by Jens Lapidus
JENS LAPIDUS
STOCKHOLM DELETE
Jens Lapidus is a criminal defense lawyer who represents some of Sweden’s most notorious underworld criminals. He is the author of the Stockholm Noir trilogy, three of the bestselling Swedish novels of this past decade: Easy Money, Never Fuck Up, and Life Deluxe. He lives in Stockholm with his wife.
ALSO BY JENS LAPIDUS
Easy Money
Never Fuck Up
Life Deluxe
A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL, APRIL 2017
English translation copyright © 2017 by Alice Menzies
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Sweden as STHLM Delete by Wahlström & Widstrand, Stockholm, in 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Jens Lapidus.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lapidus, Jens, 1974– | Menzies, Alice, translator.
Title: Stockholm delete / by Jens Lapidus ; translated from the Swedish by Alice Menzies.
Other titles: STHLM delete. English
Description: First American edition. | New York : Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031546 (print) | LCCN 2016040887 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525431718 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525431725 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Women lawyers—Sweden—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Sweden—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PT9877.22.A65 S7413 2017 (print) | LCC PT9877.22.A65 (ebook) | DDC 839.73/8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031546
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525431718
Ebook ISBN 9780525431725
Cover design by Perry De La Vega
Cover photograph © Aidan Campbell/500px
www.blacklizardcrime.com
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Jens Lapidus
Title Page
Copyright
Värmdö
Part I: May
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part II: May–June
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Part III: June–July
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Part IV: July
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Part V: August
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Eight Days Later
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Epilogue: Seven Days Later
Chapter 78
Värmdö
Tony Catalhöyük didn’t love his job. His real dream was to be a policeman. But he’d failed to get into the training course twice. He had perfect vision and hearing, and he’d passed the physical tests with ease. He didn’t have any of the inadmissible health problems, either, and his grades were good enough.
It was the psychological tests where it had all gone wrong. They’d said that he didn’t see himself as a part of the wider group. That he tested as a lone wolf. When he called the recruitment people, they just parroted more of the same story. They repeated the same words as the report, over and over again.
—
The sky had started to lighten, but the forest around him was still dark. He was driving quite a bit above the speed limit, but his bosses normally encouraged that, at least during night shifts. Not that they would ever officially admit it. “We can’t just take our time out there,” they said. “We should either be at the monitoring center or with our customers, where we can put ourselves to some use. People appreciate us getting to them quickly, even if we are just caretakers in uniform.”
Tony hated that: caretakers in uniform. He was no caretaker. He was there to fight the bad guys, just like the police officer he planned on becoming someday.
The alarm had come in about fifteen minutes earlier, from a house in the woods on Värmdö island, to the east of Stockholm. It was a power outage, though the electricity had come on again after a few minutes.
Without slowing down, he turned onto a smaller road to the right. He hadn’t been along this road before, but the risk of meeting another car was virtually zero. There were hardly any houses around.
He was only about a quarter mile from the house when he spotted something behind a big bush on the verge up ahead. It looked like a car in the ditch on the right. Maybe he should stop to see if something had happened? No, the alarm had to be checked within twenty-five minutes. That’s what their customer guarantee said, anyway.
The gravel in the courtyard crunched as he pulled up.
There was a garage beyond the house, but he couldn’t see any cars in it.
It was quiet. The alarm was no longer sounding. Tony assumed the owner must’ve turned it off. That wasn’t so unusual, either. It was the middle of the night, and their customers usually just went back to sleep after turning off a false alarm.
But it was too quiet here somehow, too still. Like everything was holding its breath. He took out his cell phone and tried calling the customer again. No one answered.
The front door was painted yellow, with a little window set into it. The place looked dark inside. Tony held down the bell, heard it ring faintly.
No one came to the door, so he rang the bell again. This time, he pressed it down for even longer.
