Without a Trace (21 page)

A shiver ran through her. ‘An actor? You used actors in your documentary?’
Dear God, as long as the Light of Truth never finds out about that!

‘We filmed him from behind and had him speak in voiceover. It wasn’t as if we were fabricating anything.’

No?

‘Have you got his name? The seller, I mean.’

He sighed. ‘Yes, somewhere. I can dig it out. I’ll email it to you.’

She looked at him. His eyes were red-rimmed. ‘What else?’ she asked.

‘She reported her passport lost at the same time as she changed her name. It was never actually destroyed, which meant that when she got hold of a new one, she had access to two passports. The old one looked valid as long as no one checked it against the Swedish Police Authority database …’

She made more notes, then looked up again at Schyman. He was scratching his stubble.

‘She made a short visit to the Cayman Islands three weeks before she disappeared,’ he said. ‘The purpose of the trip was to bring back a large amount of cash in US dollars.’

‘And how do we know that?’

‘Her passport was stamped.’

‘The real one?’

‘Affirmative.’

‘And how do you know what she was doing there?’

‘What do you do in four hours in George Town?’

She stopped taking notes and sat there in silence, staring at the sheet of paper. Something didn’t make sense.

‘She had a tailor alter the lining of her coat,’ Schyman went on. ‘He sewed in a number of pockets, sealed with zips. They were measured very carefully, four pockets measuring sixteen by seven centimetres, one fourteen by ten, and one seven by three.’

Annika wrote down the measurements. ‘American dollar bills,’ she said. ‘They’re almost sixteen centimetres by seven.’

Schyman nodded, slightly brighter now. ‘Plus passport and car keys,’ he said. ‘She’d hidden a bag containing the rest of the cash in the luggage compartment of the car.’

‘How deep were the pockets?’ Annika asked.

‘I don’t know.’

Annika jotted down some quick calculations: if a dollar bill was 0.1 millimetres thick, and the highest value note one hundred dollars, then a one-millimetre thick bundle of notes was a thousand dollars. Four pockets could probably hold a bundle about ten centimetres thick.

She put the pen down and studied what she had written. ‘So Viola had a car that no one knew was hers. She had a name that no one knew about. She had two passports and a tailor-made coat containing about a hundred thousand dollars.’

‘Correct.’

She picked up the pen again and tapped it against her front teeth. ‘And that car is the one captured in the picture,’ she said.

The picture from an illegal surveillance camera at the petrol station outside Piteå was the only real evidence that Viola Söderland had fled, and that she was alive. Annika remembered it clearly: it had been reprinted everywhere in the aftermath of the TV documentary.

‘It was that car, yes,’ Schyman said.

Annika could see the photograph in front of her, very clearly, in spite of all the years that had passed: grainy black-and-white, a light-coloured car, a flash hitting the windscreen, a woman in a dark coat in the passenger seat and a fuzzy figure to the right of the picture. There was a pump to the right, slushy snow, and an out-of-focus rubbish bin in the foreground. The number-plate was clearly visible in the light of the flash.

‘Critics claimed it wasn’t Viola Söderland in the picture,’ she said.

Schyman nodded. ‘It was her.’

She looked at him carefully. There was definitely something that didn’t make sense, something he wasn’t telling her. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘I’m quite sure.’

‘How did you get hold of the picture?’

‘It’s in the public domain. It was taken at that petrol station on the E4 in Norrbotten. The owner had got fed up of people driving off without paying and had set up his own surveillance camera overlooking the pump, without putting up any signs and without permission or a licence … He was prosecuted and convicted for breaking the law on camera surveillance, and that picture formed part of the evidence.’

She nodded. ‘I remember the story, but how did you find the picture?’

‘Like I said, it’s in the public domain.’

She fixed him with her gaze. ‘And how did you know where to look?’

He reached for a bottle of water on the table, poured himself a glass and drank it. ‘How do you mean?’

‘This picture was buried in the evidence of a humdrum case in – what? – Luleå district court? And you just happened to stumble across it?’

He put the glass down. ‘Piteå had its own court in those days. The petrol station was on the E4 in Håkansö, on the way to Luleå.’

She chewed the inside of her cheek. ‘I’m sure you were a very talented reporter back in the day,’ she said, ‘but there’s no way you could have found this on your own. You had a source. Someone who put you on the trail, sent you in the right direction …’

He didn’t answer.

She looked at her notes. There wasn’t much to go on. ‘Names,’ she said. ‘The name of the man who sold the car to Harriet Johansson, and the names of the tailor and the owner of the petrol station?’

‘You’ll get them,’ he said.

‘And you aren’t willing to let me have your source?’

She waited for him to reply.

‘If it is the case,’ he said eventually, ‘that I have a source I’ve never revealed, then there’s probably a very good reason why I’ve kept quiet.’

She nodded. ‘Viola’s colleagues, Pettersson and Witterfeldt, why are they so angry with you?’

Schyman let out a deep sigh. ‘They were prosecuted in Viola’s place. They’ve probably been waiting to have their revenge for years and, of course, Viola isn’t around.’

‘And there was never anything to suggest that Viola was the victim of any sort of crime?’

‘The police found a broken vase by the front door in her home, apparently, and there was some footprint or fingerprint or strand of hair, something along those lines, which could never be traced. A neighbour had seen a man outside, but that never led anywhere.’

‘What do I do about the Lerberg case?’

