To the Top of the Mountain

by Arne Dahl

  ‘Nazis, more specifically?’

  ‘Don’t know. I’ll check with Zoran.’

  ‘For God’s sake, “don’t know”! It’s your job to know. It’s about the man that killed Lordan, and you’re saying “don’t know”. Wake up, Ljubomir, otherwise I’ll replace you.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t say sorry. How’s the surveillance going?’

  ‘They said everything’s quiet. No one has gone into the bank with our briefcase. It’s more difficult if they’ve got rid of the briefcase. But no one has been in the box, that much we know.’

  ‘“They said”? Haven’t you been yourself?’

  Ljubomir was silent. It was a silent obstinacy. He had no intention of going there. He refused to go to that place. That was where his limit lay. The great man could see it. He could see it in Ljubomir’s eyes. And he was content. For the time being.

  ‘Fine,’ said the great man, gesturing with his index finger again. Though in the other direction.

  It meant ‘clear off now’, that much Ljubomir had learned.

  The great man never made that gesture in his private role.

  But in his private moments, he wasn’t the great man.

  Privately, he was Rajko, the childhood friend. From the little mountain village in eastern Serbia.

  Four hundred and one. Shit, no. The numbers stopped at two hundred here. Shitty little bank. Ugh.

  It was a drudge. Like a nine-to-five job.

  Whatever that was. He had never had one.

  Four hundred and one, another one gone.

  He could hear how hollow his song sounded.

  25

  PARTY TIME! IT was 4 p.m. on Monday 28 June, and everyone was bursting with excitement about the obligatory PR party being held for the World Police and Fire Games.

  The so-called Police Olympiad would take place between 16 and 24 July, with an opening ceremony in Stockholm Stadium on Saturday the 17th. Twelve thousand police officers, firemen, customs officers and prison guards from all corners of the world would compete in sixty-eight different sports. One thousand, nine hundred medals would be dealt out. It would be the biggest sporting event that Stockholm had ever hosted, the 1912 Olympics and 1992 World Cup included.

  Paul Hjelm couldn’t quite see the appeal of watching all of these more or less mediocre sportsmen and -women in action. It screamed mutual admiration society. Unless you had friends or relatives taking part, it couldn’t be much more stimulating than a sixth division football match.

  But it was a question of taste.

  There were other problems with the games, and they weren’t.

  For days, the media had been reporting what everyone on the inside already knew: that the finances were a mess. Those in charge of the budget for the World Police and Fire Games had presented the most hair-raising, overly optimistic calculations to the city of Stockholm – and with the help of difficult-to-explain PR trips to various holiday destinations, they had sent the budget far past the verge of bankruptcy. Stockholm’s taxpayers had been forced to step in with large sums of money so that the thirty thousand visitors wouldn’t arrive to a complete bankrupt mess.

  And now they were having a party. A PR party for the glorious event. All while the Sickla Slaughterers went free. It felt a touch embarrassing.

  Hjelm followed a waitress’s back with his eyes. It disappeared out through the door of the interrogation room where all of the Kvarnen-related questioning had taken place. She was the last to be seen that day: the Chinese waitress who had served Gang One and the ‘policeman’ in Kvarnen on 23 June. They couldn’t show her any pictures of 1A or 1B – the first one’s face blown to pieces, the second full of bullet holes – but she could look at 1C. They had tried to make him look as though he were still alive. It hadn’t worked too well. The waitress had screamed immediately. Once she had calmed down, she nodded and said: ‘Yeah, I think he was there.’

  About the ‘policeman’, she said: ‘I don’t remember him very well. Compared to the others, he was pretty plain. The others were tough guys, that much I know. Gangster types. I think he had dark hair, wasn’t too old, not more than forty.’

  And now she was gone. A back which had soon disappeared from memory.

  Hjelm looked at Holm.

  ‘Should we go and party, then?’ he asked, swinging his arms playfully.

  She looked at him indulgently.

  ‘The Police Olympiad,’ she said, pulling her black leather jacket on over her black T-shirt. Her tone of voice wasn’t to be messed with.

