To the Top of the Mountain

by Arne Dahl

  They stared at him.

  ‘There’s actually a door between the cloakroom and the pub,’ said the oldest, insulted. ‘We can’t hear everything that goes on inside.’

  ‘We had a pretty bloody rowdy queue to deal with,’ said the biggest. ‘Lots of difficult immigrants.’

  ‘Immigrants?’ exclaimed Hjelm. It was clear that the man wasn’t used to using any other word than ‘wog’. He continued. ‘Still, you let thirty or so drunk Hammarby fans in, one of whom turned out to be a murderer.’

  ‘You know where you are with Hammarby fans,’ said the third one.

  ‘I see,’ Hjelm said sourly, letting the subject lie. ‘Couldn’t you have reacted a bit quicker when twenty men came running out of the pub all at once?’

  ‘There was a hell of a crush then, so it wasn’t exactly easy to move in the opposite direction.’

  ‘Anyway, our job’s to check people going in, not coming out.’

  ‘We didn’t know what had happened, did we? We can’t just stop people leaving the pub.’

  ‘What kind of people were coming out?’

  ‘Men. Just men. Hammarby fans, mainly, some older builders too.’

  ‘Builders? Like construction workers?’

  ‘No, like bodybuilders. There aren’t any construction jobs any more.’

  ‘Any . . . immigrants?’

  ‘Eventually some wo— gentlemen with darkish hair, yeah,’ said the biggest. ‘I seem to remember that.’

  ‘But you must know all this,’ said the oldest. ‘You had a man there.’

  Hjelm stared at Holm. Holm stared at Hjelm.

  ‘A man there?’ they said in unison. It didn’t exactly sound professional, but what can you do? What were they supposed to do with their surprise?

  ‘Yeah,’ said the biggest of the doormen. ‘We’d just managed to push our way in and block the inner door. He hadn’t quite made it out. I pushed him back. Then he flashed his ID and ran out.’

  ‘His ID?’ they said in unison.

  ‘His police ID.’

  They were paralysed.

  Eventually, Kerstin Holm said: ‘You didn’t think it was strange that a policeman wanted to get out after a crime had been committed?’

  ‘I don’t know how you work, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘And you can’t remember what he looked like?’

  ‘It was pretty crazy, to put it mildly. Some guy was lying in a pool of blood. Everyone was screaming, people were pushing towards the door. All I saw was a police ID being waved, and let him out.’

  ‘To freedom,’ said Paul Hjelm.

  7

  VIGGO NORLANDER WAS on great form. On the ball. With it.

  To an external observer, he might have seemed like a highly ambitious policeman who wanted to solve a complicated murder case whatever the cost. He gave orders, directed and dashed around. He interrogated, bossed about and shone.

  Arto Söderstedt wasn’t an external observer. He was a sceptical observer. And Viggo Norlander wasn’t a highly ambitious policeman who wanted to solve a complicated murder case whatever the cost. He was a highly ambitious new father who, whatever the cost, wanted to spend Midsummer with his baby daughter.

  Söderstedt didn’t find that quite as honourable. He thought back to all the times he had cancelled Midsummer celebrations, remembering the faces of his disappointed, sobbing sons and daughters, and felt a pang of envy for Norlander’s purposefulness. He had never been so single-minded himself.

  On the other hand, his fatherhood hadn’t been as exceptional. On the contrary, he considered himself an unusually normal father. Anja’s five pregnancies had passed with customary minor complications, and the children had plopped out a few weeks too early or a few weeks too late, completely healthy and white as chalk. His paternity could never have been in doubt. Unless there was another ghostly-white Finn living in one of the Söderstedt wardrobes, springing out like a jack-in-the-box as soon as he had cleared off to the police station.

  Or the courtroom. Because Söderstedt’s own little quirk had nothing to do with family life. It was the way his career had panned out that was the unusual thing. And the secret one. When he was very young, he had almost unconsciously raced his way through Finnish law school at record speed, become the young legal genius at a well-regarded law firm and, aged barely twenty-five, been defending the scum of the earth. The well-off scum of the earth, that is. Those who had the means to appoint a top lawyer like Arto Söderstedt in order to escape the long arm of the law. And to piss all over it just as naturally as a dog pisses on a lamp post.

