The Beige Man
Page 15
“Have you rung the bell to see if he’s home?”
“Of course. He might be inside, but he hasn’t bothered to answer the door. I haven’t seen any lights in the windows after dark.”
“Perhaps he’s sitting there in the shadows, thinking about the meaning of life,” Irene suggested ironically.
“More than likely. Particularly if he’s got some good stuff to smoke.”
They both smiled, but realized at the same time that there could be a great deal of truth in the joke. It was obvious that Pettersson had a serious drug problem of his own.
“Will you talk to Hannu about the car, or do you want me to do it?” Irene asked.
“I’ll do it. We have to fill in our card for the trotting races anyway,” Fredrik informed her.
“Good luck,” Irene said with a smile.
Tommy, Fredrik, Jonny and Hannu had started filling in their cards together for the V75 trotting races almost two years ago. None of them had asked whether Birgitta or Irene would like to join in, so the two female detectives would sometimes buy a 100-kronor Saturday lucky dip. The computer in the newsagent’s would fill in their cards, and there was no doubt that it knew considerably more about the lottery and football than either Birgitta or Irene. They had been over the moon last October when the football pools brought them a win of nearly four thousand kronor. They had celebrated with a very good lunch at a top restaurant on Götaplatsen, and still had plenty of money left over to share between them. The gentlemen had congratulated them on their win with forced smiles. Their carefully considered trotting cards had never won them more than 370 kronor. As Birgitta had said encouragingly: just enough for a takeaway pizza and a low-alcohol beer each.
The paperwork was piling up on Irene’s desk. With a sigh she sank down onto her chair. She hated paperwork, but knew that it was a necessary evil. She might as well get down to writing some reports. The longer she put it off, the more she would have to do.
She caught herself wishing that something would happen to interrupt her, and for once her wish came true.
“Hi there!”
Linda Holm’s blonde curls appeared in the doorway. She walked in before Irene had the chance to say anything. Linda was carrying a blue plastic folder; she took out a sheet of paper and placed it on the desk in front of Irene.
“This arrived just a minute ago,” she said.
It was a printout of a faxed “Wanted” poster. The text below the picture was in Spanish. The man in the photograph had cropped hair, but Irene could see that it was dark. Several gold hoops glinted in each ear. The eyes were pale, and he was glaring straight at the camera. The full lips were framed by a neat, thin beard. His septum was pierced by a heavy gold nose ring. He was wearing a wifebeater, and Irene could see the muscles of his neck were over-developed, as were the parts of his shoulders and chest visible in the picture. A gold chain as thick as a well-fed boa constrictor snaked around his neck.
“There’s something familiar about him,” Irene murmured to herself.
“Picture him five years older. Not quite as heavy. Without the beard and the gold jewelry. Glasses. Longer hair, bleached blond, and—”
“Andres Tamm!”
“Yes! And check out the name on the poster.”
Irene skimmed through the incomprehensible text and immediately spotted the letters in larger, bold print: Sergei Petrov.
“So Andres’s real name is Sergei,” Irene concluded.
“Yes again. And my esteemed colleague El Comandante has also produced a picture of the girl, which is why he’s so shaken up. Surprise!”
With the air of a magician conjuring up whole colonies of rabbits out of a top hat, Linda whipped another sheet of paper out of the plastic folder.
The girl in the image was half-turned away with her back to the camera, glancing into the lens over her shoulder. Her hair hung down over one eye like a blonde curtain. She had pulled up her skirt with the hand nearest the camera to show that she wasn’t wearing any panties. Her buttocks were small and firm. A child’s buttocks. She was naked from the waist up. It was just possible to make out a negligible breast in half-profile; it was hardly more than a faint curve on the skinny chest. You could count the vertebrae on her thin back. Her spindly legs were shoved into black boots.
The picture could have been sexy except for the girl’s age and the expression on her face. Fear shone from the one visible eye. The photograph had probably been taken several months earlier, because she didn’t look as emaciated as in the shot from the ME. Perhaps the big stainless steel autopsy table made her look even smaller after her death.
The text was in German, but Irene could read the name “Tanya” and some numbers that she understood: “10 bis 03 Uhr” and “€130.” The little Russian finally had a name, even if it probably wasn’t the name she’d been given at birth. Tanya’s services were available between ten o’clock at night and three in the morning, at the modest price of 130 Euro.
Irene recognized both the skirt and the boots. She had been wearing those same boots on the night she was killed, and the skirt was identical to the denim skirt they had found in the apartment in Biskopsgården.
“Tanya. She was in Germany during the fall. Did our Spanish colleague say where he got the picture?” Irene asked.
“No. Well, if he did, I didn’t understand him. But I did grasp that he’s going to suggest that one of us goes over to Tenerife to assist them with the murder inquiry. Or possibly several murder inquiries. I couldn’t work out whether he was dealing with two or three bodies. He said he’s intending to speak to ‘highest Comandante for Policía Nacional in Göteborg.’ It sounds like he’s completely desperate. He yelled ‘No gang war!’ at me several times over the phone. And ‘Murder bad for tourists!’ ”
They laughed heartily at the Spanish police chief’s problems. Homicide on an island off the coast of North Africa felt like police work at a safe distance. Their own investigations were more than enough to deal with right now.
