“Do you think there’s any point in testing it then, our hypothesis, that is?” asked Johansson.
“Of course,” said Mattei. “It’s the only thing we have. We don’t even need to prioritize. But it won’t be an easy task finding our alternative perpetrator in the case files. Assuming that he’s there. I can promise you that, boss.”
“It doesn’t seem completely hopeless though,” Johansson objected. “A highly qualified perpetrator between ages thirty-five and forty-five, military, police officer, or someone else who understands this sort of thing, no criminal record, access to weapons, good financial and other resources, who has an inside contact in the government offices, with SePo or in Palme’s family. To me it doesn’t sound like a completely impossible task. Especially if you consider that he would have taken the subway to Östermalm or Gärdet when he’d finished the mission,” he added, smiling at Holt.
“The problem is that you can’t look for him that way,” said Mattei. “It’s not like on the Internet, where you can enter a number of search terms to limit the number of alternatives. The Palme case files are organized in a completely different way. Or according to completely different principles, to be exact.”
“So what are those principles?” said Johansson, looking suspiciously at Mattei.
“It is highly unclear,” said Mattei. “I don’t even think they know themselves. It’s said that the material has been organized by investigation lead file, but it’s not searchable in the way you’re talking about, boss.”
“Investigation lead file,” said Johansson with a bewildered look. I guess everyone knows what that is, he thought.
“Yes, and clearly different things are meant by that,” said Mattei. “The most common lead is a so-called tip, which as a rule means that an informant has pointed to an individual; there are thousands of such tips. The next most common is an action that the investigators themselves have initiated, an interview, a search, an expert witness, basically anything at all. Even the sort of thing that the first investigation leader called ‘tracks’ in the mass media are stored as lead files. In a nutshell, it can be anything at all. Most of it seems to have been sorted in a spirit of fatigue. Everything is already so messy and immense that when something new shows up, they don’t really know what binder to put it in. So it gets put in a separate binder. Literally speaking, that is. Would you like an example, boss?”
“Gladly,” said Johansson. One lethal stab more or less makes no difference, he thought.
“I discovered the other day, for example, by pure chance, that the same tip from the same informant—it concerns the singling out of a certain individual as Palme’s murderer—was registered in three different lead files. Considering the identity of the informant, and he is a very diligent one, I won’t rule out that there are more leads than that. Same tip, same informant, same perpetrator who is singled out. At least three different leads, according to the registry.”
“But why in the name of God then?” said Johansson.
“It came in at three different times, received by different officers. Because of the previous registration it couldn’t be grouped with the earlier tip,” said Mattei, shrugging her shoulders.
“What do you say, Lewin?” said Johansson. It sounds completely random, he thought.
“I’m inclined to agree with Lisa,” Lewin said. “If you don’t know which file to look in, then it’s hard. That is, knowing what you’re looking for doesn’t help. You also have to know where to look. Apart from certain isolated exceptions.”
“Like what then?” said Johansson. This is contrary to the nature of searching, he thought.
“The so-called police track is probably the best example. When the investigation started its work, SePo got the task of investigating all information that concerned the police. Almost all the officers who were singled out as involved in the murder worked in Stockholm, and considering that almost the entire investigation force was recruited from Stockholm it was considered inappropriate for them to investigate themselves, so to speak. So SePo got to do it, and the one good thing about that was that the material is collected in one place, most of it anyway. What it’s like for anything that has come in later I honestly don’t know.
“Okay,” said Johansson. “I hear what you’re saying. We just have to do the best we can. Work with what we’ve got.” What the hell choice do we have? he thought.
“I think you know that, Lars,” said Holt.
“Know what?” said Johansson.
“That we always do the best we can,” said Holt.
“Excellent,” said Johansson curtly. “Same time, same place, in a week.”
“And then you want the name of the one who did it,” said Holt. “Wasn’t his name ‘The Bastard’?”
“Watch it, Anna,” said Johansson.
23
After their meeting Johansson took Lewin aside for a private conversation. What choice did he really have? What had evidently been an excellent, or in any case an energetic, idea fourteen days earlier had so far only produced five different results.
More than four hundred work hours for Holt, Lewin, and Mattei, who of course did not lack other tasks. Waste of police resources. That was the first.
The media also appeared to have put on high alert all the notorious informants who constantly made life miserable for this investigation. Flykt and his colleagues were not amused. That was the second.
Johansson had clearly ended up in the little black book at the editorial offices of Sweden’s Largest Morning Newspaper. There had been a daily harvest of arrows against his bared chest, news articles about various improprieties at the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, editorials on the police department’s lack of efficiency, and most recently a cartoon with the heading “Remembrance of Things Past.” Depicted was a very fat Johansson holding a leashed German shepherd with one hand while he shone a flashlight on something that suspiciously resembled an ordinary pile of dog shit. Johansson was not amused. That was the third.
