by Jens Lapidus
“Correct.”
“So you must have read these, since you completed this training course?”
“Yes.”
Nikola didn’t know what she was doing. The cop was just answering yes to all her easy questions. She wasn’t doing anything to fight him—it was insanely weak.
Emelie asked: “You produced the memorandum in this case, correct?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“And the content, this is all true and correct, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And you haven’t left out any vital information, correct?”
“No.”
“Is that correct?”
“Yes, I haven’t left anything out.”
“Okay, let’s work from that basis. I’m now going to read to you from the report, The scent began by a ditch, roughly sixty feet to the south of the dirt track—yes?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what happened?”
“Yes, that’s what happened.”
Emelie paused and started riffling through her bag. The room was dead silent. Nikola didn’t understand a thing. She took out three books and a couple of booklets and put them on the table in front of her. Then, she said: “I’ve just taken out the following books: Tracking Training by Janne Salminen, Search Dogs by Frans Larsson, and the Swedish Working Dog Club’s Dog Tracking. I assume you are familiar with these books?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve also downloaded the National Police Board’s guidelines and general advice on examining the dogs owned by the police, RPSFS 2000:5, FAP 214-2. You are aware of this, too, correct?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then my question is this: Is it written, in any of these books or in the Police Board’s guidelines, that the dog tracking method is one hundred percent reliable when a scent begins as far as sixty feet away from the object?”
“I don’t know, but it’s possible.”
“Does it say so in Tracking Training by Janne Salminen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Aha…My claim is that there is no such statement in that book.”
“Okay…”
“Do you disagree? Do you believe Salminen comes to any other conclusions in his book?”
“I don’t know, I just said—”
“No, of course. Does it say so in Search Dogs by Frans Larsson?”
“I mean, I have no idea, I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember what the book says?”
“I didn’t mean that, but I don’t remember whether that particular book says anything about that particular subject.”
“You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“Okay. What about in Dog Tracking?”
“Oh, come on. I don’t know, I’ve told you. What difference does it make? You set out with the dog different distances from the origin point, and eventually you get a hit. Sometimes, it might be that our colleagues have contaminated the scene.”
“And by contaminated the scene, you mean that other police officers—who reached the motorcycle before you—might have left a scent that the dog then followed, correct?”
“Yes, roughly. But then the dog analyzes the ground and follows the right scent—though perhaps from farther away.”
“Yet you didn’t write anything about this in your report, did you?”
“No.”
“So that implies that you left out information from your report?”
“You might say that, but it isn’t essential information.”
“It isn’t essential information that other police officers might have contaminated the scene?”
“No. I knew what we were looking for. That’s the important thing.”
“So you left out that the scene might have been contaminated?”
“I’ve already answered the question.”
Emelie raised her voice slightly. “No, you haven’t. Just answer yes or no, please. Did you, in your report, leave out the fact that the scene may have been contaminated?”
“I don’t know.”
Emelie turned to the judge. “Thank you, Your Honor. No further questions.”
Nikola melted. It was brilliant. It was beyond smart. The dog handler looked like an idiot with no idea what was in the books he’d read, and who’d either lied in his report or been sloppy. Plus, she’d stopped just in time. Hadn’t actually gone on to ask whether the scene was contaminated. He thought about what Kerim said: Emelie had cracked the guy like an egg.
54
Peder Hult. Who the hell was he? In total, there were more than a thousand people with that name in Sweden. Four hundred of them between the ages of forty and seventy. Roughly a hundred of those living in the Stockholm area.
Michaela hadn’t been able to describe him very well; she’d never met him in person, and it had been years since they’d last talked about him. Middle-aged businessman, that was pretty much all she knew. She had no idea where he lived, when he’d been born, or even which company he’d worked for. She didn’t know how Sebbe and Mats had originally come into contact with him. “Our customers were often pretty secretive, for obvious reasons,” was all she said when Teddy tried to fish for more.
Still: Teddy was searching like a madman. He’d asked Loke to use all the tricks in the book. He himself had gone back to Boggan and Bosse to find out if they knew anything, but they had no idea. He’d asked Lillan, Cecilia, and Kum. They just shook their heads. He got Emelie to ask Benjamin, but the kid, who was clearly doing better, had just looked blank. He even sent an anonymous email to Anthony Ewing and told him he’d have trouble unless he told them everything about Peder Hult. He never got a reply. Swedish Premium Security was the beginning and end of the chain.
He’d paid Kum. Nine million reasons to hate Mazern. But on the other hand: Teddy should be happy to have fixed things without being given a bullet between the eyes. Life was back to normal—he was no longer a millionaire, though he still had a few hundred thousand left over after he paid for Linda and Bojan’s vacation and bought the apartment for Nikola. He should be able to manage without any more work for Leijon for a while.
Emelie seemed to have done a good job in Nikola’s main hearing, even though Teddy hadn’t been allowed to sit in the courtroom before he testified. The questioning itself had gone quickly: he simply repeated the same thing he’d already told the police. It felt strange to be questioned by Emelie, someone he’d slept with—he wondered whether that was really in line with the moral and ethical principles of her job.
