Babylon (11 page)

‘You don’t have to respond to this, Rebecca.’

Viktoria Ekholm made a point of turning away from Beckman. ‘It’s not a question, it’s an assertion which, furthermore, has no relevance to the crime of which you are currently suspected.’

‘If your client is guilty of the crime of which she is suspected, there is in fact a great deal of common ground with the previous crime,’ said Beckman. ‘I am merely trying to understand how it all came about.’

‘So far my client is a suspect for reasons I have yet to hear you explain. I think it would be best to use those as your starting point.’

‘OK. One,’ Beckman started to count on the fingers of her left hand. ‘You said yourself that on the night when Ann-Marie Karpov and your partner Henrik Samuelsson were murdered you’d just found out that he’d been having an affair. You also found out that it had been going on for some time, behind your back, and that several other people knew about it.’

‘I don’t see the relevance of that.’

‘Two. You were seen by a witness at the location where the murder took place; you were creeping around and trying to enter the building.’

‘Stop!’ Viktoria Ekholm’s cheeks flushed. ‘The witness saw a woman with red hair. My client is not the only woman in the world with red hair.’

Beckman was secretly impressed by the way Ekholm had assimilated every detail of the case so quickly. She raised her voice. ‘Three. Whether the red-head seen behaving suspiciously in the courtyard was you or not is irrelevant. We found your fingerprints on the inside of Ann-Marie Karpov’s letterbox. We know you were inside the apartment block. You were wearing a dark hooded top and you pushed open the letterbox. You were definitely at the scene. So why did you lie about it?’

Rebecca closed her eyes and joined her hands in her lap. Beckman didn’t think she was praying; Rebecca didn’t look the sort to rely on others, not even a higher power. But maybe she
was
praying; appearances could be deceptive.

Ekholm sat there in uncomfortable silence. This was a question her client couldn’t dodge.

Rebecca looked up at the ceiling. ‘I was there. I was there for the reason you think.’

‘When?’

‘At about two o’clock, maybe a bit later. I’d found out that . . . I didn’t go there to kill them, I just wanted . . . I don’t know.’

Her face crumpled, but tears didn’t come. Beckman waited, then pushed a couple of packets of tissues across the table. Rebecca didn’t touch them.

‘Well, what did you want to do?’

‘I suppose I wanted to confront them.’

‘And?

‘I didn’t murder them!’

‘You looked through the letterbox. If the time you have stated is correct, and you’re not lying about anything else, then you must have seen Ann-Marie Karpov lying just inside the door, as her neighbour did in the morning. So why didn’t you call the police?’

‘No!’ Rebecca shouted. ‘I didn’t see a thing, it was the middle of the night. It was pitch black in the hallway. I thought . . . I went back home. What could I do? What else could I do?’

‘You just went home? Did anyone see you? Did you speak to anyone?’

She shrugged helplessly. ‘No. I don’t know, I cycled through the park, through Slottsskogen. As I said, it was the middle of the night.’

‘And when you got home?’

‘I drank more wine. Eventually I fell asleep.’

Rebecca began to wail. Beckman grabbed hold of her upper arm. ‘Rebecca.’

The shock brought Rebecca back to her senses. She tore her arm free and buried her face in her hands. Her breathing became a series of long drawn-out sobs.

To Beckman’s surprise, she felt a sudden surge of sympathy. ‘Rebecca.’

‘My client needs a break.’

Beckman switched off the tape with a sense of relief. She too needed some air. Those dry sobs were hard to bear.

16

The house in question turned out to be a terraced house with a red front door and Samuelsson–Nykvist on the letterbox. That fitted. Preparation was the key; the difference between a job well done and a job botched. Between success and a cock-up. Torsen would have sold his mother for the cash this job could bring in. And it would put an old ghost to rest. Knud’s ghost.

Knud had been clean for many years. He’d sorted his life out. Got a job in a museum. None of the new lot even knew who he was. And it was far more about who you knew than what you knew in this business. Knud should have understood that himself. In this situation, the fact that they’d spent a short time together inside meant nothing. OK, they’d got on well and done a few things together afterwards. Before Knud decided to stick to the straight and narrow. It was all so long ago.

