Without a Trace (23 page)

LI
: Has anything happened that …?

S
: He didn’t talk so much after all those articles, actually. He seemed a bit more cagey around strangers. Not towards me, of course, we go way back. But he got more cautious. Different. Towards other people, I mean.

‘One question,’ Lamia said, waving one of Nina’s printouts.

Nina straightened her back, ready to answer.

‘Why was he called Kag?’

Nina blinked. Lamia waited expectantly for a reply.

‘I don’t actually know. Karl Gustav, KG, that probably ended up as Kag …’

Lamia made a note.

‘This child’s drawing,’ Johansson said, hunched over a different printout. ‘Was it done by one of the Lerbergs?’

‘That hasn’t been confirmed,’ Nina said. ‘The crayons don’t match those found in the house, but it could have been drawn at a friend’s or at school.’

Nina was aware that the connection between the crimes was tenuous. One happened indoors, the other outside. In one the victim had died, in the other he survived. One was dressed, the other naked. The methods were different. Lerberg was an establishment figure, Kag a down-and-out.

‘The excessive violence is the connection between the crimes,’ she said. ‘And it’s not subtle. We’re supposed to know. Both the acts themselves and the drawing are messages.’

‘Who for? Us?’ Lamia asked.

‘Not necessarily,’ Nina said.

Lamia looked at both her and Johansson. ‘Is it my turn now?’ She didn’t wait for confirmation, just sat up straight and started. ‘There haven’t been any transactions in any known bank accounts since Wednesday last week. No matches at any passport checks or on any passenger lists in the past twenty-four hours, and no ransom demand.’

‘Are we talking about Nora now?’ Nina wondered.

‘She adopted her maiden name a year ago. Until then she was just Lerberg. Mrs Andersson Lerberg has a personal Visa card, and a Mastercard from her husband’s company. Statements from her personal account show repeat purchases. Every Thursday she goes shopping at ICA Maxi on Per Hallströms väg in Nacka. The Maxi shops are those really big ones. Then there’s ICA Kvantum, which sounds like it ought to be bigger but isn’t. Then there’s ICA Supermarket and ICA Nära as well …’

‘Perhaps we could skip the size of ICA’s various stores,’ Johansson said amiably.

Lamia smiled. ‘Okay. Nora used to top up with eggs and milk and other fresh groceries at the ICA Supermarket on Torggatan in Saltsjöbaden twice a week on average – that’s the smaller sort of store, but not the smallest. She gets petrol from Statoil on Solsidevägen and at weekends she buys fresh bread from Kringelgården bakery up in Igelboda. She uses Classic Dry-cleaning and Tailoring on Laxgatan in Saltsjöbaden – they repair shoes and cut keys as well – apart from a couple of occasions when she went to Royal Tailoring on Östermalmstorg in the centre of Stockholm. A piano-tuner from Vaxholm takes care of her piano each spring and autumn. She goes to Ikea before Christmas, Easter and midsummer, and on her last visit she spent a hundred and ninety-two kronor—’

‘No plane tickets?’ Nina asked.

‘No travel at all. Apart from petrol. For the car.’

‘Nothing to Switzerland on the third of May, then?’

Commissioner Q walked into the meeting room, accompanied by a blond man so handsome that Nina caught her breath.

‘So,’ Q said, ‘this is the group working on the Lerberg case – Arne Johansson, Lamia Regnard and Nina Hoffman.’ He gestured towards each of them as he introduced them. Lamia’s eyes twinkled like stars at the blond man.

‘This is Thomas Samuelsson, the government’s special investigator into money-laundering and economic crime.’

Nina gasped. Dear God! He must be Annika Bengtzon’s husband, or were they actually divorced now? Nina had never met him, but Annika had talked about him. He worked for the government as a researcher – at least, he had four years ago: could there be two with the same name?

The man walked straight over to Nina and introduced himself. His handshake was warm and strong. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said. His eyes looked right into hers: they were pale, almost translucent.

‘Bearing in mind our victim out at Kråkträsken, I thought it would be in order for us to get an update on the situation down on the Costa del Sol in Spain,’ Q went on.

Lamia fluttered her eyelashes when the blond man shook her hand. Even Johansson looked happier.

