by Jens Lapidus
Thomas remembered his dad in front of the television. Standing with him when Palme spoke at the square at Norra Bantorget. The man’s footwork behind the podium. Gunnar’s laughter when Palme smiled after delivering a sharp line.
Now someone’d killed Cederholm, the guy who’d ratted out the person who was a hair’s breadth from being convicted of the murder of Olof Palme. Thomas didn’t know what to do with it all. He’d told the current detective on the case, Ronander, that he’d met Ballénius at Solvalla, and he’d given him all the other info too. But he didn’t let slip about his conversation with Ljunggren that night in the car.
He knew it, could feel it in the pit of his stomach stronger than he’d ever felt any other warning—he shouldn’t poke around in this mess. And still, he did. To Thomas, it was so obvious. If it’d stopped at Adamsson bursting in on his and Hägerström’s visit to the morgue, he wouldn’t have given it another thought. But then, when Ljunggren told him that it was Adamsson who’d stopped him from going out on the patrol too, Thomas knew: Adamsson was knee-deep in this shit.
His options were pretty simple: either he forgot about Adamsson or else he proceeded with his own investigation. The conclusion was even simpler: no one would get away with shitting on him—he was going to nail those fuckers. Solve the Rantzell mystery.
It was on that night two months ago, when Ljunggren’d told him who Rantzell really was, that he’d made up his mind.
Right after they parted ways, he’d climbed into his car. Made an effort to keep to the speed limit. The embarrassment if he ended up being investigated by his own traffic unit would be too much. He went into a pizzeria on Sveavägen. Ordered a calzone and a glass of some cheap-brand whiskey. Downed it in two minutes. Everything was spinning. At the time, he’d just found out. Cederholm was Rantzell. Rantzell was Cederholm. Adamsson was involved. How much? In what way? Ljunggren’s new information opened up an abyss.
Thomas scarfed down the calzone.
The incidents were being put into a context. If this was connected to something as big as the Palme murder, anyone could be involved. It was sick. The guy outside their window three months ago could be a cop, a South African mercenary soldier, a Mossad agent, a Kurdish PKK terrorist. Anything. Thomas belonged to the camp that thought Christer Pettersson actually was the one who’d popped Palme. But there were some doubts. Sure, he’d heard other theories. Someone didn’t want the track marks on Claes Rantzell’s arm to come to light. Someone’d swept Thomas out of the picture. Someone with astonishing resources.
So far, Thomas’d acted impeccably, at least according to himself. It couldn’t be prohibited for a cop to look around a little on his own—and as soon as he’d found something out he’d called the new detective heading the investigation. But now it was time to go rogue completely. He needed to clear his name.
After the calzone, he walked across the street to a Cuban place. Had a seat at a table. Ordered a glass of Gran Reserva. Felt lonely. The walls were painted black. Big Cuban flags. Should he tell Åsa what he was doing?
He asked to borrow a pen and some paper from the waitress. Started writing down what he knew about the murder in bullet-point form.
Drank the wine in big gulps. The pistol was dangling along one side of his suit jacket. The waitress set down a small plate with grilled scampi. He ordered another glass of wine.
Looked at his list. Names, places, times. Too few bullet points. A big question mark around Rantzell. Who was he?
His cell phone rang. It was Åsa, who wondered where he was. He told her the truth: “I’m sitting at La Habana, alone, drinking red wine.” She wondered why. He almost told her the truth: “Seeing Ljunggren put me in a bad mood.”
An hour later: when he went to take a piss, he saw himself in the mirror. A reddish-purple grin filled with worry. He thought, Come on now, this’ll work itself out.
He walked outside, climbed into the car. Really didn’t care about his blood alcohol content. The traffic unit could go fuck itself. He drove toward Fruängen. His buzz felt fine, anyway.
The fall darkness that usually made him depressed felt invigorating. This was his investigation.
He’d realized that something was going on in the building already down by the entrance. Two big notes were posted on the elevator door. A police investigation is being conducted on the third floor, as well as on certain other floors. Due to this, the county police will be present in your building for a certain period of time. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have any questions, please call: 08-401 26 00.
He took long strides. The right floor. The right name on the mail slot. Caution tape. Thomas took a step forward. There was a heavy padlock on the door. He went back down to the car again. Found his skeleton key. Brought his gloves along. Cleared the padlock in under a minute.
Went inside. The hall was dark. He turned the lights on. Jackets on hangers to the right. The floor was bare. His colleagues’d probably cleaned up shoes and other crap. Sent the stuff to the lab. Thomas wondered why they hadn’t taken the jackets, too.
The kitchen was small. Dirty dishes and silverware, run-down and nasty—standard protocol in junkie apartments. He knew the drill. Had been inside more crack dens than regular apartments in his life. He tried to analyze what kind of job the cops’d done in there. Felt like the booze was making him sharper. He could follow the sequence of events. How they’d swabbed, searched for fingerprints. Polished surfaces, placed dirty objects in evidence bags. He let his gaze register the details. Rantzell didn’t take care of himself. The signs were all there, the filth spoke a clear language.
