“So what does the officer who interviewed him say?” asked Johansson.
“He apologizes. He’s probably about to pee his pants,” said Mattei.
“I’ll talk to him,” said Johansson with an authoritative expression. “Then I’ll get back to you.”
“About twenty at SePo, an unknown number at his office, but at least one-”
“Who’s that?” interrupted Johansson.
“The special adviser,” said Mattei. “Bureau head Berg confirmed that in his memos from the day of the murder. They’re incorporated into the case files, and according to Berg’s notes he discussed various security issues with him, including the prime minister’s personal protection, at around three in the afternoon. What this concerned in concrete terms, according to Söderström, was the prime minister’s plans to possibly go to the movies that evening.”
“But the officer who questioned him still must have asked about his conversation with Berg,” said Johansson.
“He did, too. But out of consideration for the security of the realm, blah blah blah, and next question, please. Amazing interview,” said Mattei.
“What remains is the victim’s family,” she continued. “His wife, his son Mårten, and the son’s then girlfriend. That makes three, and according to the interviews none of them talked with anyone else. Moreover, both the wife and the son seem pretty security conscious, if I may say so.”
“Friends and acquaintances then,” Johansson persisted.
“According to the interviews with former cabinet minister Sven Aspling and party secretary Bo Toresson, besides the son the only ones he talked with on the phone from home that same evening, he didn’t say anything about this.”
“They were asked the question anyway,” said Johansson.
“Yes,” said Mattei. “They were.”
“So basically the whole world may have known about his plans, at least five or six hours before he even decided,” sighed Johansson.
“A maximum of fifty persons, if you’re asking me. Twenty at SePo, perhaps as many at his office, plus ten as a margin of error. Makes fifty tops,” said Mattei.
It’s always something, thought Johansson. The date and time of the masquerade at the Stockholm Royal Opera House in March 1792 were known by several hundred people months in advance. A hundred of them received written invitations two months before, and at least ten of those who were there had been involved in the assassination of Gustav III.
“High time for a little leg stretch,” said Johansson, getting up suddenly.
22
After the leg stretch Holt declared that she no longer believed either in Christer Pettersson as the perpetrator or in the escape route that the Palme investigators had decided on early in the investigation. On the other hand, she did believe in the witness Madeleine Nilsson and even in Johansson’s description of the perpetrator.
“You’ve finally seen the truth and the light,” said Johansson.
“Call it what you want. I’ve changed my opinion,” answered Holt.
“Although it took awhile, Anna,” Johansson teased.
Mattei seemed to have taken on Holt’s doubts. With all respect for Holt and Lewin’s calculations, she was generally skeptical of witness statements. Essentially the only thing they had accomplished was to cast doubt on the earlier investigation’s theories and promote a new hypothesis instead. Not an antithesis even, only a hypothesis.
“But we can’t be any more certain than that,” said Mattei. “A dramatic, muddled situation. Seconds here or there, that means nothing to me,” she declared, shaking her blond head.
“Do you think there’s any point in testing it then, our hypothesis, that is?” asked Johansson.
“Of course,” said Mattei. “It’s the only thing we have. We don’t even need to prioritize. But it won’t be an easy task finding our alternative perpetrator in the case files. Assuming that he’s there. I can promise you that, boss.”
“It doesn’t seem completely hopeless though,” Johansson objected. “A highly qualified perpetrator between ages thirty-five and forty-five, military, police officer, or someone else who understands this sort of thing, no criminal record, access to weapons, good financial and other resources, who has an inside contact in the government offices, with SePo or in Palme’s family. To me it doesn’t sound like a completely impossible task. Especially if you consider that he would have taken the subway to Östermalm or Gärdet when he’d finished the mission,” he added, smiling at Holt.
“The problem is that you can’t look for him that way,” said Mattei. “It’s not like on the Internet, where you can enter a number of search terms to limit the number of alternatives. The Palme case files are organized in a completely different way. Or according to completely different principles, to be exact.”
“So what are those principles?” said Johansson, looking suspiciously at Mattei.
“It is highly unclear,” said Mattei. “I don’t even think they know themselves. It’s said that the material has been organized by investigation lead file, but it’s not searchable in the way you’re talking about, boss.”
“Investigation lead file,” said Johansson with a bewildered look. I guess everyone knows what that is, he thought.
“Yes, and clearly different things are meant by that,” said Mattei. “The most common lead is a so-called tip, which as a rule means that an informant has pointed to an individual; there are thousands of such tips. The next most common is an action that the investigators themselves have initiated, an interview, a search, an expert witness, basically anything at all. Even the sort of thing that the first investigation leader called ‘tracks’ in the mass media are stored as lead files. In a nutshell, it can be anything at all. Most of it seems to have been sorted in a spirit of fatigue. Everything is already so messy and immense that when something new shows up, they don’t really know what binder to put it in. So it gets put in a separate binder. Literally speaking, that is. Would you like an example, boss?”
“Gladly,” said Johansson. One lethal stab more or less makes no difference, he thought.
“I discovered the other day, for example, by pure chance, that the same tip from the same informant-it concerns the singling out of a certain individual as Palme’s murderer-was registered in three different lead files. Considering the identity of the informant, and he is a very diligent one, I won’t rule out that there are more leads than that. Same tip, same informant, same perpetrator who is singled out. At least three different leads, according to the registry.”
“But why in the name of God then?” said Johansson.
“It came in at three different times, received by different officers. Because of the previous registration it couldn’t be grouped with the earlier tip,” said Mattei, shrugging her shoulders.
“What do you say, Lewin?” said Johansson. It sounds completely random, he thought.
“I’m inclined to agree with Lisa,” Lewin said. “If you don’t know which file to look in, then it’s hard. That is, knowing what you’re looking for doesn’t help. You also have to know where to look. Apart from certain isolated exceptions.”
“Like what then?” said Johansson. This is contrary to the nature of searching, he thought.
“The so-called police track is probably the best example. When the investigation started its work, SePo got the task of investigating all information that concerned the police. Almost all the officers who were singled out as involved in the murder worked in Stockholm, and considering that almost the entire investigation force was recruited from Stockholm it was considered inappropriate for them to investigate themselves, so to speak. So SePo got to do it, and the one good thing about that was that the material is collected in one place, most of it anyway. What it’s like for anything that has come in later I honestly don’t know.