by Arne Dahl
More silence.
‘Anyway, please can I have the Visa card number?’
‘I can’t just give that out.’
‘I’m a policeman, for God’s sake.’
‘How do I know that? Honestly: careless handling of card numbers will be the downfall of civilisation. We’re told to be extremely careful with them.’
‘OK,’ said Paul Hjelm, thinking about that particular kind of Armageddon; maybe it wasn’t so crazy. There was already a huge volume of account numbers from Visa and American Express floating around on the Internet, available for general use. He came up with a quick solution.
‘I’ll give you a fax number. You can check with the directory listing, make sure that it’s a police number. Will that do?’
The porter thought for a moment. Then he said: ‘That’ll do.’
Paul Hjelm gave him the fax number and continued: ‘What happened to the guest’s things?’
‘We packed them up in his bag and put them into storage.’
‘Storage where?’
‘We’ve got a storeroom for stuff people leave behind. If no one gets in touch within a few months, we give it away to charity.’
‘What did he leave?’
‘I don’t know, I wasn’t the one dealing with it.’
‘And this storeroom is in the hotel?’
‘In the basement, yeah.’
‘Someone will be over to pick up his bag today.’
‘Great.’
‘Though not for charity,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘I’m going to send you a JPEG of a face. I want you to show it to all the staff you can think of, right away, to see whether it’s a picture of the guest who disappeared from room 305. What’s your name?’
‘Anders Graaf.’
‘Fitting,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘Email address?’
He was given the address and ended the call with the words:
‘If you send that fax right away, I’ll send the picture right away too.’
Anders Graaf was clearly good at his job, because the fax whirred into life only a minute or two later. During those two minutes, Paul Hjelm had time to send Nikos Voultsos’s photo and to think about the increasing risks of the modern digital society. Ultimately, Graaf had been right, but he had also been inconsistent. Paul Hjelm hadn’t really needed to be a policeman. Plenty of information had been handed out with no qualms, practically everything but the card number. That was because it related to the most important thing in the world: money. They had neglected to report a missing person to the police in order to be able to charge the sixty-three thousand kronor to the man’s account, but they hadn’t wanted to give his account number to the police.
There were some interesting conclusions to consider there.
The fax came in; the card number was in Paul Hjelm’s hand. He phoned the Swedish arm of Visa and was told someone would get back to him with information about the account holder.
He returned to his long list of telephone numbers. After an eventless thirty minutes, the phone rang. He answered.
‘Hello, is that Detective Inspector Hjelm?’ a woman’s voice asked.
‘The one and only,’ Hjelm replied modestly.
‘This is Mia Bengtsson. I work at the Grand Hôtel.’
‘Hi,’ Hjelm said expectantly.
‘Hi. Anders showed me the picture of that man. It’s him.’
Paul Hjelm felt a great inner peace. He waited for her to continue.
‘He groped me a couple of times when I was delivering room service. He was at it down in the bar, too. And in the French Dining Room as well.’
‘The guest from room 305, between the twenty-third of April and the fifth of May?’
‘Exactly. Rich drug addict. Had cocaine around his nostrils like some kind of rock star.’
‘Don’t hold back. He’s dead, after all.’
‘Oh! I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead—’
‘That’s when you can really let rip,’ Paul Hjelm replied to loosen her vocal cords.
‘Yeah, OK. I’d say he was an unusually nasty type, simple as that. We do sometimes see them at the Grand. Drug people have a lot of money, and always get room service; it’s the worst – you’re alone with them in their rooms. I tried speaking French but he didn’t understand a word, he just poked my breasts and smiled horribly. He wasn’t even French.’
‘No,’ said Paul Hjelm, ‘he was no Frenchman.’
‘Plenty of money though. Was throwing it around. I saw him rip a thousand-krona note to shreds. Just to show he was cool. There were a few women up in his room, too. I’m pretty sure they were prostitutes.’
‘Were you the one who realised he was missing?’
‘I was the one who sent a message to management saying that the room hadn’t been touched, anyway. I don’t know what happened after that. Only that he was gone when I got there on the seventh. His room had been cleaned and emptied.’
