Babylon (12 page)

At this time of day the historic Sultan Ahmed was packed with people. Henrik amused himself for a while trying to guess the nationality of those who were clearly tourists. Towards evening the crowds would thin out. There were many mosques in this area, which made the nightlife quieter, and revellers tended to disappear by midnight. But you only needed to go down to the harbour or Eminönus Square, or cross Galata Bridge, and the night seemed young at any time.

Henrik wondered whether to go back to the museum. Or should he go and look for Ann-Marie? God, no. He must never get clingy. And it was important to show that he respected her work.

They had dedicated three whole days to the collections before exploring the rest of the city. They had travelled by boat across the Bosphorus to the Asiatic side, to its promenade and holes in the walls serving raki or hot, sweet tea in tinted glasses. And then back to the European side. The city silhouettes on both sides of the water, scrambling up the hillsides, looked as if they were carrying thirty metres of smog, like a dark-grey mist covering the buildings, the domes of the mosques, the pointed minarets, palace towers and pinnacles.

Late at night, when the others had headed back to the hotel – Axel Donner was usually the last to throw in the towel – Henrik and Ann-Marie would stay out. They were both night owls, egging each other on until the first light of dawn crept over the city like a gentle caress, before the traffic made their eardrums tremble and the heat arrived. Before the first call to prayer echoed across the rooftops. The nights had followed a quickly established ritual. They would start off at a courtyard restaurant high up in a narrow street behind the Hagia Sophia, with its lights shining on their laps. Or they would go to the place opposite, a more modest bar with kelim-covered sofas, tucked below the high wall of the Topkapi Palace park. A number of artists wearing paint-spattered white coats frequented the courtyard next door, their abstract paintings hung up to dry in the sun.

The first evening they talked about art and architecture, drawing on what they had seen that day. But it wasn’t long before they were teasing out a deeper connection. Gradually, they shed the inhibitions of being teacher and pupil. The city was instrumental in this. It pulled and tugged in every direction, refusing to respect boundaries, refusing to keep itself in check.

Henrik told Ann-Marie about the stirrings he had felt on the way from the airport. As their yellow taxi zig-zagged among hundreds of others, with thousands of cars revving their engines and sounding their horns. There were traffic jams as far as the eye could see, the smog was suffocating, making his eyes smart and his lungs burn, and Henrik had thought: I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe
, just as he had thought on his way into Cairo. As he had thought on his way into Bombay and Bangkok, New Mexico and countless other cities. He had been terrified at first, then exhilarated. And after that, he wanted nothing else other than to be in the city, to be nowhere else for the rest of his life.

Ann-Marie had smiled at the fact that they were so alike. And that it had taken them so long to find out.

18

Gothenburg

‘What were we talking about?’ asked Karin Beckman.

‘Rebecca’s employer.’

‘That’s it,’ Tell replied. ‘She said Rebecca used to work with patients, short-term therapy and so on, but that she was barred from direct contact when the offences against her ex-boyfriend came to light. If I understand correctly, it was some kind of compromise allowing her to keep working there after she’d completed her punishment. At the moment she has some kind of administrative role. I also discovered that our new chief constable is a bureaucrat right to his fingertips, an absolute master at digging out sensitive information. Thanks to him, I’ve been in touch with a psychiatrist who saw Rebecca back then. From what he said, I could easily imagine that . . .’

She fell silent suddenly to concentrate on the traffic, muttering about the one-way system. A man battled his way across the crossing with a Monkshood plant in an ornate pot. They watched him in silence as they waited for the lights to change.

‘I still think it’s peculiar that she’s trusted to work in a place where they’re dealing with people’s psychiatric problems, given her history . . .’

‘Admin duties could just mean she spends all day writing invoices,’ Beckman replied. ‘And, to be fair, it appears that her aggression is linked to whatever man she happens to be living with, or at least to people with whom she has a close relationship. She’s not a danger to the public. And if you’ve completed your punishment, surely you deserve a second chance, don’t you?’

