Europa Blues

by Arne Dahl

  ‘Didn’t have a nose?’

  ‘It was gone.’

  ‘Whoever killed him had cut it off?’

  ‘No,’ said Yitzak Lemstein. ‘It had been gone a long time. There was a big scar where it should have been.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Chavez, not understanding much. ‘Do you have anything else to add?’

  ‘No,’ said Lemstein. ‘But you do.’

  Chavez stood for a moment, still feeling confused. Then he raised a finger to the sky, exclaimed ‘Ah!’ and phoned the National Forensic Laboratory.

  ‘Brunte,’ he snorted. ‘My dear old father-in-law. Our rock. How’s it going with Södra Begravningsplatsen? Is everything wrapped up?’

  He listened for a few seconds. Then he hung up and turned back to Yitzak Lemstein with a nod.

  ‘You can take care of the headstone now,’ he said. ‘This “Shtayf” has suffered enough.’

  Yitzak Lemstein stared at him, turned round, took hold of the wheelbarrow and moved off. Chavez stood there for a moment, watching him as, bow-legged, he pushed the sorry old gravestone away.

  Chavez headed back to his car.

  On the way, he phoned his wife.

  ‘Hi, Sara,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In my office,’ Sara Svenhagen replied. ‘I just got back from Slagsta.’

  ‘Did anyone recognise our Greek?’

  ‘His name was Nikos Voultsos, you know. Do you want me to call you “my Chilean”?’

  ‘During intimate moments, why not, Mrs I-don’t-want-to-be-called-Chavez-I’d-rather-stay-Svenhagen-like-Daddy-Brunte. Oh, I just spoke to your dad, actually. Lovable as ever.’

  ‘No,’ Sara replied calmly. ‘No one recognised our Greek. But it doesn’t really matter. Arto just got in touch from Italy. From what he said, it seems like Nikos Voultsos was in Sweden for some big crime syndicate in Milan. He was meant to take over the eight women in Slagsta and bring them in to some kind of enormous prostitution ring. We’ve got a probable translation of the message to your ninja feminist as well. “Everyone through OK. Three seven two to Lublin.” I’m busy checking all the ferries I can think of now.’

  ‘Lublin?’ said Jorge. ‘Poland?’

  ‘Yeah. Seems like it’s our eight women who came “through OK”. It’s probably something to do with a rival syndicate in Ukraine. I mean, their contacts in Slagsta were Ukrainian, and the message was in Ukrainian. In other words, the ninja feminist seems to be Ukrainian and part of some kind of sex syndicate.’

  ‘I don’t know whether that sounds good or bad,’ said Jorge, just as Sara was replaced by a strange metallic voice. ‘From a purely professional point of view, it’s good. Though it sounds a bit worrying. Are you there? Sara?’

  Sara’s voice had now been replaced by some kind of industrial process. Robocop, Jorge thought.

  Then suddenly, her normal voice was back: ‘… how’s it going for you?’

  ‘I’m worried you’re in the process of changing into something hard and cold,’ said Jorge Chavez.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ an awful metallic voice said.

  ‘Your voice sounds weird. It’s disappearing again now. Anyway, if you have a few minutes, I just wanted to ask if you could go through all the unidentified bodies from September 1981. Jewish man in his forties. Had a concentration camp tattoo but no nose. I repeat: no nose.’

  But she was already gone. He cursed the invention of the mobile phone and hung up.

  As he climbed into the car, a tiny little hat was still clinging to his head.

  Sara stared down at the silent phone.

  Something hard and cold?

  She was in the office she shared with Kerstin Holm. Holm was, at that moment, absent. Sara didn’t know where she had gone.

  She cast a quick glance at the computer screen in front of her. It was displaying a schematised timeline. She was working with a period of time which stretched from four in the morning on Thursday 4 May, when the women had left Slagsta, to three in the afternoon on Friday the 5th, when the call from Lublin had come through to the disembodied arm in Odenplan metro station. That meant that in thirty-five hours, they had made it from Stockholm to Lublin.

