by Arne Dahl
‘Who are you talking to?’ Anja shouted from inside the house. She had managed to nurture a rather decent-sized purple ruffles basil plant in the garden and seemed to be quite frisky in honour of the occasion. Now wasn’t the right moment to be unfaithful with a computer.
‘The computer,’ Arto shouted back.
‘Right,’ Anja shouted. ‘Come and see the little ones before they go to sleep.’
‘Where’s Mikaela?’ Arto shouted.
‘Where do you think?’ Anja shouted.
A lot of shouting went on in the Söderstedt family.
Arto immediately forgot her request to say goodnight to the little ones and went back to the computer. Technically speaking, it was the youngest member of the family. Though it was true, he never said goodnight to it.
Instead, without warning, it gave him the name of the old banker suspected of being the absolute ruler of the Ghiottone. His name was Marco di Spinelli.
There were plenty of pictures of this Marco di Spinelli. Di Spinelli was an old, thin, tough-looking man, not at all what you would expect of a Mafia boss. But then, he was also a northern Italian. Active in the separatist movement. Lega Nord and things like that.
There was even a picture of Marco di Spinelli and Nikos Voultsos together. They were certainly an ill-matched pair. The old, aristocratic silver fox dressed in a black polo neck and the coarse Greek in his pale pink suit, unbuttoned shirt, thick chest hair and fat gold chain around his neck. They were greeting one another outside a luxurious-looking restaurant in central Milan. Marco di Spinelli had his hand on Nikos Voultsos’s shoulder, and Voultsos’s smile seemed particularly subservient.
Paul Hjelm had called to tell him about the Erinyes. He had also told him that Voultsos had left a suitcase full of his belongings at the hotel, along with a Visa card number. There had been nothing but clothes in the suitcase; if there had been drugs of any kind in the room, they had long since disappeared into the pockets of unknown employees of the Grand Hôtel. The card number, on the other hand, was interesting. The Swedish arm of Visa had been in touch with the name of the account holder. It was a private limited company called S.A. Contra. Arto Söderstedt phoned Italo Marconi right away to tell him the news.
Marconi said: ‘Sounds about right. S.A. Contra is a money-laundering business at the edge of the Ghiottone organisation. Their accounts are often used for payments here and there. Not that we’ve been able to link any of it to the Ghiottone or di Spinelli, of course.’
Söderstedt thanked him and hung up.
On the whole, he felt like he was starting to get a pretty good understanding of the structure of the organisation. Everything suggested that di Spinelli was the spider in the middle of the web, that all roads led to him.
As though to Rome.
But no matter how much of an authorised Europol officer he now was, Arto Söderstedt was powerless to do the slightest thing about either the Ghiottone organisation or Marco di Spinelli. That much was clear. Milan had countless competent, native policemen and women who had devoted years of their lives to getting at the syndicate. That wasn’t his job; it would be taking on more than he could chew. No, his job was to help them get to whoever had killed Nikos Voultsos, Hamid al-Jabiri and Leonard Sheinkman. Nothing more.
Though going via the Ghiottone was clearly one way of doing it.
The question was whether it was doable. He thought about how best to carry out his job. He didn’t need to think for long. As far as he was concerned, it was utterly obvious.
If anyone knew who had put his henchman to death, it would be the old banker himself.
Seven people, of whom six were serious criminals – all pimps, going by Kerstin’s latest email – had been murdered by the same method across Europe. According to Marconi, there was nothing to suggest that any of these seven were linked to Ghiottone, but it still had to be in Marco di Spinelli’s interests that whoever had killed his hand-picked Greek murderer-cum-pimp disappeared.
Di Spinelli was probably a man who took things into his own hands. He was probably already hunting for the Erinyes with a blowtorch. And it would probably be verging on impossible for a Swedish policeman to be given an opportunity to talk to him. However much authorisation his Europol status gave him.
Arto Söderstedt decided to ask Marconi anyway.
