He’s standing on the road, in full view. The lights in the building are off, apart from an advent wreath in one of the windows a couple of storeys up. It’s just after half-past nine in the evening. Less than an hour until Thomas Heber dies.
He’s stuffed the plastic bag with the knife in inside his coat, and he can feel it against his body, moving in time with his strides. He leaves Kungsholmen in a hurry, on foot. He throws the hammer into a builder’s skip near St Eriksplan. No one sees him. No one sees anything anymore.
Christian and Michael spent half their lives without each other; half, together. There’s a symmetry to this that tells you something, isn’t there?
They were fifteen, fifteen years ago. They were at a party in Hagsätra, in one of the tower blocks by the centre. It was March, and no other month can drag on forever the way March sometimes does. Everything was grey.
They knew of each other, but had never talked, just seen each other in the square and at the recreation ground a few times.
Christian went out on the balcony for a smoke, and there he was. They started talking. There was something weird between them, at least that’s the way he felt, but at first he couldn’t put his finger on what.
Then he realised that they were both wearing T-shirts with SKREWDRIVER on them. They both noticed at the same time, looking down at each other’s chests. They laughed. Christian’s was white. He had got it from his brother, Anton. Michael had a black one.
‘Do you like Skrewdriver?’
‘I’ve only heard the first album, nothing else,’ Christian replied. ‘I got that and the T-shirt from my brother. But I do like that album.’
‘Same here. I like All Skrewed Up, but not the others. You know they became Nazis later, right?’
‘What?’
‘Neo-Nazis.’
Christian was stumped. The T-shirt print changed, became threatening. He wondered if Anton knew, if that was why he’d given him the T-shirt. To wind him up. So that Christian would get beaten up.
‘No, I had no idea.’
‘Fucked up,’ said Michael. ‘That a band start out as punks, then do a whatsit, what’s it called?’
‘U-turn.’
‘That’s right. Fucked up, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
On the other side of the glass, inside the flat, someone fell off the sofa’s armrest. They turned around and peered into the room.
‘That’s Petter,’ Christian said. ‘He’s in my class. He always gets too drunk.’
Inside the flat, Nirvana were singing about finding their friends.
That’s how it started.
‘Do you live in Hagsätra?’ Michael asked.
Christian nodded, and shuddered from the cold.
‘On Åmmebergsgatan, over by the recreation ground. You too?’
‘Glanshammarsgatan.’ He pointed between the tower blocks, where candles were lit in the small windows. ‘Can you see the lower block between those two high ones?’
Christian strained to focus, and adjusted his glasses. He smoked only occasionally, and when he combined it with beer, it was like he got twice as drunk.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘The second window from the top, second from the right. That’s my room.’
The lights were off.
Christian had severe acne and was extremely short-sighted, so he wore glasses so thick they made his eyes look like drawing pins. There was a big guy at school, called Patrick, who used to shout, ‘Hello, zit, how’s it going?’ at him so that the girls would laugh. Christian tried to shrug it off. He was a sporting talent, good at basketball and floorball and table-tennis. That’s how he made friends, even if he did suspect that they talked about him behind his back.
His new friend was just like him, he would soon realise. They were similar in that sense, apart from the fact that his new friend had neither acne nor glasses.
‘I need another fucking beer,’ said Michael.
‘Me too.’
They dropped the cigarette butts from the balcony, watching them as they twirled away into the darkness. Then they opened the balcony door and went in. The warmth and humidity inside the flat made Christian’s glasses fog up. When Michael saw the white screens hiding Christian’s eyes, he burst out laughing.
‘It can’t be easy to make a good first impression looking like that.’
It wasn’t. Christian remembers it now. Under different circumstances, he’d probably have laughed at it. It must have looked funny.
Between the tower blocks, strong feelings built up, and most of the time there was nowhere to get rid of them, so you carried them around. You carried them in the corridors at school, kept out of the way of those you were scared of, and got drawn to those you hoped might be a bit like yourself. You carried them when your best friend’s locker got prised open and someone had drawn a swastika on the inside of the door. You carried them when you had your first kiss, eleven years old at a disco in the clubhouse at Hagsätra’s recreation ground. Her name was Sara, and she had the smoothest skin Christian’s fingers had ever come across. They were together for a month. Despite being only twelve, Sara had started wearing a bra, and the day before they split up she’d let him touch her breasts. He wondered if that was why, that she didn’t want to be with him because he’d been too forward.
You carried those feelings when you were fourteen and fell in love for the first time, and her name was Pernilla and she wrote they can laugh if they want to, sneer at us — we’re moving forward, they’re standing still on a note that she sneaked into his locker through the little gap in the door. It was with her he had had sex for the first time, at a party not unlike the one he wore his Skrewdriver T-shirt to a year or so later.
They were there when you saw three immigrants hitting a Swede in the gut, two holding, one hitting, behind the gym hall, and you carried them when you saw four Swedes beating an immigrant the following day, behind the kiosk owned by one of the Swedes’ dads.
