In the Shadow of Power (Sandhamn Murders) Page 3

  CHAPTER 5

  Thursday, May 30

  Nora nodded at the security guard sitting at the reception desk of the Swedish Economic Crimes Authority on Hantverkargatan. She swiped her pass card to open the glass doors and thought, not for the first time, that her photograph looked like a police mug shot.

  The sun was shining in through the windows when she reached her office on the second floor. She was hoping for a quiet morning; she had no meetings booked and wasn’t due in court until the following day.

  She had only just put down her black briefcase when there was a knock on the door. Åke Sandelin, chief prosecutor, was standing there, holding his glasses in one hand.

  “Good morning. Can you spare a few minutes?”

  His checked shirt was open at the neck. No tie, which meant he wasn’t in court today either. However, his well-polished black shoes shone, and Nora glanced at her own well-worn loafers with a certain amount of embarrassment. She waved in the direction of the nearest chair. Her office wasn’t large, but there was room for a desk, two chairs, and a side table in pale wood.

  “Take a seat.”

  Åke sat down and crossed his legs.

  “So how long have you been with us now?” he asked in his distinctively deep voice.

  “Let me think . . . I started in August 2010, just after the holiday period.”

  Nora had gone for the temporary post with the Economic Crimes Authority when Julia turned one. In the spring before Julia was born, she had stepped down from her post at the bank where she had worked for ten years; the decision had been made by mutual agreement, as they say.

  In return for a generous severance package and excellent references, she had gone quietly, without reporting her former boss for sexual harassment.

  Had she done the right thing? She would never know, but she hadn’t been able to face a long, drawn-out legal mediation. The financial settlement had kept her afloat for quite some time.

  “Are you happy here?”

  Nora gave a start and realized she’d been lost in thought, transported back to the misery she’d felt when things went so wrong.

  “Absolutely, happier than I could ever have imagined. I actually feel that I’m contributing to making a better society.”

  She was upholding the law in the best sense of the word, however banal that might sound.

  “It’s good to be working on something meaningful,” she added, “instead of putting all my time and energy into a project just so that it can be included in a quarterly report. I like the fact that this isn’t about consumerism; we’re not selling shampoo or lipstick.”

  She saw a glint of recognition in Åke’s eyes. He understands me, because he feels exactly the same. It’s important to believe in what you do. How did I overlook this in my job at the bank?

  The last few months in her previous job had been difficult. The management had tried to force her to give the green light to a dodgy deal. When she refused, she’d been sidelined and then harassed. Eventually the scandal broke when one of Nora’s colleagues in the legal department discovered what was going on and decided to blow the whistle. Nora remembered the headlines and the media frenzy. Both her former boss and the vice chair had had to leave in humiliating circumstances, but she was already gone by then.

  “We’re more than happy with you,” Åke assured her. “Your background makes you ideally suited to the work we do.”

  He broke off and put on his horn-rimmed glasses, which magnified his eyes. His gaze looked more intense, dark and piercing, which no doubt gave him an edge in court.

  He smiled and leaned forward; Nora automatically did the same.

  “We have the opportunity to take on another district prosecutor. I don’t know if you’d be interested?”

  District prosecutor? That would give her the opportunity to make a real difference. She felt warm inside.

  “I’d love to stay on here, I really would.”

  “Excellent.” Åke leaned back. “We’ll need a dispensation from the prosecutor general, and of course the selection committee will have an input, but I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  I must call Jonas. Buy a bottle of wine to celebrate. He’s not on duty until the day after tomorrow; a few bubbles tonight should be OK, even if he’s flying on Saturday.

  “It’s the usual procedure,” Åke went on. “We were thinking of an application period of a few weeks, with a start date of July 1.” He smiled again and got to his feet. The conversation was over.

  “I appreciate your confidence in me,” Nora said, suppressing the urge to skip around the room.

