He did not know who had given him the mission. It had been communicated personally at an auto parts store in Uppsala, where Rönn was going to buy a car battery. Two strange men stopped him and told him what he had to deliver.
* * *
Sammy Nilsson was sitting alone in his office. He’d turned off the sound on his phone and announced that he did not want to be disturbed. Fatigue had come over him, the certainty and lightheartedness from the meeting had vanished. The fact was that he felt lousy. He held up one hand in front of him. It was still motionless, even though he felt shaky. And alone. It was a strange feeling, but he understood that it was a reaction to everything that had happened the past few days, both personally and at work. He was alone.
He gasped for breath, collected himself, and turned back on the recording of the interview with Rönn. He had followed it in real time, but wanted to see it again. Stolpe led the questioning. Nisse Hjelm from the intelligence service was by Stolpe’s side, likewise a colleague from Stockholm, Erik Miid. Rönn had refused any assistance from an attorney. He was wearing prison clothing, had eaten lunch, and looked more or less stable compared with his early morning appearance.
“I must have been shadowed,” he said.
“You had never met the two men before?”
“No, never.”
“Why didn’t you come to us, why did you carry out the theft?” was Inspector Stolpe’s obvious follow-up question.
“They threatened me,” said Rönn. “They said they would burn down the house.”
“Your house in Rasbo?”
“The whole farm.”
“How did they know there were explosives at your workplace?”
“I don’t know.”
Hjelm leaned forward.
“Isn’t it the case that you may have met those two before? I mean at one of those gatherings you’ve attended.”
“What do you mean by gatherings?”
Hjelm glanced at his notes. “In October last year one was held in Tierp where you and thirteen others were present. Nine of them are known to us, all convicted of various offenses and crimes, everything from illegal driving and narcotics crimes to felony assault. Were those two men perhaps at that meeting?”
“No.”
“What was the Tierp meeting about?”
“I don’t remember.”
“In 2014 you were on a municipal list for the Sweden Democrats, but not before the election this fall. What has changed, don’t you like them any longer?”
“I don’t have time for such things.”
“It’s said that the gathering in Tierp was about a march, a kind of national parade that would pass through north Uppland.”
“I know nothing about that.”
“There was no march, instead it became a bomb at a square,” said Stolpe, who visibly wanted to retake the initiative. From what Sammy had understood he was not terribly interested in the political background, he wanted to see the theft and the bomb as just another crime.
“I don’t know anything,” said Rönn.
“Have you ever been in Hökarängen?” Miid asked.
“No.”
“Never visited Peppartorget?”
Rönn looked directly into the camera but his gaze was neutral, as if he didn’t really understand what had happened, and what was happening. It was clear that beyond the shock and confusion Rönn understood, he was no numbskull, but nonetheless Sammy felt a growing discomfort. Three against one in the interview room did not feel just.
“No.”
It was a ridiculous feeling, he understood that. Rönn was an accessory to a massacre, nothing less, there was no room for the slightest bit of sympathy. He turned off the recording when a cautious knock interrupted his train of thought. It was Nils Stolpe. He looked worn out.
“That Erland Edman has been swallowed up by the earth. According to his wife he’s working for a scaffolder in Landskrona, but when I checked with his buddy down there he was completely puzzled. He hadn’t heard from Edman for a couple of months.”
“Brother Rönn, then?” Sammy asked.
“He’s said to be in Thailand.”
“Why am I not a bit surprised? Unemployed, he said, but can afford to travel abroad.”
“According to the travel documents we found on his kitchen table he should be at a hotel in Phuket. We have colleagues on the scene as you know, they can question him and make an assessment.”
“Bring him home,” said Sammy. “Scare the shit out of the little Nazi.”
“I have nothing against that,” said Stolpe.
“Has Rönn’s phone given us anything?”
“Not a bit. Nothing has been saved since last winter and the recent calls are reasonably uninteresting. They have a connection to work, to Uppsala University Hospital, his mother is apparently there, and to other relatives. He doesn’t seem to have much of a social life.”
“Maybe he has a concealed prepaid phone.”
“My thought too,” said Stolpe, who unexpectedly sat down in the visitor’s chair. It creaked under his weight.
“What do you think?”
“The colleagues in Stockholm are checking surveillance cameras. Maybe we can produce something there.”
“Around the square?”
“In part, but also stores, subway, and so on.”
“Can it be the case as Rönn says, that he turned over the dynamite and then didn’t stick around any longer, didn’t know what would happen?”
Stolpe sighed.
“It’s not a hundred percent certain that the connection exists, I mean between Rönn and Hökarängen. Or what? We don’t know.”
“The white supremacy movement,” said Stolpe. “That’s where we’re moving, and it’s where he has been involved. He must have understood.”
“But we have nothing on Rönn other than the theft in Almunge. He has confessed and he’ll be convicted, of course, but he continues to flatly deny everything, so we have nothing.”
“The connection exists and we’ll find it,” said Stolpe, but did not sound especially convinced.
“It’s crucial to find Erland Edman.”
Stolpe sighed again.
