The Golden Calf (27 page)

At her last sentence, Elsy gave him a beatific smile.

They finished their coffee as quickly as they could, and when they went to the door to leave, Tommy reminded Elsy about the key. Elsy dug around in a huge flowery cloth bag for a long time before she fished out a key ring with three keys. There was a metal tag etched with the words
Hotel Göteborg
. “Here they are!”

They thanked her once more for the coffee and hurried to the car.

“T
HE HOUSE WAS
searched pretty thoroughly after Ceder was shot,” Irene said. “But perhaps we missed something in the freezer. Maybe a finger was hidden in a package of fish sticks or something like that, and there was time to get rid of it.”

“Well, there was nothing there at any rate,” Tommy said. “Maybe we’ll have better luck here in the apartment.”

He parked in an empty space close to Kjell Ceder’s entrance.

They took the swift and quiet elevator up to the sixth floor
and got out. Just as Tommy was about to insert the key in the lock, Irene said, “Wait! What if Sanna is here?”

Tommy sighed and said, with conviction, “If there’s one place where Sanna is not, it’s this apartment. She hates it.”

He turned the key in the lock and opened the door. Bowing as if to a lady, he gestured for Irene to enter first.

It seemed as if a sheet of unseen sound hit her, and Irene reeled from the shock. She stood absolutely still, and it took her a second or two to realize that the noise was a high-pitched scream. It took her another few seconds to locate the dark figure pressed against the wall at the other end of the hallway.

Tommy fumbled at the inside wall and found the switch to the ceiling lamp. The light blinded her. Sanna stopped screaming just as quickly as she’d begun. Her eyes were wide-open from fear as she stared at the two police officers. Apparently, she didn’t recognize them. She pressed against the wall as if trying to disappear into the wallpaper.

“Sanna, it’s me, Tommy, and Irene, from the police. We’re so sorry we frightened you,” Tommy said in his deep, calming voice.

The whites of Sanna’s eyes were shining just like those of a frightened deer. Irene remembered a runaway horse she and Tommy were called to control when they still shared a patrol car. The animal was skittering and hysterical in the middle of traffic on a highway, creating total chaos. As they’d approached the horse, the detail that had struck her was the shining whites of the horse’s terrified eyes.

Why was Sanna so terrified?

“We didn’t know you were here,” Tommy apologized. “We were checking on the apartment and found the door open, so we decided to come inside and see if there’d been a break-in.”

Good Lord!
Irene thought. She had no idea that Tommy was as good as she was at lying on the fly. Hopefully Sanna wouldn’t start to wonder how the police had walked into her apartment.

They didn’t have a search warrant. Of course, they could have arranged one, but it would have taken at least a day. Tommy had been improvising when he’d asked innocent Elsy whether he could borrow the apartment keys. Now Irene strode across the threshold to within a few meters of Sanna.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “It’s just us.”

The fear in Sanna’s eyes faded to tears, which started to slide silently down her cheeks.

“Come, Sanna,” Tommy urged. “Let’s go talk in the library.” He carefully took hold of her arm.

Without any resistance, Sanna allowed herself to be led into the large room with its floor-to-ceiling bookcases and leather armchairs; the aroma of leather and dust created a sense of security. Tommy let her sink down into one of the armchairs.

Meanwhile, Irene took a quick look at the surprisingly modern kitchen with dark stone counters and cupboards in light oak. Not a bit of brushed steel here. It was attractive and functional, not surprising considering Kjell B:son Ceder had been a cuisine professional. It also spoke to the great differences between the Ceders. Why had Kjell married Sanna?

Irene pulled a sheet from the roll of paper towels on a dispenser near the stove. She decided to take a quick look into the upright freezer before she left the kitchen. It was next to the refrigerator and was just as tall as Irene.

She had never before seen such a tightly packed and well-organized freezer. It would take hours to go through its contents, so all she could do was shut the door and leave the kitchen.

Sanna had calmed somewhat, and Tommy was making small talk with her. As Irene came in, Tommy smiled and said, “Here’s Irene with a paper towel. We thought you’d gotten lost in the hallway,” he told Irene.

“Good thing I learned orienteering when I was a kid,” Irene
joked in reply and gave Sanna a small smile as she handed over the paper towel.

