Protected by the Shadows

by Helene Tursten

  “Sausage?” Lindström called out, a big grin plastered across his face.

  “No thanks. We’ve come to search this place,” Stefan Bratt replied.

  “What the hell for?”

  Any pretense at geniality disappeared. Lindström froze with two sausages firmly gripped in the tongs, then waved them around in an angry gesture; the sausages fell apart and flew in all directions. Frode was as well trained as a dog can be, but when a piece of sausage, smelling utterly delicious, landed less than an inch from his nose, not even he could resist. The tasty titbit was gone before his handler could blink.

  “And I don’t want your fucking dog eating our sausages!” Lindström snapped.

  Frode lowered his head, thoroughly ashamed like the good dog he was. He knew perfectly well that he had done something he shouldn’t have. Lindström glared at the intruders, then turned away and put a fresh batch of burgers and sausages on the grill. When three little boys came racing over demanding food, his sweaty face broke into a smile. The boys jumped up and down with delight when they were each given a can of Coke to go with their burger.

  Several members of Gothia MC, along with their girlfriends, wives and children, were sitting on garden seats. Irene noticed that both the men and the women were wearing strikingly ostentatious gold chains and rings.

  A pit bull tied to the leg of a chair went absolutely crazy when Frode passed within a few feet of him. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end, and he started barking and spraying saliva everywhere. Frode didn’t even glance at him; he was now totally focused on his job, which was to search for narcotics. He stopped and signaled several times, but when the police checked, they found nothing. Or almost nothing. There were traces of white powder and tiny flakes of what could have been cannabis in the pockets of some of the vests, and they also managed to scrape together a few white grains in the bottom of a closet. There was nothing in the untidy shed or the filthy barn either. Taken altogether, they didn’t even have enough to charge someone with the possession of narcotics for personal use. They also found an old Mora knife that was so blunt it wouldn’t even have been any use for slicing bread, let alone as a murder weapon. Nothing else.

  The gang members watched their activities with scornful grins. They knew the cops weren’t going to come up with anything. The whole place had been literally cleansed of any trace of drugs; the acrid smell of Ajax was everywhere.

  On the way back, everyone sat in silence until the car entered the parking lot under the police station.

  “They knew we were coming,” Fredrik said grimly.

  After an hour’s lunch break, everyone involved in the raid gathered in the conference room. The atmosphere was subdued; the only sound was the buzzing of a sleepy bluebottle trying to escape through a solid pane of glass. The older officer from the Organized Crimes Unit put an end to the irritating noise with the culture section of Göteborgs Posten. Irene was too tired and disappointed to even try to remember his name.

  They had failed. Gothia MC had gotten away with it and still posed a major threat to her family. She wanted to lie down on the floor and scream. It wouldn’t solve the problem, but it might relieve the pressure building up inside her. She felt as if she was about to explode. A few years ago, one of the first wars between the biker gangs had ended when one of them fired a well-aimed shot from a bazooka straight into the headquarters of the other. Right now that seemed like the only possible solution, but where could she get her hands on a bazooka?

  “I know how disappointed you all are,” Stefan Bratt began. “But to be honest, I’m not really surprised. In fact this is more or less what I expected.”

  A murmur of astonishment quickly spread around the room; Stefan raised a hand to silence it.

  “Per Lindström and his associates knew we were coming. They know we have images of Andreas Brännström, linking him to the murder of Jan-Erik Månsson and the attack on Ritva Ekholm. They also know that we have images showing that he was in the area around Glady’s restaurant when the Huss family’s car was blown up. Everything indicates that Gothia MC was behind these crimes. After Danny Mara’s murder, Lindström realized we were bound to turn up. They must have cleaned that place like crazy!”

  He raised an eyebrow and gave a wry smile. The colleague who had flattened the fly spoke up. “How could they possibly know about the CCTV footage, or the fact that we’ve identified Brännström?”

  Stefan Bratt took a deep breath and gave him a long, evaluating look before he answered. “Exactly. There has been nothing in the press. How could they possibly know about the CCTV footage? Or that we knew about the Audi with the sunroof? And how did they manage to tip off Brännström so quickly that he managed to slip through the net before we could pick him up?”

  The questions were left hanging in the air. It seemed to Irene that there were other things Gothia MC shouldn’t have known, but clearly they had.

  As if he had read her mind, Stefan continued. “We have a leak. An informant. Right here in the station.”

  Most people can be bribed; almost everyone has a price. But the idea that one of their colleagues was working with a biker gang was unthinkable. Irene found Stefan’s theory every bit as difficult to take in as her fellow officers, even though she had had her suspicions for a while. It had happened before, of course. A few years ago, an officer in Malmö had been an unofficial member of the Hells Angels, and had supplied the gang with information. She had heard of similar cases in England and the US.

  Stefan cleared his throat. “As we have no evidence whatsoever against anyone, I must stress that no one is to breathe a word of this outside the walls of this room.”

  “That way, if anything does get out, it will have had to have come from someone who is here right now,” Tommy said gravely.

