“I knew her,” said Lewin. “She was a good person who lived a very sad life.”
“You knew her? How?”
“I got to know her a few years before the Palme assassination. It was in connection with an investigation. A female acquaintance of Madeleine’s, in the same situation as Madeleine, had a so-called boyfriend who beat her black and blue and ended up trying to slit her throat. She got away, fortunately, but she was scared to death and refused to talk with us. Though not Madeleine. She not only showed up and testified against her friend’s boyfriend. She also managed to talk sense into her so for once the charges held up in court. He got six years in prison for attempted homicide, felony procurement, and a few other things, and was released after serving his sentence.”
“You think that Nilsson actually encountered the perpetrator on the stairs down to Kungsgatan?”
“Yes, actually,” said Lewin. “It’s highly probable that she did. I see no time-related problems, and she was definitely not the type who would lie or try to make herself interesting. She was a good person, honorable, talented, pleasant, always stood up for others. Considering the life she lived, I also believe she was very observant about just that sort of thing.”
A good person who lived a sad life, thought Holt.
“You didn’t speak with any of the investigators about this? After you talked with her, I mean,” she said.
“I brought it up with Fylking,” said Lewin. “Partly because it was his area, partly because he was my immediate boss, both in the Palme investigation and in ordinary cases.”
“So what did he think?”
“He didn’t think the way I did,” said Lewin, smiling again for some reason. “At the same time he was friendly enough to point out, and it was very unusual coming from him, that regardless of which of us was right, it was completely uninteresting because the top officials in the investigation leadership-that was his own expression-had already decided.”
“Is she alive?” asked Holt. “Is there any sense in interviewing her again?”
“There certainly would have been,” said Lewin. “As I said she was an excellent individual. She died of an overdose about a year after the Palme assassination. In September the following year, if I remember correctly.”
“I see then,” said Holt, sighing faintly. “So our chain of witnesses already breaks between the first and second link. Instead we have witness Madeleine Nilsson, who has been dead for at least twenty years.”
“Yes,” Lewin agreed. “Though if it’s Christer Pettersson we’re thinking about, I’m afraid our witness chain broke off even earlier.”
“Witness One,” said Holt with surprise. “The one who seems so sensible. So what was wrong with him?”
“I don’t think there were any major faults with him,” said Lewin. “Possibly it was the case that our dear colleagues forgot to ask him the obligatory introductory question.”
“The obligatory question,” said Holt with surprise. “You mean whether he knew or recognized the perpetrator?”
“Exactly. But that doesn’t seem to have been done. Instead they went directly to the perpetrator’s appearance. He was never asked whether the perpetrator was anyone he knew or recognized.”
“So you mean that Witness One is supposed to have known Christer Pettersson?” What is he saying? thought Holt.
“Witness One did not know Christer Pettersson personally,” Lewin clarified. “On the other hand, he knew of him and knew who he was. Not least by appearance, because they lived in the same neighborhood out in Sollentuna. He had seen Pettersson on numerous occasions during the last few years, several times a week sometimes. Pettersson was the type that all normal people in the area took detours around.”
“So when did he report that?” This is getting stranger and stranger, thought Holt.
“Toward the end of the summer of 1988. More than two years after the murder. When our colleagues in the investigation had become interested in Christer Pettersson. Then Witness One was questioned again. At that time pictures of Christer Pettersson were shown to him, among other things.”
“So what did he say?”
“That’s when he admitted that he knew Pettersson. Not least by appearance.”
“And?”
“No,” said Lewin, shaking his head. “This rang no bells in his head. He hadn’t recognized the perpetrator as Christer Pettersson when he ran past him on Tunnelgatan ten seconds after the murder. Neither had the famous lightbulb come on at any time over the next two years during which he’d seen Pettersson in the neighborhood where he lived. And it seems like it should have. If it had been Pettersson who shot Palme.”
“So how does he explain that?” said Holt.
“That the perpetrator and Pettersson were not especially alike,” said Lewin. “In other words, he thinks he would have thought of that, and in that case naturally he would have contacted the police. Witness One is a completely ordinary, honorable person. Not the slightest shadow on him, if you ask me.”
“How many are there who know about this piece of information?”
“A few, among those who count,” said Lewin, shrugging his shoulders. “And now you too,” he said, smiling faintly. “For the usual reason that it’s not something that was talked about very much. Among other police officers.”
“Among other police officers,” Holt repeated, and for some reason it was Johansson she could see before her.
“Among other police officers,” Lewin confirmed, and to be on the safe side he carefully cleared his throat as he said it.
19
As soon as Lisa Mattei left Johansson, she called her mother, Linda Mattei, one of the superintendents at SePo’s department of constitutional protection, located in the building next to her daughter-“the secret building”-in the big police headquarters at Kronoberg. She was exactly twice Lisa’s age. Apart from the fact that they were both blondes, they did not look particularly alike. Linda Mattei was a big, busty blonde. When she was a young police officer, she had been a “real bombshell” among her male colleagues. These days, and for almost twenty years, she was “still a very elegant woman,” according to the same sources.
Her daughter, Lisa, was a thin, pale blonde. According to Johansson, like a young Mia Farrow. Lisa took after her father in appearance. Apart from the hair color, of course.
Her father, Claus Peter Mattei, had come to Stockholm and the Royal Institute of Technology as a young chemistry student in the late sixties. Short, thin, and radical, dark with intense brown eyes and almost a political refugee from Munich. He’d left because it was no longer possible to live there if you were a young person who thought and felt the way he did. In the strange world in which we live he and Linda fell madly in love, had a daughter they christened Lisa, and divorced a few years later when the differences between them became too great to be papered over by a love that steadily lessened.
What remained was Lisa. Apart from the hair color, recognizably like the father she seldom saw since he’d left her. He was the same father who for a long time now was different from the one who had left Lisa and Sweden. Still short, dark, and thin. His gaze was now melancholy and insightful in the way appropriate for every proper German investor with a PhD in chemistry and a job as research head of one of the Bayer group’s larger companies. Repatriated to his childhood Munich, he was a humanist, a conservative liberal, of course an opera lover, a wine connoisseur, and a philanthropist too.
The mother, Linda, and her daughter, Lisa, had lunch together at a restaurant a comfortable walking distance from the big police building. Lisa’s suggestion. A bit too expensive to entice their colleagues and thus discreet enough for anyone who wanted to talk undisturbed. Sliced beef with onions for Linda, seafood salad for Lisa, mineral water for both of them, the introductory mother-and-daughter exchange, and as soon as they started eating Lisa made the same suggestion she had to Johansson, and because Linda was her mother she also talked about why.