Watching You(48)

He nodded slowly, as if nothing could surprise him, and went over to his desk. He heaved a parcel out of a drawer and held it out towards her. She in turn handed him the brown envelope. He took it and put it back in the same desk drawer.

‘Thanks, Olle,’ she said, but he had already returned to his computer.

She drove back the same way, but at Lindhagensplan she carried on along Drottningholmsv?gen, drove right across Kungsholmen, across Barnhus Bridge, and all the way along Tegnérgatan until she reached the narrow street that linked Engelbrektsgatan and Eriksbergsgatan.

She left the van double-parked and went into number 4, Stenbocksgatan. She took the stairs in just a few strides, undid all the locks, went in and soaked up the atmosphere. It felt defiled, dirty. As if the atoms of a nasty fight were still in the air. Then she went into the living room and looked at what had once been a brilliantly white sofa.

Four of the six cushions were spoiled, as was one armrest. Splatters of blood from Berger’s wounded right knuckles. It must have taken a hell of a lot of effort to produce that much blood.

Berger must have been clenching his fist very hard.

Molly Blom shook her head. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to get the sofa replaced. And she wouldn’t be able to stay there as long as it was present.

She went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, took out two protein drinks, gulped them down, and ate half an apple that she unwrapped from its cling film.

Then she did a quick search of her own home. She would have preferred to go through it more thoroughly, but what had she said to the guys in the observation room? ‘I’ll be gone an hour. An hour and a half at most.’ It would have to do. She hated when things didn’t work perfectly. The way she did. These days.

The kitchen. OK, no obvious peculiarities. Nothing in the fridge, nothing in the cupboards, nothing on the worktop, nothing in the bin. He had evidently been in a hurry. The blood was hardly planned. Obviously it could have happened during his fight with Kent and Roy, but her gut said Berger had clenched his fist hard enough to reopen his wounds because he was livid and stressed. When he saw his knuckles and saw the whiteness of the sofa, temptation got the better of him. OK, she could buy that. He wasn’t a man who appreciated the finer things in life. When he saw the sofa he reacted instinctively. White things need messing up.

The bedroom. Quickly. Yes, the photographs on the chest of drawers had been moved. He had picked up or at least moved the pictures of her climbing. What had he been thinking? He had believed that she was a fundamentally damaged person – the Nathalie Fredén she had wanted him to see – and then he was confronted instead with this new personality. A mountain-climbing personality. The opposite of losing control.

That was probably Berger’s reaction. She changed from someone who had lost control to someone in complete control. And vice versa, in his case: from full control to losing control. Everything he had assumed about his suspect had turned out to be the exact opposite.

He must have been surprised to get so much out of her when he himself was being questioned. But she really did need him to know about Aisha Pachachi and Nefel Berwari.

Otherwise there wouldn’t be any point to any of it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to draw any conclusions at all. Otherwise she wouldn’t have had any use for him.

And she really did need him.

Precisely how he had managed to find her real identity remained something of a mystery. Yet at the same time it was promising. This was a man who knew what he was doing. Had he also known what he was doing when he had been wandering recklessly through her apartment? Or had he been panicking?

He was looking for the most important things, trying desperately to find the essentials. Trying to think things through with a knife to his throat.

Just as she had planned.

He must have put down the picture of her hanging from a rope beside a sheer rock face – that seemed most likely, seeing as that photograph had been moved furthest – and then gone back into the living room. There he had turned to the bay window containing a desk. What could he have seen there?

The six pads of Post-it notes in assorted colours. Had he actually been able to draw any conclusions from those? If he had, then he really was sharp.

She turned and stared at the huge photograph of the climbers heading up a snow-covered mountain. She looked at their black silhouettes against the colourful sunset. Had he stood there? Had Berger walked this way, out into the bay window, and then turned round?

A sharp, intense ringtone broke the silence. Molly Blom was jolted from her reflections and eventually managed to pull her mobile out of her bag. An hour had passed. And she still had one more stop to make.

Even though the rush-hour traffic had started to build up, she managed to get back to Kungsholmen in reasonable time. She parked in the usual courtyard and opened up the parcel from Wiborg Supplies Ltd. Inside lay something that looked like an ordinary white smartphone, but when she switched it on the screen looked completely different. She gave a quick nod, then headed out onto Bergsgatan. She walked up towards Police Headquarters, went in through the main entrance on Polhemsgatan and tapped in codes to get through a number of doors until she reached the domain of the Security Service. It took a few more codes, swipe cards and fingerprints before she reached the headquarters of the various departments. Eventually she reached the right place, the Intelligence Unit, and, as the sign on his door suggested, Steen, the head of the unit. She knocked. After an appropriate interval there was a dull whirr to indicate that the door had been unlocked.