To the Top of the Mountain

by Arne Dahl

  4

  ARTO SÖDERSTEFT HAD decided to stop driving. He didn’t own a car, and drove only rarely on duty. Still, he had now done almost two hundred kilometres behind the wheel on a midsummer’s morning which had defied all adverse weather reports, and as his tired service Volvo left the nourishing plains of Närke county and turned off towards the waste ground beneath Kumla prison, he could no longer deny it.

  Driving was fun.

  Since he was an active member of an association which wanted to drastically reduce traffic in the inner city, especially in Södermalm, and particularly on Bondegatan where he and his large family lived, that admission was made somewhat shamefully.

  He eased off the accelerator, changed down to a lower gear, and turned to the passenger seat on which he was carrying horse feed.

  A hay sack.

  He poked the hay sack. It didn’t move. He poked it a little harder. It came to life, reaching instinctively for its shoulder holster.

  Viggo Norlander woke up.

  A magnificent patch of white baby sick had dried onto the right shoulder of his leather jacket. Arto Söderstedt laughed.

  ‘I’ve had five of them,’ he said in his clear Finland-Swedish accent. ‘Five babies have been sick on my shoulders. And still I never, never looked as wretched as you already do after your very first night.’

  ‘Shut up,’ croaked Viggo Norlander, trying to straighten himself up. Disturbing sounds were coming from his large body.

  It was a strange night he had behind him. A manic-depressive night. Abrupt shifts between utter happiness and utter horror.

  He had spent a night alone with his two-week-old daughter for the very first time.

  It was a strange story. Like a dream. He was fifty years old and had lived the first forty-eight or so years of his life celibate, with the exception of a horribly unsuccessful month-long marriage in his youth, which had made all ensuing interaction with the opposite sex uninteresting. The thought of his own sex hadn’t crossed his mind at all. He had been the dullest conceivable policeman, circumscribed by banal rules for conduct and behaviour.

  Prematurely departed, that was what he thought of the old Viggo Norlander.

  Then he’d had enough. His repressed soul had broken free, and he was off to Estonia on a curious mission which, unfortunately, ended with the mafia nailing him to the floor.

  It had been the best moment of his life.

  One that had changed his life completely.

  He had thrown away all of his boring grey suits, got rid of his paunch and even had a hair transplant. He had updated his wardrobe, finding his own style, and ventured out into Stockholm’s nightlife, where he welcomed even the sleaziest of approaches. He didn’t refuse one single passion-seeking woman his services. Nor, for that matter, a servicing.

  One occasion had been different. Last autumn, right in the middle of the ongoing hunt for the Kentucky Killer, a woman almost exactly his age had crossed his threshold with the clear intention of getting pregnant. Fifteen minutes later, she was back outside on Banérgatan. But when she turned round in the doorway, smiling at him, he really saw on her face that she had been impregnated.

  He was plagued by feverish fantasies about a Nobel Prize-winning son tracking down his old policeman dad in the care home, to thank him for his near-superhuman intellect.

  That wasn’t quite how things had panned out. Instead, nine months later, a woman with a mewling little bundle in her arms appeared at his front door and said: ‘This is your daughter.’

  Viggo Norlander held out his hand and said: ‘Viggo Norlander.’

  The woman held out hers and said: ‘Astrid Olofsson.’

  After which Viggo Norlander said: ‘Come in.’

  ‘Thank you,’ the woman replied.

  And Astrid Olofsson came in, not only into his tired old bachelor flat on the quietest stretch of Banérgatan, but also into his life. And she wasn’t alone. The fourth thing she said was: ‘What should we call her?’

  Strangely enough, Viggo Norlander didn’t doubt for a second that it was true. Instead, he felt an immediate, contented peace. He hadn’t imagined that pregnant smile nine months ago. His strange fantasies about the Nobel Prize-winning son hadn’t been the first sign of dementia. He had become a father. And he had felt it, biologically, like pregnancy from a distance.

  Besides, his little daughter, who he suddenly found himself holding, was so undeniably like him that every possible trace of doubt was removed. The same long, stretched-out face, as though the force of gravity was especially strong just around the forehead. The same lopsided, inward-backward-sloping mug, as Arto Söderstedt had cryptically put it.