He knew what to do in this kind of situation. SP: standard proc
edure. Visual inspection of the exterior, check the area. Make notes. Report back to HQ.
Any discarded tools in the damp grass, broken electricity enclosures. Forced doors, muddy footprints on the porch, broken windows.
That was the kind of thing he was meant to look out for.
Then his eyes fell on one of the typical causes of false alarms—an open window on the ground floor. Normally, it was down to nothing more than the customer forgetting to close it. In this instance, though, the alarm had gone off because of a power outage, not because someone had opened a window.
Tony went over to it. The grass was long and made his combat boots damp. The room inside was dark.
When he stood on his tiptoes to look in, he realized that a circular hole had been cut into both panes of glass. It was a classic, albeit advanced, burglary technique, and one that he’d seen only twice before.
This was no false alarm. Someone had tried to cut the power. His pulse picked up.
He took a few steps away from the house, called the monitoring center again, and told them what he’d found—that it was definitely a break-in.
“Ongoing or finished?”
“I don’t know. There could still be someone inside, cleaning up.”
Tony shoved his phone back into its holder and walked around the edge of the house, toward the front door.
He made up his mind that if anything shady was still going on, he’d put a stop to it.
He looked at the front door again. This time, he tried the handle and realized it was unlocked.
He stepped into the house.
The coats and jackets hanging on hooks in the narrow hallway fluttered as he opened the door. The place smelled of old wood and open fires.
He felt for his flashlight.
To the right, a staircase led upstairs. Straight ahead, he could see the kitchen.
Tony took out his collapsible baton and grasped it in his hand. Black hardened steel, the longest model—twenty-six inches. In training, they often used them to practice attack and defense. He’d never needed to use it in service. There was a first time for everything, he thought.
He took a step forward. Heard the crunch of broken glass. He bent down with the flashlight. The hallway floor was covered in tiny shards of glass.
The kitchen seemed clean and tidy. He saw the wide-open window again, this time from the eating area. A big, round clock hung on the wall. It showed quarter past four in the morning.
The room was open plan, the living room on his right.
There really wasn’t much furniture.
An armchair. A coffee table.
Something on the floor behind the coffee table.
He moved closer.
It was a body.
He felt the nausea rise up in him like a jolt through his body.
The head. There was no face left; someone had blown their head to pieces.
Tony’s vomit hit the rug.
He looked down at the floor.
Blood everywhere.
He was shouting and crying into the phone.
“Calm down. I can’t hear what you’re saying.”
“It’s a fucking murder, a bloodbath. I’m telling you, he wasn’t breathing. Send the police, an ambulance, this is the most messed-up thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Is anyone else there?”
Tony looked around. He hadn’t even thought of that.
“I can’t see anyone. Should I search the house?”
“That’s up to you. Did you see anything strange outside?”
“No, not really.”
“Did you see anything strange on the way to the house?”
He ran out onto the porch again. He’d almost forgotten.
“What’re you doing, Tony? What’s going on?”
Back along the road he’d driven in on.
“Fuck, there was a car in the ditch. I saw it when I drove past.”
He started to run.
“I’m calling the police, but keep your phone on you. Follow standard procedure.”
He felt better now, out in the fresh air. He tried to forget what he’d just seen; the real police could take care of that. Right now, he was just glad he wasn’t one of them.
A caretaker in uniform.
—
In the faint light of morning, the dark blue car almost seemed to be burrowing its way into the earth next to the bush. When he pushed the foliage to one side, he saw that the front half was completely crumpled. The car must have gone at least fifty feet into the ditch.
Tony saw the torn earth in its tracks. In the background, the spruce trees were still dark. The bushes had hidden how smashed-up the car was when he drove past earlier.
He moved forward. The baton was back in his hand.
It looked like there was smoke rising from under the hood, or maybe it was just dust swirling in the glare of the headlights.
The mud squelched beneath his feet, and he had to hold on to the thin grass to keep his balance.
