The Strange Case of the Moderate Extremists

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Brother?” she asked.

  Ulf sighed. “Yes. My brother.” He paused, and then spoke with real regret. “Why is it that relatives have such claims on us? I never asked to have a brother.”

  Anna nodded sympathetically. “I know what you mean, but…But, I suppose the claims of family are the most basic ones, don’t you think? It goes back to…”

  Ulf stopped her. “Please don’t go sociobiological on me. I can’t face any sociobiology right now.”

  Anna laughed. “All right. But sociobiology lies at the heart of everything. We are sociobiological, after all. Family bonds were the route to survival. You had to be close to your brother when you were hunting reindeer together.”

  Ulf closed his eyes. He saw himself with Bjorn on some snowy plateau up north, following reindeer tracks. And Bjorn would be going on about something or other while the reindeer watched them from afar; and they were both hungry and needed to kill a reindeer if they were to survive the winter.

  “I know, I know.” Ulf sighed. “So, I have my brother. And I’m doing my best, you know. It’s just that…”

  Anna smiled. “If it’s any consolation,” she said, “I have brother issues too. My brother, Rasmus, is frankly impossible. Probably every bit as bad as yours. He’s incapable of sticking to one woman. He has girlfriend after girlfriend. There’s a new one every six months.”

  Ulf had heard of Rasmus, even though Anna found it embarrassing to talk about him. “He can’t be easy,” he said.

  “No, he isn’t. And each time he breaks up with one of these women he comes around to our place and wants to discuss it for hours on end. Days sometimes. Where did he go wrong? Was it something he’d said? Were they on different wavelengths all along? Is it better to end something that wasn’t going well rather than persist with it in the hope that things would improve?”

  “Very tedious,” said Ulf.

  “Jo gets fed up with it,” said Anna. “He comes home after a day in the operating theatre and there’s Rasmus talking about his failed relationships.”

  Jo was Anna’s anaesthetist husband. He was a mild and inoffensive man, somewhat mousy in his manner, Ulf felt; but then Ulf was half in love with Anna—or even more than half, he sometimes felt—and he understood that no matter how hard he tried to be dispassionate about her emotional situation, he felt envious of this man who played such a privileged and intimate part in her life. The inescapable truth was that Anna was married, that her marriage appeared to be a stable one, and that her loyalties were with Jo and their two school-age daughters. Ulf had been brought up to know right from wrong, and everything told him that this was an impossible attachment on his part—and a wrongful one at that. You did not break up a marriage that was still functional and, as far as he could see, contented enough. You did not do that. And yet, and yet…

  “What can we do?” He was talking about brothers, but he realised that the question could have been interpreted as a much broader one than that—if Anna were thinking along those lines, which of course she was not.

  “About our brothers?”

  “Yes.”

  Anna shrugged. “Nothing. I suppose that all we can do is be patient.”

  “And understanding?”

  Anna laughed. “All the virtues. And then sit back and let the sun of righteousness shine upon us.”

  Ulf felt considerably better. “He wants me to investigate a leak in their Grand Council, or whatever they call it. Somebody’s going to the press.”

  “I know who that’ll be,” she said.

  Ulf was puzzled. “How so? Do you know these people?”

  “Not at all,” said Anna. “But then we never need to know the details. People act according to type. Work out who plays which role in any given situation, and there’s your answer.”

  Ulf waited for her to explain further.

  “Grand councils have issues,” Anna said. “There will be rivalries. No grand council is without its ambitious members.”

  Ulf thought and nodded his agreement. “What politician doesn’t want to be somewhere other than where he already is? Further up the tree?”

  “Precisely,” said Anna. “So if you want to identify a leak, look for who will gain by the compromising of the existing leadership.”

  Ulf wondered whether it could be that simple. Perhaps it was.

  “His deputy?” he asked.

  “Possibly,” said Anna. She thought for a few moments, and then added, “Of course, it could be somebody who wants him out of office, but not for reasons of personal ambition.” She paused. “Do you see where this is going?”

