The Final Word Read Online Free PDF

words through a loudspeaker, with a tiny delay.
    ‘Can you give us a bit of background to your work last spring?’
    She stretched her shoulders, and felt Berglund’s eyes on her. It was hugely important that he was convicted. He was dangerous, unpredictable; his impervious core meant that he lacked the usual human inhibitions. She could sense his inner self behind those blank eyes, like oil on a stretch of water.
    ‘New information came to light that led us to take another look at a twenty-year-old case, the disappearance of Viola Söderland, and examine all the evidence once more.’
    Crispinsson nodded almost imperceptibly but encouragingly. ‘And what happened on Saturday, the seventeenth of May last year?’
    ‘A DNA sample was taken from the accused’s home in Täby.’
The house at the end of the cul-de-sac, a one-storey villa from the 1960s, red brick, closed shutters over the windows.
    He had been there, surprised but amiable and accommodating. His eyes had been the same then as they were now, heavy and dark, untarnished by more than a year in custody. No normal person would react in that way. Isolation, twenty-three hours at a stretch, and with maximum restrictions at first: no newspapers, no television, no contact with the outside world. An hour of fresh air each day in the exercise yard on the roof of the prison, in a space the shape of a slice of cake, blocked off by wire netting. She knew he hadn’t received a single visitor, noteven after the restrictions were relaxed. She was aware of his hands from the corner of her eye, resting on the table, his watchful pose.
    He was made of iron, bog ore from the marshlands where he had grown up.
    ‘Can you give us a brief summary of the main aspects of the Viola Söderland case?’ Crispinsson said.
    ‘Is this really relevant?’ Martha Genzélius, Berglund’s lawyer, interrupted. ‘My client is not accused of anything to do with Viola Söderland.’
    ‘The prosecution is based upon a chain of evidence,’ the prosecutor said. ‘We need to explain the nature of each link or the case will be incomprehensible.’
    ‘That won’t help. The entire case is incomprehensible, no matter how the prosecutor presents it.’
    The judge struck his gavel. The lawyer, Martha Genzélius, fidgeted on her chair, the picture of frustration. Nina raised her chin and waited.
    ‘Viola Söderland, if you don’t mind,’ Crispinsson said, nodding towards Nina.
    She made an effort to reply in a calm and factual way. ‘Viola Söderland disappeared from her villa in Djursholm on the night of the twenty-third of September almost twenty-one years ago. Her body has never been found. There was one witness, a neighbour who was walking his dog on the night in question, who saw a man get out of a car outside Söderland’s home. The neighbour made a note of the car’s number plate, but the owner had an alibi.’
    ‘Who was the owner?’ Crispinsson interrupted.
    She swallowed what she was about to say and lost her flow. ‘The car was registered to Ivar Berglund.’
    ‘And there were signs of a struggle in the villa in Djursholm?’
    She had spent hours studying the photographs, grainy and poorly lit, taken during the last shaky days of colour film, just before everything had gone digital, infinitely sharper and easier to work with. She had examined countless pictures of that sort, from hundreds of different crime scenes, and ‘struggle’ wasn’t the word she would have used, but this wasn’t the time or place to make pedantic points about the prosecutor’s choice of vocabulary.
    ‘There was a smashed vase on the hall floor, and strands of hair that didn’t belong to Viola, her children, or any of the staff in the house. That was as far as the original investigation got. DNA technology was in its infancy and it wasn’t possible to get a result from a few strands of hair – they would have needed a sackful to identify the entire sequence.’
    ‘But that is possible