by Arne Dahl
‘Eight asylum seekers, all strongly suspected of having worked as prostitutes, disappeared from the annexe of a refugee centre the night before last. From the Norrboda Motell in Slagsta, to be precise. Where they were living and working.
‘They’re all from Eastern Europe: three of the women from Ukraine, two from Bulgaria, two from Russia and another from Belarus. The two Russians, Natalja Vaganova and Tatjana Skoblikova, were in room 224; two of the Ukrainians, Galina Stenina and Lina Kostenko, were in room 225; the other one, Valentina Dontsjenko, and the Belorussian, Svetlana Petruseva, were in room 226; the two Bulgarians, Stefka Dafovska and Mariya Bagrjana, were in room 227. I’m sure you’ll remember all of that.
‘We worked late into the evening yesterday, talking to their neighbours. It seems like it was a pretty open secret that they were prostitutes. We’ve got names for some of the johns and we’ve managed to get a pretty good idea of how they were able to run their business. Jörgen Nilsson, the manager, didn’t just turn a blind eye to it; we’ve also got reports that he made use of their services. As a customer. I don’t think he’s got much of a future left in his job.’
Kerstin Holm had managed to collect herself and took over.
‘We had two key questions. When did the women disappear, and had their disappearance been preceded by anything unusual? We couldn’t expect to know much more than that by this point. What we do know is the following: for the past week or so, the women had been more uneasy than usual; something had clearly happened to make them nervous. Their neighbours were pretty much in agreement on that.
‘From what we can tell, the eight women were there all evening on Wednesday. One witness claims he heard them talking in a foreign language, probably Russian, as late as three on Thursday morning. They were meant to report to Nilsson at nine that morning, but they never showed up. None of their neighbours – and we’ve spoken to most of them by now – saw or heard them disappear. All that with a side note, most of the interviews were carried out using an interpreter.’
‘So we don’t even know if a crime has been committed,’ Chavez pointed out vindictively.
Holm gave him an amused look. Svenhagen gave him an angry one. The look of a wife whose husband was acting like a child.
‘No,’ Sara said, managing to sound restrained. ‘But we do have to ask whether it’s really just a coincidence that an unidentified pimp-like man was chased to his death just a few hours before eight prostitutes from a refugee camp disappeared into thin air. We can speculate a bit here. Was he their pimp? If that’s the case, then doesn’t it seem fair to assume that the whole brothel’s just been wiped out by the competition? They’re probably dead already, if that’s true. And then we’d have a real sex war on our hands. Plus, battles between brothels usually mean drug wars, too. Or maybe he was just a competing pimp, put to death by the eight’s pimp before he grabbed his women and went underground?’
‘Hang on a second now,’ said Hultin. ‘What are you up to, Sara? Do we have anything at all suggesting a link between these two cases – which might not actually even be cases?’
‘Nothing concrete, no,’ Sara replied, slightly browbeaten. ‘It’s just a hunch.’
‘I’m starting to get very tired of all these vague hunches,’ their great leader emphasised clearly, stealing a glance at his watch.
‘Slightly more concrete, then,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Unidentified men with that kind of brash, high-up-in-the-underworld appearance aren’t exactly common; we normally know who they are, it’s that simple. Which means this man is, in all likelihood, a new arrival. The women in Slagsta had been uneasy since a few weeks back. On that basis, it’s not unreasonable for us to check for any possible sightings of a cocaine-snorting man in a light pink suit and with a thick gold chain around his neck in the area around the Norrboda Motell over the past few weeks, is it? We might even get a description of him if we do that.’
‘Sounds better,’ Hultin muttered.
‘It could be Lasse Berghagen himself,’ said Viggo Norlander.
‘If we turn that reasoning around,’ Gunnar Nyberg suddenly said, ‘did those ladies chase after the pimp and push him into the ghouls?’
‘Gulo gulo,’ Chavez corrected him sourly.
‘Hardly,’ said Holm. ‘They were in Slagsta until at least three in the morning. Several witnesses saw and heard them around ten, when our man was busy climbing over the fence into the wolves.’
‘Did they have any johns then?’ asked Hjelm. ‘Was it business as usual?’
Kerstin Holm turned to him and gave him a look he struggled to interpret, but which almost made him recoil. The relationship between them had been slightly tense since the incident in Skövde, a year ago. Both of them had been shot – him in the arm and her in the head – and they were lying next to one another on the ground, their blood mixing together beneath a sky which had just opened, and she, utterly exhausted, utterly drenched, utterly bloody, had whispered: ‘Paul, I love you.’
Her words had been difficult to take. Not least because he was a married man.
Eventually, she answered: ‘We haven’t been able to get a clear picture of that. We need to check more closely. There might be indications that their entire prostitution business had been quiet lately.’
‘Right then,’ Hultin said, gathering a pile of papers together. ‘The day’s activities are starting to become clear. Paul and Jorge, you can go back to Skansen and look for alternative routes around the wolves. We need to know if it’s a murder we’re looking at. Kerstin and Sara, work with Viggo and Gunnar and talk to more people from the Slagsta brothel. We really need to know whether it’s a crime we’re looking at there, too. We might be completely wrong. Oh, this came too.’
