‘I don’t know whether that sounds good or bad,’ said Jorge, just as Sara was replaced by a strange metallic voice. ‘From a purely professional point of view, it’s good. Though it sounds a bit worrying. Are you there? Sara?’
Sara’s voice had now been replaced by some kind of industrial process. Robocop, Jorge thought.
Then suddenly, her normal voice was back: ‘… how’s it going for you?’
‘I’m worried you’re in the process of changing into something hard and cold,’ said Jorge Chavez.
‘What’s up with you?’ an awful metallic voice said.
‘Your voice sounds weird. It’s disappearing again now. Anyway, if you have a few minutes, I just wanted to ask if you could go through all the unidentified bodies from September 1981. Jewish man in his forties. Had a concentration camp tattoo but no nose. I repeat: no nose.’
But she was already gone. He cursed the invention of the mobile phone and hung up.
As he climbed into the car, a tiny little hat was still clinging to his head.
Sara stared down at the silent phone.
Something hard and cold?
She was in the office she shared with Kerstin Holm. Holm was, at that moment, absent. Sara didn’t know where she had gone.
She cast a quick glance at the computer screen in front of her. It was displaying a schematised timeline. She was working with a period of time which stretched from four in the morning on Thursday 4 May, when the women had left Slagsta, to three in the afternoon on Friday the 5th, when the call from Lublin had come through to the disembodied arm in Odenplan metro station. That meant that in thirty-five hours, they had made it from Stockholm to Lublin.
If she stuck to the assumption that they had travelled in some kind of bus – and not in the bin lorry – then the ferries were key. Between Sweden and Poland, ferries went from Nynäshamn-Gda
sk, Karlskrona-Gdynia and Ystad-Świnoujście. But then there was also the Copenhagen-Świnoujście line. When Jorge phoned, she had been busy working out possible options. The Öresund Bridge was still two months away from opening, but that wouldn’t have stopped a route via Denmark: Gothenburg-Frederikshavn, Helsingborg-Helsingør or Malmö-Copenhagen.
It was also possible to take the ferry to Germany from somewhere like Ystad or Trelleborg, heading for Sassnitz or Rostock. But then what about Gothenburg-Kiel? The nightmare scenario was surely a route via Helsingborg-Helsingør and then Rödby-Puttgarten. If the women had taken that route, there wouldn’t have been any checks anywhere; for all the other routes, locating a bus with at least eight women on board should be possible.
Most of the options were perfectly doable within thirty-five hours. At worst, they all were. That meant it was simply a case of going through all of the timetables. The task facing her seemed fairly hopeless.
And so she had nothing against taking on Jorge’s peculiar request. During the challenging time she had spent with CID’s child pornography unit, still headed up by an unaffected party policeman called Ragnar Hellberg, she had become unusually good at finding all kinds of data. She had no problem finding that particular case from almost twenty years earlier in the crime database.
An unidentified male in his early forties, a John Doe, had been found naked in the woods by a little lake called Strålsjön to the south-west of Stockholm on the morning of Wednesday 9 September 1981. Death, caused by two deep knife wounds to the back, was found to have occurred sometime on Monday 7 September. The spot where the body was found hadn’t been the murder scene, that much was clear. The body had, in other words, been dumped there, in all likelihood from a car. The man was dark-haired and, according to Medical Examiner Sigvard Qvarfordt’s notes, ‘moderately hirsute’. The most remarkable feature was the absence of a nose. Qvarfordt had continued: ‘Even the nasal bone is missing; all that remains is a rather disfiguring scar. The relative smoothness of the scar suggests that the nose was removed surgically, possibly sawn off.’
Besides that, the man was circumcised and had, on his arm, a tattoo ‘resembling a concentration camp tattoo, but with illegible digits, as though he had attempted to remove them, using a knife or similar’. That was why Stockholm’s Jewish congregation had taken it on themselves to bury the unknown man. The case, undersigned by Erik Bruun, was still open.
Sara saved the information and decided that it was, without a doubt, Jorge’s ‘Shtayf’. Then she returned to her ferry traffic.
If I wanted to take the bus from Stockholm to Ukraine, would I really go via Denmark or even Germany? Wouldn’t I just go direct from Sweden to Poland? It was a likely first choice, anyway. And if I did that, then it would preferably be to Gdynia or Gda
sk rather than Świnoujsście, slightly out of the way on the Bay of Pomerania, right by the German border. From the twin cities of Gdynia and Gda
sk, the E77 went straight to Warsaw, from which the E372 continued on to Ukraine via Lublin. Logic dictated that Nynäshamn should have been their first choice, since the shipping company Polska Żegluga Baltycka, now known as the snappier Polferries, had boats running to Gda
sk. Otherwise, they would probably have chosen the Stena Lines ferry from Karlskrona to Gdynia.
And so she started in Nynäshamn. One of the Polferries boats, either the M/S Rogalin or the M/S Nieborow, had departed at 17.00 on Thursday 4 May, arriving in Gdańsk at 11.30 the next day. The question was whether it would have been possible to make it from Gdańsk to Lublin by 14.55, when the call had come in to the phone at Odenplan metro station. That was something she needed to work out. Stena Lines had a ferry, the M/S Stena Europe, departing Karlskrona at 21.00, arriving in Gdynia at 07.00. Both of these needed to be followed up.
Sara felt like she needed assistance, and for a moment thought Kerstin’s absence slightly irresponsible. It was a purely egotistical opinion, of course; it was also a fleeting one. Instead, she phoned up her old friend from the paedophile unit, the rock she could always count on.
‘Yeah?’ Gunnar Nyberg answered.
‘Are you in the building?’ asked Sara. ‘I need your help with something.’
‘No, Sara,’ Nyberg answered, unusually bluntly. ‘I’m a bit busy right now, I’m afraid. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.’
And with that, he was gone. She cursed the invention of the mobile phone and hung up.
Gunnar Nyberg flipped his phone shut with a click and shoved it back into the pocket of his beige lumber jacket. He hoped it wouldn’t get broken. He didn’t want to go to his meeting that evening – it wasn’t a ‘date’, he refused to call it a ‘date’ – covered in cuts and bruises, either. That would hardly make a good impression on a professor of Slavic languages.
He sighed deeply and glanced around the filthy, beer-drenched cellar bar just outside of Åkersberga. A Swedish flag was hanging on one of the concrete walls; on another, a Nazi flag. Standing in the right angle created by the two flags were four enormous skinheads, baseball bats raised.
Behind him, the door was in pieces.
‘Fucking pig, you broke the door!’ one of the skinheads shouted.
‘Sorry,’ Gunnar Nyberg replied courteously. ‘But you should’ve opened up when I knocked, kiddies. I could hear you in here, even though you were trying to hide like Girl Guides.’
A growl emerged from their ranks.
He continued: ‘I’m looking for Reine Sandberg. Is he here? I just want to talk to him.’
The skinhead closest to him swung the baseball bat violently. Gunnar Nyberg didn’t appreciate that. He had promised himself to never again use violence at work, but now he had no choice.
With a well-aimed sucker punch, he sent the skinhead flying into one of the concrete walls. The others drew back slightly. Winded, the man he had punched curled up into the foetal position and groaned faintly.