‘What does he do, then?’ Johansson asked, even though she had already told him.
‘He’s a consultant at Huddinge Hospital,’ Ulrika Stenholm said. ‘A professor of internal medicine. He’s remarried. Has two little kids with his new wife. We share custody,’ she added.
‘And then what?’ Johansson asked.
It was as if the love of her life had been beaten to the ground. He refused even to talk to her. He slammed the phone down when she did finally pluck up the courage to call him. She tormented herself every day with the thought that it might not have happened if she and Yasmine’s father hadn’t escaped from the city that weekend, the weekend when all the things that would change her life took place.
‘If . . . if we hadn’t gone, she’d be alive today,’ Ulrika Stenholm said, and started to cry again.
‘What sort of nonsense is that?’ Johansson said, because he wasn’t very well disposed to that type of self-reproach or hypothetical argument. Besides, he was still very angry with the woman he was talking to.
‘Pull yourself together now. If you hadn’t gone with him, he’d just have found someone else who would,’ he said.
For ten years – at least ten years – she had blamed herself every day for what had happened to Yasmine. And she didn’t have anyone she could talk to about it either. Not her boyfriend. Not her dad, who would have been shocked, for the same reasons that would have left her fiancé in pieces. Not her mum, seeing as she would only have told her father at once. Not even her older sister, who had just left home and broken off relations with her parents after telling them that she was now living with another woman. As man and wife should live, according to Daddy Vicar, but certainly not the way a woman should live with another woman, least of all his elder daughter, who had thus rendered any further contact impossible.
‘After ten years I stopped thinking about it every day,’ Ulrika Stenholm said, blowing her nose on the paper napkin Johansson had given her. ‘In the end I only thought about it occasionally. And then I had children. And I thought that was what life was supposed to be like. My husband was happy, and I hadn’t so much as spoken to Joseph on the phone since the summer when it all happened.’
‘What about your dad, then?’
‘When Dad told me about that confession, barely a year ago now, it was as if my life had been turned upside down again. Just when I had finally found some peace. I didn’t understand it. I thought for a moment that he was trying to punish me, that he had known what I’d done all along but hadn’t said anything all those years. And that now, on his deathbed, he wanted to punish me by telling me that he had been told who murdered Yasmine. But that he couldn’t say who because it had been told to him in the confidentiality of confession.’
‘Is that how it was, then?’ Johansson said. ‘Did he know? Did he want to punish you?’
‘No,’ Ulrika Stenholm said, shaking her head. ‘He didn’t. Not a chance. My dad wouldn’t do something like that. If he’d found out what had gone on between me and Yasmine’s father, he’d have talked to me – that would have been the first thing he did. It was just another one of those horrible coincidences in my life. Dad had no idea what I had been through. He was labouring under his own torment, for the same reason I was. But neither of us knew that the other was struggling.’
I believe you. Coincidence, striking both of them. The exceptional instance when a coincidence was just that. ‘So when you met me, then,’ Johansson said, ‘what were you thinking?’
‘At first it was just a whim,’ Ulrika Stenholm said. ‘I mean, I’d heard all the stories my sister had told me about you. Not that I believed them – Anna has always been a hopeless romantic, and I’d tried to rid myself of that part of my character. But, all of a sudden, there you were. I don’t know, it was like Dad was talking to me from beyond the grave. Telling me that the Lord moved in mysterious ways. It’s happening again, I thought. First me, then Dad. And then you showed up.’
‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Johansson said.
‘I’ve never lied to you,’ Ulrika Stenholm said, shaking her head. ‘I had no idea it was about Margaretha Sagerlied. I didn’t even know she lived in the same road as Joseph, even though I was there the night Yasmine went missing, before we left the city. I took a taxi round to his. It picked me up from work; he’d booked it for me. Then we got in his car and drove off to the country. That hairgrip – I realize now that it was Yasmine’s. But I had no idea it was the one she was wearing the night she was murdered. And if it hadn’t been for you, I would never have found it.’
