Babylon (7 page)

They had worked out a preliminary allocation of tasks and got the investigation under way. When Tell rang Magnus Johansson after the first team meeting, Johansson was stressed and on his way home.

Tell explained that he realised the forensic examination of the scene had been completed, but he had just learnt that Karpov’s neighbour had seen someone peering in through the letterbox. They didn’t yet know whether this sighting matched the time of death, but would it be possible . . . preferably straight away . . .

‘To check the letterbox for prints?’

‘On the inside.’

‘I can ring Berggren and ask her to do it.’

The last fifteen minutes had given them a breakthrough, and if the fingerprints did match someone who already had a record, then they were at least well on the way, if not home and dry. The neighbour who had seen the hooded figure fumbling with the door –
Had that person been trying to get in?
– didn’t see that same individual going into the flat to commit murder, but it was undeniably suspicious behaviour, peering in through someone’s letterbox in the middle of the night. If nothing else, perhaps the person in the hood could provide some information relevant to the case. Had the red-haired woman –
Rebecca
– been wearing a jacket with a hood?

Tell kept on coming back to Rebecca Nykvist. He doodled absent-mindedly on the back of a statement, forming a vague plan in his head before dialling the direct line to Forensics. He got Strömberg’s assistant.

‘He’s told me to tell you he won’t know anything until tomorrow. But hang on a minute . . . Hello? He says the cause of death was probably the bullet wounds in both cases. He can’t identify the weapon yet, but he thinks . . .’

She disappeared again, and Tell could hear Strömberg mumbling in the background.

‘. . . no, no, OK. We don’t know the type of weapon yet. But they probably died around midnight, give or take an hour either way.’

Tell flicked through the notes on the desk in front of him. The first call from Anna-Klara Stenius had come in at 01.58. She said she’d heard
the noise coming from Karpov’s apartment at around one o’clock. That would fit. However, according to von Dewall, the hooded figure had been creeping around in the stairwell at two o’clock or half-past two in the morning, although he hadn’t been absolutely sure of the time. Give or take an hour, Strömberg had said, but what else could have caused the noise?

Outside his office someone switched off a light, and shadows glided across the newly polished floor. Further down the corridor a door opened and closed.

He leant forward and shut down the computer.

11

The woman on the other end of the line had relented after listening to Seja Lundberg’s heart-rending tale. Hadn’t she also once been left in the lurch by a coward whose preferred method of cancelling a much longed-for break was via the answer machine?

‘Perhaps you could come and stay some other time, when it suits you better?’

The woman’s voice was now kind and gentle, perhaps because Seja had managed to inject a faint tremor in her own. But she
was
upset. More about the way he had done it than the fact that their visit to the archipelago had gone down the pan, and what irritated her most was what the situation said about her. She understood perfectly that Christian had a job to do; she just wished she was more absorbed in her own career so that their relationship was on more of an equal footing.

‘I’m just not comfortable being The Girlfriend,’ she said to her friend Hanna when she called her a couple of minutes later. ‘Even if I do like having Christian as my boyfriend.’

‘But you’re happy that he
has
a job, aren’t you?’ Hanna countered. ‘I think you’re making something out of nothing. My blokes are always unemployed and generally useless. I can promise you that’s no picnic either.’

Seja took the phone into the stable with her. The warm straw stank of urine, and needed mucking out.

She didn’t want to ring Christian and end up talking to his bloody answerphone.

As soon as her eyes grew accustomed to the semi-darkness, she spotted a shapeless lump on top of the mousetrap.

‘Shit, there’s another one.’

Hanna made sympathetic noises as Seja picked up the trap between her thumb and forefinger and carried it out into the unforgiving light. Turning her face away she freed the limp, brown body and dropped it into a bank of ferns at the bottom of the garden.

‘What the hell are they doing in the stable when it’s so warm outside?’

‘They prefer to wallow in a manger of oats rather than searching out titbits for themselves.’

Seja was distracted by a fir needle that had found its way in between her bare toes. She stood on one leg and dug it out before going back to sit on the bench by the stable wall.

