To the Top of the Mountain
Page 13
The very energy source.
Almost on demand, the door opened. Energetically.
As if it’s even possible to open a door energetically, Paul Hjelm thought to himself, watching as Jorge Chavez walked purposefully towards the front the steps. He sat down on the empty row of chairs nearest to Hultin, turned round and waved cheerfully to the others before standing up again and greeting the operative head of the A-Unit more formally.
‘Welcome back, Jan-Olov,’ he said, shaking his boss’s hand. Then he sat down and waited.
Hultin raised his eyebrows briefly, before regaining his wits and getting straight down to business.
‘Fifty minutes ago, Waldemar Mörner pulled up on my driveway in his Saab. I was just about to finish cutting the lawn and take my first dip of the day when he told me what was what. I tried to get up to speed with things in the Saab on the way into town, but I know almost nothing about this damned Sickla Slaughter. But Jorge does, so I’ll hand you over to him right away. There you go.’
Chavez was ready. He climbed up onto the platform and started fastening photographs to the whiteboard using magnets in the shape of sweet little ladybirds.
‘You’ll have to excuse the insects,’ he said. ‘Someone ordered the wrong thing down in the stockroom. Anyway, these are the pictures from the industrial estate in Sickla, down by Södra Hammarby harbour. From every conceivable angle. There’s even a bird’s-eye picture from a helicopter. Here. Five dead in what seems to be a typical underworld showdown. Unusually brutal, I have to say. One of the victims had twenty-four bullets in his body. Here. Another was blown up. His intestines were stuck to the roof of the car. Here.
‘Let’s start from the beginning. This was between two gangs. Gang One: three armed with pistols (1A to 1C on this sketch). Gang Two: six armed with sub-machine guns (2A to 2F). Gang Two attacks Gang One, probably with the aim of stealing a briefcase.
‘This black Mercedes, registered to a car rental place in Örnsköldsvik and hired by a non-existent Anders Bengtsson from Stockholm two weeks ago, pulled up on this side road in the Sickla industrial estate at about two this morning. The three members of Gang One were in the car. A well-placed explosive charge detonated underneath it and killed the man in the back seat. The car kept rolling for a few metres before it stopped. The men in the front seat were injured in the explosion, but not fatally. They were forced out of the car by Gang Two, who’d driven there in a van with new Continental tyres – we don’t know any more about it than that at the moment. In all probability, they were frisked by Gang Two, though obviously not very well, since both men later managed to draw their weapons, killing two and injuring one member of Gang Two.
‘Cartridges, the angle of the shots and the location of the bodies show that six of the nine available weapons were fired. Those not fired were the pistol belonging to the man in the back seat and the sub-machine guns belonging to the dead robbers. None of them had time to shoot before they died; otherwise, they’d definitely have done so. No one present seems to have flinched at the thought of using a weapon.
‘Now look at the sketch. It seems to have played out as follows. One: the car explodes, person 1A is killed. Two: 1B and 1C are forced out of the car and frisked. Three: 1A is relieved, posthumously, of his briefcase, probably by 2A. Four: 1B and 1C take out their weapons. Five: 1B shoots over his shoulder and kills 2B, hitting him right in the eye. Six: 2A runs away towards the nearest shed with the briefcase, maybe because it’s stopping him from using his gun. Seven: 1C shoots 2A in the back and kills him. Eight: 1B shoots and injures 2C. Nine: 1C is shot and killed by five shots from 2D, 2E and 2F. Ten: 1B is shot and injured by six shots from 2C, 2D and 2F. Eleven: 1B is shot and killed at close range by eighteen shots from 2D. Twelve: the briefcase is taken from the pool of blood in front of 2A, and bundled, along with the injured 2C, into the van. Thirteen: the van drives away. 1A, 1B, 1C, 2A and 2B are left behind. The injured one, 2C has AB negative blood. So that means that the people with the briefcase, whoever they are, are the surviving passengers from the van: 2D, 2E and 2F, along with the injured 2C.
