The Silenced

“You’ve matched it to DNA that was found in another case, but never identified,” Julia interrupted.

“Exactly. All I get on the screen is the fact that there’s a match in the register, the percentage of the similarity between the samples, and the number of the case in which the other sample was found.”

Julia got hold of a pen and paper. “Would you mind giving me the number?”

She wrote the digits and letters down, one by one, then stared at the familiar combination.

“Skarpö,” she said. As much to herself as to the woman on the other end of the line.

Her brain was working at high speed, already starting to process the consequences of what she’d just been told. But she still forced herself to ask one more time:

“Just so I know I’ve got this right. Our dismembered body was present at the shoot-out on Skarpö?”

“That’s certainly what the DNA sample suggests. The match came through a few minutes ago. I’m new here, so I don’t really know what the procedures are, but I thought you’d probably want to know as soon as possible. I mean, there’s been a lot in the papers and everything.”

“You did exactly the right thing. Thanks very much for letting me know.”

“No problem.”

Julia ended the call. And realized that she was smiling. A line of inquiry, she thought. For a moment she imagined herself as a sniffer dog with its nose pressed to the ground.

And what a line of inquiry …

* * *

Sarac cautiously opened the door to his apartment. He breathed in the stale air with its smell of newly constructed Ikea furniture. Then he took a long stride across the heap of advertisements and newspapers, snuck in, and lowered all the blinds before switching on the weak lamp above the stove. He rubbed his hands together, trying to get some warmth back into his frozen fingers.

Even though it was his home, the apartment filled him with unease and he had to sit down and take a few deep breaths to control his anxiety—the new and deep-rooted varieties alike. He was safe there, he told himself, at least for a few hours.

Everything looked just as he remembered, yet he was still convinced that the apartment had been painstakingly cleaned. That anything suggesting that he was anything other than the heroic police officer David Sarac had long since been removed.

The clock on the microwave said 14:50, which meant that at best he had about three hours before the staff in the nursing home realized that he’d escaped, and maybe as long as three and a half hours before the news reached the right people. Not long, but long enough.

The envelope containing his passport, banknotes of various currencies, and the credit card he only used when traveling was still in the bottom drawer of his desk. He breathed a sigh of relief. The people who had cleaned his apartment obviously didn’t think he was likely to want to run. He could hardly blame them. Only a few days ago he hadn’t even wanted to go outside. That he had managed to handle the train journey to Stockholm was largely because Eskil had given him a healthy dose of tranquilizers that had protected him against the sounds, the lights, and, not least, the voices in his head.

In the pantry he found a packet of ramen noodles. As the water boiled he emptied the pockets of his borrowed clothes and put the train ticket, key ring, and bus pass on the kitchen table. Then, finally, the bag of sleeping pills.

He undressed and stuffed the clothes into a plastic bag he found under the sink. There were surveillance cameras at the Central Station that he hadn’t been able to avoid. It wouldn’t take long for them to find him. And police photos showing what he looked like. He dug out a pair of black jeans and a cotton shirt from his wardrobe. They were both too big, reminding him of how much weight he had lost. He ate the noodles straight from the pan, then washed down another tranquilizer with tap water. Oddly enough, the food tasted considerably better than anything he had eaten in the nursing home.

When he had finished he washed everything up carefully and put the trash in the bag containing the clothes. He was planning to dump it in a bin by the entrance to the subway, so that at least there wouldn’t be any visible evidence that he had been in the apartment.

In the back of the hall cupboard he found a padded jacket and a black knit hat. Just as he had hoped, his own clothes made him look different. Just an ordinary Swede on his way to work.

He put the things on the kitchen table in his jacket pockets, turned out the light, and then slowly peered behind the blind. Everything looked quiet outside. He couldn’t help glancing at the windows opposite. That was where they had watched him from last year. Waiting for his next move.

All your doing, your fault, the voices whispered.

* * *

It was almost nine o’clock at night by the time Julia got all the boxes into her office. The corridor was deserted, its doors closed, half the fluorescent lights in the ceiling above the linoleum floor switched off. She liked working late. It meant she avoided unnecessary distractions, telephones ringing, colleagues knocking on her door when they didn’t actually want anything.