  ‘Positive thinking,’ said Hjelm, pulling on his worn old linen jacket. ‘Apparently there’s free booze.’

  ‘And as we all know, sport and booze do go hand in hand.’

  ‘Sport, drink, corruption, doping, oxygen tents and Bingolotto.’

  They walked through the police station. It had been eerily empty for the past few days. An empty building. Das öde Haus. Forgotten by God and by man. A ruin by Caspar David Friedrich. Today, it had slightly more life in it. Though only slightly. The first proper holiday week had begun.

  Holiday, Kerstin Holm thought. That thing that others had.

  She had slowly begun to readjust to life in Stockholm. Her time in Gothenburg hadn’t been especially successful. She had been on loan to her old police district where her ex also worked. Her former fiancé; a man who, in the not too distant future, would play a crucial role in her life. Though she knew nothing about that yet. All she knew was that, during those wretched few months in Gothenburg, their icy relationship had eventually covered the entire police station in frost, and she had been forced to leave. Move on. To a district in the suburbs. To Angered. Rowdy but hardly stimulating. She went about her work among criminals who laughed at her. Called her an upper-class police whore and other such niceties. She didn’t even bring herself to contact her old church choir in Haga. She was just on loan after all. She could be called back to Stockholm at any moment.

  She got a sense of how professional hockey players must feel. You could be flung from one side of the continent to the other between one day and the next. The difference – again – was the money. For several million, you could put up with a lot. She was back now, in any case. She had managed to find a small flat right in the centre of things. On Regeringsgatan. She could feel her spirits rising. She had started jogging through Stockholm’s City district. She had gone back to her church choir. She was on the right track again. But a National Police Board PR party? No. That was more like a problem on the tracks. Or even a derailment.

  They came to the A-Unit’s room. Hultin had gone, Söderstedt had gone, Norlander had gone, Nyberg had gone, Chavez was still there. He sat, jabbing away at the keyboard.

  ‘Ten past,’ said Hjelm, jabbing at his watch. ‘Remember “arses first”.’

  Chavez looked up, as though from another planet. He stared blankly at them. His eyes looked like little computer screens.

  ‘Hello yourself,’ said Kerstin Holm, smiling.

  ‘Damn,’ said Chavez, confused. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Are those meant to be party clothes?’ asked Hjelm.

  Chavez looked down. During the summer months, he always wore an utterly plain, permanently crumpled linen suit. Hjelm had to confess that he had copied him. Though only the jacket. Jeans or shorts would do on the bottom half. Today it was jeans.

  In conclusion: none of them was dressed for a party.

  Though Kerstin always wore the right clothes, both men were in agreement about that. She had an impressive ability to always seem well dressed, regardless of what she was wearing. At that very moment, both men wondered whether it was discriminatory to think that.

  ‘What were you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, making a few final jabs at his keyboard and pulling on his jacket. ‘I was reading all I could find about the Sickla Slaughter online. I found a chat, a conversation group, which devotes all its time on it. The Sickla Chat.’

  ‘Like FASK?�
� asked Hjelm.

  ‘Exactly. Fans of American Serial Killers. A cheery club!’

  ‘Aha,’ said Jalm and Halm, exchanging knowing glances.

  He looked at them, confused, as they went out into the corridor. They understood one another so well, in a completely different way from him and Hjelm. Not like two well-functioning policemen of slightly different generations, but like . . . well, like yin and yang.

  ‘Yup,’ he said, ‘there’s a countrywide discussion about Sickla going on. It’s not completely free from racial aspects, that much I can say. You can have a printout of the entire chat tomorrow morning, if you want. It’s very informative.’

