Europa Blues

by Arne Dahl

  ‘But,’ Hultin had continued, ‘you’re our best interrogator. And Paul will be there, too.’

  As though that was any consolation. Hjelm, sitting next to her, seemed to be in even worse shape than she was. Beyond all hope. She quickly read the papers in front of her and tried to look like she was ultra-competent.

  She looked at the man sitting opposite her in the sterile interrogation room and tried to imagine him as a meticulous, sophisticated killer. It was hard work. He looked more like a petrified little brat. Though, she thought, hardening her heart, he was a skinhead.

  ‘Right then, Andreas Rasmusson,’ she said, fixing her gaze on him. ‘According to our preliminary report, you were wandering about Central Station “like a ghost” last night. And this morning, you’ve been identified by a family that was out laying flowers on their grandmother’s grave in Skogskyrkogården at half past eight yesterday evening. You were seen running away from the Jewish cemetery, where ten or so gravestones had been damaged. We’ve lifted your fingerprints from a broken bottle of schnapps found at the scene. You’re eighteen years old and you don’t have any priors, so you should just tell us what you saw right now. If you do that, maybe you can keep it that way.’

  Paul Hjelm glanced at Kerstin Holm. He didn’t feel well. She, on the other hand, seemed completely unaffected by the difficult circumstances and the ungodly hour and the previous day’s activities. How could she be so unaffected?

  Kerstin Holm felt like she was about to throw up. She stood up and said, with a harsh but somewhat stifled voice: ‘Think about what I just said for a few minutes.’

  And with that, she was gone.

  Aha, Hjelm thought. New interrogation technique. Nice.

  He glanced at Andreas Rasmusson. In a couple of years, he would probably have left the skinhead life behind him and become an ordinary member of society. He would distance himself from his earlier life but never quite leave the ideas behind. He would say one thing and think another. That was an explosive kind of existence. Sooner or later, it would all blow up in his face.

  For a moment, Paul Hjelm thought about the State of Affairs. The Swedish State of Affairs. He wasn’t quite sure he understood it. The market was king, that much was clear. Share worth had replaced human worth. And it wasn’t so much a question of what that meant for the present day, since that was quite obvious: economic redistribution from the poor to the rich. It was money that earned money now, not work, and that money had to have originally come from somewhere.

  Talk of ordinary people being free to buy shares was a weak alibi for being able to get on with the real business: in order for money to make money, it needed to be big money. But, of course, ordinary people didn’t have big money. It was that simple. Ordinary people could earn thousands on the market, but it didn’t mean a thing – except for in the public’s view of the market. It was simply a matter of marketing. Playing the markets was just like playing Bingolotto. If you were lucky, you could earn a bit of money, and there was no problem at all with that. The marketing had succeeded. Virtually free of charge.

  No, the question was what it meant in the long term. How would this unprecedented, general obsession with money change people?

  Paul thought he knew. A fundamental change was under way. He had come across it so often at work. All forms of democracy and humanity were built on the ability to change places with the person you were talking to. That was all. Actually being able to see yourself in the other person’s shoes, to take on their collective experiences. Only when that occurred did you have two human beings really facing one another. And what he had seen over the past few years was that this basic, simple ability was starting to vanish. A screen of some kind had appeared between people, and they had started regarding one another as objects. Investment objects. What kind of return will my conversation with this person bring me?

  There was no world outside of economics. And without that free zone, the coast was clear to treat people however you wanted. The number of people without a conscience was growing and growing. That was what Hjelm thought he had noticed, anyway.

  Though on the other hand, there were lots of things he thought he had noticed.

  Kerstin Holm was staring at him from above.

  ‘Knock knock,’ she said. ‘Anyone in?’

  ‘Humans aren’t the masters in their own house,’ Hjelm said, pulling himself together.

  Her gaze lingered for a few seconds before she turned to the eighteen-year-old skinhead and said: ‘So, Andreas, what’ve you decided?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Andreas Rasmusson said, his face pallid.

  Pallid, Hjelm thought. Where did these strange words come from?