Sanna took it without looking at Irene, dried her tears, blew her nose, and then tossed the crumpled paper into the fireplace.

“What are you doing here?” she asked sharply.

“That’s just what we were going to ask you,” Tommy replied.

“It’s my apartment!”

“Not quite yet,” Tommy said.

“I’m well within my rights to be here!” she said defiantly. Sanna seemed to have recovered from the shock and was turning back into her former controlled self.
If we’re going to get a sensible answer from her
, Irene thought,
we’re going to have to throw her off balance
. She decided to be blunt.

“We’re looking for the finger,” she said.

It was a wild guess, but it hit the mark. Sanna stiffened. “You can’t—know anything,” she whispered.

“We have found the finger Joachim had, and he’d written that other people had received fingers.…” Irene said, purposefully not finishing her sentence. Sanna interpreted it as a truthful statement.

“Then … we’re marked for death.” Her terrified eyes flitted between Tommy and Irene.

“Who is threatening to kill you?” Irene asked.

Sanna shook her head and her pale lips moved, but no sound came out. She was truly scared to death.

“Who is threatening you?” Irene repeated.

“I don’t know. I have to find the finger. I don’t know if Kjell hid it or if he’d gotten rid of it.” Sanna covered her face with her hands and began to sway back and forth.

Tommy got up and sat on the chair arm next to Sanna to protectively drape one arm around her. Irene was surprised, not so much at Tommy but at the fact that Sanna let him do it. Tommy spoke softly as if he were speaking to a child.

“Now, now, Sanna. You don’t have to be afraid any longer. We know about this business with those chopped-off fingers. We know that they’ve been sent to a few people. Is someone trying to extort money from you?”

“Yes … now, Ludwig.…” she whispered.

“So they’ve threatened both you and Ludwig,” Tommy stated.

Sanna nodded but didn’t take her hands away from her face.

“Why now? Is it still about money?” Irene asked.

Sanna said nothing and it took a long time before she took her hands down. She looked simultaneously desperate and hopeless.

“I have to find Kjell’s finger or else … something bad will happen to me and Ludwig!”

“So you received it three years ago.”

“Yes, though it was just about money then. Blackmail. Now … that Thomas’s body has been found … they want the fingers back.”

This was quite a macabre story. Sanna had been living under the threat of blackmail for three years. Irene realized why Sanna had reacted the way she did in the hallway. She naturally believed that the murderer had come to kill her.

“What did you do with yours?”

“My—? I threw it out! Right away! Directly into the apartment’s garbage can.”

Her answer was so rapid it had to be the truth.

“It came when you returned to Sweden?”

“Yes. I moved home in August. The finger came at the end of September.”

“What was in the message you received with it?”

Sanna’s knuckles were chalk white. After a while, she relaxed her grip and began to wring her hands exactly like her mother did.

“You received one just like everyone else,” Irene said firmly.

She was improvising, but based her statement on the knowledge that a criminal tends to use the same method over and over.

“Yes … I was supposed to pay money. It was extortion. The note said it was Thomas’s finger. If I didn’t pay up, the same thing would happen to me. I’ve been paying and paying … and soon I’ll have no money left at all.”

Tears welled in Sanna’s eyes again, and Irene refrained from asking how Sanna had financed the house in Askim. That wouldn’t be wise. Sanna would just shut back up like an oyster. Right now she was actually talking to them, and most of what she was saying sounded like the truth.

“Who have you been paying?” Irene asked.

“Edward. He passed the money along to another account. He doesn’t know who owns it.”

“How much have you paid so far?”

Sanna swallowed a few times before she could answer. “Twenty thousand American dollars a month.”

Irene converted the amount quickly in her head and understood immediately why Sanna was running out of money. She’d been paying a hundred and fifty thousand Swedish kroner a month for three years. Even a fortune would disappear at that rate.

“So your brother-in-law’s brother, Edward Fenton, took care of this?” Tommy asked. “The man in charge of HP Morgan’s European head office?”

“Yes. He’d also gotten rid of the finger sent to him. But now they’re demanding all four back. So Edward asked me to look for Kjell’s. I’ve looked for hours, and I haven’t found one!”

