Master, Liar, Traitor, Friend: a Leo Junker case

by Christoffer Carlsson (Translated by Michael Gallagher)

  MASTER, LIAR, TRAITOR, FRIEND

  CHRISTOFFER CARLSSON was born in 1986. The author of several previous novels, he has a PhD in criminology, and is a university lecturer in the subject. Master, Liar, Traitor, Friend is the third volume in the Leo Junker series.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  Originally published in Swedish as Mästare, väktare, lögnare, vän by Piratförlagets 2015

  First published in English by Scribe 2017

  by agreement with Pontas Literary & Film Agency

  Copyright © Christoffer Carlsson 2015

  Translation copyright © Michael Gallagher 2017

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.

  9781925321821 (Australian edition)

  9781911344117 (UK edition)

  9781925548020 (e-book)

  CiP records for this title are available from the British Library and the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  Sweden …

  Recalling that time, and the events that flow through these pages, you get a sense that the official explanation — The Version — was not true. That suspicion is well founded, but perhaps not in the way you might expect. The truth is still only an occasional guest.

  It’s the afternoon, the eighteenth of June 2014.

  The location: the town of Bruket. He has returned there, one last time.

  Sweden. What happened was a serious crime, with a long history, and it began, as it so often does, with two people forced to share a secret.

  He was there when it happened, in the winter of 1980, when soot and ash were all that was left behind, and he was there when the water took them, four years later. You did get a sense of it, even back then, but it wasn’t until much later that the full extent of what had gone on became clear.

  Sweden. What follows will force the guilty into submission.

  Forgive them.

  JUNE 2014

  Something’s wrong, I can tell. Something is definitely not as it should be.

  I …

  I’m not sure how to carry on.

  My name is Leo Junker. I’m thirty-four years old, and I’m sitting on my balcony. Sometimes it’s as though time’s gone backwards and in my memories I feel older than I do now.

  I’m running through the outskirts of Salem. The world has enormous teeth, a forked tongue, and if you’re not careful, it can bite you. I’m ten, maybe eleven. I’m on my way home from Rönninge, and I’ve just got off a bus on my own for the first time, worried that I might have got the stops mixed up and that I won’t recognise the surroundings.

  It’s late autumn and the leaves on the trees are drying out, and I’m relieved when I see the familiar blocks of the Triad. I don’t go straight home, although I should. My newly earned freedom — that’s what it feels like — has made me cocky, and I keep going. I’ve got my rucksack on, with my new Walkman in; I put the headphones on, listen to the beat. When I get up to the water tower, it looms over me like a temple.

  I spot a few kids. They’re several years above me in school. They’re sitting in a huddle, sharing a cigarette. It looks like they’re laughing, but I can’t hear them. I prowl along the edge of the gravel path, notice one of the guys putting his arm around one of the girls and another putting his hand on her thigh.

  I want to go up to them, but I turn around. I head home.

  That’s my childhood.

  That, and the smell of my mum and dad when they get home from work. It’s the sun sparkling on roof after roof, and the smell of cooking fat and exhaust fumes, blue lights that start flickering in the silence just as suddenly as fear; it’s the older graffiti writers, it’s tags and pieces and punitions, and us all watching, memorising the movements, the bright colours. It’s waiting for the train into town that doesn’t always turn up or has already rumbled past, and it’s cigarettes, and, later, joints, and money changing hands and the blue-grey smoke cascading through my fingers and realising that I’ve blown the month’s allowance again, and later that day me and Grim, my best mate, nicking clothes from a shop on Birger Jarlsgatan, laughing at that, and it’s Nas and Illmatic and the city never sleeps … and me and Grim sitting right at the top of the water tower, and me being struck by the notion that maybe the world, beyond all this, has made room for me, too.

  During the first summer days of 2014, I spend a lot of time thinking about what once was, all that water under the bridge. And in the course of sleepless nights, a remarkable insight emerges. Something momentous is about to happen.

  And then, just after lunch on the nineteenth of June, by way of confirmation, comes the phone call.

  When she was little, Tove Waltersson asked her mum where all the buildings and trees and people came from, and why Bruket was so big, and why there were great expanses of open fields and thick woods. The bushes’ long branches seemed to wrap themselves round each other and anything that happened to be in their way: logs, stones, dead cars, and abandoned buildings.

  Mum replied that God had not been too pleased when he looked down to admire his works. It was too small, crowded, and stuffy. To remedy this, he pushed his great hands down over them, got hold of the ground on the outskirts of Bruket, and pulled, the way you stretch a T-shirt that’s getting a bit small.

  That was a long time ago — well, almost thirty years have passed — but the feeling hasn’t changed. It’s easy to forget it when you haven’t lived here for a while. People who come to visit complain of sweats and dizziness, being more sensitive than usual to the sun. On the nineteenth of June, shadows are few and far between, and the tarmac is so warm that steam rises from its surface.