  ‘Charlotte’ was the third thing that Viggo Norlander said.

  He had no idea where it had come from.

  This had been only a couple of weeks ago. They had been together every day since. He enjoyed Astrid’s unexpected company, and found himself immediately dependent, like an addict, on the little person with the inward-backward-sloping mug.

  Viggo Norlander, the man who had scarcely seen a photo of a baby before.

  And now, for the first time, he had spent a night alone with Charlotte. A night somewhere between hope and despair. As a parting gift, she had vomited robustly onto the shoulder of his leather jacket. Since he hadn’t slept a wink the entire night, he had no energy to do anything about it, and went straight out onto Banérgatan and into the service Volvo which he had, despite repeated reprimands, refused to hand back. He sat down in the passenger seat, showing no surprise at seeing Artö Söderstedt behind the wheel, and was immediately transformed into a hay sack with bird shit on it. He was asleep before they even started talking.

  ‘Something’s happened at Kumla,’ said Söderstedt. ‘We’re heading there as national CID officers. It’s been a while. What was it that you rang in, by the way? Looking after a sick child, was it? Charlotte’s not ill, is she?’

  ‘No, me.’

  ‘It’s best that I drive, then. Not that I really drive.’

  ‘Night.’

  And so Arto Söderstedt drove. Really drove. Since Viggo Norlander had transformed into a hay sack, he also had to manage the map reading himself. He kept one of his out-of-practice hands on the wheel and held the map in the other. It wasn’t exactly easy. He looked up Kumla in the index of his road atlas, Motormännens vägatlas över Sverige, and found the answer ‘44 8E 2’. Given that he was stuck in a disorderly queue at the turn-off to the main road out of Stockholm, that impenetrable combination of letters and numbers felt particularly cruel. When he finally started to understand how the system worked, he realised that he had looked up a little church village in Östergötland province. This reminded him vaguely of an earlier time when something similar had happened, and he realised that it must be the wrong Kumla and turned back to the index. To stop the atlas from closing as soon as he turned a page, he had to press the open book against the wheel with his left thigh, resulting in some difficulties steering. There were five further Kumlas. He sighed gently and went through them, one by one. Eventually, he found the right one. ‘61 10F 1’. He needed to take the E18 via Västerås and Örebro, he realised, just as he passed the turn-off. He jolted onwards on the northbound E4, thinking positively. It was lucky that Viggo was asleep. See what luck he was having! He turned off by Kista, not losing too much time. No one had noticed a thing. He felt great. Nothing was as uplifting as discreetly correcting an embarrassment. One consequence of this cheerful mood meant that, as he finally pulled up to the security barrier outside Kumla prison, also known as the Kumla Bunker, even driving seemed fun.

  ‘Good morning,’ said the guard.

  Don’t say shut up, Söderstedt thought to himself.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Viggo Norlander.

  The guard seemed more surprised than angry. He checked their IDs, confused.

  ‘Local CID, Stockholm? We’ve got our own CID.’

  ‘We’re national CID,’ said Söderstedt. ‘On loan to local. It’s
about an explosion,’ he added.

  The guard made a few phone calls and got confirmation. The gates slid open.

  ‘You can’t say shut up to everyone who talks to you,’ said Söderstedt, releasing the clutch with pleasure. ‘It’s an untenable life strategy.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Viggo Norlander.

  They parked the car in a carefully marked-out space, passed through a series of security checks and entered the Kumla Bunker. They wandered along corridors which would remain bluish-grey no matter what colour they were painted, and were shown into the prison governor’s office. He was sitting in a leather swivel chair behind a highly polished, empty desk, and looked like male prison governors tend to. A special combination of civil servant, social worker and army officer.

  It was 10.22 on Thursday 24 June, the day before Midsummer’s Eve.

  At this point, they still thought that they would be able to celebrate it.

  The prison governor stood up to greet them.

  ‘How much do you know?’ he asked laconically.

  ‘Not much,’ Söderstedt replied, equally laconically. ‘Just that it’s obviously a matter of national concern.’

