Together, Birck and I continue searching through the investigation. He does so with bored nonchalance, while I do so with my own reasons that I have to keep to myself. Grim is here, somewhere. But where? Under what name? I don’t know where to start.
On Tuesday afternoon, I get a text from him.
it’s been a week, have you started on the investigation?
no
are you lying to me?
no
I stare at the screen, waiting for his response.
why haven’t you started yet? That’s it.
why is this so important?
10pm, same place
11
At the time of her death, Angelica Reyes has a large social network. She has lots of friends, by no means all of them in the same line of work, as well as a host of pimps and dealers, not to mention the countless punters she has met over the years.
Levin and his colleagues never manage to contact all of them — that would be an almost impossible task — but they do manage to speak to an impressively large number. They concentrate on those closest to her, and above all her clients. It is one of them, a female detective declares during the intelligence meeting on the fifteenth of October, three days into the case, a statement noted and underlined by Levin in the minutes. It may be that he trusts her judgement, or that he wants to confirm the theory for himself.
One of the victim’s best friends is named Jonna Danielsson. A woman of around the same age, from a similar background, who moves in the same circles. There’s a copy of her passport photo in the interview notes, which Birck pulls out. Her face has clean, symmetrical lines, round, deep-set eyes, a small but plump mouth. Her hair is cut in a strict pageboy hairstyle.
‘Is she still alive?’ he asks.
‘Dunno. I’ve met her twice, but the second time was years ago.’
Once in the Kronoberg remand centre, in 2011, and the second time in a junkie doss house in Vasastan in 2012. On both occasions she looked awful, but not quite as bad as you might expect. I haven’t seen or heard from her since.
‘I do remember that she was bloody crucial,’ I say. ‘To the investigation, I mean.’
Jonna Danielsson’s account begins about twenty-four hours before the murder. Angelica Reyes sleeps at her place, out in Norsborg. The following day — the day of the murder — they meet up at two in the afternoon for a late lunch in a restaurant not far from Kungsholmstorg. They remain there until about half-three, before going their separate ways. At around midnight, she arrives at the apartment on John Ericssonsgatan to drop off an outfit that belongs to Reyes.
Her voice sounds calm and soft on the tape, the kind of voice you might expect a hostess at a classy country club to have, with an intonation belying many hours of practice:
‘She’d told me to come around then — midnight — because we’re usually both free at that time. Angelica often has a client between say five and seven, something like that, another about nine, and a third at eleven, if she’s lucky.’
According to Jonna Danielsson, the punters contact a pimp, who in turn contacts Angelica Reyes or one of the others in his stable — her word — before getting back to the punter with a time and a place.
Angelica Reyes’ mobile phone receives a call at five thirty in the evening. The masts carrying her call indicate that she was at home at the time. Half an hour later, the first client of the evening has arrived, a man investigators manage to track down with the help of Vice Squad and the Prostitution Unit. He has an alibi and is immediately eliminated from inquiries. Same goes for the next punter, who sees Angelica Reyes between nine and half-past.
It’s when we come to the evening’s possible third client that things start to get interesting. Unfortunately, this is also the point at which the sequence of events and their timings become much more vague.
And confusing.
At about quarter-to eleven, Angelica Reyes’ phone rings again. She answers, and it lasts for less than a minute. The call was never successfully traced, but it did come from a mobile phone — that much can be deduced from the type of signal. Presumably it was a call from her pimp, informing her that a third customer would be arriving soon.
After that, it’s empty, dark, until Jonna Danielsson arrives at John Ericssonsgatan 16 around midnight. Standing by the lift, she hears an intense tapping sound in the stairwell and spots a man reaching the ground floor before leaving the building in a hurry.
‘He didn’t see me,’ she says. ‘That’s for sure. He didn’t even look in my direction. But I saw him.’
She does find it odd, but doesn’t give it much thought. Instead, she takes the lift up to the third floor and walks over to Angelica’s door. It’s ajar.
At nine minutes past midnight, a call comes in to the police control room. The caller is Jonna Danielsson; she states her name. Then, sounding remarkably composed on the tape, she explains that she has found her friend Angelica Reyes dead in her apartment. At this point, things get confusing, because as Jonna Danielsson is standing there with the phone in her hand, a patrol car arrives in the rain and parks up outside John Ericssonsgatan 16. There’s no way they could get there that fast.
Someone else has already had time to contact the police and inform them that a dead woman is lying on the third floor of that same address.
How anyone other than the murderer could know that?
That’s the question.
12
‘Hold on,’ Birck says, his eyes skipping back and forth between two pieces of paper, one in each hand. ‘Control get the call about a dead person at nine minutes past twelve. That’s when Jonna Danielsson calls. Confusion ensues, because operators have already sent a car to the scene, after a previous alarm from an unknown person four minutes earlier — which would make it five past.’
‘That’s right. Danielsson’s call is the second one to come in.’
‘Who makes the first?’