  Ulf looked puzzled. “Not really.”

  “You once mentioned his wife. Bjorn’s wife. What’s she called?”

  “Kitty.”

  “Yes, her. I seem to remember that you said she was less than enthusiastic about his political career.”

  Ulf nodded. “She’s tried once or twice to get him to leave politics. She’s not very keen on the Moderate Extremists and all they stand for.”

  Ulf found it difficult to work out exactly what the Moderate Extremists stood for. There was a rag-bag of policies, the only uniting factor amongst which was a marked disapproval and distaste for various bêtes-noires. That was the extremism—but it was not clear how the moderation expressed itself.

  Anna looked smug. “Well, there you are. That’s suspect number one. Kitty herself. The motive is clear enough, and who better to know what’s going on at meetings than the leader’s wife?”

  For a few moments, Ulf said nothing. Then he inclined his head in agreement. “Possibly,” he said. Yet it all seemed too neat, too quickly-arrived-at. If there was one thing you learned in the Department of Sensitive Crimes it was that the obvious solution was often misleading. Life was obvious, yes, but behind the obvious, the self-evident, there lay any number of other lively possibilities. So he said, “Do you really think so?”

  “I do,” said Anna.

  “I’ll look into it,” said Ulf. Kitty Varg, he thought, and then said, “Cats.”

  Anna had resumed filling in her form, but now she looked up. “I’m going to see the complainant later this afternoon. Would you like to come?”

  “The cat breeder?”

  Ana nodded. “I could do with reinforcements on that case. Are you interested?”

  Ulf was.

  “Four o’clock,” said Anna. “In your Saab?”

  Ulf nodded. Anna loved his car, his old Saab; she said it reminded her of what Sweden used to be, and he knew what she meant. If you wanted to understand a country, he thought, perhaps you should look at its cars. And cars told you a lot about people too, he mused. Look at a car and you can tell, at a glance, what sort of person drives it—knowledge that might be very useful to a detective.

  What sort of cars did Bjorn and Kitty drive? Would incompatibility in their cars point to incompatibility in their marriage? He smiled at the thought. The problem with such simple propositions was exactly that: they were far too simple. And they certainly were of limited use, he suspected, when it came to disentangling the sort of affairs with which the Department of Sensitive Crimes was concerned. Now that he came to think of it, he knew what sort of cars both Bjorn and Kitty drove. His brother drove a large red car of indeterminate origin—certainly it was not Swedish—that boasted, in chrome lettering at the back, of its extremely large engine capacity. Extremely large…that perhaps proved the proposition, at least as far as Bjorn’s character was concerned. And as for Kitty, she drove a modest green Italian car, a Fiat Cinquecento, so-named after its tiny engine. Five hundred cubic centimetres of engine may not be enough for the leader of the Moderate Extremists, but for his wife it was perfectly adequate. She was not the type to aspire to go from nought to one hundred in fifteen seconds. And therein, Ulf decided, lay a potential matrimonial problem; and if Anna was
right, then that matrimonial problem may be a political one as well.

  He would have to speak to Kitty—but feline affairs first.

  Chapter Five

  He hates me

  The cattery was on the outskirts of the city, in an area where the urban reached out tentatively into the rural, where small tentacles of development bifurcated field and pasture, where cows were indifferent to cars, where small, scruffy businesses advertised themselves with crudely painted roadside signs: Eggs and Fresh Produce; Artisan Cheese; Fencing Contractors; Perfect Driveway Construction. It was just the place for a business such as Julia’s Cattery, Oriental Breeds.

  It was a large plot of land—at least two hectares, Ulf thought. An unpaved drive led up to a house, planted squarely in the middle, and to a cluster of outbuildings, one of which was surrounded by a high-fenced chicken-wire run. What attracted Ulf’s attention, though, was the car parked beside the house: a Saab of exactly the same vintage as his own, though in better condition, at least when it came to bodywork. Ulf’s Saab, given to him by his uncle from Göteburg, had suffered from being kept too close to the sea, with the result that its paintwork had thinned and undergone some change in colour. This Saab had been more fortunate, was polished and shiny, with none of the down-at-heel look of Ulf’s own car.

