The Blinded Man (30 page)

The ten minutes of ‘Misterioso’ passed. Hackzell was incapable of standing still for even a second longer. When the tune was finally over and the subsequent improvisation started, Hjelm switched off the cassette player.

‘No. I don’t know,’ Hackzell said. ‘I know nothing about jazz. Sometimes the customers want to hear something and I put it on. I can’t tell the tunes apart. They all sound the same to me.’

‘And you can’t remember anybody in particular who requested jazz?’

Hjelm didn’t know where he was going with this. Igor and Igor were already the focus of the investigation: the tape, the Kazakh ammunition, Viktor X, the threat against the Lovisedal conglomerate.

‘Not at the moment, no.’ Hackzell looked as though he’d lost his brain as well as his face. ‘I’ll have to give it some thought.’

‘Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. If you have a blank tape, I’ll give you a copy of “Misterioso”, this Monk tune, and then I want you to do some real thinking. Make a list of everyone who asked to hear that particular
tune
, or jazz in general. Under no circumstances are you to leave Växjö. If you do, we’ll put out a nationwide alert to track you down, and then you can say goodbye to the restaurant, and you’ll end up in the slammer. Do you understand?’

Roger Hackzell nodded numbly. Hjelm made a copy of the tape for him. Then he took the train back to Stockholm, feeling quite satisfied with himself during the entire ride home.

24

WITH A REAL
lack of sensitivity, Jari Malinen was picked up in the middle of his mother’s funeral. The Finnish police simply entered the church during the service and whisked him away. They put him in a little cell in Helsinki overnight. He told them everything.

He’d come into contact with the Soviet mafia back in the late Seventies, made a so-called fiscal blunder, for which he served time. Then he went to Sweden, partly to escape from the mafia. It so happened that he’d dragged one of the Russians into the trap, a certain Vladimir Ragin, and he wasn’t sure whether the mob blamed him for that or not. He didn’t dare take any chances.

He went to Göteborg, borrowed some money and acquired a small restaurant; that was how he came into contact with another restaurant owner, Roger Hackzell. After some time they decided to join forces and go into business together. They found a nice spot in Växjö and opened Hackat & Malet in the late Eighties.

Suddenly the mafia contacted him again, this time the Russian-Estonian mob, and since he’d involved one of the Russians, he was terrified and agreed to everything. During the trial in Vasa, both he and the Russian had certainly had a brilliant young lawyer on his way up, whose name he couldn’t remember. And they’d got off with much lighter sentences than he thought possible in a society based on the rule of law, but that hadn’t diminished his fear. Then Igor and Igor turned up in Växjö and began delivering Estonian vodka. That was all.

Hjelm kept his eyes fixed on Söderstedt as Norlander told the story. The pale Finn sat staring at the table the whole time.

‘Hjelm did an excellent job in Växjö’ was the surprising remark with which Norlander finished his report to the unit.

This was a new Viggo Norlander sitting before them. A healed man. The crutches had been tossed aside, and the gauze bandages were gone from his hands. His wounds had closed up, and the scars shone a naked pink, like tiny flowers in the middle of his hairy hands. He moved them with a new lightness.
Healed and reborn
, thought Hjelm.
Stigmatised, healed and reborn
.

Hjelm and Holm had exchanged a few glances, each without being able to interpret what the other meant.

Hultin cleared his throat loudly and added another arrow to the whiteboard whose pattern had grown even more grotesquely labyrinthine. The arrow pointed to Växjö.

‘Does everyone agree that we should prioritise Lovisedal now?’ It sounded like a genuine question, not just a rhetorical statement. Hultin even waited for a reply. Maybe he thought he was on his way up to midfield.

He received no verbal response, just a general murmuring. He went on:

‘Okay, that’s where the perpetrator and his victims met, except for Strand-Julén. The other three, Daggfeldt, Carlberger and Brandberg, all sat on the Lovisedal board of directors for a period of time. So we’re suggesting the following scenario. The Lovisedal conglomerate tries to establish itself with a tabloid publication in Tallinn, just as it has already done in St Petersburg. The company receives some prodding from Viktor X, refuses to accept the so-called protection that’s offered and is threatened. It continues to resist, and then as a warning the henchmen Igor and Igor – alias Alexander Bryusov and Valery Treplyov – start executing members of the board. They take a break after three murders, two of them intended (Daggfeldt and Carlberger) and one of them an error (Strand-Julén) to see if Lovisedal will react. The company doesn’t – it stubbornly continues to resist. Then Igor and Igor set to work again, on direct orders from Viktor X. Brandberg is presumably the fourth victim in a new series. Does this sound reasonable?’

