Watching You(43)

‘OK, I’m tired of this now,’ Berger said, tugging at the straps. ‘It’s been fun, a very successful prank, but now we’ve got a fucking serial killer to catch. Let me go.’

‘Hmm,’ Molly Blom said. ‘So I have to let you go now, do I? Now that my prank is finished?’

Her eyes were darker than ever.

He opted for silence. It seemed simpler than choosing words.

‘Yes,’ she said eventually. ‘We really do have a serial killer to catch. As quickly as possible. And the quickest way to do that is through you, Sam Berger. We’ve been watching you very closely ever since you secretly pulled the investigations into Julia Almstr?m and Jonna Eriksson.’

‘But that was only a few weeks ago,’ Berger exclaimed. ‘You’ve been fucking about at crime scenes on that damn bicycle since Sollentuna, two years ago.’

‘I wasn’t in Sollentuna,’ Blom said. ‘I just told you I was.’

‘Why?’

‘Because that was where it started. I needed to figure out exactly what you, Sam Berger, knew about that. Analyse your reactions.’

‘But I don’t know anything.’

‘You were very quick to identify Helenelund shopping centre, Stupv?gen. As if you already knew about it.’

‘I know about Helenelund,’ Berger said. ‘I grew up near there.’

‘And that’s one of the things that makes it so interesting,’ Blom said, leafing through her papers.

‘What happened there?’ Berger asked. ‘Two summers ago?’

‘In April that year a gang of Iraqi rebels crossed the border with Syria to join in the civil war. The group had already started calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.’

‘ISIS,’ Berger said, astonished.

‘Or IS, as we call them these days. Or Daesh, which they hate being called. Sunni Muslim youths had already been heading there to fight against the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad. We regarded them mostly as naive freedom fighters. But with the appearance of IS it became clear that the young men going down there were jihadists, and we received the first indications that IS was recruiting in Sweden. One such indication was found in Helenelund, in the Pachachi family, to be precise. A twenty-one-year-old man, Yazid Pachachi – born in Sweden to Sunni Muslim, Iraqi parents – was one of the very first confirmed links to IS. It looked like his fifteen-year-old sister Aisha had gone with him. We infiltrated the neighbourhood and figured out that that probably wasn’t the case, and that Aisha was actually missing, here in Sweden. The parents were paralysed by Yazid’s unexpected radicalisation and militarisation, and Aisha’s disappearance got caught in the shadow of the son’s, not altogether surprisingly. But all the evidence suggests that she disappeared on Friday 7 June two and half years ago, after the last day of school. She simply never came home from the celebration to mark the end of the school year.’

‘But you didn’t realise that until it was too late?’

‘Far too late, yes. At first we spent several weeks thinking she was living in Syria as the child-bride of some IS monster. Then we wasted far too much time on the hypothesis that it was some sort of honour killing. But now I’m sure Aisha Pachachi was this serial killer’s first victim.’

‘But why the hell didn’t you let us know, in the real Crime Unit?’

‘Because the next victim was also a Muslim girl.’

‘Oh fuck.’

‘The Berwari family in Vivalla, ?rebro. Kurdish. At the end of November that same year, the daughter, Nefel Berwari, fifteen years old, vanished without a trace. But her parents didn’t report it to the police either, they hushed it up – apparently for reasons of honour – and tried to solve it among themselves. After all, Vivalla already had one of the highest Muslim populations in Sweden, and it was as a result of our infiltration of ?rebro mosque that we heard that Nefel Berwari was missing. Only then did we look back at Helenelund and Aisha Pachachi and start to suspect that we were dealing with one and the same perpetrator. Either a serial kidnapper or a serial killer. Or both.’

‘Who was either …’

‘Racist or Muslim, yes. Either it was something internal – honour-related or Islamist – or something to do with the far right – a lone John Ausonius-style nutter or something more organised. In both instances there was good reason for the Security Service to classify the investigation.’

‘Six months between Aisha and Nefel,’ Berger said. ‘Then four months before Julia Almstr?m in V?ster?s. Quick – and accelerating. But then a break, almost a year until Jonna Eriksson in Kristinehamn. And then eight months until Ellen Savinger. Don’t serial killers usually speed up their activities once they get a taste for what they’re doing?’

‘Unless we’ve missed a victim,’ Molly Blom said.

Berger paused and leaned back as best he could. He looked at the woman on the other side of the table. She was wearing different clothes, a tight, sporty white T-shirt, black trousers that were practically sweatpants, and bright pink trainers.

A completely different person.

One who bore a far greater resemblance to the mountain climber in the photographs in her flat.

He decided not to mention that. ‘Is that what you think? That there are other victims?’