The Department of Sensitive Crimes

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “But I’m a serving officer of the Department of Sensitive Crimes,” said Ulf quietly. “We’re very careful about confidentiality, you know.”

  The colonel looked thoughtful. “I suppose you’re a sympathiser,” he said.

  “Naturally,” said Ulf, wondering what it was he was expected to sympathise with.

  “You see we should stop handling these people with kid gloves,” said the colonel.

  “Absolutely,” said Ulf.

  The colonel leaned towards him. Ulf noticed that his nose was now almost glowing, small red blood vessels being visible on the sides of the nostrils. Yet he still seemed hesitant, and Ulf decided to pour him another glass of wine.

  “Very fine Medoc, this,” said the colonel appreciatively.

  “This community service man,” Ulf prompted.

  “Oh, him. Yes, well, I’ve got a little surprise for him,” said the colonel. He laughed. “His community service should go with a bang, I’d say. Hah!”

  Ulf waited.

  The colonel took another sip of his wine. “Bomb disposal,” he whispered. “I’ve put him on bomb-disposal duty. How’s that? That’ll teach him to stab people in the ankle.”

  “Knee,” said Ulf.

  “Yes, knee—wherever. The point is that a few days in bomb disposal will sort him out.” The colonel reached for his glass. “I had a very good man in bomb disposal, but he lost his nerve and asked for a transfer. I gave it to him because I thought he deserved a change. But when I looked around for volunteers, nobody else stepped forward. Not a soul, which shows what the country has become, I’m afraid. Then I thought: this nasty piece of work, this knee-stabber, would be ideal. So that’s where he’s going. Hah!”

  “But he’s had no training,” Ulf pointed out. “Bomb disposal is a very skilled business, isn’t it?”

  “A bit,” said the colonel. “But we have pretty good manuals, you know. He can read up before he tries his luck.”

  Ulf sat back in his chair. “I don’t think you should do it,” he said. “You can’t put innocent civilians into bomb-disposal units.”

  “Innocent?” the colonel retorted.

  “Or guilty,” said Ulf evenly. “They’re still civilians.”

  “Nonsense,” said the colonel. “It’ll do him good. And frankly who cares if he blows himself up? Serve him right.”

  Ulf persisted. “No, Colonel, you shall not do it.”

  The colonel stared at Ulf. The earlier bonhomie of the lunch seemed to evaporate. “Excuse me, Mr. Varg, you are not in command here. I am. Now, how about some tiramisu?”

  “No thank you,” said Ulf. “But in respect of this man, you are not to expose him to any danger. Give him a job peeling potatoes or painting things. And if you don’t, I shall report you. I shall report you for recklessly endangering life. You said it yourself—your own words. You said you were happy for him to blow himself up.”

  “Report me?” said the colonel, his voice rising—unsteadily. “I am a serving officer of His Majesty’s forces—who will believe your word rather than mine?”

  Ulf smiled. “A tape recording might help,” he said. And with that he withdrew the small recording-pen device tucked into his top pocket. “It makes very good recordings,” he said. “And it was very silly of me to leave it on. I must remind myself to turn it off—I really must.”

  The colonel stared at him for a moment, and then broke into a grin. “Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll put him in the kitchens.”

  “Thank you,” said Ulf.

  “Not at all,” said the colonel. “Now, did I ever tell you about a month I spent on secondment in northern India? Those Indian army messes are superb—just superb. Tiger heads on the wall. Fantastic curries; kedgeree for breakfast and so on. Most agreeable company and remarkable horsemen. They have some camel-mounted units too, you know. They look marvellous, with their long lances decorated with flags. Wonderful, quite wonderful.”

  * * *

  —

  When he left the base, Ulf telephoned ahead to suggest to Anna that as his return to the office would more or less coincide with the morning coffee break, they should meet in the café before he came up to the office. She agreed: he had left her a message about Blomquist’s revelations, and she was keen to discuss this with him.

