Without a Trace (34 page)

On top of the piano there were some black-and-white photographs: a boy in knitted dungarees and a wedding photograph of a couple with 1950s hairstyles. There was some sheet music, Satie and Grieg. Nina lifted these off and put them on the living-room table, then opened the lid that hid the workings of the piano. A puff of old dust rose up towards her. It was pitch black in there, so she switched on her torch and pointed it into the instrument. The strings stretched across a black-painted steel baseplate, the nails holding them in place arranged in six bowed rows. Further down there were eighty or so small hammers, covered with felt. They were arranged in a long line, like soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, ready to strike the moment the command was given. Nina hit a note in the middle of the keyboard and one hammer came to life, struck its string, and the room filled with the sound. She moved along and hit a bass note down to the left. The hammer hit the string, but there was no clear note. She aimed her torch at the keyboard, then the strings, the nails, the metal plate holding everything together.

Nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that shouldn’t be there.

So why didn’t the bass keys work?

She shone her torch around inside the piano and found two wooden hasps on the inside of the front. She put the torch down and loosened them. The front came away and she managed to lift it off – it was heavier than she’d expected. Carefully she leaned it against the wall next to the bookcase, and one of the candleholders hit the floor.

The piano grinned at her, like a skeleton uncovered. Behind the steel plate holding the strings in place she could make out the back, which formed the soundboard. She shone the torch everywhere.

Nothing.

She crouched down, shifted the piano stool and shone the torch underneath the instrument. There was another wooden hasp: evidently the bottom could be removed as well. She put the torch on the floor as she undid the hasp and removed the rear section.

The strings were fastened to a black steel frame. They crossed in the middle: the tin-coloured treble notes came down to the left and the copper-coloured bass notes went to the right.

She hit the keys again. The high tin-coloured strings vibrated and sang, the copper ones remained silent and dead. Why?

She crawled under the piano, beneath the keyboard, and directed her torch at the bass strings from just a few centimetres away.

Something was pressing against the back of them. She put her finger against the matt black background. Textile. Some sort of felt material, exactly the same colour and appearance as the back of the piano. An object, the size of an A4 envelope, tucked between the bass strings and the black-painted soundboard.

She put her torch down once more and hit her head on the keyboard. The wooden frame pressed against her neck, and she realized she was sweating in spite of the chill in the room. She leaned back and managed to pull a pair of latex gloves from her trouser pocket and put them on. Then she cautiously touched the felt object, which moved under her fingers. Up to the right there was a gap between the black steel frame and the back panel, and she moved the object along with her left hand until she was able to reach it with the right and pull it out through the opening. It was relatively heavy. Her heart was thudding. The envelope was sealed with a strip of Velcro. It made a tearing sound as she opened it and pulled out a MacBook Air.

Well, hello
…

Nina sat on the floor with the computer on her lap, waiting for her breathing to settle down. The device looked new, but she didn’t know anything about Macs – maybe it was actually several years old. She stood up cautiously, one hip aching from the contorted position she had been lying in. She took the computer with her into the kitchen and sat down, putting it on the table in front of her.

That was where Nora used to sit when she was organizing her transactions. Right there, with a view of Silvervägen through the meticulously clean window on one side and the polished horseshoe of white kitchen cupboards on the other.

She opened the lid of the laptop – the screen really was extremely thin. She stared at the black, mute surface. She switched the device on, and held her breath as the programs loaded.

Password?

She breathed out. Nora was careful about protecting her secrets: her other computer had been password-protected as well. Nina closed her eyes. Nora had spent seven years sitting there moving money about and sending invoices – legal and illegal – between various companies, Ingemar’s Swedish ones and presumably her own Spanish businesses.

She opened her eyes and looked at the screen thoughtfully. What could the password be?

The most common password in the world was ‘password’, but in Sweden ‘123456’ was most often used, followed by ‘hello’ and ‘hithere’ in third place. Other common passwords were ‘abc123’ and ‘qwerty’, the first six letters of a standard keyboard. Forensics would be able to decipher it in an instant, just as they had with the other computer. Even if the hard-disk had been wiped, they would be able to uncover the information that had once been stored on it.

She took a deep breath and tried to relax her shoulders.

A MacBook Air, thin enough to be hidden behind the bass strings inside a piano. The other computer had also been a Mac – it might have been called a Pro. Had Nora sat them next to each other, the small, thin one and the bigger, sturdier one? Did she use them in the same way?

She got her mobile out of her pocket, hesitated for just a moment, then called Lamia’s direct line. ‘Hi,’ she said, the moment her colleague answered. ‘Nora Lerberg had a password on her computer, didn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ Lamia said.

Nina stared fixedly at the screen in front of her. ‘Can you remember what it was?’

Other colleagues would probably have wondered why she was asking, but Lamia answered straight away: ‘Stefan.’

Stefan?

‘The dog’s name.’

Of course.

‘Thanks very much,’ Nina said.

‘Don’t mention it,’ Lamia said, and hung up.

Did Nora work on both computers simultaneously? Did she log in at the same time, first one, then the other?

Nina rubbed her hands together for a moment, then typed ‘stefan’ into the password box.

Welcome, Nora!

Nina’s head was buzzing.

She held her hands above the keyboard – she wasn’t sure how it worked, but it ought to be similar to a PC.

At the bottom of the screen there was a row of icons for different programs, which expanded as she moved the cursor over them. She clicked on the default email program, and found just one email in the inbox.

Welcome to Mail!

Evidently not a program that Nora had ever used.

