The No. 2 Global Detective

by Toby Clements

  ‘Perhaps you are right,’ agreed Lemmingsson. He wrote something on a pad of paper with a pencil.

  ‘We need a breakthrough,’ said Colander. ‘I do not think we can allow ourselves much more than a day following this line of approach.’

  The two police officers agreed that they would have another meeting when they knew more and they scheduled it for eleven o’clock that evening. Just as Lemmingsson was leaving, Colander asked him something.

  ‘See if you can get Knut Knutsson to come along,’ he said. ‘He may have something to add to what we have to say.’

  ‘Yes, I will,’ said Lemmingsson.

  Inspector Colander collected his car from the car park and drove out of Ynstead, following the road to Malmö. On the way he stopped at a service station and ordered himself a coffee. After that he drove on, concentrating on the road and thinking only vaguely about what had happened during the morning. He was sure he had forgotten something, but could not put his finger on what it might have been.

  I am empty inside, he thought, although I am also so full that I am about to burst. Why am I in such pain?

  When he got to Malmö he remembered that he had not taken his suit in to the dry-cleaner’s. He wondered if this was the thing that he had been trying to remember. He took a pencil and wrote the words ‘dry cleaning’ down on a scrap of paper that he found in his pocket.

  Then he parked the car illegally across the road from the video rental shop in Malmö and waited until there was no traffic before crossing. When he opened the door a bell pinged and a man in a cardigan came from a back office.

  Burt Colander introduced himself as a police officer. The owner of the video shop introduced himself as the owner of a video shop.

  ‘Although we also stock DVDs,’ he said, pointing with one hand to a long rack of DVD films. Colander turned to look at the display that the man had alerted him to, where a single man with dark hair and an old-fashioned elk-skin jacket stood with his head bowed over the selection, and then Colander looked back at the man in the cardigan.

  ‘I will tell you why I am here,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ said the man. ‘I was wondering.’

  Colander explained that he was looking for a video tape. The man explained that he did not have the video tape that Colander was looking for. Colander had not expected much more than this but anyway asked him to ring the police station in Ynstead if there was anything he remembered.

  ‘What is there to remember?’ asked the man as he closed the door behind Colander and watched him cross the road to where his car was parked.

  Once again Colander was struck by the thought that perhaps he was missing something. He drove back to Ynstead in the rain, trying not to think about the welcome that waited for him. When he thought of his lonely flat he thought that something had ended for him in the past. Something that he had never wanted in the first place but he was now sure had gone. He had started sweating again. He ought to go and see the doctor. But not yet. After this investigation perhaps. He took off his shirt and looked around for something with which to dry himself. Nothing, of course. He put his shirt back on.

  Tord Tordsson was in charge of the one o’clock meeting. Colander informed them about his visit to the video shop in Malmö. There was a silence after he had spoken.

  ‘Let’s just be honest with ourselves,’ Tordsson said. ‘We do not really know anything for sure. How can we? We are just insignificant humans. We can make all the plans we like, but when something like this happens it makes you stop and wonder why.’

  They all agreed with Tordsson.

  ‘Perhaps we should divide ourselves into two groups?’ Colander suggested. Everybody in the meeting room stopped and listened to him. It was if he had taken on the mantle of someone who knew what would happen next. And yet Colander had not sought out the position.

  ‘Go on,’ said Tordsson.

  ‘Perhaps if one team concentrated on working the telephones, while the other team concentrated on door-to-door?’

  ‘That is a good idea. Let’s do that.’

  They divided themselves up into teams. Colander and Lemmingsson agreed they would work together. Tordsson suggested they should have another meeting at five o’clock that afternoon to see if anyone had had a breakthrough.

  ‘Let’s keep in touch, though,’ said Tordsson. ‘We all know this is getting towards the most dangerous time.’

