Broken Mirrors (ARC) Read online

  Maria was a small, neat woman, much like her house, with wispy hair held back in a clip and sensible, nondescript clothes. The devastation that swam in her eyes even as she smiled and, in hesitant English, politely invited me in was heart wrenching. Corinna had texted to say she had been held up. She had suggested I wait at the train station, but by the time I noticed the text I was half way up the pavement of slush, so I just pressed on.

  'Tove was very beautiful, wasn't she?' Maria said, handing me a coffee. She put a plate of biscuits on a little side table next to be, but though I was hungry it didn't feel right to crunch away in the midst of this woman's grief. Her eyes shone with tears as she gazed up at the wall that was covered with photographs of her daughter, from chubby grinning baby, through awkward school shots to serious young woman who was, indisputably, beautiful.

  The largest photo was of Tove and Björne's wedding day. Tove wore a simple white shift dress, Björne handsome in a grey suit. They weren't posing formally, but grinning wildly, arms wrapped around one another, cheeks smooshed together with expressions of such unadulterated joy that I had to look away.

  'They were so happy that day,' Maria said, following my gaze. 'Of course, one hopes that everyone is happy on their wedding day, but so often persons get caught up in the stress of flowers and caterers and many things that does not matter.'

  Maria's English was definitely a little shakier than, say, Johan's, but it was a lot better than Corinna seemed to think. Corinna had impressed on me several times that Maria would be much too shy to speak to me, but with the odd hesitation as she sought for words, she seemed to be managing just fine.

  'Tove and Björne did not care about any of that. There was no flowers, they forgot to order them in the beginning. They was just so happy to be together at last.'

  'That's lovely,' I said. 'That's how it should be, I think.'

  'Mmm,' Maria nodded eagerly. 'Tove was so in love with him since she was a child, but it was a stupid boy and did not notice. So she went away to travel the world to try to forget him. As soon as she came home he proposed.'

  'Good for him.'

  'The night before the wedding, she told me that she did not go away to try to forget him, but to teach him what his life was like without her. She knew that he would learn what she had known since they were fifteen years old. Tove was — what do you say, she was not arrogant, but — she was very certain of things. She was quite sure of what she was worth, to Björne, to her employers, her friends.' Maria smiled, her eyes far away. 'I hope I helped her to grow that confidence.

  'But after Björne died, it was as though her faith in everything and everyone just disappeared. Her sense of justice, of right and wrong —' Maria shook her head. 'They kept telling her that he had killed himself, either as an accident or on purpose. She knew that was not true, and those two things —' Maria waved her hands up and down in opposite directions to suggest conflict. 'It shattered her world.'

  'Maria, do you believe that —'

  We were interrupted by a sharp knock. Corinna was here. My heart sank. I knew she was only trying to help, but it was important that I got Maria's impressions and memories first hand as much as possible, in her own words.

  'Hi, I am so sorry, the train just sat at Ulriksdal for a million years and they did not even explain why. I thought maybe you would be on it too?'

  Corinna grabbed one of the biscuits as she sat next to me on the sofa. I could hear Maria bustling away in the kitchen and I had a mad impulse to dash in and lock Corinna out so I could talk to her a little more.

  'I must have got the one just before.'

  'Oh! Tusen tack Maria,' Corinna gushed as Maria handed her a coffee. She then continued chatting in Swedish, so rapidly I was quickly hopelessly lost, so I sipped my own coffee and tried not to be too annoyed.

  The language issue is an odd one in Sweden. On the one hand, in principle, of course us newbies should make every effort to speak Swedish. I could only imagine the outcry if French people moved to London and went around asking everyone if they could speak French for their convenience. However, on the other hand, they all speak fluent English and I do not speak fluent Swedish, so there's an inherent imbalance. I knew it wasn't reasonable to find it rude for people to speak their native language in their own country just because it meant I had to sit there like a lemon, but on the other hand, it was a bit rude.

  Based on what little I could pick up of their conversation, I gathered that they had strayed from the subject altogether and decided not to fight it for a moment. I scrolled though my phone and noticed a text from Lena. Just heard that Anna Essen told a friend her date the night she was murdered was American.

  American. Boston? It wasn't impossible that a Swedish actor had been hired to talk to her and had put on an accent. But, always the most straightforward solution. Odds were, Anna Essen had spoken to an actual American. The Boston murder, I was increasingly certain, was key.

  'We had just started to talk about how Tove changed after Björne's death,' I butted in.

  'Of course, sorry Ellie,' Corinna smiled.

  'Yes, it was hard for her because —' Maria began, but Corinna cut her off with something in Swedish.

  'She says that it was difficult for Tove because she was so certain all along that Björne would never have deliberately or accidentally taken the overdose, but no one would believe her.'

  'Yes, we had already got that far.' I did my best to keep my impatience out my voice, but Corinna didn't seem to notice. It continued like that, with Corinna asking questions then translating vague, basic platitudes about how difficult Björne's death was on Tove.

  'I'm interested in the last few times that Tove visited,' I broke through another stream of Swedish. 'Could you ask her about those? Did Tove ask to use her laptop at any time, or disappear with it?'

