‘And what was his explanation?’
I laugh.
‘It’s not that straightforward. First you can tell me, again, what happened.’
Grim leans back on his chair, looks like he’s thinking.
‘This was December. I saw him in the corridor when they were leading me down for lunch. He was with one of the other inmates. He was quite discreet, being careful not to be seen, but he must have noticed that I’d seen him, because after lunch he came to talk to me.’
‘And?’
‘I was supposed to keep quiet about having seen him. To make sure I wasn’t going to squeal, he gave me a mobile phone. That’s it.’
‘Who was he with?’
‘A woman.’ Grim cocks his head to one side, and smiles. ‘Your turn.’
Levin had started on his memoirs, despite the fact that he really should have waited until after retirement. He was getting a head start, he said, perhaps because he needed access to information that he could only access whilst on duty. He kept the work a secret; I think I was the only one who knew about it. In the memoirs, he dealt with a number of cases that had never been solved. Since his memory was getting cloudy and he needed to check a few details, he visited one of the people concerned, and she happened to be a resident of St Göran’s.
I don’t know in any detail what the investigation was about, other than it being classed as murder and that the statute of limitations for that offence was abolished fairly recently. If word got out that Levin was going through old case notes with older and significantly wiser eyes than back then, it might have given false hope to the victim’s family, and that was something he wanted to avoid. He wanted to keep it under wraps, out of consideration for them.
‘That’s what he said,’ I conclude.
‘And you believed him?’
‘I didn’t believe anything. I had nothing to do with it.’
‘That’s never stopped you before.’
‘This woman he was visiting, do you know who she was?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I’d like to speak to her.’
Grim laughs and tries to wave his hand dismissively.
‘Give me a charger.’
‘If I sort that out,’ I say, feeling my pulse speeding up around my temples, ‘you’ll tell me then?’
‘I should think so.’
‘Grim, for fuck’s sake!’
He raises an eyebrow. Plit’s face appears, tense and uncertain, in the glass pane in the door.
‘You shouted,’ Grim says. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
I don’t actually know, myself.
‘I just wish that, just this once, we could talk, like normal people.’
‘Normal people don’t go around destroying each other’s lives.’
Those words hurt me. I don’t want to admit it to anyone, can’t admit it, but there’s no mistaking that feeling: when I think about Grim spending his days and nights in here, my chest burns with guilt and shame. It’s thanks to me that he’s here.
‘Is it true you’ve asked to be moved?’
‘Why?’
‘Why have you done that? You know that’s not how it works.’
‘I have the right to ask whatever I like — we’ll see what they have to say about it. How long have you been thinking about having kids?’
‘Eh?’
‘You and Sam. That’s why you got a cat, isn’t it?’
‘No, it is not.’
Grim smiles.
‘Lying again are we?’
‘No.’
I look down, despite doing my best to avoid doing so.
‘So you are lying,’ he says.
‘I don’t want you to get …’ I say but don’t finish the sentence, because I can’t say what I’m thinking.
‘I doubt I’m going to be lying on a beach somewhere with a cocktail and a copy of The Corrections. I wouldn’t worry.’
That’s not the point. Wherever he ends up might be so far away that I won’t be able to visit, and I don’t know if I’ll cope without seeing him.
I tell him that I’ll try and arrange a charger. Then I leave the room, and Grim is left sitting alone, waiting for Plit to come and lead him to his room. His cell.
On the way out, I have to sign a register declaring that I have visited him. In reception, two staff members are going through the day’s drugs round. One of them reads out the patients’ names while the other one ticks them off a list, and it’s annoying me. They shouldn’t be doing it here, in front of visitors, because you can’t help registering the names when you hear them, even when you’re trying not to.
‘Hello?’ I say, but neither of them reacts.
By the time they do come over, I’ve got quite impatient, which must be obvious because they’re scoffing and rolling their eyes at me, and not even trying to hide the fact.
Then I leave St Göran’s, with my thoughts drifting off onto Levin, his death, and tomorrow’s journey.
FEBRUARY 1984
Sometimes Charles is a stranger and Stockholm is a city he has never known. It’s just unfamiliar faces, another street corner seen for the first time, new smells and new feelings.
That’s his imagination, a mere momentary distortion, because he knows it so well. He knows the streets as though he himself had created them, at some point long, long ago. He crosses Sveavägen near its junction with Adolf Fredriks Kyrkogata. Hunched against the wind and the snow, he turns up the collar on his coat, nearly slips over in the slush.
The café door doesn’t jingle as he opens it, despite being fitted with a little bell. He’s not hungry, but still orders a roll to go with his coffee. The woman at the till is friendly — she has nice teeth and chubby fingers, asks him if he would like a paper.
He wouldn’t. Someone’s singing we all need someone to talk to and the chimes sound foreboding and lonely. They sound like his mood.
Paul is sitting at one of the window tables that has a view of the street outside, with a half-full glass of water and an unread newspaper in front of him. Charles hangs his coat on the back of his chair, sits down, and drinks a mouthful of coffee.
