by Leif Persson
‘I’ll see to it that you get them in quarter of an hour, boss.’
‘Excellent,’ Johansson said. ‘You can give them to my secretary.’
61
EXACTLY ONE WEEK after Queen Silvia’s name-day, on Friday 15 August, a bolt of lightning struck the head of Detective Superintendent Evert Bäckström of the murder squad of the National Crime Unit. At least that’s how he himself described it when he was telling his closest friend, Detective Inspector Jan Rogersson, about the undeserved nightmare that yet another crazy woman had landed him in.
‘It was as if a bolt of lightning struck me in the head,’ Bäckström said.
‘You always have to exaggerate, Bäckström,’ Rogersson objected. ‘Just tell me what really happened. You were drunk, weren’t you?’
It had begun the same way as usual, and very promisingly considering that it was the weekend and the overtime ceiling prevented him from even setting foot in his workplace before Monday morning. As soon as he had got rid of that little poof Olsson, he had left Växjö police station in his usual circumspect way and strolled slowly back to the hotel. Once he got up to his room he had undressed, put on a freshly laundered dressing-gown and opened the first chilled beer of the weekend, and when Rogersson eventually showed up, red-faced as a turkey ready for the chop, he was already on his third.
‘Friday at last,’ Rogersson said, easing the worst of the pressure straight from the can. ‘Any special plans for the weekend, Bäckström?’
‘You’ll have to manage on your own tonight, young man,’ said Bäckström, who had made use of the dead minutes between the second and third beers to call little Carin and ask her to dinner.
‘Female company,’ Rogersson said. In spite of everything, he wasn’t a bad detective.
‘First we’re going to have a bite to eat out in town, then I thought I might let the super-salami have a bit of a work-out,’ Bäckström said, emphasizing his point by taking a deep gulp of beer.
To start with everything went according to plan. Bäckström and his lady for the evening ate a reasonable dinner in a nearby place on Storgatan, and even managed a few drinks, although he was trying to hold back out of consideration for the finale to the evening. Eventually they ended up back at the hotel, and even though Carin for some reason kept saying that they should go to the bar she had finally accepted the offer of a little drink in his room. By this point the exact timings and other details weren’t entirely clear. Certainly not clear enough for him to sit and go through them later with a number of humourless so-called colleagues from the internal investigation unit.
‘There’s something I wanted to show you,’ Bäckström said, firing off his most charming smile before disappearing into the bathroom.
‘As long as it doesn’t take long,’ Carin said through the door as she sipped from her glass, suddenly seeming a bit stand-offish.
Quicker than Superman in his phone-box, Bäckström had carried out a similar manoeuvre in his bathroom. Fastening a towel round his waist, he stepped out in all his glory and let the towel fall, simultaneously pulling in his stomach and thrusting out his chest. Entirely unnecessarily, of course, but sometimes you had to make a bit of extra effort. ‘What do you think about this then, my dear?’ he said.
‘Have you gone mad? Put that nasty little thing away at once!’ Carin cried from her seat on the sofa. Then she grabbed her handbag and jacket and marched out, slamming the door behind her.
Women aren’t right in the head, Bäckström thought. What does she mean, little thing? What the hell’s the woman saying? He put on his clothes again and went down to the bar, but the only person there was Rogersson, sitting leering in a corner. In the absence of anything better to do, he stayed and squeezed in a couple more shorts. Then, when he finally returned to his room, he called her to wish her goodnight to show that he wasn’t the sort to hold a grudge, but before he had the chance to open his mouth she hung up on him. Evidently she disconnected the phone, because he didn’t get through to either her or her answering machine when he tried again. Just like that crazy bitch who lumbered me with little Egon.
62
ON SATURDAY MORNING, taking Eva Svanström with him, Lewin got on the train and went to Copenhagen. A little surprise that he had been planning in secret, and it made her as excited as a young child.
‘Why haven’t you said anything?’ she asked.
