The Dying Detective

by Leif G. W. Persson

  ‘P-2,’ Johansson said. ‘Patrik Åkesson.’ Suddenly, he could remember.

  ‘There,’ Jarnebring said. ‘You haven’t completely lost it. Anyway, like fuck had you been shot in the stomach. It was the same crap you’ve been trying for the past twenty years. Eating yourself to death. Fainting and making a right mess of yourself with sausage, mustard, sauce and other slop.’

  ‘Well,’ Johansson said, ‘I don’t know about fainting . . .’

  ‘Don’t interrupt me. All I was going to say is that I’m not going to budge when it comes to your sausage. But you can ask me for pretty much anything else. Obviously.’

  ‘In that case, there is something I’ve been thinking about that you might be able to help with.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ Jarnebring said.

  ‘Do you remember a twenty-five-year-old murder, summer of 1985?’ Johansson said. ‘A nine-year-old girl who was raped, strangled and buried outside Sigtuna – Yasmine Erdogan.’

  Jarnebring looked at him in surprise.

  ‘Why are you thinking about that?’ he asked.

  ‘Never mind that now,’ Johansson said. ‘We can do that bit later,’ he added, to smooth things over. ‘Do you remember the case?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jarnebring said with a nod.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Yasmine Ermegan, that was her name. Not Erdogan. Ermegan. If we take the short version . . . she was from Iran. She and her parents arrived here when she was just a few years old. She went missing from her mum’s flat out in Solna on a Friday evening, 14 June 1985. She was found a week later, on Midsummer’s Eve, Friday 21 June. She’d been smothered, not strangled. Probably with a pillow, according to the pathologist, because he found traces of down and white cotton in her throat. Her body was wrapped in four plastic bags, sealed with ordinary packing tape. The perpetrator had dumped her in some reeds in an inlet of Lake Mälaren, a couple of kilometres north of Skokloster Castle. So she wasn’t buried, just dumped. You could get a car to where she was found. The perpetrator only had to carry her a dozen or so metres, which most people could have managed, seeing as she didn’t weigh more than thirty kilos.’

  ‘How do you know all that?’ Johansson asked. How could Jarnebring know all this while I can’t remember a thing? he thought.

  ‘It was my case,’ Jarnebring replied. ‘So it’s not really all that strange. I know everything about little Yasmine’s murder. There’s only one thing I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s that, then?’ Johansson said, even though he already knew the answer.

  ‘Who killed the poor kid. I’d like to have a few words with that bastard.’

  12

  Wednesday afternoon, 14 July

  ‘So, tell me,’ Jarnebring said, taking a large bite out of one of the apples he had just given Johansson. ‘Why this interest in a twenty-five-year-old murder? Are you thinking of going back on the force or something?’

  ‘No, definitely not. Someone who works here asked me, it was something she’d read about in the paper, and then I realized I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, because I’m so used to being able to remember things like that.’

  ‘It’s hardly that surprising,’ Jarnebring said with a grin. ‘You were on the National Police Board at the time. Buried under all those files, unable to see or hear anything.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Johansson said.

  ‘Okay.’ Jarnebring shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘So, I’m not a doctor, but maybe it’s got something to do with what happened to you. That must have occurred to you as well? Blood clots in your noggin can really fuck things up. I remember my old man. All of a sudden he couldn’t remember anybody in his family. Spent the rest of his days either sitting there crying, or roaring with laughter at everyone and everything. He wasn’t himself after that, if I can put it like that.’

  ‘It’s more patchy with me,’ Johansson said. ‘Some bits of my head are complete blanks,’ he explained. ‘But I still think I ought to have remembered this. There must have been loads in the press when it happened. I mean, I can still remember the murder of Helene Nilsson in Hörby in 1989 in detail, for instance.’

  ‘No,’ Jarnebring said, shaking his head firmly. ‘It wasn’t anything like Helene. There must have been a hundred times more about Helene in the papers than there was about Yasmine. The first week when Yasmine was missing, she didn’t get a single mention. Nothing on television or radio either.’

  ‘Why?’ Johansson said. ‘A nine-year-old girl going missing from her home on a Friday evening? There must have been a huge fuss.’

