The Final Word Read online

  Having a defined role of his own, and in such a prestigious and important inquiry, undeniably brought with it a number of advantages. The ability to organize his own time was certainly one of them: there was no one to comment on his late starts and long lunches. Because he had been at an official dinner all yesterday evening, it was only to be expected that he should balance his hectic work schedule with an hour or so of contemplation at the start of the following day.

  He slowed down by the lifts, as though he were about to press the button and wait to be carried higher up the building (the office of the minister of justice was on the sixth floor, the prime minister and Cabinet Office on the seventh), then took a quick step to the left, into his own corridor on the ground floor. It didn’t really matter where you were in the building: his office with its view of a brick wall on Fredsgatan was as good as any other, and plenty of civil servants were dispersed in utterly anonymous buildings all over the centre of the city, where the more peripheral departments were based.

  ‘Good morning!’ he said cheerily, to one of the older secretaries, a well-preserved woman in her early fifties who had definitely had a facelift during the Christmas holiday. He appreciated women who made a bit of an effort. The woman (was her name Majken?) lit up, and even blushed slightly. He hoped it wasn’t because of the hook, that she was embarrassed by his disability. One of the younger secretaries (Marielle Simon, he knew that one) passed him in the corridor (a little too close: was she after something?), but his greeting to her was more measured: she mustn’t imagine that he found her attractive.

  He breezed into his room with a spring in his step, ready to tackle the day’s tasks, when a voice called his name. Surprised, but careful to hide it, he leaned out into the corridor.

  It was Facelift, trotting after him. ‘Thomas,’ she said, ‘the under-secretary of state has asked for you several times this morning. He seems very keen to get hold of you.’

  He adopted a concerned frown. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll go up and see him at once.’

  ‘No,’ Facelift said. ‘He said he’d come down. He just wanted to be told when you arrived. I’ll let him know . . .’

  Thomas felt the colour rising to his neck and cheeks, but as luck would have it the woman was already heading back to her cubbyhole. What was all this about? Had he not sacrificed an entire evening and done everything that was expected of him, entertaining the elected representatives of the people with his enthusiasm for his task?

  He unpacked the contents of his briefcase and spread them across his desk, a man fully engaged in his work. One of the disadvantages of this task (well, his whole work situation, really) was, of course, that his unfaithful and treacherous wife had moved in with the under-secretary of state, his boss. Enough time had passed now for him not to devote any more thought to her betrayal. The staff (at least in his own corridor) were used to seeing him there, focused and positive, admittedly with the hook instead of a left hand, but he was respected, he could tell.

  He often thought of a proverb (was it Chinese?) that Annika used to quote: If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float past.

  This was an election year, and – if the opinion polls were right – the government was going to have to pack up and move out at long last. All the political appointees in the civil service (under-secretaries of state, for instance) would be instantly dismissed and left without a job. He, on the other hand, would still be there. Who really ruled the roost in Rosenbad? he thought, settling into his ergonomically designed office chair.

  He started up his old work computer (an antiquated wreck that didn’t suit him at all) and went on to Facebook. He wasn’t fond of social media, but his ex-girlfriend, Sophia Grenborg, had once set up an account for him. Nowadays he mostly used it to keep tabs on people, such as Annika. His former wife wasn’t particularly active, he had to say. She hadn’t posted anything today or yesterday. If he was honest, he found that pretty irritating. What did she have to be so secretive about?

  His computer bleeped: a new Facebook message. His stomach clenched. Maybe Annika wanted something from him.

  Hi, Thomas, I see you’re online. It’s my birthday tomorrow and I’m having a few people round to the flat for drinks. You haven’t RSVP’d yet, but I was wondering if you were coming. You’d be very welcome! Seven o’clock. Big hug, Sophia.

  His ex was having trouble letting go. She had even become good friends with his ex-wife: she and Annika socialized these days. The children had sleepovers at hers. He thought the whole thing showed an unpleasant degree of disloyalty.

