Bad Blood: A Crime Novel

by Arne Dahl

  There are cracks in your rotten wall. At the moment of death you will see them. They will overwhelm you when I torture you to death.

  They had read enough.

  “Are there any diskettes here?” asked Hjelm.

  Chavez nodded and saved the whole “hate” folder onto one of them.

  “What do you say?” Hjelm asked.

  “The choice of words seems familiar.” Chavez put the diskette into his pocket. “What would the scenario look like? Was he so personally familiar with the Kentucky Killer’s habits that he could copy them perfectly? In that case, where did he get the information?”

  “Wouldn’t your Fans of American Serial Killers have it? And he seems to be familiar with computers.”

  “So he found out exactly when Hassel’s trip back to Sweden was booked and waited for him at the Newark airport? The rest was a coincidence?”

  “Or the opposite: he planned it in great detail. Strictly speaking, Edwin Reynolds could have been Laban Jeremias Hassel.”

  Chavez was quiet for a moment, sorting through his impressions. Hjelm thought he could see his focus narrowing. Then Chavez summed it up: “He arrives at Newark from Sweden on an earlier flight, waits an hour or so at the airport, strikes, and comes back with a false passport. It’s entirely possible. Although he might just as easily have hired a professional.”

  They considered this scenario.

  “Shall we go?” Hjelm asked at last.

  Chavez nodded.

  They passed through the deserted neighborhood via Hantverkargatan and cut diagonally across Kungsholmstorg and up Pipersgatan; it was like coming full circle. Or tying up a sack. The rain whipped at them sideways.

  They reached the stairs, climbed up to Kungsklippan, and went into the building. Outside the apartment door, Chavez took out his pistol and said, “She may have warned him.”

  Hjelm drew his service weapon too and rang the bell.

  Laban Hassel opened the door right away. He stared expressionlessly into the barrels of the pistols and said quietly, “Don’t make fools of yourselves.”

  Their scenario collapsed like a house of cards. Laban Hassel was either extremely cunning or completely harmless.

  They followed him into the darkness; the shades were down again, and the computer screen emitted its listless light. Chavez raised the blinds again; this time there was no sun to stun them. Laban hardly blinked as the pale light filtered into his eyes—it was as though he were beyond all earthly reactions.

  He took a seat at the rotten table. Everything was familiar, yet everything had changed. The two policemen remained standing and kept their service weapons up. Laban let himself be frisked without protest.

  “Elisabeth Berntsson from the newspaper called,” he said calmly. “She thought I should run away.”

  “ ‘Don’t look over your shoulder,’ ” Hjelm quoted as he took a seat and put his pistol into his holster.

  Laban Hassel gave a crooked smile. “Eloquent, isn’t it?”

  “Did you kill him?” Hjelm asked.

  Laban raised his eyes, stared intensely into Hjelm’s, and said, “That is a very, very good question.”

  “Is there a very, very good answer?”

  But Laban said no more. He just looked fixedly at the table and kept his mouth shut.

  Hjelm tried again. “What happened in January?”

  Absolute silence.

  Another attempt: “We know that you registered at the university three years ago but didn’t complete a single course. Perhaps you were able to cheat your way into student loans for a while. But for the next two years—what did you live on then?”

  “CSU,” said Laban Hassel. “Cash Support for Unemployment, I think it means. Then it ran out.”

  “In January this year,” said Hjelm.

  Hassel looked at him. “Do you know how demeaning it is to apply for welfare? Do you know what it’s like to be openly distrusted and then meticulously investigated? Do you know what it feels like when they find out that your father is too well known and well-to-do for you to qualify for welfare? It’s not enough that he’s been hanging over me like a repressive shadow all my life—now because of him, I can’t even get money to survive.”

  “That added to your hatred.”

  “The first threat was spontaneous. I just vented on the computer. Then I realized that I could send my outburst as an e-mail. Then it became an idée fixe.”

  “Why did you threaten your half-brother Conny?”

  The look on Laban Hassel’s face could not be described as anything other than self-loathing. “That’s the only thing I regret.”

  “Cut the throat of a six-year-old and fuck the severed throat?”

  “Please stop. I wasn’t threatening the boy, only my father.”

  “Have you met Conny?”

  “I see him now and then. We’re friends. His mother, Ingela, seems to like me. We’re almost the same age. Do you know when I saw her for the first time?”

  “No.”

  “I was probably about fourteen, fifteen. I was out walking with my mom along Hamngatan. And as if it weren’t bad enough to be out walking with your mom at that age, we caught sight of my father on the other side of the street. With Ingela. He saw us, but far from being embarrassed by the seventeen-year-old at his side, he started crudely making out with her in the middle of the street. Mom and I got a private show.”

  “Was that before the divorce?”

  “Yes. Sure, all our relationships were hellish at home, but from the outside we still looked like a family. That day ripped the veil from the illusion.”

  “Hellish in what way?”

