Another Time, Another Life: The Story of a Crime

by Leif Gw Persson

  “I wonder if I can ask you a favor?” said Johansson. “I’d like to look at the pictures from the crime scene, so if you could give me the materials on the crime scene investigation and the forensic investigation, plus everything else you consider to be of interest, I’ll try to form an impression of how the whole thing played out.”

  “Of course,” said Holt. He apparently cares in any event, she thought.

  “Well,” said Johansson, smiling and leaning back in the chair, “do you still think Stein did it?”

  “Yes,” said Holt, nodding. “Unfortunately we’re moving in that direction.” And it doesn’t feel especially good, she thought.

  “And that bothers you,” Johansson said.

  “Yes,” said Holt.

  “Because she’s a woman?” asked Johansson.

  “Maybe,” said Holt, “I don’t know.” Pull yourself together now, Anna, she thought.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to like the situation,” said Johansson. “Especially when Eriksson seems to have been such an outstanding little asshole.”

  “Where would we be if it was open season on getting rid of assholes?” said Holt. He’s actually rather pleasant, she thought.

  “There would be a lot less people,” said Johansson, who seemed amused by the thought. “Now let’s do this,” Johansson continued, sitting up straight in the chair and beginning to count on his fingers. “We like the situation, we don’t make things complicated, we mistrust chance, and to start with we pull out that hand towel. When we’re done with that and everything else,” Johansson continued, holding up the fifth finger on his left hand, “then we turn all our worries over to the prosecutor with a clean conscience.”

  “All right by me,” said Holt, smiling involuntarily.

  “After all, this isn’t actually a murder investigation we’re working on,” Johansson concluded.

  This is going like clockwork, thought Johansson as Wiklander sat down on the chair Holt had just left. “I’m listening,” said Johansson.

  Everything that had been discussed between Johansson and Persson over their roast pork and brown beans was now noted in an interview, a copy of which Johansson would receive the next day. In addition Persson extended his greetings to the boss and looked forward to seeing him again in more pleasant circumstances.

  “You’ve got a real old-time policeman there,” said Johansson with an extra dollop of Norrland dialect. “So what did he have to say about little Waltin?”

  Quite a bit, according to Wiklander, but nothing that was particularly flattering to former deputy police superintendent Claes Waltin.

  “Spare me no details,” said Johansson, leaning comfortably back in his chair.

  Claes Waltin had as noted already quit the secret police in the spring of 1988 because the so-called external operation, of which he had been the head, had finally been shut down. He was the one who had resigned, but if he hadn’t done so it was most likely that he would have been removed anyway.

  “Financial irregularities,” Wiklander summarized. “The auditors were furious with him, but because he was who he was Berg was content that he turned in his resignation and quit.”

  “He seems to have been pretty well off,” said Johansson. “If I’ve understood things correctly he had a lot of inherited money?”

  A great deal of inherited money, according to what could be determined. As well as an even greater amount whose origin was less clear but could probably be attributed to various shady transactions made during his time with the secret police. Another portion of his wealth he had buried abroad, and no one ever really got a handle on that, but it probably originated from the same sources as the majority of the money that had been found.

  “Waltin seems to have been a real gem,” Wiklander summarized.

  “And think how well dressed he was,” said Johansson, grinning contentedly.

  Not when he died, according to Wiklander. Not even a bathing suit was left on what the Mediterranean birds and fish left behind of the former deputy police superintendent.

  “He was on vacation in Mallorca,” said Wiklander. “It was October of 1992. He had checked into a really extravagant luxury hotel that he visited every fall—it’s out on the furthest northern point above Port de Pollenca—and every morning he was there he would take a dip in the Mediterranean before breakfast. But one morning he didn’t come back, and when he was finally found almost fourteen days later, it was only his remains, bumping against the seawall a couple miles away from the hotel.”

  “I see,” said Johansson. “Was there anything strange about that?”

  “Not according to the Spanish authorities,” Wiklander replied. “It was written off as an ordinary accident. In any case no bullet holes were found in the little that was left of him. Not according to Persson anyway.”

  “So what did Berg say,” Johansson wondered.

  “Berg was apparently his usual self,” said Wiklander. “He immediately took over the domestic investigation as soon as he found out that Waltin was dead. Among other things he had a really thorough search done at Waltin’s residence. He had a large apartment on Norr Mälarstrand, as well as an old family estate down in Sörmland.”

  “And it’s quite certain that those remains were Waltin’s?” asked Johansson, who was meticulous about such things.

  “According to Persson they were one hundred percent sure. They had access to his DNA, and when the remains came home to Sweden they compared that DNA with what they already had, so it had been established beyond a doubt that it really was Waltin.”

  We’ll all have to try to live with the sorrow, thought Johansson piously.

  “So was anything interesting found at his home?” he asked.

  “That’s what was so strange,” said Wiklander. “With the exception of some mysterious will that was in his safe-deposit box and which I’ll come back to, more or less nothing was found of a more private nature. There were a lot of expensive paintings and furniture, but nothing more personal.”

  “That must have been a downer for Berg,” Johansson chuckled.

