The Silenced. Литагент HarperCollins USD
else that said anything about the person who lived there. The only rhythm echoing between the bare walls was loneliness.
“Divorce,” Amante said, confirming her impressions. “All my things are in storage. My ex-wife sent the wrong boxes here. Old vacation clothes.” He gestured toward his yacht club blazer and sweater. “She knows I hate this jacket, so she probably did it on purpose.”
He shrugged his shoulders as if to indicate that he’d said enough on the subject.
“There’s coffee in the kitchen. Hot water in the right-hand tap. I’m just going to …” He nodded toward the toilet door.
“Sure, I’ll sort it,” she said.
The kitchen was, if possible, even barer than the rest of the apartment. And expensive. Marble counters, a big wine refrigerator, a gas range with six rings. Stepfather’s money, she guessed. Maybe the apartment even belonged to him.
She couldn’t see a coffee machine but did find a jar of instant and a few mismatched mugs covered with advertising logos. One of the German taps was marked Heisswasser. She tried it and, sure enough, got scalding-hot water straight from the tap. What an idea. She filled two mugs with water, added some powder, and stirred them with a coffee-flecked chopstick she found in the sink. She shuddered. The smell from the mugs wasn’t enticing, but a splash of milk would make it bearable. She opened a large stainless steel door that she hoped belonged to the fridge. She found an open can of pea soup, a couple of greasy trays of Chinese food, and a can of low-alcohol beer. The huge kitchen was evidently completely wasted on Amante.
At the bottom of the fridge was a big yellow plastic cooler that looked brand-new. Amante had gone to the trouble of removing a couple of shelves from the fridge to make room for it, so at a guess it contained something that needed to be kept fresh. With a bit of luck there might even be some milk. She undid the straps on the side and opened the lid. She felt her heart stop for a few seconds.
She took a step back. Then another one. The fridge door slowly closed of its own accord and she was left standing with the lid in her hand.
Amante came into the kitchen.
“Did you find the coffee?” He caught her eye and stopped.
“Amante,” Julia said, trying her utmost to sound calm. “Would you mind explaining why you have the head of our dead body in your fridge?”
* * *
Sarac had pulled on his jacket and hat. Turned out the lights in the little room. He looked at the time. Ten past five, and darkness was already settling on the parking lot outside the window. Time to get going. For some reason he felt different. Almost excited. He put his hands in his pockets and felt the bag of sleeping pills. On a sudden impulse he took it out and held it up against the weak light from the window. Twenty-five oval pills. He went over to the tiny kitchen area, opened the cupboard, and tucked the bag away inside it. Then he walked out of the room and closed the door silently behind him. He was on his way now. On his way to put things right.
* * *
The coffee tasted just as disgusting as Julia had expected. But it was also the only thing in this whole situation that was remotely predictable.
“Sorry if I scared you,” Amante said. “Let me explain. I called the National Forensics Lab yesterday. Spoke to a very nice young woman who was about to finish for the day. She said she’d spoken to you about the link to Skarpö a few minutes before I called. She asked if we actually spoke to each other in Violent Crime.”
He took a sip of coffee and gave her a long look over the top of the cup. Julia said nothing, preferring to wait for him to go on instead.
“When the pathologist said we might not be able to identify our victim from DNA, I called a guy in Europol who I got to know on Lampedusa. He works as a forensics expert in Sarajevo. They’ve got a computer program that can create a three-dimensional image of a face from a layered X-ray of a skull. They use it to identify remains from the war. Obviously it’s not a hundred percent, but enough to get a photofit.” He took another swig of coffee. “The same thing must have occurred to you—that we could try to reconstruct his face some other way. That’s why you called the Forensic Medicine Unit this morning, isn’t it?”
She glared at him for a few seconds.
“The Museum of Medieval Stockholm,” she said. “They’ve got a forensic anthropologist who came up with a wax model of Birger Jarl’s face using just his skull a couple of years ago.”
“Ah, smart.” Amante nodded. “A proper model of the whole head probably works a lot better than just a photofit. But that would take longer. At least a month or so.”
“And you couldn’t wait that long. You needed to prove how smart you were.”
A hint of a blush spread across Amante’s neck. “I did actually try to call you yesterday evening. It wasn’t that hard to work out why you weren’t answering. You knew there was a link to Skarpö and you didn’t want to involve the civilian once the case started to heat up.”
Her turn to blush now, if she’d been the type. Which she wasn’t.
“I figured out that everything would change as soon as the connection to Skarpö became common knowledge,” he went on. “All manner of different police units and bosses would get involved. And the civilian would be the first person taken off the case. And I didn’t want that, not after seeing the body. After seeing what our perpetrator had done to him.” He stared at her; his anxious expression seemed to be looking for understanding.
Julia stifled a nod. Amante was saying the right things and he sounded entirely honest. But she wanted to hear the rest of the story before she made up her mind if he really was telling the truth.
Amante took a deep breath. “So, after I tried to call you last night, I drove out to the Forensic Medicine Unit. I paid the member of staff on duty two thousand kronor to let me borrow the head for twenty-four hours. I’d have gone as high as five, but he jumped at my first offer.”
He pulled a face that was probably meant to look amused.
“The plan was to get the skull X-rayed and have it back in place by now. No one would have noticed anything and it would all have been a lot quicker than filling out forms and waiting for them to be processed. But then the Security Police appeared out of nowhere to fetch the body. Without even opening the bag, apparently, which was lucky for me.”
“You must have realized that people were bound to ask questions about your photofit. Wonder where it had come from?”
He shrugged. “One thing at a time. A photofit would have been a big step forward. Paperwork can always be sorted out afterward, and it’s not as if I’ve done anything illegal.”
“Apart from bribing a public official, you mean?”
Amante smiled, a cryptic little smile that she couldn’t really make sense of. Like so much else about him. If Wallin hadn’t warned her, by this point she would have been convinced that Amante was telling the truth. But for now she still had her doubts.
“Two, actually, if we’re being strictly accurate. An X-ray operator too—a guy I know from the yacht club. But I doubt either of them would be prepared to testify. All I did was pay what the Italians call a tangente. A sort of service charge, you could say.”
“Did you learn that on Lampedusa? You know, that Italian island in the southern Mediterranean,” she added, unable to stop herself.
He looked at her for a few seconds. His smile faded. He walked over to the sink and put his cup down.
“I learned lots of things on Lampedusa. More than I would have wanted.” He turned his back on her as he rinsed the cup under the tap. Julia waited for him to go on, but Amante seemed to have clammed up.
“What do we do now?” The question was aimed at herself as much as him.
He turned the tap off and turned around.
“That