  Anna pointed at the vehicle. “Do you see what I see?”

  “I do,” said Ulf. “Reassuring, isn’t it?”

  “I liked her when I met her,” said Anna. “She came into the office to make a statement. I liked her then, and now that I see her car I like her all the more.”

  “Don’t let Saabs cloud your judgement,” said Ulf.

  “They don’t cloud,” answered Anna. “They confirm.”

  They parked Ulf’s car beside its more well-preserved coeval and made their way to the front door. Julia answered quickly, appearing before them in a beige housecoat. She was carrying a cat. The cat looked unblinkingly at the visitors, suspicion glowing in its pale green eyes. Was this, Ulf wondered, the feline victim of the outrage—the debased aristocrat, the compromised matron?

  “We’re a little early,” said Anna. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  Ulf was not prepared for the voice that answered. He imagined that Julia would speak in a homely manner and not in the highly formal and scrupulously correct Swedish with which she now addressed them.

  “There is not the slightest inconvenience,” she said. “A difference of ten minutes is insignificant, I think.”

  She ushered them in.

  Ulf noticed the smell. It was not as pronounced as it sometimes was when you went into a house or flat colonised by cats, but it was there none the less. You would know this was a cat-oriented household even if you had not seen the sign outside.

  Before she did anything else, Julia introduced them to the cat. “This,” she said, “is Duchess IV, daughter of Duchess III.”

  Ulf smiled at the cat, but was rewarded with an even more intense glare of disapproval.

  “Duchess’s father,” explained Julia, “was Grand Champion Burmese of all Sweden three years in a row. Three years.”

  Ulf expressed admiration. “That’s very impressive.”

  “Very,” said Anna.

  “Thank you,” said Julia, lowering Duchess to the floor. “And now—may I offer you something? Coffee?”

  They took their places about a low table in the living room. On the table were piles of well-thumbed magazines—The International Cat Fancy, The Burmese Breeder’s Journal, and, to balance the feline emphasis, an equine newspaper with a picture of a gymkhana meeting on the cover.

  There were a few moments of small talk—about the traffic, the weather and a report in that day’s paper of a fire on a Stockholm ferry. Then Anna moved on to what she described as the “act of sabotage.” “You said you were going to give me a list of people who might have a grudge against you,” she said. “Or against your cats, too, although I suppose that amounts to the same thing.”

  “It certainly does,” said Julia. “For most of us, the best way to hurt us would be through our family.”

  Ulf realised that she meant through her family of cats.

  As if to confirm, Julia went on, “Our boys and girls are so vulnerable.”

  Anna was sympathetic. “Of course they are.”

  “I try to keep an eye on them all the time,” said Julia. “But you know how it is.”

  “Oh, I do,” said Anna.

  “You have cats?” Julia asked, with interest.

  “No, I meant children.”

  Julia smiled. “I wouldn’t know about that. Nils and I don’t have children. Our hands are full, though…” She gestured towards the window and its view of the outbuildings.

  Anna focused on the matter in hand. “Have you made a list?”

  Julia fished a piece of paper from the pocket of her jeans. “Here it is. Three names.”

  Anna took the list, read it silently and then passed it on to Ulf. Ulf looked at the pencilled names and the brief note beneath each one.

  “Oscar Ström,” he read. “Father of Passivity William.”

  He looked up. “I take it that Passivity William is a cat.”

  Julia nodded. “He is. A very highly regarded sire. He swept the board in Copenhagen. They have a particularly good show over there.”

  Ulf read on. “Hates me,” the note continued.

  “This Oscar Ström,” he said. “Why does he hate you?”

