Bad Blood: A Crime Novel

by Arne Dahl

  13

  To claim that progress had been made would certainly have been a lie—and yet something had changed during the night. The atmosphere in “Supreme Central Command” had been, if not transformed, at least upgraded a bit.

  Arto Söderstedt had taken the liberty of using an official car to transport his five children to various day care centers and schools; nowhere would the extra miles around Södermalm be reported. Paul Hjelm still hadn’t signed out an official car but took the subway from Norsborg, undisturbed by the rush-hour traffic, and listened to music for as long as possible.

  Jorge Chavez, however, got stuck in the traffic from his bachelor’s studio in Rågsved, where he had returned after having rented a room in town. Every morning he found himself experiencing the same infantile surprise at the extent of the traffic; it was as though cars were becoming more and more central to people’s lives, as though the distinct metal borders were replacing the increasingly diffuse borders of self-identity. Every morning he promised himself he’d leave his old BMW home the next day; every morning he broke his promise. It was like an ineffective magic spell.

  Gunnar Nyberg had gone home; he lay down with his clothes on in his bed for the overweight, slept like a clubbed seal—and woke two hours later like a completely pulped seal. He felt as though an aggressive Norwegian had lost his head during seal clubbing and kept going until all that was left was a nine-foot-square steak tartare. He finally ceased fantasizing about his similarities to small, cute, white, threatened baby seals, joined the line of cars on Värmdöleden along with all the other sour-pusses, and decided that his right to be a sourpuss was superior to that of his fellow drivers.

  Viggo Norlander had defied the long working hours and gone to King Creole for a last-chance pickup at three in the morning. It had worked, but somewhere inside himself he began to realize the advisability of getting to know the lady in question a little bit before the act was allowed to commence. The fact was, tonight’s lady turned out to have had the sole goal of becoming pregnant; immediately after the fait accompli she pulled on her clothes and rushed through the door fertilized and happy and spitting in the face of menopause, leaving behind a detective inspector who felt as if he had lost his mind. It took him half an hour to find it. On the morning bus from Öster-malm, he fell into a trancelike fantasy about an unknown, successful son who tracks down an old bachelor cop father at the nursing home.

  Kerstin Holm moved in mysterious ways from her new two-room apartment somewhere in Vasastan; possibly burned by a few collapsed relationships with colleagues, she kept a distance between her private life and her work life. But that was nothing compared to Jan-Olov Hultin, the man without a private life. Rumor had it that he lived with a wife and without an empty nest in a villa somewhere north of the city and that he played intercompany soccer with startling brutality in the Stockholm Police veterans’ team, but it was impossible to find out more than that. He was his job. He was like a god—pure presence, pure action—or like a father figure viewed through the eternally selective eyes of a five-year-old.

  Sure enough, by the time they all arrived at “Supreme Central Command” from these various directions and experiences, each sensing the heightened atmosphere, he was already there.

  The rain continued its ravages outside. At least, since rain always had a certain dampening effect on crime, fewer false leads would be scattered about.

  The item they discussed by way of opening the meeting was the false lead of Laban Hassel. Hjelm and Chavez’s quick summary filtered out the unfathomable tragedy: a father-fixated son threatens the absent father to get attention, then turns to his half-brother’s mother in a half-incestuous relationship, where they both discover they’ve taken their ability to procreate out of the game because of the father, who is murdered in almost the same way that the threats had described.

  It sounded like the synopsis of a soap opera that they were pitching to the director of programming at a commercial television channel. The director of programming replied with an awful tone of rejection: “And he didn’t do it?”

  “No,” they said in unison.

  Hjelm added, “But we’ll keep that door open.”

  “Okay. Gunnar?”

  Sullenly and laconically, Gunnar Nyberg recounted the night’s events in Frihamnen.

  When he was finished, Söderstedt said, disenchanted, “It sounds about as promising as the flasher in Tantolunden.” Targeted by their stares, he elucidated, “The one who got beaten up by the women’s soccer team.”

