by Arne Dahl
She had tried reading up on the subject. It was impossible to avoid it. On 1 July, the national immigration authority would change its name to Migrationsverket. The idea was to enable a general oversight of migration and the movement of people, as well as the country’s immigration, integration and return policy. The latter was something new. Provisional refugee was a concept that had only recently emerged, above all in connection to the Yugoslav wars. Simply put, the Swedish government let people stay for a while, until it was safe for them to return home, and when they did eventually go back, it gave them a small contribution for not becoming the burden on the state they would otherwise have become if they’d stayed. In doing so, they gave the whole business an aura of voluntariness. An idea which was a pure fiction.
The essence of this new migration concept was – if Sara had understood correctly – that returning was viewed as an equally crucial moment as integration. You could infer a great deal about contemporary society’s attitudes from that, she thought.
The old Volvo had reached Slagsta, which lay squashed up like an artificial idyll against the shore of Lake Mälaren before you came to places like Fittja, Alby, Norsborg and Hallunda – names synonymous with a high immigrant population. In any case, it was home to the ugly Norrboda Motell, a long, five-storey building of classic seventies architecture. Both detectives stood speechless for a moment, each of them longing for a glimpse into the mind of the architect. That was, in all likelihood, precisely what they got the moment they set foot in its uniform corridors, clad in urine-coloured carpets and matching, age-faded institutional material on the walls and ceilings. So this was the first image that Swedes-to-be were given of their future homeland.
It was probably a deliberate part of the national return policy.
Just past the deserted reception, they found the manager’s office; it was nothing more than a motel room among others. Jörgen Nilsson met them with a nervous heartiness. Sara thought she recognised the type immediately. An idealist from ’68, someone who had wanted to fundamentally change society but instead found himself transformed into something resembling a prison guard-cum-bureaucrat. The grimace of bitterness writ plain on his face.
Perhaps that was unfair. He was probably doing his best.
Jörgen Nilsson gestured for them to sit down in his utterly anonymous office. He perched on the edge of the desk and began speaking with the energy of a self-righteous man.
‘Four rooms have been emptied. There were two women in each. Eight missing asylum seekers.’
‘What does “missing” mean?’ Sara Svenhagen asked innocently.
‘That they should’ve reported to me this morning,’ Jörgen Nilsson replied, looking at her with a surprised expression, ‘but didn’t. I went to their rooms – they’re next to one another – and realised they were gone.’
Kerstin Holm felt obliged to explain.
‘We’re from CID,’ she said. ‘We don’t normally get involved in immigration cases.’
‘CID?’ Jörgen Nilsson blurted out, his face turning noticeably pale. ‘It’s just a few … women who’ve gone underground. It happens every day somewhere in Sweden.’
‘But it’s happened a few too many times here, hasn’t it?’
‘I’ve been completely cleared of all those allegations. They were bitter, rejected refugees, those people who filed reports against me. Completely baseless. You know that full well.’
Sara Svenhagen shifted in her seat and said: ‘What were you planning on saying just then, instead of “women”?’
Jörgen Nilsson stared furiously at her.
‘What? For God’s sake, haven’t you got anything better to do?’
‘You were planning on saying something other than “women”. You paused like you were swallowing some kind of ill-thought-out word. What was it?’
From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of an appreciative look from Kerstin. It gave her encouragement.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Nilsson said, getting up from the edge of the desk and pacing around the tiny room. It seemed slightly laboured.
Kerstin Holm pushed another portion of snus tobacco under her lip. She took a piece of paper from her pocket and unfolded it with malicious slowness. Reading it, she eventually said:
‘You moved here in September last year. In October, a Russo-Lithuanian cigarette smuggling group was uncovered. In December, it was the illegal movement of Coca-Cola from Turkey. In February, a couple of Gambians were stopped with large amounts of brown heroin. And in March, we had reports of prostitution. It was the word “whores” you were trying to stop yourself from saying, wasn’t it?’
Jörgen Nilsson continued his pacing. Despite his highly strung state, he seemed to be busy weighing up the pros and cons of talking. He came to a decision, paused, and returned to the edge of the desk.
‘Yes,’ he said, his eyes fixed on Kerstin Holm. ‘You’ve got to understand how hard it is. These people seeking asylum are locked up for months. Years, sometimes. Obviously they’ve got to have sex lives of some kind during that time. The whole thing’s a powder keg from the very start, and trying to control their sex lives would be like putting a match to it. I admit, the number of partners does get a bit much sometimes, if you see what I mean, but reporting them for it would be the same as sending them straight back home. I try to be tolerant. And yes: sometimes I might’ve looked away a bit too often. Let’s call it my form of civil disobedience. I won’t be a concentration camp guard, for God’s sake.’
‘You’re not the one we’re after,’ Holm said, feeling sudden sympathy for the exasperated man in front of her. ‘But we’re worried something might’ve happened to these women. Why else would they go underground if – with your blessing – they’ve been able to go about their business relatively undisturbed here? They didn’t have any rent to pay, after all.’