“He did actually say they would pay for travel and accommodation if we could send someone over,” Linda said when she had straightened her face.
“In that case you’d better go.”
“Impossible. For a start, the homicide investigation has nothing to do with me. That’s your area of responsibility. And secondly, we’re planning another raid. Tomorrow. Believe it or not, this time it’s a café in Trollhättan.”
“A café?”
“Yes. A pimp accompanied by several girls has turned up there a number of times over the last few months. They rent a kind of storeroom next door to the café for a week at a time. It was a neighbor who tipped us off. He thought there was a noticeable increase in the number of male customers visiting the café at certain periods. We’ve been keeping the place under surveillance, and now we’re ready to go in.”
“Young girls?”
“Not as young as Tanya and Leili.”
Irene felt an irrational surge of relief. It was terrible when women were forced into prostitution, irrespective of age, but those very young girls were so desperately lost, somehow. Their lives were over before they’d even begun.
AFTER LUNCH IRENE went back to writing her reports. Tommy came in when she had almost finished the last one, which was about the fax from Tenerife and the identification of Andres Tamm as Sergei Petrov. It consisted of just a few lines because she had requested translations of the Spanish and German text. Irene felt optimistic about the prospect of revealing Tanya’s true identity. The question was whether they would also succeed in revealing the identity of her killer.
Irene showed Tommy the faxed picture of Tanya. He raised his eyebrows when he saw it.
“Well how about that. Tanya. So the little Russian has a name. Although obviously it’s not her real name. But it might make it slightly easier to track her down.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“Where did the fax come from?”
“Linda Holm got it from her Comandante in Teneri
fe. Apparently he’s in a real mess; he sounds pretty desperate.”
Irene told Tommy what he had said to Linda over the phone, and they both laughed, partly with relief at not having an ongoing gang war on their patch. They knew from experience how difficult that could be from a purely investigative point of view, and they also knew that dealing with gangs swallowed up resources on a huge scale. As a rule they just went on until the majority of the combatants were either dead or behind bars. “A kind of natural selection,” as Jonny put it.
“Have you spoken to Hannu?” Irene asked.
“Only in passing. He was going over to the ME’s office. They’ve finished the autopsy on Torleif.”
“You heard that the car’s been found?”
“Yes. It’s a remarkable coincidence that his car was stolen, although I would go with the theory that the thief had been keeping an eye on the parking lot and noticed the car hadn’t been used for a few days.”
“You’re probably right. I mean, Stefan doesn’t know when it was stolen. He didn’t notice if it was there when he arrived on Saturday evening because it was already dark.”
“We’ll see what forensics have to say tomorrow. They might find prints belonging to one of the star names on our records.”
“That would be way too simple. Every single petty thief knows that you need to wear gloves. Or wipe every surface. Or torch the car. Bearing in mind how cold it was, I’m sure the thief had something on his hands.”
“Let’s hope you’re wrong. Maybe his hands were freezing and he took the car so that his fingers wouldn’t fall off with frostbite.”
When Tommy finished speaking, Irene realized she was sitting staring at him without saying a word.
“What is it?” he said with a curious look.
“You said something that triggered a thought in the back of my mind. But it’s gone.”
“What did I say? That he took the car so that his fingers wouldn’t fall off?” Tommy ventured helpfully.
Irene shook her head sadly. “It’s no good; it’s gone.”
She knew there was no point in trying to force the issue. Whatever it was would float to the surface eventually. But it was incredibly irritating, like walking around with a popcorn husk stuck between your teeth and not being able to get rid of it.
“THE LITTLE BASTARD has a watertight alibi,” Jonny informed his colleagues over coffee that afternoon.
He both looked and sounded angry, and Jesper Tobiasson was slumped gloomily in the chair next to him.
Daniel Lindgren had cooperated fully when confronted with the accusation that he was suspected of having been involved in a hit-and-run incident in which a retired police officer had died. In spite of his age, he was no greenhorn when it came to criminal activities, and he was well aware of how the police regarded crimes against one of their own. He immediately admitted that he and his friend Fredrik Svensson had caught a bus to Göteborg’s central station after escaping from the juvenile detention center. From there they had traveled by train to Copenhagen; when they arrived in the city a few hours later, they had headed straight for Christiania, where they already knew quite a few people. These friends had apparently taken good care of them and provided them with a roof over their heads. The police had suddenly turned up out of the blue and taken them into custody. According to Daniel, this was all a misunderstanding, and he and Fredrik had been released after two days.
The Copenhagen police had a rather different version. A notorious narcotics dealer had been found murdered in Nyhavn. His body was almost frozen solid in the slushy ice just below the quayside. The cause of death was repeated blows to the head, delivered with extreme force. The autopsy had shown that he was likely dead before he was thrown into the water, since there was no water in his lungs. Daniel Lindgren’s friends from Christiania were the only people who had been seen with the dealer during the last few hours of his life. They had been in a pub in Nyhavn, and the dealer had been with them. According to a witness, the victim had argued loudly with some of the group, although there was no physical violence. Everything seemed to have calmed down by the time they left the pub at around midnight, but the following day the dealer’s body had been found by a man walking his dog along the quay early in the morning.
