‘Why?’ Andersson asked, confused.
‘Because that was a message to the murderer,’ Gunnar Nyberg said quietly.
9
THEY SEEMED LIKE nothing more than arbitrary clusters of letters. Letters thrown together at random. And the three offerings he had weren’t especially alike.
Epivu, Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin thought. Was that just another arbitrary cluster of letters?
He was sitting in his plain, anonymous office as the rain lashed down outside, peering at three pieces of paper in the uninspiring, flickering glow of a dying strip lamp. It was half past seven, it was Friday evening, and as far as he could tell, he was all alone in the A-Unit’s corridor in the police station on Polhemsgatan.
It had to be a Slavic language. Despite the differences between the three versions hastily scribbled down and despite the peculiar spelling, Hultin thought that the words looked Russian. Nyberg and Norlander had thought so too. Which other Slavic languages were there, other than Russian? Czech, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian. Was Serbo-Croatian still a language? Or was there Serbian and Croatian now? He wasn’t sure.
They would have to call in a language expert. Present them with the unenviable task of working it out.
Still, it had been unexpectedly quick thinking from Gunnar Nyberg. He had gone from strength to strength as a detective, ever since Hultin had first brought the A-Unit together to solve the case of the Power Killer God knows how many years ago. From sluggish grizzly bear on a manhunt in the underworld, to modern, clear-thinking, newly slender online policeman.
Hultin picked up another piece of paper. Notes from the interview with Adib Tamir. He skim-read. Lone, good-looking woman of medium height; long black hair; red leather jacket; tight black trousers; black trainers. There had been a few other minor characters with them. Nameless wannabes. They had run off. First, she took down the knife-wielding Hamid with a kick. A kick to the face. Then she threw Adib, also armed with a knife, headfirst into a bench. He went out like a light and when he woke up, there were people screaming all around him. He saw Hamid’s legs and his guts spilling onto the platform a few metres away and passed out again. When he woke again, the platform had been empty, save for a group of pigs. That was all. He had no idea who the small fry were. Hangers-on. There were always some. Hamid and Adib were the pros. Sure, he could try to help out with a sketch, but he had hardly seen her. She’d had her back to him until she turned round and broke the unbreakable in just a few seconds.
Closing words: ‘She must’ve been a secret agent or something.’
Well, Adib, Hultin thought. Who knows? She had managed to grab an armed Hamid by the legs, push him like a wheelbarrow across the platform and hold half his body out over the tracks, just as the train was approaching. Then she had disappeared without a trace. Red leather jacket and all.
Though her mobile phone had still been in Hamid’s hand. A real KGB agent would never have made a mistake like that.
Weren’t the events of the past few days starting to draw closer to one another? Wasn’t some kind of link starting to emerge?
Adib Tamir had been made to look at photographs of the eight women who had disappeared from the refugee centre, just in case: Galina Stenina, Valentina Dontsjenko, Lina Kostenko, Stefka Dafovska, Mariya Bagrjana, Natalja Vaganova, Tatjana Skoblikova and Svetlana Petruseva. He had shaken his head.
‘No,’ he had said. ‘No, not at all.’
‘Not at all’? What did that mean? Hultin spread out the eight passport photos on the desk in front of him and examined each of them in turn. Ah, he admitted. He understood exactly what Adib’s ‘not at all’ had meant. These women looked browbeaten. Their eyes were dull. There was no life in them. Not one of them was a day over twenty-five, but each of them looked much older. Life had been hard on them and it showed. Like all the other Eastern European working girls flooding into Sweden and elsewhere in Western Europe, they had probably been prostitutes since their teens. An awful tidal wave of debasement was washing over the Continent and the Western world was playing an active part in the business.
For a brief moment, Jan-Olov Hultin felt ill. Because of his fellow men. Because of where he had been born. Because of his sheltered, easy life.
He got back to work. According to the technicians, it would be possible to trace the mobile phone contract. They had the SIM card. It wasn’t Swedish, but that shouldn’t be any real hindrance. Moving forward, they should be able to get hold of a comprehensive list of all calls, both received and made.
He was looking forward to that.
Until then, he would just keep working on the puzzle. They had the pieces, but the question was whether they belonged together.
A lot had happened in just over twenty-four hours. But that said, many crimes were committed across the country in any period of just over twenty-four hours. It was by no means certain that the three incidents had even the slightest connection to one another.
Strictly speaking, they weren’t even certain that a single crime had been committed. The women might simply have disappeared from their motel in Slagsta; he would probably have done the same if he was being held in custody there. The man from Skansen might just have been running from his own drug-fuelled demons; even the newly discovered hole in the fence might be entirely unrelated. And the metro incident might have been nothing more than self-defence.
And even if they were crimes, the incidents didn’t necessarily have anything at all to do with one another.
But, as we know, belief can move mountains.
And so Jan-Olov Hultin kept working on the puzzle.
First and foremost: why did it fit together? The A-Unit’s collective experience and wisdom said – as good as unanimously – that that was the case.
It was true that Kerstin was teasing Paul a little via Jorge, but that was part of some private game Hultin didn’t want to know about. He lacked the necessary curiosity. He could feel wonder, a thirst for knowledge – but not curiosity. As long as their private lives didn’t encroach onto their work, he would leave them be. After all, he had a newly married couple in the team now, and that worked much better than people generally made out. Hultin wasn’t really one for implementing directives or strict regulations; Mörner could worry about that. None of them cared, in any case.
He started over: why did it fit together? Because the entire thing stank of international criminality – Hamid and Adib were the closest to something Swedish they had. Because it had all taken place in such quick succession – a day and a half. Because nothing about it was normal – wolverine murder, missing prostitutes, violent women.
On Wednesday 3 May, at quarter past ten in the evening, a man who, in all probability, was a relatively high-level international criminal, had been chased through the wolf enclosure in Skansen; the value of his gold chain had been estimated at around three hundred thousand kronor.
The fact that his pursuers had clipped the fence to give themselves a considerably shorter route alongside the wolf pen suggested meticulous planning: they had driven him into the wolves; they were counting on him climbing the fence and getting out on the other side of the enclosure. They had found a way to be waiting for him up there. So in other words, they were probably aiming for the wolverines. From what Hultin could tell, the whole thing had been carefully planned – and the victim had acted just as they had hoped. The question was whether they were also counting on the wolverines getting such a kick from his drug-addled blood. If that was the case, it was utterly sophisticated.