by Mike Ward
Inspector Håkan Arvidsson turned off Riddargatan left onto Nybrogatan. He parked his car just past the Asian Restaurant and walked up to the police cordon showing his pass to the police officer on duty to gain entry. Inspector Linn Brexner was already at the scene, he could see her black shoulder length hair as she talked to one of the officers at the scene. Arvidsson checked the time on his phone, it was 9:15pm. The car containing the victim was just ahead with all four doors open. A police pathologist was leaning into the car examining the victim.
Everyone in front of him was intent on their work and nobody had noticed him. Arvidsson stood in the background surveying the scene. He didn’t know much as yet. A man had been found dead in his car. There was a single bullet hole in the window but when the first police officers had arrived at the scene they had discovered what seemed like a professional hit. Arvidsson liked to speculate before he investigated. Sometimes it didn’t work, sometimes it served him well.
A rental car stood at the side of the street. That was not speculation, the first officers at the scene had run the registration. The man inside was dead, Arvidsson knew that. The word on the radio was that he had been shot multiple times. Linn Brexner looked up and registered his presence but he held a hand up and indicated he didn’t want to be disturbed. She nodded and went back to what she was doing. They worked well the two of them. Although Brexner was technically his assistant, in reality they worked more as equals and he let her make a lot of decisions on the team. She had strengths in different areas than he did and rather than feeling threatened by that as a lesser man might have done, Arvidsson welcomed her abilities on the team. He knew there would be a time when she would lead her own team and he was already preparing the ground for that by making favorable comments about her to his superiors.
There was a fair amount of blood both in and around the car. Whatever had happened to the man in the car it had certainly been traumatic. In the background Arvidsson could hear a woman bystander talking loudly, her voice so loud that it impinged on his thoughts. He tried to shut her out and return to the scene. She was talking about a little swimsuit that she had bought the previous summer. It was definitely not the weather to be talking about swimsuits. One thing was certain, the man in the car would not have the chance to see the woman behind him in her new swimsuit.
Arvidsson saw fluid under the car but it wasn’t gasoline. He recognized the color of antifreeze in the fluid under the car. If that was the case then the vehicle’s radiator had been ruptured. Since somebody shooting at a car from the front was unlikely to fire as low as the radiator, Arvidsson wondered if a bullet had gone through the victim and then gone through the radiator. Arvidsson’s breath steamed in the cold air. He wondered how long it had taken the man in the car to die and if he had felt the cold while it happened. As Arvidsson looked at the car a small amount of blood dripped off the driver’s door onto the road. At these temperatures Arvidsson knew that the blood would freeze quickly. He breathed in thoughtfully, holding the cold air in his lungs and letting it out slowly. There was no inspiration this time so he walked towards the vehicle.
Frank Kjellström, the pathologist turned towards him. He nodded at Arvidsson and began speaking. “He was shot in the head multiple times, death was quick but not instantaneous. He had time to suffer.”
Arvidsson had a good imagination, that one would come back to him when he lay down in bed tonight. Judging by the scene in front of him it would be a while before he made it to his bed. “What angle was he shot from?” he said.
“Somebody leaned in behind him and shot him in the back of the head. He had time to react because he pulled his own gun and fired it once. You can see the bullet hole in the roof of the car.”
Arvidsson immediately lost some sympathy for the victim. If he had his own gun then he certainly wasn’t an innocent victim. What Linn Brexner said removed all thoughts that the victim might have had any innocence about him.
“The victim had a silencer on his gun.”
“He had a silencer?” Arvidsson said.
“Yes and it wasn’t in his pocket, it was screwed onto the gun which has to mean he was waiting for someone.”
That was poetic justice Arvidsson thought. Here you are in your quiet little assassin’s world happily waiting for your victim and then someone leans into your car and shoots you in the back of the head. It would have been interesting if the assassin’s last thought before he died was to wonder where the police were when you needed them. Interesting he thought, he was already thinking of the man in the car as an assassin. He most certainly was, there was no doubt about that. The question was who shot him.
Arvidsson looked into the car. The back of the assassin’s head was a real mess and since he had been shot multiple times in the back of the head then that had to mean his face was even worse. Not for the first time Arvidsson realized that although he had no problems being a policeman he could never have been a pathologist. The man’s face rested against the steering wheel. Arvidsson realized that one of the spokes of the steering wheel was broken and hanging loose. That had to be from one of the bullets that had passed through the man’s head. If it did that after it had passed through his head then God knows what that must have been like for the victim. Arvidsson kept his face impassive but that was another one that would come back to haunt him in the night.
