To the Top of the Mountain (13 page)

They went over to the blue-and-white plastic tape which was surrounding a square of the Sickla industrial estate. Another vehicle was approaching, one with TV 4’s colourful logo printed on the side. Behind that, an old red BMW sports car came chugging along.

The porn police went over to the TV 4 vehicle and gestured very clearly that they should leave. The TV 4 people didn’t give up easily; there was moment of fuss which ended with someone in the van blurting out their tired but well-known nickname, and the porn police started kicking the van. Eventually, it moved off and parked, slightly ruffled, next to the others in the designated space ten or so metres away. Still irate, the porn police moved on to the BMW behind them. When a short, dark figure stepped out of the car and, without a word, lifted the blue-and-white plastic tape, something inside the porn police snapped. They rushed over and grabbed the dark man in an iron grip.

‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing, you little Mediterranean shrimp?!’

‘You see a nice car, you can be sure there’s a spic in it! Clear off! As fast as you bloody can!’

They could already see that the man’s mouth was starting to form the ominous words.

‘The porn police, I assume,’ he said.

‘Little prick!’ the porn police snapped, twisting their grip.

‘What are you doing?!’ shouted a man dressed entirely in denim, running over from inside the roped-off area. ‘This is Detective Superintendent Chavez from CID. Let him go immediately.’

The porn police let go and dropped back without a word.

‘It’s not
that
nice a car,’ said Jorge Chavez, rubbing his upper arms. ‘Ancient. 1978 model. And I’m not Detective Superintendent.’

Yet, he thought. But then, apparently there aren’t any porn police.

The denim-clad man held out his hand and said: ‘Sorry about that. They’ve had a rough night. I’m Bengt Åkesson, local CID night staff.’

Chavez managed to extend his aching right arm to return the greeting.

‘Haven’t we met before?’ he asked.

‘We met very briefly on the Power Killer case. I found a Russian called Alexander Brjusov when we busted an illegal poker club.’

‘Right,’ Chavez nodded. Åkesson.

He didn’t normally forget people.

On the other hand, he hadn’t had much to do with people lately. More with his books. After the strange resolution of the Kentucky Killer case, he had studied and studied and was now, theoretically, the most qualified policeman in Sweden. Even in terms of practical experience, there was a lot in his favour, despite all that had happened. All he was missing for a superintendent’s job was years. Years
en masse
.

He was still little more than thirty years old.

‘Well, Åkesson,’ he said, ‘the only thing I know is that I got a confusing phone call in the middle of the night, from Waldemar Mörner, a division head I know from the National Police Board, saying that I had to lead the investigation into, and I quote, “an unbelievably grim mass murder”. Can you give me any more info?’

‘We could always take a trip around the sights,’ said Åkesson, as they started walking. ‘A few hours ago, at 03.08 to be precise, we received a call from an old lady who was out walking her dog in the middle of the night. She had a mobile phone with her and she said she was standing in the middle of a slaughter site, that there were bodies everywhere. When we got here, it was already light, and this is what we saw. Five dead. All shot apart from one, who’s been blown up. He’s in the car here.’

Chavez glanced into a burnt-out Mercedes, and regretted that he had wolfed down a quick sandwich on the way over. It felt as though it was just making a brief visit to his stomach. He spent a few seconds trying to prevent its reappearance, and then his professional side took over.

Sure enough, the man in the back seat had been blown up. Chavez didn’t want to expand on that observation, the medical examiners could do that. The remains of a chain lay by the man’s wrist.

Chavez was content with what he had seen. He looked up and glanced around the surrounding area. Sickla industrial estate. A worn asphalt road. A black Mercedes parked between two industrial sheds. Signs: ‘Rickard’s Auto Repairs’ on one of them, and ‘Sickla Boats and Building’ on the other.

He looked further, along the left-hand side of the Mercedes. A man was lying face down in a pool of blood next to the driver’s seat. Further away, there was a smaller pool of blood, this one lacking a body. He walked around the car. Here, on the other hand, there were two bodies. The one next to the passenger seat was riddled with bullet holes. The one slightly further away was wearing a black balaclava. Where his eye should have been, a fleshy mass protruded from the socket.

