“Okay,” said Johansson. “I hear what you’re saying. We just have to do the best we can. Work with what we’ve got.” What the hell choice do we have? he thought.
“I think you know that, Lars,” said Holt.
“Know what?” said Johansson.
“That we always do the best we can,” said Holt.
“Excellent,” said Johansson curtly. “Same time, same place, in a week.”
“And then you want the name of the one who did it,” said Holt. “Wasn’t his name ‘The Bastard’?”
“Watch it, Anna,” said Johansson.
23
After their meeting Johansson took Lewin aside for a private conversation. What choice did he really have? What had evidently been an excellent, or in any case an energetic, idea fourteen days earlier had so far only produced five different results.
More than four hundred work hours for Holt, Lewin, and Mattei, who of course did not lack other tasks. Waste of police resources. That was the first.
The media also appeared to have put on high alert all the notorious informants who constantly made life miserable for this investigation. Flykt and his colleagues were not amused. That was the second.
Johansson had clearly ended up in the little black book at the editorial offices of Sweden’s Largest Morning Newspaper. There had been a daily harvest of arrows against his bared chest, news articles about various improprieties at the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, editorials on the police department’s lack of efficiency, and most recently a cartoon with the heading “Remembrance of Things Past.” Depicted was a very fat Johansson holding a leashed German shepherd with one hand while he shone a flashlight on something that suspiciously resembled an ordinary pile of dog shit. Johansson was not amused. That was the third.
What was left were things that had to do with the issue at hand.
There was the insight that the material to a large degree had already been lost. The old police article of faith that the perpetrator you didn’t manage to find, despite everything, was there in the investigation might well be correct. The problem was simply that this time there were far too many papers that were far too unsorted for anyone to have a reasonable chance of finding him. That was the fourth.
At last the fifth. Fourteen days had passed and what had three of the country’s very best detectives actually accomplished? On reasonably good grounds they had called into question the previously accepted opinion about the perpetrator’s escape route. And they had offered only a new question mark in return.
There was the witness Madeleine Nilsson who had encountered a nameless, faceless man unknown to everyone on the stairs down to Kungsgatan. Before or after the murder? False or true? Regardless, the witness had been dead for about twenty years.
Lewin was a cautious general. If all generals had been like Lewin, there never would have been any wars. Lewin was nevertheless an excellent police officer. One of the very best. Okay, thought Johansson. Ask a direct question. If Lewin, in his peculiar way, even hints that this is futile, then you close it down.
“What do you say, Jan?” said Johansson. “Is this at all meaningful?”
“Don’t know,” said Lewin. “Easy it’s not.”
“Should we break it off and swallow the bitter pill?”
“Give it another week, by then we’ll have made an honorable attempt at least,” said Lewin. It must be Anna, he thought. She’s still on my mind.
“Okay,” said Johansson. What the hell has happened to Lewin? he thought. The guy seems to have had a change of personality.
“Sometimes you do things for good reasons but without really being clear about what those reasons are,” said Lewin meditatively.
“That was nice of you, Jan, but this time maybe it’s mostly about vanity,” said Johansson.
“Let’s give it another week,” said Lewin, getting up, nodding, and leaving.
It’s not just vanity, thought Johansson as his colleague closed the door after him. Of course he had personal reasons, that sort of thing is always present, but in this particular case it was probably more about the thirst for revenge than about vanity.
The week before he went on vacation he had been at an international police chief conference at Interpol’s headquarters in Lyons. These were recurring meetings that were aimed at people like him, whether they came from England or Saudi Arabia, Austria or Sri Lanka. Pleasant gatherings, to be sure, with plenty of time allotted for more informal activities. On the very first evening after the official banquet he and the usual colleagues from near and far gathered at the bar that was within walking distance of their hotel and which for several years now they considered their own regular bar in Lyons. There they had listened to the classic war stories. Everyone had something to contribute in the give-and-take, and naturally Johansson received the usual taunts for the same old reason. That the murder of his own country’s prime minister had remained unsolved for more than twenty years constituted the most colossal failure in global police history. Regardless of what anyone believed about the role that Lee Harvey Oswald had played in the assassination of Kennedy in November 1963.
This time it was one of his best friends, the head of the detective department of the Metropolitan Police in London, who fired the first stone in the direction of Johansson’s glass house. With an innocent expression, a friendly smile, and the nasal voice, vocabulary, and body language that people like him acquired at the breast at the family estate.
“How about the Olof Palme assassination? Any new leads? Can we look forward to an imminent breakthrough in your, quite surely, assiduous investigation? Satisfy our curiosity, Lars. Inform us ignoramuses in our professional darkness. Dispel all our worries.”
The usual merry cackling, obviously. Toasts and sporting nods to take the edge off of what had just been said-no harm intended of course, comrades-in-arms, et cetera, et cetera-but in Johansson’s case of little consolation, because the failure with the Palme investigation stuck in his head like a thorn.
For that reason too they always got the same answer.
With the Swedish police department’s Palme investigation, things were unfortunately so bad that for years it had served as an example of the danger of a major murder investigation being cockeyed from the start. There was the fact that they had failed to seize the perpetrator at the scene of the crime or surround and arrest him in its immediate vicinity. That almost never happened when it concerned the murder of someone like the Swedish prime minister.
Instead there was an unknown murderer who disappeared in the darkness of the night. Police procedures and professional practices that suddenly seemed swamped by officers running in all directions. All the wild hypotheses and pure guessing games as a substitute for the persistent, penetrating, long-term detective work that was the structural part of every genuine police identity. Everything that held them up. The individual police officer just as much as the corps he served.
But certainly he and his Swedish colleagues had learned their lesson, and if they didn’t believe him, all they had to do was to think back to the same Swedish police department’s successful hunt for the murderer of the Swedish foreign minister a few years ago.
“A good piece of old-time footwork, if you ask me,” Johansson stated in his now impeccable police chief English. “We learned our lesson. We did it the hard way. But we did it well.”
His English friend and colleague nodded in assent and indicated his approval by slightly raising his glass of amber-colored malt whiskey. But he didn’t want to let go, for if he’d understood things right the investigation was still active. Despite what Johansson had just said, and despite more than twenty years of failure.