by Jon Stenhugg
*
Lemko lived in a simple farmhouse, painted rusty red with a white trim, surrounded by furrowed, muddied fields which would be flowering in bright yellow when summer came. About fifty yards behind the house there was a patch of forest continuing up the hill, mostly birch with leafless, white trunks against the dark floor of mouldy leaves. Houses like this made up at least half of the buildings in rural Sweden, so common you had to remind yourself to notice them.
Sara’s contact followed the wet gravel road and he drove up to the mailbox, carefully avoiding the open patch of mud in front of it. He opened the window to point out the lack of tyre tracks, then continued towards the house.
They both got out of the car and he knocked at the door several times. Sara looked through one of the windows and saw only her reflection in the double-paned glass, and she jumped backwards, startled, frightened by the reflection of her own face staring back at her.
She banged on the door and waited for some kind of sound indicating someone was trying to hide on the other side, but there was nothing – just silence and her own breathing, and off in the distance the sound of some magpies squawking at the clouds that cluttered up the sky.
“If your suspect came here as you wrote in your email, then he must have managed to leave before we could get out here. We’ve looked for the vehicle you put in your BOLO request, but we haven’t seen anything in spite of watching every road out of here, every single ferry to the continent, including the bridge over to Denmark. I’m sorry, but I don’t think he’s here.”
“We’re not so sure it’s a he. There seems to be at least some indication that Kim Lemko could be a woman. Did you do a stakeout?” asked Sara. She nodded towards a power pole near the house. “I’d at least have tried to look at the power consumption on the electric meter over there to see if there were any variations.”
“We’re not all that sophisticated down here,” he said, putting the car in gear for the drive back to his office. “I don’t think he’s here. End of story.”
“This is where he’s supposed to live. Where else could he have gone?”
“It would have been no problem for him to take the ferry to the continent on the night he drove down here. We tried checking the cameras run by the Customs Bureau at the loading ramp but they were down that week for maintenance. Look somewhere else.”
They rode the entire distance back to his office in silence after that. Sara knew it would make it more difficult to get their support later on if she drove them into a corner. The genie in her Buddhist bottle was telling her Lemko was still here, watching them and laughing at their attempts to find her. Or was it a him? Sara knew she’d need more convincing evidence to prove that this was the location in order to get the guys in Malmö to react again.
The Shkval manual Spimler’s wife had given her told Sara to look harder for her husband, but they hadn’t found the slightest trace of his whereabouts after his boat had been found drifting near the House of Parliament on the day of the Hoffberg killing.
The manual indicated Hoffberg and Spimler were involved with some kind of rocket-like weapon.
This has to be the torpedo mentioned on Spimler’s brochure.
The map which pointed out a spot near where the MS Sally sank reminded Sara that Ekman would be increasing his involvement as soon as she got back.
She went over the motives they had for Hoffberg’s murder, and was beginning to feel they’d have to add another possibility. Sara didn’t know how, but it seemed the torpedo could be tied to the Hoffberg murder and Spimler’s disappearance, but the whole thing seemed too bizarre to explain to anyone.
It was a feeling, not a result of the method Sven always wanted her to use. She’d have to be careful not to spend too much time talking about this until she was more certain about what it meant. At the same time she knew letting Ekman know about the manual would cause him to grab the Secret stamp he kept on his desk, but there’d be plenty of time for that when she went in on Sunday.
*
The officer from Malmö County Police dropped her off next to her car, inviting her in for coffee and a chance to meet the weekend staff.
“No thanks,” said Sara. “I have a long drive ahead of me. We’ll be in contact again soon. Thanks for all your wonderful help.”
A few minutes after that she was on the road to Stockholm, and put herself on autopilot. It was a six-hour drive back to Stockholm, and as the afternoon wore on and the miles added up, she dredged through the case again and again. Soon her thoughts began to wander from the case to more personal subjects.
Sara had decided to try to mend her poor relationship with her family before Christmas. Her one-bedroom flat wasn’t big enough to let anyone stay over, but she had the use of a large room downstairs, a great place to host parties. She’d already booked it for Christmas, and she’d try to get what was left of her shattered family there for a turkey dinner. Her grandmother had a fantastic recipe and she was sure she’d help her fix it. Sara was in the middle of her shopping list when her cell phone rang: a number she’d never seen before.
It was a social assistant at Grandma’s nursing home, who told her that her grandmother had fallen seriously ill and they wanted her to come to the hospital as soon as she could. Then her cell phone battery died. She pressed her little Peugeot even harder and whatever remained of the case flew from her mind.
Sara had lived most of her childhood with her grandmother, a woman who’d filled her head with all kinds of trash when she was young. One day when Sara was about four years old they were standing on a platform waiting for a local train, and out of nowhere, a high-speed commuter train thundered by. The wind buffeted both of them, and Sara clutched onto her grandmother’s thick, woollen overcoat as she tried to maintain her balance. When the train had passed her grandmother told her that trains were borne on the wind, and the faster the wind, the more train it could carry. It was a ridiculous thing to tell a child, and for many years Sara caught herself looking around for a loose train whenever there was an unexpected gust of wind. Even though she could laugh about it to herself, she sometimes wondered what other crap was still lying about in her unconscious memory, cluttering up the way she saw the world.