Jesus Christ, Jorge Chavez thought, allowing himself a few more seconds to keep the sandwich in place.

‘You said there were five?’ he said to Åkesson.

Åkesson rubbed his hand slowly and firmly across his forehead. For the first time, Chavez noticed how pale he was.

‘The last one’s over here,’ he said, pointing. ‘Round the back of Rickard’s Repairs.’

‘A bit of alliteration never goes amiss,’ said Chavez, following him. Åkesson didn’t comment.

They went round the corner of the shed in front of the Mercedes. Lying on the ground was a well-built man wearing a balaclava. He had been shot in the back. In front of him, a still-wet pool of blood had spread out. It was like an irregular frame around a perfect, dry rectangle. Beyond that, ten or so bloody footprints, growing increasingly faint the further they went.

‘Hmm,’ Chavez said, like Sherlock Holmes. All that was missing was him reaching for a magnifying glass from the inner pocket of his worn old jacket.

Chavez and Åkesson exchanged a long look.

‘OK then. Have you drawn any conclusions?’ asked the former.

‘Yeah,’ said the latter. ‘They’re pretty clear. Make your own, then we’ll compare them. Intuitive versus reflective.’

Chavez gave Åkesson an appreciative glance, and said: ‘Two gangs. Those with balaclavas attack those without. The latter arrive in the Merc. They brought something attached to a chain, probably a briefcase. They’re on the way to a meeting place, to exchange it for something unknown. Somehow, the robbers blow up the car and take the briefcase. Him with the chain, he’s already dead. They cut the chain. The other two get out of the car. From their positions around it, we can assume they were frisked.

‘Then it gets tricky. Something happens. The one whose face is oozing out of his balaclava is shot by one of the two next to the car, then they’re shot. This lone pool of blood suggests that another of the robbers was shot, but only injured, since he’s not here. The fact they’ve left the bodies behind means they don’t care whether they’re identified, and that worries me. It’s hardly over. Then what? What’s the robber behind Rickard’s Auto Repairs doing so far from the others? Shot in the back. OK, so he’s running off, but gets shot from behind. The shot probably went right through him, through his heart. The blood gushes out forwards, down his chest. OK. Should we assume that this blood pattern in front of him means he had the briefcase? He’s running off to get the briefcase to safety when the fight breaks out and then, when it’s over, the robbers grab the briefcase from the pool of blood, take a couple of careless steps in the blood and clear off.’

Åkesson looked at Chavez, raising his eyebrows in surprise, and said: ‘Completely agree, I’m afraid. I don’t have anything to add. Other than that we’ve found the tracks of a van that was parked by the nearest shed, Sickla Boats and Building. And,’ he added, giving Chavez a furtive glance, ‘that the men from the Mercedes look obviously foreign.’

‘What about the robbers, then?’ asked Chavez, unflustered. ‘Have you dared look under the balaclavas?’

Åkesson grimaced. ‘It wasn’t pretty,’ he said. ‘But yeah, they seem more Swedish . . .’

Chavez looked at him. He seemed to have something else on the tip of his tongue.

‘And . . .?’ he asked.

‘I’m not exactly happy with those “careless steps in the blood”,’ Åkesson said eventually. ‘They don’t seem the type to take careless steps in blood.’

Chavez nodded for a good while. The weak link in the chain of his story, immediately laid bare. He tried to convince himself: ‘We can imagine they were in shock, I suppose. There’d been a slaughter. Five bodies. One injured. Three of them friends.’

He looked out over the ugly scene. The woman with the dog and the mobile phone had said that she was ringing from the scene of a slaughter. She wasn’t wrong, but
something
was. Here and there, the occasional policeman was walking around, looking at the crime scene. Otherwise, it was empty.

‘Where the hell are forensics?’ he exclaimed.

‘On the way from Närke,’ said Åkesson, shrugging.

‘Where?’

‘From Närke. It’s a province.’

‘Thanks,’ said Chavez.

‘No doubt they’ve been flat out with the Kumla explosion. The whole force is there. And your friends.’

‘My friends?’

‘Söderstedt and Norlander. We’ve been colleagues at local CID for a while.’

Chavez allowed himself a smile. He was standing at the scene of a slaughter, smiling.

