by Arne Dahl
‘Stallion Harald. I’m passionate about your rut. Your filly, Edna.’
‘BK is CF. 3 12 13 18 24 28 30. DL.’
‘Stefan. Come back. All is forgiven. Even the freezer incident. I L Y, Rickard.’
‘3+3=5. Still waiting. D & the gang.’
‘Eurydice. “No crime is worse than bitter betrayal, the Florento sisters said.” 82 12G 14. Orpheus.’
‘Saturday 3rd. You know where. Licking Jack.’
‘Hard-ons are fun. Secret(ion) Services.’
He lost interest, closed the window and ran down to the garage. Viggo Norlander was fuming. He was standing by his rusty old service Volvo, stomping.
‘Bastard,’ said Norlander.
‘Söderstedt,’ said Söderstedt.
They drove to Handen, twenty or so kilometres south of Stockholm. Norlander drove like a ruffled and tattered old great tit the cat had dragged in. Dan Andersson’s flat was in the centre of Handen, a flat which wasn’t a bomb site but a surprisingly well-cleaned one-bed. Precision-cleaned. Forensics probably wouldn’t find even a fingerprint. It was exactly like Eskil Carlstedt’s flat in Stockholm. They went through the few books and files. Everything was in impeccable order. Even the tassels on the rug had been combed out. A scent of soap still lingered beneath the deep-rooted stench of smoke in Danne Blood Pudding’s flat. On a shelf there was a photograph. Dan Andersson in Mallorca, smiling broadly and with an enormous beer in his hand. His face actually was slightly purple in colour. There wasn’t much else to see. Here, too, all traces of right-wing extremism were conspicuous in their absence. Here, too, they were standing in a flat which had been expecting a visit from the police, and had been made as bland as possible.
Arto Söderstedt did his duty but little else. Somewhere under the dull, routine work, something was niggling. He wondered what it was.
A grain of sand, waiting to become a pearl?
They drove north to Hökarängen. Roger Sjöqvist’s last-known haunt. Sjöqvist had fled on his first unsupervised period of release from Tidaholm prison, having served nine leave-free years. Back then, he had given this address as his residence. It turned out to be his parents’ flat, though he hadn’t been there in ten years. Both Söderstedt and Norlander were convinced by the wretched Sjöqvist parents. The father – if it was in fact his father – stank so strongly of alcohol that the smallest of sparks would have sent the entire high-rise up in flames. They left the danger zone rapidly.
‘Well, that was worthwhile,’ Norlander said in the car on the way back to Stockholm. ‘What a difference we’re making. How meaningful it all feels!’
‘Shut up,’ said Söderstedt.
Norlander looked at him in surprise.
Arto Söderstedt was thinking. The niggle was growing more and more intolerable. The grain of sand was demanding to become a pearl.
He had seen, heard or thought something. At some point during the morning, something had crept past and should have caught his attention. But it had slipped away, and now it was rubbing, like a grain of sand in a mussel. Or rather like a fly which has worked its way behind someone’s eyeball, and can’t be reached. Without resorting to surgical methods.
Söderstedt’s surgical methods were of the orthodox, clinical kind. He went through the entire day, from the moment he woke up. When he opened his eyes, Anja was gone. She had already dragged herself to work to scrape excess fat from tax returns. Next, he went to the toilet. No memorable thoughts. Irritated by his constipation. Breakfast. Lively. Four kids. Minor fight between the eight-year-old and the ten-year-old. Catfight, he recalled thinking. The fifth kid at summer camp north of Uppsala. Dropping off three of the kids, the thirteen-year-old staying at home: the first two at the youth centre, the smallest at nursery. Pondering over dropping the kids off at nursery in summer and winter. The lightning-quick realisation that soon he would never have to drop them off again. Watching the shadow play on Bondegatan and on the tower block. Strange fantasies about being in a crime novel. Pondering the parking regulations in inner Stockholm. His clear victory in the Safari Rally. Thoughts of buying a car. The term ‘family car’. European crash tests. Viggo. Discussion on sudden infant death syndrome, sewing circles, hen houses, the word ‘bubbling’. Viggo’s dreamy expression. Gula Tidningen. Expensive family cars. Seven messages of interest sent by email. Then the shamefulness. The feeling returned. Why the shamefulness? The headline THIS WEEK’S ‘I LOVE YOU’. Exactly, ‘Secret(ion) Services’. It was here. Somewhere here. A message.