  Maria shook her head slowly, frowning thoughtfully as she tried to remember. Finally she responded, and Corinna turned to me with a triumphant smile. 'The last time Tove came, just three days before her death, she was very preoccupied and worried. Just before she left, she asked if she could check her email on her mother's computer because her phone had run out of battery.'

  'Did Maria see Tove use the laptop?'

  I glanced over at Maria as I asked, feeling daft directing the question to Corinna when I knew full well Maria could understand.

  'Tove took the laptop into the bedroom to use it,' Corinna translated. 'But Maria remembers her taking something from her purse.'

  'Something like a USB stick?'

  Corinna nodded. 'Tove uploaded those photos to her mother's laptop and three days later she was dead.'

  36

  Sigrid had once read a book about how human beings were pack animals. To excel in life and be content, it claimed, one had to function as part of a unit. Co-operation, it explained, was the key to life.

  At the time, Sigrid had thought it childish. Let's all be friends together. It was the sort of thing that the teachers and doctors and social workers used to say to her, and even as a child she had found it ridiculous.

  'Try to think of others,' a teacher had once pleaded. Sigrid had eaten a classmate's packed lunch, and the girl, whose mother had packed her a slice of cake as a special treat, was howling on the teacher's lap. Sigrid couldn't understand why she was making such a fuss. It was only cake. 'You cannot just help yourself to whatever you want if it belongs to someone else,' the teacher tried again.

  'But I wanted it,' Sigrid reasonably explained.

  As she got a little older, she began to understand that if she did things for others — or at least did not eat their cake — they would do things for her. She could see the value in that, it was just that when she wanted something, there never seemed to be time to remember that it might upset someone else if she took it. Sigrid learned to accept that she was simply not a pack animal, and she managed perfectly well.

  Since all the things had begun to change, however, Sigrid had learned that it could in fact be useful to
co-operate with other people. Sometimes, other people knew things she didn't or had skills she lacked. The idea had never occurred to her before, though once she thought of it, she realised that someone must have figured out how to make airplanes fly or how to turn flour and yeast into bread or fix toilets. Sigrid had no idea how to do any of those things. She had never been on an airplane, but she had eaten bread and used toilets, so she supposed that she owed other people something after all.

  And although the storm was gathering around her, although it was she who controlled the people who came to the meetings and she who would decide when it was time, she was willing to admit that the skills some of the others brought had their uses. Things with computers, for example.

  She had taken a computer class at school once upon a time, back when they were enormous bulky things with black screens and greenish text. During her first class, Sigrid realised that all the other girls were already typing away while she was still tying to figure out how to open the screen that would allow her to type. It made her furious so she walked out and never touched another one of the stupid things again.

  Sigrid had a mobile telephone, that one of the doctors or social workers gave her, but the screen showed only numbers and occasionally text messages from the telephone company telling her to upgrade. Now, however, one of the young men, a skinny one with round little eyeglasses, thin hair held in a scraggly ponytail and skin that always shone with sweat, had given her a box thing he insisted was a phone.

  It didn't have any buttons, but a glassy screen she was supposed to touch to make it work. Sigrid had been about to object and throw the thing back in the young man's face, when she decided she liked the feel of the cool glass beneath her fingertips.

  The young man swallowed several times as he explained that there was only one box-picture she had to concern herself with. His prominent Adam's apple bounced up and down and Sigrid wanted to jab it with her fingers to see what it felt like, but then she remembered that if she did that, he would probably take the phone away from her. She smiled when she realised that she had learned about consequences at last. That doctor or teacher or social worker would be proud, if they were still alive.

  The young man did something to the screen to take all the other box-pictures away, until only the black one with the grey circle remained. He showed Sigrid how to tap it with her finger tip to open a camera image. At first, Sigrid didn't understand what she was seeing. The screen was a sort of lime-green, and to begin with, it made Sigrid's eyes hurt. But as her eyes adjusted, she realised that she could see a person lying on a bed.

  The person was curled up, their knees almost to their nose, but Sigrid could see their face twisted with fear and devastation. They were moving their mouth — talking to someone? Shouting? Singing? Sigrid couldn't hear anything, but she could feel the person's terror throb right out of the phone, and her heart started to beat faster.

  Then the young man explained that it was her. The killer. And Sigrid could watch her whenever she wanted.

  37

  'Weirdest fuckin' thing I ever saw in my life,' Marty MacDonald said into the webcam. 'And I saw a lot of fuckin' weird things in my life.'

  After emailing what felt like the entire population of Boston, I'd finally reached someone who was willing to talk to me about the Ice Statue Killer. Marty MacDonald had retired from the homicide department three years earlier, and cheerfully confessed over email that he was bored as shit and happy to chat to anyone about anything.

  'This is what happens,' he'd groused when I first answered the call. He opened a can of beer and took a healthy swig, even though I was pretty sure it was about 10am in the States. 'They expect you to give up your entire life for the job, so your wife leaves you, kids could hardly pick you out of a line up, buddies don't even remember your name, then retirement comes and boom, you're out and you've got no one. Just gotta spend the rest of your whole life sitting in a chair watching TV.'

