by Arne Dahl
‘So this happened – when? Wednesday night?’
‘Must’ve been. And two days later, we’ve got a couple of plain-clothes policemen on the scene to catch the trespassers. Nice to see such good priorities in these austere times. Don’t you think they might’ve disappeared by now?’
‘Yes,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘Most definitely.’
A policeman in uniform came running out of Odenplan metro station and threw up at Viggo Norlander’s feet.
So, Norlander thought, examining his new Italian shoes and sighing inwardly. It’s one of those.
Once he had checked that his shoes had made it through unscathed and accepted the guilty police assistant’s apologies, he turned to Gunnar Nyberg, who met his gaze with a look that said: Yep, one of those.
One of those cases.
They had been interviewing asylum seekers in the Norrboda Motell in Slagsta when Hultin had called to say: ‘I think we’ve got something you should go and take a look at.’
And so they had driven back into town.
As they ducked beneath the blue-and-white plastic tape and went below ground, closely followed by the sniffing, ashen-faced police assistant, Viggo Norlander was thinking about sick. The past year had practically been drenched in the stuff. Just think, he thought, of the difference between adult and child vomit. And how different they were from baby sick in particular – that thin, white, almost pleasant-smelling liquid which washes over new parents like nectar. But then suddenly, it changed. Suddenly it started smelling like … vomit.
It was a defining moment in any parent’s life.
It had happened recently in the Norlander household. Viggo, the out-and-out bachelor who had unexpectedly become a father at the age of fifty, had suddenly noticed one day that little Charlotte’s sick smelled awful. It had been a terrible discovery. She would start walking soon, too. And with that, he felt ancient. He was struck by the realisation that he could have been Charlotte’s great-grandfather.
Her great-grandfather.
For the first time, he started to wonder what it would be like for Charlotte, having such old parents. The thought threw him into a crisis. One which lasted a few minutes. For Viggo Norlander, that was an unusually long time.
The platform was completely deserted, an eerie sight. The station area had been cleared, with replacement buses taking the passengers between Rådmansgatan and S:t Eriksplan. But within half an hour, the train system needed to be up and running again. That was when rush hour began in central Stockholm. And when that happened, no number of replacement buses would suffice.
Viggo Norlander and Gunnar Nyberg had, in other words, just thirty minutes to try to establish a chain of events.
Hultin had phoned them immediately.
‘Why?’ Nyberg had asked.
There had been a moment’s silence. Nyberg had recalled what Hultin had said that morning, during their meeting: ‘I’m starting to get very tired of all these vague hunches.’ Hultin was well aware of that fact.
‘I know,’ he had said quietly. ‘It’s vague. But it’s not exactly something common, so I think you should head over there right now.’
‘Can we drive fast?’ Nyberg had asked hopefully. As part of his new way of life, he had swapped his battered old Renault for a brand-new model. He had first owned a Renault 4 during his teens, a lethal box made from paper-thin metal, and since then, he had never given up on the French car make. It was a lifelong love.
‘Yes,’ Hultin had replied compliantly. ‘You should drive fast.’
And so they had. Slagsta to Odenplan in fifteen minutes. On roads with a serious risk of aquaplaning.
They sped smoothly underground on the escalator. In contrast to most of the other metro stations in Stockholm, the platform at Odenplan was spacious and airy. The ceilings were high and the platform open, with no walls separating the tracks in one direction from those in the other. A young man was sitting in the middle of the platform with a bandage around his head. Two paramedics with a stretcher were standing close by, plus three uniform policemen. There was a plastic sheet next to the escalator on the left-hand platform. Another policeman was standing beside it. Down on the tracks to the left, there were a few more plastic sheets. A forensic technician was moving around, photographing the scene.
When they reached the bottom of the escalator, the police assistant whose vomit had only narrowly missed Norlander’s new shoes said: ‘I hope you’re ready for this.’
His voice could hardly have been described as convincing.