‘Anything you want to add?’
‘Not really. But I can’t claim I’m really sad about him being dead.’
‘Thanks a lot for your help, Mia. Bye.’
‘Bye.’
Paul Hjelm sat still. The link between Nikos Voultsos and Slagsta had been established. It was now a fact. As though the Ghiottone hadn’t been enough. Paul Hjelm laughed. He had done the same when Arto Söderstedt phoned from Tuscany to tell him about wolverines and ghiottoni.
A picture of Nikos Voultsos’s murderer was starting to emerge and it was multifaceted.
Hunting down a man with links to a crime syndicate like the Ghiottone and then throwing him to the wolverines in Skansen was tremendously subtle. A clear, direct message to Milan. Perhaps they hadn’t expected his body to supply the wolverines with such a high level of drugs that they essentially obliterated him. The police had been very close to not being able to identify him at all. That was the first aspect of it: the message to Milan.
The second was the wire, which seemed to be more at home in the scientist Leonard Sheinkman’s cerebral cortex. That said, Sheinkman’s link to the whole thing was still unclear. There were German diaries waiting to be read. Aspect two, then: the metal wire in the brain. Was that a message too? Did the two belong together? Was that another message for Milan?
A third aspect was that which had been immediately apparent in the Odenplan metro station, and certainly in both Skansen and Södra Begravningsplatsen: enormous cruelty and a great deal of skill in the noble art of neutralising someone. They had a female suspect, which was in itself extremely unusual. Professionalism or … hate? Or both? Wasn’t it a case of passionate feelings whichever way you looked at it? That was the impression he had, anyway. It wasn’t just a message that was being sent, it was something more, something deeper.
Then there was the journey to Ukraine. ‘Everyone through OK.’ It was, of course, nothing more than a Slavicist’s interpretation of fairly shaky foundations, but still. If they were to believe the latest information, direct from the mouth of a skinhead, then there was a league involved, not a lone killer. That league had transported at least eight prostitutes across Europe. Would that have been possible if they had kidnapped them and forced them to move using violence? ‘Everyone through OK.’ Didn’t that sound more … considerate? A crime syndicate would have treated the women like objects. Would they have expressed it like that? ‘Everyone through OK.’ It was vague, but it was a hunch he had. They couldn’t afford to let things like that slide. Besides, it was a case of a call being made from woman to woman. ‘Not a bloke as far as the eye could see,’ as old Maja had put it at the cottage in Dalarö. ‘Everyone through OK.’ Aspect four: the female.
And then there was the fifth. That which had already been hinted at by Nikos Voultsos’s mad flight across Djurgården. The blind panic. He had shot wildly, ripped his hands to shreds, thrown his gun away and torn off his gold chain – the very symbol of his dominance. The same panic had sent a group of skinheads running across Skogskyrkogården at breakneck speed. All but one, who had
been left behind in his own private inferno, and ended up in the psych ward. A dark, gliding presence among the gravestones, one which made a seasoned skinhead talk about ‘mythological beings’.
Paul Hjelm sat still. Something was calling to him. Something was starting to come together. The edges of a wound slowly growing closer. All the different languages which had turned up during this case … It was like the Tower of Babel. A God, saying: ‘Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ The richness of European languages. ‘Everyone through OK’ in Ukrainian. ‘Shtayf’ in Yiddish. ‘Ghiottone’ in Italian. ‘Wolverine’ in English. And then ‘Epivu’ in …
For God’s sake. It didn’t say ‘Epivu’ at all.
Hjelm searched wildly on the computer. The folder of photographs from the case. The wolverine enclosure. There: the letters in the earth. ‘Epivu’. He enlarged the image so that it filled the screen. Then he enlarged it further. He stared at the last letter: ‘u’. He enlarged it further. Didn’t it look like there were a couple of commas above and below the ‘u’? Of course.
It wasn’t a ‘u’ at all. It was a ‘upsilon’. Broadly speaking, a ‘y’.
