Paul Hjelm glanced at Kerstin Holm. He didn’t feel well. She, on the other hand, seemed completely unaffected by the difficult circumstances and the ungodly hour and the previous day’s activities. How could she be so unaffected?
Kerstin Holm felt like she was about to throw up. She stood up and said, with a harsh but somewhat stifled voice: ‘Think about what I just said for a few minutes.’
And with that, she was gone.
Aha, Hjelm thought. New interrogation technique. Nice.
He glanced at Andreas Rasmusson. In a couple of years, he would probably have left the skinhead life behind him and become an ordinary member of society. He would distance himself from his earlier life but never quite leave the ideas behind. He would say one thing and think another. That was an explosive kind of existence. Sooner or later, it would all blow up in his face.
For a moment, Paul Hjelm thought about the State of Affairs. The Swedish State of Affairs. He wasn’t quite sure he understood it. The market was king, that much was clear. Share worth had replaced human worth. And it wasn’t so much a question of what that meant for the present day, since that was quite obvious: economic redistribution from the poor to the rich. It was money that earned money now, not work, and that money had to have originally come from somewhere.
Talk of ordinary people being free to buy shares was a weak alibi for being able to get on with the real business: in order for money to make money, it needed to be big money. But, of course, ordinary people didn’t have big money. It was that simple. Ordinary people could earn thousands on the market, but it didn’t mean a thing – except for in the public’s view of the market. It was simply a matter of marketing. Playing the markets was just like playing Bingolotto. If you were lucky, you could earn a bit of money, and there was no problem at all with that. The marketing had succeeded. Virtually free of charge.
No, the question was what it meant in the long term. How would this unprecedented, general obsession with money change people?
Paul thought he knew. A fundamental change was under way. He had come across it so often at work. All forms of democracy and humanity were built on the ability to change places with the person you were talking to. That was all. Actually being able to see yourself in the other person’s shoes, to take on their collective experiences. Only when that occurred did you have two human beings really facing one another. And what he had seen over the past few years was that this basic, simple ability was starting to vanish. A screen of some kind had appeared between people, and they had started regarding one another as objects. Investment objects. What kind of return will my conversation with this person bring me?
There was no world outside of economics. And without that free zone, the coast was clear to treat people however you wanted. The number of people without a conscience was growing and growing. That was what Hjelm thought he had noticed, anyway.
Though on the other hand, there were lots of things he thought he had noticed.
Kerstin Holm was staring at him from above.
‘Knock knock,’ she said. ‘Anyone in?’
‘Humans aren’t the masters in their own house,’ Hjelm said, pulling himself together.
Her gaze lingered for a few seconds before she turned to the eighteen-year-old skinhead and said: ‘So, Andreas, what’ve you decided?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Andreas Rasmusson said, his face pallid.
Pallid, Hjelm thought. Where did these strange words come from?
‘OK,’ Kerstin said, straightening her papers. ‘We’ll go to the prosecutor and have you put in remand, then. It’ll be court after that, years in prison with all those ruthless immigrant gangs – you can look forward to life as an old jailbird.’
She left the interrogation room, taking the papers with her.
Paul stared at the door for a moment. Then he got up and followed her out. He went into the room behind the two-way mirror and saw Andreas Rasmusson blinking confusedly where he sat. He had expected to find Kerstin there, but she was conspicuous in her absence. He stood there for a while, watching the skinhead. Like vague outlines in a sea of fire, the old man’s upside-down figure came back to him. The grey strands of hair hanging down towards the broken gravestone.
He really didn’t feel well.
Kerstin came in and stood next to him. She smelled… awful. He turned round in surprise.
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Have you been sick?’
‘Why else do you think I’ve been running in and out like an idiot all morning?’ she asked, her eyes on the mirror. ‘I had actually been planning on having the day off today. You don’t smell so great either,’ she added, turning towards him.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Probably not.’
‘Did he react?’ she asked.
‘He just looks terrified.’
‘New try?’
‘I think so.’
They returned. Andreas Rasmusson looked up at them without any noticeable reaction.
‘Your retorts are normally more caustic,’ Kerstin Holm said. ‘According to your file, you’ve been called in for interrogation fourteen times and you’ve always put up some kind of a fight. Why are you so quiet today? Is it because it’s Sunday? The Christian Sabbath?’
He looked at her without really seeing her.
Paul Hjelm said: ‘According to the police in Central Station, you were practically mad with fear when they brought you in. What did you see?’
‘I want a lawyer,’ said Andreas Rasmusson.
Sunday 7 May was a peculiar day. Something that might have been called passive chaos was reigning in the corridors of the A-Unit. On the one hand, they had plenty of leads to be chasing up, from plenty of different directions; on the other hand, they had nothing concrete to grab hold of. It was Sunday, after all. The Christian Sabbath.
Waldemar Mörner, division head for the National Police Board and official boss of CID’s Special Unit for Violent Crimes of an International Nature, had lost the plot. Since this was part of everyday life rather than some special weekend event, he had been running around the department without anyone taking the slightest bit of notice of him. He opened the door to Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin’s office and pointed at the clock.
‘Press conference in fifteen, J-O. Top banana.’
And with that, he closed the door again.
Jorge Chavez and Sara Svenhagen, who had just been brought up to date on the case after having been unreachable all morning, paused at his expression. Top banana? What wisdom lay behind those particular words?
With a slight grimace, Hultin said: ‘He was actually a candidate for the Nobel Prize.’
Two seconds later, the door flew open and Mörner’s thick, blond hair – which everyone assumed to be a toupee – entered the room again. Thoroughly flustered, its owner snorted: ‘He was actually a candidate for the Nobel Prize.’
Sara and Jorge stared at Hultin, who simply shrugged.
Waldemar Mörner continued on his way down the corridor. There wasn’t much time now. He opened yet another door and peered in at two stout middle-aged men, throwing balls of crumpled paper into a waste-paper basket.
‘What’re you doing here?’ he exclaimed in confusion.
‘This is our room,’ Gunnar Nyberg replied.
‘We’ve been called in on a Sunday,’ said Viggo Norlander.
And so they had. The entire A-Unit had been called in. Once there, however, there was little for them to do. It wouldn’t have been unjust to call the decision to bring them in – one which had been made by Waldemar Mörner – hasty.
‘Where’s Holm?’ he bawled, the collective wonder of the universe behind him.