  “People seem to think that it’s much worse for children if the parents argue rather than shutting up and pretending to be friends. But that’s the worst kind of hypocrisy, because children can always see through it. Our house was dominated by an icy silence. Hell isn’t warm, it’s cold. Absolute zero. I went frostbitten through the polar landscape of my childhood. And besides that, he could go missing at any time: soccer matches he promised to come to but never showed up at, always the same thing. And then he’d come home only to freeze the whole fucking apartment.”

  “You have literary talent,” said Hjelm, “I can hear that. Why waste it on hate letters to your dad?”

  “I think it was an exorcism,” Laban said thoughtfully. “I had to get that bastard out of my blood. That cold bastard. But I might as well have chosen not to send that shit to him.”

  “It could have been a novel.”

  Laban looked into Hjelm’s eyes and blinked intensely. Perhaps some sort of connection was forming between them.

  “Maybe,” he said. “On the other hand, I wanted to see how he’d react. I wanted to see if I could notice anything in him when we met. Maybe I also had some sort of vain hope that he would confide in his son. If he had hinted that he was being threatened even once, I would have stopped right away, I’m sure of that. But nothing. He showed no trace. He spouted the same old, tired jargon every time we met. I don’t even think he ever considered that the evil that the letters accused him of committing had to do with his role as a father.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” said Chavez from over by the window. “Do you know what the password on his computer was?”

  Laban Hassel looked over his shoulder.

  “Laban,” said Chavez. “L-A-B-A-N.”

  “Why do you think Elisabeth Berntsson called you?” Hjelm asked. “She was prepared to take the blame herself in order to keep you out of it. Why do you think she suspected you?”

  “Why do you think your father saved all your e-mails in a folder called ‘hate’?” Chavez asked. “Every single file we looked at had been accessed at least ten times.”

  “You were waiting for him to take the first step,” said Hjelm. “And he was waiting for you to.”

  Laban seemed to disappear into himself again, but they didn’t let him go completely. “What happened a month ago?” Hjelm asked. “Why did y
ou suddenly start firing off more e-mails?”

  Laban slowly raised his eyes; it seemed like an enormous, purely physical effort. His gaze fastened on Hjelm.

  “That was when I got close to Ingela. She told me about Conny, about his birth, that he had never even wanted to see him.”

  “ ‘Got close to’? How close?”

  “I decided to murder him for real.”

  Hjelm and Chavez held perfectly still. Hjelm tried to formulate the right question, which ended up being “You started piling on threatening e-mails with the intent of murdering him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And in the last one, you let him know that you knew about his New York plans and that you were going to kill him in a way that would make it impossible for him to scream out his pain? Do you know how he died?”

  “He was murdered.”

  “But the details?”

  “No.”

  “He was tortured to death, and his vocal cords were cut so that no one could hear him scream. When did you go to New York?”

  “I haven’t—”

  “When? Were you there waiting for him, or did you arrive just as the plane was about to take off?”

  “I—”

  “How did you learn about the Kentucky Killer’s MO?”

  “Where did you get the Edwin Reynolds passport?”

  “How did you sneak past the police at Arlanda?”

  Laban Hassel gaped into the crossfire.

  Hjelm leaned forward and said emphatically, “Where were you on the night of the second and third of September?”

  “In hell,” Laban Hassel said almost inaudibly.

  “Then you must have run into your father there,” said Chavez. “I don’t think any living person could come closer to hell than he was right then.”

  In the dramaturgy of investigative techniques, Laban should, at this point, either have broken down or clammed up. What happened was something in between. His lips hardly moving, he said to the table flatly, “I can’t understand it. I had almost made up my mind to take that step, and then he died. Then someone else murdered him. It was completely crazy. Or rather completely logical. Divine justice. A desire so strong that it materialized. It couldn’t be a coincidence; it had to be fate, a fate as grotesque as life itself. A message from above. And only now, now that nothing can be taken back, do I realize that I never would have killed him. And that I didn’t even want to. On the contrary, I only wanted to punish him. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to get him to show some tiny trace of remorse.”

  The room was quiet for a moment. Then Hjelm repeated, “Where were you on the night between the second and third of September?”

  “I was in Skärmarbrink,” Laban whispered, “at Ingela and Conny’s place.”

  And Chavez repeated: “What happened a month ago? How close to Ingela did you get?”

  “Very close,” said Laban calmly. “Too close. It’s not enough that I slept with my brother’s mother, not enough that she slept with the son of her son’s detested father, and that these insights slugged us hard in the face. We were also confronted with something we had in common, something horrible with the same root cause, and that was what caused me to make my decision. That was what made me send more and more letters. By then it was mutual.”

  “And what was it that you had in common?”

  Laban Hassel bent his neck way back and stared up at the ceiling. As his little goatee bobbed, he said, “We had both been sterilized.”

  Hjelm looked at Chavez.

  Chavez looked at Hjelm.

  “Why?” they said in unison.

  Laban got up, walked to the window, and opened it.

  Dusk had fallen. Rain clouds swept across the city, borrowing a bit of street light now and then. A gust of autumn blew through Laban’s hair and into the musty room.

  “Bad blood always comes back around,” said Laban Hassel.

  10

  It’s time.

  He’s on his way.

  Now it will begin.

  He moves silently through the empty cottage. The bag is resting over his shoulder. It rattles slightly in the dark.

