Marked for Life (19 page)

“Do you know what he might have been doing here?”

“No, I don't. No idea.”

“Do you know if he met anyone?”

“You mean like a relationship?”

“No, I don't mean anything. I'm just trying to find out what he was doing here. So you don't know if he was acquainted with someone employed here?”

“No, but of course it's possible.”

“In Hans Juhlén's computer we found ten different combinations with numbers and letters. They look roughly like this.” Henrik pointed at the door and then pulled out the list from his pocket. “Can you tell me what these mean?”

Rainer took the list and pushed his spectacles up to the root of his nose.

“Yes, they are numbers for containers. That's how we identify them.”

* * *

Jana Berzelius thoroughly wiped Thomas Rydberg's cell with a cloth and some degreasing cleaner and then put it inside a 3-liter freezer bag that she placed on the table. She worried about how she could get rid of the phone. Her first thought was to burn it. But where? In the flat it would set off the fire alarm, and even if she took the battery out, it would probably smell of smoke and burned plastic out in the hallway and stairwell. Another idea was to throw it into the Motala Ström River and let it sink to the bottom. That seemed to be the best alternative, she thought. She must throw it in from a place where she couldn't be seen. She thought about places where you could access the river, but none of them were suitable and deserted.

She decided to go out and check for herself if there was a hidden place next to the river.

She put the bag with the cell in her handbag and left the apartment.

* * *

Gunnar Öhrn and Henrik Levin sat in the dock office and eagerly watched as Rainer Gustavsson typed at his computer. They had left the container depot in a hurry.

“Okay, shoot!” said Rainer, his reddish eyebrows rose above his glasses and his brow became furrowed.

Henrik unfolded the sheet of paper in front of him and read out the first combination on the list.

“VPXO.”

“And then?”

“410009.”

Rainer punched the keyboard.

There was a slight buzzing sound as the computer searched the web-based international register of shipping containers. It barely took one minute but for Henrik it felt like an eternity.

“Ah, right. This container is no longer in the system. It must have been scrapped. Shall we check the next one?” said Rainer.

Henrik was squirming on his chair.

“CPCU106130,” he read out.

Rainer entered that.

“Nope, that's not there either. Next one?”

“BXCU820339,” Henrik read out.

“No, the system says that it isn't in use. They've probably all been scrapped.”

Henrik felt a stab of dejection. A moment ago they had a decisive lead in their hands, and now they were again back at square one.

Gunnar rubbed his nose in evident irritation.

“Can you see where the containers came from?” he asked.

“We can look here. This one came from Chile. I'll see where the other two...yes, they were from Chile too,” said Rainer.

“Who scraps them?” said Gunnar.

“The company that owns the container. In this case it's Sea and Air Logistics, SAL.”

“Can you check where the other containers came from? And who owns them?”

Henrik put the list down on the table. Rainer entered the fourth combination and made a note. The same with the fifth. And the sixth.

When the tenth and final combination had been checked, the pattern was clear.

All the containers came from Chile.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO

“STOP!” THE WOMAN SHOUTED.

“Now?” wondered the man who was driving.

“Yes, now! Stop!” she shouted out again.

“But we've got a long way left. This isn't where...” said the man.

“Shut up.” The woman cut him off. “I'm going to do it, and I decide where. Not you and not him.”

The man braked and the van came to a halt.

The girl immediately understood that something was wrong. Hades reacted too and straightened his back.

The woman glared at the girl.

“Give me the knife!”

The girl obeyed her immediately and handed it over.

“And the gun. Give it to me!”

Hades looked at her when he handed the gun over. The woman grabbed it from his hand and checked the magazine.

It was empty.

“You weren't meant to shoot,” said the woman with a hard voice.

Hades lowered his head.

The woman opened a box in the corner of the driver's cab and pulled out a full magazine which she loaded the gun with. Then she pulled the firing mechanism as far back as she could, let go and pointed the weapon at the girl.

“Out,” she said.

They stepped out of the car and into the forest. The silence was like a lid. The late night was just turning into day and the first rays of the sun were appearing between the fir trees. The woman pushed her along with the gun pressing against her back. Hades went first. He was hanging his head as if he had done something wrong and was ashamed.

The path they were walking along was narrow. Now and then she stumbled on the roots which stuck up from the soft ground. The branches scratched her arms and wet the thin cotton of her sweater. The further they went into the forest, the weaker became the headlights from the van.

One hundred and fifty-two steps, she counted silently and continued counting as they approached a dip in the terrain.

The dense forest opened up in front of them.

