Another Time, Another Life

by Leif G. W. Persson

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Johansson interrupted, now sounding very tired. And two minutes ago you were a hundred percent sure that she didn’t even feature in the investigation. And this is just too awful to be true, he thought sourly.

  “It might very well be her,” said Holt. Don’t back down now, Anna, she thought.

  “Listen, Holt,” said Johansson, fixing his eyes on his coworker. “And this concerns the rest of you too, for that matter,” he added, locking eyes with them too. “Now let’s take it easy. Before we do anything whatsoever that might cause the least trouble for anyone, and not least for me, we need to call and ask for permission first. Is that understood?”

  “Understood,” said Holt, who did not seem the least bit dejected.

  As soon as the meeting was finished Johansson took Wiklander with him to his office and asked him to investigate certain things that were to stay between him and Johansson. Wiklander was a male like himself, not from Norrland to be sure but from Värmland, and in this situation that would have to do. Besides, what choice did he have?

  “Women have a unique ability to get worked up about the least little thing,” Johansson explained, without naming names.

  “Our colleague Holt is one of the best police officers we have,” Wiklander said.

  “So you say,” said Johansson curtly. Not you too, he thought, and then he put an end to the conversation and took the elevator down to the garage to drive home.

  If this is a background check, then the direction it has taken is somewhat disturbing, thought Johansson as he sat in the car en route to Söder in the dense inner-city traffic. It has to work out, he thought. Where do I stand now? I still like the situation, even if I liked it better just a short while ago than I do now. We needn’t make things unnecessarily complicated. It should be possible to find a fellow who stabbed Eriksson to death. If that really was the problem, he thought. It always worked out, well, it almost always worked out, he corrected himself, so why wouldn’t it work out here? Besides, this wasn’t about solving an old murder for the homicide squad in Stockholm.

  He had to admit that he was troubled by what Holt had said about hating chance. It didn’t seem to be simply a matter of chance that among a large number of Tischler’s cousins this particular one had probably been involved with his best friend Welander when she herself was only a child, and that she had shown up in the Eriksson investigation too. That was not good. It was bad enough that she appeared in the investigation on the West German embassy. Enough and more than enough. Damn it all, thought Johansson.

  “You seem worried, Boss,” his driver noted, and when Johansson looked up he saw that he was being observed in the rearview mirror. “Is there anything I can help you with, Boss?”

  His driver was named Johan—Johansson had forgotten his surname but he wouldn’t forget Johan—and looked like a twenty-years-younger copy of his best friend Bo Jarnebring. When he wasn’t carting Johansson around, Johan worked at SePo’s bodyguard squad. I’m sure there’s a great deal you can do, thought Johansson as he encountered his driver’s narrow, watchful eyes.

  “You wouldn’t be able to shoot Holt for me?” said Johansson.

  “Holt,” said Johan with surprise. “Do you mean Chief Inspector Holt, Boss?”

  “One and the same,” said Johansson.

  “What has she done?” asked Johan.

  “Talked back,” said Johansson.

  “Well, in that case,” said Johan, grinning.

  “Let’s forget it,” said Johansson, smiling wryly. “It’s the weekend after all, so I’ll let her live.”

  29

  Friday evening, March 31, 2000

  After an irritated Lars Martin Johansson had marched out of the meeting to have a private talk with Wiklander and then go home to sulk over the weekend, and the others had escaped to their respective offices to try to get something accomplished, Holt stopped by to see Mattei.

  Mattei was sitting in front of her computer, pecking with concentration at what would eventually become the supporting structure of the biography of Helena Stein. “Little biography” as it was called in police Swedish, although in this particular instance there was reason to believe it would be rather lengthy.

  “Can I help you with anything, Anna?” Mattei asked without taking her gaze from her computer.

  “If you could make a copy of what you’ve got,” said Holt.

  “Sure,” said Mattei.