What had it said? Your filly, Edna. The freezer incident. Licking Jack. Still waiting. Nope, they didn’t set any bells ringing.
‘No crime is worse than bitter betrayal, the Florento sisters said.’ That must have been it. The Florento sisters? A small bell rang. A crime of some kind which had recently been discovered . . . Weren’t the Florento sisters criminals? They were in the US, weren’t they? A couple of prostitutes who had stolen a load of money from some mega-pimp? Though surely that couldn’t have been so important?
Why were criminals being quoted in THIS WEEK’S ‘I LOVE YOU’, in a message posted on Gula Tidningen’s home page?
Yeah, yeah, so what? It was their combination with something else in the same message that was crucial. What had it said? Orpheus and Eurydice? Yes, that was it, but it wasn’t all. Weren’t there some numbers? Some combinations?
How had it gone in THIS WEEK’S ‘I LOVE YOU’?
‘BK, CF, DL. 3 12 13 18 24 28 30.’ No, those sounded like lottery numbers. There were seven numbers when you played Lotto, weren’t there? Initials and a row of numbers.
‘3+3=5.’ No that was ‘still waiting’. One of the six was missing. Two groups of three. Maybe two love triangles joining together. Two smaller group-sex gangs joining forces. But one didn’t want to. You could call that group pressure.
More. ‘Saturday 3rd.’ Nope, meeting. ‘You know where. Licking Jack.’ Classic adultery. Meeting between woman and tongue.
He normally remembered things. Memory like an elephant. Orpheus and the Florento sisters and – a combination of numbers.
‘Eurydice. “No crime is worse than bitter betrayal, the Florento sisters said.” 82 12G 14. Orpheus.’
‘82 12G 14.’ Exactly. That was it. That was what had been nagging him, and continued to do so. Why? How could he be supposed to know what that combination meant? It was just numbers and a letter. Impenetrable. Give up, as Kerstin Holm would say.
He couldn’t give up. It was nagging him. ‘82 12G 14.’
‘82 12G 14.’ ‘82 12G 14.’
A car emerged in his mind. This car. Viggo Norlander’s half-stolen service Volvo. Why? When? Hard to steer. Yeah? Why hard to steer?
Because he had to hold a book open using the wheel.
Kumla. A little church town south-west of Lake Tåkern in Östergötland.
E18. Missed turn-off on the way out of Stockholm.
Arto Söderstedt grabbed the atlas from the compartment in the car door. Motormännens vägatlas över Sverige. He ripped the loose red plastic cover open and leafed frantically in the index. Kumla. ‘44 8E 2.’
Shit. It was right and not right.
‘82 12G 14.’
‘44 8E 2.’
At the start of the index, there were instructions on how to read the combinations. First page. 82 and 44. Then a square on that page: 12G and 8E. After this, the quarter of that square: 1 was bottom left, 2 bottom right; 3 was top left, 4 top right. It was that part which didn’t make any sense. The last number in the combination could only be 1, 2, 3 or 4. Not 14.
Arto Söderstedt didn’t really understand what he was doing. Was this just a mental workout? Brain-training? So that it didn’t go rusty when he was seventy-five?
Conclusion. Criminals are quoted in THIS WEEK’S ‘I LOVE YOU’. Why? Combined with something which seemed to be a geographic location, but wasn’t quite. Was it a red herring after all? Did ‘82 12G 14’ have nothing to do with the atlas, despite the similarities?
Norlander stared at him so long that he became a real road hazard.
‘You’ve gone mad,’ he said eventually. ‘You’ve finally lost the plot. It was just a question of time until the little bells started ringing.’
‘Just answer me.’
Norlander caught sight of the oncoming lorry just in time to swerve out of the way.