  Eventually, he had simply had enough. Cast his Hugo Boss suits and Armani ties aside, scrapped the Porsche, given up his Finnish citizenship and fled the limelight to Sweden, becoming . . . a policeman. In the stubborn, lingering belief that, despite everything, the system can only be changed from within.

  And that afternoon, with the midsummer sun slowly starting to descend outside the walls, he was sitting in the Kumla Bunker with the other kind of scum of the earth. The kind that didn’t have the means to appoint a top lawyer like Arto Söderstedt in order to escape the long arm of the law.

  He didn’t feel entirely satisfied.

  But Viggo Norlander was in his element. Completely disinterested in formal rank, he had relegated Bernt Nilsson from the Security Service and Lars Viksjö from Närke CID to the sidelines. Or was it the substitutes’ bench?

  Norlander raised his inward-backward-sloping mug, beaming with energy, from the stack of papers in front of him, and peered out over the gathering in the cold little interrogation room.

  ‘Shall we see if we can sum up before we let him in?’ he asked, without waiting for an answer. ‘Erik Svensson, the guard, saw that Lordan Vukotic was still curled up in his bed after they were woken up at half six. Vukotic announced from under the covers that he wasn’t feeling well and asked to skip breakfast, which he was allowed to do. When the bomb went off at 08.36, that meant he hadn’t been out of his cell since the evening before. Can we draw any conclusions from that?’

  Here – possibly – he paused for an answer.

  ‘It’s surely not out of the question that there’s a connection between him missing breakfast and the explosion,’ said Bernt Nilsson. ‘But in that case, what kind of connection? Was he really tinkering around under the covers with a bomb of his own, one that went wrong and detonated by itself?’

  ‘Hands above the covers,’ said Arto Söderstedt, receiving glances of the same kind that an orang-utan in a ball gown would receive.

  ‘Alternative?’ said Norlander coldly.

  ‘We don’t know enough,’ said Söderstedt, defusing the situation. ‘There could be any number of reasons why he chose to go without breakfast. Maybe he really did feel ill. Maybe Lordan Vukotic was telling the truth for the first time in his life. Let’s keep going.’

  Norlander kept going.

  ‘“A couple of Slavs of the same type”, Zoran Koco, Petar Klovic and Risto Petrovic, they’re keeping their mouths shut. All three of them are Rajko Nedic’s men, just like Vukotic was, so they’re not going to talk. Did anyone get a sense that any of them knew anything?’

  Three shaking heads.

  ‘They actually seemed quite jittery,’ said Nilsson. ‘Even a notorious war criminal like Klovic seemed worried. Vukotic was really close to Nedic, who was meant to be untouchable. You could call him Nedic’s right-hand man. That much we know. Still, someone managed to get at that right hand, and in the very heart of the Kumla Bunker. Maybe we’re looking at the start of a power struggle in the drug business. Maybe that’s what Klovic and the boys think, anyway. Though there’s nothing else to indicate that.’

  Söderstedt glanced furtively at Bernt Nilsson. He didn’t exactly correspond to his – perhaps a touch unjust – picture of a Security Service man. No far-fetched conspiracy theories, no bind of absolute secrecy, none of the old nonsense that had almost scuppered the A-Unit’s first case: the Power Killer. Maybe there was a shake-up
going on within the Security Service. Though maybe that was just a far-fetched conspiracy theory.

  ‘War criminal?’ was all he said.

  Nilsson looked at him.

  ‘It’s been confirmed that Klovic was a camp guard in Bosnia,’ he said. ‘He’s a Bosnian Serb. Should really be in court in The Hague, but apparently there’s not enough evidence for a trial. Petrovic was also involved in the ethnic cleansing, though in Croatia. Of Serbs. But under Rajko Nedic’s protection, the former enemies have been united by a common love, the love of weapons.’

  ‘So Nedic happily works with war criminals?’

  ‘They’re brilliant workers, aren’t they? Ready trained, as it were. Nedic’s been in Sweden for maybe thirty years now; he got Swedish citizenship back in the seventies, but he seems to have a whole load of contacts from the paramilitary groups on all sides in the former Yugoslavia. A lot of the drugs are supposed to come from down there.’

  ‘But in this case, we can just put the Slavs on the shelf?’

