by Arne Dahl
It was just that the two of them were surprisingly similar. She had fallen in love with her own mirror image. That had been the mistake. During the past few days, she had realised that that had been the mistake.
She needed something completely different.
After Paul Hjelm, she had dived straight into a strange, intense relationship with a sixty-year-old priest, a man who also happened to be dying of cancer. It had been an overwhelming experience and one which forced her to reassess the very basis of her life. That was what she had been doing for the past few years.
And then this metamorphosis. The thing she suddenly found herself in the middle of.
On her computer, she was busy checking whether the reports from Hungary, Slovenia, Germany, Belgium, Italy and England in any way suggested that prostitutes had disappeared in parallel with the murders. She had no problem with the reports from Germany, Italy and England, and with the help of a little dictionary she had compiled herself, using all the buzzwords she could think of, she was making some headway with the Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian and Dutch reports too. But quick work it was not. Each country had sent a summary of their reports in English, all more or less distorted, but if she was going to do this properly then she was going to have to delve into the chaos of the original languages used to write the reports.
She started thinking about the eleventh chapter of the Book of Genesis. The Tower of Babel. Why had God really decided to split that unified human language into so many? Why had He decided to make us incomprehensible to one another? Did religion really have any sensible explanation for that?
She went online to look at the Bible. The only thing she found was an old translation. It would have to do.
The whole story of the Tower of Babel was told in nine cryptic verses beginning with: ‘And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.’ What happened next? Mankind worked out how to make bricks, eventually building a city and a tower which was to be so tall it would stretch right up into heaven. That didn’t sound so bad. But their purpose was clearly to prevent themselves from being ‘scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’. They wanted to speak one single language and live in one single place. That was when God turned up, thinking something like: it seems as though nothing is impossible for these people. And so He decided to ‘go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech’. After that, He scattered them across the globe.
There was no real explanation for God’s actions, but from what she could tell, He was using the confusion of tongues to spread mankind across the earth and prevent them getting up to any mischief in one single place. Because everything would have been possible for them if they had been able to stay as one. Even building a tower up into heaven, God’s domain.
Kerstin Holm wondered whether mankind really would have been stronger had they been able to live together in one place, speaking one single language. Would anything have been possible for them if that had been the case? She thought it sounded stifling. The oft-slandered God of the Old Testament, the Jewish God, seemed rather to have saved mankind from near-fascist uniformity, and made possible a continuous exchange between people of different languages, experiences, climates and world views. He hadn’t been afraid that the Tower of Babel would encroach into His heavenly domain at all – he had been afraid that the Tower would have been the downfall of mankind as a result of inbreeding.
If there was a God then He had, by creating the different languages, saved us from suffocating beneath our own self-sufficiency.
This reasoning in mind, she jumped straight into the strange Hungarian language and felt the challenging power of the unfamiliar mounting.
Detective Superintendent Mészöly’s report was still waiting for her. The victim in Budapest had been a twenty-nine-year-old pimp strung up in his own home on 12 October 1999. She feverishly searched for missing prostitutes from the same point in time. Mészöly hadn’t written a single word about anything similar.
Six countries, Kerstin thought, of which four were EU member states. Hungary, Slovenia, Germany, Belgium, Italy and the United Kingdom – none seemed to have a particularly good oversight on the women involved in the sex industry. The fact that she and her Swedish counterparts did was more a coincidence; the fact that they had discovered the women’s disappearance was entirely dependent on their believing it was a case of asylum seekers going underground. That was when they reacted. That was when it was decided that the country was at risk of becoming impure. If eight prostitutes had simply disappeared from the streets of Stockholm, no one would have batted an eyelid. Eight fewer people to deal with at the social welfare office. Many would have breathed a sigh of relief. Little else would have happened.
The fact that no trace of missing prostitutes appeared in the foreign reports didn’t mean that there hadn’t been any. Time for another group message to the nations involved.
She went through the old messages; she couldn’t get enough of number eight: ‘Who in high heavens authorised this inquiry? Whose budget will this come out of? WM.’ The more she read it, the more incredible it seemed. It was a brilliant summary of Waldemar Mörner’s work.
Number two was also good. The scolding from the Parisian policeman, Chief Superintendent Mérimée: ‘You, Madame Holm, seem to be using Europol resources for Swedish petty crimes.’ Considering what was currently going on around Europe, it was almost worth saving that message just so she could shove it up the good superintendent’s arse at the first opportunity.
Yes, it was true, that might have sounded a bit vengeful.
Message number one, on the other hand, was still waiting for her. The online flirt, Detective Superintendent Radcliffe from Dublin: ‘No idea what his title is, but he’s friendly. As you also seem to be, Ms Holm.’ And this friendly man he alluded to happened to be called Benziger. ‘I’m wondering whether I didn’t hear about something similar in the former DDR. Get in touch with Benziger in Weimar.’
It was true, she had completely forgotten. She found an email address for the Weimar police department and wrote a brief inquiry to the complete stranger, Benziger.
Then she sent the group inquiry off to the six countries with pimps who had been strung upside down and had a metal wire driven into their temples.
