Watching You(41)

Anyone daring to have a white sofa had to be certain of being immaculate. On the surface. And probably not have many visitors. Or at least carefully selected ones, just as clean, just as proper. If there were any lovers, then they were neat lovers.

The bathroom seemed almost sterile, including the obviously expensive spray shower, and everything smelled faintly perfumed with a sophisticated scent. On a chest of drawers in the airy, fresh bedroom were a number of framed photographs. He picked them up, one after the other. The first was of three people wearing bathing suits with exactly the same striped pattern. Between two beaming and very evidently upper-middle-class parents stood a thin girl of about ten – the age when the real Nathalie Fredén had killed herself – and there were certainly external similarities with the class photograph from Mariehem School in Ume?. Including the snub nose. Three more photographs showed the adult Molly Blom in various sporting settings, always on her own. In one she was running, presumably a marathon, and in the others she was wearing climbing equipment. In one of the climbing pictures she was dangling from a rope by a sheer rock face, waving happily at the camera.

In the interview room he had never seen her smile. Only now did he realise just how beautiful she was.

Berger put the rock-face photograph down with a bang. Why the hell would anyone have pictures of themselves lined up in the bedroom?

He went back to the living room and felt that his image of Molly Blom was growing clearer. Fucking Security Service. He’d vaguely heard about these teams. Half-external elite units that could just as easily be deployed against corrupt police officers as international mafias. Only used when they were truly needed.

And now they were evidently needed.

Against Sam Berger, of all people.

The living room bulged out in a bay window. There was a desk in it. It was just as tidy as the rest of the flat. No computer in sight. A few pens, six pads of Post-it notes, different colours. He spent a while looking at them. Then he turned round to get an overview of the room.

Above the white sofa hung a piece of art two metres wide, an astonishing photograph of a group of mountain climbers heading up a snow-covered peak. You could just see their black silhouettes against the extraordinary sunset, its colours reflecting off the snow. What occurred to Berger, apart from the breathtaking beauty of the picture, was how bulky it was: it stuck out almost ten centimetres from the wall.

Just as he was struck by the irrelevant thought that it must have been very heavy for the removal men, he heard a muffled noise from the street door, as if someone was trying to move around very quietly. He let out a deep sigh and scanned the room again in the hope of spotting something, anything at all.

Beside the sofa, beneath the picture, he saw a crumpled Post-it note. Pink. He darted over and picked it up, saw that there was handwriting on it. He scanned it and thought for a couple of seconds. There was no time for anything more.

But it was enough to make him clench his right fist so hard that the scabs opened up again.

Then he heard footsteps on the stairs.

Two men, no more.

He pulled a tiny plastic bag from his pocket, the smallest type of evidence bag, tucked the little pink note inside and tugged his jeans down. Then, with a certain degree of force, he pushed the bag into his rectum. He heard the locks on the door open, one after the other, and only just had time to do up his jeans before they stormed into the flat.

He purposefully splashed blood from his wounded knuckles over the white sofa, and finished off by wiping his bloody right hand on it. Then they were on him. One of them punched him in the solar plexus and he buckled – the pain leaving him unable to breathe – and countered the blow by headbutting the man in the groin. The man flew backwards with a heavy groan, hitting the small of his back against the doorframe. As Berger straightened up and managed to draw breath again, he was struck from behind, a heavy punch to his kidney that made him kick out furiously behind him. His foot found nothing but air and he lost his balance. As he fell, his flailing foot managed to connect with something, and the second attacker staggered back. The other one stood up in the doorway and rushed at Berger, intending to accomplish something as elegant as stamping on his face. Berger rolled out of the way, grabbed the raised leg and punched the shin hard, sending this attacker off on one leg as well. Berger got to his feet and threw himself at the second man, aiming for a classic armlock. He succeeded and heard pain spread through the flat, along with a cry that sounded like: ‘Roy!’

But with more of a sob.

Berger saw an arm sporting a big, cheap diver’s watch sweep past with a syringe in its hand. Then he felt a prick in his neck. His field of vision collapsed in a peculiar way, and the last thing he saw before his consciousness was cut off was the pattern of bloodstains on the lovely white sofa.





19




Tuesday 27 October, 14.37

Even before he opened his eyes, Berger knew he was in an interview room.

Sight is our most instinctive sense. When we wake up, we want to open our eyes at once. It’s a gut reaction, and our newly woken consciousness is rarely sharp enough to make us disobey a gut reaction.

But on this occasion it was.

Berger had been awake for a couple of minutes and was trying to gather as much information as he could without opening his eyes. His whole body ached, but that didn’t really matter.

First and foremost, he was sitting up. He had been placed, unconscious, on a hard chair, and his arms were resting on what felt like metal armrests. It took him a while to realise that they were held in place by leather straps around his wrists. The chair felt so stable that it might well be fastened to the floor, and a faint cellar smell was finding its way into his nose.