To the Top of the Mountain (37 page)

‘Brambo’s’ IP number could, after lots of toing and froing, be traced to a restaurant. To the Thanatos restaurant on Östermalm, right here in Stockholm.

Thanatos, she thought, as she searched the registry of businesses for an owner and manager. Wasn’t that the ancient Greeks’ kingdom of the dead? The deepest depths of Hades?

The deepest caverns of Hell.

Strange name for a restaurant.

Wasn’t it Freud, too? Eros and Thanatos? Our two strongest urges. The sex drive and the death drive?

The Thanatos restaurant was owned by Rajko Nedic.

Rajko Nedic, she thought to herself. Wasn’t he the drug dealer who always managed to get away? He had never figured in any child-porn context, had he?

She checked the times. ‘Brambo’ had been online at all manner of times. It was difficult to imagine anyone in the restaurant busying themselves with child porn down in the kitchen while the lunch rush was on. She checked with the network, Telia. The IP number had been subtly and secretly diverted. She would have to use all the police tricks she could think of to crack their wall of confidentiality.

Yes, the number was diverted.
Home
to Rajko Nedic in Danderyd.

Suddenly, it all started to make sense. Rajko Nedic wasn’t in the child-porn business. It was much simpler than that.

Rajko Nedic was a paedophile.

She started to collect all the images linked to ‘brambo’ that she could find online. It was a cavalcade of the usual kind. So normal, and so unbearable. Always the faces. It was always the children’s faces that grabbed hold of her and which she couldn’t let go, which held onto her, accusing her; accusing her for having escaped, for being able to have lived her childhood in peace, for not helping them right then and there, for being removed from the actual event. A terrible, silent, dampened scream of horror which rose towards the horizon and swept over the world, taking her with it and leaving her with nightmares about an awful double penetration in the middle of giving birth. Those eyes. Always so dark – ruined, but always crystal clear. Their acute prematurity. Their stolen childhoods. The inconceivably grotesque act.

Sara Svenhagen tried to calm herself down. She recognised the situation so well. She tried to become a policewoman again: objective, critical, chasing clues. It was always the same procedure, the same narrowing of the field of vision. It worked in the end.

Though through a haze of tears.

For the most part, it was a question of
one
child in the pictures, a dark little girl at different ages, but there were others, too. It was always the same room, the same background. The walls were clearly soundproofed – it looked like golden foam cushions had been stapled to the walls. Otherwise, there were no distinctive features. The perpetrator’s face could never be seen, and of his body, only his penis was visible. There was nothing special about it – aside from what it was doing.

In all probability, it belonged to Rajko Nedic.

OK, she thought, stretching. She looked around the flat. Traces of Jorge were everywhere. The sight of his boxer shorts on the bedside lamp filled her with warmth. It rose from her toes up to her hairline.

OK. Ragnar Hellberg had never seemed particularly comfortable online; his speciality was making jokes for the press. Still, he had obviously cracked the utterly complex code that she herself had cracked – with the help of the master hackers. He had realised what he had stumbled across: a way to trap the man who had never let himself be caught. A back route into the untouchable Nedic’s organisation. Why hadn’t he used that back route, then? Why had he made sure that not even the faintest trace of it was left in the investigation instead?

Because he had gone after Rajko Nedic in private?

Because Detective Superintendent Ragnar Hellberg had been blackmailing Rajko Nedic for money?

Taking a sober view of it, there were two alternatives: either Hellberg had simply felt a certain shame over not being able to crack the ‘brambo’ pseudonym and erased it from the reports, or else he had used his knowledge of Rajko Nedic for blackmail purposes.

Sara Svenhagen was about to find out which of the two was correct, because through the hordes of German tourists, Detective Superintendent Ragnar Hellberg, also known as Party-Ragge, was pushing his way towards her. He stroked his little black beard as though deep in thought, and sank into the chair opposite her. He gestured, and asked: ‘Why here?’

‘I want it this way,’ was all she replied.

Ragnar Hellberg nodded. As though he understood.

‘Let’s hear it, then,’ he said.

‘Rajko Nedic,’ she said.

He looked at her. His gaze was sharper than she had ever seen it. Otherwise, there was no reaction.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘The “brambo” pseudonym is the drug dealer and restaurant owner Rajko Nedic. And you deliberately left “brambo” out of the investigation.’

He smiled. Ragnar Hellberg actually smiled. He laid his hand on top of hers and looked into her eyes.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘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.”’

They stared at him.

‘Now, if the police had been mythologically ignorant,’ he continued, ‘then this cryptic little message would have passed us by. That’s not the case, though. Philemon and Baucis are another classical pair of sweethearts from antiquity, though in some ways the opposite of Orpheus and Eurydice. Instead of being stormy and dramatic, their relationship was settled and peaceful. If we weave the two stories together, it’s roughly as follows. The god of marriage, Hymenaeus, is called to Thrace, where Orpheus is going to marry his Eurydice. But Hymenaeus comes in vain, because Eurydice is dead: “ran joyful, sporting o’er the flow’ry plain, a venom’d viper bit her as she pass’d; instant she fell, and sudden breath’d her last”. Orpheus, the divine singer, makes his way to the kingdom of the dead and appeals to Hades: “all our possessions are but loans from you, and soon, or late, you must be paid your due”. Even Sisyphus stops his eternal rolling of the stone up the mountain. The entire kingdom of the dead allows itself to be seduced, and Eurydice is carried up from the shadows.
As long
as Orpheus doesn’t turn round and look at his bride before they’ve left the underworld, then he’ll have brought her back to the world of the living. But he couldn’t resist; in his care for her, he glances back over his shoulder anyway. Obviously it’s impossible for us to know what kind of hell our young pair has been through, but just as Eurydice is on her way back into the kingdom of the dead, just as Orpheus is on his way to return to be torn apart, alone, by the Thracean women, just then – they transform the transformation. The metamorphosis undergoes a metamorphosis. Instead of being Orpheus and Eurydice in Thrace, they become the industrious pair of Philemon and Baucis in Phrygia. A couple of gods in human form go there, to test the population. Everywhere they ask, they’re refused a room. Everywhere apart from with Philemon and Baucis. The penniless pair offer the gods everything they have, and they’re given their reward. The gods reveal themselves: