The Nightmare

59

Officers have gathered in the hallway of police headquarters until it is filled with nervous energy. Everyone waits for the latest reports. First, contact with the Coast Guard boat had been lost; then radio contact with the rescue helicopter had also gone dead.

At CID, Joona stands in his office, reading a postcard that Disa once sent him from a conference in Gotland. “I’m sending along a love letter from a secret admirer. Hugs, Disa.” He guesses that she searched quite a while to find a postcard that would make him shudder so. He bites his lip as he turns the postcard over. SEX ON THE BEACH is printed over a picture of a white poodle wearing sunglasses and a pink bikini. The dog lounges in a deck chair and has a red drink beside it.

There’s a knock on his door. Joona’s smile disappears at the expression on Nathan Pollock’s face.

“Carl Palmcrona willed everything he owned to his son,” Nathan starts.

“I thought he had no relatives.”

“His son is dead. He was sixteen years old. It appears there was an accident yesterday.”

“Yesterday?” Joona repeats.

“Stefan Bergkvist survived Carl Palmcrona by just three days,” Nathan says softly.

“What happened?”

“I don’t really know. Something about his motorcycle,” Pollock says. “I’ve asked for the preliminary autopsy report-”

“What do you have so far?”

“I’ve talked to his mother several times now. Her name is Siv Bergkvist. She lives with her partner, Micke Johansson. It appears that Siv was a substitute secretary for Palmcrona when he was working at the Fourth Navy Flotilla. They had a short relationship. She became pregnant. When she told him, he wanted her to get an abortion. Siv returned to Västerås instead, had the baby, and never told anyone the name of the father.”

“Did Stefan know that his father was Carl Palmcrona?”

Nathan shakes his head and thinks back on the mother’s words: I told my son that his pappa was dead, that he had died before my little honeybee was born.

Another knock on the door. Anja walks in and puts a report on the table. It’s still warm from being printed out.

“An accident,” Anja says grimly, without further explanation, and then leaves the room again.

Joona picks up the plastic folder and begins to read the report from the initial technical investigation. Death was not from carbon monoxide poisoning but as a direct result of burns. Before the boy died, his skin had swollen and split as if from deep cuts, and then all the internal musculature shrank. The heat had exploded the skull and the long bones. The coroner had put the cause of death as heat-related hematoma, due to the fact that the blood began to boil between the skull and the hard brain membrane.

“Unpleasant,” Joona mutters.

Basically, nothing was left of the shed where Stefan Bergkvist’s remains were found, which hindered the work of the fire investigators. The shed was now nothing more than a smoldering pyre of ashes, a few blackened pieces of metal, and a charred body in a fetal position next to what had been the door. Police based a preliminary theory of what had happened on the testimony of a single witness: the train engineer who’d called the fire department. He’d seen the burning motorcycle wedged next to the shed. Indications pointed to an accident in which sixteen-year-old Stefan Bergkvist had been trapped inside the old shed when his motorcycle had fallen over and blocked the door. The gas cap was not secure and gasoline had leaked out. The spark that led to the fire was still not accounted for, but the guess was that it was due to a cigarette.

“Palmcrona dies,” Pollock says slowly. “He leaves his entire fortune to his son. Three days later, his son is also dead.”

“Does the inheritance go to the mother, then?” Joona asks.

“Yes.”

In silence they listen to the slow, halting steps in the hallway before Tommy Kofoed comes in.

“I’ve gotten into Palmcrona’s safe,” he says triumphantly. “Only this inside.”

Kofoed holds up a beautifully bound book.

“What is that?” asks Pollock.

“It’s a summary of his life,” Kofoed says. “Very common among the nobility.”

“So a kind of diary?”

Kofoed shrugs.

“Just a simple memoir not really meant for publication. Like a genealogy, it’s meant to pass along another part of the family history. These pages are handwritten. It starts with a family tree and mentions his father’s career and then a boring recitation of his school years, his diplomas, his military service, and his career… He’d made some bad investments and he needed money, so he sells some property and some other possessions. Everything in a very dry manner.”

“What about his son?”

“At first, his relationship with Siv Bergkvist is described, short and sweet, as an ‘unfortunate event,’ ” Tommy Kofoed answers. He takes a deep breath. “Soon, however, he begins to mention Stefan in his memoirs. All the entries for the past eight years are about his son. He follows his son’s developments from a distance. He knows which school he’s attending, what interests him, who he hangs out with. He says he’s going to build up the inheritance again. It appears that he’s saving everything he has for his son. Finally, he’s decided to contact the boy when he turns eighteen. He hopes that his son will forgive him and that they will be able to get to know each other after all these years. That’s the only thing he cares about… and now, they’re both suddenly dead.”

“What a nightmare,” Pollock mutters.

“What did you say?” Joona looks up.

“I just said, I thought it’s a nightmare come true,” Pollock says, wondering why Joona’s face is suddenly alive. “He does everything he can for his son’s future and then it turns out that his son survives him by only three days. His son never even knew who he was.”