Birck looks at the printout with a vaguely uninterested expression.
‘It was also used by five others, including Patrik Sköld.’ Birck puts down the paper. ‘That’s what I’ve got. A car that probably was parked up all day. Hardly a breakthrough. In fact, it isn’t even weird, at all — it simply wasn’t used. What have you got?’
‘A person we should go and talk to straightaway,’ I say. ‘If she wants to.’
She doesn’t. When we arrive at the apartment block in Hagsätra and ring the bell, Lisa Vargas opens the door with a child — a girl of two or three — in her arms.
‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’ She goes to close the door, and we make no attempt to prevent her, we’re not that daft, but then halfway through closing it she stops. ‘I’ve quit. I’m clean. I keep out of trouble. I’m married to an economist. I’ve even got fucking kids. What is this about?’
Birck smiles at the child, an unusual occurrence.
‘What’s your name?’
The girl doesn’t respond. She has her mother’s mouth and cheekbones, but her eyes come from someone else. She pushes her face into her mother’s shoulder. Birck stops smiling and turns to Lisa.
‘We need your help.’
‘What’s this about?’ she repeats.
‘Angelica Reyes.’
Something happens to the woman’s face. She looks determined.
Lisa takes a step backwards, lets us in. She puts down the kid, who wraps herself round one leg and refuses to look at us. Lisa points a remote at the TV in the living room and when it flashes on she bends down to whisper something to her daughter, who goes over and flops onto the floor with her eyes on the screen.
It’s three in the afternoon. We’re in a two-bedroom flat with low ceilings and small windows. It’ll soon be dusk, you can feel it in the air. On a chest in the hall, there are photographs of a happy family. Her husband is handsome, well dressed, and smiling towards the camera in almost every shot. She shows us into the kitchen.
‘My husband will be home in an hour,’ she says, as if that means something.
‘We can be discreet,’ Birck says. ‘Does he not know that you used to, um …’
‘Oh yes,’ she cuts in. ‘But we don’t get to spend a lot of time together, so we have to make the most of it. We live hectic lives.’
Lisa folds her arms. She’s wearing a muted green cardigan, with a blouse of some kind underneath. A heavy necklace with a long chain rests below her chest.
‘I understand,’ says Birck. ‘We won’t hang around. Are you working, or … ?’
‘Studying.’
We stay standing up. My colleague leans against the doorframe. You can hear the TV, kids singing a song with a neat little melody. I think I recognise it.
‘How did you know Angelica?’ I ask.
‘My parents knew hers. They came to Sweden from Chile at about the same time. So we knew of each other, or whatever, but we didn’t hang out until years later, when we were about twenty and met up in town.’
‘Were you close?’
‘No. I think we …’ Her eyes drop and she stares at her folded arms. ‘It was always a little bit weird, looking at Angelica. We had shared history, in so many ways. It was like looking at myself, seeing what could’ve happened to me. Whether she felt the same way, I couldn’t say. Anyway, I kept my distance a little bit, because thinking about her was almost like thinking about me. But what’s happened now?’ she goes on. ‘Have you arrested someone?’
‘Not yet.’
‘We’d like to talk to you about a complaint you made,’ says Birck. ‘Do you know which one we’re talking about?’
‘I’ve only ever done that once,’ says Lisa, ‘and I regret it.’
65
‘I hardly found out anything about him. I know Angelica met him after I had, I heard Miro talking about it.’
‘Miro Djukic?’
‘Yes. After that complaint, when I refused to see him, Miro sent him to her instead. And I don’t know what he was like with her, but Jesus that guy had problems.’
‘What kind?’
‘Do we have to do this now?’
‘The more you can talk, the faster this will be, and the quicker you’ll be able to get rid of us.’
She walks out into the hallway to check the girl’s still sitting by the TV.
‘Everything okay, darling?’ she asks. ‘Turn it up a bit if you like. You know how to do it, don’t you?’
She waits while her daughter fiddles with the remote.
