by Jens Lapidus
Josephine ran her hand over the Céline bag. It looked as though she was caressing it tenderly. “That doesn’t count as materialistic,” she said. “A woman’s got to have something to carry her stuff in.”
At seven thirty, Emelie lit a cigarette on the way to Riche. Jossan and a few of the other girls from the office were already inside the restaurant, eating moules frites and waiting to celebrate with her.
She paused. Hesitated. Maybe she didn’t have time for this. She’d been working like a madwoman. The breakup of Husgrens AB—in which the profitable parts were being sold to a Chinese industry conglomerate, and the unprofitable sections were being taken over by one of EQT’s opportunity funds—had meant fourteen-hour negotiation sessions with the Chinese for three weeks in a row. The sale of Airborne Logistics to an American industry giant meant eighteen-hour stretches in the due-diligence room, with no breaks, even on Sundays. Emelie was in charge of the other legal associates. The air in the room was always so heavy when they left that she handed out painkillers to the team every evening.
Her phone rang. Unknown number.
She answered with her first name.
“Hello, this is Detective Inspector Johan Kullman. Is this Emelie Jansson, the lawyer?”
Emelie Jansson, the lawyer. That sounded good. All the same, she wondered why a detective inspector was calling her.
“It is. What’s this about?”
“I’m calling from the custodial wing of Kronoberg Prison. We’ve got a suspect who’s requested you as his lawyer.”
“Sorry, what did you just say? A suspect has requested me as his lawyer?”
“Answer: yup.”
“At this time?”
“It’s his right to request a lawyer. And as we understand it, he’s requested you. That means it’s our responsibility to check whether you accept the task.”
“But I don’t work on criminal cases.”
“I have no idea. All I know is the suspect requested you.”
“What’s he suspected of?”
“Murder. We think he killed a man out on Värmdö last night.”
“And why does he want me?”
“That’s a little tricky to answer, I’m afraid. He’s actually more or less unconscious. He was in a car accident.”
Emelie took a final puff on her cigarette.
She’d made it to the entrance of the restaurant.
Everyone seemed to be having such a good time inside.
3
He’d been sitting in the car since five that morning. Shoving snus tobacco under his lip and chewing xylitol gum. Waiting for Fredric McLoud.
The man he was tailing hadn’t followed his usual pattern today. It was past ten now.
Teddy wondered what was going to happen, what he would have to do to finish this job—finding something big on McLoud—without getting himself into trouble. Whatever happened, he’d made up his mind: he was going to live a different life. He wasn’t going back to the slammer.
He pushed a new piece of snus under his lip. Snus and chewing gum: his new favorite combination. The snus almost too earthy otherwise. Like it needed balancing out somehow, pushing back.
Banérgatan wasn’t the world’s most interesting place on an ordinary morning in May. From five till seven, it had been deserted, like no one even lived in the grand old apartments in this part of town. Just over a year ago, he’d walked this street on another job. A dark, unpleasant start to his new life as a free man. But that felt distant somehow. Teddy had been out for almost a year and a half now.
The first people out on the street were the dog owners. Older men in hats and green wax jackets, waiting patiently as their dachshunds pissed on the nearest lamppost. Younger women in sneakers and lightweight down-filled body warmers, quickly bending down to scoop up the dog shit in their plastic bags before heading off toward Djurgården with their golden retrievers.
By quarter to eight, the men in suits and women dressed for business started to appear. They moved quickly toward their luxury cars, or else they headed off toward the city on foot.
Fifteen minutes later, it was schoolkids streaming along the pavements, aside from those who were picked up by taxi directly outside their front doors. The cars waiting for these seven-year-olds weren’t exactly Taxi Stockholm’s climate-neutral Volvos or Kurir’s environmentally certified Toyota Priuses, either. They were different cars, different companies. Teddy didn’t know their names, but he’d heard of them. These cars were booked in advance, paid for using credit cards, and ordered using the relevant app.