The pictures were all laid out on her desk. First their unidentified body with its silent grin. She looked at him. No matter who he was and what he had done, no one deserved to die like that. Someone had stripped him of everything. His name, his dignity, even his humanity.

Below the pictures of the body she had lined up the photographs from Skarpö.

First the burned-out wreck of a house surrounded by snow. Black beams, a solitary chimney stack sticking up toward the sky from the foundations. Then a number of pictures that were far worse: charred bodies among the ruins, others outside in the snow. Lifeless, some of them with visible holes in their torsos or heads. Spent cartridges everywhere. Short ones from pistols, longer ones from assault rifles, red or blue ones from shotguns. The photographs were an all-too-visible reminder of just how violent the shoot-out had been.

Superintendent Peter Molnar lay on his back with his mouth wide-open, several of his dazzlingly white teeth shot out. The blood around his head formed a red halo. His eyes were staring blankly up at the sky. She’d seen the picture before, enough times for the shudder in her stomach not to feel quite so strong. Poor Peter. He’d been a good officer, someone most people spoke well of. Admittedly, he and the men on his team were the same tiresome alpha males whom the force seemed to be awash with. The guys who tried it on with her, one after the other, on the few occasions she had been stupid enough to visit any of the police bars. But Peter was at least both smart and funny. He knew when it was time to give up and go and hunt easier prey. And now his wife was a widow and his children left fatherless. She turned the photograph over.

Detective Inspector Josef Almlund’s death looked more peaceful. She had known him too, of course. Peter socialized more with his second-in-command than with his own family. Josef had been a large man of few words, always ready to do exactly what Peter asked of him. Even lie to Peter’s wife, if that was called for. Which it probably had been on a fairly regular basis.

Josef Almlund was sitting at one end of the house, leaning back against the foundations with his head lolling on his chest. The fire had burned his jacket and the hair at the back of his neck, but apart from that it almost looked like he was asleep. Having a bit of a rest before the fighting started again. She turned the picture over, just as she had with the one of Molnar. She paused for a moment, trying to shake off the images of the two dead men. She only half succeeded. She thought about David Sarac. The horrors he must have experienced out there. Watching his friends die around him. The last she had heard about Sarac was that he was in a nursing home in an undisclosed location. Hardly surprising, really.

Her cell phone buzzed, but she ignored it, just as she had a few minutes earlier. She knew it was Amante. He’d have to wait until morning, when she had a better idea of things. Besides, her conversation with Wallin was still in the back of her mind.

She gathered all the photographs she needed and put the others back in the evidence boxes. Now at least she had a time and a location to work with. On January 2, 2014, the dead man had been on the island of Skarpö, just outside Vaxholm in the Stockholm archipelago. According to the pathologist, the body parts had been in the water for approximately four months, so since late February or thereabouts. That left a gap of six, eight weeks between the Skarpö shoot-out and the time when the body parts were deposited beneath the ice.

She looked at the photographs from the Forensic Medicine Unit again. Stared at the mutilated smile.

“I’m getting closer,” she whispered. “I’ll soon know who you are.”

Her cell phone started to buzz again, but she let it ring.

* * *

“Come in, David. I’m Frank.” The man who had opened the door held out his hand toward Sarac, but he didn’t take it. It was the same man from the grainy photograph Eskil had shown him. The nurse was right: they did actually look quite similar. They both looked like cops. Or criminals. Or both.

He walked past the man into a shabby little office. The room couldn’t be more than fifteen to twenty square meters in total. By one wall was a camping mattress and a sleeping bag, and there was a door that presumably led to a toilet. In the opposite wall was a dirty window facing the parking lot outside. Two overflowing Dumpsters were visible below, but, judging by the general state of the building, all construction work had been abandoned a long time ago. The whole of the run-down industrial estate felt badly neglected. Next to the bus stop Sarac had seen a couple of large signs proudly showing the future. Glass and concrete reaching for the skies. No 1970s barracks like this.