On closer inspection, he saw that the middle letter had no dot above the ‘i’.
Of course, it was Greek.
Nikos Voultsos was thoroughly Greek.
That meant that the ‘p’ wasn’t a ‘p’ after all, but ‘ro’. In other words, an ‘r’. The ‘v’ was no ‘v’ but ‘ny’, or ‘n’.
It wasn’t ‘Epivu’, it was ‘Ερινυ’, pronounced something like ‘Erini’, with the emphasis on the last vowel. And which, in all likelihood, was a word.
Paul Hjelm even thought he recognised it.
He went online and found a Greek dictionary. No hits. Damn it. Then it struck him that there were several different types of Greek. Modern Greek had surprisingly little in common with Old Greek. This had to be Old Greek. Ancient Greek. After some effort, he managed to find an old Greek dictionary on an American website called ‘Perseus’. He searched for ‘Ερινυ’. He found a result.
Erinyes.
He realised why he had recognised it. It was something he had come across during the A-Unit’s very first case. A young man called Gusten Bergström had been convinced that his sister, who had committed suicide following an attempted rape, was being avenged from beyond the grave by ancient goddesses of revenge. By Erinyes.
The Erinyes were antiquity’s most terrifying figures. Known as the Furies, they came from the kingdom of the dead and demanded revenge for past injustices. To restore the balance. And they never gave up.
The Erinyes were female goddesses of revenge.
Nikos Voultsos’s last act in this life had been to write down precisely who was killing him. He wrote it in Old Greek, the language of mythology. The man who had murdered three prostitutes in Piraeus and who had been about to take over a group of prostitutes in Stockholm was convinced that he was being hunted by female goddesses of revenge. Was it simply his conscience finally catching up with him?
Paul Hjelm shuddered. At least five thin, dark figures; a gliding presence among the gravestones in Södra Begravningsplatsen, like mythological beings …
No, he thought. No, this wasn’t just some crime syndicate among others. This was no Eastern European mafia group, selling women like pieces of meat. No, sir.
He phoned Kerstin. It was a reflex.
‘Kerstin Holm,’ she said.
‘Are you in the building?’
‘I’m in my room. Viggo’s here.’
‘Well, what do you know,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘This “Epivu”, it’s the Erinyes, the ancient goddesses of revenge. “Ερινυ”. It’s Old Greek.’
‘Jesus,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘How did you work that out?’
‘Long story. But it’s not some Mafia syndicate.’
‘I never thought it was. You said it yourself: the ninja feminist.’
‘I think you were the one who said that. We just clarified it.’
‘Viggo’s found our phantom pimp. The man who did the deal with the manager of the Norrboda Motell. His name was Finn Johansen, he was Norwegian.’
‘Was?’
‘He committed suicide on the twenty-fourth of April. Shot himself in the head. With a silenced Luger that wasn’t his. The serial number is pretty similar to Nikos Voultsos’s gun. They’re sister guns. From the same line.’
‘What time?’
‘Time?’
‘What time of day on the twenty-fourth of April?’
There was a moment’s silence. Then Viggo Norlander’s not-quite-so-pleasant voice came down the line.
‘What’re you playing at, Freddie Freeloader?’
‘When did he shoot himself?’
‘Never, I’d guess.’
‘Me too.’
‘About one, half past one in the afternoon, apparently. His prostitute girlfriend came home from the day’s shift at about quarter to two and found him lying in a pool of his own blood.’
‘Nikos Voultsos came to Stockholm on the twenty-third of April. At half four on the twenty-fourth, he phoned each of the four rooms in the motel. 224, 225, 226 and 227. They’d lost their pimp, Finn Johansen, only a couple of hours earlier, and to a weapon almost identical to Voultsos’s.’
There was a scratching sound on the line.
‘I hear you,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘It’s Sunday. Sunday the twenty-third. That’s when the unease starts spreading through the four rooms. The girls know they’ve been taken over by another, bigger, and presumably worse gang than Finn Johansen’s. The wolverines. Ghiottoni. A couple of days later, your ninja feminist rings—’
‘She’s not mine. And she’s not a ninja feminist. She’s a goddess of revenge; she’s an Erinye.’