Irene and Tommy exchanged glances. No surprise that Kjell B:son Ceder had received a finger, but why Edward Fenton? Since only four fingers were cut from Thomas Bonetti’s body, this meant that Edward Fenton, Sanna Kaegler, Kjell Ceder, and Joachim Rothstaahl had each gotten one.

Something didn’t add up here, and Irene’s police instincts kicked in.

“When did you get the demand for Kjell’s finger?” she asked carefully.

“Yesterday morning. It must have been after Thomas’s body was found.”

“Did the note tell you that Thomas had been killed?”

“No, just that it was Thomas’s finger. It was so horrible. He was … gone. Though I have to say, Thomas is clever. He could have bought some fingers off another corpse and then sent them himself to extort money. Even if he’d gotten all ph.com’s money, it still must cost something to stay in hiding.”

“But he wasn’t the one who sent them,” Irene said, drily. “He was already dead.”

Sanna jumped as if she were a scolded schoolchild. Obviously she preferred her theory about Thomas’s cleverness to the stark reality.

“Did Philip say he’d received a finger?”

Sanna appeared sincerely surprised. “No, not that I know. But I wouldn’t be surprised based on … what happened to him later.” Her eyes filled with tears again, and she couldn’t hold back a sniffle. Irene crossed off any lingering suspicion that Sanna had been involved in Philip’s death. She was truly hit hard by his death. Perhaps she’d have been able to shoot Joachim or Thomas, but not Philip.

If Philip, too, had received one, that would add up to five fingers sent. Obviously not the case. Irene felt more sure that something wasn’t adding up—not just fingers.

“Why Edward?” asked Tommy.

Sanna sighed and seemed to huddle into herself. “He’d gotten some money for ph.com from a man who absolutely did not want to lose anything. But that happens with risky capital. It’s part of the game. Anyway, Edward also received a finger
and had to pay up or he’d meet the same fate as Thomas. It was the same threat as in my note.”

“So Edward knows the name of this man who is demanding his money back,” Irene said.

“He says he doesn’t.” Sanna looked totally uninterested. Obviously she had no idea how important this question was. Or maybe she did. Irene felt something did not fit in Sanna’s tale, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Instead, she asked, “How was the finger packed when it arrived?”

“In a plastic tube. One of those for vitamin C tablets that fizz.”

“How was the plastic tube packed?”

“A padded envelope.”

“Do you remember the post mark?”

Sanna wrinkled her forehead and seemed to concentrate before she shook her head. “No, I don’t remember.”

“Did the package come to your mother’s address?”

“Why would it? I’d just moved to my own apartment. That’s where it came.”

This meant that the sender kept tabs on Sanna. He knew that Sanna had moved back home to Göteborg and even knew her new address. So the murderer probably had ties to Göteborg.

“Did you know then that Kjell had also received a finger?”

“No, not until yesterday.”

“Why did he get one?”

Sanna raised an eyebrow and looked directly at Irene. “I really have no idea.” Her surprise was genuine.

“Was Kjell involved in ph.com?”

“No, absolutely not! He was busy with the hotel and the two restaurants.”

“Did he put money in Poundfix when Thomas Bonetti and Joachim Rothstaahl were in London?”

“No. Kjell put all his money into the hotel. It was a money
pit, according to him.” Suddenly Sanna leapt to her feet. “Oh my God! If you take the finger then I can’t send it back! Then it’s all over for me and Ludwig!”

Tommy just looked calmly at her. “Who were you supposed to send it to?”

Sanna took a huge breath, and fear shone in her eyes again. “I have no idea. They’re going to contact me.”

“How?”

“Through Edward. He is going to call tonight or tomorrow. If I find it, I’m supposed to get further instructions.”

Irene and Tommy stood up at the same time. Tommy placed a hand on Sanna’s arm. “We’re going to help you look for it. Then you can tell Edward in good conscience that you’ve searched but didn’t find it. Kjell could have gotten rid of it, just like you and Edward. And remember, the press hasn’t found out anything yet about Thomas’s missing fingers. They also don’t know we found one of those fingers at Joachim’s place. Your blackmailers have no idea that the police already know about them.”

A bit of what he said managed to reach Sanna and she visibly relaxed, but only a little, as if she wasn’t entirely convinced.