by Arne Dahl
Though that wasn’t exactly what Paul Hjelm and Jorge Chavez had on their minds. They were thinking about a murder.
If it was in fact a murder.
‘Underworld,’ Chavez said, trying in vain to bite through the slice of cheese in his sandwich. He wished he had bolt cutters for teeth.
‘Ellroy?’ Hjelm asked, staring blindly out at the magnificent view of Stockholm. ‘Which Ellroy?’
‘In one way or another, it’s the underworld,’ Chavez explained.
‘In one way or another, yes. But not in any way at all. This isn’t a simple drugs deal, it’s not a normal execution. If it was, we wouldn’t have this. This is something special. There’s a message here.’
‘Epivu?’
Hjelm shook his head but said nothing. Chavez continued to think aloud.
‘He was probably tied up and then thrown to the wolverines. Then he had time to write “Epivu”. But why did he do it? Why didn’t he try to get away instead? I mean, even a mediocre sportsman like Paul Hjelm can make it over the ditch without any real bother.’
‘His right groin,’ Hjelm said, taking a sip of his remarkably viscous coffee. ‘Pain in the right groin. Radiating to the knee.’
‘Sounds like cancer,’ said Chavez. ‘Groin cancer, the most dangerous kind. Ninety-seven per cent death rate according to the latest research.’
‘In his defence, it’s easier to jump in than out.’
‘If you get thrown in to a wolverine enclosure, you don’t just sit down and write in the ground with your fingers. That’s not the first thing you do. You try desperately to get out.’
‘But then even assassins aren’t likely to throw someone in to the wolverines and run off immediately. They’d probably stay there to watch. They’d probably be pointing a gun at you. They’d probably stop you from escaping. They’d probably stand there enjoying the show. Like some kind of gladiator games.’
‘Doesn’t that sound a bit complicated?’ asked Chavez. ‘You decide someone’s going to be killed. You tie that person up, take them into Skansen after hours, carry them through the animal park where straggling keepers might turn up at any moment, and you do all that just so you can throw them to the wolverines? Doesn’t sound like something you’d do unless you had a very specific reason for it.’
‘Which takes us right back to Ellroy,’ said Hjelm. ‘Who is this Ellroy?’
‘Or,’ Chavez shouted, slamming his coffee cup down with such force that the saucer broke into two neat half-circles, ‘or maybe they were chasing him and ended up in Skansen by chance.’
‘And if that’s what happened,’ Hjelm said, nodding, ‘it makes sense that he fired a couple of shots somewhere along the way, and that one of those bullets made its way into a ten-year-old girl’s arm.’
Chavez gave him a slightly surprised look. Hjelm paused for effect long enough that Chavez started squirming with anticipation.
Yes, he knew it was childish.
‘At 22.14 yesterday, a 9mm bullet got lodged in the arm of ten-year-old Lisa Altbratt as she wandered down Sirishovsvägen.’
‘And where’s Sirishovsvägen?’ asked Chavez.
‘It joins Djurgårdsvägen, coming down from Rosendal.’
‘Skansen map,’ said Chavez. Hjelm pulled the crumpled paper from his inner pocket and handed it to Chavez.
‘Sirishovsvägen is here,’ Hjelm said, pointing.
‘And where was Lisa Alstedt when she got shot?’
‘Altbratt,’ Hjelm corrected him. ‘About here.’
He pointed to a spot close to the point where Sirishovsvägen joined Djurgårdsvägen, not far from the Oakhill villa and the Italian embassy. The Skansen fence ran right alongside it.
‘Hmm,’ Chavez said. He sounded like Sherlock Holmes when he was thinking. ‘Lisa Altbrunn here. Wolverine man here.’
‘Altbratt,’ Hjelm corrected him, following Chavez’s pencil with his eyes. Chavez continued.
‘The bullet?’
‘Right arm, walking down towards Djurgårdsvägen.’
‘Meaning it came from somewhere inside Skansen. Here. Can you get over the fence here? Which part is that?’
‘What does it say? Wolves?’