  'Couldn't you go out and make friends now?' I'd asked. 'Take up bowling or something?'

  'Bowling?' He'd stared at me aghast. 'You want me to take up bowling? I've got gout in my left foot and arthritis everywhere else.' He shook his head. 'I try to wind up to shoot and you just watch me fall and slide all the way down the lane after the ball like a possum on ice. Is that what you want for me?'

  'Perhaps not bowling, then. Maybe paper maché?'

  'What?' In his horror he choked on a mouthful of beer and went into a coughing fit that lasted for several minutes.

  'The Ice Statue Killer?' I said when he'd finally recovered.

  'Right, sure. Why you want to talk about that now? It was six years ago, ain't gonna be solved.'

  'I'm writing a book about unsolved murders,' I said with deliberate vagueness. 'It's an interesting one, so I'd like to include it.'

  'It sure is.'

  'You worked it, right?'

  'Sure did.'

  'What would you do differently if you were investigating it starting today?'

  He raised his eyebrows, nodded slowly as he thought. 'Well now that's a good question, young lady.'

  I took a sip of my tea — Kate had come through on her promise to send me a few boxes of proper builders' teabags — and resisted snapping that I wasn't particularly young, nor was I much of a lady. There wasn't much point in taking my bad mood out on someone who could help, I reminded myself, taking a deep breath to try to release the bad feelings as I'd been taught in a yoga class Maddie dragged me along to. I'd been doing bloody great releasing breaths all morning waiting for it to become a reasonable time to phone Boston, and I still felt like shit.

  Johan didn't want me to move back in.

  'It's great, Ellie,' he'd said, when I told him I was being chucked out. But it was too late. I'd felt his hesitation. Just for an instant, that flash of uncertainty in his eyes that had sent my heart plummeting, before he smiled and started chatting, too quickly, about helping me to carry my stuff back. He'd never even been here, I thought resentfully, in all these months.

  Not that I'd wanted him to. He might have offered to visit once or twice in the first couple of weeks in fairness, but I'd not really wanted him to see my weird little indoor camping lifestyle so I'd put him off, but still.

  Okay, now I thought about it, that bit was on me.

  But he had definitely hesitated about me moving back, and right now I just didn't know what to do with that. Was it too late? Had we died the moment I moved out, and I'd just been kidding myself all this time that it was possible to go back a couple level and then move forward again? The thought of it being over, of us just not being together again at all, sent a great swirling mass of misery over me, but —

  But he had hesitated.

  'I would have taken more time to strategise,' Marty MacDonald said, and I nearly jumped. 'You gotta understand, the Winslow family are big people around here. Jason's old man is country club buddies with my commissioner, so the directive from on high was to solve it, and solve it fast. Problem is, sometimes a case just takes a bit of time. There was pressure to be seen to be taking all the action, so we were out there visibly interviewing just about every goddamn person who stepped foot on a twenty block radius of the crime scene in their whole lives. So what we ended up with was a huge mass of statements from people who didn't know a thing and wasted time sifting through all of those. I don't know what we missed in that time we wasted, but I know we missed something.'

  'Did you ever have focus on a particular suspect?'

  'Not really, to tell the truth. It was crazy. I don't know how much you already know about it, but you need to realise that Jason Winslow was about the last person you ever would expect to be a murder victim. I know it's not all PC to profile folks these days, but reality is what it is. White, six foot four, male athletes are not a demographic I lose a lot of sleep worrying about getting murdered, you know what I mean?

  'But that was the problem.' He shifted in his easy chair, grimacing. 'It made us look for a personal motive. Some
body with a grudge against him, his family. The freaky way the body was embalmed and posed suggested serial killer, but it just didn't figure he was a random victim. I mean, I'm a serial killer and I walk down a street filled with a bunch of cute little co-eds I could snap with one hand, and I pick the guy on the starting line up of a top league basketball team? It just doesn't make sense.

  'Now though, I've got nothing but time to think, and I reckon that's exactly what it was. I've got a criminal profiler buddy, we drink from time to time when he's in town. We talked about this case a little, it's one those of us who were around won't ever forget. I think this guy killed the most unlikely victim to make a point. Something about proving his power, his superiority. He wasn't just some run of the mill bad guy who strangled a hooker, right?'

  I cringed at the casualness with which he said 'strangled a hooker,' but I knew what he meant. The showiness of these murders was key. It always had been. This killer wanted us to notice them.

  'You said guy,' I pointed out.

  'What's that?'

  'The killer. You think it was definitely a man?'

  Marty MacDonald chuckled. 'Look, I'm all for women's lib, lady. Have your career, don't make me a sandwich, I don't care. But don't waste your time looking for a female here. Aside from the fact that women just don't typically murder in this kind of way — they don't make movies about lady killers not because they don't exist, but because they don't kill in popcorn-friendly ways. They poison, most often and that can be subtle, sometimes the victim dies a week later. There are less lady serial killers, but statistically they are more successful, if you wanna think of it like that, because they keep it on the down low. They tend to be at large for a lot longer than men who eventually stop being so careful.'