The Silenced

“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 was what I was thinking of asking you. As soon as the Security Police open the bag and discover that the head’s missing, all hell’s going to break loose. The smart option would be to go out to the Forensic Medicine Unit right away, pay the guy to sneak the head into one of the cold storage units, and forget the whole thing.”

She looked at him, aware that he could easily have done that without her involvement.

Amante smiled faintly again and glanced at the time. “Or we wait until ten o’clock before we decide what our next step’s going to be.”

“Why ten o’clock?”

“Because that’s when we get to see what our dead man looked like.”

* * *

Sarac was standing perfectly still in the darkened doorway. He resisted the temptation to reach out for the light switch he could see on the wooden wall. The forest behind him was dark and silent. The narrow unpaved track he had followed from the main road was only just visible at the edge of the trees on the far side of the turnaround. In the distance he could hear a raven call. The ghostly sound echoed between the trees, fading into a distant rumble. Unless it was just in his head.

The wind blowing off the ice-covered inlet cut straight through his clothes. He shivered and stepped in through the door. The soles of his boots scraped against the concrete floor. The smell inside made him think about the house on the island, and he waited for the usual accusing whispers. But for the time being the voices seemed to have fallen silent. Maybe the dead were huddled together in the darkness. Waiting for whatever was going to happen.

What was going to happen?

He didn’t really know. All he knew was that he had reached the end of the road. That the whole Janus affair was going to end here, this evening, one way or another. That everyone involved would finally have to face up to the consequences of their actions.

The rumbling in his head grew louder. The winter thunder was getting closer. Then his thoughts were interrupted by another sound. A real one this time. It sounded as if someone was approaching. Taking cautious, creaking steps through the snow outside on the path. Sarac felt his heart beat faster.

Soon, he thought. Soon it will all be over.

A dark shape appeared in the doorway. Clearly visible against the white snow.

“David Sarac?” he heard a low voice say. And at that moment he knew how it was all going to end. The voice was firm, clear, not unfriendly. This was someone who had made up their mind. Then he saw a weapon aimed toward him. Saw it being raised. He closed his eyes.

Debts I can’t escape till the day I die.

Time to pay his debts. Pay for his betrayal. Some things were simply too broken to be fixed.

“H-Here,” he whispered. “I’m here.”

A lightning flash, a frozen gust of wind right through his chest. The roar of winter thunder drowning his thoughts. Then nothing more.

* * *

The face on the screen looked real. Everything was where it should be, the proportions looked right. The nose, neither large nor small. The mouth with its hard, pursed lips, and the skin stretched across the cheekbones. The short, dark hair, the thin eyes. Even the eyelashes and brows were perfect, down to the last hair. Yet there was still something about the picture that wasn’t quite right, something Julia couldn’t put her finger on. But that didn’t really matter. A clump of ice had formed in her stomach, its chill spreading throughout her body.

“A computer simulation will never be entirely accurate,” Amante said over her shoulder. “The program uses measurements from the CAT scan—the size and angles of the bones in the face, eye sockets, and nose. Then it adds supplementary information such as hair and skin color. It all comes together to form an image that ought to be fairly close to reality. The only thing the program can’t provide is—”