The Final Word Read online

  ‘You don’t want to talk about the psychologist?’

  She leaned her head back, looked into his eyes, and tried to smile. There was something wrong with her. Healthy people didn’t collapse on the hall floor, frightening the life out of their children. ‘My mother called today,’ she said. ‘And Steven, my brother-in-law. Birgitta’s gone missing. She didn’t come home from work yesterday.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Annika shut her eyes, and saw in her mind’s eye the rented flat on Odendalsgatan in Hälleforsnäs, the bunks, her on top, Birgitta underneath, as close to each other as any two people could be but without having anything in common. Annika was always wanting to get away and Birgitta just wanted to stay at home.

  ‘She was frightened of everything when we were little,’ Annika said. ‘Ants, wasps, ghosts, aeroplanes . . . She could never stay with Grandma in Lyckebo, because there were snakes in the grass . . .’

  ‘Didn’t she buy a place of her own out there somewhere?’

  ‘She only rented it one summer.’ She screwed her eyes shut and took a deep breath. ‘The print edition of the paper is being closed down,’ she said. She could feel him staring at her and opened her eyes. ‘I got called in to see Schyman today. The board took the decision last Friday. It’s going to be made public next week.’

  ‘What’ll happen to the staff?’

  ‘A lot of them will have to leave, but not all. They’ll need people on the newsdesk who can deal with the digital side of things.’ He didn’t ask the obvious question, but she answered it anyway. ‘Schyman wants me to stay on, to help invent the future with wish-list layouts.’

  Jimmy sighed. ‘Sometimes I can’t help wondering what’s going to become of humanity,’ he said.

  ‘We’re really nothing but a load of fish who crawled out of the sea a hundred and fifty million years ago,’ Annika said.

  ‘Come here.’ He pulled her towards him.

  TUESDAY, 2 JUNE

  Nina walked into her office at a quarter past seven. The sun was nudging above the roof of the inner courtyard, making the stacks of paper on her desk glow. It would be very warm and muggy later in the day.

  She shoved her gym bag under the bookcase and put the day’s papers and a bottle of mineral water on the desk. She took a sandwich and a bottle of orange juice from the bag and put them into the top drawer – she’d need something to eat after she’d been to the gym.

  She sat down at the desk and listened to the silence around her. Most of her colleagues didn’t arrive until around eight o’clock, and some didn’t appear until the meeting at nine. Johansson, the oversized secretary, was already there, though: she could hear him coughing further down the corridor. Fortunately the guy she shared her office with, Jesper Wou, was off on another of his long business trips. She enjoyed having the room to herself.

  She logged on to her computer. Nothing much had happened overnight – no one had emailed. With a sense of relief, she pulled the newspapers towards her. She paged through them, but they contained nothing she hadn’t already seen on teletext. The Evening Post had an article about one of the princesses on its front page, speculating about whether she would fly back to Sweden to celebrate National Day. Nina ignored the story: the royal family weren’t her problem. Her colleagues in the Security Police were responsible for them. At the bottom of the page was a reference to ‘the Timberman’: Ivar Berglund. She turned to pages six and seven, and found herself staring into Berglund’s blank eyes. The picture ran across both pages. It had been taken with a long lens through an open doorway. Berglund must have glanced in the photographer’s direction for a fraction of a second, and she (according to the credit) had been ready. It must have happened very quickly, Berglund might not even have been aware of it, yet the picture had captured his cool, unruffled demeanour, his impenetrable inner life. Nina stared at it for a few seconds before she saw the headline above it:

  SUSPECTED OF SERIAL KILLINGS ACROSS EUROPE

  The implications of the headline struck her in an almost physical way, leaving her breathless. With her palms flat on the newspaper, Nina leaned forward and skimmed the article in the vain hope that things weren’t as bad as she feared. It turned out to be a forlorn hope, of course . . .

  According to Nina Hoffman, an operational analyst with the National Crime Unit in Stockholm, there are a number of unsolved murders in other countries that bear similarities to the case in Orminge. Ivar Berglund’s DNA profile has therefore been examined in light of these other investigations, in both the Nordic countries and across the rest of Europe. This collaboration has been going on for the past year and is still not complete, although the National Crime Unit has not yet found any matches . . .

