THE FALLING DETECTIVE
Christoffer Carlsson was born in 1986. The author of several previous novels, he has a PhD in criminology, and is a university lecturer in the subject. The Falling Detective is the sequel to The Invisible Man from Salem, and is the second volume in the Leo Junker series.
To Mela, always
Scribe Publications
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Originally published in Swedish as Den Fallande Detektiven by Piratförlagets 2014
First published in English by Scribe 2016, by agreement with Pontas Literary & Film Agency
Copyright © Christoffer Carlsson 2014
Translation copyright © Michael Gallagher 2016
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.
A CIP record for this title is available from the National Library of Australia
9781925321210 (Australian edition)
9781925228397 (UK edition)
9781925307399 (e-book)
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Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.
Apocalypse Now
It was the winter of the raging storm.
A scientist died, a Dictaphone passed from one hand to another across Stockholm, and it caused trouble wherever it turned up. A demonstration spiralled out of control, and a pair who had once been friends met at the swings where they had played as children.
At the bottom of Lake Mälaren lay a mobile phone, which had nothing to do with what happened, other than that it had been thrown into the water by the perpetrator. In a hospital bed, a man lay dying, and his last words were sweetest sisters and Esther. Whatever that meant. That wouldn’t emerge until it was too late. And all the time the clock was ticking down towards the zero hour, the twenty-first of December.
It was a strange and complicated story, everyone agreed afterwards. But was it really that strange? Perhaps it was actually pretty straightforward, banal even, because that was also the winter when one man betrayed another, and that was probably the beginning of the end.
What happened, as far as we know, was something like this.
I
WHO COMES AROUND
ON A SPECIAL NIGHT?
12/12
Only one thing is certain: this town is scared. It has shown its true colours now, I’m sure of it. You can hear it in the city’s pulse if you get close enough and dare to put your ear to it, if you really listen to it beating. It is tense and nervous, unpredictable — a light bulb that has started flickering, soon to be extinguished for good, but no one is paying attention. No one can see it.
Instead, a lone church bell rings. It’s midnight, and the snow is falling gently and slowly. The cold streetlamps make the flakes glitter silver and become translucent. You can hear pulsating, heavy bass from a nearby club, and someone singing Oh, I wish it could be Christmas every day, and the screech of brakes a bit further away. The driver blasts his horn.
And in the distance: sirens. It’s that kind of night.
One of the alleys off Döbelnsgatan is narrow and cramped. If you stretch out your arms, you can almost touch the worn brickwork on both sides, it’s that narrow. And dark. The facades in the centre of town are high, and it’s been a long time since the sun reached the crumbling tarmac below.
The little alleyway opens out into a large courtyard. Plastic bins full of refuse line the walls. A thin layer of snow has settled on their lids. When you look up, you can see a patch of sky, framed by the walls of the buildings.
A woman in light-blue overalls is carefully unfurling a large, white awning over part of the courtyard. Under the canopy is a man lying on his back. He’s wearing an unbuttoned, thick overcoat, a knitted scarf, dark-grey jeans, and black boots. Four bright, white floodlights illuminate the scene. At his side is a worn-out Fjällräven rucksack, open. Possessions spill from its mouth — a book, a card wallet, a pair of thick socks, a bunch of keys, some cash. He’d been wearing gloves, but had taken them off. They’re sticking out from the pockets of his overcoat.
The man is between thirty and forty years old, dark-haired, and well groomed with a short hairstyle, a few days’ stubble, and square facial features. His eyes are closed, so you can’t tell what colour they are, and that might be just as well, for now.
I wait a little way away from the tent with my hands in my pockets, and stamp my feet; it might look as though I’m impatient, but in fact I’m just cold. High above, in one of the windows overlooking the courtyard, a red Christmas star glows brightly. It’s the size of a car tyre, and behind it a face is just visible. A boy.
‘Has he been there long?’
The woman in the blue overalls, Victoria Mauritzon, is crouched on the ground, about to open her bag. She turns around.
‘Who?’
I want to keep my hands warm, so I leave them in my pockets, and nod towards the window.
‘The boy.’
Mauritzon follows my stare.
‘Oh, right.’ She squints into the falling snow. ‘I don’t know.’
She returns to the task at hand. She picks up a camera, adjusts the lens, and proceeds to take sixty-eight photographs of the deceased and the world around him.
Silent blue lights strike the walls of the building, and in the distance the blue-and-white incident-tape is flapping in the wind. Some passers-by have stopped and are carefully observing the scene, hoping to see something. Every now and then there is the flash of a mobile-phone camera.
Mauritzon has put the camera back in its bag and carefully inserted a digital thermometer into his ear.
‘It’s quite fresh,’ she says.
‘How fresh?’
‘An hour, maybe not even that. I’m less confident than I would normally be. This method just gives a very rough indication, but I haven’t got the other one with me.’
‘How did he die?’
