by Arne Dahl
“Nice apartment,” he said.
“Here’s my Filofax.” She handed it to him. He skimmed through it and seemed unconcerned, but his brain was working overtime. There had been seven mysterious celebrities in her uncensored agenda, which he had copied at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: G every other Monday at ten; PS on Sundays at four; S, who showed up at various times in the evenings; Bro, who appeared every Tuesday at different times; PPP on September 6 at 1:30; FJ all day on August 14; and CR on September 28 at 7:30 p.m. He had them all in his head and was struggling to look dumb as he battled his way through the official version of the Filofax.
“What’s G?” he said. “And PS?”
She looked embarrassed. “G is manicures; my manicurist’s name is Gunilla. PS means parents; we have a family dinner at four o’clock every Sunday. I have a large family.”
“PPP and FJ? How can you keep all these abbreviations straight?”
“PPP was a girls’ lunch on the sixth, with Paula, Petronella, and Priscilla, to be exact. FJ was a conference day at work, foreign journalism. Aren’t you about finished?”
“CR?” he persisted.
“Class reunion,” she said. “I’m going to see my old class from upper secondary.”
“S and Bro?” he said.
She looked like she’d been struck by lightning. “There’s nothing like that,” she said, trying to remain calm.
He elegantly returned the Filofax. “S on occasional evenings, Bro every Tuesday at various times,” he said with a chivalrous smile.
“You’ve got a screw loose.”
“Those entries were in there, in ink, so you had to go out and buy a whole new Filofax to replace the pages with S and Bro. What does S mean, and what does Bro mean?”
“You had no right to go through my things,” she said, close to tears. “I’ve lost my husband.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but actually I had every right. This is a murder case of enormous proportions. Talk to me now.”
She closed her eyes. And didn’t say anything.
“This apartment is yours,” he said quietly. “It was purchased two years ago, and you paid 9.2 million kronor cash. You also own an apartment in Paris that’s worth two million, a summer home on Dalarö worth 2.6 million, two cars worth 700,000, and all together you are worth 18.3 million kronor. You’re twenty-eight years old and you earn 31,000 kronor a month at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In addition, you get substantial expense allowances when you’re abroad. You come from a reasonably wealthy family, but none of them have the kind of money you do. Can you explain that? How did you explain it to Eric?”
She looked up. Her eyes were red, but she wasn’t crying, yet.
“Eric accepted it without questions. My family is rich, I said, and he was satisfied with that. You should be, too. He was satisfied with anything that brought a little joy into this life. Well-invested money. Superior money. If you have a fortune, it works for you. Money is what earns money in this country now; people like you have to accept that, too.”
“I don’t,” said Söderstedt, without changing his tone.
“It’s best that you do!” she shouted.
“What do S and Bro mean?” he said.
“Bro means Bro!” she yelled. “Every Tuesday I met a man by the name of Herman in Bro. We fucked. Okay?”
“Did that bring joy into Eric’s life, too?”
“Stop it!” she cried. “Don’t you think I feel guilty enough about it? He knew what I was doing—he accepted it.”
“And S?”
She stared at him fiercely. Her body seemed to contract. Had he pressed too hard?
“That’s when I jog,” she said calmly, exhaling. “That’s my jogging session. I work so much that I have to schedule my jogging.”
“S as in ‘jogging’?”
“S as in ‘stretching.’ It takes longer to stretch than to jog.”
He looked at her with amusement. “You schedule stretching? And you want me to believe that?”
“Yes.”
“And the money?”
“Successful gambles in the stock market. It’s possible to earn money in Sweden again, thank God.”
“And it has nothing to do with shady Arab transactions?”
“No.”
“Excellent. Fifteen minutes ago you were placed under watch by the guard unit of the National Criminal Police. We are of the opinion that you are in mortal danger.”
She glared at the crafty Finland Swede, full of hate. “Protection or surveillance?” She maintained her calm.
“Take your pick,” said Arto Söderstedt, and took his leave of her.
