Marked for Life (4 page)

“How do you mean?”

“Well...my husband thought that the decision process for asylum was difficult. He never liked having to turn away any asylum seekers, even though he wasn't personally responsible for having to tell them himself. He knew how desperate many were when they didn't get asylum here. But not everyone qualified. And no one has threatened him. Or has sought revenge, if that is the question.”

Henrik wondered whether Kerstin was telling the truth. Hans Juhlén could admittedly have kept the threatening letters hidden away from her. But it did nevertheless seem unlikely that he never during all his years in the job felt frightened of somebody nor talked with his wife about it.

* * *

“There must have been a relatively serious threat against Juhlén,” Henrik said to Jana when the interview was concluded. They both left the interrogation room with slow steps.

“Yes,” she answered briefly.

“What do you think about the wife?”

Jana remained standing in the corridor while Henrik closed the door. “There are no signs of violence in the house,” she said.

“Perhaps because the murder was well planned.”

“So you think she's guilty?”

“The spouse is always guilty, right?” Henrik smiled.

“Yes, almost always. But at the moment no evidence links her to the murder.”

“She seemed nervous,” he added.

“That isn't enough.”

“I know. But it feels as if she isn't telling the truth.”

“And she probably isn't, or at least not completely, but to arrest her I'm going to need more than that. If she doesn't start talking or we can't get any technical evidence, I'll have to let her go. You've got three days.”

Henrik ran his fingers through his hair.

“And the secretary?” he said.

“Check out what she knows. I want you to visit her as soon as you can, but definitely by tomorrow. Unfortunately I have four cases which I have to pay attention to, and so I am not free to go with you. But I trust you.”

“Of course. Mia and I will talk with her.”

Jana said goodbye and walked past the other interrogation rooms.

As a public prosecutor, she regularly visited the place. She was on emergency duty a certain number of weekends and nights every year—it went with the job. A rotating duty schedule was posted, whose main purpose was to ensure that a prosecutor was available for urgent decisions such as whether somebody should be detained. A prosecutor could keep somebody in detention up to three days without introducing charges. After that, a court hearing was necessary. On a number of occasions, sometimes late at night, Jana had been called in and, in a rush, had to make a decision about an arrest.

Today all the cells in the center were full. She looked up toward the ceiling and thanked a higher power that she wasn't on call the coming weekend. At the same time, she remembered that she would be on standby duty the weekend after that. She slowed her pace as she walked down the corridor, then stopped to sit and pull her calendar out. She turned the pages ahead to April 28. Nothing was noted there. Perhaps it was Sunday, April 29? Nothing there either. She turned a few more pages and caught sight of the entry for the first of May. A public holiday. ON CALL. And that was the day she had agreed to have dinner with her mother and father. She felt immediate stress. She couldn't possibly be on call that same day. How had she not seen that? Of course, it was not absolutely necessary to be at her parents' for dinner, but she didn't want to disappoint her father by not coming over at all.

I'll have to swap days with somebody
, she thought, as she put her calendar back in her briefcase. She got up and continued walking, wondering with whom she'd be able to swap days. Most likely Per Åström. Per was both a successful public prosecutor and a popular social worker. She respected him as a colleague. During the five years they had known each other, a friendship of sorts had grown up between them.

Per was thirty-three years old and in good shape. He played tennis on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He had blond hair, a little dimple in his chin and eyes that were different colors. He smelled of aftershave. Sometimes he tended to go on a bit, but otherwise a nice guy. Only that; nothing more.

Jana hoped that Per would swap with her. Otherwise she would resort to bribing him with wine. But red or white? She weighed the two choices in time with the sound of her heels on the floor. Red or white. Red or white.

She contemplated taking the stairs down to the garage but chose the elevator instead. When she saw that the defense lawyer Peter Ramstedt was waiting there too, she immediately regretted her decision. She stood back from him at a safe distance.

“Ah, it's you, Jana,” said Peter when he noted her presence. He rocked back and forth on the soles of his shoes.

“I heard that you had gone to review the autopsy and see the victim's body at the medical examiner's.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“One hears a thing or two.”

Peter gave a slight smirk and exposed his whitened teeth.

“So you like corpses?”

“Not particularly. I'm just trying to lead an investigation.”

“I've been a lawyer for ten years and I've never heard of a prosecutor going to an autopsy.”

“Perhaps that says more about other prosecutors than about me?”

“Don't you like your colleagues?”

“I didn't say that.”

“Isn't it simpler in your position to let the police do the legwork?”

“I am not interested in what is simple.”

“You know, as a prosecutor you can complicate an investigation.”

“In what way?”

“By calling attention to yourself.”

