Watching You Read online

  He focused all of his attention on her. She maintained a neutral expression, yet there was still something playing across her face. That type of reaction wasn’t particularly common in interview rooms, but he had seen it on a few rare occasions. It had its own special place in the internal register of human reactions that Sam Berger had compiled over the years. He just couldn’t quite place it.

  It was a long way from Västerås and the television camera which had unwittingly captured her two decisions. On that occasion a lot had played out on her forehead. Two clear decisions. The first was whether or not to speak to local media at all, the second whether or not to say her name.

  If she hadn’t done that a year and a half ago they wouldn’t be sitting there. Neither of them.

  No, this reaction was much smaller, yet unmistakable. Not on her forehead but under her eyes.

  Her brow was quite smooth.

  ‘Botox?’ Berger said instinctively.

  Nathalie Fredén looked at him. For the first time there was no immediate response. And no perceptible reaction.

  ‘Your forehead,’ Berger went on, touching the top of her face with his index finger. ‘It was much more expressive in Västerås.’

  ‘Västerås?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about. The interview with local television in Västerås. When you made your decision.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Berger said, leaning back. ‘So it is Botox? Why would you need that? Why would you want to be less expressive?’

  Now she just shook her head.

  He waited and reflected. What was the reaction he had seen? He ran it through his internal register. What had he said that had prompted that reaction? A fusillade of information. When had the reaction happened? When precisely?

  He found the right location in the archive. It was a reaction that said she really wanted to comment on something he had said. She was forcing herself not to. Comment? No, not comment. Correct. Yes, that was it. He had said something that she wanted to correct. He felt like breaking off at once to go and check the video recording of the interrogation.

  The Botox discussion was just a way of getting time to think.

  Even so, she replied: ‘Botox wasn’t produced to make skin smoother. Not to start with.’

  ‘It’s a neurotoxin, isn’t it?’ he said without really caring.

  ‘A diluted form of the botulinum toxin,’ she said. ‘It’s one of the strongest poisons known to man. One millilitre would be enough to kill everyone in Sweden.’

  ‘And people inject that just a centimetre away from their eyes?’

  ‘Botox was originally used to treat the spasms associated with brain damage.’

  She was talking. She was talking of her own volition. That in itself was something new. He let her go on.

  ‘And of course to treat migraines,’ she continued.

  He looked at her altered fae. ‘So, migraines? You had Botox injected into your forehead to treat migraines?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Serious migraines?’

  ‘Fairly.’

  He cast a pointed glance at the video camera in the left-hand corner of the ceiling. Deer had probably already picked up on it. He lowered his head and met Nathalie’s eyes.

  ‘What did I get wrong earlier?’ he finally asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He sighed and tried again, but after that he’d have to move on. ‘I said a whole load of things about how you just happened to be standing there at the three crime scenes. I got something wrong. What was it?’

  When she merely looked at him with that same smooth forehead, he slapped some more photographs on the table.

  ‘March last year, fifteen-year-old girl missing, the police mount an operation in Västerås – bang, there you are. February this year, fifteen-year-old girl missing, police mount an operation in Kristinehamn – bang, there you are. Yesterday morning, fifteen-year-old girl missing, police mount an operation in Märsta – bang, there you are. How the hell can you have been in all three places?’

  ‘Coincidence,’ Nathalie Fredén said. ‘I cycle all over Sweden. That’s my life. Sometimes I have to work the odd month here and there, simple office work, but apart from that I keep on the move. Sometimes I run into things. There’s nothing strange about that.’

  ‘But do you really not understand that it is strange? That it’s seriously strange? Are you mentally handicapped? Have you been shut away in an institution?’

  ‘Ugh,’ she said with distaste and pushed the pictures away.

  ‘I’m serious,’ Berger said, taking hold of her wrists. ‘You’re not in any databases, you live completely outside of society. Your social pattern is that of a criminal, a homeless person, or someone who’s mentally ill. But it’s all a persona.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A persona, a mask. You’re pretending to be something you’re not.’

