by Arne Dahl
“Yes,” said Lisbet Heed. “He was really good at it. He was the first to arrive every morning, and he always started the day with a… What was it called?”
“A five-oh-one,” said Josephson. “You start at five-oh-one and work your way down to zero.”
“What happened to Göran Andersson after he was fired?” asked Hjelm. “Did he stay here in town?”
“No,” said Lisbet, looking sad. “No, he left his girlfriend high and dry and vanished. I don’t think even Lena knows where he went.”
“Lena?”
“Lena Lundberg. They lived in a little house on the other side of Algotsmåla. Now she lives there alone. And she’s pregnant, the poor thing. Göran probably doesn’t even know that he’s going to be a father.”
“Do you remember whether Göran was injured sometime during the spring of ’91?”
“Yes.” Josephson had the personnel list filed in his mind. “He was out sick for a couple of months back then. It had something to do with his teeth-”
“I think he had to get a bridge, or something like that,” said Heed. “He mostly stayed indoors during that time. He didn’t want to talk about what had happened. But I saw him with a plaster cast on his arm too. I think it was a car accident.”
“One more thing,” said Hjelm. “Had Göran Andersson turned in his bank keys?”
“I don’t think he’d done that yet,” said bank president Albert Josephson, for the first time sounding a bit uncertain.
The three members of the A-Unit exchanged glances again. Things were falling into place. Loose threads were getting tied up.
Göran Andersson.
There wasn’t much more to add.
Hjelm turned to Wrede. “Do you have a sketch artist in Växjö?”
“A police sketch artist?” said Wrede, still looking pale. “There’s an artist here that we sometimes use, yes.”
“The three of you are going to help each other produce a drawing of the man from NCP who was down here and took over the case. Be as specific as you can. But first I want you to drive us over to see Lena Lundberg.”
It wasn’t far to the other side of Algotsmåla. But while sitting crowded together in a police cruiser, each of them put all the information together in their minds to form one big picture.
In the spring of 1991, the bank employee Göran Andersson from Algotsmåla had been beaten up in a restaurant in Växjö. It was a result of the Swedish banking world’s grotesque borrowing practices during the late eighties: those borrowing practices contributed not only to the bank crisis and to Sweden’s general economic crisis in the early nineties but also to scores of unnecessary personal bankruptcies. One of these bankruptcies was suffered by Anton Rudström, who at the sight of a banker went berserk and beat up the man. That man turned out to be Göran Andersson. Andersson apparently had already suspected that something was wrong with the bank’s policies, because after the beating he said that Rudström’s actions were justified. Yet he continued to work at the bank, maybe out of loyalty, or maybe because there simply wasn’t any other job available.
Later, as a direct result of these shady business dealings, he lost his job, and that’s when he snapped. Even though he’d been fired, he went to the bank just as he usually did, arriving before the normal opening time. He let himself in through the staff entrance, using the keys that he hadn’t yet relinquished, in order to rob the bank. That would be his revenge.
But for some unknown reason, he opened the bank doors as usual. That was strange, because the opening hours at the bank had been cut back, and because he’d been fired and was in the process of robbing the bank. Maybe it was the power of habit, or maybe he was distracted by a dart game that he’d started playing. Five-oh-one.
To top it all off, he was robbed just as he was planning his own robbery. A brutal Russian mafia man by the name of Valery Treplyov came into the bank in the middle of Andersson’s robbery and game of darts. The situation was grotesque. The world fell in on Andersson. The mafioso on the other side of the counter had the same gigantic build as the man who had beaten Göran up a couple of years earlier. Maybe he was holding the dart in his hand. Regardless, he threw it with infallible precision right into Valery Treplyov’s eye.
Now Andersson had killed a man; in self-defense, of course, but no matter what, he was standing there with a dead body in his old bank office, which he was in the process of robbing. He dragged the body inside the vault and locked it. He had appropriated Treplyov’s gun, perhaps in a state of confusion, and he’d emptied the man’s pockets. In addition to a lot of ammunition from the notorious factory in Kazakhstan, he also found a cassette tape.