‘Though it’s entirely possible they were paying in one way or another,’ Sara Svenhagen said, looking at Holm, who pulled a disapproving face. It was plain it was the thought she disapproved of, not what Sara had said.
Jörgen Nilsson’s diatribe was preceded by a brief shifting gaze. Then it came:
‘Am I accused of anything here? Just come out and tell me exactly what it is you want. Are you seriously accusing me of sexually exploiting asylum seekers? Just spit it out! Do you think I’ve chopped eight women up into pieces and eaten them or something like that?’
Sara felt like she might – though only might – have gone a step too far. She had taken on the role of ‘bad cop’ voluntarily, without thinking it through. It had just happened.
‘Like we’ve said, you aren’t the one we’re after,’ she said courteously. ‘But it’s important you aren’t sloppy when you think it through – because that’s what you’ve got to do now. Has anything unusual happened, anything at all, the past few days? What about yesterday evening, last night, this morning? Could any of the neighbours have seen anything? Who knows about the prostitution? Do you know any of the johns? Is there a pimp?’
Kerstin waited until Sara was finished. Then she stood up, pushed a pad of paper and a pen over to Jörgen Nilsson and said: ‘Keys to the rooms, please. We’ll go and have a look round while you get your answers to those questions together. And provide us with the most comprehensive information on the missing women you can.’
The keys were placed in her hand, and as they left the manager’s office, they could clearly hear the scratching of pen on paper; frenetic, as though done by a man with a knife to his throat.
Both detectives walked down the corridor with stony faces – right until they turned the corner and reached the stairs. Then they started giggling like schoolgirls. The moment passed. As they climbed the stairs, Kerstin Holm said gruffly: ‘It’s important you aren’t sloppy when you think it through.’
‘It just came to me,’ Sara said with a hint of smugness, running her hand through her cropped blonde hair. ‘What reason could he have for keeping quiet about pr
ostitution in the refugee centre?’
‘Just when I’d started to like him. I actually fell for his whole civil disobedience thing. Me, an old dear, I’m more naive than you. That feels weird.’
‘Don’t say that. All the crap I saw when I was working with the paedophile unit … It’s nothing to be jealous of. And you’re not an old dear.’
‘Mmm,’ Kerstin Holm replied, gravely serious.
They came to the rooms, four doors next to one another in the middle of a seemingly endless corridor two floors up. Rooms 224, 225, 226 and 227. After fumbling with the keys, they made their way into number 224. Unmade beds against two of the walls; an empty desk; a couple of empty wardrobes, doors flung wide; ugly strip lighting on the ceiling and the same piss-coloured wall-to-wall carpet and institutional fabric as everywhere else. It was clear that the atmosphere wasn’t part of what the brothel had to offer. People came here for raw sex, nothing more, nothing less. Even the reading lamps were bare strip lights.
They stood for a moment, taking in the scene.
‘What’s your intuition telling you?’ Kerstin asked, a question aimed as much at herself as Sara. ‘Is it worth calling the technicians in? Do you think they’ve just done a runner? Or has something happened to them? Sara?’
‘Fingerprints, semen …’ Sara thought aloud. ‘Yeah, well … should we take a look at the other rooms first?’
The other rooms were remarkably similar. In fact, there was barely anything to distinguish them. It was like that classic nightmare: no matter which door you opened, the very same room was waiting on the other side.
Both women knew that it would take multiple, time-consuming interviews before they would even start to form an idea about what had happened here. And by then, it would be too late for the technicians. They would have to go on their intuition. Breathe the rooms in. Try to find some small clue as to what had happened.
They thought about the decree from above – from the CID department head, Waldemar Mörner – which obliged staff to minimise their use of the National Forensic Laboratory, since its services were, in his view, ‘criminally overpriced’.
They stood for a moment, trying to get a sense of the atmosphere. Then they nodded, both at the same time.
‘Yup,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Something’s not right.’
‘No,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘Something’s not right.’
And so they called in the technicians. Not that it was easy; they were busy elsewhere.
‘Skansen?’ Kerstin Holm exclaimed into her mobile. ‘What the hell are they doing there? Wolverine shit?? OK, OK, someone’s been reading their Ellroy …’
She hung up on her boss, Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin, and shook her head. Doing so still hurt slightly. Just over a year ago, she had been shot, leaving her left temple paper-thin. Her hair was still refusing to grow back over it. She poked at the little bald spot which her dishevelled black hair was managing, with some trouble, to cover.
‘Don’t ask,’ was all she said as they relocked the doors and headed back downstairs.
When they reached the manager’s office, Jörgen Nilsson had already filled ten or so sheets of A4. They looked at one another and groaned.
It would be a long afternoon.
6
DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT JAN-OLOV Hultin was sitting in a traffic jam, trying to work out how much of his life he had spent sitting in traffic jams. He gave up once the numbers started reaching astronomical heights. From what he could tell, he had spent more than a year in traffic jams. The thought was unbearable. He was sixty-three years old, and of those sixty-three years, more than one had been spent in traffic. That must be what people meant by progress.
