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

by Christoffer Carlsson (Translated by Michael Gallagher)

  It’s unusual to get an application for a visitor’s permit for Midsummer’s eve approved. That doesn’t have much to do with legal formalities, but rather more to do with the fact that the staff would prefer to have as little as possible to do, and would rather be sitting in their offices and bemoaning the fact that they’re spending Midsummer’s eve in a loony bin. The only highlight probably consists of a slice of dark bread with pickled herring in the staff room, if there’s anyone left in there.

  ‘Thanks for this,’ Birck says when he meets one of St Göran’s middle managers, a gloomy bloke called Westin. ‘It can’t wait, I’m afraid. I did try to get hold of Martin, but he didn’t answer.’

  ‘He’s probably at a party somewhere,’ Westin says flatly. ‘What is it about?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure myself,’ Birck says with his lips pursed thin, because nothing gives a liar away like a smile. ‘But it concerns the policeman who died.’

  ‘I understand,’ Westin says. ‘I’m sorry, but I am going to have to search you.’

  Once Westin’s finished, he pulls out a great big bunch of keys, chooses one, and slides it into the lock. He then holds a card up against the reader on the wall and punches in a code that allows them to enter.

  ‘John Grimberg really ought to be on maximum security. Unfortunately, he’s far too well behaved for us to get that approved.’

  ‘You mean he’s not on maximum security now?’

  Westin shakes his head.

  ‘Not since the first of June. But there isn’t an awful lot he is allowed to do.’

  Beyond the door, a small corridor leads them to another door, identical to the first. Then they are on the ward where John Grimberg now lives his life. It is quiet and still here, yet there is a tension in the air that makes you want to turn back immediately.

  ‘Grab a seat in the first visiting room,’ Westin says. ‘And I’ll get John.’

  Birck sits down on one of the chairs, examines his right hand. Had he expected it to be so steady? He’s spent nearly twenty years with the force, and in that time he has been afraid on a number of occasions. On three of them, he has had to discharge his firearm. He never did so with John Grimberg, but Grimberg remains the one person who has scared Birck more than any other.

  ‘You,’ Grimberg says, shocked, when he sees Birck from the doorway. He then turns to Westin. ‘I’m not talking to him.’

  ‘I’m not here because I’ve missed you.’

  ‘John, stop it now,’ says Westin.

  ‘I want to go to my room. Give me my pills.’

  ‘Talk first,’ Westin smiles. ‘Then you can have your tablets.’

  ‘This is not allowed,’ says Grimberg. ‘I could report you.’

  ‘And who would believe you?’

  Westin is still smiling. Birck is examining his own shoes. Grimberg is standing, hesitating in the doorway before he allows himself to be led into the room.

  ‘I’ll let Johanna know that you’re sitting here,’ Westin says. ‘She’ll only be a minute or so.’

  ‘No worries.’

  Westin looks at his watch and checks Grimberg’s handcuffs before leaving the room, closing the door behind him.

  ‘You’ve got used to them,’ Birck says, looking at the cuffs.

  ‘It’s not something you ever get used to. You adapt.’

  Birck bends down, pulls up one trouser leg over his calf, revealing the little charger that had been hidden by his sock. It was sheer good luck. Westin’s search had been haphazard and clumsy.

  Birck puts it on the bare tabletop, just far enough away from Grimberg for him not to be able to reach it.

  ‘Make your mind up quickly, John. Anyone could look through the glass in that door. You give me the name. You’ll get this in return.’

  Grimberg looks at the charger with all the interest you might show when studying a bit of tarmac.

  ‘What name?’

  ‘The name of whoever Charles Levin was visiting here.’

  He lifts up his hands.

  ‘You’ll have to stick that inside my jumper. My hands are, well, otherwise engaged.’

  ‘Name first.’

  Grimberg shakes his head. Birck stares at him before eventually grabbing the charger, getting up, and walking around the table, ending up behind him. He’s expecting Grimberg to try and keep watching him, but he doesn’t. He just sits there and waits.

  I could kill him, Birck thinks to himself. Might be just as well, before he kills me.

  He grabs Grimberg’s hair, drilling his fingers into the short quiff and pulling, forcing him to throw his head back and gasp to catch his breath. Birck quickly pushes the charger down the front of his jumper, and sees it get stuck under his chest. When he sits back down, he puts one hand inside the other, to hide just how much they’re shaking.

  ‘Did you have to do it like that? You’ve given me a crick in the neck now.’ Grimberg scowls before tugging at the jumper with two fingers. ‘Can you see it?’

  ‘No, the jumper’s baggy enough. Now tell me.’

  ‘Haven’t you got better things to do, on Midsummer’s eve?’

  ‘John.’

  ‘Answer my question first.’

  Birck rolls his eyes.

  ‘This is a favour.’

  ‘I see. How is he?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know who I mean.’

  Suddenly Grimberg brings his hands up to his face, and the movement makes Birck stiffen up. Grimberg smiles and scratches his cheek. It’s a clear, rasping sound.

  ‘You seem a bit het-up,’ he says.

  Birck blinks. He should just stand up and leave, and give Grimberg a punch on his cheek or nose on the way out.