  There was a knock on his door frame and Jimmy Halenius was standing there, heavy and, actually, rather short. He couldn’t imagine what Annika saw in the man. Thomas clicked to close Facebook, stood up with a smile and held out his hand. ‘I heard you’d been trying to get hold of me,’ he said, as they shook hands. He made sure he took a firm, tight grip.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve got time to see me,’ Halenius said, and Thomas wondered if the under-secretary was making fun of him – but why would he do that?

  His boss sat on a chair by the door without being asked.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Thomas asked, lifting his trousers slightly at the knees.

  ‘I thought we could have a chat about the state of your inquiry, and go through a few things that need to be updated,’ Halenius said.

  Thomas tried to look as if he understood. Updated? He tried to think of a suitable question to ask. When he didn’t manage to find one, the under-secretary began speaking again.

  ‘I should have looked through your outline before you presented it to the reference group, and I accept full responsibility for the way things have turned out, but it’s important that we get this right now.’

  Thomas struggled to hide his surprise. ‘How . . .?’

  Halenius raised a hand as if to shut him up. ‘The coercive measures you propose are as expected. The police have the right to search premises and trace IP-addresses once they have a court order, as they do with bugging and surveillance, but after that things get a bit tricky. What would be the effect if this change to the law were passed?’

  Thomas felt his tongue swell and his mouth dried. When he didn’t reply Halenius continued, ‘You’ve suggested in the legislative proposal that coercive measures should only be used for crimes that carry a sentence of at least four years in custody.’

  Thomas breathed out: this was something he had under control. He leaned back calmly in his chair and adjusted his lapels with his right hand. ‘I thought we should be consistent and follow the same line as bugging. We can’t have different thresholds for everything.’

  Halenius scratched his eyebrow. ‘If this legislation is passed, it would be utterly toothless,’ he said. ‘There isn’t a single crime it would apply to. Almost the only offences that carry sentences of more than four years are murder and terrorism, which is why that’s the threshold for bugging. Telephone interception can be applied to offences with a two-year sentence. That’s a lower established threshold. You didn’t consider using that one?’

  Thomas took a deep breath, but couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘You’d only be making the work of the police harder,’ Halenius went on. ‘It would be practically impossible for them to function. They wouldn’t be able to investigate a single case.’

  A gaping hole opened in Thomas’s stomach and he clung to the arm of his chair with his one hand to stop himself falling. ‘But I’m giving a presentation at the cabinet meeting on Thursday. The results of the inquiry are due to be delivered then.’

  ‘Not in this state,’ Jimmy Halenius said, and stood up. ‘We’d hoped to be able to send the proposal out for consultation before the summer, but now we’ll have to aim at having it ready before the election instead. Can you do that?’

  Thomas stared at his boss, his messy hair, the too-tight shirt. Who the hell did he think he was? ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘Of course. It’ll be ready before the
election.’

  Former Chief Prosecutor Kjell Lindström lived in an old wooden house with towers and turrets on Vegagatan in Flen. Annika parked in the neatly raked drive. A man in his seventies got up from a garden chair on the lawn and walked towards her, his gait relaxed and powerful. He had a full head of white hair, and was wearing a brown cardigan over a white T-shirt.

  This is where I’d like to be when I’m seventy, Annika found herself thinking. Wooden house, cardigan, lawn.

  ‘Editor Bengtzon, I presume?’ His eyes were dark and clear.

  ‘That’s right,’ Annika said, hoisting her bag higher on her shoulder and shaking his hand.

  ‘I don’t think we’ve met before,’ Lindström said.

  ‘No,’ Annika said. ‘I did try to see you at the time, but you were very busy.’

  He chuckled. ‘Coffee?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d love some.’

  He waved towards the lawn. Carrying the tripod for the video-camera, Annika followed him to a table next to a lilac arbour. A tray with a Thermos flask, cups and buns waited on the table.