‘Really?’ Johansson said. I believe you, he thought.
‘I swear,’ Ulrika Stenholm said. ‘It’s completely true.’
‘When did you call your old boyfriend, then?’ Johansson said. ‘When did you phone Joseph Simon?’
‘The day you told me you knew who it was, who murdered Yasmine. It was the first time I’d spoken to him in twenty-five years.’
‘That was a stupid thing to do,’ Johansson said. ‘It was a very stupid thing to do. You should have talked to me instead.’
‘Sorry,’ Ulrika Stenholm said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realize.’
‘Call him again. Tell him to get over here as soon as possible so that I can talk to him. I’m in no fit state to travel,’ he said. Anyway, a man like Joseph Simon has probably got a private jet, he thought.
‘Are you sure? You promise to talk to him?’
‘On Monday,’ Johansson said. ‘If he can get here on Monday, I promise to talk to him.’
As soon as he was back in the car he called Mattei. From his mobile to her mobile, and, because Mattei was Mattei, she answered on the first ring.
‘I need to see you. Preferably right away,’ Johansson said. ‘We’ve got a problem.’
‘Then I suggest you come to my office,’ Mattei said. ‘I’m still here.’
90
Thursday evening, 19 August
Soon the only thing missing will be the double-headed eagle above the entrance, Lars Martin Johansson thought as he walked into the headquarters of the National Crime Unit on Kungsholmen in Stockholm. The large, marble-clad lobby, the armed security guards in their bulletproof lodge, the airlocks enclosed in matt-polished steel. The guard who spoke to him over the loudspeaker must have been there since his day.
‘I’ve called them,’ he said. ‘They’re coming down to fetch you, boss. By the way, I hope everything’s okay, boss.’
‘Couldn’t be better,’ Johansson said, gesturing behind him with his thumb, towards the big, black Audi out on the street. ‘That’s my car and my chauffeur. Nothing for you to worry about,’ he added.
The guard responded by putting his hand over the microphone, opening the little glass hatch above the counter and talking directly to Johansson. ‘I get it, boss,’ he said. ‘Everyone here knows that you’re still working in Covert Ops.’
Five minutes later Johansson was sitting on the visitor’s chair in front of Lisa Mattei’s desk. These days, it was almost as large as the one he had left behind three years ago.
‘Shouldn’t you and your little girl be asleep by now?’ Johansson said, nodding towards her bulging stomach.
‘We work the same hours, she and I,’ Mattei said with a smile. ‘Right now she’s playing football in her mum’s tummy. We’ll go to sleep in an hour or so.’
‘Like I said on the phone, I’m afraid we’ve got a problem,’ Johansson said. ‘And I’m sorry to have to admit that I was the cause of it.’
Then he told her the whole story. From the moment Ulrika Stenholm had told him her story. He left nothing out, apart from the name of the man who murdered Yasmine. He even gave Mattei the name of his informant, even though he hadn’t even told his best friend. All the way through, from his first conversation with Ulrika Stenholm to the call he received from Superintendent Hermansson just a few hours ago.
‘So now they want my files,’ Johansson said.
‘Nonsense,’ Lisa Mattei said. ‘They can fo
rget that.’
‘What do we do now?’
‘I’ll sort it,’ Mattei said. ‘You don’t have to worry at all, Lars. I’ll call you as soon as it’s done.’
‘The security guard in there thought you worked for the Security Police,’ Johansson said when he was back in the car.
‘That’s not so strange,’ Max said with a shrug. ‘My dad looked just like this, and Grandpa always claimed he used to work for the KGB.’
‘What did he do there, then?’ Johansson said.
‘Professional hit man,’ Max said. ‘Grandpa always used to say he was a professional hit man.’
‘What did you think?’ Johansson said. What the hell am I supposed to say to that? he thought.
‘I used to think it sounded exciting,’ Max said. ‘But, obviously, I wasn’t very old at the time.’
