by Arne Dahl
Nyberg had obtained a little blackboard on which he could write messages in his wobbly left-handed script. ‘Igor?’ he wrote.
Hjelm nodded. ‘Alexander Bryusov. That idiotic tackle you made on his car uncovered the whole connection between Viktor X and Lovisedal, a very real connection. Bryusov is apparently going to be the star witness.’
Nyberg wrote, ‘Not our man, right?’
Hjelm had to ask Chavez and Holm for help in deciphering his scrawl.
‘No,’ said Chavez. ‘Bryusov isn’t our man. Our man is an ordinary Swedish bank teller by the name of Göran Andersson.’
The twitching under the wads of bandages could almost be interpreted as a laugh.
‘We’re conducting a nationwide manhunt for him now,’ said Hjelm. ‘But you may be back at work before he’s arrested.’
Nyberg shook his bandages emphatically. The tubes that connected him to the surrounding machinery swayed alarmingly. One apparatus began beeping, as if in fear. He wrote, ‘Damn it all, no, you’ll get him in a couple of days.’ Then he erased the words and wrote a new message: ‘Missa.’
‘Missa what?’ said Hjelm.
‘Is there something we’ve missed?’ asked Chavez.
‘Ah.’ Kerstin Holm, who had been standing at Nyberg’s feet, walked over and sat down on the chair next to his bed. She took his hand, the only patch of skin visible in all that whiteness. She hummed a pure and clear note for ten seconds, then she began to sing. It was the lead alto part in Palestrina’s Missa papae Marcelli.
Nyberg closed his eyes. Hjelm and Chavez just stood there, motionless.
When they returned to police headquarters, Hjelm found a fax lying on his desk. Since Hultin was waiting for them in Supreme Central Command, he cast only a quick glance at it as he headed out of the room. Not until he was out in the hallway did his brain register the name of the sender: Detective Superintendent Erik Bruun of the Huddinge police force. Hjelm went back to his desk.
‘I thought it best that you hear this from me rather than in the media,’ Bruun had written. ‘Last night Dritëro Frakulla committed suicide in his cell at Hall Prison. At least now his family will be allowed to stay. Don’t let this affect your work. You were just doing your job. Warm wishes, Bruun.’
Last night, thought Hjelm, holding the fax in his hand. What a strange night. Gunnar Nyberg was shot in Lidingö, Ulf Axelsson was murdered in Göteborg, Dritëro Frakulla killed himself in Norrköping and Göran Andersson was identified in Algotsmåla. And all of these events were vaguely connected.
What a small country Sweden is, he thought, realising that he ought to be thinking about something else.
He was still holding the fax when he entered the room of Supreme Central Command. The other members of the A-Unit were already there. It was the first time he’d seen Hultin since they’d returned from Växjö.
‘An outstanding job in Växjö.’ Hultin gave him a searching look.
Excellent job, thought Hjelm, and for a moment he felt as if he was sinking into a pile of shit and had to stand on top of Dritëro Frakulla’s body in order to keep his nose above the surface. He shook off the image, let go of the sweaty fax and sat down.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘So outstanding that I’m even going to ignore the time between when you found out the perp’s name and when you called in your report.’
Hultin’s praise was seldom one-sided.
‘Okay,’ he continued calmly. ‘The surveillance effort has been moved from the Lovisedal board members in 1991 to the Sydbanken board in 1990. Daggfeldt, Strand-Julén, Carlberger, Brandberg and Axelsson are all dead. Unfortunately, the board included an additional twelve individuals. Eight in Stockholm, two in Malmö, one in Örebro and one in Halmstad. The sole member from Göteborg has already been taken out. Of the twelve remaining members, we’ve located nine and set up surveillance for them. But one is out of the country, and two we still haven’t found. Both happen to be Stockholmers: a Lars-Erik Hedman and an Alf Ruben Winge. Finding them is our highest priority. An all-points bulletin was put out this morning for Göran Andersson’s green Saab 900. It turns out that for almost a month it’s been in the possession of the Nynäshamn police, without licence plates and with the VIN number filed off. The techs are going over it right now, but as is to be expected, the preliminary report says they haven’t found any evidence. As for Andersson himself, we’ve put out a nationwide alert, and the most recent photo of him has been sent to all police districts and border stations. The question now under discussion at the highest level is whether to release his picture to the press and enlist the aid of that Big Detective, the public.’