  ‘Pretty much nothing happened,’ Jarnebring said. ‘The parents had separated a year or so earlier. Yasmine spent every other week with her dad and his new partner out in Äppelviken, and the other week with her mum in Solna. Her mum lived alone, incidentally. So that week she should have been with her mum, but they started arguing after just a few hours. The kid took her things and walked out. When the mother finally got in touch with our colleagues out in Solna a few hours later, even she believed that Yasmine had just gone back to her dad’s. She’d called there, of course, but there was no answer. The duty officer in Solna sent a patrol car round to the father’s house. The mother refused to go – she was terrified of her ex-husband – but the villa where he lived was empty and shut up. Which was a bit odd, seeing as his workmates, whom our colleagues had also spoken to, said he was going to be working that evening. He was a doctor. Involved in some weird experiment that involved him going back and forth between home and work to keep an eye on a load of laboratory animals while he slowly killed them. But that Friday evening he’d just disappeared. Persuaded a workmate to do his shift instead. But it was a week or so before we discovered that. This was where he worked, by the way.’

  ‘Here? In Neurology?’

  ‘No, here at the Karolinska. The Karolinska Institute. He was an associate professor in some research department.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Johansson said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Jarnebring said. ‘So the general understanding was that when the kid showed up at her father’s, he went mad, took the kid and vanished. They were in the middle of a messy divorce; things were getting really nasty. Mostly about custody of Yasmine, who was the only child, as well as everything else. Everyone thought that was what had happened, including us and Yasmine’s mother.’

  Classic, Johansson thought. A classic example of a case going wrong right at the start. Everything seemed right, everyone thought the right things. And then everything turned out to be completely wrong.

  ‘But on Midsummer’s Eve, when she was found, everything changed. That was when I was brought in. I was called in on the Saturday morning, together with the rest of my team, to help our colleagues out in Solna. Unfortunately, that went wrong as well, not because of me but because of the cretinous moron who was in charge of the investigation.’

  ‘I thought you were in charge?’ Johansson said. ‘Didn’t you say it was your case?’

  ‘I was deputy. Another of our colleagues was officially head of the investigation.’

  ‘Who was that, then?’ Johansson asked.

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ Jarnebring said with a broad smile.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Johansson said.

  ‘Evert Bäckström.’ Jarnebring smiled even wider.

  ‘Sweet Jesus!’ Johansson said. Sweet Jesus! he thought.

  13

  Wednesday afternoon, 14 July

  ‘Get me a glass of water,’ Johansson said, nodding towards the carafe on his bedside table.

  ‘Your face has gone bright red, Lars,’ Jarnebring said. ‘Maybe I should have done as you said, after all, and brought that bottle of vodka.’

  Jarnebring poured a glass, then put it carefully in Johansson’s outstretched hand. Johansson drank, deep gulps. He felt completely calm now. Completely calm, without any drugs.

  ‘Too late now,’ Johansson said, wiping a few errant drops from his top lip. ‘The vodka, I m
ean.

  ‘Thanks,’ he added as Jarnebring took the empty glass and put it back on the table.

  ‘Maybe you could get a job as a traffic light, Lars,’ Jarnebring said. ‘They could put you next to a crossing, say something inappropriate, and you’d go red instantly.’

  ‘How the hell,’ Johansson said, with force, feeling and an acute need to lower the pressure building up inside him, ‘can anyone come up with the idea, or even think the thought, of appointing Evert Bäckström head of the preliminary investigation in a case like that?’

  ‘I think it was Ebbe’s fault.’ Jarnebring didn’t seem entirely unpleased when he said it.

  ‘Ebbe? Which Ebbe?’

  ‘Ebbe Carlsson. That crazy little publisher who kept sticking his nose into police business. Everything from the West German Embassy siege, when he worked as head of information for the Minister of Justice, to the murder of Olof Palme twenty years later. When little Ebbe was a director at Bonniers Publishing House – whatever the hell they had to do with a murder investigation. Or rather that moron of a police chief we had back then, who appointed himself head of the investigation into the murder of our beloved prime minister, despite the fact that he had no idea about how to investigate a murder, and insisted on asking his best friend, Ebbe, to help him.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘Do you want the long or the short version?’ Jarnebring asked.

