‘He was married for a while when he was still living there, even though he was mostly away on military exercises and in UN service in Cyprus. Just as his relationship was breaking down, he left the army and joined the Foreign Legion. Apparently you can still do that. His ex-wife is still called Lindberg, which might suggest that it wasn’t an acrimonious divorce. It didn’t sound that way, either. She got tired of him being away all the time, she had lovers, he had lovers among the nurses over in Cyprus. Popular with women in general. But let’s start from the beginning. Niklas Lindberg was born in January 1965, took the science route in high school in Trollhättan, leaving with good grades in 1983. Did his compulsory military service in a commando unit in 1985, went through that with top grades, started officer training in autumn 1986, was a cadet in Boden in 1988, an officer in Cyprus in 1990 and 1992, climbed up the ranks and had just become a major with the commandos in Arvidsjaur when he left in 1994. Twenty-nine-year-old major, pretty good, no?’
‘Yeah,’ said Hultin. ‘That’s great.’
‘A couple of friends from school talked about him as a fun-loving guy who it was generally going well for,’ Chavez continued. ‘A high-flyer. A golden boy, you could say. Loads of women. His friends saw the thing with the commandos as a way to… get good grades in his enlistment, too. He liked getting good grades. His friends didn’t take it seriously. There was nothing soldier-like about him. He doesn’t seem to have done his service with his eye on a regular officer’s career, either. And his childhood seems to have been a comfortable, small-town, middle-class one. His parents seem nice. A sweet couple, you could say. High-school teacher and occupational therapist. No racist tendencies, and believe me, I can normally get an instinctive feel for that. They were talking about a little tow-head who had always landed on his feet, always been happy, always taken care of those weaker than him. The pictures from his childhood didn’t suggest anything else. His parents really were immensely sad about his inexplicable transformation into a violent offender. A deep, internal sorrow. He stayed in Trollhättan even once he’d become an officer, married an old flame and seems to have been a nice enough guy. Smart, handsome, kind, or thereabouts. Then there seems to have been some kind of breakdown linked to his divorce five years ago. Spring 1994. A critical point.
‘I’ve been talking to two of his superiors from the commando unit in Arvidsjaur; no one understood why he quit. There were no complaints. From either side. He just quit and went straight into the Foreign Legion. Two weeks later. It must’ve been well planned. But why? I haven’t managed to get in touch with any of his Foreign Legion colleagues, they’re a bit secretive after all, but I’ll keep working on it. He quit that after a year, in any case, went to Stockholm and took part in a failed bomb attempt against a Kurdish cultural centre. There’d been a party there, but the bomb went off when everyone had gone home. It turned out there was something wrong with the timer. The bomb was meant to go off right in the middle of the party, and it was powerful enough to kill a lot of people, a hell of a lot. It was generally assumed that Lindberg himself was behind the bomb, but they never managed to pin it on him. There was no doubt the day after, though, at a Kurdish demonstration in Solna Centrum, where he violently assaulted two Kurds. In the investigation, it transpired that he had good contacts with Nazi organisations in both Sweden and the US, and presumably elsewhere, too. So we can assume that his departure from the army had its roots in some kind of Nazi conversion.’
‘In that case, the Foreign Legion sounds like a really strange choice,’ said Hjelm. ‘Isn’t it a truly multicultural army?’
‘Maybe that’s what he discovered,’ said Chavez, shrugging. ‘But he had a year-long contract. All he wanted was to make war, for real. And maybe his racial hatred reached unexpected heights among all of those foreigners. Well, from my conversations with the police and lawyers involved, I got a picture of an unusually cold, violent man, with a great love of bombs. Acute lack of empathy, that’s what his own defence lawyer said off the record.’
‘He always wants to be best,’ said Kerstin Holm, thoughtful. ‘Could he really be challenging the man he views as best? Sweden’s smartest drug dealer, Rajko Nedic? Who’s also an unusually well-integrated foreigner.’
‘There’s probably only one who’s better assimilated,’ boasted Jorge Chavez. ‘Sweden’s best-educated policeman.’
‘Let’s not get cocky now,’ Hultin said neutrally. ‘Anyone else have anything?’
‘One strange thing which might not be that important,’ said Viggo Norlander, deep in the reports, one of which he waved in the air. ‘Forensics’ report from the crime scene in Sickla. The dead men, Bergwall and Carlstedt, they were wearing black balaclavas. The same brand. A whole load of black fibres from other, similar hats have been found there, too. But also some gold-coloured ones.’
‘Gold?’ an uncoordinated chorus exclaimed.
Chavez smiled and said: ‘Aha. The golden one…’
‘What’re you talking about?’ Hultin asked, irritated.
‘Could it be possible that Niklas Lindberg marks his dominance over the others by wearing a golden balaclava?’ Chavez asked.
There was a momentary pause in the Supreme Command Centre. Suddenly, they felt that they knew Niklas Lindberg much better.
‘Of course it could,’ Hultin nodded.
After yet another pause, he continued.
‘How’re you getting on, Gunnar?’
Gunnar Nyberg had been sitting in silence. He was torn. Was this his team? Or was it Sara Svenhagen, Ludvig Johnsson, Ragnar Hellberg and the others? He felt deeply and sincerely torn.
‘I’ve been switching between paedophile and Nazi sites online,’ he said, ‘and I haven’t been able to work out where I belong. I’m starting to get a feel for the extent of these secret networks, in any case. And for how they’ve grown massively since the Internet became commonplace. But I can’t find Lindberg online. Or Carlstedt, aside from as a seller at Kindwall’s. Bergwall’s name crops up on certain racist home pages. He seems to have been the group’s ideologue.’
‘So now they’re ideologically homeless,’ said Söderstedt.
‘But no less dangerous for it,’ said Hultin. ‘Let’s keep going as before. Don’t forget that there’s a little party tomorrow afternoon for the Police Olympics. They need all the support they can get. So, 16.00 in the Police Board’s assembly halls, Polhelmsgatan. You’re guests of honour. Waldemar Mörner hinted subtly that you’ve got orders to be there. Anyone missing will be kicked out, quote “arse first”.’
‘Good job his priorities are in order,’ said Paul Hjelm.
24
FOUR HUNDRED AND one. An inscription on a small plaque above a key, a hand shaking slightly. It had done the same several times already. It would probably stop shaking soon. It would just be a matter of routine.
He had even found himself a little ritual.
Four hundred and one, another one gone, he sang to himself, pushing the key into the lock and turning it.
No. He didn’t turn it. It wouldn’t turn. It was the first time the key had even gone in. That’s a bit strange, he thought, taking a piece of paper from his pocket and marking it. Why had the key gone in? Was that a hint that the safe-deposit box was in another branch of Föreningssparbanken? Maybe. But it didn’t make a difference. He had to check them all anyway. Every single place on the list had to be checked off.
Every place. Every bank. And the places were banks. And the banks were places.
Postbanken, he thought, distracted, walking over to the branch of SE-bank on the other side of the road.
Four hundred and one, another one gone.