  Alvavägen is cordoned off with blue-and-white tape, hung loosely between the lampposts. Tove stops the car, puts her hair up, and takes her sunglasses off.

  Two patrol cars are parked along the line of the tape.

  Brandén and Åhlund are talking to each other, both perched on their cars’ bonnets, each holding a can of Fanta.

  ‘Number ten,’ Brandén says.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Tove asks.

  ‘An older gentleman.’ Åhlund takes a swig. ‘Charles Levin.’

  ‘The Charles Levin?’

  Åhlund looks over at Brandén, who raises his eyebrows.

  ‘Who?’ he asks.

  ‘Police Superintendent Charles Levin.’

  ‘Klas and Östen were first on the scene, so they’re in there. Ask them. A technician left Halmstad half an hour ago, so he should be here in about fifteen.’

  Alvavägen 10 is a light-grey wooden house, old and uncared for. From a distance, it almost looks more like a hut. A letterbox with no name on it hangs off the fence, and the front door is wide open. The lights are off, and if there’s anything to be grateful for here, it might well be that. There’s something unsettling about the lights being on in a dead man’s house.

  In a room to the right, Östen Vallman is standing there, phone in hand, app
arently looking for something. A sofa guards a glass coffee table, and on the wall next to a large, empty bookcase is a Carl Larsson painting. The other walls are lined with piles of packing boxes, each marked CROCKERY, GLASS, or BOOKS.

  She takes her shoes off and walks into the small hallway. She finds the sound of the wooden floor as it creaks under her feet quite pleasing.

  ‘There,’ Vallman says, ‘on the left, in the kitchen. He’s in there.’

  There’s a table and two chairs by the window. He’s lying on his side, wearing blue jeans and a pale-yellow polo shirt. From the wound, which is level with his right temple, a significant amount of blood has spilled out, and there are no tracks or other marks anywhere near him. He was probably sitting on the chair when it happened, and then slumped, falling to the floor. The other chair is pulled out a bit from the table, as though whoever was sitting there just got up and left.

  On the wallpaper, at head-height, tiny scattered droplets form a blurred cloud of dried blood.

  The victim is a tall, spindly man. Must be sixty plus, but it looks like he’s put some effort into keeping trim, and the first weeks of summer have left him with a bit of a tan. His features are distinctive yet elegant, with a hawk-like nose and high, well-defined cheekbones.

  It is him. Fuck.

  ‘When did the call go out?’

  ‘An hour ago, two minutes past eleven,’ Vallman says, with his eyes on the phone’s screen. ‘An old friend of the victim’s, Lars-Erik Sunesson, made the call. They spoke on the phone yesterday and arranged to meet for a coffee, at eleven this morning. When he got here and rang the bell, and no one answered, he got worried and tried to see into the kitchen. He saw some blood on the floor, so that’s when he called us.’

  ‘Where is he — Sunesson?’

  ‘Klas drove him home. He was going to take his statement there. He was pretty shaken.’ Vallman lowers his voice, despite there not being anyone else around. ‘I think he might’ve needed a snifter, if you know what I mean.’

  Farmer’s son Östen Vallman had the face of a dog and the hands of a labourer. As a teenager, he had been Bruket’s best shot-putter, and once won the regional championships in his age group, something that merited a mention in the paper. He’s good-looking, in the way that boys in their mid-teens sometimes can be, precisely because their expressions are so blank.

  ‘Do you think he might have done it himself?’ he says, looking at the deceased.

  ‘Shot himself?’

  ‘I’m just thinking,’ he goes on, ‘the damage it’s done and the way he’s lying.’

  ‘Can you see a weapon?’

  Vallman looks around, hopefully, holding his phone, which looks like a miniature in his huge hands. When he fails to find anything, he turns to Tove.

  ‘Might it … ?’

  ‘And the two cups on the table, does that indicate that he was drinking coffee alone? An imaginary friend?’

  Vallman looks at her and cocks his head to one side.

  ‘You know, it wouldn’t hurt you to be a bit nicer. No wonder no one likes you.’

  ‘They’ll transfer me soon enough. Don’t worry about that.’

  Vallman shrugs.

  ‘Yeah but still.’

  Four thousand people live here, at most. Lots of the homes are in the area behind the square, close to the main road, from where smaller, narrower roads spread out. She lives on one of those now, on an estate where the houses are old, and small. The kind of home you only live in if you can’t afford anywhere better, or if you don’t want to feel guilty about not giving a shit where you live. Either way, it’s impossible to make it feel cosy.

  Tove moved away when she turned twenty-one, and got a place on the Police Training course in Stockholm, three years behind Markus, and while he graduated with great grades and references, Tove barely scraped through. She never did get the posting she’d been hoping for in Gothenburg or Malmö, just places like Trollhättan, Nässjö, and Varberg.

  Six months ago, she ended up back here again. Her brother used to say that people like them were doomed to a life here, and that all you could do was live it with as much dignity as possible.

  Sometimes Tove thinks he was right and that his fate served to prove just that: leaving Bruket had meant that Markus had to die.

