The Treacherous Net

by Helene Tursten

  “No problem. It gets a bit lonely all the way down there,” Irene replied calmly.

  If Thylqvist picked up the little dig, she showed no sign.

  “Excellent,” she said with a brief nod to Åsa Nyström.

  •••

  When the two women reached what was now their shared office, Irene had to ask a question. “Did you know you were coming here when we met in Partille?”

  Åsa smiled. “No, but I had applied. They called the following day and told me I’d gotten the job.”

  “What a coincidence! And I’m so pleased to have some company again.”

  “Again?”

  “Yes. Tommy Persson and I shared this office for many years, but now he’s Thylqvist’s deputy, so he’s got his own office next door to her.”

  Irene made a huge effort not to let her tone of voice give away what she really felt, but the look Åsa gave her made it clear that it hadn’t worked. Or perhaps Åsa was an excellent judge of character. Irene wasn’t sure this was the kind of new colleague she would have wished for.

  “Is your ex really a hard rocker?” she asked, changing the subject.

  Åsa grinned. “No, he’s a saxophonist. He plays jazz.”

  She assumed a serious expression and said loftily: “Which is also an artistic profession, of course.”

  The atmosphere was gloomy in the Cold Cases Unit’s office. Sven Andersson and Leif Fryxender had just been informed that their colleague Pelle Svensson needed a heart bypass. The angioplasty had revealed that his condition was worse than the consultant had first thought, and the operation was scheduled for the beginning of September. Needless to say, he wouldn’t be returning to work in the meantime.

  “He won’t come back at all,” Andersson stated.

  “I think you’re right,” Fryxender agreed.

  They both knew that Svensson was intending to retire on the same day as Andersson—October 31.

  “When do the two new guys start?”Andersson asked.

  “October first.”

  “Good. We need reinforcements.”

  They gazed in silence at the files and the pile of small boxes marked e.p. sept 16, 1941. They had taken over a very strange story. Their eyes were drawn to the transparent evidence bags, each containing three bullets. One bag was labeled 420315 mats persson nov 9, 1983. the other 081002 elof persson sept 16 1941. The Tokarev pistol lay beside the bags.

  While looking into Mats Persson’s disappearance in November 1983, the investigating officers had managed to access documents from the Second World War. The security service, SÄPO, had looked at the papers first and decided there was no security risk involved in releasing most of the case notes from forty-two years earlier.

  Inspector Arne Carlsson, who had led the investigation, had produced an exemplary summary when the search was scaled down in 1985. Andersson and Fryxender had put together their own summary when they took over the old case, and they now had a pretty clear picture of what had happened in both 1941 and 1983.

  Elof Persson was born on October 2, 1908, in Katrineholm. His father was a station master. Elof seriously considered a career with Swedish Rail, where his two older brothers also worked.

  Young Elof liked the idea of a profession that required a smart uniform. Meanwhile he spent his mid-teens in the freight depot at Katrineholm station, running errands and helping to load the wagons. At the age of eighteen he was called up for military service. He did well, and was accepted to the officer training program. He was very happy in the army, but realized after a year or so that he would never be able to advance beyond the rank of sergeant due to his lack of education. He considered his options and was accepted at the police training academy in Stockholm, where he qualified as one of the best cadets in his year.

  His rise was meteoric, and he was the youngest inspector when war broke out at the beginning of September 1939. One month later Elof Persson and a dozen hand-picked colleagues were brought together. They were to begin work with the security service, which had been created by the government back in June 1938 but only became active when war broke out.

  The officers were forbidden to tell anyone, including their closest family and friends, where they worked and what their job entailed. Anyone who broke the rules was summarily dismissed.

  In spite of the difficulties, Elof immediately felt at home. He approached his work in the Surveillance Unit, monitoring suspects, with both enthusiasm and seriousness. These suspects were referred to as “red” and “brown” Socialists in order to distinguish between them. Their basic ideologies were bewilderingly similar, even though Hitler had introduced increasingly vague nationalistic and fascist elements during the late 1930s. However, both groups were firmly anti-Zionist and shared a hatred for homosexuals. After the German attack on the Soviet Union, it became easier to tell them apart, because the reds were clearly on the Russian side, while the browns were with the Germans.

  In the fall of 1940 Elof was asked to travel to Göteborg on a special assignment. They were having problems with an Englishman, George Binney. He was responsible for the shipment of steel, machine tools and ball bearings to the Allies. He also tried to support the Danish resistance movement. The Russians were on his side, as were Swedish communists and Torgny Segerstedt, who led the publicity campaign against the Nazis in the daily newspaper Göteborgs Handels-och Sjöfartstidning. Against Binney were Georg Wagner, the chief of the German intelligence service, as well as German intelligence officers, Swedish Nazi agents and Norwegian Quislings. There were also a significant number of Swedish officers who sympathized with the Germans, and a good proportion of the Swedish public had a positive view of Hitler, particularly during those first successful years of the war.

  The security service wanted to know why Binney had moved to Göteborg, and what his plans were. Elof and his colleagues came up with the brilliant idea of bugging Binney by dropping a microphone down the chimney. A second microphone was fed through an air duct to a vent in the living room.