  He glanced furtively at them as they wandered on through the labyrinthine corridors of the police station. He couldn’t help wondering what had happened while they were over in the US together. They were close in a way that implied there had been intimacy. He delved further back in time. Hadn’t it been there already, during the hunt for the Power Killer? Various overlooked signs? Small, fleeting touches? Loaded glances? Furtive hints of tenderness? A hole emerged in the wall he thought he had built so carefully between his professional and private lives. His job on the one hand, the music, the jazz, the double bass on the other – and the women. When he saw Hjelm and Holm deep in relaxed conversation in the corridors of the police station, he thought, to his surprise: imagine if you’re lacking something essential as a policeman if you don’t embrace your private side. Imagine if all of those small agreements, the caring, and instances of forethought which went into cultivating and holding a loving relationship together were actually necessary for being a good policeman. Even though he wouldn’t readily admit it, Paul Hjelm was still his role model as an officer. The way that Paul and Kerstin had worked out what had gone on between Gang One and Gang Two in Kvarnen, how they had come up with something from all that background noise – would that have been possible for anyone else other than those two? Would it have been possible for Jorge Chavez and Paul Hjelm? Or did the whole thing depend on that partial hint of patience and gentleness normally seen in relationships? The hardships of a real relationship were relatively unknown to him, however; he still put his faith in the easy freedom of looser unions.

  His thoughts drifted some distance before they were pulled back. The trio had reached the rooms which had been temporarily transformed for the party. Each of them was handed a glass of champagne from somewhere, and they heard some sporadic applause, following the noise to see Waldemar Mörner climbing down from a rostrum. They had definitely missed a high point. Mörner looked incredibly happy, a broad grin revealing his brilliant-white teeth. He put his arm around Jan-Olov Hultin who, faced with the National Police Commissioner, managed to crack a smile; they could see him simmering behind the smile, and turned sharply away.

  The rooms looked like completely normal police-station offices. The only extravagance was a couple of banners on the walls, proclaiming the ‘World Police and Fire Games’. Quite a few policemen and -women had managed to tear themselves away from the stacks of unsolved cases piling up more and more uncontrollably in the country’s increasingly unmanned police stations. A familiar face or two slipped past; the trio nodded now and then, blurting out something amusing from time to time, saw Söderstedt talking to a few people, and saw Nyberg with a group to one side, coffee cups in hand: a thin, well-dressed man with a black ring of hair around his skull; a younger man with well-groomed hair and a small, black beard. And a short-haired woman that caused Jorge Chavez’s Latin heart to skip a beat.

  They joined the end of the conversation. The thin man said to Nyberg: ‘Yup, the holiday starts in a couple of days. I’m going out to the cottage to recharge the batteries. Do you remember the cottage, Gunnar?’

  Then their peace was shattered.

  ‘Paedophiles!’ Paul Hjelm shouted. ‘Are you having a coffee?’

  ‘We. Are. Not. Paedophiles,’ Gunnar Nyberg said emphatically, looming menacingly over the trio. Then he made introductions in all directions. It was utterly incomprehensible, so they took matters into their own hands.

  ‘Of course,’ exclaimed Kerstin Holm as she greeted the thin man with the bald head. ‘The Marathon Man! Where did you come this year?’

  ‘Ludvig Johnsson,’ the Marathon Man said politely. ‘I came ninety-sixth, my first time under a hundred. And you’re the miraculously resurrected A-Unit, I assume?’

  ‘Part of it,’ Holm nodded.

  Hjelm greeted the younger man with the little beard, and gave a start when he said: ‘Detective Superintendent Ragnar Hellberg.’

  He didn’t look more than thirty. A superintendent younger than Chavez? Was that possible? Was this really Party-Ragge?

  ‘I tend to give the title to see people’s reactions. They’re often like that,’ Hellberg added, laughing, when he saw the reaction.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Hjelm. ‘I can normally keep a neutral face.’

  ‘That’s not exactly true,’ said Holm, giving him a furtive glance.

  Hjelm started to wander deeper into excuse territory.

  ‘I knew that there was a Hellberg and that he was young, but we’ve never met before, so . . .’

  ‘Give up,’ Kerstin Holm whispered, and Hjelm gave up.

  Chavez gave the considerably taller woman a kiss on her hand. She looked sceptically at him while Gunnar Nyberg said: ‘Don’t lick the lady’s hand, you ruffian.’

  ‘Sara Svenhagen,’ said the lady.

  ‘Jorge Chavez,’ said the ruffian, adding: ‘Svenhagen?’

