“So now the time is somewhere around 23:25:30, four minutes after the murder,” Holt clarified.
“Something like that, yes,” Berg agreed.
“So what did you do next,” asked Holt.
“Continued in the direction shown by Witness Two,” said Berg. “Down David Bagares gata toward Regeringsgatan that is, and about fifty yards down the street I ran into Witness One.”
“So what did he say?” asked Holt.
“Not much,” said Berg. “It probably took a minute or so before I realized that he hadn’t seen which way the perpetrator went. He only reported what Witness Two had said to him.
“If you ask me,” he continued, “there’s a thing or two rattling around loose in that part of the description. Such as, for example, that it’s a hundred percent certain they’d seen the same person run past.”
“Explain what you’re thinking,” said Holt.
Berg had talked with both Witness One and Witness Two. He was actually the first police officer to do that, and for once he hadn’t been asked to write even a line about it. The officers from the bureau had taken over that aspect as soon as they arrived at the scene, and he had no idea what had happened to his brief, handwritten notes. He had just a vague memory, of some colleague from the duty desk who stuffed them in his coat pocket.
Berg had not conducted any interviews. He’d only stopped to talk with Witnesses One and Two for the obvious reason that he wanted to know as much as possible as quickly as possible to organize his initial search for the perpetrator.
“When Witness One comes up on Malmskillnadsgatan, he runs into Witness Two. Then he asks her if she’s seen a character in a dark coat run past. I don’t recall the exact wording, but I get the idea that Witness One asks her whether she’s seen a guy in a dark coat who’s run past. She replies that she has. Right before she saw a man in a dark coat run across Malmskillnadsgatan and down on David Bagares gata.”
“Right before,” asked Holt.
“I asked the same question myself as soon as I had the chance. It must have been maybe fifteen minutes later. According to her it concerned a male individual in a dark coat who twenty seconds at most before she got the question from Witness One had run across Malmskillnadsgatan and down on David Bagares gata. Otherwise she didn’t have much in particular to offer. Nothing else about his clothes other than that she thought he had a small bag in his right hand that he tried to put in his coat pocket. She hadn’t seen his face. She had an idea that he was maybe trying to conceal it from her as he ran past. Tall or short? Thin or husky? Stout or slender? Dark or light? Old or young? No definite perception about that either. Looked like all the other male individuals who were out that evening, I guess, if you were to summarize her observations. Apart from the fact that he’d acted suspiciously, of course. On that point she was more and more certain the more we talked. That he seemed nervous, hunted, tried to conceal his face and all that. Yes, Lord Jesus,” said Berg and sighed. “What could she say otherwise? By that time there was a horde of officers crowding around her.”
“Witness One then. What does he say?” asked Holt.
“He was right there the whole time up on Malmskillnadsgatan, and if I could have chosen I would have kept him and the other witness apart, but it was so damned messy that that didn’t work. Before the officers from the bureau took over, the two of them must have stood talking with each other for close to half an hour. Witness One and Witness Two, that is.”
“Did you make note of any differences between their descriptions of the man they’d seen?” asked Holt.
“Witness One was considerably more detailed. He’d heard the shot and seen the perpetrator with the weapon and realized what’d happened. A man in a dark jacket or coat, possibly bareheaded, possibly with a knit cap on his head, the kind Jack Nicholson had on in Cuckoo’s Nest, sturdily built, rolling gait as he ran or trotted away, almost bear-like, maintained that he’d seen him put the weapon in his right jacket or coat pocket but nothing about a bag. He looked mean, that was what he said. About forty to forty-five years old. Older than the witness, in any case. Otherwise nothing.”
“I see what you mean,” said Holt and nodded. Now’s the time to bring up Madeleine Nilsson, and how do I do that without putting words in his mouth? she thought.
