X Ways to Die Read online

  X

  WAYS TO

  DIE

  THE FABIAN RISK THRILLERS

  The Ninth Grave (Prequel)

  Victim Without a Face

  Eighteen Below

  Motive X

  X Ways to Die

  STEFAN AHNHEM

  X

  WAYS TO

  DIE

  TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH

  BY AGNES BROOMÉ

  www.headofzeus.com

  Originally published in Swedish as X sätt att dö in 2019 by Forum

  First published in English in the UK in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Stefan Ahnhem, 2019

  English translation copyright © Agnes Broomé, 2020

  The moral right of Stefan Ahnhem to be identified as the author and Agnes Broomé to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available fromthe British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781786694645

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781786694652

  ISBN (E): 9781786694638

  Images: Shutterstock

  Author photo: Thron Ullberg

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  ‘God does not play dice.’

  A. EINSTEIN

  Contents

  The Fabian Risk Thrillers

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Previously, in Motive X…

  Part III: 24–27 June 2012

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Part IV: 27–28 June 2012

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Epilogue: 28 June–1 July 2012

  Author’s thanks

  About the author

  About the translator

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Previously, in Motive X…

  IN THE WAKE of the presumed suicide of his colleague Hugo Elvin, Fabian Risk discovers a set of notes in his desk at the Helsingborg Police Headquarters. The notes suggest that their colleague, forensic scientist Ingvar Molander, not only murdered Elvin, but is also behind several other recent murders. Fabian secretly starts to investigate whether there is any truth to Elvin’s suspicions, and just as he unearths definitive proof of Molander’s guilt, he also realizes Molander is on to him.

  At the same time, a string of seemingly unconnected murders of the most brutal kind are committed in Helsingborg and neighbouring towns. Several complex investigations eventually lead to the arrest of two perpetrators. But something’s not right and Fabian can’t shake the feeling they’ve missed something pivotal.

  Fabian’s daughter, Matilda, has recovered from the gunshot wound she received a month and a half earlier, when the killer whom Fabian was trying to catch had forced an entry to the family home. But the trauma has had a profound effect on her and Fabian struggles to recognize his own daughter in the girl who comes home from the hospital. His relationship with his wife, Sonja, is better than it has been in a long time, but she is still holding back about what happened when her lover turned out not to be who she thought he was.

  Fabian’s son, Theodor, has felt tormented since he witnessed a brutal murder in Helsingør, committed by a group of his girlfriend’s friends. They have been remanded in custody and are awaiting trial in Denmark. The guilt drives Theodor to attempt to take his own life, but Fabian intervenes at the last moment. The end result is that Theodor decides to do the right thing and agrees to testify in court.

  Meanwhile, a ruthless killer with no discernible motive is rolling dice to decide who his next victim is going to be, and how that victim is going to die.

  PART III

  24–27 June 2012

  THEY SAY THERE’S a motive behind every murder. Revenge for past injuries, a nightmarish childhood that compels us to repeat what was once done to us, anything to explain the unfathomable horror. Cause and effect that together make the world easier to understand and help us feel slightly safer.

  Unfortunately, in some cases, it’s wishful thinking. Pure evil never has and never will need a motive.

  1

  THE LOCK MECHANISM in the door to the three-storey block of flats across the street from the train station in Klippan likely hadn’t been oiled in twenty years. As a consequence, the door hadn’t shut completely and was easily opened without a code, a key or violence.

  Leo Hansi had been on the verge of giving up. But when he slunk into the lobby without turning on the lights, he felt optimistic, for the first time in several hours, that the night, the very last one before he was finally going to get real about turning his life around, might on balance come out positive after all. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had an okay night, and this particular June night, which was rapidly moving towards dawn, had up until this point been exceptionally terrible.

  And that was despite him being out in the field, working hard for six hours straight. He had checked off one house after the other along Bjersgårdsvägen, Fredsgatan and V
allgatan, and all he’d managed to get his hands on was a relatively new buggy and a pink kid’s bike, which said a lot about how low he’d sunk. Stealing from children and new parents. Could it get any tawdrier?

