Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End: The Story of a Crime

by Leif G. W. Persson

  . . .

  Actually it was he who was the real victim. He would never have dreamed of even defending himself against such a person as Krassner, if he’d only known who he was and what he was working on. On the contrary, he would have treated him to a beer or two, for he’d earned it, considering the job he was working on. He hadn’t had any choice, and exactly like the time before he’d only tried to defend himself.

  Suddenly he’d just stuck the key in the lock and stepped right in, and because Hedberg had been standing on the other side of the door in a narrow coat closet there hadn’t been anywhere to go. And instead of asking him what he was doing there—he was, after all, dressed like an ordinary laborer, so he ought to have thought of that—Krassner had just attacked him and started by trying to head-butt him, and then when he’d dropped him to the floor he’d first tried to knee him and then bite him, and in that situation Hedberg no longer had any choice. He’d been forced to defend himself, and unfortunately he’d happened to break Krassner’s neck along the way. Pure self-defense, and if there was anyone who was a victim in this story it was he. To start with he had of course been duped into it, exploited in order to protect the greatest traitor in Swedish history.

  The rest had been pure routine. He’d thought about throwing him out through the window from the start. For what else could he have done? The guy couldn’t just lie there. But because he still had to photograph his papers, he’d happened to see that introduction that he’d written to his book, and when he’d looked at it it had suddenly struck him that this was a typical suicide note, and then there wasn’t too much left to think about. He’d sorted a suitable pile for that traitor Berg and those other idiots, kept the rest for himself, and seen to it that it all appeared normal. Most of the time had gone to changing the ribbon in the typewriter and typing a new, similar suicide note, which he’d then put in his pocket and taken with him. He’d put the real one in the typewriter, and he’d seen that there were prints on it when he held it up against the lamp. Thank the devil for that, by the way. It was of course actually Krassner who had written it.

  Then he’d broken loose the catch on the window, lifted him up, and thrown him out. Rather a grand sight, actually, as he fell straight down, and it was only when he hit the ground that he’d seen the bum who was prowling along the building exterior with his mangy pooch and almost got the whole package right in the face. When he’d pulled in his head so as not to be unnecessarily visible, he’d seen that one shoe had evidently fallen off when he was wriggling the body out through the rather narrow window. It wouldn’t do to have it lying on the floor, so he’d picked it up to throw it out too, and because the bum had just been standing there glaring with his silly little dog he’d made a serious attempt to put it right in his cap. Although this time it wasn’t exactly a quarter, like when the bums were sitting down in the subway begging change for liquor. Unfortunately he’d missed and instead hit the pooch, which had folded up and lain down flat on the ground. And nothing more than that had happened. He’d just packed up, made a final quick check, and left the place. The rest had been a question of maintaining a good face, which wasn’t too difficult since Waltin was the only person he needed to talk to.

  Typical suicide, if anyone were to get the idea of asking him. One of the most typical he’d heard about, actually, with a letter left behind and the whole shebang. Ought to sit like a sports cap on those retarded policemen in Stockholm, thought Hedberg, and then he hadn’t thought about it again.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  And all that remained was the cold of winter

  Stockholm in February

  The Stockholm chief constable had received very positive reactions to his New Year’s greeting in the police department’s newspaper. Many people had contacted him, both inside and outside the corps, not least many women who had been tremendously appreciative. All this warmth coming his way had strengthened him in his conviction that perhaps it was high time that he realized yet another of his visions.

  If you disregarded his literary activities—for there it was more a matter of an inner calling—the chief constable had two great interests in life: physical training and police problem-solving, or detective work, as it was usually more popularly called. Every year he spent hundreds of hours on jogging tracks and ski trails, and it was during one of these exercise rounds that he’d gotten the extraordinary idea of creating an internal training course in qualified police problem-solving. Obviously nothing for the hoi polloi, but an exclusive forum for the most promising and most qualified of his many coworkers. The actual training operation, lectures, and seminars that he saw before him, he intended to run himself. The lack of qualified forces from other quarters was unfortunately apparent and moreover was one of the reasons that he had developed his thoughts in this area.

  He had devoted a great deal of his time to thinking about what he should call the operation. This business of sending the right signals was not only important but often completely decisive. Since it was quite clear that the great deficiency in all investigations of serious crimes was that the intellectual analytical work was neglected in favor of running around out in the so-called field, knocking on doors and talking to witnesses and family members and a lot of other peculiar, time-consuming activities, he’d first thought about christening his lecture series “The Armchair Detective,” but because so few of his coworkers understood English he had dropped that idea early on.

  It was then that he had his flash of genius: “The Scientific Detective”! At the first seminar he planned to take up the new systematic arrangement of police clues that he’d developed during all the hours he’d spent on the jogging trails out at the police academy in Ulriksdal to which he’d transferred his regular fitness training. A good system of classification as a foundation; that was the solid ground that must be laid before the purely analytical work could begin, and managed correctly, there wasn’t a crime, however difficult it might appear, that couldn’t be solved by correct intellectual operations. You wouldn’t need to leave the meeting room where you were sitting at all other than to eat, go to the toilet, stretch your legs, and whatever else was necessary in a physical sense, but obviously had nothing to do with the work itself.