‘I take your point. But is that argument ever going to be watertight? Can a person be aggressive, extremely aggressive I mean, to one particular person or in one situation, and behave completely normally to everyone else? In my opinion, if you’re crazy in that way you’re a liability. A time bomb. Surely all it would take would be for someone to piss you off one day when you’ve got out of bed on the wrong side?’

The corner of Beckman’s mouth twitched almost imperceptibly.

‘Hmm . . . No, actually, I think that a person could function perfectly normally and do their job and have friends but still lose it over and over again in one specific context. After all, it’s not particularly unusual to have hang-ups about infidelity. It’s only human.’

‘And what’s behind it? In the case of Rebecca Nykvist?’

He opened his door to help as Beckman tried to squeeze their Hyundai into a parking space which looked smaller than the car itself.

‘Shall we?’

The letterbox was marked Samuelsson-Nykvist. But Samuelsson wouldn’t be coming back and Nykvist might not see her front door for a while, Beckman thought, with a sudden, surprising feeling of melancholy. She had no relationship with Rebecca Nykvist. Or her problems. She thought back to her earlier conversation with Tell.

‘You asked what’s behind it? Well, I don’t really know, but it could be that any situation that evokes a fear of abandonment acts as a trigger. Her aggression is a survival instinct.’

The lupins on either side of the path made her think of Österlen, where her family used to have a summer cottage.
Just imagine lying down in the flowers and forgetting everything else
.

She was getting annoyed with Tell, who was now on the street, chatting on his mobile. She didn’t usually get annoyed with Tell and she wasn’t usually tired. There was a connection. The tiredness meant
that she was constantly on edge and she was conscious of the fact; it made her uncharacteristically cheerful until her defences came crashing down, when she would shout at people who let a door close in her face, were walking their dogs without a lead, or who simply happened to be nearby. She felt unreliable.

She shoved a handful of peanuts into her mouth and blinked away a tear as she swallowed too soon and felt the sharp nuts scratching her throat. She shouldn’t be too hard on herself, she thought. She had just ended a ten-year relationship that had been anything but restful, and she had yet to develop a new routine as a working single mother. She really didn’t want to think about her feelings. But she knew deep down that the separation was for the best, and that was all she could focus on for the present.

When you were young, you thought breaking up would get easier. Perhaps it did, in a way. After all, she was a master of suppressing her emotions. She simply put certain matters to one side, tackling them when there was the time and space to do so. And it was only four weeks since she had left Göran. Four weeks, that was no time at all. She wasn’t stupid; she realised that at some point she would have to face up to the grief. But not today.

Then she noticed something. She raised her arm and gestured to Tell without turning around.

‘Tell! Come here!’

She heard him end the call.

‘The door. It’s unlocked. Or has someone broken in?’

Beckman withdrew her hand instinctively and fumbled in her bag for latex gloves and shoe protectors.

‘You can never be too careful . . .’

‘There’s no reason for the door to be open,’ Tell agreed, automatically lowering his voice. ‘When Rebecca was brought in for questioning she must have known that it could be some time before she came home. Be careful until we’re sure the house is empty.’

The red door opened slowly. It took them a couple of seconds to establish that the hallway was in a considerably worse state than on their previous visit. The cloakroom and wardrobe doors were wide open, and the floor was covered with clothes, bags and shoes.

Beckman listened intently at the foot of the stairs before going up to check the landing and bedrooms. Judging by her response, things
were much the same upstairs. Tell walked around the ground floor taking care not to touch a thing, a grim expression on his face. Whoever was responsible for this devastation had done a thorough job.

They met up in the living room five minutes later. The sofa had been ripped open and its stuffing was spread all over the floor along with shards of glass from a painting. The poster that had been in the frame had been torn out and had slid under the table. Even the pot plants had been turned upside down, and compost had fallen between the floorboards.

‘Look.’ A vase had been knocked over. Tell crouched down beside the broken glass, taking care not to step in the pool of muddy soil and water. He found the long-stemmed gerbera halfway under the piano stool.

