The Fire Dance (7 page)

“Who is Marcelo?”

“Marcelo? Oh, he’s another dancer, I believe. He’s a friend of Pontus Backman, you know, the new star in the heavens of poetry. Max and I both know Pontus because we have the same publisher. Although I don’t write poetry, not in the least. I’d never be able to put a stanza together. I just plod away at my detective stories. When you’re as old as I am, you have to keep doing what you know. By the way, I have two published books about growing roses. That was before I started writing crime novels. I was a journalist at
Gardening
magazine and—”

“Did she come alone?”

“Yes, indeed. I’m absolutely sure about that. At any rate, she was alone when she turned up next to Marcelo.”

“So you didn’t see her when she came into the bar?”

“No, it was impossible. There were so many people in the foyer. People were constantly coming and going through those swinging doors … do you call them swinging doors? What do you call doors that go around and around without stopping? Revolving doors?”

“Right. What time was it when she appeared at your table?”

“Between twelve thirty and one, I think … somewhere around then.”

“When did you decide to break up the party at the table?”

“One thirty. They close the bar then. We thought it was much too early for us to quit. So a group of us decided to head up to Max Franke’s suite. He always brings a whole case of really good wine to the Book Fair. Max is one of our most famous authors. We’ve been good friends since we were kids.
These days we have the same publisher and his first wife, Barbara, and I were close friends during our days at the School of Journalism. It was—”

“Was Sophie going to go with you to that suite?”

“Yes. Max and her father were related … I think they’re cousins … you know that Ernst Malmborg is her father?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Yes, well, I guess most everyone knows that. It was a huge scandal when—”

“So Sophie was supposed to go up to the suite. What happened then?”

“The suite was on the top floor. We all packed ourselves into the elevator. Sophie didn’t want to get in with us. Said she’d rather take the stairs.”

“She said nothing more than she’d take the stairs?”

“Not that I heard. Just that she wanted to take the stairs. And she must have. The last I saw of her was her back. She was heading toward the stairwell. And from what I hear, that’s the last anyone saw of her.”

Detective Inspector Irene Huss nodded slightly, as if she agreed. The author had just given her a witness report, which, for the most part, agreed with what they’d already figured out. Which was not much.

The woman on the other side of the table, Alice Mattson, seemed to be nearing retirement age. Irene had never heard of her before. She didn’t have the time or interest to read all that much. Still, she’d bought one of Max Franke’s paperbacks at the Landvetter Airport bookstore and read it on her vacation to Cretet. It was a detective novel set in Stockholm. According to the back cover, Max Franke had sold an incredible number of books, and he’d become one of Sweden’s most well-known authors. Now he was a part of the investigation that she was conducting.

As soon as she’d read the first chapter in the book, Irene
had found herself irritated at all the mistakes the investigators were making. There were also a surprising number of wine enthusiasts and opera lovers in the literary police department. She’d been a policewoman for seventeen years, and she only knew one single colleague who listened to opera. Strangely enough, that was her boss, Sven Andersson. He also kept a great number of CDs with music from the fifties and sixties. His favorites were Glenn Miller and Louis Armstrong. On the other hand, Andersson drank strong beer and schnapps. He thought that wine was for women.

Irene thanked Alice Mattson for taking the time to come down to the police station and file a report. The tiny, plump author chirped that it hadn’t been any trouble at all. She was going to put down the cost of the car ride from Sävedalen as “research” on her taxes.

“Do you know that I’ve never been inside a real police station before? And I’ve written thirteen mystery books! My heroine has a flower shop and just has the habit of wandering into criminal investigations,” she confided to Irene before she disappeared through the reception room.

Irene tried to hide her irritation and made a mental note to never buy a single book by Alice Mattson.

I
RENE SAT DOWN
in her office to think. It felt odd to stir up ghosts from the past. There had been times when the girl had turned up in her dreams: her large, slightly almond-shaped eyes and the emotionless expression. But had she truly been emotionless? Had she just lowered a protective curtain to avoid revealing anything? Irene had thought about Sophie Malmborg’s gaze as the years went by. She never figured out what it meant or what Sophie was hiding.