  ‘Freshly made,’ Annika said.

  He laughed again. It seemed to come easily to him. ‘I must admit that we tend to stick to gender stereotypes in this family. My wife is the baker. I look after the barbecue. She’s at her Pilates class, by the way.’

  They sat down on the garden chairs, stained blue, with thick cushions. The wind tugged at the birch leaves above them, making the sunlight flicker. Annika held up the video-camera. ‘Do you mind if I use this?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  She screwed the camera to the tripod, adjusted the white balance, then checked that the old prosecutor was in frame. She got a pen and notepad out of her bag as he poured coffee. ‘So, you’re interested in Josefin Liljeberg?’ he said, screwing the top back on the flask.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you about something entirely different before we start the interview?’ she said.

  The prosecutor raised his eyebrows as he dropped a sugar lump into his coffee. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘When do you think is the right time to report someone missing?’

  He looked at her in surprise. ‘Missing? That depends. Are we talking about a child or an adult?’

  Annika hesitated. ‘My sister, actually,’ she said. ‘She didn’t come home from work the day before yesterday.’

  He stirred his coffee. ‘It’s not against the law to leave home. Adults can come and go as they wish without it being a criminal offence.’

  ‘But if something really has happened?’

  ‘If there’s a risk to her life, or health, that puts matters in a very different light. Is she in a relationship?’

  ‘She has a husband and child,’ Annika said.

  ‘Perhaps the missing person doesn’t want to be found. Perhaps she just wants to be left alone for a while.’

  ‘I thought that too. But she me sent me a text, asking me for help.’

  He sipped the coffee. ‘Then I think you should go to the police,’ he said. ‘The duty officer at the Regional Crime Unit will decide whether or not to set up an investigation.’ He put the cup down. ‘But I don’t think you have any reason to be concerned,’ he said. ‘Almost everyone who disappears comes back fairly quickly.’

  Annika nodded. ‘I’ll probably contact the police this afternoon.’

  The prosecutor reached for his cup again and looked out across his garden. Annika followed his gaze. The flowerbeds in front of the fence next to the road contained a mixture of perennials and annuals, including marigolds and lobelia. A large clump of bleeding hearts swayed in the breeze in the corner beside the drive.

  ‘I remember Josefin very well,’ Kjell Lindström said. ‘It was a terribly tragic story.’ He turned his head to look towards his house, painted green with white detailing, and ornamental carving around the windows and front steps.

  Annika waited, her notepad in her lap.

  ‘Of course all murders are tragic,’ he said slowly, ‘but the young victims, the ones who never really got started in life . . . Taking someone’s life from them is the very worst thing one person can do to another, and the worst form of blasphemy, pretending to be God and making decisions about life and death. No one, in any culture, has the right to take on the role of God.’

  ‘Except for the president of the United States, perhaps,’ Annika said.

  Kjell Lindström chuckled. ‘True enough. Our penal code is designed around that. If you kill someone by mistake, you won’t necessarily be sentenced to prison, but a conviction for murder can get you a life sentence. It’s the intent that is criminal, not necessarily the act itself.’

  Annika looked at her pad. ‘How does it feel, as the head of a preliminary investigation, when you think you know who the perpetrator is but can’t prosecute him?’

  Lindström picked up a bun and took a small bite. ‘In this case we had a suspect,’ he said. ‘We ended up charging him with a series of financial offences instead. He received a severe custodial sentence.’

  For years, Annika thought, looking towards the house. Dishonesty to creditors, false accounting, tax fraud, tax crime and obstructing tax control.

  The prosecutor turned to her. ‘The tip-off about his double accounting came from someone inside the club, I seem to remember.’

  Annika lowered her gaze and blushed. She had taken a job at the sex club, looking after the roulette table. Joachim had given her Josefin’s old work outfit, a sequined pink bikini – they had been the same size. She had found out all she could about the way the business was run, the threats, blackmail, and where Joachim hid his double-accounting records. She didn’t know if the prosecutor was aware of who had phoned in with the tip-off, but she wasn’t about to tell him now.