‘Well, it might be a bit of a surprise,’ Marconi unexpectedly said. ‘Blunt, chalk-white Swedish police officer on a personal visit. It could catch his attention. He likes playing games with the police.’
‘Have you talked to him? Personally, I mean?’
‘Many times. I’m practically a regular at his house. He’s not at all shy in that Sicilian no-one-knows-who-the-godfather-is kind of way. On the contrary, for such an old man, he’s really quite hungry for publicity. He’s a politician. Or rather, he’s a kind of politician …’
‘Marco di Spinelli must be what …? Ninety-two?’
‘And swims two hundred metres a day and takes part in sailing races and sometimes drives rallies. They say he likes the Värmland forests, whatever they are. Swedish?’
‘Swedish. I might be able to fake an interest in rallying. I am Finnish, after all. A bit, anyway.’
‘I’ll pass on your request,’ said Commissioner Marconi, and Söderstedt could almost feel – through the telephone itself – that big moustache start spinning.
Arto Söderstedt allowed his gaze to wander over the shade-bathed garden. The trees and bushes had been deliberately planted so that they formed a shadowy canopy. It was a Mediterranean method he was familiar with. As the days passed, the May sunshine seemed to be increasingly convinced that it was a bright summer sun rather than a lousy little spring one. Its self-confidence was growing relentlessly – and, with it, the need to take siestas. Arto had lost count of the number of times he had arrived at this or that shop only to find its shutters closed. What surprised him most was that he never learned from his mistake; like a psychiatric patient on the run, he made the daily journey into Greve only to find the entire town was deserted. Between one and four, Greve shut down – and between one and four, the chalk-white Finn would arrive in his big family car, try a locked door, and produce a series of undefinable noises. You could have set your watch by him.
He needed a siesta, that much was clear.
But now he was sitting in the shade on the terrace, sipping a very small glass of Vin Santo and looking at his watch. Two o’clock. Mid-siesta. He had been pleased that Marconi had answered immediately, but now, with hindsight, it struck him that he must have phoned at the worst possible time. Not that it was a problem – Marconi had clearly skipped his afternoon’s rest, just like he had.
He refused to take a siesta.
One way or another, he would probably regret it. But right now, he was distracted. His thoughts were practically running away from him. This from the man who was normally so good at damming the flow and digging channels to allow his thoughts to pour in the right direction. Now, though, they were more like the Danube delta.
If he was given access to Marco di Spinelli, he would need to be prepared. Well read, like a real nerd. But he would also need to repress all that knowledge as best he could from his working mind, so that it didn’t hinder the thought process and his ability to react. Arto Söderstedt sometimes managed to trick suspects into giving themselves away. He often did it by playing dumb – he had that kind of appearance. It was hard to deny that he could look quite vacant.
‘Is Daddy dead?’
He chuckled slightly and gently dipped the tip of his tongue into the tiny little glass.
How should he go about grabbing di Spinelli’s attention? How could he get him to loosen his tongue? He had ten or so pictures of the man open on his computer screen and was trying to get a purely visual understanding of him. So far, di Spinelli was still nothing more than a picture. Or rather, a collection of pictures.
He tried to imagine the entire situation, how he would be met, how di Spinelli would act, what the
y might talk about and – above all – how he would even begin to go about asking the important questions as though they didn’t mean a thing. That was the great, decisive trick.
The thing he had learned from Uncle Pertti.
Arto Söderstedt was an unusually well-educated policeman, there was no denying that, with a past that he would much rather avoid talking about. A career lawyer in Finland by the age of twenty-five, keeping the scum of the earth away from lawful society. Specialising in the richest, most cunning and unconscionable of criminals. And then he had simply turned his back on that mad, dishonest life, fled the country and ended up in Sweden where, after a couple of years of hard work, he became a policeman; he proved much too obstinate for his superiors in Stockholm and was sent to Västerås, where he lived a peaceful, comfortable and utterly intolerable suburban life. Until a detective superintendent with owl-like glasses perched on his enormous nose came stomping into the police station and changed the direction of Söderstedt’s life once more.