  ‘OK,’ Kerstin said, straightening her papers. ‘We’ll go to the prosecutor and have you put in remand, then. It’ll be court after that, years in prison with all those ruthless immigrant gangs – you can look forward to life as an old jailbird.’

  She left the interrogation room, taking the papers with her.

  Paul stared at the door for a moment. Then he got up and followed her out. He went into the room behind the two-way mirror and saw Andreas Rasmusson blinking confusedly where he sat. He had expected to find Kerstin there, but she was conspicuous in her absence. He stood there for a while, watching the skinhead. Like vague outlines in a sea of fire, the old man’s upside-down figure came back to him. The grey strands of hair hanging down towards the broken gravestone.

  He really didn’t feel well.

  Kerstin came in and stood next to him. She smelled … awful. He turned round in surprise.

  ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Have you been sick?’

  ‘Why else do you think I’ve been running in and out like an idiot all morning?’ she asked, her eyes on the mirror. ‘I had actually been planning on having the day off today. You don’t smell so great either,’ she added, turning towards him.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Did he react?’ she asked.

  ‘He just looks terrified.’

  ‘New try?’

  ‘I think so.’

  They returned. Andreas Rasmusson looked up at them without any noticeable reaction.

  ‘Your retorts are normally more caustic,’ Kerstin Holm said. ‘According to your file, you’ve been called in for interrogation fourteen times and you’ve always put up some kind of a fight. Why are you so quiet today? Is it because it’s Sunday? The Christian Sabbath?’

  He looked at her without really seeing her.

  Paul Hjelm said: ‘According to the police in Central Station, you were practically mad with fear when they brought you in. What did you see?’

  ‘I want a lawyer,’ said Andreas Rasmusson.

  Sunday 7 May was a peculiar day. Something that might have been called passive chaos was reigning in the corridors of the A-Unit. On the one hand, they had plenty of leads to be chasing up, from plenty of different directions; on the other hand, they had nothing concrete to grab hold of. It was Sunday, after all. The Christian Sabbath.

  Waldemar Mörner, division head for the National Police Board and official boss of CID’s Special Unit for Violent Crimes of an International Nature, had lost the plot. Since this was part of everyday life rather than some special weekend event, he had been running around the department without anyone taking the slightest bit of notice of him. He opened the door to Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin’s office and pointed at the clock.

  ‘Press conference in fifteen, J-O. Top banana.’

  And with that, he closed the door again.

  Jorge Chavez and Sara Svenhagen, who had just been brought up to date on the case after having been unreachable all morning, paused at his expression. Top banana? What wisdom lay behind those particular words?

  With a slight grimace, Hultin said: ‘He was actually a candidate for the Nobel Prize.’

  Two seconds later, the door flew open and Mörner’s thick, blond hair – which everyone assumed to be a toupee – entere
d the room again. Thoroughly flustered, its owner snorted: ‘He was actually a candidate for the Nobel Prize.’

  Sara and Jorge stared at Hultin, who simply shrugged.

  Waldemar Mörner continued on his way down the corridor. There wasn’t much time now. He opened yet another door and peered in at two stout middle-aged men, throwing balls of crumpled paper into a waste-paper basket.

  ‘What’re you doing here?’ he exclaimed in confusion.

  ‘This is our room,’ Gunnar Nyberg replied.

  ‘We’ve been called in on a Sunday,’ said Viggo Norlander.

  And so they had. The entire A-Unit had been called in. Once there, however, there was little for them to do. It wouldn’t have been unjust to call the decision to bring them in – one which had been made by Waldemar Mörner – hasty.

  ‘Where’s Holm?’ he bawled, the collective wonder of the universe behind him.

  ‘Wouldn’t be unheard of,’ said Nyberg, ‘for her to be in her room.’

  ‘And not in ours,’ Norlander finished.

  Mörner rushed off down the corridor with his eyes on his brand-new, albeit very fake, Rolex. It was thirteen minutes to one. The world’s press was waiting. Very soon, he would have to walk out in front of them and disclose information about the Nobel Prize candidate in six different languages.

  No, there was something wrong there somewhere.