Like the time Sara’s grandmother told her that some pigeons chose partners for life, and when they did they got a special ring they carried on one of their legs. Sara could still remember the first time she saw a dead pigeon with a ring, and how she had cried about it several times during the next few days; the thought of that poor pigeon’s loved one searching for its life-mate wrenching her heart.
She still loved her grandmother, and even though she could spend hours telling her off in her mind, castigating her for the stupid parts of her upbringing, Sara still wouldn’t have had it any other way. Her Grandma loved her, and it made up for everything. Sara wished her own parents had done the same.
Still, in spite of it, or maybe because of it, the way she’d grown up had given her some insight into the way crooks thought. When she spoke to others at the police station she was struck by the differences in the way they were brought up. Most of them had had very normal lives at home; many of them coming from traditional families: mummy, daddy and kids, number one and two. Few came from rich families, but very, very few from parents who were destitute, and almost no one else had been raised by a grandparent like she had been.
Her broken family brought her closer to understanding the crooks, but her grandmother’s bizarre explanations of her parents behaviour had prepared her for her work better than any course she’d ever been on. She had grown up surrounded by lies. The news of the sudden illness dismayed Sara, and she started calculating when she could make it to the hospital to talk to the nurses.
The sun set as she sped up the E4 highway, and she turned on the radio to listen to the news. Very little was happening, as usual. Some Opposition politicians were reacting to the Prime Minister’s decision to give Parliament a week’s holiday so that some extraordinary rodent e
xtermination could be carried out in the building. Business as usual.
*
The first thing Sara did when she got home on Saturday night was to call the hospital. They told her it’d be OK if she showed up during evening visiting hours on the following day, so she made a pot of tea and passed out on her bed before it had time to steep.
She woke up at six in the morning, microwaved the pot of cold tea still on the counter from the night before and prepared her notes for the meeting with Ekman as she watched the sky become lighter; the sun rising somewhere beyond the view that her one kitchen window allowed.
*
Ekman told her he had a briefing to do with his boss at ten o’clock. “This has to be a brief meeting. Is Sven coming?”
“No, I’ve sent Sven a copy of the report you’re about to get now. I’ll keep it short.”
Ekman sat in front of her in the conference room, a single yellow notepad in front of him, tapping his pen impatiently. “So what’s your news?” he asked. “I haven’t got much time.”
Sara referred to her notes and showed Ekman the box with the manual she’d brought back with her, and flipped open the manual to the page containing the drawing.
“Looks like some kind of rocket might be involved,” she said. “Unless it’s the ‘torpedo’ on this brochure.” She pushed the fax Spimler’s wife had sent across the table.
She explained what they’d found about the Volvo 242 and its driver, and that her attempts to identify Lemko as a he or a she hadn’t been successful, but that she at least knew where to look. Sara even told Ekman about Malmö’s assumption that Lemko had already escaped. She took up the 50,000 euro payment on Hoffberg’s bank statement, and at that point Ekman looked up sharply. He hadn’t been taking notes as she spoke, and Sara wondered if he’d be able to remember it all later.
When she told him that Hoffberg’s wife thought he’d been robbed, Ekman took up his pen, then let it drop onto the notepad. He looked at her, his voice now very calm, matter-of-fact, a weatherman explaining that it rained last night, and so what?
“You have to find Spimler,” he said.
“Yes, I agree, but how?” Sara asked.
“That’s your job.” Ekman looked down at his notepad, then looked up again. “And I can’t help you do that. I’d like you to keep the information about the manual from the team for the time being. I doubt it will help them find Spimler, and until I get clearance I want the box held here. OK? Has Mr Hurtree contacted you yet?”
“No. Not beyond that postcard telling me he was going to visit, but I’ve been on the road a lot. Why?”
“He probably will soon.” Ekman gathered up his notepad and opened the conference room door for her. “Keep in touch.”
“Before Tuesday your team will be off this case,” he muttered to himself as he saw her leave.
He returned to the requisition form used to book one of the patrol boats assigned to Stockholm Harbour, signed it and hoped his boss would approve it without question. He had already overstepped the normal way of doing things when he’d asked some friends working the police helicopters assigned to traffic to work all night last week, carrying the radiation sensors he’d borrowed from Uppsala University. He had to find something soon, or even success would be frosted with an icing of defeat.
*
On the way back to her office Sara stopped for a tea at the café separated by a glass wall from the swimming pool, a place everyone called the Aquarium. This place wasn’t popular with the uniformed cops who seemed to prefer to have their coffee outside, so the café was usually empty except for investigators who liked to sit and watch the swimmers on the other side. Sara was alone, and it gave her a chance to sit in peace for a few minutes as she tried to adjust her thinking to what she’d just learned.
She gazed at her reflection in the glass window, noticed two tiny wrinkles on her face, and bent closer. She leaned back, concentrating on the reflection of her thirty-six-year-old image with a deep sigh. Sara still remembered the excitement and confusion of being eighteen. Then she added another eighteen years to her current age, blinked her blue eyes and saw a fifty-four-year-old woman staring back at her from the window. Doubling her age meant she was already halfway to seventy-two, and she began to wonder if the glass was some kind of crystal ball.
