The man who can see around corners, thought Lisa Mattei solemnly, and suddenly she didn’t feel the least bit afraid of heights any longer. Then she went to her computer because she’d just had an idea.
Extensive academic educations, that’s one way to describe it, thought Jan Lewin in the absolute solitude of his small apartment up at Gärdet. In his case it was a matter of an intro course in law, forty credits in criminology, and a basic course in statistics that he dropped because he couldn’t make any sense of all the formulas and numbers.
Still, worst of all was that the little he’d learned during his academic education was either obvious or the sort of thing he already knew. Apart from statistics, of course, because that mostly confused him. It’s high time to hit the sack, he thought. Then he undressed, brushed his teeth, and went to bed. As usual he twisted and turned for a few hours before he finally fell asleep.
Like the situation, he thought. How do you do that when loneliness has robbed your life of both purpose and meaning?
Johansson himself was feeling splendid. He finished the evening by reading a few more chapters in Grimberg’s book about the Gustavian period and the assassination of Gustav III. Then he sat down in front of his computer and searched the Internet to learn more about murders of people like Gustav III and his own murder victim. The way he went about it would surely have surprised at least one female reporter at TV4.
Interesting, thought Johansson. Although you’ve suspected as much all along, he thought as he stood in the shower two hours later, pondering his new insights as a completely separate idea began to take shape in his head.
Then for some reason he started thinking about the police work in the investigation of the murder of the great king Gustav more than two hundred years ago. An excellent investigation. Based on the conditions of the time, the police chief, Liljensparre, had done everything a real policeman could be expected to do. Everything that his successor in the position 194 years later had failed to do.
First Liljensparre closed the doors to the opera house before anyone had a chance to slip out. He wrote down the names of everyone in the place and did some initial questioning. Then he personally inspected the two pistols that the perpetrator had thrown aside at the scene of the crime. One loaded, one recently fired, both recently repaired. He’d been able to do that without having to worry about fingerprints or DNA traces, thought Johansson, letting the water cascade around him.
The following day Liljensparre summoned the city’s gunsmiths, one of whom immediately recognized the weapons. He had repaired them himself a fortnight earlier for a captain by the name of Jacob Johan Anckarström. The same Anckarström who had attended the masquerade ball the evening before and had a reputation for hating the king.
Anckarström was picked up for interrogation, confessed more or less immediately, and Liljensparre trudged happily on. Quite certainly in the same red woolen stockings he was wearing in the full-length portrait that still hangs in the police chief’s corridor in the old police headquarters in Stockholm. One by one ringleaders, accomplices, conspirators, and opposition elements in general ended up in jail, where a good percentage of them more or less immediately tried to talk their way out by informing on all the others who were already there.
We must have had good interrogators at that time, thought Johansson as he soaped in extra under his arms.
With the number arrested passing a hundred, and a police chief who was getting more zealous every day, apparently the powers that be thought enough was enough. Liljensparre was released from his duties, the investigation was ended, and the majority of those who had been arrested were let out. Only the ones most closely involved were convicted, and they received surprisingly mild sentences considering the time and the crime-with the exception of Anckarström, who was, to put it simply, hacked to pieces.
Ingratitude is the world’s reward for a poor policeman, regardless of how it ends, thought Lars Martin Johansson. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, he thought, turning off the water and reaching for a towel.
Five minutes after going to bed he was sleeping deeply, his snores disturbing nobody in the whole world.
6
Despite what he’d said to Holt and Mattei at their introductory meeting, Lewin started with his old boxes. The same boxes that held everything under the sun that was at best of doubtful police value. The results of the internal investigation he’d been responsible for over twenty years earlier.
Back then he hadn’t found anything, and since then no one seemed to have even tried. Three ordinary cardboard moving boxes piled among hundreds of others. At the bottom of each pile, of course, that’s how it always was. He found them with the help of his own handwritten lists of contents that he’d taped to the boxes twenty years earlier.
Apart from the fact that someone must have moved the boxes, surely a number of times, the papers in them were arranged exactly as he’d left them. The only thing missing was cobwebs, thought Lewin. First he took out the old suicide on the islands in Mälaren. Mostly out of piety and to check his own recollections. He had no factual reason whatsoever.
The initial report-“suspected cause of death”-was dated the day after the assassination of the prime minister, Saturday the first of March 1986, and prepared by the Norrmalm police after a tip from the same colleague who’d contacted him. It was unclear why the case had ended up with the Norrmalm police-the Mälaren islands belonged to a different police district-but it was probably due to the fact that the officer who submitted the tip worked there, as well as the general chaos that prevailed after the assassination.
The report was topmost in a binder that also included an autopsy report, a technical investigation of the house on Ekerö where the former watchman who’d hung himself in the rec room was found, a ballistics report on the revolver found in the house search but which had nothing to do with the suicide, a test firing of the same weapon and a ballistic comparison with the two bullets secured at the crime scene where the prime minister had been murdered. Even though it was already known that the suicide’s weapon had a different, considerably smaller, caliber than the gun the perpetrator used to shoot the prime minister.
At the back of the binder were interviews with five different witnesses, the ex-wife, and four neighbors. At the very back was the memorandum that Lewin had prepared when he closed the case. Convinced as he then was, far beyond all the doubts that tormented him more than almost any of his colleagues, that the man who had taken his life had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of Olof Palme.
How much simpler it all would have been if it had been the watchman after all, thought Lewin and sighed.
The copies of old parking tickets required a separate box. From the afternoon of Friday, February 28, 1986, until Saturday afternoon on March 1, the traffic wardens and police had ticketed almost two thousand illegally parked vehicles in the Stockholm region, at Arlanda airport; the central stations in Uppsala, Enköping, and Södertälje; plus the ferry terminals in Nynäshamn, Norrtälje, Kapellskär, and Hargshamn up in north Uppland. They were sorted into piles for the various police districts as well as the various traffic districts in Stockholm. Arranged in chronological order according to the time on the ticket. Neatly bundled with rubber bands, and he was probably the one who had organized most of them.