‘I knew him,’ I say. ‘We were … I want …’
‘He spent his whole life as a policeman,’ she interrupts. ‘Of course he had colleagues who were also friends. But do you see any of them here? Did anyone else come down sticking their oar in and carrying on like this? No, because that would be serious misconduct. I’m going to make sure you get sacked, you fucking moron.’
She steps over the tape and walks over to my Opel, which is parked next to it. Kit is on the passenger seat, tense, his eyes constantly darting back and forth.
‘I let you in his house one last time, to say goodbye. Do you understand? Unlike you, I have a heart.’
We’re standing right next to each other, so close that I can smell her hair. It smells familiar, in a weird way.
‘Is this about Mar—’
Tove drops her cigarette and then, so fast that I have no chance of defending myself, she knees me in the guts.
The pain radiates out, up into my chest and down into my groin, and I bend double. She grabs my hair and pulls my head up, and I see the knee coming towards me again, towards my face this time, and I shield myself with my arms, but I’m too slow, I still get hit in the forehead. I groan, I think, because some sound escapes from my throat before my eyes fill with tears. I lose my balance and collapse in a heap on the warm tarmac.
She sits astride my chest and grabs my hair again. The punch that lands on my cheek sets bells ringing.
It feels cathartic, almost welcoming. I relax to avoid breaking anything, I don’t resist, and I close my eyes to the pain.
She hits me again, somewhere near my right ear I think, because it pops and everything sounds muffled. Her clenched fist comes again, and I hear a plop when my lip splits open.
Hot, hot blood in my mouth, down my throat. She’s banging my head on the tarmac.
I take another blow somewhere — around the temple, I think.
Everything is swaying too much, and I’m nauseous, yet the swaying is quite pleasant, the kind that might get you off to sleep. The pain that is pounding across my face sails slowly away, and I’m just about to drift off when she drags my face up and leans over me.
‘Look at me,’ she hisses, but I can’t. ‘Look at me.’
I open my eyes. So bright, everything is so bright, and it hurts. Stings my eyes. My neck hurts; so does my nose.
Her stare is dark and glazed.
‘Get out of here and stay away. Got that?’
She lets go of my hair, and the back of my head hits the tarmac. I see the sky above, treetops at one edge of my field of vision, my car tyre on the other. She rubs her hands on me. Blood, I think to myself. She’s wiping the blood off.
‘If I see you again, I will beat you to death.’
My chest hurts. The last I see of Tove is her walking briskly away, and being swept into the shadows until she disappears, and I think that I’ve finally got what I’ve deserved all along.
SEPTEMBER 1984
The clerical assistant is a small, slight man with thick glasses and short stubbly hair, the type who would surely have ended up a conscript dogsbody if it hadn’t been for his talent for gathering intelligence.
‘Telephone,’ he says, standing in the doorway.
‘Who is it?’
‘She didn’t say. Just that she wanted to talk to someone. It was important.’
‘Get someone else to take it. I’m busy.’
‘But …’ He hesitates. ‘She called your room. The direct number,’ he explains.
Up here, officially at least, all calls must be routed via the switchboard, a severe group of female voices who allow themselves neither to be intimidated nor impressed, though there are exceptions made for unofficial colleagues and informants of various kinds.
Charles has been sitting in one of the numerous offices, going through documents relating to Palme’s visit to the GDR in June, and they make for bizarre reading. The prime minister sought peace in the mornings and sold weapons in the afternoons.
‘Why did you answer then?’ Charles stands up and goes out into the corridor. ‘And what were you doing in my room?’
‘Looking for a file.’
Charles goes into his room. As he closes the door, the intense noise of the open-plan office quietens to a low, muffled murmur. It’s nearly possible to catch your breath.
There’s a telephone on the desk, and one of its buttons is pushed in and lit up. He stays standing and presses the button, connecting the call.
In the background: a hum of voices, a phone ringing.
‘Hi,’ says a high female voice. ‘Hello, who am I speaking to?’
‘Who are you looking for?’
‘It’s the police, isn’t it?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Which department?’
Beyond her voice, the phone is still ringing.
‘What’s your name?’ she asks.
This doesn’t feel right. Someone picks up the receiver, making the ringing phone go silent. The person answering, a male voice, says Swedish Television, Fredrik.
‘Are you a journalist?’
Click.
It’s been a hard summer. He started drinking so he could get to sleep, and promised himself he’d stop, but he hasn’t yet succeeded. In the evenings, he followed the media reports about the murder of Catrine da Costa and felt strange ripples emanating from the past.
Transporting banned materials to a state subject to embargoes means taking diversions. The only chance of successfully getting the VAX computers out of Sweden is by synchronising all parties — those in the country of origin, the necessary people in the transit zones, and those responsible in the destination country — which is what takes time. The synchronisation needs to take place via messages and signals, the sending and receiving of which is a highly clandestine process.
It always takes time, but never this long. For the time being, the computers are being moved around from one address to another at irregular intervals by Öberg and his underlings.