“It’s all ready, just as we agreed.” The man calling himself Frank gestured toward the two wooden chairs beside the camping table in the middle of the room. There was an open laptop on the table and, next to it, a camera mounted on a tripod.

Sarac took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair, then sat down. Frank put a photograph in front of him. The blonde woman on the hood, the same terrible image as the picture he had already seen, but from a different angle. Then a sheet of paper, a printout from the vehicle register with the name of the car’s owner clearly circled. Then another picture. The good-looking family again.

Sarac swallowed. His heart was pounding so hard that he was having trouble breathing.

“He called me straight afterward. Crying like a little child,” Frank said. “I went round and cleaned up. Got rid of all the evidence that he’d ever been there. And in return he told me about you. Who you met, how much you could remember after the accident. He was my source in the hunt for Janus. And he told me that you and Janus were out there on the island.”

Sarac took a deep breath. So it was true. He’d been betrayed. Betrayed by his ultimate superior.

“You understand what this means, don’t you?” Frank went on in a low voice. “What the consequences could be if you choose to go on with this? This sort of knowledge can be lethal.”

“If I d-didn’t …” Sarac cleared his throat. The bullet that had passed through his neck out on the island had damaged his larynx, making his voice unreliable. “If I didn’t, I’d hardly be here.”

Frank nodded, then went over to the small sink at the far end of the room and poured a glass of water, which he put down on the table. Then he sat down in front of the computer. Sarac took a couple of sips before looking up.

“Okay,” Frank said. “Your turn. Your secret in return for mine, like we agreed.”

The man pressed a key and a little red light lit up on the camera. “You can start talking whenever you like.”

Sarac cleared his throat again and instinctively scratched the scar on his neck.

“M-My name is David Sarac. I handle informants for the Stockholm Police, and I was responsible for a secret source, an undercover agent called Janus. I was also responsible for the shoot-out on Skarpö in the New Year. Everyone who died and was injured out there was trying to get hold of Janus, to uncover his true identity. None of them succeeded.”

He paused, then breathed in through his nose.

“I’m the only person who knows the truth. The only survivor who knows who Janus really is …”

* * *

Julia stood up from her chair. She hit her knee hard against the desktop and very nearly emptied the contents of her morning coffee across the collage of terrible images that had lain on her desk since the previous evening.

“Gone? How can a body just be gone?”

“Well …” The pathologist’s voice on the phone was dry as dust. “I didn’t say it was gone. I said it isn’t here. There’s a big difference. We aren’t in the habit of losing bodies here in the Forensic Medical Unit.”

The pain in her knee made Julia grimace. She was at the point of saying that she hadn’t had enough coffee to deal with semantic pedantry but managed to stop herself just in time.

“Do you feel like telling me what has happened to the body, then?” she said as calmly as she could.

“Your colleagues came and collected it last night. They brought their own van and everything.”

For a couple of seconds Julia’s brain stopped working.

“My colleagues,” she managed to say. “My colleagues moved our dismembered body?” She could hear how stupid she sounded.

“Exactly,” the pathologist said. “Your colleagues in the Security Police. According to the night staff, they seemed to be in quite a hurry.”

* * *

The door to Pärson’s room was open, but it wouldn’t have made any difference if it had been barricaded from the inside. No one stuck their oar into her cases—not the Security Police, nor anyone else.

“What the hell is going on? Why have the Security Police taken my dead body?”

“And good morning to you too, Gabrielsson. I was just about to call you, so you’ve saved me the trouble. Please have a seat.”

Pärson waved his fleshy hand toward one of the two chairs opposite his desk. Only then did Julia realize that Amante was already sitting in the other one.

“Well,” he went on, “the news I was going to share with the two of you, which Julia has evidently already heard, is that the Security Police, in their great wisdom, have decided to ease our burden.”

He smiled ever so slightly, just enough to crease his jowls.

“Apparently our dismembered body is connected to a suspected terrorism case. Some sort of defector. Syria or Iran or something.”

“That’s not true,” Julia said, rather less calmly than she had hoped.

“No?” Pärson’s happy smile faltered slightly.

