Europa Blues

by Arne Dahl

  ‘Eastern Europe?’ Hjelm asked.

  ‘That too, yeah. Russia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and a couple of others.’

  ‘Good,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Then there’s the link between the two squares below, “Slagsta” and “Odenplan metro station”. The fact that someone in one of the rooms in the motel in Slagsta made calls to and received them from the ninja feminist from the metro platform. The link goes both ways, in other words. It was room 225, where the Ukrainians Galina Stenina and Lina Kostenko were staying.’

  ‘Ninja feminist?’ Hjelm asked.

  ‘It was a popular term a few years back. Nothing you blokes would understand.’

  ‘Nina Björk,’ Chavez said nonchalantly. ‘About the construction of femininity. She objects to certain strands of feminism – to difference feminism, those people who think there’s a kind of innate maternity in women or ninja feminists who take man’s weapons and turn them against him.’

  Both Hjelm and Holm stared at him in surprise.

  ‘Clearly it’s not just swimming you’ve taken up,’ Hjelm noted.

  ‘It’s more of an all-round workout,’ Chavez said. ‘All the muscle groups.’

  ‘Can we try to concentrate now?’ Kerstin Holm said, turning man’s weapons against him. ‘Some rational thinking please, guys. This is interesting. The last conversation between them came from our ninja feminist, who called Galina Stenina and Lina Kostenko in Slagsta at 22.54 on Wednesday evening. As you might remember, the bullet hit ten-year-old Lisa Altbratt in the arm at 22.14 that same night. It might not be a coincidence.’

  ‘Or maybe it is,’ Paul Hjelm said reluctantly.

  ‘Think about it,’ Kerstin continued. ‘Our eight women in the refugee centre had been uneasy for a few weeks. Something happened. Then the first call from the ninja feminist to room 225 – that’s Galina Stenina and Lina Kostenko’s room – was made on the twenty-ninth of April, just about a week before they disappeared. We know she speaks some kind of Slavic language, judging from what Gunnar and Viggo heard on the phone. They were in contact back and forth for five days after that, nine calls in total. The last call was made to Slagsta just before eleven on Wednesday night; it’s the very last registered call. After that, they must’ve discussed it among themselves in rooms 224, 225, 226 and 227 until at least half two in the morning. Then the women disappeared. But a couple of neighbours heard some kind of loud engine sometime between half three and four in the morning. The bin lorry or a bus that’d lost its way, they thought.’

  Jorge nodded enthusiastically. ‘That’s the link then,’ he exclaimed.

  Paul nodded too. Then he said: ‘Can we work out where our ninja feminist was ringing from? Was it always from Sweden?’

  Kerstin leafed through her papers.

  ‘What I’m reading comes from the four contracts in Slagsta. The list from Telia which Brunte faxed to Jan-Olov on Friday night. You can’t tell where the calls were coming from using this, no – not whether she dialled a country code or anything like that. They’re working on getting a list of calls from the mobile phone. I think it’s possible to get that from the SIM card.’

  ‘So what does that mean for the link?’ Paul Hjelm asked. ‘That it was the ninja feminist who threw our man to the wolverines?’

  ‘Could see it that way,’ Kerstin Holm replied.

  ‘Fine, so there are links in different directions,’ Jorge Chavez said, ‘but the connection to an eighty-eight-year-old professor emeritus, and one who survived Buchenwald at that – it was there, right? – how the hell does that fit?’

  ‘Buchenwald,’ Hjelm nodded. ‘Yeah, Kerstin, what’s the link there?’

  ‘It ruins the whole thing,’ Holm said, throwing her pen at the wall.

  ‘Don’t pick up bad habits like that,’ Chavez said sternly.

  ‘Who is she then?’ Hjelm asked abruptly. ‘If we’re assuming what we’ve said is right – who is she, the ninja feminist? And what does she have to do with eight prostitutes? Is she busy setting up some kind of mega-brothel somewhere behind the former Iron Curtain?’

  ‘Of course,’ Kerstin Holm said sourly. ‘An anti-Semitic mega-brothel with a sideline in wolverines, right in the centre of Moscow. It goes without saying.’