Paul spoke to Resident Kraus towards the end of the summer, a cryptic conversation that had to take place over the phone, and Kraus reassured them that the cogs were in motion: the deal was on. That it was almost time.
Our man in Stockholm will contact you.
Neither Charles nor Paul know who this man is, or indeed whether he even exists.
And as if that is not enough: Charles suspects that Marika has started nicking his alcohol.
He sits down, phone in hand. He then presses the switch-hook to get the internal dialling tone, dials the number, and lights a cigarette while he waits for the call to be answered.
‘Yes?’ says Paul’s voice on the other end, four rooms down.
‘We need to meet.’
We are now in a new era, tense and insecure. No one knows who is a friend and who is an enemy anymore. They look the same, speak the same language, and have the same warm handshakes.
When we lie to each other, we do it because we have to.
Even before Charles’ existence became centred on the work carried out at The Bureau, he had already found himself in deep, deep water, and perhaps he should have had an idea of what lurked behind Paul’s mask even then. It started with small things, just after he’d arrived at The Bureau, almost four years ago: details in cases and investigations that were altered by Paul. He had the ability to divert a sum of money, a weapon, or a shipment of heroin away from SEPO’s vaults and into his desk drawer.
Paul was no collector, and the confiscated items — that’s what he called them — were not simply stacked in piles. Money, weapons, drugs, and other booty had the cumulative function of capital, which was then reintroduced into the black economy, leading in turn to new successes.
A sum of money that disappearezd from a raid on a communist sect in Sollentuna was used to bribe an official
at the social-welfare office a month later.
A weapon that Paul pocketed, after a policeman with links to underground groups on the far right took his own life, found its way into the hands of a former Soviet spy, now living in Stockholm and fearing for his life after defecting to the West.
Seized drugs that Paul managed to secrete somewhere were used to recruit informants and attract people who found intoxication difficult to resist, like Savolainen.
It wasn’t just a nice little earner. It also became an element of Paul’s official role, and, at times, the Director would look the other way, choose to nod quietly at the successful results, rather than asking questions about the methods used. By now, no hands that had held anything of significance were clean — that illusion had been well and truly shattered by the so-called ‘IB affair’, and that was many years ago now.
The fact that Paul’s hands were busily working away under the table wasn’t immediately obvious to Charles. It wasn’t until 1982, late one night at a petrol station near Bergshamra, where they’d stopped after a raid on a suspected terror group outside Uppsala, that he finally understood.
The petrol station was deserted, but as he and Paul stepped out of the car, a man revealed himself, emerging from the darkness just beyond the light cast by the street lamps. He was older than them and wore glasses that looked thick and heavy, their weight causing his nose to turn a strained shade of red.
‘Have you got something for me?’ he asked in a broad southern accent.
‘That’s right.’ Paul handed the little packet over. ‘I’ve taken my cut.’
The man weighed it in his hand.
‘Quite right.’
‘You’ll have to trust me — that, as usual, I’ve only taken my fair share.’
‘Who is that?’ the man said.
‘My colleague.’
He inspected Charles.
‘Is he with us?’
‘Yes,’ said Paul.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Charles.’
The man nodded, adjusted his glasses, and disappeared back into the shadows.
‘This thing isn’t completely … kosher,’ Charles said in the car a few minutes later, as the university campus in Frescati whizzed past the windscreen. ‘Is it?’
‘Not many things are, nowadays,’ Paul said. ‘Open the glove box.’
Charles did as he was told. Inside was a thin but dense wedge of notes, dry and rustling against Charles’ fingers.
‘What is this?’
‘Your share.’
Charles tried counting it. When he got to thirty thousand, he lost count.
‘We nabbed eighty in total,’ Paul said. ‘These terror muppets have plenty of money. Makes you think, eh? You can only imagine how they might have got hold of it. Anyway, that’s forty. I gave him twenty, and I keep twenty myself.’
‘Forty?’ The notes got warm in Charles’ hands. ‘Why so much?’
‘We split the original sum in half. Then I give half of my share to people like Gert.’
‘What do you do that for?’
‘Because …’ Paul shifted down a gear, slowed for the red light. ‘I needed help once. Like I helped you. The only ones who came to my aid were the likes of Gert.’
‘What was it?’
‘That I needed help with?’
‘Yes.’
Paul stopped, put the car in neutral.
‘I really shouldn’t talk about it.’
‘But do you want to talk about it?’
‘No.’ The lights changed. ‘Not that either.’
Charles fingered the notes one last time.
He would later discover that Paul’s parents had lost the custody of their son, but not why. He was put in a foster home, a farm outside Uppsala, and that’s where he met Gert.
It would be a while before he understood who Gert was, or rather what Gert was a part of. Paul diverted money to an extremist right-wing movement comprising police, servicemen, and private citizens who used to meet in an apartment in Gamla Stan. He did so not because of deeply held ideological convictions, but because he got to keep half for himself. Charles never knew what Paul did with his share. The movement, though, used theirs in various schemes to exert pressure wherever they saw fit. They hated Palme, and, above all else, they wanted him dead. They still do.