And now Sophie was dead.

Fifteen years after the house fire out in Björkil.

Irene turned on her computer but couldn’t focus on the screen. She stared out of the one window in her office. The rain had created patterns in the thick dirt. Twilight was falling. She ought to turn on the ceiling light but just kept sitting in her chair as the darkness gathered. Her thoughts went back in time again to try to piece together what had been gathered in the investigation.

She could hear the clattering of china in the hallway. The scent of coffee and cinnamon buns seeped beneath the gap in her office door. Or perhaps it was just her imagination, since she already knew that she’d need something sweet with her coffee.

A
CCORDING TO NUMEROUS
witnesses, Sophie Malmborg had arrived late, perhaps around twelve thirty, at the bar. She had come to join a group of friends who had arrived at least an hour beforehand. The group consisted of three men and a woman. Everyone knew one another. Around 1
A
.
M
., Max Franke, Alice Mattson and the publisher, Viktor Borgsten, had joined the young people. The older group was just as drunk as the younger one. According to poet Pontus Backman, Max Franke went up to Sophie’s table and bellowed: “Well, if it isn’t my itty-bitty cousin!” or something to that effect. Then Max had hugged Sophie, who was as stiff as a statue. “A really strange girl, that one,” Pontus concluded at the end of his testimony. The poet had no clear memories about the rest of the evening. The only thing he
did
remember was waking up at the apartment of the sulky blonde. Her name was Kia, and he never caught her last name. He didn’t ever find out what it was, as he hadn’t seen her since September. Kia lived in the Majorna district and was an art student. Pontus stroked his thin goatee tiredly and sighed. “Her apartment reeked of paint and turpentine. If I didn’t already have a headache, I would
have gotten one from the smell. And I’m getting another one now.”

He gave this last sentence as half an apology. Irene would be able to swear on a stack of Bibles that Pontus Backman was even now severely hungover. His stinking breath hovered in the air between them—cigarette smoke, garlic and red wine.

He had no recollection of the elevator ride to Max Franke’s suite. Therefore he also had no memory of anything Sophie might have said about taking the stairs instead.

Irene’s conversation with Christina “Kia” Strömborg brought nothing new. As Irene caught a glimpse of her in the reception lounge area, she strongly suspected that Kia was high. Kia wore black clothes and a black blanket with a white pattern that she’d cut a hole in and was wearing like a poncho. She’d tied a grey scarf around her waist to keep it in place. All her movements were jerky and nervous. She was walking close to the wall like a caged animal and appeared unable to make her body pause long enough to sit down.

Kia had hardly known Sophie, it turned out. She only knew her by reputation. “Sophie was all hyped up—clothes and all—and just glommed onto Marcelo. But what could he do? He was addicted to her.” Kia’s narrow fingers kept plucking at the lint on her blanket.

As Irene could tell from Kia’s national identification number, Kia was just twenty-six years old, but she looked much older. Her skin was pocked with acne scars and her heavily bleached hair hung in clumps. Apparently she was trying to grow dreadlocks but with limited success. The coal-black makeup she wore on her eyelids had run.

“What do you mean Marcelo was ‘addicted’ to Sophie?” Irene asked.

Kia gave Irene a look that Irene could not read. She answered shortly, “They lived together.”

“How long had they been living together?”

Kia gave a dry laugh, which crunched like leaves in the autumn sun. “Don’t know. She had a house of some kind.”

Irene had checked out the house and found it was true. Ernst Malmborg had died of cancer at seventy-three in the summer of 2002. His only child, Sophie, had inherited everything he owned, which was a substantial fortune: 400,000 Swedish kronor in the bank, a summer cottage on the ocean by Ljungskile and a large house in Änggården. For the most part, the wealth of the estate had come from Ernst’s inheritance from his first wife. He hadn’t been careless with his fortune, and had husbanded it. As soon as probate concluded, Sophie sold the summer cottage for a million Swedish kronor. She had been a wealthy young woman when she died.

Was that why she was killed? Her next of kin was her mother. Certainly Angelika Malmborg-Eriksson could use the money, but how often would a mother kill her own child for the sake of money? The reverse was more likely.

