To the Top of the Mountain (16 page)

His insurance wasn’t really valid any longer.

He was afraid of the pain, that was all.

When he finally lifted the coffee mug to his mouth, there was nothing left in it. The jet-black brew had spilled out over the floor and table.

It wasn’t time to drain the bitter draught yet.

There were things left to do.

15

THE SUPREME COMMAND
Centre. A name with a past.

Everything was the same in the sad old miniature lecture theatre which had, at one time, served as the temporary meeting place for CID’s A-Unit, later known as its ‘Special Unit for Violent Crimes of an International Nature’.

Now risen from the dead.

Maybe just as temporarily.

The dirty, yellow, windowless cement walls; the row of nailed-down seats you had to flip down to sit on, like a line of toilet seats; the table on the platform at the front, like a schoolteacher’s desk, crowned by a what was now a fairly outdated computer; the clock on the wall, just past ten. And then the two doors.

The remains of the old A-Unit entered in dribs and drabs through the first. One after another, with almost tentative steps.

Paul Hjelm was first, like an overly eager student. He watched the others arrive. Trying to compare their outward appearances with those in his head. They never really matched.

They didn’t even match when it came to Kerstin Holm, who was second to arrive. Even though they had worked closely the whole of the previous day, her appearance came as a surprise. He stole glances at her while she slipped over towards him. That wonderful woman. Always dressed in the simplest possible choice of clothes, but they always fitted her perfectly. A pair of loose, straight-legged linen trousers. A summery white blouse. That was all. And above: that dazzling face, ageing better than any burgundy ever had. Every hint of a wrinkle was an improvement.

Though he was a touch biased, of course.

She sat down and turned to him with a smile he was forced to call ‘spirited’, a word he had always been suspicious of, but which had now undergone a metamorphosis.

‘Have you got it?’ she asked.

Hjelm nodded and took a small microphone from the breast pocket of his short-sleeved blue shirt. He waved it in front of her eyes. She nodded. He continued to wave it. She continued to nod. He continued.

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ she said eventually, laughing indulgently.

The door opened again. A thin, extremely pale man dressed in a striped T-shirt underneath an ill-fitting, light-coloured suit entered the room. He caught sight of them and spread his arms.

‘My favourite people,’ he shouted in his clear Finland-Swedish accent.

They stood up and hugged Arto Söderstedt. He chuckled continuously.

‘Well, we all had our hands full with those nice little cases yesterday, didn’t we?’ he said. ‘The media’s already come up with names. The Kumla Bomber and the Kvarnen Killer. It didn’t take long.’

‘And now they’ve been overshadowed by the Sickla Slaughter,’ said Kerstin Holm, grinning.

The door banged. Viggo Norlander entered, bluish bags under his eyes. They went nicely with the pink stigmata on his hands. He waved at them, taking the seat closest to the door and falling asleep immediately. On the way down, Hjelm thought.

Then Sweden’s Biggest Policeman arrived. Gunnar Nyberg raised a cup of coffee to them.

‘They sent me with my ascetic’s coffee,’ he shouted incomprehensibly, sitting down next to the loudly snoring Norlander. ‘Hi, Kerstin,’ he said with a wave. ‘Welcome back to the right side of the country.’

‘Sweden’s shithole,’ she shouted back.

Nyberg laughed, surprised, and placed the coffee on the little folding table in front of him. It could stand there until it cooled down. He had no intention of touching it.

A toilet flushed. Viggo Norlander woke with a start; it was a familiar sound. They waited while the taps ran. Eventually, the other door opened, and Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin entered the room from his private toilet, incontinence pad in place.

He nodded neutrally at them and sat down at the table at the front, a thick pile of papers in front of him.

Kerstin Holm went forward and placed a large bouquet of red roses in front of him. He stared at them. For a good while. Then he fished out the card from deep within their thorny depths. Silence. Absolute silence. They watched him. His expression was completely neutral, but his eyes were lowered. For a little too long. When he looked up, a couple of tears ran down his enormous nose.

‘Thanks,’ was all he said.

‘Just a little whip-round,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Welcome back.’

‘Thanks,’ Hultin said again, stiffly. Then he straightened up and turned the situation on its head. ‘But now we’ve got a job to do. Is anyone missing?’

They looked around the ‘Supreme Command Centre’. The joker in the pack was missing.

The very energy source.

Almost on demand, the door opened. Energetically.

