A hero who had tortured a suspect.
Two days after his death, the full material on Rajko Nedic’s crimes arrived from Ludvig’s childhood friend in Säffle.
As he sang, Nyberg imagined for a moment that he had caught sight of a family at the very back of the room. Two small boys, a mother and a father. The father had his arms around his family, laughing happily. At everything and at nothing.
On the other hand, he saw a lot while he sang.
As soon as this was all over, he would finally go on holiday. He would travel to Östhammar and descend upon his son’s family. For a long, long while.
In the extensive material from the investigation, there were no irregularities when it came to Gunnar Nyberg.
He sang for his life, glancing over to the other side of the large police choir. Kerstin Holm was there, a bandage wrapped around her head. She smiled at him as she sang. He smiled back.
Kerstin Holm was the choir’s second alto. She united the other voices even though what she was singing didn’t remotely resemble ‘The Time of Blossoming Now Arrives’.
She was singing for her life. Because several inexplicable millimetres had separated her from death. She sang and gave thanks, but she didn’t know who to thank. Not even here, in this room, did she know for sure who to thank. Or why.
She thought of Orpheus and Eurydice. She and Paul had visited Per Karlsson’s flat in Aspudden. No one had been there for quite some time. A layer of dust had started to gather on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which lay open on the table, and in the disorder, they had found an old yearbook from the school in Danderyd. After a few moments of searching, they found Per Karlsson’s class photo. The seventh grade. He was small and pale, almost a head shorter than the second shortest in the class. He looked morose. And in the background, there was a tall, dark girl. She looked tough. Her name was Sonja Nedic.
Eurydice had checked into the hotel in Skövde under the name Sonja Karlsson. Afterwards, she became Baucis.
Rajko Nedic’s daughter must have taken the two mobile phones from her father’s restaurant in Stockholm; she must have found out, somehow, that her father was planning to make a large financial transaction and that the meeting place would be decided in Kvarnen on the evening of 23 June. So she sent her beloved Per Karlsson, the Orpheus who had brought her back from the underworld, the Philemon with whom she would grow old and would die alongside, and he found out that the meeting would take place in the Sickla industrial estate. The pair made their way there, and if they had tried to steal from her father’s ferocious gang of war criminals, then they would most likely have been slaughtered. But that didn’t happen. Instead, they were more or less handed the briefcase – by a gang of Nazi robbers, paradoxically enough. They took it and fled. But there was no money inside, only a key. Sonja tried to think of possible safe-deposit boxes. She had no idea, but she knew where her father sold his drugs. They split up, each looking in a different place. Two meandering routes across the map of Sweden.
Paul and Kerstin wandered on through Per Karlsson’s little flat. Strange wooden sculptures stood everywhere, shapes of all kinds, and a box room had been turned into a workshop. The floor was covered in iron filings, and in a rubbish bin there was a piece of sheet iron. From this, a key had been punched. A comparison with the safe-deposit-box key revealed identical teeth and notches.
And then, just over a week after the World Police and Fire Games began, a charity supporting the rights of children announced that a large sum of money had been deposited anonymously into their account. Five million kronor, to be precise. The money had been paid in from Paris.
Baucis and Philemon had found their safe-deposit box.
Kerstin Holm sang, thinking that for the first time in her life, justice had been done.
She looked down to Jan-Olov Hultin, sitting with his wife in the front row, in the middle of the rowdy Chavez family. Pappa Chavez, Carlos, glanced suspiciously from time to time at the man with the enormous nose and owl-like glasses. Hadn’t someone very similar split his eyebrow during a veterans’ football match once?
Hultin was longing for his lawn. He was longing, like Sisyphus, to push his manual lawnmower up and down the slope, avoiding all weeds in accordance with the sadly neglected principle of ‘Live and let live’.
Then he would bathe in Ravalen, make a comeback in the Stockholm Police veterans’ football team, travel to Greece, and never, ever shoot another person. Enough was enough.
Still, he wouldn’t retire just yet.
And it was harder than ever to tell weeds from grass.
He glanced over the aisle to Viggo Norlander. He was sitting, dressed in a much-too-tight dress coat, next to Astrid. Little Charlotte, with her inward-backward-sloping mug, was hanging over his shoulder. From her mouth a chalk-white dribble of vomit ran like bird shit onto the shoulder of his jacket. Then she started to scream. Norlander patted her gently on the back, and didn’t say ‘shut up’ even once.
Norlander looked over the aisle towards a curious gathering of white heads. He had never seen the entire Söderstedt family gathered in one place before. Arto Söderstedt sat, hair slicked back like someone from the 1930s, following Norlander’s eyes as they moved, step by step, over five white-haired children’s heads, over a white-haired mother’s head, and on to the slicked-back white hair of the father’s. He saw these steps, laughed to himself, and pointed at his shoulder. Norlander prodded the mess with his finger and shook his head.
Söderstedt was thinking about the bank loan he had been forced to take out to pay for their brand-new family car, a Toyota Picnic. He knew that he should be thinking about lots of other things, but he didn’t have the energy. Not yet. He thought about how fun it would be, driving again. It was finally time for a holiday – the family had a car, but no money to go anywhere. He thought that he was nearing a fundamental societal paradox. But he didn’t have the energy to work it out. Not yet.
Not as the police choir’s ‘The Time of Blossoming Now Arrives’ died out in a distinctive, drawn-out bass tone which was replaced by the familiar opening notes of a wedding march.
The bridal couple passed slowly down the aisle. He was dark, she was light, and there were no walls between them.
Sara Svenhagen looked at her father as she walked down the aisle. Chief Forensic Technician Brynolf Svenhagen, cut from a traditional cloth, was already crying loudly. It’s a bit premature, Sara thought to herself. Then she thought about the distorted images of loneliness, about how she had seen far too much for her age, and about the nightmares which had slowly begun to evaporate. The enormous stomach glowed on, undisturbed. She thought of Ludvig Johnsson, about the death of fathers, and about the way that their own steps ploughed a path which could never be followed. She thought about the virtual world, about the weightlessness of cybersphere compared to heavy reality. She thought about the connection between Eros and Thanatos, between love and death; she thought about the strange justice of fate, and about Rajko Nedic’s tongue. And she thought about Jorge Chavez, about how unpredictable love is, about all of the prerequisites which make it possible, and she looked into his eyes and smiled, for the first time, it seemed to her, without any reservations.
Honeymoon in Chile, and then back to the new job. In the A-Unit.
It didn’t sound too bad.
Jorge Chavez wasn’t thinking about much. He was mostly worrying that the enormous Chavez clan wouldn’t be able to toe the line in the cool Protestant church. He thought to himself that the Chileans seemed to be in the majority. The black-headed mass seemed to be bubbling unpredictably. He surprised himself, looking out at the room through Niklas Lindberg’s eyes. Why were they such a threat? What was it they were threatening? Nothing more than a warped self-image. A Swede looking in a mirror, seeing something completely different to what everyone else sees. Where everyone else saw a human being, Niklas Lindberg saw a superhuman. How had that metamorphosis taken place? Was it the same thing as when the geeky young Agne became Bullet, ‘the toughest guy you’ll ever meet’? Or was that too simple?