  Together, they would net him at most five hundred kronor – in other words, less than a hundred an hour. If you counted the petrol, a coffee break and lack of overtime pay, he was operating at a loss, and suddenly, going back to finish college, taking out a student loan and getting a master’s degree seemed the only sensible way forward.

  It had been the Weber grill that had convinced him, after all these years, that enough was enough. That he had to make something of his life, something real that made a difference and wasn’t just about sneaking around suburban gardens, breaking windows and hot-wiring mediocre cars.

  The grill had been the size of a small outdoor kitchen and gas fuelled, of course, which from an environmental perspective was unquestionably the worst alternative. But judging from the four-wheel-drive Jeep in the driveway, the planet’s looming climate crisis was not something its owners cared about. He wouldn’t be surprised if they never barbecued anything but red meat. Big fat steaks with an enormous carbon footprint that would take their stomachs weeks to digest. Those bastards probably took a plane whenever they were going anywhere, too.

  Given all this, he hadn’t felt the slightest twinge of guilt when he spotted the shiny grill sitting unlocked on the wooden deck in the garden. New, it would have cost at least thirty big ones, so he should have been able to get a few thousand, maybe even five.

  His problems had started the moment he set foot on the deck, in the form of two powerful spotlights. Suddenly, it was like he was being interrogated at Guantanamo. But that hadn’t been the worst part. The real headache had been the fucking dog that had woken up and started barking like it was rabid, eventually waking its owners, who, naturally, let the manky thing out.

  The only thing worse than climate offenders was dogs. Not only did they shit everywhere, they reeked like furry bins and insisted on barking like their life depended on it as soon as they laid eyes on him. It didn’t matter how small they were, or if it was the middle of the day or they were tied up on the other side of the street. As soon as they saw him, they went nuts.

  At least he’d made it back to the van and it had started on the second attempt, which it normally never did.

  He was amazed he’d been able to keep going for so many years. Particularly considering suburban developments. Just a few years ago, all it had taken was a rock through a window, and you were in. Today, every last goddam house came equipped with either a tinnitus-inducing alarm or a slobbering dog.

  More people had safes these days, too, in which they kept everything that used to be so easy to steal. Not even TVs were worth taking any more. These days, it took so long to get them off the wall they were obsolete by the time you heaved them into the back of your van.

  Flats were different, though. People who lived in flats still felt safe, for whatever reason, and didn’t think they needed alarms. Some were even naive enough to leave their front doors unlocked. With a bit of luck, you could just stick your arm in and rummage through jacket and coat pockets for keys and wallets at your leisure.

  Even so, you couldn’t count on more than one out of a few hundred doors being unlocked, and, as expected, all three doors on both the first and second floors were locked. His simple lock pick didn’t stand a chance against the new secure locks they’d all had installed. There were only two flats on the top floor, lowering his odds further.

  The first one was locked, of course. He walked over to the other and stared at it.

  This was the last night he was going to spend humiliating himself like this. The decision was made. Come what may, this is the last building and the last door, he thought to himself as he placed his hand on Evert Jonsson’s door handle and barely had to push at all for the door to swing open.

  After recovering from the surprise of actually coming across an unlocked door, he stepped into the darkness and paused for a few seconds before gently shutting the door behind him and listening for any sounds from Evert Jonsson or, worse yet, a dog. But everything was quiet. As though the air had stood still for weeks and grown so thick it clung to his face. It smelled sweet and fusty, too.

  He turned on his torch and pointed the beam at the coatrack, where two jackets and a blazer were neatly lined up on hangers. But apart from an unopened bag of Fisherman’s Friend, a loose shirt button and a handful of old supermarket receipts, he found nothing of interest in any of their pockets. The key cabinet on the wall was just as uninspiring. No keys to a car or a safe as far as the eye could see.

  He moved further into the hallway and tried to shake his growing sense of unease. But, like the air, it clung to him. Something was wrong. Something that made him consider turning around and going home to start his new life right then. But he wasn’t going to give up that easily. An unlocked flat. Talk about low-hanging fruit.

  The first door on his left was closed and would remain so for now, since it probably led to the bedroom. He didn’t want to risk waking the old man. Instead, he walked through the door on his right, which stood ajar and led to the kitchen.