  “This case is getting no simpler,” she said over the phone. “I’d like your input.”

  “Sometimes the most complicated cases are in reality the simplest,” said Ulf.

  There was a brief silence. “The most complicated...,” she began, and then, “Ulf, what exactly does that mean?”

  Ulf was not sure. “That’s the point,” he said. “Meaning is not always apparent.”

  He drove back, parked the Saab, and made his way to the café. It was not busy, and he was able to get his preferred table at the window. He felt proprietorial about that table, resenting those who were sitting at it when he came in, as if they had no right to be there. That feeling, though, amused him, as might any unjustified conviction or sense of entitlement. Tables in cafés were common property and nobody had a greater right than anyone else to occupy them; and yet, and yet...there were subtleties in the claiming of space; we staked out our territory on beaches, small squares of sand to which we felt entitled to return after our swim; we created all sorts of unseen boundaries, temporary and informal, by leaving our possessions on seats and benches—a jacket left on a chair made a claim every bit as specific and discouraging as a notice of legal title. This is mine—I’m coming back. Don’t think of sitting here.

  Anna arrived five minutes later. “Good,” she said. “You’ve got our table.”

  Ulf told her he had just been thinking of that. “It’s not really ours,” he said.

  “It should be,” said Anna. “We’ve been coming here for years.”

  Ulf looked out of the window. “Possession,” he mused. “Don’t they say that possession is what counts?” He transferred his gaze to Anna. “So, who owns Sweden?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The people who owned it in the past, or the people who are here right now?”

  She looked at him cautiously. “Nobody likes to talk about that, do they?”

  He agreed—they did not. “I think it’s a mixture,” he said. “The past has its claims, but it has to recognise that there’s a different present.”

  “And behave in a civilised manner?”

  Ulf nodded. “Precisely.”

  “Behave Swedishly?”

  Ulf laughed. “Exactly. Behave Swedishly.”

  “Which involves?”

  That was difficult, thought Ulf. And yet he knew what Swedish behaviour was, and could recognise it when he saw it. “Being civil to other people, I suppose.”

  Anna became businesslike. Social philosophy was all very well, but there was a job to be done. “And that leads me to the matter in hand,” said Anna. “Blomquist’s information.”

  Ulf asked her what she felt. Did the fact that Bim had betrayed Signe to her two boyfriends make a difference to her view of the case?

  Anna frowned. “Two boyfriends...What’s she thinking of?”

  Ulf shrugged. “I’ve never understood how people can do that. Or why they should want to.”

  “Variety,” said Anna. “You get fed up with somebody but you don’t want to end things with him. Somebody else comes along who makes you feel good. It’s understandable, I think.”

  “But would you do that yourself?” asked Ulf. The question came out spontaneously, and he immediately regretted it. She could always take his question the wrong way—as an invitation, or suggestion—in spite of their conversation of a few days ago.

  She did not, and Ulf felt relieved. “I wouldn’t,” she said. “But then, most people say they won’t do things...until they do them.” She looked at h
im, and for a few moments they held each other’s gaze.

  Ulf felt he had to bring the moment to an end. He was about to say what he thought he would not say, and so he had to stop. “Give me your thoughts,” he said, “about what’s been going on. If Bim has—”

  She held up a hand. “Hold on, let’s look at it in terms of who wants what. Or rather, what we think people want.”

  “Then reverse it,” suggested Ulf. “Because often what we think people want turns out to be the opposite of what they actually want.”

  “Or, indeed, who they are in the first place—just in case we’re looking in the wrong place.”

  Ulf reflected on this—Anna was right. When Blomquist had first mentioned Bim’s role, he had immediately thought that this provided a clue to Signe’s disappearance. They knew nothing about these boyfriends, but if a young woman disappeared, the first person whom one might wish to interview was usually the boyfriend, especially if, as in this case, the couple had become estranged. Here, of course, there were two young men who might feel strong resentment against Signe, and in Ulf’s view if anything had happened to her, then they would be prime suspects.

