Dark Secrets (56 page)

Nothing else.

Nothing more.

Ursula came back, still not speaking. She was carrying a toolbox, which she put down and opened. Dove into it and came up with a large electric drill. Three minutes later shards of metal were flying as she drilled around the lock. The two of them pushed the door open and peered into the room behind it, which looked like a neat and tidy office. No windows, of course, but it had white-painted walls, soft lighting, and a large dark-colored desk with a computer on it. Some stylish filing cabinets and an English leather chair in the center. The pedantic tidiness immediately told Sebastian that they were in the right place. The furniture was arranged symmetrically and gave the room balance, while the position of the pens on the desk practically screamed the principal’s name. Sebastian and Ursula looked at each other and actually smiled. The principal’s little secret, whatever it might be, was revealed.

Ursula handed Sebastian a pair of latex gloves and led the way into the room. Sebastian thought it felt like one of those neat interrogation rooms he had seen when he and Lily visited the Stasi Museum in the former East Germany. Stylish and civilized on the surface, but beneath the orderliness it vibrated with secrets and events that impregnated the walls, secrets that were never meant to be known. The feeling was reinforced by the contradictory smell that met him and Ursula as they walked in: fresh lemon and dry stuffiness.

Carefully they made a start. Sebastian took the shiny, spotless filing cabinets, Ursula the desk. It wasn’t long before Sebastian made the first discovery behind some files in the cabinet. He held up a pile of DVDs with brightly colored pictures on them.

“
Real Men, Hard Cocks
. Volumes two and three. I wonder what happened to volume one?”

Ursula smiled grimly.

“We’ve only just started. I expect you’ll find it.”

Sebastian carried on sifting through the loose DVDs.

“
Bareback Mountain. Bears Jacking and Fucking
. There’s not much variety.” He put them down and carried on going through the filing cabinet.

“Look at this.”

Ursula came over and peered into the drawer. Behind the files was a cardboard box belonging to a Samsung cell phone. The box looked new. Ursula reached for it.

T
HE EXAMINATION
of Lena Eriksson’s apartment strengthened the theory Torkel and Vanja were working on. For some reason, Groth had confronted Lena at home. They had quarreled. The deep wound on the back of Lena’s head suggested that she had been pushed, or had fallen and hit the sharp edge of the kitchen table so hard that she had died of her injuries. They found nothing to suggest anything other than Ragnar Groth had then taken his own life. Vanja had even found a brief farewell note on Roger’s desk. Written on a torn-off sheet of paper.

Forgive me
, it said in blue pen.

After Ursula’s preliminary investigation of the apartment, once she had gone off to Palmlövska High with Sebastian, Torkel organized the next stage of the procedure. The difficulty lay in preventing too much coming and going in the apartment, to avoid any forensic evidence being contaminated. It seemed as if the entire Västerås police force needed to call around for one reason or another, and Torkel soon stationed a well-built officer at the bottom of the stairs to make sure that only those who really did have legitimate business were allowed in.

They focused on the bodies first of all. Photographed them from every conceivable angle in order to send them off for an autopsy as soon as possible. Vanja found Lena’s cell phone in her handbag in the hallway, and it provided further clues to the course of events that had led to the tragedy.

Two hours after Lena had left the police station, where they had
shown her pictures of a dark blue Volvo S60, she had made a call lasting just twenty-five seconds. To the man now hanging in her son’s bedroom, who had access to a dark blue Volvo S60. Everything suggested that Lena had recognized the car, but for some reason had chosen not to tell the police.

The question was why. Why did she choose to contact Groth instead?

Vanja’s immediate thought was that there must be a link between Lena and Groth that they didn’t know about. When Ursula called a moment later and told them that she and Sebastian had found a secret room at Palmlövska High that was turning out to be a veritable smorgasbord of circumstantial evidence against Groth, Vanja realized she had been right.

Particularly damning was the prepaid phone, tucked away in its box in a filing cabinet. Its contacts list contained only three numbers.

One for Frank Clevén, one for Roger Eriksson, and one for Lena Eriksson. It was also the phone that had sent the pleading text messages to Roger just before his death. Vanja switched her cell phone to speaker so that Torkel could hear the news too. Sebastian and Ursula had also found the school accounts and a whole load of gay porn. The four of them arranged to meet at the station in an hour.

Billy was slightly late, and the others had just started when he turned up. The conference room felt warmer, as if the past few hours had not only raised the temperature of the investigation but had also affected the air around them. Ursula nodded to him as he walked in.

“As I was saying, Palmlövska High really was Ragnar Groth’s baby. He even did the accounts himself. Look at this.” Ursula took out some sheets of paper and handed them out.

“We were looking for a link between Groth and Lena Eriksson. There were three entries in the accounts for the last few months that
stuck out. ‘Personal expenditure.’ First of all two thousand kronor, then five thousand kronor twice the following month.”

Ursula paused. Everyone in the room suspected they knew where this was heading, but no one spoke, so she went on.

“I called the bank. Lena Eriksson made deposits of almost exactly the same amount only a day or so later.”

Ursula had just irrefutably linked Lena Eriksson and Ragnar Groth.

“Blackmail?” Torkel left the question hanging in the air.

“Why else would he give her twelve thousand kronor?”

“Particularly in view of the fact that Groth sends a text to Roger at the same time, begging for this to stop, whatever ‘this’ might be,” Vanja offered, pointing to the phone in its pristine box.

“The question is what was it that had to stop,” Billy said, feeling he wanted to join the game. “There are a couple of options there.”

“We know Groth liked guys,” said Vanja, nodding at the porn films on the table. “Perhaps Lena found out.”

