Eden shifted impatiently in the back of the cab.
It was through the victims that the perpetrators were found. If her basic theory was correct, if Simon and Abraham had been murdered in revenge for what had happened in that Palestinian village, then none of those involved were safe. Unless they were childless. Could Efraim have a family, and if so, where were they? Eden had no idea what kind of life he led. Perhaps he had already had a family back in the day, when he and she first met.
Bastard.
It wasn’t until the cab was driving through the city streets that she realised what she had ignored. Consciously or unconsciously.
Because of course Efraim Kiel had children.
At least two of them.
Eden’s daughters.
It was vital to act quickly. First of all Alex Recht drove over to Samson Security AB’s office on Torsgatan and rang the bell. He banged on the door and eventually tried the neighbours. No one knew where the woman who usually occupied the office might be, but one man said he had seen her only the previous evening.
Alex called Mona Samson twice from the pavement outside, then drove back to Police HQ, contacted the prosecutor and asked for a warrant to search the premises of Samson Security AB.
‘Why?’ the prosecutor wanted to know.
‘Because I’m wondering if Mona Samson might have fallen victim to our killer, and I want to make sure she’s not lying there dead.’
The thought had struck him as he stood there hammering on the door.
So far he had assumed that the woman he was looking for was somehow involved in what had happened; the indentations on the roof indicated that a woman had played a part in the murders, and Mona Samson was the only woman who had emerged as a suspect. But what was to say that she couldn’t also be a victim? In this tangle of loose ends where nothing was what it appeared to be, wasn’t it possible that Mona Samson had somehow been drawn in and exploited?
Standing in her office a little while later, he didn’t know what to think.
The place was spartan, bordering on desolate. Or perhaps the company hadn’t been there very long. Two desks, a bookcase, a computer, a few books and brochures. And a mattress on the floor. That was all. Cold and sparse. Alex stood in the middle of the room, the snow that had landed on his coat melting and dripping onto the floor.
‘Empty,’ said a colleague who had come with him. A technician was there too. In films the cops always had a skeleton key in their back pocket; in reality, it was the police technician who opened doors.
They had no mandate to remove anything, so they had to leave the computer where it was. As for the next step… Alex gazed around despondently.
‘Let’s put the building under surveillance,’ he said. ‘See if she comes back. It looks as if she sleeps here sometimes.’
His colleague glanced up.
‘But we don’t know what she looks like.’
‘In that case we’ll put someone on the door asking everyone who goes in to show their ID,’ Alex said. ‘We have to find her.’
Fifteen minutes later he was back at Police HQ, sitting at his desk reading the latest surveillance update on Saul Goldmann’s activities. He was travelling only between home and work. Sometimes Daphne was with him, sometimes he was alone. There was a photograph of the couple standing on the pavement outside their home; they had their arms around each other, and it looked as if Daphne was weeping on her husband’s shoulder.
Alex swallowed hard and put down the picture.
There was a certain kind of grief against which there was no defence. Daphne’s crumpled face expressed that particular sorrow, and it was painful to see.
He forced himself to look again, knowing that he had seen something important.
Saul’s face.
Barren and closed.
Not distorted with anguish like his wife’s. Alex knew he was on thin ice, that he couldn’t or shouldn’t draw conclusions from a single snapshot, a brief moment. But it actually looked as if Saul wasn’t grieving at all. He seemed annoyed, if anything.
Alex went down to the technicians’ department and managed to get hold of Lasse, who had helped them with the Super Troopers forum.
‘Saul Goldmann’s mobile,’ he said. ‘Have we got a location for the occasions when we want to know where he was?’
‘In other words when the teacher was shot, when the boys disappeared, and on the morning when they died?’
‘Yes.’
‘No. We haven’t asked the phone company for that information.’
‘In that case I’ll fill in a request and sign it right now,’ Alex said. ‘And I want a list of calls for the relevant days.’
He was about to leave when Lasse said:
‘However, I’ve just got a GPS on Mona Samson’s phone. The guy who called her to confirm Goldmann’s alibi asked me to do it last night. He was probably worried in case you thought he hadn’t done a good enough job.’
Too right.
‘What did you find out?’ he said, desperate to know.
Lasse waved him over, wanting him to look at the computer screen.
‘At two o’clock on the afternoon when the boys went missing, she received a call. We can see that she was definitely in Kungsholmen then, but look where she was when the phone rang at three.’
Alex peered at the screen.
The mobile had been up by the bridge, Djurgårdsbron. In Östermalm.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said.
‘The teacher was shot just after three, wasn’t she?’
‘She was.’
‘But at that time Mona Samson, or her phone at least, was by Djurgårdsbron.’
‘She could have been separated from her phone,’ Alex suggested. ‘It might have been in her car, for example. Do we know if she actually has a car?’
‘I checked, but I couldn’t find one. Of course she could have hired one that day, or borrowed one from a friend.’
‘True,’ Alex said. ‘But given the location of the phone, I think we can assume that she definitely wasn’t in Kungsholmen with Saul Goldmann. Where did she go after that? When did the next call come in?’
‘Hang on,’ Lasse said. ‘Look at this. So she had a call at two o’clock, which she didn’t answer. I don’t know who that was from. But guess who called her at three o’clock?’
‘I haven’t time to play guessing games – just tell me.’
‘Saul Goldmann. But she didn’t answer then either.’
Alex let out a whistle.
‘Bloody hell,’ he whispered.
Lasse smiled with satisfaction.
‘The next activity is half an hour later, at three thirty. She called Goldmann, and they talked for just over two minutes.’
Alex stared at the map where Mona Samson’s trail ended. At Djurgårdsbron. Which wasn’t far from the building on Nybrogatan, where someone had lain on their stomach on the roof and shot a teacher in the back. He thought about what the CSIs had said: that the person on the roof had been no more than one metre seventy tall.
And then he thought about the theory that the boys had been picked up by someone they knew. Perhaps Efraim Kiel, if he was the one who had sought them out online. Even if they hadn’t met before, it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that the boys might have been curious and gone with him if he referred to their exchange of emails. But it could also be much simpler than that; it could have been Saul Goldmann who had picked them up.
What a team they would have made, if that were the case. Saul and Mona. Providing one another with an alibi. Helping one another with the murders in order to fragment the investigation, make the police’s job so much more difficult.
They’re not a team; they’re a couple.
The realisation made him go cold.
That was why they had lied, why they had met in her apartment rather than her office.
‘They’re in a relationship,’ he said, hardly conscious of the fact that he was thinking out loud.