  It didn’t smell particularly nice in there, either. But at least it was a smell he recognized. Old food, rubbish and sewer. The stove was still on and, without thinking, he walked over and turned it off. He couldn’t bear seeing precious electricity wasted.

  There was an empty plate and a knife and a fork and an equally empty glass on the small round table behind him. Also, a half-empty ketchup bottle, a jar of Piffi seasoning and a carton of milk.

  The milk had expired on 27 May, almost a month earlier. That explained a lot. Evert Jonsson was dead and likely still to be found in the flat. He’d seen a dead body once before, but only for a split second as he passed a traffic accident ten years earlier. Quick as it had been, he still had nightmares sometimes about the many details seared into his memory.

  Hopefully, that kind of scene wouldn’t be repeated here; the old man had probably had a stroke or something along those lines. On the other hand, he had no idea what a body looked like after a full month in this kind of heat.

  He went back into the hallway, walked up to the closed door and braced himself before opening it. As expected, the room was dark. The blinds were down but not fully shut, allowing the first light of the early dawn outside to trickle in and settle like a striped blanket across a nightstand piled high with books and a desk on which sat a desktop computer.

  And across the bed.

  The empty bed.

  Leo Hansi didn’t understand. Was there another bedroom? Or had Evert Jonsson managed to phone an ambulance and was now in the hospital? Was that what had happened? Had he just not been able to lock the door behind him?

  The computer on the desk was a Dell, nothing special. But it did look relatively new, and depending on the RAM and processor, it could conceivably fetch him a few thousand.

  When he moved the mouse aside to disconnect the keyboard, the screen flickered to life, revealing a desktop littered with files and documents. So it wasn’t password protected, which was pretty much the computer equivalent of an unlocked flat. He sat down in the office chair and studied the various files, all of which had names that were just incomprehensible combinations of letters.

  Except one. Bitcoin Core.

  He’d heard of bitcoin, that it was a kind of virtual currency that some unidentified Japanese guy had invented and that each transaction consumed an obscene amount of energy. Apparently, the bitcoin network used as much electricity as Switzerland. But how the currency worked and how it was used, he didn’t know.

  He opened the programme and clicked around aimlessly until he found what looked like a main window with two separate columns. One was labelled Wallet, the other Recent transactions, and as far as he could make out, Evert Jonsson had accumulated 2,400 bitcoins over the past six months.

  That didn’t mean much to him. It could
be a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand. But maybe he’d finally be compensated for the hard work he’d put in tonight.

  He found the browser, went online and typed ‘bitcoin currency’ in the search field. The page it directed him to was a blur of rapidly changing numbers in different columns. It felt like an impenetrable wall of mathematics. But when his pulse suddenly started to race, he knew his heart had realized something it would take his brain a few more seconds to see.

  A bitcoin was worth seven dollars. Seven dollars, he repeated to himself while he quickly calculated that the old man’s bitcoins were worth over a hundred and fifty thousand Swedish kronor. That was a fortune and it could go straight into his pocket. No middlemen and, more importantly, no guilt at stealing from new parents and some little girl who had just learned to ride a bike.

  He disconnected the screen, carried it out into the hallway and was just about to go back to pick up the rest when it struck him that he hadn’t so much as glanced at the living room, which should be located at the far end of the hallway, behind the glass door.

  What he wanted to do was take the computer and leave, but there might be an old vase in there, or, with the kind of luck he was having, a piece of art.

  But the moment he opened the door, his thoughts were no longer on valuables, but on the pungently sweet smell he’d managed to ignore so far, but that now made him pull his shirt up over his mouth.

  Two steps into the room, that was all he needed to know exactly where the smell was coming from. But less clear was what the thing was. He moved in closer and aimed his flashlight at the cylindrical contraption in the middle of the floor. It was just about two feet across and six feet long, dark greenish-brown and made of some kind of taut plastic. Like a tent. Or a greenhouse. The kind people might have to use the day Earth is no longer habitable and it’s time to colonize Mars.

  He aimed the torch beam at the near end of the cylinder. On closer inspection, the plastic looked like the bottom of a transparent bin bag, and when he gingerly touched the rounded edge, he realized the frame underneath was actually a bicycle wheel. There was probably a wheel at the other end, too, and the plastic bags were held together by several layers of heavy-duty duct tape in the middle.