Marked For Life. Emelie Schepp

first and who could stay awake the longest. Mia struggled to impress her brothers, but they never let her win. Not even in something as silly as her memory.

      So it had become natural for Mia to compete about virtually everything and this instinct had never waned. Since she had also been gifted with a decidedly volatile temperament, many of her classmates at school let her have her own way. Even in junior secondary school she had on several occasions been sent home for getting into fights with older pupils.

      In her fifth year at the school, she had hit a classmate so hard that she drew blood. She could still remember the boy, her own age with a wide nose. He used to tease her and throw gravel at her during the PE lessons. He was also the only pupil who could run the 100 meter dash faster than she. He hadn’t gone unpunished. After a lesson one day, Mia had kicked him so hard on his shin, he had to go to the school nurse and then on to the hospital to deal with a crack in his bone. That in turn had almost gotten her suspended, but she claimed it was an accident. The incident was noted on her school record by the headmaster, but Mia couldn’t care less. She had run the fastest at the next PE lesson. That was all that mattered.

      Mia gobbled up the rest of the bun. The granulated sugar fell onto the table and she scooped it all into a tiny mound, then licked her fingertip and used it to pick up the sugar and put it in her mouth.

      Mia had almost no friends during her school years. When she was thirteen, her eldest brother died in a gang fight and she decided to go against the flow. At first she was forced to survive her tough suburban neighborhood where you were supposed to stick out as much as you could. Piercing, dyed hair, partly shaved head, no hair, tattoos, cuts, open wounds—nothing was alien. Not even for Mia, who herself had pushed a needle through one eyebrow just to fit in. But what distinguished her from the others was her attitude. She actually wanted to make something of her life. And with the help of her cocky attitude and her competitive spirit, she made it through school. She had decided that she wasn’t going to be a loser like her brother.

      Mia helped herself to yet another cinnamon bun, then she held the dish out to Henrik, who shook his head no.

      By now they had already spent close to an hour discussing how the boy might be involved in the case. Ola showed a frozen image of the boy from the security camera file. He was slightly turned away, crossing the street.

      With the help of the keyboard, Ola showed more, image after image. They appeared one by one at a slow pace. The team followed the boy’s steps until the last thing to disappear was his hood.

      Henrik picked up his cell and compared the images on the screen with that of Lasse Johansson’s son, Simon. He remarked that any suspicions against Simon were now dismissed.

      “The nephew is shorter, more muscular. The boy on the picture is thinner,” he said.

      “Let’s see.” Ola stretched to reach Henrik’s phone and looked at the digital photo.

      “And this Simon has reddish hair. I think our guy is darker. That’s what it looks like, anyway,” said Henrik.

      “Okay, so we can forget Simon, but that still leaves the question—who is the boy? We must get hold of him,” said Gunnar and moved on to the telephone log. Ola, who usually checked all the technical details, had been fully occupied with the security camera film so, to hurry the process along, Gunnar had chosen to check the lists himself. Now he pushed copies of the log into the middle of the table and let each of them take one.

      Henrik took a gulp of coffee and looked at the first page.

      “Hans Juhlén’s last call was on Sunday at 18:15 to the Miami pizzeria. Ola?”

      Ola got up and noted the call on the time line on the wall.

      “The phone call has been confirmed by the pizzeria and they also confirmed that he picked up the pizza at 18:40. You can see the other calls on the next page,” he said.

      They all turned to page two.

      “There weren’t many,” said Henrik.

      “No, there are only a few. Most of them are to or from his wife. There is an outgoing call to a car service, but nothing remarkable about that,” said Gunnar.

      “What about texts?” said Mia.

      “Nothing strange there either,” said Gunnar.

      Mia folded up the pages and threw them onto the table. “So what do we do now?”

      “We must find that boy,” said Gunnar.

      “Do we know anything about the half brother?” Anneli wondered aloud.

      “Not much. Mia and I just interviewed him. He is single, on welfare, he says, with some kind of shared custody of his child. And he is addicted to gambling,” Henrik answered.

      “Does he have a criminal record?” said Mia.

      “No,” said Gunnar.

      “My instinct is that he isn’t involved in the murder,” said Mia.

      “What do we think about Hans Juhlén’s wife, then?” said Gunnar.

      “I don’t think she did it,” said Mia.

      “I’m not convinced either,” said Anneli. “We don’t have any witnesses or any decent technical evidence.”

      “Lasse said something interesting when we saw him. He mentioned that Hans claimed to be broke. He suddenly didn’t have enough money to even lend Lasse a few kronor,” said Henrik. “Since we know he had received some threatening letters, we can assume that somebody had a hold on him. Perhaps that’s where the money went.”

      “Could Hans have had gambling debts too?” said Mia.

      “Possibly, that could also explain why he seemed so stressed, at least to his wife, recently. Maybe it wasn’t just the criticism his department was getting, but the threatening letters too.”

      “Right, we’ll use that as a starting point. I want you to check his bank accounts. Ola, that’s the first thing you’ll do tomorrow morning,” said Gunnar.

      “What about the computer?” said Ola.

      “The bank statements first, then the computer. Right, that’s it,” said Gunnar.

      Henrik looked at the clock and swore to himself when he saw it was already half past seven. Overtime again. Emma would have finished dinner and the children would have already gone to sleep. Oh hell!

      He sighed and drank the last of the coffee, which was now cold.

      * * *

      Henrik Levin tried to unlock the front door as silently as he possibly could. He opened it quickly, stepped into the hall and immediately nipped into the bathroom.

      When he had finished, he washed his hands, then looked at his face in the mirror. The stubble had grown over the last three days, and it needed trimming more than he had thought. He felt with his right hand on his cheek and around his chin. He didn’t want to shave now. A shower perhaps.

      Henrik ran his fingers through his brown hair and noted a gray hair on his forehead. He immediately pulled it out and let it fall into the washbasin.

      “Hi.”

      Emma poked her head into the bathroom. Her hair was clumsily done up in a bun on the top of her head. She was wearing a red velour jumpsuit and black socks.

      “Hi,” said Henrik.

      “I hardly heard when you came in,” said Emma.

      “I didn’t want to wake the children.”

      “How’s your day been?”

      “Okay. And yours?”

      “Fine. I managed to paint the hall drawers.”

      “That’s great.”

      “Yeah.”

      “White?”