying, “What about it . . . oh.”
“Yeah, oh.” They both looked beyond the computer to the corkboard with the single photograph on it. It was the same girl, Sabine Merel.
Chapter Sixteen
Inger was quick to make one connection that Dan hadn’t yet seen. She walked over to the board and said, “It wasn’t new, and I don’t think he planned to fill it. You’re sitting there at the computer, you look up, and what do you see? This picture.” She tapped the board. “He had it here as a reminder, I think, you know, always reminding himself what this was really about.”
Dan knew she was right, knew it instinctively.
“So we have two questions. What did Sabine Merel mean to Jack Redford? And in what way did he believe Brabham might be responsible for her murder?”
“Could she have been Jack’s girlfriend? Or daughter maybe.”
Dan grabbed Redford’s passport off the desk, checked the dates in the article.
“She was nineteen when she was murdered, he would’ve been thirty-seven. I guess it’s possible she could have been his girlfriend, but it’s a big gap, particularly when she’s so young.”
“But probably too small a gap for him to be her father. She could be the daughter of a friend.”
“Maybe. But that brings us on to the other question. I don’t know much about Brabham, so I don’t know if he’s the kind of guy who picks up young girls and murders them for kicks . . .”
He noticed Inger looking over his shoulder, and he knew she was looking at the picture of Brabham on his own corkboard.
He continued, saying, “It’s more likely she was collateral damage in some way, that Redford took exception to it . . .”
“No, it’s bigger.” He looked at her questioningly. “Dan, think of the fact that he disappeared, that he spent all those years putting all of this together, that he built the stockpile in there. In some way, it has to be bigger. You don’t do all of that because you take exception, you do it because you care deeply, or because you have no choice.”