Free Falling, As If in a Dream

by Free Falling, As If in a Dream (retail) (epub)

  When he turned on the TV the next morning he was in such severe shock that it took fourteen days before he managed to gather himself to the point that he could contact the police.

  Apparently he had made a deep impression on them. Özök had immediately been categorized under the lead file that then still went under the designation “Turkey/PKK.” The investigator presented the case to the prosecutor, who decided that Özök should be picked up for questioning without prior summons and that the police should do a search of his house in Skogås, his car, and his place of work.

  The efforts were extensive. The outcome meager. No weapons had been found. The closest they got was some fishing equipment. Özök was an enthusiastic sports fisherman both in Stockholm’s archipelago and in various lakes in the vicinity of the capital. In addition he liked soccer and had been a loyal Hammarby supporter for many years. Most of all he was upset at the police and their informant.

  He had never had any firearms. Thus he could never have shown anyone any. He admired Olof Palme, a great man and politician. He had never expressed criticism of him. Much less threatened him. On the contrary, he had taken his side in a number of political discussions at his workplace, Haga Auto Body Repair. He had been a Swedish citizen for many years. He did not intend to return to Turkey even on vacation. Turkey was a military dictatorship. Suleyman Özök was a democrat, a Social Democrat to be precise, and a proud one. He preferred to live in social democratic Sweden despite the sorrow and loss after Palme. He had given up hope on his old homeland long ago.

  Finally he had a message for the anonymous informant. If he did not immediately stop harassing him and his new woman, Suleyman would deal with the matter personally. On the other hand he did not intend to make a police complaint. In an auto body repairman’s world there were more substantial, manly means, if such were required.

  “You can tell him that if he even tries to touch my lady I’ll stuff a welding iron up his ass,” said Suleyman Özök to his interviewer, but it hadn’t amounted to more than that.

  From the concluding notation in Özök’s file it appeared that “Suleyman has been engaged for some time to a former female acquaintance of the informant. Özök’s fiancée works as a secretary at Stockholm University and lives in a service apartment at Teknologgatan 2, in the vicinity of Tegnérlunden. She does not appear in the crime registry.”

  Late on Friday afternoon Lewin and Mattei took a long coffee break at an Italian café in the vicinity of police headquarters and discussed their findings of the past week. They each had a café latte. Mattei threw all moderation overboard and feasted on some tiramisu while the ever-cautious Lewin was content to nibble at the biscotti with almond and nuts that came with his coffee. Despite the weekend calm, the beautiful weather, the cheerful atmosphere at the table, and the article of faith that they must always embrace the situation, it had been a conversation under a cloud of resignation.

  Together they had reviewed—or at least read about—almost a thousand suspects who, in at least a formal sense, met their criteria of a qualified perpetrator. Upon closer consideration, few of them proved to fulfill these criteria, and what they all had in common was that nothing tangible argued for their having murdered the prime minister twenty years ago. There was a shortage of motives, and even if the police had found the means and opportunities they still would not have been able to find the motive, although hundreds of man-hours had been devoted to certain cases.

  At the same time only a few of the suspects could be ruled out with complete certainty. The normal reason was that they were in a correctional facility at the time of the crime, not on the run or on leave or able to sneak out unnoticed. That it was certain that they had been somewhere else, sufficiently far away or with people who were reliable enough that the police could live with their alibis. In summary almost all were investigative question marks, difficult enough to straighten out back then, probably quite impossible to get straight today.

  A contributing reason to the latter was that a strikingly large share of them were now dead. When the prime minister was shot, the median age of the men in the group that Lewin and Mattei were reviewing was just over forty. Today it was sixty plus among the sixty percent of them who were still alive.

  There were unusual causes of death. Twenty of them had been murdered over the years. Compared with regular, decent folk this was a hundred times more than the expected rate. A hundred of them had committed suicide, a rate twenty-five times greater than it ought to have been. Another couple of hundred had died in accidents, of drug abuse–related diseases, or of “unknown” causes. That rate was ten times greater than normal. Finally fifty or so had simply “disappeared,” and it was unclear where and why.

