He was a downtrodden, downright nasty so-and-so. Nothing more than a stinking great toothless, sneering mouth.
Memories…
But there was one thing he had taught little Arto. He had pulled him onto his lap one day and tried to talk some sense into him. Little Arto had done nothing less than try to get away as quickly as he could, of course. Even now, he could clearly remember the stench coming from Pertti’s toothless mouth. But in the middle of it all, amid all his general slurring, the key questions came through. They sounded exactly the same as the slurring but had been accompanied by a look that wasn’t usual for Uncle Pertti. That was when little Arto saw the real hero from the Winter War, the guerrilla fighter who had spent years hidden away in the frozen landscape. He had seen pictures of Uncle Pertti from that time and they really were something else. One image in particular had stuck in his mind. The pride beaming from Pertti Lindrot’s fair-skinned face, standing in the middle of a snowdrift with his hand on the butt of a sabre was not only impressive, it was familiar.
Oddly familiar.
As familiar as a mirror image. It was as though Arto Söderstedt himself was the one standing in the snowdrift, his hand on the sabre, trying not to laugh. The likeness was uncanny.
And so he had adopted the slurring tactic. If not the stinking mouth.
OK, so his thoughts were drifting aimlessly. He tried to halt the rivulets and direct them back into the main stream.
It didn’t quite work.
The pictures of the seemingly sophisticated and iron-fisted Marco di Spinelli weren’t coming together to form one harmonious portrait. It remained superficial. It remained a series of inconsequential computerised projections. It remained elusive.
He would have to come back to it later, once he had renewed his strength.
Arto Söderstedt emptied the very little glass of Vin Santo in one gulp, switched off the computer and stood up.
He was going for a siesta.
22
KERSTIN HOLM WAS busy. Normally, she enjoyed being busy – she liked her job. Sometimes, when she found herself alone in the police station at nine in the evening, she would tell herself to get a life, but then it always struck her that she already had one and that her job was an important part of it. Her life consisted of working, singing and a little bit of jogging.
Until one day it was no longer quite enough.
Suddenly, she found it bloody hard work being busy.
Her life was about to quietly undergo a metamorphosis. Another one. And no one had the slightest suspicion.
She was no longer in the habit of mixing her work and her private life. Her escapades with Paul Hjelm a few years earlier had been the final straw. Until then, her relationships had all been with other policemen. She was originally from Gothenburg and had been married to a colleague whose relationship to sex was utterly uncomplicated: whenever he wanted it, she wanted it. That was the starting point. It had resulted in several utterly unexpected rapes taking place in their marital bed. For a long time, she had thought that was just how things were meant to be. That was the extent to which her sexuality had been affected. By a male relative. With a fondness for special occasions and wardrobes.
That relative had long since died and her ex-husband had recently been suspended for alcoholism. Kicking someone while they were down wasn’t really her thing.
Still, she thought she knew what a genuine, wild thirst for revenge was like. And that was precisely what she found herself faced with as she received reports and material from Budapest, Maribor, Antwerp, Venice and Manchester. The last had arrived that very day; so far, Chief Inspector Roelants in Antwerp had been right – it wasn’t over yet.
A well-known pimp had, as far back as March last year, been put to death in the exact same way as Leonard Sheinkman in a park not far from Old Trafford. The case was stretching out further and further through time. The Erinyes had been busy for more than a year.
The goddesses of revenge.
Not a single witness in any of the other cases. That made their skinhead Reine Sandberg and his gang unique. They were the only people to have seen the Erinyes and survived. His associates had confirmed every last detail of his story. There had been four of them and, in blind panic, they had fled across Skogskyrkogården. When they reached the metro station, there were only three of them left. Andreas Rasmusson, who was now slowly starting to recover in the psych ward, had been wandering around among the graves for three hours. He had finally managed to find the train station and then continued his wandering in Stockholm’s Central Station, where the police had picked him up.
In a way, she wished she could feel sorry for him.
Kerstin felt like she understood. She felt like she really understood what this entire case was about: a pure, genuine, wild thirst for revenge.
The thin, dark figures dressed all in black were, without a doubt, women. What kind of women? Who had cause to murder pimps? Prostitutes, of course. It seemed likely that their so-called ninja feminist belonged to a gang of highly trained, detoxed prostitutes. According to Adib Tamir, she had been wearing: ‘red leather jacket, tight black trousers, black trainers’. Had she been wearing the other get-up beneath the red jacket? Had she been dressed for battle when she was attacked? Was that why the whole thing had been so unnecessarily violent?
On the whole, though, it wasn’t unnecessarily violent. They hadn’t been taking down any old drug-addled, small-time pimps; they had been exclusively murdering pimps who also happened to be violent criminals. All had been murderers. And all had a rape or two under their belts.
In other words, they were scum.
But imagine if what happened in Odenplan metro station was a result of controlled acts of violence. Imagine if it was a first sign that violence can never take place without leaving a trace, without sooner or later exploding and running amok. Practically all the Vietnam veterans were serious addicts, the men who dropped the atomic bombs on Japan had virtually lost their minds, and they were only just starting to see the far-reaching consequences of the violence in Yugoslavia. Violent men – and presumably women too, for that matter – were always consumed by their violent acts in the end. Executioners had always gone mad, throughout history. Their job ate them up from the inside.
But Hamid al-Jabiri wasn’t a murderous pimp. He was far from an angel, but had he deserved such a terrible end? Was he really one of those doomed to death? No, that was where the whole thing had gone off the rails. After a year. Perhaps that had been a reasonable amount of time to endure it all, before it became impossible.
Before the violence had gained a life of its own. It was no longer under control; it had started to do the controlling.
That was one interpretation, anyway.
The Erinyes had been at it for a year now. Their acts of violence were strictly controlled and didn’t affect innocent bystanders – providing, of course, you excluded Leonard Sheinkman. They quite simply targeted men they considered worthy of death. And a terrible death was exactly what they gave them. But perhaps that wasn’t all they did. What would be interesting was if their strength kept increasing. Were they recruiting at the same time as they were exacting revenge? Had eight seemingly worn-out women from the Norrboda Motell been initiated into some kind of army? Would they too start wearing tight black clothing and murdering pimps across Europe once they had finished their training? Was this a way of countering the aggressive growth of the prostitution industry?