It could have gone a little better, but he was satisfied.
Jorge Chavez had put one hundred cars on the shelf and was now concentrating on a single one. He was taking a bit of a chance. The nonexistent company’s name was Café Havreflarnet, which sounded harmless—it was named after a cookie—and was therefore an excellent front. It was supposed to be located on Fredsgatan in Sundbyberg, but there was no fucking Café Havreflarnet there, just a boring old Konsum grocery.
He pored with his usual intensity over the patent office’s business register and finally came upon the name of an authorized signatory, a Sten-Erik Bylund, who had been living on Råsundavägen in Stockholm when the business was established in 1955. The National Social Insurance Board showed that the firm had gone bankrupt, and Chavez was obliged to consult a large manual register and page through lists of bankrupt estates. Finally he found Café Havreflarnet and learned that it had gone bankrupt in 1986. The Volvo with the B license plate had been registered three years later, in 1989. So even then the practically nonexistent business had been the owner of the car. Taxes and insurance were paid up, but the money didn’t come from Café Havreflarnet.
He tracked down a current address for Sten-Erik Bylund in Rissne. Without further ado, he set out to meet force with force, but that tactic turned out to be inadequate, because the address belonged to a long-term-care institution, and Bylund was a seriously senile ninety-three-year-old. He didn’t give up; rather, he sat across from the snacking elderly man and watched him stick bananas in his armpits and pour blueberry soup over his bald skull. Perhaps the café was not a CIA front after all.
“Why did you register your Volvo station wagon under the name Café Havreflarnet, even though the business had gone bankrupt three years earlier? Who pays the bills? Where is the car?”
Sten-Erik Bylund bent toward him, as though he were about to tell him a state secret. “Nurse Gregs has wooden legs,” he said. “And my father was a strict old woman who liked a quickie or two on the go.”
“On the go?” Chavez said, fascinated. Could it be a code?
“Yes indeed. He ran like a bitch in heat among the mutts. Brother Kate’s breasts are great.”
Although he was still suffering from speed-blindness, Chavez was beginning to have his doubts, not least when Bylund stood up and exposed his genitals to an old woman, who only yawned loudly.
“It was different with my Alfons,” she said to her neighbor at the table. “He was well hung, let me tell you. A real hunk of beef just hanging there jiggling. Unfortunately, it just hung there jiggling.”
“Well, dearie,” her neighbor replied, “one time my Oliver and I were sitting there necking in the dark, and he reached it out to me. I said, ‘No thank you, dear, I don’t really feel like a smoke.’ But he could go on for hours and hours until a person was really tender, you know, dearie. Even though a person had seen bigger, if you know what I mean.”
Chavez’s mouth was hanging open.
As he left he heard the women tittering, “Wasn’t that the new doctor, darling? Why, he must be from Lebanon. The smaller the body, the bigger the member—that’s what they say down there in the tropics, you know.”
“I think it was Oliver. He visits me sometimes. For being dead, he’s kept his backside in very good shape, dearie.”
Paul Hjelm shivered. He’d crosse
d many borders in the past twenty-four hours, but the weather transition was the most awful. As he stood under an umbrella with police logos, he saw LinkCoop’s long row of warehouses standing out against the streaky perpetual-motion machine that was the rain. He understood what Nyberg had meant when he talked about fallen skyscrapers. A downtown skyscraper in Täby and a slum skyscraper in Frihamnen. Both had fallen over.
He passed the sentry box with his ID raised, then moved to the right along the building with its loading dock. Hell had many manifestations, he thought. He had been in a crack house in Harlem, in Lamar Jennings’s dismal Queens apartment, in a torture chamber in Kentucky: so alike, yet so different. And now this dismal, gray warehouse in Frihamnen, where the only upgrade that had been done in decades was the business logo, which glimmered and flashed in spectacularly spectral spectra. Here Eric Lindberger had had his hell, Benny Lundberg his, and Lamar Jennings his.
