Watching You(8)

Deer turned slowly back to face him. Her face was no longer streaked. ‘And then there’s the whole fifteen thing,’ she said. ‘Ellen was fifteen years and one month old when she disappeared. Which means it wouldn’t be sexual assault of a child – not technically paedophilia, in other words, as long as they’re not related. Which they’re not. We have at least managed to discount the Savinger family. That’s something we’ve achieved, anyway.’

‘Perhaps we could try thinking of it as an alternative hypothesis. That there could be other motives besides the two obvious ones, a ransom – which he hasn’t demanded – or paedophilia.’

‘Maybe,’ Deer conceded.

As Berger started to gather his things together from the next desk, Deer’s phone rang. She didn’t say much, and the conversation was over in twenty seconds.

‘Forensics have finished with the house,’ she reported. ‘No fingerprints, no traces of DNA apart from the blood. Disgustingly clean, according to Robin.’

‘Scrubbed clean,’ Berger nodded. ‘Shouldn’t you be home with your family now?’

‘Johnny and Lykke are at the cinema with Grandma. I’m out on licence. Beer?’

‘Tempting,’ Berger said. ‘But I actually had a couple of small jobs in mind.’

‘For me, presumably,’ Deer said with a wry smile. ‘While Supercop Sam Berger heads off on yet another dodgy internet date.’

Berger snorted. He wasn’t sure if it was a laugh. ‘There’s been one,’ he said. ‘Just one. A first stumbling step. And yes, it was a bit dodgy.’

‘What was it Madame X wanted to do, again?’

‘You just want to make me say it out loud.’

‘Oddly enough, it just gets funnier every time you say it.’

Berger tried not to smile and shook his head as he pulled his rucksack closed over the bulky files. Then he looked up at Deer not even a hint of a smile on his face.

‘You were the first person into that cell in the basement. How much blood would you say there was?’

Deer’s smile faded.

‘A lot,’ she said. ‘Back at the house I said I thought Ellen was alive. But I don’t know if I was just trying to console you, console both of us.’

‘An educated guess, then?’

‘I don’t know. Two litres?’

‘According to the pathologist’s preliminary evaluation, it was no more than three decilitres. First: a bit of homework. What would be the point of pumping Ellen Savinger full of blood thinners?’

Deer nodded, with a frown.

‘And my second job?’

‘You can do that one right now. Which hospital is Ekman in?’

‘Ekman?’

‘It would be useful to have a first name as well.’





6




Sunday 25 October, 21.54

Berger walked through the rain, all the way from S?dermalm Hospital. It was strangely restorative, as if the walk were rinsing all the crap away. The grim darkness of the autumn night competed with the weakly illuminated softness of S?dermalm, and somewhere in the tension between them was where the act of cleansing happened. As he took the last few steps over the brow of the hill on Bondegatan and turned into Ploggatan, it really did feel like he’d been given an opportunity to start again.

It didn’t feel anything like the way it usually did when he tumbled into the lift and was carried up four floors. Not the way it had recently. For over two years. Could that really be called recently?

As always, the front door announced that Lindstr?m & Berger lived there. The fact that it still said that wasn’t because of inertia, but because it would have felt even more hopeless to walk in through a doorway bearing the name Berger alone. So it was still there; he told himself it was an active choice.

He stepped into the valley of the shadow of death. He stopped on the hall mat with his whole body dripping. He could feel water trickling down his face, neck, ears, scurrying downward. It was like his whole body was weeping.

The damp chill had time to eat its way into him before he made his way to the bathroom. He pulled off his wet clothes and dropped them in the bath. Even his underpants were wet, and he was left standing naked in front of the mirror, towelling himself off.

Then he caught sight of himself in the mirror. That stopped him smiling. It made the silence of the flat echo extra loudly, a flat that had once received complaints from neighbours trying to sleep.

After picking up the post and his rucksack from the hall floor and grabbing a pair of underpants, he took another look at himself; it seemed somehow inevitable. This time, in the gloom of the hall, the sight was forgiving enough for him to feel like lingering on it. That was a delusion he always regretted. The full-length mirror in the hall showed a dishevelled, brown-haired character with a bit of stubble and traces of grey in both beard and hair. No baldness yet, though, thankfully. Apart from a slight protuberance than was the beginning of a pot belly, possibly even a beer gut, the tall, hairless, nearly forty-year-old male body looked relatively intact, with one exception. And that was only visible on closer inspection. There was a depression in his upper left arm, and when he ran his fingers over the edges of the five-centimetre-wide crater, the skin was just as insensitive to touch as usual. A dead patch on his body. Untouchable.