‘How long does a cut flower like this stay fresh without water?’

The fat stem exuded a foamy liquid when he squeezed it between his thumb and index finger.

‘Not very long, I should think.’

‘So the disturbance probably happened less than twenty-four hours ago?’

‘What do you think about the marks on the floor? They’re not footprints.’

‘No, I noticed that too. It almost looks as if the person made a conscious effort to remove all traces. What’s your take on it?’

‘I think whoever did this knew what they were doing. I don’t think this is the work of kids.’

Beckman walked slowly to the kitchen, resisting the impulse to flop into one of the chairs and rest her head on the table. Instead she tried to marshal her thoughts.
You can always read a crime scene
. The perpetrator will always give away something of himself – or herself. Who they are, what they want, and what they are planning to do next.

The kitchen sofa had been dragged away from the wall, and the drawer beneath it had been emptied. Photographs of different sizes lay in drifts around the dresser, having been tipped out of a shoe box that now lay upside down. Many of them showed Rebecca and Henrik on holiday, striking fun poses. There were several arty pictures of Rebecca, taken in black and white. They were pictures of a happy life together, just what you’d expect. Nobody wanted to capture their misery for
posterity. And yet the tragedy was palpable, given that one of these smiles had been mercilessly taken away.

‘But this puts Rebecca Nykvist’s involvement in a completely different light,’ she muttered. ‘Because it doesn’t look like a straightforward burglary. The house appears to have been searched. Perhaps it’s not a crime of passion after all.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing,’ said Beckman, shaking her head. ‘So what do you make of it?’

‘Well . . .’ Tell’s laugh was somewhat strained. ‘I don’t think we can rule out a connection to the murder of Henrik Samuelsson. Given that the evidence against Rebecca is unsatisfactory in some ways, I think we need to reconsider whether she is our prime suspect. I’m not sure we can hold her.’

‘What about the witness?’

‘The witness statements don’t tally. Rebecca’s fingerprints were found on the letterbox, there’s no doubt she was there, but they weren’t found anywhere inside the apartment. Her calls on the night of the murder have been verified. The woman who reported the disturbance said it happened at around one o’clock. The next-door neighbour’s account puts Rebecca at the scene closer to half-past two.’

‘In which case Henrik and Ann-Marie were already dead by the time Rebecca got there,’ said Beckman. ‘She said she didn’t see anything when she looked through the letterbox, presumably because it was dark outside and the hallway lights were switched off. The neighbour who called looked in after it got light.’

‘Plus, do we think Rebecca is a danger to the public? Do we think she’s planning to do a runner or continue her life of crime? No, we don’t. We don’t have enough evidence to arrest her. And now this. I’m beginning to think we need to cast the net wider.’

Beckman pointed her toe at a sewing kit – even that had been searched. Reels of cotton and packets of needles had spilled onto the kitchen floor.

‘The burglars were after something very specific, wouldn’t you say? Something they expected to find which wasn’t here. Or which was so well hidden that they couldn’t find it. Or they didn’t find it until they’d searched the entire house. It
could
be that Rebecca Nykvist is unlucky enough to be the victim of a break-in while she just happens to be in
police custody. But it doesn’t look to me as if this house was chosen at random. It looks as though this particular house was searched.’

Tell agreed. ‘Do you know what confuses me most?’

‘No.’

‘If we believe the two crimes were linked, why hadn’t the apartment on Linnégatan been searched?’

Beckman shrugged. ‘Perhaps they knew that whatever they were looking for was here. Perhaps Ann-Marie Karpov and Henrik Samuelsson needed to be silenced, because they knew something about . . . about whatever the murderers were looking for?’

Tell bent down and examined a black imitation-leather case which contained an iPod.

‘They don’t appear to have taken any valuables.’

‘So what do you think they were looking for?’ Beckman persisted. ‘Off the top of your head?’

Tell looked exhausted. He had absolutely no idea. ‘Something small; the bubble bath has been poured out in the bathroom, the jewellery box has been searched. Something that would fit inside a jewellery box.’