“I’ve forgotten that time,” said Johansson. “Tell me. What did your cousin want? What advice did you give him?”
“He and one of his many friends, a very remarkable man by the way and one of the richest in this country, much richer than Theo, had apparently decided to let so-called market forces work to try to put some order into the Palme investigation, given that our public judicial authorities had so sadly failed. Neither of them was a Social Democrat exactly, to put it mildly, but that thing with the murder of Palme, and perhaps even more the police fiasco, they both took very much to heart. So what do you do in the world where Theo and his good friend live? You invest a billion, buy up the best there is in individuals, equipment, knowledge, and contacts and set about solving the problem. It’s no more difficult than that.”
“This friend,” said Johansson. “Theo’s good friend. He doesn’t have a name?”
“Yes,” said Helena Stein. “I’m sure you’ve already figured out who I’m talking about. The problem is that he’s been dead for several years. Another problem is that I liked him very much. He was one of the most remarkable men I’ve ever met and in a positive sense. So I don’t know. I get the feeling I’ve gossiped enough about him already.”
“Jan Stenbeck,” said Johansson. Sweden’s answer to Howard Hughes, he thought.
“Jan Hugo,” said Helena Stein with a streak of melancholy in her cool smile. “Who else, by the way, in the Sweden we’re living in? But it was actually not the case that it was my advice he and Theo wanted. What could I have contributed where the murder of Olof Palme was concerned? In a purely factual sense, I mean.”
“So what did he want from you?” said Johansson.
“They wanted to make contact with my lover at the time. Or boyfriend, as someone like that is called nowadays, regardless of age and emotional heat.”
“So what did they want from him?” asked Johansson, who had already figured out his name.
“They wanted him to start working for them. Lead their private investigation. With basically unlimited resources, because he was the best they could possibly imagine.”
“But personally he preferred to remain in the vicinity of the prime minister,” said Johansson. So at least that got said, he thought.
“Yes, and because you know him I’m sure you can imagine how he formulated the matter.”
“No. Tell me,” said Johansson, sounding more amused than he intended.
“If I can be very brief, he wasn’t particularly happy about Theo. I want to think he said that if he did have the power that all ignoramuses ascribed to him, then for starters he wouldn’t have hesitated a minute to ensure that the authorities had my cousin Theo executed. With a dull, rusty broadax.”
“I’ve heard tell of that broadax,” said Johansson. “Just to see if I’ve understood this correctly. I already knew that Theo Tischler is your cousin. That you had a relationship with our own Richelieu was news to me. I didn’t know you knew Jan Stenbeck either.”
“People like us know one another. It’s no more complicated than that,” Helena Stein observed with a slight inclination of her slender neck.
“Though it never came to anything,” she continued, shaking her head. “He talked with Jan and told him that he should hang on to his money. That this particular investment was a complete waste. He obviously refused to speak with Theo. He had no problem talking with Jan Stenbeck. They’d probably known each other forever and had numerous interests in common, which weren’t limited to food and drink.”
“He dissuaded Stenbeck,” Johansson reminded her. “Why did he do that? Why was it a complete waste?”
“Because the murder of Olof Palme was already solved,” said Helena Stein. “He already knew who the perpetrators were and why they had the prime minister assassinated. Out of concern for Sweden’s interests it was best for all of us that we continue living in uncertainty.”
“Did he say that to you?” said Johansson with surprise. Wonder just what he’d been stuffing himself with that time? he thought.
“Not to me,” said Helena Stein, shaking her head. “He would never dream of doing that. On the other hand he said it to his good friend Jan. To my good friend too, for that matter. My very good friend, to be precise. He in turn told me only a month or so before he died. On the other hand what that would have been about in factual terms he didn’t know. So when he in turn talked with Theo back then, he just said that he was tired of the whole idea. Not a word about why.”
“No,” said Johansson. We didn’t have such luck, he thought.
