Watching You(87)

‘The Gulf War?’ Berger asked, staring at the picture of the now moustachioed and very blond officer in front of his men.

‘Yes,’ Blom said. ‘This picture’s from ’91. If they’ve got the rank right, he’s a colonel.’

‘Brought in by Saddam Hussein?’

‘Looks that way. And this colonel showed up two years later to collect his son from Sweden.’

‘You’re actually saying son?’

‘Hang on,’ Blom said, clicking through the pictures. Nils Gundersen kept on getting younger. In the first picture he was standing in a mountainous landscape, had a full beard and was leaning against a bazooka.

‘Afghanistan?’ Berger said.

‘The Mujahedin,’ Blom said. ‘It looks like Gundersen had links with the CIA and trained Mujahedin fighters in the eighties. The Soviet Union’s last war.’

‘Hmm,’ Berger said.

The slideshow went on. Nils Gundersen as a stylish young officer with the Norwegian flag neatly sewn onto his breast pocket. As a high-school student with a sparkling smile. As a rosy-cheeked adolescent on skis. In one yellowed black-and-white photograph he was sitting in a sandpit throwing sand. And he was in his mother’s arms on a sturdy armchair. Behind the chair stood a man.

‘This is the only known photograph of Gundersen’s father,’ Blom said, and began to zoom in on the man’s face. ‘Genetic traits often skip a generation.’

Eventually Berger could see that the man’s chin was crooked, and there was a bony protrusion on one side of his forehead.

William Larsson’s grandfather had a very angular, misshapen face. It bore a strong resemblance to a cubist sculpture.





34




Thursday 29 October, 16.12

That afternoon the hedgehogs went into hibernation. The whole family withdrew to the far corner of the boathouse. It was apparent that the mother had constructed a winter abode for them. She wandered over towards the unhappy figures by the whiteboard, as if to say: Goodnight, we’re off for the winter, into the infinite world of dreams, so much better than your world.

Then she went back and settled down with her little ones.

One of the unhappy figures by the whiteboard was half undressed. The second was touching the first one’s arm.

‘You can see teeth marks,’ Molly Blom said.

‘I know,’ Berger said. ‘They don’t seem to want to fade.’

As he pulled his top back on, Blom turned round and attached another photograph to the board. Beside the picture of the fifteen-year-old William Larsson there was now a new snap of Anton Bergmark. The facial deformities were amazingly similar.

‘A precision job,’ Berger said.

Blom stood next to him, looking at the two pictures. Eventually she said: ‘If we assume that William managed to leave Sweden with the help of his father, a blond mercenary active in the Arab world, then we can probably assume that was where he underwent pretty comprehensive plastic surgery. That would have been 1993, the Lebanese Civil War had ended a few years before and the Gulf War was over. In those slightly more peaceful times, maybe Nils Gundersen finally found out he had a son, and discovered the sort of life he was living. He heard about the bullying, decided to rescue his son and took him back to his own world, a secret world below the radar. Off in the badlands.’

‘But wouldn’t Gundersen have needed some sort of help in Sweden?’ Berger said. ‘I mean, he was an internationally wanted war criminal. It can’t have been that easy to remove an injured and highly conspicuous sixteen-year-old from Sweden to Lebanon without anyone noticing.’

‘He probably had contacts in Sweden from his visit here in ’76, when William was conceived.’

Berger walked closer to the board and looked carefully at the picture of the young William Larsson.

‘Gundersen was a fighter,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t the sort of man who turned the other cheek. I think we can assume that he didn’t exactly preach the value of forgiveness.’

Blom nodded.

‘A man schooled in torture and violence,’ she said. ‘And some twenty years later the son returns, after plastic surgery and military training, and embarks on his revenge with a decisive blow against the worst of the bullies, Anton Bergmark. William tortures him with a hammer for two crazed, nightmarish days, transforming him into a person who no longer exists except in his own head. And even this crime is disguised, to make it look like a different sort of attack. But then he stops attacking the guilty and goes after innocent girls. Why?’

‘We’re outside the realm of logic,’ Berger said. ‘He isn’t interested in taking out his revenge on grown women. It was fifteen-year-old girls who witnessed his humiliation. That’s what stayed with him, and maybe made him completely incapable of interacting normally with women. They’re the ones who have to be wiped out. I agree that when it comes down to it, he’s basically a psychopath His mass-murdering father may have taught him how to give his actions a rational and professional veneer, but William’s motives are genuinely sick. If a man gets in the way, like Simon Lundberg in the cave, he just gets rid of him. It’s the girls that interest him.’

‘Seven layers of blood in the cellar in M?rsta,’ Blom said. ‘He tortured all of them. And thanks to Anton we know William has both the ability and detachment to carry it out. He spent two whole days with him.’