The Thin Blue Line

by Christoffer Carlsson

  As she’s talking, Jonna picks her bag off the floor, pushes her hand into it, and fumbles around before placing the diary on the table between us.

  ‘I called the police, of course,’ she says. ‘Rang the same day, went and handed it in the following Monday.’

  ‘We know,’ I say. ‘The whole thing was scanned into the files. I’ve read every page.’

  A plain-clothes officer on reception, whose name she doesn’t remember, took the diary. It was probably Aronsson — his name’s on the docket.

  Jonna asked for it to be returned to her afterwards. It was, over a year later, when the investigation had hit a dead end. She had to go down to HQ to sign for it.

  It was handed over in a sealed plastic bag, along with the document where all forensic examinations on the exhibit are logged. Since it hadn’t been at the crime scene around the time of the murder, it had barely been looked at, except to try to map out the last weeks of her life. There hadn’t really been time for anything else.

  ‘I got it back,’ says Jonna, ‘and put it in my wardrobe. That’s where it was for five years.’

  ‘Until …’

  ‘Until after he’d been round, Grimberg. After he left, I started thinking about it and I got it out. I sat and flipped through it in front of the telly. That was when I found it.’

  ‘Found what?’

  ‘The list.’

  The diary had a pocket. And if you didn’t know it was there, you’d never spot it.

  ‘Look here,’ she says, turning to the last page. ‘See that?’

  An empty, white page, a bit stiffer than the others. It’s the inside of the cover.

  ‘No.’

  She bends the back page until it clicks.

  ‘How about now?’

  There’s a little slit visible inside the cover. Someone’s used a knife to carve a little pocket.

  ‘It was in here,’ she says.

  I take the diary and run my fingers across the slit.

  Jonna explains how she removed the piece of paper that had been in there, a folded A4 sheet. She looked down the list and thought she recognised a few names.

  ‘I guess you knew about it back then, 2010,’ she says. ‘Since you kept hold of the diary for so long, I mean. Didn’t you?’

  ‘We know about it.’

  ‘At first I thought it was a list of customers,’ she continues. ‘That for some reason she was writing down the names of those she met. But then I noticed that there were women on there, too, added to the fact that I knew some of the names, including this Ludwig Sarac. I knew that he’d been working for you but was then exposed. Then I got thinking about what Grimberg had said, that it would be about cops.’ She looks at the floor. ‘I didn’t know what to believe. And I’m not really in the habit of trusting the police.’

  ‘So you gave it to him.’

  ‘That’s who I called, yes.’

  And so he came back and got the list off her. His face lit up when he saw it, so she knew it meant a lot to him. He thanked her profusely — that’s the word she uses — and asked her not to talk to anyone else about this. Could get her in trouble, he said, and she believed him.

  What was she going to do? She’d been there before, knew what they were capable of.

  ‘They,’ I say. ‘You mean …’

  ‘I mean you. Cops. I know the kind of shit you’ve got up to before. As I said, I used to meet a lot of you. I got told things.’

  ‘And yet you’re here now,’ I say.

  ‘I suppose … I don’t know, I just wanted to tell you what little I do know. I heard he died recently, Grimberg, and I thought … better late than never. I hope,’ she adds, like a question. ‘But I wanted to talk to you.’

  I picture Grim’s face. I like the way she described it, that my friend’s face lit up at the sight of the list.

  So that’s how he got hold of it.

  At that moment, I break down.

  This comes as a surprise to her, I realise that but I have to leave the room.

  I crumple onto the toilet seat, put my head between my knees, breathe. I don’t know what’s happening. It’s just happening. I shouldn’t be here.

  From November, shortly after his return, a note in my pad. It’s about them: ask him about J.D.

  That’s all that’s there. I meant Grim, but didn’t dare to write his name, not even an initial, in case someone were to see and ask. I must’ve suspected a possible link between them, but that question got lost among all the others, in the chaos.

  It’s too late now. Lots of things are too late. And unnecessary, it turns out. I found out, but not from him. Maybe he did want to tell me, near the end, but couldn’t.

  I think about Patrik Sköld — you could say the same thing about him. He wanted to tell us but ran out of time, the abyss opened up beneath him.

  I convince myself that that’s what happened with Grim, too. He would’ve told me, eventually, he wanted to tell me, but he didn’t get the chance.

  That isn’t particularly likely. It’s what I tell myself nonetheless.

  Jonna is still sitting there. Dizziness is gathering in the distance, but I push it away, exerting myself to walk without leaning against the wall. It works, until I go to sit down on my chair. That’s when everything starts swaying and I have to grab hold of the armrest to keep myself upright.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  I pull the diary towards me.

  ‘I had to … thanks for telling us about this. It may be useful later. Was there anything else?’

  ‘You look … it looks like you’ve just been …’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  A weird silence follows.

  ‘Do you know who did it, by the way?’

  ‘Who killed Angelica?’