Hearing those words, Jana Berzelius decided to take the stairs down to the garage anyway. For every step she cursed Peter Ramstedt.

CHAPTER
SIX

THE ROCKING HAD STOPPED
. They were traveling silently, shut inside the dark container.

“Are we there?” said the girl.

Her mama didn't answer her. Nor her papa. They seemed tense. Her mother told her to sit up. The girl did as she was told. The others also began to move. There was a feeling of unease. Several others were coughing and the girl felt the warm, stuffy air as it sought its way down into her lungs. Even her papa made a wheezing sound.

“Are we there now?” she said again. “Mama? Mama!”

“Quiet!” said Papa. “You must be completely quiet.”

The girl became grumpy and pushed her knees up toward her chin.

Suddenly the floor shuddered under her. She fell to one side and stretched out an arm to brace herself. Her mother got hold of her and held her close. It was silent a long, long time. Then the container was lifted up.

They all hung on tight in the cramped space. The girl gripped her mama's waist. But even so, she hit her head when the container landed hard on the ground. At last they were in their new country. In their new life.

Mama got up and pulled her daughter up too. The girl looked at Danilo, who was still sitting with his back to the wall. His eyes were wide open, and just like all the others he was trying to hear sounds outside. It was hard to hear anything through the walls but if you really concentrated then you could perhaps distinguish weak voices. Yes, there were people talking outside. The girl looked at her papa and he smiled at her. That smile was the last thing she saw before the container was opened and daylight poured in.

Outside the container stood three men. They had something in their hands, something big and silvery. The girl had seen such things before, in red plastic that sprayed water.

One man started to shout at the others. Something weird was on his face, an enormous scar. She couldn't help but stare at it.

The man with the scar came into the container and waved the silvery thing. He was shouting all the time. The girl didn't understand what he said. Neither did her parents. Nobody understood his words.

The man went up to Ester and pulled at her sweater. She was scared. Ester's mama was also frightened and didn't realize what was happening until it was too late. The man pulled Ester and held her in a firm grip around her neck as he backed away, all the time with the silvery thing pointed at Ester's mama and papa. They didn't dare do anything; they stood there completely still.

The girl felt somebody take a firm hold of her arm. It was Papa, who quickly pushed her in behind his legs. Her mama spread out her skirt to cover the girl even more.

The girl stood as still as she possibly could. Behind the skirt she couldn't see what was happening. But she could hear. Hear how the grown-ups started to shout. They were shouting no, no, NO! And then she heard Danilo's desperate voice.

“Mama,” he shouted. “Mama!”

The girl put her hands over her ears so that she wouldn't have to hear the other children's crying and shrieking. The voices of the grown-ups were worse. They were crying and shrieking too, but they were much louder. The girl pressed her hands even harder against her ears. But then after a while, all became silent.

The girl took her hands away and listened. She tried to look out between her papa's legs, but when she moved he pressed her hard against the wall. It hurt.

The girl heard steps approach and felt her papa press her harder and harder against the steel wall. She could hardly breathe. Just as she was about to open her mouth to complain, she heard a popping sound and her papa fell down on his face on the floor. He lay there unmoving in front of her. When she looked up, the man with the scar was standing in front of her. He smiled.

Her mama threw herself forward and held on to her as best she could. The man just looked at them, then shouted something again and Mama shouted back.

“You don't touch her!” she screamed.

Then he hit her with the silver thing he had in his hand.

The girl felt how her mama's hands slipped down her tummy and legs until she lay on the floor with staring eyes. She didn't blink, just stared.

“Mama!”

She felt a hand on her upper arm as the man yanked her up. He held her arm tightly, pushing her ahead of him out of the container.

And as she left she heard the dreadful sound when they fired the silver things. They didn't have water in them. Water didn't sound like that. They shot something hard, and they shot straight into the dark.

Straight at Mama and Papa.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

Tuesday, April 17

JANA BERZELIUS WOKE
up at five in the morning. She had had the same dream again; it never left her in peace. She sat up and wiped the sweat off her brow. Her mouth was dry from what she imagined was her shrieking. She straightened out her cramped fingers. Her fingernails had dug into the palms of her hands.

She had experienced the same dream for as long as she could remember. It was always the same images. It irritated her that she didn't understand what the dream meant. She had turned, twisted and analyzed all the symbols each time she fell victim to it. But that was no help.

Her pillow lay on the floor. Had she thrown it there? Presumably, as it was a long way from the bed.

She picked up the pillow and put it back against the headboard, then pulled the duvet back over herself. When she had lain there restless under the warm duvet for twenty more minutes, she realized it was pointless to try to fall back to sleep. So she got up, showered, dressed and ate a bowl of muesli.