  He tore open another door with excessive force. Still not the right room. It was the door to the women’s toilets.

  He was just about to plough his way through the rest of the police station when he suddenly realised Kerstin Holm was staring up at him from the sink where she had been splashing water onto her pale-looking face.

  ‘What’re you doing here?’ he shouted.

  ‘Shouldn’t I be the one asking that?’ she asked, gargling.

  ‘You’re actually just the person I’ve been looking for,’ he said in confusion.

  ‘And …?’ she said slowly, drying her face with a hand towel which looked like it had seen better days.

  ‘I need you,’ Mörner said, sounding like an impassioned lover from beneath a balcony.

  Kerstin Holm put the towel to one side, pulled a face and stared at him sceptically.

  ‘The press conference,’ he explained, pointing at his fake Rolex. ‘We’re in a bit of a hurry. Twelve minutes. No, eleven.’

  ‘You need a female hostage,’ she said in an icy tone.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mörner, not registering even the slightest shift in temperature.

  ‘I’m ill,’ Kerstin Holm said, still drying her face. ‘Try Sara.’

  ‘But she’s the baby.’

  ‘Even better.’

  Waldemar Mörner stood there in the women’s toilets, thinking it over for a few seconds.

  And so it came to pass that Sara Svenhagen, without having been brought fully up to date on the case and fresh from a session in the swimming pool, found herself standing behind a podium next to Waldemar Mörner and Jan-Olov Hultin, an enormous bouquet of saliva-drenched microphones in her face. She stared at the television cameras and felt her chlorine-soaked hair stand on end.

  Paul Hjelm was in his office, making notes in the form of a system of coordinates, when she and her greenish hair appeared on the TV screen.

  ‘Green?’ he said.

  ‘Chlorine,’ Kerstin Holm, sitting next to him, replied. ‘They swim a kilometre every Sunday. After a while, blonde hair goes green.’

  ‘A kilometre? Jorge?’

  ‘Twenty lengths. Quiet.’

  Waldemar Mörner cleared his throat. That always boded well. Language lovers were in for a real treat.

  ‘Distinguished members of the press corps and other honoured guests,’ Mörner began. ‘Since we realise that rather considerable demands will be made for official transparency in connection to the recent racial killing of a well-known Swedish scientist, active in the cerebral branch, we have decided to anticipate your utterly just demands and enter into a state of openness now, for we live in an open society and the resources of the police force are finite; with that said, we now await your finely honed questions regarding Professor Emeritus Leonard Sheinkman.’

  The members of the press looked expectantly at one another, hoping that someone else had understood. Eventually, a brave youngster said: ‘Who was he?’

  Waldemar Mörner blinked forcefully and exclaimed: ‘He was actually a candidate for a Nobel Prize.’

  The picture vanished. Paul looked indignantly up at Kerstin.

  ‘Now’s not exactly the time to be revelling in Mörner’s howlers,’ she said, putting the remote control down on the desk.

  He would just have to agree with her. He saw a series of numbers looping around a wrist and felt a distinct sensation of unease.

  ‘OK,’ he said, pointing to the piece of paper on which he had drawn a system of coordinates that looked like a big plus sign. ‘Four squares, four incidents. The horizontal line is a dividing one. “Skansen” and “Skogskyrkogården” above it, “Slagsta” and “Odenplan metro station” beneath. Do we have anything concrete linking the things above with the things below?’

  ‘The rope links the two above,’ Kerstin said. ‘A reef knot on an eight-millimetre red-and-purple polypropylene rope. Anything else?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Paul said. ‘Maybe the fact there weren’t any footprints in the wolverine enclosure. He could’ve been hanging upside down from the railing, I suppose, completely out of his mind on drugs and drawing in the earth with his fingers; Professor Sheinkman’s hands weren’t bound, after all. We need to check whether the technicians found anything like this when they went back to the wolverines.’

  He held up a long, rigid, millimetre-thick metal wire with a needle-sharp point. Kerstin took it from him and examined it.

  ‘And this was … where? In his head?’