Julia took a deep breath. “Our victim was involved in Skarpö. There’s a match with his DNA in the register. We already knew that at least one person got away, so that’s probably who we’ve found.”

Pärson straightened up. The movement made his chair whimper under his weight. “And how the hell do you know that?”

“I spoke to the National Forensics Lab late yesterday afternoon,” she said. She bit her lip and waited for the inevitable explosion.

Pärson’s face turned from pink to red. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me straightaway?”

Well, she thought. Partly because you’d already left several hours earlier; partly because you get annoyed if anyone calls you after work about things that aren’t a matter of life and death; but mainly because you would have seen a chance to make a bit on the side by calling the media, thereby making my job ten times harder. For a few seconds she actually considered saying all this out loud.

“We were going to tell you first thing this morning,” Amante said out of the blue. “We just wanted a chance to discuss it first. To be honest, neither of us believed that there was much urgency in a case where the victim had been dead for several months.”

Pärson glared at him, and even Julia got the evil eye before he threw himself back in his chair, which once again protested loudly.

“Bloody hell. This sort of thing needs to be reported at once; that should be obvious, surely? A connection to Skarpö changes everything. The media are going to lose it completely. The phones will be ringing off the hook. Those soft-shoed bastards must have got one of their hackers to flag up the case in the computer system. And got advance warning as soon as the lab found a match. The Security Police have been waiting for an opportunity to muscle in on the Skarpö case ever since last winter. It’s no wonder that they were so damn fast. I need to inform the head of Regional Crime right away.”

“Why do the Security Police want to get a foot in the door of the Skarpö investigation?”

Pärson glared at Julia.

“Are you hard of hearing? They want to stake out their position in the new police authority. Show that they’re worth their huge budget. If the Security Police manage to tie all the remaining loose ends in the Skarpö case and find the person who got away—the one we and National Crime have failed to find so far—it’ll make us look like incompetent idiots. Thanks a fucking bunch for that, Gabrielsson. I promise you now, I’ll be sure to tell the head of Regional Crime all about your exemplary work.”

Julia tried to control herself. She didn’t succeed as well as she usually did. And blamed it on the lack of caffeine.

“What about you, then,” she said, “just letting the Security Police stroll in and take over everything? Without so much as calling me, even though it was my case. Who did you talk to at the Security Police? What unit? What case number did he give?” She stopped herself, aware that she had crossed the line, actually way beyond it.

“Now listen,” Pärson said, leaning forward over his desk. “You’ve been in the force long enough to know that you have to take things as they come. Don’t try to blame this on me. If you’d kept me properly informed, I could have told them to go to hell—just like I want you and your little pal here to do now, before I resort to physical measures.”

As they were walking away from Pärson’s room, Amante drew her aside in the corridor. They stopped in front of a faded picture of an archipelago landscape.

“Explain what just happened to me,” he said quietly.

“I thought you’d worked it out,” she muttered. “Our work-shy boss allowed someone at the Security Police—whose name he can’t recall—to take over our case for reasons he can’t remember. And right now he’s calling his own superior and blaming the whole thing on us.”

“So we’re being taken off the case?”

“He didn’t actually say that in so many words. Not that it really matters. Without the body we haven’t got a case. No chance of making any progress. The National Forensics Lab has probably already received new orders to talk exclusively to the Security Police from now on, presumably for reasons relating to national security.”

She fell silent and nodded at a colleague walking past them.

“Okay, that’s pretty much what I thought,” Amante said when the man was out of earshot. “Just wanted to make sure.”

He leaned a bit closer to Julia as he glanced over his shoulder.

“I’ve got something I need to show you. It’s about our body.”

She raised her eyebrows and waited for him to go on. But Amante gave no indication of continuing.

“Okay,” she said. “Let me get a cup of coffee. Your room or mine?”

Amante shook his head. “Not here. In my apartment. I’ll make you coffee.”

* * *

Sarac got up from the camping mattress, switched the computer on, and sat down at the table. He stretched to shake off the half doze that had more or less replaced real sleep for him. Time was running out, his tranquilizers would last another four days, but he hoped everything would be over by then.