She moved the cursor to a folder titled ‘Nora’s book – memories and reflections’, and clicked on it. Another password box appeared: the file was protected. After a moment she typed in ‘stefan’.
Wrong password
. She moved on – Forensics would have to sort that out. She opened the web browser instead. The start-page loaded: a Swiss bank with offices in Zürich and Geneva. Nina’s pulse quickened and her head began to sing.

Bitte melden Sie sich an.

She wasn’t going to get any further without the log-in details. She moved on to the browser’s history instead.

Empty, unless she was doing something wrong.

Her eyes roamed across the screen, and she clicked on ‘favourites’.

A short list appeared.

At the top, a Spanish bank.

Logical, bearing in mind Kag’s five companies.

Next was a bank in the Philippines.

Nina’s pulse was hammering now.

Then came a bank in Panama City, and that marked the end of the list.

The three big customers of Ingemar Lerberg’s company: shipping companies in Panama and the Philippines, and a transport business in Spain.

She forced her shoulders to relax and pushed her chair back slightly from the table.

Could that be a coincidence?

Unlikely.

She wanted to save his life
.

Nina closed her eyes.

Nora had borrowed money that didn’t appear anywhere in the family’s finances. Was this what she had used it for? Filtering her assets into Ingemar’s business? To make him look like a successful businessman rather than a failed politician who had been forced to resign?

One thing was certain: Ingemar knew nothing about it. Hence the computer, the secrecy, Irina …

Nora had borrowed money from the wrong people. Had they forced her to launder money in return, or had she entered into that arrangement voluntarily? Maybe she thought she could control the situation. That she would be able to launder enough money for her to repay the debt. Had she ventured deeper and deeper into that world of her own accord, even as her debt grew ever larger?

Nina knew there was no way out of that sort of process. It was a cycle that escalated out of control until nothing but violence was left.

She sank back in her chair and looked around the gleaming white kitchen.

If that was what had happened, Nora had kept everything going for a long while, six years, before it had collapsed around her. She must have panicked.

She had run out of options, once and for all.

*

Ingemar’s anger is eating away at me from inside, stealing my oxygen, I’m falling, falling.

He says I’m not fit to look after his children, that I can’t be his wife after what I’ve done.

I try to explain that this isn’t about me, it’s about him. They want his company now that it’s got a major client, a real client, the big Chinese firm, there’s real money there now, and I’m culpable. We are culpable. He can’t just close his eyes – there’s no way back – but he’s refusing. He keeps calling them ‘gangsters’.

You can’t give in to violence
.

I beg and plead impotently, but he refuses to see, refuses to hear.

Ingemar, Ingemar, we have to be rational!

And he turns towards me but he doesn’t see me: he sees only my actions, only my mistakes. I’m nothing to him. I’m worth absolutely nothing as an individual. I am a problem, something that could trigger another media avalanche, I am a potential snowstorm of headlines – everything I’ve done, all my dreams, everything I’ve tried to achieve … His eyes are as cold as a snake’s, his hands like daggers pointing at my chest, and my heart freezes to ice. I feel the cold spread through me as the muscles of my heart grow sharp and scrape against each other.

He refuses to listen, and I am nothing.

*

The man was at the back of the crowd of agitated citizens who were screaming and waving their fists at the imposing brick building.

‘Child-killer! Child-killer!’ the crowd was chanting.

But he said nothing, just stood there with his hands buried in the pockets of his raincoat, watching the mass of people. He had to admit that he found the entire situation breathtakingly comical.

Here he was, surrounded by the mob, unable to deny that Anders Schyman really was true to his word. In complete contrast to what this crowd evidently believed, the editor-in-chief of the
Evening Post
was a man of honour and courage – he would be the first to attest to that.

Not a single word in all these years that there had been a secret source behind his television documentary, not so much as a whisper. Anders Schyman was a good bloke, he could personally vouch for that. He prided himself on being a good judge of character, and he had got better over the years.

The man focused on his breathing for a while, noting the way his stomach tensed when he breathed in, then relaxed when he exhaled, in a constantly repeated process.

It had been when they were doing their obligatory military service that he and his mirror-image had discovered their suitability for their very particular choice of career. They had done very well on their interpreting course in the garrison town of Karlsborg, especially in the simulated torture sessions that later received so much criticism in the press. The two of them had each, entirely unknown to the other, faked breakdowns so as not to stand out from the crowd.

Going back to their ordained careers as forest wardens had felt impossible after that. Instead they had set up their own little forestry company, and had simultaneously embarked upon the considerably more interesting career that now occupied most of their time. They worked as freelancers, primarily in Scandinavia, but they also accepted jobs in other parts of Europe. Their employers were many and various: they would work for anyone who was prepared to pay.

Viola Söderland was their first big case. They had done a few smaller jobs for the Russians, whose own organizations weren’t particularly impressive in those days: the post-Soviet nation was very young at the time. Viola Söderland had done business with a lot of them. She had bought forests and land, but then she had tried to defraud them. She had regarded them as Communist amateurs. In the end it was abundantly clear that the money was gone, along with every possibility of recovering it. She was also under investigation by the police, and it was only a matter of time before she started to talk. She was, to put it mildly, a risk-factor that was no longer fit for purpose.

But he and his brother hadn’t been very professional in those days. After Viola Söderland, he and his mirror-image had had to do a serious clean-up job. The police were getting closer. He didn’t know what the authorities had on them – all they knew was that they had to find some way of dealing with the situation.

The best way to get the police off their tail was obviously to get them to look in a completely different direction. So they had chosen a controversial and risky method: they had contacted a highly regarded television journalist and served him up a watertight story that showed Viola Söderland had fled the country and was now living in luxury in the former Soviet Union. It had been relatively straightforward. Viola had actually been planning to run. She’d told them so entirely of her own accord – they hadn’t even had to work very hard on her.