‘Exactly: right there. Yeah, wolves. There.’
Hjelm followed the pencil as it moved up from the map to the window of the observation tower. Chavez pointed it out at the real Skansen. Hjelm could make out the labyrinthine bear enclosure and his gaze swept further, past horses and lynx, wild boars and buffalo; past the wolverine enclosure where the blue-and-white tape was fluttering in the morning breeze, finally reaching the extensive pen which housed the wolves. The fence was high but not impossible to scale, though there was barbed wire on top of it.
Paul Hjelm nodded. His face cracked into a malicious smile.
‘I think Brunte’s going to have to expand his search area slightly. Do you want to break it to him?’
‘With the greatest pleasure,’ Jorge Chavez replied, grinning.
4
PROFESSOR EMERITUS. HE wasn’t quite used to the title, despite having had it for years. He was, by now, a very old man.
And yet, it was only during the past few days that he had started to feel old.
Since everything had started coming back to him.
It was difficult to put a finger on what had changed. Nothing had actually happened.
But still, he was convinced he was about to die.
He hadn’t given much thought to death. It was just one more part of all that needed to be repressed. And he had succeeded. He had succeeded beyond all expectation. He had succeeded in drawing a line over the past and starting afresh. As though life was a piece of blank paper, waiting to be filled. He assumed that his own sheet was full now, he assumed that was why it had started spilling over onto the other side. Onto the back, where all that had been repressed was written, everything that half a century hadn’t managed to erase. He no longer wrote – he read. And that was much, much worse.
It had started as a presence, nothing more than that. A faint, diffuse presence which had suddenly appeared in his peaceful, structured life. In a way, he was thankful: not everyone was given the chance to walk, for a while, with death at their side; not everyone had the opportunity to reflect over what life had had to offer before they reached their end. Though in a way, it would have been better simply to die without warning. To die without regret, without reflection, without remorse. To drop down dead on the street one day, and be swept away like a broken bottle.
The End, as American films had once proclaimed. Just so there could be no doubt it was over.
But no. For some unfathomable reason, he had been given this … respite. He couldn’t understand why.
Or rather: the longer it went on, the better he understood it.
It had been a morning like any other. No great ailments, just the usual sciatica and his sluggish stomach. No outward changes at all.
Aside from the sudden arrival of this presence.
Yes. The tranquil presence of death.
Until then, life had gone on like always, the way it does for a formerly active man in his early eighties. Slowly, in other words. He saw the grandchildren as normal, went to their always-delightful Sunday dinners, observed the Sabbath and celebrated Passover, Sukkot, Hanukkah and Yom Kippur with them as he always had. This illusion of normality was what made it all so eerie. Because it was eerie, wasn’t it? Wasn’t dying eerie? He wasn’t quite sure.
The most worrying thing was that the whole thing lacked a rational explanation.
He had devoted his life to the brain. The human brain. He had been a researcher in a field which had been practically non-existent before he ventured into it. Right after he arrived in Sweden, learned the language and became a member of Swedish society, he had started his medical research. What had struck him was how absurdly little we knew about our own brains. He had, essentially, launched brain science in Sweden. In the 1950s, he became a professor at the Karolinska Institut, an
d since then his name had figured in discussions about the Nobel Prize every single year. The prize never materialised, but he did gain an increasingly concrete belief that human beings were matter through and through. ‘The soul’ was an antiquated construction used to cover over a void in human knowledge – in other words, it represented our lack of understanding of the brain. And so, as knowledge of the brain’s functions increased, the need for the soul disappeared, in the very same way that gods and myths and fantasies have always given way the moment science gains ground. He married, had children and experienced all kinds of everyday miracles without ever losing his belief in materialism. Human beings were controlled by nerve impulses in the brain. That was that.
And then, aged almost ninety, this sudden presence for which there was no rational explanation, for which there seemed to be no place among these nerve impulses.
Perhaps he was simply lacking knowledge about what was happening to him.
