‘Channa, the middle child, she’s the one who rebelled. She was active in the left-wing movement in the seventies; she’s teaching in a school of social studies now. And then me, the eldest son, I obediently went down the medicine route but then refused to specialise in anything other than general medicine. He took it hard to begin with; he’d seen me as the chosen one. And when I started working in the poorer suburbs, in Tensta and Rinkeby, he just shook his head. But eventually, I think he found a certain respect for what I was doing.
‘He wasn’t an impossible person. When I came up against the wall, he was a real rock. When the whole world seemed to be falling apart, he was my anchor point. Our relationship was really good back then. He’d just retired and was full of life, and he’d finally managed to pull himself back together after Mum’s death. He was a man who’d had a completely different life once, and we never made it into that life – not even Mum.’
Hjelm nodded and held out his hand.
‘Thanks very much, Harald,’ he said. ‘We’ll be in touch.’
‘I enjoyed our chat, Paul,’ Sheinkman said.
‘I did too.’
On his way out, Hjelm said goodbye to the daughter. He found himself sitting, for a while, in his old Audi. He leafed through the yellow pages. Text which had been written inside a concentration camp, in the terrible Buchenwald. Leonard Sheinkman, the poet from Berlin, had somehow got hold of paper and a pencil and managed to keep it all hidden from the guards. It was a remarkable achievement.
He turned the ignition, left Bofinksvägen and drove out onto Breviksvägen. The sky was still clear and blue, but it was as though the film had been pierced and wiped away – and the sky was actually blue behind it. The weight which had been pressing down on the landscape had been evened out. Nature was peaceful and beautifully springlike.
Summer would come once more this year, in spite of everything.
His mobile phone rang. Jorge Chavez said: ‘Yup.’
He said no more, but Paul Hjelm immediately understood.
‘They found it?’ he asked.
‘The technicians managed to gather an unbelievable amount of stuff from the wolverine enclosure, I have to say. Everything from pieces of bread – as though the things were ducks – to rat traps. They found two rat traps in there. One of them was still set.’
‘It’s a new pastime. Tormenting animals. Horses are regularly abused in our open countryside.’
‘Plus eight beer cans. The long, sharp wire was inside one of the cans. A drug-addled wolverine must’ve gobbled down the skull, found the wire in its mouth like a fishbone and somehow spat it out into a beer can.’
‘The Lord works in mysterious ways,’ Paul Hjelm said, heading home.
Home to the police station.
15
AT HALF EIGHT in the morning on Monday 8 May, a miracle occurred in the police station in Kungsholmen, Stockholm. For the first time in the history of the world, the sun was shining in the Tactical Command Centre.
One by one, the members of the A-Unit entered the gloomy lecture theatre; one by one, they paused at the sight of the little patch of sunlight just inside the doorway. They crept reverently past it and headed for their seats, further inside the room. When the last of them arrived and closed the door, the little patch of sun disappeared. Viggo Norlander opened the door and just like that, it came darting back.
The people gathered in the Tactical Command Centre were detectives, not mystics. A cause needed to be ascertained and a miracle shattered. Joint efforts deduced that the little pool of sunshine had been made possible by five factors. First, the fact that the sun was actually shining outside. Second, that it was shining in through the window of the ladies’ toilet. Third, that the door of the ladies’ toilet was slightly ajar, having caught on a crumpled cigarette packet on the floor. Fourth, that the sunlight from the window in the ladies’ toilet was also falling on the glass of a third-rate painting which had been temporarily placed against the wall directly opposite the door to the Tactical Command Centre, waiting to be hung in Waldemar Mörner’s office whenever the aforementioned dignitary arrived. Fifth, that the sunlight hitting this painting of a bawling child was being reflected in through the open door of the Tactical Command Centre.
The door was closed. The miracle shattered. Jan-Olov Hultin let his owl-like glasses slide down his enormous nose until they were practically level with his invariably well-shaven upper lip.
‘Good news,’ he said neutrally, ‘but we’ll save that for later. Firstly, I want to apologise to Sara for being dragged into yesterday’s TV debacle. A person should be thoroughly prepared before they take their place next to Waldemar Mörner.’
‘And a person shouldn’t move an entire bunch of microphones.’
Who had said that? Who was this reckless person who had, so daringly, stuck their head into the lion’s mouth? They glanced around the room, waiting for the headbutt to come.
This time, their combined efforts deduced that the words had, in fact, come from Jan-Olov Hultin himself. Self-criticism? A drastic change of personality was clearly under way.
Was it a stroke? wondered four people whose names shall, for all eternity, remain anonymous.
‘It was a bit of a surprise,’ Sara Svenhagen said mildly.
‘Let’s move on,’ Hultin said as though nothing had happened. ‘The forensic technicians’ preliminary survey of Södra Begrav-ningsplatsen gave us nothing. Not a single usable footprint; not a single fingerprint on the rope or the body. They found Leonard Sheinkman’s fingerprints on a few pieces of the broken headstone below him, though. Should we just interpret that as a sign of pain? Or is it an indication that the gravestone had some kind of significance to him? Had he been on his way to that particular grave?’
‘The name on the grave,’ Jorge Chavez said, ‘has been reconstructed as “Shtayf”. That’s all. We’ll have to find out more about that body.’
‘That can be your job, Jorge,’ Hultin said. ‘What else? What happened with our skinhead, Andreas Rasmusson?’
Kerstin Holm glanced at her papers.
‘Apparently he had some kind of psychosis last night. He’s been moved to hospital.’
‘Under guard?’
‘If you’re arrested as a suspect, you’re treated as a suspect. Yes, there’s an assistant watching over him day and night. From what they’ve said, he seems to be completely out of it.’
‘I think it’s very important we find out what those skinheads saw,’ said Hultin. ‘There must be some way of finding out who he was with, who he met that day, et cetera, et cetera. Gunnar?’
‘OK,’ said Gunnar Nyberg.
‘After you’ve been to the university, though. You and Viggo and Police Assistant Andersson are meeting a Slavicist called Ludmila Lundkvist in the Department for Slavic Languages at ten o’clock. Get hold of Andersson and get yourselves up there to Frescati.’
‘Da,’ Nyberg said like a good linguist.
‘Now,’ Hultin said with brutal neutrality, holding up a piece of paper on which a large plus sign had been drawn, ‘this diagram was sent anonymously to me. There are four segments-’
‘Quadrants,’ said Chavez.
Hultin gave him a very long, very neutral look.
‘… four segments labelled, in turn, “Skansen”, “Skogskyrkogården”, “Slagsta” and “Odenplan metro station”. Beneath Skansen, it says “fingerprints, pistol, metal wire, rope, Epivu”. Beneath “Skogskyrkogården” it says “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”. I’ve taken the liberty of adding “Shtayf”. Is that acceptable to my superiors in the congregation?’