In the A-Unit, he had become the joker in the pack. The card a seasoned player would throw down to win the entire pot.
Or something like that.
But despite his varied life, despite the abundance of educational opportunities and pathways which had been available to him, it was Uncle Pertti who had taught him the great, decisive trick.
Pertti Lindrot – hero from the Finnish Winter War, victor at Suomussalmi, the man who had posthumously sent the Söderstedt family on a trip to Tuscany they would never forget – wasn’t a positive figure from the past. He wasn’t one of those relatives who leave fond memories behind in the minds of the children, thus prolonging their lives by a couple of decades.
He was a downtrodden, downright nasty so-and-so. Nothing more than a stinking great toothless, sneering mouth.
Memories …
But there was one thing he had taught little Arto. He had pulled him onto his lap one day and tried to talk some sense into him. Little Arto had done nothing less than try to get away as quickly as he could, of course. Even now, he could clearly remember the stench coming from Pertti’s toothless mouth. But in the middle of it all, amid all his general slurring, the key questions came through. They sounded exactly the same as the slurring but had been accompanied by a look that wasn’t usual for Uncle Pertti. That was when little Arto saw the real hero from the Winter War, the guerrilla fighter who had spent years hidden away in the frozen landscape. He had seen pictures of Uncle Pertti from that time and they really were something else. One image in particular had stuck in his mind. The pride beaming from Pertti Lindrot’s fair-skinned face, standing in the middle of a snowdrift with his hand on the butt of a sabre was not only impressive, it was familiar.
Oddly familiar.
As familiar as a mirror image. It was as though Arto Söderstedt himself was the one standing in the snowdrift, his hand on the sabre, trying not to laugh. The likeness was uncanny.
And so he had adopted the slurring tactic. If not the stinking mouth.
OK, so his thoughts were drifting aimlessly. He tried to halt the rivulets and direct them back into the main stream.
It didn’t quite work.
The pictures of the seemingly sophisticated and iron-fisted Marco di Spinelli weren’t coming together to form one harmonious portrait. It remained superficial. It remained a series of inconsequential computerised projections. It remained elusive.
He would have to come back to it later, once he had renewed his strength.
Arto Söderstedt emptied the very little glass of Vin Santo in one gulp, switched off the computer and stood up.
He was going for a siesta.
22
KERSTIN HOLM WAS busy. Normally, she enjoyed being busy – she liked her job. Sometimes, when she found herself alone in the police station at nine in the evening, she would tell herself to get a life, but then it always struck her that she already had one and that her job was an important part of it. Her life consisted of working, singing and a little bit of jogging.
Until one day it was no longer quite enough.
Suddenly, she found it bloody hard work being busy.
Her life was about to quietly undergo a metamorphosis. Another one. And no one had the slightest suspicion.
She was no longer in the habit of mixing her work and her private life. Her escapades with Paul Hjelm a few years earlier had been the final straw. Until then, her relationships had all been with other policemen. She was originally from Gothenburg and had been married to a colleague whose relationship to sex was utterly uncomplicated: whenever he wanted it, she wanted it. That was the starting point. It had resulted in several utterly unexpected rapes taking place in their marital bed. For a long time, she had thought that was just how things were meant to be. That was the extent to which her sexuality had been affected. By a male relative. With a fondness for special occasions and wardrobes.
That relative had long since died and her ex-husband had recently been suspended for alcoholism. Kicking someone while they were down wasn’t really her thing.
Still, she thought she knew what a genuine, wild thirst for revenge was like. And that was precisely what she found herself faced with as she received reports and material from Budapest, Maribor, Antwerp, Venice and Manchester. The last had arrived that very day; so far, Chief Inspector Roelants in Antwerp had been right – it wasn’t over yet.
A well-known pimp had, as far back as March last year, been put to death in the exact same way as Leonard Sheinkman in a park not far from Old Trafford. The case was stretching out further and further through time. The Erinyes had been busy for more than a year.