  “Yes,” said Wiklander. “Among other things Waltin was known as a ladies’ man, so I guess everyone was a little surprised that no traces of that part of his life were found. For a while they had the idea that he’d cleaned up after himself and gone to Mallorca to commit suicide. He had started drinking rather heavily after he quit working with us,” Wiklander added. “According to the colleagues who ran into him in town he was starting to look rather moth-eaten toward the end.”

  “Is that what he did?” asked Johansson. “Took his own life I mean?” Nice to hear he was a ladies’ man, he thought, and for some reason it was his own wife he was thinking about.

  “I don’t know,” said Wiklander, shrugging his shoulders. “There was never any real clarity on that point, but according to the Spaniards it was a pure accident. They naturally talked with the personnel at the hotel, and according to them he was exactly the same as usual the morning that he drowned.”

  “There were no witnesses?” asked Johansson.

  “No witnesses,” said Wiklander, shaking his head. “It was mostly Spaniards who stayed at the hotel, and they lounged in bed until late in the morning in contrast to Waltin, who apparently was a morning person. The hotel had its own beach too, discreet and separate from the hoi polloi.”

  “I see,” said Johansson. “We’ll have to live with the uncertainty. So what was there with that will?” he wondered.

  “A real shocker,” said Wiklander. “It was in his safe deposit box, it was handwritten, and it had been established beyond a doubt that he wrote it himself. You’ll hardly believe it’s true.” Wiklander shook his head.

  “What was in it then?” asked Johansson impatiently.

  “All the money he had—and there was quite a bit—was to go to a foundation to support research on hypochondria among women, in memory of his old mother, and the foundation would bear her name. The Foundation for Research into Hypochondria in Me
mory of my Mother, Aino Waltin, and All Other Hypochondriacal Old Hags Who Have Ruined the Lives of Their Children—that was what he wanted it to be called.”

  “Sounds nice,” said Johansson, whose mother would soon turn ninety. She had given birth to seven children and got up with the rooster the day after every birth. Dear Mama Elna. It’s high time I called to ask how she’s doing, thought her youngest son Johansson affectionately.

  “That was far from the worst.” said Wiklander. “He wrote down a detailed explanation too. He said his mother had apparently promised she would die for as long as he could remember, from basically every conceivable illness to be found in a medical book, and finally he got so tired of the old hag and her unfulfilled promises of an imminent departure that he pushed her off the platform at the Östermalm subway station.”

  “That sounds completely insane,” said Johansson. Not even Waltin could have been that crazy, he thought.

  “In and of itself, yes,” said Wiklander. “The problem is that the old lady appears to have died in exactly that way, sometime in the late sixties when Waltin himself was about twenty-five years old and studying law at the University of Stockholm.”

  “So did he do it?” asked Johansson.

  “It was written off as a pure accident,” said Wiklander, “but our colleague Persson was completely convinced that he was the one who killed her. According to Persson she wasn’t the only one either, but he didn’t want to go into who the others were, so I think that was mostly bullshit.”

  Amazing story, thought Johansson.

  “So what happened with the foundation?” he asked.

  “It didn’t happen,” said Wiklander. “The will was declared invalid and the money went to his old father. They hadn’t met since Waltin was a little boy, because the old man had taken his secretary, fled his home, and moved down to Skåne, but he got the money in any event. Whatever he could do with it, because he was pretty well heeled himself, and besides he was already ancient when his son died. The old man is said to have died a year or two ago, just before he turned a hundred.”

  “I see,” said Johansson. “This was a rather amazing story.”

  “Yes,” said Wiklander. “It’s got just about everything, but what I don’t really get is what this has to do with our case. With Stein, I mean?”

  “Nothing at all,” said Johansson. “I promise and assure you that it has nothing whatsoever to do with our case. I was simply curious about what happened to Waltin,” said Johansson.

  Should I believe that? thought Wiklander, who was a real policeman and had already forgotten the good advice his predecessor Persson had given him.

  When Johansson arrived home that evening, after mature deliberation, and against his oath of secrecy—after all this matter did not bear directly on the security of the realm—he told the whole, sorrowful story of Waltin and his demise to his wife, Pia.

  “I knew that something would happen,” said Pia agitatedly. “He was just the type to be murdered.”

  Sigh and moan, thought Johansson. Wonder if it can be all the vegetables she eats. For according to his clear understanding, based on common sense and far too much experience, Waltin was exactly the type who would never be murdered.

  “I’ve just told you that he drowned,” said Johansson with emphasis on every syllable. “So why do you persist in saying that he must have been murdered?”

  “He was the type,” said Johansson’s wife. “I’m quite sure. I can feel it. That’s just how it is.”

  “What do you think about sleeping on it?” Johansson suggested, pointedly turning off the light on his nightstand. Another one that’s like a child, he thought, and it was his good fortune that his wife was not a coworker of Anna Holt.

  34

  Tuesday, April 4, 2000

  Holt devoted half of Tuesday to searching for a vanished hand towel, but the only thing the tech squad in Stockholm came up with was yet another copy of the forensic report already in the investigation file confirming the existence of the hand towel in question, and they gave a number of strangely evasive responses when she talked with them on the phone. Meanwhile her colleague Martinez, who had promised to help her, had disappeared.

