“Yes,” said Ulf.
They shook hands again, and Ulf left the office. When he returned to his own desk, the email from the Commissioner’s assistant had already arrived, giving the name of the spa, its address, and a telephone number to call if he needed directions to find it.
* * *
—
It was almost lunchtime when Ulf returned to the office. Carl had already left to eat his sandwich lunch in a nearby park, while Erik, taking his lunch at his desk, was paging through an angling magazine.
“You survived,” said Anna as Ulf walked into the room.
Erik looked up from his magazine. “Does he really exist?”
Ulf smiled. “Yes, I survived—and he does exist. He’s charming, in fact. Polite. Interested. Everything you’d want a police commissioner to be.”
Anna was eager to hear the details. “What did he want? Are you getting a promotion? Are we getting promotions?”
“Or early retirement?” added Erik.
“No,” said Ulf. “Nothing was said about that.”
“So?” pressed Anna. “Why did he get you over there?”
Ulf crossed to his desk. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t talk about it.”
Anna and Erik both stared at him in incomprehension. “But we’re colleagues,” said Anna. “We tell one another what’s going on. Otherwise...” She shrugged her shoulders in a way that implied the collapse of sensitive crime work in Malmö, perhaps in all southern Sweden.
“Yes,” said Erik. “There are no secrets here.”
Ulf was not to be swayed. “I gave the Commissioner my word that I would not discuss the case with anybody. Sorry, but that means you.”
Anna shrugged. “Very well, if that’s the way it’s to be.”
“I really am sorry,” explained Ulf. “I’d love to tell you, but I just can’t. Put yourself in my position—you’d do exactly the same.”
Ulf’s appeal had its effect. Mollified, Anna suggested that they go for lunch together in the café, where she would tell him about the latest developments in the Signe Magnusson case. “Something odd has been going on,” she said, as they prepared to leave the office. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s definitely fishy.”
Erik glanced up, but then returned to his magazine.
“There’s been something odd about it from the beginning,” agreed Ulf.
In the café across the road there was no table at the window and they were obliged to seat themselves at the back. A straggling group of students, noisy and bound up in themselves, had taken the best places and were drowning out conversation at neighbouring tables with their laughter. Ulf looked at them with an air of slight regret.
“Were we like that?” he asked.
Anna glanced up from her scanning of the menu. “Yes, I think we were. Nothing changes, really.”
“And yet,” said Ulf, “when you’re at that stage you have no idea that you yourself will change, have you? When you’re twenty, you can’t imagine your forty-year-old self.”
“What’s that English poem?” Anna mused. “ ‘Gather ye rosebuds while you may...’ ”
“ ‘Old time is still a-flying...’ ”
She was impressed. “I didn’t think you knew much poetry.”
“I don’t,” said Ulf. “We were made to learn poetry at school. I rather enjoyed it—others didn’t. Strindberg, Erik Axel Karlfeldt; some German poets too; some Shakespeare. Some of it stuck. But not much.” He remembered something. “Oh yes. Homer. We read Homer.”
“In Greek?” she asked.
“No, Swedish. Homer sounds rather good in Swedish—it could be an old Norse saga, if you changed the names. Lagerlöf’s translation. I remember thinking of the Odyssey as taking place in the Stockholm archipelago. At that age, I couldn’t really imagine Greece.” He paused as he looked down at the menu. “Tell me about Signe. Bring me up to date.”
Anna leaned forward; there was a woman at the table next to them who had been eavesdropping on their conversation about poetry, so she lowered her voice as she spoke. “Right. She was reported missing five days ago. A young woman by the name of Linnea Ek, a student at the university, reported to the local police that her friend had failed to turn up for a meeting. They were both something to do with the university’s amateur dramatic club and the meeting had been set up for some time. It was an important meeting, apparently, and she thought it most unlike her friend not to show up.
“She tried calling her on her mobile—to no avail. The phone was switched off, and still is. Then she tried her parents, but they’re in Japan apparently. We’ve been in touch with them subsequently—they’re very anxious, as you can imagine. They could throw no light on the matter.”
Ulf asked about Signe’s other friends, and, in particular, Bim.
“I spoke to her,” said Anna. “She was worried at first that I was coming to raise the matter of her own recent behaviour, but she relaxed a bit when she realised that this had nothing to do with that. She said she thought it most unlike Signe to go off without telling anybody. Apparently, she reports her movements obsessively on social media. You can effectively track her from her online posts.”
“And have there been any?” asked Ulf.
Anna said there had not. “That’s the most worrying thing,” she said. “But listen to this: several hours after my interview with Linnea Ek, she called me back and said that she had been thinking about it all and had an idea that she wanted to run past me.
“Actually, the idea was a suspicion. When she told me she looked rather worried. She said that it had suddenly occurred to her that Bim might know more about the matter than she was letting on. She said that Bim and Signe had had a major falling-out over Signe’s coming to us to report on the disappearance of that imaginary boyfriend. Bim believed that Signe had stolen that selfie from her, and was not ready to forgive her for it. She more or less suggested that Bim had killed Signe in some unknown place and in some unspecified way.”