The family lived on the very top floor, in a pristinely renovated attic apartment more than thirty-two hundred square feet in size. Things had moved quickly for Fredric McLoud these past few years. But now, perhaps, they were on the way back down. All depending on how Teddy did his job.
At nine thirty, he finally came out. Fredric McLoud. Not wearing the suit and tie you might expect of the millionaire business leader. Instead, he was dressed in what looked like sweatpants and a polo shirt with a huge sailing brand logo on it.
Teddy noticed it immediately: Fredric’s behavior was different today. He stood still for a few seconds, just looking about, before he crossed the road and started off down Riddargatan. Every three hundred feet or so, he stopped, turned, and glanced all around him.
Teddy stepped out of the car as his surveillance object passed. He went up to the parking meter and started fiddling with his payment card as McLoud continued down the street.
Pay with your phone, EasyPark, he read on the machine. Next time, I’ll bring the fucking bike, he thought.
After a few seconds, Teddy slowly started off after him. As soon as Fredric dropped the pace, Teddy took out his phone and stopped to write a pretend text message.
This was his life now. He’d been offered the job with the Leijon law firm by one of the partners he knew from before, Magnus Hassel. The firm didn’t employ him directly—Hassel had thought that would be too much—but they had some kind of company they used for the so-called freelance jobs, Leijon Legal Services AB. The deal was actually pretty generous. They paid for a hire car and even helped him get a Visa card, despite the fact that the credit checks the bank had run must’ve shown his declared income over the past twenty years wasn’t even close to subsistence level.
His work for the company mainly consisted of so-called personal due diligences.
Fredric McLoud was one of the two founders of Superia, an online-payment service that had grown enormously over the past few years. The company had been valued at more than “a yard,” as Magnus Hassel put it, “and that’s in euros.”
Leijon’s client wanted to buy a 20 percent stake in the company. The only problem? There was talk about young Fredric McLoud being a bit of a coke fiend. And according to those same rumors, it wasn’t just a little partying here and there, no. He was snorting on a daily basis; the guy couldn’t even make it through a morning meeting without doing a couple of lines in the bathroom first.
Teddy had been tailing him for three weeks now and hadn’t seen anything odd. Either McLoud had a huge stash at home or else he got the stuff delivered to him some other way, Teddy had no idea how. The alternative was that his habit wasn’t nearly as bad as people said. Rumors were just rumors, after all, and they were often spread deliberately to ruin someone’s career.
But today he’d caught a whiff of something. He just hoped it wouldn’t all go to shit.
His surveillance target continued across Nybrogatan and on toward Birger Jarlsgatan. If McLoud had been even slightly more cautious, it might’ve been tricky for Teddy to follow him today. But as things stood, his gestures and movements were all exaggerated. He would slow down noticeably a few seconds before he stopped completely, stood stock-still, and glanced all around. As long as Teddy moved slowly, he wouldn’t bother McLoud.
There was a beggar on the corner of Nybrogatan and Riddargatan. Colorful headscarf contrasting with her dark, furrowed skin. Pieces of cardboard on the
ground beneath her flowing black skirt. The woman was humming a melody: a dirge from another world. There hadn’t been as many beggars in Stockholm before Teddy was sent down; that was something new. He watched people’s eyes as they passed. They looked down, turned away. Pretended she wasn’t there.
The Leijon office was only a few blocks away. Not that Teddy needed to go in today. He didn’t have an office there, and he was happy about that. He ran these investigations more or less on his own, and it was often enough just to report to the lawyer involved by email or phone. Besides, he didn’t want to bump into Emelie Jansson.
They’d made plans to get dinner together a year or so ago, her idea. But she’d called to reschedule it, and he’d had to put their next date back, which she’d then canceled at the last minute. Their dinner plans had slipped away like shampoo down the drain.