Pia and Matilda were sitting in the kitchen when he and Max walked in. They were drinking white wine, just as he had told them, the way girls usually did, quite irrespective of any difference in age and income, Johansson thought.
‘I thought you said two hours. That’s what Tilda told me, anyway,’ his wife declared with a pointed glance at the clock above the stove.
‘Barely three,’ Johansson said sheepishly, checking his watch just to make sure.
‘Welcome home,’ Pia said. ‘You can have a salad of grilled chicken thighs, avocado, beans, tomato and red onion. And, if Tilda is to be believed, you were a good boy and saved your red wine from lunchtime.’
‘I love you,’ Johansson said. What do you mean, ‘good boy’? he thought. Only Elna has ever called me that.
‘Just as long as you don’t go and end your own life,’ Pia said.
‘No,’ Johansson said, shaking his head. What life? I haven’t got a life, not any more. I need to talk to her, he thought.
After dinner he took his coffee into his study to drink it in peace and quiet while Pia, Max and Matilda sat in the kitchen chatting and drinking more wine. Just when he had leaned back on the sofa his phone rang.
‘Are you awake, Lars?’ Lisa Mattei asked.
‘Very much so,’ Johansson said.
‘I’ve spoken to our DG. He talked to the NPC, who in turn talked to the DPC. We all agree. The investigation stays with you, and, if you don’t have any objections, I thought I might pick the files up tomorrow morning.’
She’s all grown up now, Johansson thought. Little Lisa has called the Director General and the head of the Security Police, who called the National Police Chief, who called the District Police Commissioner in Stockholm, and they all did exactly what she told them to do.
‘No problem at all,’ Johansson said. ‘Send someone first thing tomorrow. What do you think about calling her Elna, by the way? After my mother. Your little football player, I mean.’ Your very own football player, kicking up a storm in your womb, he thought.
‘Actually, Elina is one of my favourite names,’ Mattei said.
‘What does your bloke say, then?’ Johansson said.
‘Ingrid. After Ingrid Bergman.’
‘Marry me instead, then,’ Johansson said. Why did I say that? he thought.
A quarter of an hour later, he was fast asleep. In spite of the cheerful voices from the kitchen. In spite of Hypnos tempting him with a greenish-white seedhead when he was teetering on the boundary between dozing and sleeping. Sorry lad, you’re too late, Johansson thought. Then he closed his eyes and fell asleep of his own accord. Without dreams, without any external help from anything or anyone. He simply slept, and woke up the following morning to find Max standing next to his bed and gently shaking his left shoulder.
‘There’s a couple of spooks who’d like to see you, boss,’ he said. ‘A bloke and a girl.’
‘Who are they, then?’ Johansson asked.
‘Not that they’re anything like my old man, but I still get the impression they work in the same sort of place,’ Max said. ‘But the Swedish version,’ he added.
91
Friday, 20 August
It was two taciturn colleagues from the Security Police: a man in his fifties and a woman some ten years younger. He didn’t recognize either from his time as operational head, but the fact that they were aware of who he was – or had been, to be more precise – was obvious.
‘We’re here to pick up some boxes,’ the man said.
‘Sure,’ Johansson said. ‘Hang on and I’ll ask Max to carry them down for you.’
Then he took Max with him into the study.
‘There’s nothing you’ve forgotten, boss?’ Max said for some reason, nodding towards the three cardboard boxes on the floor.
‘No,’ Johansson said. He had removed all his own contributions and ideas the previous evening, and concluded by extracting the record from the vehicle register relating to Staffan Nilsson’s ownership of a red Golf. He had put the whole lot in a folder and locked it away in his safe.
‘Okay,’ Max said. ‘In that case.’
Half an hour after that his phone rang. It was Hermansson.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
‘Don’t ask me,’ Johansson said, sounding more irritable than he meant to.
‘I’ve just had a call from the chief of police’s office, saying that the Yasmine case is going to be staying with you.’
‘Yes,’ Johansson said. ‘What’s funny about that?’
