More silence.
‘Anyway, please can I have the Visa card number?’
‘I can’t just give that out.’
‘I’m a policeman, for God’s sake.’
‘How do I know that? Honestly: careless handling of card numbers will be the downfall of civilisation. We’re told to be extremely careful with them.’
‘OK,’ said Paul Hjelm, thinking about that particular kind of Armageddon; maybe it wasn’t so crazy. There was already a huge volume of account numbers from Visa and American Express floating around on the Internet, available for general use. He came up with a quick solution.
‘I’ll give you a fax number. You can check with the directory listing, make sure that it’s a police number. Will that do?’
The porter thought for a moment. Then he said: ‘That’ll do.’
Paul Hjelm gave him the fax number and continued: ‘What happened to the guest’s things?’
‘We packed them up in his bag and put them into storage.’
‘Storage where?’
‘We’ve got a storeroom for stuff people leave behind. If no one gets in touch within a few months, we give it away to charity.’
‘What did he leave?’
‘I don’t know, I wasn’t the one dealing with it.’
‘And this storeroom is in the hotel?’
‘In the basement, yeah.’
‘Someone will be over to pick up his bag today.’
‘Great.’
‘Though not for charity,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘I’m going to send you a JPEG of a face. I want you to show it to all the staff you can think of, right away, to see whether it’s a picture of the guest who disappeared from room 305. What’s your name?’
‘Anders Graaf.’
‘Fitting,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘Email address?’
He was given the address and ended the call with the words:
‘If you send that fax right away, I’ll send the picture right away too.’
Anders Graaf was clearly good at his job, because the fax whirred into life only a minute or two later. During those two minutes, Paul Hjelm had time to send Nikos Voultsos’s photo and to think about the increasing risks of the modern digital society. Ultimately, Graaf had been right, but he had also been inconsistent. Paul Hjelm hadn’t really needed to be a policeman. Plenty of information had been handed out with no qualms, practically everything but the card number. That was because it related to the most important thing in the world: money. They had neglected to report a missing person to the police in order to be able to charge the sixty-three thousand kronor to the man’s account, but they hadn’t wanted to give his account number to the police.
There were some interesting conclusions to consider there.
The fax came in; the card number was in Paul Hjelm’s hand. He phoned the Swedish arm of Visa and was told someone would get back to him with information about the account holder.
He returned to his long list of telephone numbers. After an eventless thirty minutes, the phone rang. He answered.
‘Hello, is that Detective Inspector Hjelm?’ a woman’s voice asked.
‘The one and only,’ Hjelm replied modestly.
‘This is Mia Bengtsson. I work at the Grand Hôtel.’
‘Hi,’ Hjelm said expectantly.
‘Hi. Anders showed me the picture of that man. It’s him.’
Paul Hjelm felt a great inner peace. He waited for her to continue.
‘He groped me a couple of times when I was delivering room service. He was at it down in the bar, too. And in the French Dining Room as well.’
‘The guest from room 305, between the twenty-third of April and the fifth of May?’
‘Exactly. Rich drug addict. Had cocaine around his nostrils like some kind of rock star.’
‘Don’t hold back. He’s dead, after all.’
‘Oh! I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead-’
‘That’s when you can really let rip,’ Paul Hjelm replied to loosen her vocal cords.
‘Yeah, OK. I’d say he was an unusually nasty type, simple as that. We do sometimes see them at the Grand. Drug people have a lot of money, and always get room service; it’s the worst – you’re alone with them in their rooms. I tried speaking French but he didn’t understand a word, he just poked my breasts and smiled horribly. He wasn’t even French.’
‘No,’ said Paul Hjelm, ‘he was no Frenchman.’
‘Plenty of money though. Was throwing it around. I saw him rip a thousand-krona note to shreds. Just to show he was cool. There were a few women up in his room, too. I’m pretty sure they were prostitutes.’
‘Were you the one who realised he was missing?’
‘I was the one who sent a message to management saying that the room hadn’t been touched, anyway. I don’t know what happened after that. Only that he was gone when I got there on the seventh. His room had been cleaned and emptied.’
‘Anything you want to add?’
‘Not really. But I can’t claim I’m really sad about him being dead.’
‘Thanks a lot for your help, Mia. Bye.’
‘Bye.’
Paul Hjelm sat still. The link between Nikos Voultsos and Slagsta had been established. It was now a fact. As though the Ghiottone hadn’t been enough. Paul Hjelm laughed. He had done the same when Arto Söderstedt phoned from Tuscany to tell him about wolverines and ghiottoni.
A picture of Nikos Voultsos’s murderer was starting to emerge and it was multifaceted.
Hunting down a man with links to a crime syndicate like the Ghiottone and then throwing him to the wolverines in Skansen was tremendously subtle. A clear, direct message to Milan. Perhaps they hadn’t expected his body to supply the wolverines with such a high level of drugs that they essentially obliterated him. The police had been very close to not being able to identify him at all. That was the first aspect of it: the message to Milan.
The second was the wire, which seemed to be more at home in the scientist Leonard Sheinkman’s cerebral cortex. That said, Sheinkman’s link to the whole thing was still unclear. There were German diaries waiting to be read. Aspect two, then: the metal wire in the brain. Was that a message too? Did the two belong together? Was that another message for Milan?
A third aspect was that which had been immediately apparent in the Odenplan metro station, and certainly in both Skansen and Södra Begravningsplatsen: enormous cruelty and a great deal of skill in the noble art of neutralising someone. They had a female suspect, which was in itself extremely unusual. Professionalism or… hate? Or both? Wasn’t it a case of passionate feelings whichever way you looked at it? That was the impression he had, anyway. It wasn’t just a message that was being sent, it was something more, something deeper.
Then there was the journey to Ukraine. ‘Everyone through OK.’ It was, of course, nothing more than a Slavicist’s interpretation of fairly shaky foundations, but still. If they were to believe the latest information, direct from the mouth of a skinhead, then there was a league involved, not a lone killer. That league had transported at least eight prostitutes across Europe. Would that have been possible if they had kidnapped them and forced them to move using violence? ‘Everyone through OK.’ Didn’t that sound more… considerate? A crime syndicate would have treated the women like objects. Would they have expressed it like that? ‘Everyone through OK.’ It was vague, but it was a hunch he had. They couldn’t afford to let things like that slide. Besides, it was a case of a call being made from woman to woman. ‘Not a bloke as far as the eye could see,’ as old Maja had put it at the cottage in Dalarö. ‘Everyone through OK.’ Aspect four: the female.
And then there was the fifth. That which had already been hinted at by Nikos Voultsos’s mad flight across Djurgården. The blind panic. He had shot wildly, ripped his hands to shreds, thrown his gun away and torn off his gold chain – the very symbol of his dominance. The same panic had sent a group of skinheads running across Skogskyrkogården at breakneck speed. All but one, who had been left behind in his own private inferno, and ended up in the psych ward. A dark, gliding presence among the gravestones, one which made a seasoned skinhead talk about ‘mythological beings’.