To the Top of the Mountain

by Arne Dahl

  That was where he was lacking.

  He paused his Sisyphean work and bent down towards a little clump. He sighed, feeling the green strands between his fingers.

  Grass or weed?

  He stood up again and swung the lawnmower in an arc around the clump. Since he had retired, he regularly practised the mantra ‘Live and let live’.

  Who was he to decide what was grass and what was a weed?

  None of his colleagues had ever visited him at home. He was known by most as ‘the man without a private life’ and he never let anyone into his world. When he retired, he had relaxed his principles a touch, and actually spent time – even if it was never at his home – with an old colleague, his former boss, Erik Bruun from Huddinge Police. Bruun had also retired early, but following a heart attack rather than out of . . . necessity. They met once every other week at the Kulturhus in Stockholm, drinking coffee and playing chess for a few hours. It was Bruun who, once upon a time, had picked out Paul Hjelm from the Huddinge police force to work in the A-Unit.

  The pensioner’s equally retired wife came out and sat on the porch with a cup of coffee and the morning paper, her hair in curlers. She waved at him. He waved back. Behind her, the waters of Ravalen glittered invitingly in the morning sun.

  Everything was all right, it was just a matter of enjoying life. Fixed monthly outgoings at a minimum. Full supplementary pension. A tangible surplus in their account every month. A piece of land which, after thirty-five years, he had only just begun to find attractive. He would even be able to leave a decent inheritance to both of his adult sons.

  Rowing boat and fishing rod down on the lake. Sauna on the shore. Binoculars hanging from a nail on a tree up at the edge of the forest. Two decent trips abroad per year. A healthy couple, retired early, who could be confident that they could be full of life for twenty years to come.

  Fit as a fiddle, apart from the incontinence.

  But that could be managed. The future was theirs.

  The former boss of the former A-Unit, former Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin had, in other words, every reason to be happy with his life. He had no reason whatsoever to grieve over what had happened at the end of his career. He didn’t regret a thing. Of course there were one or two less successful decisions to look back on in connection with the Kentucky Killer, but there was absolutely no misconduct, nothing which should have forced him into early retirement. Nothing of that calibre at all.

  He had nothing to dwell on.

  There was nothing to dwell on.

  He had no reason whatsoever to dwell on it.

  And so on.

  Day after day.

  He paused in his doubly Sisyphean work. He could hear the crunching of gravel up by the garage. Not another grossly criminal estate agent who wanted to ‘make a fantastic offer’ on the place? He pushed the lawnmower aside with a clang and trudged determinedly up the steep grassy slope.

  The man who stepped out of the shiny new Saab certainly looked like a grossly criminal estate agent. Neat blond hair in a hurricane-proof style that looked confusingly similar to a toupee, artificially bronzed face, toned body, and even a thick gold wrist chain to go with his stylish, summery suit.

  Still, Jan-Olov Hultin’s jaw dropped.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, JO,’ the man panted, as though he had galloped the whole way like an elk and not driven in a luxurious, air-conditioned car, ‘there’s something wrong with your phone. Some old cow was going on about how it’s been disconnected. Haven’t you paid the bill?’

  ‘My name’s not JO,’ said Hultin neutrally. ‘It’s Jan-Olov. And the phone has been disconnected. We don’t need a phone.’

  ‘Connect it again, for God’s sake,’ said the bleach-blond man, who wasn’t a grossly criminal estate agent but Head of Division from the National Police Board, and the Police Commissioner’s right-hand man. His name was Waldemar Mörner, a man with a speciality for legendary blunders.

  Waldemar Mörner’s feet skidded on the gravel, he hopped delicately over the little fence that marked the divide between gravel and grass, and realised that his expensive Italian shoes weren’t non-slip. He lost his footing on the dewy grass and suddenly his feet were pointing straight up in the air in an upside-down pirouette. He rolled unstoppingly and with gathering speed down to the porch, where his body hit the steps with a faint thud and his mobile phone flew out of his pocket, up onto the porch, and straight into Hultin’s wife’s coffee. Mörner got to his feet, bewildered, held out his hand to Hultin’s wife, missed her by over a metre, sidestepped the entire porch, fell over the railing and landed, with a splash, in the waters of Ravalen.