He peered behind the blue-and-white police tape that surrounded the door on the far right end of the long row of buildings. Beyond the curtain of rain he could see crime scene techs moving back and forth carrying various tools. He entered and went down the stairs to the storage area—and found a setup surprisingly reminiscent of Wayne Jennings’s secret torture chamber in Kentucky. The cast-iron chair that was welded to the floor appeared to be identical, as did the cement walls and the bare lightbulb.
“How’s it going?” he called to the technicians.
“Pretty good,” one of them called back. “Lots of organic material here. Mostly the victim’s, I expect, but since the perp didn’t have time to clean up after himself, we might get lucky.”
Seen in daylight, Hjelm thought, the premises looked relatively harmless, defused. So this was where the confrontation had taken place, he mused. Lamar Jennings had gotten in with the key made from a clay imprint, stationed himself behind the boxes in the corner, and awaited his father; that seemed the most likely scenario. Wayne Jennings arrived with Eric Lindberger, who was either unconscious or not, placed him in the chair, took out the pincers, and set to work. For Lamar, the sight of the diabolical father he’d thought was dead for fifteen years, performing the very actions that had given rise to the most horrifying of his mental images, was too much; he couldn’t keep his cool and showed himself. Wayne heard him, took out his pistol, and executed him.
So they could hardly call it a confrontation. It was more like a quick elimination, without reflection, as when you kill a mosquito without interrupting your lawn mowing. A fitting end.
Hjelm strode back over to the entrance, under the large, grotesque LinkCoop logo, and spoke with the receptionist, a tanned forty-five-year-old woman who was dressed in overalls because she was also the warehouse’s organizer.
“What kind of warehouse is the one at the far end?” Hjelm asked.
“It’s a resource building,” she said without looking up; apparently she had already said this a few times today. “That means it’s empty. If we get a larger delivery than expected, we have a little extra space. We have a few like that.”
“Is there anyone who often hangs out there?”
“You don’t hang out in a warehouse,” she rebuffed him. “You keep things there.”
He chatted idly with the warehouse workers. None of them knew anything; none understood anything. Break-in, yes, we’ve had those before, but murder—that’s insane.
He grew tired and went home.
Home to police headquarters.
Kerstin Holm didn’t feel up to holding a difficult, demanding conversation, such as one with Benny Lundberg’s parents. Not only was she feeling her jet lag, she had a stressful work week behind her. She wanted to sleep. Instead she was sitting in a small apartment in Bagarmossen at the home of shocked and grieving parents who blamed her personally for their son’s ill fortune.
“The police are falling apart,” said the father, who kept up the resentful facade even as his every word revealed the depth of his sorrow. “If they would fight crime instead of devoting themselves to affirmative action and other shit, our son wouldn’t be lying there like a fucking vegetable that you can only shoot out of mercy. Every other fucking cop is a woman. I’m just an old, fat school janitor, but I would easily be able to get ten cop chicks off me and scram, believe me.”
“I believe you,” said the cop chick, trying to move on.
“Let the men do their thing and the women do theirs, for fuck’s sake.”
“It was a man who assaulted your son, not a woman.”
“Thank God for that!” the father yelled, disconcerted. “A man’s home is his castle. Everything is going downhill.”
“Stop it!” she finally had to bark. “Sit down!”
The large man stared at her, struck speechless in mid-speech, and plopped down like a chastised little mischief-maker.
“I am truly very sorry about your grief,” Holm continued, “but what Benny is going to need is your help to come back, not a mercy shooting.”
“Lasse would never do that,” sniffled the small, shrunken mother. “He’s just so—”
“I know,” Holm interrupted. “It’s okay, just take it easy and try to answer my questions. Benny lived here at home. He had vacation in August. Do you know why he took vacation almost immediately again?”
The father sat there, stiff. The mother trembled but answered, “He was on Crete with some friends from the military in August. He hadn’t planned any more vacation. But he hardly talks to us these days.”
“Didn’t he say anything about why he took more vacation?”
“He had gotten extra vacation time. That was all he said. A bonus.”
“A bonus for what?”