“When you drive up Döbelnsgatan, past the stairs to Tunnelgatan at the start of Malmskillnadsgatan, the bridge passes over Kungsgatan and continues on Malmskillnadsgatan down to Brunkebergstorg where you get the alarm…”
“I follow you,” said Berg, nodding.
“You didn’t observe any other mysterious or suspicious persons?”
“Then we would have mentioned it,” said Berg, shaking his head. “Definitely no one with a smoking revolver in his fist,” he said.
“No one else?”
“Mostly ordinary Joes who were freezing. A whore or two, naturally, that’s where they worked, and at that time there were lots of them. Certainly a few hooligans and addicts too, but no one up to anything.”
“And if you’d seen someone like that?”
“Then naturally we would have stopped and frisked him or her. We always did that if we didn’t have anything better to do. Otherwise we would blink at them, and I’ll tell you, we had an uncannily good knowledge of people.”
“Blink?”
“With the headlights,” said Berg. “Just to let them know their presence was noted, if nothing else. Get them to realize we were keeping an eye on them.”
“But you don’t recall any particular person from that evening?”
“No,” said Berg. “Then we would have mentioned it, like I said. It was not an ordinary evening exactly.
“Too bad you weren’t involved from the start, Holt,” he added, smiling at her. “There was one more thing, by the way. If you can stand listening, and it’s really not at all about this. And besides, I want it to stay between you and me,” he continued.
“If it’s not about this, it will stay between us,” said Holt.
“It’s not,” said Berg. “It’s about your boss.”
“Johansson,” said Holt. “Fire away,” she said. Not a second to lose, she thought.
“Just a piece of advice,” said Berg. “As I’m sure you know, he and I have a history together that’s not very pleasant, so I guess you have to take this for what it’s worth.”
“I know he put you in jail for a week twenty years ago.” On not completely baseless grounds, she thought.
“Me and my colleagues,” said Berg, nodding. “Then you also know that my colleagues and I were cleared of all suspicions and that we got damages for the time we spent in jail.”
“I know all that,” said Holt. “I know for example that you and many other colleagues in the uniformed police call him the butcher from Ådalen.”
“It wasn’t that he put us in jail. I’m sure I’ve put a few innocent so-and-sos in jail too. The name we gave him, he’s earned honorably. I’ve never met such an ice-cold bastard in my entire life. A person who can kill you without hesitation if he thinks it’s in his interest. Without even breaking a sweat. So whatever you do, Holt, watch out for that man,” said Berg, shaking his broad shoulders.
“Now you’ll actually have to explain yourself,” said Holt. What is he saying? she thought.
“Yes,” said Berg, “I will.”
Then he told the story about his father.
Berg’s father had also been a policeman, a regular patrol cop with the uniformed police in Stockholm. When Berg was a young boy in his teens his father had died on duty. While chasing a couple of car thieves he’d been forced into a ditch. It was the sixties, and there were no seat belts even in police cars. Berg’s father was thrown headfirst through the windshield, broke his neck, and died on the spot.
“I really loved my father,” said Berg quietly. “Despite all his faults, because both my mother and I knew he had them. It was because of him I decided to become a policeman. As soon as I got the chance I told everyon
e about my father and what happened to him and why I chose to become a policeman. I talked about what all my relatives had told me, and in our family there’s no shortage of policemen, you should know. What all Dad’s colleagues told me. That my father was a hero. That he actually sacrificed his life in his job as a policeman. For twenty-five years I believed that’s what had happened.”
The one who had opened Berg’s eyes about his father was Lars Martin Johansson. Berg and his colleagues were being held for the third day. Johansson and his co-workers conducted daily interrogations. Johansson spent most of his time with Berg, the one Johansson knew was the leader.
“I’m not particularly sensitive, but this you should know, Holt: It gets to you if you’re a cop and suddenly you’re sitting in the jail at Kronoberg,” said Berg. “So on the third day I was actually pretty much done. Johansson and another officer had been attacking me the whole day, and if I’d only been able to keep my shoelaces or my belt I know exactly what I would have done as soon as they left.”