  ‘Who was Charles Levin visiting when he came here?’

  Johanna arrives outside the door and peers through the glazed pane. Sirens wail somewhere close by, sudden and sharp. Outside, the colours of evening descend. Rain on the way.

  It’s gone nine p.m. when Birck calls. I’m working to avoid thinking. I’ve gone through page after page from the crime scene. It’s hard, but not as hard as I feared. When it comes to looking at documents, photographs, or files, my approach is cool and scientific.

  ‘The woman Levin came to see was Marika Alderin,’ says Birck. ‘She’d been there a long time, according to Grimberg, somewhere between five and ten years. Apparently she can barely talk, and whenever she does say anything it’s just nonsense. That’s if he is to be believed, I mean. And I don’t think he is.’

  Not normally. But this time, perhaps.

  He rounds off with a ‘Happy now?’

  ‘So he doesn’t know that she’s Levin’s daughter?’

  ‘He didn’t seem to. But I never asked, because I didn’t want to risk giving that away.’

  ‘Did you speak to her, too?’

  ‘She was asleep. They wouldn’t let me.’

  ‘Are you going to have another go tomorrow?’

  ‘On Midsummer’s day?’ Birck says.

  ‘I’ve got a feeling this could be important.’

  ‘A feeling?’

  ‘Why did he keep his daughter a secret?’ I say, thinking aloud more than talking to him. ‘It must mean something.’

  ‘Yes. Maybe.’

  ‘Gabriel …’

  ‘Okay. I’ll talk to her tomorrow.’

  My phone has received a picture from Sam during the time we were talking: she’s standing by the Thames, wearing shades, denim shorts, and an unbleached white woolly jumper. Miss you, reads the message. And then: cat still alive?

  Kit is lying on one of the chairs, asleep. I don’t know where the others are. Outside the meeting room, it’s quiet. From time to time, I can hear the emergency line ringing on the floor below, then a voice answering, but I can’t make out the words.

/>   As soon as I relax, Markus Waltersson is back. I found a list of the reinforcements assigned to the investigation on the table, and the names of the local group were also listed. Tove Waltersson. I made a note of her mobile number, and I’ve nearly called her several times, but always thought better of it.

  She might be avoiding me. Might be staying away. My restlessness takes over. I need to talk to someone. The ringing is slow and monotone, and, when he answers, the shouting and bustle of a noisy party can be heard in the background.

  ‘This is Leo Junker.’

  ‘Changed your mind did you?’ Davidsson slurs his reply, barely audible above the din.

  ‘His house keys,’ I say. ‘I’d like to …’

  ‘In my desk, bottom drawer,’ he roars. ‘Happy Midsummer.’

  I’m about to return the greeting, but Davidsson hangs up before I get the chance.

  Driving around an unfamiliar place is a strange experience, above all in twilight, when the world seems to be shedding its skin and changing its form.

  Loneliness. Loneliness is the way moving through a town you’ve never been to before can make you feel so alone. Free too, perhaps, but freedom terrifies me, always has. I don’t trust myself, what I’m capable of doing, if no one else is around to make sure I stay in one piece.

  I follow the trunk road and think about Eva and Charles Levin, about the car crash that took Eva’s life in the winter of 1980, about Fredrik Oskarsson’s witness statement. There’s a little plastic bag in my trouser pocket containing Levin’s house key. It’s on a little key ring, and it was found in the study. According to their inventory, it was the only key that forensics had found, yet both the front and back doors were locked. Levin must have had a copy, which the perpetrator took with him.

  The cordon ought to have extended right out to the main road. Instead, the first sign of blue-and-white tape flapping gently in the summer-evening breeze is at the end of Alvavägen. I stop the Opel, which coughs in surprise before quietening down to silence. It’s a warm evening, and the air is light, almost hopeful. From a distance, I can hear a lonely dog barking, over and over again. There’s a squad car parked next to the blue-and-white tape, but it’s empty and all the lights are off.

  I get past the incident tape and amble down the little street. A hunched figure appears from the shadows, the glowing tip of a cigarette moving around just in front of it. The figure stops and then goes stiff at the sight of me, and that’s how I know that it’s her.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she says.

  ‘I thought I’d find out what his house was like.’

  ‘Haven’t you seen the pictures?’

  ‘It’s not the same. What are you doing here yourself?’

  ‘I wanted to see the area behind the house, in the woods.’

  ‘And?’

  She pulls on the cigarette. Then she lets it drop to the ground, despite the fact that we’re inside the cordon.

  ‘Nothing. I didn’t find anything.’

  She’s now wearing a short leather jacket over her T-shirt, and has one hand in a jacket pocket. Tove Waltersson looks like someone who might play bass in an inner-city garage band.

  ‘Where’s your car?’ I ask.

  ‘I walked. It’s not far.’

  She looks around, over at the house. Maybe now she knows I’ve realised; maybe she can tell.

  ‘Shall we go in?’ she asks.

  ‘I can do this alone.’

  ‘No, you cannot.’