He’d also asked Michaela why she thought Sebbe might be the dead man out in Värmdö.
“Because he lives here with me. He went away on business for a few weeks, but I haven’t heard from him since the fourteenth of May.”
“You know whether he’s in the fingerprint or DNA register in Sweden?”
“I don’t think he is, actually,” she groaned.
“Does he still have the tiger tattoo on his arm?”
Michaela looked like she was about to start crying. “Yeah. That one and far too many other tats. I used to complain about them.”
Teddy: “Could we get his DNA from anything here? Hair? Blood? Anything at all, so we can compare it with the victim’s.”
Stockholm County Police Authority
Interview with informant “Marina,” 20 December 2010
Leader: Joakim Sundén
Location: Högdalen Centrum
MEMORANDUM 6 (PART 4)
Transcript of dialogue (continuation)
M: It was twelve days ago now, and it sounded really simple. Sebbe was going to pick something up from someone in Gamla stan. It was actually Maxim or one of the others who usually looked after that stuff, but you know, he’s not with us anymore. It was a one-off. I was just meant to sit in the car and wait. When Sebbe came back, I’d drive him somewhere. I didn’t ask any unnecessary questions. It wasn’t my place.
JS: Why couldn’t Sebbe drive himself?
&n
bsp; M: He broke his arm, in the same car crash where Maxim died, I told you.
JS: Oh, right, yes.
M: Anyway, it was the middle of the day. I don’t know why they chose that time and that place, but maybe it was a good idea choosing somewhere always full of people.
I parked the car in Kornhamnstorg. It was a rental. So yeah, the Range Rover you asked about a few days ago, it’s not mine or Sebbe’s.
Sebbe got out. I watched him walk away and stop under one of the bare trees. There was a café to the right. The lake was covered in thin ice—it’d come early this year. I waited. Sebbe just stood there, smoking. The time passed slowly—I didn’t know why we’d been in such a rush. Nothing was happening.
I thought about Benjamin—he had just turned sixteen, and he borrowed my apartment to have a party with some friends the weekend before. When I got back at two in the morning, the place was oddly tidy. He was asleep on the sofa in the living room. I wondered how many of his friends had actually come.
Sebbe lit his fourth cigarette. He seemed calm. We’d been waiting for more than half an hour by that point.
For a while, I thought about just quietly starting the engine and driving off. Going back to Clara’s and waiting for Sebbe to turn up and start yelling because I’d wimped out; it really wasn’t something I was used to, sitting in a car out on the street. But that thought disappeared just as quickly. Of course I didn’t have the nerve to do anything like that. And if I’m honest, I didn’t want to. Sebbe’s…well, he’s who he is, and we’d all taken Maxim’s death hard.
But something didn’t feel right out there. An hour passed and nothing happened. Sebbe had sent me a message: Must’ve got the time wrong. I’ll wait a bit longer. But I had a really bad feeling in my stomach. It wasn’t that it was taking ages. It was two men. One of them was wearing some kind of scarf. He was sitting in the café across the road; I could see him through the window. He seemed to be talking into a hands-free headset. The other was wearing a camouflage jacket and standing under a tree, about thirty feet away from Sebbe. He was on the phone, too. Two men who’d been in the exact same positions for more than an hour without taking their headphones out once. Two men who kept looking at Sebbe. Who occasionally seemed to exchange glances.
After fifteen minutes, I sent a message back to Sebbe. Think we should go. This feels wrong. Got a bad feeling about two guys looking at you constantly.
I didn’t get a reply. Sebbe was standing about 150 feet away from me. I watched him light his eighth cig and look across to Slussen in the distance.
A few minutes later, something happened. Sebbe turned around. There was a man coming toward him—he was wearing an old-fashioned hat, it was at a kind of nonchalant angle, and he was carrying a shoulder bag. Sebbe greeted him. I thought he must be one of our smurfs, the ones Maxim used to look after. I watched them exchange a few words and then start walking down Lilla Nygatan. Straightaway, I saw the man in the scarf get up and leave the café, and the man in the camouflage jacket move from under his tree. They were following Sebbe and his friend. There was no doubt now.
I called Sebbe. No answer. I sent a message: They’re tailing you.
No reply. I thought about when he’d come down to the strip club and saved me and my poker friends. I got out of the car.
Gamla stan: the historical heart of Stockholm, its midpoint. I don’t have any relationship to that part of town, other than vague memories of a guided tour there sometime in high school, when the guide told us about Stockholm’s bloodbath. Christian II—Christian the tyrant, you know?—he’d chopped the heads off a load of Swedes there. That was five hundred years ago. The same thing still happens in other parts of the world.
Sweden’s changed, and changed again. It’s a safe country now. It’s for the people, that’s what they say anyway—a welfare state without parallel. And maybe that’s true. All I know is that it’s too fucking easy to make dirty money clean in this country. And that if you’re high enough up in the hierarchy, you can do whatever you want to other people.
I followed Sebbe.
He and the guy in the old-fashioned hat were chatting. They were walking slowly up one of the narrower streets. The two other men kept a distance of fifty, one hundred feet. I couldn’t believe Sebbe hadn’t noticed them. I thought he was experienced, always on his guard, like Maxim. I tried ringing him again.