‘No,’ said Viggo Norlander, crouching down and lifting the plastic sheet. Nyberg was watching him from the other side of the sheet and couldn’t see what was beneath it. Norlander was completely still. His face unchanged, he lowered the sheet, got slowly to his feet and vomited on his new Italian shoes.
One of those cases, Gunnar Nyberg thought, handing a tissue to his colleague.
He steeled himself, squatted down and lifted the plastic. Beneath it was the lower half of a body. Satisfied with that observation, he stood back up.
‘Did you find anything in the pockets?’ he asked the policeman who had been standing guard next to it.
The policeman nodded and held out a sealed plastic pouch. In it, Nyberg could see a key ring, a wallet and six mobile phones.
‘Well then,’ he said, taking the bag.
‘Hamid al-Jabiri,’ the new policeman said. ‘Twenty-four years old. From Fittja. Two years for assault and aggravated larceny.’
‘Imagine that,’ Nyberg said, moving along the platform. Norlander was sitting on a bench, wiping his shoes. He let him sit. Then he took a deep breath and said to the policeman who had been standing guard over the body: ‘Should we have a look at the rest, then? What’s your name, by the way?’
‘Andersson,’ he replied, before pointing down at the tracks. ‘There are three more bits.’
Nyberg jumped down onto the tracks, closely followed by Andersson, who continued: ‘The one closest to you’s the worst. It’s one big mush. The upper body and head. The head’s really not pretty.’
Nyberg lifted the plastic sheet and saw that Andersson wasn’t lying. There wasn’t much they could do there and so they moved on to the next sheet.
‘These last two are the arms,’ Andersson explained. ‘Both of them must’ve been ripped clean off. They’re in slightly better shape.’
Norlander turned up, his face deathly white. Nyberg found himself thinking of Söderstedt, and welcomed him down.
‘Back in the saddle,’ Norlander said, heaving heroically.
The two remaining plastic sheets were right next to one another, ten or so metres from the body. The first hand, the right, was holding a knife.
‘Well, what do you know,’ said Nyberg.
The other was clutching a mobile phone.
‘One last grab,’ said Nyberg. ‘I hope it was worth it.’
Andersson placed the plastic sheet back over the arms and leapt energetically up onto the platform. He seemed remarkably unfazed by the awful sight. Nyberg and Norlander dragged themselves up onto the platform like fifty-year-olds. Nyberg was annoyed he didn’t find it easier. After all that damned healthy food.
‘Should we talk to his pal now, then?’ Nyberg panted.
‘Adib Tamir,’ Andersson nodded. ‘Exact same story: assault and larceny. Twenty-three years old. He’s got concussion.’
They were on their way over to the other side of the platform when a phone started ringing. Both Nyberg and Norlander checked their phones. It wasn’t them. Nyberg glanced down into the plastic bag containing the six mobiles. He held it to his ear. It wasn’t any of them, either. He glanced at Andersson, who shrugged.
‘For God’s sake!’ Gunnar Nyberg exclaimed, charging back towards the tracks. Norlander and Andersson followed him.
They jumped down onto the tracks. Nyberg tore the plastic sheet from the left arm.
The mobile phone in the hand was ringing.
Nyberg bent down and tried to lo
osen the fingers. They were gripping the phone like a vice. Eventually, he managed to prise it loose. He beckoned for Norlander and Andersson to come over. They leaned in, their heads grouped like a team ahead of a handball match.
Nyberg pressed the green button. The three men were silent.
From the phone, an incomprehensible tirade began. A woman, speaking a foreign language. There was a moment’s silence, then something which sounded like it was probably a profanity, then silence again.
The three policemen exchanged a surprised look. Eventually, Nyberg piped up and said: ‘Remember what you just heard. We’ll try to write it down, each of us.’
‘Why?’ Andersson asked, confused.
‘Because that was a message to the murderer,’ Gunnar Nyberg said quietly.
9
THEY SEEMED LIKE nothing more than arbitrary clusters of letters. Letters thrown together at random. And the three offerings he had weren’t especially alike.
Epivu, Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin thought. Was that just another arbitrary cluster of letters?