  “In any case, we’ll keep that door open as well,” Hultin said.

  Despite the rather worthless reports and the lack of responses, the atmosphere remained heightened. Somewhere in what had been said lay the potential for more.

  “Who was he?” said Chavez. “The body in Frihamnen?”

  “Unidentified,” said Hultin. “The fingerprints didn’t tell us anything. A classic John Doe, as the Americans like to call their unidentified bodies. About twenty-five, medium-blond, nothing more. The autopsy didn’t tell us anything. Four shots to the heart can probably be considered reason enough to die. Otherwise he was hale and hearty.”

  “Hale and hearty, he lay on the autopsy table,” Söderstedt said indifferently, counting on being ignored, and so he was.

  “We’re looking around Frihamnen for any vehicle he might have left behind,” Hultin continued. “Gunnar will go to the company, LinkCoop, to discuss the break-in. We’ll send the fingerprints to Interpol for examination, and some people whose next of kin are missing will come to look at the body. Viggo can go to the pathologist and get a statement. Otherwise we’ll keep on with what we were doing before.”

  What they were doing before was, in practice, waiting. Considering the circumstances, it was surprising that all of them left with renewed hope. No one could explain it as anything other than an intuition, and intuition was really the only thing they had in common; it had been the decisive characteristic when, once upon a time, Hultin had handpicked them.

  Even Viggo Norlander, whose task could once again be seen as suitable for a dunce, felt uplifted—which couldn’t be explained by his lingering conviction that his genes were, at this very moment, being perpetuated. Sure, he was being forced to spend the rest of the day with more or less desperate next of kin who would probably never find their loved ones, but even he was sucked into the slightly indefinable sphere of hope.

  He stopped by his office to retrieve his trendy but slightly dirty-old-mannish leather jacket. Up until the Russian mafia had nailed him to the floor in Tallinn, he had always worn a pretty respectable civil-servant suit at work, and he had in general been a respectable police officer with faith in the system, the hierarchy of command, and the social order. He had been raised in a different world from the one he was part of now; this fact had become more and more obvious during the Power Murders, and it was that insight that had led him to take the desperate measure of setting aside all the order he’d had so much faith in and going alone to Estonia to solve the case. The stigmatization he had suffered there would never leave his extremities. The robust strikes of the hammer had emphatically ended the era of faith in his life. Never again would he trust anyone other than himself. And never again would he really trust himself. Instead he took refuge in sex, which had never seriously interested him; his potbelly, his bald spot, and his civil-servant suit all disappeared. He changed to polo shirts and the leather jacket he’d just fetched from the office.

  His office mate, his former adversary Arto Söderstedt, had sat down at the computer, but his gaze was far off in the nasty fall weather. They were good friends these days, not least because they hadn’t the slightest thing in common and thought that excellent grounds for friendship. A little affirmative nod was enough, as Norlander picked up his leather jacket. He then made his way through the corridors and down to the garage under the police station, where his service Volvo was parked. He got behind the wheel and came out onto Bergsgatan, which closely resembled t
he Torne River just after the ice has melted. An autumn flood was streaming down toward Scheelegatan, but Norlander fought his way upstream toward Fridhemsplan so he could continue on toward Karolinska Hospital.

  In the not-too-distant future, he would turn fifty. Nearly thirty years ago, he had been married for a few incredibly misery-tinged years; since then all relations with the opposite sex had lain fallow, only to bloom now, in a violent fifty-year-old’s crisis of uncritical one-night stands. Up until the night before, he had attributed it to repressed horniness; now he began to suspect that he was hearing the ticking of his biological clock. An endless line of forefathers extended back in time from him to Adam himself, and each of them was tapping on his successor’s shoulder, and the tapping was magnified into a demanding, biological tick-tock-tick-tock, and the line of men lifted their thunderous voices in unison and said, “Do not let it stop here. Do not break the line of descent. Do not be the last one.” And if he hadn’t even come close to thinking about being a father, not once, it was now the only thought that prevailed: he would become a father, he wanted to become a father, he had to become a father. And all because of that strange woman, almost his own age, who had swept into his bachelor pad on Banérgatan like a spring breeze, allowed herself to be fertilized, and disappeared out into the autumn storm. It had all happened in fifteen minutes. Now she was carrying his life inside her. About that, he was sure. The more he thought of it, the more certain he became that he had seen it in her even then.