‘Any news?’
Paul shakes his head and puts the paper away.
‘Not since this morning.’
‘We should have got an apartment for this. There are people here. I’m sure people will have seen.’
‘I know.’
Paul looks at him, his blue eyes as light as polar ice. A patrol car glides past the window and along the street. It’s one of the new type, with blue-and-yellow decals, and the blue lights are attached to the roof bar. Charles doesn’t recognise the officers’ faces, and over the rooftops, above it all, the sky is heavy like wet snow.
Paul eats some of the roll. Charles lights a cigarette and takes a puff, closing his eyes. Straightaway the world seems far away, muted. He’s been working under Paul for three years now. Charles is thirty-seven, although most people say he looks younger. Eva always said so, even if he had aged unnaturally fast recently.
He opens his eyes again and drinks some coffee, which is strong and black.
‘How many of them are there up there?’
‘Three, I think. You would be able to see them if they weren’t being so careful to keep away from the windows.’
‘Do they suspect something?’
He shakes his head.
‘It’s just their ordinary, everyday paranoia at work.’
On the radio, the music makes way for the news: the navy are ending their operations concerning the suspected submarine that was thought to have been present in Swedish waters off Karlskrona. Thunborg makes a statement, but everyone’s waiting for Palme — the only one who remains silent.
Then come the reports in the wake of Sarajevo. The jubilation in Sweden as Svan and Was
sberg returned with their medals. In Sarajevo, all that remains is the deserted Olympic village, foreign correspondents, and a tense political climate. Vacuum is the word on everyone’s minds, but no one actually says it. And now: the weather.
‘Strange times, Charlie,’ Paul says, taking another bite of the roll.
‘To say the least.’
‘The bell on the door,’ he says then.
‘What about it?’
‘It didn’t jingle when you came in.’
‘I noticed that, too, thought it was odd.’
Paul smiles.
Across the road, the door opens, and a man in a leather jacket comes out. He has dark hair and is wearing thick gloves; he moves with the jerky gait of an addict.
‘Showtime,’ says Paul.
Charles gets to his feet and pulls on his coat. It’s still damp. He leaves the café without a word, or a thought.
Sometimes it’s like he’s not even there.
Inside his coat pocket, Charles’ hand cradles the camera, scarcely bigger than a cigarette packet, as he follows the man through Stockholm.
While they’re waiting for a train at Tekniska Högskolan, the man disappears into a shop. Charles stays out on the platform and lights a cigarette.
A little way away stands a woman carefully reading a public-information pamphlet, In the Event of War, with a suitably furrowed brow. Charles recognises the publication from his childhood: he was fourteen when it arrived, and he and his brother both read it over and over again, until they knew it off by heart. He still remembers them — the instructions and the recommendations, and Tage Erlander’s illegible signature, accompanied by his name in elegant slanted handwriting at the end of the foreword. The exhortations and the insecurity, the paranoia, a result of the world’s fear that the war might yet be more hot than cold, that it would come sooner rather than later. Sweden wishes to defend itself, can defend itself, and will defend itself. Any messages claiming that the resistance is over are false.
The world was a threatening place. You could be shaken awake on any given night, forced to begin the evacuation and the flight from impending doomsday.
The man re-emerges. Minutes later, they board one of the Roslagsbanan’s narrow-gauge trains.
Shadowing someone is pretty taxing for the senses. At first, it’s quite a pleasant sensation — paying such intense attention to a single individual makes the world’s contours sharper, and one’s thoughts clearer, cleaner. Everything except the object of the surveillance sinks away and becomes mere background noise. But it’s also tiring, constantly being on guard, and being careful not to fall too far behind or get too close. At the wrong place, at the wrong time, losing focus, even for a second, can mean complete failure.
He observes the man, sitting there at the far end of the carriage. The world outside flashes past.
The streets in Täby haven’t been ploughed, and the ground is slippery. Tyres have left tracks in the snow.
Håkansson. He’s going to Håkansson’s house.
The man turns into a driveway that leads up to a bungalow built of dark brown bricks and that has its own garage. Charles can hear voices: one man and one woman; they’re in the garage, but the main door is closed. There, the door on the side of the garage. It’s slightly open. Charles pulls out the camera and moves towards the garage wall, then hugs it as he makes his way along its length. When he gets within earshot, she’s in the middle of a sentence:
‘… not going to be able to talk to him for weeks.’
‘Where’s the key?’
‘Can’t you arrange for me to speak to him? I just want to hear his voice — he’s my husband after all.’
‘No.’ He sounds harsher now — more demanding: ‘Give me the key.’
Silence.
Her: Anette Håkansson. The man she is talking about is her spouse, Sven-Olof Håkansson. Owner of electronics firm Sunitron, and currently on remand.
A cupboard opens, a jar or a bottle is lifted down, a lid squeaks as it is screwed off — and then, the quiet jingle of a key.
Charles moves to the end of the building, waits for him. There, he’s walking back out onto the road. He keeps his hands in his pockets, and has a determined look about him.