Linn Brexner looked at her boss. She knew him well and she had a good idea about the thought that had just passed through his mind. She was more impassive than her boss. In another life Arvidsson might have been a poet but in this century a man needed to keep a roof over his head and poetry as a profession did not pay as well as it might have done a few centuries ago. The man in front of them had been shot five times in the head and once in the back of the neck. It occurred to Linn Brexner that this might well have been a deliberate attempt to cut through the spinal column and paralyze the man, if that had happened then he would have died from asphyxiation if he didn’t die from his injuries first.
Frank Kjellström looked at Arvidsson and Brexner. “You can move him whenever you want. I have all I need here, the rest I’ll do in the lab.
Brexner looked over at Police Photographer Veronica Nellfors. “Did you get everything Veronica,” she said.
“Yes I did.”
Fingerprint expert Anna Strandgård nodded at Brexner to indicate that she had what she needed. Arvidsson and Brexner spent another hour looking around the body and talking about different scenarios. They were both of the opinion that the attacker had opened the door behind the driver, leaned in and shot him. The victim’s gun lay on the floor of the car where he had dropped it after firing one shot. Frank Kjellström had told them that even without a thorough examination he could tell that the victim’s brain would have been so badly damaged that he would have been unlikely to have been able to hold the gun after the first few shots.
They stepped back and watched as the body was removed from the car. Frank Kjellström would go with it and make sure it was put away properly or he might even work through the night on it. He had been known to do that in the past. Now that the body was gone Linn Brexner put some gloves on and opened the drawer in front of the passenger seat. There was blood on the glove she had used to open the drawer. Arvidsson already had his gloves on. There was a European A4 sized envelope in the drawer, she pulled it out and handed it to Arvidsson. There was more in there. He held onto the envelope while she handed him a menu. The menu was for the Hotel Urban in the Plaza de las Cortes and Huertas in Madrid. Arvidsson knew enough Spanish to read a menu, main courses were thirty Euros to sixty five Euros and the gourmet menu was two hundred and twenty Euros. He wondered if the man who had just been taken away had killed anyone after eating at that restaurant. If Arvidsson had eaten a meal that cost that much he would have wanted to savor it rather than walk outside and blow somebody away but the dead man was probably different from him. Arvidsson had seen the prices on the menu and he knew that on his Inspector’s salary even if h
e were on vacation then he would think twice about eating at a place where the food cost so much. He wondered how much the dead man had made in a year. He might even have made more for just one hit than Arvidsson made in two years. The next thing Linn Brexner handed him was a map provided by the rental company. Arvidsson looked at the map and an address on the map was ringed, Nybrogatan 27. They were on Nybrogatan. Arvidsson looked up the street. There at Nybrogatan 27 was the gleaming façade of the Zetterstrand Investment Bank. Zetterstrand was the biggest investment bank in Scandinavia and one of the biggest in Europe, possibly even in the top ten.
He pointed at the bank. “Our victim’s target very likely works in there,” he said.
“So if he hadn’t been shot dead tonight then we might well have been here investigating the murder of someone else,” Linn Brexner said.
“Correct,” Arvidsson said. “I’d love to open this envelope right now but let’s get it back to a safe location and have a fingerprint expert open it. We have two murders to investigate here, the one that did happen and the one that didn’t happen. The other question we have is when whoever sent this man finds out what happened to him will there be another man sitting in a car this time next week looking to kill the same person the victim was after. We have to find the man who did this.”
“Who said it has to be a man?” Brexner said.
“It couldn’t be a woman,” Arvidsson said. The words were out before he realized how stupid they sounded.
“You’re right Håkan,” Linn Brexner said. “A woman wouldn’t have had the strength to lift the gun used to kill this man.”
Arvidsson opened his mouth to reply and then thought better of it. Actually he had been going to say that a woman couldn’t have been evil enough to kill the victim.