  They soon learned that Binney was planning an operation with the code name “Rubble.” Five Norwegian merchant ships were to run the German blockade of the Skagerrak, carrying cargo essential to the war effort, including ball bearings and steel.

  During his stay in Göteborg, Elof met a young woman named Marianne Strandberg. She was born and bred in the city, and had just gotten her certification as an elementary- school teacher. When Elof proposed after just a few months, she said yes right away. She was ten years younger than her husband-to-be.

  They married at Easter 1941 and moved to Stockholm. Elof had handed over the surveillance work in Göteborg to local operatives; he was needed back in the capital. The couple managed to secure a small one-bedroom apartment on Hornsgatan. They shared a bathroom with two other families on the same floor. Marianne had obtained a post at a school within walking distance, but she was never really happy in Stockholm. She got on reasonably well with her colleagues at school, but she still felt lonely and was terribly homesick. Elof was often away on secret missions, both during the day and overnight, and it was a long way to Katrineholm where his family lived. They went to visit them only twice during their short marriage.

  At the end of July she realized she was pregnant. Only then did she dare to complain about the poor condition of the apartment, but Elof got angry and she didn’t bring it up again. Therefore, she was very surprised when suddenly, on the evening of September 16, he said: “Trust me, darling—we’ll soon be able to afford a much bigger and better place to live.” He had laughed at her astonishment, which soon turned to delight. They had been standing just inside the door; Elof had put on his overcoat, ready to set off on yet another secret assignment. He hadn’t said as much, but Marianne had stopped asking where he was going. He had pulled his hat well down with a nonchalant gesture and added: “They call themselves the net. The net! Have you ever heard such nonsense? A disgusting cre
ature is about to get caught in his own net, I can promise you that!” With those words he had opened the door and disappeared into the wet and windy night. That was the last time she saw him alive.

  A neighbor had called the police at 10:54 p.m. His bedroom window on the first floor looked out onto Hornsgatan. A minute or so earlier he had heard several shots in the street. The patrol car arrived eight minutes later. The two officers found a man in the doorway, covered in blood. He appeared to be dead. He had been shot in the chest and in the middle of the forehead. The neighbor came outside once the police were on the scene and said he thought the deceased was Herr Persson, who lived on the same floor. The police knocked on Elof Persson’s door just as Marianne was about to go to bed. She pulled a coat on over her robe and accompanied the officers downstairs, where she identified the man who had been shot as her husband. At that point she had broken down, and was taken to Sabbatsberg Hospital.

  That same night, September 16, the security service and the police launched an inquiry into the murder of Elof Persson. They didn’t find the murder weapon at the scene. Other neighbors who had heard the shots came forward. None of them had seen the perpetrator. The street lamps hadn’t been on because of the blackout. The killer had gotten away under cover of darkness and rain.

  On the morning of September 17, the Hårsfjärden disaster took place. Three of the Swedish navy’s four destroyers were anchored in Hårsfjärden. The torpedoes on board the destroyer Göteborg exploded; this was immediately followed by a similar explosion on board Klas Horn. Burning oil then caused the fire to spread to her sister ship Klas Uggla. All three vessels sank, with the loss of thirty-three lives. A further seventeen sailors were injured. The catastrophe would have been even more serious if the majority of the crew had not been on shore leave. It was still the worst incident in Swedish territorial waters during the entire war.

  One of the security service’s most comprehensive sabotage investigations of the Second World War began straightaway, working closely with the naval authorities. All available resources were brought in. At first it was thought that a bomb might have been dropped from a Swedish plane by mistake while on a training exercise, but there were also several other theories. The cause of the catastrophe was never established.

  But the following morning, the inquiry into Elof Persson’s death was overshadowed by the Hårsfjärden disaster, and the murder was never solved.

  Marianne Persson moved back to Göteborg straight after the funeral, and her son, Mats, was born in March 1942. Marianne got a job at Nordhem School, where Mats eventually became a pupil. After graduating from Levgrenska High School, he attended the School of Business and Economics, and while studying there he met Barbro, who was training to be a physiotherapist. They married in 1969 and had two children, Peter and Anna. Mats worked for a large accountancy firm and seemed happy.

  His mother, Marianne, never remarried. She continued to work full-time as a teacher until her retirement in 1982. Just before Christmas 1983 she suffered a major stroke and died a few days later.

  After the funeral Mats cleared out her apartment, but didn’t feel up to sorting anything or throwing things away. He moved the family Volvo out of the garage and put the rest of his mother’s furniture in there before carrying boxes and bags down to the cellar. When he had finished, he broke down.

  He was diagnosed with severe depression, and his therapist suggested that he start looking for information about his father. He felt that Mats’s reaction to the loss of his mother indicated that he was also upset that he had never known his late father. Mats started to go through his mother’s things, listlessly sorting through boxes without much hope of finding something that would tell him more about his father.

  During the late summer of 1983, he spent more and more time down in the cellar. Sometimes he would bring papers upstairs and lock himself in his study. According to both Barbro and his children, he was obsessed.