  ‘That’s also a standard reaction,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘Yep, Chief Forensic Technician Brynolf Svenhagen is my dad. Just so that’s out there.’

  ‘Unexpected quality from the chief technician’s gene pool,’ Chavez said clumsily.

  ‘Give up,’ Kerstin Holm whispered, which Chavez took as a hint to keep trying.

  ‘You don’t expect someone investigating paedophiles to look like this.’

  At which point someone should have shown compassion and removed him from the stage, throwing him out of a side door. That didn’t happen, however. The conversation was already under way.

  ‘How come you recognised me?’ Ludvig Johnsson asked Kerstin Holm.

  ‘I’ve started running a bit myself,’ she said, receiving a surprised glance from Hjelm.

  ‘Are you getting anywhere with the Sickla Slaughter?’ Ragnar Hellberg asked Paul Hjelm. ‘It seems to be a real hornets’ nest.’

  ‘You could say that. We’ve started to close in on a few leads, but no arrests are imminent.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Hellberg. ‘You sound like a press release. And now you’re going to steal Gunnar from me, too.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Gunnar Nyberg. ‘I’m struggling to tear myself away from all those nice web pages on the Internet.’

  ‘Gunnar working on a computer seems like a contradiction to me,’ said Hjelm. ‘He’s the most earthbound policeman I’ve ever worked with. He once wrote off a car by tackling it. With a bullet in his neck.’

  ‘He seems to have lots of strings to his bow,’ Ragnar Hellberg laughed.

  Sara Svenhagen, meanwhile, had been left at the mercy of the strange Latino man. Her thoughts were elsewhere, and the terrible introduction had been followed by sluggish distraction. Not from his side, though. Quite the opposite. Through sheer hard work, he had eventually managed to find a common interest, the Internet, strangely enough, and suddenly they were the only ones left, giving one another tips on how to deal with JavaScript. He was also courting her ceaselessly. Swapping her firmly rooted coffee mug for a champagne glass, toasting her, looking at her attentively, giving her compliments of a kind she had never heard before, incredibly aware of her reactions. And the strange thing was that she started to feel seen. Really seen. Appreciated. Valued. Things were so distorted.

  The Internet made her virtual, faint around the edges; paedophilia hardened her against erotic feelings, and so when she successfully cracked a complicated code, tracking d
own a paedophile all by herself, she had no one to tell. She had painted herself into a corner, cut off her hair, let herself be held back by a horrible nightmare. She had disappeared among the invisible. The only person who saw her was Gunnar Nyberg, but as nothing more than a shining light, she knew that. And now, suddenly, she was standing before this passionate little man who was looking at her non-stop, really looking at her in order to uncover her true feelings, and she just wanted to let her hair down, like young, single women sometimes did. Even though she had no hair to let down. She did it anyway. Allowed her cropped hair to flow. He seemed to be spellbound, enchanted by her very existence, and she liked it. She had to admit that she really did like it.

  They stayed behind until the catering staff started circling them like hungry hyenas. They hadn’t even realised that they were the last to leave, that the party had ended long before, that the police station was as good as empty for the night. When they finally did realise, she heard herself asking: ‘Do you want to come for a cup of coffee?’

  They kissed in the taxi on the way to Surbrunnsgatan, engaged in a spot of light petting in the stairwell, threw off their clothes in the entrance, made love in that utterly uninhibited way, starting in the hallway, continuing in the bedroom and finishing on the floor; starting over again somewhere else. When they came to their senses, they were in the kitchen. Neither of them knew how they had ended up there. The contents of the bin were strewn over the floor. Neither of them knew why.

  Sara felt as though she had thrown the windows wide open, as though air was rushing into a vacuum, as though her short hair was blowing wildly in the intense breeze. She threw her arms around him, holding him tightly.

  Jorge felt as though something had shifted. Sex was no longer the end of something: it could also be the beginning. This was a radical mental shift. He wondered what it meant. He lay, curled up in her arms. She had thrown her arms around him, and he lay curled up, with his cheek against her chest.

  It was a fantastic feeling.

  A feeling. A shared feeling.