The Strange Case of the Moderate Extremists

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Ulf sighed. He suspected that his brother knew next to nothing about art, and this campaign was no more than a crude crowd-pleaser. If there had been any chance of the Moderate Extremists ever getting anywhere near power, then he would have taken these threats more seriously, but as it was, with support for the party hovering at about one per cent of the electorate, there was little danger of that.

  As their dogs renewed their acquaintanceship, passing on through body language all the canine information they sought to share, Ulf and Anders chatted about human affairs. Anders had recently reviewed an all-electric car. He was not an expert in these matters, but when his paper’s motoring journalist was away from work, he stood in, usually taking whole paragraphs from previous car reviews and merely changing certain words where necessary. After all, he said, all cars are basically much the same, and what one might say about car A could surely be said with equal relevance and accuracy about car B, mutatis mutandis, of course.

  “I took this car for a spin along the coast,” said Anders. “It’s a very smooth ride, you know. And you don’t hear a thing—you really don’t.”

  “That’s a bit of a problem,” Ulf pointed out. “People often rely on hearing what’s coming when they cross the road. Electric cars creep up on you.”

  “Yes,” said Anders. “I suppose so. It must be a bit like that for Martin—all the time, though.”

  Ulf’s dog was deaf. His hearing had been impaired during his puppyhood, and then it had disappeared altogether. Veterinary surgeons had done their best, but eventually had concluded that nothing could be done. And that was the point at which Ulf had resorted, with some success, to teaching Martin how to lip-read, making him Sweden’s first—and only—lip-reading dog.

  They moved on to crime. Anders never expected Ulf to reveal anything confidential, nor pressed him to do so, but from time to time he was able to get some scrap of information that had escaped other journalists.

  “Anything new at the office?” he asked.

  Ulf looked thoughtful. “We’re raking through our cold cases at the moment—things that happened a long time ago. We try to keep on top of our housekeeping.” He paused. A memory made him smile. “But there are one or two current things. There was something that came in the other day: an offence at a cat show, believe it or not.”

  This caught Anders’s attention. It was just the sort of thing that his readers liked to hear about; they relished a combination of animal interest and crime. And if one could add a sexual element, too, then their interest was guaranteed. And this story, as it happened, involved just that combination.

  “There was a very important cat show a few months ago,” said Ulf. “One of the cats was destined for great things—a supreme champion Burmese, if I remember correctly. She was a very valuable animal, as you can imagine—for breeding purposes, that is. The kittens can reach a pretty high price.”

  “Shockingly high,” said Anders. “Thousands for a cat. Who would believe it?”

  “Exactly. Now, you know they take the cats to these shows in large cage-type carriers. They have every luxury, of course—they’re thoroughly spoiled. What happened at this show, though, was that somebody slipped a tomcat into this special Burmese’s cat carrier. And the inevitable occurred.”

  Anders let out a whistle. “An unwelcome liaison?”

  “Yes,” said Ulf. “This tom was pretty lowlife. A big ginger thug. Previous convictions, I imagine. No background. Not much to look at. Torn ear and so on.

  The owner thought that she was pregnant by the regular, approved stud tom. So she had sold the litter in advance, all to people who wanted to breed from them. But the kittens, when they appeared, clearly came from the wrong side of the tracks. The ginger tom was the dad.”

  “And that didn’t do anybody’s reputation any good?”

  “Precisely. Word got out that the champion might not be quite as purebred as people thought and that she was, therefore, no good for breeding. That involved a big financial loss, of course, for the owner.”

  Anders was puzzled. “But how did anybody find out what happened?”

  “One of the assistants at the show though she saw someone putting the tom in. She thought that this was the owner of the Burmese, so she did nothing about it. She came forward much later, after the kittens had been born and when she read a report on the issue in some cat magazine.”

  Anders wondered whether Ulf and his colleagues had any leads.

  “No,” said Ulf. “Not at the moment. We’re about to start an investigation. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “It’s a good story,” said Anders, chuckling as he envisaged the headline.

  They exchanged a few more words before going their separate ways. Ulf walked back to his flat, where he showered, dressed for work, and then took Martin to Mrs. Hogfors next door. His neighbour was extremely fond of the dog, and was more than happy to look after him while Ulf was at work. She had already prepared Martin’s breakfast, and she fed this to the dog while she and Ulf spoke briefly about the day ahead.

  “Martin and I shall be going to the supermarket,” she said. “Would you like us to get you anything?”

  Ulf asked her if she could pick up a cauliflower. “I’ve got a sudden yearning for cauliflower cheese,” he said. “I’d like to make it tonight.”

  She put cauliflower on the shopping list she kept on her fridge door.

  “I saw that brother of yours on the television,” she remarked, adding, “Again.”

  He could tell that she did not approve.

  “He’s him and I’m me,” said Ulf. “I disagree with him on virtually everything, you know.”

  She said that she understood. “It’s a pity when brothers don’t see eye to eye,” she said. “It must be difficult for you.”

  “A bit,” said Ulf. “I try to keep off politics when I’m with him. But blood—”

  “—is thicker than water,” Mrs. Hogfors interjected.