  Nora gathered up the documentation she needed for tomorrow: a small-business owner had been cheating on his taxes and his value-added tax payments. She had familiarized herself with the details and was ready to go for a conviction. As she was locking everything away, she glanced at her watch. Jonas was picking her up in half an hour, just after six.

  “We’re going out to celebrate,” he’d said as soon as he heard her news. “The boys can watch Julia.”

  Nora stared at her computer. There was no point in starting anything new at this point, so she clicked on the home page of one of the country’s leading daily newspapers, Dagens Nyheter, and scrolled through the headlines. An article about wealthy Swedish expats caught her attention, and her thoughts turned to the building project on Sandhamn.

  What was it Eva had said about the people who’d bought Fyrudden?

  Nora knew she shouldn’t be so nosy, but she couldn’t help googling Fyrudden + Sandhamn. She soon discovered that a limited company was listed as the buyer. That wasn’t particularly unusual in itself; expat Swedes often put their assets into a company in order to avoid tax.

  However, the person who had named this company hadn’t exactly used their imagination; it was called Fyrudden AB. Nora did a little more searching and found that someone called Carsten Jonsson was behind the purchase. Sounded like a Danish first name.

  She checked public records, feeling slightly ashamed as she looked up Carsten Jonsson, but she was too curious to back off now.

  Jonsson’s mother was born in Copenhagen, while his significantly older father came from Rimbo, north of Stockholm. The father had been a sea captain before transferring to the Customs Service. He had died many years ago, in the late 1990s, but the mother, Kirsten, was still alive.

  Lars Carsten Jonsson was born in 1975, so he must be thirty-eight now. After graduating from high school in Vallentuna, he’d studied at the Stockholm School of Economics before traveling to the US to do his master’s in New York.

  She didn’t find anything else out about his life in Sweden until he popped up as the new owner of Fyrudden, but Nora did manage to find out what he’d been doing in the meantime.

  Carsten had stayed in New York and started his career with Morgan Stanley, the major investment bank. After a while he’d moved back to Europe and settled in London, where he worked for a smaller investment bank. But he wasn’t a current employee.

  Maybe he’d started up some kind of fund and was making investments of his own? That was a pretty common move for a venture capitalist. The Swedish Economic Crimes Authority kept a close eye on those guys—almost as close as the IRS.

  The trajectory for successful venture capitalists was laughably standardized. First they got themselves a sound education in economics before serving their time with a major bank in London or New York. Gradually they started investing privately, often with one or two associates. All with the aim of becoming stinking rich.

  The king’s youngest daughter, Princess Madeleine, was soon to marry a man with exactly that kind of background.

  Nora decided to take another look at the mother, see where the money came from.

  Judging by his mother’s tax details, Jonsson hadn’t grown up in a wealthy household. Vallentuna wasn’t exactly a luxury suburb, and Kirsten received only the state pension. His father didn’t appear to have left them anything either, so Jonsson must have done really well overse
as if he’d made enough to buy Fyrudden.

  Twenty million—unbelievable. And how much was the house costing? Every time she was on the island, she’d heard the locals complaining about the construction workers’ trucks constantly shuttling back and forth with materials.

  She kept searching and discovered a photograph. It must have been taken at the English gala premiere of a James Bond film; she could see a cardboard figure of Daniel Craig in the background and the title of the movie in big black letters.

  Carsten Jonsson wasn’t what she’d expected at all. He was wearing a well-fitted black dinner jacket and was tan and muscular, his slightly too-long blond hair flopping over his forehead. There was something impatient about his posture, as if he was on the way to somewhere else and didn’t really have time to stand still for two seconds.

  The woman next to him was in a lilac silk dress. She had dark wavy hair and was very slim, bordering on skinny. His wife? Impossible to tell, but a huge diamond sparkled on her left hand, and there was something very relaxed and confident about the way her arm was tucked under his.

