She’s fallen backwards. Someone is holding glowing coals to her arm. Tove can’t get any air; the pain of each breath sticks in her throat and becomes a gasp. She daren’t look at it.
Panic. She’s going to panic.
Everything tilts, and she can tell that her left arm is still there, that the explosion hasn’t ripped it off, but when she moves the arm her vision goes black: she’s going to faint.
Tove spits again — more blood — and slowly gets to her feet. A scratching, slicing sensation in her fingers and her neck. She can’t move the arm, has to steady herself against the roof of the little playhouse so as not to collapse again. Weapon in hand, she founders through the shadows at the edge of the playground.
Up to the fence. She can see him: he’s getting into a car, a low-slung Citroën parked on the cobbled street. By the time Tove has forced herself over the fence, he is far away. She must memorise the numberplate.
That’s when it happens.
A horn blares and then blares again, a long blast this time, and it doesn’t stop until it’s too late.
At the end of Tessinparken, Askrikegatan ends abruptly, met from the right by the unexpected narrow road that had taken Tove by surprise as she drove past less than twenty minutes earlier.
Down the road, a howl comes from the heavy goods vehicle that, however desperately its driver pounds the brakes, is unable to stop — and when they collide, the silhouette inside the truck’s cab is thrown forwards. In the car, the man gets flung around in his seat. Flakes of paint and shards of metal, some the size of fingernails but others much bigger, rain down over them onto the ground.
Tove wants to run, but can’t. The fingers of her left hand are tickling, and it takes a while for her to realise — it’s blood that has trickled down from the hole in her arm.
Finally, the sound of sirens, growing in strength. She is, remains, alone, and her throat feels strained, like when you have just screamed. Maybe she has; she can’t remember anymore. Everything is getting even darker, being erased in front of her.
The man in the car is bleeding, from his forehead. He moves his hand up to the blood and then looks at his fingers, as though he’s surprised at having just discovered a shortcoming.
Tove aims the barrel at him, her finger resting on the trigger.
‘Out,’ she screams through the tumult. ‘Get out.’
Don’t get out. Please, stay where you are. Let me hurt you. I need to hurt someone.
Bright lights arrive, perhaps from a car, but Tove isn’t sure. What she does know is that the lights are bright and white, illuminating the man slowly extricating himself from the Citroën. He is groggy and unsteady, has to hold himself up against the bonnet.
Before long, flashing blue lights strike the walls and the tarmac, and the man is still standing, propped up against the bonnet of the car.
Tove doesn’t lower her weapon until someone takes it from her hand. She can’t feel anything anymore. She’s mute, inside and out, just skin and bones, and the thought that washes over her is that something might be coming to an end.
I blink.
My breathing hurts, and dead people don’t breathe. That’s how I know this is a halt, a short pause. The driver has stopped on the roadside. Maybe he’s having a cocktail. I want one myself. My tongue is dry, so it’s sticking to the roof of my mouth; my lips are peeling and tight. You should be allowed that before continuing the journey — a cocktail and a last chance to meet the one you love.
I am in a room, and the room has a door, and when it opens it does so silently. The driver is a short man with a potbelly, and he’s wearing a funny white coat over his green clothes.
‘Leo,’ he says. ‘Leo? Can you hear me?’
He picks up a torch, shines it in my eyes.
There’s this bleeping in here. What is that noise? Is that sound inside my head?
My chest really hurts.
‘Leo,’ he says. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Yes.’
He asks me if I know where I am.
I blink.
‘No.’
He says that I am in Karolinska Hospital. That his name is Christopher Åström, and that he’s a surgeon. It’s the twenty-fourth of June 2014.
‘It hurts,’ I wheeze.
‘Where does it hurt?’
‘When I breathe.’
‘Your lungs?’
‘I … don’t know.’
There must be something above my head because his eyes keep drifting off in that direction.
That’s it. That’s where the bleeping is coming from. It must be my pulse, but it sounds alien. Maybe it belongs to someone else.
He says something, I think, but I don’t hear what, because the journey continues, and it’s about time, I really want to get out of here and every breath surges through me like electricity, down my spine and out through my arms, and now, finally it all goes dark again, and in the background someone shouts something, and the bleeping suddenly becomes very, very intense and
In my memories
In my memories, I feel older than I am now.
It’s autumn, long ago, my second year on the Violent Crime Unit. I walk along Norr Mälarstrand, following the shoreline of Lake Mälaren, and the air is crisp and light. All the colours are stronger than usual. Beside me, Levin is walking with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his thin, open trench coat. It feels good to be outside for a change. We have both spent the morning conducting separate interviews concerning a suspected manslaughter in a flat on Pipersgatan.
‘You’ve met someone,’ he says.
I light a cigarette, and Levin’s eyes longingly follow my hand movements.
‘How do you know that?’
‘Your clothes. They no longer just smell of smoke and fabric softener. Can I have one?’