  ‘It involves class-A prisoners, so it’s automatically a matter of national concern. But we don’t even know if it’s a crime we’re dealing with.’

  ‘Looking after a sick child,’ Norlander thought aloud.

  The prison governor looked at him, surprised, and came to the conclusion that it was Söderstedt he should talk to. So that was what he did.

  ‘A powerful explosive charge went off in one of the cells this morning. The inmate was in the cell at the time, and had to be scraped from the walls afterwards. At present, we have absolutely no idea how it can have happened, what kind of explosive it was, how it was triggered, etc., etc. The inmate in question was Lordan Vukotic, if that rings a bell.’

  Söderstedt thought it over. Norlander didn’t.

  ‘Vaguely,’ said Söderstedt. ‘We brought the file with us but . . . er . . . didn’t have the chance to read it on the way here. Drugs, isn’t it?’

  ‘Serious drug offences and aggravated assault. Eight-year sentence. He’d been in for three. Model inmate. Studying to become a business lawyer, and was going out on his first period of day release soon.’

  ‘Vukotic . . . Part of the group around Nedic?’

  The prison governor nodded gravely.

  ‘Definitely in the group around Rajko Nedic. One of the biggest drug dealers. Not that Vukotic has ever admitted it. Lordan Vukotic has never mentioned Rajko Nedic at all. It’s that kind of loyalty that counts when you get out.’

  ‘Nedic has never done time, has he?’

  ‘Never, and he was just about to get a personal lawyer of his own. Still, that’s not how it turned out. They’re still scraping bits of would-be lawyer off the walls.’

  ‘What happened? Was anyone else hurt?’

  ‘The precise nature of the damage leads us to suspect foul play. A perfectly measured charge. It completely destroyed Vukotic’s cell, but nothing else. The cells next door are fine. An old friend of yours is in one of them, by the way. An old friend of the A-Unit.’

  ‘The A-Unit doesn’t exist any more,’ said Norlander morosely.

  ‘It did then. You were bloody good, as I understand it. The best. Though I never understood what happened with that Kentucky Killer.’

  ‘Who does?’ said Söderstedt apathetically. ‘An old friend?’

  ‘Göran Andersson. Another model inmate.’

  Neither Söderstedt nor Norlander could avoid a short laugh. The crime landscape of the past . . .

  ‘Is he still alive?’ asked Norlander.

  No one uttered another word. Instead, they followed the prison governor out into the corridor, and were escorted to various areas of the Kumla Bunker by a couple of burly guards, noticing the walls changing colour. They grew successively greyer. Eventually, they went through the very last, almost spectacular security check, and found themselves in the inner sanctum. There were no inmates in sight. The long, concrete corridor was closed off, and an acrid smell of burnt rubber, plastic and meat was coming from the only place where life and movement could be seen. Forensics were running in and out of the doorway. The enormous door was wide open and seemed to be completely intact. Jet black, but intact. A fat civilian policeman was leaning against the wall, smoking a badly rolled cigarette. He was talking in a drawling voice to a well-dressed, fit-looking man who immediately registered on Söderstedt’s Security Service radar.

  The prison governor stopped and formally introduced them. Manly handshakes were exchanged.

  ‘Arto Söderstedt and Viggo Norlander from national CID. Bernt Nilsson from the Security Service. And Lars Viksjö from our own Närke CID.’

  ‘First on the scene,’ the fat man said.

  ‘What’ve we got?’ asked Söderstedt, glancing in through the doorway. The devastation was complete. The entire room was black, and everything within was twisted beyond recognition. A macabre deep-sea aquarium. That enormous sea urchin might have been a bed, that sculpturesque coral a TV. Maybe those algae formations on the wall were actually the remains of a person. The forensics team were literally scraping Lordan Vukotic from the walls, packing the remains into small, well-labelled plastic bags. These were then being placed into a blue plastic box marked with the droll label ‘Pathologist puzzle’. Söderstedt had a feeling that Qvardfordt, the forensic examiner, was behind this black humour; it was Qvardfordt who would be fitting all of the pieces together, in any case. Nowhere among the bags and boxes were any labels marked ‘Explosive’ or ‘Detonation mechanism’.