  Then his phone rang. Mrs Hultin fished it out from her coffee and answered: ‘Waldemar Mörner’s phone. Yes, he’ll be here in a minute.’

  No.

  No, that wasn’t what happened.

  That was just what happened in Jan-Olov Hultin’s vindictive mind. But Mörner had actually stumbled when he stepped over the fence onto the grass. He grabbed at Hultin’s strong shoulders, keeping himself upright.

  ‘Oops!’ he said cheerfully, clapping him on the shoulder. ‘Good job there are some mainstays left in the force!’

  ‘That’s exactly what there aren’t,’ said Hultin neutrally.

  He hoped it wasn’t obvious that his heart was pounding. At the same time, he knew he didn’t need to worry about that. No one had ever looked deep into Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin’s soul. It was so well hidden behind all his neutrality that he sometimes wondered if it hadn’t disappeared back there.

  It hadn’t.

  ‘Yes,’ said Waldemar Mörner.

  The magic word.

  ‘Yes,’ he continued, still panting. ‘There are, if you want it. We need you. I’ve talked the NPC into launching again. We’ve got a really nasty mass murder on our hands.’

  The NPC, Hultin thought to himself. Who the hell called the National Police Commissioner, NPC? It sounded like something from an old seventies crime novel. Instead, with emphasis on every syllable, he said: ‘Launching again?’

  ‘Piling it on again,’ explained Mörner. ‘Checking the nets. Pulling out the aces we’ve got up our sleeves. Changing to winter tyres. Reactivating the potential. Taking our secret weapons off safety.’

  Hultin managed to keep up with the flood of metaphors. He replied clinically: ‘The A-Unit?’

  ‘Yup,’ said Mörner, bursting into song with ‘Born to be Wild’.

  It was too much. Hultin stared at him blankly.

  ‘In what shape?’ he managed to ask. Utterly neutrally.

  ‘In good shape,’ said Mörner, giving him a friendly little punch on his upper arm; against all odds, Hultin managed to ignore it. ‘In its good old shape.’

  ‘So its original shape, then?’

  ‘Yep. Who’d dare to upset an old man’s calculations?’

  ‘And everyone agreed?’

  ‘Even Chavez happily agreed to give up command. But only to you. Norlander just wants to spend Midsummer’s Eve with his newborn daughter. And there’s a bit of a question mark around Gunnar Nyberg – it’s been going so well with the paedophiles. But he’s coming to the meeting at ten, too.’

  Newborn daughter, thought Hultin. Those two words didn’t seem to tally with the name Viggo Norlander. He said nothing. Instead, he looked at his watch. Ten past nine. Not much time to make a decision which would change his life.

  ‘I need to talk to my wife,’ he said.

  ‘Go for it,’ said Mörner. ‘But don’t take too long.’

  ‘Can I borrow your mobile as well?’ asked Hultin, taking it and walking down the slope towards the porch.

  He went over to his wife, who listened neutrally – a family trait, apparently – before eventually nodding and putting in a few words. He went into the house to change out of his Hawaiian shirt and too-small shorts into something more respectable, which turned out to be a baggy lumberjacket, a slightly frayed lilac shirt and an ancient pair of g
aberdine trousers. The fact was, they were his old uniform trousers. He also phoned Erik Bruun, who listened patiently but by no means neutrally. It wasn’t his style. When he eventually responded, Hultin imagined he could see the reddish-grey beard bobbing around the ever-present black cigar, which no heart attack in the world would manage to prise from his jaws.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Jan-Olov. This is what you’ve been secretly dreaming about for ten months.’

  ‘Is it?’ Hultin asked sincerely.

  ‘Yes, stop pussyfooting around.’

  ‘So I should forgive and forget?’