  How could she have been so incredibly stupid? Without any reflection, she had given honest answers to the lawyer’s questions. It had been a crazy thing to do. She had played right into the hands of the defence team. She had revealed that they had nothing else to offer, that they had searched and searched and searched, but hadn’t found the slightest suspicion to pin on Ivar Berglund. She had revealed their fundamental failure to the court and the whole of the assembled media. She was so stupid, she ought to be locked up.

  She stood up but had nowhere to go, so sat down again.

  In her mind she replayed the scene again, saw the smartly made-up lawyer standing there: What have you all been doing during the protracted period of time that my client has been in custody? And she heard herself answer, shooting herself in the foot: Ivar Berglund’s DNA profile has been compared against other open investigations both in the Nordic countries and elsewhere in Europe . . .

  If they lost the case, and Berglund was released, it would be her fault. She pressed her hands to her cheeks. Her fingers were icy: adrenalin had made the blood vessels in her extremities contract to prepare for a fight.

  She forced her shoulders to relax: focus! Her eyes roamed across the table, and she saw Berglund’s file. She pulled it to her and opened the section on the DNA traces. Had there really been anything wrong with the results of the DNA sample found at the crime scene in Orminge? The match was almost perfect, 99 per cent. The defence lawyer had tried to make out that it was contaminated – could that be so? Was it possible that the sample had been impure? Could something have gone wrong when it was taken, or during the analysis?

  She leafed through the report from the National Forensics Laboratory, her fingers warming.

  There was nothing new. She knew all the answers off by heart.

  She heard Johansson cough again, hesitated, then stood up with the file in her arms.

  The secretary’s office was five doors away. He had a room to himself, a luxury granted to few in the department. It was possible that he had privileged status because he had once been part of the National Rapid-Response Force, but after some traumatic incident (exactly what was unclear) he had been transferred to an office job. He might have trouble dealing with the cruelty of the world, but he was a formidable administrator.

  Nina knocked on his door frame and he looked up at her over his glasses. Without saying anything, he nodded to the chair on the other side of his desk.

  ‘I’ve got a question,’ Nina said, as she sat down. ‘How many more unsolved cases are out there for us to cross-check with the Berglund case?’

  Johansson took off his glasses. ‘Just the bottom of the barrel,’ he said. ‘Our colleagues are dredging through samples taken when DNA technology was in its infancy.’

  ‘Eighteen, twenty years ago?’ Nina said.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘What are the chances of finding anything?’

  Johansson looked out of the window and thought for a moment. ‘Slim, but not non-existent. The technology was completely new back then, and the criminals were still making basic mistakes, hadn’t learned how to get rid of DNA . . .’ He turned back to her. ‘Something bothering you?’

  She flushed. ‘Have you had a chance to look at the Evening Post?’ she asked.
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br />   He held her gaze. ‘You answered the questions,’ he said. ‘To do anything else would have been against the law.’

  Nothing but the truth, with no additions or amendments.

  She straightened her back. ‘I’ve been thinking about the DNA results from Orminge. Could something have gone wrong? Could the sample have been manipulated or contaminated?’

  ‘If there was anything wrong with the equipment, the results wouldn’t have shown a match at all,’ Johansson said.

  Nina opened the DNA report.

  ‘If someone did manipulate the sample,’ the secretary went on, ‘it would have to have been someone at the National Forensics Lab, or one of the officers at the scene.’

  Nina held her hand still on the folder. Planting DNA evidence at a crime scene was a fairly easy thing to do, much easier than falsifying fingerprints, she knew. Anyone could plant some saliva, or a drop of blood, a trace of semen. ‘Could someone switch the DNA in a sample? Tamper with it to make it look like it came from someone else?’

  Johansson took a sip of coffee and sighed. ‘If you get rid of the white blood cells in a centrifuge, the DNA disappears. Then you just have to add some different DNA, from a strand of hair, for instance. Are you suggesting that someone at the lab might have . . .?’

