Efraim’s frustration was bordering on intolerable. Whoever had decided to start leaving him messages was starting to get careless. The note outside his hotel room had been nothing short of stupid. It wasn’t just that the person could easily have been spotted – it was almost as if he or she wanted to be caught.
The tone of the messages was playful, but Efraim knew what they really meant. Someone was following him, and that wasn’t good. Particularly in view of the fact that the individual in question was calling himself the Paper Boy.
He had gone to see Peder Rydh again, and that had got him thinking.
Rydh had done his job at long last, and looked for something that could be a calling card. He didn’t seem to understand the importance of what he had found.
A paper bag with a face drawn on it.
The discovery terrified Efraim.
The plant and the bag had been sent to the Solomon Community after the schoolteacher had been shot, but before the boys were found on the golf course. And that told Efraim everything he needed to know.
Now he was almost sure he knew who had contacted him.
Someone passed him on the stairs and carried on down to the ground floor. He couldn’t stay here. He was running the risk of being noticed if he didn’t move soon.
Why had he actually come here? So that he would know where she lived in case he ever needed to get hold of her in a hurry. He read the nameplate on the door one last time.
‘E & M Lundell’.
Good. So this was where Eden had settled down with her husband and children. He looked at the lock; he would be surprised if it was easy to force, but on the other hand he didn’t think it would be impossible.
He turned away and went back down the stairs. Personally he would have preferred to live a couple of floors higher up. Distance was good – in all directions. He left the building and cut across Sankt Eriksplan, heading towards Vasa Park.
He never saw the woman standing at the bus stop on Torsgatan as he crossed the road. Nor did he notice when she set off after him.
A paper bag with a face drawn on it.
Three victims shot with the same gun, but on two different occasions.
Fredrika Bergman couldn’t take her eyes off the bag in which the chrysanthemum had been delivered to the Solomon Community. It had been picked up from Östermalm by a patrol car and brought to HQ before being sent on to the National Forensics Lab for analysis.
Alex had asked to see it first, and now they were standing in his office, staring at it.
‘What the hell are we missing here?’ he said, his voice suffused with annoyance. ‘A paper bag. With eyes, a nose and a mouth. What’s the message, and who is it meant for?’
Fredrika thought about the boys lying in the snow and the paper bags someone had pulled over their heads. At the time she had believed the bags were a nod to an as yet unidentified recipient, then she had wondered if they could be the killer’s calling card. This new discovery strengthened that view.
But there was something that didn’t fit.
‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ Alex said, his tone brusque, challenging.
Fredrika took her time before she spoke. She looked closely at the bag: the large eyes, the pointed nose, the gaping mouth.
She found the photographs of the bags that had been over the boys’ heads.
She studied them in detail, then passed them to Alex.
‘Look,’ she said.
Alex stared at the photographs.
‘And now look at this,’ she said, pointing to the bag from the school.
Alex made the same comparison. He didn’t speak for a moment.
‘They’re different,’ he said eventually.
‘I agree. The bags from Lovön are similar, but not identical. The bag the plant was in…’
She paused.
‘Look at the face. It’s much more aggressive. And drawn in different colours.’
The eyes on this bag were coloured blue. The noses were different too: short lines on the original bags, considerably bigger on this one.
‘You think we’re looking for different perpetrators?’ Alex said.
The doubt in his voice told Fredrika that he didn’t share her point of view, if that was the case.
‘I don’t think we can rule it out,’ she said.
She sat down and went on:
‘First of all our perpetrator shoots a woman outside the Solomon school. He does so while lying on his stomach on a rooftop on the opposite side of the street. By the time the police arrive, he has managed to get off the roof and leave the building without anyone seeing him. But he doesn’t stop there. Instead he gets in a car an hour later and picks up Simon and Abraham. Keeps them overnight, and shoots them the following morning.’
Alex was still holding the paper bag. The gloves he was wearing covered the scars on his hands from the time when he saved a child from burning to death.
Fredrika looked away. She didn’t want to think about children being burned or hurt in any other way.
‘Does that sound reasonable to you?’ she said. ‘The idea that the same person did all that?’
‘What evidence do we have to suggest that there’s more than one perpetrator? Concrete evidence, I mean?’
Fredrika took a deep breath.
‘None at all.’
‘We need to inform the National Crime Unit,’ Alex said. ‘As I said before, we’ll continue to investigate the two crimes separately, but I’m afraid we have to accept what the evidence is telling us: there is only one perpetrator.’
He put down the bag. ‘Okay?’
Fredrika nodded. The days when she and Alex stood in opposite corners fighting over which direction the investigation should take were long gone. The team was too small now; she couldn’t afford to fly solo any more.
The soloist.
That was what Spencer had called her when they first got to know one another almost twenty years ago. When their love was secret, her desire overwhelming. She had loved him so much back then. She still did. They had both been worried about how they would cope with ordinary everyday life together, but on the whole it had gone unexpectedly well.
The weekend loomed before her like an iceberg. In only two days’ time Spencer would be leaving for Jerusalem. Fredrika had spoken to her mother, who had promised to help out with the children.
She straightened up. Wished she was somewhere else, perhaps with the orchestra. The violin made her feel safe; her job didn’t. Not the way things were right now.
Playing the violin was pure enjoyment.
Dead children were about as far from enjoyment as you could possibly get.
As Fredrika was on her way out of Alex’s office, a thought suddenly struck him.
‘Why did the secretary react to the way the bag looked?’ he said.
Fredrika turned back.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We haven’t said a word to the press about the bags we found over the boys’ heads. So why did she think it was worth mentioning that someone had drawn on this bag?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Fredrika said. ‘You were the one who spoke to her.’
Alex picked up his phone and called the school.
‘What was it about that paper bag that made you call the police?’ he said. ‘Why did you think it would be of interest in our inquiries?’
The secretary sounded surprised.
‘I didn’t, to be honest.’
Now it was Alex’s turn to be surprised.
‘So why did you call?’
‘It wasn’t my idea. Our new head of security suggested it. Peder Rydh.’
Alex thought fast, trying to understand.
‘You showed the bag to Peder first?’
‘No, he found it himself. He came and asked me if we’d received anything odd after Josephine and the boys were murdered, and then he started looking at the wrapping that the plants and flowers had come in. Why he thought a paper bag would be of interest to the police, I have no idea.’
Nor had Alex. And that bothered him.
Had Peder known what he was looking for among the wrapping? And if so, who was feeding him the information?