by Arne Dahl
‘But he was conscious the whole time, the guy who was lying there getting beaten; he just stared up at Anton with a strange expression. Then Anton stepped back to take aim for a fucking big kick that definitely would have killed the guy. I screamed at him. Anton stopped himself and instead picked up a bottle and hurled it against the wall. Then he left.
‘I helped him up, the guy who was lying on the floor. He was beaten real bad, his teeth were rolling around under his tongue and he spat them out, one after the other. One arm was hanging limply, bent at an odd angle, and he had terrible pain in his stomach and abdomen. “I’m going to call the police,” I said, “and an ambulance.” “No,” he said, “he was totally justified.” That’s what he actually said about the lunatic who had just beaten him to a pulp: “He was totally justified.” Okay, I thought, it was great not to have to bring in the police, because then we’d lose our nighttime licence. I helped him sop up the worst of the blood, and he left. And that was it.’
‘I think that’s good enough,’ said Hjelm. ‘This Anton, who is he?’
‘Anton Rudström is his name. He’d opened a gym here in town – that must have been back in 1990. But when this happened it was about a year later, in the spring, and the gym had gone bankrupt. He’d got a bank loan without having to provide any collateral – you know how easy that was in those days – and then he couldn’t pay it back. That happened a lot in the late Eighties. At the time of the episode in the restaurant, Anton had just started on his drinking career. Now he’s a full-blooded alcoholic, one of the drunks who usually hang around outside the state off-licence.’
‘Although he still looks like a bodybuilder,’ said Hjelm pensively, amazed at the coincidence.
Roger Hackzell, Kerstin Holm and Jorge Chavez all looked at him in surprise.
‘What about the other man?’ said Chavez. ‘The victim. Who was he?’
‘I don’t know. I’d never seen him before or since. I don’t think he was from here in town. But he was a fucking expert at darts, I do remember that. Stood there for several hours, throwing them.’
‘Throwing them?’ said Kerstin Holm.
‘Darts,’ Roger Hackzell clarified.
He was sitting with a group passing around a bottle of cheap Rosita sherry. He was the youngest and the biggest on the park bench.
‘I thought vodka was your poison,’ said Hjelm.
Anton Rudström recognised him at once.
‘Will you look at that!’ he said jovially. ‘The Stockholmer with the taste test. Gentlemen, you see before you the man who gave me a half-bottle of vodka so that I’d drink more vodka.’
‘Hell, I was sure you were making him up,’ said an old, toothless man, stretching out his hand towards Hjelm. ‘I’d be willing to help with a taste test.’
‘No taste test this time,’ said Hjelm, showing them his police ID. ‘Now clear out.’
Rudström tried to clear out too, but without success. ‘Right now I want to hear a little about the fight in the restaurant Hackat & Malet in the spring of ’91,’ said Hjelm, sitting down next to the man. Chavez and Holm remained standing. Neither of them seemed particularly impressive compared to the enormous Rudström.
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he said sullenly.
‘We’re not here to arrest you. There’s not even a police report about it. Just try to answer my questions as precisely as you can, and there’ll be another half-bottle in it for you, I promise. First we’d like to know why you wanted to hear that particular piece of jazz called “Misterioso”, by Thelonious Monk, while you beat that man to a pulp.’
Anton Rudström paused to think. He had to dive down through cubic yards of ethanol to return to the opposite shore. He fumbled his way along its shifting sands.
‘I remember vaguely that I was about to kill somebody. That was after the plug was pulled for good.’
‘You owned a gym, right?’ Hjelm ventured.
‘The Apollo,’ said Rudström cockily. ‘The Apollo Gym. Fuck.’
‘Tell us about it.’
‘Yeah, well, okay. Let me see. I’d been working out at Carlo’s place all those years, and I finally got a job there. Then I happened to walk past a great vacant space in the centre of town, a little expensive, of course – an old boutique of some kind. Well, then I decided to go to the nearest bank and ask for a loan to open a gym there; it was just an impulse, I didn’t have any collateral or anything. And suddenly I was coming out of the bank with a huge loan in my pocket. Everything was going so well back then; it was easy to get a loan.