But Annika Bengtzon’s husband had had one hand chopped off when he was kidnapped in Somalia, and this man had two. She had just shaken the right, and the left held a coat and an expensive leather briefcase.

‘I assume you’re aware of the basics of how money-laundering works,’ Thomas Samuelsson said, sitting down on one of the desks with his briefcase beside him, one foot firmly on the floor, the other dangling in the air. He was wearing an expensive suit with a simple T-shirt underneath, which gave him a casual but sophisticated air.

Nina saw both Lamia and Johansson nod: yes, they were very familiar with money-laundering.

‘The problem for international crime syndicates isn’t manufacturing weapons or drugs, smuggling goods or finding a market for them. It’s cleaning up the dirty money so that it can be used. Building a network, or smurfing, as it’s known in bank jargon, is the big bottleneck in the flow of illegal money. A good smurf is worth his weight in gold to a crime syndicate.’

He smiled at Nina.

‘As far as Spain is concerned, there’s been a noticeable deterioration in the conditions for international crime syndicates in recent years, specifically on the Costa del Sol,’ he went on. ‘The Spanish government has taken a number of steps to put a stop to such transactions. On the thirty-first of October 2012, for instance, new fraud legislation came into force, limiting cash payments between companies to two and a half thousand euros. And early in 2013 they finally permitted greater scrutiny of financial institutions, under a law that has existed since 2010 but which hadn’t previously been implemented.’

Lamia shifted in her chair, making her skirt slide up her thigh, but apparently Thomas Samuelsson didn’t notice.

‘Of course, we have to remember that the financial crisis has hit everyone. Spain’s economic development since the millennium was based upon rapid expansion of the construction sector. That was also where a lot of the laundered money was processed, so when the industry suffered a total collapse, the criminal machinery developed problems.’

Nina got it. The euro crisis meant Kag had run into trouble – or, rather, the companies he fronted had.

Johansson leaned forward. ‘What other effects has the crisis had? Has drug use in Spain gone down, for instance?’ He sounded genuinely interested. Nina had never heard him sound so enthusiastic before.

Samuelsson adjusted the creases in his trousers. ‘It’s still the biggest market in Europe, but it’s a very good question. It is possible to detect a slight reduction and …’

Q stepped in front of her, blocking her view of the man. Nina had to stop herself craning her neck to look over his shoulder. ‘Nacka have found Kag’s landlord,’ he said quietly. ‘I thought perhaps you might like to drive out there and have a word with him.’

‘I’ll go as soon as we’re finished here,’ she said.

Q cast a glance at the blond man and smiled.

Anders Schyman had decided to hit back, hard and with force. He devoted six pages of the print edition of the paper to his own defence, with photographs, facsimiles and detailed explanations, countering the accusations on the Light of Truth, or the Lie of Truth as the headline writer so cleverly called it.

Engage in some sort of debate about responsible publishing?

Yeah, right!

This was how bullies, online trolls and conspiracy theorists should be dealt with, full blast: hit them with their own arguments, ram their so-called facts down their throats.

He had published his contract of employment with Swedish Television (he most certainly wasn’t freelance!), his tax returns for the years when the documentary was broadcast, its original screening and the repeat (he hadn’t earned millions in those years when he was a television reporter on state wages), and his thirty-one-year-old contract for the house. All his other tax returns were available for download as a PDF for anyone who was interested. There was also a picture of their house (luxury villa?), the view from their terrace (not a glimpse of sea as far as the eye could see!), and, just to be sure, pictures of his and his wife’s cars (an ordinary Saab and a Volvo).

The intercom burst into life. It was from Reception. ‘Anders? Can you take a call from a news agency? It’s about the reports filed with the police.’

He stared at the intercom. ‘Reports filed with the police?’

The loudspeaker clicked.

‘Anders Schyman?’

It was a male voice. He picked up the receiver.

‘What’s this about?’ he asked curtly.

‘Hello, I’m Anders Burtner, from the TT news agency. I was wondering if you wanted to comment on the accusations filed against you with the police?’

He stared at his shelves, the reference books he kept going back to, again and again, his lodestars in the murky world of tabloid journalism: a dog-eared copy of Günter Wallraff’s
Lowest of the Low
from 1985, Jan Guillou and Göran Skytte’s
Stories from the New World
, and many editions of the Publicists’ Association yearbook.