‘It’s the standard road atlas in Sweden,’ he said after a while. Their pulses were racing.
Söderstedt nodded. OK, if you were looking for a geographical location in Sweden, then it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable to assume that you would use this particular atlas. He continued from that hypothesis. The last number, 1, 2, 3 or 4, referred to the division of each square into four identical squares. It had said 14 in Gula Tidningen. If you imagined a more precise division of each of these new squares into four further squares, in this case ‘12G 1’, you would end up in square 4 in square 1. 14.
From the square labelled ‘82 12G 14’, he created the square ‘82 12G 1’, and from this square, he made another four, choosing square number 4 from them, ‘82 12G 14’. He turned to page 82, square 12G, and then square 1, to the bottom left, and inside that square, square 4, in the top right. He ended up in Avesta, a town on the border between the counties of Västmanland and Dalarna. That didn’t seem unlikely. Right in the middle of a town.
Orpheus was sending Eurydice a message to tell her that he was in Avesta, and also took the opportunity to quote those criminal Florento sisters from America.
So what? The A-Unit was in the middle of one of the most important murder investigations of late – why should that little message be of interest to him? He couldn’t describe it as anything other than a hunch. That indescribable feeling of being onto something completely unknown.
Criminals, location, mythology . . . There was something there.
But, of course, it couldn’t intrude on the rest of the investigation. That much was clear.
When they returned to the office, Söderstedt went straight to the computer. He had received four messages on the family cars: sold, sold, sold and sold. Not much variation.
There was, however, variation on Gula Tidningen’s home page. Under the title THIS WEEK’S ‘I LOVE YOU’. It now read:
‘Orpheus. “But the sisters vanished into thin air.” 41 7C 31. Eurydice.’
Söderstedt had smuggled the atlas with him into the office. He looked up ‘41 7C 31’.
It was the other side of the country, Alingsås.
He had found something, but he had no idea what.
All he had was his hunch.
31
LJUBOMIR WAS THERE. There. He knew perfectly well why. It was a test of loyalty.
The two Swedes had been in the study. ‘Security consultants’ dressed in Hawaiian shirts and shorts. They had sat cumbersomely on the L-shaped desk, talking to the great man. Quietly, so that Ljubomir wouldn’t hear. He had been standing by the door, as usual. He heard everything. His hearing was good.
‘Do we know who they are?’ the great man asked gruffly.
‘Not really,’ said one of the Swedes. ‘We’re working on it.’
‘It seems racial,’ said the other. ‘That’s top of the list. Wog money. Royal straight flush. Can’t get any higher.’
‘Who the hell blew Lordan up?’ the great man demanded.
‘Like we said, we can’t access that information. It’s not possible.’
‘You’re ex-police,’ said the great man. ‘So what the hell can you actually access? What’re you doing to earn your money?’
He paused, gathered himself, and continued.
‘Could we get to any of the investigators?’
Both of the ‘security consultants’ shook their heads.
‘They’re difficult. We’ve had a bit to do with them . . .’
‘Dyed-in-the-wool types. Tight, smart, a bit eccentric. Untouchable.’
‘No one’s untouchable,’ said the great man. ‘The one who came here. Hultin?’
‘Forget it,’ said the first of the Swedes, looking troubled. ‘A rock. Old school. You’ll never get to him. You could kill him, but you can’t squeeze him.’
‘Fuck the police,’ said the other. ‘Just stay ahead of them. Like normal.’
‘Nothing from our man?’
‘He’s lying low. Isn’t it time to squeeze him a bit now?’
‘Absolutely not. His insurance is watertight. If anyone’s going to squeeze him, then it’ll be my people doing it. Understand?’
That was the end of the discussion. The Swedes had left without even giving Ljubomir a glance. Then the great man had just dragged Ljubomir along with him, without a word. He dragged him out, through the paradise garden to the garage door. They stopped. Three men had immediately come rushing out of the guardroom and followed them, close on their heels. They went past Ljubomir and the great man, entered the garage and started the car. Everything was fine.