  At the end of October, Mats had said something about a breakthrough, that the final piece of the puzzle might be within reach. When Barbro had asked him what he meant, he had smiled and said cryptically, “It’s still top secret. I have to get permission from SÄPO.” The police were unable to find any indication that Mats Persson had contacted SÄPO. Which was perhaps not entirely unexpected. However, given that SÄPO appeared to be cooperating fully, and handed over a considerable amount of material from the investigation into Elof’s death in 1941, the police were inclined to believe their assurances.

  Had Mats been imagining things? Had he been affected by some fresh psychosis? The only indication that something might be amiss was the fact that Mats had disappeared while looking into his father’s life and death.

  On the evening of November 9, 1983, Mats had hurried into the city library on Götaplatsen just before it closed at six o’clock and picked up some books he’d ordered. Before he left he had leaned over the counter and whispered conspiratorially to the librarian, “They’ve always thought they were protected by the net, but I’m onto them!” Then he walked out.

  Once he had left the city library, he might as well have gone up in a puff of smoke. There was a statement from a person who had been standing outside the theater; a man had hurried past her, heading around the corner toward the back of the building. Bearing in mind where Mats Persson’s mummified body had been found twenty-four years later, the witness could well have been right; the demolished building on Korsvägen was barely three hundred meters from the library.

  The books Persson had ordered were H.-K. Rönblom’s The Spy Without a Country, Stig Wennerström’s From Beginning to End, and John Barron’s KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents. This particular choice of books had interested SÄPO, but when they went through them they couldn’t find any link to the murder of Elof Persson. The retired air force attaché Stig Wennerström had been arrested by the Swedish security police under sensational circumstances in 1963, on suspicion of spying on behalf of the Soviet Union. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, and stripped of his military rank. This was twenty-two years after the murder of Elof Persson.

  SÄPO concluded that Mats Persson had been confused, and during the course of his research had become fascinated by spies and their activities. With regard to the limited investigation into the murder of Elof Persson, there were a number of questions that had never been answered. Marianne had kept a log of the times Elof was working. When this was compared with the service reports Elof had handed in, there were many discrepancies—nights and certain days when he had been free according to the security service, yet Marianne’s notes indicated that he had been away. During the spring of 1941 this had happened only occasionally, but during the summer and early fall it became far more frequent. The investigating officers had assumed that he was doing another job on the side, but there was no evidence to support this assumption. Marianne had dismissed the idea.

  There was yet another mystery with no apparent explanation. Elof had deposited six thousand kronor in a bank account in two installments, three thousand each time. This amounted to almost two months’ salary. The first deposit was made in the middle of July, the second almost exactly a month later. No money had been paid into the account in September. Marianne had no idea where the money had come from. When the case was closed, it was decided that the young widow would be allowed to inherit the money.

  The police spent a long time wondering what Persson could have meant during that last conversation with his wife. She had interpreted his promise of a larger apartment to mean that he would be getting a raise, perhaps even a promotion. However, his employers made it clear that this was definitely not the case. Nor could they work out what he meant by his talk of “the net.” Marianne had thought he was talking about some kind of spy network or something similar, and the security service had also leaned toward that theory. However, they were never able to verify it.

  When Mats Persson went missing, he had his w
allet with him. His bank account was monitored following his disappearance, but it was never touched, which led the police to believe at a fairly early stage that he must be dead. His family hadn’t noticed any signs of deepening depression, but still the conclusion was that he had probably taken his own life. There was nothing whatsoever to suggest that he had fallen victim to crime. Not until his body was found walled up in a chimney on the first sunny day in May 2008.

  Shot three times, just as his father had been forty-two years earlier.

  Sven Andersson had found the three bullets that killed Elof Persson in a small tin inside one of the cardboard boxes. According to the ballistics report, they were 7.26mm caliber. Andersson was taken aback; he read the report three times before he asked his colleague to take a look. Leif Fryxender picked up the sheet of paper and read through it. Slowly he put it down, and their eyes met.

  Fryxender had taken the bullets and the gun down to the lab himself, and now the results had arrived. All six bullets had been fired from the old Tokarev pistol.

  The two remaining members of the Cold Cases Unit had each armed themselves with a mug of coffee and a wrapped pastry from the canteen. Andersson’s pastry was sugar-free; it looked both smaller and drier than his colleague’s. Leif Fryxender pressed play on the small cassette player, and Tommy Persson’s voice filled the room:

  “. . . DCI Tommy Persson. Today’s date is Monday, May twelfth, 2008. Are you okay with me recording this interview?”

  “Yes . . . that’s fine. I realize it must be difficult to write everything down. Where shall we start?”

  “Let’s begin with your name and date of birth.”

  “Barbro Linnea Persson-Melander. I was born on July third, 1945, so I’ll be sixty-three this summer.”

  “Unfortunately I have to ask you to revisit what actually happened before your husband . . . your husband at the time . . . disappeared. The original investigation was conducted as a missing persons case; today we know that he was murdered.”