  “I got the list from our CIS squad this morning,” said Lewin, sneaking a look at a small piece of paper. “But you seemed so occupied by your reading I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “More than a third have died,” Mattei summarized. “Instead of about seven percent, as in the normal population, I mean.”

  “I wonder what the mortality rate is among our informants and witnesses,” sighed Lewin, as if he were thinking out loud.

  The same as for those they singled out, thought Mattei.

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  Talk with Anna Holt about it. Look at the military and police track because they’d looked at all the rest anyway. Talk with Johansson. Explain to him that his idea of this variation of an internal investigation lacked any conceivable possibility of success. That it was simply too late. That it was time to wipe the slate clean. That what remained was simply the hope of some decisive lead.

  “The one we’ll never get,” said Lewin, sipping his coffee. “Not a moment before the clock strikes twelve in any case,” he noted, shaking his head.

  “Oh well,” objected Mattei. “There are still three years, six months, six days, and a little over six hours left,” she said, looking at her watch to be on the safe side.

  “Three years, six months, six days, six hours…and thirty-two minutes…if mine is running right,” said Lewin, looking at his watch.

  “Yes, and here we are, lazing around,” said Mattei. You’re overworked, she thought.

  “I was thinking about continuing that over the weekend, lazing around, that is,” said Lewin.

  Then they went their separate ways. Lewin walked to the subway to return to his apartment at Gärdet. He meant to shop on the way. Mattei didn’t have anything particular in mind, until she suddenly discovered that she was outside the entryway to her office in the big police building on Kungsholmen.

  I guess you didn’t have anything better to do, she thought as she passed the guard in reception, held up her police badge, and drew her pass card through the card reader in the entry passage.

  Exactly three years, six months, and six days left, she thought after a quick look at her watch six hours later.

  Then she opened the end paper of the last of the thirty-one individual files that were in the three binders that contained the Palme investigation’s “military track.” The one that concerned a baron and captain who ended up last in the alphabetically ordered list of brethren because he was registered under “v” as in “von” and not under his real surname. He was fifty-five years old when the prime minister was assassinated, and in an opinion piece in Svenska Dagbladet a year before the murder he had criticized the murder victim because he had neglected Swedish defense and had been much too indulgent to the great neighbor in the east. An officer and a gentleman, as well as an aristocrat, politically incorrect, and, in the eyes of the Palme investigators, possibly a latter-day Anckarström.

  Ay, ay, ay, now it’s really starting to heat up, thought Lisa Mattei. Then she had a serious attack of the giggles and was forced to hunt for a tissue to dry her tears and blow her nose.

  31

  Late on Friday afternoon—about the same time as Lewin and Mattei were taking their coffee break at a nearby Italian café—Superintendent Anna Holt looked
in on her chief to report what she was up to. The secretary’s office was empty and the door to her boss’s office was wide open. Johansson was lying on his couch, reading a thick book with an English title Holt was not familiar with, by an author she did not recognize. He seemed to be in an excellent mood.

  “Sit yourself down, Anna,” said Johansson, waving his thick book in the direction of the nearest armchair.

  “Thanks,” said Anna.

  “Well, well,” said Johansson, changing to a semi-reclined position. “Because Bäckström has stopped poisoning life for Helena I realize you’ve battered that little fatty. What can I do for you in return?”

  “It would be good if I could return to my normal work assignments,” said Holt.

  “Everything has its time, Anna,” said Johansson, making a deprecatory hand gesture. “Tell me. What kind of bullshit did he want to sell us this time?”

  “He got a tip a few weeks ago. It was Friday the seventeenth of August. The day after all the articles reported that we’d started up the Palme investigation again.”

  “Imagine that,” said Johansson.