‘Well, it seems pretty bloody mysterious to me,’ Hermansson said warily.
‘It’s not the least bit mysterious. I haven’t finished with the case. That’s all there is to it.’
‘So I’d be way off the mark if I were to think that you’d already found him?’
‘Found who?’
‘Yasmine’s killer. I thought we trusted each other, boss.’
‘Yes, of course. But there are some things it’s probably better not to know about.’
‘With all due respect, you’ll have to forgive me, boss, but not this time.’
‘That’s because you don’t know what you’re talking about, Hermansson. With all due respect,’ Johansson said, and ended the call.
First, the usual visit to the physiotherapist, then, as soon as he returned home, he shut himself in his study. He called Mats Eriksson and gave him some brief instructions. Not a word about Johansson’s past if Nilsson happened to ask. Johansson was a businessman, a part-owner of the company, brother of the main shareholder, and was on the board. Rich and eccentric and all the other things that made men like Staffan Nilsson salivate with greed. That was all: no more, no less. Mats would also have to do most of the heavy lifting when it came to the conversation, asking all the questions that should be asked in a situation like this. All the classic accountancy questions.
‘I shall mostly sit there in silence,’ Johansson said. ‘So that I don’t say anything stupid,’ he added. Or get to my feet and beat him to death, he thought.
‘I can’t help being a bit curious,’ Mats Eriksson said. ‘He must have done something really terrible.’
‘Yes,’ Johansson said.
‘What?’
‘It’s so fucking terrible that you really don’t want to know,’ Johansson said.
Then he had lunch. He took all his usual pills, plus one of the little white ones, and even considered taking a second, to guarantee maintaining enough distance from the man who had murdered Yasmine and who would soon be in the same room as him. He refrained, because there was a risk that he would seem completely detached, and possibly even fall asleep.
‘Are you ready, boss?’ Matilda asked. ‘Ready for the grand transformation?’
‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ Johansson said. She seems unusually perky, he thought.
Matilda found everything she needed in Johansson’s wardrobe. A pair of red trousers Pia had bought him that time she was determined to drag him off for a golfing weekend in Falsterbo, even though he had never held a golf club, and had no intention of ever doing so. A blue blazer with some sort of mysterious crest on the breast pocket tha
t had been there when he got it. Another gift from his wife. A loose, white linen shirt; a silk scarf round his neck; brown golfing shoes with little leather tassels, acquired at the same time as the red trousers.
How the hell can any normal man walk around in this sort of get-up? Johansson thought when he looked at himself in the mirror a quarter of an hour later. Good job Evert can’t see me. Or Bo.
‘Clothes maketh the man,’ Matilda declared, happy with what she saw.
Then she concluded her work by oiling his hair. His normally unruly grey hair now sat like a shiny, back-combed helmet on top of his head. It was considerably darker, too. And he had a completely different facial expression, all of a sudden.
‘Very Stureplan. Classic twat hairstyle.’
‘Are we done?’ Johansson asked.
‘Almost.’
Two details remained. First, she rubbed his cheeks with strongly scented aftershave. And, finally, she put a pair of rimless mirrored sunglasses on him.
‘Remarkable,’ Johansson said when he looked at himself in the mirror. That’s not me, he thought.
‘Aging director with a penchant for little girls,’ Matilda said. ‘If you like, boss, I could put a tight top on and come with you?’
‘That’s a kind offer, Matilda, but if you could just order me a taxi,’ Johansson said. He looked like Pinochet, he thought as he got in the taxi. Pinochet towards the end, after they’d taken his uniforms away from him.
He was, intentionally, ten minutes late for the meeting. When he limped in on his crutch Mats Eriksson and Staffan Nilsson were already sitting in the meeting room.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ Johansson grunted. ‘The traffic in this city, it really is beyond belief. Sit down, sit down,’ he said, waving his good arm as Staffan Nilsson made to stand up and introduce himself.
‘You look better with every day that passes, Lars,’ Mats Eriksson said with an innocent expression.
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