‘Because then it wouldn’t have been a surprise,’ Lewin replied.
‘This is going to be so exciting. I’ve never actually been to Copenhagen,’ Eva said.
First they visited the Tivoli Gardens, where they went on the roller coaster and the roundabout. Then they took a gentle stroll down Strøget. They found a nice bar in Nyhavn and ate a proper Danish breakfast, with herring, pastries and all the usual trimmings. The sun was shining just as it was in Småland, but here it seemed quite bearable, and Lewin felt better than he had for ages. In fact he felt so much better that he finally felt able to mention what had been preoccupying him so much recently.
‘Maybe we ought to do something serious with our lives, Eva,’ he said, squeezing her hand.
‘I’m fine,’ Eva said. ‘I’ve never been as happy as I am right now.’
‘Let’s think about it,’ Lewin said, and then the moment passed, but perhaps that was just as well. Even if he never plucked up the courage to ask again.
‘So what do you think about our new boss?’ Eva said, preferring simply to change the subject than to make a big song and dance. ‘That Lars Martin Johansson.’
‘I’ve actually met him,’ Lewin said. ‘We were on a case together back when he was just an ordinary officer. Must be almost thirty years ago now. Before your time. The Maria murder. A woman was found strangled and raped in her flat out in Enskede.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Eva said, lacing her fingers between his. ‘What’s he like? Johansson, I mean.’
‘As a police officer he wasn’t bad,’ Lewin said. ‘His colleagues used to joke that he could see round corners. He had an unnerving ability to work out what was going on.’
‘The policeman who could see round corners,’ Eva repeated delightedly. ‘Sounds a bit like one of those cop shows on telly. So what was he like as a person, then?’
‘What was he like as a person? He was the sort who could pretty much step over a body without even worrying where he was putting his feet.’
‘Ugh. That really doesn’t sound very nice.’
‘I might be wrong. We don’t have much in common, him and me. Maybe I just didn’t understand him.’
‘Sounds like a complicated character, anyway.’
‘Maybe the combination of being able to see things yet still be untroubled by the consequences frightened me,’ Lewin said. ‘Isn’t that what they’re supposed to be like, those supercops? Seeing everything, being able to work everything out, yet not sparing a thought for what happens to the people that it’s ultimately all about?’
‘Well, if the worst comes to the worst, we can always move,’ Eva said. ‘Apply somewhere else. I know the Stockholm force needs people. My old boss has even been in touch and asked me.’
‘It’s worth bearing in mind,’ Lewin said, and for some reason he leaned over and smelled her hair, nuzzling gently between her right earlobe and cheek. That would be the worst that could happen, and things could never be any better than they are right now, he thought.
63
THE NIGHT AFTER they returned from Copenhagen Lewin dreamed again of that summer almost fifty years before, when he got his first proper bicycle. A red Crescent Valiant. And his dad had taken almost the whole summer off to teach him to ride it.
The hardest bit was always when they were almost home again. Worst of all was the gravel path leading to the house. The last twenty metres between the white garden gate and the red wooden porch.
‘I’m letting go,’ Daddy calls, and Jan squeezes the handlebars and pedals and pedals and slides over on the loose gravel. And this time he slid over
badly, scraping his elbows and knees, and the whole idea of ever learning to ride a bike suddenly seems pointless.
‘Up you get, Jan,’ Daddy says, picking him up and ruffling his hair. ‘Let’s go and have some hot chocolate and a cheese sandwich, and find some plasters.’
And everything was back to normal again.
64
ON SUNDAY JOHANSSON stretched out on the sofa in the living room of his flat on Wollmar Yxkullsgatan on Södermalm in Stockholm. He had fixed himself a large gin and tonic with plenty of ice, and started to read through the files on the Linda murder. It looked as though it might take him all afternoon, but his wife was away staying with a friend and he had nothing better to do. Besides, this was pretty much as close as he could get, given his elevated position, to a proper murder case these days. Maybe I should apply for a job in that CP group? It looks like they need help with pretty much everything, he thought, as he glanced through the profile of the perpetrator.