Her thoughts returned to her meeting with Ekman. He seemed to know everything she’d just told him, including the astonishing news of the torpedo and its connection to Hoffberg. She began to wonder if maybe he also knew who’d murdered Hoffberg, and if that could be the reason why he kept pushing her to find Spimler.
Outside the café there was a steady stream of police cars navigating the streets near the County Court House, a sign that a sensitive case would be going to trial the next day. It made her wonder why it took so many uniformed police to keep trials secure, and it didn’t seem like a good sign at all. Sara had seen key witnesses to her own cases suddenly change their testimony, suffering the consequences of perjury to avoid an alternative that was apparently far worse.
Her father’s comment when he’d found out she’d been accepted to the police academy popped up in her mind: “You’ll soon find out what it’s like to march up the mountain with Sisyphus.” Sara hadn’t looked up the Grecian myth until she’d graduated from the academy. Maybe they were in an absurd rat-race, destined to repeat themselves forever, and could only be happy when they prepared for their next impossible case.
Sara had never been able to figure out her father, who had ended his academic career as a flip-flop heroin addict, and who’d concealed his habit from everyone except his family, somehow managing to keep it under control well enough to do his menial office job during the week while blasting his mind out during the weekend.
As she woke up from this daydream Sara caught herself looking at two well-proportioned police officers diving off the springboard, and she had the feeling they’d seen her watching them. She took her tray to the trolley and left, hoping they hadn’t recognised her.
*
When Sara got back to the Hoffberg room the whole team was there, and she felt like the teacher who had just arrived too late for class.
“Hello, everybody,” she said, trying to sound irritated. “Has anyone found Spimler yet?”
“We’ve been waiting for you.” Sven wasn’t happy.
“I was over speaking to Ekman,” said Sara. “He said to tell you hello.”
“Have there been any new developments there?” Sven asked.
“Not very much that seems to pertain to the Hoffberg case.” And she continued with the news that came from Hoffberg’s widow about the large payment from his account, and Kristina’s assumption that he’d been robbed while in Tallinn.
Sara watched for a reaction from Sven as she told them about the trip to Malmö and Lemko’s disappearance, but he seemed preoccupied with something else, so when she finished she asked if anyone else had any news.
“The only real news I’ve got is that the company Spimler worked for has just filed for bankruptcy,” said Dan. “Maybe Spimler was out after money. Maybe the fifty grand from Hoffberg went into Spimler’s account somewhere.”
Sara pulled the bank statement from the case file and gave it to him. “Here,” she said, “check it out now.”
“But it’s Sunday,” he said.
“You’ll find a way,” said Sara, who then looked over at Robert standing next to the whiteboard, waiting for something to add. “Talk to the people in Forensics. Spimler’s boat was found adrift, and I want to know where it drifted from.”
After the team left to continue on their own, Sven and Sara were left alone in the Hoffberg room and he said, after closing the door after them, “I’m not too happy with your performance on this case. There’s a lot of pressure to get this solved soon, or at least be able to explain why we can’t.”
“Well, I’m not so happy with the straitjacket I have to wear. You and Ekman seem to know things that I don’t about this case and I have
to fumble around in the dark, discovering important leads by accident. And when I do find something I can’t even tell the team about it, even though it might help them figure out what’s going on.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, and Sara told him about the box with the manual in it.
“Shit. So it’s out in the open now.”
“And that’s your reaction? Shit, I managed to find out something? Is that why you’re not pleased with my performance?” Sara felt like she probably should have swallowed those last words, but they hopped out of her mouth like ugly toads.
“This is about a little more than just a murder,” said Sven. His voice told Sara that it involved events that were need-to-know; and that as far as he was concerned, she didn’t need to know. “Keep the news about the manual under your hat for the time being.”
“That’s what Ekman said,” Sara told him as she left the room.
*
The phone was ringing when Sara got back to her office, and her mouth was dry, making it hard to answer.
“Sara? Dan here. I managed to get some speed out of our friends at Economic Crimes and they’ve helped me find the bank payment made from Hoffberg’s account. The money went into a Swiss bank account in Lenzburg, just outside of Zurich.”
“Swiss bank account. We’ll see hell freezing before they let us know the owner of that account,” said Sara.
“You’re right, but at least we’ve got one more piece of the puzzle to work with,” said Dan.
“Put it on the whiteboard,” said Sara, and from nowhere a line from one of the seminars that she’d been to last year flashed in front of her eyes. “And ask Economic Crimes if maybe Hoffberg had some kind of document in order to be able to make the money transfer. Anything: a reference number, a contact name, whatever. Such a large sum of money wouldn’t be that easy to get out of the EU without some kind of reference. He must have been paying for something and I want you guys to find out what it was. No bank would have been allowed to carry out such a large transaction without requiring some kind of documentation. Dan, follow this up as soon as the banks open up tomorrow. We’ve been at this for nine days now. We’ve got to have a breakthrough.”