He started travelling; it became an overwhelming need. No grand chartered trips over far-flung oceans; no epic train journeys across Russia; no scaling Mount Everest. It was simply a matter of being on the move. He used the metro system, as a rule – it seemed most logical. Pure movement. Being able to feel the journey, the movement, without necessarily being taken anywhere. Such was his need.
And so he had spent the past few days riding the metro. He simply travelled, without destination, without purpose. In some ways, it mirrored the internal journey he was making. Towards the repressed letters on the other side of the paper. The paper he had tried to turn to give an illusion of blankness.
Things came towards him. They came flying out of the tunnels, pouring towards him from the platforms, gushing towards him down the escalators. Scenes, that was all, short sequences, and he had no chance of putting them into any kind of order. It was all very strange. He was doomed to wandering, doomed to being in motion, as though he would die the moment he stopped. Like a shark.
Or like Ahasver, the wandering Jew, doomed to eternal life and eternal suffering.
But there was still so much left to understand, that much he understood.
He was sitting in the metro. He had no idea where he was. It didn’t matter. The lights rushed by, sometimes a station, sometimes only sporadic flashes in the tunnels. There were arms on top of him, legs on top of him, thin, thin legs, thin, thin arms, and he saw an upside-down face, and he saw a thin wire being pushed into a temple, and he saw the upside-down face distorted by pain. And then he was writing in a book. He was reading the words which he himself was writing and the book was talking about pain, about pain, pain, pain.
He looked at his arm where the line of digits was tattooed, and the numbers passed through him, moving away from him.
He passed further, further through the heart of the city, and death was by his side, death wanted something and he couldn’t understand what.
All he did was travel.
5
SINCE SARA SVENHAGEN was having trouble working out why she was in an unmarked police car, en route from Kungsholmen to a motel somewhere in Stockholm’s southern suburbs, her thoughts drifted back to that morning. They floated in through an elegant doorway in Birkastan, up a genuine art nouveau staircase and in through a door marked with the area’s only foreign name, through the stylish but messy kitchen of a little three-roomed flat and then into a loudly creaking marital bed. Just as she caught a first glimpse of her fiery latin lover’s olive-coloured skin, the long panning shot of her thoughts was broken by an aggressive honking of a horn. Her attention was brought back to being in the passenger seat of an unmarked police car, en route from Kungsholmen to a motel somewhere in Stockholm’s southern suburbs.
So it goes.
Kerstin Holm let out a particularly coarse string of abuse, turned round and said: ‘I am sorry.’
Sara Svenhagen pulled a face and managed to focus on her older colleague behind the wheel.
‘I don’t know what I’m meant to be forgiving,’ she answered honestly.
Kerstin Holm looked at her and smiled wryly.
‘Let me guess where you were,’ she said, giving the finger to a confused old man in a checked cap driving a silvery Volkswagen Jetta.
‘What did he do?’ Sara Svenhagen asked, still half asleep.
‘He just proved that driving licences have a best before date. Don’t try to change the subject. You were in the bedroom of a newly bought three-roomer in Birkastan. Right?’
Sara smiled weakly and felt like she had been caught red-handed. Kerstin nodded self-righteously, struggling with the lid of a stubborn pot of snus tobacco and eventually managing to push a portion of it up under her lip.
‘You still haven’t told me what it cost.’
‘It was pretty run-down …’
‘That’s a new one. Nice. Normally I hear: “We exchanged for two rentals”, “the price per square metre was surprisingly low”, and then the cryptic “second mortgage rates are pretty good at the minute”. I want a hard figure.’
‘Two point two.’
‘Thanks,’ Kerstin Holm said, accelerating gratefully.
‘Including two rentals. One of which was in Rågsved.’
‘Sounds pretty cheap.’
‘It was a good price. The price per square metre was surprisingly low. And it was pretty run-down.’
‘What did you get for your place on Surbrunnsgatan?’
‘I didn’t sell it illegally. We exchanged.’
‘Who said you sold it illegally? That came from the heart.’
‘Three hundred thousand. And I think they saw Jorge’s bloody studio in Rågsved as more of a punishment. A cross to bear.’
‘So it was up around two and a half million?’