The living room: a leather couch, a leather chair, flea-market art, shelves empty of books. Thomas took a step forward. Dust in the bookshelf. He remained standing there for a second. Looked, registered. Analyzed. Tried to see things through a detective’s eyes. What would Hägerström have seen in here? There was something, his gut told him so. He looked around the room again. The coffee table was cleared, traces in the dust, stains, burn marks. The TV, video: nothing strange. Hägerström, what would he have been looking for? Things that didn’t tally. Anomalies. Departures from the ordinary. Thomas knew all about crack dens. He could visualize the bookshelf before they’d emptied it. A couple of paperbacks maybe, possibly some inherited hardcovers or collected works. Even addicts cared about culture. Probably a few photos, possibly memories from a better time, a time before the present.
Then he saw it: the tracks in the dust on the bookshelf. They weren’t straight, regular. As they would’ve been if the technicians’d pulled the books out one by one and placed them in evidence bags. This was different—the books’d been swept out of the bookshelf. His thoughts came to a halt. Then he repeated the thought: the books’d been swept out. That meant that either Rantzell’d swept them out himself, or else someone’d searched the apartment before the police got there.
He went into the bedroom. The bed was stripped. Ingrained filth and stains covered the mattress. A rug on the floor. A mirror on the ceiling. He searched for traces of the person or persons who’d searched the apartment. Tried again—to think like someone else might. He didn’t see anything. Opened the closet. No clothes remained. He saw a box. Opened it. It was empty.
He continued trying to spot something, whatever it might be. On the wall farther down in the closet was a small metal cabinet, eight by eight inches. The door was ajar; it was empty. Looked like a key cabinet with three rows of hooks. He looked closer at the cabinet. It had obvious traces of having been broken into. That decided it: Rantzell wouldn’t break open his own cabinet, now would he? And what else did it mean? Maybe there’d never been anything in the cabinet. Or else the technicians’d taken what’d been in there, probably keys. But someone’d broken into the apartment before them. And maybe taken the keys that could’ve been hanging in the cabinet. What kinds of keys do you keep in a cabinet like that? Could be anything—for your bike, for the attic, the basement, the summer cottage, the car. He thought: no, not the ca
r, it was too impractical to keep keys like that in a cabinet way back in a closet, behind clothes and a bunch of other junk.
He let his eyes scan the room again. Tried to understand what was important. It didn’t work. He was tired, his buzz was fading. It felt weird, being there. If he was found out, he could kiss the dull traffic unit good-bye. Pronto.
He left the apartment.
Took the stairs down. It was eleven-thirty at night. Down by the entrance. He stared at the note again. A police investigation is being conducted on the third floor, as well as on certain other floors. Other floors? Where could that be? He thought about the key cabinet. Just had to check one more place.
He went down into the basement. One of the storage units in the basement was cordoned off with caution tape. He stepped over the plastic barrier. The unit was open. An old carpet, two moving boxes. In one: dusty porcelain. In the other: old porn magazines. Other than that, the storage unit was empty. Thomas started walking back. The other storage units were more or less crammed with junk. Skis and ski boots, armchairs, bags, furniture, spare beds, crap. The bars felt feeble. The padlocks on the wooden doors were thin. He passed a unit that was almost empty except for a computer that looked like it was twenty years old. Imagine, people saved shit like that. Thomas felt a headache coming on. He just wanted to go home. Coming here was a mistake. He glanced into another storage unit. Froze. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Plastic bags. All with the same print on the side: Willys. He saw the image in front of him clearly: the woman who’d sat next to Ballénius at Solvalla’d had a bag like that.
His mind cleared. There was a connection. This was his chance. He opened the lock with his skeleton key. Stepped into the storage unit. Bent down. Checked out the dust, looked for footsteps or other signs that his colleagues’d been in here. Didn’t seem like it. On the other hand: next to the bags, the layer of dust was a little bit thinner than over the rest of the floor. Obvious: someone’d already taken something from the storage unit.
Thomas went out to his car. Got two big plastic bags from the trunk. Brought them down to the storage unit. Emptied the contents of the plastic bags into the two big bags. Smushed the bags down too. Tomorrow, no one would know he’d been there.
He remembered he had already been completely awake when Åsa woke up. Too many thoughts in his head. He needed to gain control over his ideas. Bring some order to his investigation. Understand what the finds he’d made in Rantzell’s basement meant. It was a lot of paperwork. It would take time to go through it and he didn’t like paperwork. He had to think things over. Give it time.
The Adamsson trail was the theme of the day. The questions were piling up. At which end would he begin unwinding the knot? When should he begin? In the present or in the past? He tried to analyze.
But how does a traffic cop run an investigation on a superior who is also the boss of all his colleagues in the Southern District? Should he go to the Palme Group, the little that was left of the Palme Commission, and tell them about Adamsson’s intrusion at the morgue? Maybe there was some paperwork that would back up the fact that the intervention happened. If not, it all went bust. But even if it was possible to prove that Adamsson was behind the incident at the morgue, it didn’t mean anything. Adamsson’d been right about that—they had been at the morgue without the requisite authority.
