Master, Liar, Traitor, Friend: a Leo Junker case

by Christoffer Carlsson (Translated by Michael Gallagher)

  ‘Where have you got that from?’

  ‘I haven’t. I’m just asking.’

  ‘We most definitely were not.’

  ‘You must have made an impression on her, anyway.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you’re the only person she talks to in here.’

  ‘Aha.’ Grimberg smiles. ‘Well, maybe, yeah.’

  In my memories, I feel older than I do now.

  The last time I meet Levin is at the end of April, in the canteen. I’m sitting at one of the tables by the windows in the corner. The sun’s shining in, making the tabletop warm, and I drink my coffee, and look at the cinnamon bun on the little saucer in front of me. The sky outside seems more hopeful than it has for a long time. It’s going to be a good summer.

  He walks over with a cup of tea and a sandwich, tall and gangly as ever, with the round specs and his shaved head, the nose that shoots out over his lip, and his narrow mouth. He reminds me of a scarecrow.

  I avoid eye contact. It’s been nearly a year since the Gotland affair.

  ‘Leo?’

  I look up.

  ‘Alright if I sit down?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He takes his blazer off and sits down, drinks some tea. Levin uses a cool, fresh deodorant, a discreet scent. He has done as long as I’ve known him.

  ‘How are things up there?’ I say.

  ‘Stormy.’ He smiles and peels the cling film off his sandwich. ‘How are things down at yours?’

  ‘Noisy.’

  He laughs, loudly and heartily.

  ‘I miss the Violent Crime Unit,’ he says.

  You don’t notice at first, but now it’s obvious: the creases in his skin are deeper than usual, and dark rings frame his eyes, which are slightly bloodshot. The shaved head has a few days’ worth of silvery stubble.

  ‘You look tired.’

  He takes a hungry bite.

  ‘I’ve turned things upside-down recently. Up all night, sleeping in the day. It’s not like me at all, but unfortunately it was unavoidable.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘You know,’ he says between bites. ‘Paperwork.’

  ‘Paperwork,’ I repeat. ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘The kind you have to do when you’re alone.’

  I understand, without understanding. Levin’s role as a superintendent at the National Police Authority means that he works on cases and issues that no one else is allowed anywhere near. A lot of the time, you don’t know what the colleague in the room next-door is working on.

  I wait for a continuation, but none comes. It’s always like this: Levin, who one minute is remarkably direct and straightforward, clams up again the next.

  My coffee’s getting cold. The nausea mounts when I think about the cinnamon bun.

  ‘Will there be a party?’ I ask.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘In May, your retirement. Will there be a party?’

  ‘Aha.’ He laughs again, not as heartily. ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘A white-collar retirement is no cause for celebration, Leo. Retiring is a very …’ He takes a new bite of his sandwich while he searches for the word, ‘troubling rubicon. It’s sort of final.’

  ‘So is that what you’re doing? The paperwork?’ I ask.

  ‘Something like that.’ Long silence. He takes the last bite of his sandwich. ‘Are you not eating your bun?’

  ‘You can have it if you like.’

  ‘You need to eat, Leo. You’re looking thin.’

  I slide the saucer over.

  ‘So are you.’

  He drinks some more tea and takes a bite of the bun.

  ‘All well with Sam? With the two of you?’

  ‘We’re thinking about getting a cat.’

  ‘Cat?’

  Levin is seldom surprised, or at least he almost never reveals it, but this is one of the few occasions when the mask slips.

  I squirm in my seat.

  ‘Wasn’t exactly my idea.’

  ‘I’ve always thought of you more as a person who needs a dog.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Cats are self-sufficient, proud creatures. They don’t need anyone to look after them, they’re fine on their own. However, you leave a dog on its own for fifteen minutes and you can bet your bottom dollar that it’s either got depressed or is about to eat something poisonous or valuable. Dogs need looking after.’

  ‘And I need someone to look after?’

  ‘Routines and responsibilities, more like.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Sam’s working again now, isn’t she? At the art gallery on Rosenlundsgatan?’

  ‘Yes. Someone she studied art history with years ago got in touch and asked if she’d be interested.’

  ‘I had some errands in the area a few days ago. It’s a fantastic gallery. Have you been?’

  ‘I haven’t managed to get there. But I will.’

  ‘Good.’ Levin smiles. ‘Sam looked well. That cheered me up.’

  ‘She’s certainly getting better.’

  We stay there for a while without saying anything. He polishes off the cinnamon bun, looks at his watch, and puts on his blazer.

  ‘This might be the last time we see each other for a while, Leo,’ he says. ‘I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen. But whatever happens, I’m going to be a long way away.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I can’t really talk about it.’ He looks out of the window. ‘But I will be back.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, smiling, but I can tell that he doesn’t know, that he might even be lying, and just being able to read Levin that easily makes me realise that he’s shaken, and that this must be serious.

  One evening in May, I arrive at the block in Gamla Stan where Levin lives with a present in my hand. It was Sam who persuaded me: he has just retired after all. I take the lift up and step out, walk to his door, and notice a sign decorated with ornate lettering and smiling faces under words explaining that the property is being sold by the real-estate agents, Stockholmsmäklarna.