He took the money, locked the bank doors, and left through the same entrance he’d come in, the back door, which was for employees only. In front of the bank was the truck containing Estonian vodka, ready to be delivered to other parts of the country. In the vehicle, the other Igor, Alexander Bryusov, waited for his partner to appear. After a while he might have gone over to the bank, only to find the doors locked and the place deserted. A mystery.
By then Göran Andersson had already driven off in his car, which he’d parked in back, in the employees’ lot. Maybe it was then that he popped the cassette into the car tape player and listened to the very jazz tune he’d heard a few years earlier while he was being beaten up: the inexplicable hand of coincidence. It was as if some higher power were behind it all. An unexpected element that was simply impossible to explain. That absurd Russian-who had come into the bank while Göran was making a radical break with everything he’d ever believed in-had supplied him with not only a weapon but also a motivation in the form of this music.
It was too much. He was transformed into the instrument of a larger power, seeking revenge against the banks, on behalf of the greater public, and at the same time against Anton Rudström, for himself personally. He decided to go after the bank’s board of directors from the year when Rudström had so hastily been granted a loan, the year 1990. That loan had resulted in the beating in Hackat & Malet in the spring of 1991. Both banks were branches of Sydbanken, but it could just as well have been any of Sweden’s larger banks. Göran Andersson presumably went to Stockholm on February 15, right after the incident at the bank in Algotsmåla. There he planned the first of three murders to be committed in less than a month. He started on his path as the avenging angel between March 29 and 30. After the first three murders, he retreated to his lair to plan the next series of killings. Which they were in the middle of right now. Göran Andersson was very determined, very accurate, very damaged, and very dangerous. He was beyond desperate.
The mystery was gone. But the mist still remained.
Misterioso.
They got out of the police car in front of a small house on the edge of town. It looked tranquil and peaceful, basking in the evening sun. The police car drove away.
None of them wanted to be the first to go in and talk to the woman who was expecting the Power Murderer’s child.
26
The underside of the crackle-glazed altocumulus cloud cover gleamed dark orange in the early summer evening. An infinite number of small, just barely separated wisps plunged Lilla Värtan and all of Lidingö into a strange, fractured, bewitching twilight. It was as if the sky were pressing down with superhuman force.
Gunnar Nyberg, sitting in a police car up on Lidingö Bridge, thought he’d never seen such a glow before. It had a fateful music about it.
Maybe it’s my time to die, he thought, then shook off the idea.
He was on his way to the villa of Lovisedal board chairman Jacob Lidner in Mölna, located on the southern spit of Lidingö. Arto Söderstedt had the night watch; he would be gazing out across the water as he sat in that living room that radiated resistance to the police presence. Nyberg sympathized with the living room.
He had nothing to do and had decided on his own initiative to spend the night keeping Söderstedt company. There were worse things he could be doing. Besides, he was fee
ling an acute need for human companionship. Loneliness had suddenly overwhelmed him and sucked the breath from his throat, propelling him inexorably out into this appallingly lovely early summer evening. The beauty on the Lidingö Bridge took his breath away again.
After the bridge Gunnar Nyberg turned right and took Södra Kungsvägen all the way out to Mölna. When he caught sight of Lidner’s palatial villa, he stopped the car, parking it a safe distance away on the little entrance drive. Dusk had fallen. The peculiar cloud formations now glowed only faintly; then during the minute it took him to walk to the house, they disappeared entirely.
He reached the hedge surrounding the garden. The gate appeared in the middle of all the vegetation. It was ajar. He opened it all the way and stepped into the yard.
Out of the corner of his eye, off to the left, he saw a faint movement, and long before the pain hit him, he heard the dull pop of a gun with a silencer.
He threw his huge body full length onto the gravel path and pulled out his service weapon. Yet another shot whined right over his head.
