Watching You(34)
‘Have you been inside the house in M?rsta? Did you see Ellen sitting there chained up and bleeding? Did you see her scrape the nails off her fingers and toes on the ice-cold cement floor? Did you help to torture her?’
‘No! No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Yes, you do. You know exactly what I’m fucking talking about. That’s quite enough bullshit now. Did you help to torture her?’
‘Stop it.’
‘Stop it? Stop it?’
‘Sam,’ a voice said calmly and quietly in his ear.
That was all it took. Berger fell silent. He felt time pass, his heart’s sharp stabs at itself. Always one beat closer to death.
Always.
‘Tell me about the phone call,’ he said calmly.
‘I didn’t make a phone call,’ she said.
‘You don’t understand, Nathalie. We know you made that phone call. We know you were playing a role, and with a lot of flair, by the way. That’s not what I’m asking you. Just tell me about the phone call.’
She sat in silence. He let her, even though he couldn’t really tell which direction she would take.
Eventually she said: ‘I didn’t make a phone call.’
He let out a deep sigh and pulled two sketches from a folder. He pushed them towards her. One showed a man in a van in ?stermalm. The other was from the person who had seen their odd neighbour on the edge of the forest in M?rsta.
‘Does either of these drawings look like Charles?’
Nathalie Fredén looked at them and shook her head.
‘Not much,’ she said.
‘OK,’ Berger said, pulling the drawings back. ‘We’re going to take a break now. As soon as I leave the room you’ll be joined by a police artist who will help you to come up with a portrait of Charles Lindbergh. And I want you to think about that phone call, and about anything else that springs to mind when you think about him.’
He looked down at his wrist.
A hole had opened up in the pervasive condensation inside his watch. He could see about a third of the top left quadrant of the face. But no hands.
Time was still unfamiliar to him.
16
Tuesday 27 October, 02.42
Everyone wanted to put as much distance between them and the interview room as possible. They gathered round Berger’s desk in the far corner of the office. Berger and Deer, Allan and Samir. Much as he would have liked to, Berger couldn’t just curl up in a foetal position and try to understand why everything felt so distorted. It had been pretty successful, actually.
The darkness was broken by screen-lit faces. The rain was hammering invisibly but in no way inaudibly against the many windows. It was the middle of the night.
Close to the hour of the wolf.
Samir was fast-forwarding through the recording from the interview room. As he was about to hit play Berger put his hand on Samir’s. He didn’t feel ready, not yet.
Instead Deer said: ‘We’ve found out a number of things. Not least, we have the toxicology analysis from the National Forensic Centre. Ellen Savinger’s blood did indeed contain high quantities of an as yet unidentified blood-thinning substance.’
‘And you had some homework to do, didn’t you, Deer?’
‘I know.’ Deer sighed. ‘Why pump Ellen full of blood thinners? And I can’t come up with any answer except to make her bleed a lot …’
‘And last a long time,’ Berger said. ‘Utter torment. What else?’
‘A whole list. It’s growing all the time. Considering how hard it is to inject Botox to combat the symptoms of migraines, there’s a surprising number of people doing it. And bearing in mind that it’s the middle of the night, we’ve had a surprising number of responses to our enquiries.’
‘Responses to your enquiries about what, exactly?’
‘About female clients in the right age range and in the right time period. We’ve heard back from a few clinics that seem to work nights. They’ve probably outsourced their customer service operations to countries where it isn’t night.’
‘Good,’ Berger said. ‘Although the big question is what we want all that information for.’
‘That’s the big question about all this,’ Allan exclaimed. ‘Aren’t we complicating things unnecessarily?’
‘It’s one line of inquiry,’ Deer said. ‘We need to expand our understanding of who Nathalie Fredén is. The Botox is part of that. The migraines are part of that.’
‘It’s a fuck of a long shot,’ Allan bellowed. ‘Surely it’s obvious what we’re looking at? Occam’s razor, for God’s sake. Cut away all the dead flesh. The simplest solution often turns out to be the right one.’
‘I’m having trouble seeing anything simple here,’ Berger muttered.
‘She’s the murderer, for fuck’s sake!’ Allan roared.
‘To start with you said she was a lunatic, a dead end, a psycho,’ Berger said.
‘And now it turns out instead that she’s a brilliant actor. Who’s playing a lunatic. You ripped her mask off, Sam. You should have kept up the barrage. Blow after blow. She would have collapsed.’
‘If she’d fallen apart I wouldn’t have got anything else out of her at all,’ Berger said. ‘And she was close to collapse at the end. Now we’ve got another chance, and we’re better prepared than ever.’