The noise swells like a wave until it gets so loud that a roaring, grating din is all you can hear.
‘Not that much,’ Lisa shouts shrilly and rushes to the living room.
‘What kind of problems,’ Birck repeats once she returns to the kitchen, ‘did this man have?’
‘It’s weird talking about it. But if you really want to know, he was the type — maybe I’m prejudiced — that is either far too fond of his mother, or absolutely hates her. If you know what I mean.’
‘Not really,’ admits Birck.
‘As I was saying, I didn’t know much about him. Not even what he did for a living, until that last time when I realised he must’ve been a cop. I’d had my suspicions, a lot of the time you can sort of feel it, but it was only then that I really realised.’
She pauses, maybe trying to work out how that’s gone down with us, which side we’re on. Hardly surprising.
‘How did you come to realise that?’ Birck asks.
‘I saw a bit of his badge sticking out as he was paying. Unfortunately, I didn’t see his name, or his ID number. Now of course he could have had someone else’s badge, but I can’t really think why he would? And right then, I didn’t want to know any more about it. But in that business, or whatever you want to call it, you know … Being able to read people is a survival strategy. It’s crucial — if you’re no good at it, you won’t be around for long. After two meetings, three at the most, you know your punter.’
‘I can imagine,’ I say. ‘What did you find out about him?’
‘I’m not one to start moralising. I mean, look at me.’ She does actually laugh. Then she lowers her voice. ‘I’m not in a position to do anything about it without, you know, throwing stones in a glass house. But he had problems. With sex, I mean. Wanking several times a day.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘He told me, as an excuse. You should’ve seen him ejaculate. It was hardly streaming out of him. Wanking that often, I’m sure a lot of people do, that’s not what I’m talking about. There was more to it. If it hadn’t been so risky for him, then he’d have been surfing porn and having phone sex, too.’
‘How do you know he wasn’t?’
‘I asked him. And the other thing was that he always got so low afterwards. Anxiety or something, I don’t know. Sounds like a great shag, eh?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Basically, he’d always behaved like a pig, been a bit too rough, that sort of thing. But then he tried to strangle me. That was, in some way, the turning point for me. I knew that reporting it wasn’t going to make any difference, but I still wanted to do it, like I was putting down a marker for myself. After that, I started slowly trying to put my life back in order. It wasn’t easy, but I got there.’
‘Were you …’ Birck says before changing his mind. ‘Was there ever a police officer trying to get you onside? Who wanted you to start reporting information,’ he clarifies.
‘They never said as much to me, but I heard that they were planning to, yes.’ She laughs. ‘My guess is they dropped that plan when I went to the Prostitution Unit and told them that some bastard cop had tried to strangle me. You don’t really want people like that as informants, do you?’
You. There it is again.
‘I don’t suppose they did, no,�
� says Birck.
‘Did you ever find out who it was?’ I ask. ‘The man, the customer who tried to strangle you?’
She shakes her head.
‘No, I put it all behind me after that, I didn’t even want to think about those years. Jesus, what a load of shit.’
I pull out my phone and show her a photograph of Jon Wester.
‘Was it him?’
Lisa looks stunned.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’
‘Was it him?’ I try again, not really understanding what’s going on.
‘You appear out of nowhere, asking about Angelica. It’s so fucking callous of you to do that, you reopen so many wounds with all your questions — are you aware of that? Not only that, you shove a picture in my fucking face, a picture of the man who tried to strangle me. What the fuck are you doing? Have you known all along or what?’
‘No, no,’ says Birck. ‘Sorry, I apologise. It’s only now we’ve begun to understand. And we still don’t understand everything. That’s why we’re here.’
She stares at Birck, then at me.
‘Who is that?’ she asks.
‘He used to be a policeman,’ I say.
‘You mean he’s not anymore?’
‘No.’
‘Did he get sacked?’
‘No.’
She laughs.