  The end of the week was always bad, but Friday evenings were the worst. This was when the utter hopelessness of their existence often became intolerable and suicide became a definite option. To prevent this, the police officers kept in touch and had formed an Ingmar Bergman Film Club, which met every Friday evening to watch the Swedish master’s old films.

  Colander asked Lemmingsson to come to his office after the one o’clock meeting. Before he could speak, Lemmingsson asked a question.

  ‘What will we do if we cannot find the film we are looking for?’ he asked.

  ‘We still have until tomorrow, don’t we?’ replied Colander.

  ‘Yes, but the Film Club begins at four. What if we do manage to find the film but cannot manage to get it back in time?’

  ‘It is a problem.’

  ‘Have you tried Helsingborg?’ Lemmingsson asked.

  ‘No,’ Colander said. ‘To be honest I am somewhat in the dark about Helsingborg.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘In the meantime why are you always talking to me as though we were standing at the top of a hill with a strong wind blowing all around us?’

  ‘Everyone in this area speaks like this. It is the Swedish way.’

  ‘By the way, where is Knut Knutsson? I heard that he had arrived and yet I have not had a chance to meet this new highly-thought-of police officer from Stockholm.’

  ‘He is in his office, I understand,’ Lemmingsson said. ‘Working on something.’

  The telephone call came at about two o’clock in the afternoon. Toff Toffsson had been relieved on the reception desk by Son Sonsson who put the call through to Burt Colander at 2.05. At 2.06 Burt Colander picked up the telephone and spoke into the receiver.

  Lemmingsson was surprised to see his boss stand up when he heard the voice on the other end of the line. Oh no, he thought, another narrative voice. Colander listened for a moment with his eyes wide in slight confusion. Lemmingsson had the impression that the call was important.

  ‘Of course,’ said Colander into the receiver. ‘I will do anything I can to help.’

  He wrote something on a pad of paper with his pencil. When he put the phone down, Lemmingsson thought the senior police officer looked strained and pale. He too hated it when information was rationed like this.

  ‘Someone is coming to see me,’ he said. ‘Someone from abroad. An Englishman and a woman from Botswana. Where does that leave us? The world is closing in on us.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Lemmingsson.

  Colander drank some coffee and then turned to face the wall. Will we ever truly be alone? he wondered. Or are we all destined to be tossed hither and thither until we can stand it no more. He thought of suicide often.

  His coffee was cold and he could hear music coming from the office next door.

  ‘Who has the office next door now?’ he asked Lemmingsson, just as the young police officer was about to turn and walk out of the office with his by now cold cup of coffee.

  ‘That is Knut Knutsson,’ said Lemmingsson. ‘He has brought a radio with him.’

  ‘I do not like music generally,’ said Colander.

  ‘Nor me,’ agreed Lemmingsson.

  ‘But this is nice. It has a nice rhythm. It seems as if the person playing the instrument knows how to play a tune.’

  ‘He might not be Swedish,’ cautioned Lemmingsson.

  Lemmingsson gathered his coffee cup and said goodbye to Colander. Inspector Colander followed him down the corridor but, instead of turning left at the end, as Lemmingsson had, the inspector turned right and out into the car park.

&nb
sp; He got into his car and drove home. He was just about to park outside his flat when he remembered his dry-cleaning. He drove to the dry-cleaner’s and gave them the suit, remembering to point out that there was a stain on the lapel from when he had spilled some pizza. When he got back into the car, despite the distant rumble of mental thunder to remind him there was still the problem of the foreigners who were coming to see him, Colander felt he had achieved something. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove, recalling the music he had heard through Knut Knutsson’s wall.