  ‘Jammed into his right temple. We’re waiting for more information from the brain surgeon helping Qvarfordt with the autopsy. I don’t know if they’re finished yet.’

  ‘Should we infer anything from the fact that this wire was found in the brain of a brain scientist?’ Kerstin asked, putting the wire – not without a certain repulsion – down.

  ‘Maybe,’ Paul said. ‘We’ll need to speak to the relatives anyway. What about revenge for an old case of misconduct? Scalpel accidentally left behind in the cerebral cortex or something?’

  The door flew open. Jorge Chavez came rushing in, grabbing the remote control and switching on the television. He sat down in the middle of Hjelm’s system of coordinates, crumpling it.

  ‘Look,’ he said breathlessly.

  His wife’s face filled the television screen. Her short, straggly hair had an undeniable greenish tinge to it.

  ‘I understand what you mean,’ Sara Svenhagen said to the crowd, ‘but at present we have no reason whatsoever to suspect that the Kentucky Killer has struck again.’

  ‘What does she know about the Kentucky Killer?’ Paul Hjelm asked darkly.

  ‘Everything I know,’ Jorge said. ‘Quiet.’

  ‘We aren’t even certain it’s race-related,’ Sara continued. ‘It’s too early to speculate.’

  ‘Though judging by appearances, it’s a racial killing,’ Waldemar Mörner interrupted. ‘We’ve already arrested a suspect.’

  In the right-hand corner of the screen, half of Hultin’s face came into view. It was twisted, as though he had just passed half a dozen kidney stones.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Paul Hjelm said, throwing his pen at the wall.

  ‘You’ve arrested a suspect?’ at least six members of the press clamoured. One of them, a fierce woman from Rapport, continued: ‘So have you been sitting there lying to us this whole time?’

  There was a moment of violent crackling. Hultin had grabbed the entire cluster of microphones and hauled them towards him.

  ‘An individual has been brought in for questioning,’ he said in a crystal-clear voice. ‘We will shortly be bringing in more p
eople for questioning. At present, however, no one has been arrested. I repeat: no one has been arrested.’

  ‘Waldemar Mörner, why did you claim that a suspect had been arrested?’ the fierce lady from Rapport continued.

  Mörner blinked intensely. His mouth moved but no sound came out.

  ‘Can we move the microphones back?’ an irritated technician piped up.

  Jorge Chavez switched the television off. The trio exchanged glances which veered between rage, irritation and hilarity.

  ‘How long is it possible for someone like Mörner to cling on to his job?’ Kerstin Holm eventually asked. ‘Where’s the limit?’

  ‘Far, far away,’ Jorge answered. ‘She was good, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Television makes colours look brighter,’ Paul said. ‘Twenty lengths?’

  ‘Say no more,’ Jorge replied in English, pursing his lips. ‘What’re you working on?’

  ‘Could you get up?’

  ‘If you tell me what you’re working on.’

  ‘I can’t until you get up.’

  They had, in other words, reached a deadlock. A clinch. An unprecedented power struggle playing out between the room’s two males. Kerstin Holm sighed deeply. Eventually Chavez shifted slightly so that Hjelm could pull the paper out from beneath him.

  ‘Draw,’ Chavez said, jumping down from the table, grabbing the spare chair and sitting down.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Hjelm, smoothing the crumpled sheet of paper. He pointed at the big plus sign and continued: ‘A little system of coordinates for the past couple of days. We asked ourselves if there was anything concrete linking the top part with the bottom.’

  Chavez pored over the paper. At the top, ‘Skansen’ and ‘Skogskyrkogården’. At the bottom, ‘Slagsta’ and ‘Odenplan metro station’. Between ‘Skansen’ and ‘Skogskyrkogården’, the word ‘rope’ had been written.

  ‘So the rope was the same?’ Chavez asked. ‘I’ve been looking into it. The combination of colours, red and purple, seems to be quite unusual. But otherwise it seems to be a perfectly normal polypropylene rope, the kind you can buy anywhere. I’ve been in touch with a couple of manufacturers in Sweden and abroad and they said they’d send some samples over. Those should be coming this week.’