  “Okay,” said Holt when she finally got hold of Martinez, in their own break room of all places. “We’ll have to hop down to Stockholm and question that fuckup Wiijnbladh, who was responsible for the hand towel debacle.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be easy,” said Martinez, who had already investigated the matter.

  Wiijnbladh had scarcely been a giant at the time Holt had worked with him on the investigation of the murder of Kjell Göran Eriksson. He was currently a fragment of his former self, and had been working for several years at the Stockholm Police Department’s so-called lost-and-found. The alleged purpose of the job was to hunt for stolen and missing goods, though everyone who knew anything worth knowing also knew that this was one of the agency’s many assignments for warehousing colleagues for whom things had gone badly but who for various reasons could not simply be kicked out.

  Mere months after the murder of Kjell Eriksson, Wiijnbladh had suffered an accident at work under peculiar circumstances. One day he had simply fallen apart at work—cramps, vomiting, crazed outbursts—and his terrified colleagues had carted him off to the ER at Karolinska, where he was immediately sent on to intensive care.

  At first no one understood a thing. The assembled medical experts stood by scratching their heads, until a senior physician in the department with a good memory recalled a recent, very sad story at the Karolinska Institute about a young medical student who had stolen a bottle of thallium, which he had used to poison his father. From the notes in Wiijnbladh’s medical record it appeared that he worked as a crime technician with the Stockholm police, and the doctor quickly added one and one together and got to two. Because there was no way to talk with Wiijnbladh himself—in plain Swedish he was completely gone, and was wandering back and forth in the borderland between life and death—his doctor called the head of the Stockholm Police Department’s disciplinary unit, whom he knew due to a previous, similar story, and reported his observations directly to him.

  The bottle of thallium was found locked up where it should have been at the tech squad, but the quantity it contained was less than what it should have been according to the confiscation report, and the remainder, more than ten grams, was found on the shelf in Wiijnbladh’s locker at work. Someone, most likely Wiijnbladh himself, had poured it into a can that originally held instant coffee.

  Considering that a few hundredths of a gram was sufficient to kill, and that even a few microscopic grains on the skin were more than sufficient to make you feel like Wiijnbladh, the potential for harm was frightening and the agitation at the tech squad had been great. They were worried not so much about Wiijnbladh as about what might have happened to other, completely normal colleagues in Chief Inspector Blenke’s valiant battalion.

  “But what would he do with ten grams of thallium?” Holt asked with surprise.

  “According to a colleague at internal investigations, Wiijnbladh was going to use it to kill his wife,” Martinez explained.

  “What?” said Holt. That little twit, she thought. Who knew he had that much backbone?

  “Although that problem solved itself—they say she’d already left him before he was discharged from the hospital. I hardly think he’s in any condition to kill her with anything he can swipe from all the old shit he has access to down at the lost-and-found department,” said Martinez. “It’s mostly stolen bicycles and TVs,” she clarified.

  “So what happened to the hand towel?” asked Holt.

  According to Martinez the hand towel had been lost to forensic science in the general disorder that had broken out in the wake of Wiijnbladh’s sudden bout of ill health. In normal circumstances Wiijnbladh would have placed it in one of the tech squad’s freezers for storage to await any future needs—such as now, for example—or until the case was closed and it cou
ld be discarded. But things did not go as usual.

  Instead it had remained lying on Wiijnbladh’s work bench, and because it was well packaged it had managed to rot considerably before the odor finally forced its way through the plastic, alarming Wiijnbladh’s colleagues—who by that time were rather sensitive where he was concerned—and one of them took immediate measures.

  “Someone simply threw it in the garbage,” said Martinez, shrugging her shoulders. “It’s unclear who, but it was someone who worked there.”

  “I see,” said Holt. “Have you spoken with Wiijnbladh?”

  “Yes,” said Martinez, “and the reason I didn’t take you along was that you were sitting talking to our beloved boss.”

  “So what did Wiijnbladh say?” Holt wondered. Typical, she also thought.

  “Not much,” said Martinez, shaking her head. “The guy’s only a remnant. No hair, hardly any teeth left, his whole body shaking like he’s playing maracas. I could hardly hear what he was saying and he didn’t remember any hand towel or any murder of any Eriksson. On the other hand he remembered that he had personally solved hundreds of murders when he was working at the tech squad. He just didn’t remember Eriksson. Then he asked me to say hello to someone named Bäckström. So I promised to do that. Is he someone you know?”

  “Depends on what you mean by know,” said Holt, shrugging her shoulders. “He was the one in charge of the Eriksson investigation.”

  “Omigod,” said Martinez. “I wondered. So what’s he like?”

  “Well,” said Holt, delaying her response. “Like Wiijnbladh—only the other way around—and just as bad.”

  “I get it,” said Martinez.

  According to Martinez it was still too early for them to throw in the proverbial towel. One of their own technicians had promised to do his best with the report and get back to them as soon as possible, and dear Mattei had had an idea when Martinez told the sorrowful story of the hand towel to her.