Siren Song: A Different Scandinavian Crime Novel (9 page)

Lena scoops up water from the sink, splashes it over her face, and gasps; the water is chilled from travelling through near-frozen pipes. She is alone in the bathroom. Her only company is the odour of disinfectants, the humming pipes, and the wind rattling windows coated with frost.

She looks up at her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes are bloodshot, her skin pasty. Her thoughts are constantly derailed by flashbacks bobbing to the surface of her consciousness. Molly’s flat, John’s paintings, the shopkeeper’s concerned look. The wine glasses and the burning candle. Forgetting to put away her gun.

She has to find these men. Before she cracks, she will catch a killer and stop another man from becoming one. The missions will be the glue that keeps her together a little longer.

But the reports from the underground station at Alvik have complicated an already tangled mess. A knife fight, a bloodied train car, and more confused statements. On the plus side were definite sightings of John, but he had disappeared again, most likely running over the bridge and into the city.

She looks at her mobile phone. Twenty past eight. Agnes and Gren will be waiting for her to head the briefing. Shaking her head, she grabs her notes and leaves the bathroom.

The seventies still cling to the police headquarters’ veneer doors and carpeted floors. Most walls are painted an immaculate non-colour, as if the painter had been unable to choose between yellow and orange and settled for a compromise that defies words. Over time, grey linoleum had replaced some of the carpets, large maps of the city had given way to LCD screens, and the
taptaptap
of typewriters had changed to the soft plastic whisper of keyboards.

But the past lingers like a lecturing spirit:
work harder, act faster, be smarter
. Forty years of hard thought, night shifts, and desperate puzzling left marks that faded slowly. The less time she has to spend in the oppressive corridors, the better.

She walks past rooms filled with discussions, ringing phones, radio calls and news broadcasts. Pausing at a vending machine outside the room, she chooses between two varieties of sandwiches she does not want, picks the cheapest, and enters the meeting room.

A dozen officers sit around a rectangular table, their faces cast in blue and white by a ceiling-mounted projector. On a wall are flickering images of John’s driver’s licence photo and a dot-point list of facts. Three small windows frame the night outside. The room smells of strong coffee and hot plastic. Everyone is silent.

Gren stands at the far back, a white folder in hand, his face in deep shadow. Agnes is waiting just inside the door.

Lena is thankful for the half-gloom as everyone turns to look at her; the spotlight is not her favourite location. Someone must coordinate and sum up the ongoing investigation, but she would rather get back to work.

“Any news before we start?” Lena asks the room.

Gren clears his throat and shakes his head. “Nothing since you came back.”

“Right.” Lena walks to the end of the table. As she passes the water cooler, she reaches out to turn it off, but someone has already done so.

Agnes catches Lena’s eye and nods once, almost imperceptibly.

Frowning, Lena winces in the light from the projector. She tries to remember if she has ever told Agnes that she hates the sound the water cooler makes, but she is sure she never has.

Lena clears her throat. “As you all know by now, we’re looking for two men. The person for whom we put out the first warrant is John Peter Andersson.”

She points to the wall behind her where an image of John is projected. “He’s forty-two years old and lives in Grimsta, a small suburb west of the city. Unmarried, no criminal record. His employer is a company called Argenti Advertising. We’ve left a message with their manager and asked him to report back if he hears from John.”

“Does he have any family?” an officer asks.

“None living,” Lena answers. “His parents have passed away. No siblings.”

She changes the image. “This is a copy of the attendance record at John’s high school,” she continues. “It seems John went to counselling, but the counsellor’s journals have been archived, so I have nothing that explains why he went there. Seeing a counsellor hardly makes John an exception, but I still want to know why he did.”

“I’m quite sure those records still exist,” Gren says. “They’re probably kept in some department. Almost definitely as actual papers, although we should be able to get hold of them quickly if the right office is staffed.”

“See if you can get them,” Lena says to Agnes, who makes a note on her phone.

“What was John’s relation to the victim?” Gren asks.

“I’m getting there.” Lena sifts through her notes. “John’s believed to have been the victim’s partner for some time. We initially thought he was involved in the murder, but there’s nothing specific that ties him to it. I take it we haven’t found the weapon yet?” She looks up at an officer, who shakes his head.

“We have prints from John,” Lena continues, “and the victim. I requested another sweep, and the lab’s working on some partial prints they’ve found.”

Lena walks over to the laptop that controls the projector, taps with her finger on the screen, and waits for the software to load. She resists the urge to shake the slow computer. Every second that passes is another moment for John to go deeper or run farther. Or closer.

When a map replaces the projected photo on the wall, Lena zooms in on the western suburbs.

“John has done a number of unusual moves since he was sighted at the scene,” she says. “Soon after the murder, he withdrew money from a cash machine at Brommaplan.” She points at coloured areas and dotted lines that illustrate John’s supposed route. “He left his shoes behind in the flat, probably to avoid leaving tracks. His car was parked outside. He probably realised that he wouldn’t have made it far in the blizzard.”

“The bank says he got as much cash as he could in a single day,” she continues. “He went on to buy shoes and chocolate bars from a gas station at Brommaplan. After that, he returned to the corner shop across the street from the scene and bought a second-hand computer from the owner.”

“A computer?” an officer asks.

“Yes,” Lena says. “After that, we think he ran to another station, probably Abrahamsberg, where he got on a train. One stop later, he gets in a fight. Again, the statements on what happened are all over the place, but we’re pretty sure it’s him. One of the involved men matches the description of John, and the timing is right. Three other people were part of the fight too, one of which were wounded. There was blood in the train car. Lots of blood.”

“Was it the suspect’s?” an officer asks.

