Must be the good pasta that has brought out a new, gentler side of dear Bo, Johansson thought.
“So suddenly there you are with two new little rascals. The boy then. Yes, and the girl of course,” said Jarnebring, shaking his head thoughtfully. “The boy’s no slouch. Let me tell you, Lars.”
“But his big sister,” said Johansson divertingly. “How are things going for her?”
“You mean little Lina,” said Jarnebring with surprise. “The spitting image of her mother, if you ask me.”
Depends on what you mean by little, thought Johansson. Must be fifteen by now. He and Pia never had any children. It hadn’t turned out that way, he thought. For various reasons he didn’t want to talk about, and then he changed the subject.
“Speaking of crazy colleagues,” said Johansson, “I ran into your dear police chief the other day.”
After a while they left the restaurant and trotted home to Johansson’s for the usual concluding session. Halfway there they ran into four younger men who came toward them four abreast on the sidewalk with expectation in their eyes. Jarnebring stopped, looked eagerly at the biggest one, and when he saw that he recognized Jarnebring the rest was pure routine.
“How’s it going, Marek?” Jarnebring asked. “Planning to get yourself killed?”
“Respect, boss,” said Marek with frightened eyes, stepping ahead of his friends onto the street.
“Take care of yourselves, girls,” Jarnebring grunted.
We’re too old for that sort of thing, thought Johansson, putting the key into his door and seeking the peace and safety on the other side. Wrong, he thought. You’ve always been too old for that sort of thing. Bo is who he is and he’ll always be that way.
“Tell me about Palme,” said Johansson ten minutes later when they were sitting in armchairs in his large study. Jarnebring with a respectable whiskey toddy and the bottle at a comfortable distance. He himself with a glass of red wine and a bottle of mineral water. At his age you had to take care of yourself, and apart from the obligatory introductory shot, because he would never give that up, these days he was content with beer, wine, and water. Plus the occasional cognac, to help his digestion. Though not Jarnebring, of course. He was who he was. With a physique that defied human understanding and seemed completely unaffected by alcohol.
I wonder why he drinks, thought Johansson.
“Tell me about Palme,” he repeated. “You were there when it happened.”
“You want ideas about how to put all the binders on the shelves? Personally, I usually set them with the spine out. Then I paste little labels on them so that I can tell what’s in them,” Jarnebring teased.
“Forget about my binders,” said Johansson.
“It went to hell,” said Jarnebring. “If we’d done it the usual way of course we would’ve caught the bastard. If those of us who usually took care of it had been able to do it the usual way,” he clarified. “If we had not had a lot of crazy lawyers telling us what to do. You certainly would have found him if you’d been involved from the start. You wouldn’t have needed more than a month or two. But I guess you had your hands full with your binders as usual.”
“So who did it?”
“Who the hell knows,” said Jarnebring, shaking his head. “But it wasn’t Christer Pettersson. I knew him, by the way. Don’t know how many times I dragged that asshole to jail over the years. May he rest in peace,” said Jarnebring, raising his glass.
“He seemed crazy enough anyway,” Johansson objected.
“Christer Pettersson was crazy, with a certain degree of sanity. For example, he was never so crazy that he tried to attack me the times I arrested him. He knew, you see, that he would get a sound thrashing and he never got that crazy. He drank and did drugs, carried on and was generally disorderly. Fought with smaller, drunker companions and his ladies. Though it wasn’t more than that, and he didn’t understand firearms. Besides, I think he liked people like Palme. It was people like you and me he didn’t like.”
“The one who shot Palme was a skilled shooter,” said Johansson. Wonder what Palme would have thought about Christer Pettersson, he thought suddenly. A social outcast? A person who only happened to end up on the outside? Through no fault of his own?
“The one who shot, yes,” said Jarnebring. “He was just as good a shot as you or me. Forget all our colleagues who complain that it’s no big deal to shoot someone a few inches away-but in that case how could he miss Lisbeth Palme when he shot at her? Forget all that bullshit from everyone who’s never shot at anyone in a crisis situation, when people move around and start jumping and running like dazed chickens as soon as it goes off.”
“I see what you mean,” Johansson agreed.
“The bullet that strikes Lisbeth Palme goes in on her left side, passes between the skin and her blouse, the whole way along the back, level with her shoulder blade and out on the right side. If you miss like that you’re a damn experienced shot. If she’d just twisted her upper body a tenth of a second later he would’ve clipped off her back. So he could really shoot. I’m a hundred percent sure he was convinced he’d shot her through the lung, and because he also knew that was enough, with interest, he was content to get out of there.”
“She falls down on her knees beside her husband,” said Johansson.
“Sure,” said Jarnebring with emphasis. “First he shoots Palme. Hits him from behind in mid-step, and he falls flat on his face on the street. He had a bruise the size of a silver dollar on his forehead. In the next second he aims at Lisbeth, targeting the middle of her back, but just as he fires she twists her body to see what happened to her husband who has suddenly fallen headlong in front of her feet. She hasn’t even seen the shooter behind her.
“So all that about Pettersson, you can just forget. Cheers, by the way,” said Jarnebring. “There’s way too much talking at this party, if you ask me.”
It was definitely not Christer Pettersson. Completely wrong type, according to Jarnebring. Just as wrong as that nonsense about the Kurds, those guys would eat out of the hands of someone like Palme. Or the “thirty-three-year-old” for that matter.
“Usual fucking pathological liar,” Jarnebring summarized.
“So who did it?”
“Someone very familiar with the area, good physique, experienced shot, presence of mind, sure of himself, full control of the situation, sharpness and the capacity to resort to violence when it was time. Ice-cold devil. Not at all like Pettersson, because he would be jumping around yelling for a while, then waving his arms if his opponent seemed small and harmless enough. If he’d tried to kill Palme he would have started by doing a war dance around him, and then he would have done the wave and given him the finger afterward. But this perpetrator didn’t do that. He did what he needed to do, calmly and quietly, and then he just left.”
“I hear what you’re saying,” Johansson agreed. “An ice-cold devil who only needs to pull a trigger to be able to shoot another person from behind. Not the least like Christer Pettersson.”
“Could be me. The one who put Palme out of business, that is,” said Jarnebring and grinned.
“No,” said Johansson. “I don’t think so, despite all the rest, because I do believe that.”
“Someone like me then,” Jarnebring persisted.
Not you, thought Johansson. Not someone who is only bigger and stronger than everyone else and never lost a fistfight. Another type, someone who can just pull the trigger and suddenly change from person to executioner, he thought.
Although he’d actually thought that the whole time, so they didn’t talk about it anymore.
Wednesday, October 10. The bay outside Puerto Pollensa on north Mallorca