  He suggested this to Anna. “The two boyfriends—what do you think?”

  “Possible,” she said. “Remember that case we had three years ago when that make-up artist went missing and was eventually found up north...”

  “...under the permafrost.”

  “Yes, under the permafrost,” said Anna. “That was the boyfriend’s doing, wasn’t it? He worked up at the research station. He discovered she was having an affair with that television producer—the wildlife man, the one who made that film about the reindeer.”

  Ulf remembered the case well. He had spent two weeks up north, accompanied by Carl on that occasion as Anna could not leave the children back in Malmö. He remembered the digging—the sound of pneumatic drills hammering away against the silence of the tundra, and then the discovery, and the thought that always occurred to him in such circumstances that this was the moment when the end of somebody’s world was confirmed: not the world of the victim so much as the world of those left behind, the relatives. It defeated him that anybody could ever bring such a result about if they knew, or could imagine, the heartbreak of the victim’s family. Of course the people who did these things were usually deficient in moral imagination—they could not see what it would be like because they simply lacked the capacity to do so. Expecting them to understand—and to empathise—was like expecting a blind person to see a rainbow.

  Ulf signalled to the waitress to take their order. “So you think we should bring those young men in?”

  “Yes,” said Anna. “We’ll need to get Blomquist to give us the details. Did he tell you which coffee bar one of them works in?”

  Ulf said that he had not. “Blomquist likes to keep things to himself. I think he resents being excluded from the investigation.”

  “But it’s none of his business,” Anna pointed out.

  Ulf said that Blomquist did not see it that way. “I think he feels frustrated. He’s tried twice to get into the Criminal Investigation Authority but was refused on both occasions. Somebody said they thought he was dyslexic.”

  “That shouldn’t be a bar these days.”

  “No,” said Ulf. “You’d think not. But I was told that on his application, he wrote that he wanted to get into the AIC rather than the CIA. I suspect that didn’t help.”

  Anna smiled. “Poor Blomquist.” She looked at her watch. “Could we get him to come in here—if he’s free?”

  “Can’t do any harm,” said Ulf, taking his phone out of his pocket. As he dialled the number he told Anna about the results of his visit to the colonel.

  “Hampus is off bomb-disposal duty,” he said. “And I don’t think the colonel will try that one again in a hurry—thanks to my recording pen.”

  Anna was surprised. “You have a recording pen?”

  Blomquist’s phone was ringing. Ulf took his pen out of his breast pocket and showed it to her.

  “Where are the controls?” she asked. “How do you play something back?”

  Ulf smiled as he took the pen back from her. “You don’t,” he said. “It can’t record at all.” He paused, slipping the pen back into his pocket. “Not that the colonel has to know that.”

  “Hah!” said Anna.

  “That’s what the colonel kept saying. It was a pronounced mannerism he had.”

  “I hope I don’t say hah too much,” said Anna. “You’d tell me if I did, wouldn’t you?”

  Ulf reassured her that he would notify her of any irritating mannerism, but that he felt she very rarely said hah. Anna thanked him. “It’s good that we can talk so freely,” she said.

  “Yes, it is.” But he thought: I can speak freely to you about everything, except the one thing that is really important. I can’t speak to you about that. I can’t tell you how I feel about you because I cannot allow myself to feel that way. That is forever closed to me. Forever.

  * * *

  —

  Blomquist blew over his coffee. “Too hot,” he said. “These people always serve their coffee far too hot. It’s bad for the lining of the stomach.”

  “You’re right, Blomquist,” said Ulf. “I find I get heartburn if I drink things too hot.”

  “Heartburn is very unpleasant,” said Blomquist. “Mind you, did I tell you what happened to me four or five months ago?”

  Ulf began to say that perhaps some other time, but Blomquist had already started.