He held up a postcard covered with pictures of wine bottles.
‘Ah, yeah,’ Chavez said, still sourly. ‘The heirs.’
‘From Arto Söderstedt in Chianti, yes,’ Hultin said, pulling his owl-like glasses down to the end of his nose and reading: ‘“You rascals. Here I am, toiling away trampling grapes while you laze about in glorious spring Stockholm. Fate apportions her favours unequally. By the way, do you know the best way to split five watermelons between seven people? All suggestions gratefully received. Pieces is just lazy. Greetings from a warm, pine-scented, Vin Santo-hazy Tuscan afternoon.”’
‘That piece of shit,’ said Viggo Norlander.
7
HE TRAVELLED. LIKE a worm, he moved in distinctive patterns beneath the city. He had got it into his head that these underground shapes formed letters, a subterranean script identical to the text on the reverse of his page. The text that was growing increasingly legible. That was becoming clearer and clearer – and increasingly impenetrable.
Simultaneously.
He was nearing ninety, professor emeritus. As a former brain scientist, he had made a conscious decision not to go senile in his old age, not to let his brain cells wither away. He had deliberately devoted his time to mental gymnastics, keeping his cerebral cortex in shape. He enjoyed literature and read the news in four different languages, he solved the most difficult crosswords in Dagens Nyheter, forced himself through at least one differential equation a day, and viewed the world with a sober, analytic, penetrating gaze.
Until a few days ago. When a vague, shifting presence had found its way into his life.
It was death.
Death didn’t normally make demands. Death didn’t normally walk alongside you for days, waiting for something to happen.
He was starting to understand what was expected of him.
Once upon a time, more than fifty years ago, he had turned a new page in his life. The old page had been full. It told a story which couldn’t go on. One which had reached its conclusion. He had realised that to keep on living, he had no choice but to turn to a new page and pretend it was blank. Doing so would mean he could keep writing. Could keep living.
And so he had turned the page. He had left the past behind him and consciously – with precis
e, deliberate mental gymnastics – eradicated it. The text on the reverse of the page disappeared and a completely new life began. A Swedish life.
But now that his Swedish life was also about to end, he understood what was required of him. He had to turn the page once more and reread his old story. The problem was that it wasn’t something you could just do. His old story came towards him like a punch, like a blow from an axe, like a metal wire jammed into his temple.
He hadn’t realised that such old people could experience such intense feelings. It went completely against the very latest brain research.
He looked at his arm. The numbers were peeping out from beneath the sleeve of his coat. The numbers on his arm. As soon as he looked at them, they began moving. Just like he was. They were on their way away from him.
It was one of the things he didn’t understand.
And then came the pictures, like a blow from an axe.
There were arms on top of him, legs on top of him, thin, thin legs, thin, thin arms. He was moving through a pile of people. Dead people. He saw an upside-down face and he saw a thin wire being pushed into a temple, he saw the upside-down face contort in pain. And he wrote in a book. He read the words which he himself had written and the book was talking about pain, about pain, pain, pain.
And then he saw another image. One which took his breath away. He opened a door. The outer door to his own house. Here. In Sweden. That picture didn’t belong. He opened the outer door from within and found a man without a nose waiting on the step outside.
And then the man without a nose was dead on the floor in front of him.
He woke up. He was sweating more than a ninety-year-old should be able to sweat. The metro was speeding through the dark tunnels, on and on. He had no idea where he was. It didn’t matter. The pattern was all that mattered.
He didn’t understand. The pages were mixed up. The front and the back of the page were mixed together. Why?
Then he saw an extremely pale man dressed in uniform. The extremely pale man in uniform was holding a thin metal wire in his hand.
The image vanished.
His train was approaching a station. He was alone in the carriage.
He closed his eyes for a moment. Mental gymnastics. Come back. You don’t have the right to close your eyes. You’re not allowed to close your eyes to anything.
He returned to the pattern his journey beneath the city had been creating. He was increasingly convinced it was forming symbols, letters. The Stockholm metro system was hardly as complex as the network of streets in New York, but symbols could still be formed. And formed they had. He had travelled and he knew how he had travelled. Not where, but how.
The first day’s journey appeared slowly before his eyes. First a vertical line.
The train stopped at the station. The doors opened. The station was almost completely deserted. He didn’t know where he was.
First a vertical line and then three horizontal. A letter.
On the first day, he had travelled in the shape of a letter.
A lone woman was standing on the platform, talking on her mobile phone. A group of teenagers spilled out of the carriage behind his.
It was an E. An upper-case E.
The train doors closed. The teenagers were approaching the woman. As the train gathered speed, he saw the flash of a knife.
He couldn’t do a thing.
Other than reconstruct the second day’s letter.
Sometimes, the right conditions just came together entirely by chance.
Usually, though, it needed lots of planning: the right time, the right place, the right person. You had to bide your time – waiting, watching and sneaking glances. You had to spread out and make it seem like you weren’t together. That was when you struck. Once you’d grabbed enough, you went straight online. Sometimes there was as little as an hour between theft and sale.