“Keep on walking!” said the woman and pushed the weapon hard between her shoulders. “Move on!”

They went down into the dip using their hands to push away thick branches.

“Stop there!” said the woman and took a firm grip on her arm.

She pushed the girl toward Hades and put them next to each other. She gave them a last glance before walking round them and disappearing behind them.

“You thought you were immortal, didn't you?” she said.

She hissed the words.

“You couldn't have been more wrong. You are nothing, just so you know. You are completely worthless little insects that nobody wants! Nobody wants anything to do with you! Do you hear me? Not even Papa cares about you. He needed you to kill, nothing else. Didn't you know that?”

The girl looked at Hades and his eyes met her panic-stricken look.

Please smile, she thought. Smile and say that it's just a dream. Let that little dimple on your cheek become even deeper. Smile. Just smile!

But Hades didn't smile. He blinked.

One, two, three, he indicated with his eyelids. One, two, three.

She understood what he meant and blinked back, in confirmation.

“Of course you didn't grasp that. You're totally brain-dead. Programmed. But now it's over.”

The woman spat out the words.

“Now it's over, you damned monsters!”

Hades blinked again. Harder this time. One, two, three. And then again. The last time. One. Two. THREE.

They threw themselves backward. Hades got a firm hold of the woman's arm and twisted it to make her drop the gun. The woman was caught unawares and instinctively pulled the trigger. A shot went off. The sound echoed between the trees.

But then she couldn't resist the pressure from Hades any longer and shrieked with pain when he forced her arm back.

The girl got hold of the gun and immediately pointed it at the woman. Then she saw Hades sink down on the grass. He had been hit.

“Give me the gun,” snarled the woman.

The girl's hands shook. She stared at Hades who was lying still in the grass. His throat was bare and he was breathing heavily.

“Hades!”

He turned his head toward the girl and they looked into each other's eyes.

“Run,” he whispered.

“Come on now, give me the gun,” shouted the woman.

“Run, Ker,” Hades whispered again and coughed violently.

“Run!”

The girl backed a couple of steps.

“Hades...”

She didn't understand. She couldn't just run off. Couldn't leave him.

“Run!”

Then she saw it.

His smile.

It spread right across his face. And that very same moment she understood. That she must.

So she turned around and ran.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE

JANA BERZELIUS DROVE
alongside the Motala Ström River for more than thirty minutes without finding a single appropriate place. People were around at every potential site and it would presumably have been regarded as odd if she had gone to the water's edge and thrown a mobile phone straight into the river.

She maneuvered the car into a parking space on Leonardsbergsvägen and turned the engine off. She thought about how she could get rid of the phone. A feeling of frustration grew inside her and finally it bubbled over. She hit the steering wheel. And again. With both hands.

Hard.

Harder.

Then she leaned her head back and caught her breath. She put her elbow against the car door and the fist of her right hand against her mouth. She sat like that a long while and just looked out across the barren landscape. Everything was gray. Depressing. The trees had no leaves, the ground was brown from the dirty snow that had recently melted. The sky was just as dark gray as the asphalt on the road.

Then an idea started to take form inside her head. Jana opened her handbag and pulled out the plastic bag with the mobile in it. Why hadn't she thought of this before!

She sat up properly in the driver's seat and put the phone next to her bag. The number that the text message had been sent to belonged to the Migration Board. That much was clear. But she hadn't bothered to try to phone the number—yet.

She started the car, absolutely certain she would make the call. But first she had to buy a prepaid card.

She quickly turned out from the parking space and set course for the nearest petrol station.

* * *

Mia Bolander sat rocking on the chair in Henrik Levin's office. She was biting her thumbnail while reading the list with the combination numbers.

Gunnar stood in the middle of the room, Henrik sat at his desk.

“SAL manufactures containers in Shanghai, China,” said Henrik and adjusted the desk pad so that it would be parallel with the edge of the table.

“They own, or rather they owned, the first three containers on Juhlén's list and they have been scrapped.”

“What about the others?” said Mia.

“Four of the others were owned by SPL Freight and the rest by Onboardex. The strange thing is that they have all been scrapped. So we must find out what the containers were filled with. Henrik, you take SAL, Mia, you take SPL and I'll take Onboardex. I know it's Sunday but we can surely get hold of somebody. We must get an answer to why Juhlén had combinations for scrapped containers in his computer.”

Gunnar strode with decisive steps out from Henrik's office.

Mia slowly got up and left the room dragging her feet. Henrik sighed and suppressed a strong desire to tell her to get a move on.