  ‘Is there anyone at the National Forensics Lab who has any connection with Berglund? Someone who might want to frame him? Have we checked that?’

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘There are more victims out there,’ Nina said quietly. ‘The perpetrator in Orminge was no novice. He’d done it before. Lerberg, the assault in Solsidan, that was him as well . . .’

  Johansson shook his head sadly.

  ‘The torture methods were identical,’ Nina said. ‘It was the same perpetrator. I think that the first DNA we found, the mitochondrial sample in Djursholm, was Ivar Berglund’s as well. No one’s tampered with the tests. He abducted Viola Söderland, and he tortured Ingemar Lerberg.’

  ‘The evidence . . .’

  ‘He’s playing with us,’ Nina said in a low voice. ‘And he wants us to know it.’

  She thought about the drawing that the murderer had taken from the Lerberg children’s room and inserted, rolled up, into the rectum of the victim in Orminge.

  Tears stood in Johansson’s eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘DNA evidence has been wrong before.’

  ‘You mean the Phantom of Heilbronn?’ Nina asked.

  Johansson blew his nose.

  For most of the 1990s and 2000s a female serial killer had made fools of a number of Central European police forces, mostly in south-west Germany but also in France and Austria. Her DNA was found at almost forty separate crime scenes: she committed robberies and killings. She was described by detectives as extremely brutal, probably a drug addict, and usually pretended to be male. The first DNA sample was found as early as 1993 when an elderly woman had been strangled in her home after a burglary.

  In the winter of 2009 the German police devoted almost sixteen thousand hours of overtime to the search for the Phantom of Heilbronn: the investigating team was expanded, they conducted daily DNA analysis, tested seven hundred women, worked through almost three and a half thousand possible leads, and announced a €300,000 reward. All to no avail.

  Then, in March 2009, the case had taken a different turn. The French police conducted a DNA test on the charred remains of a male asylum-seeker, and discovered that he was in fact a woman, and not just any woman but the Phantom of Heilbronn. Among her many other crimes, she had murdered a police officer in Heilbronn two years before. At this point it had dawned on the detectives that something was seriously wrong with the DNA evidence.

  It turned out that the DNA from the forty different cases had not come from evidence gathered at the different crime scenes but from the cotton-wool swabs used to take the samples. All the swabs had come from the same factory in Eastern Europe.

  ‘Could there be some other explanation?’ Nina said. ‘Could the sample be right but the match wrong? Could the DNA actually belong to someone else?’

  ‘That’s a theoretical possibility,’ Johansson said.

  ‘But who, then? As far as we know, Berglund doesn’t have any sons, does he?’

  ‘Correct,’ Johansson said. ‘He’s never made any maintenance payments, either officially or unofficially, and he’s never been the subject of any paternity claims. Mind you, that isn’t proof that he doesn’t have a son . . .’

  Nina clasped her hands. ‘It still doesn’t make sense,’ she said. ‘Not for the Orminge case, and not for Djursholm. Even if he had a son, his DNA wouldn’t be such a good match, and mitochondrial DNA is passed down the maternal line.’

  They sank into silence as Nina read the report. Both of Ivar Berglund’s parents were dead – they had drowned in the early 1970s. His brother, Arne Berglund, had died in a car crash in the south of Spain twenty years ago.

  ‘Lots of accidental deaths in that family,’ Johansson said gloomily. ‘And it can hardly be his sister.’ Ivar Berglund’s younger sister, Ingela, lived in a care-home up in Luleå.

  Nina stared out of the window at the far side of the room. She could almost feel the heat hitting the glass. ‘Has anyone spoken to her?’

  ‘She has learning difficulties.’

  ‘But how bad are they? Do we know what sort of problems she’s got?’

  Johansson flicked through the file. ‘It doesn’t say. Presumably our colleagues decided it wouldn’t be useful. Maybe she can’t talk or perhaps they just wanted to spare her. It’s possible she doesn’t even know that her brother has been charged with murder.’