  ‘Probably. It’s one of them who’s the victim, after all.’

  ‘So,’ resumed Norlander, ‘we don’t have much to go on. Our general enquiries trying to find out what Lordan Vukotic spent yesterday evening doing didn’t give anything. It seems that the governor was right: he really did keep himself to himself. Ate dinner at half four. The time between then and lock-in at half seven is a blank, no one is saying anything about those three hours. And his deaf cell neighbours don’t have anything to say but—’

  ‘What,’ Söderstedt interrupted.

  ‘What?’ said Norlander.

  ‘His deaf cell neighbours don’t have anything to say but “what”.’

  The stout Lars Viksjö burst out into roaring laughter. Bernt Nilsson and Viggo Norlander raised their eyebrows. Söderstedt chuckled to himself; irritating Norlander had its charms. Upsetting his energetic calculations.

  Norlander continued, however, relatively unfazed – and more like his normal self. ‘They don’t know anything except that their eardrums suddenly burst. Just like that, they sprang a leak.’

  ‘There’s one still remaining,’ said Bernt Nilsson. ‘How does it feel to be meeting him again?’

  Söderstedt and Norlander glanced at one another. Ties from the past. They didn’t say anything, just let Göran Andersson in and looked at him. His tall figure clad in a bright green jumpsuit. Feet shoved into a pair of worn-out Birkenstocks. His face was completely different. Instead of the impeccable, neat-haired bank worker there was – well, what could you call it? A thinker? His blond hair was sprouting in all directions and he had an untidy beard which seemed to have been stuck haphazardly onto various parts of his face; but his gaze, that bright blue gaze, was crystal clear. The only thing spoiling the image of a fully-fledged artist were the two wads of bloody cotton wool sticking from his ears.

  Leonardo da Vinci, thought Söderstedt.

  Peter Dahl, thought Norlander.

  The truth was somewhere in between.

  How many people had this man killed?

  Was it five? Or six?

  ‘Hi,’ said Göran Andersson. ‘What’ve you done with Hjelm?’

  It took a moment before they registered what he was asking.

  ‘We don’t work together any more,’ said Söderstedt.

  ‘What?’ said Göran Andersson.

  Söderstedt chuckled. ‘His deaf cell neighbours don’t have anything to say but “what”.’

  ‘Can you hear anything at all?’ he shouted.

  Andersson chuckled too. ‘Just talk loudly. They say that burst eardrums heal, but that it’ll take time and will probably leave scars that distort the soundscape for ever.’

  ‘How’s your family?’ Söderstedt asked loudly.

  ‘Good, thanks,’ Andersson said just as loudly, as though he was listening to a Walkman. ‘Jorjie is almost two now. We’ve only met in here. Dad in the Kumla Bunker.’

  ‘Your son’s called Jorjie?’

  ‘He’s actually called Jorge. Probably the blondest Jorge on earth.’

  Söderstedt and Norlander exchanged astounded glances.

  ‘Jorge?’ they said in unison.

  ‘After the man who saved my life, yeah. Jorge Chavez. And Paul, after Hjelm. Paul Jorge Andersson. The two policemen who dragged me up from the underworld. Now Jorjie can continue the job. And Lena, of course. She’s waiting for me. She’s holding me up with her frail arms all the time.’

  ‘I’ve heard everything now,’ said Söderstedt. ‘Do you still play darts?’

  ‘Never again,’ said Göran Andersson calmly.

  ‘Tell us what you know now,’ Viggo Norlander interrupted.

  Andersson turned his clear gaze towards Norlander.

  ‘Wasn’t it you who got crucified?’ he asked.

  Norlander instinctively looked down at the circular scars on his hands. Stigmata.

  ‘Just tell us what you know.’

  ‘Not much to say,’ said Göran Andersson. ‘Breakfast, back to the books, bang. The feeling of blood running from your ears is a deeply unpleasant sensation. Mystical, almost.’

  ‘You have the cell next to Lordan Vukotic, don’t you?’

  ‘Had. I think they’ve shut that section down. I don’t know where I’ll be tonight.’

  ‘What is it you’re studying?’ Söderstedt asked.

  His eyes turned back to the fair-skinned Finland Swede.

  ‘I’ve noticed a certain discrepancy between your respective interests,’ he said, good-naturedly.