It could be the same man that Jonna Danielsson noticed while waiting for the lift, the one hurrying down the steps at full pelt and who might be the murderer. Subsequently Levin dedicates a large tranche of the investigation’s budget on tracking him down, while an audio technician spends hours analysing the recording.
‘Dead woman at John Ericssonsgatan 16,’ the first call begins. ‘Third floor. Hurry.’
‘John Ericssonsgatan 16,’ the operator recaps in a neutral tone.
In the background, you can hear the operator typing commands into the computer, and saying:
‘Dead woman. Are you there … ?’
‘Hurry,’ the voice interrupts.
‘And you, what is your name …’
That’s as far as the operator gets. The call ends.
Birck stares at the screen.
‘Weird,’ he says, then takes a swig of coffee from his mug. ‘I think the voice sounds a bit … unnatural.’
‘That occurred to me, too. A bit strained, almost. Play it back again.’
The same words, and sounds. Tones reverberate off the glass walls as we listen. It’s taken a long time to go through all of it, even focusing only on the most obvious material. In a few hours’ time, I’m meeting Grim.
‘Yes, definitely something,’ Birck says. ‘Why does he want to disguise his voice?’
‘They assume this is the perpetrator,’ I say.
‘Exactly. Me, too. This is our man, I think.’
‘But that’s a weird assumption. Why would the perpetrator contact the police?’
‘They often do.’
‘Sure, but why in this case?’
‘Because this is some terrified punter who only realises what he’s done after the fact and is racked with guilt at seeing her lying there, dead and bloody and fucked up, and who wants someone to come and clear it all up as quickly as possible. It’s happened before.’
‘He h
ardly sounds shaken, though.’
‘Right, how about this,’ Birck says. ‘Let’s say that the person making the call to the police has nothing whatsoever to do with this. Why wouldn’t he say who he is?’
That’s a good question. And a tough one.
‘Because he has something else to hide?’
Birck rolls his eyes.
‘That’s your imagination.’
I press play, listen to the short call again.
‘He doesn’t sound like a man who’s just taken someone’s life. Admittedly he is distorting his voice — but he’s calm enough to do so. He sounds cool and collected.’
‘That’s what you’re hearing,’ says Birck. ‘What I’m hearing is someone straining to sound like that. It’s reasonable to assume that this is the same person that Jonna Danielsson sees in the stairwell. There are no reports of anyone else moving around the building immediately after the crime. You’re on board with that, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘So what if we start from the other end? With the man on the stairs. Who is that?’
At that end, it turns out, everything gets weirder still, and perhaps we’re just taking another step further into the maze.
Jonna Danielsson is at the base of the stairwell. She presses the button that slowly sends the lift down its shaft. As she waits, the man makes his way down the stairs, and the tapping of footsteps echoes around her. He’s about 180-centimetres tall, with short, dark hair; he’s pale and skinny, with defined cheek- and jawbones and a pointy nose. Dark-blue jeans and a light-green unbuttoned military jacket. Inside that, Jonna Danielsson catches a glimpse of a white T-shirt. His clothes are clean and his hands are empty. Without looking around, the man makes for the door and leaves. She doesn’t see which direction he takes.
‘When one person kills another, as in this case, with repeated knife blows,’ Birck reads aloud from meeting notes made by my old boss, ‘it is impossible for the assailant to avoid blood spatter. It gets everywhere. Of course, it is possible that Danielsson doesn’t notice spatter on his jeans, since blood on dark-blue denim is easy to miss, but the light-green coat is clean, too. As, crucially, is the white T-shirt. Blood on a light-green coat becomes dark purple, and you might, from a distance, not pick it up. But dark red spatter on a white T-shirt stands out crimson and clear.’
The man has no rucksack or bag, according to Jonna Danielsson, which rules out him having got changed afterwards.
‘But he might not have had any clothes on when he did it?’ Birck ventures. ‘If this is a punter we’re talking about then it would be logical for him to be naked.’
‘That’s the theory they work from,’ I say, tapping further down on the page Birck has in front of him, where Levin notes that this has been pointed out to him by one of the detectives. ‘Or else it’s not the perpetrator she sees, but someone else.’
‘And who would that be?’ Birck puts the sheet of paper down and opens his arms wide. ‘A punter pays Reyes for sex. Perhaps he doesn’t have an awful lot to work with, if you get my drift. Reyes points this out, which badly wounds his fragile masculinity — and he loses it. Only afterwards does he realise what he’s done, at which point he gets dressed, calls the police, and rushes off down the stairs.’ Birck looks at me. ‘Something like that.’
‘That’s what they arrive at in 2010, too.’
‘One last little problem — finding him.’ Birck yawns. ‘And they never do.’
They didn’t. But perhaps they came close.
A promising moment arises ten days after the murder, on the twenty-second of October, as Levin is eating lunch down in the canteen with parts of the preliminary investigation on the table in front of him.
A colleague from Vice Squad approaches him and asks if he’d like some company. Levin puts his file to one side, but once they’ve finished and are about to head off, his colleague asks what he was grimacing about when she arrived. He hands the plastic wallet over: the first page details Jonna Danielsson’s description of the unknown stranger in the stairwell.
