Watching You(4)

‘I’m pleased to hear you say “is”,’ he said.

‘Ellen isn’t dead,’ she said.

But her eyes didn’t waver.

‘Again?’ he repeated with a sigh.

‘Yes?’ she prompted.

‘I was thinking more existentially,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘“Too late” is my motto.’

It had stopped raining.





4




Sunday 25 October, 19.23

‘Booby trapped?’

Detective Superintendent Allan Gudmundsson had apparently decided to perform a parody of a reprimand. The performance made Berger’s stomach turn.

‘Yes,’ he replied innocently, ‘that bastard mechanism probably ought to be called a booby trap.’

‘That’s not what I was asking, as you’re perfectly aware.’

‘So what was your question, then?’

‘Why the hell did you warn the rapid response unit to look out for booby traps?’

‘Fat lot of good it did …’

‘That’s not the point. Why?’

‘Because the bastard hasn’t left any clues behind him. He’s smart, that’s all. Smart enough and dangerous enough to booby trap his abandoned hellhole.’

‘The address was a clue, wasn’t it?’ Allan roared. ‘The house.’

Berger stopped himself saying any of the things crowding on the tip of his tongue. He looked out of the window. The autumn rain had returned and it was pitch black. Most of the team had already left Police Headquarters. Deer was still there, he could just see her face in the light of her screen through two rain-streaked windows set at a ninety-degree angle to each other. The panes were separated by a slice of downpour.

‘No, Sam,’ Allan bellowed, unexpectedly combative. ‘You’re lying to me.’

Berger suddenly realised that could have fallen asleep at that precise moment. He could have closed his eyes and let Allan’s squawking lull him to sleep.

It was probably best not to.

‘Lying?’ he said, mostly to hide his detachment.

‘As long as it was nothing worse than little white lies I was prepared to let it go,’ Allan said in a considerably gentler tone; it was obvious that he was preparing for a crescendo. ‘But the fact that you’re telling bare-faced lies to your boss shows that you’ve elevated your conspiracy theory to a new and dangerous level.’

‘You became a bureaucrat far too early, Allan.’

‘You’ve gone off piste, and to cover it up you’re lying to your own boss. Do you think that’s sustainable in the long run?’

‘What should I have done differently?’ Berger asked with a shrug. ‘Not gone to the address? Not warned the team about potential booby traps?’

‘This is more about what you’re likely to do in the future.’

‘Catch a serial killer?’

Allan’s carefully prepared crescendo tailed off into a long exhalation which went way beyond a sigh and suggested an impressive lung capacity for a man of his age. He probably hadn’t smoked a single cigarette in his entire life.

With exaggerated slowness, Allan said: ‘There isn’t even a killer, Sam. At most there’s a kidnapper. Every year eight hundred people go missing in Sweden, the vast majority of them entirely voluntarily. That’s more than two a day. You can’t just pick out a couple of those voluntary missing persons and claim they’ve been murdered by a serial killer that no one else can see. Christ, we don’t even have serial killers in this country. They only exist in the minds of corrupt prosecutors and overambitious cops. And overambitious cops are even worse than corrupt prosecutors.’

‘There isn’t a killer?’ Berger said pointedly.

‘There isn’t a victim, Sam.’

‘You weren’t in that cellar, Allan. I swear to you, there are victims.’

‘I’ve seen the pictures. And I’ve spoken to the pathologist. The blood dried in different stages, on different occasions. And it looks as if there’s more blood than there actually is. Three decilitres at most. That’s not enough to kill anyone.’

Berger stared at the wall behind Allan. It was completely blank. ‘Unless perhaps she wasn’t dead when she was moved, maybe she isn’t even dead yet. But she will be.’

Oxygen freezes at ?218°C. Because both nitrogen and argon, the other major components of air, have a slightly higher freezing point, that means the air freezes when the oxygen freezes. So it must have been, if only very briefly, at least 218 degrees below zero in Detective Superintendent Allan Gudmundsson’s office in Police Headquarters in Stockholm, because there was no question that the two officers were separated by a block of frozen air.

Eventually Allan said: ‘Blood group B negative. The second most uncommon blood group in Sweden. Two per cent of the population. One of them is Ellen Savinger. But that wasn’t the only trace of blood we found.’

The frozen chunk of air was still hanging between them.

Berger remained silent.

‘There was a fair amount of A positive, which confused Forensics,’ Allan went on. ‘Is that your blood group, by any chance, Sam? It was found on the walls outside the cell, and on the floor inside it. There were also fragments of skin.’