“So what happened then?” asked Holt. Though I already sense it, she thought.
“A few hours later, after dinner, I was there on the cot staring at the ceiling and wondering how I could strangle myself with the blanket. Tear it in strips and all that—you get pretty inventive in those situations. There’s no hook in the ceiling where you can hang yourself in that place, as I’m sure you know. Suddenly Johansson was standing in the doorway. He was alone, apart from a couple of jailers hiding out in the corridor. He had his overcoat on. I remember he said he was going to go out and get a bite to eat before he went home. He’d brought a little nighttime reading for me. He realized I had a hard time sleeping, that is. Then he threw one of those old investigation files at me. The ones with green cardboard binders that we had ages and ages ago. Then he simply left and there was a lot of locking and slamming before he and the jailers finally wandered off.”
“At first I thought it was an interrogation with one of my colleagues who was in there too, and that he wanted to play us against each other, but that wasn’t it,” said Berg.
You’re not feeling well, thought Holt. Right now you’re feeling really bad, and you’re not the least bit like the Berg I’ve read about, she thought.
“It was the investigation of the cause of death of my own father,” said Berg. “With pictures and everything. From the scene of the accident, the autopsy photos, everything. The same investigation that Dad’s colleagues had hidden down in the basement and that none of them had said a word about during all those years, and least of all to me or Mom.”
Berg shook his head and took a short pause before he continued.
“What they’d told me and my mother wasn’t correct. One day Dad put on his uniform and borrowed a radio car. He had been suspended from service because he’d shown up drunk at the station one evening the week before, but Mom and I knew nothing about that. Whatever,” continued Berg, shaking his head. “He got into the radio car and drove out to Vaxholm. On the way there he consumed a whole bottle of straight vodka plus a quart of schnapps. More than a quart of alcohol. When he got down to the ferry landing in Vaxholm he waited until the ferry set out. Then he put the accelerator to the floor and drove right out over the edge of the pier. The car landed more than fifty feet out in the water, so before he drowned he really had driven his head through the windshield and broken his neck.”
“So what happened then?” asked Holt.
“I went crazy,” said Berg. “They had to strap me down and drug me. Took twelve hours before I came around enough that they could drag me back to my regular cell. The file was gone, naturally. Who do you think retrieved it.”
“Have you told this to anyone else?” asked Holt.
“A few other officers,” said Berg. “Without going into any details. It’s history now.” Berg looked at her and nodded. “Be careful with that man, Holt. He’s not just pleasant and entertaining in that Norrland way. He has other sides that he can show when he feels like it.”
26
After the conversation with Bäckström, Lewin sought the serenity of the Palme room. Mattei was already there, and she had clearly not been inactive. On the table in front of her was a tall stack of thick binders, and when Lewin came in she was leafing through one of them with her left hand as she typed diligently on her laptop with her right.
Eidetic memory combined with a very high capacity for multitasking, thought Lewin. A lovely young woman besides.
“Hi, Jan,” said Mattei, smiling at him. “I had no idea there were so many certified crazies. I’ve already found over three hundred, and because I’m sure I’ve missed half of them there are going to be quite a few.”
“But now they’ll end up in a registry,” Lewin observed. Wonder how many uncertified lunatics there are? Must be lots more anyway, he thought.
“There,” said Mattei, shrugging her slender shoulders. “Some kind of list, in any case.”
Nice to hear, thought Lewin, and for lack of anything better he took out his old box of parking tickets. Neatly packed, stored in one place, and probably completely uninteresting in fact. If our perpetrator is as well-organized as both Anna Holt and Johansson seem to think, he won’t have parked illegally, he thought.
More than two thousand parking citations had been issued in the Stockholm area the day of the murder. A few hundred of them had been distributed in the finer parts of the city that were along the Red Line on the subway. Gärdet, Östermalm, Lidingö. Why was it called the Red Line? Considering who lived there, it really should be the Blue Line, Lewin philosophized as he leafed through the bundles of tickets, trying to think of what he was really searching for.