It was a Volvo, a V60.
He tried to see whether there was anyone inside, but it was hard to make out.
He clambered alongside the car and peered in from one side.
Then he saw. There was someone slumped forward in the driver’s seat.
“Hello?”
The person didn’t move.
The windshield had been forced inward, and the thousands of cracks in the glass reminded him of ice. It hadn’t shattered.
Tony bent down and opened the driver’s door. The air bag had discharged.
The driver seemed to be a youngish man, probably in his twenties, blond hair.
The limp air bag looked like a white plastic bag spread over the wheel.
Unconscious, maybe dead.
Tony prodded the man’s arm with the tip of his baton.
No reaction.
PART I
MAY
1
Eat shit.
Nikola had been forced to take shit for so long now.
One whole year he’d been here.
But it was almost over. Tomorrow: the last day. Thank God. He was almost ready to start going to church with Grandpa Bojan.
He was nineteen. Sweden was messed up like that—they could lock you up somewhere like this even though you weren’t a minor. Though that was his majka’s fault. Linda, his always-fucking-nagging mom. She’d threatened to throw him out, cut all ties with him. And worse: she’d used Teddy as a threat. Honestly, that was what got to Nikola—the risk that Teddy would be disappointed. He loved him more than the freshest snus in the shop, more than all the ganja in the world, sometimes even more than the crew. The guys he’d grown up with, his brothers.
Teddy: his uncle.
Teddy: his idol. An icon. A role model. He only knew one person you could even compare him with. Isak.
That hadn’t been enough, though. The amount of community service, all that crap, it got too high. The fines too big. The whining from social services too loud. Linda had wanted him to go into custody. She wanted her own son to be put into a drug-free, fun-free, completely pussy-free care home.
So that’s where he’d been the past year. Spillersboda Young Offenders’ Institute.
Care shall be decreed if, through the abuse of addictive substances, criminal activity, or any other socially destructive behavior, the individual subjects his/her health or development to a significant risk of damage.
Fuck the place: he’d heard that paragraph fourteen million times by now.
It was still worthless.
Every other minute, the same thought going through his head. Like a broken record by some tired old house DJ. The chorus on rewind: fucking Mom, fucking Mom, fucking Mom.
“I’ve tried to do everything for you, Nikola.” That was what she usually said when he went home on release. “Maybe things would’ve been different if your dad had been around.”
“But I’ve had Teddy.”
Linda would shake her head. “You think? Your uncle’s been
inside eight of the past nine years. Is that what you call being around?”
Nikola was sitting at the back of the classroom. Like usual. Eating s-h-i-t. They really were trying to keep him down.
Every now and then, a few new words would appear in the chorus: fucking Sandra, fucking Sandra, fucking cunting Sandra….
She was his so-called course support officer here. She talked about job applications. You need to be able to present yourself well, write a personal statement, know how to kiss ass. Nikola had trouble working out the point of all her talk: he’d chosen a vocational program just so he didn’t have to sit around talking crap endlessly. And besides, he had no plans for a regular nine-to-five life, or even cash-in-hand manual work somewhere. There were much quicker ways to make some dough. He knew that from experience. The stuff they did for Yusuf paid off straight away.
Mini conversation group. Just Nikola and five other guys, once every week. The rest of the time, they expected him to turn up at the work experience place they’d organized in Åkersberga: George Samuel Electrical. There was nothing wrong with George, but Nikola just couldn’t be bothered.
According to the head of Spillersboda, and according to his mom, it was good for him to have group hours on top of the work experience. “It increases your ability to concentrate. You might not pass Swedish, but it’s still good to be able to read properly.” They went on and on worse than the drunks on the park benches in Ronna. ’Course he could read. His grandpa was the biggest book lover ever, for God’s sake: the reading genius from Belgrade. He’d been teaching Nikola literary magic since he was six, sat by his bed and plowed through the good old stuff. Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious Island.