  “He is, after all, my brother.”

  She sighed. “Yes. And I have my sister—the one who’s so difficult.”

  Ulf had met her, and agreed with the assessment.

  “She tries, though,” said Mrs. Hogfors. “You have to give her that.”

  “Most people try,” said Ulf. It was something that he reminded himself of regularly, as it made all the difference in your dealing with people. If you bore in mind that they were trying their best, it became that much easier to be tolerant. He thought of the office and of the wider police headquarters; there were people there who tried their best, even if they could be irritating, not to say sometimes downright maddening.

  He looked down at Martin and patted him fondly on the head.

  “He thinks the world of you,” said Mrs. Hogfors.

  “I’d love to know what he really thinks,” mused Ulf. “Not just of me, but of everything.” He turned to Mrs. Hogfors. “What goes on in a dog’s mind, Mrs. Hogfors? Have you any idea?”

  She shook her head. “Not the faintest, Mr. Varg. And I suspect that even the cleverest scientists in Sweden don’t know either. Even the professors at the Karolinska.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Ulf.

  He thanked her, said goodbye to Martin, and left for work. He drove his old silver-grey Saab, the one that had been given by an uncle—not Maksimilian—who had become too infirm to drive any longer. He loved the car, with its smell of old, cracked leather, and its chrome-framed instruments that ticked and clicked as instrumentation used to do before microchips took the magic out of machinery.

  He parked at the back of the office, in one of the places reserved for officers of inspector’s rank and above. Somebody, some nameless wit, had scrawled in paint the message: No Norwegians to park here. Ulf had laughed the first time he saw the graffiti, and even now he smiled. The person who wrote that message did not dislike Norwegi
ans—that was clear. He admired them—that was obvious—because we often say no to the people we would like to be. That was the sort of thing that a detective would know—especially if he worked in a Department of Sensitive Crimes.

  Chapter Two

  I’ll never learn salsa now

  Ulf shared a large, open-plan office with three others, two of whom, Anna and Carl, were fellow detectives and one, Erik, was the records and filing officer. The four desks in this room amounted, in essence, to the Department of Sensitive Crimes. Ulf was the senior member of the team, although the department was run on collegial grounds and it was rare for seniority to be asserted. “Our approach is horizontal, rather than vertical,” Ulf was in the habit of asserting. “The modus is fundamentally different.”

  He knew what he meant by this, as did Anna and Carl, but Anna was not entirely sure that outsiders within the wider force would grasp the nuances of the situation. “How do you approach something horizontally? In general, that is? Does it mean you look at things from the side rather than from the top?”

  “It’s more to do with the chain of command,” explained Ulf. “Information flows sideways in a horizontal system. In a vertical system, it flows from the top down towards the bottom.”

  Anna was not convinced. “If I tell you something now—that is, right now; if I say it’s ten o’clock, for instance. Is that information coming horizontally rather than vertically?”

  Ulf smiled. “That depends on where you and I stand in the system. If you are the boss, and you tell me it’s ten o’clock, then it’s ten o’clock vertically. Provided I’m required to accept that it’s ten o’clock because you say it is.”

  “And if I am junior to you,” said Anna. “What then?”

  “Then it’s vertical, but the other way round.”

  Anna thought for a moment. “What difference does it make? It’s either ten o’clock or it isn’t.”

  Ulf thought it probably did not make much difference anyway. Most theories and ideologies claimed to explain the world, or some aspect of it, but did not in any real sense influence the world. Underneath everything, beneath the layers of explanation that we created, beneath all our elaborate protocols, people still did exactly as they wanted to do. In other words, you did not change human nature by inventing a theory of human nature. Ulf was convinced of that fundamental truth. Look at Russia, he thought: they spent seventy years of the twentieth century trying to button up human nature in clothes of theory, and at the end of the day what had happened? Human nature popped out of their conceptual straitjacket and asserted itself once more, in spite of everything done to subdue it.

  When he arrived at the office that morning, his two male colleagues were already at their desks. Carl Holgersson was always first in, being widely regarded as one of the most hardworking and conscientious officers in the entire Malmö Police Department. Carl, who was the son of a well-known Lutheran theologian, was often in the office even before the cleaners made their rounds shortly after six.

  “I’m surprised they haven’t swept Carl away,” Anna observed wryly. “You’d think the cleaners might just vacuum him up, along with all the dust and paper waste. Woosh. Carl gone.”

  “That might happen one day,” said Ulf. “Who knows. And then we’d have to investigate, wouldn’t we? It would be a very sensitive matter and so it would be within our remit, I’d have thought.”

  “Except it wouldn’t be a crime,” said Anna. “It would be a mistake, rather than a crime.”

  Ulf thought about that. It depended, he thought, on one’s definition of mistake. There was a tendency, particularly amongst public figures, to confuse the categories of mistake and wrongdoing. People who had been caught out doing something egregiously wrong would often refer to having “made a mistake.” This made their actions seem less reprehensible; after all, mistakes are human, and usually pardonable.

