‘Could you get up?’
‘If you tell me what you’re working on.’
‘I can’t until you get up.’
They had, in other words, reached a deadlock. A clinch. An unprecedented power struggle playing out between the room’s two males. Kerstin Holm sighed deeply. Eventually Chavez shifted slightly so that Hjelm could pull the paper out from beneath him.
‘Draw,’ Chavez said, jumping down from the table, grabbing the spare chair and sitting down.
‘I suppose so,’ said Hjelm, smoothing the crumpled sheet of paper. He pointed at the big plus sign and continued: ‘A little system of coordinates for the past couple of days. We asked ourselves if there was anything concrete linking the top part with the bottom.’
Chavez pored over the paper. At the top, ‘Skansen’ and ‘Skogskyrkogården’. At the bottom, ‘Slagsta’ and ‘Odenplan metro station’. Between ‘Skansen’ and ‘Skogskyrkogården’, the word ‘rope’ had been written.
‘So the rope was the same?’ Chavez asked. ‘I’ve been looking into it. The combination of colours, red and purple, seems to be quite unusual. But otherwise it seems to be a perfectly normal polypropylene rope, the kind you can buy anywhere. I’ve been in touch with a couple of manufacturers in Sweden and abroad and they said they’d send some samples over. Those should be coming this week.’
‘Eastern Europe?’ Hjelm asked.
‘That too, yeah. Russia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and a couple of others.’
‘Good,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Then there’s the link between the two squares below, “Slagsta” and “Odenplan metro station”. The fact that someone in one of the rooms in the motel in Slagsta made calls to and received them from the ninja feminist from the metro platform. The link goes both ways, in other words. It was room 225, where the Ukrainians Galina Stenina and Lina Kostenko were staying.’
‘Ninja feminist?’ Hjelm asked.
‘It was a popular term a few years back. Nothing you blokes would understand.’
‘Nina Björk,’ Chavez said nonchalantly. ‘About the construction of femininity. She objects to certain strands of feminism – to difference feminism, those people who think there’s a kind of innate maternity in women or ninja feminists who take man’s weapons and turn them against him.’
Both Hjelm and Holm stared at him in surprise.
‘Clearly it’s not just swimming you’ve taken up,’ Hjelm noted.
‘It’s more of an all-round workout,’ Chavez said. ‘All the muscle groups.’
‘Can we try to concentrate now?’ Kerstin Holm said, turning man’s weapons against him. ‘Some rational thinking please, guys. This is interesting. The last conversation between them came from our ninja feminist, who called Galina Stenina and Lina Kostenko in Slagsta at 22.54 on Wednesday evening. As you might remember, the bullet hit ten-year-old Lisa Altbratt in the arm at 22.14 that same night. It might not be a coincidence.’
‘Or maybe it is,’ Paul Hjelm said reluctantly.
‘Think about it,’ Kerstin continued. ‘Our eight women in the refugee centre had been uneasy for a few weeks. Something happened. Then the first call from the ninja feminist to room 225 – that’s Galina Stenina and Lina Kostenko’s room – was made on the twenty-ninth of April, just about a week before they disappeared. We know she speaks some kind of Slavic language, judging from what Gunnar and Viggo heard on the phone. They were in contact back and forth for five days after that, nine calls in total. The last call was made to Slagsta just before eleven on Wednesday night; it’s the very last registered call. After that, they must’ve discussed it among themselves in rooms 224, 225, 226 and 227 until at least half two in the morning. Then the women disappeared. But a couple of neighbours heard some kind of loud engine sometime between half three and four in the morning. The bin lorry or a bus that’d lost its way, they thought.’
Jorge nodded enthusiastically. ‘That’s the link then,’ he exclaimed.
Paul nodded too. Then he said: ‘Can we work out where our ninja feminist was ringing from? Was it always from Sweden?’
Kerstin leafed through her papers.
‘What I’m reading comes from the four contracts in Slagsta. The list from Telia which Brunte faxed to Jan-Olov on Friday night. You can’t tell where the calls were coming from using this, no – not whether she dialled a country code or anything like that. They’re working on getting a list of calls from the mobile phone. I think it’s possible to get that from the SIM card.’
‘So what does that mean for the link?’ Paul Hjelm asked. ‘That it was the ninja feminist who threw our man to the wolverines?’
‘Could see it that way,’ Kerstin Holm replied.
‘Fine, so there are links in different directions,’ Jorge Chavez said, ‘but the connection to an eighty-eight-year-old professor emeritus, and one who survived Buchenwald at that – it was there, right? – how the hell does that fit?’
‘Buchenwald,’ Hjelm nodded. ‘Yeah, Kerstin, what’s the link there?’
‘It ruins the whole thing,’ Holm said, throwing her pen at the wall.
‘Don’t pick up bad habits like that,’ Chavez said sternly.
‘Who is she then?’ Hjelm asked abruptly. ‘If we’re assuming what we’ve said is right – who is she, the ninja feminist? And what does she have to do with eight prostitutes? Is she busy setting up some kind of mega-brothel somewhere behind the former Iron Curtain?’
‘Of course,’ Kerstin Holm said sourly. ‘An anti-Semitic mega-brothel with a sideline in wolverines, right in the centre of Moscow. It goes without saying.’
‘Don’t get sarcastic on us now,’ Chavez said, feeling like a bachelor again. ‘Let’s save that for later. Should we try linking everything up before we go to the Sheinkman children? Three of them, aren’t there?’
‘Three,’ Hjelm nodded.
‘Seems like a coincidence, one Sheinkman for each of us. Let’s look at each part of your square first. Quadrants, I think they’re called. Everything that needs to be done and everything we’re still waiting for. Quadrant one: “Skansen”. Left to do: identification. We’re waiting for a response from Interpol about the fingerprints. Should come soon. Our man’s in a crime database somewhere, I’d bet my neck on it. The serial number from the silenced Luger has been sent to Interpol as well. We’re also waiting for a response on that. What else?’
‘The metal wire,’ Hjelm said. ‘The technicians collected half a ton of rubbish from the wolverine enclosure. It’s been sent to the national forensic lab. Whoever finishes with their Sheinkman kid first can head over there. Maybe they’ve already found a sharp, rigid metal wire and just haven’t linked it to the wolverine man.’
‘Under way with the rope, like I said,’ Chavez added.
‘And then there’s this “Epivu”,’ said Holm.
‘Oh God, yeah,’ Hjelm said. ‘That word’s been bothering me for a few nights now. I’m getting absolutely nowhere with it.’
‘Summary,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Fingerprints, pistol, metal wire, rope, “Epivu”. We’re waiting for answers on all of them apart from the last one. We’ll have to find an answer to that ourselves. Write, Paul.’
Paul wrote.
‘Quadrant two,’ Chavez said. ‘The empty one. “Skogskyrkogården”. Slightly inaccurate, since it should really be “Södra Begravningsplatsen”, but we’ll let that slide. Conversations with his relatives are about to take place. What else?’
Hjelm took over. ‘I guess the broken gravestones will be solved just as soon as Andreas Rasmusson starts talking. They probably don’t have a thing to do with the case. A gang of skinheads probably just happened to be up to their repulsive business when an even more repulsive event came their way. Rasmusson’s fear is probably the result of him witnessing something more awful than even he could’ve imagined.’