Watching You(106)

Syl nodded at Blom and sat down. Berger met her gaze. There was something unmentionable lurking there. A primal terror. But, on the other hand, that had been there for a while now.

‘Have you got any further?’ Berger asked.

‘I don’t even know what I’m doing here,’ Syl said, trying to adjust her style-free hairstyle. ‘Remind me.’

‘Helping me,’ Berger said with a wry smile.

‘Yes, that’s done me a fat lot of good over the years,’ Syl said.

‘What have you found?’

‘The anomalies,’ Syl said. ‘There’s actually been quite a lot of digging about in the archive. All at the same time.’

‘The Security Service archive?’

‘That is what we’re talking about, isn’t it?’ Syl said caustically.

‘OK,’ Berger said. ‘And this happened at the turn of the year, or thereabouts?’

‘No thereabouts,’ Syl said. ‘Exactly.’

‘When someone knew that security would be weaker?’

‘That seems likely, yes. A number of files have been erased, the activity can be reconstructed, but not the files. At least not yet. I’m working on it.’

‘Is it possible to say when the erased files were first created?’

‘Specific historical moments, yes. The earliest I’ve found was from 1976.’

Berger and Blom looked at each other.

‘Seventy-six?’ Blom said. ‘April 1976 by any chance?’

Syl looked at her seriously for the first time.

‘That’s right,’ Syl said, ‘28 April.’

‘After Nils Gundersen had been in Sweden to recruit mercenaries,’ Blom said. ‘And when he got a young woman named Stina Larsson up the duff.’

‘There was a Security Service report about that?’ Berger said.

‘It’s not possible to say anything about the contents of the file,’ Syl said. ‘It’s just noticeable by its absence.’

Berger nodded. ‘That was the oldest document that was deleted from the archive?’ he said. ‘When were the next ones from?’

‘They’re fairly regular, but no more than one per year for the following fifteen years,’ Syl said. ‘I was able to uncover the size of the missing files, if nothing else, and these annual reports were much smaller than the one from 1976. That remained the largest up to March 1991. That one was also large. A bit larger, in fact.’

‘OK … 1991,’ Berger said to Blom. ‘Two years before sixteen-year-old William Larsson vanished without a trace. Have we got anything for March ’91?’

Blom shook her head. ‘Gundersen was forty-three, had been active on Saddam Hussein’s side in the first Gulf War. William was fourteen and being badly bullied in Stuvsta.’

Berger nodded and felt his brain getting closer to boiling point.

‘Let me guess: the next large intervention in the database corresponds with a file in the summer of ’93?’ he said.

‘Correct,’ Syl said. ‘July. Although before that there was more activity from March ’91 and the following three or four months. Four documents missing. Then one larger one again in July ’93.’

‘When William had just left Sweden.’ Blom nodded.

‘This goes a long way to explaining why Nils Gundersen is completely absent from the Security Service archive but crops up in MISS’s files,’ Berger said. ‘He’s been purged from it.’

‘MISS?’ Syl exclaimed. ‘The Military Intelligence and Security Service? What the hell have you dragged me into?’

‘What about after ’93?’ Berger said instead of replying.

‘Less activity,’ Syl said, staring darkly at her former boss. ‘Back to annual reports again. One small document is missing from each year, and soon even less than that. Every other year after the millennium, then nothing until towards the end of 2012. Then another large file disappears. The largest of them all: 11 November 2012.’

‘Three months before Anton Bergmark was attacked,’ Blom said. ‘That must have been when William returned to Sweden. And the Security Service had a file about it. A big one.’

‘We don’t know that,’ Berger said. ‘We don’t know for sure.’

‘We don’t know anything for sure,’ Blom said. ‘But the circumstantial evidence is piling up like shit in the Ganges.’

‘The sacred river,’ Berger said. ‘Then what?’

‘That’s where it stops,’ Syl said, getting to her feet. ‘Along with my involvement. You’ll have to manage on your own now.’

Berger looked at her. For the first time since Police Academy he managed to see behind Syl’s everyday exterior and get a glimpse of the Sylvia Andersson who had never really interested him, the single mother with a five-year-old daughter, Moira, the spitting image of her mother.

And what he saw was sheer, unalloyed terror. Possibly more for Moira’s sake than her own.

‘What do you suspect?’ Berger asked. ‘What can you see that we can’t?’

‘Nothing,’ Syl said through her teeth. ‘See nothing, hear nothing, and above all, say nothing.’

‘In one word? Off the top of your head?’