Watching You(46)

‘The whole weekend?’ Blom exclaimed, her voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘Two whole days?’

‘I didn’t have longer than that. I found two new victims. Given more time I’d have found Aisha Pachachi and Nefel Berwari as well, in spite of your attempts to cover them up. And you were the one who informed me that there were more, Nathalie Fredén. When you reacted so strongly to me saying “three crime scenes”.’

‘Let’s set that peculiar lie to one side,’ Molly Blom said. ‘It’s a lie that implies that someone with access to all the police material – a police officer – would have brought forward your incursion into regional police records to a time before Ellen’s disappearance. A lie which is far too crazy to be properly thought out, so I’m consigning that to the category of wild excuses. And that’s why it isn’t really the main point. The main point – as you know all too well, Sam – is this.’

With that, she put her hand on his box of watches. Slowly she slid the little gilded catch to one side, opened the lid, revealing the velvet-lined compartments.

‘Here we have no fewer that four watches, made by Jaeger-LeCoultre, Rolex and IWC, all from the fifties and sixties. The fifth ought to be on your wrist, but then we wouldn’t have been able to strap your wrists. It’s in front of you.’

Berger looked at his Rolex Oyster Perpetual Datejust on the interview-room table. The tiny drops of condensation had moved, so he could only see the centre of the dial, with the two hands pointing in different directions. There was no way of working out how long he’d been unconscious.

Molly Blom looked at him. ‘In a more traditional internal investigation, I would have been very interested in the fact that the combined value of these watches exceeds half a million kronor.’

‘They were inherited,’ Berger said. ‘From my grandfather. His name was Arvid Hammarstr?m.’

‘Good to hear you haven’t lost your sense of humour,’ Blom said in an expressionless voice. ‘That suggests we’ve got energy for the next session. Which will be very different, I can assure you. But, as I say, your improbably expensive watches would only have been of interest if this had been a traditional case. Which of course it isn’t. There’s nothing traditional about this.’

‘I’m good with watches,’ Berger said, holding on to the metallic armrest with half-immobilised hands.

‘You’re good with watches?’

‘I buy broken ones and repair them.’

‘And you think I’m interested in your pathetic little hobby? You think that’s why I’m talking about your watches?’

‘I don’t know what you mean now.’

‘Oh, but you do,’ Blom said, grabbing hold of a couple of the box’s velvet-lined dividing walls and pulling upwards.

In the little space beneath the watches was a jumble of plastic. Molly Blom picked up one of a number of extremely small ziplock bags and carefully read the label that was stuck to it. ‘“Ellen Savinger”. Goodness,’ she said. ‘What could this mean?’

Berger said nothing. But his breathing was perfectly audible.

‘The more innocent explanation is that this is something you found in the house in M?rsta and withheld from the investigation. Shall we take a look at what it is?’

She opened the little zip and tipped the contents of the bag out onto the table, between the two photograph frames. What fell out was a tiny cog, no more than a centimetre in diameter.

‘Where did you find this?’ she asked.

Berger remained silent. It was a long time since he’d felt his brain cells work so hard.

‘OK,’ Molly Blom said after a while. ‘This could be written off as the traditional hubris of a burned-out detective inspector. “I’ve found something no one else found, and I’m going to solve this much more quickly than the official investigation can.” That would obviously be misconduct, but not misconduct of the worst sort. But then we have this.’

Two more of the little plastic bags were pulled out. Outwardly they looked just the same, including the labels with the tiny writing in ballpoint pen.

Molly Blom laid the three bags out so that they were in a line, the open one marked Ellen Savinger on the right, with the cog in front of it. Then she picked up the middle one and said as she opened it: ‘Jonna Eriksson.’

And she tipped out a similar minute cog onto the table. Without a word she repeated the same manoeuvre with the last bag, marked Julia Almstr?m. Another cog, slightly larger this time, rolled out.

‘If you stole Ellen’s cog from the house in M?rsta, where do the other two come from?’

Berger’s silence hung heavily in the room, as inescapable a car alarm.

Blom went on: ‘The cases before Ellen Savinger’s featured neither a body nor a crime scene. There were two failed attempts to find Julia and Jonna – the bikers’ clubhouse in V?ster?s and the buried elk in Kristinehamn – but neither of those crime scenes turned out to be connected to these offences. Let me ask once more: Where do these cogs come from?’

Because Berger’s silence had entered a new and apparently final phase, Molly Blom said. ‘But we’re not done yet. There’s more. Are you ready for more, Sam Berger?’

She picked his Rolex up from the table and put it next to the others in his watch box. She looked at it pointedly.