  “You see, I have an idea,” Holt continued, “that it might—”

  “Be easier to find Stein in the Eriksson investigation if you know what you’re looking for,” Mattei interrupted, without taking her gaze from her screen.

  “Exactly,” said Holt. Lisa is probably the smartest person in this place, thought Holt.

  “If you go and check your e-mail, it’s already there,” said Mattei.

  “Thanks,” said Holt. She’s almost a little too smart, she thought.

  • • •

  Wiklander had already ordered the binders on the Kjell Eriksson murder to be brought up from the archives in Stockholm, and Holt didn’t need to think for very long to realize that it was unlikely anyone would miss them. There was nothing that even hinted that anyone had worked on the investigation since she and Jarnebring left it in December 1989.

  There were ten letter-sized binders with several thousand pages of text. Mostly it was interviews, file searches, and other computer lists, plus the forensic investigation, crime scene investigation, and various technical reports, which, based on experience and at such a late date, were usually more interesting than anything else. In a context like this ten binders with several thousand pages were almost conspicuously little.

  The papers were neatly organized, and it was quite obvious that Gunsan had done it. The traces of the leader of the investigation, Bäckström, primarily consisted of a long list of searches on individuals who came up in connection with various violent crimes directed at homosexual men, and quite certainly it was Gunsan who had made sure that this list also ended up in the right place in the investigation materials.

  What an indescribably dreadful person, thought Holt, and she was thinking about her colleague Bäckström.

  Because Holt knew that it could be as tricky to find things in binders as in a house search, she started by printing out the information on Stein that Mattei had e-mailed to her.

  If you were going to search for something you might as well do it properly—for some reason she happened to think about what Jarnebring had said about checking the curtain rods in Eriksson’s apartment. Because it was Stein she was searching for, it ought to be simpler to find her the more she knew about her, assuming that she was there in the investigation for an important reason and not simply because at the age of ten, through the luck of the draw and ordinary human interaction, she had wound up in Eriksson’s photo album.

  Maybe she’s another Mary Bell, thought Holt, smiling to herself.

  Helena Stein was born in the autumn of 1958 and graduated from the French School in the spring of 1976, not yet eighteen years of age. Then she matriculated at the university in Uppsala, became a member of the organization of students from Stockholm, and studied law. She earned her degree in three years compared to the usual four and a half, and she had the highest grades in all subjects except two. After that she did her internship at the district court in Stockholm, practiced at an upscale law firm on Östermalm, was hired as an assistant attorney at the same firm, and just over five years after her degree she was accepted as a member of the Bar Association. At twenty-seven years old Stein was the youngest attorney that Holt had ever heard of. Having come this far in Stein’s biography, Holt suddenly realized what she was searching for, and it took her only five minutes to find the papers she hoped would be in the files.

  This is almost a little ridiculous, thought Holt. It’s so damn easy as soon as you know what you’re looking for.

  In her hand she held three papers that she herself had entered into the investigation in t
he middle of December over ten years before. It was a program from a SACO conference held in Östermalm in Stockholm on the thirtieth of November 1989, the same day Eriksson was murdered. Between ten o’clock and ten-thirty in the morning attorney Helena Stein had given a presentation on a case she had conducted on SACO’s behalf at the Labor Court in Stockholm. According to the conference program her talk was the third item of the day, right before a fifteen-minute break. A list of participants revealed that one of those sitting in the audience listening to her was bureau director and TCO representative Kjell Eriksson.

  Holt had read through the same papers herself when she and Jarnebring had had lunch on the day after Eriksson’s murder, and she was the one who had made sure to conduct the fruitless search in the police department’s files of all the participants, presenters, and conference organizers. But because she had not known who she was looking for, Helena Stein had been invisible to her.

  What a strange feeling, thought Holt, weighing the papers in her hand. I wonder if my fingerprints are still there after ten years, she thought.

  • • •

  “How’s it going?” asked Mattei, who had suddenly appeared in the door to her office.

