These thoughts were a reminder of duty, of what he had to do simply because he was Ulf Varg. “Of course I’ll see him, Blomquist,” he said at last. “And thank you again for what you did in that case. We couldn’t have solved it without you.”
Blomquist’s pleasure was evident down the telephone line. “Anything I can do, Mr. Varg. Anything. Any time.” And then he added, “I know how busy you people are.”
The conversation ended with the arrangements. Blomquist would come to the office within the next half hour and they would drive together, in the Saab, to the dance studio where Hampus taught. As Ulf hung up, he pictured the studio where that extraordinary meeting with Hampus had taken place. He saw the revolving mirror ball, that cheap dispenser of glittery light that seemed de rigueur in those tawdry dance places. He saw the sprung floor, with its pliant boards and its dusting of French chalk...
French chalk. French chalk. For some reason this resonated with him, but he could not remember why.
* * *
—
Hampus was playing the piano when they arrived. Two couples were on the dance floor—two instructors with their clients. The instructors were women, the clients, two middle-aged men, one in a loose-fitting white suit, the other wearing jeans and a seersucker jacket. Hampus, who did not see them arrive, was perched on a piano stool, his legs far from touching the floor or the pedals of the piano; his limited reach meant that he had to twist from this side to that as the music ascended or descended.
The instructors noticed them enter but continued dancing. One was counting out loud to her pupil as she guided him through the steps; the other was demonstrating the correct position of the arms as she moved the man in the seersucker jacket through the steps. Blomquist beamed with pleasure as he watched the dance, tapping a foot against the floor in time to the music. “I just love dancing,” he whispered to Ulf. “My wife and I go out dancing whenever we can. We dance a lot.”
Ulf nodded. “Yes,” he said. Letta had been keen on dancing, he less so.
“Our daughter’s turning into quite a good little dancer,” he said. “Ballet, though—not ballroom.”
Ulf smiled. “Very nice,” he said.
“You know there’s a ballet school up in Stockholm?”
Ulf watched the dancers. Blomquist talked too much, he thought; he really did. What was wrong with silence? “I’ve heard of it.”
“The Royal Swedish Ballet School. They take quite young children, I believe. We couldn’t send Svea up there just yet—she’s only eight, you know. Eight’s too young, don’t you think? You can’t make up your mind about a career—and ballet really is a career—if you’re eight.”
The pace of the music increased; Hampus twisting from side to side more energetically now to reach the higher or lower notes. The floor creaked as the dancers moved. Ulf saw the French chalk, a thin white layer on the wood, striated by the dancers’ feet.
“I went to ballet lessons myself when I was a boy,” said Blomquist. “Just for a year or two. I gave them up because I was being teased.”
Ulf glanced at him. “I can’t quite see it, Blomquist.”
Blomquist grinned. “Oh, I think I was quite good, Mr. Varg. Perhaps I could have continued. I might have become a professional ballet dancer rather than a policeman.” He paused, as if imagining the contrast. “Life’s odd, isn’t it? You make a decision that could dictate the whole course of your life, and you don’t know at the time that it will do that, do you? You don’t.”
“No, I suppose you don’t.”
“You never did ballet, Mr. Varg?”
“No, Blomquist. I never did ballet.”
“You might have been quite good, you know. Some surprising people are quite good at ballet.”
Hampus was reaching the end of the tune. With a final flourish he concluded, and then closed the piano lid with a bang. The man in the seersucker jacket said, “Ah!” loudly—an exclamation of satisfaction. His instructor patted him on the shoulder in congratulation—a dance well danced.
Hampus turned around and saw Ulf and Blomquist. Slipping off his stool, he walked quickly across the floor and shook hands with Ulf.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Varg,” he said. “I hope you haven’t been waiting too long.”
“I enjoyed watching,” Ulf replied. “And you’re a fine pianist, Mr. Johansson.”
Hampus made a self-effacing gesture. “No, I’m not really, Mr. Varg. I play very functionally.”
“I see that you can’t reach the pedals,” Blomquist observed. “That can’t help.”
Ulf glanced at Blomquist. Hampus frowned, and then rubbed his hands together as if to restore the circulation.
