‘And if that’s what happened,’ Hjelm said, nodding, ‘it makes sense that he fired a couple of shots somewhere along the way, and that one of those bullets made its way into a ten-year-old girl’s arm.’
Chavez gave him a slightly surprised look. Hjelm paused for effect long enough that Chavez started squirming with anticipation.
Yes, he knew it was childish.
‘At 22.14 yesterday, a 9mm bullet got lodged in the arm of ten-year-old Lisa Altbratt as she wandered down Sirishovsvägen.’
‘And where’s Sirishovsvägen?’ asked Chavez.
‘It joins Djurgårdsvägen, coming down from Rosendal.’
‘Skansen map,’ said Chavez. Hjelm pulled the crumpled paper from his inner pocket and handed it to Chavez.
‘Sirishovsvägen is here,’ Hjelm said, pointing.
‘And where was Lisa Alstedt when she got shot?’
‘Altbratt,’ Hjelm corrected him. ‘About here.’
He pointed to a spot close to the point where Sirishovsvägen joined Djurgårdsvägen, not far from the Oakhill villa and the Italian embassy. The Skansen fence ran right alongside it.
‘Hmm,’ Chavez said. He sounded like Sherlock Holmes when he was thinking. ‘Lisa Altbrunn here. Wolverine man here.’
‘Altbratt,’ Hjelm corrected him, following Chavez’s pencil with his eyes. Chavez continued.
‘The bullet?’
‘Right arm, walking down towards Djurgårdsvägen.’
‘Meaning it came from somewhere inside Skansen. Here. Can you get over the fence here? Which part is that?’
‘What does it say? Wolves?’
‘Exactly: right there. Yeah, wolves. There.’
Hjelm followed the pencil as it moved up from the map to the window of the observation tower. Chavez pointed it out at the real Skansen. Hjelm could make out the labyrinthine bear enclosure and his gaze swept further, past horses and lynx, wild boars and buffalo; past the wolverine enclosure where the blue-and-white tape was fluttering in the morning breeze, finally reaching the extensive pen which housed the wolves. The fence was high but not impossible to scale, though there was barbed wire on top of it.
Paul Hjelm nodded. His face cracked into a malicious smile.
‘I think Brunte’s going to have to expand his search area slightly. Do you want to break it to him?’
‘With the greatest pleasure,’ Jorge Chavez replied, grinning.
4
PROFESSOR EMERITUS. HE wasn’t quite used to the title, despite having had it for years. He was, by now, a very old man.
And yet, it was only during the past few days that he had started to feel old.
Since everything had started coming back to him.
It was difficult to put a finger on what had changed. Nothing had actually happened.
But still, he was convinced he was about to die.
He hadn’t given much thought to death. It was just one more part of all that needed to be repressed. And he had succeeded. He had succeeded beyond all expectation. He had succeeded in drawing a line over the past and starting afresh. As though life was a piece of blank paper, waiting to be filled. He assumed that his own sheet was full now, he assumed that was why it had started spilling over onto the other side. Onto the back, where all that had been repressed was written, everything that half a century hadn’t managed to erase. He no longer wrote – he read. And that was much, much worse.
It had started as a presence, nothing more than that. A faint, diffuse presence which had suddenly appeared in his peaceful, structured life. In a way, he was thankfuclass="underline" not everyone was given the chance to walk, for a while, with death at their side; not everyone had the opportunity to reflect over what life had had to offer before they reached their end. Though in a way, it would have been better simply to die without warning. To die without regret, without reflection, without remorse. To drop down dead on the street one day, and be swept away like a broken bottle.
The End, as American films had once proclaimed. Just so there could be no doubt it was over.
But no. For some unfathomable reason, he had been given this… respite. He couldn’t understand why.
Or rather: the longer it went on, the better he understood it.
It had been a morning like any other. No great ailments, just the usual sciatica and his sluggish stomach. No outward changes at all.
Aside from the sudden arrival of this presence.
Yes. The tranquil presence of death.
Until then, life had gone on like always, the way it does for a formerly active man in his early eighties. Slowly, in other words. He saw the grandchildren as normal, went to their always-delightful Sunday dinners, observed the Sabbath and celebrated Passover, Sukkot, Hanukkah and Yom Kippur with them as he always had. This illusion of normality was what made it all so eerie. Because it was eerie, wasn’t it? Wasn’t dying eerie? He wasn’t quite sure.
The most worrying thing was that the whole thing lacked a rational explanation.
He had devoted his life to the brain. The human brain. He had been a researcher in a field which had been practically non-existent before he ventured into it. Right after he arrived in Sweden, learned the language and became a member of Swedish society, he had started his medical research. What had struck him was how absurdly little we knew about our own brains. He had, essentially, launched brain science in Sweden. In the 1950s, he became a professor at the Karolinska Institut, and since then his name had figured in discussions about the Nobel Prize every single year. The prize never materialised, but he did gain an increasingly concrete belief that human beings were matter through and through. ‘The soul’ was an antiquated construction used to cover over a void in human knowledge – in other words, it represented our lack of understanding of the brain. And so, as knowledge of the brain’s functions increased, the need for the soul disappeared, in the very same way that gods and myths and fantasies have always given way the moment science gains ground. He married, had children and experienced all kinds of everyday miracles without ever losing his belief in materialism. Human beings were controlled by nerve impulses in the brain. That was that.
And then, aged almost ninety, this sudden presence for which there was no rational explanation, for which there seemed to be no place among these nerve impulses.
Perhaps he was simply lacking knowledge about what was happening to him.
He started travelling; it became an overwhelming need. No grand chartered trips over far-flung oceans; no epic train journeys across Russia; no scaling Mount Everest. It was simply a matter of being on the move. He used the metro system, as a rule – it seemed most logical. Pure movement. Being able to feel the journey, the movement, without necessarily being taken anywhere. Such was his need.
And so he had spent the past few days riding the metro. He simply travelled, without destination, without purpose. In some ways, it mirrored the internal journey he was making. Towards the repressed letters on the other side of the paper. The paper he had tried to turn to give an illusion of blankness.
Things came towards him. They came flying out of the tunnels, pouring towards him from the platforms, gushing towards him down the escalators. Scenes, that was all, short sequences, and he had no chance of putting them into any kind of order. It was all very strange. He was doomed to wandering, doomed to being in motion, as though he would die the moment he stopped. Like a shark.
Or like Ahasver, the wandering Jew, doomed to eternal life and eternal suffering.
But there was still so much left to understand, that much he understood.
He was sitting in the metro. He had no idea where he was. It didn’t matter. The lights rushed by, sometimes a station, sometimes only sporadic flashes in the tunnels. There were arms on top of him, legs on top of him, thin, thin legs, thin, thin arms, and he saw an upside-down face, and he saw a thin wire being pushed into a temple, and he saw the upside-down face distorted by pain. And then he was writing in a book. He was reading the words which he himself was writing and the book was talking about pain, about pain, pain, pain.