‘I think it would be a mistake,’ said Söderstedt. ‘As long as he doesn’t know that we know about him, he’s going to feel relatively secure about what he does.’
‘Of course that’s true,’ said Hultin. ‘It’s just a matter of getting Mörner and the rest of the boys to understand that.’
‘Do your best,’ said Söderstedt. ‘You do have a number of secret weapons.’
Hultin gave him a stern look. ‘Our priorities are as follows,’ he went on. ‘One, locate Hedman and Winge. Two, check up on all potential Stockholm contacts that Andersson may have had, in order to find out where he’s been living since February; we have that darts shop in Gamla Stan, but there must be more contacts, the darts association, or whatever else. Three, put some pressure on Lena Lundberg via that incident man in Växjö, Officer Wrede. See what else she knows. Four, show Andersson’s photograph around in the underworld.’
Hultin paused to consult his papers.
‘This is how we’re going to proceed. In Nyberg’s absence, Chavez will go with the Stockholm criminal division to canvass the underworld; Holm will return to Växjö and accompany Wrede to check up on circles of friends and contacts that Andersson may have had in Stockholm; Norlander will check out the darts shop and the darts association, and afterwards, along with various foot soldiers, he’ll check out hotels and apartment rental agencies for customers from around the fifteenth of February; and Hjelm and Söderstedt will locate Hedman and Winge. Keep in mind that you have access to the whole damned police force. And as usual, avoid all contact with the press and with Säpo. It’s now twelve noon on the twenty-ninth of May. It’s two months since Göran Andersson began his serial killings. Let’s see to it that the number of victims stops at five, and that the case doesn’t go on for another two months.’
Kerstin Holm went back to Växjö to ‘accompany’ Jonas Wrede, as Hultin had expressed it. He looked a bit jittery when she stepped into his office; he’d thought that he’d no longer have to be reminded of his sins of omission in the Treplyov case. But now he would have to spend yet another day in its shadow. Holm quickly discovered that Göran Andersson’s circle of friends was largely limited to the darts club. Apparently he’d been the club’s star, but even there no one made any real claim to have been his friend. And nobody knew anything about his possible contacts in Stockholm. She and Wrede went to see Lena Lundberg, but she didn’t have the heart to ‘put some pressure’ on the woman. It was obvious to them that she knew nothing.
Jorge Chavez’s excursions through Stockholm’s underworld were not a success. No one recognised Göran Andersson’s photo; he really didn’t expect them to. Chavez thought he’d been given the shittiest assignment of all.
Viggo Norlander felt the same way. In the darts shop they had to look up Andersson in the computer files. The clerk behind the counter remembered the darts with the extra-long points, but nothing else. Andersson had always ordered his darts by post. At the darts association, no one knew anything at all about him, although they did find his name on a couple of local lists of results from Småland, always at the very top. Surprisingly, he never seemed to have competed outside Småland, even though several times he’d defeated national competitors.
Norlander finished off the day, with the assistance of a whole team from the NCP and the Stockholm police force, by going
round to all the city’s hotels and consulting the rental ads in the morning newspapers, as well as the free classified paper, for 15 February onwards. He got no bites at the hotels, but over the phone several people at rental agencies seemed to recognise the vague description of Göran Andersson. But when Norlander presented them with his actual photo, they all said they’d been mistaken. Norlander and his men stubbornly continued their search.
On direct orders from Hultin, the foot soldiers of the Stockholm police also went to the workplaces and residences of the Stockholm victims to show the photograph to colleagues, family members and neighbours. The Göteborg police did the same among the circles frequented by Ulf Axelsson. No one had seen Göran Andersson anywhere.
Söderstedt and Hjelm struggled to locate the other two members of the Sydbanken board of directors anno 1990.
Arto Söderstedt visited Alf Ruben Winge’s company, UrboInvest, as well as his home in Östermalm. Nobody seemed especially concerned about his absence; apparently he would occasionally disappear from the surface of the earth for a few days at a time and then show up again as if nothing had happened. He had the pecuniary wherewithal to afford this type of luxury, as an astute employee expressed it. Söderstedt made a trip out to the archipelago, to Winge’s impressive summer place on the island of Värmdö, but found the house closed up. And that was about as far as he got.