‘Almost. We were thinking of having a house-warming party next weekend. What do you think?’
‘Sounds good.’
‘Other halves are welcome too.’
Kerstin Holm accelerated slightly less gratefully.
‘Wow, what a subtle turn of events,’ she said gloomily. ‘What a smooth interview technique.’
‘Let’s hear it now,’ Sara Svenhagen said, turning to face her. She couldn’t quite escape the feeling that Kerstin Holm was the proudest person she had ever met. Even in profile – her dark, elegant, dishevelled hair; the well-defined lines on her face – everything suggested a kind of innate proudness which, she had to admit, she admired. It had been almost a year since Sara Svenhagen had joined the A-Unit and the two women had worked together a few times, but she had never felt that she was a real, proper equal. In her eyes, Kerstin Holm was the best interviewer the police corps had to offer, and she still had plenty to learn from her. That did mean it was tough sometimes, when you knew she had seen right through you. After a conversation with Kerstin, it was as though you had no secrets left. Everything always came out. But with Kerstin herself, the exact opposite was true: she was one big mystery. So that meant it felt good to have turned the conversation around. Even though Kerstin had clearly seen straight through it.
‘I’ll be coming alone,’ Kerstin said, guiding the old Volvo out onto the E4 motorway. ‘If that’s OK with you.’
And with that, the conversation was over.
They drove in silence for a while. Both were searching for something to talk about. It wasn’t an easy task. Sometimes, it was just too awkward. Sara knew that back in the beginning, Kerstin had been with Paul Hjelm, a married man. Her own husband Jorge Chavez’s partner and best friend.
It all felt a bit complicated.
‘Is it true he’s the only darkie in the neighbourhood?’ Kerstin Holm eventually asked.
That broke the ice. The two of them laughed. It felt good.
‘It’s very, very true,’ Sara said, then, changing tack: ‘Where are we going, exactly?’
‘No idea,’ Kerstin Holm said, still laughing. ‘No, we’re going to the Norrboda Motell in Slagsta. The refugee centre is full, so the immigration authorities have been renting rooms in the mot
el. Apparently some of the refugees staying there have gone missing. There seems to be a whiff of international criminality to the whole place, so they’ve called us in to take the case. If it even turns out to be a case. Any other questions?’
‘What kind of whiff?’
‘The motel seems to have been a bit too self-sufficient. A whole load of smuggling has been linked to it, with the Russians and the Baltic states mostly, but there’ve also been suggestions of prostitution. And a few of the women who’ve gone missing now are suspected to have been involved in that.’
‘So in other words, a group of whores have disappeared?’
Kerstin Holm pulled a face as they drove through Skärholmen in the cool but bright May afternoon.
‘It’s looking that way,’ she reluctantly admitted.
‘Who reported it?’
‘The owner, apparently. He’s been the subject of certain suspicions himself. Jörgen Nilsson’s his name.’
‘What kind of suspicions?’
‘Not seeing, saying or doing anything. But he’s been cleared. Reporting this is probably just a way of showing us that he’s on the right side.’
Sara Svenhagen leaned back in the worn-out passenger seat. She was forced to admit that she didn’t quite understand the priorities of Swedish immigration policy. From certain countries, primarily the EU member states, it was clearly possible to immigrate quite freely. Becoming a Swedish citizen was no problem. But from others, it seemed to be a completely impossible task. To even stand a chance, you had to seek asylum and claim to be a refugee. That meant you had to make sure not to stop off in any other countries along the way. If you managed that trick – which in itself meant increasing numbers of deaths, with people suffocating in containers or dying of dehydration in the boats transporting them – then you ended up in a refugee centre while your case was considered. The combination of growing numbers of asylum seekers, tougher regulations and more sweeping staff cuts meant that waiting times were becoming more and more absurd, the refugee centres brimming over and being outsourced to private businesses, usually second-rate motels and hostels. There, you would find people with terrible experiences behind them, rotting away in some kind of limbo for years on end. Sara couldn’t quite understand how they were then expected to become integrated, functional citizens – nor how so many people actually managed it.
