He said: ‘It was then, in September 1981, that Bruun coaxed me into CID. Clearly he’s done a lot of coaxing in his time. I was given the case on the ninth of September and started half-heartedly looking into it. I knew I’d be getting a response to my application to CID at any time; I didn’t behave very professionally those last few days. It’s the greatest blot on my career right up to the Kentucky Killer. I got the reply on the eleventh and moved here right away. Bruun more or less took over the wrecked investigation himself.’
‘I’ll be damned,’ said Hjelm. ‘I started there as a newly qualified officer in 1984. I have no memory of him ever mentioning a case involving a man without a nose.’
‘It was never a proper case,’ said Hultin. ‘Just another John Doe among others. Not even the press showed much interest. You couldn’t print images of bodies back then. Things are different now.’
‘What do you remember?’ asked Chavez.
‘He was found lying in a ditch by a little lake in Älta, right next to a highway. No tyre tracks to speak of. He was naked, two big knife wounds to the back – either of them could’ve been the cause of death. The numbers on his arm were almost illegible beneath a criss-cross of scars, as though he’d tried to scratch them off. And then that nose…’
‘I’ve got a picture here,’ said Chavez, passing an old colour photo around the Tactical Command Centre.
‘I didn’t really manage to find anything. No witnesses, no clues. It didn’t seem like anyone in all of Sweden had seen that noseless man. But like I said, I didn’t look very hard.’
‘One thing,’ said Kerstin Holm, looking down at the photograph. ‘Why wasn’t more done, considering how badly disfiguring his facial damage was? One single look would’ve been enough to make any plastic surgeon leap at the challenge.’
‘Good question,’ Hultin admitted. ‘Poverty? Lack of medical care? Outcast?’
‘And a foreigner, too,’ Kerstin added, nodding slightly.
‘Would it be worth talking to Bruun?’ Hjelm asked hopefully. He hadn’t seen his old boss since the heart attack had brought in a nightmare replacement by the name of Sten Lagnmyr.
‘I think so,’ said Hultin. ‘You and Jorge.’
‘OK,’ Hjelm and Chavez said in unison.
‘How’s it going with the boats, Sara?’ Hultin continued, looking more neutral than he had in a long while. Clearly it was time to compensate for his earlier emotional outburst.
‘Great,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘There are plenty of options if you want to get from Stockholm to Lublin by bus, especially if you have thirty-five hours to do it. That’s the amount of time between their possible departure from Slagsta and the phone call from Lublin.
‘The most logical thing would be to get on the closest ferry, from Nynäshamn, and head to Gda
sk. It’s a straight line from there, if you want to get to the Ukraine via Lublin. It’s a night ferry, leaving at 5 p.m. and not arriving in Gda
sk until half eleven the next morning. It’s roughly six hundred kilometres between Gda
sk and Lublin, and the phone call to Odenplan was made at three. So if we say it took maybe half an hour to get off the ferry, then you would have to drive at 150, 160 kilometres an hour to get to Lublin in time. It’s just not possible. It’s wrong.
‘The other plausible option if you’re going direct from Sweden would be via Karlskrona. The M/S Stena Europe left Karlskrona at nine in the evening and arrived in Gdynia at seven on Friday morning. That would mean they had eight hours to drive those six hundred kilometres. Sounds much better. So I got in touch with Stena Line to check how many buses they had on board on that date. Turns out there were eight buses on that particular ferry from Karlskrona, leaving on the fourth of May. Four of the buses were organised trips and then there was one Polish, one German and two Swedish; one of the Swedish buses was full of single men on their way east to find partners or venereal diseases or something like that. One bus was on the way to scrap in a Polish scrapyard, and the others were private hires. But here’s the interesting part. What gets smuggled from Sweden to Poland rather than the other way round?’
‘IKEA furniture?’ suggested Viggo.
‘Moose antlers?’ suggested Jorge.
‘Almost,’ said Sara. ‘Sea eagles.’
‘Poached?’ asked Kerstin.
‘Get to the point,’ said Hultin.
‘The privately owned Polish buses were full to the brim with poached sea eagles. Swedish and Polish customs were evidently working alongside our environmental protection agency. It filmed the crackdown. There were a few minutes about it on Aktuellt on Friday evening. They’ve got quite a lot of extra film that they’re going to send over a bit later today. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to spot the other buses in the background. I was also planning on taking a trip down to Karlskrona to talk to the crew on the ship. The same crew is going to Gydnia again tonight. Will the budget cover a flight down to Karlskrona?’
‘Purpose?’ asked Hultin.
‘To show them pictures of Galina Stenina, Valentina Dontsjenko, Lina Kostenko, Stefka Dafovska, Mariya Bagrjana, Natalja Vaganova, Tatjana Skoblikova and Svetlana Petruseva. To see what the crew remembers. If the women were on board, they must’ve stuck out in one way or another.’
‘Have you learned their names by heart?’ Jorge asked in surprise.
‘It’s the least you can do, working on a case like this,’ Sara said cuttingly.
‘Trip approved,’ Hultin said curtly. ‘Viggo?’
As though it was the most natural thing in the world, Viggo Norlander said: ‘We’re having another baby.’
‘For God’s sake, Viggo!’ exclaimed Gunnar Nyberg. ‘Astrid’s forty-eight.’
‘Forty-seven,’ Norlander corrected him. ‘And how old’s Professor Ludmila?’
‘Congratulations, Viggo,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Don’t listen to those fossils. They’re just jealous.’
‘Why the plural?’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘Where did that come from?’
‘The women congratulate and the men commiserate,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘Just as it should be. Congratulations, Viggo.’
‘Yeah, yeah, congratulations, you damn rabbit,’ said Hjelm.
A few more congratulations were uttered before Norlander, entirely unaffected, continued: ‘The circumstances of the other pimp’s death are, as you know, murky. The pistol which killed him was apparently made three minutes after Nikos Voultsos’s. The silencers were identical, too. I rest my case.’
‘Who was he?’ asked Kerstin Holm. ‘How did he get in touch with the girls in Slagsta? Was he the one who brought them here?’
‘His name was Finn Johansen, but he doesn’t seem the kind to have “brought” any whores here,’ said Viggo Norlander. ‘Though he did seem to have a certain talent for sniffing out new free agents. His speciality was finding girls who didn’t have any protection. So that’s probably what happened. I looked into the Norrboda Motell a little. Why was it that eight whores were given rooms right next to one another? Jörgen Nilsson clearly wasn’t the one who made that decision. He was brought in later, by none other than Finn Johansen.
‘I think it went like this: Botkyrka’s refugee centre was overflowing. When they were being moved, any single asylum seekers could put in a request if there was someone they wanted to share a room with. In the old centre, only a couple of our eight were living together. I think that they found one another somehow and decided to work together. It’s entirely possible that some of them weren’t working as whores before they came here. Though their pictures were really typical whore pictures. Johansen found out about the place and went down there to provide them with protection and drugs. I’d bet that was what happened. I’ve talked to a few whores who-’