Since it was only quarter to ten, most of the open-air cafés were empty, but there was a surprising number of people out on the street. Teddy couldn’t help but think that those who earned the most—the people who worked in this part of town—seemed to take life the easiest. The working day didn’t start before now for some of them.
Many of the people were extremely well-dressed; the men rushing past wore slim-fitting suits with slacks that looked too short, though that was probably intentional. The women were in high heels, with fluffy, well-washed hair and rose-gold Rolex watches.
He thought of his sister, Linda, and his nephew, Nikola. Teddy had gone over to her house for dinner yesterday. She’d had her hair in a bun; she’d looked tanned. Teddy wondered whether she’d started going back to the tanning beds again.
“Nikola gets out the day after tomorrow,” she’d said, “and I don’t know what I should do.”
Teddy had cut a potato he’d just peeled, added some butter. “He’s a man now. It’s not your responsibility. But he’s gonna be fine.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know anything. But we’ve got to believe in him. He needs our support.”
Linda had carefully cut her meat into five equal pieces. Her hands didn’t look young anymore. “He looks up to you, he wants to be like you. But the one thing I hope is that he doesn’t end up like you.”
“Like I was, you mean?”
Linda had looked down at her plate. “I don’t know what I mean,” she’d said.
Fredric McLoud stopped and went into an Espresso House.
Teddy paused. Should he follow him in and risk making him suspicious? Fredric must’ve noticed the huge man walking behind him all the way here. So far, there hadn’t been anything strange about it, but if Teddy turned up in the same café, there was no way it could be a coincidence.
He followed him in anyway. McLoud’s routine was off today. That had to mean something.
Plus, honestly, Fredric McLoud seemed so far gone that he could’ve had half of Stockholm’s plainclothes policemen creeping after him and he wouldn’t have even noticed there was anyone else on the street.
Teddy got in line by the counter. He saw Fredric sit down at a table opposite a young man with a bottle of Coca-Cola.
There was a plastic bag under the table.
Fredric shook hands with the kid. He looked young, dark hair, dark eyes. Dressed in a Windbreaker and Adidas sweatpants.
Sweatpants: Teddy remembered wearing them himself at that age. Once, Dejan had been in court for assaulting someone in a metro station. A shitty thing, but Teddy and some of the other guys had decided to go watch the trial. To support Dejan, but also for fun; they’d had nothing better to do that day. During the break, Dejan’s lawyer had come up to Teddy and said: “Get out of here, I don’t want a load of people wearing trousers like that in the public seats.”
“What d’you mean, trousers like this?” Teddy asked.
“You know, you all look alike, and the judge knows exactly what kind of guys you are. So get out of here. It won’t do your friend any good to be associated with sweatpants. Believe me.”
The ironic thing today: Fredric McLoud looked just as much a thug as the kid did.
Teddy already had his phone in his hand, the camera rolling. He pretended to be busy doing something on it, but he was really just making sure it had a clear shot of the table where Fredric and the kid were sitting. These new phones, they were pretty much magic.
Document everything: that was one of the golden rules he’d been given by Leijon. His job was all about collecting evidence. Collecting evidence without fucking things up for himself.
It only took a couple of seconds. Fredric said something. The kid nodded. Fredric took the bag from under the table, stood up, and left.
Teddy watched him through the big windows out onto the street—it was an unnatural sight, one of Stockholm’s richest thirty-seven-year-olds with a battered old supermarket bag in his hand. But he’d caught it all on film.
Teddy was still standing by the counter. It was his turn now. Macadamia nuts, raw food balls, green juices. In the past, pre-jail, the baked goods had all contained flour and sugar.
“What’ll it be?” the girl behind the counter asked.
“You have any normal buns?”
“Yeah, we’ve got sourdough.”
“Sounds too healthy.”
The girl’s eyes flashed.
Teddy turned and left.
Fredric “coke fiend” McLoud was thirty feet ahead of him, heading along Riddargatan again.
Teddy wondered why it was so important to Magnus that he do this, but the partner had been explicit. He wanted irrefutable evidence, even if it gave away that they’d been following him.