“If it really is like that, what happened was probably best. That he didn’t talk with Theo, because then all the rest of us would have read about it in Expressen the following day, I mean. Theo is not exactly discreet. Or do you think I’m attaching too much significance to my personal experience?”
“Not really,” said Johansson with more emphasis than he intended, because his thoughts were already elsewhere. How do you go about holding an interview with a legendary Swedish multibillionaire who died five years ago? thought Lars Martin Johansson. Trying to question the special adviser was inconceivable. Regardless of whether he was alive or dead, and especially if there was anything to what Helena Stein had just said.
Though it can hardly have been out of concern for the completely inconsequential Christer Pettersson that he gave such advice to Jan Hugo Stenbeck, thought Johansson as he sat in the taxi on the way back to his office.
78
Hedberg’s parents were dead. He had never been married. Had no children. None that were in the records, at any rate. What remained was his younger sister. Birgitta Hedberg, age sixty. Also single with no children. Lived in a condominium with three rooms and a kitchen on Andersvägen in Solna. The same apartment in which Hedberg had lived previously, before he reported that he had moved out of Sweden.
It’ll have to do, thought Jan Lewin, for he had to start somewhere.
Hedberg’s sister had worked as a secretary at a large construction firm until four years ago when she took early retirement after a car accident. As she drove her boss to a conference in Södermanland her car had been rear-ended; she suffered whiplash and became unable to work. The general pension system took over and gave her early retirement. Her employer and the insurance company added another couple million in damages for her suffering, and this was possibly the main reason that her assessed net worth came to over five million kronor in bank deposits, interest-bearing bonds, and fund shares.
Although perhaps not, thought Jan Lewin. Even before the insurance money was disbursed, she had reported assets of just under three million, and with the salary she had been drawing this seemed like quite a bit to Lewin.
A frugal life, good investments, a rich lover, or perhaps simply an older brother she helped by taking care of his money, thought Jan Lewin. The same brother who according to Johansson was supposed to have robbed the post office on Dalagatan in May of 1977 of 295,000 kronor. Five years’ salary before tax for a detective inspector at that time. Lewin knew that as well as Johansson, because he had been working at the homicide squad when it happened and even remembered the case. Over thirty years later, this corresponded to almost two million, still five years’ salary before tax for a detective inspector, thought Lewin, making a note of it.
If it’s the case that she’s acting as the bank for her brother, then they must have contact with each other, thought Lewin. Even if it isn’t, she may be communicating with him anyway, he thought, even though sibling affection was unknown territory for someone like him.
Then he proceeded to fill out all the forms that were needed so he could make the usual checks on her in the registries that were at the disposal of the police, and he concluded that part by requesting a telephone check on her. So far everything had been routine, and there was still the more creative aspect to tackle before it was time to go home.
First he found a picture of her. Fortunately it was a current one, taken when she renewed her passport in Febr
uary earlier that year. It showed a dark-haired woman in her sixties with her hair pulled back in a tight bun, regular facial features, straight nose, prominent jawline and chin, dark, vigilant eyes. Looks good, thought Jan Lewin. If it weren’t for that austere, vigilant expression. Wrong, he thought. She looks mean.
Passport, foreign travels, credit cards, travel bureaus. Start with the credit cards, and if that doesn’t produce anything, then check the travel bureaus in the area where she lives, wrote Jan Lewin.
Whiplash injury, disability pension, home help, complaints? Talk with home services, Lewin noted. If she’s the way she seems in the picture, they’ll probably remember her, he thought.
Then he wrote out his usual to-do list on his computer, for otherwise he wouldn’t have been Jan Lewin. For the same reason he read it three times, added to it, deleted, changed and changed back again, before with a deep sigh he was finally ready to send it to Johansson. Then he shook his head meditatively once again. It was the fifteenth and final point that worried him, “Question Birgitta Hedberg?” It feels completely wrong, thought Jan Lewin.