What was left were things that had to do with the issue at hand.
There was the insight that the material to a large degree had already been lost. The old police article of faith that the perpetrator you didn’t manage to find, despite everything, was there in the investigation might well be correct. The problem was simply that this time there were far too many papers that were far too unsorted for anyone to have a reasonable chance of finding him. That was the fourth.
At last the fifth. Fourteen days had passed and what had three of the country’s very best detectives actually accomplished? On reasonably good grounds they had called into question the previously accepted opinion about the perpetrator’s escape route. And they had offered only a new question mark in return.
There was the witness Madeleine Nilsson who had encountered a nameless, faceless man unknown to everyone on the stairs down to Kungsgatan. Before or after the murder? False or true? Regardless, the witness had been dead for about twenty years.
Lewin was a cautious general. If all generals had been like Lewin, there never would have been any wars. Lewin was nevertheless an excellent police officer. One of the very best. Okay, thought Johansson. Ask a direct question. If Lewin, in his peculiar way, even hints that this is futile, then you close it down.
“What do you say, Jan?” said Johansson. “Is this at all meaningful?”
“Don’t know,” said Lewin. “Easy it’s not.”
“Should we break it off and swallow the bitter pill?”
“Give it another week, by then we’ll have made an honorable attempt at least,” said Lewin. It must be Anna, he thought. She’s still on my mind.
“Okay,” said Johansson. What the hell has happened to Lewin? he thought. The guy seems to have had a change of personality.
“Sometimes you do things for good reasons but without really being clear about what those reasons are,” said Lewin meditatively.
“That was nice of you, Jan, but this time maybe it’s mostly abou
t vanity,” said Johansson.
“Let’s give it another week,” said Lewin, getting up, nodding, and leaving.
It’s not just vanity, thought Johansson as his colleague closed the door after him. Of course he had personal reasons, that sort of thing is always present, but in this particular case it was probably more about the thirst for revenge than about vanity.
The week before he went on vacation he had been at an international police chief conference at Interpol’s headquarters in Lyons. These were recurring meetings that were aimed at people like him, whether they came from England or Saudi Arabia, Austria or Sri Lanka. Pleasant gatherings, to be sure, with plenty of time allotted for more informal activities. On the very first evening after the official banquet he and the usual colleagues from near and far gathered at the bar that was within walking distance of their hotel and which for several years now they considered their own regular bar in Lyons. There they had listened to the classic war stories. Everyone had something to contribute in the give-and-take, and naturally Johansson received the usual taunts for the same old reason. That the murder of his own country’s prime minister had remained unsolved for more than twenty years constituted the most colossal failure in global police history. Regardless of what anyone believed about the role that Lee Harvey Oswald had played in the assassination of Kennedy in November 1963.
This time it was one of his best friends, the head of the detective department of the Metropolitan Police in London, who fired the first stone in the direction of Johansson’s glass house. With an innocent expression, a friendly smile, and the nasal voice, vocabulary, and body language that people like him acquired at the breast at the family estate.
“How about the Olof Palme assassination? Any new leads? Can we look forward to an imminent breakthrough in your, quite surely, assiduous investigation? Satisfy our curiosity, Lars. Inform us ignoramuses in our professional darkness. Dispel all our worries.”
The usual merry cackling, obviously. Toasts and sporting nods to take the edge off of what had just been said—no harm intended of course, comrades-in-arms, et cetera, et cetera—but in Johansson’s case of little consolation, because the failure with the Palme investigation stuck in his head like a thorn.
For that reason too they always got the same answer.
With the Swedish police department’s Palme investigation, things were unfortunately so bad that for years it had served as an example of the danger of a major murder investigation being cockeyed from the start. There was the fact that they had failed to seize the perpetrator at the scene of the crime or surround and arrest him in its immediate vicinity. That almost never happened when it concerned the murder of someone like the Swedish prime minister.
Instead there was an unknown murderer who disappeared in the darkness of the night. Police procedures and professional practices that suddenly seemed swamped by officers running in all directions. All the wild hypotheses and pure guessing games as a substitute for the persistent, penetrating, long-term detective work that was the structural part of every genuine police identity. Everything that held them up. The individual police officer just as much as the corps he served.
But certainly he and his Swedish colleagues had learned their lesson, and if they didn’t believe him, all they had to do was to think back to the same Swedish police department’s successful hunt for the murderer of the Swedish foreign minister a few years ago.
“A good piece of old-time footwork, if you ask me,” Johansson stated in his now impeccable police chief English. “We learned our lesson. We did it the hard way. But we did it well.”
His English friend and colleague nodded in assent and indicated his approval by slightly raising his glass of amber-colored malt whiskey. But he didn’t want to let go, for if he’d understood things right the investigation was still active. Despite what Johansson had just said, and despite more than twenty years of failure.