You carried them the first time you met someone at a party and he had the same T-shirt as you, and you soon realised that he was going to be your protector and executioner.
There’s no catalyst, no single event that starts things rolling. No answer to the question Why? There are only events followed by events, and if you go back far enough, everything becomes an ethereal web of them. And that might be, Christian thinks to himself, how we end up becoming the people we are.
As instructed, he avoids the tube and its CCTV, and makes his way out to the university by bus instead. He makes a few detours, changes several times so as not to arrive too early. At each bus stop, he’s freezing cold. The buses come coughing out of the darkness, and none of their drivers are Swedish. He passes The Vasa Real School, where someone has written JEWISH SWINE, followed by the number 1488. He wonders who held the pen. Snow has started falling. By Odenplan, a Saint Lucia procession made up of students winds past him, laughing and stinking of alcohol.
Stockholm University’s large sheet-metal complex towers over him as he steps off the last bus into the darkness. He is waiting in the shadows by one of the corners of the complex, Christian can sense it as he gets closer. And, sure enough, there he is, eyes fixed on one of the windows above — the only one with the lights on.
‘Any joy?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t sound sure.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Give it here.’
Christian pulls down the zip on his coat, and gets out the plastic bag. Michael takes it from him.
‘What were you goi—’
‘Get out of here. We’ll get to that later.’
‘But I …’
‘No. Not this time. See you tomorrow.’
Michael looks up at the window again. The lights are still on. A second’s hesitation gets stretched and becomes unnaturally
long. Thoughts are washing through Christian like a strong current.
‘Alright,’ he says, and turns to leave. The snow crunches under his feet. In front of him, the Statoil signage shines large and orange. Traffic swishes past, but it is strangely quiet. It’s an evening where old feelings come back.
They were fifteen years old, fifteen years ago. We’re moving forward, they’re standing still.
Christian turns his head one last time, looking for the window with the light on, but doesn’t see it. The lights are off, and, by the corner of the complex, Michael isn’t there anymore.
13/12
There’s a lot of things said about Gabriel Birck, and most of them are contradictory, like splinters of evidence pointing towards different stories, different fates.
Some say he has no sense of smell, yet others say he can smell a person’s saliva. That he’s gay, but that he once dated a woman from the Hamilton clan. The same person claims that Birck changed his surname when he did National Service and that he actually comes from a wealthy aristocratic family. Others say he comes from a poor background — that he grew up on the estates with a loner alcoholic father who beat him every weekend. That he once married an Estonian woman to save her from a trafficking league. That he was approached by the Security Service while he was still training, but that he’d never been tricked into joining them. Others are convinced that he does in fact have a murky past in that very organisation.
And so it goes on, and nobody knows for sure. I believe about half of what is said, but which half changes from day to day, depending on what sort of mood Gabriel Birck is in. I think he lives a fairly solitary life, that Birck is a loner. We have that in common, and that’s why we can work together.
By some kind of unspoken agreement, we decide to walk to Vanadisvägen 5. We become silhouettes as we move through the night in the capital. As we leave the crime scene, Birck stops dead.
‘Hmmm,’ he says. ‘Look at that.’
The contents of my stomach that I expelled less than an hour ago are already covered by a layer of ice crystals.
‘Is it yours?’
We’re inside the cordon. They’re going to do tests on it. There’s no point in lying.
‘Yes.’
‘Are you ill?’
‘I don’t know, but I was nauseous. It might have been the body.’
Birck leans forward and studies the vomitus more closely. I find this very embarrassing, as though he’s seen me naked.
‘What do you eat anyway?’ he says.
Almost nothing — that’s part of the problem with the Serax come-downs. My appetite disappears completely, and I’m constantly weak, with quivering hands.
‘What everyone else eats,’ I say. ‘Can we go now?’
‘You really should change your eating habits.’
We’ve turned off the wide Sveavagen, and we’re now outside Vanadisvägen 5. It’s just before two. It is now the thirteenth of December.
‘Are you going to St Göran’s now, on Lucia?’ he asks.
‘No.’
‘But you’re going at Christmas?’
‘Just for a short visit, maybe. Nothing more.’
‘How often do you go? How often do you see him?’
‘As often as I need to.’
‘Here.’ He holds out a packet of Stimorol. ‘For my sake,’ he adds.
I take a piece of chewing gum. Birck puts his gloves on, and takes the key from the plastic bag and slides it into the lock of the main entrance. The door is lighter than you’d think, and if it does creak or scrape, the sound is drowned out by the noise of the city.
‘Fifth floor.’ Birck reads the list of residents. ‘Second from the top. No, you can keep it,’ he says when he spots the chewing-gum packet in my hand. ‘You need it more than I do.’
Outside the door — light brown with HEBER above the letterbox — I take my boots off, and Birck steps carefully out of his black shoes. The lock looks untouched; there’s no sign of anyone having tried to force their way in.
‘Shall we ring the bell?’ I ask.
‘What for? He’s dead, you know.’
‘There might be someone else in there. A friend or a girlfriend. Or boyfriend.’