Charles gets him in the viewfinder, holds his breath, and catches him in mid-stride.
The shutter clicks, a light, discreet sound.
The woman leaves the garage, closing the door behind her. Her shaky legs take her back into the house, and only then does Charles dare to go back onto the road himself.
Bagarmossen district.
Up there, on the surface. He can breathe again — that’s how it feels, after a long time underground. The man slips a bit, a stone’s throw ahead of him. He’s heading for the apartment blocks a little further down. They’re the same colour as a chain-smoker’s fingers.
Someone who’s shadowed a person long enough will know it when it happens. Sight is a slow sense; it just confirms what the rest of your body is already telling you. Charles turns in at the first corner of the building and looks for him, but, sure enough — he’s lost him.
Bollocks.
There are several entrances, all visible from here, the windows in rows above them. The odd dead shrub here and there; a light green bicycle that has been propped up against the wall of the building but has toppled over. A woman with a walking frame, out for a walk. Charles can hear her grunting, but that’s it.
He walks between the blocks, keeping his footsteps calm and gentle.
What he really wants is to scream at the top of his voice. There’s too much at stake.
Steps at the gable end of one of the buildings lead down to an open steel door. Beyond it, a basement storage room. The door glides to, slowly at first, before abruptly slamming shut.
He stands at the corner of another of the blocks, as if he were waiting for someone, and from there he has a clear view of the cellar door. The cold of the ground beneath has seeped up through the soles of his boots. His fingers are tight and stiff.
Now.
The door opens, and the man emerges. Charles pulls out his camera and studies him through the viewfinder. Then, click: captured on his way up the steps. Click: a profile shot; he’s at the top of the steps and heading towards the metro. A third, final picture — the outline of the man’s scrawny back through his leather jacket.
Nearby, the sound of sirens — an ambulance. Charles puts the camera back in his pocket.
He’s doing this ‘naked’ — which is how secretive intelligence agencies such as The Bureau refer to working without support or protection. He’s not even armed. If something happens, he’s got no back-up, no guarantees to call on.
The cellar comprises a single long passage with numbered storage cages on either side. First is number 515, with the sequence continuing upwards. These storage spaces are separated from each other by chicken wire and thick wooden beams. Everything is bathed in a warm yellowish glow emanating from the roof light, and he can feel the warmth on the top of his head as he walks underneath it. A spider the size of a large coin darts across the floor in surprise. He stamps on it.
It smells of old furniture and mould down here. Some of the cages are full to bursting, others hardly used. The great thing about them is the ease with which their contents can be identified: an old ping-pong table here, a bookcase there, a set of winter clothes, a bike.
Surely they should be visible. If they’re down here somewhere, they should be obvious.
There. Way down on the left, in a cage marked 536. Right at the back, an old sofa is just visible, as is an old refrigerator with its door ajar. They’re almost completely obscured by whatever is in front of them: something large, which has been covered with a thick dark-green tarpaulin. That could be them. The height — about chin-height on Charles — is right. Whatever it is, it’s just inside the door, where you would expec
t to find something that had only just been left there.
It has a serious-looking padlock. Charles has a search around. He pulls out the camera and squints into the tiny viewfinder, adjusts the aperture to the low light level, and holds his breath. Two rapid clicks.
The chicken wire has a slightly larger gauge mesh closest to the floor. He squats down and pushes a hand through one of the holes, manages to grasp a corner of the tarp, and lifts it slightly to get a glimpse of what lies underneath.
They look like drying cabinets, heavy-duty steel boxes with vents in their doors.
At the bottom, little markings are just visible, figures scrawled in felt-tip on a bit of masking tape:
VAX 11/782.
Charles counts: two, three, four of them.
He pulls the camera from his pocket with his free hand.
The computers don’t look much, but they’re worth their weight in gold, in blood.
As he leaves Bagarmossen, snow is falling.
It’s the end of February 1984.
JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1971
Charles and Eva’s having met was not simply down to chance, although for a long time he thought so. Hindsight has made him wiser. It was a test, sent by an unknown higher force, something that forced him to display his true colours.
He was an ambitious young man, who after his training had been assigned to District One before being recruited to the Surveillance Unit. It was there he learned the ropes under the guidance of the legendary Sivertsson, a man so cunning he was widely known as ‘The Fox’. Charles lived in a one-bedroom flat on Kungsholmen, and he studied when he wasn’t working.
The world was changing. Nineteen seventy was one of the last true ‘record years’. Growth remained strong, making Palme’s social reforms possible, but the idealised notion of the ‘People’s Home’ had begun to reveal its true nature: an illusion, a mirage, an apparition that found its way inside peoples’ heads. Nineteen sixty-eight was still an open wound, and Charles’ early days as a policeman had been unsettling, full of revolt and unrest. Now, a few short years later, the city’s ugly concrete-and-glass estates were soaked in drugs and dirty money. The only ones who didn’t realise that something was happening were those still spellbound by Erlander’s utopia.
Master, Liar, Traitor, Friend: a Leo Junker case Page 5