With those words he left Bergwall’s office, slamming the door behind him. A fresh thought occurred to him as he heard the crash. What if there were more snuff movies out there? Morgan Axberger might just be able to answer that question.
Exhaustion washed over him after lunch. Peder realised he was blinking several times in order to try to clear his vision. He knew he ought to eat, even though he wasn’t hungry. Ylva called him.
‘Still no sign?’
Peder hardly knew how to respond. No sign, was that what people said when someone disappeared?
‘No, we haven’t found him yet.’
Yet. Was that too optimistic a word, under the circumstances. Was there a possibility that it was already too late?
Don’t think about the unthinkable.
Peder’s eyes filled with tears. If Jimmy was dead… for the first time, Peder was facing something he knew he wouldn’t be able to accept. The bond with his brother was unbreakable, it would last forever. Jimmy was the eternal child, the eternal responsibility.
‘What will happen to Jimmy when Dad and I aren’t around any more?’ Peder’s mother had said a few years ago.
Peder had reacted with fury.
‘Jimmy will come to me. I would never abandon him. Not for a second.’
That promise still held, even though Jimmy was missing. Peder would never abandon him, never stop searching. But why was it so bloody difficult to work out where Jimmy had gone? He couldn’t explain it, but Peder knew it must have something to do with Thea Aldrin. Jimmy had seen someone standing by the window, spying on the old woman. And Peder had dismissed it as a misunderstanding, a figment of his imagination.
What did you see, Jimmy?
You didn’t have to talk to Jimmy for long to realise that his mind wasn’t that of an adult. And yet someone had felt sufficiently threatened to abduct him.
His anxiety grew into sheer terror, and Peder sat in the car with sweat pouring off him. He now felt certain that Jimmy had not simply got lost, but had been robbed of his freedom by someone who wanted him out of the way. Someone who had already committed several murders, and who definitely wouldn’t hesitate to kill again.
Peder wanted to cry. He had to pull himself together, fast. He mustn’t think he had lost, mustn’t give up. Not yet. He had to get back to HQ and try to understand how his brother’s disappearance fitted in with everything else.
There was no time for rest or food. The only thing that mattered was finding Jimmy.
Fredrika bumped into Alex as she left Ellen’s office. He seemed pleased to see her, but the strain was etched on his face.
‘We need to speak to Morgan Axberger as soon as possible,’ he said, and filled Fredrika in on what he had found out from Janne Bergwall.
She was as shocked as Alex.
‘How could Bergwall and Ross keep quiet about all this?’
‘They thought it was irrelevant,’ Alex said. ‘They didn’t think it had anything to do with Rebecca’s disappearance. They should have realised that it was impossible to make that judgement without having the full picture.’
His mobile rang.
‘Get the team together in the Lions’ Den in fifteen minutes,’ he said to Fredrika. ‘I just need to take this.’
It took less than three minutes to gather everyone who wasn’t out on the case. Fredrika sat down and went through the latest fax from Kripos in Norway. They had attached a passport photograph of Valter Lund at the age of eighteen.
It’s not him.
Even though the quality of the image was poor, Fredrika could see from a distance of several metres that the man in the picture was not the Valter Lund she had interviewed earlier in the day.
Could Kripos have made a mistake? Virtually impossible.
She tried to shut out the chatter of her colleagues in the conference room. If Valter Lund had stolen another man’s identity, then he must have done so at a very early age. Was that kind of thing even possible?
She looked at the man on the passport photograph. His expression was grim; he had long hair and a tattoo on the lower part of his neck, just visible above his T-shirt. How had his path crossed that of the man who was now such a well-known figure in the business world? And how had the identity switch been achieved? Murder?
Regardless of who he really was. Valter Lund was too young to have murdered the woman who had been buried the longest. He could have killed Elias Hjort, but in that case he must have known the person or persons who had murdered the woman, because otherwise he wouldn’t have buried Hjort’s body in the same place.
Alex walked in. Everyone straightened up and stopped talking.
‘Unbelievable,’ he said, dropping his mobile on the table. ‘They took the guards off the grave site last night because they’d finished digging, and apparently some idiot has come along and started filling in the crater.’
He shook his head.
‘Sorry?’ said one of his colleagues. ‘Someone turned up in the middle of the night and started shovelling the soil back into the hole?’
‘Apparently,’ Alex replied. ‘But let’s move on: we have more important things to discuss.’
Fredrika put down the fax so that she could listen properly, but a strong sense of unease had come over her. Why would someone go to the grave site in the dark and start filling the hole?
Alex updated everyone on the latest developments. He began with Valter Lund’s interview, and went on to his own inquiries into the old film.
Someone let out a whistle when he had finished speaking.
‘A genuine snuff movie. Bloody hell.’
Alex held up a warning finger.
‘A number of points regarding the film are still unclear, including the link with the two notorious books, Mercury and Asteroid. The film was made in the ’60s; whereas, the books weren’t published until the ’70s. This raises the question of whether the film might have inspired the person who wrote the books, rather than vice versa. And we still don’t know why Rebecca Trolle made a connection between The Guardian Angels and snuff movies.’
‘Does there have to be a concrete link?’ Fredrika asked. ‘It sounds as if she got quite a lot of information from Janne Bergwall. The snuff movie led back to both Elias Hjort and Morgan Axberger, and the fact that they were members of The Guardian Angels, along with Thea Aldrin, was no secret.’
‘What about Spencer Lagergren, the fourth member?’ a colleague wondered.
Fredrika looked down at the table, embarrassed.
‘He’s completely in the clear,’ Alex replied. ‘We’ve spoken to him purely to check our information, and he has nothing whatsoever to do with the other events.’
How many people knew that Spencer and Fredrika were a couple? It was difficult to read anything from the faces around the table, but Alex’s expression clearly communicated support and reassurance. He gave Fredrika a wry smile.
‘Have we heard from Morgan Axberger?’ Alex asked.
‘No,’ said Fredrika. ‘Not since this morning when he called Ellen.’
‘We’ll give him another hour, then we’ll go to his office and pick him up.’
‘Unless he’s already left the country,’ Fredrika said. ‘If he thinks we’re onto him, I mean. If he’s the one we’re after.’
‘Is he?’ Alex said.
‘Maybe. Him or Valter Lund.’ She explained what she had found out from Kripos.
‘Valter Lund is too young,’ Cecilia Torsson chipped in.
‘That’s what I thought,’ Fredrika replied. ‘But he’s still living under a false identity, in spite of the risks that must involve at his level.’
She fell silent, wondering what might lie hidden in Lund’s past. Images crowded her mind, images of strong arms digging in Midsommarkransen.
It’s not him.
Her gut instinct left no room for doubt: it wasn’t Valter Lund they were looking for. And yet he seemed to be an important part of the game.