Something was ignited in Gunnar Nyberg’s eyes.
He got up and with a wild bellow ran like a crazed buffalo, firing one shot after another at the spot where he’d seen the movement a couple of seconds earlier.
A car started up a little farther down the road. He heard it approaching. He tossed aside his empty gun and, still bellowing, crashed like a bulldozer right through the thick hedge and came out onto the road just as the car came up.
Gunnar Nyberg tackled it like a professional hockey player.
He hurled his furious giant’s body against the left side of the accelerating vehicle. It flung him off, and he landed with his face pressed to the asphalt.
The pain came. His field of vision was shrinking drastically, but he saw the car drive into a lamppost a dozen yards away.
Arto Söderstedt, with gun raised, rushed over to the car, yanked the driver out, and pulled him over to the other side of the road. The last thing Nyberg saw before everything vanished in a sea of fire was Alexander Bryusov’s bloody face being dragged across the asphalt.
Maybe it’s my time to die, thought Gunnar Nyberg, and he was gone.
27
I miss the music.
That’s the only thing he’s thinking.
Here the sensitive fingers should have started on their cautious promenade.
He sits motionless for a while on the living room sofa, imagining that he’s listening.
Here’s where the sax should come in.
The body performs no dance of death, as it lies there on the floor, without moving, with two holes in the head. It’s a piece of dead meat; nothing more.
Yet another corpse.
Without joy, he mentally checks another name off the list.
Art has become a trade, and a mission has become an execution. All that’s left is an inexorable, imperative list.
I miss the music, he thinks as he picks up the gun from the table and leaves via the terrace.
In the wall he leaves behind two slugs from Kazakhstan.
28
It’s night and they’re sitting in Hjelm’s hotel room in central Växjö. Each of them is holding a photo of Göran Andersson; three pictures that they’ve brought along, given to them by Lena Lundberg.
Kerstin Holm is half-reclining on the bed. In her hands she’s holding a group photo of the staff at the bank in Algotsmåla from the summer of 1992. They’re posing outside the bank, all four of them smiling pleasantly. It’s a PR shot. In the front stands Lisbet Heed and a young woman who is Mia Lindström; in back are Albert Josephson and Göran Andersson. Andersson is tall, blue-eyed, blond, wearing a nice suit. He has one hand on Lisbet Heed’s shoulder, and his wide smile shows very white teeth. The bridge in his mouth is apparently in place. There’s nothing special about him. Just like hundreds of similar-looking Swedish bank tellers.
“He was always a model employee,” Lena Lundberg had said, speaking in the distinct, broad accent of Småland as she glanced up from her coffee cup for a moment. “Almost a perfectionist, you might say. Never a day’s absence, except after the accident. A real asset to the bank.”
On the wall behind her was a little framed embroidery that elegantly declared, MY HOME IS MY CASTLE.
Lena kept her hands clasped over her stomach, where a slight bulge had started to show.
“Would you say that he lived for his job?” asked Holm. “That he had a personal investment in his work?”
“Yes, I think so. He lived for the bank. And for me,” she added hesitantly. “And he would have lived for our child.”
“He can still do that,” Kerstin Holm had said without really believing it.
Jorge Chavez is sitting on the edge of the bed at Kerstin’s feet. In his hand he has a photo of an utterly focused Göran, who holds a dart out in front of him and is just about to throw it. There is a tremendous, ice-cold purposefulness in his supremely attentive gaze. The date 12/3/1993 is printed faintly in pencil on the back of the photo.
On the wall directly across from the embroidery was a dartboard with three darts stuck in it. Chavez went over to the board and pulled out one of them. He studied with fascination the strange shape of the dart with its extraordinarily long point.
“Is this how darts usually look?” he asked.
Lena Lundberg stared at him with her sorrowful green eyes. It took a moment before she managed to shift gears:
“He special-ordered them from a company in Stockholm. Bows & Arrows, I think it’s called. In Gamla Stan. A dart can be as long as seven inches,” she told them. “Half for the point and body, half for the flights. He experimented until he found a certain weight that suited him, and the ideal shape turned out to be that long point. But it does look rather strange.”