‘Freshly nicked phone for sale.’ And then the time.
The responses always came quickly. As though there were people just sitting at their computers, waiting for their moment. The pigs didn’t stand a chance.
But then, every once in a while, one of those chance occurrences appeared. They were the best. Unplanned openings. Some bird all by herself on a platform, for example.
Hamid saw her straight away. He exchanged a quick glance with Adib and stepped off the train. The small fry tagged along. There were five of them and they were dangerous. No one ever put up any resistance. They just handed over their phones. If anyone tried to be clever, they got a punch. If anyone put up a fight, they got a cut.
Sometimes people shat themselves. It was disgusting.
She was good-looking, the woman. He could see that even though she was standing with her back to him, talking on her phone. Long black hair, red leather jacket, tight black trousers, black trainers. She turned round and caught sight of them. She ended the call.
She really was good-looking. If they had been somewhere more secluded than the station, he would have given her a little extra treatment.
The adrenalin had started pumping through his body. Hamid pulled out the knife. Her lower lip should be starting to tremble right about now.
In the distance, he could hear a train coming from the other direction.
‘Phone, you whore,’ he snarled.
Her lip wasn’t trembling. It tightened. Her dark eyes narrowed.
The knife went flying. He didn’t know what was happening. Suddenly, she kicked him in the face. He saw the bottom of her shoe. Reebok. He felt his teeth bend inwards. Upside down, and as though at high speed, he saw Adib being thrown onto a bench and then slumping to the floor. He heard the small fry running away.
He found the knife and struggled to his feet. Fucking hell, he thought, running his tongue along his front teeth. They were angled towards the roof of his mouth. He could feel a broken root poking through his upper lip.
All he could taste was blood.
‘You slut,’ he lisped, grabbing the knife from the platform and holding it out.
She was standing opposite him, completely motionless. He threw himself forward and grabbed the phone. In return, she kicked him hard in the stomach. Unable to breathe, he felt himself being pushed away, across the platform. He heard the train. He saw the lights appear in the tunnel.
He was struggling like a madman. His arms were flailing, his chin grazing the platform. He was fighting for his life but there was nothing to fight against. His body was pushed out over the edge, slowly, inexorably slowly, and the increasingly loud noise from the metro became a deafening, maddening scream – the last sound Hamid would ever hear.
And just like that, he became a split personality.
8
THE LITTLE DEARS were drinking water. Like cute little bear cubs, they crouched awkwardly down and lapped at it, their tiny pink tongues like kittens’. They were the kind of animal children wanted to take home and cuddle.
Though that would have been an unwise move on the part of the parents.
The little dears were wolverines.
Paul Hjelm watched them wander off, slightly pudgy and happily swishing their squirrel-like tails. He really was struggling to picture these good-natured little things chewing on a human skull.
‘Come on,’ Jorge Chavez said impatiently. ‘Don’t let them hypnotise you. Think of Ellroy.’
Hjelm leaned back against the wooden railing, took a deep breath and asked, loudly and clearly: ‘Who the hell is Ellroy?’
But by then Chavez had already left Skansen’s wolverine enclosure and moved on to the wolves on the other side of the road. When Hjelm caught up with him, Chavez said: ‘The wolf pen is pretty big. It stretches all the way from the lynxes. Ends right here. So what happened?’
It had stopped raining but the ground was still dangerously sodden. They turned at the edge of the wolf enclosure and every step they took was treacherous; a slippery downhill slope stretching all the way to the outer fence. A gangly man dressed in overalls and protective go
ggles was squatting by something which looked like a gate. He was busy welding. Bluish flames curled up around him like a stray firework.
They waited for him to finish. The firework fizzled out. He pushed his goggles – more like a face mask with built-in glasses – up onto his head. They cleared their throats and he turned round.
‘Hi,’ said Hjelm. ‘We’re from the police.’
The man in overalls nodded quickly and looked like he was about to get back to work. Chavez grabbed his shoulder.
‘One minute,’ he said. ‘What happened here?’
The man took off his mask, stood up and stared down at Chavez.
‘I think it costs a fortune to get into Skansen these days too,’ the man said. ‘And then the kids want to go into that bloody aquarium as well, to see that man with the beard from TV. That’s five hundred gone, just like that. And then you’ve got to eat and ride those stupid cars and buy tickets to win all that Pokémon crap Nintendo makes millions and millions from, and then you’re suddenly nearing a thousand. So then you wish you’d just gone to the theme park next door instead, but if you’d done that it would’ve been a few thousand more gone up in smoke. Though at least you would’ve been able to go on that free-fall ride.’
Both policemen turned round in confusion to check whether the man was talking to someone behind them. There was no one there.
‘Sorry,’ Hjelm said. ‘I don’t understand …’
‘Someone cut the wire to get in,’ the man said, nodding towards the mesh fence. ‘And I can understand why.’
‘When did it happen?’
‘They found it yesterday, apparently. I don’t work here.’
‘It looks like you work—’
The tall man in overalls sighed deeply.
‘I’m from the fence company. We’re repairing it temporarily. It’s Friday – we can’t deliver the new fence before the start of next week.’