  ‘You don’t get it,’ she said, pulling her hands free. ‘You can’t handle it. I’m nothing more strange than a free person. That’s what I do, I cycle, in complete freedom. I have no credit card, no internet access, no mobile phone. I tried once, I got a mobile phone, tried to join Facebook. But I let it drop. What’s the point?’

  The terrible thing was that what she was saying was sounding more and more plausible. For the first time a hint of doubt entered Berger’s resistant consciousness. Serious migraines, constant cycling all round Sweden, probable first-hand knowledge of mental institutions, the inherited flat, maybe a shoebox full of inherited cash she’d been living off. And then that lame phrase, ‘it shows in your eyes’. Taken as a whole, an asocial existence, completely outside of society.

  The perfect assistant.

  The subordinate helpmeet.

  A master’s slave.

  ‘Who is he?’ Berger exclaimed, standing up. ‘Who the hell is the scum who’s got you in his power? Who is it you’re ready to lie for? Lie until you’re blue in the face? Who’s your master, your ruler? Who sent you?’

  The door opened behind Berger’s back. Deer came in and half whispered in his ear, very slowly: ‘Sam, you have an important call.’

  She led him out of the interview room through one of the two doors and closed it firmly but gently behind them. Then she turned round in the soundproofed observation room and barked at Samir over at the computer: ‘Watch her every move. If she so much as lifts a finger, you rush in.’

  Then she fixed her very sharpest look on Berger, shook her head and moved aside. Behind her stood Allan. It was as if his bushy eyebrows were saying: And it was looking so promising.

  Berger managed to stop himself exploding, formulated the words very carefully and said: ‘You saw where it was heading, Allan.’

  ‘Of course,’ Allan said. ‘But I also saw that it was heading off the rails. You need to take a break.’

  ‘She’s a puppet,’ Berger said. ‘She has a specially selected, damaged psyche that the Scum is directing from a distance. She’s the shell, surrounding another person’s will. She was placed here for a reason. Has she been through a metal detector? She could have a whole fucking bomb in her stomach. Or at the very least a transmitter, a recording device.’

  ‘Of course she has,’ Allan said.

  ‘Did you spot the three critical moments, Deer?’

  ‘Botox treatment for migraines,’ Deer said, looking down at her notepad. ‘I’ve got people on it already. It can’t be that common a treatment, and she must have started treatment after her television debut a year and a half ago. And I saw her reaction when you revealed our three crime scenes. Maja and Syl are working on that, trying to find the exact moment the reaction occurred. Because she wanted to correct you, didn’t she?’

  ‘I’ve trained you well, Deer,’ Berger said.

  ‘You haven’t trained me at all. You said three? I’m not sure about the third critical moment. Arvid Hammarström and the inheritance
? If that’s it, we’ve got people looking into it. But the Mariehem School was accurate.’

  ‘No,’ Berger said. ‘I meant the bicycle. Have you found it?’

  ‘Not sure. We’ve seized three women’s Rex bicycles in the vicinity. She didn’t have a key to a bike lock on her, and those three were all locked. We’re dusting them for prints and comparing them with the photographs.’

  ‘Good,’ Berger said. ‘She was given the bicycle by an ex. Rex from an ex. With a bit of luck we’ll manage to find the ex. And with a bit more luck, the ex is our man.’

  ‘The perp?’ Deer exclaimed.

  ‘Check the number on the frame. Maybe we can figure out when and where the bike was bought. And by whom.’

  ‘What the hell is this?’ he asked straight out.

  Berger in turn was watching Allan. He did look genuinely curious. Had a trace of police instinct returned to the old bureaucrat?

  ‘Samir?’ Berger said.

  Without taking his eyes from the screen, the young man said: ‘What?’

  ‘Strongest impression from the interview?’