With a mug of coffee in her hand, she looked out the window at the unsteady weather. Even though they were already halfway through April, winter still made itself felt. One day it was a cold rain, and the next it was snowing with a temperature of close to freezing. From her flat in Knäppingsborg, Jana had a view of the river and the Louis de Geer Hall. From her living room she could also see the people who visited the quaint shopping area. Knäppingsborg had recently been renovated, but the urban planners on the council had managed to retain the genuine feel of the place.

Jana had always wanted a flat with high ceilings, and when the first plans were approved for renovating the old buildings in the area, her father had put his name down to invest in a housing-association apartment for his then newly graduated daughter. As luck would have it, or thanks to a few phone calls, Karl Berzelius was given the opportunity to choose first. Of course she chose the apartment that was forty square meters larger than the others, with a total floor area of 196 square meters.

Jana massaged her neck. Her scar always became irritated by the cold weather. She had bought a cream at the pharmacy that the pharmacist assistant said was the latest on the market, but she hadn't noticed any improvement.

Jana draped her long hair over her right shoulder, exposing her neck. With a careful touch, she gently rubbed the cream into the carved letters. Then she covered her neck with her hair again.

She took a dark blue jacket out of her closet and put it on. Over that she buttoned up her beige Armani coat.

At half past eight she left the flat, walked to her car and drove in the smattering rain to the courthouse. She was thinking about the first case of the day, which concerned domestic violence. The proceedings would start at nine. Her fourth criminal case, the last for the day, probably wouldn't finish until half past five at the earliest.

It would be a long day, she knew that.

* * *

It was just after 9:00 a.m. when Henrik Levin and Mia Bolander entered the Migration Board offices. They checked in at reception and were given a temporary key card.

Lena Wikström, the secretary, was in the middle of a telephone conversation when they stepped into her outer office on the second floor. She held up her finger to signal that she would be with them in a few moments.

From Lena's office you could see straight into what had been Hans Juhlén's. Henrik noted that Hans's office looked tidy. The surface of the wide desk was uncluttered, with just a computer and a pile of folders next to it. Lena Wikström's space was quite the opposite. Papers were strewn everywhere, on the desk, on top of file folders, underneath ring binders, in trays, on the floor, in the paper-recycling box and in the wastebasket. Nothing appeared organized. Documents lay all around.

Henrik felt a shiver down his spine and wondered how Lena could concentrate in such chaos.

“That's that.” Lena ended the call and got up. “Welcome.”

She shook hands with Henrik and Mia, asked them to sit down on the worn visitors' chairs next to her desk and immediately started speaking.

“It's dreadful what happened. I still can't understand it. It's simply terrible. So terrible. Everybody's wondering who would do such a thing. I'm answering calls about Hans's murder all the time now. He
was
murdered, wasn't he?
Usch
, yes, it's simply too terrible, I must say.”

Lena started to pick at her peeling nail polish. It was hard to say how old she was. Henrik guessed fifty-five plus. She had short dark hair and was wearing a light lilac blouse and earrings in a matching color. She almost gave an impression of elegance and affluence. If it hadn't been for the flaking nail polish, of course.

Mia took out her pen and notepad.

“I understand you've worked with Hans Juhlén for many years, is that correct?” she said.

“Yes, more than twenty,” said Lena.

“Kerstin Juhlén said it was almost twenty.”

“Unfortunately she doesn't really keep track of her husband. No, it's actually twenty-two. But I haven't been his assistant all that time. I had another chief first, but he retired many years ago and handed over to Hans. Hans was in charge of the accounts department before this position. We met frequently during that time since I assisted the previous chief.”

“According to Kerstin, Hans was somewhat stressed recently, would you agree as to that?” Henrik said.

“Stressed? No, I would hardly say that.”

“She was referring to the recent criticism that had been directed toward the department.”

“Oh really? Yes, well, that of course. The newspapers wrote that we were bad at accommodating the flow of asylum seekers. But it's hard to know exactly how many will come. You just have to make an educated guess, a projection. And a projection is only that, after all.”

Lena took a deep breath.

“Three weeks ago we received a large group of asylum seekers from Somalia and that meant work both before and after regular hours. Hans didn't want to risk more exposure in the local papers. He took the criticism seriously.”

“Did he have any enemies?” said Henrik.

“No, not as far as I know. But you always feel a bit vulnerable in this job. There are a lot of emotions, a lot of people behave threateningly when they're not allowed to stay on here in Sweden. So if you think of it like that, then there are potentially a lot of enemies. That's why we have a security firm that always patrols here,” said Lena. ‘But I don't think Hans felt he had specific enemies.”

“Even evenings and nights?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been threatened?”