  They made an attractive couple, but Nora couldn’t imagine them on Sandhamn, where jeans and faded shorts were the norm. She scrolled down the page, but there were no more pictures.

  Maybe a media-shy venture capitalist wasn’t so unusual these days, given the attitude of the press toward those involved in finance.

  She shook her head and logged off. She knew quite a lot about her new neighbor on the island now—a lot more than the gossip Eva had passed on. Should she be ashamed of herself for having spent half an hour poking around? Maybe, but at the same time it was important to understand what kind of person Carsten Jonsson was. Plus she hadn’t accessed any unauthorized databases. Everything she’d found was either online or counted as public information, available to anyone.

  In spite of all that, she wasn’t entirely comfortable with herself as she got to her feet. She felt as if she’d secretly peeped in through the window of her neighbor’s bedroom.

  CHAPTER 6

  Thomas was in the middle of a huge yawn when Margit Grankvist poked her head around the door.

  “Are you busy?” she asked, waving a bundle of papers. “I think our bosses have finally gone completely crazy. Sometimes I just get so tired . . .”

  She pushed back her short hair, which was now peppered with gray, and dropped the papers on Thomas’s desk. He could see from the letterhead that they came from the National Police Board, so were unlikely to contain good news.

  The expression on Margit’s face confirmed his suspicions.

  “What’s happened?” He read the title: Streamlining Police Work.

  “A streamlining and efficiency consultant will be joining us and monitoring our work in order to . . .” Margit broke off and picked up the first page. “In order to identify comparison figures that can be used in the development of a methodology within the national police service with the aim of securing and optimizing a coherent resource allocation and competence provision in a cost-effective way.”

  She sat down and leaned back. “Sometimes I wish the Old Man was still here so I wouldn’t have to deal with this crap.”

  “As far as I’m aware, no one forced you to take his job when he retired.”

  Thomas immediately realized that his words weren’t going to improve Margit’s mood. Anyway, he wasn’t convinced that their former boss, well known for his uneven temper, would have handled the demands from on high any better.

  “How much damage can one consultant do?” he added quickly, hoping to take the sting out of his words.

  “Who do you think should have the honor of looking after the idiot when he gets here?” Margit went on as if he hadn’t spoken. It was obvious that she had Thomas in mind.

  No, thanks. Thomas was about to suggest Aram Gorgis, his partner since Margit’s promotion, but knew Aram wouldn’t thank him for it.

  “How about Kalle? He’s pretty diplomatic,” he said instead.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Margit said slowly.

  Thomas still thought of Kalle Lidwall as a young detective, even though he’d recently turned thirty-six and they’d worked together for many years. Maybe it was because of his colleague’s reserved manner; Kalle didn’t make a fuss about anything. But he was far from a novice, even though he looked like a young Coastal Ranger with his cropped hair.

  “Plus he’s good with IT; he’ll be able to produce any stats that are required,” Thomas went on, underlining Kalle’s suitability.

  Margit’s shoulders dropped a little. “By the way, guess who I saw in the newspapers the other day?”

  “No idea.”

  “Erik Blom. There was a big article about the firm he’s working for now, Eagle Security. They’ve won some major contract with the city of Stockholm. Erik’s security chief of the division that handles the public sector.”

  Thomas couldn’t tell whether Margit was impressed or critical.

  “He seems to be doing well. In the picture they had of him, he was wearing a significant amount of hair gel, and his watch must have cost a fortune.”

  Erik had always been something of a high flyer, cooler than most. He hadn’t been a bad cop, far from it, but he was a guy who liked the good things in life.

  Karin Ek, their admin assistant, had sadly informed everyone of Erik’s departure, adding that the unit would never be the same, but Thomas knew exactly why he’d decided to go. A few years earlier, he’d lost his only sister to cancer. A month after the funeral, Erik had come into Thomas’s office late one evening when they were both working overtime.