  Samir looked up and said: ‘I’m looking at her now, and I’ve been looking at her the whole time. If she had a serious mental health condition, wouldn’t it be more obvious?’

  ‘There is such a range of disorders,’ Berger said.

  ‘I know,’ Samir said, gesturing towards the screen. ‘But there’s nothing. I’m not seeing a troubled soul.’

  They gathered round the computer screen, leaning in. Nathalie Fredén was sitting perfectly still at the table in the interview room. There was no movement. It might as well have been frozen.

  ‘No curiosity about the things I left in the room?’ Berger asked.

  ‘None,’ Samir said. Not a flicker of movement.’

  ‘That in itself strikes me as an indication of mental illness,’ Allan said. ‘Isn’t she just a complete lunatic with a thin veneer of social competence that we simply have to drill through? Isn’t that what you were starting to do in there, Sam, before you got overexcited? For my part I don’t care if you destroy her. Peel off layer after layer and see how empty she is inside. I can’t help wondering if she’s a dead end. A psycho who has a habit of showing up in the crowd whenever there’s a major operation. She cycles round the country with a police radio at the ready, then dashes off to exciting places to get her pulse racing. Have you actually checked to see how many police photographs she appears in?’

  Berger straightened up and stared at the ceiling of the small room.

  ‘How many,’ he repeated in a completely different voice.

  Allan and Samir looked up at him with two different generations’ expressions of scepticism. Then Berger’s mobile rang. It sounded like a pig, mid-slaughter. He answered it.

  ‘Hello,’ a sharp voice said. ‘This is Sylvia.’

  ‘Syl,’ Berger said. ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Maja and I have been scrutinising the recording. We think we’ve found the moment when Fredén wants to correct you.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘It’s right at the end of your long speech. You start by saying “She’s isn’t a ‘that’. She’s a girl with her whole life ahead of her.” Do you remember?’

  ‘Vaguely, yes. Go on.’

  ‘Then you put all the pictures on the table and get to Västerås.’

  ‘But it wasn’t then?’

  ‘That’s the dilemma,’ Syl said sharply. ‘For a while we thought that was it, when you mentioned the biker gang in Västerås. You hadn’t talked about that before. But then we got the impression that it was when you talked about a lamb to the slaughter. Do you remember the phrase?’

  ‘More or less. That was when she reacted?’

  ‘Like I said, we thought so for a while. But then came your last salvo. I quote: “How the hell can you just happen to be standing there at all three crime scenes?” And that’s when the reaction actually comes.’

  ‘How many,’ Berger said, looking up at the ceiling.

  ‘Yes, now that we’ve looked carefully and compared the results from all four cameras, that seems to have been the moment.’

  ‘More precisely?’

  ‘When you say “all three crime scenes”.’

  ‘Interpretation?’

  ‘When you say the number. Three.’

  ‘Yes,’ Berger said, clenching his fist.

  15

  Tuesday 27 October, 01.26

  Berger stepped inside after the break imposed on him. The door closed. Nathalie Fredén watched him. Without a word he switched on the recording equipment. The red light came on. He uttered the required phrases and then said: ‘Tell me, who did you get your bicycle from?’

  ‘It was a long time ago. I think his name was Charles.’

  ‘Wasn’t it an ex? Don’t you remember your former lover’s name?’

  ‘Like I said, it was a long time ago.’

  ‘But your Rex can’t be more than four years old?’

  ‘You really want to talk about my bicycle?’

  ‘I really want to talk about your Rex … your ruler, king. That’s what I really want to talk about. But we can start somewhere else. Although I can promise that we’ll come back to it. Have you ever lived abroad?’

  ‘Abroad? No.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where did you disappear to after Year 3 in Mariehem School in Umeå? According to your teacher, your family was going abroad.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

  ‘No, there’s no indication that you actually went. Your parents remained registered at the same address in the forest outside Umeå for another fifteen years. But you vanished from school records. Where did you get to when you were ten years old?’

