Petrovic stared at Nyberg. His eyes were searching for a way out. He didn’t know whether he could find one in the large, bear-like policeman. Maybe. He repeated, mostly because it was expected of him: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
It sounded so hollow that Nyberg simply ignored him.
‘However,’ he said, nodding, ‘there is a way out.’
They looked at one another for a moment. The paramilitary commander and Sweden’s Biggest Policeman. The Foreign Legionnaire and Mr Sweden. It felt masculine to the point of absurdity.
‘We’re waiting for a policeman called Lars Viksjö. He’ll take you to a safe place. You’ll be a Crown witness, get a new identity, and be placed wherever in the world you want to go. In exchange, we want to know the following. One: the connection between you and Lindberg. Two: everything imaginable, and unimaginable, about Rajko Nedic’s organisation. Three: what kind of handover it was. Four: who was going to receive it. Five: what Lindberg was going to use it for. Six: where Lindberg and his men are now.’
Risto Petrovic closed his eyes. He was completely still. When he opened them again, the decision had been made. It was obvious.
‘I don’t know where Niklas Lindberg is,’ he said.
Then he said nothing more.
After fifteen minutes of absolute silence, Lars Viksjö arrived, taking Petrovic with him. Once again, the former war criminal had changed lives.
It would be interesting to see how Rajko Nedic reacted.
Gunnar Nyberg allowed himself a moment of quiet contemplation. No, he admitted to himself, not contemplation; that was saying too much. Rather, it was a moment of pure self-righteousness. He felt very pleased with himself.
He rang Hultin and updated him.
Hultin said: ‘Bloody good job, Gunnar.’
Nyberg said: ‘Not at all.’
He climbed back into his rusty old Renault and pottered homewards. Just after Enköping, he came to the little village called Grillby. He was forced to stop. What was it with this Grillby? Why was it demanding his attention in his moment of triumph?
Grillby. A little cottage. An aunt’s cottage. Youthful feeling of freedom. Police College exams. Twenty years ago. Five men and a van full of six-packs.
What was it he had said? ‘I’m going out to the cottage to recharge the batteries.’
Why not try? Gunnar Nyberg followed a twenty-year-old internal map. Grillby mustn’t have changed much, because he found it without a problem. He came to a narrow gravel road which led out of the little community into the forest. He drove a couple of kilometres along an increasingly vanishing road. The sun turned the old Renault into a baking oven, and Gunnar Nyberg into a slow-cooked meatloaf. He was doubting his memory more and more, along with his sense of direction, when a glade finally opened up in the sparse forest, and the little cottage came into view. It was the same, exactly the same. It stood by the edge of the trees and looked like it had been abandoned. A little red labourer’s cottage from the turn of the century. Many beers had been transformed into urine here.
Ludvig Johnsson was leaning against the veranda, stretching. He looked up with an utterly surprised, almost terrified gaze. He obviously wasn’t used to visitors.
Nyberg waved to him. His face lit up, and he jogged over to the Renault, peering in through the wound-down oven window. He recoiled.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘You’ve been sitting in there a while.’
‘It’s quite warm,’ said Gunnar Nyberg, squeezing out of the entirely-too-small car. He stretched, and held out his hands towards the cottage.
‘So it’s still standing,’ he observed.
Ludvig Johnsson nodded, returning to the veranda and continuing to stretch.
‘It’s still standing,’ he said. ‘No electricity, no running water, no phone. I come back when I want to get away from the world. It’s happening more and more.’
Nyberg nodded. ‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘I go to my son and grandson’s in Östhammar, though it hasn’t happened so often this year.’
Johnsson stopped stretching and looked at him.
‘That’s not so relevant for me,’ was all he said.
Nyberg bit his tongue. Much too late.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
Ludvig Johnsson walked over to Nyberg and put an arm around him. It turned into a hug. They stood in the blazing hot sunshine by the little cottage outside of Grillby, Uppland county, hugging. The power of the past.
‘It’s OK,’ Ludvig Johnsson eventually said. ‘It was a long time ago.’
They sat in the shade on the veranda. Johnsson fetched two beers. They disappeared quickly. Two more appeared.
‘Gas fridge,’ said Johnsson.
‘That’s enough,’ said Nyberg. ‘I’ve got to drive home later. We’ve had a breakthrough in the investigation.’
‘From paedophiles to Nazis,’ Johnsson nodded. ‘Anything you want to talk about?’
‘I think so. Later. Is this still your aunt’s place?’
Ludvig Johnsson laughed and scratched his bald head.
‘She had senile dementia even then, when we were here celebrating the end of exams. She still does. She’s in the same home and looks the same, though she’s closer to a hundred. Like the dementia preserved her.’
He grimaced and continued.
‘Then, when I got a family, I almost forgot about it. Hanna and I travelled a lot. With the boys once they’d arrived, too. They were nine and seven when they died, and they’d been to fourteen countries. They bragged about it at school. Fourteen countries! Then one day they were just gone. All three. Hanna, Micke, Stefan. Just like that, gone. I don’t know if it’s possible to understand it.’
It was completely silent. Gunnar Nyberg imagined he could hear the sun shining. A tiny, tiny whirring in the background. He had nothing to say. There was nothing to say. He had managed to put the broken pieces of his past back together. Ludvig Johnsson hadn’t even had the chance. The irrevocability of death.
‘Mmm,’ Johnsson said after a moment. ‘Then I remembered the cottage. I can just be myself here. I need it. Recharge my batteries before taking the paedophile world head on. No one knows that this place is here. Well, they didn’t until now.’
‘I won’t tell,’ said Gunnar Nyberg, thinking he had made a mistake. He had barged onto holy land. He had populated a world which should never have been populated. Without consideration, he had forced open a door to an intimate world with such force that it was hanging in scraps. He felt awful.
Ludvig Johnsson leaned forward over the table, placing his hand over Nyberg’s, and looking into his eyes with a clear, searching look.
‘It’s OK, Gunnar,’ he said quietly. ‘Maybe it’s what I needed. I can’t be a hermit any more.’
They looked at one another. In some way, they were still living together in their shared flat, twenty years ago. Neither of them had ever really left it. The way you never really leave a place. Everything always remains. Those had been important years in their lives. The worldly Ludvig and the sulky Gunnar. There they were again.
And so it happened that Gunnar Nyberg made a mistake. He talked about the case. He needed a sounding board more than ever, and his sounding board needed to be one, too. That was clear. For a moment, Gunnar Nyberg imagined that they were about to solve the case together. Like they had done in Police College.
He began with the breakthrough, with the leak around Rajko Nedic: Risto Petrovic. Then he went back to the very beginning, to the events in Kvarnen and the Kumla Bunker, before moving on to the ex-Yugoslav mercenaries and Niklas Lindberg and the Foreign Legion and possible right-wing extremist umbrella organisations, and then he was done. It was a long and complicated story. One which, thus far, had no ending.