‘And now for the interesting part. We’re pretty much in agreement that this is some kind of underworld dispute, right? So our fingerprint recognition software should be going crazy, but that’s not the case. Of the five bodies – we obviously don’t have any other fingerprints – there’s just one who’s got a criminal record. It’s one of the robbers, Gang Two, the one who was shot in the eye. 2B. His name was Sven Joakim Bergwall, and he’s been inside twice – the first time in Tidaholm and the second time in Kumla. A real first-class criminal. Bank robbery, manslaughter, attempted murder, grievous bodily harm and incitement to racial hatred.
‘Incitement to racial hatred?’ asked Hultin, when he finally managed to get a word in edgeways.
‘Organised Nazi,’ said Jorge Chavez, letting his words sink in. ‘Was a member of the White Aryan Resistance, when it existed. Was also a member of the Nordic Reich Party, when it existed. Etc., etc. He was also active on the edges of the Maskeradliga, if you remember it. An armed gang carrying out robberies across the country. Military character. But the other four don’t have records. No one from Gang One. Not 1A, 1B or 1C. Nor, for that matter, 2A.’
‘I’m a bit confused by all these codes,’ Gunnar Nyberg confessed. ‘So 2A was the one who ran away with the briefcase and got shot in the back? The big guy?’
‘Yeah,’ Chavez confirmed. ‘Though you’re more of a big guy, if we’re being accurate. The point of the codes is that we can pinpoint their positions and movements. We’ve got sub-machine-gun bullets with four different firing pin marks. Four sub-machine guns. Plus the two who never fired, but whose guns are still there: 2A, who was shot in the back, and 2B, who was shot in the face.
‘2B was Sven Joakim Bergwall. He was alone on the right-hand side of the car. 2A took the briefcase and then stood in front of the car, from where he ran. 2D and 2E were also standing in front of the car. 2C and 2F were standing to the left, where 2C was shot and injured. 2D and 2F hit both 1B and 1C. What else can we say? Which of them went up to an injured man and put eighteen bullets into him? The group’s crazy man, or the group’s leader? Intuitively, I’d say: yes. The group’s crazy man and its leader. I’d bet the leader is 2D. But we’ve got nothing on him.’
‘What about the explosion?’ said Söderstedt.
‘Well, that’s our lead, other than Sven Joakim Bergwall. A couple of white, middle-aged men had just dragged the whole of the national forensic squad to Närke. Every single forensic technician in service is scraping walls in the Kumla Bunker.’
‘Get to the point,’ said the white, middle-aged Norlander gruffly.
‘It’s the same explosive and the same detonation device,’ said Chavez, letting the information sink in before he continued. ‘Both as yet unidentified, but the same. And it’s obvious that if we put the details of the Kumla explosion together with the details of the Sickla Slaughter, then something not-too-pleasant emerges.’
Söderstedt and Norlander glanced at one another knowingly. Pattern, they thought simultaneously.
When does a pattern start to emerge?
Arto Söderstedt suddenly felt alive. For the first time since he had driven Norlander’s service Volvo to Kumla. It had been driven back by some rank-and-file officers while they took a plane from Örebro in order to make it back in time for 10 a.m.
Suddenly it all made sense.
‘We’d like to deliver a greeting,’ he said. ‘To all of you, but mainly to Paul and Jorge. From a two-year-old called Jorge Paul Andersson, nicknamed Jorjie.’
There was a moment of confusion in the ‘Supreme Command Centre’. Söderstedt smiled covertly. He liked confusing introductions.
‘Göran Andersson’s son,’ he continued, with dramatic precision.
Paul Hjelm and Jorge Chavez exchanged glances for the first time in almost a year. Was the old connection still there? They could read one another like a book, in any case. The
serial killer Göran Andersson had named his son after the policemen who had sent him to prison. It felt peculiar.
Arto Söderstedt continued. ‘Andersson’s eardrums burst in the Kumla explosion. At 08.36 yesterday morning, he was studying art history in his cell, the one next to Lordan Vukotic’s. The night before, he’d seen Vukotic stagger back to his cell with – as the post-mortem jigsaw puzzle later showed – a ruptured spleen, broken shin bone and both shoulders pulled out of joint. The next morning, he was blown up. Not into pieces, but into a bloody mess splattered all over the walls, and maybe by the same man who, about eighteen hours later, blew up the Mercedes down in the Sickla industrial estate. Which means that we were both right and wrong. Four policemen – the two of us, one from Närke CID and another from the Security Service – came to some fantastical conclusions yesterday, but we spent the evening on completely the wrong track. We assumed the following: that Vukotic had been tortured and talked; that that was why he didn’t want to let anyone know he’d been tortured, least of all Nedic’s henchmen in Kumla. Maybe he lay there in his cell all night, trying to put his shoulders back into joint. But why, you might ask, when he was just going to be blown up the next day? Why was he blown up the next day? That was the next question.