  The letterbox no longer bears his name.

  He disappeared just as I imagine he once appeared, quietly and when no one was looking, just a shadow of a figure who appeared at the moment when the light was just right: now you see him, now you don’t.

  Waiting. Always this waiting.

  In the corner of the computer monitor, the clock ticks along: 14:21, 14:30, 14:55.

  ‘Why are they taking so fucking long?’ Tove says to Davidsson on the phone. ‘Are they? That’s good.’ She glances at me. ‘I’ll let him know.’ Tove ends the call. ‘The prosecutor is reviewing the evidence against Bredström now,’ she says. ‘And Davidsson asked me to tell you that your colleagues from NCS set off an hour ago. We’re expecting them to arrive at some point this evening.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I say, distracted by the computer display. ‘Good.’

  ‘Good?’

  ‘I’ll probably be gone by then.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Just a hunch.’

  ‘The shit’s going to hit the fan anyway. Davidsson’s going to realise that you’re not one of them. I shouldn’t think NCS themselves will be too pleased either.’

  ‘You’re right, there.’

  ‘You don’t seem to care?’

  ‘I do.’ I tear my eyes away from the screen. ‘I do care. I just don’t know what to make of all this.’

  Tove turns towards the computer.

  The text folder on Levin’s memory stick contains sub-folders called 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, and 84, and each of them contains date-marked photographs and documents from the year in question.

  Ther
e are lots of individual files, and I have tried to print them off several times, to make it easier to sort through them, but every time I do the computer answers with a hiss that continues until the machine freezes and has to restart.

  In the folder marked 77, there’s a memorandum from 1977, sent to the director of the Security Police’s Operations Department. If I’m interpreting Levin’s comment correctly, it’s a summary of a successful recruitment attempt, the subject being a man named Jonathan Ekblom. That’s it.

  The 80 folder contains several more files. The first is a memo written by Detective Constable Charles Levin on the fifth of July 1980, concerning the murder of Ted Lichter. Levin summarises a conversation with a witness who is not named, referred to only as The witness or He, perhaps because the conversation includes an admission of having paid Lichter for sex.

  What comes next is more than 300 scanned pages and photographs, and, in the corner of each one, someone — I assume it was Levin — has written a short explanation of what the reader is looking at.

  ‘That’s what he was up to down here,’ says Tove.

  ‘Well, he wasn’t trying to solve any old crimes,’ I say, and feel my pulse climb, which in turn gives me another headache. ‘He must have had far more documents with him than the ones found at the house.’ I look at her. ‘There were no more, besides those in the files?’

  ‘I can check the technician’s notes, just to be on the safe side.’

  She stands up from her chair, and shuffles through the papers spread across the oblong table.

  I think about the voices I heard in the car, the conversation taped just before I was recruited to Internal Affairs. Levin’s manipulation put me there, tricked me into going to Gotland. He had to. That’s why I was there, and why my life changed direction and ended up on such a destructive trajectory.

  Now though, finally, at least I know about it. The file was called leo. He wanted me to know. He knew that it would end up in my hands. I look down at them, my hands. The morphine is keeping them still.

  Goffman. They were friends — perhaps he knows. I need to talk to him.

  ‘No,’ Tove says, reading the thick pile of notes from forensics. ‘I can’t find anything about any other boxes containing similar stuff. Clothes and shoes, crockery, books, kitchen utensils, and so on. That’s it.’ She carries on flipping through, until she shakes her head. ‘Nothing. So if they were here, the perpetrator took them with him. If that’s part of the motive, then it would surely make Bredström a pretty unlikely suspect?’

  ‘There might be something about him in here, too. The question is whether Levin had got that far. They seem to be arranged in chronological order.’

  ‘Open that last file.’

  I click on the 84 folder and scroll down to the file at the bottom of the list, a text document. At the top is a striking stamp, STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL. Next to that, someone has written FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. DESTROY UPON READING in angular block capitals. I don’t know who the sender is, but just like the first memorandum it is addressed to the then director for the Security Police’s Operations Department.

  10/10/1984

  It is with great regret that I have received your update on the — due to the failure of your operatives — missing VAX computers. While I have no desire to tell you how to manage your bureau and staff, I assume that you will take appropriate measures when dealing with the operatives in question. Based on our mutual past, and my knowledge of your capacity and skill, I am confident that you will.

  Intelligence collected by our operatives agrees with your suspicion: the most likely recipients are our treacherous neighbours. We will, of course, do our best to locate them. Please await further instructions.

  ‘So do you think he finished it?’ Tove asks. ‘Is this actually the last one or just the last thing he entered?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘VAX computer. What the hell is that?’

  ‘No idea.’

  We sit there quietly for a moment, just staring at the screen, before I start clicking away in the hope of finding something that relates to Daniel Bredström.

  ‘Well, maybe it was a scanner after all,’ Tove says suddenly.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘We weren’t sure whether it was a printer or a scanner that had been sitting on the desk.’