‘It’s hard to see anything more reasonable,’ said Gunnar Nyberg.

‘There’s just one catch, aside from Strand-Julén,’ said Jorge Chavez. ‘Daggfeldt, Carlberger and Brandberg sat
on
the Lovisedal board together for only a brief period in 1991. Daggfeldt was a member from 1989 until 1993; Carlberger from 1991 until his death; and Brandberg from 1985 until 1991, when he was elected to parliament. The only year they had in common was 1991. At their deaths, only Carlberger was still a board member. One out of four.’

‘The point is presumably that it was in 1991 that the company started probing the Estonian market,’ said Hultin. ‘It’s the board from that time period that they’re after. Maybe they simply have an old list, or maybe it’s deliberate: maybe they’re saying it was that year, in 1991, that the company made the mistake of a lifetime when it tried to force its way into territory that had already been claimed. In any case, it’s the most reasonable explanation we have.’

‘There’s one other catch,’ said Viggo Norlander. ‘Jüri Maarja and Viktor X allowed me to live as a means of proving their innocence. You’ve all read the letter that was pinned to me, so to speak.’

‘That doesn’t prove or disprove anything,’ said Hultin.

‘I saw the surprise on Maarja’s face when I accused them. It was absolutely genuine.’

‘Your Jüri Maarja is a smuggler of refugees. It’s possible that he doesn’t have Viktor X’s ear in all matters.
He
was surprised, okay, but was Viktor X surprised? You never saw his face, if it really was him at all. Igor and Igor may be acting on direct orders from Viktor X, with no intermediaries involved. That’s entirely possible, don’t you think?’

Viggo Norlander nodded, but remained unconvinced.

‘Chavez has a list of the Lovisedal board members
anno
1991,’ Hultin continued. ‘How many are still alive?’

‘Seven on the list, six are still alive. One died of natural causes.’

‘Six individuals. We have to keep an eye on those six at all costs. No one is a more likely victim.’

Hultin looked at his notes.

‘Of the six, I’ll take Jacob Lidner, who was then chairman of the board; he still is. There are five more for you to divide up. Put some pressure on them, find out whether they know anything, whether they’re scared and whether they have any security protection. They’re going to have to get some, like it or not. As of tonight, we’re putting the entire Lovisedal board under round-the-clock surveillance. And of course we’ve put out a juicy all-points bulletin for Igor and Igor. In all likelihood, they’re our Power Murderers. All right then, let’s get going.’

Hultin exited through his mysterious door, and the A-Unit gathered around the table to divide up the board members among themselves. The previous timetable, in which a murder occurred every other night, apparently no longer applied. If it did, then the previous night, sometime on the nineteenth or twentieth of May, which Hjelm had spent in a strange, fitful slumber in a little overnight room in police headquarters, would have produced a new corpse. The old theory about a specific pattern had fallen like a house of cards; the only constant now remaining was the fact that the
murders
were committed at night, so they probably had plenty of time during the day to talk to the board members. The important thing was to find the next potential victim before it was too late.

‘I’m wondering whether there’s any system behind the selection,’ said Söderstedt. ‘If we disregard Strand-Julén, we have Daggfeldt, Carlberger and Brandberg, in that order. D-C-B. Are there any names that start with
A
?’

There weren’t. They divided up the board members. One person would be off the hook. Nobody wanted to be off the hook. Finally they agreed that Söderstedt and Hjelm would share one of the board members.

Hjelm went to Söderstedt and Norlander’s office; he already had on his denim jacket and was ready to go. Norlander left, eager to start on his first real assignment since Tallinn. He was alive, but not exactly kicking – he was still limping slightly on his stigmatised feet.

Söderstedt reached for his lumber jacket, on a hook just inside the door.