‘Our conclusion was that the perpetrator realised his exploits would be discovered and so he got rid of all traces of his crime. So we were searching for inmates with a knowledge of explosives. We spent the night interrogating a whole range of people who had some connection to explosives. I’ve only just realised how wrong we were. If the perpetrator really wanted to “cover up his tracks”, as Göran Andersson put it, then we’re assuming that he hadn’t really understood the consequences of torturing Vukotic. But of course he had. He knew that Vukotic was Rajko Nedic’s right-hand man, that he was untouchable. Closest to what might be Sweden’s most dangerous man. Of course he knew what he was doing when he got Vukotic out of the way. The explosion was hardly a display of regret or the result of some kind of fear of being discovered. It was more like a challenge, a statement. One which said: “Pay attention, you fucking foreigner, we’re coming!” But not just that. It also said: “Pigs, I don’t give a damn if you identify me, you can’t catch me!”’
It was silent in the Supreme Command Centre. Once again, in the blink of an eye, it seemed to have lost the quotation marks around its name. Something unpleasantly – but also attractively – big was emerging.
‘So,’ said Arto Söderstedt, ‘now you see what I’m getting at. Two points. First: the Kumla bomber wasn’t a man rotting away in the clink, full of fear. He was someone leaving Kumla – guns blazing. Second: what we’re looking at is a confrontation between neo-Nazi, professional, maybe even paramilitary attackers on the one hand, and one of Sweden’s leading drug dealers, Rajko Nedic, and his group of war criminals from the former Yugoslavia on the other. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? And maybe that explains why no one from Gang One – not 1A, 1B or 1C – left any identifiable fingerprints behind. They’d been imported directly from . . . well, maybe even from Kosovo. In any case, from the centre of the conflict in the Balkans.’
‘And all three die,’ Jorge Chavez said, breathless. He hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. He looked at Arto Söderstedt, languid, gangly and chalk white in appearance, and throwing out these horrible truths almost in passing.
Söderstedt continued, waving a piece of paper. ‘I’ve got the fax in my hand. It’s from the governor of Kumla. At half eight yesterday morning a prisoner was released from the Kumla Bunker. Six minutes before the explosion. He’d been inside for three years, sentenced to six for grievous bodily harm, but got out halfway through for good behaviour. He’s known on the fringes of racist and Nazi organisations, too. He beat up two Kurdish citizenship campaigners when they were taking part in a demonstration in Solna Centrum three years ago. There were explosives involved too, meant for a Kurdish cultural centre, but nothing could be proved. His name sounds so harmless, Niklas Lindberg. He’s thirty-four and comes from Trollhättan. He trained as an officer in the army, quickly climbed the ranks, went on a few campaigns with the UN in Cyprus – and then joined the French Foreign Legion. Apparently – though this isn’t confirmed – he has good ties with xenophobic organisations around the world. Not least in the US. My guess, if that kind of thing’s allowed, is that Niklas Lindberg is your 2D, Jorge. The leader and the crazy man. The man who fired eighteen shots from close range into an injured person.’
‘Who, in all probability, was a war criminal from the former Yugoslavia,’ Jan-Olov Hultin nodded. ‘It’s beginning to make sense now, even for an old pensioner like me. Jorge, you said that Sven Joakim Bergwall did his last stint in prison in Kumla. Does the time frame overlap with Niklas Lindberg’s?’
‘Lindberg’s name is new to me,’ Chavez confessed immediately, leafing through his papers, ‘but Bergwall was released from Kumla a month ago. So it’s not exactly unlikely that two violence-prone Nazis like these met inside. Bergwall arranged things on the outside, Lindberg the inside. We can look at it like that.’
‘What is it they’re up to?’ Hultin continued. ‘The night before he was released, Niklas Lindberg tortured Lordan Vukotic, but it seems to be better planned than that. The night before. It surely must go further back in time. Six men in a well-planned attack – that surely wasn’t something they decided on eighteen hours before?’