I take a cigarette from the packet. He puts it between his lips, and I give him a light.
‘What’s her name? If you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Sam.’
‘As in …?’
‘As in Sam. I don’t know if it’s going anywhere, but there’s something captivating about her.’
A large bird passes over our heads, silently, on flaccid wings. It glides out over the water.
‘Captivating women often have short names,’ Levin says, his eyes following the bird’s flight.
‘Is that a theory you’ve got?’
‘It’s a theory I am testing. My experience supports it, thus far.’
‘You mean Elsa.’
‘For example.’
He rarely talks about her. I know they have been married a long time but that they don’t have kids. I don’t know whether that’s because they couldn’t, or if they simply didn’t want to.
‘Be careful in love,’ Levin says. ‘If you’re only going to follow one piece of my advice, I suggest that should be the one.’
Winter, many years later. It’s after the Gotland affair, after my suspension. I find myself on the fringes of a murder investigation that is nothing to do with me. It’s almost Christmas, and Levin has less than six months to live. I’m standing on Kungsholmsgatan, and I spot him on the other side of the road. A car rolls onto the junction, and Levin raises his hand, gets it to stop. He climbs into the back seat, and the car disappears in the direction of St Göran’s. I don’t see who the driver is, and it’s so cold that the air is freezing, becoming tiny sparkling pearls.
The sun is shining through the windscreen, blindingly bright, and warm. I sit in the back next to Levin, on the way to or from something — I can’t remember what. I just remember an old song on the radio, and Levin singing along, in the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine, I would shiver the whole night through.
1984 to 2014.
Thirty years in the blink of an eye. Thirty years, almost half a life, yet no more th
an a single breath.
It is the eighteenth of June, and the figure at the back door is tall and curved like a bracket, the posture you assume in the face of a challenging task. Twice he has put his knuckle to the door — knock knock — and that is how Charles knows that it’s him.
‘Good evening, Charlie,’ he says as he is let in. ‘Were you expecting me?’
‘Not really.’
Paul is carrying a black leather bag. He closes the door behind him, and asks, ‘Do you have visitors?’
‘No, why do you ask?’
‘It looks like you’re alone here, but there’s a car parked outside the front.’
‘Is there?’
‘A dark, expensive Volvo.’
He goes into the kitchen ahead of Paul and confirms that he is right: parked alongside the low fence is a car he doesn’t recognise.
‘Strange.’ He hesitates. ‘Would you like some coffee?’
‘I would love some.’
‘If that’s not your car out there, then where did you park?’
‘There’s a clearing in the woods, I parked there.’
Paul pulls out one of the chairs by the kitchen table, sits down, and undoes the top button of his shirt. He puts the bag down on the floor.
‘It really is freakishly warm here,’ he says. ‘I’d forgotten that.’
‘I know.’
‘I bet it’s not even something you get used to either?’
‘Not really.’
They had last met at a meeting with one of the directors two years previously, the meeting that forced Charles to move Leo Junker to Internal Affairs. The meeting that he had taped and saved in case one of those rainy days finally arrived. He is glad he did.
Paul looked better then, he recalls; despite being much paler, he had still seemed healthier. He is emaciated now, his cheeks sunken and his jaws marked in a way you only see in sick people.
Charles fills the coffee pot with water, pours it into the machine, and gets out the coffee.
‘How did you find me?’
‘Oh, you know.’ Paul folds one leg over the other, stares out of the window. ‘By piecing things together.’
Charles puts a filter paper into the coffee machine and puts in five small scoops.
‘You talked to Marika?’
‘I don’t know about talked,’ Paul says. ‘I tried.’
‘When were you there?’
‘A few days ago.’
‘How was she?’
‘Same as usual, I’m guessing.’
Charles turns on the coffee machine, and it starts hissing. It’s a pleasant sound, and sitting there opposite Paul he’s struck by the way everything goes in cycles — that time must be a loop rather than a line.
‘She tried to kill you,’ Paul says.
‘Nearly ten years ago.’
‘But still. Chilling.’
‘She was psychotic.’
‘You’re defending her.’
‘No, that’s not what I’m doing.’
‘What happened with the investigation?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Just curious. She was sectioned, I know that much, but I couldn’t even find the name of the victim.’
‘The files will be there somewhere, I should think.’
‘You got them to hush it up.’
‘I didn’t really have much choice.’
‘I can imagine. As you know, I don’t have kids of my own, but I can imagine how it must have felt. Do you know why she did it?’
Charles doesn’t answer. He stands up from the chair and takes two cups from the cupboard, puts them next to the spluttering coffee maker, and glances out at the car outside. He suspects that Paul is lying. The car must be his.
‘Isn’t it weird, being back here?’
‘It sure is.’
Paul smiles weakly.
‘Does he still live here?’
‘Who?’
‘Bredström.’
‘Yes, he still lives here. Black, right?’
‘Yes, please.’