Ulf snorted. “Unlikely. A little dispute amongst a few imaginative young women. This doesn’t smell of homicide.”
“Yes,” said Anna. “But there’s something else: Linnea said that on the day Signe disappeared, she had received a text from Bim saying they had to meet. That was just before the amateur dramatic meeting that she didn’t turn up to.”
“How did Linnea know that?” asked Ulf.
“Signe texted her.”
“And where were they to meet?” asked Ulf.
“Signe didn’t say.”
Ulf thought for a moment. “And Bim? What does she say about that meeting?”
Anna leaned even farther forward. The woman at the next table had inclined her head slightly, to be able to hear better. “Here’s another interesting thing: Bim denies all knowledge of the meeting with Signe. She flatly denies it.”
Ulf groaned. “Lies,” he said. “Somebody’s lying.”
Anna agreed. “Yes, but who? This seems to be one of those cases where you have A saying x and B saying y.”
“I like you when you’re algebraic,” said Ulf—and immediately regretted it. It was a flirtatious remark—describing somebody as algebraic was undoubtedly to cross a line. You would not normally describe an ordinary friend as algebraic, and then say that you liked her that way.
He saw the effect on Anna, and his regret deepened.
“Algebraic?” she said, half coyly. “Well, I’m very happy to enter into any equation.”
Ulf floundered in his attempt to extricate himself. “I wasn’t being personal, Anna. I was simply referring to your use of symbols.” He paused, and then added, “That’s all, really. Just that. Nothing else.” He put an emphasis on the words nothing else that they would normally not have had. They were not an afterthought; they were the thought itself.
She was looking
at him intently. “I thought you said you liked me. I thought that was what you meant.”
“But of course I like you. I wouldn’t be having lunch with you if I didn’t like you. Algebra has got nothing to do with it.”
She lowered her eyes to the menu, and he saw that she was blushing. There was nothing he could do about that; she had picked up his message of disengagement, if that was the message, and he was not sure about that. It was geometry, rather than algebra. The geometry of this situation was wrong: there was a triangle, with Jo and Anna as two points of the diagram and himself as the third. He did not want to be involved in that sort of arrangement, because it was a triangle that had ended his marriage—an involuntary triangle—and he did not want a repetition. Anna was married. It was as simple as that. He could not become responsible for jeopardising a marriage.
She looked up. “Ulf,” she blurted out. “I value your friendship—you know that.”
His reply was measured. “Of course.”
“But I do think—I’ve always thought—that we should keep our friendship as just that: a professional one.”
He caught his breath. This was not what he had expected. After her remark about equations—which surely was pretty unambiguous—he thought that it would be for him to put the brakes on the situation. But now she was acting as the one who was intent on calling a halt. Was that to save face?
He knew what he had to do. Ulf was gentlemanly, and he knew that a gentleman in these circumstances would assume the role of the proposer and would apologise and take a step back. That was what a gentleman would do. And although he knew that nobody talked about being a gentleman any more, the concept still existed and was waiting to be rediscovered. Perhaps it had just been renamed and was still operating somewhere under the burden of the new language of relationships, the language that stressed self-determination and personal space. That was not all that different from the code of gentlemanly conduct that had previously prevented men from inappropriate conduct in their relations with women. The things that men were now supposed not to do were precisely the things that gentlemen were not meant to do anyway—so what was the difference? Were we simply becoming old-fashioned again, as societies tended to do when they saw the consequences of tearing up the behavioural rule book?
Ulf had never reflected on where his values came from, but had he done so, the answer would have been obvious. His father, Ture Varg, had been the doorman of a famous, old-fashioned hotel. He was a self-taught man who spent his spare time reading in an effort to make up for the education that family misfortune had prevented him from getting. He was well known to the hotel’s clientele and in the wider city, much appreciated for his courtesy and charm. In his professional role, he wore a stovepipe hat that he doffed to all who entered. He wore grey kid-leather gloves and a long frock coat on which two small military medals were pinned. He sang in a choir that performed Swedish folk songs. He never spoke harshly or rudely to anyone.
That was where Ulf came from, and now, intuitively and automatically, he knew what his father would do.
“I’m very sorry,” he said. “I spoke out of turn. Forgive me; it was my fault entirely. I was forgetting that some things simply cannot be, no matter how much one might wish otherwise.”
Anna seemed to recover remarkably quickly. It was a relief to her, he thought. “Of course,” she said. And then repeated, “Of course.”
Ulf pointed to the menu. “What are you going to have?”
Anna pointed to an item at the top of the handwritten menu. Although describing itself as a café, and although much of its business was in the serving of coffee to office workers, this was really a bistro with a carefully prepared, if small, selection of classic dishes. “Jansson’s Temptation,” she said. “When did you last have that? Ten years ago?”
Ulf licked his lips. “I loved that. My mother sometimes made it on a Sunday evening.”
It was a simple dish, consisting of onions, potatoes, anchovies and cream. It was echt comfort food.
“Or Gubbröra,” Anna said, pointing to another item.
“Both,” said Ulf with delicious irresponsibility. “Jansson’s Temptation first, and then Gubbröra.”