  ‘He’s been out for ten years,’ Annika said. ‘He’s registered at his parents’ address in Sollentuna. Do you know what he’s doing these days?’

  The prosecutor sighed. ‘I know he was suspected of assaulting a seventeen-year-old girl a year or so after he was released. She withdrew the allegation. The last I heard was that he was in Croatia, working as an estate agent.’

  ‘Are you prepared to say, here and now, that Joachim killed Josefin? Can I quote you on that?’

  Kjell Lindström put his cup down.

  ‘Those men who hit women,’ he said, ‘they’re not like people think. People are all pretty much the same, even murderers. They aren’t monsters, even if their actions are monstrous.’

  Annika made notes. He was answering her question, even if he wasn’t.

  ‘Most men who are convicted of murdering their wives and partners in Sweden are native Swedes,’ he went on. ‘The majority are sober. More than half have no previous criminal record, not even for traffic offences. Nine out of ten are mentally sound. The critical moment is when the woman says she’s leaving, or when she gets custody of the children. When he loses control of her. When it’s no longer possible to isolate, control, manipulate . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Of all the criminals I’ve come across, those men are the most pathetic. They’re cowardly, arrogant, obsessed with power, and they accept no responsibility. They kill her because she won’t obey them, only to discover that she won’t obey them when she’s dead either. And that’s when they get really confused.’

  Warming to his subject, he leaned forward across the table. ‘There’s an institution outside Mariestad, which houses men who have been sentenced to long stretches in prison for violence against people close to them. They are offered treatment to help them control their aggression, but half are impossible to treat. In order for them to be receptive to the treatment, they have to admit their crimes and accept responsibility for what they’ve done. They spend the entire duration of their sentence proclaiming their innocence. He never hit her, and if he did, it was because she deserved it.’

  ‘Maybe they can’t deal with the shame of it,’ Annika said.

  The prosecutor nodded. ‘According to psychologists who’ve studied them, one sh
ared characteristic is that they constantly expect the very worst to happen. They think they won’t survive if they acknowledge what they subjected their victim to. They don’t believe that people around them could cope with the truth, so they reshape reality to suit themselves. All that denial must take a phenomenal amount of effort.’

  ‘One man’s confessed to Josefin’s murder, Gustaf Holmerud. What do you make of that?’

  Lindström pushed his cup away. ‘Attention-seeking individuals confess to crimes that they haven’t committed. It’s a fairly common phenomenon,’ he said. ‘What’s most scandalous in Gustaf Holmerud’s case is that he actually managed to get himself convicted of five.’

  ‘Can I quote you on that?’ Annika said.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘And you believe that his confessions are baseless? Not just the five cases that Holmerud was found guilty of, but all the others he’s confessed to as well?’

  ‘There’s one case in which Holmerud was initially a suspect, unless I’ve been misinformed, and it’s possible he might be guilty of that one, but I have no way of judging. But he’s not guilty of Josefin’s murder. I can say that with absolute certainty. We conducted a very thorough investigation into that case, and his name never cropped up once.’

  ‘Can I quote you on that as well?’

  ‘Why not? What are they going to do? Fire me?’

  She glanced at the camera to make sure it was working. It was. ‘Would you say that those five convictions constitute a miscarriage of justice?’

  ‘Of course.’

  This was great. It was the first time that a person in any position of authority, who had been actively involved in at least one of the cases, had spoken out directly.

  ‘Have you been in contact with the prosecutor-general?’

  He narrowed his eyes. ‘You appear to know more than I do now,’ he said.

  Annika looked across the lawn. ‘Josefin’s murderer,’ she said. ‘Do you think Joachim fits the criteria you outlined earlier? Is he pathetic, cowardly, arrogant, obsessed with power, and unwilling to accept responsibility?’