  ‘You could say that,’ said Söderstedt, equally good-naturedly.

  ‘Art. Once I’ve studied art history, I’m going to start painting too. Theory and practice will become one.’

  ‘You keep yourself to yourself; Vukotic did the same,’ said Norlander. ‘Maybe that creates a kind of bond between you. Did you see him this morning?’

  ‘No,’ said Andersson. ‘We normally see each other at breakfast, but not today.’

  ‘He was seen at dinner at about half four yesterday afternoon. From then until lock-up around three hours later, no one seems to have seen him. Did you see him during that time?’

  ‘You’ve got to understand, I stay in my cell. That’s what I do. I eat in the canteen, I’m let out into the yard for a few minutes, I study in my cell. Nothing else.’

  Söderstedt looked around. Was he the only one who had felt a slight hesitation in Göran Andersson’s reply?

  ‘You didn’t answer the question,’ was all he said.

  Andersson was silent. Unmoving. The way that he had waited for his victims. And yet not. He shrugged.

  ‘If I was a different person today, if I wasn’t the person I’ve become, this would’ve been a bargaining position. Then, my friends, I would’ve started asking if it wasn’t time for release on temporary licence, or at least longer visiting times.’

  It was silent in the bare little room. Four pairs of police eyes trained on an apparently transformed murderer’s.

  ‘But I am the person that I am now,’ he said. ‘Just before lock-up, I heard a faint moaning out in the corridor. Short, like something escaping through gritted teeth. I peered out and saw Lordan Vukotic dragging himself into his cell.’

  ‘What do you mean, “dragging”?’ asked Norlander.

  ‘He glanced towards my cell. His face looked the same as usual, but it was obvious that he was seriously injured. His legs were giving way under him. It was the look of death I saw.’

  ‘And you didn’t do anything about it?’

  ‘Look, I hate this world. I still don’t understand how I could’ve ended up here. I don’t want anything to do with it. If he chose not to report it himself, why should I?’

  ‘You haven’t changed as much as I thought,’ said Söderstedt.

  ‘What’s your understanding of why the injured Vukotic was blown up the next day, then?’ asked Norlander.

  ‘It’s quite obvious,’ said Göran Andersson, stroking his thin beard. ‘Someone was cove
ring his tracks.’

  And what tracks they turned out to be.

  At about half five, a joint preliminary report from the forensic technicians and the medical examiner arrived. A long, difficult document came spilling out of the primitive fax machine in the little interrogation room in Kumla prison.

  The medical examiner, Qvarfordt, had solved his autopsy puzzle. Viggo Norlander couldn’t quite get away from the image of the staring eye in the lump of material which had been scraped down from the wall. It looked accusingly at him while he struggled his way through the medical examiner’s report.

  ‘I don’t know how they’ve managed it,’ he eventually said, ‘but the fact is, they’ve worked out that Lordan Vukotic’s spleen was ruptured, his left tibia broken, and both shoulders pulled out of their sockets. In that condition, the explosion must’ve almost come as a relief.’

  ‘So he can hardly have been busy with his own explosive charge under the covers, then,’ said Bernt Nilsson.

  ‘By no means,’ said Söderstedt, fishing out the other part of the report, the forensic report. ‘They’ve found a microscopic detonation mechanism. Controlled remotely. And the explosives are assumed to have been some kind of solution. Liquid form. Though they don’t really know what it is, just that it’s extremely volatile.’

  Four policemen, of different origin and different character, each digested this information.

  The stout Viksjö, who evidently had the most well-trimmed digestive system, concluded: ‘Lordan Vukotic gets a real going-over yesterday evening. He crawls back to his cell and skips breakfast so that no one discovers he’s had a thrashing. After that, he’s blown into a thousand pieces with the help of a highly sophisticated explosive device. How should we interpret that?’

  ‘It could be banal, some scumbag with good knowledge of explosives beats him up for some trivial reason and then covers up their crime with another crime,’ said Bernt Nilsson. ‘Silence the victim, who’s also the only witness.’

  ‘Or it might not be banal at all,’ said Söderstedt. ‘That leaves us with two questions. Why did Vukotic try to cover up the fact that he’d been battered? And why was he killed, despite his silence?’