Torsen could write a fucking book about everything that had happened since then. He still carried the marks of it; marks on his skin and marks deep inside. It was stupid of Knud to think he could ring up after years of silence, just like that – ‘A little job for me, for old times’ sake’ – coldly counting on Torsen’s help.

Knud had hardly any contacts left. What he did have was attitude. It shone through his mates-from-the-old-days chat. As if he had just touched a pile of shit, Knud had discreetly wiped his hand on his trousers after shaking Torsen’s hand.

What bothered Torsen was the companion Knud had forced on him. Young, moody, annoying. He had a crazed look in his eyes, as if he was on something. He was off-hand and way too mouthy.

‘Just like you in the old days,’ Knud had said, but that was bullshit.

Before his body let him down and the bigger jobs dried up, Torsen had always known how important it was to cover your tracks.

‘Fucking idiot,’ he hissed as the lad blundered inside, running a
hand through his spiky hair. Shedding two or three hairs on the carpet, no doubt.

Torsen swayed in the doorway as he pulled on his gloves. He wasn’t a hundred per cent today, definitely not. But so far, the job seemed straightforward. In and out. There was no one home. They’d parked the car a few streets away. They knew what they were looking for. They wouldn’t have the usual hassle of several journeys to the car.

The lad was a risk. But he hadn’t a clue what was going on, beyond the fact that he would get a few thousand for a quick job. He knew they were in a house in Sweden where some guy had hidden a number of items Knud wanted to get his hands on. And Knud had been very specific: Don’t touch anything else. Don’t waste time on mobile phones or any of that crap. Get in, pick up the stuff, get out.

Torsen felt slightly better. He resisted the urge to give the lad a slap. The more methodically they went to work, the quicker they would find what they had come for.

Then he would need a fix. And a lie down.

‘I’ll take the attic. You take the cellar.’

‘Aye aye.’

Aye aye. Still, he was in no state to do the job on his own. It was age, it was the dope, it was the other thing clawing at his body. Of course he could go to the doctor about the other thing, but he’d never liked doctors. Doctors did tests and discovered things that didn’t belong in the human body. He had a feeling that he was beyond the point of no return. It was only a matter of time until he had done his last job, conned his last punter. In some strange way, he was almost relieved.

The attic was a dusty hellhole. His body ached even though he’d taken his pills. The boy should have been the one crawling around up here, but Torsen couldn’t trust him to be thorough.

If he had wanted to hide something important, would he have chosen the attic? Perhaps in the alcoves below the sloping roof, behind boxes of junk. Or in the utility room, behind the tumble drier. Maybe under the fridge. No, not under the fridge, that was too much of a cliché. In the air-con system. Or stitched inside a piece of furniture. No, they would slice open every single thing in the house.

Torsen didn’t know why he lost control. It might have been his bitterness at being saddled with a twenty-two-year-old. Or the fact that he was beginning to think Knud had got it wrong, that they were
wasting their time searching every nook and cranny of the house. Or it might have been his treacherous body, the fact that he lacked that extra bit of strength. But, whatever the cause, he abandoned his systematic approach and fell into a desperate frenzy, smashing open the stud wall and hurling the contents of the wardrobe onto the floor.

When he finally found what he was looking for, it was only one item, hidden in a box behind the books on a shelf in the bedroom. A clay figure. He weighed it in his hand.

His rage subsiding, he searched the attic and upstairs one more time. Went through the kitchen and the living room again, the hallway and the downstairs bedroom. The cellar this time. In his peripheral vision he could see that the lad was a little calmer, as if his own carelessness had been subdued by seeing someone else who was equally reckless – or perhaps he was just afraid. Torsen was having an attack of the shakes and he felt as if he was using up the last of his strength. When they finally came to a standstill, it looked as though a hurricane had passed through the house. There was a pervasive smell of desperation secreted through their skin. They had been in there for hours.

As a car backed onto the drive next door and the outside lights came on, Torsen’s bloodshot eyes met the lad’s suspicious gaze. He thought:
Got to keep the lad quiet, he won’t like the idea that we’ve been conned, he’s already getting ideas
. They wordlessly established that the job was over. It was time to go.

