Watching You(85)

33




Thursday 29 October, 14.54

Berger and Blom stared at the deformed face. It stared back, dark, sceptical, dismissive. Berger felt his insides lurch.

‘William?’ he said, and didn’t recognise his own voice.

He saw Blom out of the corner of his eye. He could see that she was shaking.

To her very core.

The figure in the wheelchair didn’t reply. He just sat still and stared at Berger, completely blank. A trickle of saliva slowly ran down his chin.

Had they been utterly wrong?

Had both Berger and Blom allowed themselves to be deceived by their damaged childhoods? Had they thrown away their careers on a whim?

Were they back to square one?

Traces of rationality returned to Berger. Was this really William? And why would he be sitting here, tucked away in a care home under the name of his former tormentor, Anton Bergmark?

There were signs of age, lines, wrinkles, redness to indicate the passage of years. But the swellings and lumps, all the jagged angles, were in the same places as twenty-two years ago.

In exactly the same places.

Blom came to her senses first. She looked at the nurse. ‘Can you fetch all the documentation you have about Anton?’

The nurse nodded and went away.

It wasn’t William Larsson’s gaze. If it was, it was utterly wrecked. The eyes were watery, absent.

‘Are you William Larsson?’ Berger asked with exaggerated clarity.

The watery gaze rose through the cratered landscape of the face and latched onto him. Berger looked back, but didn’t know what he was seeing.

‘Hello, Sam,’ the figure said, and produced a crooked smile. When the left corner of the mouth turned upward a string of saliva dribbled from the right side.

Berger turned towards Blom. He had been recognised. The question was: what did that mean? He saw that Blom had stopped shaking. She was already deep in thought. What did it mean, if William Larsson had never left the country? Who was behind the kidnappings if William’s deformities had finally reached his brain and left him pretty much a vegetable? How had he come to assume Anton Bergmark’s identity? Blom’s shaking had been replaced by whirring. Berger could see her mind whirring – as clearly as if it were his own.

‘Hello, William,’ he asked. ‘How are you?’

The figure produced a hiss that was probably intended to be a laugh.

‘How are you, Sam?’ the figure said. ‘How’s your arm?’

Berger’s right hand instinctively reached for his left arm. Even through the fabric of his jacket he could clearly feel the indentation in his bicep.

‘You bit me,’ he said. ‘You bit me badly.’

Now the figure just stared at him, and somewhere in the midst of that stare his consciousness seemed to fade. The look in his eyes was no longer clear. It was somewhere else.

The nurse appeared with a bundle of medical notes. ‘There’s a police report here as well, from the Sollentuna Police. That’s in the bottom file.’

She handed the two files to Blom and left them. They took one each, went to the other end of the day room and read them standing up. After an indeterminate amount of time they swapped. When Berger was finished with the second file he looked over at Blom. Her eyes were closed.

In the end Berger said. ‘Fucking hell.’

‘We were wrong,’ Blom said. ‘But not as wrong as we thought.’

‘Less wrong than we feared,’ Berger said, and felt himself smiling wryly.

‘Aisha Pachachi wasn’t William’s first victim,’ Blom said. ‘Anton Bergmark was.’

Berger nodded and cleared his throat.

‘Let me try to summarise what we just read,’ he said. ‘One winter’s evening in February almost three years ago the recently divorced Anton Bergmark was sitting at home in his villa in H?ggvik in Sollentuna, drinking. Someone came to the door, and all the evidence suggests that he let the visitor in voluntarily. The marks on his wrists and ankles, as well as on the legs of the dining table in the living room, indicate that Anton was strapped to the table, lying on his back. Further marks suggest that some sort of vice was attached to one end of the table, holding Anton’s head in place before the assault began. According to the medical report, the assault was carried out using four different hammers, all different sizes. The grotesque torture went on for almost two days. Somewhere during the process Anton Bergmark literally lost his mind. He was declared very obviously unfit to work, and was granted early retirement six months later. Because Bergmark had done business with numerous criminal gangs, the assault was assumed to be connected with unpaid debts. The investigation focused exclusively on those groups, and in the absence of evidence, ran out of steam. The Sollentuna Police managed to keep it fairly quiet; the media barely mentioned the case and no pictures of Bergmark were ever published following the assault. There was no one who could draw any connection between William’s face twenty years before and Anton’s face today.’

Blom grimaced and nodded.

‘A reversal of roles,’ she said after a pause.

Berger summarised: ‘William smashed up Anton’s face in order to make it look like his own, the way it looked when he was being bullied; he probably doesn’t look like that now. The determination, precision and emotional detachment required to use a vice and four hammers to turn Anton into William means that we need to re-evaluate William. He’s a bloody professional. How can he be such a pro?’