Watching You(15)

‘No,’ Berger interrupted. ‘We need something to go on.’

‘Right now I can’t actually say for certain …’

‘Now. Please.’

‘OK,’ Cary said, and leaned forward. ‘I haven’t yet been able to identify the speaker. The sound quality is far too poor to be able to find any individual characteristics of the voice. We’ve got a probable gender, but, once again …’

‘A man?’ Berger interrupted. ‘A man calling and pretending to be a woman?’

‘No,’ Cary said. ‘It’s a woman’s voice.’

Berger froze, spreading a chill through the whole room. Everyone was looking at Berger. In the end he said: ‘Should I interpret that as a guess?’

‘The probability is 97.4 per cent,’ Cary said.

Berger stood up and left the room.

It actually took a little while for a state of bewilderment to spread. Once it had ebbed away Robin stood up and navigated his way out of the meeting room, with Vira and Cary following in his wake.

Deer was left alone. Half a minute later she sighed deeply and stood up.

When she reached the open-plan office Berger was sitting at his desk staring into space again. She approached cautiously, sat down on her chair and turned it towards him. She couldn’t catch his eye. This went on for so long that Deer eventually said simply: ‘Is our perp a woman?’

Berger looked at her without expression.

‘Or has a female accomplice?’ Deer pressed.

Extremely reluctantly, Berger emerged from hibernation.

‘Could be an actor,’ he muttered. ‘Or someone he just picked off the street and made an offer she couldn’t refuse.’

‘In which case she probably saw him.’

Berger frowned and held her gaze just a little too long.

‘Saw him,’ he said.

Then he pulled out his mobile again and dived in. The photographs. The pole star. Marcus and Oscar. Then the pictures from the house. The hellish cellar. Then, right after that. Up, out on the porch, the strangely fresh air. Berger and Deer close together. It had almost stopped raining. That was when he had been struck by a peculiar, fleeting feeling that left just an echoing void behind it.

What sort of feeling was that?

A vision?

The photographs. The photographs from the porch.

Deer watched him. He scrolled through them and deftly zoomed with his fingers. In the end he lowered his head towards the screen as if he were hopelessly short-sighted. And then he got to his feet. He stood there for a while. Then he grabbed his rucksack. And walked, deeply distracted, towards the exit.

‘Where are you going?’ Deer called out, in the absence of anything better.

‘Dentist,’ Berger said, turning round. ‘If Allan shows up, tell him I’ve had to go to the dentist.’

‘For God’s sake!’ Deer exclaimed.

‘The dentist,’ Berger muttered, and carried on walking. ‘That’s it. I’m at the dentist.’

‘Any chance you might be back this afternoon?’ Deer said in a tone that betrayed her utter disbelief in any further communication.

But the disappearing Berger replied: ‘If I’m lucky I’ll be back this afternoon with considerably sharper teeth.’





9




Monday 26 October, 09.28

The fact that it didn’t come with a parking space was by no means the only drawback of the car that went with the job. Another one was the seats. There was no question of leather, not even the most artificial sort, and beneath the flimsy but quick-drying material was some sort of highly absorbent padding. It might look nice and dry while deep down it was soaking. In other words, Berger’s clothes – now dry again, at last – returned to what was starting to feel like their natural state.

Not that it mattered in the slightest. Berger tore through the city, all the way to an unexpected parking space right in front of his door on Ploggatan. The lift was waiting on the ground floor, but for the first time in about six months, he hurried up the four flights of stairs two steps at a time, with surprising agility. He even managed to ignore the threefold phantom pain that always followed the sight of Lindstr?m & Berger on the front door. Once he was inside he was careful not to glance through the wide-open door towards the bath, strewn with the previous day’s wet clothes – which had been faced with a choice between drying and rotting and had evidently picked a side – and made his way into the chaos of the bedroom. The chaos from the hour of the wolf. It was a scene frozen at half past three that morning, with the contents of Julia Almstr?m strewn across the floor, and papers from Jonna Eriksson and Ellen Savinger mixed up on the undisturbed side of the oversized bed. He pulled out one desk drawer and took out a magnifying glass. Then he gathered the files together and lined them up along the edge of the bed. He crouched down in front of them and took out his mobile phone.

He scrolled quickly through the photographs until he got to the porch. Three pictures, largely identical. They had just emerged from the nightmarish basement, every impression was new, untested. The wounded Ekman had been taken away, the ambulance had gone, and the last traces of his blood were being washed from the porch. Deer pushed closer to Berger, the post-rain freshness of the air was remarkable, a mixture of ozone and spores that the dampness had released from the depths of the earth.