‘I suppose it’s just pride, really. I mean, I know he has the kind of job that has to take priority. And precisely
because
I know he has a job that has to take priority, I always put him first. And that annoys me. If I were busy too, then at least I could get my revenge by cancelling on him sometimes. I hate the feeling of being at his beck and call. And I hate talking about
priorities
.’

‘I’m sure you’re not at his beck and call. Anyway, what about going out tonight? By way of consolation, plus you’d be cheering me up as well?’

‘What about Markus?’

‘I’m a free woman! Markus is at a sleepover tonight.’

Seja felt much better by the time she hung up, so much so that she rang Christian’s friend Jonas right away to tell him the trip was postponed. But perhaps Jonas and his girlfriend would like to meet up with Seja and Hanna later?

It was rare for Hanna to have a child-free night and Seja always had to think about night buses or make arrangements for the animals if she stayed away overnight. As a result they usually met at Hanna’s house. After Markus had gone to sleep, they would sit and chat while stuffing themselves with over-salted popcorn. And that was fine. But
Seja still liked the opportunity to go into town, particularly as she spent most of her time working and studying at home.

Järntorget had been regenerated so thoroughly that it was difficult to believe it had ever looked any different, that it hadn’t always been an airy cobbled piazza. Sitting outside the old Customs House was a perfect spot to watch the world go by. The perfect place to see people getting on and off buses and trams, waiting for each other, meeting and parting, hurrying past with sunglasses pushed up on top of their heads and their hands full of shopping, or cutting across the square on their way from Majorna and Masthugget towards Vasastaden and the city centre.

As soon as the sun had gone down, the air had lost its mildness and they were sitting wrapped in blankets, chatting about the fact that Järntorget used to be a sprawling roundabout before the tunnel was built.

‘Here’s to the Göta tunnel,’ said Hanna, clinking her glass against Seja’s. ‘But everybody still used to arrange to meet here, in the days before mobiles. See you in Järntorget, we’d say. I remember we used to eat falafels at Grand Burger. After Solrosen and Gillestugan, but before the terminus.’

‘The Red Room? Or that illegal club . . . the French club?’

They laughed at the memory.

‘We’d better stop talking about the past, it’s making me feel ancient,’ said Hanna. ‘These days we’d never cope if we stayed out till five in the morning.’

‘No, but back then we used to sleep all day,’ said Seja.

That phase of Seja’s life had only lasted a year. Before she was forced – or persuaded – to go back into education at the age of nineteen. But if she looked back, it seemed as if the whole of her youth had been spent in dive bars or in illegal clubs where underground bands played. She remembered dragging herself through her apartment from her stuffy room to the toilet. Blinking sleepily at her mother and father as they sat at the kitchen table like beings from another planet.

‘Sometimes I think it’s amazing they didn’t go completely crazy,’ she said to Hanna. ‘I mean, they never told me off. I suppose they had no idea what I got up to at night.’

‘They probably realised there was no point in having a go at you.
My mum and I fought non-stop for ten years. I didn’t take any more notice of her just because she was yelling and screaming.’

They fell silent. Hanna’s mother had taken her own life a few years earlier. Seja didn’t want to make Hanna talk about that if she didn’t want to but, just at that moment, Christian’s former colleague and friend Jonas Palmlöf appeared with his girlfriend Sofia Frisk, weaving their way between the tables.

Seja just had time to explain: ‘These are the friends we were supposed to be going to the archipelago with. I hope it was OK to say they could meet us here?’

Hanna allowed the blanket to slip from her shoulders onto the chair and straightened her back. She was wearing a tight cerise top with a striking pearl necklace nestling in her generous décolletage. She flicked her hair back from her shoulders in a smooth, practised movement. Hanna was almost certainly unaware of it, but Seja noticed that her friend changed as soon as a man approached. Particularly if he was good-looking, like Jonas Palmlöf. As soon as Jonas and Sofia had disappeared in the direction of the bar, Hanna whispered her verdict in Seja’s ear: he was totally gorgeous.

‘Pack it in, you trollop,’ Seja laughed. ‘He’s here with his girlfriend!’

