The Falling Detective

by Christoffer Carlsson

  Birck goes quiet as he clicks through the Dictaphone to get to the next file.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I say.

  ‘It’s coming. Calm down. This is the follow-up interview that he does a week or so later, at the same café. It’s after this one that they go back to his place for a fuck.’

  Same place, but something’s different. When the doorbell rings during the clip, it sounds distant. They’re sitting towards the back of the café. It’s late evening. The ten o’clock news is on the radio.

  ‘You know, things have … changed.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘No, the whole thing. It’s got a bit rawer since the Sweden Democrats got into parliament.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘You should know better than me.’ There’s a short laugh, a clucking sound like a child’s. It sounds nice, genuine. ‘I guess that … I mean, you can’t just have a load of Nazis and racists from out in the sticks sitting in parliament. That’s what they are — look at their history, it looks really fucking bad. So since 2010, or rather since they got a new leader in 2005, they’ve been trying to reinvent themselves, to make themselves more palatable. I saw this slogan, THE PARTY FOR ALL SWEDES, on the internet somewhere. Did you see that?’

  ‘I think so. It sounds familiar.’

  ‘They’ve toned down what they really stand for, at least on a national level — I don’t know what they’re like locally. But it’s shifted the whole political arena to the right, because all the parliamentary parties, even the left, are affected when a new player comes along. It’s just logic.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it has also meant that the extreme right has become more extreme, because they always need to stand apart from mainstream politics. They believe that the Sweden Democrats are led by a traitor. That he has betrayed Sweden.’ She laughs again. ‘Can you believe it? How fucked up is that? They are really fucking nasty. They talk about Swedish-ness, the superior race, white culture, stage faked mass-executions of immigrants and homosexuals at their parties, and film them and put them online until they get taken down by some mod. They send them to us, of course, to provoke us. And we stage mass-executions of Nazis, and send the films to them.’

  She goes quiet, perhaps to let it sink in.

  ‘We didn’t do that ten years ago,’ says Heber.

  ‘No, that’s what I mean. And it’s a good example — they were the ones who started it, but then we, the anarchists, joined in. We’re doing exactly what they’re doing. As the extreme right gets more extreme, so do we — just in the other direction. RAF had a public meeting two weeks ago, for International Women’s Day, and halfway through the meeting they cut the cables to the PA with pliers or some kind of saw, when no one was looking. We don’t really find out about their meetings, because they’re such a fucking closed group. But for some reason their parties are more open — we got word about one the other week, and went down there. It was in an old barn, near Ösmo, out in the middle of nowhere. It was fucked up, people were wearing uniforms, there were flags and swastikas on the walls, white-power music, and a projector was showing old film of Hitler. Every time a swastika flashed up, they cheered, as though it was a football match and their team had just scored.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘We set fire to the barn.’

  He wasn’t expecting that. Then the tape records the sound of footsteps and someone coming over to them, a woman with a high-pitched voice.

  ‘Just to let you know, we’re closing now.’

  ‘Thanks,’ says Heber.

  Lisa Swedberg says nothing, and the woman leaves. All my friends in the loop, someone on the radio is singing, making up for teenage crime.

  ‘What happened to the barn?’ Heber asks.

  ‘It burned down. It was in the press the next day.’

  ‘Was anyone hurt?’

  ‘No. Unfortunately.’

  ‘I would like to continue the interview, if that’s okay with you? Otherwise just say so.’

  ‘Fine by me. Don’t you live around here somewhere?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘That’s not really the sort of thing you tell people, as I’m sure you understand?’

  I wonder what Heber thinks at this point, and try to imagine his facial expression.

  All my friends in the loop, making up for teenage cri—

  The clip ends with a crackling sound.

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘they go back to his place and have sex now.’

  ‘Yes. No recording, though. Which I think we should be thankful for.’ Birck clicks the Dictaphone again. ‘They don’t seem to have continued the interview that evening, at least not on tape. This was around the twenty-seventh of March — she mentions Women’s Day, and that it was two weeks earlier. The next time they meet up for an interview, it’s May.

  ‘The barn that burned down …’ I say.

  ‘I checked that out. The organisation she doesn’t want to name is Swedish Resistance. The story stands up: there was an arson attack recorded in Ösmo, and our talented local colleagues did their utmost, put everything into finding the suspects — probably because half of them actually sympathise, ideologically, with the idiots at the party. They never managed it, though. The case was closed in June — probably just as well, if you ask me. Listen now. This is when things start happening.’

  This time it’s quiet, except for a slight hum, perhaps from an open window. Yes, it’s spring now, and Vanadisvägen is buzzing away somewhere below them, and they’re sitting close to the window, Lisa Swedberg and Thomas Heber. Crockery is chinking.

  ‘Would you like some more?’ he asks.

  ‘No, I’m good, thanks.’

  A lighter clicks — once, twice, three times. There’s the fizzing sound of tobacco being lit. She breathes in the smoke and blows it out again.

  ‘Your flat really is weird,’ she says. ‘How long have you lived here?’