First he deleted the question mark and then, after further pondering, the entire short sentence. Finally he replaced it with a new one. “Suggest that we wait as long as possible before questioning Hedberg’s sister,” wrote Lewin. Breathing deeply, he nodded and pushed the send button as the last official action of another day of all the days that made up his life.
Wise, thought Johansson ten minutes later when he was sitting in front of his computer reading what Lewin had written. Not only wise but necessary, he thought, if there was something in what Helena Stein had told him. Then he called in half a dozen of his most taciturn co-workers and gave them some quick instructions.
“Questions,” said Johansson, letting his gaze sweep over the group.
They all shook their heads, three had already stood up, and colleague Rogersson had even managed to open the door on his way out.
“Good,” said Johansson. “Get going.”
Then he asked his secretary to immediately contact his counterpart with the Spanish national police, Guardia Civil, at their headquarters in Madrid. His Spanish colleague called back within fifteen minutes. Johansson told him in a suitably roundabout way about his errand and was promised all the help that matters of that nature required. Or more, if that were to prove necessary.
Never bad to have a few contacts, thought Johansson as he hung up and for some reason happened to think about the back room in that pleasant bar in Lyons. The bar where he and other really big owls sometimes had the privilege of being nighthawks together.
All the strategic planning had taken him only a little more than an hour. Obviously without having said a word about it to Lewin, Mattei, and least of all to Holt, because he now found himself in a situation where the one hand shouldn’t know what the other hand was up to. That was well and good, as long as he alone was guiding both.
Further information will be given on a need to know basis, thought Johansson contentedly. As he leaned back in his chair for some reason the one person he was thinking about was Anna Holt.
79
Lisa Mattei also looked at the pictures of Hedberg and his family that Johansson had distributed, and true to her systematic disposition she started with the ones who were already dead. Master pilot Einar Göran Hedberg, born in 1906, died in 1971 at the age of sixty-five. Then his wife, Ingrid Cecilia, born in 1924. She was eighteen years younger than the man she married the same year she gave birth to his son. Died in 1964, at the age of only forty.
He doesn’t look nice, thought Mattei as she considered the Hedbergs’ wedding picture. Einar Hedberg dressed in the ship pilot uniform, standing at an angle behind his wife, broad-shouldered, more than a head taller than she was. He would have looked good if it hadn’t been for the vigilant expression, the absence of a smile, his military posture and body language.
His wife, Cecilia. That was apparently what she was called. Small, dainty, cute, anxiously smiling at the camera. Gaze directed a little to the right, and her husband’s hand heavily protective as it rested on her shoulder.
Wonder what he did to her? thought Lisa Mattei.
Einar Hedberg seemed to have been a man accustomed to ruling over other people’s lives, who not only piloted shipping vessels past shoals, reefs, and islets through narrow passages in the Stockholm archipelago. His obituary in Norrtelje Tidning mentioned his natural leadership qualities, his firmness of principle, and his considerable nautical and maritime knowledge. His “prematurely departed wife” had “stood faithfully by his side” in life, and if he was now mourned and missed in death, it did not appear so from his obituary notice. Einar Hedberg had “two surviving adult children,” and there was nothing more than that.
Wonder what he did to them, thought Lisa Mattei.
Regardless of what the master pilot did to his two children, judging by Johansson’s pictures things seemed to have turned out differently. If he had done anything, that is, thought the meticulous Lisa Mattei, aware as she was that pictures could be just as treacherous as words.
Among the ones she got from Johansson, four class photos from the comprehensive school in Vaxholm were included. Big brother Kjell Göran with teacher and schoolmates when he started first grade, and the same arrangement right before he left ninth grade and finished his studies. Corresponding pictures of his little sister, Birgitta, who went to the same school. There was a striking physical family resemblance between the siblings, especially if you knew what the parents looked like, but their similarities also ended there. It was their attitude to the outside world and the camera that set them apart.
