‘Twelve!’ Tova shrieked in her most piercing voice. Wasn’t it meant to be sons whose voices broke?
‘Twelve,’ the parrot cawed, its voice definitely breaking. Normally, that would have caused Paul to reach for a slipper to throw at the disgusting creature, but today he was immune. He was sitting in his little glass bubble, watching their performance from another planet. It was splendid.
‘Eleven!’ Cilla shouted, sounding precisely like both daughter and parrot. ‘You know, you could tell her too, Paul, rather than just sitting there like a dolt!’
A dolt? Did those still exist? Paul wondered to himself from inside the bubble. He didn’t lift so much as a finger.
The door opened and Tova slipped out, Cilla running after her, shouting from the doorway: ‘If you come back later than eleven, I’ll kill you!’
Hmm, Paul thought to himself from inside his bubble. Was that good parenting? Was that a model of tolerance and understanding?
‘Dolt!’ Cilla repeated in the direction of the lump of jelly on the sofa, as she pulled on her coat.
‘Dolt,’ croaked the parrot.
‘Aren’t you head of ward?’ asked the dolt. ‘Don’t they have normal working hours?’
‘Do you think I’m cheating on you?’ shrieked Cilla, ‘Is that what you think? Do you think I’m running off to fuck some doctor?’
That was something that hadn’t even crossed his mind. But it would be lodged in there now, that much he knew. There was just one way to get rid of it. Temporarily. He glanced in the direction of the piano, which had been shoved into a corner, detested by all except him. As compensation, he had been forced to accept the parrot, something they had been desperately asking for without success for years.
The worst thing was when it mimicked his mediocre piano playing. A real nightmare.
‘No,’ he said, holding back the rest.
Cilla sighed deeply and made a slight conciliatory gesture.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Tova’s driving me crazy. And work. I have to go in and do the night shift sometimes, you know. Otherwise everything’ll fall apart. We’re on our knees, you know that.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Go on. Have as good a time you can.’
A quick kiss on the cheek. Nothing more.
He sat in the glass bubble for a while longer. Waited until it was safe. Then he smashed it. One hit, and it broke into pieces. He went over to the piano and lifted the lid. Sat down. Let his fingertips touch the keys. Enjoyed it for a moment.
He started playing. A little tune he had learned. ‘Misterioso’. Monk. Strange, beautiful notes. He fell into dangerous improvisation. Eventually, he started to hum along. He didn’t sing, though. He hadn’t come that far yet.
He wondered why. But not now. Now, he was just playing.
Instead, the parrot sang. With an awful breaking voice.
Paul Hjelm laughed and continued to play.
He didn’t sing.
27
IT WAS WEDNESDAY morning. Or, to put it more dramatically: it was the last June morning of the millennium.
Jan-Olov Hultin preferred to call it Wednesday morning. There was hardly any reason to go over the top. Their investigation was going surprisingly slowly. He still felt rusty.
Hultin was sitting at the desk at the front of the room, waiting. While he waited, he went through the latest documents from Brynolf Svenhagen’s overexcited forensic technicians. More about the weapons. An Interpol list of places where the Russian Izh-70-300 pistols had been found; it was endless – Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro were just a few among many.
There was also a list of places that the sub-machine guns from Boden had ended up after they were stolen a few years ago. Sure enough, several had been recovered from right-wing extremist circles around Europe; two had been found with a fascist group in Bulgaria, two more with a Danish motorcycle gang. It didn’t seem unlikely, though it was far from certain, that Sven Joakim Bergwall and Niklas Lindberg had carried out the break-in at the weapons arsenal in Boden themselves. Then there were the explosives. New indications suggested that the highly explosive liquid had been developed by the South African security services during the final years of apartheid, apparently with the intention of using it at one of the ANC’s international mass meetings. But this was all still unconfirmed.
Hultin looked up and sighed. It still wasn’t time. The A-Unit could wait.
He had tried to look at the case from above, to summarise it and tie all of the threads together, but it hadn’t quite worked. Something was missing. Swedish-Yugoslav drug cartel, a lone Swedish ‘policeman’, right-wing extremist techno-robbers, sophisticated explosives from South Africa, dead war criminals from the former Yugoslavia. It stank – he couldn’t stretch his analysis any further than that. The guesswork went much further. Wasn’t there a whiff of continuation in this crime? Was the crime they were investigating really over – or was it ongoing? Were the fascist robbers really just out to steal from the drug dealer? Was that all? Wouldn’t the money, or whatever was in the hypothetical briefcase, ultimately be used for some specific goal? By this point, he was skating on increasingly thin ice.
He read on, turning to a compilation of the kingdom’s ongoing crimes from the National Police Board. A violent spring had turned into an equally violent summer. Further attacks on the police had taken place after the Malexander shootings, most recently in Malmö, where a policeman had been called to an abandoned car following a report of a theft. When he opened the door, the car exploded. He was left blind. It was an attack aimed directly at the police. This was something new, Hultin thought to himself. A new, incomprehensible trend. Why were they focusing on the police? He thought about the World Police and Fire Games for a moment. Twelve thousand competitors from every corner of the earth, coming to a country where policemen were being executed and blown up…
What else? A Norwegian with links to international alcohol and cigarette smuggling had recently been found murdered in a van to the south of Stockholm. A string of robberies was taking place on the west coast, from Ängelholm northwards. An investigative journalist specialising in Swedish Nazism had, along with his son, been blown to pieces in his car in Nacka. Everything seemed to be curiously linked to everything else. But only vaguely.
Hultin looked up again. No. Still not time.
He was starting to feel annoyed. The after-effects of the day before were still lingering. Mörner’s speech to the police Olympians, the embrace which had followed – all had left a bitter taste in his mouth. And now this meeting which he hadn’t even called – and then the idiot had the cheek to not even turn up. As though Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin had nothing better to do.
They still hadn’t had any response from the authorities of any ex-Yugoslav states other than Slovenia, where none of Gang One had left any traces. Considering the circumstances in Serbia and Kosovo, they couldn’t expect any answers from there. They could hardly expect anything from Bosnia or Macedonia either, both of them preoccupied with their own problems. He was still hoping for Croatia to come through.
He was on the verge of cancelling the meeting when the lead character came trudging in, a triumphant smile ready to burst across his face. Jorge Chavez went straight to the whiteboard and attached, on top of all the earlier pictures, three black-and-white enlargements. Each of the photographs required eight of the absurd ladybird magnets to hold it in place.