  Nina got to her feet. ‘Thanks for letting me take up your time,’ she said. ‘When are you next due to contact our European colleagues about the remaining cases?’

  Johansson sighed again.

  Nina left the room and saw Commissioner Q, head of the Criminal Intelligence Unit, disappear into his office at the end of the corridor. She hurried after him and knocked on his door. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but have you got a moment?’

  Commissioner Q was holding a stained coffee mug. The buttons of his Hawaiian shirt had been done up wrongly. ‘Of course I have, Nina. What can I do for you?’

  Q was a very unusual sort of police chief, not just in his unorthodox style of dress and appalling taste in music (he loved the Eurovision Song Contest), but more particularly in his way of thinking, and the lack of presumption with which he approached things he didn’t understand. During the year she had been working for him at National Crime she had come to appreciate his acerbic way of communicating and open leadership style.

  ‘I’d like to go up to Luleå, to talk to Ivar Berglund’s sister.’

  The commissioner sat down behind his chaotic desk and frowned. ‘Isn’t she supposed to be a bit backward? Lives in a home, or something?’

  ‘Yes,’ Nina said. ‘But she might be able to communicate. I’d like to look into it, anyway.’

  Q hesitated. ‘There are probably good reasons why she’s been left alone, as a matter of respect. How old is she?’

  ‘In her fifties,’ Nina said.

  He scratched his head. ‘A middle-aged woman with learning difficulties? Ask to see her medical records and check what’s wrong with her.’ He reached for a file on his desk, indicating that the conversation was over.

  Nina paused in the doorway. ‘There was one other thing, about the murder of Josefin Liljeberg.’

  Her boss looked up in surprise. ‘Josefin?’ he said. ‘That was my case, once upon a time, my first when I got to Violent Crime.’

  Nina straightened. ‘Annika Bengtzon from the Evening Post got in touch yesterday. She’s taking another look at the case and is wondering if she can see the preliminary investigation; unofficially, of course.’

  The commissioner drank the rest of his coffee and pulled a face. ‘Why didn’t she call me?’

  ‘You’re the boss, so you haven’t got a direct line. The prosecutor has let her have th
e list of witnesses, so it clearly isn’t completely off-limits.’

  Q put his mug down with a bang. ‘Have we got the case here?’

  ‘It’s among the stack of confessions Gustaf Holmerud made.’

  The commissioner groaned at the mention of Holmerud’s name. He sat without speaking for a while. ‘I remember Josefin,’ he eventually said. ‘A boiling-hot day, a Saturday. Her boyfriend did it, a nasty piece of work. His friends gave him an alibi, or we would have got him. It might not do any harm to let Bengtzon go through the file.’ He nodded to himself. ‘Quite the contrary, in fact,’ he went on. ‘If the Evening Post stir things up a bit, one or two cockroaches might come to the surface. Give her a copy of the file, and remind her about the confidentiality of sources. She’s not to quote from it.’ He leaned over his bundle of papers.

  Nina turned and headed off towards her office.

  ‘By the way,’ he called after her, ‘you said the right thing in court. That bastard’s guilty – let him sweat it out. He’ll know we’re keeping an eye on him.’

  Her boss had read the Evening Post. That didn’t improve her mood.

  Anders Schyman sat back in his chair. He had adopted a neutral expression, and was trying to stop himself frowning. He could have saved himself the trouble: Albert Wennergren, the chairman of the board, was standing with his back to him, his silly ponytail swaying gently in the breeze from the air-conditioning. He was gazing out at the newsroom on the other side of the glass wall. The staff were busy absorbing news, checking it, questioning and monitoring it, a silent film in colour with no background music.

  ‘What sort of premises do you think we’ll need after the reorganization?’ Wennergren asked, without turning.

  Reorganization? Reorganization?

  Schyman took a deep, soundless breath to stop himself screaming. ‘I haven’t worked that out yet,’ he said, in a measured tone. ‘First we have to decide how many people will be needed to maintain our digital activities, and for the development of video coverage, as well as our focus on other platforms. We’ll have to compare the cost of moving against scaling back our existing premises and maybe renting out . . .’