Watching You(37)

Yes, there had almost certainly been a camera there. A microscopic camera.

He climbed down and went into the kitchen. There were barely any yellow leaves left on the big aspen tree in the courtyard, but even so their rustling seemed to drown out the rain. He sat down at the kitchen table and looked out into the hall, trying to process the fact that it was only a few hours since he had last sat there. It felt like a lifetime ago.

OK, think. Think, at last. Undisturbed.

In the solitude that he knew he always needed.

Nathalie Fredén was dry when she walked through the door. She couldn’t have come from the street. She must have come from somewhere inside the building. She must have been sitting somewhere in the building waiting until – via the hidden camera – she saw the police enter her flat. Then she headed towards it and was seen through the windows of the stairwell by the surveillance officers in their car. She could have been operating on her own at that point.

But not now that the camera had been removed.

That had been done by someone else.

Someone who had presumably been waiting with her in another flat.

Where they could well have had a third guest.

Ellen Savinger.

But why would Nathalie Fredén hand herself over to the police? Why would she walk straight into the trap?

In a nutshell: what did Charles or Erik or the Scum have in mind by sacrificing his slave?

A sacrifice which had been planned for more than two years.

There was clearly something that didn’t make sense.

And Sam Berger couldn’t figure it out.

Was he being selectively blind? Was he stuck in a corner, unable to see a truth that was obvious from every other angle?

He stood up. Lit his way to the front door. Went out into the stairwell again. Found the glowing red switch. Went down the stairs. Stopped in front of the list of residents. He read the names, nothing that stood out. There were ten fairly common Swedish surnames, and one of them concealed the flat where that bastard and Fredén had sat and waited, just a few metres away, just a few hours ago.

If Berger had been firing on all cylinders they would have had the bastard, all wrapped up in a box.

Literally.

Of course there was a slim chance that he was still there, that he was still in one of the flats, just a few metres away from Berger. At that very moment. But it wasn’t very likely. Obviously Berger would see to it that all the flats were searched as soon as possible, but the bastard was probably gone. Leaving just a faint but lingering laugh.

Why had he thrown Nathalie Fredén to the wolves?

Berger aimed his mobile phone at the list of names and took a picture. It suddenly started to sound like a piglet being ritually slaughtered.

He quickly silenced the ring tone and was about to whisper back to Deer, who had presumably begun to suspect that he wasn’t in the toilet after all. But then he saw that it was an unknown number beginning 0915. Before he got the door open and threw himself out into Vidargatan he also noticed that the time was now 3.27. The hour of the wolf, and the rain was still tipping down relentlessly.

‘Yes,’ he answered, pulling his jacket collar up. ‘Sam Berger.’

‘I’m sorry to call at such an unusual hour,’ said a female, elderly voice in a northern accent.

‘Who is this?’ Berger asked.

‘They said it was urgent, and I never sleep very well after three in the morning anyway.’

‘Who am I speaking to?’

‘Yes, sorry,’ the tremulous voice said. ‘My name is Britt-Marie Bengtsson. I’m calling from Bastutr?sk.’

‘I see,’ Berger said impatiently. ‘Who told you it was urgent?’

‘The police in Ume?. Apparently they’ve been trying to reach me since last night. They gave me Constable Berger’s telephone number.’

Berger had a feeling that a penny should be dropping. Sadly there was no penny, and no dropping.

‘I’m listening,’ he said simply.

‘I worked as a counsellor in Mariehem School in Ume? in the late eighties and early nineties.’

‘Ah,’ Berger said, hearing the rattle as the penny finally dropped.

‘I understand that you’re interested in one of my former clients?’

‘If you call a ten-year-old girl a client.’

‘What would you suggest, constable? Patient? Pupil?’

‘Anything but constable. That title disappeared from the police force in the early seventies.’

‘Which says quite a lot about my age,’ Britt-Marie Bengtsson said calmly.

‘They evidently had quite a job finding you,’ Berger said.

‘I remarried and moved to Bastutr?sk after I retired.’

‘OK,’ Berger said. ‘As you know, this concerns Nathalie Fredén, who was in Year 3 at Mariehem School in the late 1980s.’

‘Poor Nathalie, yes,’ Britt-Marie Bengtsson said. ‘She came to see me because she was being badly bullied in class.’

‘That’s what I imagined,’ Berger said. ‘What happened?’

‘It remains a mystery why some people are picked out as victims, I’m afraid. Nathalie came to me of her own volition. She wasn’t at all happy. We met a few times, but nothing I was able to suggest seemed to help; the situation just got worse and worse. I had to turn to Hans-Ove for help.’