‘Whatever. Somehow, she offers the girls an alternative to the situation they’ve found themselves in; exactly what, we’ve got no idea. A week goes by, Nikos Voultsos cements his position as their new pimp; maybe he gives them a display of his power, probably in combination with some kind of drugged-up, hardcore sex. Maybe he’s also taken over other groups in the same way, we’ll have to check that. Maybe that bus to Lublin really is a bus, maybe it’s full.’
‘Full of – what? Saved whores?’
‘I don’t like that word,’ said Kerstin, ‘but OK. Maybe. While he’s busy carrying out his orders from the Ghiottone, someone is planning his downfall. And carrying it out. They creep up on him somewhere in Djurgården. They probably know that he liked to sit and snort cocaine out there. Then, with precision, they drive him towards the Skansen fence, right by the wolves. They’d probably already clipped a hole in the fence next to it, alongside the wolf enclosure. That’s how they get in while he’s struggling up the fence, over the barbed wire and into the wolves.
‘Then they stand and wait for him at the top of the hill. They see him go crazy, throwing his pistol away and tearing his gold chain off, and they follow him. Then they catch him, bind his legs with a red-and-purple rope, push the metal wire into his brain and lower him to the wolverines. The animals take a first bite, maybe a bit cautiously, but there’s enough cocaine in that bite to drive those greedy little creatures to a massacre. He’d probably already died by that point; he probably died in the same incomprehensible way as Leonard Sheinkman. Of pure pain.
‘Once it’s all over, they pull the rope back up. There’s nothing left. The wolverines have managed to jump high enough to bite off the knot. It doesn’t really matter, so they take the rope and clear off. Then, virtually right away, they phone Slagsta. One of the Ukrainians in room 225, either Galina Stenina or Lina Kostenko, answers. They find out that their tormentor, Nikos Voultsos, is out of the game and that their transport will depart as planned, at four in the morning. When no one is watching. They blissfully talk the night away. They’re free. They’re finally free. No more pimps. No more bad drugs. Never again. New lives. Time to turn over a new leaf.’
He said: ‘But the league stays behind. To murder an old man.’
‘Yeah, that’s the blow. You know what I mean – when everything seems to be making sense and then along comes the disappointment, flooding in and muddying everything else.’
‘I know all too well,’ said Paul Hjelm.
‘Do you know what I’m doing?’ asked Kerstin.
‘You’re wondering about the fate of the girls. Lublin onwards.’
‘Aside from that? Practically?’
‘I haven’t got the faintest idea. Washing your underwear? Pulling burrs from your hair? Cutting your toenails with hedge clippers?’
‘Looking at a growing list.’
Kerstin Holm was in her office, looking at a growing list. Viggo Norlander was sitting right next to her, looking at her as she looked at the growing list. She was a glorious woman. He wondered why he had never realised that before. Him, an expert after several years’ intense interaction with the opposite sex in all of Stockholm’s imaginable and unimaginable singles bars – before suddenly finding himself, at the age of fifty, with a live-in partner and a small baby. And all that had happened as a direct result of being crucified by the Russian-Estonian mafia, on a floor in Tallinn.
It was complicated.
It was probably because little Charlotte was learning to walk that he had regained his eye for the opposite sex. He didn’t quite understand the link, but it was a fact. Fortunately, Astrid kept him busy, meaning that this eye remained theoretical.
The growing list on the screen was simply Kerstin Holm’s inbox. It was growing bigger and bigger until eventually she had received emails from eight different police authorities.
‘Eight,’ she said to the astonished mobile phone.
‘Explain right now,’ the astonished mobile phone exhorted.
‘The big inquiry through Europol and Interpol is starting to bring in results. General appeal for information to all the bigger police authorities in Europe. Something like the three hundred biggest cities on the Continent. I don’t know if the answers are affirmative yet, but eight of these three hundred cities have something to say about our modus operandi.’