“No, not personally. But the Board always has to think about security. Once a man poured gasoline over himself and ran into reception and threatened to set himself on fire if he didn't get a residence permit. They can be completely mad, those people. Yes, there's all sorts.”

Henrik leaned back in the chair and glanced at Mia. She moved on to the next question.

“Is it possible to talk to the person from security who was here on Sunday?”

“This past Sunday? When he...”

“Yes.”

“I'll see what I can do.”

Lena picked up the phone, punched in a number and waited. Shortly after, the security firm promised to immediately send a Jens Cavenius who had worked all Sunday.

“So do you know if Hans had felt especially threatened in any way?” said Henrik.

“No,” said Lena.

“No strange letters or phone calls?”

“Not that I saw, and I open all the mail... No, I haven't seen anything.”

“Do you know if he had any contact with a child?”

“No. Not specifically. Why do you ask that?”

Henrik declined to answer.

“When he was here, late evenings and Sundays, do you know what he did?”

“I don't know exactly, but he was busy with paperwork and reviewed lots of documents. He didn't like the computer at all and wanted to use it as little as possible so I had to print out all documents and reports for him.”

“Were you usually here with him when he was working?” said Mia and pointed at Lena with her pen.

“No, not on Sundays. He wanted to be by himself, alone, that was why he liked working evenings and weekends. Nobody was here to disturb him.”

Mia nodded and wrote in her notepad.

“You said that certain persons can behave threateningly. Do you have a list of the names of all the asylum seekers that we can take with us?” said Henrik.

“Yes. Of course. For this year, or further back?”

“This year's list would suffice to start with.”

Lena went into the database on her computer and ordered a printout. Her laser printer came to life and started delivering page after page with names in alphabetical order. Lena picked them up as they came out. After twenty pages, a warning lamp started to flash.

“Oh, how annoying, it's always going wrong,” she said, and turned red in the face. She opened the paper tray which—to her surprise—was not empty.

“Oh, what's the matter now?” She pushed the tray back in. The printer made a noise but again the red lamp indicated that something was wrong.

“Apparatuses are best when they work properly, aren't they?” she said in an irritated voice.

Henrik and Mia just sat there in silence.

Lena opened the tray, saw that there was still some paper left and closed it again, this time with a bang. The printer started up, but no pages came out.

“Oh, why are you being so difficult!” Lena hit the start button with her fist and that got the printer to work. Embarrassed, she ran her fingers through her hair until all the pages printed out. Just then, the phone rang and in a short conversation the receptionist informed Lena that Jens Cavenius had arrived.

* * *

Jens Cavenius stood leaning against a pillar in reception. The nineteen-year-old looked as though he had just woken up. His eyes were red, and his hair was flattened on one side and untidy on the other. He was wearing a lined jean jacket and white Converse sneakers. When he caught sight of Henrik and Mia, he approached and stretched out his arm to shake hands.

“Shall we sit down?” Henrik asked.

He gestured toward a sofa and armchairs to the right of reception, which was surrounded by two-meter-high plastic Yucca palms. Some Arabic brochures were in a display on the white coffee table.

Jens flopped onto the sofa, leaned forward and despite his red-shot eyes, looked expectantly at Henrik and Mia. They sat down opposite him.

“You worked here on Sunday?” Henrik said.

“Yeah, sure,” said Jens and clapped the palms of his hands together.

“Was Hans Juhlén here then?”

“Yep. I chatted a bit with him. He was the boss, like.”

“What time was it then?”

“Perhaps around half past six.”

Henrik looked at Mia and saw that she was prepared to take over the questioning. With a nod he let her do so.

“What did you talk about?” she said.

“Well, it was more like we said hello to each other. You could say,” said Jens.

“Okay?” said Mia.

“Or nodded, I nodded to him when I went past his office.”

“There was nobody else here then?”

“No, no way. On Sundays it's just dead here, like.”

“When you went past Hans Juhlén's office, did you see what he was doing then?”

“No. But I could hear him using the computer keyboard. You know, you've got to have good hearing to be a security guard, so you can notice sound that might be weird or something. And my night vision is pretty good too. I was the best in the test in fact, in the selection. Not bad, eh?”

Mia was hardly impressed by Jens's senses. She raised her eyebrows to indicate ridicule and turned toward Henrik, whose gaze had fastened on one of the Yucca palms.

When she saw that Henrik appeared to be lost in thought, she thumped him on the arm.

“Hans Juhlén's computer?” she said.

“Yes?” said Henrik.

“He seems to have used it quite a lot.”

“Yes, all the time,” said Jens and clapped his hands.

“Then I think we should take it with us,” said Henrik.

“So do I,” said Mia.