He pulled out onto the E4 by Norrviken in Sollentuna, where he lived, on a highly sought-after plot of land on the shore of Lake Ravalen. Gravely criminal estate agents still stopped by every now and then, trying to buy the land for a song. He had chased the latest of them away with a needle-sharp rake. The estate agent had wet himself and screamed, tears in his throat: ‘Tool killer!’ Jan-Olov Hultin had regretted it for the rest of the day. It had been less than a year since he had actually killed a man. In a hotel room in Skövde. In addition to that, he had jammed his service weapon into the mouth of an unarmed man and had come damn close to shooting him too. Only Arto Söderstedt had stopped him, a debt he would forever struggle to repay. Granting him a few months’ leave without a word had been a matter of course – despite the fact that it went against all the usual rules and regulations.
It often happened – much too often – that Hultin found himself back in that hotel room in Skövde. Of course, it could just be called a dream – it probably was a dream. Only, it didn’t feel like one. He was really there. It was so strange. The whole sequence of events, every little detail, repeated itself, and the odd thing was that throughout it all, he knew exactly what was going to happen. But despite that, he still couldn’t do a thing about it. He was reliving the whole thing – fully aware of what would happen – night after night. Paul Hjelm shot a thug and was shot in the arm, Kerstin Holm was shot in the head. And Jan-Olov Hultin killed one man and jammed his pistol into the mouth of another.
Killing a man wasn’t so easy.
The events in Skövde were just one part of the previous summer’s strange, complicated, eye-catching series of crimes. The media had been able to summarise the A-Unit’s earlier cases with relative ease, talking about ‘The Power Killer’ and ‘The Kentucky Killer’, but this third case had proved trickier, and thankfully the press hadn’t managed to cling on to every single twist and turn. There had been a patchwork of unusual names instead – ‘The Kumla Explosion’, ‘The Sickla Slaughter’, ‘The Skövde Shooting’ and the ‘Kvarnen Killing’ – and not even the most eagle-eyed of readers had managed to link these diverse incidents to one another.
But there had been a link, and it hadn’t been pretty.
It had been relatively tough for them all to get back to work again afterwards. Hultin had officially returned as operating chief of the A-Unit, having been involuntarily retired before the case began. That was something for which he would never forgive Waldemar Mörner, the group’s official boss.
Usually, he hit the first traffic jam as soon as he turned off onto the E4 at Norrviken. Those were slow mornings. But this particular early May morning, however, it was plain sailing all the way to Ulriksdal. Now the rain was lashing down and he was sitting in a motionless traffic jam, feeling bitter.
Not least because he had wet himself.
It wasn’t really a problem, because he was wearing a pad specially designed for the purpose. He had chronic incontinence and there was nothing to be done but swallow the bitter pill. Give up and retire on health grounds or say to hell with it and ignore it. He had chosen the latter.
But the more he thought about it, the clearer the link became between his condition and those bouts of rage which, just over a year ago, had resulted in a couple of headbutted eyebrows and escalated to a climax in Skövde. Though for the past year he had – the tool-killer incident aside – actually managed to stick to his mantra of ‘live and let live’. Also in relation to the weeds in his garden, now thriving like never before.
Their last case might well have resulted in a number of his team giving up; it had been unbelievably demanding. Thankfully, though, they had all stayed put. Thankfully, they were all still alive.
It struck him that as time went on, he saw them more and more as his children. He knew it was wrong. He, more than anyone else, had always managed to draw a line between his work and his private life; he thought perhaps he had gone sentimental in his old age. They had been through so much together and they had formed a bond like no other group he had worked with before.
The Devil had found religion in his old age.
In a brief moment of reckless honesty, he decided that Paul Hjelm and Kerstin Holm, Jorge Chavez and Arto Söderstedt, Viggo Norlander and Gunnar Nyberg – even Sara Svenhagen, the compet
ent newcomer – were more like his children than his biological sons, both business-minded bachelors who visited him once a year at Christmas and then spent the time clock-watching and talking on their phones.
Jan-Olov Hultin could feel himself sinking into a muddled pool of mixed emotions. Then he decided enough was enough with the sentimental whining. He had arrived at the police station and no matter how good a detective he was, he would never be able to work out where the time had gone. Those gaps in time were one of life’s great mysteries.
A car was parked. A detective superintendent wandered through a station. A detective superintendent reached an office. A briefcase was put down by a desk. A watch was checked. A toilet visited. An incontinence pad was changed. Sleep was rubbed from a left eye. Corridors were walked down. Doors were opened. The Tactical Command Centre was empty. Stop.
The world took on a near-telegraphic style when everything went according to routine. But then suddenly it changed. Stop. Where was his team? Why was the sad little meeting room which – not without a slight sense of irony – went by the name ‘Tactical Command Centre’ completely empty?
Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin checked his watch again. It was thirty-three minutes past eight. Their morning run-through was meant to have started three minutes earlier. Even if the A-Unit wasn’t a marvel of temporal precision, at least one of them should have been there by now.
With resolute steps, Hultin headed for the desk where he usually sat waiting and watching like an old high-school teacher who was still refusing to retire. He picked up the phone and dialled the number for the talking clock. In its human – much too human – voice, it said: ‘eight, sixteen and ten seconds. Peep.’