  Anna was right, though. If the cleaners did throw Carl out with the office detritus, then that would be a genuine mistake because they did not know what they were doing. But if they did it deliberately, then it would be a different matter altogether and it would do them no good at all to use the language of mistake rather than that of guilt.

  But this was an odd line of enquiry, and Ulf pointed out that there was no point in engaging in utter fantasy. “Nobody is going to throw Carl out, either deliberately or by mistake,” he said. “I don’t think we need worry.”

  Anna laughed. “Of all the worries I have, Ulf, that is probably the very last on the list. I’d rank it equally with the chance of being hit by a meteorite while walking in my garden.”

  Their conversation had been overheard by Erik, whose desk at the end of the room, by virtue of an odd acoustic effect, allowed him to follow with great clarity anything that was said elsewhere in the room, even in the most hushed of tones.

  Erik Nykvist was the oldest member of the department. His career on the Malmö force spanned decades and he was now within sight of retirement. In a few years he would be able to stop work on a decent pension and pursue the passion that had sustained him since boyhood—fishing.

  Erik’s life revolved around fish. While the others often brought newspapers into the office, Erik never brought anything but fishing magazines, in particular a popular Swedish monthly called New Fisherman. This magazine claimed on its cover to be The best source of information about fish in the North. This interested Ulf, who would occasionally page through copies of New Fisherman left lying about by Erik.

  “Listen to this,” he said to Anna one day. “Just listen to what this magazine says.”

  Erik was out for lunch at the time, as was Carl, and only Ulf and Anna were in the room. Ulf had recovered the latest issue of New Fisherman from Erik’s desk, and had been smiling as he waded through page after page of advertisements for fishing rods and reels.

  “You shouldn’t laugh,” said Anna. “It means so much to poor Erik, and heaven knows, he doesn’t have much else in his life.”

  “I don’t know,” said Ulf. “He’s got his wife. They seem happy enough. And they have that cabin on an island somewhere or other. He’s always going about that. And he’s got fish, as we all know only too well. I think that sounds like quite a full life.”

  “You’re mocking him, Ulf,” said Anna. “He’s an odd fish, poor Erik.”

  Anna’s choice of metaphor had been accidental, but it made Ulf smile.

  “Listen,” he said. “This is the main news item.” He cleared his throat before reading on. “Reports are reaching us of a marked drop in tuna catches. According to industry sources, it is becoming increasingly difficult for deep-sea anglers to find a good-sized tuna. Nobody knows why this is happening but there have been urgent calls for scientists to redouble their efforts to find out why tunas are becoming less common. Many anglers are bringing forward their plans to catch a tuna before this unfortunate situation makes it impossible to do so.”

  Ulf put down the magazine and laughed. “Well, I could give them the answer to that,” he said. “The reason why there are fewer tuna is because too many of them being caught—that’s why. And who by? By these very people.” He poked the magazine with his forefinger. “It’s guys like Erik who are causing the problem in the first place. Stop killing tuna and—hey presto!—tuna survive. You don’t have to be Einstein to work that out.”

  Anna was staring at the ceiling. “Do you think Einstein ever went fishing?”

  Ulf burst out laughing. “What a question, Mrs. Bengstdottor!” He addressed her in these formal terms in a spirit of irony, and she, in turn, would call him Mr. Varg in return.

  “But it’s a very relevant question, if I may say so, Mr. Varg.”

  “Well, I suspect we’ll never know,” said Ulf. “And anyway, it’s time we got back to work.”

  Erik had returned a few minutes later and noticed that his magazine was in a slightly different
place on his desk.

  “Have you been reading my magazine again?” he asked.

  Ulf raised a hand. “Guilty,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” said Erik. “There’s nothing confidential in it.”

  “No,” said Ulf. “So few magazines have confidential information in them. It’s incompatible, some say, with the very idea of publication. Don’t put private stuff in a magazine. Sound advice.”

  Anna shot Ulf a glance. Erik was an easy target. Ulf, receiving the glance, looked apologetic. He was a kind man, and he understood that one should not make fun of a colleague—or anybody for that matter. He looked away, slightly ashamed. “It’s an interesting magazine, Erik. All that…all that…” He was floundering. “All that stuff about fish.”

  “Exactly,” said Erik. “It’s all there. Everything.”

  “I was reading that news item about tuna,” Ulf went on. “It’s not looking good, is it?”

  Erik shook his head. “No, it’s certainly not. I expect I’ll never catch a tuna now.”

  He spoke with sadness. I expect I’ll never catch a tuna now. What a tragic thing to say, Ulf thought: never to catch a tuna, when, presumably, you’ve wanted to catch one for so long. And you might apply that to so many different spheres of longing. I expect I’ll never learn salsa dancing now. Or, I expect I’ll never have coffee with the Pope now. Human longing—it took so many different forms.

  “You’d like to catch one?” Ulf asked.

  “Oh yes,” said Erik. “Although not as much as I’d like to catch a striped marlin.”

  “Do you think you might be able to do that? How are striped marlin doing?”

  Erik thought for a moment before replying. “I can’t give you an absolutely firm answer to that, but I think they’re not doing too badly. All fish are under pressure, though, and the big ones even more than the small ones.”