‘Course he didn’t. Bastards like him never do.’ She returns to studying the image. ‘He tried to strangle me because I refused to obey him. It happened once, but I could tell from the start that he was capable of that sort of thing. There was just something about him, I can’t explain it.’
‘What was he trying to get you to do?’ says Birck.
‘I can’t even remember. Some stupid shit, I was supposed to get dressed up or do something. He offered me more money, but I said no, I didn’t want to. There was no particular reason, I think I was just high and contrary. I used to get that way,’ she adds, shaking her head. ‘Anyway, that’s when he put his hands around my throat. He let go after a while, but Jesus I was terrified. I hated cops at the time — still do as a matter of fact — but then it was … Whatever, because I’d worked out that he was a cop I thought, no, fuck that, he’s not going to get away with it.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘I’m sure I was high when I had that thought, too. It was pointless.’
‘And what about Angelica, she met with him after you?’
‘Yes, she took over. Or however you put it.’
‘Do you know how often they met?’
‘No, but he used to come every couple of weeks. It might’ve been a bit longer between me and Angelica, if he was being careful. I think he needed to find a girl he felt he could trust.’
So the beginning of August, maybe. That would be two months before the murder. A month before Angelica Reyes captures Wester on tape, a month before the extortion attempts begin. That could be right: He stops seeing Vargas in July. He finds Angelica at the beginning of August. They start meeting regularly, once every other week. By their third or fourth meeting, Angelica has worked out who he is. A plan takes shape, and she puts it into action. None of that breaks the timeline.
‘We are going to go,’ says Birck. ‘Thank you. One more question, though, there’s something I don’t understand.’
‘Okay?’
‘The risks he was taking. Why did he come to you?’
‘You mean why wasn’t he seeing one of those exclusive escort girls?’
‘Yes,’ Birck says, unsure. ‘That’s if you’re going to pay for sex in the first place in his position.’
‘If you knew what positions of power some of my punters had. There aren’t many escorts, or at least there weren’t back then. The few there are have power and influence. They have friends in high places. The rest of us …’ Lisa laughs. ‘Well … who’s going to believe a smack-whore? Obviously it’s preferable to come to us. Just look at Angelica. Someone killed her. That was five years ago and whoever did it got away.’
66
‘Another piece of the puzzle,’ says Birck. ‘That’s all.’
We head back to the city centre. The southern estates, Rågsved and Högdalen and Bandhagen, swish past. Thursday’s light is fading.
‘And as of now,’ he goes on, ‘we can’t prove anything more than payment for sex, which now falls under the statute of limitations anyway. But still, Jesus … the risks he must’ve taken.’
‘Remember Göran Lindberg.’
Göran Lindberg, the lawyer from Uppsala, Police Academy chancellor, later chief superintendent, and perhaps a future National Police Chief. In January 2010, he was arrested at a petrol station in Falun, on his way to meet a fourteen-year-old girl he’d made contact with via a telephone chat line. They found a bag in his car, containing leashes, straps, a gag ball, a whip, and Viagra tablets.
That was the tip of the iceberg. In November 2010, little more than a month after Angelica’s murder, he was convicted of aggravated rape, rape, assault, procuring, and attempting to pay for sex.
Everyone knows that there are more Lindbergs out there — police are no better than anyone else at reining in their sexual desires, or need for power, or whatever.
It’s Thursday the seventeenth of December, a week before Christmas. Five days until Grim’s funeral. On the way back into town, the rain arrives.
Then, suddenly, it happens. Birck’s phone rings.
‘What’s that noise?’ he asks.
‘It’s your mobile.’
‘Shit, that’s right, I changed the ringtone.’ He pushes his hand into his inside pocket, searching for the phone. ‘That trainee we have, you know, she swapped rooms. She used to sit down by your room but now she’s in the room next to me. She has the same ringtone as me, so whenever it rings I hear it through the wall and I think it’s mine. It was driving me mad, so I changed to another tone. Now I don’t realise when my phone’s ringing, so now that drives me mad instead. Where the fuck is it? Aha.’ He fumbles his way into his trouser pocket and pulls out his phone. ‘Hello?’