Three days had passed since their exchange. Frank had left shortly after the video was finished. Packed his things, gave him the key to the office, and showed him how the computer and encrypted e-mail worked before taking his leave. This time Sarac did shake his hand. He knew who Frank was now, and why he had gone to such lengths to find out the truth about Janus. But instead of trying to steal it the way he had last winter, he had offered something in exchange. A fair deal between two equal parties. Quid pro quo.

So there he was, in a shabby little office in a ramshackle building that was waiting to be demolished. A perfect hiding place.

By now they must be hunting all over for him. They’d have tracked him via the security cameras at the Central Station, and one way or another they’d have figured out that he’d been back to his apartment. But there the trail would go cold. He had taken three different buses to get out here, using a different travel card each time. All bought at different places and paid for in cash, according to Hunter’s instructions. He was safe here. Safe enough, anyway.

He had spent a whole day thinking about his next course of action. Then he made up his mind not to beat around the bush. He sent an encrypted e-mail revealing what he knew. What he wanted. But so far he hadn’t received a reply.

He logged into his online e-mail account and, as he waited for the program to load, wrapped his fingers around the bag of sleeping pills in his pocket. He counted them one more time. Odds and evens.

Debts I can’t escape till the day I die, the song in his head echoed, just as it had last Christmas.

The program opened up. There was a new message at the top of his in-box. He held his breath. Heard the music in his head get louder as he clicked to open the e-mail.

Curl your lip and make me want to live for one more day. Make me want to sleep through one more night.

An answer. One final task. His final task.

* * *

The apartment didn’t look anything like what Julia had been expecting. The lobby of the building in Östermalm was imposing, with high arches and a heavy limestone staircase with a polished teak handrail. But inside the heavy door of the apartment the furnishings were considerably more spartan.

She should really have said no. Should have made her so-called partner tell her whatever he had to say up in Police Headquarters instead of wasting time going home with him. That she went along with him without a word of protest or even asking any questions was entirely Oscar Wallin’s fault. Wallin’s and that of her own wretched curiosity.

Sadly, Amante’s apartment didn’t provide any immediate clues regarding either him or his intentions. There were three bedrooms, two of which were completely empty apart from a few dead flies on the windowsills. In the third was a folding bed, two open removal boxes, and a small, old-fashioned television on the floor. No photographs, pictures, or anything else that said anything about the person who lived there. The only rhythm echoing between the bare walls was loneliness.

“Divorce,” Amante said, confirming her impressions. “All my things are in storage. My ex-wife sent the wrong boxes here. Old vacation clothes.” He gestured toward his yacht club blazer and sweater. “She knows I hate this jacket, so she probably did it on purpose.”

He shrugged his shoulders as if to indicate that he’d said enough on the subject.

“There’s coffee in the kitchen. Hot water in the right-hand tap. I’m just going to …” He nodded toward the toilet door.

“Sure, I’ll sort it,” she said.

The kitchen was, if possible, even barer than the rest of the apartment. And expensive. Marble counters, a big wine refrigerator, a gas range with six rings. Stepfather’s money, she guessed. Maybe the apartment even belonged to him.

She couldn’t see a coffee machine but did find a jar of instant and a few mismatched mugs covered with advertising logos. One of the German taps was marked Heisswasser. She tried it and, sure enough, got scalding-hot water straight from the tap. What an idea. She filled two mugs with water, added some powder, and stirred them with a coffee-flecked chopstick she found in the sink. She shuddered. The smell from the mugs wasn’t enticing, but a splash of milk would make it bearable. She opened a large stainless steel door that she hoped belonged to the fridge. She found an open can of pea soup, a couple of greasy trays of Chinese food, and a can of low-alcohol beer. The huge kitchen was evidently completely wasted on Amante.

At the bottom of the fridge was a big yellow plastic cooler that looked brand-new. Amante had gone to the trouble of removing a couple of shelves from the fridge to make room for it, so at a guess it contained something that needed to be kept fresh. With a bit of luck there might even be some milk. She undid the straps on the side and opened the lid. She felt her heart stop for a few seconds.

She took a step back. Then another one. The fridge door slowly closed of its own accord and she was left standing with the lid in her hand.