These three men tested everything. They shielded him with their bodies, they entered all rooms first, they tasted his food, they opened his post, they started his car, and they drove his car. That’s what they were doing now. Ljubomir was squashed in between two lumps of meat on the back seat as the car raced into town.
And now they were there. In that place.
It was disarmed. Disinfected. Not a trace of its disgusting past left. An empty flat. Apart from two additional, almost identical men. Like parodies of gangsters. The civilian look.
But they simply didn’t know how civilians dressed. They had been recruited to various armies and paramilitary forces since they were young. Since before they had learned how to dress.
But they knew how to follow orders.
No one said a word.
If you ignored the precision binoculars in the window, it was a completely normal flat.
If you ignored the screams which bombarded Ljubomir’s ears from the soundproofed walls.
Those clear, piercing screams.
Ljubomir imagined that they had been absorbed by the porous walls, which looked like they had golden foam cushions fastened to them. All the screams. They bombarded him in unison, like a terrible, piercing accusation. He was overwhelmed. He could feel that he had turned pale. He stepped over to the window, tried to open it. No fresh air blew in. It was stuck.
The great man came over to him and put his arm around him. It wasn’t a gesture of friendship – he saved those for outside of working hours. It was a test. To see how much he was shaking.
To see if he was about to throw up.
They stood together, childhood friends from the little mountain village in eastern Serbia, looking down at the bank on the other side of the street. You could almost believe they were friends.
A short, well-built man wearing a hat had just entered the bank.
A short, well-built man wearing a hat had just entered the bank. He scratched his forehead as he walked, scratched it so that his hand covered his face. He looked around for a moment. Big, inner-city bank. Not yet converted into an open-plan office. Half ten, mid-morning: low traffic. Four customers, none of them potential heroes. Three cameras. He worked out their range, pulled the black hat down over his face, and peered out through the balaclava’s eye holes. As the others came running into the bank, he pulled out a pistol and shot the surveillance cameras. Three shots were all that was needed.
One of the others stood guard by the door. He could hardly lift his gun. Two went over to the counter, weapons raised. One of them was wearing a golden balaclava. He said, clearly: ‘We know you’ve pressed the alarm. So we’re asking you to fill these two bags with money as quickly as you can. You’ve got thirty seconds, then we’ll start shooting customers.’
The bags were quickly filled. No one screamed, no one made a sound. A strange silence spread through the room. As though everyone had instinctively understood that he had meant it.
On
the way out, they took off their balaclavas, wrapped a chain around the door handles and locked it using a padlock.
The four men walked calmly down the street, the two bags over their shoulders, turning off into a side road. No one paid any attention to the fact that one of them could hardly walk.
The short, well-built man wearing a hat had just left the bank in the company of a young blonde girl. He put his wallet into the inner pocket of his jacket, and ruffled the girl’s long hair before they hugged and parted ways. The great man pointed at him.
‘He’s probably just seen his daughter in the bank. A chance meeting. His daughter. Do you understand, Ljubomir?’
Ljubomir met the great man’s gaze. It bored into him. The great man continued.
‘This flat is for surveillance and nothing else. You’ve got to forget everything else, Ljubomir. We can see everything from here. Sooner or later, they’ll come here, and then we’ll catch them. It’s that simple. No one cheats Rajko Nedic, Ljubomir, and no one lets him down. I really want you to understand that.’
Ljubomir nodded. He understood. He understood exactly.
And still, he didn’t want to forget.
32
THEY WERE AS close to one another as they could get. Though the blinds couldn’t stop the sun in its tracks, they lay pressed up close to one another, as much of their bodies as possible touching the other’s. The heat could never be oppressive.
It was forty degrees in the little flat on Surbrunnsgatan.
They had done something that neither of them had done before. They had skipped work. Suddenly, as if following a simultaneous, shared impulse, they had just gone home and made love. As though they had been following orders from some higher and more important being than the National Police Commissioner.
Both realised – around the same time – that they had wandered into an emotional wilderness of work, work and nothing but work, and that they had only now found an oasis; not another mirage, but an oasis. That was where they planned to stay. That was where they planned to settle down.