He seemed not to understand what she was talking about. Then he stood up. ‘Write up what you’ve got. Berit will have to come back from Oslo a day early – she can take over. I’ll tell Patrik that you’re working on a special project from now on.’

‘What about the trainee, Valter?’

‘I’ll have a word with him about confidentiality,’ Schyman said.

‘No need,’ Annika said. ‘I can do that.’

She stood up, clutching the sheet of notes, then moved to the desk and replaced Schyman’s pen.

At the glass door she stopped. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘did you have dinner with Ingemar Lerberg at Edsbacka krog a couple of weeks before he resigned?’

Anders Schyman stared at her, eyes wide. ‘What do you mean by that?’

She kept her gaze on him. ‘Speaking of information in the public domain, if I managed to find the receipt, there’s a chance that other people will too.’

All of a sudden he was angry. ‘So what? We had dinner, he offered to pay, we were fellow Rotarians.’ He sat down on the desk, hands on his thighs, combative now.

‘Was that why we were the worst?’ she asked. ‘To prove that we weren’t making any special allowances for him?’

‘We were worst at everything in those days.’

She turned to leave.

‘What happened to him?’ she heard Schyman say behind her back. ‘What happened to Daniel Lee?’

She stopped at the sliding door. ‘He made a solo album that got to number two on the
Billboard
chart, and number one on iTunes in Canada and the USA. According to MTV, it was one of the five best debut albums in the world that year. And his detractors still claim that he’s lying.’ She closed the door behind her.

All children drew pictures, didn’t they?

Lundqvist hadn’t been impressed. He wanted to find out if the child’s drawing had been produced by one of the Lerberg children before he linked the investigation on Silvervägen with the one at Kråkträsken. Nina couldn’t recall seeing any children’s drawings in the house, but they could have been tucked out of the way somewhere.

She made herself more comfortable at her desk. If she wanted information about Kag from the Spanish police, the protocol was clear: she needed to contact Interpol and get them to pass on any questions she wanted answered. She clicked her ballpoint pen. It was a long time since she had lived in Spain, but the years hadn’t done anything to shrink Spanish bureaucracy, she was sure. If she went the formal route she could probably expect some sort of answer next month, possibly next year. And how should she formulate the question? What was she after? Her palms itched: picking up drunks and cleaning police cars had been much easier.

She pulled her laptop towards her, went onto Google and searched for ‘karl gustaf evert ekblad’, and got almost thirty thousand hits. A bit too broad, clearly … She limited the search to the exact name, and got no results at all.

She pushed the laptop away, got up and went to stand at the end of the desk, looking out at the courtyard. Had he been tortured where he was found? Henriksson couldn’t say anything definite before he had conducted a thorough search of the site, but it didn’t seem improbable. Regardless of where the abuse and murder had taken place, the victim must have screamed with pain – might someone have heard something? The site was in the middle of the forest, and Ekblad’s mouth was covered with duct tape, so it was unlikely that anyone would have been able to hear muffled cries at a distance of half a kilometre or so, over by the residential area. If their preliminary guesses were correct, Ekblad had died during the night, when it was pitch black and pouring with rain, so no one would have been out running. The scene was also a hundred metres from the path, which also happened to be waterlogged and impassable.

So how had Ekblad got there? Was he tricked into entering the forest, or was he forced?

And why?

She had to start by finding out who he was.

Nina went back to her chair, pulled her laptop towards her again, then tried ‘buscar gente España’ (search people Spain). There were a number of possibilities, most of them dating sites. She tried ‘paginasblancas.es’, the Spanish telephone book, and searched for ‘karl gustaf evert ekblad’ in every possible combination and in every province. No results.

He didn’t appear to have been particularly visible in Spain either.

But where had he got his money from? He had been lodging somewhere for several years, he drank every day, and bought food from the Orminge Grill. He must have had some sort of income, and his fellow alcoholics had said he had a mobile phone.

She went onto another search site,
einforma.com
, which listed individuals and companies, typed the murdered man’s name into yet another search box and pressed ‘buscar’. The page took ages to load.

Empresas y Autónomos (5) Ejecutivos (1)

Karl Gustaf Evert Ekblad

Coicidencia por denominación principal

Provincia: Málaga

Her arms goose-pimpled.

Hello there, Kag
.

She clicked the first result.

It was a business. Kag had a business in Spain. Something to do with property and industrial rights of ownership, the acquisition of property, unlimited trade and acquisition, leasing, sales and rental …

An estate agency.

She clicked the address and found herself confronted with a new form. To find out the details of Kag’s business she had to register on the site and fill in all the marked fields.

No problem, she thought. As she filled in her name, telephone number and email address, the white boxes turned green until she reached the one labelled NIF/CIF, which required a Spanish ID number. She thought for a moment, then made one up that looked like it might be genuine, starting with a capital L followed by seven numbers, then a final letter. The box turned red. She tried a different number. Red. Another letter. Still red. She could feel frustration creeping in: she wasn’t going to get hold of the information without a correct ID number.

She clicked back and looked at one of the other five results.

La importación y exportación de suelos de piedra y madera …

Import and export of stone and wooden flooring, sales and installation of kitchens and bathrooms, interior design and architectural services …

A building company.

She went back and checked the other results. They were presented in the same way, and gave her fragments of information. There were another two construction companies, and a building-supplies wholesale business.