As if it’s even possible to open a door energetically, Paul Hjelm thought to himself, watching as Jorge Chavez walked purposefully towards the front the steps. He sat down on the empty row of chairs nearest to Hultin, turned round and waved cheerfully to the others before standing up again and greeting the operative head of the A-Unit more formally.

‘Welcome back, Jan-Olov,’ he said, shaking his boss’s hand. Then he sat down and waited.

Hultin raised his eyebrows briefly, before regaining his wits and getting straight down to business.

‘Fifty minutes ago, Waldemar Mörner pulled up on my driveway in his Saab. I was just about to finish cutting the lawn and take my first dip of the day when he told me what was what. I tried to get up to speed with things in the Saab on the way into town, but I know almost nothing about this damned Sickla Slaughter. But Jorge does, so I’ll hand you over to him right away. There you go.’

Chavez was ready. He climbed up onto the platform and started fastening photographs to the whiteboard using magnets in the shape of sweet little ladybirds.

‘You’ll have to excuse the insects,’ he said. ‘Someone ordered the wrong thing down in the stockroom. Anyway, these are the pictures from the industrial estate in Sickla, down by Södra Hammarby harbour. From every conceivable angle. There’s even a bird’s-eye picture from a helicopter. Here. Five dead in what seems to be a typical underworld showdown. Unusually brutal, I have to say. One of the victims had twenty-four bullets in his body. Here. Another was blown up. His intestines were stuck to the roof of the car. Here.

‘Let’s start from the beginning. This was between two gangs. Gang One: three armed with pistols (1A to 1C on this sketch). Gang Two: six armed with sub-machine guns (2A to 2F). Gang Two attacks Gang One, probably with the aim of stealing a briefcase.

‘
This
black Mercedes, registered to a car rental place in Örnsköldsvik and hired by a non-existent Anders Bengtsson from Stockholm two weeks ago, pulled up on
this
side road in the Sickla industrial estate at about two this morning. The three members of Gang One were in the car. A well-placed explosive charge detonated underneath it and killed the man in the back seat. The car kept rolling for a few metres before it stopped. The men in the front seat were injured in the explosion, but not fatally. They were forced out of the car by Gang Two, who’d driven there in a van with new Continental tyres – we don’t know any more about it than that at the moment. In all probability, they were frisked by Gang Two, though obviously not very well, since both men later managed to draw their weapons, killing two and injuring one member of Gang Two.

‘Cartridges, the angle of the shots and the location of the bodies show that six of the nine available weapons were fired. Those not fired were the pistol belonging to the man in the back seat and the sub-machine guns belonging to the dead robbers. None of them had time to shoot before they died; otherwise, they’d definitely have done so. No one present seems to have flinched at the thought of using a weapon.

‘Now look at the sketch. It seems to have played out as follows. One: the car explodes, person 1A is killed. Two: 1B and 1C are forced out of the car and frisked. Three: 1A is relieved, posthumously, of his briefcase, probably by 2A. Four: 1B and 1C take out their weapons. Five: 1B shoots over his shoulder and kills 2B, hitting him right in the eye. Six: 2A runs away towards the nearest shed with the briefcase, maybe because it’s stopping him from using his gun. Seven: 1C shoots 2A in the back and kills him. Eight: 1B shoots and injures 2C. Nine: 1C is shot and killed by five shots from 2D, 2E and 2F. Ten: 1B is shot and injured by six shots from 2C, 2D and 2F. Eleven: 1B is shot and killed at close range by eighteen shots from 2D. Twelve: the briefcase is taken from the pool of blood in front of 2A, and bundled, along with the injured 2C, into the van. Thirteen: the van drives away. 1A, 1B, 1C, 2A and 2B are left behind. The injured one, 2C has AB negative blood. So that means that the people with the briefcase, whoever they are, are the surviving passengers from the van: 2D, 2E and 2F, along with the injured 2C.

‘And now for the interesting part. We’re pretty much in agreement that this is some kind of underworld dispute, right? So our fingerprint recognition software should be going crazy, but that’s not the case. Of the five bodies – we obviously don’t have any other fingerprints – there’s just
one
who’s got a criminal record. It’s one of the robbers, Gang Two, the one who was shot in the eye. 2B. His name was Sven Joakim Bergwall, and he’s been inside twice – the first time in Tidaholm and the second time in Kumla. A real first-class criminal. Bank robbery, manslaughter, attempted murder, grievous bodily harm and incitement to racial hatred.