  He stops at the window next to the front door. He hears a weak, drawn-out, hollow cry as the autumn winds whine through the round hole next to the lock.

  He raises his eyes from the hole in the pane of glass and takes in the night’s autumn storm, which heaves great sheets of rain across the pitch-black landscape. When he steps out onto the porch and the rain whips his cheeks, it is another wind he feels.

  It is dry, dry as a desert. It sweeps down from Cumberland Plateau and whistles through the ice-cold house.

  Through the night, he sees the shadow in the closet as a darker darkness. He follows it.

  He wanders through the rain. It doesn’t exist. All that exists is a target. A darker darkness.

  He gets into the beige Saab and drives away. The roads are more like paths. He carefully avoids the floodlike rivulets and balances on the banks of the river until the first lights of civilization color the bands of rain, and he discovers the stairs behind the secret door that catches the arm of a jacket. He takes the first step, and the next. The lights disappear; the dusty-sweet scent comes, the same one that is thick in the car that is just turning out onto the big road. Occasional headlights sweep by. The illuminated facades of buildings take shape around him. There are nuances to the darkness now: he can not only feel the ice-cold, damp handrail; he can see it too, see it as a hazy band hurtling down toward the abyss in an endless, snakelike copycat of the stairs, which crunch with sand; and the skyscraper towers, strangely alone, at the entrance to the city. He sees it, a bit to the right, and drives along the street with the green swath in the middle. He doesn’t know its name, just knows the street, knows the number of steps, the exact number of steps down to the light-framed door that he can almost see now, a tiny glimmer at the very bottom. He knows exactly where each correct movement ought to happen, and then he turns around the stadium with the old clock tower, and he’s very close. Forest again; he is balancing at the edge of civilization: complexes of buildings on one side, forest on the other, a nocturnal jungle that he drags himself through until the contours of the door are visible. Like an icon frame around a darkness that’s brighter than any light, the light shoots out from behind the door. A halo that shows him the way.

  He enters to the right. Dimly lit contours of ships give faint illumination to the rows of empty offices and warehouses. Otherwise, nothing.

  He stops the car in an empty parking lot and walks with even, distinct steps down to the water. The rain is flung from side to side; it can’t get to him. Now he can tell it’s a door; the light is coming from inside it. Not a sound can be heard. A few steps left. Something makes a clinking sound behind him. The key clinks softly in the lock. He turns it, pulls open the heavy door, closes it behind him, and opens the bag. He places a hand towel on the floor just inside the door and stands there dripping. Then he changes shoes, puts the wet towel and the wet shoes back in the bag, takes out a flashlight, and climbs down the stairs, the back point of a solitary cone of light. He stops in front of the door with the glittering halo swarming around it. He stands there. He can’t breathe.

  He lets his flashlight sweep through the cellar. Nothing has changed. The junk in one corner, the collection of carefully stacked boxes in the other, and the empty surface a bit farther away; the always well-scrubbed cement floor with the drain and the heavy cast-iron chair. He pushes his way behind the farthest row of boxes, sits down with his back against the cold stone wall, turns off his flashlight, and waits.

  He loses contact with time. Minutes pass—or seconds, or hours. His eyes adjust to the darkness. The image of the humid cellar develops slowly. The door appears clearly, above the stairs, about ten yards away. His eyes do not leave it.

  Time passes. Everything is quiet. He waits.

  Then a key is pushed into the lock. Two men step in, one older and one younger. He can’t make out their
features. They converse quietly but intensely in a foreign language as they walk down the stairs.

  Suddenly something happens. It goes so quickly. The older man presses something against the throat of the younger one. He immediately loses consciousness. The older man drags him over to the heavy cast-iron chair, takes a number of leather straps out of a case, and binds the man’s legs, arms, and body. Then he bends down to the case again.

  That is when he opens the door and everything is revealed. The light streams out. He steps into the Millennium.

  The older man lifts a large syringe out of the case and, with an experienced hand, guides it into the unconscious man’s throat from the side. He adjusts a few small knobs on the upper part of the mechanism.

  He gives a start behind his boxes; he is close to knocking them over.

  Then the older man lines up a series of surgical instruments on the cement floor, in careful order. Farthest to the right is another large syringelike gadget.

  Finally he pats the unconscious man on the cheeks, harder and harder until he starts to shake. His head is stabilized. Intense jerks course through the restrained body, but the chair remains completely still. There is not a sound to be heard.

  The older man says a few toneless words and bends down toward the second syringe. When he leans to the side to inject it in exactly the right spot, a faint light comes in from an unknown source and illuminates his face. For one second, it is completely clear.

  That is when he truly gives a start. A box falls.

  The older man stands stock still. He places the syringe on the floor and starts to move. He’s approaching fast.

  It’s time, he thinks, and steps out of his hiding place.

  11

  The minibus imitated the gliding flight of a bat through the rainy night. Its night vision was turned on; its perception of space was perfect.

  Although maybe bats don’t glide.

  And was it really night vision they had?

  He wished he hadn’t had that last whiskey.

  “Where the hell are we?”

  “Damn, Matte broke down up there.”