He was sitting in his plain, anonymous office as the rain lashed down outside, peering at three pieces of paper in the uninspiring, flickering glow of a dying strip lamp. It was half past seven, it was Friday evening, and as far as he could tell, he was all alone in the A-Unit’s corridor in the police station on Polhemsgatan.
It had to be a Slavic language. Despite the differences between the three versions hastily scribbled down and despite the peculiar spelling, Hultin thought that the words looked Russian. Nyberg and Norlander had thought so too. Which other Slavic languages were there, other than Russian? Czech, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian. Was Serbo-Croatian still a language? Or was there Serbian and Croatian now? He wasn’t sure.
They would have to call in a language expert. Present them with the unenviable task of working it out.
Still, it had been unexpectedly quick thinking from Gunnar Nyberg. He had gone from strength to strength as a detective, ever since Hultin had first brought the A-Unit together to solve the case of the Power Killer God knows how many years ago. From sluggish grizzly bear on a manhunt in the underworld, to modern, clear-thinking, newly slender online policeman.
Hultin picked up another piece of paper. Notes from the interview with Adib Tamir. He skim-read. Lone, good-looking woman of medium height; long black hair; red leather jacket; tight black trousers; black trainers. There had been a few other minor characters with them. Nameless wannabes. They had run off. First, she took down the knife-wielding Hamid with a kick. A kick to the face. Then she threw Adib, also armed with a knife, headfirst into a bench. He went out like a light and when he woke up, there were people screaming all around him. He saw Hamid’s legs and his guts spilling onto the platform a few metres away and passed out again. When he woke again, the platform had been empty, save for a group of pigs. That was all. He had no idea who the small fry were. Hangers-on. There were always some. Hamid and Adib were the pros. Sure, he could try to help out with a sketch, but he had hardly seen her. She’d had her back to him until she turned round and broke the unbreakable in just a few seconds.
Closing words: ‘She must’ve been a secret agent or something.’
Well, Adib, Hultin thought. Who knows? She had managed to grab an armed Hamid by the legs, push him like a wheelbarrow across the platform and hold half his body out over the tracks, just as the train was approaching. Then she had disappeared without a trace. Red leather jacket and all.
Though her mobile phone had still been in Hamid’s hand. A real KGB agent would never have made a mistake like that.
Weren’t the events of the past few days starting to draw closer to one another? Wasn’t some kind of link starting to emerge?
Adib Tamir had been made to look at photographs of the eight women who had disappeared from the refugee centre, just in case: Galina Stenina, Valentina Dontsjenko, Lina Kostenko, Stefka Dafovska, Mariya Bagrjana, Natalja Vaganova, Tatjana Skoblikova and Svetlana Petruseva. He had shaken his head.
‘No,’ he had said. ‘No, not at all.’
‘Not at all’? What did that mean? Hultin spread out the eight passport photos on the desk in front of him and examined each of them in turn. Ah, he admitted. He understood exactly what Adib’s ‘not at all’ had meant. These women looked browbeaten. Their eyes were dull. There was no life in them. Not one of them was a day over twenty-five, but each of them looked much older. Life had been hard on them and it showed. Like all the other Eastern European working girls flooding into Sweden and elsewhere in Western Europe, they had probably been prostitutes since their teens. An awful tidal wave of debasement was washing over the Continent and the Western world was playing an active part in the business.
For a brief moment, Jan-Olov Hultin felt ill. Because of his fellow men. Because of where he had been born. Because of his sheltered, easy life.
He got back to work. According to the technicians, it would be possible to trace the mobile phone contract. They had the SIM card. It wasn’t Swedish, but that shouldn’t be any real hindrance. Moving forward, they should be able to get hold of a comprehensive list of all calls, both received and made.
He was looking forward to that.
Until then, he would just keep working on the puzzle. They had the pieces, but the question was whether they belonged together.
A lot had happened in just over twenty-four hours. But that said, many crimes were committed across the country in any period of just over twenty-four hours. It was by no means certain that the three incidents had even the slightest connection to one another.