There were other indications that the motive was something completely different.

Sophie had disappeared that night from the Park Aveny Bar. The people in the elevator had seen her walk toward the stairwell. According to Angelika, Sophie had a phobia of elevators. She never took them, or even escalators for that matter. The security guard who had been posted at the stairwell actually saw her go up the stairs. The same guard had seen her on the second floor right outside the elevator doors when he did a check of the stairwell a few minutes later. She was holding her cell phone, and it looked like she was sending a text message. She seemed to be concentrating, so he continued up the stairs on his rounds without saying anything to her. He’d walked all the way to the top floor. On the way back down, he hadn’t seen Sophie. None of the other
employees had seen her leave the building. They were totally occupied in putting the bar back in order after the rowdy night.

Thomas Magnusson, the security guard, was the last person to see Sophie alive. He was in his third year at Chalmers University, and he had the job on the side to earn some extra cash. Irene and Tommy had run his name through an electronic search, but they hadn’t found anything remarkable. Magnusson didn’t even have a parking ticket. His record was so clean that it was suspicious. He was blond and well built, and his honest blue eyes and clear, steady voice gave her no reason to be suspicious of his testimony.

Sophie Malmborg disappeared from the bar of the Park Aveny Hotel at approximately 1:40
A
.
M
. on Friday, September 24th, 2004.

She had received a text message on her cell phone at 1:38 and sent a reply two minutes later. The sender had been in the vicinity of the hotel, but could not be identified, as a prepaid phone card had been used. That text message was the last sign of life from Sophie.

She had disappeared without a trace for three weeks.

On Saturday, October 16th, a storage shed in the industrial area of Högsbo had burned to the ground, and a charred corpse was found in the rubble. Another few days passed before the body was positively identified as Sophie Malmborg.

Irene had not yet gone to the site of the fire. She’d only seen the pictures. There was not much left of the building.

Irene got up from her desk to look at the map hanging on the wall. The location of the fire was in the oldest area of the industrial park at the end of a narrow cul-de-sac, not far from the rifle range. A thicket of hawthorn and birch trees had grown up around the abandoned building. No other
industrial buildings were nearby. The shed had belonged to a tire company, which had closed years ago. Recently, the entire area had been bought by a pharmaceutical company that planned to demolish the shed and the buildings nearby and start construction on a lavish new office complex.

All the buildings in the area had been searched thoroughly. Although there were signs of unauthorized inhabitation, there were no traces of Sophie. The police quickly were able to determine that Sophie had not been kept hostage in any of the other buildings. It was also highly unlikely that Sophie had been held in the burned building since, prior to the fire, most of the roof had caved in. The weather had been cold and rainy the three weeks that Sophie had been missing. The chill dampness would have killed her in just a few days. And the area was not so deserted that someone could come and go for weeks on end unseen. Someone would wonder. Even if the suspect only appeared at night.

So the questions remained. Where had Sophie been kept the three weeks she had been missing? And who had been her captor?

“S
O, WHERE DO
we go from here?” Superintendent Andersson began.

He helped himself to a slice of mocha cake, which he rapidly stuffed into his mouth, washing it down with large gulps of coffee.

The other people around the table contemplated his question, ignoring the cake, which Birgitta Moberg Rauhala had brought in for her birthday. They all felt they needed to stay focused. The discovery of Sophie Malmborg’s body had made the papers with large, boldface headlines. Journalists were blocking the entrances to the main police station and the telephone lines were constantly busy. Irene could empathize with the journalists a bit. The case was sensational.

“We’ll have the autopsy report tomorrow or Wednesday. Then we can see what they’ve found out about Sophie,” Tommy said.

“Poor girl,” said Birgitta, shivering.

Birgitta’s husband and colleague, Hannu, who had recently returned to work after his paternity leave, nodded in agreement. Little Timo was now going to nursery school. Irene thought it was good to have Hannu back in the department again. His substitute, Kajsa Birgersdotter, had returned to her position in general investigation, but after the New Year she was scheduled to start a new position in the narcotics division.