  ‘A couple of years. In what way is it weird?’

  ‘It feels … uninhabited.’

  ‘I don’t spend an awful lot of time here.’

  ‘Your bed works, anyway.’

  She might be smiling as she says that — there’s a playful tone to her voice. She takes a drag. Heber clears his throat.

  ‘It’s been a while since we did an interview,’ he says. ‘I’ve spoken to a few others, and I’ve been thinking that it’s interesting, how anarchists like you in RAF, and those in the White Power movement, see each other. I was listening to our previous interview yesterday, and you mentioned setting fire to a barn after they’d sabotaged your public meeting. Can you tell me a bit more about that?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, what happened next, for a start?’

  She giggles.

  ‘This is strange, doing this, when we’ve already talked so much.’

  He laughs. For a moment, he’s not a scientist.

  ‘I know,’ he says.

  She touches him — his arm, or maybe his thigh. Her hand makes a pleasant, rasping noise against the fabric.

  ‘I know it’s weird,’ he says, obviously uncomfortable, as though he doesn’t really know how to deal with the situation. ‘But try.’

  ‘It escalated. That’s just what happens. We know it; they know it. It’s been pretty calm for a while, but it’s just a matter of time before something else happens and it gets in the papers again.’

  ‘How did it escalate? In what way?’

  ‘Well, they stole money from us, for one. I think it must have been a couple of days after our last interview. It probably doesn’t sound too bad, compared to the barn and everything, and it wasn’t a lot — a couple of thousand — but, you know, we have such tight margins. That money could have paid for ten of us to get the train to a demo, or three times as many i
f we took cars. They really went for the heart of our operation. Of course, on paper, RAF’s money doesn’t get spent on demos and stuff like that — it wouldn’t look good. But organisations like Swedish Resistance and People’s Front, they know what we do with our money. And they exploit it. It won’t be long before someone ends up getting seriously hurt.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Since then we haven’t attempted any counter-attack, mainly because we haven’t been able to. It’s pretty quiet at the moment — no big demos or anything coming up. But soon. I’ve heard that the hate is stronger than it has been in a long time. Th—’

  A ringtone interrupts her, so loud that it masks the other sounds and makes the Dictaphone’s little speaker crackle horribly. The phone must have been lying right next to it.

  ‘Sorry,’ her voice says through the racket. ‘I need to take this, it’s someone I …’

  The sentence remains unfinished. The ringing suddenly stops.

  ‘Hello?’

  The voice on the other end is surprisingly audible. It’s a man.

  ‘Yeah … I don’t know,’ Lisa Swedberg says. ‘Eh? How the fuck did you find that out? You fucking … I’m sick and tired of this now. You can… can we talk about this some other time? No. It’s not like that at all. Nothing. I’m putting the phone down now. Don’t call again.’

  She hangs up.

  Only now, when the voice has gone, does it sink in, who it belonged to.

  Goffman.

  ‘Goffman,’ I say. ‘It was him, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I think so. The voice doesn’t turn up in any of the other clips, so that’s all we hear from him. But, yes, it’s pretty fucking similar.’

  ‘In that case, what has he got to do with her?’

  ‘Who knows? She did mention that Goffman had been on her case, but surely she meant after Heber’s murder, as part of the investigation.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, too.’ I glance at the Dictaphone, as if it were about to reveal everything, at any moment, fit all the pieces of the puzzle where they belong. ‘What happens next?’

  ‘Well, it’s a while later. It’s autumn. It’s November before they meet for an interview again.’

  We’re parked by the water down by Hornsbergs beach on Kungsholmen. It’s quiet, almost deserted here. A row of parked cars lines the street. The imposing bulk of Karlberg Palace sits across the water from us. Birck shifts position in his seat. I think he’s content, feeling almost peaceful.

  He clicks the Dictaphone, next file, PLAY.

  And it starts with Heber, alone. He’s speaking right into the microphone, as though he were afraid that someone was standing close by and listening in.

  ‘She called this morning,’ he says. ‘And I thought she seemed scared. I don’t know what’s going on, or whether something’s happened.’ Short pause. ‘We haven’t done an interview since May. I’ve got a few questions for her, and I was going to call her. But then she got in touch, wanted to know if we could meet up. Something was wrong — she sounded agitated.’ There’s another deliberate pause. ‘I might be imagining it.’

  There’s a crackle and then silence, and then she’s there. She kisses him loudly. The interview starts just like the others, with Heber asking questions and then listening to her long, thorough answers, but there’s something between them that wasn’t there before. Heber’s questions are posed more delicately, and her answers are more ardent — the kind of answers that people give when they’re deliberately ignoring whatever is actually occupying their thoughts.

  ‘You sounded different on the phone,’ he says. ‘There was something you wanted to talk about, wasn’t there?’

  ‘No, nothing special.’

  ‘I don’t really believe that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I know what you’re like when you’re hiding something.’

  ‘Er, no you don’t.’

  I wish I could see Lisa Swedberg’s facial expression. She breathes in and clicks her lighter, but without doing anything else.

