Watching You(76)

After a couple of hours a crooked smile spread across Berger’s face, and he snatched up Blom’s untraceable mobile phone and went out onto the jetty.

During the relatively long call Blom printed pictures of Sunisa Phetwiset and Emma Brandt, the two potential new victims. She went over to the whiteboard and put them up next to the older pictures. There were now seven of them, and as she looked at the row of young faces – all victims of an insane serial killer who had tried to murder her nearly a quarter of a century ago – she felt not only revulsion and a terrible sorrow, but something else. A vague insight that quickly evaporated.

But she had seen something.

Something in the seven faces. And now it was gone.

Berger came in from the jetty, held the phone up and said, unnecessarily cheerfully: ‘Tomorrow we’re going to Kristinehamn.’

‘That’s, what, three hundred kilometres away?’

‘Only 250. Just think, you cycled all that way once upon a time.’

He was expecting a very sharp glare. But she merely said: ‘Tell me.’

‘Jonna Eriksson went missing together with her boyfriend, Simon Lundberg, on 12 February this year from her foster home in Kristinehamn. The newly established Bergslagen Police Authority conducted a large number of interviews with past and present foster parents, friends, teachers, you name it. They didn’t come up with anything of note, except that Jonna and Simon often ran away from their respective foster homes together. No one was particularly interested in them. But there was a significant date marked in their files – when Jonna’s best friend Sandra was due to come home after a long stay in Australia. That date has just passed. She’s home now. And she had quite a bit to say.’

‘Worth a round trip of five hundred kilometres?’

‘I think so. Sandra knows of a secret place in the V?rmland forests where Jonna and Simon could have gone to hide away from the world. No one else knows about it. And no one contacted Sandra when she was travelling through the Australian outback.’

Blom nodded and gave a brief smile. It was a remarkable smile.

Then she stood up and went over to the whiteboard. She looked at the faces once more. They were almost all smiling.

Aisha Pachachi, Nefel Berwari, Julia Almstr?m, Sunisa Phetwiset, Jonna Eriksson, Emma Brandt and Ellen Savinger.

‘I was standing here a little while ago, and I had some sort of revelation. It’s gone now, but I’m seeing something. When did William rent the house in M?rsta, in the name of Erik Johansson?’

‘Over two years ago,’ Berger said, watching her intently. ‘From March, two and a half years ago. The owners live in Argentina.’

‘March,’ Blom said. ‘And he kidnaps the first victim, Aisha, at the end of the school year on 7 June. He obviously took her to the house in M?rsta. The wall. Why were the mooring rings so deeply embedded? I haven’t been inside the house, of course. But that whole business of the labyrinth in the basement: is that his work?’

‘Don’t know,’ Berger said. ‘It seems crazy enough.’

Molly Blom scratched her head hard, as if she were trying to wake her brain cells up. Then she said: ‘He’s taken seven girls in two and a half years, if our hypothesis is correct. The M?rsta house is the only crime scene we’ve got. Has he had seven similarly elaborate buildings at his disposal? Where he could calmly take his time constructing his torture clock? There can’t be that many, surely? Wouldn’t it be logical for there to be just one clock, one crime scene? Where he took all the girls?’

‘OK,’ Berger said. ‘You mean the M?rsta house was the headquarters? That Ellen wasn’t the first girl held there? Even though only her DNA was found?’

‘How about this,’ Blom said, with the light of revelation shining in her eyes. ‘For each girl he tortured, he added a new layer of wall. Which works because the mooring rings are ten centimetres in diameter. In the end there can’t have been much left of the rings. He’s walled up all the DNA evidence.’

Berger felt his churning thoughts contort his face.

‘Shit, we have to go to M?rsta tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I was hoping we’d get to Kristinehamn.’

‘Tomorrow?’ Blom said, pulling on her tracksuit top.





30




Thursday 29 October, 00.01

Berger pressed his back against the wooden planks. They were really so rotten they felt soft. He looked over at the remains of the next building. Blom was crouched there in the darkness; he couldn’t see her, just saw the play of her torch on the grass. Up among the aspen trees there were no leaves left, no rustling to perforate the night.

And it wasn’t raining.

He cast a glance at his watch. Behind the almost condensation-free glass the hands were pointing at midnight.

They were entering the ghosting hour.

Blom was suddenly gone. When he looked up from his watch she wasn’t there. His torch swept the grass, the trees, the rotting walls of the ruined outbuilding, a small, half-collapsed door in its facade.

Then the door was thrown open. The interior was illuminated, the light shining straight through to the road behind.

Blom appeared in the opening. She waved him towards her. He went over. He saw that the wall opposite was completely open, as in a garage. Her finger pointed into the beam of light, at the clay that acted as a floor. There were clear, relatively fresh, tyre marks.