Strictly speaking, they weren’t even certain that a single crime had been committed. The women might simply have disappeared from their motel in Slagsta; he would probably have done the same if he was being held in custody there. The man from Skansen might just have been running from his own drug-fuelled demons; even the newly discovered hole in the fence might be entirely unrelated. And the metro incident might have been nothing more than self-defence.
And even if they were crimes, the incidents didn’t necessarily have anything at all to do with one another.
But, as we know, belief can move mountains.
And so Jan-Olov Hultin kept working on the puzzle.
First and foremost: why did it fit together? The A-Unit’s collective experience and wisdom said – as good as unanimously – that that was the case.
It was true that Kerstin was teasing Paul a little via Jorge, but that was part of some private game Hultin didn’t want to know about. He lacked the necessary curiosity. He could feel wonder, a thirst for knowledge – but not curiosity. As long as their private lives didn’t encroach onto their work, he would leave them be. After all, he had a newly married couple in the team now, and that worked much better than people generally made out. Hultin wasn’t really one for implementing directives or strict regulations; Mörner could worry about that. None of them cared, in any case.
He started over: why did it fit together? Because the entire thing stank of international criminality – Hamid and Adib were the closest to something Swedish they had. Because it had all taken place in such quick succession – a day and a half. Because nothing about it was normal – wolverine murder, missing prostitutes, violent women.
On Wednesday 3 May, at quarter past ten in the evening, a man who, in all probability, was a relatively high-level international criminal, had been chased through the wolf enclosure in Skansen; the value of his gold chain had been estimated at around three hundred thousand kronor.
The fact that his pursuers had clipped the fence to give themselves a considerably shorter route alongside the wolf pen suggested meticulous planning: they had driven him into the wolves; they were counting on him climbing the fence and getting out on the other side of the enclosure. They had found a way to be waiting for him up there. So in other words, they were probably aiming for the wolverines. From what Hultin could tell, the whole thing had been carefully planned – and the victim had acted just as t
hey had hoped. The question was whether they were also counting on the wolverines getting such a kick from his drug-addled blood. If that was the case, it was utterly sophisticated.
They seemed to know their Ellroy.
On Thursday 4 May, at sometime after half two in the morning, eight Eastern European prostitutes had disappeared from the annexe of a refugee centre. In other words, a few hours later the very same night. Was there any possible link there? Sara Svenhagen might have been closest after all – even though a certain detective superintendent had attacked her ‘vague hunch’. If there was a connection – and this still felt like the weakest link – then it would probably be related to one of two things.
One: that the Skansen man was their protection, and with him gone they were kidnapped or, in worst case, murdered. Two: that the Skansen man was a threat, one which had been neutralised, meaning the women could finally have their freedom. Either way, it seemed likely he was their pimp, whether a good one or a bad one. Though good pimps weren’t especially common …
Hultin leafed through the printouts from the interviews at Slagsta. Like any good post-industrial employer, he counted them. Two from Norlander, four from Nyberg, seven from Svenhagen – and twelve from Holm. OK, Norlander and Nyberg had left the place a few hours earlier than the others, but the difference between twelve and two was still striking. Plus, he also had a number of reports from the women from the previous day. In total, thirty or so stacks of paper.
Thankfully, Kerstin Holm had summed it all up in a separate report ahead of the weekend. If he ever – against all odds – finally retired, she was looking more and more like his natural successor. She should probably have been made Superintendent long ago. Though on the other hand, so should Hjelm, Söderstedt, Chavez and Nyberg. Well, everyone but Norlander, he thought slightly evilly.
Two measly interviews.
He summed up Kerstin’s summary. Unfortunately, no one from Slagsta could remember having seen anyone wearing a thick gold chain around his neck, nor a pale pink suit. Despite that, it was becoming increasingly clear that something had happened just over a week ago. Several of the extremely reluctant johns had noticed a change in the eight women’s moods. They had seemed deeply uneasy but hadn’t wanted to answer any questions. ‘She fucked like a bloody machine,’ as a habitual sex-addict security guard from the neighbouring area had said of Mariya Bagrjana.