  Over the last ten years, it’s got worse. Every time she’s approached the outskirts of Bruket, she’s had to turn around. She gets nauseous, her hands start shaking, she gets the sweats, and her teeth chatter until she blacks out and has to stop on the roadside and breathe, breathe, breathe for several minutes before she can drive again.

  And then she drives back.

  She was on sick leave for nine months after Markus’ death, full-time at first, then 50 per cent; three months ago, she was deemed well enough to go back full-time. When she went back on duty, it was at the local station in Bruket, since that was the only place that had room for her. Besides, as they pointed out, she lives here now.

  As if that was going to make things better.

  Her new colleagues, acquaintances from her past, or old friends of her mum and dad gave their sympathies, told her how they remembered the two of them as children. How they’d stood and peered in through the main entrance, wide-eyed and inquisitive. Did she remember that?

  Yes, she said. She remembered it.

  They asked how it felt to be home again, how her mum was. Sometimes they’d see her mum, up by the graveyard.

  It’s okay, Tove lied. She’s okay.

  They don’t need a detective here, nor do they want one, so she’s neither needed nor welcome. Even her boss, Ola Davidsson, considers her to be surplus to requirements, and above all most of them are probably hoping that she’ll collapse and go back on sick leave.

  A car stops outside the house. Tove and Vallman head out to meet the technician, who introduces herself as Fanny Söderlund, notices the stripes on Vallman’s shoulders, and asks for his boss. When he points at Tove, the technician looks surprised.

  ‘I was expecting a man,’ she says.

  ‘So was I.’

  Söderlund has dry hands, fine lines on her face, and silver hair in a bun. She grabs her black bag, which more than anything resembles a toolbox, before moving along the path that leads up to the steps and beginning the forensic investigation.

  It’s a while before she enters the house, and once she gets to the kitchen and looks at the deceased, she frowns slightly.

  ‘I would have appreciated a heads-up that it was him,’ she says.

  ‘Did you know each other?’

  Söderlund shakes her head.

  ‘We just knew of each other. But he was still a colleague.’

  ‘We could call someone else out.’

  ‘The day before Midsummer? Good luck.’ Söderlund looks at Vallman, who’s on the phone to someone. ‘Get him out of here. He’s skipping around like a chihuahua.’

  ‘So,’ Tove says, ‘up until a month ago Levin was a superintendent at the National Police Authority?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what’s he doing here? Does he live here? Is this his house?’

  ‘No idea.’ Söderlund stares at Vallman. ‘Get rid of him now. His plodding is driving me mad.’

  Tove leads Vallman into the hall and out onto the steps, leaving Söderlund alone in there.

  The warmth of the sun is getting stronger, and it’s only going to get worse. The air is still, yet somehow almost pulsating. Heavy beads of sweat trickle from her scalp, down behind her ears, and along the front of her neck. Tove’s headache is getting worse. She goes back inside, pulls out a pair of latex gloves from Söderlund’s bag, and asks if it’s okay for her to have a look around the house.

  ‘Not really.’ Söderlund sighs. ‘Just … tread carefully, okay?’

  The living room has a back door, which was intended to lead out
onto a patio or a terrace that someone forgot about or couldn’t be bothered to build. Now it opens straight onto the lawn.

  Several of the drawers are empty and the wardrobes are only half-full of clothes. In the bathroom cabinet, there’s a wash bag containing a toothbrush and some toothpaste; in the shower, a single bottle of shower gel. That’s it. The rest of it is in boxes. There are some in every room, these packing boxes. He’s hardly bothered to furnish the place.

  He was busy doing something else.

  You can almost feel that in the air, in the silence.

  In one corner of the bedroom, there’s a laptop charger, and one for a mobile phone, on a little desk. Next to the desk is a packing box, gaping open and full of books and paper in an unsorted pile. It looks like how the inside of Tove’s head feels.

  Tove gets down on her knees, and examines the floor under the table and the bed. Nothing. There’s a little office chair in front of the desk. Tove sits down on it and peers out of the window. It looks out across the little garden at the back.

  She pulls the packing box towards her. A hole-punch, stapler, bits of paper, and countless books. She puts them to one side. At the bottom of the large box, there’s a pile of ring binders, four altogether, a couple of the old metal variety, the remainder modern plastic ones. She lifts one out. It’s full of photocopied documents, parts of preliminary investigations and forensic reports from cases she doesn’t recognise. Someone — perhaps Levin himself — has made notes and comments in the margins. She flips through the other three binders: similar content, but relating to other cases.

  The books: Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré, and Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor. Underneath that, The Judge and His Hangman by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Tove flips through the pages. Nothing, apart from old turned-down corners and the odd page that’s coming loose.

  Something is poking out from the unsorted pile of paper, a Polaroid photo of a man, a woman, and a girl, maybe five or six years old. The man is wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and jeans, the woman a blouse and a beige skirt, and the girl is in a blue dress. They look happy.