Håkan Arvidsson moved his coffee off his desk. Inspector Linn Brexner sat with him. Anna Strandgård had just brought the envelope in that they had removed from the victim’s car. Her boss always thought ahead, it would not do to have a cup of coffee knocked over on this envelope. The chance of that happening was extremely unlikely but Arvidsson was not a man to take chances. It was one o’clock in the morning but both Arvidsson and Brexner wanted to know what was in the envelope. Anna Strandgård would personally have been quite happy to be in her bed at that moment waiting for the morning when she would go in and take fingerprints off the envelope but she had owed Håkan Arvidsson a favor for some time and this was the night he had decided to collect.
Anna laid the envelope on the desk and also the photo that had been inside. The photo was not technically a photo, it had been printed on a printer. Linn Brexner recognized the man in the photo immediately, Arvidsson did not. Having said that the man’s name was printed clearly underneath the photograph, Martin Ingvarsson, Chief Executive Officer of the Zetterstrand Investment Bank.
Arvidsson looked at Brexner. “Put a car outside his house all night whether he wants it or not.”
“Will do.”
As Brexner got on the phone, Arvidsson leaned back in his chair. He was aware of Anna Strandgård leaving the room, her work was done for the night, his was only just beginning. By the time Brexner came off the phone Arvidsson had the website up for the Zetterstrand Investment Bank. He went to the section for the bank’s executive officers and selected Martin Ingvarsson. This was an evening for shocks and at that point he got another one.
Brexner was off the phone and standing behind him. “My God,” she said. “Whoever set up this hit lifted the photo given to the hit man from the bank’s own website. That’s a little audacious to say the least.”
“Let’s see what else is on the web about Herr Ingvarsson,” Arvidsson said. He copied Ingvarsson’s name from the list of executives, opened a new web page and pasted the name into Google. The first result was an article in Aftonbladet about Ingvarsson. Interestingly the picture in the paper was also the same one used on the bank’s website. Ingvarsson was in his fifties with gray hair that was cut very short and receding slightly. He was broad shouldered and had the face of a man who gets what he wants. Arvidsson scanned the article and Linn Brexner leaned over his shoulder.
“Interesting, I see he married the daughter of Herr Zetterstrand.”
Stefan Zetterstrand was listed as Chairman of the bank. Although he was retired he was listed as still playing a semi-active role at the bank. Martin Ingvarsson had married his daughter Camilla when they were both in their twenties three years after he had joined the bank. Marrying the boss’ daughter had been good for his career and Ingvarsson had risen rapidly in the bank. However, it was obvious he had talent because he had been running the bank on his own for a number of years now and it had gone from strength to strength under his leadership. Ingvarsson had built Zetterstrand up to be the sixth largest investment bank in Europe. Something in the article caught Arvidsson’s eye. It said that Ingvarsson was a fitness fanatic who liked to walk. He often ate at a restaurant near Östermalmstorg Tunnelbana and then caught the Tunnelbana home. Arvidsson looked at Brexner and saw that she was thinking the same thing.
“If you walked from the Zetterstrand Bank to Östermalmstorg Tunnelbana then you would have passed the spot where the assassin had been waiting. If he hadn’t been shot then it might well be Martin Ingvarsson lying in the morgue right now,” Brexner said.
“All the information needed to set up a hit on Ingvarsson is right there on the web,” Arvidsson said. “You could have set this whole thing up from a hut in the Siberian tundra if you had wanted. The question is who would have wanted him dead?”
“At the moment we have absolutely no idea about that,” Brexner said stating the obvious.
Arvidsson was quiet, sometimes comments like that helped Linn Brexner begin the process of analysis of a case. “I think we should start with who killed the assassin and who paid him or her.” After Brexner’s comments earlier he was careful to leave the possibility open for a person of either sex to have been the killer. Although he personally doubted that the assassin was killed by a woman he could feel his mind opening itself to the possibility and beginning to play with the idea.
“The obvious possibility is that Martin Ingvarsson found out he was about to be assassinated and decided to strike first,” Brexner said.
“It’s possible but not a good idea unless he is about to leave the country. The assassin was just a tool. If someone had enough money to hire one assassin then they very probably have enough to hire two. If I were Ingvarsson I wouldn’t be thinking of walking to Östermalmstorg Tunnelbana from the office anytime soon.”
At that moment the phone rang. Arvidsson picked it up listened and then thanked the person on the other end. “There is a police car outside Martin Ingvarsson’s house. I think we are done for the night. We’ll get together first thing tomorrow.”