“Johansson,” said Linda Mattei with a frown. “You have to be a little careful with that man. Is this something you’ve cooked up together?”
“My idea, but he bought it right away,” said Lisa Mattei. “Best boss I’ve had. The best police officer I’ve met. You know he can see around corners?” Almost always, she thought.
“Yes, I’ve heard that. Ad nauseam,” said Linda Mattei, who did not seem particularly pleased. “You haven’t fallen in love with him?”
“But Mom,” said Lisa, shaking her head, “he’s twice my age, at least. Besides, he’s already married.”
“They usually are,” Linda Mattei observed. “Which seldom seems to hinder them.”
Though Lisa is probably not Johansson’s type exactly, thought Linda Mattei. Even though I’m her mother.
“Nothing like that,” said Lisa Mattei. “But what do you think about the idea itself?” I wonder if they’ve ever been together. Dear mother and Johansson.
“I promise to call Söderberg,” said Linda Mattei, and then nothing more was said about it.
After her second meeting with Lewin, Holt started grappling with the witnesses from the crime scene. She had meticulously read each and every interview with the thirty witnesses to the murder itself. As well as the half a dozen who might have seen the perpetrator as he fled from the scene. Plus the dozen or more who several years later recalled that in any event they had seen Christer Pettersson right before and right after the murder. Plus the hundred others the police chose to disregard.
For example, Madeleine Nilsson, who for some reason ended up on the same computer list as the two teenage girls who admitted at the second interview, a week after the murder, that they had made it all up. True, they had been to the movies on Kungsgatan, but when the screening was over they ended up at a club down at Stureplan. They had not walked past on Sveavägen just as Olof Palme was shot.
Young punks, thought Holt with sudden vehemence, because just reading through all the papers had taken her almost a full day. She’d come up with no answers, only new question marks. And the big question mark, which Lewin had put in her hands, was just as big as before.
She could live with Lewin’s calculations in principle. Perhaps something completely unexpected had happened to the perpetrator as he stood up there on Malmskillnadsgatan and no one saw him. Maybe he’d stood there only a minute or so before he finally collected himself and ran down David Bagares gata, where he saw Witness Two coming toward him further up the street. If that’s really how it was, then suddenly the times were neat and tidy and there were no longer any broken links in the chain of witnesses. Although considering Witness One and his knowledge of Christer Pettersson, or Witness Three and the “fucking gook” who actually shoved her, it could hardly have been Pettersson who stood there collecting himself before he ran on to the next link.
Thought Anna Holt, sighing deeply.
Johansson’s intuitive observation-dead sure and incomprehensibly spot-on-she could live with too. True, Johansson was almost always right, but now and then he was wrong, and in some isolated instance he might even have been completely out-in-left-field wrong. The few times Holt reminded him of this he grinned and shrugged his shoulders. If you were going to say wise things, it was also necessary to say something really stupid, and handled correctly that was an unbeatable way to learn something new, according to Johansson.
The problem was the improbable alliance between Lewin’s monomaniacal calculations, his anxiety-driven exactitude, and Johansson’s merrily unrestrained intuition. An angst-ridden accountant teamed up with a male fortune-teller, and to hell with both of them, thought Holt. To hell with Lewin, who was almost always right but hadn’t been man enough to stand up for what he believed when he had the chance twenty years ago. To hell with Johansson, who was almost always right despite his big ego, his self-centeredness, and all his vices. But if both of them believe it, the bad thing unfortunately is that it’s true, thought Holt. So what do you do about it? she thought. Shrug your shoulders, act like it’s raining, and go on with your life?
Linda Mattei called her daughter within an hour after they’d finished their lunch.
“This evening at seven o’clock,” said Linda Mattei. “Björn is going away fishing for the weekend. He was supposed to meet a former colleague down in Strömstad and be there all next week. But because it’s Johansson who’s insisting, there’s probably some urgency too, and he had nothing against coming here as soon as this evening.”
Rapid response, thought Lisa.
“He must have a little crush on you, Mom,” she teased. “As soon as you call he comes rushing over.”
“Certainly,” said Linda Mattei. Who doesn’t, she thought. The problem was that they were all considerably older than she was.
“What will you be serving?” asked Lisa.
“No salad anyway,” her mother answered. “Be sure to arrive on time, by the way.”
Just about the time Linda Mattei’s two guests were sitting down at her neatly set kitchen table, Anna Holt decided to bite the bitter apple and visit a crime scene more than twenty years old. Embrace the situation. What alternative do you really have? thought Holt in the taxi on her way into town. It was another completely ordinary evening, nothing on TV, no movies she wanted to see, no friends or even acquaintances who had called and wanted to see her. Definitely no guys, despite the fact that there was more than one to choose from, and none of them should have any reason to complain. Not even her only child, her son, Nicke. He could be reached only by voice mail on his cell phone, where she would hear a message announcing with youthful naturalness that he didn’t have time right now but feel free to try again later. He doesn’t even need money anymore, thought Holt and sighed.
Holt spent over two hours in the neighborhood around the scene of the crime. Followed the perpetrator along the trail and even did so in the various walking styles described by the witnesses. She leafed through her bundle of old crime scene photos, paced out distances, pressed on her stopwatch, walked, jogged, and ran at full speed. She did everything the witnesses said the perpetrator or they themselves had done. Finally she considered the various alternatives and boiled them down to two conclusions.
Lewin was probably right. If it were the perpetrator Witness Two had seen, then she’d seen him much too late. The only possibility-it was unclear why and highly improbable-was that in that case he had stopped on Malmskillnadsgatan above the stairs to Tunnelgatan and that he stood there for approximately one and a half minutes. Why in the name of God would he do something that stupid? thought Holt.
Johansson was definitely right. There were no objections to his hypothetical line of reasoning. Other than that it was hypothetical, of course. The escape route he proposed was decidedly the best if you wanted to get away from the scene undetected. Up the stairs from Tunnelgatan to Malmskillnadsgatan, turn right, sixty yards’ brisk walk, and then down the next set of stairs on the same street. The one that led from Malmskillnadsgatan down to Kungsgatan.
It was Friday after payday, and all the people walking down there were unaware of what had happened only a few hundred yards away. All the restaurants, cafés, cinemas, all the stairs down to the subway, and it could hardly be more safe than that for a perpetrator who had just shot the prime minister in the street. Times Square, Piccadilly, or Kungsgatan in Stockholm, if it was about hiding yourself in the crowd it was all the same, thought Anna Holt. An ice-cold soul who knows the area, without mercy and with no butterflies in his stomach. I only wonder whether Johansson read the interview with witness Nilsson, she thought.