  “Yes,” said Holt. “I understand what you’re thinking. The tip comes from one of Bäckström’s own informants. This one seems to have turned in tips to Bäckström on a previous occasion and is according to him a very experienced and reliable individual.”

  “You don’t say,” said Johansson. “So he wants to be anonymous of course.”

  “Of course. Although Bäckström knows who he is. They seem to have known each other a long time, according to Bäckström, and he has no intention of giving out his name. Otherwise he sounds more or less as usual.”

  “Well, perhaps he’s found his place in life. The police lost-and-found warehouse. If he didn’t steal so much I would’ve made a parking garage guard out of him,” said Johansson. “Did he have anything to offer?”

  “It’s unclear,” said Holt. “I’m in the process of checking that part. But probably not.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” said Johansson.

  “Although he actually gave us a name,” said Holt.

  “A name? What kind of name?”

  “Of that bastard you’re always harping about,” said Holt, smiling for some reason.

  “So what’s his name?” asked Johansson, sitting up on the couch, and now he was no longer smiling.

  “Not a bad name, actually,” Holt teased. “We’ll really have to hope it doesn’t add up.”

  Esperanza was not only beautiful to look at with her harmonious lines and well-balanced proportions. She was also well built, with keel stock, frame, and plating made of oak from the mainland where the oaks grow more slowly than here and give better timber. Built entirely of wood with blue-coated carvel-built planks, white-painted railing, and a teak deck. She was twenty-eight feet long and ten feet across. Softly rounded at the stern, slightly concave bows tapering toward the stern and room for a small cabin forward. The deck was a good size, with plenty of room for fishing tackle and diving equipment. She had a reliable engine too, a four-cylinder, two-hundred-horsepower Volvo Penta marine diesel, and a good-sized fuel tank.

  A boat built for all types of weather and the vicissitudes of life. To moor in the sunshine on the smooth sea; to eat, drink, and socialize. To fish and dive from. To rest in or simply sit leaning back against the railing while you cooled your hands and arms in the reflecting water. But also strong and tenacious enough to make its way to the mainland on either the Spanish, French, or African side, as long as the winds kept below hurricane force. Or perhaps to Corsica, where the boat’s owner had at least one friend he trusted unconditionally, and where there were many like him. To Corsica, three hundred nautical miles and a thirty-hour run northeast of Puerto Pollensa, where he could find a refuge for the remainder of his life if he needed it.

  32

  Bäckström was little, fat, and primitive, but if necessary he could be both sly and slow to forget.

  Of the country’s seventeen thousand police officers he was also the one who had the largest professionally adapted vocabulary, with hundreds of crude names for everyone he didn’t like: immigrants, homosexuals, criminals, and regular Joes regardless of gender. In brief, everyone who wasn’t like him, of which there were extremely few. Taken together these human qualities had made him famous within the corps he had served for thirty years. Detective Chief Inspector Evert Bäckström was a “legendary murder investigator” who, in contrast to most other legends, was active in one thing or another.

  A year earlier he had been exiled from his natural habitat at the National Homicide Commission to the Stockholm police department’s property investigation squad. Or the police lost-and-found warehouse as all real policemen, including Bäckström himself, called this final storage place for stolen bicycles, lost wallets, and strayed police souls.

  Bäckström was a victim. Of unfortunate circumstances in general and evil plots in particular. But most of all of the Royal Swedish Envy. His former chief, Lars Martin Johansson, simply could not cope with Bäckström’s successful battle against the constantly increasing and ever more serious criminality. When Bäckström solved an unusually complicated murder case of a young female police candidate from Växjö, Johansson wove a rope from all the strands of slander, put the noose around Bäckström’s neck, and personally gave him the final kick.

