Dark Secrets (55 page)

Sebastian straightened up and took out his cell phone. He was about to call Torkel when the phone started buzzing in his hand. He didn’t recognize the number, but answered at once, sounding stressed.

“Hello!”

It was Billy. He sounded excited, and Sebastian didn’t get the chance to tell him where he was or what he had just discovered.

“Have you spoken to Torkel?”

“No, but—”

“Palmlövska High owns a Volvo,” Billy said quickly. “Or, at least, the foundation that runs the school has one. A dark blue S60, 2004. And it gets better…”

Sebastian took a few steps into the living room, away from the body. The situation seemed too bizarre to start discussing possible Volvos with Billy.

“Billy, listen to me.”

But Billy wasn’t listening. He was talking. Rapidly and excitedly.

“I’ve the list of calls from the phone that sent those texts to Roger. Calls to Frank Clevén and Lena Eriksson were made from that same phone. Do you realize what that means?”

Sebastian took a deep breath and was about to interrupt Billy when he sensed something in Roger’s room. Something that definitely shouldn’t be there. He was hardly listening to Billy as he took the last few steps to the door of the boy’s room.

“We can bring Groth in now! We’ve got him!” Sebastian could almost feel the triumph in Billy’s voice.

“Hello, Sebastian, can you hear me? We can bring Groth in!”

“There’s no need… He’s here.”

Sebastian lowered the phone and stared at Ragnar Groth, who was hanging from the light fixture in Roger’s room.

Ragnar Groth’s dead eyes stared back.

They worked hard for the rest of the day. Made sure they were as quick and efficient as they could be without cutting corners. The day’s events required inexorable focus. They had been waiting for a breakthrough for so long, and now it seemed they were within touching distance of the solution. Nothing must go wrong. Nothing. It was a difficult exercise. They needed time to consider what they knew, time for forensic tests to be carried out on what they had discovered, and yet at the same time the results were needed with lightning speed.

Torkel had tried to keep the press out of it for as long as possible; there was nothing to be gained from information about the scene of the murder or the two dead bodies in the apartment becoming public knowledge. But as in all complex investigations involving a large number of individuals, the news about Principal Ragnar Groth’s death soon leaked out. This gave rise to wild speculation, particularly in the local newspaper, which seemed to have access to a well-informed source within the police, and soon it was impossible to wait any longer.

Torkel and Hanser called a press conference with the aim of restoring some semblance of peace and quiet in which to work. Torkel was usually very careful when he made a statement to the press, but after putting together a number of preliminary results and consulting with Ursula and Hanser, he had decided that they could risk promising an imminent breakthrough in the investigation. The room was packed with journalists when they arrived, and Torkel wasted little time on small talk.

Another man and a woman had been found dead.

The woman was closely related to Roger Eriksson and had been killed, in all probability, by the man who had been found dead.

There were a number of indications to suggest that the man, who had previously figured in the investigation, had taken his own life after the woman’s death.

Torkel did, however, make one thing very clear. The suspect was not the teenager who had been brought in for questioning at an earlier stage in the investigation. He was still in the clear. He stressed this point again before bringing his short presentation to a close.

It was like putting a dish of strawberry jam next to a nest of wasps. Eager hands shot into the air, questions came raining down. Everybody was talking without listening to what anybody else was saying; they were just demanding answers. Torkel was able to pick out the same questions, over and over again.

Was it true that the principal of Palmlövska High was involved?

Was he the man they had found?

Was the dead woman Roger’s mother?

Torkel was struck by the special interplay between the two parties in the hot, crowded room. On one side were the journalists, who were actually just as well informed as those to whom they were addressing their questions. On the other side the police, whose real task was to provide official confirmation of what was already known. One side already knew the answers, the other already knew the questions.

It hadn’t always been so obvious, but it had been a long time since Torkel had been involved in an investigation where information didn’t leak out. At least, that’s what happened as soon as the information was passed beyond his own small team.

Torkel answered as evasively as possible and continued to refer stubbornly to the fact that the investigation was now at a sensitive stage. He was used to ducking and diving when it came to journalists’ questions, which was likely why he was unpopular with them. Hanser found it more difficult to fend them off, which Torkel could understand. This
was her town, her career, and in the end the desire to have them as friends rather than enemies became too much for her.

“I can confirm that certain indications do point toward the school,” she began before Torkel quickly thanked everyone, and led her out of the room. He could see that she was embarrassed, but she still tried to justify her lapse.

“They already knew anyway.”

“That’s not the point. We decide what we give them, not the other way around. That’s the principle. Now all hell will be let loose at the school.”

