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

by Christoffer Carlsson (Translated by Michael Gallagher)

  It would remain one of life’s mysteries. Some days Eva was just tuned half-a-note lower than others. She sank into herself, became absent, almost apathetic. It would carry on for a day or two, three at the most, and then she would be back to normal.

  He tried to handle it as light-heartedly as possible. They both did.

  ‘Are you my little darkness today?’ he would ask in a playful voice, standing by the sofa, where she lay staring into space, with their little treasure asleep on her chest.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she mumbled, with a little laugh.

  It takes a long time, getting to know someone else, and, what is worse, even longer to get to know yourself.

  Little darkness. It soon became an in-joke, the kind all couples have, something that only they understood.

  ‘I love you,’ he said, and when she smiled in response he knew that he, too, for the first time ever, was truly loved by someone else.

  Charles was twenty-five, Eva twenty-three. So young, he thought to himself whenever he allowed himself to look at the photographs.

  JUNE 2014

  Blood, Tove thinks when the old man greets her at the door. Shit! I’ve still got his blood under my nails.

  He doesn’t notice the rusty-brown patches. He just smiles weakly, but with a pained look in his eyes.

  ‘It’s a shame he’s gone,’ he says. ‘He was a nice chap.’

  The handshake comes to an end, and she stuffs her hands into her trouser pockets.

  On Midsummer’s day, just after half-nine in the morning, they’re the only ones there, apart from a man asleep in his car on the square.

  The company is run by a man named Petter Aspgren, and his whole business is really just a leftover from the glass factory’s heyday in the Seventies. Back then, his office was situated within the grounds of the factory, and his job entailed dealing with the huge volume of internal mail that circulated within the site. Gradually, he developed his business idea, and once the factory closed down he had made himself an indispensable part of the local infrastructure — so he bought premises on the square and has been there ever since.

  When Sweden’s post offices disappeared and the handling of letters and parcels was outsourced, Aspgren started offering his customers cheap photocopying and printing, parcel collections, and post-office boxes to rent. He’s the sort of person people remember from their childhoods, a warm man who Mum would visit to pick up her mail-order purchases.

  One of the walls inside is covered with plain metal P.O. boxes, another with examples of Aspgren’s handiwork in the field of copying and printing: posters, paintings, placards, and a flyer from 2005 for a demonstration against the decision to close the town’s hotel. In one corner stands a large, silent photocopier and printer; in another, a little counter, behind which an open door leads to a small office.

  Aspgren takes off his dark-blue cap and wipes his hand through the remaining strands of hair on his head before replacing it. He’s a short, spindly chap with a big silver-grey moustache and rectangular glasses.

  ‘The reason I called you was this: I really ought to have made contact sooner, but it didn’t occur to me, simple as that. But then I woke up last night, couldn’t sleep — it was that bloody hot — I lay there tossing and turning and then all of a sudden something clicked up in the old noggin.’ He taps his head. ‘What the hell am I going to do with his box now that he’s dead?’

  ‘Charles Levin’s box?’

  ‘That’s the one.’ Aspgren holds his fingertip in the air, close to the box marked 382. ‘I’ve started renting these out, to keep afloat. These are tough times. Anyway, this one was his.’

  ‘He rented it from you, is that right?’

  ‘He did. My problem is that I can’t open the box without breaking into it. There’s only one key.’

  It’s in her inside pocket, after Leo found it during the visit to the house yesterday. Before I smashed his face in. Her knuckles are buzzing at the thought of it. It felt good. She’d waited so long. It was right.

  Leo had tricked her. She thought that maybe he’d been temporarily assigned to NCS from the Violent Crime Unit, precisely because he was close to, and knew a lot about, Levin. He could potentially have been an asset. It was only later that she realised that NCS would never allow someone with such a relationship to the victim onto the case, and it was then she picked up the phone and called Stockholm.

  She wonders whether she could be in the shit for having allowed an unauthorised person access to a murder inquiry. That thought causes her fists to clench.

  Whatever happens, she can’t get as much shit for it as he is going to.

  That thought makes everything feel a tiny, tiny bit better.

  She looks at the box’s shiny lock. With any luck, the key won’t fit. The fact that it was Leo that found it, that they had missed it, was a real annoyance. Worse still if it turned out that his discovery was significant.

  ‘Do you know what he kept in there? The box doesn’t look very big.’

  ‘All of these are the size of an ordinary letterbox. But I have no idea what he might have kept in his. That’s part of my recipe for success — not sticking my nose in.’

  ‘Has anyone been here asking about him or his box since he died?’

  ‘No. No one.’

  ‘And you’re the only one who works here?’

  ‘That’s right. We are a one-man band.’

  ‘Do you know how long he had been renting it?’

  ‘I can tell you that,’ says the old man, apparently delighted at being able to help out for once, and goes into his office. ‘It might take a while, that’s all.’

  In the meantime, Tove goes out into the sunshine and gets two latex gloves from the car’s glove box. They hide her nails, at least. When she returns, Aspgren is standing there with a gnarled finger deep in a large, open ring binder.