‘Those white, middle-aged men,’ he said.

Though he was thinking about something else.

Hmm, he thought.

The Kumla explosion, he thought.

13

IN FRONT OF
us is a house that very few policemen have ever seen. It stands alone by a lake with the unusual name of Ravalen. This lake is in Sollentuna municipality, just over ten kilometres north of Stockholm.

The fact of the matter is, only one policeman has ever seen this modest villa at the edge of the dense forest. And he’s no longer a policeman.

He is the owner of the villa. He can say that in all honesty now. The last payment was made to the bank on the same day he retired, something that seemed like more than just a coincidence.

And isn’t it him we see there now? Isn’t he the sixty-two-year-old man we can see on that hilly little patch of land that’s really nothing more than a parenthesis between the lake and the forest? Isn’t it him dressed in the Hawaiian shirt and shorts which are a touch too small, pushing a lawnmower up and down the slope like Sisyphus?

Cutting grass is an endless job.

It has a tendency just to grow back again, after all.

As a policeman, this man had a defect. Former policeman, that is. Not a policeman, a
former
policeman. This defect consisted of not being able to tell grass from weeds. Obviously he could have taught himself that
this
little green tangle is grass and
that
little green tangle is a weed, but he had never, ever understood the more fundamental difference between grass and weeds.

Policemen should definitely be able to tell grass from weeds.

Not by looking in a manual which says that certain types of plants are grasses and others are weeds, but by
instinctively
being able to say what distinguishes grass from weeds.

That was where he was lacking.

He paused his Sisyphean work and bent down towards a little clump. He sighed, feeling the green strands between his fingers.

Grass or weed?

He stood up again and swung the lawnmower in an arc around the clump. Since he had retired, he regularly practised the mantra ‘Live and let live’.

Who was he to decide what was grass and what was a weed?

None of his colleagues had ever visited him at home. He was known by most as ‘the man without a private life’ and he never let anyone into his world. When he retired, he had relaxed his principles a touch, and actually spent time – even if it was never at his home – with an old colleague, his former boss, Erik Bruun from Huddinge Police. Bruun had also retired early, but following a heart attack rather than out of . . . necessity. They met once every other week at the Kulturhus in Stockholm, drinking coffee and playing chess for a few hours. It was Bruun who, once upon a time, had picked out Paul Hjelm from the Huddinge police force to work in the A-Unit.

The pensioner’s equally retired wife came out and sat on the porch with a cup of coffee and the morning paper, her hair in curlers. She waved at him. He waved back. Behind her, the waters of Ravalen glittered invitingly in the morning sun.

Everything was all right, it was just a matter of enjoying life. Fixed monthly outgoings at a minimum. Full supplementary pension. A tangible surplus in their account every month. A piece of land which, after thirty-five years, he had only just begun to find attractive. He would even be able to leave a decent inheritance to both of his adult sons.

Rowing boat and fishing rod down on the lake. Sauna on the shore. Binoculars hanging from a nail on a tree up at the edge of the forest. Two decent trips abroad per year. A healthy couple, retired early, who could be confident that they could be full of life for twenty years to come.

Fit as a fiddle, apart from the incontinence.

But that could be managed. The future was theirs.

The former boss of the former A-Unit, former Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin had, in other words, every reason to be happy with his life. He had no reason whatsoever to grieve over what had happened at the end of his career. He didn’t regret a thing. Of course there were one or two less successful decisions to look back on in connection with the Kentucky Killer, but there was absolutely no misconduct, nothing which should have forced him into early retirement. Nothing of that calibre at all.

He had nothing to dwell on.

There was nothing to dwell on.

He had no reason whatsoever to dwell on it.

And so on.

Day after day.

He paused in his doubly Sisyphean work. He could hear the crunching of gravel up by the garage. Not another grossly criminal estate agent who wanted to ‘make a fantastic offer’ on the place? He pushed the lawnmower aside with a clang and trudged determinedly up the steep grassy slope.

The man who stepped out of the shiny new Saab certainly looked like a grossly criminal estate agent. Neat blond hair in a hurricane-proof style that looked confusingly similar to a toupee, artificially bronzed face, toned body, and even a thick gold wrist chain to go with his stylish, summery suit.