  He had invited only ten participants to the first seminar, “A Systematic Classification of Police Clues.” Kudo and Bülling, of course; his own Deputy Chief Inspector Grevlinge, who perhaps wasn’t exactly God’s gift to the police academy, but a very industrious and loyal force; an experienced and skillful technician by the name of Wiijnbladh, whom he’d never met—it was the head of the tech squad who’d given him the tip—as well as a few other officers. In addition there were a few external talents, for as always in an intellectual, analytic context it was imperative that you got new, fresh input from outside. It was his best friend, who was now an executive in state-owned industry but who had earlier had a long history as a consultant to the department, who had promised to ask a good friend of his, a former diplomat who had a very high position in the foreign ministry and solid experience of his own in police investigation. And this person had in turn contacted one of his acquaintances, a press spokesman with the National Police Board who also brought great personal experience of “forceful exertions in manly connections and environments,” as the former ambassador summarized it in the very friendly letter that he’d written to the chief constable to thank him for the invitation to the seminar.

  After he’d welcomed the participants he started with a little lecture on historical scientific detectives both in literature and in so-called real life, and he’d brought in Holmes, Bertillon, and Locard, and his own great predecessor in the subject, Georg Liljensparre. Only after that had he gotten onto the subject of his own system of classification.

  “You must always have a main track,” the chief constable began. “By main track I mean the clue that in the light of earlier empirical experience of similar criminal actions is in statistical terms the most probable.”

  No one had had
any objections, and most of them had diligently taken notes.

  “As far as the next most likely alternative is concerned,” the chief constable continued, “I have chosen to characterize it as the alternative main track. This has among other things the advantage,” he added, “that if new information should present itself that alters the original probabilities of various alternatives, then it’s simple enough to make an alternative main track the main track and vice versa. Any questions?”

  “What do we do about the broad unprejudiced effort?” wondered one of those invited, whose name he’d forgotten. He had to ask Grevlinge afterward.

  “On that point there is no reason for concern,” the chief constable, who had thought of everything, reassured him. “At the next level, the third level below the main track and the alternative main tracks, we have thus a greater or lesser number of so-called secondary tracks, and the great advantage with that is that we are free to have as many secondary tracks as might need to be mobilized based on the particular case.”

  The congregation had pondered this obvious point in deep silence.

  “Imagine a pyramid, a logically constructed pyramid,” said the chief constable. “Moving from bottom to top we have secondary tracks, alternative main tracks, and main tracks, and obviously we work in the opposite direction from top to bottom, digging down intellectually, so to speak.”

  “An excellent ground rule in all analytical work,” agreed the retired diplomat.

  “Exactly,” assisted Kudo, who realized that it was high time to say something if he wasn’t going to be run past by a bunch of civilians.

  Strange characters, by the way. If it hadn’t been an impossible thought he himself would have guessed that all three were homos. That character in the leather jacket who was some sort of spokesman at the National Police Board was hardly the type you’d want to run into in a dark alley. Especially not in Skeppar Karls gränd, for wasn’t it there that they had their little society? thought Kudo, who had a history with the Stockholm Police Department’s old vice squad.

  “Agent Bülling and I already work like that,” added Kudo.

  “Always from the top down,” mumbled Bülling, carefully pulling his foot in because there was clearly someone who was stepping on his toes the whole time.

  “Excellent, excellent,” praised the chief constable, who thought it was now high time that he unveiled one of his analytical innovations. “Gentlemen, if I say ‘the wrong track,’ what do you think of?”

  “Well,” said Grevlinge. “That’s the kind of thing that crooks get up on the dupe front. To dupe you and your colleagues, that is.” Grevlinge looked around with a certain hesitation, since it was a while since he himself had been involved.

  I must do something about Grevlinge, thought the chief constable. Send him to a course or something.

  “In a traditional sense, yes,” said the chief constable. “But if I say ‘police wrong track,’ what do you think of then?”

  Nothing, judging by the empty faces looking back at him.

  “An innovation,” the chief constable explained with a certain pride. “Everyone around this table has surely at some point landed in a situation where you want to confuse your opponent, lead him astray, deceive him, quite simply. Thence also the police wrong track or simply the wrong track, as I myself prefer to call it since it’s we in the police who in this connection have both the initiative and the advantage of interpretation.”

  “Obviously,” agreed Kudo. “If you lose the initiative you’re lost.”

  “For the same reasons I would like to propose a change of terminology, namely that from now on we reserve the expression ‘wrong track’ for those consciously false clues that we ourselves choose to set out, while the earlier ‘wrong track’—that is, what the crooks have set out—will be called ‘false tracks’ from now on. In addition this gives the right signals,” the chief constable underscored with a certain emphasis. “The crooks set out false tracks while we ourselves set out wrong tracks.”

  “I have a suggestion,” said his best friend.

  “I’m all ears,” said the chief constable, because his best friend was a highly talented man.