  ‘He started out renting box 382 on the twenty-first of May, and hired the same box until now.’ He runs his finger across the page. ‘I haven’t written anything in miscellaneous, so there was nothing unusual about him or the transaction itself.’

  ‘Good. Thanks.’

  Twenty-first of May, right after Levin moved here.

  ‘Did he come here a lot?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Aspgren. ‘Every morning, every afternoon he was here.’

  ‘Did he come last Wednesday, too?’

  ‘Yes, twice.’

  She pushes the little envelope from her pocket, opens it, and shakes it carefully until the little key, wrapped in its piece of tape, falls out.

  ‘This sort of key?’

  Aspgren’s eyes become wide with surprise.

  ‘Yes.’

  Tove gently removes the piece of tape. Then she puts the key in the lock and turns it. Damn. It works.

  ‘I would like to do this undisturbed.’

  ‘Of course. I’ve got some bookkeeping that I’m a bit behind with — I’ll get on with that. Let me know if I can help with anything.’

  With light steps, Aspgren walks away. Tove looks inside the box.

  Empty.

  Then she squints. No, not completely empty. She carefully squeezes her hand inside, and her fingers touch a small, rectangular object.

  She opens the window in the meeting room. It ought to be open all the time, so that the night air would have time to cool the room down, but when the custody officer finishes the evening shift, one of his duties is to do a final check of cabinets, doors, and windows. Tove has considered bribing him.

  She starts up one of the laptops, enters the password, and, while she’s waiting for it to get going, pulls out the object that was at the back of Charles Levin’s post-office box.

  A red USB memory stick, with a black lid. It’s smaller than a cigarette lighter. When the computer is ready, she pushes the stick into the little socket.

 
It contains a folder called text, which in turn contains files named 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, and 84. Must be years. Next to the primary folder is a sound file, and when she spots it, her stomach turns.

  It is called leo.

  The sound file is less than fifteen minutes long. She listens to it twice, hoping to be able to distinguish between the two voices, bring some kind of order to what she hears; she makes a note of which voice says what.

  One of them belongs to Levin; another to someone called Paul. A third person, also male, is present but is never addressed by name.

  Tove opens a new text document and plays the sound file again, transcribing the conversation as best she can. This takes almost an hour, but she has a feeling that it is important.

  She prints a copy and locks the computer, puts the USB stick back in her pocket, and goes out the back to smoke a cigarette and work out what the hell she should do next.

  She doesn’t understand everything they’re talking about, but she understands enough to rule something out. The file carries his name: Does Leo know about its contents? Does he know it exists? Would he hear something in what Levin says that she doesn’t?

  And who is this Paul?

  She scrapes some of the blood from her nails. Shit. She really ought to wash her hands.

  Midsummer morning in Bruket is slowly burgeoning. After driving through the centre, she passes the small houses around Alvavägen. People have their doors open and are eating breakfast in the sun. You can smell the coffee and the grass; you can hear children shouting and adults laughing. Neither Leo nor the old car are still there on Alvavägen, only the blue-and-white incident tape.

  She glides along Bruket’s backstreets, past dead ends, the wide grassy meadows, and the dense little woodlands, through the streets in the centre, and out towards the ruins of the glass factory, looking for the faded Opel. She should have got his mobile number, should have made a note of the car’s registration. Her pulse rises around her temples as the anxiety mounts: What does she do if she finds him? What does she do if she doesn’t find him?

  The glass-factory site covers a vast expanse. Shortly after it closed, the area was searched, and a number of inhabitants were discovered, including the odd fox and a number of feral cats, but also a few humans. There weren’t that many homeless people around then, but the few there were had already moved in, until both they and the wildlife were chased away by the police.

  She turns left, following the line of the high fence, and then it appears.

  The Opel is parked with the passenger side closest to the fence, as though the driver had stopped for a rest under one of the thick trees lining the road. Half-hidden by the sparse leaf coverage on one of the branches, the car looks more like a leftover from the glass factory’s days than anything else.

  Tove parks by the roadside, slings her bag over her shoulder, and walks in under the tree, up to the driver’s side of the car. It looks empty from here, but soon she can make out small, shadowy movements.

  The cat. It’s meowing and pawing him on the chest. Tove leans forward, getting so close that the tip of her nose touches the glass.

  Leo’s right hand, rusty brown from the dried blood, trying without success to bat it off. Either he’s too weak or the cat is too nimble.

  He’s reclined the seat, as far back as it goes in the little car. Great streams of blood have run down his chin and across his throat from the split in his lip, and the whole upper-half of his T-shirt is discoloured.

  I did this. I’m the one who left him looking like this.

  The driver’s door is locked, and Tove puts her knuckle to the glass instead, and knocks twice.

  He lifts his head and grimaces. He soon finds the little wheel to wind the seat-back up. This takes time.

  Once he’s sitting up, direct sunshine hits his face, and he closes his eyes with a groan. It sounds distant and muffled through the glass.