17

Istanbul, September 2007

The area between the Hagia Sophia and Sultan Ahmed Camii could have offered coolness and shade, with its fountain and neatly clipped trees. But all the spots in the shade had been taken. Henrik had at least managed to find a vacant place among the hundred square, backless benches in front of the Blue Mosque. He sat down to rest his aching
feet, grimacing with pain as he pulled off his Converse trainers to expose the burst, fleshy blisters on his heels. It was the heat that made the body vulnerable. His feet weren’t the only part suffering. For the first two days his stomach had been unsettled – along with some of the others, he had found it difficult to adjust to the strongly flavoured food and the sweet Turkish wine. They had been constantly on the lookout for the nearest public toilet, joking amongst themselves:
Here we go again
.

He put on the leather sandals which he had just bought from a street trader. They were well made and looked good, although they did press slightly on his big toe when he slipped them on his feet – if it wasn’t one thing, it was another. But they were still his best bet; the heels of the trainers were stiff with dried blood. He perched them on top of an overflowing bin, and immediately a boy appeared from nowhere and grabbed them, clutching them defiantly to his stomach as he disappeared into the crowd.

The trader, whose goods were spread out on a blanket in front of him, spun around as if he had eyes in the back of his head. He gesticulated wildly, shouting at the boy.

‘It’s OK,’ Henrik said. ‘I’d thrown them away.’

He took his water bottle out of his shoulder bag, in case it was dehydration that was making everything flicker in front of his eyes. He had learnt to drink water with his raki now; in the beginning he had refused.
As it comes
, he had said the first evening; he never drank water with red wine, nor put ice in his whisky. The waiters had smiled condescendingly. No doubt they knew all about the iron band that would slowly tighten around his head in a few hours’ time.

It was the worst hangover Henrik had ever endured. The only thing that helped was a quick hair of the dog in the hotel lobby before the others came down. He consoled himself with the thought that he was on holiday; he was usually much more careful when it came to spirits.

Henrik emptied the bottle thirstily. A young woman immediately appeared by his side. She was strikingly beautiful, dressed in a sequinned shawl that dazzled when it caught the sun. She was holding out bottles of water in different sizes. He didn’t even need to get up; he simply picked a couple of coins out of his wallet.

‘You American?’

The usual polite phrases to butter him up, giving the impression that she actually cared who he was and where he came from.

‘No, no, absolutely not. I’m from Sweden. A town called Göteborg, Gothenburg.’

As soon as he had paid, she lost interest in him. He watched her disappear into the crowd, her thin body stooped under the weight of the water. Anyone could disappear into that throng and never be seen again.

He gazed over towards Alemdar Caddesi, looking for Ann-Marie; if she finished early at the museum she would come that way. He couldn’t see her sky-blue suit anywhere. His stomach somersaulted at the thought of her.

Henrik knew that if he went to look for her at the Museum of Archaeology, he would find the upstanding, learned professional who had been the object of his admiration for so long. He felt a tremor of doubt: perhaps he had imagined the moments they had shared.

He pushed his doubt aside. The nights had been real, they had belonged to them.

Their days were spent as a group. Annelie fell in love with the old, handwritten books and the objects made of stone, wood, metal and ceramics, in particular the hand-woven kelims. They were determined to take home some examples of Turkish handicrafts. Even though Henrik wasn’t exactly a fan of shopping, he had gone with them to the Egyptian market and had been amazed by the array of goods on offer. He had pottered among mounds of piled-up herbs and spices, but then he reached his limit. When the others went on to the Grand Bazaar, he had returned to the Archaeological Museum on his own. He loved its collections and the building that housed them. He wandered through the echoing exhibition halls more or less alone, gazing at the three-thousand-year-old remains of buildings and Roman sarcophagi. He spent hours sitting in the inner courtyard, enjoying being surrounded by ancient Greek columns and statues. The feel of the museum particularly appealed to him. In contrast to its Swedish equivalent, the institution seemed completely lacking in educational aims. There was no sense of curation; the artefacts were displayed in no particular order and only occasionally had the sparse lines of text been translated from Turkish.