Ad mortem.
Silently, they dropped into the park, one by one, nodded to each other, gave a little shudder and sank down on the benches. An editor from Situation Sthlm came too. Vera had been one of their sellers for many years. He said a few moving words about vulnerability, and about Vera having been a source of vivid warmth. They all nodded in agreement.
Then they descended into their own memories.
Their beloved Vera was dead. She who never managed to get there, to life. Who wrestled with those figments of her imagination and those grimy childhood memories and never succeeded in gaining control herself.
Now she was dead.
Now she would never again stand in the setting sun and release her sudden hoarse laugh, or throw herself into complicated discussions about the lack of care for those she called ‘the people who have gone astray’.
The sledgehammer was no more.
Jelle had slipped in at the edge of the park, unnoticed. He sat down on a bench at the far end. A clear indication of his dual needs: I am here, at a distance, stay away. He didn’t know why he had made his way here. Or he did know. Here were the only people who knew who Vera Larsson was. The murdered woman from northern Uppland. There were no others. No others who cared, or who mourned. Only the people sitting here, on the benches round about.
A gathering of social casualties, of ragamuffins.
And him.
Who had loved her and seen her fall asleep and caressed her white scar and then left.
Like a cowardly rat.
Jelle got up again.
Finally, he had made up his mind. At first he had wandered around aimlessly hoping to stumble across a stairwell where he could shelter, or an open attic, anywhere he could be left in peace. But in the end he found himself back at his old shack beside Järla Lake. He was safe there. He wouldn’t be disturbed there.
He could get really drunk there.
Jelle never got drunk. He hadn’t touched spirits for years. Now he had some cash from the magazine and bought a half-bottle of vodka and four strong beers.
That ought to do it.
He sank down on the floor. A couple of thick roots had pushed up the planks and he felt the musty smell of damp soil. He had laid out some brown cardboard and covered that with newspapers here and there, that sufficed, at this time of year. In the winter he got cold as ice as soon as he fell asleep.
He looked at his hands. Emaciated, with thin long fingers. More like claws, he thought, when they grasped the first can of beer.
And the second.
Then he added to that with a few glugs of vodka. When the intoxication started to hit, he had already articulated the question five times, in a low voice.
‘Why the hell did I leave?’
And not found an answer. So he had reformulated the question, somewhat louder.
‘Why the hell didn’t I stay?’
A very similar question, five times again, and the same answer. No idea.
When the third beer and the fifth glug of vodka had settled in his body, he started crying.
Slow heavy tears that laboriously made their way down over his rough skin.
Jelle was crying.
You can cry because you have lost something, or because you haven’t been given something. You can cry for many reasons, trivial or deeply tragic, or for no reason at all. You just cry, because a sensation has swept past and lifted up a hatch to the past.
Jelle’s crying had an immediate cause. One-eyed Vera. But the tears had deeper sources than that, as he well knew. Sources that were about his divorced wife, about some vanished friends, but above all about the old woman on her deathbed. Mama. Who died six years ago. He had sat beside her deathbed, at the Radium Home. Her body, drugged with morphine, had rested peacefully under the thin covers, the hand he held was like a shrivelled bird’s claw. But he had felt how the hand had suddenly contracted a little and seen how his mother’s eyelids opened a slight gap into her pupils and heard how some words passed her narrow dried lips. He had leaned much closer to her face, closer than he had been for many, many years, and heard what she said. Every single word. Phrase for phrase.
Then she died.
And now he was lying here crying.
When the intoxication eventually led him into a mist of horrible memories, the first scream came. And when the images of smoke and fire and a bloody harpoon appeared again, he roared out loud.
* * *
He switched without effort between French and Portuguese. French in the left mobile, and Portuguese in the right one. He was sitting in his exclusive director’s office on the top floor on Sveavägen with a view of the churchyard with Palme’s grave.
An old object of hate in his circles.
Not the grave, but the man who was shot and ended up in the grave.
Olof Palme.
When he heard the news of the murder, Bertil Magnuson was sitting at the Alexandra nightclub with Latte and a couple of other jolly men from the same dark blue soil.
‘Champagne!’
Latte had called out, and champagne there was.
All night long.
Now it was twenty-five years later and the murder was still unsolved. Which hardly bothered Bertil. He was negotiating in the Congo. A landowner outside Walikale had demanded economic compensation on a level that was unreasonable. The company’s Portuguese local manager had problems. The company’s French agent wanted them to agree to the demands, but Bertil didn’t want to.
‘I’ll phone the military commander in Kinshasa.’
He phoned and booked a telephone meeting with yet another shady potentate. Reluctant landowners were a small problem for Bertil Magnuson. It always sorted itself out in the end.
With soft methods or with hard ones.
Unfortunately none of them were applicable to his real problem. The taped conversation.
He had found out that the call from Wendt couldn’t be traced. So that path was blocked. Thus he didn’t know whether Wendt had rung from abroad, or was in Sweden. But he assumed that Wendt wanted some sort of contact with him. Sooner or later. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any point in phoning at all. Would there?
