‘Two things,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘First: modus operandi. Why such an unusual method of execution? Hanging someone upside down by a rope and pushing a long nail into their head, it’s not the usual.’
‘No,’ said Chavez. ‘It’s not usual.’
‘It suggests something really specific, doesn’t it? That there’s some kind of history. We’ll have to look everywhere we can think of and try to find similar cases. If we don’t turn up any leads, you can hang me up by the scruff of my neck.’
‘We don’t want to do that,’ said Hjelm. ‘But a bottle of whisky would do.’
‘I won’t say no to that,’ Kerstin replied tersely. ‘What kind?’
‘Cragganmore.’
‘OK. Second: the murder scene. Going by Andreas Rasmusson’s reaction, Södra Begravningsplatsen was also the murder scene; I don’t think there’s any doubt he witnessed a murder, nothing less. Sheinkman probably made his way to the scene himself. What was he doing there? Did he have any reason for visiting the cemetery? Was he visiting a grave? Was it purely coincidence that he was strung up right there? Which graves are nearby? Et cetera et cetera.’
‘Good,’ said Hjelm, writing on his sheet of paper. ‘Relatives, modus operandi check, brain surgeon’s verdict on the impact of the metal wire on the brain, skinhead witness, other witnesses, check of the murder scene. What else?’
‘Nothing else,’ Chavez said firmly. ‘Quadrant three: “Slagsta”. Go through the rest of the incoming and outgoing calls to the motel – that’s a whole load. Read through the forensic report on rooms 224, 225, 226 and 227. So far, not much has come up. Throwing money away, calling the technicians out. Must be female logic behind it.’
‘The vehicle,’ Kerstin said, ignoring him completely. ‘If something like a bus passed through little Slagsta at half three in the morning, it shouldn’t have gone unnoticed. I’ll put some uniforms on it.’
‘Great,’ Paul said. ‘Then we’ve got our phantom pimp, right?’
‘Sure, yeah,’ Kerstin replied. ‘The john, aka the manager Jörgen Nilsson, was in touch with a pimp back in November. You don’t want to know what I had to do to get that out of him.’
‘Oh?’ Jorge said, utterly ignored once again.
‘There’s an e-fit being put through the system. Are you writing, Paul?’
‘Non-stop. Phone call check, forensic technicians’ report, vehicle, phantom pimp.’
‘Do our eight runaways have their passports, by the way?’ Jorge asked.
‘No, they were in the manager’s office,’ Kerstin replied.
‘Last quadrant, then,’ said Jorge. ‘The incident in the metro station. Can we get any more out of – what’s his name? – Tamir?’
‘Adib Tamir,’ Paul replied. ‘Gunnar was looking into that and I think he’s squeezed him enough. The main point under “Odenplan metro station” has to be the mobile phone. Hopefully its owner can be identified and we can get a list of calls from it. It’s probably our biggest hope. And I’ve got to admit, I’ve been messing about with that phone – it’s a good old Siemens E10, by the way – wondering how you can handle a phone without leaving a single fingerprint on it.’
‘Then there’s the language expert,’ said Kerstin, ‘who has the dubious honour of discussing phonetics and Slavic languages with Gunnar, Viggo and a police assistant called Andersson.’
‘Do we have anything else?’ Paul asked, scribbling as though his life depended on it. ‘Phone, list of calls, language expert.’
‘I’m wondering what we can get out of our ninja feminist’s behaviour on the platform,’ Jorge Chavez said. ‘It all seems so neat. Bish, bosh and the people attacking her are gone. But then she leaves the phone behind. What happened? True, she was attacked by Hamid – he was waving a knife and everything – but still. Did she really have to carry him like a wheelbarrow across the platform and hold him out in front of the train? Wouldn’t it have been enough to give him another kick in the face? He must’ve been groggy already. What happened? Pure sadism?’
‘I actually think,’ Kerstin said, ‘that she was busy calculating. She was counting on the phone being smashed to pieces. It’s a miracle it wasn’t. According to the autopsy report, both arms went right under the train and were ripped clean off, bouncing along beneath the carriages. The fingers were like a shield for the phone, they stopped it from breaking. There’s not a scratch on it.’
‘Siemens quality,’ said Hjelm. ‘Just think of the ovens.’
‘What ovens?’
‘The crematorium ovens in the Nazi concentration camps. They were Siemens.’
There was a moment of silence. A ghost passed through the room. The ghost of Professor Emeritus Leonard Sheinkman. It was as though he wanted something.
They shuddered.
‘There’s one thing we’ve forgotten,’ Paul Hjelm said after a moment, glancing down at his extensive diagram.
‘What’s that then?’ two hopeful voices asked simultaneously.
‘Isn’t this Hultin’s job?’
14
IT WAS SUNDAY afternoon and three different cars were en route to three different addresses. They had drawn lots to decide which. ‘Channa Nordin-Sheinkman, Kungsholmen’ was written on the scrap of paper Chavez had picked; Holm’s read ‘David Sheinkman, Näsbypark’, and ‘Harald Sheinkman, Tyresö’ was printed on Hjelm’s. The three names belonged to the late professor’s three children. Given that he had been eighty-eight when he died, not arriving in Sweden before 1945 when he was thirty-three, that put the children around the fifty mark. As much as ten years older than Hjelm himself.
Only once he was on the way to Tyresö did he realise that the address to which he was heading – a street called Bofinksvägen in a place called Nytorp – was identical to the address listed for Leonard Sheinkman in the telephone directory.
The old man must have been living with his eldest son.
Paul Hjelm ploughed on through the Sunday traffic on Tyresövägen and felt a certain relief at not having to be the bearer of bad news; Sheinkman’s son could hardly have missed hearing about his father’s awful death by now – it had been all over the papers and television for the past twenty-four hours. Hjelm just hoped that someone from the local police had stopped by to break the news before that.
The sun was low in the sky, which was an unusually deep shade of blue. Not quite like when a sly thundercloud camouflages itself as clear blue sky and dumps its heavy artillery on astounded sun worshippers with a dark laugh; it was more like a blue film had been stretched over the firmament, to disguise the fact that the sky was no longer blue. There was a dead weight bearing down on the pretty spring landscape and the light seemed artificial; as though an opera set designer had tried to imitate nature.
Or maybe it was just because Paul Hjelm was filled with dread.
Dread about having to barge in to a house deep in mourning. Dread about having to put all the usual questions to a grieving son. Dread about being a blond, secularised Christian, raised in a sheltered environment. And – here came the real admission – dread about having to bring up the Holocaust and concentration camps and European anti-Semitism.
He was Swedish, after all, and Swedes did not like taboo subjects. Their armpits started sweating. Ideally, they avoided them, but if they absolutely had to broach them, they did so with a kind of remote reverence and a string of clichés about never allowing it to happen again. The Holocaust was an abstraction they liked to talk about from a pedestal, using big words. They didn’t like to tackle it properly. They hadn’t been a part of it, they could never understand it, they had nothing to do with it, everyone else could look after all that. Sweden’s lack of a sense of history and its pseudo-neutrality in an unholy alliance. Because they had been involved, to the highest degree. They did have something to do with it, to the highest degree. They could understand it, to the highest degree. They had to.