‘So?’ said Hanna, vaguely offended. ‘I’m allowed to say what I think. Do you know how rare it is for me to get out the door without a child in tow? And besides, it’s not often you see such a—’

She stopped as Sofia came towards them with a glass in each hand.

‘I’m just kidding,’ she hissed.

‘Yeah, right.’

This is how it feels, thought Seja, to let go. To lose yourself.

This is how it feels, lying by the water and drying off, while Lukas grazes on birch leaves and whinnies, the sound travelling across the inlet and bouncing off the rock face on the far side.

They had left the Bishop’s Arms and strolled along to Skål, which had got busier and busier as the night went on. Hanna had met an old boyfriend in the bar and was sitting very close to him, their shoulders touching. They were deep in conversation; every time Seja glanced in their direction, Hanna’s head was leaning even closer to the man’s.

Jonas had come with them to the Vasastan area of the city after Sofia
had taken her leave. Seja liked how easy-going he was, even if he had had a little too much to drink by this stage.

He returned to a conversation they had had earlier in the evening. They had been talking about work, about priorities in general, and about the abruptly postponed mini-break in particular. When Seja explained what had happened, and told him how upset she had been, Jonas didn’t seem that surprised.

‘I don’t think you necessarily have to buy into the idea that the job takes up all your time. I mean, it’s true that if you’re in the CID you have to be a bit flexible with your working hours, and of course there are emergencies from time to time, and so on. But these things also come down to your personality and how you handle things. There’s always back-up. Nobody’s expected to work non-stop.’

He took a swig of his beer, aware that Seja was waiting for him to go on. ‘Christian is a friend of mine, as you know. But Christian is – to put it diplomatically – a complete control freak. He’s never really happy until everyone else is being as obsessive as he is.’

‘That wasn’t tremendously diplomatic.’

‘Believe me, it was.’ He laughed gleefully. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy.’ He thumped his breast pocket dramatically, just over his heart, a macho gesture which almost made Seja blush. ‘He’s one of the most morally upright people I know. He’d take a bullet for anybody. Well, perhaps not for anybody, but for a colleague, a friend. What I mean is, I think maybe he just can’t understand that other people might want something different out of life. It might be that he demands way too much from everybody else. But he allows himself even fewer concessions. You know, I actually think . . .’

He banged his glass down on the table. A girl smiled and raised her eyebrows as she walked past. Jonas waved theatrically. ‘I think Christian is harder on himself than anyone else I know. It’ll finish him off one of these days.’

Seja didn’t know how to respond to that. The Christian Jonas was talking about didn’t sound like the Christian she knew.

‘I don’t really know,’ she said eventually. ‘I don’t see him as a police officer when he’s with me. I see a completely different side of him.’

‘Rubbish!’ shouted Jonas.

Seja gave what sounded even to her like a slightly strangled
laugh. ‘What do you mean, rubbish? What do you know about our relationship?’

The light from above was reflected in his eyes, making them glint.

‘You do
not
see a different side of him. There is no other side to Christian Tell. That’s what I mean!’

Seja leant forward, her expression challenging as she met his gaze. ‘What do you want me to say to that?’

‘I’m just telling it like it is. Someone needs to save Christian from himself.’

‘If I’m to believe what you say, it sounds as though it would be a better idea to dump him straight away.’

‘Well, if you get fed up,
you’ll
have to dump
him
. Because he’ll never leave you. Do you understand? Deep down, he’s incredibly loyal. He might mess everything up, he might
act
in a way that makes you think he’s leaving you, but . . . He’ll hang onto you like a bloody lifebuoy.’

He fell silent. Seja didn’t speak either. She felt surprisingly embarrassed. A bell rang behind the bar. Last orders.

‘Hang in there. He really needs you.’

Seja groaned and covered her face with her hands. ‘Enough, Jonas. You really are embarrassing me!’

Jonas grinned as he suddenly realised how soppy he’d been sounding. He took Seja’s hand and shook it vigorously.

‘Does it embarrass you to be told that you’re an exciting and very beautiful woman, Seja? I thought you knew that! Hello! Earth to Seja! The old sod’s been very lucky, and he knows it.’