  ‘If you do, I want to know. She was my best friend.’

  I really shouldn’t be saying anything. Yet the two of us have got something in common, I realise. We have both had someone taken from us, lost them before time. There are certain things you have to do to stop yourself disintegrating from inside.

  ‘We think we know what happened. Right now, we’re trying to prove it.’

  ‘I would really like to know how it goes.’

  ‘If we succeed, I’m sure you’ll notice.’

  Jonna looks at the diary in my hands.

  ‘Was that why she died? I mean, the list that was in there.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You knew him, didn’t you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Grimberg. You were friends.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Close friends?’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss. I know how it feels. Do you cry?’

  ‘It does happen.’

  ‘Good.’ Jonna stands up and gets ready to leave. ‘It’s the only thing that works.’

  61

  She’s gone, and I’m left sitting holding the diary. The smell of her clothes, a fabric softener, hangs in the air. It’s a pleasant smell. I flip to the last page of the diary and prod the slit on the inside of the cover, before I put my hand in my inside pocket and retrieve the list I found at Grim’s. This is where I keep it. I don’t know what else to do.

  This little piece of paper has travelled a long way. From someone — Jon Wester? — to Angelica Reyes, to Jonna Danielsson, to Grim — who jotted down Patrik Sköld’s phone number on it — to me.

  It’s folded in two. I gently ease it into the little slit in the cover. Then I close the cover, turn the thing back to front and upside down.

  No difference. The paper is thin, you can’t see it. When I open the diary again, I run my fingers over the inside back cover. Since it’s stiff, you can’t tell that there’s something inside it. And unless you bend the
cover like Jonna Danielsson did, you wouldn’t even see the slit.

  It could be true.

  We stored this for over a year; I remember the notes from our run-through down in the archive. We received it in October 2010. Jonna Danielsson got it back in January 2012. A single rudimentary forensic test was carried out on its cover, looking for blood or DNA. Nothing there, of course.

  Its inside was never examined quite so carefully. If there was anything of interest in there, it should’ve emerged during the scanning process — that’s the assumption they were probably working under. Perfectly understandable.

  The person doing the scanning, Aronsson, was probably standing restlessly in between turning pages and waiting for the scanner to do its thing before he turned the page. Then more waiting, next page, more waiting. It was, in itself, a meaningless exercise that must have taken hours. Chances are, he was pretty chuffed to have reached the last page and to be able to move on to the next thing in life.

  A knock at the door. Birck opens it and steps in.

  ‘What did she want?’

  I give him a tired smile and hold the diary up in front of him.

  ‘Examine this for me, would you? Come back when you’ve found it.’

  Birck, looking puzzled, takes the diary from my hand.

  ‘Found what?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  ‘Is this a joke?’

  ‘This is an experiment.’

  ‘I hate experiments,’ Birck mutters, closing the door behind him.

  About an hour passes, not more, and when he does come back he’s annoyed. He went through every single page in the diary, he says, without finding anything.

  ‘So you didn’t find it?’

  ‘Oh, I did, but not before I’d wasted an hour. Couldn’t you have just told me?’

  ‘I wanted to see if it was possible to miss it.’

  ‘This doesn’t get us any closer to our man.’ Birck points at the list, before he passes it to me. ‘You take it.’

  He had it in his hands, I think to myself. Grim was looking for that list for so long, and in the end he found it. His face lit up. I take the list off Birck and put it in my pocket.

  Three days later, the breakthrough comes.

  62

  I saw someone today. Our eyes met for a moment, not long, in fact more like a second than a moment. He reminded me of someone, had the same smile as the man who, a month ago, was Sweden’s most wanted man, suspected of conspiracy to commit terrorism on Swedish soil.

  The evenings and the nights are disorientating. I wake from a dream and sit up dizzily. I know that I need to return to Salem. I have to go back.

  It’s happened before. I’ve never told anyone, but many years ago, when things between me and Grim first cracked and I wasn’t living in Salem anymore, something similar happened. It got so bad that I was there several nights a week. I took the bus, because it was so late the trains had stopped running, and got off in Salem. Then I would walk the streets where we used to hang out, stopping to look at the buildings where our friends once lived.

  I didn’t really know what I was doing, or why. I just knew that I needed to do it.

  Every night, I would end up by the water tower. On one occasion, I climbed it and sat on the edge. But once I was up there, I didn’t really know what to do; from a distance, it probably would’ve looked like I was waiting for someone. Maybe I was.

  Sitting up the tower, I watched the sun expanding over the horizon, bleeding red. Then I understood.

  Something went wrong here, a long time ago, and I came back to try to make things right. That must be it.

  But it can’t be done, I thought. The dead are gone forever, the disappeared are lost. You have to learn to live with that.

  With that insight, if you can call it that, I climbed back down to the ground. A curse had been broken, and I stopped going back.

  I think about the man who looked like the suspected terrorist. Maybe it was him. I wonder where he is.

