The colleague was named Berg, and he was now with the uniformed police in Västerort. He had worked more than forty years as a policeman, would soon retire, and was still a police inspector. This could not be blamed on lack of contacts within the corps. His father had been a policeman, his uncle a legendary police officer, bureau head Berg, Johansson’s predecessor as head of the operational unit of the secret police.
The fault was his own. For more than ten years, from the late seventies to the early nineties, he’d been one of the country’s most investigated police officers. The department of internal investigations with the Stockholm police had been at him thirty or more times due to complaints of mistreatment and other excesses on duty. His own boss, Lars Martin Johansson, had even put him and his colleagues in jail twenty years ago. That time it concerned serious mistreatment of a retiree, which was supposed to have taken place in the holding cells at the Norrmalm district. Nonetheless, the outcome was minimal. Berg and his associates had been released every time.
The one who put a stop to his career-the one ultimately responsible for Berg’s inability to gain the title of chief inspector-was his own uncle. The year before the prime minister was murdered, he had the secret police make a survey of extreme right-wing officers within the Stockholm police, and before long it became clear that his own nephew was playing a prominent role in that context. When the prime minister was assassinated six months later and the media started digging into the so-called police track, Police Inspector Berg was the individual officer most often mentioned in the various lead files that the Palme investigators were collecting. Never convicted. Indicted and released one time, but no more than that, and for the days his own boss had him held and jailed him, he was later able to collect sizeable damages.
The night the Swedish prime minister was murdered he’d been the third police officer to set foot on the crime scene.
Small world, and who could be better than him? thought Anna Holt.
When Holt got hold of her colleague Berg by phone, he suggested they meet at a café near the police station. Like Holt, he lived in Solna, and because he would be working the afternoon shift, getting together down by the station was best for him. Besides, there were never any people there at that time of day, and they had good coffee and sandwiches too.
“Iranians,” Berg explained. “But nice people. They’re the ones who’ve taken over the service sector nowadays.”
“Nice of you to help out,” said Holt half an hour later.
“It’s cool,” he said, smiling. “Had nothing better to do, to be honest. But there’s one thing I want to say before we start.”
“Of course,” said Holt.
Then he’d expounded for five minutes about himself-by way of introduction, pointing out everything that Holt surely already knew-before he got to the payoff. He had not had anything whatsoever to do with the assassination of Olof Palme. He had been as surprised as everyone else. Just as dismayed as everyone else, believe it or not, and if there was anything he wished from his life, it was that he and his fellow officers who’d been there when it happened had succeeded in seizing the perpetrator at the scene.
“Just so we save time,” said Berg, shrugging his shoulders.
“I believe you,” said Holt. “I’ve never believed in those characters on TV and their police track.” The fact that I do believe quite a bit of the other things I’ve read is hardly interesting right now, she thought.
“Nice to hear,” said Berg, looking as though he meant what he said.
“There’s a completely different matter I wanted to discuss with you,” said Holt. “The reconstruction of the crime that our colleagues made at that time. I had a hard time getting the times to tally.”
Then for five minutes she recounted her and Lewin’s conclusions that Witness One must have been one and a half minutes behind the perpetrator when he came up from the stairs to Malmskillnadsgatan. And that Witness Two, simply for that reason, could not have seen the perpetrator run across the street “right before.” On the other hand, she did not say a word about the witness Madeleine Nilsson. Holt intended to wait with that bit.
“If we assume that the murder was committed at 23:21:30,” said Holt, “and that the perpetrator needs a minute to run down Tunnelgatan and up the stairs to Malmskillnadsgatan, then he’s standing up there at 23:22:30.”
“I know,” said Berg with feeling. “The man who shot Palme must’ve had crazy good luck.”
Then he recounted his memories of the same course of events, which Holt had devoted hours to reading about.
“According to the officers at central administration and all the know-it-alls, we got the alarm from Sveavägen almost exactly twenty-four minutes past eleven,” said Berg. “I’ll buy that, plus or minus the usual seconds here or there, ’cause it’s always like that. The time is thus 23:24:00,” he clarified. “Then we were at Brunkebergstorg right by the National Bank, we were coming from the north on Malmskillnadsgatan, so less than a minute earlier we’d passed the stairs up from Tunnelgatan. We must have missed the murderer by only thirty seconds. Palme is down on Sveavägen, a hundred yards to the right of us. He was shot only a minute and a half earlier, and we’re driving past at a leisurely pace up on Malmskillnadsgatan and manage to drive another four hundred yards before we get the alarm. You can go crazy for less.” Berg sighed and shook his head.
“So how fast were you driving?” said Holt.
“We were gliding,” said Berg. “The way you do when you want to see all you can from a bus. Gliding down Malmskillnadsgatan at max twenty miles an hour. Calm and quiet out. It was cold and nasty too, I recall. People were trotting along with turned-up collars, hands in their pockets and shoulders hunched. We were sitting there in peace in our warm Dodge until all hell broke loose on the radio.” Berg shook his head.
“What happened then?”
“Full speed as soon as we responded to the call,” said Berg. “Gunfire at the corner of Sveavägen and Tunnelgatan, so there wasn’t much more to ask. Blue lights, sirens, first a right from Brunkebergstorg down to Sveavägen and then five hundred yards straight north to the crime scene. I was the first man out of the bus, and the time must have been somewhere between 23:24:20 and 23:24:30. Would’ve taken us less than half a minute after we responded, so that certainly tallies,” Berg said.
The riot squad bus had driven down Malmskillnadsgatan one and a half minutes after the murder, and thirty to forty seconds after the murderer stood at the top of the stairs and looked around before he disappeared from Witness One’s view.
The officers in the Södermalm riot squad had not seen the perpetrator. They hadn’t seen Witness One either, or observed Witness Two, and so far all was well and good, for they shouldn’t have, thought Holt.
Witness One and Witness Two, thought Holt, but before she could ask him he had anticipated her.
“I see what’s bothering you, Holt,” said Berg suddenly. “You have the idea that the woman up on Malmskillnadsgatan, the one who’s called Witness Two in that chain all the geniuses at the bureau were harping about, the one who says to Witness One as he comes up on the street that the murderer ran down David Bagares gata, you get the idea that it was someone other than the perpetrator she’d seen.”
“Why do you think that?”
“That’s what I thought as soon as the picture was clear to me,” said Berg. “How else would it have fit together? Time-wise,” I mean.