It had fallen to Paul Hjelm to track down the other missing former board member, Lars-Erik Hedman. Fallen, in a different sense of the word, was also what had happened to Hedman. He’d been the TCO union representative on the Sydbanken board from 1986 until 1990. At the time he was also a leading negotiator within TCO, with aspirations to become the union’s president; he was married, with two children, and he owned an exquisite apartment in Vasastan. Now he lived alone in a two-room place in Bandhagen. He’d been thrown out of TCO and stripped of all board assignments. During a couple of years in the late Eighties he’d managed to combine a serious drinking problem with his work, convincing everyone to keep a lid on it. But after a number of bizarre performances in semi-public situations the union had lost patience, and Hedman was out in the cold.
Via the social-welfare office in Bandhagen, Hjelm traced Hedman to a park bench outside the state off-licence and roughly dragged him home to the man’s filthy apartment. There he ushered in the police officers who had been given the dubious pleasure of protecting Lars-Erik Hedman’s health – by definition, an impossible job.
Hjelm returned to police headquarters, certain that another fallow period in the case lay ahead. He hated the thought. Another dreary month. With the whole summer holiday frozen. And with an elusive Göran Andersson roaming the streets holding an aimed but invisible dart in his hand.
Hjelm was sitting in his office, staring blindly through the police building window at the other police building outside, when the phone rang.
‘Hjelm,’ he said into the phone.
‘Finally,’ said a quiet voice with an accent that made Hjelm instinctively switch on the phone tape recorder. The man was speaking a Småland dialect. ‘It was hard to find you. A difficult switchboard staff. Paul Hjelm, the hero from Botkyrka. You’ve been given nearly as many labels as I have this spring.’
‘Göran Andersson,’ said Hjelm.
‘Before you even think about trying to trace this call, I’ll tell you the best way to avoid being tracked. Steal a mobile phone.’
‘Forgive me for saying this,’ Hjelm said a bit recklessly, ‘but it goes against the picture we’ve formed of you that you’d call up to brag. It doesn’t fit the psychological profile.’
‘If you find somebody who does, let me know,’ said Göran Andersson faintly. ‘No, I’m not calling to brag. I’m calling to tell you to stay away from my fiancée. Otherwise I’ll have to break even more with the psychological profile and take you out too.’
‘You’d never be able to take me out,’ Hjelm declared, contrary to all recommended psychological advice.
‘Why not?’ said Andersson, sounding genuinely interested.
‘Helena Brandberg, Enar Brandberg’s daughter. You could easily have shot her too and taken away the cassette, but instead you chose to flee and leave the tape in our hands.’
‘Was it the tape that identified me?’ Göran Andersson said in surprise. ‘That couldn’t have been easy.’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ said Hjelm. ‘How did you think we’d found you?’
‘Because of the bank robber in the vault, of course. I was just waiting for that whole episode to come out and for you to start hunting me. But when nothing happened, I decided to proceed. Later he showed up in that police sketch in the newspapers, as if he were still alive. What was that all about?’
Why not tell him the truth? thought Hjelm.
‘Säpo buried the investigation out of concern for national security.’
Göran Andersson laughed loudly. Hjelm was on the verge of doing the same. ‘I guess their original intent kind of backfired,’ Andersson said after a moment.
‘Why don’t you put a stop to all this and turn yourself in?’ said Hjelm quietly. ‘You’ve very clearly demonstrated your displeasure with the actions of the banks in the late Eighties and early Nineties. So why not stop? By now you know that we’re watching every damned member of the board.’
‘Not exactly … Besides, it’s not a question of demonstrating anything; there have been so many coincidences that it’s no longer a matter of chance. It’s fate. There’s a very fine line separating chance and fate, but once you’ve crossed that line, it’s irrevocable.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t you read the newspapers?’ Göran Andersson said in surprise.
‘Not very often,’ Hjelm admitted.