After a few more feet, they stopped. The guy in the hat took off his bag and gave it to Sebbe. Farther down the same street, the man with the scarf held something up. I moved closer and saw what it was. A camera. I worked out what was going on. They wanted proof of the handover. Some kind of evidence against Sebbe. They moved forward.
That’s when I understood their next move. They wanted to secure more evidence, they wanted to arrest them. The man in the scarf and the other one, in the camouflage jacket, they were moving toward Sebbe and his friend, and behind me two more men were moving quickly in the same direction.
They hadn’t seen me, though. I could still warn Sebbe, shout to him, get him to see.
Our burning kitchen. Sebbe in the fight at the strip club. His screwed-up face when he told us what’d happened to Maxim. The darkness in the box, the man who’d been in charge.
I yelled as loud as I could: “Run, Sebbe—police.”
He turned to me. I think he understood right then. They were about fifty feet away. He could make it. He ran.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t drugs in that bag. Sebbe doesn’t do that kind of thing.
Five seconds later, I was facedown on the ground with a knee on my back. They handcuffed me, drove me to the station. And you already know the rest.
JS: Yeah.
M: Sebbe’s still free, right? You haven’t arrested him?
JS: We haven’t, no. Can you help us?
M: I’ve told you a lot, but I’ll never do that. Sorry.
JS: We might come back to that later. I wanted to thank you anyway. You’ve given us lots of valuable information. And as far as our agreement is concerned, you’ll be kept out of all of this. You’ll be my anonymous source, Marina.
55
Her secretary phoned: “There’s a delivery for you down here.”
“A delivery?”
“Viveca says it’s a bouquet. Should I bring it up?”
“No, I’ll come and get it.”
Emelie wondered who would send her flowers. She could only think of one person. She didn’t take the elevator, half ran down the stairs instead.
The floor in reception was made of huge slabs of Gotland limestone, and the walls were clad in wooden panels. Not old, British-inspired panels, but a smooth, matte wall of birch. The reception desk itself was made from a piece of dark gray granite. The idea was that it symbolized ancient Sweden: stability and tradition.
The room was Leijon’s pride and joy. The message: we’re playing at the same level as the exclusive London firms like Slaughter and May, Parabis, and Stewarts Law—in other words, those with the highest PEP, or Profit per Equity Partner, where partnership after four or five years meant, in principle, economic independence for years to come. No one could mistake Leijon for some provincial Swedish law firm anyway, full of local, general lawyers, but nor did the reception give the same echoing sense of emptiness you often had in the big firms. When their clients stepped through the seemingly nondescript oak doors on the seventh floor, they would feel, in all respects, like they had just entered one of Europe’s foremost legal firms.
Emelie was panting when she made it down. She was clearly in worse shape than she’d thought.
Viveca handed over the bouquet.
Emelie tore open the paper in the stairwell on the way back up. Huge pink roses and peonies—it must’ve cost a fortune. There was a card taped to one of the stalks.
Thanks for your help! / Nicko
Emelie thought back to the ruling from the day before.
“Nikola Maksumic maintains that he was in the area because he planned to visit his uncle. An o
utgoing call was, indeed, made from his telephone to his uncle just before the time at which the crime occurred. It does not, however, seem particularly credible that he would choose to visit his uncle so late at night, nor that he would get lost to such a degree that he would find himself in the location where he was intercepted by the dog handler.
“In Sweden, we abide by the principle that, in order for prosecution to take place, the deed attributed to the individual in question must be proved beyond all reasonable doubt. In other words, all other sequences of events must be ruled out.
“The district court concludes that tracking did not proceed directly from the motorcycle in question. Additionally, it has not been established whether the area around the motorcycle was contaminated, nor how many additional scents may have led from this area. We cannot with confidence say whose scent the dog picked up at a distance of sixty feet. It can therefore not be ruled out that the dog picked up Nikola Maksumic’s scent some distance into this area, and followed this instead of the true suspect’s scent. It is thus difficult, in the eyes of the court, to draw any conclusions relating to Nikola Maksumic’s connection to the motorcycle or the crime scene, on the basis of dog tracking alone.”
The case had been dropped. The court had followed the principle of benefit of doubt.
Benjamin was getting better and better. He could get out of bed and take a few steps; he was eating simple meals by himself and could express certain things. According to Jeanette from section six, he had reached somewhere around fourteen on the Glasgow Coma Scale. He was heading in the right direction—he should be back to normal within a few weeks.
But all the same, he didn’t know any more than what Emelie had already gotten out of him. He knew he’d been in the house with his dad, and he was sure he hadn’t killed anyone. But he couldn’t remember anything else. He didn’t, for example, know who the dead man was. That didn’t bode well.
The prosecutor had indicated that the preliminary inquiry would be ready very soon. That meant she would be able to look through the evidence the police had actually managed to gather. Finally. But it also meant that the charges would be brought against him shortly afterward. And then: the main trial. She shuddered to think how Benjamin would make it through that, feeling the way he did. But she was almost more worried about how she herself would cope. She was still a complete newbie. Even if Nikola’s case had gone fantastically well.