‘Oh,’ the colleague from Vice Squad says. ‘Sounds like the guy I saw at a party a few weeks back.’
The party, she goes on, was held in a basement in Nacka, and hosted a collection of Stockholm’s finest shady characters: musicians, authors, criminals, addicts, and troublemakers. She was there along with a duo from Surveillance because three of the guests were suspected punters with connections to a particular pimp who they were keen to bring in. The problem was, they had no idea what this pimp looked like. At the bar, she started talking to a man she thought might be the one they were looking for, but before long she realised she’d got it wrong and left him to it. What he was doing there, she doesn’t know, but he did give a name: Karl Hamberg.
‘This is the man who matches the description?’ Levin asks.
‘I don’t know whether or not it’s the same person. But it’s a small world we’re talking about, and the description is bang on. Right down to the military jacket, which, if I remember rightly, was unbuttoned then, too.’
Over the next few days, Levin and his colleagues conduct extensive searches for a man named Karl Hamberg, but find nothing, apart from a collection of namesakes who can all be eliminated from their inquiries.
That name is a cul-de-sac, or rather a little corner somewhere in the depths of the maze.
Birck stretches and says he needs the toilet.
‘After that I’m going home,’ he adds. ‘And tomorrow we’re going to have to talk to some fucking people, just for a change.’
‘Who?’
‘The ones who worked on the case, for example.’
‘I’ve promised Morovi that we’ll report back to her first thing tomorrow.’
‘Right.’ Birck’s eyelids flutter. ‘And what are we going to say?’
‘I don’t know. But I’ll see you at eight.’
He heads off. It’s getting on for ten; time for my second meeting with Grim.
I flip through the papers without finding anything that might be able to help us. Karl Hamberg. A dark-haired, pale man. Dead woman at John Ericssonsgatan 16. Third floor. Hurry. Someone doesn’t want to reveal themselves, yet contacts the police to tell them what he’s seen. Who would do such a thing, and why?
13
It’s about one minute to ten when the text arrives: four digits, and the words top floor.
I’m already here. Maybe he knows that. Next to the door on Tjärhovsgatan is a little keypad, and after I’ve entered the number the lock buzzes. I open the door and step inside.
The sound of my footsteps cracks between the walls of the stairwell. On the top floor, I search for any sign of movement in the gloom, but find none. Instead, I see a lone sliver of light on the floor from a door left ajar.
I push it with my foot. The sliver of light widens, weak, as if from a useless table lamp.
‘Come in, and close the door behind you, please.’
I do as he says and try to get my bearings inside the flat. It feels as though someone’s just moved out, having left behind all the furniture they wanted rid of: an old IKEA desk over on my left. On it, sure enough, is a table lamp, next to which there’s a bottle of whisky and two glasses. In front of the desk is an office chair on castors. At the far end of the room, there’s a mattress and a blanket, a faded fridge, and a little table with electric cooking rings on it.
Grim is sitting on the chair by the desk, and he pours a dram of whisky into each glass.
‘Do you live here?’
‘It’s a long story. Want some? Don’t stand over there by the door, come in and sit yourself down.’
I guess he’s referring to the mattress; there’s nowhere else to sit. It’s more comfortable than it looks. When I get close to my friend, it’s all I can do to resist the sudden impulse to touch him. I take the glass from his outstretched hand and ta
ke a little sip. The whisky brings a pleasant heat to my chest.
‘Have you started looking at the investigation?’ he asks.
‘Why is it so important?’
‘Because …’ Grim runs a hand through his hair. ‘It’s hard to explain. Have you started?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Why not?’
‘I wanted to talk to you first.’
‘About what?’
‘Do I really need to say it again? I want to know what you’ve got to do with the Angelica murder.’
‘You think I was involved.’
‘Well, weren’t you?’
Grim sighs and leans back on his chair. He looks so different now. And something about that hurts.
‘Weird,’ Grim says. ‘Me and you, sitting here like this. Isn’t it?’
‘You’re acting as if it was perfectly natural. That’s weird.’
‘I know.’ Grim bites his bottom lip. ‘It’s … I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what to say.’
‘You escaped.’
He puts the bottle down and raises an unnaturally dark eyebrow, which nevertheless suits his face.
‘I escaped. And?’
I look down at my hands, trying to work out whether there’s a question of some sort hiding in my thoughts.
‘Why?’
‘If you knew what it was like to be deprived of your liberty, you wouldn’t be asking that question.’
Grim gets up from the office chair. It creaks horribly. He pushes his hands into the pockets of his jeans and stretches his back with a grimace.
‘It’s not easy, putting on weight. I’m so stiff nowadays. It’s the cortisone, you just swell up and it distorts your appearance. Very effective.’
‘How did you get hold of it?’
‘Well, safe to say I didn’t buy it at the chemist’s.’
I look around. There’s no wardrobe or chest in here, I wonder where he keeps his clothes. Maybe he doesn’t have any. Something isn’t right here. The walls are thick, and cold.
The Thin Blue Line Page 4