  If she stuck to the assumption that they had travelled in some kind of bus – and not in the bin lorry – then the ferries were key. Between Sweden and Poland, ferries went from Nynäshamn–Gdask, Karlskrona–Gdynia and Ystad–Świnoujście. But then there was also the Copenhagen–Świnoujście line. When Jorge phoned, she had been busy working out possible options. The Öresund Bridge was still two months away from opening, but that wouldn’t have stopped a route via Denmark: Gothenburg–Frederikshavn, Helsingborg–Helsingør or Malmö–Copenhagen.

  It was also possible to take the ferry to Germany from somewhere like Ystad or Trelleborg, heading for Sassnitz or Rostock. But then what about Gothenburg–Kiel? The nightmare scenario was surely a route via Helsingborg–Helsingør and then Rödby–Puttgarten. If the women had taken that route, there wouldn’t have been any checks anywhere; for all the other routes, locating a bus with at least eight women on board should be possible.

  Most of the options were perfectly doable within thirty-five hours. At worst, they all were. That meant it was simply a case of going through all of the timetables. The task facing her seemed fairly hopeless.

  And so she had nothing against taking on Jorge’s peculiar request. During the challenging time she had spent with CID’s child pornography unit, still headed up by an unaffected party policeman called Ragnar Hellberg, she had become unusually good at finding all kinds of data. She had no problem finding that particular case from almost twenty years earlier in the crime database.

  An unidentified male in his early forties, a John Doe, had been found naked in the woods by a little lake called Strålsjön to the south-west of Stockholm on the morning of Wednesday 9 September 1981. Death, caused by two deep knife wounds to the back, was found to have occurred sometime on Monday 7 September. The spot where the body was found hadn’t been the murder scene, that much was clear. The body had, in other words, been dumped there, in all likelihood from a car. The man was dark-haired and, according to Medical Examiner Sigvard Qvarfordt’s notes, ‘moderately hirsute’. The most remarkable feature was the absence of a nose. Qvarfordt had continued: ‘Even the nasal bone is missing; all that remains is a rather disfiguring scar. The relative smoothness of the scar suggests that the nose was removed surgically, possibly sawn off.’

  Besides that, the man was circumcised and had, on his arm, a tattoo ‘resembling a concentration camp tattoo, but with illegible digits, as though he had attempted to remove them, using a knife or similar’. That was why Stockholm’s Jewish congregation had taken it on themselves to bury the unknown man. The case, undersigned by Erik Bruun, was still open.

  Sara saved the information and decided that it was, without a doubt, Jorge’s ‘Shtayf’. Then she returned to her ferry traffic.

  If I wanted to take the bus from Stockholm to Ukraine, would I really go via Denmark or even Germany? Wouldn’t I just go direct from Sweden to Poland? It was a likely first choice, anyway. And if I did that, then it would preferably be to Gdynia or Gdask rather than Świnoujsście, slightly out of the way on the Bay of Pomerania, right by the German border. From the twin cities of Gdynia and Gdask, the E77 went straight to Warsaw, from which the E372 continued on to Ukraine via Lublin. Logic dictated that Nynäshamn should have been their first choice, since the shipping company Polska Żegluga Baltycka, now known as the snappier Polferries, had boats running to Gdask. Otherwise, they would probably have chosen the Stena Lines ferry from Karlskrona to Gdynia.

  And so she started in Nynäshamn. One of the Polferries boats, either the M/S Rogalin or the M/S Nieborow, had departed at 17.00 on Thursday 4 May, arriving in Gdańsk at 11.30 the next day. The question was whether it would have been possible to make it from Gdańsk to Lublin by 14.55, when the call had come in to the phone at Odenplan metro station. That was something she neede
d to work out. Stena Lines had a ferry, the M/S Stena Europe, departing Karlskrona at 21.00, arriving in Gdynia at 07.00. Both of these needed to be followed up.

  Sara felt like she needed assistance, and for a moment thought Kerstin’s absence slightly irresponsible. It was a purely egotistical opinion, of course; it was also a fleeting one. Instead, she phoned up her old friend from the paedophile unit, the rock she could always count on.

  ‘Yeah?’ Gunnar Nyberg answered.

  ‘Are you in the building?’ asked Sara. ‘I need your help with something.’

  ‘No, Sara,’ Nyberg answered, unusually bluntly. ‘I’m a bit busy right now, I’m afraid. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.’

  And with that, he was gone. She cursed the invention of the mobile phone and hung up.

