Another Time, Another Life: The Story of a Crime

by Leif Gw Persson

  Helena Stein kept her promise. She did not say a word. She simply sat up straight in her chair, without leaning against the back and without looking at him. No expression on her face or even a shift in her eyes, very present and yet very far away.

  “When you’ve done that you back a step out of the room still holding the knife in your hand and you hardly know what’s happened, for it took only a fraction of a second, and Eriksson seems to have barely reacted. He turns around and looks at you with surprise, then he runs his left arm up along his back toward the place where it’s starting to hurt, and when he sees all the blood he has on his left shirt sleeve he sets down the glass he’s been holding in his right hand and gets up and suddenly he’s completely furious and starts to yell.

  “Then he tries to get hold of you,” Johansson continued, “and you back straight out toward the window in the living room, because maybe you have the idea that you might be able to get help by calling out to the street, but Eriksson gets tangled up in his own furniture. After following you a few steps to the left he turns in place and takes another few steps back, yelling at you the whole time. Then suddenly—just like that—he collapses between the couch and the coffee table, which turns over, and the glasses and bottles land on the floor. And now he’s lying there—and he’s not screaming anymore. He’s only moaning faintly and he’s hardly moving, but a lot of blood is running out of the wound on his back and out of his mouth. And then you run back into the kitchen, throw the knife in the wastebasket, rush into the bathroom, lock the door, and vomit into a hand towel you grab …

  “That’s how it went, more or less,” said Johansson, nodding.

  “May I say something now?” asked Helena Stein, but without looking at Johansson.

  “Sure,” said Johansson. “Just think about what you’re saying.”

  “So why would I have done that?” she asked.

  “You had run into him earlier in the day. You probably hadn’t even seen him since the embassy takeover almost fifteen years earlier, but suddenly he was simply sitting there in the audience listening to your lecture. And when you saw him it was like seeing an evil apparition from another time. You were already nervous. East Germany had just fallen apart, and you were constantly worried about what people like me might find in the Stasi files when we finally had the chance to snoop through them. And when Eriksson came up to you after your lecture he didn’t exactly do anything to calm your fears on that score. More likely he tried to get you to think that your whole life was now in his hands. And maybe he also said something to the effect that he was the only one who would get off on the strength of his contacts, once the police finally came knocking on your doors.”

  “That’s what he said to Theo—long before,” said Stein.

  “Careful now,” Johansson warned.

  “So what did I do afterward?” asked Helena Stein. “Yes, I promise to be careful,” she said, and now suddenly she looked at him again.

  “You tried to collect yourself as best you could, cleaned up as well as you could, went through his desk and took a binder with you that he probably had been boasting about earlier in the evening—and that mostly contained a lot of nonsense and his own notes, if you want to know what I think personally—because unlike you I’ve never seen all that shit he had locked up in his safe-deposit box, mostly for his own sake, so that he could convince you what a remarkable person he was. The following months you weren’t doing so well yourself.… You told Theo what had happened, naturally—if he hadn’t already figured it out on his own—and obviously he promised that regardless of anything else he would see to it that nothing bad happened to you and that in the worst case you would simply disappear to some tropical island as far away as you could get. But apart from that, well, you were desperate, probably thought about committing suicide. On several occasions I’m convinced you stood with phone in hand and were about to call the police so that it would finally be over, but then time passed, and nothing happened, and now we’re sitting here,” said Johansson, sighing.

  “Why are you telling me this?” asked Helena Stein.

  “For several reasons,” said Johansson. “Because I think that if someone offered you a new job within the government, you should be given the chance right now to avoid the risk by choosing to do something else. I brought these with me, by the way,” said Johansson, taking out the bag with two CD-ROMs containing extracts from Mattei’s research that he had carefully edited himself.

  “What’s that?” said Stein.

  “Scenes from your life,” said Johansson. “When I look at them, I get the distinct impression that you don’t lack alternatives. If you were to decide to live a different life now, of course,” said Johansson, looking steadily at her.

  “What I don’t really understand,” said Stein, “is why you’re telling me this. Why are you doing this?”

  “Oh well,” said Johansson. “If I don’t remember wrong, it was actually you who asked me.”

  “You came here to tell me,” she said. “I’m quite sure of that, and I’ve listened to you. I haven’t said anything about what you’ve said that can cause you any problems.”

  “I’m not the one who has problems,” said Johansson, “and I didn’t come here to play God.”

  “Why did you come here then?” she asked.

  “Two reasons, as I see it,” said Johansson. “It has happened that I’ve been wrong, and I guess I wanted to assure myself that this time I wasn’t.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Stein. “I haven’t said a word about what I think about your story.”

  “No,” said Johansson, “and I was actually the one who asked you not to. Let me put it like this: I guess I’ve figured it out anyway. Maybe I saw it in your eyes?”

  “The other reason then,” said Stein without looking at him.

  “Justice,” said Johansson. “I think what has already happened is good enough. What happens now, you decide yourself.”

  “Do you want me to thank you?” said Helena Stein, and the bitterness in her voice suddenly came through.

