The Department of Sensitive Crimes

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The man with the dachshund raised a finger. “Excuse me,” he said. “I happen to know about that. It’s in the Arctic Circle, but it’s certainly not at the North Pole, it’s in a place called Abisko. And it’s not just ice up there—there are trees and marshes and so on.”

  Both Ulf and Blomquist stared at him—Blomquist with an expression of some interest. The dachshund stared back suspiciously. Martin stared at the floor. Blomquist’s cat stared fixedly at Martin.

  The man with the dachshund continued, “They’ve been looking at methane emissions recently. It’s important work.”

  “Methane?” asked Blomquist. “That’s a big problem.”

  “Yes,” said the man. “The permafrost up there has been thawing...”

  “Oh yes, I know that,” said Blomquist.

  “And when that happens—when the permafrost thaws—methane is emitted. And that, of course, has consequences for global warming.”

  “That’s very serious,” said Blomquist. “Carbon dioxide too. That’s an issue.” He paused. “Cows emit methane, I believe. And dogs too, for that matter. A dog has a large environmental footprint, you know.”

  “Yes, they do,” said the man. He smiled. “Dr. Håkansson could tell us all about that, I imagine.”

  Ulf turned back to Blomquist. “I’m sorry, but I need to know something: Have you seen this young man recently? And I mean over the last couple of weeks.”

  Blomquist answered immediately. “Yesterday, I think. No, hold on, the day before yesterday. In the shower at the gym, actually.”

  For a few moments Ulf was silent. Then he asked, “Are you absolutely sure?”

  Blomquist became the policeman again. “Yes, I’m quite sure. It was him, beyond all doubt.”

  “All right,” said Ulf. “Could you bring him in? Tomorrow?”

  “You mean arrest him?”

  “No,” said Ulf. “Nothing that drastic. Just for questioning.”

  “What has he done?” asked Blomquist.

  “Nothing. It’s not him—it’s...well, it’s complicated, Blomquist.”

  Blomquist looked reproachfully at Ulf. It’s complicated. Well, that said it all! Those people in the Criminal Investigation Authority—especially those in that fancy Sensitive Crimes Division, or whatever they called themselves—thought that ordinary, on-the-street policemen like himself were incapable of handling anything sophisticated. It was so unfair—particularly because he was the source of much of the information they used to solve their sensitive crimes. Me. I give them the facts. I was the one who solved that Gustafsson case. I told them about Hampus. And now I’ve solved something else for them and he won’t even tell me what it is that I’ve solved. Typical. Absolutely typical of the injustice of the world.

  And Ulf thought: We must be kinder to Blomquist. His isn’t an easy job these days, what with...well, what with everything. These are times of everything—the Age of Everything. And it was everything that was straining civil society to the breaking point, challenging our world and its certainties. Everything, including methane.

  Martin thought...biscuits, cat, basket, Sweden.

  Chapter Ten

  THE SUDDEN URGE TO CRY

  At the end of Ulf’s next session with Dr. Svensson, the psychotherapist said to Ulf, “Busy recently?”

  “Yes,” replied Ulf. “Moderately. We had a rather unusual matter to deal with, actually, a ridiculous spat between young women. Twenty-year-olds. Friends disagreeing with one another. Under-the-surface rivalry. That sort of thing.”

  “At that age, feelings are very intense,” said Dr. Svensson.

  “You can say that again,” agreed Ulf. And then, “Could I ask you something, Dr. Svensson?”

  “Of course. That’s what I’m here for.”

  “Imaginary friends.”

  “Yes?”

  “Are they at all common?”

  Dr. Svensson shrugged. “There’s literature on the topic, you know. They crop up in childhood.” He paused. “Why do you ask?” He grinned. “Do you have one?”

  Ulf shared the joke. “Not really. Or not one I’d reveal to you, Dr. Svensson.”

  “Because I’d spoil the friendship?”

  “Something like that. No, I’m just interested...Well, more than just interested—it’s something to do with this case we had.”

  “The two young women?”

  “Yes. One of them, you see, created an imaginary boyfriend. She actually got somebody to pose with her in a photograph—a young man she encountered on the street. Then she ‘disappeared’ him, and so the friend thought she’d done him in. She’d made up some ridiculous story about his going off to the North Pole.”

  Dr. Svensson’s eyes widened. “The North Pole! That’s very significant, you realise. The symbolism.”

  Ulf waited for him to explain further.

  “The North Pole is a phallic symbol, Mr. Varg.”

  Ulf frowned. “But it exists, doesn’t it? It’s not just a symbol. It has a real, physical existence.”

  “No, it doesn’t. The North Pole doesn’t exist. There is no pole, Mr. Varg. It’s an idea.”

  Ulf did not wish to labour the point. “All right, there’s no actual pole. But if there’s no pole, then how can it be a phallic symbol?”

  “A word can be a symbol,” replied Dr. Svensson. “Semiotics, Mr. Varg!”