On the other hand, Thomas was certain that no evidence existed to prove that Adamsson was the one who’d ordered Ljunggren to switch patrols that night. Nothing more than Ljunggren’s word, and that wouldn’t weigh particularly heavily against Adamsson’s.
And Hägerström? Shouldn’t he call Hägerström? No, he would never call that IA snake. You had to have some pride.
All his suspicions were founded in the present, but he didn’t have much to go on. Maybe it was better if he tried to go back in time, research history. Find out who Adamsson really was and who he’d been. Thomas felt alone. His usual colleagues and friends were not reliable. The people at the shooting club were no support. And Åsa, she was really more of a burden in all of this.
The only person he could think of was Jonas Nilsson. He was simple—didn’t think too much. Thomas perceived him as genuinely kind, through and through. After all, Nilsson’d helped him look up Ballénius—without anything leaking about that, at least not that Thomas knew of. The only problem with Nilsson: he was a former colleague. In reality, Thomas didn’t know him anymore. But it was worth the chance.
He called the guy from Åsa’s cell to be on the safe side. They decided to meet up on a night that week. It was dicey: he didn’t know if he should tell Nilsson what it was all really about, the murder of a prime minister. He’d have to choose some happy medium.
It all went smoothly. They met up at Friden. Nilsson seemed happy to see him. They ordered beers, started shooting the shit straight off the bat. Compared districts, complained about equipment, bosses, their colleagues. Empathy-whined about Sweden, the National Police, the weather.
Thomas explained his thing: “I’m really damn pissed off about what happened to me.”
Nilsson was understanding. To be transferred to the traffic unit was a pure nightmare for a real cop.
Thomas went on. Explained that he thought it was Adamsson’s fault, that he wanted to find a way to really stick it to the old fucker. And then he said it. “Nilsson, do you know any old cop who might know what Adamsson was like back in the day? You know, we’ve all heard a bunch of talk about the guy. What he was up to during the eighties and all that. It would be golden if you knew someone who knew more than we do. Just to have something to hold over Adamsson.”
Nilsson promised to think about it. Talk to the old-timers, maybe one of the guys who’d helped him with Ballénius.
Jonas Nilsson delivered a name a few days later: Göran Runeby. Northern District, detective inspector. Not bad. According to Nilsson, Runeby was the kind of man who knew the police force the way a genealogist knows his family tree.
Runeby agreed to meet in an unbiased manner, that’s what he told Jonas. Thomas didn’t know what to expect and it didn’t matter—even if Runeby only knew what anyone could figure out—that Adamsson’d happened to pinch a police secretary in the butt now and then, that he’d had a predilection for excessive force, that he disliked immigrants—then that was good.
Thomas met Runeby at his house in Täby. The old guy lived in an okay house, two stories, more than 2,700 square feet. Thomas wondered if an inspector’s salary could really stretch that much further, or if Runeby’d played the game the same way he did.
Runeby’s wife was home. Welcomed him at the door.
“Hello, it’s so nice to see a fresh face. How do you two know each other?”
Thomas didn’t really know what to say. He just smiled and mumbled something about police matters.
“Sure. The usual, in other words.” Runeby’s wife smiled. Thomas thought she was probably used to the way the men carried on. She reminded him of his own mother.
Runeby came down from upstairs. Led Thomas into the living room. He had white hair and a white mustache. A thin gold watch on his wrist: over thirty years in the service of the state. The guy really was an old hand.
“I’m so glad you were able to come all the way out here. May I offer you something to drink? Cognac, whiskey?”
Thomas had a cognac. Runeby closed the doors to the room.
He was a straight shooter.
“So, Nilsson told me that you’ve got a particular interest in old Adamsson?”
Thomas liked his style. No small talk. Real police mentality.
“That’s right.”
“Just so you know—you can trust me,” Runeby said. “I’ve never liked that quasi-fascist.”
Thomas reacted inside. A police using the word fascist in that way wasn’t exactly par for the course.
He looked at Runeby.
“I’m sure you’re aware of what happened to me.”
Runeby didn’t say anything.
“I w
as transferred after the episode with the boxer. And it’s made me bitter as hell. I feel betrayed and poorly treated. Collegiality seems hard to come by in the Southern District. I’ll be completely honest with you, Runeby—I blame Adamsson.”
Runeby nodded but didn’t say anything. Waited for Thomas to go on.
“But that’s not what I want to discuss with you. I want to talk history. The past. I’ve heard quite a lot about Adamsson. But Nilsson said you know even more. That you’re well informed about the police in this city. So I would like to ask you, very humbly, if you would tell me about Adamsson, the old quasi-fascist, as you called him. Who is he and who was he?”
“And why do you want to know, if I may ask?”
“I hope you understand that I can’t go into that. But he betrayed me. I have no right to demand anything of you. But Nilsson said that you’d probably be willing to share some information with me.”
Runeby looked pleased. Even if the old guy hadn’t proven himself yet, Thomas couldn’t help but like him. There was something calm, dignified, and inviting of respect about the old inspector. Again: genuine cop feel—but with something special, something extra. Thomas couldn’t put his finger on what. But he could sense it plainly. Some kind of warmth.