  Nathalie Fredén fell silent and met Berger’s gaze in a new way. While he pushed across the enlarged photograph of the ten-year-old Nathalie Fredén, he tried to figure out what it was that felt new.

  ‘Do you recognise yourself?’ he asked.

  She turned away and stared at the wall beside them.

  ‘That smile,’ Berger went on. ‘Anyone would think you had your whole life ahead of you, that anything was possible, don’t you think? Look at the picture, Nathalie. I want you to remember who you were then. Ten years old. Look at that smile. You were happy. But could you see a future of unlimited possibilities?’

  ‘I don’t know what you want.’

  ‘I’m looking at that smile, Nathalie, those disproportionately large front teeth, the sort everyone has when they’re ten; those teeth seem to be there to tell the rest of the body: hurry up and catch up with us. But I know that neither you nor I see a future of unlimited possibilities in that smile. It’s something else, isn’t it? What do you see, Nathalie?’

  The same silence. Which was different from the first interview. He went on: ‘Just before I came in here the staff at Mariehem School managed to dig out some files from their pre-digital archive. Someone had to physically hunt through a basement up in Västerbotten. Do you know what they found, Nathalie? It wasn’t that you moved abroad.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘No. No, of course not. But if I put it like this: in those days there used to be counsellors in schools. Even the occasional school psychologist.’

  Nathalie Fredén was present in a different way now; it was as if she was suddenly crash-landing into her own body. She fixed her eyes on him in a way that he hadn’t experienced up to now. She became a different person. But she said nothing.

  He went on, his eyes on a sheet of paper: ‘There are three visits to the counsellor in fairly quick succession, and then – just a few days after the last one – a visit to the school psychologist. That takes place four days before the end of the school year, in June. Then you don’t come back for the autumn term, because you’ve moved abroad, according to your teacher. How much of this do you remember?’

  ‘The betrayal.’


  It came so abruptly, so distinctly, with a sharp and very clear stare, straight into Berger’s own eyes. He held her gaze for a while, and was then held by hers. He found himself thinking about the balance of power, about the interrogator’s indisputable upper hand in the interview room. In the end he looked away and, to his immense irritation, found himself moving his papers around the table.

  ‘Whose betrayal?’ he said without raising his eyes.

  When she didn’t answer he was obliged to look up, ready to regain control of the conversation. But the look in her eyes was too strong, too sharp; it was as if she was delving deep inside him, even though he had no idea why. He had to alter the situation. He let his eyes drift towards the wall instead. She hummed and leaned back hard in her chair, as if she had gained some sort of insight.

  ‘Who betrayed you?’ he tried again, looking back at her once more. But she was no longer looking at him, her gaze was turned inward.

  He paused for a moment. There had been contact, a strong, peculiar contact, and now it was gone again. He didn’t have time to get to the bottom of it, and falling silent was hardly an option. Some sort of breakthrough had taken place, and he had to find his way back to it.

  ‘The school psychologist, a Hans-Ove Carlsson, is dead now,’ he said, ‘but the counsellor is still alive. It won’t take us long to track her down. What’s she going to say, Nathalie?’

  Fredén sighed heavily and said nothing.

  Berger pushed the enlarged photograph of the ten-year-old Nathalie Fredén forward and put another picture next to it.

  ‘The class photo,’ he said. ‘Your happy smile in context.’

  No response at all.

  ‘Group photographs are always interesting,’ he went on. ‘Even formulaic ones like class pictures. Can they tell you anything about the dynamics within a group? Are the individuals merely positioned by a jaded photographer who once had grand ambitions? Or do these compositions reflect real relationships?’

  Still no response, except possibly a hint of derision at the corners of her mouth. He continued: ‘There’s a tiny gap around you. All the others are standing close together, their bodies touching. But it looks like no one wants to touch you, Nathalie.’