  “I was thinking about suggesting that we complement your otherwise extraordinary analytic model with something I myself would like to call ‘dead-end track,’ ” said his best friend.

  Dead-end track, thought the chief constable, feeling the intellectual excitement growing in his head like the bubbles in a newly opened bottle of soda pop. Crystal clear but at the same time stimulating.

  “Would you mind developing that?” he said.

  This his best friend had done with both joy and all the brainpower of which he was capable. From his own activity in state-owned industry—it was there he’d gotten the idea—he had discovered that sometimes you were compelled to have a workforce in reserve in order to be able to meet what was new and unexpected or simply the strain of additional demand in general. So that these people wouldn’t have to sit around dawdling in the meantime, or even worse get up to something, he created a reserve of duties of a purely make-work nature. A kind of completely harmless nonwork that at the same time had all the outward characteristics of work.

  “The advantage with a dead-end track is that it doesn’t lead anywhere,” summarized his best friend. “At the same time it looks exactly like an ordinary clue,” he added.

  “What do you mean, exactly?” said the chief constable slyly. “If you could expand that somewhat in the police context, I mean.”

  “Imagine that you have a large surveillance force where you can’t keep everyone occupied but at the same time you want to have a reasonable reserve just in case,” said his best friend. “Drive them out onto a dead-end track until you need them.”

  Ingenious, thought the chief constable. His best friend hadn’t become his best friend by chance.

  “It would be excellent if you could write this down for the next time we meet,” said the chief constable, nodding with genuine warmth. “Yes, gentlemen. Should we perhaps be thinking about moving along? Any concluding questions?”

  There was only one who had raised his hand. He hadn’t said anything the entire time. A skinny little character, the one who came from the tech squad, and whose name he hadn’t even needed to learn since he was here for the first and the last time.

  “My name is Wiijnbladh,” said Wiijnbladh. “I work at tech and I have a small question.”

  Get to the point sometime, thought the chief constable sourly and contented himself with nodding. The fellow looks like a sparrow, he thought. How he got into the academy is a pure mystery.

  “What do we do about the ordinary clues?”

  What the hell is he saying? thought the chief constable. Ordinary clues?

  “Ordinary clues?”

  “Yes, fingerprints and bloodstains and that sort of thing,” Wiijnbladh clarified.

  “I see, those,” said the chief constable. “Those I was thinking about coming back to in another context.”

  The sparrow was content to nod, which was a good thing for him since there were always vacant positions at the parking bureau out in Västberga, and instead the chief constable rounded off their meeting with a few well-chosen words.

  “To quote the greatest detective that ever lived …” said the chief constable. “To quote the greatest of all detectives,” he amended, for on closer thought he of course hadn’t lived in a formal sense but rather only in a novel or two.…

  “When we have ruled out everything that is obvious or merely believable and only the unbelievable remains … then, gentlemen … then nonetheless it’s that which is the truth, however unbelievable that might seem,” said the chief constable, nodding solemnly.

  That man has The Gift, thought Kudo.

  . . .

  The special adviser didn’t go to Forselius’s funeral, but when all the others had left and before the cemetery workers had filled in the family grave where he would rest, he took the opportunity to lowe
r a final greeting to him: an ordinary plastic bag with a couple of bottles of Frapin 1900 plus a copy of his own old dissertation on stochastic processes and harmonic functions. Then he drove back to Rosenbad, where there was a great deal to tackle, and from now on he would be forced to do it himself. What do I do about Krassner? he thought. After he’d spoken with the minister of justice he understood that the message to Berg had been delivered, and he hoped he would get a period of peace and quiet. Hopefully he wouldn’t need to think about it at all.

  He’d gone through a few economic analyses that he’d gotten from the military, and if he were to believe them the Russian bear was in the process of falling to its knees. The economy wasn’t up to it, quite simply, and sooner or later something would happen. But what would happen? he thought. And when?

  His boss didn’t appear to be very cheerful either, and within the party there was a great deal of talk in more or less closed circles about the prime minister’s falling approval ratings and how that would influence the party’s possibilities in the next election. At the same time a palace revolution didn’t appear particularly likely. Social democrats didn’t get involved in that kind of thing, but it wasn’t good, and sooner or later something would have to be done. The well-being of the individual was secondary to the well-being of the party, he thought, and for a moment—it must have been Krassner who flickered past in his awareness—he was a hair’s breadth away from starting to think along the forbidden lines that solved the majority of both his own and the party’s problems. Stop, he thought, for such things don’t happen here. They were still living in Sweden, after all.

  . . .

  At the weekly meeting Berg confirmed that the ongoing survey of the extreme right-wing elements within the police had been put on ice for the time being, but given the situation he chose not to even comment on it. Now it was the doctrine of least possible disturbance that prevailed, and in that connection an abandoned survey of a number of unsuitable police officers was a low price for a little peace and quiet. After the meeting he took Berg aside—the minister was of course the way he was and this time he wanted to make certain that the message had really gone out—and saw to it that the most recent intentions regarding the future of the secret police really had been made clear enough. But Berg never ceased to amaze him. He appeared almost absentminded and mostly nodded in agreement regardless of what he said.