At the top of the piles was a blue binder. In it were copies of nineteen different parking tickets that Lewin had traced to his own agency or to individual police officers. Six of them involved civilian service vehicles, and all the tickets were canceled. The remaining thirteen applied to cars whose registered owners were fellow police officers.
Nine of them paid their fines within the stated time, and because their vehicles were parked near their home addresses there was certainly nothing remarkable about those tickets. Two of them paid after a reminder, and Lewin hadn’t been able to find anything strange there either.
He talked with both of the vehicle owners, and one of them frankly admitted he’d been at home with a woman other than the one he was married to. A colleague of his moreover, and if the Palme investigators didn’t have anything better to do then of course it would be fine to talk with her too. Better that than ending up on TV as part of the so-called police track. If Lewin would be so kind as to not talk with his wife about it, no one would be happier than he. Lewin let the matter rest with the female police officer/lover, and after that conversation crossed out yet another person as a conceivable perpetrator in the murder of the prime minister.
Remaining were two tickets dated the day of the murder for illegally parked vehicles owned by police officers who used their own cars on duty; both of the parking tickets had been canceled. One was a detective with the narcotics squad who’d met one of his informants and preferred his own Alfa Romeo because he felt that the police agency’s Saabs and Volvos were a red flag for the people he was after.
The other was an officer with the secret police who had looked in on a person that SePo kept hidden at one of their secure addresses. Otherwise everything seemed in order. Both the addresses where the vehicles were parked and the times the tickets had been written argued strongly that these events did not have the least thing to do with the assassination of the country’s prime minister. In addition he’d received papers on the matter from both the narcotics squad and the secret police.
I don’t understand how I managed, even at that time, thought Lewin as he closed up his old boxes and placed them in a pile of their own to spare his back.
After that he started doing what he had promised Holt and Mattei he would do. Simply finding the investigation files he needed for his work kept him occupied far into the evening. He was not able to leave the police station until ten o’clock. He took the subway home to Gärdet. Hesitating a moment outside the 7-Eleven store in the block where he lived, he went in and bought a sandwich and a bottle of mineral water. When he stepped into his apartment everything was as usual. What awaited him was yet another night of loneliness and the next morning yet another day with the same substance. A series of nights and days that never seemed to end, thought Lewin as he finally fell asleep.
7
Anna Holt had no intention of sitting in the Palme room. Not at a wobbly card table they’d brought in themselves with barely enough room for the computers Lisa Mattei had set up for them. So Lisa, with the help of those same computers, located the documents Holt needed for her review of “Palme assassin” Christer Pettersson. Finally they carried the material over to Holt’s office themselves, where she intended to read in peace and quiet. A total of ten binders, only a small portion of the material on Pettersson. At the same time, those portions, according to Mattei, ought to cover the essentials about the suspect up to the indictment in May 1989, the sentence of life imprisonment in Stockholm District Court a few months later, and how all this had been turned on end when a unanimous court of appeals released him in November of the same year.
As Holt disappeared with her burden she noticed a worried glance from Jan Lewin. In Lewin’s world, files of that type were not something you stuck under your arm and simply walked away with. Not least the kind that were stored in the Palme room. Files that were removed should be signed for on a special list, returned as soon as you were done with them, and checked off on the same list. Date, time, signature. True, all his colleagues did the same as Holt, but this was also the sorry explanation for why meticulous individuals such as himself often had a terrible time finding the documents they needed for their work.
Pity that Jan is so anxious. He’s actually very good-looking, thought Holt as she and Lisa disappeared through the door, headed toward the peacefulness of Holt’s office.
“Is there anything else I can help you with?” asked Lisa Mattei as she set the binders down on Holt’s desk.
“That’s plenty,” Holt said. “You’ve got a few things to do yourself.”
“I pulled this out for you,” said Mattei, giving Holt a plastic folder she’d carried squeezed under her arm.
“What’s in there?” asked Holt.
“A few interesting dates on Christer Pettersson plus his police and court records. I’m sure you’ll find it in one of the binders too, but an extra copy is never a bad thing if you want to make your own notes. Otherwise there’s nothing special about most of it as I’m sure you already know. But sometimes it’s good to have exact dates and so on.”
“When did you find time to do this?”
“Did it as soon as I knew what Johansson wanted to talk about.”
“But that was before we decided I should look at Pettersson.”
“One of us had to do it,” Mattei observed, shrugging her shoulders. “That much I could figure out anyway,” she said, smiling.
“Thanks,” said Holt. Dear, dear Lisa, she thought. She’s got more in her head than the rest of us in this place combined.
When she finally shut the door, Holt cleared her desk of everything else. Placed her binders within comfortable reach, took out notebook and pen, leaned back in her not at all uncomfortable desk chair, took out the plastic folder about Christer Pettersson that Mattei had given her, and finally put her feet up on the desk. All in accordance with the general advice and life tips that her boss so regularly shared with his co-workers when he was in the mood.
According to Lars Martin Johansson, the “Genius from Näsåker,” as co-workers who didn’t think he could “see around corners” called him when they were sure he couldn’t hear them, this was the most ideal body position for engaging in “more demanding reading.” The feet and legs should be placed high in relation to the head in order to facilitate the flow of blood to the brain, and the very best choice was lying on a comfortable, sufficiently long couch equipped with the necessary number of pillows.
It was also important that it not be too warm in the room where the couch was. According to Johansson, who would usually make reference here to a major sociomedical study from Japan, including the names of the authors, this type of reading demanded approximately the same temperature as for the storage of fine wines.
The first time Johansson had expounded on this burning issue was when they were sitting in the bar toward the end of a nice staff party a few years earlier.
“That sounds really cold,” Holt objected.
“Depends on what you mean by cold,” Johansson snorted. “It should be cold around you. Then you think your best. It should be just cold enough that your noggin feels clear but without having to freeze your rear end off.”
“Well, I thought wine should be stored at about fifty degrees.”
“That depends,” said Johansson evasively. “But it can’t be more than sixty degrees in the room. For reading, that is,” he clarified. “If we’re talking about sleeping it should be a lot colder.”
“Too cold,” said Holt, shaking her head firmly. “Much too cold for me. Couldn’t even think if it were that cold in my office.” Wonder whether his poor wife is an Eskimo? she thought.
“Yes, I might have guessed that,” Johansson observed, and no more was said about it for the rest of the evening.