‘Didn’t you see his shoes? A man who wears shoes like that is definitely not gay.’
‘You know what I mean.’
Birck looks for a doorbell, finds it, and then pushes it. There’s no sound from inside. I place my knuckles against the door instead, and knock three times, hard. When nothing happens, Birck puts the key in and opens the door.
The place where Thomas Heber lived the last few years of his life is a little one-bedroom flat with high ceilings. It’s sparsely furnished, with three fully laden bookshelves along one wall of the first room, next to some kind of reading chair whose only companion in the flat is a floor lamp peering over its shoulder. Otherwise, the room is empty, apart from a pile of packing boxes against the opposite wall, the traces of a man who lived his real life outside his home.
‘How long had he lived here?’ Birck asked.
‘According to Markström’s background check, two years.’
‘Looks more like two weeks. I would’ve had a nervous breakdown if my home looked like this after two years.’
‘Will you do the bedroom?’
Birck walks off without saying anything. I walk over to the bookcase and tilt my head to one side, reading the titles of well-thumbed books about sociology and philosophy. In one corner of the bookcase there’s a collection of books that really stick out, like The Activists Handbook, Manual for Militant Political Siege, and The Occupy Movement: an instruction for practice. I pull one out. It’s been read in great detail — the pages are marked and annotated with the illegible handwriting of an academic. In another corner of the bookcase are several copies of the same book, his own PhD thesis in sociology, Studies in the Sociology of Social Movements: stigma, status, and society.
I take a couple of steps back. Nothing grabs my attention. That’s annoying. I head for the kitchen instead. It’s narrow, with units along both sides, and then opens up into a small square space with a smaller but equally square wooden table and four chairs. The windowsills are empty, with no plants or lamps, and each window is framed by a light-blue curtain. On one windowsill is a little saucer, empty and clean.
‘Did he smoke?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ Birck’s voice comes back.
I open the fridge. Inside are two bottles of Czech lager, a jar of Taco sauce, some butter, and a sad little piece of cheese with less than a day to go before its sell-by date.
I go into the bedroom, where Birck is kneeling in front of the wardrobe and pulling out a pair of shoes. He investigates the laces, and then the soles and the inside of the shoes, before putting them back.
‘Nothing?’ I ask.
Birck shakes his head.
The bed is unmade. I put my nose to the bed sheets and smell them. They haven’t been washed in a long time. A desk is next to the bedroom’s only window, and I flip carefully through the papers lying on it — an invoice for December’s rent, a wage slip from the Stockholm University, and a mobile-phone bill. I pick up the bill and find the number, get my phone out, dial the number, and put the phone to my ear. A cold, robotic voice tells me that the person I have called is unavailable.
‘Switched off or no coverage.’
‘Wasn’t expecting anything else,’ says Birck.
Under the phone bill is a scrunched-up piece of paper. I carefully pick it up between two fingers and unfold it.
‘What’s that?’ Birck asks.
‘A receipt. Heber bought a coffee at Café Cairo on the eleventh of December. Looks like he paid by card. That’s it.’
‘Cairo. That’s near us, isn’t it?’
‘Mitisgatan,’ I read. ‘Yes,
it’s near the bunker.’
‘Put it back.’ Birck stares at my hand, which is heading for my coat pocket. ‘It has to be here when the technicians arrive.’
‘Shall I scrunch it up for them, too?’
Birck rolls his eyes. I leave the receipt on the desk, and we go through the bathroom and the closet together, but the flat says very little about its owner. Next to nothing, in fact.
‘Do you reckon he was on his way home?’ I ask. ‘That he’d stopped off on Döbelnsgatan to see someone he’d arranged to meet there.’
‘I don’t reckon anything,’ Birck says, his eyes glued to the floor in the hall.
‘Everyone always thinks something.’
‘I reckon that whatever has happened, we’re not going to find the answer here.’ Then he stops, and crouches down. ‘Is this yours? This shoeprint?’
‘How could it be mine? We took our shoes off out there. I thought you were a good cop. Anyway, what footprint? I can’t see anything.’
‘I think you need to be right over here, crouching down where I am.’
I take two steps forward, crouch down, and it appears. The print is a bit bigger than mine, and from a heavier boot. There are two, three, four more in the hall. The pattern is smeared, as though someone has hastily tried to hide them.
‘Have we ruined them?’
‘I don’t think so. We walked along the wall.’
‘It’s not the same person,’ I say. ‘The one who was hiding behind the bins on Döbelnsgatan, and whoever’s been here. Not the same tread.’
‘How did we miss this on the way in?’ says Birck. Then he stands up, and takes two steps towards the door. He laughs. ‘Bugger me.’
Light and shade often play games with your eyes. In Heber’s hallway the ceiling light makes the shadows scatter and the light reflect off the floor. It’s probably a coincidence but when you stand by the door, you can’t see the prints unless you know they’re there.
Birck pulls out his phone and takes a picture of the prints.
‘They’re not dry,’ he says. ‘We’ll have to get Mauritzon to check them out.’
The Falling Detective Page 3