  “Yes,” said Ulf briskly. “Anyway, this other young woman—a friend of the first young woman—came to us with the photograph and the story of the mysterious disappearance of the boyfriend, whom at that stage we all thought real.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes. And we then had a visit from the mother—the mother of the first young woman, that is. She came to tell us that her daughter had told us a pack of lies when we asked her about what happened to her boyfriend. The mother explained that the boyfriend was imaginary and that her daughter had had an imaginary friend as a child—with the same name as the boyfriend she created later on.”

  “I see.”

  “The mother was very apologetic. She told us that the girl’s father, a naval officer, had deserted them and gone to live up north.”

  “Ah,” said Dr. Svensson. “North.”

  “She asked us to take an understanding view of her daughter’s behaviour. She understood that she could be in trouble for giving false information in a criminal investigation.”

  “Even into one concerning a non-existent person?”

  “Yes, even then. So we did. She was given a warning.”

  “And that was the end of the matter?”

  Ulf nodded. “Yes, that was it—as far as we were concerned. But I must say I was curious about this whole business of imaginary friends. Why do children do it?”

  Dr. Svensson said that he thought it was a form of play. “They act out the issues that concern them in their real lives. That’s what children do. So the imaginary friend will be a projection. The friend will mirror what’s going on inside the child.”

  “And then they bring the friend to an end?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Svensson replied. “It can seem very abrupt to any adult who witnesses it. The parent asks, ‘Where’s Bo?’ And the child just says something like, ‘Bo’s gone away.’ It can seem almost brutal.”

  Ulf stared at the psychotherapist. “Excuse me,” he said. “Could you say that again?”

  “Say what?”

  “That last bit. What the parent says, and then what the child answers.”

  “The parent says, ‘Where’s Bo?’ and then the child replies, ‘Bo’s gone away.’ I think that’s what I said.”

  “Why Bo?” asked Ulf. “Why did you choose that name?”

  Dr. Svensson did not answer immediately. He turned to look out of the window. “I suppose that tells you something about me.”

 
Ulf waited.

  “I had an imaginary friend myself, Mr. Varg. He was called Bo, as it happens. He was my constant companion until I was about eight. Then, apparently—and I don’t remember this part, but my parents told me this is what happened—I got rid of Bo. I just said, ‘Bo’s gone away.’ That was the end of Bo. And that’s why I chose that name. Nothing more significant than that.”

  Ulf was silent. He felt sorry for Dr. Svensson; for the first time in their acquaintanceship, he felt sorry for him.

  “Life is a progression of partings,” said the psychotherapist. “One by one, people—and things too—are taken from us. We lose them, they die, they are shown by us to be things of transitory association.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ulf.

  “So am I,” said Dr. Svensson.

  * * *

  —

  When Ulf returned to the office, there was a message from Anna awaiting him. “She had to go out,” said Carl. “She left you a message. It’s on your desk.”

  He saw the note, placed prominently on his keyboard. “Have just heard,” wrote Anna, “that Signe Magnusson has gone missing. Will get in touch.” And then she had put a kiss, an x, before her name. It was the first time she had ever done that, and Ulf felt a sudden thrill. Of course, it could be meaningless; many people signed off with an x, and it was probably no more than a mannerism, as meaningless as dear at the beginning of a letter. Or it could mean something more. It could be a little sprig of warmth, of particular affection, put there to make personal the impersonal. Love and kisses, xx. They were such clichéd words and symbols, but there were times they set the heart racing because they meant exactly what they purported to say.

  He put the note down. He had assumed they had seen the last of the Sixten affair, but this news from Anna put an end to that assumption. He picked the note up again and examined it afresh. The pleasure he had felt on seeing the casually inscribed kiss was now replaced by anxiety. And that anxiety, insidious and troubling, itself soon gave way to regret. He could not allow himself to embark on this...this, what was it? Dalliance? Affair? Hopeless friendship?

  He noticed that he was being watched from across the room, and now Carl pointed at the note. “What does she say?” he asked.

  It occurred to Ulf that Carl had read the note. If he had, then he would have seen the kiss. It was very unwise of Anna, he thought; it was reckless.

  “Missing girl,” he answered.

  “Anything else?”

  He folded the note and placed it in his pocket. Carl watched him, and then said, “Shouldn’t you put that in a file?”

  At the mention of the word file, Erik looked up from his desk. “Pass it over. If there’s no existing file, I’ll start one. What’s the name of the suspect?”

  “There’s no suspect,” Ulf said quickly. “It’s just a personal note. There’s no suspect and no need for a file.”

  Carl sat back in his chair. “But you just said it’s about a missing girl; what’s personal about that?”

  Ulf turned away, pretending he had not heard.

  Carl repeated himself. “I said: you’ve just said it was about a missing girl. That’s not personal.”

  Ulf felt the effect of the blush that he knew must be giving away his feelings. He felt flushed about the face; warm.

  “There’s some personal stuff in it,” he said. “Nothing important. Anna has been asking my advice.”

  He did not know where that came from. It was a straw grasped at in extremis, but he thought it sounded credible.

  “About what?” asked Carl.

  The direct question gave Ulf his chance to go on the attack and deflect the heat. “Isn’t one entitled to ask a colleague about a personal issue? Such as...such as the recommendation of a dentist?”