  “I’ve found her,” said Holt.

  “That conference,” said Mattei.

  This is not true, thought Holt.

  “Yes,” she said. “How did you know that?”

  “An idea I had. That’s why I’m here. I thought I’d give you a tip about what you should be looking for. It struck me suddenly when I was running Eriksson’s biography and the log of what he’d been doing on the day of the murder against Helena Stein’s biography. Conference on labor law issues, then-attorney Stein—if you want I can make a copy of the computer hits I got—I got two hits, one on ‘attorney’ and one on ‘labor law.’ It’s pretty interesting software actually. First you enter the documents you want to search in plain text and then you run them against each other.”

  “I believe you,” said Holt, smiling. Lisa is unbelievable, she thought.

  “You’re the one who found her,” said Mattei, shrugging her shoulders. In this building that’s the only thing that counts, she thought.

  “I’m satisfied,” said Holt. So there, she thought, and the person she was thinking about was her top boss, Lars Martin Johansson, who right now was probably settled on the couch in front of his TV dreaming his way back to the good old days when he was a legend who was never contradicted.

  “In any event you’ve connected Stein with Eriksson on the day in question,” said Mattei. “I actually had an idea too.”

  “I’m listening,” said Holt.

  While Mattei sat and waited for Johansson to show up at the Friday afternoon meeting, she had taken the opportunity to read the two interviews with Eriksson’s closest neighbor, Mrs. Westergren. The reason she had chosen them in particular was simply that after quickly thumbing through the otherwise rather thin binder, she judged them to be the most interesting.

  “Those interviews with his buddies were really worthless,” Mattei said. “That Bäckström doesn’t seem quite healthy. He’s trying to direct them the whole time, get them to confirm that Eriksson was homosexual. I don’t understand why he didn’t just question himself?”

  Mrs. Westergren, in Mattei’s estimation, had made at least one interesting observation, namely that Eriksson had shown signs of increased alcohol intake during the months preceding his death. That was how she had expressed it: “increased alcohol intake.”

  “Personally I hardly ever drink,” said Mattei, “but sometimes when I’m really wound up I have a small one when I come home, mostly to get my head to quiet down. I got the idea that Eriksson increased his alcohol intake because he was nervous about something and that this was happening during the autumn—the same autumn he was murdered.”

  “Jarnebring and I thought so too,” said Holt. “Yes, that was the colleague I was working with at that time. The problem was that we couldn’t find anything. One idea we had was that it must have involved his business dealings, but they seemed to be going better than ever.”

  “That was probably because you weren’t aware of Eriksson’s involvement in the occupation of the West German embassy,” said Mattei.

  “No,” said Holt. “I only found that out today.” Typical for this place, she thought.

  “What I was thinking,” said Mattei, as if she were working on it out loud, “is that if I had been involved in that incident, I would probably have been going out of my mind in the autumn of 1989.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Holt. “Fourteen years later? Why then? Shouldn’t you have been used to the idea that you would get off?”

  “East Germany,” said Mattei emphatically. “East Germany collapsed in November 1989. The Stasi, their secret police, collapsed. The Stasi’s archives were suddenly everyone’s property. Hordes of people like our esteemed boss Johansson poured in from the Western powers and started rooting through their papers. What I mean is simply that if I had been involved with West German terrorists in the mid-seventies, wouldn’t there be a high probability that my name was somewhere in the Stasi’s files? The Stasi and the Red Army Faction and the Baader-Meinhof gang and all the rest were buddies. They helped each other, it has been shown. It’s clear that the Stasi knew who the terrorists were.”

  “It’s as plain as the nose on your face,” said Holt. “And if my name was Eriksson, Welander, Tischler, or Stein I would have been really nervous.” Not least if my name was Stein and someone like Eriksson knew something about me that he could exploit, thought Holt. And now you can shove it, old man, she thought, rerunning the conversation she’d had with her boss, the legendary Johansson, only a few hours before.

