‘For what?’ she asked, pulling her hand from beneath his.
‘For it not being you,’ he said.
She could feel herself staring at him in disgust.
‘What’s going on here?’ she asked.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I had to test you. First of all, I wanted to make sure that all new material was kept from the group; that was why you had to work in private, Sara. Then I realised that it could be the litmus test. In all probability, you’d come across those hidden websites, and maybe even decipher them. Though that was more of a side issue. Most important was whether you’d accuse me or not.’
She could feel that her gaze had become murderous. He continued.
‘A couple of weeks ago, I was looking – for an entirely different reason – through my old investigations linked to Operation Cathedral. I found considerably more files with my name on them than I’d written. Someone had been producing material in my name. I managed to separate the unfamiliar files from my own and go through them. I looked through all of the web pages where the pseudonyms appeared. And I found – just like you – the unmentioned “brambo”. But I had no chance of cracking his identity.’
‘And you want me to believe all of this?’ she exclaimed loudly. A large number of Germans looked sceptically at her.
Ragnar Hellberg continued unperturbed. ‘What I did manage was to narrow down the possible culprits. It was between two people. One of two of my subordinates had been submitting incomplete investigatory material in my name. Someone who wanted to frame me, I thought. I realise it was more of a side matter now. The main reason was blackmail. All the material on Rajko Nedic the paedophile is now with this subordinate, and if anyone decided to investigate it, they’d end up with… me. And you, Sara, you were one of the two possibilities.’
‘How long have you been preparing this?’ she asked. She didn’t know if she had actually asked him. She didn’t know what to believe. But she had realised where it was heading.
She felt herself growing pale.
‘I can’t prove anything,’ said Hellberg. ‘He’s made sure of that. It’s his word against mine, and I know that my word’s worth very little in the group. Figurehead, Party-Ragge. Who am I against Ludvig Johnsson? The man who lost his family in a car accident and then built up the entire unit. And who then had his leadership stolen by… me. The lightweight party policeman.’
‘So it was between me and Ludvig?’ Sara asked. She felt that she should have said something else. Here sat the man she saw on TV more often than in the police station, accusing her mentor, the only policeman she really admired. Ludvig Johnsson. Along with Gunnar Nyberg, he was the only man she really dared to call a colleague.
‘Yes,’ said Hellberg. ‘It was you or Ludvig. Look at it like this: would I really have managed to identify this well-disguised “brambo”? Would I really have been able to blackmail someone as notoriously dangerous as Rajko Nedic? Would I have dared go anywhere near his mob of torturers and war criminals? Party-Ragge? Think about it.’
Sara Svenhagen closed her eyes.
She was convinced.
And overwhelmed with sorrow.
Ludvig Johnsson. Her surrogate father.
She gave her coffee cup a shove, causing it to splash onto the Germans.
Ragnar Hellberg sat still, flecks of coffee on his suit.
She gave him a resounding slap.
39
‘KERSTIN’S DOING WELL.’
There was a moment of silence in the Supreme Command Centre. Then the rejoicing began. Briefly, intensely, a lid which lifted for a short moment. Then it closed again.
Paul Hjelm continued. ‘They just let me leave the hospital. I crept up to see her on my way out. The bullet caught her just above the ear, taking a bit of bone from behind her temple with it. It hit a blood vessel, so it looked a lot worse than it was. She’s got concussion, but sends her regards.’
‘How are you, though?’ Hultin asked from the desk at the front.
They exchanged a glance. The first since they were in Skövde. A glance between two men who had killed. Both realised at that moment what a strange threshold they had crossed. Neither of them had given much thought to it during the last twenty-four hours. Now it hit them with full force.
Both of us have killed another human being.
There was nothing to say.
‘Fine, thanks,’ said Hjelm. ‘The bullet went through my arm and hit the vest. One slightly fractured rib, but my arm’s fine. Just flesh wounds, but it hurts like hell.’
Hultin nodded and asked straight out: ‘Have all of you spoken to Internal?’
They nodded. All had spoken to Internal Affairs. Hjelm had already been confronted by an old tormentor named Niklas Grundström while he was in hospital in Skövde. It had been surprisingly painless.
No one had mentioned Hultin’s gun handling. It was as though it had never happened. He himself seemed to be remarkably unaffected.
‘Well, listen,’ he said, stretching. ‘There are both pluses and minuses in all of this. The biggest plus is that we saved Eurydice. The biggest minus that she escaped. That Niklas Lindberg had just left his friends was hardly our fault. Maybe we could’ve been fifteen minutes earlier, but it was out of our hands. A quick-thinking member of the group’ – Hultin cast a grateful glance in Söderstedt’s direction – ‘made sure the ambulance was diverted to minimise attention. Still, that wasn’t enough to get Lindberg to return. He must’ve smelt a rat and vanished into thin air.
‘The shooting of Roger Sjöqvist and of Dan Andersson must be seen as just. Obviously, it was a blunder that Sjöqvist had the chance to shoot Paul, and that Andersson managed to shoot Kerstin, but there was absolutely no misconduct. It all went so quickly. What we do have is Eurydice’s shoes, size 7 brown sandals, the briefcase and a safe-deposit-box key, and then Agne “Bullet” Kullberg. Besides that, we’ve got the right-wing extremist Risto Petrovic in safe keeping. Thorough interviews with both these two should give us some kind of idea about what Niklas Lindberg has got planned. Both are keeping surprisingly quiet at the minute. What we don’t have is Niklas Lindberg, the van and the loot from the robberies out west which, all told, should add up to about a million. If Lindberg is planning something, then he’s not likely to have shelved it. Unfortunately this wasn’t the end.’
‘The safe-deposit-box key is the Swedish standard,’ said Chavez. ‘It could be from any bank anywhere. If we’re going to reconstruct the entire thing, then we’ve got to assume that the mistrust we’ve already talked about, between Nedic and the “policeman”, was so great that Nedic didn’t even dare to hand over the money. Instead, he gave him a key and a top-of-the-range police radio. Presumably the “policeman” was going to be told which bank was holding the money as soon as something had happened. Exactly which that was is, for the moment, unknown. Anyway, it meant that the civil engineer, Bullet Kullberg, could make an electronic tracking device to find the briefcase stolen by Orpheus and Eurydice. They don’t have the key any more, so their role in the drama must be over. They’ll have to make do with still being alive and having one another. We can also add that, amazingly, we’ve managed to keep the entire thing out of the press.’ Chavez added with a sidelong glance: ‘Also largely thanks to Arto’s quick thinking, which was what led us there, after all.’
Söderstedt looked completely dumbfounded by this unexpected praise. He leafed through his papers, confused.
‘I’d been planning to tell a story,’ he mumbled. ‘About the metamorphosis of metamorphoses.’
They looked at him. This unlikely policeman went from clarity to clarity. They waited tensely for the next step.
‘It’s Monday today,’ said Arto Söderstedt with great precision. ‘Monday morning, the twelfth of July. Two hours after our Skövde incident, at one on Saturday, a short message appeared on Gula Tidningen’s THIS WEEK’S “I LOVE YOU” page. Since then, no other messages have appeared. We’ve got to assume that our young couple have now been reunited. The message went like this: “Philemon. Starting point. Baucis.”’