The waitress came to take their order. As regulars, they both knew her, and they listened as she complained about the students. “You know what I’d like to say to them?” she said. “I’d like to go up to them and say: What gives you the right to sit about in cafés laughing your heads off when other people have to go to work? You know how long they’ll stay in here? Three hours at least. And the government pays them to study, doesn’t it? They get all that money to sit about in cafés and make a din.”
“Would you like us to arrest them?” asked Varg. “We could, you know? For sitting about. It’s there somewhere in the penal code.”
The waitress laughed. “Somebody will believe you one of these days, Mr. Varg.”
Their order placed, Ulf steered the conversation back to Signe. “Why was the matter referred to us?” he asked. “A missing student—and they usually turn up—is hardly a sensitive crime.”
“Her father’s a diplomat,” explained Anna. “He’s the Swedish representative on a number of anti-terrorism initiatives. Hence...”
Ulf raised a hand. “Enough said.”
“Although I don’t think this has anything to do with terrorism.”
“No?”
Anna glanced at the woman at the next table, who had now given up her attempt to listen to their conversation. A reproachful glance came in return.
“I think,” Anna continued, “that this has nothing to do with anything political and everything to do with some silly goings-on between three young women. Boys are probably involved somewhere in the background—especially after that ridiculous business of the imaginary boyfriend. Hormones come into it, I think.”
“Don’t they always?” said Varg.
“Possibly. Anyway, I don’t think that Signe has been the victim of anything. She hasn’t been kidnapped or murdered. She’s probably just gone off in a huff because of a row with her friend Bim. Or ex-friend, I should say.”
Ulf fiddled with the menu. “So this is all just collateral damage resulting from a bust-up between Signe and Bim?”
Anna nodded. “Yes.”
“So, what do we do now?”
Anna spread her hands. It was a gesture of defeat in the face of uncertainty. “Heaven knows,” she said.
Chapter Twelve
BEING SWEDISH IS NOT ALWAYS EASY
On his return to the office, Ulf was told by Erik that Blomquist had telephoned him and wanted him to return the call. As he sat down to dial the number, Ulf felt the effect of the Jansson’s Temptation—the lingering taste of anchovies, always given to repeat itself, was accompanied by a heaviness in the stomach that, although not unpleasant, was hardly conducive to work. He would have liked a siesta; he would have liked to stretch out on a sofa and think about anything other than a telephone call to Blomquist.
Blomquist answered quickly. “You aren’t busy, are you?”
Ulf resented this. There was a widespread belief in the police force that those in special offices—such as the Department of Sensitive Crimes—occupied virtual sinecures, with very little to do.
He could not help himself and replied snappily, “Fairly busy.” He added, “As always,” which was not true, of course, but seemed merited in the circumstances. He could, of course, tell Blomquist that he was preparing for a major case assigned to him by no less a person than the Commissioner, but confidentiality prevented that. And it was also true that he did not have much preparation to do; but that was irrelevant—the point was that Blomquist had no business insinuating that the Department of Sensitive Crimes was underemployed.
Blomquist revealed what he wanted. He had been, he said, on regular duty on the street when he had been approached by Hampus Johansso
n. “You’ll remember him, won’t you? The man who stabbed Malte Gustafsson? I gave you the information and—”
Ulf cut him short. He had anticipated that Blomquist would take the credit for Johansson’s arrest, but in fact it was he, Ulf, who had had the idea in the first place that the crime had been committed by somebody of short stature. But he was not going to get involved in an argument with Blomquist about that, so he simply replied, “Yes, your response to my initial query was very helpful, Blomquist.” And before Blomquist could say anything else about who had done what in bringing Hampus to justice, he added, “What does he want?”
“He wants to see you. He’s very...well, I suppose you’d describe him as distraught.”
Ulf sighed. “We can’t reverse convictions. We’re not a court of appeal.”
Blomquist said that it was nothing to do with the conviction. “It’s the sentence, Mr. Varg—his community service sentence.”
“But that’s the court’s affair,” said Ulf. “We don’t decide who has to do what. You must know that, Blomquist.”
“It’s very difficult for him, Mr. Varg. He feels you’re the only one who can help. He has a lot of respect for you, you see.”
Ulf looked up at the ceiling. He had felt sorry for Hampus—everybody in that courtroom had felt that way. And he was a kind man, possibly the kindest man in the entire Swedish police service, and he found it difficult to refuse a heartfelt request—such as this obviously was. Yet at the same time there were limits to what you could do. The world was a place of sadness and strife, of selfish behaviour and disagreement, of oppression and injustice; and efforts to remedy that, to set right the scales of justice, sometimes seemed like patching up a crack in a dam wall with sticking plaster. But you had to do what you could, and, more specifically, what your role in life expected of you. And he was a detective; he was a member of the Malmö Criminal Investigation Authority, and that meant there were souls within his care...yes, he thought, souls, because that old-fashioned word said so much more than the word person. A soul was something more than that—a soul had feelings and ambitions and private tragedies. A soul weighed more than something that was not a soul.
The Department of Sensitive Crimes Page 14