‘I’m a folk hero, for God’s sake! Haven’t you read the letters to the editor? Getting a hangover without having had even a glimpse of the party is no fun. That’s the mental state of Sweden today. Everybody who has the opportunity and authority to speak is telling us that we’ve participated in some sort of party, and now we have to pay the price. What party? So that’s what I’m doing; this is the party, the people’s retroactive party! Read the letters, listen to what people are talking about in the city! That’s what I’m doing, and maybe you should too. But no, you’re stuck in an enclosed space, and you think this case is playing out inside there. All the conversations going on in the city are about this. It’s easy to see who’s scared and who’s cheering.’
‘Don’t try to tell me that this is some kind of political mission!’
‘I’ve only been to one party during those giddy days,’ said Andersson a bit more calmly. ‘At the restaurant Hackat & Malet in Växjö on the twenty-third of March 1991. That’s when I found out what the buying frenzy had done.’
‘You’re no people’s revolutionary,’ Hjelm insisted. ‘This is all something you’ve invented after the fact.’
‘Of course,’ said Andersson soberly. ‘Personally, I’ve always voted conservative.’
This is a very strange conversation, thought Hjelm. This was not the obsessed serial killer who sat and waited for hours in an empty living room, fired two shots through his victim’s head and afterwards listened to jazz. The mystery shattered into a thousand pieces, the myth crumbled away. Misterioso, he managed to think. Maybe the murders had somehow made him sane. On the other hand, maybe this was just the daytime version of Göran Andersson that he was having such a relatively normal conversation with; maybe the night-time version looked entirely different.
People, thought Hjelm, and then he said, ‘Just one question, purely from a factual point of view. How did you get into the houses?’
‘If you follow somebody long enough, sooner or later you’ll have access to their keys,’ said Andersson indifferently. ‘Then all you have to do is make a quick impression on a lump of clay and grind your own key. It’s no harder than grinding a dart point. And then you check out their habits and anticipate them.’
‘Have you
been following your next victim long enough?’
There was silence for a moment. Hjelm was afraid the man had hung up.
‘Long enough,’ said Andersson at last and went on: ‘But we digress. I just called to tell you to stay away from my fiancée. Otherwise I’ll be forced to kill you too.’
A question had been churning in Hjelm’s mind the whole time. Would it be wise to ask? How would Göran Andersson react? He was even less sure after this weird conversation. Weird by virtue of its apparent normality.
Finally Hjelm decided to ask, possibly against his better judgement. ‘If you’ve been in contact with Lena, then you must know that she’s carrying your child. How does that child’s future look now?’
Utter silence on the line.
After ten seconds he heard a faint click, and the conversation was over. Hjelm put down the phone, switched off the recorder, plucked out the tape and went to see Hultin.
‘I’ve just talked to him,’ said Hjelm.
Hultin looked up from his papers and stared at him through the half-moon lenses of his glasses. ‘Talked to whom?’
‘Göran Andersson.’ Hjelm waved the tape.
Hultin pointed at his cassette player without changing expression.
They listened to the whole conversation. Once in a while Hjelm thought he might have been unnecessarily passive, and sometimes he’d been downright obtuse, but in general it was a lengthy and astonishing conversation between a serial killer and a police officer.
‘I can understand your caution,’ said Hultin when the tape was over. ‘Although maybe you could have fought a little harder to get some leads. But in my opinion there are three clues here: One: even if we take that final silence to mean that he didn’t know about his fiancée’s pregnancy, he has apparently been in contact with her. She simply hadn’t mentioned that particular detail to him. And with regard to the fact that he made contact with you so soon after you’d been there, it’s likely that they’ve been in contact with each other before; it seems unlikely that their first contact after three and a half months would occur on the very day after you identified him. Holm is going to have to put the squeeze on Lena Lundberg down there in Algotsmåla. She knows more than she’s telling us. Two: Andersson responds “Not exactly …” when you say that we’re keeping watch on all of the board members. That may mean that Alf Ruben Winge is the target; he’s the only one that we haven’t yet located. We need to put every effort into finding him. Three: when you ask Andersson whether he’d followed his next victim long enough, he replies “Long enough”. That could mean that he’s ready to proceed tonight. Even though he was active in Göteborg as recently as last night. Okay, that’s not much, but it gives us enough to go on. To summarise: we can probably find out from Lena Lundberg where Andersson has been staying in Stockholm; the next victim is most likely Alf Ruben Winge; and the murder is probably planned for tonight. I’ll call Holm. You call Söderstedt about Winge. Use my mobile.’