The temple, yes. Right there. Kerstin Holm touched her own thin left temple, the spot where her hair refused to grow. Wasn’t it an awful coincidence that these wires had been forced into the very spot where she herself had been shot less than a year ago, missing death by millimetres?
She didn’t like coincidences. They rarely stayed that way.
She had a vague memory of lying on a mud-soaked lawn, her blood mixing with Paul Hjelm’s beneath a heavy sky and whispering, completely exhausted, completely soaked, completely bloody, ‘Paul, I love you.’
She was afraid he had misunderstood. Of course she loved him, she did, but she didn’t quite know how.
In other words, she was undergoing a metamorphosis.
It just wasn’t something she could touch upon yet.
23
THE BEAUTY OF the abstract. A case which was becoming increasingly complex, increasingly far-reaching, reduced by an anonymous artist to an extremely simple, extremely distinct plus shape.
Perhaps it should have been a minus sign.
Jan-Olov Hultin secretly wished he had been the artist. His diagrams were normally big, sprawling things, with lines and arrows in all directions, the whiteboard ending up so full that he often had to continue on the back. By the time the lines and arrows reached so far he had no choice but to spin the board to clarify each thought, his audience had usually given up.
And so he preferred the beauty of the abstract.
The polar opposite of which was piled up on the desk in front of him. For the first time since it all began, he had taken the time to read through the press reaction to the case. They had managed to keep most of it quiet so far – that was a first.
Th
e ‘Skansen’ quadrant, to begin with. The wolverine case wasn’t really a case at all. During the first few days, there had been plenty of eye-catching headlines and close-ups of the chewed leg, and plenty said in the tabloids about just how dangerous Skansen really was for our innocent children. Pictures of children dangerously close to bears had been published. The Skansen management had been forced to stand to account in a number of television debates, with demands for their immediate resignation being made and talk of a general ban on wolverines being bandied about. The relevant government minister would be looking into the regulatory system.
Then the ‘Slagsta’ quadrant. Hultin hadn’t managed to find a single line about the eight missing women. It was, quite simply, not news.
Next, the ‘Odenplan metro station’ quadrant. Hamid al-Jabiri’s death had, fortunately, been reported as an accident. One paper had managed to take a photograph of his lower body on the tracks. They had printed it without hesitation. A television debate about safety on the metro system had so few viewers that several advertisers had clubbed together to write a discussion piece in Dagens Nyheter. It had inspired several follow-ups. One of those involved, the information officer for a brewery with a strong media presence, was estimated to have earned twenty-three thousand kronor for his articles. That in itself had started a new debate.
Lastly, the ‘Skogskyrkogården’ quadrant. The all-important question of Leonard Sheinkman’s tragic end had been treated like a racial killing of the worst kind, not least after Waldemar Mörner’s blunder during Sunday’s live press conference. Otherwise, it was Sara Svenhagen’s chlorine-green hair that was being discussed, the result of which was that she had been sent three invites to film premieres and one to Café Opera’s twentieth-anniversary celebrations.
A number of media representatives had desperately tried to bribe hospital staff into letting them talk to ‘the arrested suspect’, Andreas Rasmusson. According to one paper, he had ‘not only violated Jewish graves on this occasion, but also brutally murdered an old Jewish professor of nuclear physics’. The same piece had continued: ‘Obstinate police interviews with the suspect resulted in his admission to the psychiatric ward. One source claimed misuse of batons.’
Sheinkman’s hanging was being discussed, but the long metal wire had been kept from the press. One television channel had managed to get hold of the old cemetery caretaker, Yitzak Lemstein, who had shown them his tattooed arm. The studio audience had read signs telling them to be loudly horrified, and so they were. During the interview which followed, Lemstein had unfortunately brought up the visit from Chavez and the grave marked ‘Shtayf’. Happily, it hadn’t led to any further questions. The presenter had had some trouble comprehending the word ‘Yiddish’.
Jan-Olov Hultin spent a moment thinking about what caused strokes before pushing the pile of papers away from him and saying, without further ado: ‘We’ll have to wait for answers regarding the phone. It turns out the contract is Ukrainian after all, but apparently the Ukrainian company is unable to produce a list of calls. Their technology is about a decade behind ours, and it’s impossible, from a technical point of view. Our technicians are slowly helping them onto the right tracks. Otherwise, you know about the other new development. Arto is now formally involved in the investigation, as a Europol officer. I just heard that he’s been granted access to the suspected head of the Ghiottone organisation, the name of which means not only “wolverine” but also “glutton”. This man is a ninety-two-year-old banker called Marco di Spinelli. Arto will be visiting him this evening. Should we try to put this into some kind of order? Jorge?’
Chavez sighed gently and glanced at his papers.
‘Bits of rope have started turning up,’ he said. ‘I guess we’ve just got to hope we find the exact one, that there aren’t too many resellers, and that someone remembers whoever bought it. I know it’s a bit of a long shot, so it should hardly be our top priority. None of the ropes have matched ours yet anyway.