Bertil tried to reason it out.
So he phoned K. Sedovic. A very reliable person. He asked him to check all the hotels and motels and hostels in the Stockholm area to see if there was any trace of Nils Wendt. If he was even in Sweden. A long shot, Bertil knew. And even if Wendt was in Sweden he wouldn’t necessarily be staying in a hotel or similar. Above all, not under his own name.
But what else could he do?
* * *
A pretty woman, Olivia thought. She had kept her figure, must have been successful as a female escort in younger years. Lived on her looks and her body. Olivia fast-forwarded the tape. She was sitting at her kitchen table with her laptop and looking at the interview that Eva Carlsén had sent a link to. With Jackie Berglund. It had taken place in a boutique in Östermalm. Weird & Wow on Sybillegatan. A typical boutique of its type, and for the area. Coquettish interior details combined with shockingly expensive designer clothes. A façade boutique, that was what Eva had called it, a façade for Jackie’s other business.
Red Velvet.
The interview had been recorded a couple of years earlier. It was Eva who was doing the interviewing, and it was clear that Jackie ran the boutique herself. Olivia searched online and quickly found it. And the same owner: Jackie Berglund.
That would be worth a visit, Olivia thought.
She looked at the rest of the interview. Eva had got Jackie to talk about her background as a female escort. It was nothing she was ashamed of, on the contrary, it had been a way for her to survive. She categorically denied that there had been any sexual services.
‘We were like geishas, sophisticated lady companions, we were invited to events and dinners to create a better atmosphere, besides, we made contacts.’
She returned to how she made contacts a couple of times. When Eva tried to establish what sort
of contacts this concerned, then Jackie’s answers were vague. Not to say dismissive. She thought it was private.
‘But were they business contacts?’ Eva asked.
‘What else would they be?’
‘Friend contacts.’
‘They were both.’
‘Do you still have those contacts today?’
‘Some of them.’
And thus it went on. It was clear what Eva was after, clear to Olivia at least. She wanted to establish whether contacts were the same as customers. Not customers in the boutique, but customers in the business that was using the boutique as a façade. Red Velvet.
Jackie’s escort service.
But Jackie was much too sharp to fall for that trap. She almost smiled when Eva pressed her a fourth time about her customers. The smile quickly vanished, however, when Eva asked a follow-up question.
‘Do you have a register of customers?’
‘For the boutique?’
‘No.’
‘Now I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘A register of customers for your other activity, as a supplier of call girls? Via Red Velvet.’
Olivia couldn’t believe she had dared ask that question. Her respect for Eva went up a few notches. And evidently nor could Jackie believe how someone had dared ask that question. She looked at Eva with an expression that suddenly came from another world altogether. A forbidden world. A look that reminded Olivia of Eva’s warning. A woman with that look wasn’t somebody you should go snooping on.
Especially if you were only twenty-three years old, and didn’t have anything concrete to go on.
Nothing at all.
And thought you were Sherlock Holmes.
Olivia couldn’t help but smile a little, at herself, right into her laptop. Suddenly she came to think about the German police that had created a Trojan that could get inside your laptop and record everything that went on in front of the camera.
She pulled the lid down a little.
It was almost midnight when Jelle woke up in his miserable shack. Slowly, arduously, with eyes that seemed to be glued shut and what felt like a snail in his mouth. One hell of a hangover and covered in vomit, something that he had no memory of. He slowly pushed himself up into a sitting position with his back against the wall. He saw the moonlight filter in between the boards. His brain felt like mashed potato. He sat there a long time and felt something building up. Inside him, a sort of heated fury forged through his chest and up into his head. He found it almost hard to see. Suddenly he jerked into action and stood up. He kicked the door open with considerable violence. The boards flew in all directions. The murder of Vera and his own treachery had taken up position in his body like an ironbar lever. He banged one hand against the doorpost and stepped out.
Out of the vacuum.
It was well past midnight when he started to climb up the steps. The stone steps to the left of the Katarina garage. Harald Lindberg’s steps. From Katarinavägen up to Klevgränd, four flights of steps, in all 119 stone steps up and just as many down again, with a streetlight beside each landing.
It was raining, a heavy lukewarm summer rain, but that didn’t bother him.
He had made up his mind that the time had come.
Long ago, back in the Stone Age, he had had an athletic body. Muscular and 192 centimetres tall. There was nothing athletic about him nowadays. He knew that his physical condition was abysmal, that his muscles had almost withered away, that his body had been lying fallow for many years. That he was almost a wreck.
Almost.
Now he was going to change that.
He made his way up the stone steps, step by step, and it took him some time. It took six minutes up to Klevgränd and four minutes down again. And when he started to go up a second time, that was the end.
Absolutely.
He sank down on the first landing and felt how his heart pumped. He could almost hear it through his ribs. How it struggled like a jackhammer and couldn’t understand what this person was trying to do, and who he thought he was.
Or what he was capable of.