  ‘Neither. Ignore. To hell with them. It’s not about them, it’s about you. You’ve got a lot left to give. And you can start playing football with the veterans again. Just think how many of those ageing strikers have missed having a brute like Wooden-Leg Hultin to deal with. You can start splitting people’s eyebrows with your headers again. It’ll be like a rebirth.’

  Hultin’s mouth was watering. He thanked Bruun and hung up.

  He kissed his wife on the forehead; one of her curlers caught on the collar of his lumberjacket. Mörner untangled it for him.

  ‘That doesn’t make a good impression,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve got a holiday to Greece booked for the end of September,’ said Hultin, looking with some surprise at the curler in Mörner’s hand.

  ‘No problem,’ said Mörner, throwing the curler like a champagne glass over his shoulder, opening the Saab’s door in a smooth motion and adding: ‘By then, this little debacle will be dealt with.’

  As Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin stepped into the car, a luminous aura followed him.

  The aura of a policeman.

  14

  FIRST IT WAS French. A long, complicated conversation in French. There was a lot of smiling, a lot of laughter into the phone. The man standing motionless by the closed door, gazing across the large study, thought to himself that even his gestures had become French. He, who spoke two languages at most, had learned to distinguish between languages by the changes in his boss’s body language. Long before he heard that a new conversation had begun, his boss’s gestures had revealed it to him. The movements had taken on a different tempo now, they were slower but more distinct; slightly abrupt, perhaps. It was obviously a conversation in German. After a few sparing, solemn phrases, the speech took a new turn, which he could see because his chest puffed out, his back straightened and his jaw tightened. Since he realised that it was Spanish now being spoken, the man allowed his gaze to drift across the large study. The conversations in Spanish always took time.

  Everyone in their line of business knew about this room. It was here that the big decisions were made, where the large transactions took place. The panoramic window out onto the bay; the large, digital globe on a pedestal next to the L-shaped oak desk; the walls covered in Miró paintings above the high dado rail; the thick Persian rugs on the shiny, mosaic-like parquet floor.

  Everything was well known, legendary.

  The man by the door knew that he shouldn’t have been in this mythical room, that he wouldn’t have even been allowed in if the circumstances hadn’t been so extreme. The lack of staff was getting acute.

  They had known one another for thirty years, came from the same little village in the mountains; they were childhood friends. Still, he had never won the great man’s trust, other than as a friend, as a link to the past. Nonetheless, he accepted his role as a reserve without hesitation, his role as a substitute, as a surrogate. Even that was an honour.

  He called him ‘the great man’. It was natural. But he never said it aloud. Doing so sounded pathetic, corny. But in his mind, his boss was never called anything other than ‘the great man’. There, it was anything but pathetic.

  When the language changed once more, he decided that it was precisely this multilingualism which he admired most of all in his boss – it was there that he was ‘the great man’. This multilingualism was a requirement for his sprawling international business.

  On the other hand, there were parts of the business that he just couldn’t come to terms with. The fact that the great man knew all too well how he felt about these areas was probably the main reason why he had never been part of the inner circle. Before now, when there was no other choice.

  When it was also those parts of the business which had caused the problem.

  The language now being spoken was fairly familiar. The gestures had become cockily natural. As though it was his mother tongue.

  It was Swedish.

  He realised that it was the ‘security consultants’ on the line.

  ‘Yes,’ the great man said from behind the desk, spinning round in the leather chair to look out of the window. ‘I understand. And you have no idea where he is? No. OK. That makes the situation unstable to say the least. Yes, the material may well be on the way and then we’ll have a real disaster on our hands. So in spite of everything, we’ve got to trust his greed. It’s the most reliable thing we’ve got. We’ve got to trust that he’s waiting until we’ve calmed things down. And that means we’ve got to find the briefcase fast. Number-one priority. Yeah, yeah, full throttle. Speak soon.’

  The leather chair span 180 degrees. For the first time, his eyes were on the doorway. When the next exchange began, it was finally directed at the man by the door. And the language was that which had, at one point in time, had the courage to call itself Serbo-Croat.