“It’s about embracing the situation,” said Johansson sternly. “As long as the statute of limitations hasn’t passed, we’re going to keep at it.” He hadn’t said a word about the fact that for many years his investigators had essentially been occupied with other things.
“An obvious courtesy to a high-standing politician who was murdered,” agreed his English companion, and obviously the only one imaginable or indeed appropriate, should anyone ask his opinion. Moreover a necessary measure to preserve political stability in every constitutional state and democracy. Despite the fact that police officers were actually above politics.
Possibly, nodded Johansson. Perhaps he hadn’t thought about this because political theorizing left him cold. He hadn’t even been involved in the investigation until much later, and then in the role of the government’s technical expert in the various commissions that had been appointed. At the same time, if it was the police’s failure that was to be explained, he wanted to underscore an observation he’d made, and from his listener’s changed body language he understood that the occasion had arrived.
His well-mannered tormentor had obviously fallen into the trap, coming to a halt in Johansson’s field of fire with his broad side toward the shooter. This was extraordinarily interesting and he wanted to hear more about it at once.
“It is essential for complicated police investigations to be run by real police officers,” said Johansson as he smiled just as amiably, leaned forward, and patted his adversary on the shoulder.
According to Johansson’s firm opinion, it was completely dangerous, not to say a guaranteed total fiasco, to turn such things over to all those attorneys and bureaucrats who populated the upper echelons of most modern Western police organizations nowadays, and this unfortunately had been done at the time when his own prime minister was assassinated.
“Touché, Lars,” replied the colleague from New Scotland Yard, seeming almost more amused than the happy faces around him. Sure, it was no secret that he personally had not patrolled his way up through the corps that he now led. It was not until he turned fifty that he had risen from the judge’s high bench in the criminal court at the Old Bailey to take his place in the executive suite on Victoria Street. For all that, the judge’s seat he’d left for the police could be of use in that context. Especially as he worked mostly with finance and personnel issues and “would never dream of sticking my long nose in a murder investigation.”
“You’re the one who started it,” grunted Johansson.
Then it continued as it always did; this time the acting police chief in Paris was talking about the city’s problems with “all the statues of great Frenchmen, the plentiful occurrence of pigeons, and not least the fact that the pigeons in Paris shit like crazy.”
According to Johansson’s French colleague, the Swedish Palme investigation was an extraordinary example of basically the only thing that the police could do. Failure or no. Actually Johansson and his Palme investigators played the same decisive role for the maintenance of Respect for Authority in Sweden as the fifty-some persevering workers with the municipal cleaning company in Paris, who tried to keep all the statues in the city free of pigeon shit.
“Respect for a great nation stands and falls with respect for the great leader,” he said. He himself wanted to take the opportunity to make a toast to his Swedish colleague who, with indefatigable zeal and self-sacrifice, and without the least regard for his own comfort, had shouldered this task.
High time to call it an evening, thought Lars Martin Johansson as soon as the volleys of laughter subsided, and two hours later, as he was lying in bed in his hotel room, he made up his mind. Then he fell asleep. Just like he always did when he was at home. Lying flat on his back with his hands clasped over his chest. Quickly falling asleep while he thought about his wife and that he left her far too often for things that were actually unimportant and only stole their lives from them both.
24
“Has anything happened?” Johansson asked his secretary as soon as Lewin had left him.
“Things happen here all the time,” she
answered.
“Has anyone called?”
Just like always calls had been coming in the whole time. Not that the whole world wanted to talk with her boss, but a good share of those who were interested in the darker side seemed to experience a strong need to get in touch with him in particular. Just like always she’d taken care of these calls herself and given the person who called what he or she needed without having to disturb Johansson. With two exceptions so far on this Wednesday morning.
“That secretive character down in Rosenbad called, the one who never says his name.”
“So what did he want?” The prime minister’s own special adviser, Sweden’s own Cardinal Richelieu, thought Johansson.
“Are you making fun of me, Lars?” she answered. “He wouldn’t even spit out whether he would call again or if you should call him.”
“I’ll talk with him,” said Johansson. “Who was the other one?”
“Probably nothing important,” his secretary answered, shaking her head.
“He doesn’t have a name either?”
“Well, he’s called several times. Last Friday, actually, but because I didn’t want to disturb the weekend for you I thought it could wait.”
“Name,” said Johansson, snapping his fingers.
“Bäckström,” said his secretary and sighed. “He called the first time last Friday, and since then he’s called another half a dozen times. Most recently just this morning.”
“Bäckström,” repeated Johansson skeptically. “Are we talking about that fat little creep I kicked off the homicide squad?” It can’t be possible. That was only a year ago, he thought.
“I’m afraid it is. Chief Inspector Evert Bäckström. He demanded to speak with you personally. It was extremely important and enormously sensitive.”
“So what was it about?” asked Johansson.
“He wouldn’t say.”
“Tell Lewin to call him,” said Johansson.
Free Falling, As If in a Dream Page 17