The goddesses of revenge.
Not a single witness in any of the other cases. That made their skinhead Reine Sandberg and his gang unique. They were the only people to have seen the Erinyes and survived. His associates had confirmed every last detail of his story. There had been four of them and, in blind panic, they had fled across Skogskyrkogården. When they reached the metro station, there were only three of them left. Andreas Rasmusson, who was now slowly starting to recover in the psych ward, had been wandering around among the graves for three hours. He had finally managed to find the train station and then continued his wandering in Stockholm’s Central Station, where the police had picked him up.
In a way, she wished she could feel sorry for him.
Kerstin felt like she understood. She felt like she really understood what this entire case was about: a pure, genuine, wild thirst for revenge.
The thin, dark figures dressed all in black were, without a doubt, women. What kind of women? Who had cause to murder pimps? Prostitutes, of course. It seemed likely that their so-called ninja feminist belonged to a gang of highly trained, detoxed prostitutes. According to Adib Tamir, she had been wearing: ‘red leather jacket, tight black trousers, black trainers’. Had she been wearing the other get-up beneath the red jacket? Had she been dressed for battle when she was attacked? Was that why the whole thing had been so unnecessarily violent?
On the whole, though, it wasn’t unnecessarily violent. They hadn’t been taking down any old drug-addled, small-time pimps; they had been exclusively murdering pimps who also happened to be violent criminals. All had been murderers. And all had a rape or two under their belts.
In other words, they were scum.
But imagine if what happened in Odenplan metro station was a result of controlled acts of violence. Imagine if it was a first sign that violence can never take place without leaving a trace, without sooner or later exploding and running amok. Practically all the Vietnam veterans were serious addicts, the men who dropped the atomic bombs on Japan had virtually lost their minds, and they were only just starting to see the far-reaching consequences of the violence in Yugoslavia. Violent men – and presumably women too, for that matter – were always consumed by their violent acts in the end. Executioners had always gone mad, throughout history. Their job ate them up from the inside.
But Hamid al-Jabiri wasn’t a murde
rous pimp. He was far from an angel, but had he deserved such a terrible end? Was he really one of those doomed to death? No, that was where the whole thing had gone off the rails. After a year. Perhaps that had been a reasonable amount of time to endure it all, before it became impossible.
Before the violence had gained a life of its own. It was no longer under control; it had started to do the controlling.
That was one interpretation, anyway.
The Erinyes had been at it for a year now. Their acts of violence were strictly controlled and didn’t affect innocent bystanders – providing, of course, you excluded Leonard Sheinkman. They quite simply targeted men they considered worthy of death. And a terrible death was exactly what they gave them. But perhaps that wasn’t all they did. What would be interesting was if their strength kept increasing. Were they recruiting at the same time as they were exacting revenge? Had eight seemingly worn-out women from the Norrboda Motell been initiated into some kind of army? Would they too start wearing tight black clothing and murdering pimps across Europe once they had finished their training? Was this a way of countering the aggressive growth of the prostitution industry?
Was it a sign that the women of Eastern Europe were fighting back?
If that was the case, Kerstin Holm hoped they wouldn’t be caught.
Yes, she was a police officer. Yes, it was her job to prevent crime and to bring criminals to justice. And yes, she hoped that they wouldn’t be caught.
That didn’t mean she wouldn’t be doing her job. She just didn’t feel especially happy about doing it.
And not just because her life was undergoing a metamorphosis.
After divorcing her policeman husband in Gothenburg, Kerstin Holm had ended up in Stockholm. The A-Unit had been formed. During a brief, intense relationship with Paul Hjelm, she had lowered her defences and told him everything. It was the first time she had ever done so, and it meant that her relationship with him was special, even once it was over. She still loved him, just not in that way. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with him. But he was, with his peculiar combination of awkwardness and precision, warmness and coolness, frenzy and passivity, intellect and feeling, a man who seemed particularly full of life. It was that simple. Everything was constantly in motion inside him. He would never stagnate.