“It’s cool,” said Mattei. Smiled and nodded. Seems relatively normal even though he looks the way he does, she thought.
Stuck-up lady, thought the guard, watching her as she went in. That cool, blonde type that always played the leading role in his daily dreams of a better life. What would someone like that have to do with someone like him? A moonlighting student. Shaved head to conceal the baldness that had started to appear even in high school. Could bench-press four hundred pounds. A workout buddy had suggested he should moonlight as a guard. Better than student loans. Plenty of time to read. Get paid while he did it.
So now here he was. In the reception area of the big police building, of all places. On the basis of his appearance and even though he was in cinema studies at the university. They must have missed that on his application. Although there wasn’t much time for reading. Not after all the instructions he had been given at the new employee training course. But what would someone like her do with someone like me? he thought.
The police track was the track that no serious thinking person believed in. That the police themselves didn’t was both human and explicable. At the same time they were in good company. The special adviser had already expressed his condemnation a few years after the murder, when the issue was discussed in the mightiest of all secret societies, where people like him exchanged viewpoints and ideas with one another.
“The classic conspiracy theory is a thin fabric of poorly conceived ideas, personal shortcomings and ordinary, common slander as…ersatzmittel…for factual circumstances,” he stated in his introductory address. “Or plain nonsense, if you prefer that description,” he added.
What was called the police track in the mass media was, in the Palme investigation’s materials, the general designation for a number of tips, leads, and theories that individual police officers, groups of police, or the police as an organization in one way or another were involved in the murder of the prime minister.
In an objective sense-factual, or simply putative-to start with this was about three threads in “the thin fabric of conspiracy.” Policemen who had been on duty during the night of the murder and appeared, or acted, in a strange way; police officers who harbored extreme political opinions, hated the murder victim, and for that reason also would have had motive to kill him; and the operational leadership of the police in Stockholm, who conducted their mission so badly after the murder that it must have been with intent or ill will.
After that the tips had poured in. About mysterious meetings between police officers, about policemen who said strange things, about policemen who did the Hitler salute and toasted that Olof Palme was finally dead, about policemen who had supposedly vowed to kill him years before he was actually assassinated. Policemen who were observed in the vicinity of the crime, policemen who had a violent past, who had a license for their own Magnum revolvers, policemen who…
It was the secret police who as early as the second day of the investigation were given the task of investigating the substance of all this. The reason was simple and obvious. Almost all the tips were about policemen who worked in Stockholm, the same police authority that also had responsibility for the investigation of the murder. Placing it with the Stockholm police department’s own department for internal investigations was not an option either. The mission was far too extensive, and those affected much too close to one another.
The opinion of the leadership of the first investigation had been clear from the start, and to be on the safe side provincial police chief Hans Holmér had yet another memorandum prepared. In reality there was no “police track” that could be investigated. The very thought of such a thing collapsed on its own absurdity. What remained was that it could not be ruled out that the murderer, or one of his accomplices, was or had been a policeman. Just as he might be a doctor, teacher, or journalist. There was thus no police track, as a simple logical consequence of what was stated in the memo. Just as there was no doctor, teacher, or journalist track.
Even though the police track didn’t exist it ended up with SePo, sufficiently far enough away and sufficiently nearby. But so as not to bring chaos into the overarching detective organization, for once the secret police had to subordinate themselves to their colleagues in the open police operation. The leadership in the Palme investigation also led the investigation of the police track. That was who the secret police reported to. It was there that the final, conclusive decisions were made.
In concrete terms the police track encompassed about a hundred named policemen. All the way from the first investigation leader, the provincial police chief in Stockholm, whose alibi for the night of the murder was challenged, to the sort of colleagues who had generated complaints for assault on duty, because they had behaved offensively, expressed themselves disparagingly, or simply acted inappropriately in general.
All the way from the provincial police chief to those who had already been fired, quit voluntarily, or been well on their way to doing so when they wound up in the investigation. Because they’d had problems with their nerves, with alcohol, with wives, with finances. Problems that seldom came alone. Because they drove while drunk, beat up inmates in jail, stole from the till at work, threw a flowerpot at the wife’s head, shot real bullets through a neighbor’s window after a night of partying. Or simply kicked their dog.
Some seventy of them were identified, investigated, and in all cases removed from the investigation. Remaining were about thirty cases where the policemen who were pointed out could not be identified with certainty. Or even the kind of cases where it was extremely unclear whether the nameless “policeman” that was pointed out was actually the one he was alleged to be. Leads and tips that sometimes had been investigated, sometimes immediately set aside without further action. Tips, leads, cases, which in any event had not resulted in the slightest concrete suspicion that the policemen investigated had been involved in the murder of Olof Palme. In everything else imaginable, to be sure, what came out was hardly flattering to these men or the organization they served, but considered as murder suspects without any substance worth the name. Exactly as might be expected from a track that collapsed on “its own absurdity.”
Mattei started by making a list of the policemen, arranged them in alphabetical order by surname, and with her customary precision studied the information alleged against them.
After two hours and a dozen names she opened her bottle of mineral water, drank half, and ate her banana. Another two hours and ten names later she had consumed the rest of the water, eaten her apple, gone to the restroom, and then stretched her legs by walking around the floor where her office was.
Say what you will, but life as a police officer can be unbearably exciting, thought Lisa Mattei as she returned to her binders and looked at a postcard of one of her former colleagues. After twenty years of work as a policeman he had resigned. A few years later he entered contemporary history as one of the heavy names in the police track.
The picture on the postcard was a full-length photograph of himself. According to his own information, he also took the picture. Same with the postcard which he, according to the investigation, personally produced and paid for. Civilian clothes, polyester trousers, sport shirt, sandals with brown socks. Summer or late spring in the early eighties. A middle-aged man with a beer belly and early-stage baldness standing at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin doing the Hitler salute. He’s on vacation. In a week he will return to Stockholm and his work as a police inspector with the first precinct in Stockholm City.