Watching You(49)

She went in. Behind the desk sat a well preserved, steel-grey man in his sixties. He pushed his reading glasses up onto his forehead and looked at her.

‘Well, I never,’ Steen said. ‘Miss Blom. How have you been getting on?’

‘I’m reporting as agreed,’ Molly Blom said stiffly. ‘Questioning is proceeding according to plan.’

‘Has Berger confessed his involvement?’

‘No. But the picture is getting clearer.’

‘And is it as we anticipated?’

‘To a large extent, yes.’

‘Imagine that something planted so long ago could bear fruit,’ Steen said. ‘That gives us something to think about.’

‘Berger is a police officer, in spite of everything,’ Blom said. ‘That means we have to be doubly sure of everything.’

‘As agreed,’ Steen said. ‘Nothing goes to the prosecutor until we’re sure.’

‘Then, August, there’s something that you might have forgotten.’

‘And what might that be?’

‘Ellen Savinger.’

August Steen looked astonished. ‘What?’ he said.

‘Ellen Savinger,’ Molly Blom repeated, holding her ground.

‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ Steen declared.

‘The missing fifteen-year-old,’ Blom clarified in a neutral voice.

‘Oh. Yes. Of course. But presumably the Islamic line of inquiry now looks considerably cooler?’

‘It does. But Ellen is still alive.’

‘She’s at least the fifth victim,’ August Steen said. ‘Of course she isn’t alive.’

‘We can’t make that assumption. On the contrary, the situation is in all likelihood urgent.’

‘But that’s a matter for the regular criminal police. Once the jihadist trail vanished and the whole thing mutated into an internal investigation, we became hired hands. With one specific task: to investigate Berger’s involvement.’

‘On the other hand, we’ve been hiding things from the criminal police,’ Molly Blom said. ‘They’ve had to work from false assumptions.’

‘The Islamic trail may have gone cold,’ Steen said, ‘but the internal one is red hot. We’re red hot. If we can get Sam Berger to confess his involvement, we will have made a significant contribution which will make any earlier cover-ups conveniently disappear. We’ll look like heroes. Especially you, Molly.’

‘And Ellen Savinger?’

‘Dead,’ Steen said. ‘But the final victim.’

‘We don’t know that.’

‘I know you’re deeply engaged in this, Molly,’ Steen said in a different tone. ‘I know you’ve been trying to flush out the killer since the third murder. I know that the whole bicycle project was your baby. It was an ingenious but, in my opinion, rather too protracted and even fanciful method of attracting the perpetrator’s attention, but of course it turned out to be an exemplary piece of planning. He found you in the end. And now you’ve made it, Molly. The seed has borne fruit. Because you’re an internal resource, you won’t be able to bask in the glory, but here, within the service, you’ll be a hero. Berger is, however, not a threat to Sweden’s democratic system, its citizens’ freedoms and rights, or national security.’

‘Then I request permission to bring this project to a close as soon as possible.’

‘Request granted. Thank you for your verbal report. In this time of change I need you on other cases, cases which really threaten Sweden’s democratic system, et cetera.’

Molly Blom left her boss’s office and walked down the corridor. She wasn’t entirely happy with August Steen’s tone. It implied an indifference towards Ellen Savinger’s fate that couldn’t only be attributed to Steen’s trademark professionalism.

When she reached the lift a man was already waiting, someone she vaguely recognised. They nodded to each other. When the lift arrived the man pointed questioningly at the button marked G. She gave a brief nod. He pressed G. The lift sank through Police Headquarters. They got out at G, and the man walked towards the exit. She took her time, tied her shoelace, and waited until he was out of sight. Then she got back in the lift, ran her card through the reader and tapped in the six-digit code. The lift started to move down.

When it arrived she made her way along the beige corridors until an almost invisible door emerged from the homogeneity. She went in. The two thickset men were no longer staring at their computers. One was eating a banana; the other was taking a nap.

She nodded to the banana-eater and called out sharply: ‘Wake up, Roy.’

The sleeping man jerked awake in front of his computer, and his diver’s watch knocked against the wall.

‘Get him,’ Molly said.

They went out.

Molly Blom sat down on one of the chairs in the control room and pulled the white smartphone from her bag. She looked at it for a while. Then she calibrated it, stood up, took a deep breath and thought: It’s time.

It really is time.





21




Time has stopped. It really has stopped.

He is balancing on the slippery rock, his feet are slipping, but even so his sweaty hand has slowly but surely managed to clear a peephole in the window.