“Couldn’t you have some device to extend the pedals?” Blomquist went on. “Some sort of lever device?”
Hampus stared fixedly at the floor. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“You wanted to see me,” said Ulf.
“Yes,” said Hampus. “I was going to go to your office. I didn’t expect you to come down here, but Mr. Blomquist told me that you didn’t have much to do and wouldn’t mind.”
Ulf glanced at Blomquist again, who looked away, lifting his gaze to the static mirror ball. “I see.” He looked again at Blomquist. He was unrepentant, he noticed. Sometimes it was difficult to be as tolerant as he wanted to be; but then, thought Ulf, the whole point about high ideals is that they are high. Being Swedish was not always easy, but you had to do your best, and hope that you didn’t slip, and become...well, Mediterranean in outlook. It was so easy, such a beguiling option, to shrug your shoulders and behave as your immediate emotions dictated. And how comfortable it must be to sit in the sun and smile, and say the world will look after itself, and that its problems will resolve themselves tomorrow, or even the day after that.
Ulf became businesslike. “Well, here I am, Mr. Johansson. What’s the trouble? Mr. Blomquist tells me you’re not happy with your community service arrangements.”
Hampus nodded. “Certainly not. Very unhappy.”
Ulf spread his hands in a gesture of acceptance. “But that’s the whole point about a court sentence, you know. The people who get it are usually not very happy. In fact, some of them are downright unhappy.”
“That’s what I said,” Blomquist interjected.
Ulf asked Hampus what his assignment was.
“I’ve been assigned to work at an army base,” said Hampus. “I was told that I would be given general duties. Eight hours a week.”
Ulf said he thought that sounded reasonable enough. “Some people doing community service get very unpleasant tasks, you know.” General duties in an army base did not sound too onerous to him.
Hampus looked at Ulf defiantly. “This is. This is very onerous.”
“Tell me, then,” said Ulf. “What do they make you do? Carry heavy things? Peel potatoes in the cookhouse?”
“Potatoes are best eaten unpeeled,” interjected Blomquist. “The skins contain a lot of the real nutritional material, you know. You shouldn’t peel potatoes.”
Ulf threw Blomquist a dismissive glance. “I know that, Blomquist,” he said. “But does the army?”
“You’d think they would know by now, Mr. Varg. The army should keep up to date with these things. Soldiers need a balanced diet—just the same as everybody else.”
Ulf turned back to Hampus. “So, what do they make you do, then?”
Hampus hesitated. “They haven’t told me yet,” he answered.
Ulf frowned. He was beginning to feel irritated by Hampus. The dance instructor was lucky to have been let off so lightly by the court—he could easily have ended up in prison—and it ill became him now to complain about his community service assignment. What was wrong with being allocated to an army barracks? A pickpocket of Ulf’s acquaintance—a habitual thief whom Ulf had arrested on several occasions
during his early days in the police—had recently been given one hundred hours of general duties in the sewage works, and another, a public drunkard and indecent exhibitionist, had been sentenced to fifty hours of cleaning up at the fish market, a malodorous job involving the disposal of rotten fish heads. The army would be nothing like that.
“So how do you know you won’t like it?” asked Ulf.
“Because I was warned about it,” said Hampus. “Somebody who comes for dance lessons is married to one of the sergeant majors up there. He told her that they’ve planned something very unpleasant for me. He didn’t tell her what it was, but he said he would never do it himself—even if they offered to promote him.”
Ulf sighed. “That’s not enough,” he said. “That doesn’t give me grounds to interfere.”
Hampus looked at him imploringly. “He said I might not survive. That’s what he said.”
Ulf raised an eyebrow. This was different. Was the army planning to use Hampus on some sort of dangerous combat mission? “You mean that you might be obliged to fight?” he asked.
Hampus nodded. “That’s what it looks like.”
Ulf glanced at his colleague, who shrugged.
“They’re short of men,” Blomquist said. “Maybe it’s their way of recruiting—they get community service people.”
“That’s ridiculous,” retorted Ulf. “Absurd.”
“Defence spending cuts,” ventured Blomquist.