  “Why should you thank me?” said Johansson. “If the prosecutor had decided to report you on reasonable grounds for suspicion, we would have turned the case back over to the Stockholm police and let them take care of the formalities. And I’m convinced they wouldn’t have gotten very far. Just as I’m convinced that you would have had to run the media gauntlet anyway. So it was solely for that reason I did it this way. How could we have done anything else? The prosecutor chose to write off your case, and with that it’s closed for me and my colleagues too. We’re not the ones you need to be worried about now; there are completely different interests and different individuals. And if anyone asks me, you and I have never met. For the one simple reason that that’s the way I’m expected to answer such a question, and, if I may be personal now, I don’t have the slightest problem with that.”

  “I understand what you mean,” said Helena Stein.

  “I’m convinced of that,” said Johansson. “And for me it’s only about justice.”

  And then he left, walked to Östermalm subway station, and took the subway home to Söder. To another, and better, life, thought Johansson as he strode into the hall to his and Pia’s apartment. A new time, and a better life.

  Part 7

  A New Era

  XIII

  On April 24, Easter Monday, the media made note of the fact that twenty-five years to the day had passed since six young German terrorists occupied the West German embassy in Stockholm, murdered two people in cold blood, and carelessly or intentionally blew up the embassy building.

  The occupation was described as one among a well-known series of events from a different time, and the anniversary provided an opportunity to show the classic images of a now legendary TV reporter screaming at his technicians to start filming him live. He crouches with microphone raised while in the background the embassy building shakes and there are shock waves and flames from the explosions. He too was interv
iewed on this anniversary, of course, and everything he had to say showed clearly that nowadays he was living a different life and that the exuberant interest of his younger colleagues mostly just made him feel tired.

  The legal consequences of the twenty-fifth anniversary were for the most part not touched on. Only in passing was the fact mentioned that in a legal sense, right before midnight the statute of limitations would run out on the legal case based on the occupation of the embassy, and from now on the event would live on only in history. Of the intimation of Swedish involvement in the drama, there was not a peep.

  At the beginning of May, Undersecretary Helena Stein left her position at the Ministry of Defense, and according to the briefly worded press release—for the most part passed over in silence by the media—the reason she did so was that she had decided to return to private legal practice. She did, however, intend to retain some of her political involvement on the local level, and she also expressed a hope that the change in her work situation would give her more time for such involvement.

  The same day as the press release about her departure became public, the former bureau chief of the National Police Board Erik Berg passed away at a private nursing facility in Bromma.

  During the spring the cancer had spread like a wildfire in his body, and on this particular day he had decided to release his hold. Now I’ll let go, he had thought. Let go so I can fall freely, like in a dream. And so he did.

  Both Johansson and Berg’s old squire, Persson, attended the funeral.

  Berg’s widow was there too, of course, but not many others, especially considering who Berg had been. The undersecretary, on the other hand, sat in the front pew in the church and surprised them all by showing visible signs during the funeral that he was deeply moved. On one occasion he even snuffled audibly and rubbed the corner of his eye with a giant handkerchief.

  After the funeral service, when both Persson and Johansson were about to go their separate ways, the undersecretary came up to them and asked if he might invite them to lunch at Ulriksdals inn.

  “I need a couple of good shots in the company of someone I can talk to, so I can gather my courage to say goodbye to Erik,” he explained. Johansson and Persson did not make any objections, but instead immediately accepted his invitation, and when they thought back on this afterward it really had been pleasant.

  The following week Johansson met the undersecretary to ask him for a favor.

  “I want a new job,” said Johansson.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said the undersecretary, sounding as though he meant what he was saying. “What kind of job do you want?” he asked. “You can have whatever you want.” Finally, he thought.

  Oh, well, thought Johansson.

  “I’m a policeman,” said Johansson, “but these last twenty years I’ve mostly been involved with other things. Before I retire I would like to have a job where I get the opportunity to put away the occasional bad guy who has done ordinary, decent people harm. That was why I wanted to become a policeman in the first place,” Johansson concluded.

  An extremely honorable ambition according to the undersecretary, and as far as the details were concerned he did not intend to interfere.

  “If you give me a proposal, I’ll arrange it,” he said.

  “Thanks,” said Johansson.

  A week before Midsummer the chief inspector at the National Bureau of Investigation’s homicide squad, Evert Bäckström, entered the police hall of fame. The reason was that the almost eleven-year-old murder of Kjell Göran Eriksson had been cleared up after an almost heroic investigation by Bäckström. For once, and in the sphere in which the police department’s homicide investigators ordinarily live and act, it was also justified to describe the formidable investigative effort as having been solely thanks to Bäckström. It proved that Bäckström had been right the whole time. The murder of Eriksson was an almost classic gay murder, allowing for the fact that the perpetrator was, fortunately, a highly unusual gay.

  The murder of Eriksson was yet another deed in an apparently endless series of senseless outrages with homosexual overtones and motives that had been committed by the now nationally known and even internationally renowned serial killer who went under the name the Säter-Man in the media—named after the well-known mental hospital in Dalarna where, by the way, he had spent more or less half his life.