  As the meeting broke up, Tommy beckoned to Irene. “Do you have a moment before you go home?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s about your annual leave; I just want to check to make sure I’ve got my facts correct.”

  Irene followed Tommy into his office, where he unlocked the top drawer of his desk. Since when does he lock his drawers? Irene thought.

  “Here,” he said, handing her a slim folder.

  Inside was a sheet of paper torn from a notepad, on which Tommy had scrawled: Take an unmarked car. Drive around until you’re sure no one is following you. Park outside the ICA grocery store and walk the last part.

  Irene knew the small store a few hundred yards from Tommy’s house. She nodded.

  “Looks right to me,” she said, forcing a wan smile.

  “Good!” Tommy said, closing the folder.

  Irene knew he would destroy the sheet of paper as soon as she had left the room.

  After dinner—prawn noodles from a Thai restaurant in Partille—Irene tried to get Tommy to discuss the informant, but with little success. When she returned to the subject for the fourth time, he cut her off impatiently.

  “It’s for your own sake.”

  “What do you mean?” Irene was taken aback to say the least.

  “There’s a leak. We don’t know who it is. Your family is in danger. Gothia MC might have threatened you personally. They could be forcing you to pass on information,” he said, with a crooked smile to show that he didn’t for one second believe the scenario he had just outlined.

  At first Irene didn’t know what to say, then she got angry. “Have you lost your mind? Do you really think I’d—”

  He interrupted her before she went completely crazy. “No, I don’t, but Stefan Bratt isn’t quite as sure, so it’s best if we leave it there.”

  So Tommy and Stefan had been discussing this behind closed doors. And Stefan suspected that she . . . Irene took a deep breath and tried to calm down. With a huge effort she switched to professional mode, and after a little while she realized they were doing the right thing. They had n
o idea who the guilty party was, which meant they had to regard everyone as a suspect. The biker gangs’ ability to corrupt democracy and the judicial system had reached inside the walls of police HQ. The force itself had been infiltrated.

  The bomb planted on the steps of the house in Örgryte went off at exactly 7:00 on Monday morning. It was an enormous explosion; the door was blown in, and a fire started in the hallway. Every window at the front of the attractive house was shattered. An elderly man next door received a number of cuts when the window in his living room fell in on him. He and his wife, who was suffering from severe shock, were taken to hospital even though neither of them was seriously hurt.

  Fortunately the house where the bomb had been left was empty. Gunilla Åkesson, the prosecutor who lived there, had needed to step in for a sick colleague in Vänersborg on a case with which she was already familiar, and in order to get there on time, she had left home at six. Her husband had flown to a medical conference in London the previous evening, and their two grown-up sons had moved out some time ago.

  Gunilla Åkesson had made a name for herself as someone who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind; she had been involved in several high-profile trials against the members of various gangs. She was regarded as something of an authority on the subject of organized crime in Västra Götaland.

  The case in Vänersborg concerned two men with links to biker gangs in the town. They were accused of extortion and making threats. The plaintiff was the former owner of a small restaurant. He was Iranian, and had worked hard to buy the business. Everything was going well, and at last he could see a brighter future for himself and his family. Until the two men from the biker gang turned up. They explained that terrible things would happen to both his family and his restaurant unless he paid them 200,000 kronor. The owner didn’t have that kind of money and went straight to the police.

  He and his family had been left with no choice but to go into hiding, and he had been forced to sell the business. He was devastated, but had decided to stick to his accusation.

  The parallels with the case in Vänersborg and what had happened to her own family were crystal clear to Irene. There was exactly a week between the detonation of the bomb under Krister’s car and the one outside the prosecutor’s house in Örgryte.

  She shuddered and pulled her jacket more tightly around her; it was a damp, chilly morning. Chunks of the door, still smoking, were strewn across the driveway at the bottom of the steps. For the third time in seven days she was standing at a crime scene that reeked of smoke. Inside she could see the charred remains of something that had presumably been a rug, a chest of drawers and a large mirror. Parts of the gold frame lay among the pieces of the door; maybe the mirror had been a treasured heirloom, or a much-loved item picked up at an auction. Now the glass was in a thousand pieces, sparkling like tiny stars amid the blackened mess.

  Irene had spoken to a deeply shocked Gunilla Åkesson on the phone, and they had agreed that the prosecutor would come to the police station at around four o’clock for a longer conversation. The answers she had given Irene so far had been encouraging.

  There could be links between Gothia MC and the gang members accused of threatening behavior and extortion in Vänersborg. Patrik Karlsson’s name had come up during the investigation into the allegations made by the Iranian restaurant owner, and a few months earlier, an anonymous witness had said Karlsson regularly delivered drugs to the biker gang in Vänersborg. There was no proof, so the tip off was put to one side, but the information was still there in the case notes, and Gunilla Åkesson remembered the name when Karlsson’s murder hit the headlines. However, she didn’t think it was relevant, so hadn’t contacted the police.