Amante came into the kitchen.

“Did you find the coffee?” He caught her eye and stopped.

“Amante,” Julia said, trying her utmost to sound calm. “Would you mind explaining why you have the head of our dead body in your fridge?”

* * *

Sarac had pulled on his jacket and hat. Turned out the lights in the little room. He looked at the time. Ten past five, and darkness was already settling on the parking lot outside the window. Time to get going. For some reason he felt different. Almost excited. He put his hands in his pockets and felt the bag of sleeping pills. On a sudden impulse he took it out and held it up against the weak light from the window. Twenty-five oval pills. He went over to the tiny kitchen area, opened the cupboard, and tucked the bag away inside it. Then he walked out of the room and closed the door silently behind him. He was on his way now. On his way to put things right.

* * *

The coffee tasted just as disgusting as Julia had expected. But it was also the only thing in this whole situation that was remotely predictable.

“Sorry if I scared you,” Amante said. “Let me explain. I called the National Forensics Lab yesterday. Spoke to a very nice young woman who was about to finish for the day. She said she’d spoken to you about the link to Skarpö a few minutes before I called. She asked if we actually spoke to each other in Violent Crime.”

He took a sip of coffee and gave her a long look over the top of the cup. Julia said nothing, preferring to wait for him to go on instead.

“When the pathologist said we might not be able to identify our victim from DNA, I called a guy in Europol who I got to know on Lampedusa. He works as a forensics expert in Sarajevo. They’ve got a computer program that can create a three-dimensional image of a face from a layered X-ray of a skull. They use it to identify remains from the war. Obviously it’s not a hundred percent, but enough to get a photofit.” He took another swig of coffee. “The same thing must have occurred to you—that we could try to reconstruct his face some other way. That’s why you called the Forensic Medicine Unit this morning, isn’t it?”

She glared at him for a few seconds.

“The Museum of Medieval Stockholm,” she said. “They’ve got a forensic anthropologist who came up with a wax model of Birger Jarl’s face using just his skull a couple of years ago.”

“Ah, smart.” Amante nodded. “A proper model of the whole head probably works a lot better than just a photofit. But that would take longer. At least a month or so.”

“And you couldn’t wait that long. You needed to prove how smart you were.”

A hint of a blush spread across Amante’s neck. “I did actually try to call you yesterday evening. It wasn’t that hard to work out why you weren’t answering. You knew there was a link to Skarpö and you didn’t want to involve the civilian once the case started to heat up.”

Her turn to blush now, if she’d been the type. Which she wasn’t.

“I figured out that everything would change as soon as the connection to Skarpö became common knowledge,” he went on. “All manner of different police units and bosses would get involved. And the civilian would be the first person taken off the case. And I didn’t want that, not after seeing the body. After seeing what our perpetrator had done to him.” He stared at her; his anxious expression seemed to be looking for understanding.

Julia stifled a nod. Amante was saying the right things and he sounded entirely honest. But she wanted to hear the rest of the story before she made up her mind if he really was telling the truth.

Amante took a deep breath. “So, after I tried to call you last night, I drove out to the Forensic Medicine Unit. I paid the member of staff on duty two thousand kronor to let me borrow the head for twenty-four hours. I’d have gone as high as five, but he jumped at my first offer.”

He pulled a face that was probably meant to look amused.

“The plan was to get the skull X-rayed and have it back in place by now. No one would have noticed anything and it would all have been a lot quicker than filling out forms and waiting for them to be processed. But then the Security Police appeared out of nowhere to fetch the body. Without even opening the bag, apparently, which was lucky for me.”

“You must have realized that people were bound to ask questions about your photofit. Wonder where it had come from?”

He shrugged. “One thing at a time. A photofit would have been a big step forward. Paperwork can always be sorted out afterward, and it’s not as if I’ve done anything illegal.”

“Apart from bribing a public official, you mean?”

Amante smiled, a cryptic little smile that she couldn’t really make sense of. Like so much else about him. If Wallin hadn’t warned her, by this point she would have been convinced that Amante was telling the truth. But for now she still had her doubts.