‘I don’t want it,’ Charles said on the way back from Bergshamra. ‘I don’t want to get involved in this.’
Paul stared at him, his expression giving nothing away. Charles dropped the money into Paul’s lap.
‘Pick that up.’
‘No.’
‘Do you really think you have a choice?’ Paul’s voice was cold. ‘You know what I’ve got on you. You know what I can do.’ He picked up the wedge of notes. ‘I need you,’ he went on, gentler. ‘I need you for this. You know what I did for you. I saved your arse, for fuck’s sake. I saved you both.’
‘But I can’t.’
‘I’m not your enemy, Charlie. I’m your friend.’
Charles looked out the windscreen, avoiding eye contact with Paul. He’d already lost, he knew that; he’d lost long ago.
He let Paul place the notes in his hand.
It’s late. Music pounds through Marika’s closed bedroom door, crunching guitars and bashing, echoing synths, a voice singing just like the old days again and again, broken, almost panting, as though the singer had just been stabbed.
She can’t get to sleep without listening to music. Every night, Charles has to go in and turn the stereo off. At first, it irritated him, but it soon became one of the most precious moments of the day: Charles goes in, turns the music off, and stands there in the darkness, glass in hand, and looks at his daughter lying there, always on her back and with the duvet pulled up round her cheeks, her hair fanned out across the pillow and her mouth half-open.
He sits down on the sofa and takes a swig from the glass, looks at the little dark-red book on the table in the knowledge that he’s going to open it. Yet still he tries to resist.
She’s left it there for him. She wants him to read it.
It’s lighter than it looks. He takes another sip from the glass, then puts it to one side. A severe headache rumbles away at his temples, making it impossible to relax. The book is a kind of notebook, not a diary or a journal, but Marika has dated the entries, or the texts or whatever they are. The first is entitled 8/3/1984, and from that point she writes every or every other day, up to today’s date, 25/9/1984. He’s surprised at how well she writes, how gifted she is with words. It must be all the books she reads, he thinks to himself, and his chest swells with pride at first, but that gives way to shame before long.
I don’t even know what my daughter is good at.
He doesn’t want to read it. Yet he still does. Just the last entry. That’s as much as he can bear. After running his fingers over the page, feeling the words against his skin, letting them trace the lines left by Marika’s pen, he puts the book down.
His hands — he can’t stop them shaking.
Marika’s state of mind was unpredictable even four years ago, and it was impossible to know how she had dealt with what happened then. He can tell that she remembers, but not how much.
Charles has never asked, never dared. He knows that memory is at its least reliable in the aftermath of experiences like the one Marika had been through, thanks to the brain’s own suppression mechanisms. But he has also read somewhere that young people tend to remember traumatic events with more clarity than others, precisely because of the intensity of the experience.
And now he knows. He stares at the book.
She really does remember.
With quiet steps, he goes into the bathroom and sits down on the floor, and then sits there, crying silently, perhaps out of grief.
OCTOBER 1965
Years ago, there was a farm on the outskirts of Uppsala. One late-October evening, the area around it was so still that it could easily have been abandoned, the young man walking up the gravel track no more than a shadow.
The bag that had been so heavy and awkward on the journey up now felt strangely light. As he made his way over the fence and across the meadow, into the farmyard, there was a vibrating in his chest. Despite it only being a matter of hours since he was last here, it felt like a homecoming. His thoughts were already somewhere else.
He stopped in front of the house, had an unsettling feeling of being watched. Looking around, he saw nothing, just more darkness.
This must be the moment, he thought to himself; the moment that fills me with doubt.
He dropped the bag to the ground and crouched down, opened it and carefully lifted the shotgun out, placed it to one side and pulled out the hunting knife. It was heavy but the grip was intuitive, the skin on the palm of his hand responsive, and his fingers willing.
Their voices echoed around his head. For four years, he’d had to keep them in check. They did it because they could. Because no one stopped them. Because people had never been good and they never would be.
As he entered the house, his heart stayed in its normal place in his chest, not racing or pounding, just a calm, rhythmic beat urging him on.
When he came out again, he wasn’t finished, but had to catch his breath. A pause for effect, that was all. It had been worse, bloodier, than he had feared. It was on his hands, his cheeks, his face, in his mouth, everywhere.
He wiped the knife on his trousers, dried it, and spat.
‘I can help you.’ The voice reached him through the gloom of the farmyard.
It was quiet, composed, and had a strange accent, but it passed through him like an electric charge.
‘No,’ he whispered.
‘Is there cash in there?’ said the man.
‘Yes.’
‘Valuables?’
‘I think so.’
‘Do you know whereabouts?’
The young man nodded. The knife was warm and heavy in his hand.
Master, Liar, Traitor, Friend: a Leo Junker case Page 13