The whole group of friends from Christiania had been picked up, including Daniel Lindgren and Fredrik Svensson. They had all flatly denied any knowledge of the dealer’s death, and insisted that he had been very much alive when they parted company outside the pub. There were no witnesses, and no trace of forensic evidence that could link any of them to what had happened. After two days they were all released.
So at the time when Torleif Sandberg was run down by two young car thieves in Göteborg, Daniel and Fredrik were spending their second night in the cells in Copenhagen.
Daniel had gotten cold feet and come running home to Göteborg, but he didn’t have an apartment of his own in the city, so he had had to go and stay with his mom. Which was where he had been picked up.
“Well, at least that means we can definitely cross those two off our list. So that just leaves Björn Kjellgren, alias Billy, and Niklas Ström,” Irene said in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere.
The baleful look she got from Jonny said it all. He was obviously frustrated at the thought of having to start all over again.
“Irene is right. Even though it didn’t look as if those two guys knew each other, there is one thing that suggests it might be them. They both absconded from Gräskärr,” Tommy pointed out.
“Billy Kjellgren is a loner and Niklas Ström is a crazy homosexual rapist. According to the staff, they both kept to themselves, and none of the other guys would hang out with them. Hardly surprising in Niklas Ström’s case. Obviously you want to know that your ass is safe when you go for a shower.” Jonny snickered at his own joke.
Jesper joined in, but stopped abruptly when he realized that no one else was laughing.
“Of course it could be that only one of them was involved,” Tommy said, ignoring Jonny’s last comment. “Or neither. The nightmare scenario as far as we’re concerned is that we might be dealing with two guys who are completely unknown to us. But for the time being we have to go with the two names we have left: Niklas Ström and Billy Kjellgren.”
“Am I disturbing you?” came a woman’s voice from the doorway.
Everyone in the room recognized the voice and turned their heads. Marianne Wärme, the Acting Chief of Police, was standing there. She was a small, plump, middle-aged woman with short greying hair and glasses. Her bright, nut-brown eyes twinkled behind the thick lenses, and she often smiled warmly at the person she was talking to. When she wasn’t in uniform she usually wore a skirt suit and pumps and carried a matching purse. Anyone who didn’t know better could easily have taken her for a harmless old biddy, but she wasn’t nicknamed “The Iron Lady” for nothing. While climbing the career ladder, she had developed a reputation for incorruptible honesty, uncompromising toughness, and a will of steel. Whatever task she set for herself, she carried to its conclusion. Nobody could question her ability or her leadership skills—at least not within earshot of Marianne Wärme. Most people liked her because she gave clear, straight answers, and at the same time they had the greatest respect for her. Women with power and authority tend to intimidate people far more than men with the same qualities, particularly if those women deserve the position they have achieved. Acting Chief of Police Marianne Wärme was one of those women.
She walked into the room in her sensible low-heeled shoes and refused the offer of a cup of coffee.
“I’m in a rush. I’ll be brief. The commissioner of the Policía Nacional in Spain has contacted me. He’s received a request from the Chief of Police in Tenerife that a colleague from the Violent Crimes Unit in Göteborg go over there to help with an investigation into a series of homicides. There are four victims in total. Apparently these homicides are directly linked to the murder of the Russian girl who was found out at Delsjön.”
“Yes, it certainly does seem very complex. Which is why I think it’s a good idea if one of you goes to Tenerife. You can be there in the sunshine in five or six hours, which is no longer than it takes to drive to Stockholm. And the Spanish authorities will pay, as they’ve already said. We’re talking about two days, one overnight stay. That should give both sides plenty of time to exchange information. It could well benefit our investigation here in Göteborg, if the Spaniards are privy to information we don’t have.”
She definitely had a point. There were still major question marks within the investigation.
“It also fosters goodwill if we facilitate this kind of information exchange between countries within the EU,” the Acting Chief of Police said with a smile.
That smile fooled no one. If Marianne Wärme said that one of them was going to Tenerife, then one of them would soon be sitting on a plane.
“I HAVEN’T GOT time to go,” Irene said firmly.
The main reason was they were snowed under with work. The other reason was the Huss family had planned a ski trip at the cottage in Värmland. Irene had booked two days of leave, Friday and Monday, and wanted to clear her desk before the weekend. Krister was free for the long weekend, and the twins were coming too. On the way up to Sunne, they were going to stop off in Säffle and have lunch with Krister’s sister; they hadn’t gotten together since the funeral of Irene’s mother-in-law in August.
“You’re the only one who can go,” Andersson said.
“What do you mean? Am I the only person who’s dispensable in this department? We’re up to our ears in work! And you’re saying you can spare me?” Irene didn’t often flare up, but right now she was deeply hurt.
“You’re going to Tenerife to work. Not to sunbathe and see the sights. You have experience working with colleagues in different countries,” the superintendent said.