Watching You(103)

Blom and Berger exchanged a look; the situation was even better than they had dared to hope.

Blom said: ‘And what do the girls have to say about the question of William Larsson’s guilt?’

‘So far questioning has been kept to a minimum,’ Allan said, ‘out of consideration for the girls’ state of health. But the statements taken are unanimous, and match yours. All the victims have identified Olle Nilsson, and his DNA has been found in both the B?lsta house and the flat in Helenelund. The fact that Nilsson was guilty of all seven kidnappings is therefore beyond all reasonable doubt now – as well as three murders, Simon Lundberg, Yazid Pachachi and Rayhan Hamdani, and the aggravated assault of an Anton Bergmark in Sollentuna.’

‘So the body sitting in the kitchen was Aisha’s brother Yazid,’ Berger said. ‘But the name Rayhan Hamdani doesn’t mean anything to me.’

‘Another young man from Sollentuna who went off to fight for IS. They both died of gunshot wounds, and had serious amounts of heroin in their bodies, according to initial analysis. They both returned to Sweden on 20 August this year. The preliminary forensic examination indicates that they’ve been dead just over two months, which suggests that they went to the flat more or less straight away.’

‘Where a complete lunatic was busy building a labyrinth,’ Berger said.

‘What happened to the rest of the Pachachi family?’ Blom asked. ‘There’s definitely a mother and father. I questioned both of them around the time of their daughter’s disappearance.’

Allan nodded. ‘Ali and Tahera Pachachi, yes. They’ve vanished into thin air as well, just like their daughter.’

‘Strange,’ Blom said.

‘Not really,’ Allan said with a shrug. ‘They’re presumably dead, cleared out of the way by Olle Nilsson. Because there’s nothing to support your theory that his real name is William Larsson, and that he underwent plastic surgery somewhere in the Middle East. We can’t find any connection to a mercenary called Nils Gundersen living in Lebanon. And your own childhood memories obviously don’t count as evidence. But the Security Service are currently going through the whole of your unofficial investigation. Some evidence may of course arise from your material or from the professional scrutiny it’s being subjected to – the van, or DNA from the sixteen-year-old Larsson, for instance. And the most vital work of all is still ongoing: analysis of Olle Nilsson’s computers from Stupv?gen, which will hopefully provide answers to a lot of questions. Mind you, it doesn’t really matter who he was. Whether his name was William Larsson, Erik Johansson, Johan Eriksson or Olle Nilsson, he’s been neutralised now.’

‘William was a lot of people,’ Berger said.

The other two looked at him for a few moments.

‘Your statements have made for extremely interesting reading. But it’s clear that you don’t have any detailed information about how the kidnappings took place. How did he get to know the girls? How did he know that they existed? How did he plan his actions?’

Blom cleared her throat. ‘We don’t actually know anything except that he seems to have snatched Aisha Pachachi right after the celebration to mark the end of the school year, broke into Julia Almstr?m’s house in the middle of the night to take her, and simply picked a blonde girl at random from the high school in ?stermalm. We don’t know how Nefel Berwari disappeared. The other aspects that remain unclear are how William knew that Sunisa Phetwiset, who had been forced into the sex trade, would be visiting a paedophile on a particular evening, how he found Jonna Eriksson and Simon Lundberg at their hideaway in the cave full of bats, or how he knew precisely when Emma Brandt was going to commit suicide at Midsummer. I imagine a lot of that will become clear after William’s computers are analysed. The whole thing reeks of social media.’

Allan nodded. ‘I also need to get to grips with your plan to capture him in the boathouse. Once you had received the message in the B?lsta house – “I’m coming for you soon” – you still went back to the boathouse. Then everything gets a bit hazy. You set up four new security cameras in the vicinity. One of them was pointing out across the water. You were anticipating that Larsson was going to come that night. You had predicted that he would strap Berger to his clock at the scene of the original crime. So you were prepared to sacrifice yourself, Sam?’

‘My shoulders still hurt,’ Berger said.

‘We found the parts of the clock hidden under the floor,’ Blom said. ‘We realised that he wanted to attach Sam to the contraption. And Sam was prepared to go through that if I could render William harmless without killing him. We needed him to tell us where the third house was. The third labyrinth. Everything hinged on that.’

‘We had a number of different strategies, depending on which direction he came from,’ Berger said. ‘But the mannequin that we’d dragged back from B?lsta was part of all of them.’

‘He came from the water,’ Blom said. ‘In a rowing boat. That was unexpected, but not unmanageable. At best he would regard me as so irrelevant that he would merely get rid of me without closer inspection.’

‘That was obviously an element of uncertainty,’ Berger said. ‘But we would have stuck to the plan even if he had discovered the dummy.’

‘Then what?’ Allan said.