That was exactly what Torkel wanted to avoid. The school had, in fact, been given priority as a possible site where further clues might be found. One of the first things Torkel had done following Sebastian’s dramatic discovery—after consulting with Billy and Ursula—was to widen the search area. Groth’s house had turned up an almost suspicious lack of personal belongings, not to mention evidence. The car was registered to the foundation that ran Palmlövska High, so the idea of searching the school buildings seemed perfectly natural. It was the only place they knew of to which Groth had unrestricted access. Torkel quickly made the decision to send Ursula over there, once she had carried out a preliminary investigation of the new crime scene. But she wouldn’t be going alone. Sebastian would go with her.

To Torkel’s surprise, Ursula hadn’t objected. The possibility of solving the case was far more important than her own ego when the pieces might fall into place so quickly, and Sebastian was the only one who knew the school well. Admittedly his knowledge was thirty years old, but even so… Ursula had even invited him to sit in the front seat of the car.

They hadn’t spoken on the way there.

There was a limit, after all.

Billy felt completely cut off from everything that was going on as he sat alone in the office. Torkel had asked him to track down the dark
blue Volvo S60. It wasn’t at the school; both Ursula and the principal’s PA had confirmed that. Billy had sent out a call to all patrols, then decided to go to Lena Eriksson’s apartment anyway. He had done what he could and wanted to form his own impression of the latest crime scene.

The station seemed emptier than usual, and Billy suspected that Torkel had commandeered most of the staff to cordon off the various crime scenes and the school. They had a number of places to analyze now: the soccer field, Lena’s apartment, Groth’s house again, and the school. Like a four-leaf clover of interesting places, but at the same time not all that easy to handle. Torkel had to prioritize which places they should process themselves and which they should hand over to the Västerås forensic technicians.

Billy was elated as he got in the car. For the first time in days he felt as if the solution to Roger’s death was within reach. Everything seemed to be going their way at the moment. And that was set to continue. As Billy turned off toward Lena’s apartment, he had a call from a patrol car reporting that the vehicle he was looking for was parked outside the building he was heading for. Thirty seconds later Billy was standing by the Volvo and ringing Torkel to tell him. Torkel was inside Lena’s apartment with Vanja and had just found a set of Volvo keys in one of Groth’s pockets.

Everything did indeed seem to be going their way at the moment.

For thirty minutes Ursula and Sebastian had been working their way through the school, and they were now standing in front of a dirty gray steel door in the basement. A door that neither the janitor nor one of the secretaries, who had come down with them, seemed to know anything about. In Sebastian’s day it had been a shelter, but now nobody seemed to know what the space behind the door was used for. None of the staff had been very helpful, and both the janitor and the secretary wanted to check with the principal before they had any intention of
helping open the door. Sebastian looked at them and remembered how anxious the staff had been around his own father. “Anxious” hadn’t really come close, in fact. Perhaps respect for authority—or rather fear—was impregnated in the walls. But enough was enough.

“Let me put it like this: Ragnar Groth couldn’t give a shit whether you open this door or not. He doesn’t care anymore.”

That didn’t help. The janitor puffed himself up and suddenly maintained that he didn’t have a key to this door, in any case. He’d never had one. The secretary nodded in agreement. Sebastian moved closer to them; there was a hint of doubt in the janitor’s eyes, he could see it. Ragnar Groth’s power was waning, they both knew it, and somehow this was giving the janitor a spurt of confidence. One last battle before the institution that had always regarded itself as superior to most fell.

Sebastian looked at the man and realized that at this moment he was closer to destroying his father’s dream than he had ever been. Palmlövska High and its irreproachable reputation would never be the same after this, whether the principal was guilty or not. Sebastian knew it, and the man standing in front of him probably realized the same thing. Even though the janitor didn’t know what had happened to Groth, the interviews and the frequent visits from the police had told him something. What had been clean and pure would soon no longer be clean and pure. They looked at each other, locked into a mutual stare. For Sebastian it was no longer the school janitor standing in front of him: it was the lies, the hypocrisy, everything his father’s creation represented. Sebastian took a deep, energizing breath and moved another step closer, ready to shake every single key out of every single pocket in the smaller man’s clothing. That door was going to be opened. Ursula, who had rarely seen Sebastian looking so aggressive, stopped him.

“You can go.” She dismissed the staff with a wave of her hand, then turned to Sebastian. “We are police officers. Please bear that in mind. Behave yourself.”

Then she walked past him without another word. Sebastian watched her, for once unable to come up with that spiteful retort he was usually
so good at. But she was wrong. He wasn’t a police officer. He was there for his own sake, no one else’s. That was how it had begun, and that was how it would end. He would gladly help them to bring down Palmlövska High if he could, but then it would be over and he would move on. Go and look for a woman he had once slept with.