“We’re not sure. From what I’ve been told, the surveillance camera filmed John holding the knife and fighting someone else, and apparently it looks as if John is stabbing the other man in his face. I haven’t seen the tape, but I will soon. And we’re going to match the blood with DNA samples from the shoes.”

“After that,” Lena continues, “John climbed down onto the tracks and ran over the bridge, towards the city. A passenger on a passing train reported seeing a man on the maintenance track. That’s the last sighting we can link to John. What else have we got?”

An officer at the back waves a paper. “I’ve talked to the tax authorities. His record is spotless, but we found that John owns another property. A house in Drottningholm. It’s about fifteen minutes from Brommaplan by car when it isn’t rush hour. Or a blizzard.”

“Drottningholm?” Another officer turns to look at the paper. “That’s an expensive address. And his other place is a tiny flat in Grimsta?”

“The property in Drottningholm isn’t big,” says the officer who holds the paper. “I looked it up. It’s a family property. The land’s worth a lot, but the house is old and small.”

“I want to have a look,” Lena says. “Has any patrol been out there yet?”

The officer shakes his head. “It’d take forever to reach the place,” he says. “The ploughs are focussing on busier areas. I’m sure the main road in the district is cleared, but from there, it must be at least an hour’s walk. And that’s without the snow. Right now, it’d take half the night to trudge there.”

Lena pinches the bridge of her nose. “We still need to see it. Gren?”

“I’ll put in a request for a helicopter,” Gren says. “Don’t expect miracles, though. They’re needed everywhere right now. And that’s those that are cleared for flight in this weather.”

“I see,” Lena says. “That’s not in the direction John was heading, though. Unless he doubled back.” Lena pauses. “But I don’t think he did.”

“Why not?” Gren asks.

Lena looks at him and braces herself. “He’s got an agenda,” she says. “Food, money, and the computer. It sounds random, but it’s not random enough. John Andersson has a plan.”

This is the critical part: she needs to let them work through the options and exclude dead ends. If she simply states her idea that John has turned into an avenger, her reputation is going to trigger denial and immediate scepticism. Logic is no match for brute cynicism.

Gren puts his palms together in thought and looks at Lena. “What has the computer got to do with this?” he asks. “Do you know why he bought it?”

“I think so,” Lena replies. “It’s got footage from the corner shop’s surveillance cam.”

“You think John is trying to cover his tracks?” Gren asks.

Lena shakes her head. “He risked too much for that by going back.”

“Unless he’s panicked and isn’t thinking clearly,” Gren suggests.

“Unlikely,” Lena replies. “The shopkeeper said John was calm and composed.”

Gren gestures with his papers. “Then what’s your theory?”

Lena flexes her hands. The projector glares at her like an interrogator’s light. “The camera is mounted outside the shop. It caught John, but it might have filmed the other man, too.”

Gren pauses, then curses and sits back in his chair. “You think John is going after him,” he says after a moment.

“Yes.”

A moment passes while the notion sinks in. Heads turn, looks are exchanged. A murmur rises. Someone sighs. An officer curses. Lena holds her trembling hands behind her back to hide them; if she is right, John is heading down a dark path. And she will follow him.

Lena’s phone buzzes. When she sees the number from the police’s laboratory, she takes the call.

“Tell me you have what I need?” she asks.

“Hello to you too,” says a man in a deep, tired voice. The caller is Liam Swan, a young and ambitious forensic who works too late and smokes too much. “I’m calling to let you know we’ve pieced together a set of prints from the front door of the victim’s flat. They were made very recently.”

“Were there any matches in the database?” Lena asks.

“Oh yes,” Swan says.

Lena suppresses a relieved sigh. At bloody last.

“I’ll put you on loudspeaker,” she says. “We’re in the middle of the brief. I’m hanging up, so call back on this number.” She runs through the number twice and ends the call just as the man on the other end starts to speak.

Across the room, Agnes’s phone rings. Agnes checks the phone, looks at Lena, mouths a word Lena does not catch, and then slips out of the room.

The speakers beep. Lena pushes a button, and the sound of the lab technician clearing his throat booms in the stifled room. Lena lowers the volume.

“We can hear you,” she says. “Proceed.”

“As I was about to say before I was cut off, we ran the new set through the scanner and have a positive match. Niklas Petterson, born 1971 in Sala, just outside of Stockholm. He’s got a long criminal record. I’ll read you a summary. The rest is in the email.”

“Go on,” Lena says.

“Thirteen cases of assault, nine cases of robbery, two of which were armed. He was taken in for a botched-up burglary when he was fourteen. After that, he’s been picked up five times for possession of marijuana and amphetamine. He’s done two years for grievous bodily harm, another two for three robberies.”

The technician clears his throat. “There’s also charges of possession of guns, knives, axes, and tear gas. Explosives, too. He was released from prison a year ago. His current address is unknown, but most previous arrests took place west of the city.”

Lena closes her eyes. An armed, brutal psychopath junkie, a furious, devastated man on his tail, and she was hunting both. The confined space of the room is smothering her. She wants to walk away, run out into the storm to breathe, clear her head and think. Her hands shake so much she can barely hold on to her papers.

“Thank you,” Gren says to the technician. “That’s very valuable.”

Lena’s eyes shoot open. “Yes, thank you,” she echoes. “Let me know if you find anything else.”

The call ends with a click. Lena switches the projector off and turns on the lights. Eyes blink in the sudden pearl-white glow.

“I want to search the area around the foot of the bridge,” she says. “Starting with Kristineberg and its adjacent stations,” she says. “Two patrols, more if any are available.”

“Not very likely on Friday night,” a man murmurs. Two other officers nod.