‘I bought the best equipment available and created a real fancy gym. Of course it wasn’t going to make it in little Växjö. It took only six months or so for the whole shitload to go bankrupt, and I stood there with a fucking debt in the millions of kronor, with no idea how it all happened. I’d lost everything, just like that.’
Rudström snapped his fingers, then floated off to happier hunting grounds.
Hjelm cautiously prodded him back. ‘It was about that time that you were in Hackat & Malet one night. The only people in the place were you, the owner and one other person. It was almost closing time. In the middle of the night. Do you remember?’
‘Vaguely,’ said Rudström. ‘Shit, I need a drink.’
‘You’ll get plenty of drinks afterwards. Try to think back.’
Anton Rudström dived once again into the deep sea. ‘He was standing in the corner, throwing darts. At least I think it was that night … I can’t really recall.’
‘Yes, it was. That’s right. Go on.’
‘Well … He was already there, throwing his fucking darts when I came in. The place was packed, but he stood over there in the corner, throwing one dart after another, for hours. It was starting to annoy me.’
‘Why?’
‘Somebody said something earlier that night … something that made me pay attention to him. Otherwise he’d have been easy to overlook. But somebody said that he was … that he …’
Rudström was about to fade away and slip through their fingers. All three noticed it.
‘Was it something he said or did?’ asked Chavez quickly. ‘Some annoying behaviour? Or maybe something about him personally? Some trait? A particular type of person? Or profession? Was he an immigrant?’
‘Something about him personally, that’s what it was.’ Rudström looked at Chavez in surprise. ‘He was something that made me fucking mad, and the more beers I drank, the madder I got. I blamed him for all the shit that had been dumped on me.’
‘Why him?’ said Hjelm.
‘He was a bank guy,’ said Rudström clearly. ‘That’s what it was. Somebody said that he worked in a bank. Finally it drove me crazy.’
‘He worked in town?’
‘No, in some hole-in-the-wall town, I think. I’m not sure. He wasn’t from Växjö, I know that. I have no clue who he was. But he was a real ace at darts. I hope he wasn’t seriously injured.’
They exchanged glances, all four of them.
‘It’s possible that he was injured worse than you might imagine,’ said Hjelm. ‘But not in the way you mean.’
He pressed two hundred-krona bills into Rudström’s hand. The man now seemed to be totally immersed in the memory that he’d initially thought the booze had drowned out for ever.
‘My God, how I hit him,’ he said. A couple of tears quietly ran down his steroid-scarred cheek. ‘My God.’
They were just about to leave when Kerstin Holm crouched down in front of him. ‘I have to ask you one thing, Anton,’ she said. ‘Why did you want to hear “Misterioso” while you beat him up?’
He looked her right in the eye. ‘It was such a fucking great tune. But now I’ve forgotten how it goes.’
She patted his arm lightly. ‘But he probably hasn’t.’
* * *
They were so distracted that they ended up at what they thought was an outdoor café until they got their hamburgers with a big M on the wrapper. They found themselves sitting
on the McDonald’s terrace on the big pedestrian street in Växjö. It was afternoon.
‘Misterioso,’ said Kerstin. ‘It’s a play on words, typical Monk. There’s an inaudible mist in the title. Behind the mystery, the mysterium, there’s a mist. When you say the word, you don’t hear the mist. It’s hidden by the more-pronounced mystery. And yet it’s there and has an effect. It’s in the tune too. The mystery is immediately apparent, intangible, of course, and yet physically manifest. The mist inside is harder to distinguish. But it’s there in the mist that we go astray.’
Hjelm had gone astray. There was something somewhere that he had overlooked, something that had passed him by and yet had been there the whole time; okay, he thought, something altogether physically manifest. Someone had said something. It was driving him crazy.
‘Have you thought of anything?’ asked Chavez, biting into his Quarter Pounder.