  ‘Amazingly little,’ Bernt Nilsson from the Security Service eventually said. ‘We can’t even establish the most basic of facts straight off. Normally you’d know what kind of explosive had been used almost immediately, but the technicians are at a loss.’

  Söderstedt prodded at an annoying, bright red patch of sunburnt skin on his otherwise chalk-white left arm. The result of a hole in his shirt. He didn’t cope especially well in the sun.

  He turned to a feverishly working technician who was apparently at a loss.

  ‘No news?’

  ‘Nope, nada,’ the technician said, continuing to scrape the wall.

  Söderstedt turned ostentatiously to the flabby Lars Viksjö from Närke CID.

  ‘Do you have a sequence of events?’

  Viksjö leafed through his little notebook.

  ‘Woken up half six, breakfast at seven. Work duty for everyone who isn’t studying from seven thirty. Vukotic was studying to become a business lawyer, so he was in his cell rather than in the workshop. We’ve got a statement saying that he “skipped” breakfast, so presumably he hadn’t left his cell at all. We haven’t got a clear picture of what this “skipped” breakfast means.’

  The prison governor looked anxious.

  ‘We don’t count people in to breakfast,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘Who was it that said he “skipped” breakfast?’ Söderstedt asked.

  Viksjö flipped frantically through his notebook.

  ‘A guard,’ he eventually said. ‘Erik Svensson.’

  ‘OK. Go on.’

  ‘The explosion took place at 08.36. Apparently everyone in this section studies, so his neighbours were in their cells too. But it seems that the charge was so precisely measured for his cell that the walls weren’t damaged. The four inmates closest to his cell are being treated for hearing loss in the infirmary, though.’

  ‘Difficult to interview them,’ Norlander chipped in, running his finger over the jet-black wall. The technician closest to him gave him a stern look. The black came off on his fingertips. It felt nauseating. Burnt cell remains – in both senses.

  ‘Could he have been tinkering with his own charge?’ Söderstedt asked, without turning to anyone in particular. ‘Was that why he didn’t turn up to breakfast?’

  ‘I find it hard to believe,’ said the prison governor. ‘Thou
gh that’s just based on my personal knowledge of him.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Vukotic was the type who’s a model of good behaviour while he’s inside for the simple reason that he wants to get out as quickly as possible.’

  ‘And become drug baron Rajko Nedic’s legal expert.’

  ‘Probably, yes. We were under no great illusions about rehabilitating him. Rather business law than aggravated assault, in any case. That’s how we have to look at it.’

  ‘But the arm of the law isn’t always especially long,’ said Söderstadt, repeating Norlander’s blunder. The black stuck to his fingertips like glue. ‘As you know,’ he added, scratching his sunburn with his black, sticky fingers. He sighed deeply and withdrew into himself.

  Viggo Norlander had, however, somewhat unexpectedly recovered and taken command.

  ‘Are any of Rajko Nedic’s other helpers in here? Who did Lordan Vukotic spend time with?’

  ‘No one admits to any contact with Nedic at all,’ said Bernt Nilsson from the Security Service, the crime database in his head. ‘But there are a couple of other Slavs of the same kind here. Zoran Koco, Petar Klovic, Risto Petrovic.’

  ‘So these three people are “a couple of other Slavs of the same kind”,’ Söderstedt said in summary.

  This summary earned him a sharp look from Bernt Nilsson.

  ‘Though you can’t really say that he spent much time with anyone, really,’ the prison governor said. ‘He kept himself to himself.’

  Norlander retook the command.

  ‘What we need are the following. One: an interrogation room. Two: the guards, especially Erik Svensson. Three: to get past the deafening ringing in the four neighbours’ ears. Four: “a couple of other Slavs of the same kind”. And five: constant updates from forensics and the doctors. Are Qvarfordt and Svenhagen in charge?’

  Those present stared at the former hay sack, astounded.

  After a moment, Bernt Nilsson nodded stiffly.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Norlander said formally while he picked the baby sick from his shoulder in paper-thin, white flakes, ‘tomorrow is Midsummer’s Eve and I’m planning to devote it to my newborn daughter, not violent thugs in the Kumla Bunker. So let’s get to work.’