‘My second point is more interesting – the question is whether it was a pure coincidence that Leonard Sheinkman was strung up right next to the anonymous “Shtayf” grave. There’s a twenty-year-old murder case behind “Shtayf”. The victim was in his forties, died of knife wounds and was a concentration camp survivor. It should’ve been possible to identify him from the numbers tattooed on his forearm, but he’d evidently tried to scratch them off with a knife, meaning they were illegible. His most distinguishing feature was that he had no nose. In my opinion, it’s really odd that the Huddinge police investigation from 1981 was such a complete failure. Someone should’ve remembered seeing a man without a nose, his appearance should’ve caught someone’s attention, wherever he came from. The Interpol of the time also failed back then. I’ve re-sent them his face and fingerprints. Europe has grown and it’s more accessible now.’
Jan-Olov Hultin didn’t look like normal. Since each minute shift in his stony face immediately caught their attention, the A-Unit held its collective breath. Was this the stroke they had been dreading?
‘It was my case,’ he said, sinking into a hole in time. There was a jolt in the space–time continuum, the clocks rushing madly backwards. Jan-Olov was suddenly in his forties and found himself in a tiny, newly decorated office in the police station, leaning back with satisfaction and thinking ‘finally’. The image was as clear as day.
A moment of silence prevailed. Then Chavez said: ‘No.’
‘What?’ said Hultin, rapidly transported back through the ages. Clusters of stars raced by at a speed faster than light.
‘That’s not what it said,’ said Chavez. ‘Bruun. Superintendent Erik Bruun from Huddinge Police. Haven’t I heard that name somewhere?’
Paul Hjelm laughed. They looked at him with a tangible scepticism.
‘Erik Bruun’s my old boss,’ he explained. ‘He’s the one who coaxed me into the A-Unit.’
‘Right,’ said Chavez. ‘We went there once. But that was when he’d just retired.’
‘Heart attack,’ Hjelm nodded. ‘Too many cigars.’
Hultin was becoming more like his old self again. They collectively breathed out. The blood clot was clearly keeping its distance this time, too.
He said: ‘It was then, in September 1981, that Bruun coaxed me into CID. Clearly he’s done a lot of coaxing in his time. I was given the case on the ninth of September and started half-heartedly looking into it. I knew I’d be getting a response to my application to CID at any time; I didn’t behave very professionally those last few days. It’s the greatest blot on my career right up to the Kentucky Killer. I got the reply on the eleventh and moved here right away. Bruun more or less took over the wrecked investigation himself.’
‘I’ll be damned,’ said Hjelm. ‘I started there as a newly qualified officer in 1984. I have no memory of him ever mentioning a case involving a man without a nose.’
‘It was never a proper case,’ said Hultin. ‘Just another John Doe among others. Not even the press showed much interest. You couldn’t print images of bodies back then. Things are different now.’
‘What do you remember?’ asked Chavez.
‘He was found lying in a ditch by a little lake in Älta, right next to a highway. No tyre tracks to speak of. He was naked, two big knife wounds to the back – either of them could’ve been the cause of death. The numbers on his arm were almost illegible beneath a criss-cross of scars, as though he’d tried to scratch them off. And then that nose …’
‘I’ve got a picture here,’ said Chavez, passing an old colour photo around the Tactical Command Centre.
‘I didn’t really manage to find anything. No witnesses, no clues. It didn’t seem like anyone in all of Sweden had seen that noseless man. But like I said, I didn’t look very hard.’
‘One thing,’ said Kerstin Holm, looking down at the photograph. ‘Why wasn’t more done, considering how badly disfiguring his facial damage was? One single look would’ve been enough to make any plastic surgeon leap at the challenge
.’
‘Good question,’ Hultin admitted. ‘Poverty? Lack of medical care? Outcast?’
‘And a foreigner, too,’ Kerstin added, nodding slightly.
‘Would it be worth talking to Bruun?’ Hjelm asked hopefully. He hadn’t seen his old boss since the heart attack had brought in a nightmare replacement by the name of Sten Lagnmyr.
‘I think so,’ said Hultin. ‘You and Jorge.’
‘OK,’ Hjelm and Chavez said in unison.
‘How’s it going with the boats, Sara?’ Hultin continued, looking more neutral than he had in a long while. Clearly it was time to compensate for his earlier emotional outburst.
‘Great,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘There are plenty of options if you want to get from Stockholm to Lublin by bus, especially if you have thirty-five hours to do it. That’s the amount of time between their possible departure from Slagsta and the phone call from Lublin.
‘The most logical thing would be to get on the closest ferry, from Nynäshamn, and head to Gdask. It’s a straight line from there, if you want to get to the Ukraine via Lublin. It’s a night ferry, leaving at 5 p.m. and not arriving in Gdask until half eleven the next morning. It’s roughly six hundred kilometres between Gdask and Lublin, and the phone call to Odenplan was made at three. So if we say it took maybe half an hour to get off the ferry, then you would have to drive at 150, 160 kilometres an hour to get to Lublin in time. It’s just not possible. It’s wrong.