  ‘Don’t get sarcastic on us now,’ Chavez said, feeling like a bachelor again. ‘Let’s save that for later. Should we try linking everything up before we go to the Sheinkman children? Three of them, aren’t there?’

  ‘Three,’ Hjelm nodded.

  ‘Seems like a coincidence, one Sheinkman for each of us. Let’s look at each part of your square first. Quadrants, I think they’re called. Everything that needs to be done and everything we’re still waiting for. Quadrant one: “Skansen”. Left to do: identification. We’re waiting for a response from Interpol about the fingerprints. Should come soon. Our man’s in a crime database somewhere, I’d bet my neck on it. The serial number from the silenced Luger has been sent to Interpol as well. We’re also waiting for a response on that. What else?’

  ‘The metal wire,’ Hjelm said. ‘The technicians collected half a ton of rubbish from the wolverine enclosure. It’s been sent to the national forensic lab. Whoever finishes with their Sheinkman kid first can head over there. Maybe they’ve already found a sharp, rigid metal wire and just haven’t linked it to the wolverine man.’

  ‘Under way with the rope, like I said,’ Chavez added.

  ‘And then there’s this “Epivu”,’ said Holm.

  ‘Oh God, yeah,’ Hjelm said. ‘That word’s been bothering me for a few nights now. I’m getting absolutely nowhere with it.’

  ‘Summary,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Fingerprints, pistol, metal wire, rope, “Epivu”. We’re waiting for answers on all of them apart from the last one. We’ll have to find an answer to that ourselves. Write, Paul.’

  Paul wrote.

  ‘Quadrant two,’ Chavez said. ‘The empty one. “Skogskyrkogården”. Slightly inaccurate, since it should really be “Södra Begravningsplatsen”, but we’ll let that slide. Conversations with his relatives are about to take place. What else?’

  Hjelm took over. ‘I guess the broken gravestones will be solved just as soon as Andreas Rasmusson starts talking. They probably don’t have a thing to do with the case. A gang of skinheads probably just happened to be up to their repulsive business when an even more repulsive event came their way. Rasmusson’s fear is probably the result of him witnessing something more awful than even he could’ve imagined.’

  ‘Two things,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘First: modus operandi. Why such an unusual method of execution? Hanging someone upside down by a rope and pushing a long nail into their head, it’s not the usual.’

  ‘No,’ said Chavez. ‘It’s not usual.’

  ‘It suggests something really specific, doesn’t it? That there’s some kind of history. We’ll have to look everywhere we can think of and try to find similar cases. If we don’t turn up any leads, you can hang me up by the scruff of my neck.’

  ‘We don’t want to do that,’ said Hjelm. ‘But a bottle of whisky would do.’

  ‘I won’t say no to that,’ Kerstin replied tersely. ‘What kind?’

  ‘Cragganmore.’

  ‘OK. Second: the murder scene. Going by Andreas Rasmusson’s reaction, Södra Begravningsplatsen was also the murder scene; I don’t think there’s any doubt he witnessed a murder, nothing less. Sheinkman probably made his way to the scene himself. What was he doing there? Did he have any reason for visiting the cemetery? Was he visiting a grave? Was it purely coincidence that he was strung up right there? Which graves are nearby? Et cetera et cetera.’

  ‘Good,’ said Hjelm, writing on his sheet of paper. ‘Relatives, modus operandi check, brain surgeon’s verdict on the impact of the metal wire on the brain, skinhead witness, other witnesses, check of the murder scene. What else?’

  ‘Nothing else,’ Chavez said firmly. ‘Quadrant three: “Slagsta”. Go through the rest of the incoming and outgoing calls to the motel
– that’s a whole load. Read through the forensic report on rooms 224, 225, 226 and 227. So far, not much has come up. Throwing money away, calling the technicians out. Must be female logic behind it.’

  ‘The vehicle,’ Kerstin said, ignoring him completely. ‘If something like a bus passed through little Slagsta at half three in the morning, it shouldn’t have gone unnoticed. I’ll put some uniforms on it.’

  ‘Great,’ Paul said. ‘Then we’ve got our phantom pimp, right?’

  ‘Sure, yeah,’ Kerstin replied. ‘The john, aka the manager Jörgen Nilsson, was in touch with a pimp back in November. You don’t want to know what I had to do to get that out of him.’