  “That is a possible motive,” said Mattei thoughtfully. “A little speculative, perhaps, but completely possible. They needn’t have been in the Stasi archives—it would have been enough for them to believe that they might be there. For them to be nervous, I mean.”

  “But they were there,” said Holt. “Both Johansson and Wiklander have confirmed that.”

  “Of course,” Mattei objected, “but they didn’t need to know that for certain. If they simply believed it they would start getting worried.” Anna seems mainly practically oriented, she thought.

  “How’s it going, gals?” Martinez asked, after suddenly materializing in the door to Holt’s office. “Now there are three of us, so it’s a girl party. All the boys have gone home to knock back a few beers and stare at the TV.”

  “It’ll be ready soon,” said Holt. “Just wait till you hear—”

  “Easy, easy,” said Martinez, raising her hand in a gesture meant to hold off further discussion. “I’m completely starved. I was thinking about ordering a little junk food, the sort of thing our male colleagues are always stuffing themselves with in all the detective movies. You know, hamburgers and hot dogs and doughnuts. What do you think?”

  “Maybe not hot dogs,” said Mattei. “That’s pure poison. Can’t we have sushi instead? I’m trying to eat as little meat as possible. I can run down and get some sushi.”

  “Sushi,” said Martinez. “Real detectives don’t eat sushi.”

  “We do,” said Holt. “I want sushi too.”

  “Okay then,” said Martinez, shrugging her shoulders. “I’ll get sushi.”

  When Martinez returned half an hour later bringing sushi and mineral water, the three of them held their first war summit.

  “I think you’re on the right track,” said Martinez after she had listened first to Holt and then to Mattei. “For one thing you’ve managed to connect Stein with Eriksson. For another you’ve produced a plausible motive for Stein to stick the kitchen knife in Eriksson. I hardly think Johansson is going to do the wave when he hears what you’ve come up with,” said Martinez, smiling broadly. “Do you want to know what I’ve been thinking?”

  “Yes,” said Holt.

  “Yes,” said Mattei.

  “All right then,” said Martinez. “
I’ve been looking through the technical reports. But you should know I did it without even glancing at Stein. It was before I knew about that conference where she ran into Eriksson. But while I was waiting for all the rice balls you just stuffed yourselves with I happened to keep thinking about her.”

  “Yeah,” said Holt.

  “Yeah,” echoed Mattei.

  “We have to be able to place her in Eriksson’s apartment,” said Martinez. “I think there are two good chances. For one thing there are a few prints that were picked up but couldn’t be identified. A few of them could be the perpetrator’s. They belong to the same person, and both are sort of semi-good if I can put it that way. One is on the kitchen counter and the other on the inside of the cupboard door under the sink where he kept the wastebasket.”

  “Sounds good enough,” said Holt. You can’t have everything, she thought, and before her she saw the bloodied Sabatier brand kitchen knife.

  “The other thing I was thinking about was that hand towel,” said Martinez. “That’s good too. If the perpetrator threw up in it, it should still be possible to lift DNA from it, because that hasn’t been done. It wasn’t done at the time.”

  Helena Stein’s vomit on Eriksson’s hand towel, thought Holt, and suddenly it became so tangible as they sat talking that she felt slightly nauseous.

  “Assuming that the hand towel has been preserved in a freezer as it should have been, it’s worth a try,” Martinez said.

  “Both the fingerprints and the hand towel are probably down at the tech squad in Stockholm,” said Mattei.

  “Then we’ll have to bring them here so our own technicians can look at them,” said Martinez. “Who’ll call Johansson and ask for permission?”

  “I can do that,” said Holt, feeling instantly more energetic.

  “I guess it will have to be tomorrow anyway,” said Mattei hesitantly. “It’s almost ten o’clock.”

  “Sure,” said Holt. “Personally, I was thinking about going home to see the sandman.”