What on earth are they doing down there? he thought four hours later when he had finished reading, done some thinking and put the files to one side. Any proper police officer ought to have worked this out last week.
65
Växjö, Monday 18 August
BY THE MONDAY when the hunt for Linda’s killer entered its eighth week, Bäckström was starting to feel rather tired of the whole business. They weren’t able to take any more DNA samples, although even an idiot like Olsson ought to have realized that if they weren’t going to catch him any other way, they would do so eventually if they carried on with that. Nor was there anything tasty for him to get his teeth into either. No juicy breakthroughs or promising thugs to get hold of. All they had was crazy hundred-year-olds who couldn’t remember when they were born and thought the perpetrator looked like someone who didn’t exist. Not to mention all the other so-called witnesses who hadn’t seen, heard or thought anything, let alone the usual lunatics and head-cases with their premonitions and messages from the other side. What the hell was he doing here? It was entirely the wrong place for a proper policeman, and high time to pack up and go back to work in Stockholm.
Besides, the town he’d ended up in was fucking awful. To top it all, every newspaper, television channel and radio station now seemed to devote all its time to telling him and his colleagues how they should do their job. And of course the bosses were conspicuous by their absence when it came to standing up for the common foot-soldiers. Like, most recently, that bastard Lapp, whom even the biggest of the evening papers hadn’t managed to find in order to get a quote out of him. If you could believe what they themselves were claiming, that is, and Bäckström thought that in this instance you probably could.
As if all this wasn’t more than enough, his colleague officer Sandberg suddenly appeared in his office. She closed the door behind her, and just managed to whisper the reason why she was there.
‘There’s been a complaint about you this morning.’
‘So what have I done this time?’ Bäckström asked. ‘Apart from just trying to do my job?’ I expect I’ve exceeded the National Crime budget for the purchase of cotton-buds, he thought.
Attempted rape, according to the complainant. Sexual harassment, according to the colleague who had received the complaint and, for safety’s sake, had put it in a little pile all of its own.
‘Are you pulling my leg?’ Bäckström said, although he had already worked out what was going on. Of all the crazy bitches on this planet, he thought.
Sadly not, according to Sandberg. The report claimed that late in the evening of 15 August, Bäckström had, in his room at the Town Hotel, done what he had actually done, and a number of other things that he hadn’t actually done. The victim was a female reporter for local radio in Växjö named Carin Ågren, forty-two years old. The person who had filed the complaint was a close friend of hers, the coordinator of the women’s helpline in town, by name Moa Hjärtén. The only positive was that they hadn’t been able to get hold of the alleged victim, Ågren, and that, as was so often the case, there were no witnesses.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Bäckström said. ‘I never touched the woman.’ Which was entirely true, he thought.
‘Not my case,’ Sandberg said, shaking her head defensively. ‘I just thought it might be useful for you to know about it.’
‘I have a vague recollection of that Hjärtén woman,’ Bäckström said. ‘Is she the little fat woman who scuttles about in an old pink shift? I’ve met her here at the station. Evidently some close acquaintance of our colleague Olsson.’
‘Well, I’ve told you now,’ Sandberg repeated.
‘Good of you, Anna.’ Bäckström smiled his most relaxed smile. ‘In this job you have to put up with a lot of crap.’ And they haven’t got any witnesses, he thought.
The female anaesthetist hadn’t been very easy to get hold of. As soon as she got back to work her services were required in the operating theatre, and it wasn’t until later that afternoon that she had time to see Lewin. Assuming it was important enough. Assuming that it wasn’t about anything that conflicted with her oath of confidentiality, and assuming that he came to her and not the other way round, seeing as he evidently didn’t want to tell her what this was about over the phone.