“Would you pay twelve thousand kronor to stop people from finding out that you watched gay porn on your computer?” Sebastian sounded skeptical, with good reason. “I mean, he could just have thrown away the disks. Lena would have to had found out something a lot more incriminating for a blackmail scenario to work.”

“Like what?” Vanja wondered.

“I’m thinking about what Lisa told you. She said Roger had secrets…” Sebastian left it there. Vanja knew at once what he was getting at. She sat up straight, her voice excited.

“And that he was meeting someone. Ragnar Groth?”

The others looked at Vanja and Sebastian. There was something in what they said, of course. They had all realized that the secret behind this tragedy must be a serious matter, if not utterly devastating for Ragnar Groth. An illicit sexual relationship with a sixteen-year-old student definitely fell into that category.

“If that was the case, that must have been what Lena found out. And
instead of reporting him, she decided to exploit what she knew for her own ends.”

“We know she needed money. She even sold her story to the highest bidder, didn’t she?” Vanja raised an eyebrow at Torkel, who went over to the whiteboard. He had the bit between his teeth now. His earlier irritation had been swept away. Along with his own private meltdown.

“Okay, let’s run with this theory for a while.” He started to scrawl spiky, almost illegible notes on the board as he spoke. His handwriting always got worse in direct proportion to his elation.

“One month before Roger Eriksson was murdered, Ragnar Groth began making payments to Lena. We are assuming this was to prevent her from revealing something. Correct? Perhaps her son was having an intimate relationship with him. What suggests that this was the case? Let’s consider that for a second.” He looked encouragingly at his team, keen to hear their thoughts. Vanja went first.

“We know that Groth was homosexual. We know he sent text messages to Roger, wanting something to be interrupted or stopped. This suggests that they had something going on together. Lisa told us she thought Roger was meeting someone in secret.”

“Okay, hang on.” Torkel couldn’t keep up with his notes. Vanja stopped speaking. When she saw something on the board that might possibly correspond to “meeting” and “secret,” she carried on.

“We know that Groth was at the motel on the Friday evening and that Roger was nearby. We know that Groth was in the habit of using the motel for sexual encounters. We also know that the car belonging to the school met Roger that evening and that Roger in all probability got into the car. There are strong indications that the car took him to the soccer field.”

“I can tell you a bit about the Volvo if you like,” Billy added. “We’ve made a number of interesting discoveries.”

Torkel nodded.

“Absolutely, carry on.”

“Unfortunately there were no visible traces of blood in the car, but I
did find fingerprints belonging to Roger, Ragnar Groth, and two other individuals. Roger’s prints were on the passenger door and on the glove compartment. I also found a large roll of builder’s plastic in the trunk that could have been used to wrap the body. Ursula will need to look at the car after this meeting to see if she can find any traces of blood or DNA. It also had the right tires: Pirelli P7.”

Billy stood up and produced a well-thumbed book with a red hard cover.

“I also found a driving log. The interesting thing is that a trip was logged on the Thursday before Roger disappeared, then the next is on the Monday after that weekend. But there is a discrepancy of eleven miles between the two.”

“So someone used the car at some point between Friday and Monday morning and drove eleven miles?” Torkel asked, frantically scribbling on the whiteboard at the same time.

“According to the logbook. It is possible to calculate the exact length of the journey, but that eleven-mile trip is not entered into the log.”

Sebastian glanced at the map on the wall next to Torkel.

“It has to be more than eleven miles between the school, the motel, the soccer field, Listakärr, and back to the school, surely?”

Billy nodded.

“Yes, that is a problem, but as I said, this is a driving log, so it’s easy to manipulate the figures. At any rate, the car was definitely used.” Billy sat down. Torkel nodded.

“Good. Ursula will take a look at the car after we’re done. There’s one more thing we mustn’t forget: Peter Westin, the school counselor.”

Torkel wrote his name on the board.

“We know that Roger went to see him several times over the year. It seems likely that if anyone else found out about a possible relationship with Groth, it would have been Westin. Perhaps he even confronted Groth. That would explain why his notebook is missing. I mean, what do people talk to psychologists about?”

“I expect Sebastian knows,” Vanja replied with a grin. Everybody except Sebastian smiled. Instead he gazed at her for a while.

“Well, you’ve read my book, so you must know too.”

Torkel looked at both of them and shook his head.

“Could we stick to the matter at hand, please? It’s reasonable to assume that if there was a secret sexual relationship between Roger and Groth, then Roger might have told Westin about it.”

“No, that’s not right,” said Sebastian. “Sorry. Roger wanted to fit in. Be one of the gang. To do that he needed money. He might have sold sexual services to Groth, but he would never have told Westin about it. That would be like killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.”

“Perhaps he was under some form of duress?” Ursula said.

“I don’t think so. He left Lisa to go to meet someone.”

“However you look at things, I find it difficult to believe that Westin didn’t die because of something he knew about Roger,” Ursula went on. “I mean, there’s nothing else. Particularly as his notebook is the only thing that’s missing.”

There was a knock on the door and Hanser walked in. She was wearing a smart dark purple suit that looked new; Torkel couldn’t help feeling that she had bought the suit for the day when the case was solved. So that she would look good in the photographs. She was obviously preparing herself for the next press conference. Which meant she would be even more difficult to stop next time. “Don’t let me disturb you,” she said. “I just wondered if I might sit in?”

Torkel nodded and gestured toward an empty chair at the end of the table. Hanser sat down carefully to avoid creasing her clothes.

“We’re just going through possible scenarios,” Torkel went on, pointing to his illegible scrawl on the whiteboard.