He put the landline phone in front of him, and dialed the number to SAL in Stockholm. He was automatically connected to an exchange abroad where a digitally recorded voice said in English that the telephone wait time was five minutes. Eventually he heard a male receptionist answer in English with a German accent.

Henrik explained what he wanted in rather limited English and was connected to a female administrator in Stockholm with a drawling voice.

After briefly introducing himself, Henrik got to the point.

“I want to check a couple of shipping containers that you owned in the past.”

“Have you got their identity numbers?”

Henrik slowly read out the combinations and heard how the woman clicked the letters and numbers on her keyboard.

Silence followed.

“Hello?”

“Hello, yes?”

“I thought you had hung up.”

“No, I'm waiting for an answer from the system.”

“I know that the containers were scrapped by you, but I want to know what sort of goods they contained.”

“Well, as far as I can see they weren't scrapped.”

“They weren't?”

“No, they aren't in the system at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“They're missing.”

“All three of them?”

“Yes, all three. They have disappeared.”

Henrik immediately stood up and looked straight at the wallpaper.

His thoughts were whirling around.

He thanked her for the information with a stuttering voice, then left his office and in five quick strides was in Mia's room.

She was just putting the phone down.

“That's odd,” she said. “According to SPL they have never received those containers. They've vanished without trace.”

Henrik went straight into Gunnar's room and almost bumped into him in the doorway.

“Well,” Gunnar started.

“Don't say anything,” said Henrik. “The containers are missing, aren't they?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

* * *

The pay-as-you-go SIM card cost fifty kronor. Jana Berzelius paid with the exact change and said no thanks to the receipt that the assistant offered her. She left the little kiosk and had to walk sideways so as not to bump into the display shelf with all the candy and chewing gum.

She chose the place to purchase the card carefully. She considered going to a gas station at first, but then changed her mind. Gas stations had security cameras and she didn't want to risk being recorded.

Once she was back in her car, she pulled off her gloves, opened the envelope with the SIM card and put it inside Thomas Rydberg's cell phone. Then she turned the phone on and remained sitting with it in her hand for quite a while before dialing the number that the text message had come from. She waited to see if the call would go through. She had expected that the person she was ringing wouldn't answer, that the phone would have been turned off, or the number was no longer in use.

When she heard the first ring she was genuinely surprised. Her heart started to beat faster. She put one hand on the steering wheel and squeezed it hard. Suddenly she heard a voice with a name.

The name astounded her.

* * *

The temperature in Henrik Levin's office had gone up a couple of degrees. Gunnar Öhrn sat with a sheet of paper in front of him. Mia Bolander was leaning against the wall, and Henrik sat on a chair, one leg crossed over the other.

“So no company had received the containers. They are all missing?” said Mia.

“Yes,” said Henrik. “But that isn't so unusual. Shipping freight containers can fall overboard in heavy seas and the risk is greater if the crew hasn't secured them properly. Or if they've been loaded wrongly.”

“Evidently a lot of containers are lost every year. It's hard to get any exact figures but I heard that it can be between two thousand and ten thousand,” said Gunnar.

“That's quite a wide range,” said Mia.

“Yes,” said Henrik.

“And the companies didn't seem especially concerned,” said Gunnar.

“No, it's evidently quite normal,” said Henrik.

“They will be well insured,” said Mia.

There was silence in the room for a few moments.

“Okay, so if these containers, the ones we've been looking for, are somewhere on the seabed, then that isn't particularly strange. The strange thing is why Hans Juhlén had the combinations in his computer,” said Henrik.

“What did they contain? I mean, they must have contained something,” said Mia.

“Nobody can tell us that either. All they know is that they all came from Chile and that they arrived via Hamburg, were reloaded here in Norrköping and then shipped back to Chile again. But they never arrived back home; they disappeared somewhere on the way back across the Atlantic,” said Henrik.

“So there's a whole lot of valuable goods lying on the seabed, in other words? I ought to become a diver,” said Mia.

“The first container on the list was recorded as missing in 1989,” said Henrik. “Another two went missing in 1990 and 1992. The last one disappeared a year ago. In between, the others went missing. So why did Hans Juhlén have these ten container combinations, all of them missing, in his computer?”

He recrossed his legs and sighed silently.

Mia Bolander raised her shoulders in a gesture of helplessness. Gunnar scratched his head just as Ola Söderström appeared at the door. He came in and leaned up against the wall with the ghost drawing on it. The drawing fell to the floor. “Sorry,” said Ola.