  The arrangement was ideal. His genes would live on, the line of men would cease tapping his shoulder—and he wouldn’t even have to take part in the difficulties of fatherhood. At most, he would be looked up by his Nobel Prize–winning son, who would suddenly realize where his exceptional gift had come from, and who would invest all his intelligence and a great deal of his enormous capital into contacting his father before he died so that he could fall to his knees and thank him for everything.

  A honking truck brutally yanked him back to reality, or rather to the correct half of the street, just in time for him to make the turn to the pathology department at Karolinska, where the unknown body awaited his glorious arrival.

  Viggo Norlander wandered through corridors that were much like those at the police station, made his way down to the notorious basement, and was welcomed by a none-too-warm nurse on penalty duty. There he stood before the legendary medical examiner Sigvard Strandell, a man of at least seventy-five, infinitely distinguished and infinitely slovenly—a combination that, within the medical profession, only researchers and pathologists could allow themselves to be; the risk that their patients would complain was minimal. Everyone called him Stranded; he had become stuck in this job as soon as he’d started. His specialty was hackneyed corpse jokes, one of which was immediately forthcoming: “Norlander, of all people. Are you here for a follow-up?”

  “You know why I’m here,” Norlander said in a measured tone.

  Strandell jangled a small plastic bag and its contents and handed it to Norlander. “His belongings. Traveled light, as they say. Otherwise I have nothing new to add. A sound and healthy young man, whose last meal probably consisted of hamburgers of the fattier sort. With honey on them, strangely enough. The death probably occurred between midnight and three in the morning; it’s not possible to be more exact. Four shots right into the heart and out again. Immediate death. His watch is still ticking, though—unfortunately.” He pointed at the plastic bag.

  Norlander was shown to a spot next to a desk outside the cold chamber and supplied with copies of autopsy reports; there he awaited the visits from potential next of kin.

  All together six of them showed up. First came an older couple, Mr. and Mrs. Johnsson, whose son-in-law had disappeared a few weeks earlier. Norlander’s papers said that the son-in-law had run off with the daughter’s not-insignificant fortune to Bahrain, where he had procured a harem that would have been a bit pricy to run, so the viewing was merely a formality.

  The Johnssons’ faces went from hope to despair when they saw the dead man, and they shook their heads; nothing would have made them happier, it seemed, than to be reunited with their son-in-law in these environs.

  It was with the Johnssons that Norlander saw the corpse for the first time. It lay there, in the ice-cold, stripped-bare room with refrigerator doors along the walls, and seemed to glow white in the horrid, naked fluorescent light. He was immediately struck by the ordinariness of the young man. He had not a single distinguishing feature. If someone were to draw a specific individual and send a copy into outer space with the Voyager as an example of a male Homo sapiens, this youngster would have been made for the role, thought Norlander with astonishment.

  Next came a couple of experienced visitors whose sons had disappeared as small children in the 1970s. They had never given up hope and never made peace or accepted a fait accompli. Norlander shared their sorrow; their lifelong powerlessness and protracted grief moved him deeply.

  Then came a long period of waiting. Norlander skimmed the difficult autopsy report and emptied the man’s possessions from the plastic bag. There were three things: a fake Rolex that, sure enough, was still keeping time; a long tube of ten-kronor coins; and a shiny key that seemed to have been made very recently. Nothing more. It told him nothing. And so it seemed quite fitting.

  After that came two women, in quick succession, who had male family members who had disappeared the night before. First was Mrs. Emma Nilsson, whose junkie son was to have come home from detox but never showed up. Norlander could have told the middle-aged woman that the dead man wasn’t her son, but still he led her, with her prematurely crooked back, to the body. In the seconds while it was pulled out of its cooler box, fear was mirrored in the unfathomable darkness of her eyes. Once she saw the corpse and shook her head no, she seemed liberated, almost happy; there was still hope.