  He intended, as usual, to lie down when he got to his flat, but instead he felt unnaturally energised. All the while that tune from Knut Knutsson’s office ran through his mind as he found a roll of black bin bags and swept all the pizza cartons from the kitchen table into one of them. Next he changed the sheets on his bed. Then he flushed all the whisky and vodka down the lavatory pan and then all the pills and the coffee. There was almost nothing left in the flat now. He took down one of the five oil paintings from the wall. He removed the simple wooden frame and broke it into pieces over his knee. He pushed the pieces in the wood-burning stove and then set them alight with a match that lit first time. He studied the picture at arm’s length. A picture of a parrot in a wooden sauna. It had to go. It was a shame that they were his father’s paintings, but never mind. He folded it up and forced it into the flames. When the fire took hold the oil paint burned with an acrid black smoke that poured out of the wood-burner. Soon the overhead sprinklers activated and a fine rain soaked everything that was left in the house.

  Such things happen in a sophisticated modern society, thought Inspector Colander. I should be glad that the smoke did not asphyxiate me, nor the building set itself on fire. Besides, the water was refreshing. He undressed and stood for a while in the sitting room, enjoying the feel of it falling on his back and also the mossy feel of the carpet between his toes. Then he rubbed his clothes with soap from the bathroom. Soon they were clean enough to put back on.

  All in all, a good day.

  It was too far to drive to Helsingborg that evening and he had a meeting with Lemm Lemmingsson scheduled for later, so Inspector Colander decided to run to the police station. He felt the need for some exercise. Maybe he should lose a little weight, he thought. He dug out an old tracksuit and a pair of trainers and set off at a decent pace.

  He could have gone straight to the police station but instead diverted past the video shop in Hamngatan. It was from here that the police officers usually got their videos for the Ingmar Bergman Film Club and as such it was at the heart of this investigation. Yellow and blue police tape sealed off the door and a junior police officer was standing guarding the entrance.

  He greeted Inspector Colander and removed some of the tape to let his superior into the shop.

  Inside it was just as Colander remembered it. Nothing seemed to have changed. The man behind the counter was looking somewhat bored. Since the police had closed the shop he had had no customers. He looked at the inspector aggressively.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Information,’ snapped Colander. He was in no mood to talk. ‘Has the video been returned?’

  ‘How can it have been returned when you have closed my shop? No one can get in or out.’

  ‘Don’t play games with me. Tell me who took it out and when.’

  ‘I keep telling you, my records are confidential.’

  ‘And I keep telling you that I am a policeman and I need to know everything.’

  The two men stared at one another. Neither looked like yielding until the man behind the counter sighed.

  ‘I can’t very well make a living like this,’ he said. ‘All right. I will show you my files.’

  Was this the breakthrough Colander had been looking for, he wondered. I have waited so long, he thought, but I must not expect too much. After all, what will this man’s records reveal that I do not already suspect?

  The man sat behind a monitor and began typing in the words necessary.

  ‘The film is due back on Saturday,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘Saturday? Saturday is too late. I need it tomorrow.’

  ‘Well,’ shrugged the man. ‘You cannot have it unless he brings it back early and since the shop is shut, I do not expect him to do that, do you?’

  Colander thought for a minute. He would have to take the man off the door.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You can open the shop again, but I am going to have to have a name.’

  There was a long pause. Finally the man behind the terminal read out a name and an address.

  ‘Knut Knutsson, Hamngatan 219, Ynstead. Just along the road.’

  Knut Knutsson. The name of the highly-thought-of police officer from Stockholm. Could they be one and the same? And, if so, what was Knut Knutsson doing with the video tape? This was something for which Colander had not prepared himself. Knut Knutsson had only just arrived from Stockholm and already he had joined the video shop and taken out the very film the Film Club wanted. Colander left the man in the video shop and told the man on the door to clean up and get back to the station.

  Toff Toffsson was back behind the desk in reception. He had with him a cup of coffee.

  ‘Good afternoon, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I see you are in a tracksuit.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, Toff. A tracksuit.’

  Toffsson looked up sharply. Toffsson had had no idea that Colander knew his given name. More alarming was the fact that ordinarily Colander only donned his tracksuit and trainers toward the end of his cases, when it was time for him to act out of character and blunder about the woods in the dark. As far as anyone had informed the receptionist, the case had not progressed that far yet.