“Was he a member of any dart club?” Chavez weighed the dart in his hand to find the center of gravity.
“The dart club in town. In Växjö, I mean. That was where he’d been on the night you were talking about, when somebody beat him up. He’d won some sort of record, and when the club closed, he wasn’t ready to stop, so he went over to that restaurant and kept on practicing. Otherwise he doesn’t usually go out to pubs very often.”
“Did you play darts with him?” asked Chavez, throwing the dart at the board. It didn’t stick but instead fell down, puncturing the parquet floor. “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling out the dart and looking at the annoying little hole in the wooden floorboard.
It seemed so irrelevant.
“Sometimes we used to play a game,” said Lena, without casting a glance at Chavez’s dubious activities. “Just for fun. Although it wasn’t really much fun. He always gave me a head start, but he always caught up in the end. He hated to lose. You know, you go from five-oh-one down to zero. You have to finish with the checkout, as it’s called, hitting the double ring with the last dart you throw, so that you end up right at zero, no more, no less. The checkout and zero have to coincide exactly.”
Paul Hjelm is slouched in an armchair in the hotel room, staring at the third photograph. It’s the most recent one of Göran Andersson, taken only a couple of weeks before the bank incident. He has his arm around Lena and is smiling broadly. They’re standing outside in the snow in front of their house; they’ve made a snow lantern, with a little candle burning inside. His cheeks are rosy, and he looks happy and healthy. And yet there’s a certain shyness in his clear blue eyes.
Hjelm recognizes that look. It’s the quiet shyness of a child.
“And he doesn’t know that you’re pregnant?” said Hjelm.
Lena looked down at her coffee cup again and murmured, “I was just thinking of telling him. But he hadn’t been himself after getting the pink slip. It arrived in the mail in an ordinary brown envelope from Stockholm. Not even his boss at the bank, Albert Josephson, knew about it. I watched him open the envelope and saw how something died in his eyes. Maybe I knew even then that I’d lost him.”
“So you haven’t
had any contact with him since he disappeared?”
“On the morning of February fifteenth…” said Lena, as if she were leafing through a calendar. “No. Nothing. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing.”
Suddenly she looked Hjelm straight in the eye. He had to look away. “What exactly has he done?”
“Maybe nothing.” Hjelm lied, feeling ill at ease.
Jorge Chavez gets up from the bed, stretches, and gathers the photographs. He hesitates for a moment. “Maybe we should tell Hultin about this?”
“Let them spend one last night guarding the Lovisedal board members,” Hjelm says tersely. “Nothing’s going to happen there anyway.”
“Besides, we should probably wait for that sketch of our so-called colleague,” says Kerstin Holm, yawning.
“The guy who stopped the whole damned investigation,” says Chavez, and after a moment continues: “No, listen. That’s enough for today. A good day’s work. Although with a rather bitter aftertaste.”
He places the photographs on Hjelm’s nightstand and leaves the room in the midst of a huge yawn.
Kerstin is still lying on the bed, tired and incredibly… erotic, thinks Hjelm. He’s still uncertain whether the previous hotel room incident actually took place or not.
“Do you know anything about astrology?” he asks abruptly.
“Because I’m a woman?” she replies, just as abruptly.
He laughs. “Presumably, yes.”
“The alternative way of thinking,” she says sarcastically, sitting up on the edge of the bed and tossing back her black hair. “I know a little about it.”
“This morning-was it really this morning?-my daughter said that this… blemish on my cheek looked like the astrological sign for Pluto. What does that mean?”
“I’ve never thought about that,” she says, coming over to touch his cheek. “Maybe your daughter is right. Lately I’ve thought it looked like a hobo sign.”
“Have you really been thinking about my blemish?” He closes his eyes.