‘What accusations?’ he said.

‘You haven’t heard about—’

‘No,’ he interrupted.

Show strength and solidity. The one who stands firmest wins.

The agency reporter took a deep breath. ‘You’ve been reported to the police for fraud and document forgery because the contract for your house is a fake,’ the reporter said. ‘The tax office will be investigating your tax returns for the past ten years. My source tells me that unfortunately they can’t go back any further than that. Also, you’ve been reported to the National Board for Consumer Complaints …’

Schyman sank onto his chair and stared at the wall in front of him.

‘… the Broadcasting Commission, and the Parliamentary Ombudsman …’

‘What a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money,’ he said. ‘This is all bollocks.’

‘Bollocks?’

‘None of this is going to lead anywhere – anyone can see that.’

‘So your comment is that this is bollocks?’

‘You bet it fucking is,’ he said, and hung up.

He got up and walked round the room three times.

That had told him, the bastard.

Then he stopped and stared at his bookshelves. Günter Wallraff had faced huge criticism and hostility throughout his career. He had been tortured by the Greek police, then imprisoned and falsely accused of being a Stasi collaborator. Jan Guillou had uncovered the Social Democrats’ policy of spying on their own, and was also imprisoned and falsely accused of being a KGB agent. That was the sort of thing that happened to controversial reporters. They had to stand up to the blows of the establishment. It went with the job.

A feeling of calm spread through him.

The Light of Truth was hardly representative of the establishment. Online trolls were insignificant, after all, people with no voice, the people he was supposed to protect.

Anxiety and self-doubt followed.

Perhaps he hadn’t handled that interview with the news-agency reporter particularly well.

He looked at the phone, hesitated for a moment, then lifted the receiver and dialled zero for Reception. ‘I won’t be taking any more calls today.’

Despair struck.

What had he done?

‘Bollocks’?

Oh, God, he’d have hell to pay for that.

Kag’s landlord was a Hans Larsén, resident at Valövägen 73, just a few hundred metres from the patch of forest that led to Kråkträsken. Nina parked on the road in front of the house, got out of her car and locked it. She couldn’t see the footpath from there.

The building that had been Kag’s home was characteristic of the area: small, one storey, with a flat roof. Several of the neighbouring houses had been extended or modernized over the decades, and had acquired sloping roofs or concrete cladding, but not number seventy-three. The dark wooden panelling needed varnishing, the mailbox was crooked, and there were no flowerbeds. A pair of greyish-white curtains hung in the big picture window, stopping anyone seeing in.

Hans Larsén lacked either the interest or the money to bother with home maintenance and decoration.

He opened the front door as soon as Nina got out of the car. ‘Are you from National Crime?’

She shook his hand and introduced herself. The man nodded: he was a former fireman, which practically made them colleagues, he said. Nina didn’t agree, but let it go.

‘Your colleagues from Nacka have been here and emptied his room,’ Hans Larsén said. ‘They’ve put a no-entry sign on the door. How long will that have to stay there?’

‘I’m sure they’ll let you know,’ Nina said.

He had prepared coffee, put shop-bought buns in a basket on the table, and pottered about between the stove and the kitchen table, getting out napkins and sugar-lumps.

‘It’s a terrible business,’ he said, glancing at Nina.

His hands shook slightly as he poured the coffee. Nina studied him discreetly. He was in his seventies, clean-shaven, well dressed.

‘All those years you serve other people,’ Hans Larsén said. ‘You get up in the middle of the night and risk your life to save other people from burning buildings, you move gas canisters out of harm’s way at huge personal risk, you pull people out of crashed cars, dear God, all the things you do, but you never for a minute believe that your own tenant will be murdered.’

‘Had Karl Gustaf lived here long?’ Nina asked.

Hans Larsén turned his back on her and fiddled with something on the worktop. ‘Not very,’ he said evasively.

Nina sat in silence for a while. ‘There’s no need to worry,’ she said eventually. ‘I don’t care what sort of arrangement you and Kag had, I just want to find out who killed him.’

Hans Larsén swung round and glared at her. ‘You surely don’t think that – that Kag and I …’

Nina couldn’t help smiling.