The wiper blades drum rhythmically across the windscreen. Grim’s words come back to me, because I never learn.
Five days till the funeral. A final farewell, rest in peace, the memories remain.
From this point on, I’m alone with them, our memories, and that might be the hardest part. The memories you once shared, that you now have to carry alone — and despite lots of them being bright and warm, a thick, dark mist converges around them. Memories are easy to carry if there are two of you, but so heavy if you’re carrying them alone.
‘Cancelled?’ Birck says down the phone. ‘Are you sure? Fucking hell. Can you send it to me then? Yes, we’re coming in.’
Birck hangs up. We glide up onto the bridge where Grim was shot, now smothered by the heavy traffic.
‘What was that about?’
It was, it turns out, about a parking ticket. As part of the process of identifying SGS’s vehicles, Birck contacted the beat officers and asked one of the old foxes to do a search on MCC 860 in their databases. He asked him to pay particular attention to October 2010, but that was all. The man doing the search found nothing, but was the meticulous type.
‘Fortunately,’ says Birck, ‘he took the registration number, then went and double-checked manually, in the archive.’
And so he found something. A parking ticket from the twelfth of October 2010.
Well, actually, no, he corrected himself. A cancelled parking ticket. It was only now, on the phone, that the man noticed the word cancelled had been added at the bottom.
We stand in Birck’s room examining it.
The ticket was printed half an hour before midnight, on the twelfth of October 2010. It’s not clear when it was cancelled, but because the details never migrated to the central system, it probably wasn’t long afterwards. It all sur
rounds a car parked illegally next to Kungsholmen’s fire station, on a little branch of Kronobergsgatan.
I know where that is: it’s an unobtrusive little dead end about five minutes’ walk away from Angelica’s home on John Ericssonsgatan. One side is lined with a huge brick wall, the other with the trees and shrubs of Kronoberg Park.
‘Hey,’ I say, pointing at the issuing officers’ names.
Birck stares at the ticket.
‘For fuck’s sake.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘Bring them in. Get them in here now.’
67
Within half an hour, they’re sitting in front of me. That might sound pretty efficient, given that the task was to bring in two officers from out in Huddinge. Yet it could actually have happened a lot more quickly.
The reason was as follows.
Earlier today, Dan Larsson and Per Leifby had found themselves at Forensics in Solna — what they were doing there, no one knows, and no one bothered to ask. Larsson stood sipping a can of Fanta while Leifby browsed through a motoring magazine. At that point, the National Police Chief himself, the top dog, there in the flesh, walked past. His suit was immaculate but his face betrayed stress in some form, which was obvious to a sensitive soul like Leifby. Which is why he swatted his magazine at his colleague’s arm, spilling some soft drink onto Larsson’s uniform.
‘Oh fucking hell,’ Larsson said in his thick Småland accent. ‘I told you it’s just been washed.’
‘Dan, it’s him.’
‘Who?’
‘It’s the NPC. Listen.’ Leifby had raised his voice, causing the National Police Chief to stop by the door. The man looked confused. ‘Do you want a lift?’ asked Leifby.
Larsson brushed the liquid from his uniform and straightened himself out. The NPC gave them one of his normal vacant smiles, and asked where the gents were heading.
‘We’ll go where the boss is going,’ Leifby said, and when the NPC raised a surprised eyebrow in Larsson’s direction, he quickly reassured him that the back seat was of course at his disposal.
The NPC was going to Kungsholmen. Leifby drove, looking almost entranced, while Larsson attempted to ask as many sycophantic questions as possible. The NPC’s replies were short; he was busy with something on his phone. When they arrived at HQ, he thanked them for the lift, called Per ‘Dan’ and Dan ‘Per’, and didn’t make eye contact.
The Thin Blue Line Page 22