  ‘I heard something that … rattled me a bit.’

  ‘What was that?’

  No answer.

  ‘Okay,’ Heber continues instead. ‘Who did you hear it from?’

  ‘Someone I know from RAF.’

  ‘Do I know who this person is?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Is it a man or a woman?’

  No answer.

  ‘When did he or she tell you about this?’ he says.

  ‘This morning. We met in Café Cairo, and then we left together.’

  ‘Do you know this person well?’

  ‘No, but I trust what they tell me.’

  ‘Right. So you think that what you’ve heard is true?’

  ‘Exactly. That’s the thing … that’s why I can’t just forget about it.’

  ‘I’m going to ask you one more time,’ he says. ‘Then I’ll drop it, because I’ve no right to demand answers from you. But it feels as though you want to tell me.’

  ‘I do,’ she says. ‘That’s why I rang. I felt that I needed to tell you, but I still don’t know if I can.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because I don’t know how far your professional confidentiality stretches.’

  ‘A long way,’ Heber says, with no obvious effort to convince her. ‘If you were to tell me you’ve committed a serious crime, I still wouldn’t be allowed to pass that information on. The only circumstances where I might possibly be entitled to do so — by which I mean the only time I wouldn’t be reprimanded by an ethics committee — would be if you were to tell me about a serious crime which will definitely take place. If there was a chance, I could try to prevent the crime. But not even then would I be obliged to do so. It is the researcher’s prerogative to determine whether or not they choose to report it, and I would choose not to. So, in effect, my professional confidentiality is absolute.’

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t tell anyone, even if that was the case? If you knew that a crime was going to be committed?’

  ‘Is that what it’s about?’

  She doesn’t answer.

  ‘I am certain,’ Heber says. ‘I wouldn’t say anything. Not even then.’

  ‘I think,’ she says slowly, ‘that someone might be about to get hurt. That’s it — I don’t know who or where.’

  ‘Is this a person on the “other side of the fence”, as you call it? Who’s going to get hurt?’

  ‘I think so. It’s really tense between the groups at the moment. There’s a small faction within RAF — well, not even really a faction, just a few people who’ve got together and started pulling in their own direction.’

  ‘How many of them are there?’

  ‘Roughly ten people, maybe one or two more, or less. Only three of four of them are involved in this, according to my contact.’

  She breathes out in the way that people who’ve just betrayed someone, or something, do. It’s taken a toll on her, and Heber’s noticed.

  ‘This group,’ he says. ‘They’ve started pulling in their own direction.’

  The window creaks as someone opens it, and the sound of the city sweeps into the apartment, like a wave. The lighter is being clicked — quick, hard clicks this time. She pulls in smoke, and then lets it out. Heber moves the Dictaphone closer to her.

  ‘They’re more extreme; they advocate more violence. They think everyone in RAF should arm themselves. I mean firearms — we’ve already got baseball bats, and knuckledusters, and stuff like that.’

  She takes a drag.

  ‘Do you know whether they’ve already got guns?’

  ‘I think so. I’ve not seen them myself, but the person I spoke to said they did.’

  ‘I wonder,’ he says, ‘whether you think they’re prepared to use them? The far r
ight have also been doing loads of this sort of thing, posing with Swedish flags and automatic weapons outside schools in immigrant areas — it’s a kind of propaganda. Very few, if any, of those organisations are actually ready to use them. Might the same thing apply to this grouping within RAF?’

  ‘Yes. But I’m certain that at least two or three of these people are capable of using guns. There’s something about them, just how brutal they are.’

  ‘You’ve no idea who it is that’s going to get hurt?’

  ‘No. No idea.’

  Lisa Swedberg takes several drags on her cigarette. Someone blasts their horn in a car on the street below. That sound is followed by voices, an argument happening at a distance.

  ‘How high up might this person be?’ Heber asks. ‘Do you know that?’

  ‘No. But I’m guessing it’s not someone too high up, nor very low down in the organisation, whichever organisation it is. Too low down is pointless, really. People at the top are impossible, they’re too well protected. Where’s your ashtray?’

  ‘I don’t have one — I usually use a saucer. I can get a new one. Hold on.’

  Heber gets up and goes off. A cupboard opens. She smokes more of the cigarette. The tobacco hisses and sizzles. She puts the saucer by the window with a slight clink.

  ‘Personally, I don’t give a fuck if some Nazi bastard dies,’ she says. ‘I’ve nothing against that, might even enjoy the thought of it. The higher up, the better. Sorry, it’s just … that’s how strong my hatred is. On the other hand, it would be an absolute disaster if it actually did happen. You remember in September, when The Party of the Swedes marched through town and people were throwing water-bombs at them? They kicked up a big fuss about that. Their support would increase.’

  Heber says nothing for a long time. Nor does she. Something is tapping away, maybe a fingernail on a glass.

  ‘Are you going to try and find out more about this?’ he asks. ‘About this … threat?’

  ‘I don’t know if I want to.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’