‘I think,’ said Kerstin Holm suddenly, her chorister’s vocal powers composed, ‘that they were double-checking something.’
Again, a certain confusion spread through the concentration of the Supreme Command Centre. And, again, a new voice entered the chorus, altering the tune of the song and disrupting the harmony. All eyes were on her. She held her hand out to Paul Hjelm who, without hesitating, placed the little microphone into it.
She held it up before the A-Unit’s collective eyes.
‘This was taken from the underside of a table in the Kvarnen bar on Tjärhovsgatan yesterday evening. It’s a discreet listening device.’
‘The Kvarnen Killer,’ exclaimed Gunnar Nyberg, who had been sitting in silence for too long and felt excluded.
‘Not at all,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘More like a result of him. During our interrogations with the witnesses from Kvarnen, something completely different emerged. Entire groups of people ran out of the place as soon as the killing had happened; something completely different was taking place in the background of all this everyday violence. Or maybe in the foreground.’
‘Double-check?’ asked Jan-Olov Hultin, in an attempt to bring some clarity to a situation in which it was utterly lacking.
‘Yeah,’ said Kerstin Holm, gathering herself. ‘The actual check, the real check, was taking place in Kvarnen on Wednesday evening. I think that all five bodies were there on Wednesday evening. Though living.’
They stared at her. The room was completely silent.
‘I don’t know when patterns start to emerge,’ she continued, ‘but for me and Paul, they emerged early on. We had nothing at all to go on, really, except what we call a ‘scent’. Something was emerging. We didn’t know what it was, but it was there, in the middle of all the Hammarby fans. To make things a bit clearer: Gang Two were sitting listening to Gang One with this listening device. The penny’s only just dropped.’
‘But Niklas Lindberg didn’t get out until the morning after,’ said Hultin, trying to keep up. He felt rusty – but he could also feel it coming off him in large flakes as he sat at the front of the room. He was home. He was finally home again.
‘That’s true,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘If we follow Söderstedt’s reasoning then these were his men, the ones who picked him up from Kumla afterwards, maybe led by the now-departed Sven Joakim Bergwall. It might also have been Bergwall who was clear-headed enough to leave a man behind on the crime scene, to divert our attention from the gang.’
‘What can you tell us about the unidentified bodies from the Sickla Slaughter, Jorge?’ Paul Hjelm asked.
‘It’s 2A we’re interested in,’ said Hjelm. ‘The big guy who ran off with the briefcase and got shot in the back, the one who doesn’t have a record. Powerful build?’
‘No doubt.’
‘Thin moustache.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Shaved head?’
‘Yeah.’
Paul Hjelm fell silent. He left the rest to Kerstin. She had the notes ready.
‘From what you’ve said, I think he’s a match for a man called Eskil Carlstedt. Salesman from Kungsholmen. We spoke to him yesterday morning and bought his entire story. We let him go without suspecting a thing. So damn careless.’
‘Come on,’ said Hultin, slightly unexpectedly. ‘You had nothing to go on. You were looking for a man who’d crushed someone’s head with a beer glass. You’ve got really bloody far on the little you had. If it’s correct, that is; if it isn’t just a good old Hjelm–Holm flight of fancy.’
‘Five men,’ Holm continued without seeming to have heard him, ‘at a table by the door. “Not skinheads but almost.” “Skinheads who’ve passed the age limit.” They ran off quickly but left Carlstedt behind, since he was the only one without a record. That’s quick thinking. Carlstedt was interviewed briefly in Kvarnen by the night staff, but he identified himself and was told to come to the station the next day for a proper interview. Then he met up with the four who’d run off, and the five of them spent the night working out the best way to divert our attention. Carlstedt has to say that he saw the Kvarnen Killer. Sure enough, it diverts our attention enough to let him go without a fuss, not to his four friends but to the five of them, because the others have just been up to Närke to pick up the boss, Niklas Lindberg. Now the six of them are reunited. It’s time to wait for the following evening. They’ve got the time and place from two sources now. From Lordan Vukotic in prison, and from the group in Kvarnen which, for the most part, is identical to Jorge’s ex-Yugoslav war criminals in Gang One: 1A, 1B and 1C.’