“Doesn't matter,” said Henrik, as Ola picked up the drawing and handed it to him.

“Nice ghost,” Ola said.

“My boy is in a difficult period right now. Everything is about ghosts.”

Henrik put the drawing on his desk and went back to his musings.

“Ghosts?” said Mia.

“Yes, he dreams about ghosts, draws ghosts, watches films about ghosts,” said Henrik.

“No, I mean...ghosts! When we questioned Yusef Abrham he said something about ghost containers, didn't he?” said Mia.

“Yes,” said Henrik.

“That illegal refugees die en route. Sometimes all of them.”

“But the containers were on their way from Sweden, not to Sweden.”

“Yes, you're right,” said Mia.

“But what could have been inside them?” said Ola.

“It's almost impossible to get any information about that,” said Henrik.

“Perhaps they were empty?” said Ola.

“That doesn't seem likely. Why would Juhlén keep the numbers then, since most of them disappeared years ago?”

He got up from the chair and went on: “The document was deleted Sunday evening, correct? Ola?”

“Yes, at 18:35,” said Ola.

“Hang on a moment... What time did he pick up the pizza?”

“At 18:40 if I remember right,” said Ola.

“How far is it between the Migration Board and the pizzeria that we're talking about?”

Mia pulled out her phone and entered the addresses in a map app.

“Eight minutes by car.”

“But that assumes one is already sitting in the car, doesn't it?”

“Yes...”

“Then it is impossible that Hans left his office, got into his car, drove to the pizzeria in just five minutes, isn't it?”

“Yes...”

“So somebody else in his office must have deleted the document,” said Henrik.

* * *

“I don't know how we could have missed this. But now it is clear that Hans Juhlén himself could not have been able to delete the document from his computer,” said Henrik into the phone.

Jana regretted that she had answered when Henrik called. He just went on and on.

“He died some time between seven and eight in the evening. The document was deleted at 18:35. So somebody else did it.”

“Yes.”

“We must find out who.”

“Yes.”

Jana was silent for a moment or two, then she said, “The young security guard who worked at the Migration Board on Sunday...why don't you phone him again. Ask him if he saw anybody else in the building at the time. And now you'll have to excuse me. I'm busy.”

“Okay,” said Henrik. “I just wanted to let you know.”

Jana Berzelius ended the conversation and stepped out of her car. She had parked a bit out of the way and could see the terraced house she was going to in the distance.

She crossed the street with quick strides and kept away from the street lamps as best she could. Now and then she looked over her shoulder to ensure that nobody noticed her.

She checked the windows but there was no movement from the curtains. She was grateful for the darkness when she entered through the white-painted fence and went up to the front door. The letterbox outside had the number 21 on it. And a name. Lena Wikström.

* * *

Mia Bolander took a noisy bite of the juicy pear she had found in the fruit bowl in the staff kitchen.

Henrik had tasked her with immediately phoning the security company that patrolled the Migration Board. She took another big bite while she punched in the number. A receptionist answered immediately at the other end of the line.

“Mia Bolander, Norrköping CID.”

But the words were hard to distinguish with a piece of pear still in her mouth. Mia swallowed and started again.

“Hello, this is Mia Bolander, detective inspector. I need to get hold of...”

She stretched across to reach the carelessly scribbled name on the notepad and read it out loud.

“...Jens Cavenius. It's urgent.”

“One moment please.”

Mia waited thirty seconds and managed to eat the rest of the pear.

“Unfortunately Jens Cavenius is not working today,” said the receptionist.

“I must get hold of him immediately. Make sure he phones me, otherwise I'll trace his number myself. Okay?” said Mia.

“Yes, right.”

She gave the receptionist her number and thanked her for her help.

It didn't take more than five minutes, and then Jens Cavenius phoned.

Mia got straight to the point.

“I need to know about your observations from Sunday, so think carefully. Did you really see Hans Juhlén?”

“I went past his office.”

“Yes, but did you
see
him?”

“No, not exactly, but the lights were on in the room.”

“And?”

“I heard him typing on the computer.”

“But you didn't see him?”

“No... I...”

“So somebody else could have been there?”

“But...”

“Think a bit
more
now, did you see anybody else in the office, did you notice any detail, item of clothing or anything else?”

“I'm trying to think.”

“And I'm trying to get you to think quicker.”

“I believe I saw an arm through the crack in the door. A lilac arm.”

“And if you think a bit more, who might have such an arm at the office?”

“I don't know...but perhaps...”

“Yes?”

“Perhaps it could have been his secretary, Lena.”