  ‘Oh?’ Jorge said, utterly ignored once again.

  ‘There’s an e-fit being put through the system. Are you writing, Paul?’

  ‘Non-stop. Phone call check, forensic technicians’ report, vehicle, phantom pimp.’

  ‘Do our eight runaways have their passports, by the way?’ Jorge asked.

  ‘No, they were in the manager’s office,’ Kerstin replied.

  ‘Last quadrant, then,’ said Jorge. ‘The incident in the metro station. Can we get any more out of – what’s his name? – Tamir?’

  ‘Adib Tamir,’ Paul replied. ‘Gunnar was looking into that and I think he’s squeezed him enough. The main point under “Odenplan metro station” has to be the mobile phone. Hopefully its owner can be identified and we can get a list of calls from it. It’s probably our biggest hope. And I’ve got to admit, I’ve been messing about with that phone – it’s a good old Siemens E10, by the way – wondering how you can handle a phone without leaving a single fingerprint on it.’

  ‘Then there’s the language expert,’ said Kerstin, ‘who has the dubious honour of discussing phonetics and Slavic languages with Gunnar, Viggo and a police assistant called Andersson.’

  ‘Do we have anything else?’ Paul asked, scribbling as though his life depended on it. ‘Phone, list of calls, language expert.’

  ‘I’m wondering what we can get out of our ninja feminist’s behaviour on the platform,’ Jorge Chavez said. ‘It all seems so neat. Bish, bosh and the people attacking her are gone. But then she leaves the phone behind. What happened? True, she was attacked by Hamid – he was waving a knife and everything – but still. Did she really have to carry him like a wheelbarrow across the platform and hold him out in front of the train? Wouldn’t it have been enough to give him another kick in the face? He must’ve been groggy already. What happened? Pure sadism?’

  ‘I actually think,’ Kerstin said, ‘that she was busy calculating. She was counting on the phone being smashed to pieces. It’s a miracle it wasn’t. According to the autopsy report, both arms went right under the train and were ripped clean off, bouncing along beneath the carriages. The fingers were like a shield for the phone, they stopped it from breaking. There’s not a scratch on it.’

  ‘Siemens quality,’ said Hjelm. ‘Just think of the ovens.’

  ‘What ovens?’

  ‘The crematorium ovens in the Nazi concentration camps. They were Siemens.’

  There was a moment of silence. A ghost passed through the room. The ghost of Professor Emeritus Leonard Sheinkman. It was as though he wanted something.

  They shuddered.

  ‘There’s one thing we’ve forgotten,’ Paul Hjelm said after a moment, glancing down at his extensive diagram.

  ‘What’s that then?’ two hopeful voices asked simultaneously.

  ‘Isn’t this Hultin’s job?’

  14

  IT WAS SUNDAY afternoon and three different cars were en route to three different addresses. They had drawn lots to decide which. ‘Channa Nordin-Sheinkman, Kungsholmen’ was written on the scrap of paper Chavez had picked; Holm’s read ‘David Sheinkman, Näsbypark’, and ‘Harald Sheinkman, Tyresö’ was printed on Hjelm’s. The three names belonged to the late professor’s three children. Given that he had been eighty-eight when he died, not arriving in Sweden before 1945 when he was thirty-three, that put the children around the fifty mark. As much as ten years older than Hjelm himself.

  Only once he was on the way to Tyresö did he realise that the address to which he was heading – a street called Bofinksvägen in a place called Nytorp – was identical to the address listed for Leonard Sheinkman in the telephone directory.

  The old man must have been living with his eldest son.

  Paul Hjelm ploughed on through the Sunday traffic on Tyresövägen and felt a certain relief at not having to be the bearer of bad news; Sheinkman’s son could hardly have missed hearing about his father’s awful death by now – it had been all over the papers and television for the past twenty-four hours. Hjelm just hoped that someone from the local police had stopped by to break the news before that.

  The sun was low in the sky, which was an unusually deep shade of blue. Not quite like when a sly thundercloud camouflages itself as clear blue sky and dumps its heavy artillery on astounded sun worshippers with a dark laugh; it was more like a blue film had been stretched over the firmament, to disguise the fact that the sky was no longer blue. There was a dead weight bearing down on the pretty spring landscape and the light seemed artificial; as though an opera set designer had tried to imitate nature.