He fills the cups with coffee. The pot is shaking in his hands, but it’s not just the weight; there’s something else that he can’t put his finger on. He puts the cup down in front of Paul.
‘Back in a sec,’ Charles says. ‘There’s something I want to show you.’
He goes into the bedroom, opens the top packing box, and digs out the sheet of paper, which is folded double.
Out in the kitchen, Paul is sitting motionless, his stare fixed on his hands. Charles puts the paper down in front of him. Paul picks it up carefully, unfolds it, and then reads it. It’s obvious that the content doesn’t surprise him.
‘Is this the original?’
‘No.’
Friday the seventeenth of June 1977, more than three years before Charles met Paul Goffman for the first time, a successful recruitment was sealed in Malmö. This news was reported in by the operative responsible, with a summary of the circumstances and their potential consequences, in a document delivered to the Director of SEPO.
The subject was Jonathan Ekblom, a thirty-five-year-old man who lived in a detached house near Möllevången with his wife and two children. He worked for Swedish Customs in Malmö. Four months earlier, in February that year, he had been approached at work by a man from Stockholm who was ostensibly interested in the workings of shipments that crossed the border on the way to West Germany.
The man dropped several hints during his visit about how a potential future collaboration could be lucrative for both Ekblom and the company the man claimed to work for. Ekblom was a polite soul and thanked him for the offer, but declined it. Further attempts were made to persuade Ekblom of the benefits of cooperation, but none were successful.
Ekblom was a complicated target. He spent little money, and therefore had no debts; he had no secret affairs, had no police record, and all his papers were in order.
As a result, a drastic, and therefore complicated, solution was required.
On the evening of Wednesday the fifteenth, several witnesses told how he had spent the small hours getting drunk with a man at one of the watering holes near the harbour. After that, he was put in his car, and Ekblom headed for home. Halfway between the bar and his home was a patrol car manned by Officers Ambjörnsson and Fant. Ambjörnsson was apparently busy with a crossword at that point, so it was Fant who had to wave the car into the kerb because it was swerving markedly.
Ekblom was immediately arrested, taken to the station, and put in a cell to sleep it off. If the officers had been more alert, they might well have got someone to do a blood test on him. It would have been a wise move, because Ekblom had never before got behind the wheel after drinking alcohol, and, as far as anyone knew, there was no reason for him to have done so that evening either. A possible explanation would have been that Ekblom had been drugged, in which case the man who he had been seen drinking with might reasonably have been suspected.
That, though, is not what happened.
In their defence, there had been some confusion when Ambjörnsson and Fant had arrived at the station. The duty officer looked at the crossroads recorded under LOCATION in their incident report, and wondered what on Earth Ambjörnsson and Fant had been doing there. They replied that they had received a call on the radio and had been sent there; but when the officer in charge asked them for the name of the person who’d called them, Ambjörnsson looked quizzically at Fant, who looked back at Ambjörnsson with a look that was every bit as puzzled. And, as was so often the case, nobody really seemed to know which way was up or down.
As dawn broke, Ekblom received his first and only visitor during the twelve hours he spent in the cell: the man he had drunk himself legless with.
‘This is a precarious situation,’ the man said as he opened the incident repo
rt that Ambjörnsson and Fant had submitted.
After that, it went like it always did.
‘This sheet, along with all the consequences it entails, could go up in smoke. All it would take is for you to agree to help us with small favours, every now and then: little errands, checking information here and there, contacting us about a certain vehicle and whether this or that person has passed through customs. It will take up hardly any of your time and will be of great benefit to our operation.’
And if Ekblom were to continue to resist?
Well …
Well, the consequences would, in that case, be unfortunate.
Paul drops the sheet of paper onto the table.
‘How long have you known?’ he asks.
‘A while. It wasn’t that easy to get hold of.’
‘How long had you guessed?’
‘A long time.’ Charles folds the sheet of paper and slides it into the back pocket of his jeans. ‘You were supposed to be staying at the hotel that night, but you must have got into the car to have been able to hear the police radio. Then I started wondering what that squad car was even doing there in the first place.’
It happened occasionally, that the area’s local talent would stand at the roadside and wave cars in, even on the least busy roads — that was where their hit ratio was best — but in all his years in Bruket, he had never known them to be out at that time of night.
‘But you shouldn’t set great store by feelings and hunches.’
‘Is that why you’re doing this?’ Paul asks. ‘To punish me?’
‘Doing what?’
‘I saw your log-on activity in the archive. I know what you were up to this spring.’
Charles drinks some coffee.
‘So that’s why you’re here.’
‘I don’t want you making a big mistake.’ He throws his hands up. ‘You’re sixty-seven. Given your lifestyle, your diet, you’ve probably got another twenty years in you. Do you want to spend them in a cell? That is — excuse my saying so — stupid, Charlie.’
Master, Liar, Traitor, Friend: a Leo Junker case Page 31