‘No idea.’ She removes the thermometer, and makes a note of the reading on the form. ‘But dead he most certainly is.’
I enter the tent carefully and crouch down next to the rucksack. Mauritzon hands me a pair of latex gloves, and, reluctantly, I take my hands out of my pockets. The gloves make my skin paler; make my fingers look even bonier than they really are.
Warmth spreads along my spine. Nausea is building inside me, and then cold sweats. I hope Mauritzon doesn’t notice.
‘He looks smart,’ she says, glancing at the body. ‘Not exactly the kind of person you’d expect to find in a yard.’
‘Maybe he was meeting someone.’
I pick up the wallet. It’s small, black, and made of leather. Various cards stick out from the little compartments: a credit card, an ID-card, some sort of key card, and a white one, with a curly blue motif and UNIVERSITY OF STOCKHOLM written in the same blue. I pull out the ID-card, and swallow twice to control the nausea.
‘Thomas Markus Heber.’ I compare the picture with his face. ‘It looks like him. Born 1978.’
I make a note of his national ID Number, and I have the strange feeli
ng that I have stolen something from the deceased. Then I put the card back in the wallet and turn to the other items that have spilled out of the rucksack. The bunch of keys reveals nothing more than the fact that the victim didn’t own a car. There are three keys: one to his home, one that isn’t immediately identifiable but in all probability is to his workplace, and a bicycle key. The thick socks are dry, but have been worn; the smell is like putting your nose in a shoe.
The book is The Chalk Circle Man, by Fred Vargas. The dust jacket is a little bit worn, and halfway through the book one of the pages is dog-eared. I open it at that page, and my eyes focus on the sentence at the top.
Can’t think of anything to think.
I wonder about the meaning of the sentence before closing the book, putting it back and standing up. It’s my twelfth day back on duty; the second on nights.
The question is what the fuck I am doing here.
The Violent Crime Unit responsible for the city centre and Norrmalm gets called the Snakepit by other police. Intoxicated people hitting, kicking, stabbing, and shooting each other; junkies and pushers getting found in cellars with holes in their necks; women beating men to death, and men beating women to death; consignments of drugs and weapons changing hands; riots, demos, wild chases, and torched cars. That’s the Snakepit. But now this: a well-dressed middle-aged man dies in a backyard. No one is safe.
Officially, I was out in the cold until the New Year. Before then, active duty was unthinkable, mainly because of what had happened at the end of the summer. It might have been a conversation with the psychologist that changed all that.
My psychologist is the sort who values his clients in monetary terms, and I had long since ceased to be a lucrative investment. The hour-long sessions consisted of me alternating between floods of tears and sitting in despondent silence, smoking cigarettes, despite that not being allowed. The psychologist, for the most part, looked bored, admired his own tanned face in the mirror behind my back, and ran his fingers through his neatly combed hair.
‘How are you getting on with the Serax?’ he asked.
‘Good. I’m trying to cut down.’
His eyes lit up.
‘Good, Leo.’ He wrote something on his piece of paper. ‘Good, that is good. A huge step forward.’
Not long afterwards, the psychologist declared that I no longer needed his help. I went through a ludicrously simple check-up a few days later, and the person examining me saw no reason why I shouldn’t return to serving the law.
That might have been because I didn’t say anything about the nightmares, nor did I mention the sporadic hallucinations. Nothing about the occasional strange impulse to hurl a glass at the wall, smash up a chair, punch someone in the face. For some reason, nobody asked, and even if they had, I wouldn’t have told the truth. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that in the police, it isn’t that hard to lie your way out of trouble.
Internal Affairs was out of the question, bearing in mind what had happened, but I should have at least been allowed to start with some desk job somewhere, maybe on the burglary or sex-crime unit. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of the bureaucracy, where I couldn’t really do any harm.
But no.
I was doomed to the Snakepit again, where I’d once been trained by Levin. The National Police Authority has been throwing money at the area, and that might be why I’m here. Those extra resources, as far as we can tell, don’t help much. The drone of the big city makes people mad, they say, and maddest of all are those at the source of the drone, the heart of the city. Anyone who has ever earned their crust in the Snakepit can tell you that.
I take off the latex gloves. The boy is still standing up there, half hidden by the big, glowing star. He’s six, maybe seven years old, no more, with large eyes and dark, curly hair. I lift my hand in a friendly gesture, and am surprised when the boy, expressionless, does the same.
‘Someone should talk to him.’
‘Who?’ says Mauritzon.
‘The boy.’
‘I’m sure they’ll get around to him eventually.’
Mauritzon is right. It’s late, most of the windows overlooking the yard are in darkness, but, one by one, lights come on as people are woken by my colleagues, who’ve started the door-to-door. I take a Serax from the inside coat pocket, the first one since the start of the shift. It’s small and round, like the ‘o’ on a keyboard.