‘Incitement to racial hatred?’ asked Hultin, when he finally managed to get a word in edgeways.

‘Organised Nazi,’ said Jorge Chavez, letting his words sink in. ‘Was a member of the White Aryan Resistance, when it existed. Was also a member of the Nordic Reich Party, when it existed. Etc., etc. He was also active on the edges of the Maskeradliga, if you remember it. An armed gang carrying out robberies across the country. Military character. But the other four don’t have records. No one from Gang One. Not 1A, 1B or 1C. Nor, for that matter, 2A.’

‘I’m a bit confused by all these codes,’ Gunnar Nyberg confessed. ‘So 2A was the one who ran away with the briefcase and got shot in the back? The big guy?’

‘Yeah,’ Chavez confirmed. ‘Though you’re more of a big guy, if we’re being accurate. The point of the codes is that we can pinpoint their positions and movements. We’ve got sub-machine-gun bullets with four different firing pin marks. Four sub-machine guns. Plus the two who never fired, but whose guns are still there: 2A, who was shot in the back, and 2B, who was shot in the face.

‘2B was Sven Joakim Bergwall. He was alone on the right-hand side of the car. 2A took the briefcase and then stood in front of the car, from where he ran. 2D and 2E were also standing in front of the car. 2C and 2F were standing to the left, where 2C was shot and injured. 2D and 2F hit both 1B and 1C. What else can we say? Which of them went up to an injured man and put eighteen bullets into him? The group’s crazy man, or the group’s leader? Intuitively, I’d say: yes. The group’s crazy man
and
its leader. I’d bet the leader is 2D. But we’ve got nothing on him.’

‘What about the explosion?’ said Söderstedt.

‘Well, that’s our lead, other than Sven Joakim Bergwall. A couple of white, middle-aged men had just dragged the whole of the national forensic squad to Närke. Every single forensic technician in service is scraping walls in the Kumla Bunker.’

‘Get to the point,’ said the white, middle-aged Norlander gruffly.

‘It’s the same explosive and the same detonation device,’ said Chavez, letting the information sink in before he continued. ‘Both as yet unidentified, but the same. And it’s obvious that if we put the details of the Kumla explosion together with the details of the Sickla Slaughter, then something not-too-pleasant emerges.’

Söderstedt and Norlander glanced at one another knowingly.
Pattern
, they thought simultaneously.

When does a pattern start to emerge?

Arto Söderstedt suddenly felt alive. For the first time since he had driven Norlander’s service Volvo to Kumla. It had been driven back by some rank-and-file officers while they took a plane from Örebro in order to make it back in time for 10 a.m.

Suddenly it all made sense.

‘We’d like to deliver a greeting,’ he said. ‘To all of you, but mainly to Paul and Jorge. From a two-year-old called Jorge Paul Andersson, nicknamed Jorjie.’

There was a moment of confusion in the ‘Supreme Command Centre’. Söderstedt smiled covertly. He liked confusing introductions.

‘Göran Andersson’s son,’ he continued, with dramatic precision.

Paul Hjelm and Jorge Chavez exchanged glances for the first time in almost a year. Was the old connection still there? They could read one another like a book, in any case. The serial killer Göran Andersson had named his son after the policemen who had sent him to prison. It felt peculiar.

Arto Söderstedt continued. ‘Andersson’s eardrums burst in the Kumla explosion. At 08.36 yesterday morning, he was studying art history in his cell, the one next to Lordan Vukotic’s. The night before, he’d seen Vukotic stagger back to his cell with – as the post-mortem jigsaw puzzle later showed – a ruptured spleen, broken shin bone and both shoulders pulled out of joint. The next morning, he was blown up. Not into pieces, but into a bloody mess splattered all over the walls, and maybe by the same man who, about eighteen hours later, blew up the Mercedes down in the Sickla industrial estate. Which means that we were both right and wrong. Four policemen – the two of us, one from Närke CID and another from the Security Service – came to some fantastical conclusions yesterday, but we spent the evening on completely the wrong track. We assumed the following: that Vukotic had been tortured and talked; that that was why he didn’t want to let anyone know he’d been tortured, least of all Nedic’s henchmen in Kumla. Maybe he lay there in his cell all night, trying to put his shoulders back into joint. But why, you might ask, when he was just going to be blown up the next day?
Why
was he blown up the next day? That was the next question.