  Or maybe it was just because Paul Hjelm was filled with dread.

  Dread about having to barge in to a house deep in mourning. Dread about having to put all the usual questions to a grieving son. Dread about being a blond, secularised Christian, raised in a sheltered environment. And – here came the real admission – dread about having to bring up the Holocaust and concentration camps and European anti-Semitism.

  He was Swedish, after all, and Swedes did not like taboo subjects. Their armpits started sweating. Ideally, they avoided them, but if they absolutely had to broach them, they did so with a kind of remote reverence and a string of clichés about never allowing it to happen again. The Holocaust was an abstraction they liked to talk about from a pedestal, using big words. They didn’t like to tackle it properly. They hadn’t been a part of it, they could never understand it, they had nothing to do with it, everyone else could look after all that. Sweden’s lack of a sense of history and its pseudo-neutrality in an unholy alliance. Because they had been involved, to the highest degree. They did have something to do with it, to the highest degree. They could understand it, to the highest degree. They had to.

  World champions at brushing things under the carpet.

  Yes, Paul Hjelm admitted. His agitation stemmed from the fact that it was about him. Him and his pitiful, pitiful knowledge. Fragmented images of dead, emaciated bodies. Dates. 1939. 1945. D-Day. The Desert War. Stalingrad as the turning point. Sterile and doctored, like the laminated crash-landing procedures in the back pockets of plane seats. Docile and happy, we pull on our oxygen masks, breathe slowly and calmly and make our way to the emergency exits. Then, with grins on our faces, we speed down inflatable slides into the blue waves lapping invitingly beneath a clear blue sky.

  Soon, though, all the witnesses would be gone.

  There really was a great weight bearing down on the countryside. The blue sky wasn’t blue. The greenery wasn’t green.

  And he had arrived, on Bofinksvägen in Nytorp.

  The house where Leonard Sheinkman had lived, where his son Harald was still living, could hardly be described as luxurious. Still, it was pretty. An original functional house. A stylish thirties building, set back from the road, with a pretty sea view. Presumably an architectural original from those days when houses like that weren’t just reserved for the newly rich, insistent on designing everything themselves. In line with their IKEA-tinged style.

  He clambered out of the old Audi which, in the absence of any traffic, had been well behaved on the way over. He hoped his sweaty armpits didn’t smell. There were two types of armpit sweat, after all: the kind that smells and the kind that doesn’t. The odourless kind was the sweat of exertion. The other kind, nervousness. Time would tell which variant was
currently pouring from his armpits beneath his linen jacket and pale yellow T-shirt.

  Maybe he should have worn something more respectable?

  Too late, he thought, ringing the bell.

  A girl, aged around sixteen, opened the door. The same age as his own daughter, Tova. She was dark-haired and soberly dressed, and she looked genuinely sad.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, holding up his ID. ‘My name is Paul Hjelm, I’m from the police. Are your parents in?’

  ‘Is it about Grandpa?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She disappeared. In her place, a well-dressed man in his early fifties appeared.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked.

  ‘Paul Hjelm, CID. Harald Sheinkman?’

  The man nodded and gestured for him to come in.

  Paul Hjelm stepped inside and was shown into a room which he assumed was the library. Its walls were clad with books, in any case, and the otherwise unassuming room was dim and cosy. Perfect for reading. He immediately felt at home. He wanted to go over to the bookshelves and pore over their spines, but sat down on the old sofa instead. Harald Sheinkman sat down next to him. The closeness didn’t even feel uncomfortable.

  ‘He was nearly ninety,’ he said quietly. ‘I mean, we knew he might go at any time, but the circumstances …’

  He fell silent and stared down at the rough pine table.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Hjelm said, feeling awkward.

  ‘What do you want to know, Detective Hjelm?’

  ‘First of all, whether you have any idea what he was doing in Södra Begravningsplatsen. Do you have relatives there, Mr Sheinkman?’

  ‘No. On Dad’s side, there are no relatives – for obvious reasons – and my mother’s family are all buried in Norra Begravningsplatsen in Solna.’

  ‘So you don’t know what he was doing there?’

  ‘We reported him missing to the police.’