Hjelm stopped him and pulled the door closed. ‘There’s just one thing I’ve been wondering about,’ he said as he studied A. Söderstedt, formerly a top lawyer in Finland, and Jari Malinen’s defence lawyer, hired by the mafia in February 1979. ‘Why the police?’

Arto Söderstedt returned his gaze as he took down his jacket. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked without really asking. He slowly put on his jacket.

‘And why Sweden?’

Söderstedt gave up. He sat down heavily on his chair
and
said dully, ‘Why I chose Sweden is simple: I was already a marked man in Finland; my name was known. I was the ambitious young lawyer who rescued citizens with fat wallets from the worst possible jams. I had no way out in Finland.’

He paused for a moment and stared at Hjelm. For the first time the gaunt Finn looked completely serious. He grimaced slightly, then went on.

‘Why I chose the police is harder to explain. In 1980 I was twenty-seven years old and had just become a partner in the firm. Koivonen, Krantz & Söderstedt. Fucking cute name. Everything that I’d been striving for in my short and extremely goal-oriented life had now been achieved. Then I got a case representing a real fucking bad guy. That wasn’t anything new – I’d been defending that type of person all my adult life. But this time something went over the line. Behind the man’s respectable facade, the most repulsive sort of business you could imagine was going on: a type of sex-slave trade, it was beyond description. Finland was a closed country, the land that almost always refused to accept any immigrants, yet a steady stream of drugged Asians was coming in, sold at what might be called … auctions.

‘Naturally I got him off so that he could continue to conduct his business, but something happened inside me. In that proper-looking man with his elegant facade and his loathsome attitude, I saw my entire future. The upholder of facades. That’s when the whole shitload came down on me. I moved to Sweden with my family,
became
a Swedish citizen and tried to go underground. After a few dog-years I decided to join the police force, maybe to try to change the system from inside – the system I thought I’d seen in its entirety, from above and below.

‘But things don’t allow themselves to be changed from inside. During my time in Stockholm I became known as a controversial cop; then I was exiled to Västerås, and that’s where I stayed. You might say I went underground again. The police work became routine. I acquired a large family, and I read books instead of putting any real energy into my work; the job just took care of itself. Somehow Hultin found me by looking through the records – don’t ask me how. The end.’

Söderstedt stood up.

He had undergone a transformation in Hjelm’s eyes. Gone was the buffoon. Here instead was a man who had suffered the consequences of taking a moral stand. He had given up millions of kronor in salary, he had accepted the fact that he’d thrown his life away, and for the sake of this insight he had changed his country and language and life.
Integrity
, thought Hjelm.

‘The last one to the car is a frog with no legs!’ shouted the man with integrity as he dashed off.

On that sunny morning of 20 May Jacob Lidner, chairman of the board at Lovisedal, was home in Lidingö. Jan-Olov Hultin arrived at the magnificent villa in his Volvo Turbo
and
rang the bell, which blared long and loud and with a slight delay through all the rooms of the mansion and out into the garden at the back. It was from there that Lidner came marching around the corner of the building. He was an impressive old man with an imperious gaze, wearing a white, monogrammed bathrobe. His white hair was a dishevelled mane, as if he’d just climbed out of the bath. Up close he smelled of chlorine.

‘Stop pestering me,’ he said to Hultin and then continued without giving the superintendent a chance to get a word in edgeways. ‘I’ve had enough of publicists. I’m just an ordinary retiree who wants to wait for death in peace and quiet. Stop harassing me about the troubles on the board. I know you want press people on the board at all costs, but this happens to be a business we’re running.’

Finally he paused to catch his breath.

‘Do I look like a reporter?’ said Hultin, putting on his half-moon reading glasses.

‘You certainly do,’ said Lidner. Then a light went on in his head. ‘But you’re not, are you?’

‘I’m Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin. I’m in charge of the investigation of what the mass media have labelled the Power Murders.’

‘Aha,’ said Lidner. ‘The A-Unit. An appropriate name. To distinguish you from the A-media of the Social Democrats.’

Hultin was thrown off balance, but managed to hide it. ‘That’s not information that the media has had access to …’

Lidner laughed briefly. ‘Good Lord, superintendent, surely you know that a matter like that can’t be kept secret. It’s our social circles that are being threatened, after all.’