Watching You(54)

‘But the cogs from your Patek Philippe are small.’

‘In part he wants to show the world that this is about clocks. And in part he’s leaving clues for you, implicating me. I realised that as soon as I found the first cog. That he was the one who had stolen my watch. Now he’s distributing the cogs to incriminate me. That’s why I’ve been collecting them and keeping them away from the investigation. They’re his way of getting back at me.’

‘Evidence?’ Blom said.

‘You left several lines of inquiry for me,’ Berger said. ‘Two things that stuck out from my interviews with you. When you said “The betrayal” so distinctly and your comment “You know exactly what happened”. Those were the two times you emerged from your role as Nathalie Fredén. I’ve been racking my brains. Was I the one who betrayed you? When, where, how? I don’t know you.’

‘Don’t play dumb, Sam Berger,’ Molly Blom said. ‘You know exactly what happened.’

He stared at her, overwhelmed by the rustling of aspen leaves, and felt himself turning pale.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said.

‘I became a cop for reasons of justice,’ she said. ‘What happened to me should never happen to anyone else. Especially not a woman. A girl.’

‘You were there? At Helenelund School? I don’t remember you.’

‘I was in the year below,’ she said. ‘Your lunatic of a friend grabbed me one day. He strapped me into that sick contraption. And you saw me. You saw me through the window, you bastard. And you ran away. You fucking coward.’

Berger was perfectly silent. He couldn’t get a single word out.

‘Your betrayal in that moment,’ Molly Blom said, ‘still leaves me utterly speechless. From that second on I couldn’t trust anyone in the whole world.’

‘Fucking hell,’ Berger said.

‘Not much time left,’ Blom said. ‘They’ll be starting to wonder out there.’

The sound of aspen leaves in Berger’s ears was deafening. Even so, he knew there was one question that had to be asked. ‘I retrieved the investigations five days after Ellen Savinger went missing. Why are you saying it was four days before?’

‘Because that was my opportunity to attack you. To get to this point.’

‘You changed the dates?’

‘So that the Security Service could go in as hired hands for Internal Investigations. It was my chance to get to meet you. Under the right circumstances. Once I’d punished you enough.’

‘And why did you want to meet me under the right circumstances? Because you know who the killer is as well?’

‘I’ve suspected it for a while,’ Blom said, moving her neck from side to side. ‘His name is William Larsson.’

‘Yes,’ Berger said. ‘William Larsson. He joined my class in Year 9. His face was all crooked, misshapen. He had some sort of rare disorder, some inherited variant of something like Proteus Syndrome, I think; it wasn’t entirely clear. His mother, who was on her own with him, had to keep moving around Stockholm because he kept getting bullied. At Helenelund School, among others. The girls weren’t kind to him.’

‘The fifteen-year-old girls,’ Blom said. ‘And one of them was me.’

‘I’d have sounded the alarm if I’d found him,’ Blom said. ‘Then of course it would all have ended up in the investigation. But he no longer exists. William Larsson has ceased to exist. I was forced to look underground.’

‘Me too,’ Blom said. ‘I’ve been working on this for a long time, considerably longer than you. I wanted to find him, at any cost. But he ceased to exist after Year 9. I managed to break out of that mechanism of his before it pulled me apart, quite by chance, but I never said anything to anyone. Not a word to a single person. It was too painful; I was eaten up with shame and anxiety. And then he vanished. I’ve looked everywhere, but he flew away. Like Charles Lindbergh.’

‘Do you think it’s really William, then?’ Berger said. ‘Is that possible?’

‘It’s possible, if he’s undergone plastic surgery abroad. And now he’s back, externally patched up, but more warped than ever inside. And with an appearance that no one recognises.’

‘I understand you wanting to punish me,’ Berger said. ‘There’s nothing in my life I’ve regretted as much as that moment when I fled from you and the boathouse.’

Blom looked at him. ‘You took something from my flat, didn’t you?’

Berger blinked hard. Then he opened his mouth and managed to extract a rolled-up piece of paper from the innermost crevice between his top teeth and right cheek. A pink, rather damp piece of paper.

A Post-it note.

‘It was on the floor,’ he said. ‘Next to the sofa.’

Blom leaned forward and read it out loud: ‘WL pl. surg. Saudi?’

‘It made me suspect a thing or two about you,’ Berger said. ‘WL had to be William Larsson. Then the rest: “pl. surg. Saudi?” Plastic surgery in Saudi Arabia?’

‘Yes. The Saudis are very good at plastic surgery, which might seem odd in light of Wahhabism and in a society where women aren’t even allowed to drive. But behind the veil there’s a lot of scope for plastic surgery. Because it’s unofficial it would be very difficult to trace. Hence the question mark.’