  It was a different story with Justine Lindberger, a young, dark beauty with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs whose equally young husband and coworker Eric hadn’t come home the night before. While the cooler box was opened, she waited, paralyzed with fear, radiating desperation, convinced that the corpse would be her murdered husband—and when that turned out not to be the case, she broke down and wept. Norlander’s attempts to comfort her were beyond awkward; he had to call in personnel from psych, who gave her an injection of a rather heavy sedative. When Norlander sat back down at the desk, his body was trembling.

  Last up was Egil Högberg, an old rapids-shooter from Dalsland who’d had both legs amputated. He’d been driven down from the nursing home in his wheelchair by a young female aide.

  “My son,” he said to Norlander in a toothless, quavering voice. “It must be my son.”

  Norlander did everything in his power to ignore Högberg’s monstrously bad breath. The gum-chewing aide just rolled her eyes. He let the odd couple into the room and opened the cooler.

  “It’s him,” Högberg declared calmly, placing his rheumatic hand on the dead man’s icy cheek. “My only son.”

  The aide tapped Norlander lightly on the shoulder, and they left Högberg alone with the dead man. Norlander closed the door.

  The aide said, “He doesn’t have a son.”

  Norlander looked at her skeptically and peered through the window at the elderly man, who was now laying his cheek against the corpse’s.

  “He gets unmanageable,” she continued, “if he doesn’t get to come down and look at the new bodies. We don’t know why, but it’s best to let him have his way.”

  Norlander didn’t take his eyes from the old man.

  “Presumably he’s preparing to die,” said the aide.

  “Or?” said Norlander.

  “Or else he’s an old necrophile,” said the aide, blowing a big pink bubble.

  It was quiet for a moment. Then someone said, “Or else he wishes he had a son.”

  After a while, Norlander realized that he’d said it himself.

  He opened the door. Egil Högberg looked up f
rom the corpse and sent his crystal-clear gaze straight into Norlander’s. “The line of descent is broken,” he said.

  Viggo Norlander closed his eyes and kept them shut tight for a long time.

  14

  The first thing that struck Gunnar Nyberg was the contrast between LinkCoop’s headquarters in Täby and its warehouses in Frihamnen. The only link between them was the vulgar logo that blinked in all the colors of the rainbow as though advertising Stockholm’s most lavish brothel.

  At closer glance, the 1980s-style two-story building was a well-camouflaged skyscraper that had prophesied the conclusion of the decade by falling over. The luxurious atmosphere inside the company gates had more in common with a golf club than with a factory building. LinkCoop didn’t manufacture anything; the company was merely a link between east and west, as advanced computer equipment made in a variety of places streamed in from the east and out toward the west and vice versa. Nyberg didn’t really understand how this enterprise could be as profitable as the building suggested it was. On the other hand, economics was not his strong suit, and he felt some trepidation about the terminology that he would soon have to face.

  Nyberg drove his Renault past a security gate that was disguised as a vehicle reception, then headed toward the main building. He obstinately parked across two handicap spots, because he couldn’t imagine that anyone with a handicap worked at LinkCoop; the spots were the only two empty ones and reeked of artificial political correctness. Striding through the overzealous rain, he couldn’t see a single car in the lot that had cost less than 200,000 kronor. Either the janitors and receptionists used public transportation, or there was a hidden lower-class parking lot somewhere, along the lines of a good old kitchen entrance to a gentry flat.

  In other words, Gunnar Nyberg was properly worked up as he loped through the autumn storm, fat jiggling, and arrived at the main entrance. Once he was inside the automatic doors, he shook off the water like a walrus on amphetamines. The twin receptionist beauties had clearly been forewarned, for their only reaction to this antibody in their bloodstream was a tandem smile of the kind that could soothe even the most inflamed of souls.