Not very much. Yet. Just now – nothing. Just now he was sitting, perspiring and panting and trying with great effort to press the right buttons on his mobile. In the end he managed it. In the end he found the film online.
The murder of Vera.
The film began by showing the back of a man who was copulating with a woman beneath him. Him and Vera. He started the film again. Could you see his face? Doubtful. But nevertheless. He knew that Forss and his henchmen would closely examine every frame. The man in the caravan must be of considerable interest to them. What would happen if they could identify him? At the scene of a murder? And Forss of all people?
Jelle didn’t like the idea. He didn’t like Forss. A piece of shit. But Forss could cause an awful lot of hassle if he thought that Jelle was involved in the murder of Vera.
And that could happen soon.
Jelle let the film roll on a little. When they started to beat up Vera, he clicked away and looked down over Katarinavägen. What cowardly bastards, he thought, they waited until I’d left. They didn’t dare come near when I was still there. They wanted to get at Vera when she was on her own.
Poor Vera.
He shook his head a little and rubbed his eyes. What feelings had he actually had for Vera? Before what happened had actually happened?
Sorrow.
From the very first second he met her and saw how her eyes clung, leechlike, onto his as if he was a rope ladder to life. And he wasn’t. He had climbed down quite a long way the last few years. Not all the way down, admittedly, not to where Vera was, but he wasn’t many rungs above her.
Now she was dead and he was sitting here. Absolutely knackered. On some stone steps close to Slussen, and thinking about her, and how he had left her on her own in the caravan and walked away. Now he was going to do some walking here. Up and down the steps. Night after night, until he was fit enough to be able to do what he felt he was obliged to do.
Deal with the men who had murdered Vera.
* * *
It was as Bertil Magnuson expected. K. Sedovic had given his report: no Nils Wendt at any hotel in Stockholm. But where could he be hanging out? If he was even in Stockholm? He hardly had any contacts left from the old days, Bertil had already checked that, discreetly. Wendt was not in anybody’s address book nowadays.
So what now?
Bertil got up and crossed to the window. The cars rolled past down on Sveavägen. You couldn’t hear them. A few years earlier they had installed exclusive windows with insulating glass on the entire street side of the building. A sensible investment, Bertil thought, and then another thought came into his head.
Or idea, rather.
A sudden realisation.
About where Nils Wendt might well be found with his repulsive recording.
The boy with wavy blond hair took it easy. The skateboard had a crack down the middle. He had found it in a skip the day before and repaired it as best he could. The wheels were worn and he was on a steep hill so he took it easy. Tarmac. Then there was a long straight stretch towards the high rise buildings with their gaudy colours, Flemingsberg, with small groves of trees in front. Here and there, a playground. On almost every balcony, a satellite dish stuck out. A lot of people here wanted to watch TV channels from other countries.
The boy looked towards one of the blue buildings, up at the seventh floor.
She sat beside a formica table in the kitchen, smoking, turned towards a little gap where she had opened the window. She didn’t want smoke in her flat. She would have liked to have stopped smoking altogether. She’d been wanting to do that for years, but it was the only bad habit she had and she knew that the sum of all bad habits was constant. If she stopped smoking she would only start with something else.
Something worse.
She was called Ovette Andersson and was the mother of Acke, a boy with wavy blond hair just over ten years old.
/> Ovette was forty-two.
She blew out some smoke through the gap and turned towards the clock on the wall, spontaneously. The clock had stopped. It had been stopped a long time. New batteries, new tights, new bed sheets, new existence, she thought. The list was overwhelmingly long. And at the very top was a pair of new soccer boots for Acke. He would get them as soon as she could afford it, she had promised him that. After the rent and all the rest had been paid. And all the rest included some big debts which the bailiffs were collecting and instalments to pay for some cosmetic surgery. She had enlarged her breasts some years ago, and borrowed money to do it. Now she had to look after every penny.
‘Hi!’
Acke put his cracked skateboard down and went straight to the fridge to get some cold water. He loved cold water. Ovette always put a couple of litres in a jar in the fridge so it would be waiting for him when he came home.
They lived in a two-room flat. Two rooms and a kitchen and a bathroom in one of the high rise blocks. Acke went to Annerstad School down in the local centre. Now it was the summer holidays. Ovette pulled Acke towards her.
‘I think I’ll have to work this evening.’
‘I know.’
‘I might be rather late.’
‘I know.’
‘Have you got your soccer training?’
‘Yeah.’
Acke was lying, but Ovette didn’t know that.
‘Don’t forget your key.’
‘No.’
Acke had had his own key as long as he remembered. He looked after himself for a large part of the day. The part when his mum was in the city working. Then he usually played soccer until it got too dark and then he went home and heated up what his mum had prepared. It always tasted good. Then he played his video games.
Unless he was doing something else.
* * *
Olivia was in a hurry and in fact she hated hypermarkets. Especially the ones she had never been in before. She hated wandering about more or less totally lost in narrow aisles with overfull shelves trying to find a little can of vongole, and in the end be forced to seek out some sort of staff person in a semi-uniform.
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