  “Life’s too short,” he’d said when he’d told Thomas about his decision. “I’m tired of risking my life for a pathetic salary, fighting for a bonus of a couple of hundred kronor. I want a decent income. I want to be able to travel, to afford a nice apartment.”

  Thomas had picked up the slight unsteadiness in his voice, the grief seeping through.

  “Look what happened to Mimi,” Erik had said quietly. “You never know what’s waiting around the corner.”

  Margit picked up her papers and got to her feet. “OK, so that’s settled: Kalle will babysit our consultant.”

  After she’d gone Thomas just sat there, staring into space. Erik’s words echoed in his mind. Maybe he’d had the right idea.

  Life was short and unpredictable.

  He saw his face reflected in the computer screen. His hair was still mostly blond and hadn’t yet begun to thin. He exercised regularly and kept himself pretty fit. But his temples were graying, as was the stubble he could see when he shaved in the mornings. The lines in his forehead had deepened.

  I’m only forty-six, he thought, wondering why he’d put it that way. You’ll soon be fifty, a voice whispered.

  “I want a different kind of life,” Erik had said.

  So do I.

  CHAPTER 7

  The door closed behind Sarah and Maria. Celia had asked Maria to take Sarah with her when she went to pick up Oliver from school, blaming a headache even though she really didn’t need to explain herself.

  Maria got along well with the children—almost better than she did.

  There weren’t many years left before Oliver would be sent off to boarding school, and Celia knew she ought to make the most of the time they had. But she couldn’t do it, couldn’t cope with Oliver’s babbling and his constant questions when her mind was filled with Carsten and the way he treated her.

  The pleading look on her little boy’s face when he wanted attention was too much for her. It was better if Maria took care of him; then at least Celia didn’t have to disappoint him.

  She went into the bedroom and drew the dark velvet curtains, then fetched a Sobril from the bathroom. She knew she shouldn’t do it, but it was necessary. It wasn’t as if she was some kind of addict; she just needed to alleviate the pain for a little while.

  She lay down on the bed and pulled the soft cashmere throw over her. She’d found it in Harrods, an
d it was a perfect match with the other colors in the bedroom, Champagne and Bordeaux.

  She was oppressed by the thought of the holiday home in Sweden. Carsten’s new project on Sandhamn.

  Sandhamn. The name made her feel anything but positive.

  They could have bought a villa in the south of France like so many of their friends, but Carsten had refused to listen. Instead he’d spent a ridiculous amount of money on a plot on some little island in the Baltic. She’d seen the total cost on the contract, which he’d accidentally left out on his desk. When she converted it into pounds, she was shocked. Carsten hadn’t even given her a sensible explanation, apart from insisting that the children needed to spend time in Sweden and become fluent in the language. But there were plenty of other ways to learn Swedish.

  She’d seen pictures of the construction site; the new house was completely isolated by a stretch of shoreline with a dense pine forest behind it. There were no neighbors nearby, and the small village was some distance away. No cars were allowed on the island, only bicycles.

  Celia swallowed and wished she’d taken a double dose to stop the bad thoughts creeping into her head.

  She’d done everything he’d asked of her, even learned Swedish for his sake. And still it wasn’t enough. She knew he had other women; she was smart enough to realize what was going on when he went off to his business dinners and came home in the middle of the night with unfamiliar perfume on his jacket.

  She’d once had herself tested, terrified that he might have infected her with something he’d picked up. The humiliation still made her feel sick.

  She curled up under the throw.

  Over the last six months, Carsten had made frequent trips to Russia but had refused to go into detail about them when he came home. It had to do with investments, and that’s all he would say.

  Celia was worried that he’d met someone else. There were plenty of rumors about beautiful Russian women who were looking for a meal ticket in the shape of a rich Westerner.

  The more Carsten stayed up late making phone calls, the more anxious Celia became. She’d even considered mentioning it to her father, just to find out whether he knew anything about these Russian investments, but Carsten would be furious if he found out, and there was already enough tension between her husband and her father.