Ulf looked at Hampus, who was staring back at him, waiting for his response. He trusts me, thought Ulf. He expects me to protect him. And at that point, the urge that had prompted Ulf to join the police all those years ago once again tugged at his heart. If there was an injustice—or an abuse of power—then he felt compelled to set it right. And there was an abuse of power here—a major one, perhaps—and he would not dodge it.
Ulf found himself thinking of what he would do. He knew that one could go back to the court and get a community service order varied, but that this could take time. The last time he had been involved in that particular procedure, it had taken two months. Hampus did not have two months; he might not even have two days. It was almost unbelievable that the army should behave in this way in the twenty-first century. If they wanted to take risks with their own men, that was their affair, although he imagined that they were careful to train them properly. But to take a complete outsider and put him into combat was breathtakingly irresponsible. Hampus was now looking imploringly at Ulf. “Could you speak to the colonel?” he pleaded. “Ask him not to make me do whatever they’ve been planning. I’ll do anything—anything that a civilian can do. Even peel potatoes—gladly.”
“You shouldn’t,” said Blomquist. “There are minerals in potato skins. It’s pointless to get rid of the best part of—”
Ulf interrupted him. “I think you have a very strong case,” he said.
“So you’ll do it?” asked Hampus eagerly.
“Whatever they have in mind,” Ulf said, “sounds unacceptable. I’ll go to the base and insist on seeing the colonel.”
“Good,” said Hampus. “Thank you.”
“And if he won’t deal with it immediately,” Ulf continued, “I shall speak to the Commissioner of Police and ask him to intervene.” He paused. “I know him, you see.”
Blomquist looked sharply at Ulf. “You know him? You know Ahlbörg?”
Ulf did his best to sound casual. “As it happens, I do.”
“Wow!” exclaimed Blomquist, and then, his voice dropping, he added, “What’s he like?”
“Very pleasant, actually,” Ulf replied. “Felix is—”
Blomquist’s eyebrows shot up. “Felix? You know his first name?”
Ulf’s manner remained casual. “He asked me to call him that. It wasn’t my idea.”
“Felix,” mused Blomquist. “And what did he call you? Ulf?” He laughed at the sheer unlikelihood.
“Yes,” said Ulf. “He called me Ulf.”
Hampus looked up sharply. “Is that your name? Ulf?”
“Yes, I’m Ulf.” And then, with a smile, “I don’t mind if you call me that, if you like.”
“So both your names mean wolf,” said Hampus. “You’re Wolf Wolf.”
“It’s a common enough name,” said Ulf. “There are other names that refer to animals.”
Blomquist frowned. “Not many. You don’t come across many people called ‘Dog’ or ‘Horse,’ do you?”
Ulf felt himself becoming irritated. Both Ulf and Varg were perfectly good names and somebody called Hampus was hardly in a position to question the names of others. Hampus...what a ridiculous name that was—not that he would ever dream of drawing attention to it.
Blomquist ploughed on. “Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? Remember that one?”
Ulf did not reply. He turned to Blomquist. “What about you, Blomquist? Doesn’t Blomquist mean ‘flower branch’?”
He did not wait for an answer, continuing, “Anyway, we don’t need to discuss names. When are you next due at the base?”
“Tomorrow,” said Hampus. “Unless they call me in before then. They said I might have to come in at short notice if there’s an emergency, but they didn’t tell me what sort of emergency it could be. An invasion, maybe.”
Ulf looked at his watch. “I could try to get over there later this afternoon. Otherwise, I’ll go first thing tomorrow.”
Hampus gave him a look of gratitude. “You’ve been very kind to me, Mr. Varg,” he said. And then, to Blomquist, “And you too, Mr. Blomquist.”
* * *
—
In the Saab, on the way back to the office, Ulf made known his views on the army. “They think they’re above the law,” he said. “That sort of conduct—exposing a civilian to risk—is downright criminal.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” said Blomquist.
“I won’t take no from that colonel,” Ulf continued.
They turned a corner and Blomquist indicated where he would like to be dropped off. Before he alighted, though, he turned to Ulf and said, “That missing girl—the one they sent a notification out on...”
“Signe Magnusson? Yes?”