‘It’s there, just below the surface,’ said Hjelm.
‘I know how you feel,’ said Chavez, chewing. ‘It’s like Fawlty Towers, right? A difficult guest is served the wrong dish three times. Basil’s wife, what’s her name? Sybil. She finally serves the wrong dish on purpose. Basil says between clenched teeth, “I know how she feels.”’
‘What does that have to do with any of this?’ said Holm in surprise.
‘Not a damned thing. Just making conversation, as I’m told it’s called.’
A bank, thought Hjelm, digging through his own memory bank. He came up with nothing, not even a statement of account.
‘What do we do if you can’t come up with anything?’ said Chavez. ‘Line up every banker in Småland in a row and let Mr Serious Alcoholic take a look at them, one after the other?’
‘He must have been treated for the teeth that were knocked out, and the broken arm, if that’s what it was,’ said Holm.
‘This whole thing is still such a long shot.’ Chavez smacked his lips. ‘Not something we can present to Hultin, at any rate. He beat up a guy listening to Hackzell’s “Misterioso” – but it’s a big leap from there to actually having the tape.’
‘There’s a connection,’ Hjelm said doggedly.
‘Okay,’ said Chavez. ‘Does your connection have anything to do with Igor and Igor? It almost has to. The cassette is the only link between the beating in the spring of ’91 in a restaurant in Växjö and the ex-Soviet bullets in the upper-class walls in Stockholm. And the path of the tape from the restaurant to the villa in Saltsjöbaden follows the same route as Igor and Igor. They took the tape from Hackzell, after all, as partial payment for the Estonian vodka on February the fifteenth.’
Hjelm shook his head. The whole thing was unclear. Misterioso.
‘Let’s start from the point of view of the banker who was beaten up,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘According to Hackzell, right after the beating, as he’s spitting out teeth, he said, “He was totally justified.” About the guy who pounded him! Strange, don’t you think? The years pass, the wounds heal, but at the same time the accumulation of distrust, insight, confusion, powerlessness grows—’
‘Wrede!’ shouted Hjelm, jumping to his feet.
Holm looked at him in surprise.
‘Wrede. Jonas Wrede, from the Växjö police. He said something about an incident in a bank. I lost it in all the other damn incidents he kept talking about. Albertsboda, or somewhere like that. Shit, what time is it?’
‘Three-thirty,’ said Chavez. ‘What’s going on?’
‘We have to go to the Växjö police station,’ said Hjelm and dashed out.
Detective Inspector Jonas Wrede stood at attention three times, once for each member of the NCP Power Murders team that came into his little office. Finally he was standing so erect that the top button of his shirt popped off.
‘Relax,’ said Hjelm. ‘Sit down.’
Wrede obeyed the command. Ordered to relax, he sat there looking like a sack of hay.
‘The last time I was here, you said something about a previous contact with the NCP. It had to do with a bank incident somewhere.’
‘That’s right,’ said Wrede hopefully. ‘The bank incident in Algotsmåla. But of course you must know about that. The NCP sent a man down there. He never introduced himself, said his identity was confidential. He put a lid on the whole thing. Nothing got out to the press. I’m quite proud of that: no leaks from here whatsoever. Even the bank personnel kept their mouths shut. A matter of self-preservation, I assume.’
‘What happened?’
‘All the documents were confiscated by your man, so obviously you already know.’
‘Just tell us everything you can remember.’
Wrede looked a bit disoriented, since he wasn’t able to make use of his computer.
‘Yes, well, let’s see. It happened this year, on February the fifteenth. When the staff arrived at the bank that morning and opened the vault, they found a dead body inside. And a lot of money was missing. We immediately brought in Stockholm; it was a real mystery. Your man came down here and took over the whole investigation. That’s all.’
‘Our man …’ said Chavez.
‘February the fifteenth,’ said Holm.
‘Tell us about the dead man,’ said Hjelm.