  Irene spoke to several colleagues in Vänersborg, and gradually the picture became clearer. Patrik was born in Trollhättan. His parents divorced when he was ten years old, and he and his mother moved to Vänersborg. After a while his mother met someone new, and they moved again, this time to Göteborg. Patrik kept in touch sporadically with his friends in Vänersborg and relatives in Trollhättan. The Göteborg police were very familiar with the next chapter in his story because Patrik featured heavily in both police and social services records less than a year after his arrival in his new hometown. He quickly made his mark in the teenage gang known as the Desperados, and since they were a subchapter of Gothia MC, his career was already mapped out. It began with break-ins and petty larceny, then moved on to two suspected cases of assault and a conviction for serious assault. He also went down twice for drug dealing. He had achieved all this before he was eighteen, and he finished up in a juvenile detention center. At seventeen he went into rehab for four months, and at nineteen he was sentenced to nine months for dealing. But this time he was in a real jail. He was released thirteen months before his death and had nothing new on his record during that period. By this stage he was a full member of Gothia MC.

  Irene was sitting at her computer with all the facts on the screen in front of her, gathered as part of the investigation into his horrific murder. Her thoughts turned to the suspect, Kazan Ekici, the handsome young man who was rumored to go completely crazy when he took too much cocaine, or whatever his narcotic of choice might be. According to the CCTV footage, he had been in the area at the relevant time. It was unfortunate that there were no cameras closer to Kolgruvegatan because then it would have been much more difficult for him to explain why he was there. At the moment he was getting away with it because he and Fendi, who had been driving the car, had stuck to the same story.

  Sometimes she wished there was the same density of CCTV cameras in Sweden as in the UK. Some people claimed that it was an infringement of their liberty, and Irene agreed to a certain extent, but the cameras made it so much easier for the police to catch the real criminals. She and her colleagues always had problems investigating gang crime, because there was rarely anyone brave enough to testify. If they did step up, like the Iranian in Vänersborg, things usually didn’t go well for them. Irene often felt frustrated when the courts had to release a suspect, or when she and her colleagues had to drop a case for lack of evidence. The key was to find watertight proof that would stand up in court, but without involving any witnesses. CCTV cameras were a big help.

  She was convinced there was a connection between Kazan Ekici and the murder of Patrik Karlsson. All she had to do was prove it.

  Tommy and Irene had managed to slip away to a small Chinese restaurant on Odinsgatan. The food was terrible, which was why none of their colleagues ever went there. There was a high staff turnover, and most of the employees spoke very little Swedish, if any. The place could well be involved in illegal immigration and people trafficking, but that was another department’s responsibility. Right now Irene needed to speak to her boss and friend without anyone disturbing them. This place was ideal; the customers sat in individual booths, and modern Chinese pop music made it impossible for their conversation to be overheard.

  Irene briefly ran through the ideas she had come up with during the morning. When she had finished, Tommy sat and looked at her for a long time before he broke the silence.

  “You want to search Kazan’s home for drugs, and you want us to go over the car that’s registered in his father’s name with a fine-tooth comb. And you want to question him again.”

  She nodded.

  He ran his fingers through his thinning hair and went on. “You also want us to put more effort into seeking links between Gothia MC and the Gangster Lions. I’m with you on that; there have to be several points of contact.”

  Irene leaned forward over her plate, which was virtually untouched. According to the menu it was supposed to be “three tasting dishes,” but in fact it reminded her of something unidentifiable that a child at nursery might have made out of modeling clay. She held up her index finger.

  “One. The murder of Patrik Karlsson, which took place in Gothia MC’s former HQ. We know that Kazan and Fendi were in the area,
so I want their car examined for any possible traces.”

  She added her middle finger.

  “Two. We know that Kazan and Patrik had a common interest: narcotics. Both have a long history of dealing and using. They need money, because it’s an expensive habit. There’s money in dealing. And somewhere in the middle of all that is the motive for Danny Mara’s murder: a turf war over the drug market.”

  Third finger.

  “Three. The bombs. We know that the bomb under our car and the one outside Gunilla Åkesson’s front door were exactly the same kind as the car bomb that killed Soran Siljac. Once again, this points to Gothia MC.”

  She paused for breath, then waved her little finger.

  “Four. The attack on Ritva Ekholm. She was the witness who had to be silenced.”

  Tommy nodded. “As I’ve often said, you have an unusually well-developed instinct as a cop, and . . . yes, you could be on the right track. But . . .”

  Now it was his turn to raise a warning finger.

  “. . . don’t forget our informant. No one must hear about this. Can you take a closer look without anyone else getting a sniff of what you’re up to?”

  “Yes.”

  The answer sounded much more confident than Irene felt, but at the same time she realized she had to get going before her colleagues started to wonder what she was doing. She had to stay one step ahead of whoever was leaking information.

  “I’ll get a search warrant for Kazan’s home; it should be ready for this afternoon,” Tommy said.

  “I can go over there after I’ve spoken to Gunilla Åkesson.”