But during work hours, he had his service vehicle. He pushed the key which had miraculously appeared into the lock on the old beige Audi, looked out at the traffic and sighed deeply. It would probably be quicker to swim over to Djurgården.
That was where he was headed. His colleague and partner in crime Jorge Chavez had had that mysterious, expectant tone in his voice, the kind Paul Hjelm had been longing for for months. ‘I think you should head over here, Paul. To Skansen.’
The fact that he had just come from another case with links to the area around the Skansen open-air museum and zoo made it even more interesting.
He got caught up in traffic within the gates of the hospital and made a conscious decision not to turn into Mr Hyde. It just wasn’t worth the effort. Instead, he slipped the Kind of Blue CD into the car stereo and smiled as its opening notes spread their honey over his eardrums. As he meekly fought his way out of the enormous hospital area, he started ranking strange surnames. Wasn’t Altbratt a candidate for strangest? He’d come across heavyweights like Kungskranz and Riddarsson before, Äppelblohm and Sarkander, but did they really stand a chance against Altbratt?
Anton Altbratt was the wealthy owner of a fur shop in Östermalm, living in Djurgårdsstaden and currently on his second marriage, of which ten-year-old Lisa was the fruit. He also had a couple of adult children from his previous marriage, and they hadn’t been able to get in touch with his new wife, Lisa’s mother. She was on a business trip to some unknown location. To Hjelm, the whole thing stank of intricate erotic arrangements, but he decided not to enquire further.
Instead, he was trying to work out what could be behind the shooting of poor little Lisa. With any luck, her father Anton had been the intended victim. It was much easier to imagine a rational motive if that was the case – the young wife, the upper-class business activity, maybe even an attack by militant vegans. Though the lack of sound implied a silencer, which in turn implied some kind of professional criminality – in other words, it sounded more like the wife had wanted to get her husband out of the way for financial or sexual reasons, or else it was down to some kind of dodgy business links, or maybe even illegal fur dealings. Something like that. If any of those were true, it didn’t seem half as dangerous. An unsuccessful one-off attack. But if Lisa had been the target, it was much, much worse. That would mean the majority of plausible motives disappeared, making some kind of madman more likely. A madman specialising in children.
Paul Hjelm didn’t really want to follow that thought through to its logical conclusion.
But of course there was a third alternative: that neither father nor daughter had been the intended target, and the bullet had simply found its way into Lisa’s arm by pure chance. If that was what had happened, the picture which emerged was of some kind of underworld dispute in among the trees of Djurgården.
There was, in other words, plenty to be done. They needed to check the wife’s activities the previous evening, what her relationship with Lisa’s father was really like; they had to check who knew about the children’s party up in Rosendal, any possible irregularities in the business, any possible threats from militant vegans or similar, and search the wooded area from which the shot had, in all likelihood, been fired. Et cetera, et cetera.
And then they had to wait and see whether it was anything other than a coincidence that two crimes had been committed so close to one another – whatever it was Jorge had to offer up at Skansen.
Time, time, time. He was really stuck; as usual, the engine temperature of his Audi shot up drastically the moment it found itself in the slightest hint of a queue. The car lacked all patience. Since the driver refused to become Mr Hyde, the car would have to do it instead. As though every queuing car and its driver were, by definition, forced to explode. Paul Hjelm turned the heating up high and thanked his Maker that it was winter and not summer in Stockholm. With one eye on the engine temperature gauge, he allowed his thoughts to drift along with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb’s unrivalled improvisations.
A picture of his life, it struck him.
A stony, controlling eye on an engine about to explode. Trains of thought taking the form of reckless improvisations. All while the vehicle crept forward extremely slowly.
Yup, that was exactly how it was. Though the picture wasn’t quite complete.
Just as ‘So What’ faded out into ‘Freddie Freeloader’ and a more familiar twelve-bar blues started streaming out into Hjelm’s sauna masquerading as a car, a gap appeared in the right-hand lane at Roslagstull. He sped forwards, accelerating so violently that the tyres screeched, made it through on the newly introduced European-standard amber light, and suddenly found the whole of Birger Jarlsgatan empty ahead of him.
Well, he thought. That’s it, now the picture’s complete.
‘Freddie Freeloader’, he thought, putting his foot down.
It was remarkably smooth-going all the way to Stureplan, where he found himself in a slight, inevitable tussle with one of those reckless drivers, the type who worked in advertising, who thought they were in the right regardless of how wrong they were. Paul Hjelm didn’t care. Let them have their way, he thought, mumbling along with the final notes of ‘Blue In Green’. Even down in the confusion of traffic by Nybroplan, he held his tongue. Just as he was singing along like a fool to a favourite line from ‘All Blues’, windows down, he saw Ingmar Bergman staggering up the steps into the National Theatre, cane in hand. The old man turned round, astonished, and met his eye for a brief moment. It seemed like more than a coincidence.
Strandvägen was worse. It seemed awfully big.
No, he thought. Now the picture was complete. A brief free stretch and then back to the slow, sluggish, grind. A plod.
The traffic eased slightly and he crossed Djurgården Bridge without problem. By that point, the picture had already gone up in smoke. As he parked, terribly, outside the entrance to Skansen, the last Spanish-tinged harmonies of ‘Flamenco Sketches’ were playing. That was what you called precision. His route – from Astrid Lindgren to Skansen via Ingmar Bergman, practically a trip through the heart of Sweden – was the exact same length as Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. That was that.
It was quarter to ten when Paul Hjelm marched in through Skansen’s gates, was handed a little map and sent in the direction of ‘the wild animals’ in the north-east corner of the big open-air museum. As he stepped onto the long, covered escalator heading up the hill, Hjelm wondered which animals weren’t wild. Was man a wild animal? He reached the top and stepped out into completely different weather from at the bottom. It was as though winter had been blown away. In its place, he found himself wandering through the museum’s mock-nineteenth-century town in highest possible summer. April weather, he was on the verge of thinking, even though it was in fact May. Thursday the fourth of May, in the two thousandth year of Our Lord. Twenty hundred. As the sun reflected on red-painted walls, his thoughts drifted to the way people spoke about the year. In general, they had naturally gravitated towards calling it ‘the year two thousand’, a perfectly logical choice. But Paul couldn’t help but wonder why it wasn’t twenty hundred, like the beginning of the previous century. He found a certain pleasure in taking what he called the either/or approach, occasionally using both. It never failed to raise an eyebrow or two.
That was what was playing on Detective Inspector Paul Hjelm’s mind in this, the two thousandth year of Our Lord – a year in which the kingdom of Sweden had been singled out by Amnesty International for a sharp rise in police violence; a year in which the police had regularly turned their batons around to strike out with the hard end; a year in which Kosovans and Albanians had been sent back to their war-torn homelands with five thousand noble Swedish kronor in their pockets.