  I carry on clicking, and stumble across a photo of an older man who I don’t recognise. In the photo’s white border, Levin’s handwriting: J. Kraus, 1984.

  ‘He felt that this content was important enough to keep secure in a post-office box,’ Tove says. ‘Content that is missing in hard copy along with his computer, mobile phone, and scanner.’

  ‘He told me that he was doing some paperwork.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said it in the spring, the last time we met. The sort of thing you need to do when you’re alone in the office.’ I look at the screen again. ‘It must have been all this. That hadn’t occurred to me until now. And yes, I think that his assailant took the computer, the phone, and the scanner, if that’s what it was. And the paper documents themselves, one or maybe more boxes. That’s why he needed the trolley.’

  The door to the meeting room swings open. Over in the corner, Kit stops eating and turns his head sullenly.

  ‘We haven’t had it approved yet,’ says Davidsson, red-faced and excitable. ‘But we’re not waiting any longer. We’re bringing Bredström in for questioning now.’

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ Grimberg says.

  ‘I don’t,’ says Birck.

  ‘Your clothes smell of cigarette smoke.’

  ‘In that flat, 2002, during the time you … hung out, you and Marika. What did you talk about?’

  Grimberg sighs, visibly bored.

  ‘Junkies don’t talk much. And she was quite a lot older than me, almost ten years older, I think. It took a while before we started talking. And she was … Well, she’s very ill now, as you know, but it had already started. She said she was hearing voices.’

  ‘What did the voices say?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What else did you talk about?’

  ‘The sort of things junkies usually talk about, I suppose. Who’d got done for what, which dealers were good, and which ones to give a wide berth.’

  ‘Did she say anything about herself? About her background?’

  Grimberg’s hesitation is just perceptible.

  ‘That …’ he begins. ‘I thought it was a joke. She told me her dad was a copper.’

  ‘When did you realise that it wasn’t a joke?’

  ‘I asked her if it was true. She said yes.’

  ‘And you believed that?’

  ‘I could tell she wasn’t lying.’

  ‘Did she say anything else about that? About him?’

  ‘That he had ruined her life. That he had ruined her mum’s life.’

  Birck waits.

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When did you realise that she was Charles Levin’s daughter?’

  ‘Not until I ended up in here, and saw them together — last winter.’

  ‘If we go back to 2002, did she say anything more about herself then?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Most of the people who end up in flats like that are not that keen to talk about themselves. It’s easier to talk about other people.’

  ‘She didn’t say anything else about the voices she’d started hearing?’

  ‘Just that it ended up as it always did.’ Grimberg looks out the window with an expression verging on disgust. ‘She had tried to get help for it. They had ignored her, told her it was down to the drugs and that they were the real problem.’

  ‘Do you think they were right?’

  ‘Very often, it is the drugs that ruin thing
s. But there was something deeper here. Something else, like a kind of darkness. I think you can only really see it in others if you’re like that yourself.’

  ‘And you were?’

  ‘Yes.’ Grimberg looks Birck in the eye again. ‘I’m afraid I was.’

  That must have been why they became close back then, thinks Birck, and perhaps that’s why she lets him get close to her now, all these years later. Old sorrows bring people together.

  ‘Did you tell her? About your background?’

  ‘Gabriel,’ says Grimberg, using his name for the first time. It sparks fear in Birck’s chest.

  Grimberg notices.

  Grimberg smiles.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You are boring me. I don’t want to talk anymore. If we’re going to carry on, you’re going to have to give me something in exchange.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Grimberg doesn’t stop smiling.

  EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT (REF 0500-K1754-08)

  INTERVIEWEE: Bredström, DANIEL

  ID NUMBER: 19501024-4674

  ROLE: Accused

  SUSPECTED CRIME: Suspicion of murder: Charles Jan Levin 140618, at victim’s home address: Alvavägen 10, Bruket.

  INTERVIEWER: Ola Davidsson

  DATE OF INTERVIEW: 20140621

  INTERVIEW START: ca 16:10

  INTERVIEW END: ca 17:00

  LOCATION: Interview room, Bruket Police Station

  INTERVIEW TYPE: RB23:6

  TRANSCRIBED BY: R. Å.

  _ _ _ _ _ _ _

  DAVIDSSON: How did you find out that Charles Levin was dead?

  BREDSTRÖM: I don’t remember exactly. I think someone told me.

  DAVIDSSON: Who was that?

  BREDSTRÖM: Don’t remember.

  DAVIDSSON: When did you find out? Can you remember that?

  BREDSTRÖM: No.

  DAVIDSSON: When did you last see Levin?

  BREDSTRÖM: It, when was it, Wednesday. The eighteenth, in the alcohol store. He was behind me in the queue. That was the first time we’d seen each other in thirty years. Mad, that was.

  DAVIDSSON: Did you speak to each other then?

  BREDSTRÖM: Not really. I said something along the lines of: ‘Oh, look who’s here,’ or something. He just said, ‘Yes.’ That was the end of it.