  “I woke up,” he began. “It was about midnight, I think. No, hold on, it was more like one in the morning, maybe even a bit later. My wife is a very sound sleeper—she’ll sleep through a thunderstorm right overhead—and I didn’t wake her up. But what a pain I had in my chest—somewhere there, over the sternum. I had some of those antacid tablets, and I took one; maybe even two, I forget, but it made no difference.

  “It was worse when I lay down, and so I spent the rest of the night—morning, actually—sitting in a chair in the living room. Eventually, at six or so, I realised that this wasn’t going away, that this wasn’t heartburn. So I woke up my wife and she drove me to the emergency department up at the hospital. They took one look at me and I could see they thought: heart attack. So they hooked me up to an ECG machine, and you know the result? They said the pattern was typical of classic pericarditis. You know what that is? Pericarditis?”

  Anna said that Jo had explained it once, but she had forgotten what he’d said. One of his colleagues had it, he said.

  “Well, it’s inflammation of the pericardium,” said Blomquist. “It’s caused by a virus in most cases. You breathe it in or it’s on food or whatever, and it goes to the pericardium. An anti-inflammatory relieves it. They gave me that and I was fine. But I was told not to exert myself for six weeks.” He paused. “That’s pericarditis for you.”

  Ulf and Anna stared at Blomquist, who stared back at them.

  Eventually Ulf said, “Most unpleasant.”

  “Yes,” said Anna. “I’m glad you recovered, Blomquist.”

  “That young barista you spoke to,” Ulf said. “I think we should have a word with him.”

  Blomquist took a tentative sip of his still-steaming coffee. “Why?”

  Ulf resisted the temptation to tell the policeman that it was not for him to question the direction of an investigation being carried out by the Sensitive Crimes Department.

  “Because we think he—or the other boyfriend—could have a motive for harming Signe. One of them may have something to do with her disappearance.”

  Blomquist considered this for a few moments, and then shook his head. “No,” he said. “It won’t be one of them. Or certainly not the barista.”

  “How can you be so sure?” asked Anna.

  “Because of the way he told me,” a
nswered Blomquist. “If he had done something to her, he wouldn’t have volunteered the information. He knows I’m in the force; I often go in there in my uniform.”

  Blomquist waited for them to absorb this before he continued, “If you would like my opinion, that young woman has disappeared of her own free will.”

  “In order to put heat on Bim?” prompted Ulf. “Bim told her boyfriends of her two-timing. She had a score to settle with her.”

  “But Bim had a score to settle with her too,” Anna interjected.

  “Yes,” said Blomquist. “Both of them would love to do something to get the other into trouble.”

  “So which one did it?” asked Ulf. “Bim or Signe?”

  Blomquist shook his head. “That’s too binary. There’s another factor in the equation.”

  Anna looked unconvinced. “What?”

  “Linnea, the girl who reported it.”

  Ulf had not anticipated this. “Why did she get involved?”

  “Because of something the barista told me.”

  Ulf and Anna were silent as they waited for Blomquist to explain.

  “He said to me that he used to go out with Linnea—before he became a member of Signe’s stable. I had the impression that Signe had prised him away from Linnea.”

  Ulf was listening intently. “And she—Linnea—didn’t like that?”

  “Presumably,” said Blomquist. “Who would?”

  “So Linnea had a grudge against Signe, and Bim and Signe had a grudge against each other?”

  Blomquist took another sip of his coffee. “That’s a bit cooler now. You know, one of these days somebody’s going to scald their tongue and make a big song and dance about it.” He took another sip. “Grudges? Yes. Definitely.”

  It took a bit of effort on Ulf’s part, but he felt they needed to know what Blomquist would do. “So who should we speak to, Blomquist?”

  “Linnea,” said Blomquist, without hesitation. “Because she’s the one who’s been hoping that we would take action against Signe when she turns up. She’s hoping, I imagine, that Signe will be punished for wasting police time with her non-disappearance.”