It was a bright, clear day. The sun glared in the windows. Teddy could feel his stress levels rising. He went up to a middle-aged woman who was busy jabbing at the buttons on a parking meter.
“Hi, sorry to bother you. Could you do me a favor?”
The woman turned around. Now she was holding her phone. She looked stressed—maybe she was trying to work out which app she needed to solve her problems—but she answered softly, “Of course.”
“Great, thanks. Do you see that man there?”
Teddy pointed to Fredric.
“Yes, why?”
“Just watch.”
He took out his phone again, but this time he switched on the sound recorder. Leijon had given it to him, it was a smartphone, and he’d learned how to use it much more quickly than he’d thought he would. All the same, he sometimes felt like throwing it into the water or dropping it from a balcony somewhere. Teddy refused to use the calendar function on it, but he’d given in to some of its applications: in this line of work, it was a fantastic tool.
He caught up with Fredric McLoud. Tapped him on the shoulder.
“Sorry, but I think you took my bag?”
Fredric clutched the plastic bag to his chest.
“Who are you? What’re you talking about?”
“Yeah, I lost my bag. This one’s not mine, is it?”
Fredric stared at him. His eyebrow twitched.
“Are you crazy? It’s definitely not yours.”
“Can I just have a quick look in it?”
“No way.”
Teddy moved quickly. He grabbed Fredric’s arm and reached for the plastic bag with his free hand.
Fredric raised his voice. “What the hell are you doing? Get off my bag.”
“I just want to have a look in it. There’s no problem is there?”
“Like hell there’s not. It’s my bag.”
Teddy couldn’t give up now. He needed to be in the moment—act, not analyze. JDI—just do it, like Dejan used to say.
He snatched at the bag again and pulled Fredric’s other arm to try to knock him off balance. They stumbled.
Teddy was bigger, beefier, but McLoud wasn’t some stick. And he was fighting for his career, his business, his family. His life.
Their fumbling continued.
Suddenly Teddy felt a searing pain in the hand holding the bag. He looked down. Fredric had
bitten his thumb.
No. No, he couldn’t yell. Couldn’t shout. This had to work. He’d promised himself.
He could have stuck a finger into Fredric’s eye. Hit him square in the nose. Grabbed his Adam’s apple and just ripped it out. But instead, he pushed Fredric’s head, pressed his hand against his cheek, tried to force him into submission.
Eventually, Fredric let go of his thumb. Teddy saw blood on the man’s teeth.
He needed to take control now. Calm the situation. He was standing close to McLoud.
The woman was shouting something in the background. “Stop this now. I’ve called the police.”
Teddy was panting. “You heard her. I’m pretty sure you don’t want the police to come snooping around that bag of yours. Just let me have a look.”
Dilation. Panic in McLoud’s eyes. The guy understood.
Too late for Teddy. McLoud had started to run.
Teddy had thought it would all be over by now. He rushed after him.
Along Riddargatan. To the left, onto Artillerigatan.
Uphill. McLoud had long legs. And Teddy knew he saw his personal trainer in the fancy Grand Hôtel gym three times a week.
Teddy could feel how heavy he was.
Up the hill. Army museum to the left. A home electronics shop to the right.
On to Storgatan. He wouldn’t be able to make it much farther.
People were staring at them. Some of them were shouting.
Then, all of a sudden, Teddy couldn’t see him anymore.
Where the fuck had Fredric McLoud gone?
He saw a police car farther down the street.
Shit, shit, shit. It couldn’t end this way.
He slowed down. Swedish Enterprise’s offices to his left. A men’s clothing shop to the right. The first thing the cops would home in on was anyone running. He tried to catch his breath. Analyze the situation.
Where had Fredric McLoud gone? He had to be here somewhere, just a few feet away. He couldn’t just disappear.
The police car was only a hundred or so feet behind Teddy now. It was crawling forward.
He had to do something.