  ‘Give me the long one,’ said Johansson, who was feeling brighter than he had in ages.

  ‘You may remember that Ebbe was a poof,’ Jarnebring began.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘This time it is actually relevant,’ Jarnebring said with a crooked smile.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Six months before Yasmine was murdered, the publisher had been at one of those clubs for like-minded souls, where he found a young man in a sailor’s uniform, whom he invited home for all the things people get up to when they drag new friends home from bars. Regardless of whether or not they’re gay, I mean,’ Jarnebring added, for some reason.

  ‘So what happened?’ Johansson said.

  ‘The young man in the Donald Duck costume robbed him. Beat him up badly and then disappeared, taking the publisher’s wallet and various other valuables with him. Including some old dress that the publisher had bought at an auction. Supposed to have belonged to Rita Hayworth. That American actress, you know. Worth loads of money, apparently.’

  ‘Go on,’ Johansson said.

  ‘The publisher filed a report with the police and had the great good fortune to end up with Bäckström looking after his case. Bäckström wrote it off, explained to the publisher that he had to expect that sort of thing if he didn’t pull himself together and start behaving like a normal person.’

  ‘Sigh,’ Johansson said. Sigh and groan, he thought.

  ‘Naturally, Ebbe was seriously fucked off. Mind you, who wouldn’t be, given that he’d been beaten up and robbed? So he called his best friend and told him about little Bäckström and his performance. And the fact that Bäckström had called him an arse bandit, an anal acrobat, and other things of a similar nature.’

  ‘And the chief of police went mad,’ Johansson concluded.

  ‘To put it mildly,’ Jarnebring said. ‘He’s supposed to have lost it completely, and threatened to kill little Evert if he didn’t behave better. So Bäckström got kicked out of Crime in Stockholm. As punishment, he was transferred to the crime unit out in Solna. He happened to be sitting there the evening Yasmine went missing, and because it was summer and everyone was on holiday and there was barely anyone else around, he ended up as head of the investigation a week later.’

  ‘So what happened after that? With Yasmine, I mean,’ Johansson asked. Stupid question, because he already knew the answer.

  ‘Got shunted downstairs,’ Jarnebring said. ‘All the way down to the basement. But to be honest, that wasn’t only Bäckström’s fault.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Jarnebring looked at the time. ‘I mean, isn’t Pia coming today?’

  ‘In three hours. We’ve got plenty of time. Go on.’

  Detective Inspector Evert Bäckström had the picture clear in his mind right from the outset. Yasmine had argued with her mum. She had gone home to her dad’s, he had taken her with him and left the city, a straightforward way of putting an end to a difficult custody battle. Then, when Yasmine was found murdered a week later, he only had to make a minor adjustment. The father hadn’t only abducted his daughter, he had also raped and murdered her. For the usual reasons that applied to people like him.

  ‘Another wretched honour killing, the sort of thing Arabs and Muslims and others of that ilk got up to. Because, naturally, Evert understood that sort of thing better than anyone else.’ Jarnebring nodded gloomily.

  ‘But the rape? How could he believe that? The poor girl had been raped.’ Johansson shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘That wasn’t a problem. According to Bäckström, men like Yasmine’s dad fucked goats and sheep when they weren’t shagging their own children. And, sorry to say, he got a degree of support for this from Yasmine’s mother. Like I said, the parents had already filed for divorce when this happened, and by then the mother had reported the father for several instances of abuse. That investigation was dropped more or less at once but, if you ask me, I think he beat her pretty badly on more than one occasion,’ Jarnebring said thoughtfully.

  ‘Only a couple of months before this business with her daughter, the mother threw some more fuel on the fire by claiming that he had sexually assaulted their daughter. She was really going for it, basically. They both wanted custody of the daughter but, while they waited for the verdict, they had agreed to share Yasmine between them, one week at a time. By the way, she went to school in the centre of Stockholm. One of those fancy private schools. She started there when her parents were still together.’