  ‘The cat,’ he croaks, blood seeping from his lip as he opens the door. ‘He needs water.’

  Tove doesn’t know exactly what the feeling is when she sees him, but whatever it is makes her want to light another cigarette.

  ‘Can you move the car?’

  Leo draws his hand across his chin, wiping away the fresh blood.

  ‘Umm?’

  ‘Can you roll it forward a bit so that I can get in the other side?’

  His eyes can’t focus. They glide past Tove’s eyes, her shoulder, to her face, without landing anywhere.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So that I can sit next to you?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Can you do as I say?’

  ‘I’m so dizzy.’

  Tove closes the door for him while he starts the engine and slowly turns the wheel. She takes a step back as the car lurches forward in three jolts, leaving the front end pointing out towards the road. Tove walks around the car and opens the unlocked passenger door, lifts up the cat, and sits down, closing the door behind her.

  The air inside the car is stuffy and stale; the smell of sweat mixes with the smell of old polyester and metal. The cat is small and warm in her hands, limp when she drops it to the floor.

  ‘No, hold him,’ he says, his voice thick.

  She picks the cat up again, and Leo opens the driver’s door, holding onto the steering wheel as he leans out. A gurgling noise comes from deep inside him before the vomit slaps onto the gravel.

  She looks at the cat, and he looks inscrutably back at her. Leo groans. Then he closes the door again, gingerly leans back against the headrest, and breathes out.

  ‘I feel so sick.’ He looks at the cat in her lap. ‘In the back, there’s a little bowl, and a little container of water.’ He makes eye contact, and this time his stare is clearer, more balanced. ‘Could you …’

  After finding it and pouring some water into the bowl, she puts it down next to the bag between her feet. The cat jumps down and laps it up, noisily and greedily.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Kit.’ Silence. ‘Are you here,’ he says — and takes another breath — ‘to beat me to death?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘That’s what you said yesterday. That if you saw me again, you’d …’

  He doesn’t finish the sentence.

  ‘No, that’s not why I’m here.’

  He adjusts the rear-view mirror and examines his face, the great purple-blue swellings across his forehead and down his cheek.

  ‘I have, believe it or not, looked worse,’ he says.

  Tove resists the urge sweeping through her again: she wants to hurt him.

  He moves a hand up to the inside pocket of his jacket and removes a little tube, flips off the lid and establishes that it is empty.

  ‘Why are you here then?’

  ‘I …’ she says, but that’s as far as she gets.

  Did she really say that, that she would kill him? Or is he lying?

  Kit stops drinking, and settles down at her feet.

  ‘I had a phone call this morning,’ Tove says, and while she tells him about the USB stick that was in Levin’s P.O. box, Leo winds the window down.

  ‘What was on it?’

  ‘Just two things. A folder called text, which contains a load of documents, and a sound file. Which is called leo.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘So you didn’t know about it?’

  ‘No.’

  She opens her bag, pulls out the laptop, and starts it up. In the quiet of the car, the whirring of its fan sounds noisy.

  ‘I’ve transcribed it, but it might be easier for you to listen.’

  ‘The key.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Is that what it was for? The post-office box?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She fumbles to get the USB stick out of her pocket, and accidentally pokes Ki
t with her foot. The cat raises its head, cocks it to one side, and looks rather put out, before slumping back down again.

  [Crackling, scraping. A door opening]

  CHARLES: Hi. Sorry I’m late. I was in [Inaudible, rustling].

  PAUL: Hi, Charlie.

  CHARLES: I thought it was going to be just the two of us. That’s what we said wasn’t it?

  MAN: Yes. [Clears throat] I know that’s what we said, but then I gave it some thought and decided to ask Paul to sit in. I think it might be a good idea under the circumstances.

  CHARLES: Uh-huh.

  [Crackling, scraping. Levin sitting down?]

  PAUL: It’s good to see you again, Charlie. It’s been a while. How are things?

  CHARLES: Good. A bit confused, that’s all.

  PAUL: [Laughter] I understand that things are getting chilly down at Internal Affairs.

  MAN: Maybe you’d like some coffee? Shall I ask my secre—

  CHARLES: No, thank you.

  MAN: Down to business, then, perhaps. What can I do for you, Levin?

  [Silence]

  CHARLES: I [Clears throat] know that this sounds a bit rude, but I would really like this conversation to take place just between [Crackling] of us.

  MAN: I understand. But I would very much like Paul to be present, if you do not object.

  CHARLES: Why, if you don’t mind me asking?

  MAN: I think that will become clear during the course of our conversation.

  CHARLES: No offence, Paul.

  PAUL: None taken. This is a weird situation for all of us.

  MAN: Right, let’s get started.

  CHARLES: Yes, I’d … I would like us to go through this one more time.

  MAN: And by ‘this’ you mean?

  CHARLES: This latest recruitment to Internal Affairs. I’m struggling to understand it. In order to be able to answer any questions my staff might have, not least if something were to go wrong, for the Police Federation and for the press it wou—

  MAN: Naturally.

  CHARLES: It would be good if I did.