  Colander knocked on the door of Knut Knutsson’s office. Although that music was still playing, there was no answer. He tried the door handle. It was locked.

  Colander’s meeting with Tord Tordsson started. Tordsson ran the meeting and he began by outlining the situation so far.

  ‘Although we do not know anything for sure,’ he said, ‘we need a breakthrough. But we should bear in mind that, even if we do find a link between what we know and what we don’t know, there is no guaranteeing it will lead us to what we want to know.’

  ‘I do not know why we bother,’ said Colander quietly. He could hear that delightful music coming from Knut Knutsson’s office.

  ‘Perhaps you would like to tell us about the film you have chosen for the Ingmar Bergman Film Club, Inspector,’ rebuked Tordsson.

  Colander explained what had happened at the video shop in Hamngatan.

  ‘Has anyone actually laid eyes on the highly regarded police officer from Stockholm?’

  There was a general shaking of heads.

  ‘You mean the nationally known one? No. I have not seen him. It is somewhat mysterious.’

  Silence followed, so that Colander thought he might as well mention the two foreigners who were coming to see him.

  ‘They are coming to Ynstead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They cannot join our Ingmar Bergman Film Club.’

  ‘No.’

  The meeting broke up when Lemmingsson entered the room with a cup of coffee to start his meeting with Colander and Tordsson. Tordsson recapped on the earlier meeting and then Lemmingsson took over and ran the meeting.

  ‘Perhaps the two foreigners might be allowed to join the Ingmar Bergman Film Club if we are not watching an Ingmar Bergman film?’ he suggested.

  ‘That is one idea,’ said Tordsson dismissively. Why should foreigners appreciate Bergman?

  ‘We do not know if the foreigners will even be in time for the screening of the film anyway, so all this might be academic,’ said Nog Noggsson, who had come in to join the meeting.

  ‘We should find out when they are arriving.’

  Lemm Lemmingsson agreed that he would ring the airline company in Stockholm.

  ‘Are there enough chairs in the television room?’

 
Again Lemmingsson agreed to check. He is shouldering the lion’s share of the investigation, thought Colander. Tordsson suggested they ask Knut Knutsson to come to the screening.

  ‘It might smoke him out,’ he said.

  ‘And he can bring his own chair if it is an issue.’

  Again Lemmingsson agreed to count the chairs.

  ‘Do you know why the foreigners are coming to our shores, Inspector Colander?’

  Inspector Colander was doodling love hearts in a pad of paper with a pencil and was thinking about something else. The meeting broke up. The police officers went their separate ways. Colander drove to see his father. Why am I so cheerful? he wondered. He had felt elated all day. It was true that he could not concentrate for a second, but still. What, he wondered, would the next day bring?

  Later Colander would recall the next few hours as among the most ordinary he had ever spent as a police officer. He drove along the E13 towards Sjöbo, to where his father lived. There was too much left to chance. He felt as if he were shooting off in the wrong direction and yet there was something that Lemmingsson had said, or perhaps had left out, that made Colander think. He rang the police officer on the car telephone. Lemmingsson picked up the phone on the third ring.

  ‘Why are you ringing me?’ he asked.

  ‘There was something you said in the meeting. Or something you did not say in the meeting. It makes me think we are on to something.’

  ‘I can show you my notes of that meeting at the meeting this afternoon.’

  ‘I thought the meeting was scheduled for this evening?’

  ‘We are having another meeting first at the police station to go over the case so far at four o’clock. I can bring my notes then.’

  ‘I am sure it is nothing.’

  Colander put down the phone.

  His father had married a Thai bride almost exactly 30 years Inspector Colander’s junior. To begin with, their relationship had been strained. What was a Thai woman doing in Sweden? Inspector Colander had tried to have her deported. The wedding ceremony was rushed but nonetheless official, even if the garbled vows to love one another ‘long time’ were not completely by the book.