  ‘Was it true, then?’ Johansson asked. ‘Had he assaulted his daughter?’

  ‘No,’ Jarnebring said. ‘I’m sure he hadn’t. I’ll get to that in a moment,’ he went on. ‘But I’m pretty certain he used to hit his wife, on the other hand. And, towards the end of the relationship, I reckon it happened pretty often.’

  ‘What an incredibly depressing story.’ Johansson sighed.

  ‘It gets worse.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘When Yasmine was found, her father was still missing. He’d been gone a whole week by then. On the morning of the following day, on Saturday, the radio and television news reported that Yasmine’s body had been found. Within a couple of hours he showed up at the police station out in Solna. Completely mad.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘It was a disaster. A total fucking disaster. The first time Bäckström interviewed him it ended with the father trying to break little Evert’s arms and legs. The father was a big man, kind of like me,’ Jarnebring said. ‘But Bäckström wasn’t stupid, not like that, anyway. There were plenty of officers in the vicinity, so Yasmine’s dad got a serious seeing-to before he was dragged off to the cells. The prosecutor immediately decided to remand him in custody. At that point he was in complete agreement with Bäckström. Most of our colleagues were, to be honest. Even I thought it was probably the father at that time. His story of what he’d been doing during the week he was missing sadly turned out not to be true.’

  ‘What was he claiming, then?’

  ‘That he’d been sitting in a cottage out in the archipelago, all on his own, thinking deep thoughts about life. He said he’d borrowed the cottage from a workmate, which, admittedly, was true, but apart from that it was all lies, and for the usual reason.’

  ‘An affair. He was with another woman,’ Johansson concluded.

  ‘Of course he was,’ Jarnebring confirmed. ‘But it took several days before he managed to say that. The situation turned out to be rather complicated, if I can put it like that.’

  ‘How do you
mean, complicated?’ Johansson asked.

  ‘Well, like I said, he had a regular shag,’ Jarnebring said. ‘Another doctor, same age as him. This story’s crawling with doctors, as you might have noticed. She was the one he lived with in that villa out in Äppelviken; it was her house. She’d been given it by her parents, and she and Yasmine’s father had been seeing each other for a year before he left Yasmine’s mother. She was away when all this happened. She’d gone to Spain for a fortnight’s holiday – her parents lived there – and so her partner decided to make the most of the opportunity. He’d managed to pick up a younger model who worked in the same lab as him, borrowed the cottage in the archipelago from a colleague, and got on with it. Making the beast with two backs, morning, noon and night. The girl he’d picked up was only half his age, and she was also playing away from home. Had a fiancé doing national service.’

  ‘Half his age, you say. So the father didn’t kill his daughter?’

  ‘Nope,’ Jarnebring said. ‘He didn’t kill Yasmine. He certainly had an eye for the ladies and he was a bit handy with his fists, but he wasn’t a paedophile. As little as you or me, Lars. He was thirty-four when his daughter was murdered – born 1951, if I remember rightly. The girl he dragged out to the archipelago may have been only nineteen, but she certainly wasn’t a child. A young, attractive blonde. Neither you nor I would have said no if she’d asked.’

  ‘When did you work this out?’ Johansson asked. Speak for yourself, he thought.

  ‘As soon as I met him. He was in custody, and was pretty much climbing the walls. After a few days I went up and talked to him. I realized it wasn’t him almost immediately. He was basically mad with grief at what had happened to his daughter.’

  ‘You’re absolutely sure?’

  ‘Completely the wrong type. Nothing about him felt right. At least I managed to talk some sense into him. To the extent that he said there’d been someone with him who could give him an alibi. A female acquaintance from work. But he didn’t want to give me her name. So I took the gloves off. Told him the whole investigation was heading for the rocks if he didn’t see sense. That we weren’t going to make any progress until we could count him out. And if he was as innocent as he claimed, then he ought to give that some serious thought. And then I finally got the name out of him. I had a proper talk with her. And it turned out to be exactly the way he said. By this point we’d started to get hold of other information that backed up his alibi. People who’d talked to him on the phone, seen him and the girl out at that borrowed cottage. The usual sort of thing.’