  ‘Ljubomir,’ said the great man, waving him over. ‘No trace?’

  Ljubomir strode across the large study, meeting the other man’s piercing gaze and shaking his head.

  ‘And the money’s really stuck?’ the great man continued.

  ‘Yes. It was probably a mistake letting Jovan open the bank account. Now that he’s dead, we don’t have either the key or the identification papers. The money’s stuck. Unless we rob the bank.’

  The great man frowned slightly; that didn’t bode well.

  ‘We may be childhood friends, Ljubomir,’ he said softly, ‘but remember that you should never, and I mean never, say what was or wasn’t a mistake. That’s way beyond your authority. You should just arrange everything I ask. That’s your only job.’

  Ljubomir looked down at the desk.

  ‘Have you got it?’ the great man asked.

  Ljubomir nodded and placed a backpack on the desk. He opened the zip and pulled out a two-way radio. The great man contemplated it, and said: ‘Frequency?’

  ‘It’s programmed. It’s ready to go. Just press the button next to the microphone.’

  That gaze again. And then, ice cool: ‘I know how a two-way radio works.’

  The great man sat quietly for a moment, the radio raised. In the few seconds which followed, Ljubomir imagined that he saw the great man’s true essence; it swept across his face like an icy north wind, tightening his features. The man about to speak was someone different. A ruler. A master. The most terrifying adversary you could imagine.

  He pressed the button and changed languages once more. With clear, almost pedagogic emphasis, the great man began, in Swedish.

  ‘This is a message for the person who stole my briefcase. You know that I will find you, and you know what will happen then. To know roughly what will happen requires no more than a minimum amount of imagination. But not even the most well-developed imagination is enough to know exactly. So give the briefcase back now. If you think about it, it’s in everyone’s interests.’

  Then he switched language once more, and repeated the tirade in English. Word for word.

  Ljubomir shuddered.

  He hoped it wasn’t obvious.

  They were in bed again. He was pale, she was dark, and they were finally sleeping.

  After the longest night of their short lives, they had fallen asleep in an embrace, still joined, as one. The morning sun was shining through the lowered blinds, and although it was almost thirty degrees in the tiny flat, neither of them had rolled away from the other. They refused to separate.
>
  But soon it would be necessary.

  It wasn’t what they had planned.

  After they had practically danced over the threshold into the room, he had unpacked the champagne, torn off the foil, loosened the wire around the cork and prepared himself. She had gone into the bathroom and carefully cleaned the briefcase. Not a speck of blood could be left behind when they opened it. She came back out and they kissed briefly before she placed the briefcase on the table beside the champagne glasses. He was ready, holding the cork firmly in his right hand.

  She lifted the lid of the briefcase.

  No bundles of money.

  Not a penny.

  Only a key and a two-way radio, each in an individual holder.

  The champagne cork popped by itself. It smashed the mirror in the hallway. Seven years’ bad luck. As though to finish the job, he threw the bottle after it. The neighbours banged on the ceiling.

  He cried.

  But she thought.

  She was already thinking. It had always been her only defence mechanism.

  She lifted the key from its little holder, turning it over and over. There was a number engraved on it. 401.

  ‘Safe-deposit box,’ she said. ‘Box 401.’

  ‘A safe-deposit box, for fuck’s sake,’ he whined. ‘Where the hell is it, though? Kiruna? Paris? Guatemala?’

  ‘Can you make a copy of it?’ she asked, reaching for paper and a pen and jumping onto the bed.

  His desperation was knocked off course. He could see the purposefulness in her, the thing which had led them there, and it put a stop to his self-destructive streak. Reorientated it. Towards something constructive. Like it had done so many times before.

  ‘You know I can,’ he said honestly.

  ‘Can you do it now?’ she asked, starting to write a list on the piece of paper.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I can.’

  ‘Get going then,’ she said.

  He took the key and went over to the walk-in cupboard where he had set up his workshop. Before he opened the door, he said: ‘What’re you doing?’

  ‘I’m trying to remember all the places he does business. It’s our only chance.’