“He didn’t say.”
“How did he seem the last few days?”
“Happy. Happier than he had been for a long time. Like he was expecting something. Like he had won some money at Bingolotto or something.”
“Did he say anything about why?”
“No. Nothing. We didn’t ask, either. I was a little nervous that he was up to some sort of trouble, now that he’d finally gotten a proper job.”
“Had he been in trouble before?”
“No.”
“I’m here to catch his”—she was about to say murderer—“his tormentor, not to put him away. Tell me.”
“Benny was a skinhead, before. Then he went through coastal commando training and became a new person. He tried to become a career officer and applied to the police college, but his grades weren’t good enough. Then he got that security guard job. It was wonderful.”
“Is he in the criminal registry?” she said, cursing her own laziness; she should have found out ahead of time instead of asking the parents. Couldn’t someone who was more familiar with this aspect of the case have taken care of it? Gunnar Nyberg wanted nothing more than to go out into the field, after all. She had just come straight from the United States, after all. Old bastard, she thought, thinking of Hultin.
“A few assault convictions in his teen years,” the mother said, embarrassed. “But just against blackheads.”
God in heaven, thought Kerstin Holm. “Nothing since then?”
“No.”
“Okay. What can you tell me about yesterday?”
“He was pretty tense. Stayed closed up in his room and talked on a phone a lot.”
“You didn’t happen to hear what he was saying?”
“Do you think I eavesdrop on my own son?”
Yes, thought Holm. “No, of course not. But you can just happen to hear things.”
“No, you can’t.”
Not her too, thought Holm, groaning, imagining that she kept most of her groan internal. “I’m sorry. Then what happened?”
“He went out around five. He didn’t say where he was going, but he seemed nervous and keyed up. Like he was going to pick up some Bingolotto winnings or something.”
“Did he say anything that might give some hint as to where he was going or what he was doing?”
�
��He said one thing: ‘Soon you’ll be able to move out of here, Mom.’ ”
“Have you touched anything in his room?”
“We’ve been at the hospital all night. No, I haven’t touched anything.”
“May I look at it?”
She was shown to the door of what seemed to be a teenage boy’s room. Old, peeling stickers from packs of gum covered the surface.
Once inside the room, she thanked the mother and closed the door in her face. An enormous Swedish flag covered two of the walls; it was creased in the middle, behind the bed. She lifted the fabric and peered behind it. A few banners were hidden there. She couldn’t really see them, but she recognized the black, white, gold, and red stripes; they were probably miniature Nazi flags. She flipped through the CDs. Mostly heavy metal, but also some white power albums. Benny Lundberg hadn’t broken very radically with his skinhead past, that much was certain.
She went to the telephone on the nightstand and looked for a notepad. She found it on the floor. It was blank, but she could see impressions on the top page—something for the crime-scene techs to sink their teeth into, she thought, feeling as if she were quoting someone. She lifted the receiver and pressed redial. The speaking clock rattled off numbers in her ear. She was disappointed. The only thing she found out from this was that Lundberg had had an appointment that he didn’t want to miss for any reason.
She dialed a number.
“Teleservice? This is Kerstin Holm, National Criminal Police. Do you see the number I’m calling from on the screen? Good. Can you run a quick check on outgoing and incoming calls for the past twenty-four hours and e-mail it to chief inspector Jan-Olov Hultin, NCP? Top priority. Thanks.”
She did a quick check of the cluttered desk. Comic books, porno magazines out in the open—what would Mom say? Company pens, military magazines, trash. In the top drawer were two items of interest: a small bag of pills, doubtless good old pinkies, anabolic steroids; and a small jar of keys, probably spares: house key, car key, bike key, bike lock key, suitcase key, and then a key that seemed vaguely familiar. Was it to a safe-deposit box? What could Benny Lundberg have in a safe-deposit box? A weapon? Surely there was a whole arsenal under the floorboards. No, a safe-deposit box didn’t really fit the profile. She lifted the receiver of the phone again and dialed.