Vehicles in good condition, no clunkers, illegally parked in the hours before and after the murder around the various subway stations, thought Lewin. Twenty-one years later, for the most part all of the vehicles had gone to the junkyard several years ago, and all information about the owner or user had disappeared from all conceivable registries. Even if the murderer had a brand-new Mercedes when he shot Palme, thought Lewin and sighed.
For lack of anything better he had to rely on his old notations. Almost everyone who’d parked illegally had done so in the immediate vicinity of their own residence. Just as you would expect, and this was hardly instructive considering Holt’s hypothesis that the perpetrator had relied on his own car for further transport.
Before Lewin went home for the day he also made a separate review of his own contribution to the so-called police track. Of the total of nineteen parking tickets pertaining to police service vehicles or cars belonging to individual police officers, three had been issued along the Red Line. One in Östermalm, one at Gärdet, and one in Hjorthagen at the final station in Ropsten. Besides one out in Lidingö, all the way on the other side of the bridge, five hundred yards from the final station.
Nothing strange about those either, thought Lewin as he put the bundles back in the box. The colleague out in Lidingö, for example. He lived in Lidingö, worked with the Lidingö police department, and his car had been illegally parked the whole weekend. According to information from his co-workers, this was because he had the flu and was in bed from Thursday evening until Monday morning.
Nothing strange about that either. When Lewin talked with one of the bedridden illegal parker’s colleagues twenty years ago, he remembered that he’d called down to the station as early as Friday morning and asked one of the other officers to move his car. They could get the keys in his apartment up on Torsviksvägen. But it never happened. Suddenly there were more important things to do than deal with illegally parked vehicles.
There was a clear pattern in Mattei’s material about more qualified crazies. The origin of the information was almost always a tip from various individual informants. Extremely few of the conceivable Palme assassins had ended up in the files on the basis of information the police had produced through their own detective work. The constantly recurring reason they ended up in the Palme investigation was that they
all hated Olof Palme and had also talked about it to individuals in their vicinity. These individuals had then contacted the police, as a rule pretty soon after the prime minister had been murdered, and told about their strange friend, acquaintance, neighbor, co-worker, ex-spouse, partner, and so on, who had promised to kill him. Conspicuously often by shooting him, and always with a weapon to which they had legal access. Hunters, marksmen, reservists, gun collectors.
Their qualifications were not impressive either. To start with Mattei sorted out the cases of pure psychosis, known addicts, and professional criminals. What remained were several hundred odd, single men, often extremists, almost always with broken relationships, and usually with a bad name in their own neighborhoods. Almost exclusively men of Swedish origin. Immigrants—for example the “gook” who according to Witness Three supposedly ran into her on David Bagares gata—were a clear minority. This was about Swedish men. The kind you talked to only if you had to, so as not to rile them up unnecessarily.
“I’m a hundred percent convinced that it’s Tore Andersson who murdered Olof Palme. On several occasions he’s shown me a black attaché case with a revolver in it and said he was going to shoot Palme. The most recent time this happened was only a week before the murder, and I know he was in Stockholm visiting an acquaintance who lives on Söder, the same weekend Palme was murdered. And besides, he had definite information that Palme was spying on behalf of the Russians. Tore also corresponds well with the description of the perpetrator. He’s rugged, about six feet tall, dark, and forty-four years old. Tore is something of a loner…”
“It was Stefan Nilsson who murdered Olof Palme. He has a definite radical right-wing image and is a very eccentric and exhibitionistic person. At the same time he’s a so-called lone wolf, and as far as I know he’s never been involved with a woman. He’s forty-one years old, and in the hall to his apartment there’s a closet where he stores a number of firearms. When Palme was here at a conference less than a year ago I know Nilsson visited the hotel where Palme was staying to try to find out which room he was in…”
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