  Gunnar Nyberg flipped his phone shut with a click and shoved it back into the pocket of his beige lumber jacket. He hoped it wouldn’t get broken. He didn’t want to go to his meeting that evening – it wasn’t a ‘date’, he refused to call it a ‘date’ – covered in cuts and bruises, either. That would hardly make a good impression on a professor of Slavic languages.

  He sighed deeply and glanced around the filthy, beer-drenched cellar bar just outside of Åkersberga. A Swedish flag was hanging on one of the concrete walls; on another, a Nazi flag. Standing in the right angle created by the two flags were four enormous skinheads, baseball bats raised.

  Behind him, the door was in pieces.

  ‘Fucking pig, you broke the door!’ one of the skinheads shouted.

  ‘Sorry,’ Gunnar Nyberg replied courteously. ‘But you should’ve opened up when I knocked, kiddies. I could hear you in here, even though you were trying to hide like Girl Guides.’

  A growl emerged from their ranks.

  He continued: ‘I’m looking for Reine Sandberg. Is he here? I just want to talk to him.’

  The skinhead closest to him swung the baseball bat violently. Gunnar Nyberg didn’t appreciate that. He had promised himself to never again use violence at work, but now he had no choice.

  With a well-aimed sucker punch, he sent the skinhead flying into one of the concrete walls. The others drew back slightly. Winded, the man he had punched curled up into the foetal position and groaned faintly.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said to the muscular, adrenalin-fuelled skinheads. Coming from most people, such a statement would have sounded overambitious.

  Not so coming from Gunnar Nyberg.

  He took a step forward.

  ‘Come on, help an old man out. I’m Swedish fourteen generations back. My forefathers ate raw eel together with Erik XI. Are any of you Reine Sandberg?’

  The three skinheads still standing glanced at one another. They put down their baseball bats and the biggest of them said: ‘I am. What d’you want?’

  ‘Were you kicking over Jewish gravestones in Södra Begravningsplatsen yesterday evening?’

  Reine Sandberg grabbed his baseball bat and aimed a fierce blow at Gunnar Nyberg. With a sigh, Nyberg grabbed him. He moved round behind Sandberg and twisted the piece of wood from his hand. Then he pushed him down to the ground so that he was sitting with the baseball bat between his legs, and shoved him over to the concrete wall. He lifted the bat like a lever. Reine Sandberg bellowed.

  ‘Give us a minute, will you?’ Nyberg said to the two remaining skinheads.

  They did. Quickly.

  ‘I’ve tried being nice,’ Gunnar Nyberg said, lifting the bat slightly higher. ‘Let’s try again. Andreas Rasmusson is your friend, correct?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Reine Sandberg.

  ‘Great. The two of you were out drinking and breaking gravestones in the Jewish cemetery last night, correct?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Good. What exactly did you see that put Andreas Rasmusson – eighteen years old – in critical care in the psych ward, while you, Reine Sandberg – twenty-six years old – are swinging a baseball bat at a policeman as though nothing had happened?’

  ‘Fuck all,’ Sandberg groaned. ‘It was dark.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to do it like this? I don’t.’

  And with that, Gunnar Nyberg raised the baseball bat slightly higher once more. He could feel it crunching strangely against one of Sandberg’s testicles.

  ‘OK, OK, OK, take that off and I’ll tell you. Take it away!’

  Given that his voice had gone up an octave or so, it was probably time. Nyberg pulled the bat away from the skinhead’s genitals. Sandberg sank down with his hands to his crotch.

  ‘So,’ said Nyberg. ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘It was fucking horrible. They came gliding out of the shadows, these thin, dark figures. Like they were coming right out of the trees or something. All in black with, like, tights covering their bodies and black hoods on, like executioners. They hung that guy up in the tree. Upside down. That’s when we ran off. We fucking ran. We lost Andreas somewhere. He must’ve been running around the cemetery, totally lost. After seeing that, ’course he flipped.’

  ‘How many of them were there?’

  ‘Dunno. It felt like they were everywhere. Just gliding. A … presence.’

  ‘A presence?’

  ‘I don’t know how to describe it. Yeah, for fuck’s sake, a presence. At least five of them anyway, I think.’