The seven-year-old Kjell Göran Hedberg was a sturdy little thing who calmly observed the photographer. In contrast to the majority of his classmates, he did not smile. He observed what was happening, and what he saw did not seem to bother him in the least. His sister did not smile either, but because she seemed to have inherited their father’s vigilant eyes, she looked almost suspicious.
The same slightly curly, dark hair, same brown eyes and harmonious facial features. Kjell Göran with his hair neatly parted on the side despite the curls. Sister Birgitta with a bow in her hair. The same neat clothes to which their mother, Cecilia, must have devoted considerable effort as she sat in front of the sewing basket in the parlor or in the laundry room down in the basement. But quite different expressions. Big brother ready to meet the world on his own terms, even though he was only seven years old and a handsbreadth tall. His little sister, always ready to defend herself against the same world, regardless of what it might be willing to offer her.
Nine years later little seemed to have changed. A sixteen-year-old Kjell Göran in the center of the picture. As tall as the tallest of his male classmates, with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and his arms crossed over his chest. With the help of a comb and Brylcreem, the slightly curly hair was replaced with a wavy black Elvis hairstyle, according to the custom of the time. The gaze was the same—calm, observant—but because he now permitted himself a slight smile he almost seemed amusedly indulgent about what was happening. Not so his sister. The long hair arranged in a ponytail, no bow anymore, but although in an objective sense she ought to have been the cutest of all the girls in her class, she could only offer the camera the same suspicious, dark eyes.
He must have treated them quite differently, thought Lisa Mattei.
80
School transcripts, thought Lisa Mattei as she closed the file of pictures of Kjell Göran Hedberg and his relatives. I have to see his transcript, she thought, and only five minutes later she was sitting with Police Superintendent Wiklander, head of the bureau’s CIS squad, and in ordinary cases also her immediate superior.
“Transcripts? You want to see Hedberg’s transcripts,” Wiklander repeated, nodding at Mattei. “A strange coincidence,” he observed, nodding again.
“What do you mean, coincidence?”
“A few days ago when our esteemed boss and I were d
iscussing what data we should pull about Hedberg, for some reason he mentioned his transcripts.”
“I see, he did.”
“Yes. I remember that he said something along the lines of that perhaps it’s best to pull his transcripts too. Not because he thought they seemed particularly interesting, in context, but mostly not to make you sad when you came and asked about them. And he probably did it because he really can see around corners.”
“So that’s what he said,” said Mattei.
“Exactly that,” said Wiklander. He sighed contentedly and handed over a thin plastic sleeve of papers. “Dear Hedberg doesn’t seem to have been a typical intellectual. More like an ordinary, practical minded nobody, so perhaps you shouldn’t expect a communion of souls.”
“Thanks,” said Mattei, getting up.
“No problem,” said Wiklander, shrugging his shoulders. “Before you run off I have a message for you too. From Johansson.”
“I’m listening,” said Mattei.
“That you’re not allowed to talk with Hedberg’s teachers, old classmates, or anyone whatsoever who can even be suspected of having known him. Not under any condition.”
“That’s what he said?”
“Exactly that,” said Wiklander. “So drop any thought of that. Otherwise you’ll have the devil to pay. Direct quote from our top boss. His orders. To be on the safe side, mine too.”
“I hear you,” said Mattei, nodded curtly and left.
From an educational standpoint Kjell Göran Hedberg belonged to a long lost generation. During the nine years he went to school in Vaxholm, he got grades after every completed semester—nine years and eighteen semesters. Grades on a seven-degree scale, where a capital A summarized total success and a C complete failure, which to be on the safe side were supplemented by statistics that showed how everyone in the same class as Hedberg had done.
He was a typically mediocre student who was awarded B or Ba in almost all subjects. With the exception of history, metalworking/woodworking, and gymnastics including games and sports, the master pilot’s son remained safely anchored within the class’s median during his entire school career.
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