  Bäckström’s effort had come in the nick of time. During recent years public doubts about the guilt of Säter-Man had been growing at the same pace as the number of murders attributed to him had increased. As usual the media hadn’t picked up on the fact that “the critical voices”—that was how they preferred to describe themselves—consisted of an exceedingly mixed company of professional backbiters who made envy a virtue and raising doubts a meal ticket—but then the media and the backbiters were closely allied. True, the Säter-Man had already been convicted of half a dozen murders, but he had confessed to another thirty, and among those who had worked on the investigation there was a strong conviction that everything argued for this being only the “tip of the iceberg” and that there were thus indispensable values of criminal policy at stake.

  A recurring theme in the criticism centered on the fact that the Säter-Man had always been convicted solely on his own admissions and without a shred of either witness testimony or technical evidence. Confessions that were alleged to have little in common with the actions he maintained he had committed. But Bäckström had succeeded where his colleagues had failed for more than ten years. He had silenced the critics and finally managed to create the peace and quiet necessary for continued, successful work.

  For several years, long before he came to the National Bureau of Investigation, Bäckström had come, through his own persistent inquiries, to believe that the Säter-Man was also guilty of a series of five bestial knife murders of homosexual men that had been committed in Stockholm in 1989, and of which, moreover, the murder of Eriksson was the fourth. After lengthy questioning of the Säter-Man he got him to confess that in the early nineties he had access to an out-of-the-way, long since abandoned sheep pasture in northern Dalarna. “A holy place” that the Säter-Man frequented when he was “visited by elves and visions of the hereafter,” as soon as he managed to obtain the necessary permissions from the mental hospital to make “these pilgrimages to his inner borderland” possible in a purely practical sense.

  Bäckström ordered a search of the sheep pasture in question and “in a cabin at the sheep pasture in question” had secured technical evidence that unambiguously and beyond any reasonable human doubt connected the Säter-Man to his victim Kjell Göran Eriksson. For one thing, a leather suitcase bearing the victim’s initials, for another a pair of terry-cloth hand towels, and finally a plastic bag from the tax-free shop at Kastrup Airport, that contained an unopened bottle of banana liqueur as well as the signed copy of the credit card receipt that showed that the referenced bottle had been purchased by the victim in September 1989, only a few months before he was murdered.

  At the trial the Säter-Man had testified that the suitcase, hand towels, and banana liqueur were not the only things he had stolen from his victim. Besides numerous bottles of Eriksson’s alcohol he had emptied in his solitude up at the hut, he had also devoted himself to a number of videocassettes and a large number of magazines containing “brutally sadistic violent pornography of a homosexual nature.” He had later brought these pornographic works with him to the hospital after his leave was over, and there they had unfortunately been lost in the general handling. “I guess they were simply read to pieces,” he tearfully explained to the members of the court and other listeners.

  Johansson and his wife had celebrated Midsummer in the city. The weather had been excellent, and after a nice dinner out at Djurgården they had walked home at a leisurely pace through the empty summer streets to their apartment on Wollmar Yxkullsgatan on Söder. As soon as they came into the hallway Johansson reached out his hand for the hollow in his wife’s neck and t
hen … when at last they had wound up in bed, and at that point Johansson was already gliding from serene lethargy to deep and undisturbed sleep, his wife had something she absolutely had to say.

  “Are you sleeping, Lars Martin?” she asked at the same time as she slowly drew the nails of her right hand through the hair on his neck.

  Not any more, thought Johansson, because reality had just jerked him back.

  “I was thinking about that Waltin,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Johansson. Not now, he thought.

  “The one who was murdered on Mallorca,” she continued.

  “I remember him,” said Johansson, who was suddenly wide awake. “You mean the one that the Smurfs killed when he was down there swimming?”

  “I’m serious,” said his wife. “Are you listening?”

  “Yes,” said Johansson. What choice do I have? he thought dejectedly.

  “You don’t think he might have been involved in the Palme assassination?” his wife asked.

  This is, God help me, not true, thought Johansson, sitting up in bed and turning on the light on his nightstand.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Actually I don’t think so. Why in the name of heaven should Waltin have been involved in the Palme assassination?”

  “I don’t know,” said his wife, shrugging her shoulders. “It was just a thought that struck me.”

  Then everything returned to normal and they didn’t talk about it anymore. Not about Waltin, not about the assassination of the prime minister, who nowadays of course belonged to another time and another life, which had nothing to do with Pia and Lars Martin Johansson’s lives. They talked about other things. About things going on right then, about things in their lives and in their time.

  About the Author

  Leif GW Persson has chronicled the political and social development of modern Swedish society in his award-winning novels for more than three decades. Born in Stockholm, Persson has served as an adviser to the Swedish Ministry of Justice and is Sweden’s most renowned psychological profiler. He is a professor at Sweden’s National Police Board and is considered the country’s foremost expert on crime.