‘I was the first officer on the scene, and I was the one who contacted Stockholm. I saw it as my duty to keep the whole staff there until your man arrived. He gave me high praise and imposed a gag order on the police officers on site as well as the bank personnel. Consequently I was the first to examine the body properly. He was a big, stocky man, powerfully built. A long, sharp object of some kind, possibly a slender stiletto, had pierced his eye and gone right into his brain. A very unpleasant sight.’ Wrede looked more excited than upset. ‘But I’m sure that you already know all this,’ he insisted.
‘Okay,’ said Hjelm. ‘If you could arrange to have all the personnel who were present at the time come to the bank in Algotsboda, then we’ll go out there right away.’
‘Algotsmåla,’ said Wrede, and put in a call to the bank office.
Jonas Wrede personally drove the police car that carried all of them about thirty miles from Växjö. The sun was sinking towards the horizon.
Wrede was all fired up and in full subtlety mode, meaning that he urgently prodded them to reveal what this was all about. None of the NCP officers said a word. All they saw was the narrowest of tunnels in front of them, the tunnel that would lead to a serial killer.
Wrede pounded fiercely on the locked door of the bank. A short, timid, middle-aged woman opened it. The only other person inside the minuscule bank office was an elderly gentleman wearing a pin-striped suit.
‘This is the bank president, Albert Josephson, and the bank teller, Lisbet Heed.’
The officers looked at both with a certain scepticism. ‘Is this the whole staff?’ asked Chavez.
Lisbet Heed brought them cups of freshly brewed coffee. They accepted, without really paying attention.
Josephson cleared his throat and spoke in a shrill, pedantic voice. ‘We lost a number of staff members in February this year, a cost-saving measure that also involved cutting back our business hours. It was part of the bank’s austerity policy, as a result of the deplorable conditions at the end of the last decade and the beginning of this one.’
‘So the basic staff,’ said Hjelm, ‘had to pay the price for the failed speculations and absurd borrowing practices instigated by the higher-ups, who later retired with their multimillion-kronor golden parachutes. Is that it?’ He sounded like Söderstedt.
‘Not an unreasonable way of viewing the matter,’ said Josephson impassively. ‘The fact is that this’ – he glanced at Wrede – ‘incident … occurred on the very day when the new business hours went into effect. And on the same day the staff had been cut in half. I opened the vault myself and found … the blinded man.’
The blinded man, thought Hjelm.
‘Here’s the vault,’ said Josephson, pointing to the open vault. They went inside. There was nothing to see.
‘You can imagine what a shock it was,’ said Josephson, without looking especially shocked.
‘Do you remember what the … blinded man looked like?’ asked Hjelm.
‘Big,’ said Josephson. ‘Huge, in fact.’
‘A real bull of a man,’ said Lisbet Heed surprisingly.
‘Worn out by the matador,’ said Chavez, even more surprisingly.
Kerstin Holm dug around in her bag and took out the sketches of Igor and Igor.
Time for a decisive moment.
‘Was it one of these men?’ she asked.
Hjelm hardly recognised her voice. A tunnel voice, he thought.
‘So that’s why I thought I recognised the drawing!’ cried Lisbet Heed. ‘It was in the newspaper for days!’
Jonas Wrede froze. What an oversight on his part! Bye-bye to any chance of being transferred to the NCP.
‘I knew I’d seen that face somewhere!’ Lisbet went on. ‘But I didn’t even think about the man in the vault. I did everything I could to repress the whole thing. It was so horrible.’
‘That’s him, all right.’ Josephson pointed at the sketch of Valery Treplyov’s face. ‘Even though his face looked slightly different, of course.’
‘Wrede?’ said Holm, wickedly, holding up the drawing to the pale man, who nodded mutely. Bye-bye, inspector training course.
Hjelm, Holm and Chavez gave each other meaningful looks. One important thing was still missing. Hjelm went to the back of the office, behind the wall that divided it from the public section of the bank.
He stopped in his tracks, then gestured for Holm and Chavez to join him.
For a long time they all looked at the dartboard hanging on the wall.
Wrede, Josephson and Heed came over to stand next to them.
