Paul Hjelm had called to tell him about the Erinyes. He had also told him that Voultsos had left a suitcase full of his belongings at the hotel, along with a Visa card number. There had been nothing but clothes in the suitcase; if there had been drugs of any kind in the room, they had long since disappeared into the pockets of unknown employees of the Grand Hôtel. The card number, on the other hand, was interesting. The Swedish arm of Visa had been in touch with the name of the account holder. It was a private limited company called S.A. Contra. Arto Söderstedt phoned Italo Marconi right away to tell him the news.
Marconi said: ‘Sounds about right. S.A. Contra is a money-laundering business at the edge of the Ghiottone organisation. Their accounts are often used for payments here and there. Not that we’ve been able to link any of it to the Ghiottone or di Spinelli, of course.’
Söderstedt thanked him and hung up.
On the whole, he felt like he was starting to get a pretty good understanding of the structure of the organisation. Everything suggested that di Spinelli was the spider in the middle of the web, that all roads led to him.
As though to Rome.
But no matter how much of an authorised Europol officer he now was, Arto Söderstedt was powerless to do the slightest thing about either the Ghiottone organisation or Marco di Spinelli. That much was clear. Milan had countless competent, native policemen and women who had devoted years of their lives to getting at the syndicate. That wasn’t his job; it would be taking on more than he could chew. No, his job was to help them get to whoever had killed Nikos Voultsos, Hamid al-Jabiri and Leonard Sheinkman. Nothing more.
Though going via the Ghiottone was clearly one way of doing it.
The question was whether it was doable. He thought about how best to carry out his job. He didn’t need to think for long. As far as he was concerned, it was utterly obvious.
If anyone knew who had put his henchman to death, it would be the old banker himself.
Seven people, of whom six were serious criminals – all pimps, going by Kerstin’s latest email – had been murdered by the same method across Europe. According to Marconi, there was nothing to suggest that any of these seven were linked to Ghiottone, but it still had to be in Marco di Spinelli’s interests that whoever had killed his hand-picked Greek murderer-cum-pimp disappeared.
Di Spinelli was probably a man who took things into his own hands. He was probably already hunting for the Erinyes with a blowtorch. And it would probably be verging on impossible for a Swedish policeman to be given an opportunity to talk to him. However much authorisation his Europol status gave him.
Arto Söderstedt decided to ask Marconi anyway.
‘Well, it might be a bit of a surprise,’ Marconi unexpectedly said. ‘Blunt, chalk-white Swedish police officer on a personal visit. It could catch his attention. He likes playing games with the police.’
‘Have you talked to him? Personally, I mean?’
‘Many times. I’m practically a regular at his house. He’s not at all shy in that Sicilian no-one-knows-who-the-godfather-is kind of way. On the contrary, for such an old man, he’s really quite hungry for publicity. He’s a politician. Or rather, he’s a kind of politician…’
‘Marco di Spinelli must be what…? Ninety-two?’
‘And swims two hundred metres a day and takes part in sailing races and sometimes drives rallies. They say he likes the Värmland forests, whatever they are. Swedish?’
‘Swedish. I might be able to fake an interest in rallying. I am Finnish, after all. A bit, anyway.’
‘I’ll pass on your request,’ said Commissioner Marconi, and Söderstedt could almost feel – through the telephone itself – that big moustache start spinning.
Arto Söderstedt allowed his gaze to wander over the shade-bathed garden. The trees and bushes had been deliberately planted so that they formed a shadowy canopy. It was a Mediterranean method he was familiar with. As the days passed, the May sunshine seemed to be increasingly convinced that it was a bright summer sun rather than a lousy little spring one. Its self-confidence was growing relentlessly – and, with it, the need to take siestas. Arto had lost count of the number of times he had arrived at this or that shop only to find its shutters closed. What surprised him most was that he never learned from his mistake; like a psychiatric patient on the run, he made the daily journey into Greve only to find the entire town was deserted. Between one and four, Greve shut down – and between one and four, the chalk-white Finn would arrive in his big family car, try a locked door, and produce a series of undefinable noises. You could have set your watch by him.
He needed a siesta, that much was clear.
But now he was sitting in the shade on the terrace, sipping a very small glass of Vin Santo and looking at his watch. Two o’clock. Mid-siesta. He had been pleased that Marconi had answered immediately, but now, with hindsight, it struck him that he must have phoned at the worst possible time. Not that it was a problem – Marconi had clearly skipped his afternoon’s rest, just like he had.
He refused to take a siesta.
One way or another, he would probably regret it. But right now, he was distracted. His thoughts were practically running away from him. This from the man who was normally so good at damming the flow and digging channels to allow his thoughts to pour in the right direction. Now, though, they were more like the Danube delta.
If he was given access to Marco di Spinelli, he would need to be prepared. Well read, like a real nerd. But he would also need to repress all that knowledge as best he could from his working mind, so that it didn’t hinder the thought process and his ability to react. Arto Söderstedt sometimes managed to trick suspects into giving themselves away. He often did it by playing dumb – he had that kind of appearance. It was hard to deny that he could look quite vacant.
‘Is Daddy dead?’
He chuckled slightly and gently dipped the tip of his tongue into the tiny little glass.
How should he go about grabbing di Spinelli’s attention? How could he get him to loosen his tongue? He had ten or so pictures of the man open on his computer screen and was trying to get a purely visual understanding of him. So far, di Spinelli was still nothing more than a picture. Or rather, a collection of pictures.
He tried to imagine the entire situation, how he would be met, how di Spinelli would act, what they might talk about and – above all – how he would even begin to go about asking the important questions as though they didn’t mean a thing. That was the great, decisive trick.
The thing he had learned from Uncle Pertti.
Arto Söderstedt was an unusually well-educated policeman, there was no denying that, with a past that he would much rather avoid talking about. A career lawyer in Finland by the age of twenty-five, keeping the scum of the earth away from lawful society. Specialising in the richest, most cunning and unconscionable of criminals. And then he had simply turned his back on that mad, dishonest life, fled the country and ended up in Sweden where, after a couple of years of hard work, he became a policeman; he proved much too obstinate for his superiors in Stockholm and was sent to Västerås, where he lived a peaceful, comfortable and utterly intolerable suburban life. Until a detective superintendent with owl-like glasses perched on his enormous nose came stomping into the police station and changed the direction of Söderstedt’s life once more.
In the A-Unit, he had become the joker in the pack. The card a seasoned player would throw down to win the entire pot.
Or something like that.
But despite his varied life, despite the abundance of educational opportunities and pathways which had been available to him, it was Uncle Pertti who had taught him the great, decisive trick.
Pertti Lindrot – hero from the Finnish Winter War, victor at Suomussalmi, the man who had posthumously sent the Söderstedt family on a trip to Tuscany they would never forget – wasn’t a positive figure from the past. He wasn’t one of those relatives who leave fond memories behind in the minds of the children, thus prolonging their lives by a couple of decades.