Blomquist looked at his fingernails. “I could have some information about her.”
Ulf frowned. “Well? Have you seen her?”
“No, not seen her. But it so happens that I go to a coffee bar not far from my place. Not too often, but now and then. They serve really good coffee, you see—Central American stuff. You know, it’s amazing the difference the origin makes.”
“Yes, it’s important,” said Ulf. “But what about this place? What’s it got to do with the girl? Did she go there?”
Blomquist said that she did not. “One of the baristas is a young guy called Loke. He’s from Gothenburg. He used to play semi-professional football, but he hurt his knee and had to give it up. That’s hard luck, you know. You get a knee injury and that’s your career finished. Over. Pretty hard luck.”
“Yes,” said Ulf. “It must be tough. But what about this Loke?”
“He was her boyfriend,” said Blomquist.
“Ah.”
“Yes, or should I say one of her boyfriends.”
Ulf waited for Blomquist to continue. It was difficult to hurry him on, he felt, and it was best just to let the natural stream of consciousness play itself out. There were people like that—Mrs. Högfors, Blomquist, one or two others.
“You see,” Blomquist went on, “apparently Signe Magnusson had two boyfriends. She had the barista, this Loke, and then she had some guy who worked in a tax office somewhere. Both at the same time.”
“Two-timing,” muttered Ulf.
Blomquist looked disapproving. “It’s unusual to find a woman doing that, you know. Men, yes, but women...The problem is, I suppose, that women are becoming more like men and
two-timing goes with the territory. Do you think society’s becoming more androgynous, Mr. Varg?”
“I think so, Blomquist. But tell me: Did the young men know about this situation?”
Blomquist looked amused. “They didn’t. Loke said he had no idea at all until a girlfriend of Signe’s told him. She came specially to see him and gave him the news.” He paused. “And she told the other boy too.”
Ulf asked who the informant was.
“It was the girl in the photograph with the guy who didn’t exist,” said Blomquist. “Quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you agree, but that’s who it was.”
Chapter Thirteen
PERICARDITIS
The soldier at the barracks gate, unpersuaded by Ulf’s official identity card, insisted on searching the Saab.
“Nice old car,” he said as he rummaged around in the glove compartment. “Not the sort of car a terrorist drives.”
Ulf smiled good-naturedly. “Well, if you aren’t allowed to profile people, then how about profiling their cars?”
The soldier grinned. “Impossible. No profiling in any circumstances. Those are the orders.”
“Including police officers?”
“Yes, including police officers. You see, I can tell that you’re not a terrorist wanting to blow us up, but I might be wrong, mightn’t I? So it’s best for me not to trust my instincts.”
Ulf agreed that this was so. But as he got back into the Saab, now declared safe after its cursory examination by the soldier, he thought: What has happened to trust? What sort of place have we become? They were painful questions, and for that reason people avoided asking them. And he would be no exception. He had a job to do and he would do it, correctly, and, in so far as he could, with compassion. The rest would have to be left to History, whatever History was. Was it what people used to call God, or Providence, or even Fate—all of which were, by their very nature, unquestionable by mortals, and certainly by any member of the Sensitive Crimes Department of the Malmö Criminal Investigation Authority? Even Mr. Ahlbörg, the Commissioner, on his distant Parnassus, had to carry out the unfathomable will of those above him, in their remote fastness in Stockholm; and they, in spite of all their power and authority, had to heed the diktats of even higher authorities in Brussels and at the European Court in Luxembourg. Under such structures, immense and unchallengeable, he thought, we live our small lives, doing the routine things we are expected to do, trying to convince ourselves that we are in control of our destiny and that our views count for something. And if it was like that for him, then how much worse was it for somebody like Blomquist, several steps below him in the hierarchy, or for Martin, even lower still, in that layer of society occupied by dogs, where obedience to a human master is all and where freedom is rationed or excluded. Martin...He was making good progress now, and Mrs. Högfors had reported positively on her latest walks with him. He had chased some prematurely fallen leaves with what had struck her as real interest—prematurely, because the autumn was a long way away still; there was still light, and warmth and the things that dogs appreciated.
The Department of Sensitive Crimes Page 15