  Grim. They thought he was someone else — that’s why he got shot. Grim, the man who spent twenty years of his life trying to be someone he wasn’t, to live in the shadows under false identities, the man who put caution and discretion, and above all his own security, first — shot dead on the street in central Stockholm because the shooter feared that he was someone else.

  Such a mundane fate.

  63

  The seventeenth of December, the day of the breakthrough.

  We’ve dug deeper into SGS. The digital archives have become old basement vaults. Files, working materials, and documents fill boxes that are stacked along the stone walls. That’s what it feels like — walking into old rooms. You open the boxes one at a time, give the contents a cursory inspection. The thin blue line shines all the brighter in the darkness. The outside world is shut out. It’s nice, you can almost forget.

  From March 2009, documents detailing a comprehensive operation. The Black Cobras are attempting to gain a foothold on Stockholm’s problem estates, recruiting from those who took part in the riots and fires in Rinkeby and Tensta the year before. SGS attempt to disrupt the recruitment, and succeed in slowing but not stopping it.

  Jon Wester is in the field. From his car, he has long conversations with young men in the southern districts: Skärholmen, Rågsved, Hagsätra. He rolls up alongside them, appears, persuades them to get in the passenger seat, after which they drive through Stockholm. It’s information he’s after: Who has spoken to whom and when? What about? He shows them pictures of known Black Cobra members. Have any of these men approached you? If it does happen, here’s what you need to do: ring this number, that’s right, and then …

  The car’s registration number is recorded only once in the documentation: MCC 860. Wester wanted to get reimbursed for fuel he paid for, so the number was recorded. Maybe SGS have been careless by allowing that information to remain in the archive. This is the first time we’ve been able to tie Wester to a specific car.

  A completely separate incident report, dating from the twenty-third of July 2010, less than three months before the murder, is also interesting. It describes events in Grimsta, one of the estates on the north side, where a woman is believed to have sold sex to the leader of the local criminal network. This woman, a then twenty-five-year-old Lisa Vargas, is part of Miro Djukic’s pimping operation, has Chilean roots, and lives in a rented flat in Hagsätra. She is a person of interest, the SGS operative later explains in his report, because of indications it may be possible to recruit her as an informant.

  What those indications might be are not stated, and it looks as though no recruitment took place. Her name is not mentioned again.

  I do a multi-field search on Lisa Vargas. The databases rustle through criminal records, general surveillance records, charge sheets, and so on. Everything points to her still being alive, and still living at the same address. She has a turbulent past, having had repeated contact with the Prostitution Unit and Stockholm Drug Squad, but she seems not to have had any contact with the law since 2012. In the surveillance records, there’s still a note explaining her links to the gangster in Grimsta, from July 2010. No further meetings confirmed, it says, and then, former potential SGS case (07-2010, edited 02-2011).

  There’s also information from the Prostitution Unit, again dated 2010. Lisa Vargas wants to report a man, a customer, whose name she doesn’t know, for sexual assault. According to the official record, Vargas is high as a kite at the time, which might explain why she convinces herself that something might come of it, and dares to come forward.

  The man in question is a policeman, she claims. The officer from Prostitution Unit writes that Vargas says she caught a glimpse of the man’s badge in his wallet as he went to pay, but not enough to be able to read the man’s name.

  She is shown pictures of known punters, some of whom are or have been serving
officers. She recognises many of the men in the photos, several have been customers, but none are the man who assaulted her. The Unit do what they can, but fail to get anywhere. Vargas takes it badly. He was strangling me, she apparently says, loud and upset, before screaming, I could’ve fucking died, and leaving.

  That’s July 2010. The case was mothballed six months later.

  Vargas appears in the Reyes files, I remember that. An old entry in the surveillance records lists her as one of Angelica’s acquaintances.

  I head to Birck. He’s sitting with a pile of papers in his hands, reading diligently.

  ‘I’ve found something weird,’ I say.

  ‘So have I,’ says Birck.

  64

  Birck explains that, according to the archives, one SGS car behaves a little strangely around the time of Angelica Reyes’ murder.

  It was used in the preceding days and immediately afterwards, but on the twelfth of October 2010 it seems to have remained stationary.

  Birck says seems, because there’s no record of it being used then. SGS have used the car regularly, but have also been careful to register the usage of all their vehicles, presumably because they used them so much in their operations. Cars can be admissible in court, as documentation.

  ‘It could be that the car simply was stationary that day,’ Birck rounds off. ‘It wouldn’t have been the only one — two more of their cars went unused, too.’

  ‘What car is it?’

  ‘A Toyota Auris, 2009 edition. Registration MCC 860.’

  The same registration. I sit down. The days and the hours, the meetings in Birck’s room, everything melts together.

  I hand him the printed copy of the report on the Black Cobras from 2009, in which the same car is mentioned.

  ‘It was being used by Jon Wester, at least in 2009.’