  The garden is small and overgrown, and there’s only one explanation for that: Levin never had the chance to start sorting it out. He would never have let a property look like this if he’d had time to do anything about it. My chest tightens, and I clear my throat, blink several times. Tove is next to me, looking puzzled.

  I retrieve a pair of latex gloves from my pocket, and after a brief struggle I manage to get them on. There are little traces of the forensic work here and there: someone’s forgotten a glove; a torch with POLICE written down the side is perched on the steps.

  Inside, it smells like an antique shop, and the ceiling hangs low overhead. The only trace of Levin’s body is a large pool of dried blood on the kitchen’s wooden floor. It all feels so unreal. Forty-eight hours ago, he was here, alive, drinking coffee with the perpetrator.

  I can almost feel it with my tongue, and yes, there it is, suddenly he feels so close. He’s there in the doorway, just out of my line of sight, observing me. I can hear his voice saying my name through the silence. It sounds warm, welcoming, as if he were glad to see me.

  I investigate the kitchen, the living room, and the hall. I look at the area around the door that leads out to the lawn at the back of the house. There are those tiny traces of rubber scraped from the soles of shoes. I open the back door and take a step out onto the grass, and kneel down.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ she asks.

  ‘If there are prints in the grass, they’re probably only visible in daylight.’ I look over at the woods. ‘You didn’t find anything.’

  ‘Is that a question?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t find anything.’

  ‘Good.’

  Something about the damp gloom scares me; I don’t know quite what.

  ‘This witness,’ I say. ‘The one who was out getting his parasol down. He saw someone.’

  ‘We’re looking into that.’

  That’ll do, I think to myself, and head back into the house.

  ‘Where is his study?’

  She goes first, stands just inside the door with her arms folded, and lets me in, keeping an eye on me throughout.

  I think about my own big brother, who I only see a few times a year, despite him being one of the best people I know. What would I have done if someone had taken him away from me? What would I do in Tove’s situation?

  I’m afraid I might well have walked over, put my firearm to the nape of their neck, and beaten the person unconscious.

  She just stands there.

  ‘You’re from here, aren’t you?’ I say. ‘Originally?’

  ‘What do you mean originally?’

  I run my hand along the wall, the bed, the little desk, sit down on the chair where Levin might have sat. Or perhaps he preferred to work elsewhere. Whatever it was he was working on.

  ‘Your accent,’ I say.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s almost disappeared.’

  ‘Accents don’t disappear — they change.’

  ‘Same difference, isn’t it?’ I say.

  The desk has no drawers; it’s just a heavy wooden tabletop on low, thick legs. I stroke my hand across it, feeling the dust on my skin, before doing the same on the underside.

  My hand touches something.

  I get down on my knees, turn on my phone’s little torch, and shine it underneath the desktop. Unlike the top surface, the underside is not polished or painted, just dark and matt. And there it is, secured with a little strip of tape.

  ‘What is it?’ Tove says from behind me.

  I point the phone’s camera under the table and take a photo. The flash comes on and for a second everything disappears to white. Then I carefully remove the tape and hold it up between my fingers, show it to her.

  ‘A key,’ I say. ‘It was stuck to the tape, hanging like a pendulum. Haven’t forensics been here?’

  ‘Yes, they have.’

  I stand up and hold the tape up to the window, and take another photo.

  ‘We need to put this in something.’

  Tove pulls a stiff little envelope out of her leather jacket and holds it out for me to drop the key and the tape into it.

  ‘Do you always carry that around with you?’

  She doesn’t answer, just closes the envelope and puts it in her inside pocket.

&nb
sp; ‘The logical explanation would have been if it was for a desk drawer or a locked cabinet somewhere in the house,’ I say. ‘It looks like that kind of key. But the desk has no drawers, and I haven’t seen any cabinets. Have you?’

  ‘No.’

  Tove puts her hands in her pockets. I take my gloves off.

  Soon, I think to myself; it’s going to happen soon.

  Outdoors. Dry air, the sky streaked with purple-pink stripes, like the aftermath of a fireworks display that has only just finished.

  ‘Where are you going now?’ I ask.

  ‘There’s no Midsummer party waiting for me. So home, I should think.’

  ‘I can drive you home if you like. But I do have a cat in the car.’

  Tove looks for something in her pocket, pulls out a cigarette and a lighter.

  ‘Yes. Alright.’

  She lights the cigarette and takes a deep drag, then blows the smoke out in front of us.

  ‘Which of your colleagues are going to be working on this?’ she asks.

  ‘You mean here, on site?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I, er, don’t know. Do you know people at the National Crime Squad?’

  ‘No.’ She takes another drag. ‘And neither do you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What the fuck are you playing at?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What are you doing here? Is this a fucking joke or what? How did you imagine it was going to end?’

  ‘A joke?’

  ‘I checked you out. You have no idea which of your colleagues from NCS are coming here, because you don’t have any. It’s one big lie, all of it. You’re on the Violent Crime Unit in Stockholm, and you’re on leave as of yesterday.’ She spits the word out. ‘The reason for that is that you’re popping some sort of pills and generally behaving badly.’

  Ahead of us, the incident tape is fluttering gently and neatly. Despite fully expecting it, being exposed is embarrassing and shameful.