Seeing it, holding it, makes my mouth water, and I feel the sweats subsiding. I can almost feel it, the sensation of slowly being wrapped in cotton wool and the world reverting to its correct proportions. I hold the tablet in my hand before discreetly returning it to my pocket, and instantly regret not having put it in my mouth.
‘Where’s his phone?’ I ask, and notice that my voice is unnaturally thick.
‘The deceased’s? No idea. Maybe he’s lying on it. I need to roll him over, I’d like to see his back.’
She waves over two uniformed constables. They’re ten years younger than me, and shivering, maybe because of the cold. She gives them latex gloves, and they help to carefully turn the body over so that Mauritzon can study the back and the backs of the legs.
The ground under Thomas Heber’s body is browny-red. The blood has melted the snow and turned it into a purple-brown slush.
‘Strange that there isn’t more blood,’ I say.
‘It’s the cold,’ Mauritzon mumbles, and investigates the back of the wet coat. ‘It makes bodily functions shut down more quickly.’ She frowns. ‘We’ve got something here.’
A marked gash in the back, close to the heart.
‘A knife?’
‘Looks like it.’ She turns to the two uniformed officers. ‘Can we put him back, carefully?’
‘And get Gabriel Birck down here,’ I say.
‘He’s not on duty, is he?’ one of the officers asks.
‘No, not officially.’
‘Well, can’t it wait till tomorrow then?’
I look up from Thomas Heber’s body to the officer standing there. My nausea has returned, and my pulse is increasing. The fear creeps up on me, creatures emerging from the earth and trying to get to me.
‘What do you think?’ I manage. ‘We need to get someone to run the show.’
The officer turns to his colleague.
‘You do it,’ he says.
‘He asked you to do it.’
‘Just do it,’ I hiss, and I feel the walls around us closing in, about to tumble down, about to fall and crush me.
The constables head off, sighing. Mauritzon returns to her examination. In the nearby club, someone’s singing Oh what a laugh it would have been if Daddy had seen Mummy kissing Santa Claus that night, and Mauritzon is humming along to the melody.
Maybe it’s the club and the thought of alcohol that makes the sweats flare up again and flood through me, squeezing out through my pores and making me short of breath. I walk hurriedly away from the crime scene, down the alleyway and out on to Döbelnsgatan, and I don’t know how noticeable it is, but it feels as though I’m stumbling. I collapse, and I’m gasping for air. I can’t breathe.
Everything goes black, and somewhere between the body and the edge of the cordoned-off area I lean against the wall. The bricks are cold and hard, but the wall is the only thing keeping me upright. Then my stomach turns inside out. I bend double. The remains of a half-digested hotdog, bread, and coffee form a foul-smelling mix that splashes onto the snow.
My muscles give in and I fall to my knees, feel the cold seep through my jeans and up my thighs, but it’s a numb feeling, lost in the sweat, the shivering, the hoarse, rasping noise from my throat, and the absolute conviction that this is how my life is going to end.
‘Looks like murder gets to the old hands, too,’ I hear one of the uniformed officers say in the distance.
The photographers’ came
ra flashes fire off. Everything is a thick fog. I keep my eyes open, but they are filled with tears from the throwing up. Everything is murky. My throat is burning, my stomach wracked with cramps.
With one hand against the brick wall and the other fumbling in the inside pocket of my coat, I haul myself up. It’s not the first time this has happened. When did I last have one? Must have been a day or two ago. Is that really all it is? I’m still falling, deeper into myself.
It isn’t the city that’s scared, not Stockholm that is the flickering light bulb, about to give up. It’s me.
The door is cold and heavy, with the name THYRELL emblazoned on the letterbox. I raise a shaky index finger towards the doorbell before I decide to knock instead. There’s something unpredictable about children that makes me nervous.
I am dizzy, but the Serax has started working, and its haze is slowly enveloping me. My legs are still weak, but the cold sweats have evaporated, leaving my skin bristling. As soon as my knuckles make contact with the door, I can hear movement from inside, as though someone is waiting for me. The lock turns with a click, and the door swings gently open.
Behind it is a thin little boy, with sunken eyes and skin so pale that it seems to be translucent at first.
‘I’m ill,’ he says.
‘It’s alright. It’s no problem.’
‘Pneumonia,’ the boy explains slowly, as though the word demanded great exertion.
‘What’s your name?’
‘John. Yours?’
‘John. That’s a good name. My name is Leo, and I’m a policeman. Are your mum and dad home?’
‘Dad’s away.’
Somewhere behind him, a door opens, and out comes a woman about my age, who’s obviously just woken up. Her nightie is adorned with a faded Bob Dylan print.
‘Did you open the door, John?’ She asks and puts her hands on his shoulders. ‘What’s this about?’
‘Something …’ I hesitate. ‘I’m a police officer. Something has happened down in the yard, and I think John might have seen it. I would like to talk to him.’
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