But once he was sitting in her office at the hospital, the whole thing was remarkably painless, and far better than expected. White coat, stethoscope in her pocket. Short blonde hair, thin, in good shape, attentive blue eyes and a look in them that darted between alertness, insight and humour. An attractive woman, Lewin thought.
Without going into the reasons in any detail, Lewin quickly explained what was troubling him. Had she received any strange phone calls? He was particularly interested in any such calls she might have received the night before she went on holiday or early in the morning of the day her holiday began.
‘This is about the murder of that trainee police officer, isn’t it?’ She looked at him inquisitively, and the activity behind her blue eyes was obvious.
‘I didn’t say that,’ Lewin said with a faint smile. Almost too attractive, he thought.
And he really hadn’t. She was the one who had said it, and she didn’t expect an answer. But she was capable of working it out for herself. Twenty-four hours ago, when she had just got back from her holiday abroad, she hadn’t had any idea of the Linda murder. After catching up on her old newspapers and taking a couple of trips to the staffroom at work, she now knew as much as everyone else.
‘I’ve never met a real murder detective before. Least of all one from National Crime,’ she told him.
‘That must be nice,’ Lewin said.
‘So now that you’re here, I’m almost pleased.’
‘Thanks.’ Where’s this conversation going? Lewin thought.
‘You seem to be made of the right stuff. Isn’t that what you lot usually say? The right stuff,’ she repeated. ‘Anyway, I think I might be able to help you. Not that I understand why, but this is what happened.’
She seldom got calls from people she didn’t know, and almost all the calls she did get had something to do with work. She had had a few wrong numbers, but she usually forgot those pretty quickly. And she’d never had to put up with any unpleasant calls since she moved to Växjö almost two years ago.
‘No heavy breathing,’ she explained. ‘Hopefully because my number’s ex-directory, and not because I’m too old.’
That was one reason why she remembered the call. The other was that she had had to agree to being on call on the Friday morning, before she left for Copenhagen airport, because the father of one of her colleagues had suddenly had a heart attack.
‘The phone rang in the middle of the night, and I just assumed that my holiday was about to go up in smoke.’
In the middle of the night? She couldn’t remember more exactly what time it was?
‘According to the alarm clock beside the bed, it was 02.15,’ she said, smiling at Lewin’s look of surprise. ‘I can see you wondering why I
remember that,’ she added.
Lewin smiled back. I suppose I could always ask you a few control questions about your date of birth, he thought.
Times were important in an anaesthetist’s life, especially when it came to nocturnal phone calls, which she always assumed must be from work. Besides, she had an excellent memory for numbers, and, fortunately, a notepad and pen beside the phone. The first thing she did was note the time of the call. Then she had picked up the receiver and answered it.
‘Because I was so sure it was work calling, that was a reflex,’ she explained. ‘And just to make sure they realized that they were about to sabotage my holiday as well as my beauty sleep, I did my best to sound like I was still asleep.’
‘You didn’t say your name when you answered?’
‘No. All they got was a very sleepy and drawn-out hello, even though I was wide awake. I thought that would serve them right, I suppose.’
‘So what did the person on the other end say?’ Lewin asked. ‘Do you remember?’
The person calling her was a man. He sounded happy, pleasant, sober, and to judge by his voice roughly the same age as her.
‘First he said something in English. Long time no see, or something like that, then he said he hoped he hadn’t woken me. I still thought it was someone from work trying to be funny. Because I was going to America on holiday. Then I suddenly started to wonder.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Because I assumed my holiday was going up in smoke, I was probably a bit short. I asked how many people, and what had happened to them this time,’ she said. ‘When they call at that time of night, it’s almost always a car crash.’
‘So what did he say?’
‘He suddenly sounded rather taken aback as well. It was like he realized he’d got the wrong number. He asked who he was talking to, and then I asked him who he was trying to call, and it was round about then that I realized that it wasn’t anyone from work, just a wrong number in the middle of the night.’