  Julia’s reply came quickly. “Because I was the judge at a local show some years ago. I obviously didn’t enter any of my cats—judges can’t, you know—not in a show you’re judging.”

  “Of course not,” said Ulf. “And you marked him down?”

  “Yes,” said Julia. “He had one of his secondary cats on show. He really wasn’t very good. I gave him fourth place. Oscar was not pleased—not one little bit. If you’re the great Oscar Ström, you don’t get fourth place. You just don’t.”

  Ulf went on to the next name on the list. “Linda Pahl,” he read. “Also hates me.”

  “Why would that be?” asked Ulf. “Another judging issue?”

  “No,” said Julia. She hesitated. “It’s a personal matter, as it happens. My husband and Linda were close—in the past. She’s never forgiven me for marrying him.”

  Ulf nodded. “Jealousy?”

  “Yes. She never gave up. She’d love to get him—even now, she’d take him from me if she had the chance.”

  Ulf looked thoughtful. “How would damaging your reputation help her chances?”

  Julia shrugged. “Anything to destabilise our life would suit her. How do they put it—sow the seed of discord and…There’s something else that follows, but I’ve forgotten what it is.”

  Ulf moved to the third name. “Karen Olafsson,” he read out loud. “Drinks. Will do anything spiteful when she’s had a few. Ashamed of her cats.”

  “And they of her?” asked Anna.

  Julia looked puzzled.

  “Nothing,” said Anna.

  Ulf was silent. There were two suspects here, he thought. Karen, the inebriate, did not seem to have a motive, unless sheer mischievousness would count. He was intrigued, though, by the connection between Linda and Nils. In Ulf’s experience, sex lay at the bottom of so many issues: jealousy might play its role, but it was nothing when compared with the dark, anarchic power of sex. And when Julia left the room briefly to fetch coffee, he leaned over towards Anna and whispered: “Linda?”

  Anna nodded. “Ask to talk to Nils,” she said. “I’ll have coffee with Julia.”

  When Julia returned, Ulf made his request.

  “Of course,” said Julia. “Nils would love to meet you. His father served in the Malmö Police, you know. It was a long time ago, but Nils still knows one or two people there. He’d enjoy talking to
you.”

  Nils was working in one of the sheds, said Julia; Ulf was welcome to go out directly and introduce himself.

  Ulf left the two women and made his way out through the kitchen. On the other side of a cobble-stoned yard stood a large shed with an open door. The inside of the windowless shed looked gloomy, lit only by a couple of bare bulbs suspended from the ceiling.

  Nils heard Ulf coming and came to the door to greet him. “You’re the detective?” he said. “Julia said you were coming.”

  Ulf reached for his identity card, but Nils made it clear that he did not want to see it. “I can tell you’re the real thing,” he said. “No need to prove it.”

  Ulf laughed. “I’m that obvious?”

  Nils shook his head. “No, just to me, I suppose. My father, you see…”

  “Your wife said he was in the force.”

  “Yes. Malmö. You wouldn’t have met him, I imagine—he retired a long time ago. Twenty years, more or less. He was on the forensic side of things. He knew a lot about paint marks—that was his speciality. The police from all over the country consulted him.”

  “Paint tells us a lot,” said Ulf.

  Nils extended a hand. “Thank you for taking the time,” he said. “Julia has been very upset by this…” His expression showed his distaste. “…This unsavoury business. It makes a difference to her that you people are bothering to investigate.”

  “That’s our job,” said Ulf. “I’m from the Department of Sensitive Crimes, and that’s what we do. Unusual offences like this.”

  Nils pointed to two ancient dining-room chairs just inside the barn. “We can sit on those. They’re not exactly comfortable, but if you don’t mind.”

  “We put up with worse,” said Ulf.

  Once seated, Nils took out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to Ulf, who shook his head.

  “I smoke only two a day,” said Nils. “I know people don’t believe me, but it’s true. Next month I’m going down to one, and then, Deo volente, it’ll be none.”