“Go home,” said Sammy.
“You know that’s not possible.”
Sammy smiled. He felt a splash of collegiality, even warmth, an increasingly rare sensation.
“We can celebrate later, have a beer.”
Stolpe looked up; the surprise in his eyes was impossible to miss.
“Maybe so,” he said and hauled himself out of the chair. “And the smithy fire?”
“We’ll solve that,” said Sammy.
“How are things with Ms. Lindell?”
“I’ve never seen her so content.” It gave him a rare delight to express those words to a colleague, one who’d seen Ann in other forms.
“She’s helping you, huh? A little private detective work. I’ve heard the talk.”
“She lives in the middle of the village, so of course she’s listening,” said Sammy.
“The new guy then, Bodin?”
“An annoying dialect, but he seems good.”
“How long have you been a policeman?”
“Twenty-four years,” Sammy replied.
“You didn’t need to count,” Stolpe observed, nodded, and left the room.
Thirty-Seven
Erland Edman wiped the sweat from his forehead. His cold would not go away. Eight floors. Five left to go. In his hand he had a sports bag that threatened to fall apart, no doubt some damned Chinese who cut corners, he thought, wrapping the handle around his left hand. He held his right hand compulsively around the railing, more or less dragging himself upward, but stopped again after three floors. Two doors, it said Suarez on one mail slot, Lee on the other. He cleared his throat and fired off a thick wad of spit that ended up on the wall in between. Someone had scribbled Fack jo there.
Edman trudged on. The sweat felt like a cold carpet against his back. This isn’t real, h
e thought, and for a microsecond he saw himself as the striving little ant he was. He experienced no triumph when he reached the eighth and final floor, only sheer exhaustion, perhaps a little fear too. A handwritten piece of paper read K. Olsson. Edman exhaled, tried to get his breathing back to a more normal rhythm, and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket. He knew that he looked terrible, but there wasn’t much to do about that. The only thing that would help was a few days in peace and quiet, preferably in a bed.
He poked up the paper. Under K. Olsson it said Sven-Olof Granat on a brass plate. The doorbell didn’t seem to work, so he knocked carefully. The door was opened by a man that Edman had never seen before.
“Erland’s my name.”
“Let the piece of shit in!” he heard someone shout. The voice was not to be mistaken, it was Frank Give.
He was reclining on a dark brown sofa, the only comfortable piece of furniture in the room. There were also a half dozen plastic chairs, a table, and a TV placed on an old beer case. The TV was on; there was a special news broadcast. The crime in Hökarängen had messed up the program schedule.
“My God how they talk, they don’t know shit,” Give said and laughed. He looked up and inspected Edman. “Did you swim here?”
“The flu,” said Edman, clearing his throat. “The elevator isn’t working.”
“It’s those goddam gypsy kids. They grill in the elevator.”
Edman closed the door behind him. “What the hell is it?”
“We have to talk.”
Give only sneered in response, but eased up into a sitting position. “Would you like a beer?”
“I’m taking aspirin. What about that kid who was killed too?”
“I knew it! I knew you’d bring that up!”
“It was a little boy.”
Give leaned forward and took a can of beer out of a cooler.
“That’s just because you have one yourself, but there will be those kinds of losses.”
“He was a Swedish boy. His name was Jonathan.”
“I damn well don’t want to know what his name was. I don’t give a damn. A gang of Abdullahs and Alis died too, that’s more important. Don’t you understand, you see!” He made a motion with his hand. “We’ve made history!”
Edman glanced at the TV. Once again the destruction at Peppartorget in Hökarängen was shown, and how people flooded the square with flowers and lit candles. He had seen it any number of times. The sound was fortunately lowered to a minimum.
“He was riding his bike on the square.”
“We’ll do as we’ve said, if you had the idea now that we should cancel.”
Edman crossed the room and sank down on one of the chairs. “I’ll probably have a beer,” he said. Give fished up a can and tossed it to him with a grin. “Smart,” Edman said tiredly, setting the beer on the table so that the carbonation would settle down.
“Do you think Björn will talk?”
“Never,” Give affirmed. “We decided that if he got caught, he would admit that he swiped the goods and then keep his mouth shut.”
“He’s going to be in prison for a few years.”
“He knows that. He’ll go in for theft, no more than that. He has himself to blame. He could have done as we said.”
“He could have left with his brother, but he didn’t get away.”
“Amateur,” said Give.
He took a sip, observing Edman.
“His life is destroyed. His mother is dying, how nice is that for her, do you think?” said Edman. He carefully opened the beer. The sweat had subsided, but despite the medicine the oppressive feeling in his head and the aches in his muscles had not been relieved.
“Listen! Don’t sit there and regret everything! You knew like everyone else what would happen, so don’t come now and complain.”
“Does your lady know about—?”
“Lena doesn’t know a thing, and damn you if you say a single word.”
Edman shook his head. “Why should I do that? Killing a seven-year-old is nothing to be proud of.”