  Despite an unsympathetic, grudging, and flat-out destructive environment, Bäckström tried to make the best of his situation. Work as a property investigator offered interesting opportunities for anyone sufficiently alert to seize opportunity in flight. That wouldn’t include his new colleagues, who were a deplorable congregation of unimaginative pietists who did not even realize that they were sitting with the whole bunch of keys to the gigantic treasure chest that contained “stolen,” “misplaced,” or simply “ownerless” goods. Something that Bäckström of course realized as soon as he crossed the threshold to his new place of work.

  The most deplorable colleague at his new job was an old acquaintance from the time when Bäckström worked at the homicide squad in Stockholm, Detective Inspector Göran Wiijnbladh. Wiijnbladh had worked at the Stockholm police technical squad until 1990, when he took partial retirement and was moved over to what was then the lost property warehouse. He was a technician from the old tribe, and apart from six years of elementary school, less than a year at the old police academy, and a few weeklong courses for crime technicians, he had carefully avoided all theoretical digressions, firmly convinced as he was that the only knowledge worth the name was what had been obtained through practical work. It was this attitude that would prove to be his misfortune.

  Wiijnbladh’s major problem at that time was that his wife had betrayed him. This was relatively simple, in that she made up approximately ninety-nine percent of his total quantity of problems. It was worse that she did it quite openly, which considering the nature of the operation also conflicted with its fundamental idea. Worst of all, however, was that she preferred to do it with other police officers, and because this had been going on since the day after their wedding, there wasn’t a department in the Stockholm police where one or more co-workers hadn’t put horns on fellow officer Wiijnbladh.

  In the autumn of 1989 Wiijnbladh decided to do something about this by poisoning her with thallium he had come across at work. During his preparations he happened to poison himself. He handled his thallium the same way he was accustomed to dealing with fingerprint powder. He got microscopic quantities on his fingers and hands, suffered acute poisoning, and almost died to boot. When he came back from the hospital a few months later, he was only a splinter of his former self. Though he hadn’t been particularly imposing to begin with.

  The whole thing had been hushed up by police leadership. With assistance from the police officers union the event was transformed into a tragic workplace accident, which the parties then resolved on the best of terms. Wiijnbladh was given a half-time pension and a decent one-time compensation for employment injury,
and the half of him that remained was moved to the unit that later that same year changed its name from Stockholm police lost property warehouse to the Stockholm police property investigation squad.

  There he’d been for the past fifteen years, occupied with stolen art and stolen antiques. Why this area in particular, no one understood. He did not seem to possess any particular expertise in the subject, but because it seemed harmless enough he’d been allowed to stay there. In the very smallest room at the end of the corridor sat Wiijnbladh, browsing through all his binders of stolen and misplaced artworks. He would drink his coffee in solitude in the same room, and none of his co-workers really had any idea when he came and went. No one cared, and soon he would take retirement.

  It’ll be nice to be rid of that little half-fairy, thought Bäckström in his sympathetic way the few times he’d seen him sneak past in the corridors.

  Although to start with he’d had some benefit from him.

  About the same time Bäckström arrived at his new workplace, the squad got one of its biggest cases in many years. An eccentric Swedish billionaire, who’d had his official and actual residence in Geneva for ages, had a break-in in his “overnight apartment” in Stockholm. An ordinary, simple, ten-room apartment on Strandvägen where, according to information from the Swedish tax authorities, he stayed at the most a few times a year. “It’s usually a week around Christmas and New Year’s, and perhaps another week when I’m home to celebrate Midsummer or visit my children,” the man had said. Probably this was also the reason that it took almost a month before the Stockholm police became aware of the extent of the crime.

  On Pentecost Eve, Saturday the third of June, the police command center received an alarm from Securitas of a crime in progress on Strandvägen. The reason that help was being requested from their government-financed competitor was that their own response vehicle happened to run into a bicyclist in Östermalm, approximately half a mile from the scene of the crime. In addition this was urgent, because the frightfully advanced alarm system that had been installed a few years earlier was completely convinced that the thief was still at the crime scene—according to the same system he appeared to be alone.