  “Is Anna having dental work?” Carl asked.

  Ulf looked at his watch. He would leave the question unanswered, as if it were simply too unimportant to merit a response. “I have to go,” he muttered. “I have to meet somebody.”

  He left the office and began to make his way downstairs. The incident had disturbed him. He had now decided that he would have to speak to Anna and say, in the most general terms, of course, that notes left about the office could be intercepted by colleagues who had no business reading them. He would not say anything about the inscribed kiss, but if it had meant anything, then she would know what he was talking about. On the other hand, if it had been a casual, meaningless gesture, then she might wonder why he was so concerned that others might read an office note. People were always writing memos to one another and then, if they were physical rather than electronic, leaving them on other people’s desks. Anna might reasonably ask why that should be a matter for concern, and if she did then he would have to say something about the kiss. It would be embarrassing, but he would have to do it.

  He went out of the front door of the office and crossed the road to the café. There was no meeting—that had merely been an excuse to leave—and with nothing better to do, he decided to spend half an hour or so in the café, reading the newspaper or perhaps mulling over the implications of the news of Signe’s disappearance.

  The café was not busy, and he found a table at the window. Somebody had conveniently left on the table a copy of the Sydsvenska Dagbladet, and he began to browse this while he was waiting for his coffee. There were the usual items: the crimes and the threats of crimes, the wringing of hands, the advice of politicians and civic leaders. It had not been like this before, but that was in the time of innocence. Now it was all very different.

  Ulf sighed. Why could people not live together in harmony? Why did people think that berating and assaulting others should do anything but make everything worse for everybody? His eye fell on an advertisement inserted by the university. A new master’s course was being offered in community relations. He read the short paragraph extolling the usefulness and topicality of this course. He wondered whether it would help, or whether it was no more than an aspiration—a course in what might be, but wasn’t. But at least they were trying; at least they were not instituting a new master’s programme in cynicism and indifference.

  He turned the page. Journalistic gloom was replaced by levity, with a photograph of the latest piece of mouse-related street art. Malmö had been transfixed by the appearance of tiny constructions, created at floor level by anonymous artists, purporting to be the premises of local mice. There had been a restaurant, and people had left cheese outside it for the real mice that had started to frequent the premises; now there was a bookshop for the more literate mice. He looked at the picture, and smiled.

  Tiny books filled the miniature, real glass windows of the pint-sized bookshop; a bench stood against a wall; within a recess a bookcase stood replete with special offers. A restaurant, or a nightclub, or a patisserie—it was difficult to tell—was next door. In the foreground, a few fallen leaves showed the scale.

  Ulf suddenly wanted to cry. He did not know why he should feel like this; he was not given to lachrymose moments, but now he felt the urge simply to cry. It was something to do, he thought, with the fact that this was a tiny, ordered world—a world in which there were none of the things he had read about on the previous page. Or it could be that this little construction was all about civilisation, and the desire to create an urbs, a place where civic life may be led, ordered and courteous. Or it was the architecture, which was on such an unthreatening scale and so human, while at the same time being exactly the sort of thing that a mouse architect might be expected to create.

  On impulse he reached for the note in his pocket. He opened it and read it for a third time. Who am I fooling? That was the question he used to ask himself as a young man, and had found it a valuable corrective to any of the common dishonesties of this life, the excuses one gives oneself for not doing the things one ought to do. Who am I fooling?

  And now that que
stion seemed so very apt. He was denying to himself that he loved Anna. There, he had said it. He had said that he loved her. And he did. He did.

  Yet he could not; he simply could not. Anna was married to Jo. She had two young daughters who presumably loved both their parents. They were a family; he was not. How could he contemplate, even for the briefest of moments, breaking up all that? How could he look Jo in the face and admit that he would take away his wife, his companion of so many years, the mother of his children? The answer was that he could do none of this, and that this love that he had, for the very first time, acknowledged would have to be suppressed, denied, hidden away, as so many impossible loves have had to be through all time—loves that would not work, loves that were frowned upon, loves that could blast apart a social or personal order.

  He fingered the note, as if it were a talisman. A letter from a lover is always like that, he thought. It carries the sympathetic magic of the hand that wrote it; that hand. He read it one last time, and then tore it into several pieces, and then tore those pieces up until the note was no more than confetti.

  And that was the point at which Carl appeared, as if from nowhere. “I thought you said you were meeting somebody,” he said, staring pointedly at the fragments of the note still in the palm of Ulf’s hand.

  Ulf said nothing as he closed his fist around the fragments of paper. “Have you seen this?” he said to Carl. “It’s a mouse bookstore.”

  Carl looked at the photograph. “Strange,” he said.

  “What does it make you feel?” asked Ulf.

  “Strange,” repeated Carl.

  Ulf gestured towards the empty chair at his table. “Why don’t you sit down, Carl? Then we can talk.”

  Carl accepted the invitation. “Talk about what?” he asked.

  “Everything that we would each like to say,” said Ulf, “but that we are too embarrassed to put directly.”

  Carl’s eyes widened. He looked again at Ulf’s clenched fist. “That note: What was in it?”