Frank Give was not a powerful man, but when he stood there was something alarming about him, as if he could detonate at any moment. Edman knew that, he’d seen it. Give was a field full of undetonated mines, where no one could walk safely. The fragment injuries could be extensive in an explosion.
“It’s just that she’s anxious by nature. She takes it all in, feels so strongly,” said Give, unexpectedly conciliatory, and sank back down on the sofa. He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths, mumbled something while he fumbled for a fresh beer. That didn’t make Edman less nervous, but he hoped that it was all a part of some kind of therapy. Give had gone to a neurologist, that was known in a smaller circle of his acquaintances, even if he himself denied it.
“So it’ll be Alby on Saturday?”
“You bet!”
Edman was actually feeling ill. Maybe he had to vomit. He followed what was happening on the TV. People were asked if they were afraid. An elderly man in Skarpnäck was quivering with rage, he wished the terrorists a painful death. People screamed their agreement in the background. The reporter looked a bit terrified. Then came representatives of various religions, the Catholic bishop, likewise an imam, a minister from the Church of Sweden, and a representative from the Jewish congregation in Stockholm. They were obviously on the same page.
“All four of them have beards,” Give snorted from the sofa. He seemed to be getting more and more drunk.
How can I block him? thought Edman. But he knew that the only person who had any power over Give was his Lena.
“Jesus H. Christ, the way they babble. But that’s good, let them carry on about humanity and that kind of shit, so the Swedish people know what traitors they are.”
Edman stood up and went over to the window. The view was magnificent. He stood like that for several minutes, counting lighted windows on the buildings right across the courtyard, following the lights of airplanes across the dark sky, counting the sequence on the blinking radio masts, but nothing could push away the image of Jonathan’s crumpled bicycle on Peppartorget in Hökarängen. There was no light in the world that could brighten the world.
He thought about Li’l Erland, how he would remember his father. What made him better than those crazy ISIS fighters with their sabers? I have to talk with Lena, he thought. She must get Frankenstein to stop.
“Who was it who answered the door?”
“Olsson,” said Frank.
“Does he know about…?”
“He knows.”
“How many know?”
Frank turned his head. He looked at Erland Edman and smiled. “Are you starting to get nervous?”
“No, I just want to know how many there are who can snitch.”
“Olsson, you, me, and Nyström, you’ve met him. And then Rönn, of course.”
Jimmy Nyström was the one who had constructed the bomb. After two tours of duty in Afghanistan, he was good at that sort of thing. A warrior, Frank had called him, someone who liked to kill Islamists.
“Five,” said Edman, “one of whom is behind bars.” But he suspected that Björn Rönn had talked with his little brother. They were close.
“But there are many who back us up. Thousands.”
“I need more ammo,” said Edman. “I’ve been shooting a bit,” he continued, when he saw Give’s surprised expression. “And you know that I don’t like pistols all that much. Maybe I need something more powerful.”
“Not everyone can run around with automatic weapons, but Olsson takes care of all that,” Give said at last.
“Good,” said Edman, trying to look content.
“But don’t shoot a cop for God’s sake!”
Edman finished the last of the beer. “Why should I do that?”
“Because you’ve always hated cops, right?” Give sneered. Edman could see now that he was drunk, perhaps under the influence of something else too.
“I should go home and go to be
d,” he said, but the mere thought of making his way down the stairs, out onto the street, up to the car, and then the long trip home, made him sink down on the chair again. Or “home”? He couldn’t drive to Uppsala. He had to hunker down in a dilapidated forest cabin outside Gimo. Rönn had passably equipped the place, and now it functioned as a retreat site for the band of warriors.
“Olsson!” The door opened immediately, as if he’d been standing at the ready. “Arrange an AK-5 for Erland.”
Olsson observed him with eyes that sat very close together, which gave a slightly stupid impression, even more so as he was slightly cross-eyed. He did not say anything, but Edman understood from his expression that he thought it was a bad idea. Is he mute? he thought. The discomfort took a new form. Olsson was a soldier, one of Give’s men. There were a few that Edman had met and had a hard time with, but he knew that he just had to go along with it. Olsson, however, seemed more than allowably disturbed.
Olsson nodded at last. “Rimbo,” said Give. Edman knew where he would find the carbine. They had a dozen places, caches, where weapons and ammunition but also information and instructions could be set out and picked up. “Tomorrow, eleven o’clock at the earliest.” He liked his role as commander, you could hear it.
Edman stood up. He had nothing more to say. There was no point in nagging Give about the explosion in Alby. If he had decided, he was impossible to budge. Unless Lena could get him to change his mind. That was the last chance.
He left the apartment.
Thirty-Eight
The message was written, but not sent. Her phone felt warm and sticky, as if the words generated heat. Ann stared at the display again. She wanted to reword the short sentence, but it couldn’t be expressed in too many different ways, unless she wanted to be false, keep using euphemisms.
She stood up, indecisively set the phone on the kitchen table, opened the pantry door but immediately shut it again, went up to the window. Shouldn’t they be peeping up soon, the shoots from the potatoes? “A light soil,” she said, echoing Edvard’s description.
The Night of the Fire Page 25