  ‘What do you mean by thin?’

  ‘The opposite of you, you pig.’

  Gunnar Nyberg looked down at his newly slimmed body with slight surprise. Could he really still be described as fat?

  ‘So they were little? Little people?’

  ‘No, not really. I don’t know. Thin. Light. Like they’d just detached from the trees. Strips of bark.’

  ‘Strips of bark?’

  ‘Don’t just repeat what I’ve just said. For fuck’s sake, we ran off as fast as we could. We thought they’d come after us, like mythological beings or whatever.’

  ‘Mythological beings?’

  ‘You’re doing it again,’ Reine Sandberg said, annoyed.

  Gunner Nyberg was thinking. Mythological beings? Wasn’t there someone he should contact about this – in the absence of Arto? Yes, there was.

  ‘I’ve got to make a call,’ said Nyberg. ‘Then I’m going to arrest you and take you down to the station for vandalising Jewish gravestones. You’re not going to get away with that. Your testimony might just count as an extenuating circumstance, what do I know?’

  And so Gunnar Nyberg made a call.

  ‘Paul Hjelm’ came the answer at the other end.

  ‘Paul, it’s Gunnar.’

  ‘Hey, Gunnar. You busy bothering skinheads?’

  ‘You could say that. I’ve just been talking to one who said they saw some kind of “gliding presence” among the gravestones. At least five thin figures dressed in black, he called them “mythological beings”. Thought it might be something for you, my old bookworm.’

  ‘Don’t say anything like that to your “date” tonight.’

  ‘It’s not a “date”. And how do you know about it, anyway?’

  ‘The whole station knows. We’ll be sitting at the table next to you with tape recorders.’

  Gunnar Nyberg cursed the invention of the mobile phone and hung up. Then he phoned Sara Svenhagen back. She had been waiting long enough.

  ‘One call, you said,’ Reine Sandberg shouted from behind him.

  Paul Hjelm was in his office at the police station, increasingly convinced that he had haemorrhoids. It seemed like all he did was sit these days.

  The tones of Miles Davis were streaming uninterruptedly across the room. It had become more a fixation than a pleasure by this point. A need.

  He spent a moment looking down at his mobile phone, as though it had been producing entirely unfamiliar sound waves. Something was starting to come together. The edges of a wound slowly growing closer.

  He had spent the day going through the list of calls to and from the four rooms in the Norrboda Motell. After several hours’ fruitless wo
rk, it had clicked. A phone number appeared, demanding his attention.

  From Monday 24 April onwards, calls had been made to all four phones from a room in Stockholm’s Grand Hôtel, room 305. The calls had been made at three-minute intervals around half four in the afternoon; in other words, this had taken place a week or so before Nikos Voultsos had died and the women had disappeared. A few days later, on Saturday 29 April, the women had also been contacted by the ninja feminist from Odenplan.

  Grand Hôtel. If you were going to do something, you might as well do it properly. He phoned the hotel and spoke to a receptionist.

  ‘Can you tell me who was staying in room 305 from the twenty-fourth of April?’

  The porter was silent. Then he said: ‘Aha.’

  ‘Aha?’

  ‘Apparently he disappeared. I don’t actually remember him myself, but he signed in as Marcel Dumas, French citizen.’

  ‘Disappeared? What does that mean?’

  ‘Sometimes guests leave the hotel without informing us. That’s why we always take their credit card number, as a precaution.’

  ‘Instead of their passport?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So you don’t have his passport?’

  ‘No, but we’ve got his Visa card number.’

  ‘So guests can disappear without any report being made to the police, because you can just take the payment from their card number?’

  ‘That’s right. The police are overburdened enough as it is.’

  ‘True,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘But that means you’re taking the law into your own hands. What if something had happened to him? Imagine he’d been, I don’t know, eaten by wolverines?’

  The porter was silent. Hjelm continued.

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘The fifth of May. He arrived on Sunday the twenty-third of April. We got suspicious on the evening of Thursday the fourth – we hadn’t seen him for twenty-four hours. So when he didn’t show up for a second night in a row, we emptied the room and charged the bill to his account. Twelve nights. The bill came to sixty-three thousand kronor.’

  ‘Sixty-three thousand?!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now I can understand why you didn’t report it.’