The Falling Detective (4 page)

13/12

There's a lot of things said about Gabriel Birck, and most of them are contradictory, like splinters of evidence pointing towards different stories, different fates.

Some say he has no sense of smell, yet others say he can smell a person's saliva. That he's gay, but that he once dated a woman from the Hamilton clan. The same person claims that Birck changed his surname when he did National Service and that he actually comes from a wealthy aristocratic family. Others say he comes from a poor background — that he grew up on the estates with a loner alcoholic father who beat him every weekend. That he once married an Estonian woman to save her from a trafficking league. That he was approached by the Security Service while he was still training, but that he'd never been tricked into joining them. Others are convinced that he does in fact have a murky past in that very organisation.

And so it goes on, and nobody knows for sure. I believe about half of what is said, but which half changes from day to day, depending on what sort of mood Gabriel Birck is in. I think he lives a fairly solitary life, that Birck is a loner. We have that in common, and that's why we can work together.

By some kind of unspoken agreement, we decide to walk to Vanadisvägen 5. We become silhouettes as we move through the night in the capital. As we leave the crime scene, Birck stops dead.

‘Hmmm,' he says. ‘Look at that.'

The contents of my stomach that I expelled less than an hour ago are already covered by a layer of ice crystals.

‘Is it yours?'

We're inside the cordon. They're going to do tests on it. There's no point in lying.

‘Yes.'

‘Are you ill?'

‘I don't know, but I was nauseous. It might have been the body.'

Birck leans forward and studies the vomitus more closely. I find this very embarrassing, as though he's seen me naked.

‘What do you eat anyway?' he says.

Almost nothing — that's part of the problem with the Serax come-downs. My appetite disappears completely, and I'm constantly weak, with quivering hands.

‘What everyone else eats,' I say. ‘Can we go now?'

‘You really should change your eating habits.'

We've turned off the wide Sveavagen, and we're now outside Vanadisvägen 5. It's just before two. It is now the thirteenth of December.

‘Are you going to St Göran's now, on Lucia?' he asks.

‘No.'

‘But you're going at Christmas?'

‘Just for a short visit, maybe. Nothing more.'

‘How often do you go? How often do you see him?'

‘As often as I need to.'

‘Here.' He holds out a packet of Stimorol. ‘For my sake,' he adds.

I take a piece of chewing gum. Birck puts his gloves on, and takes the key from the plastic bag and slides it into the lock of the main entrance. The door is lighter than you'd think, and if it does creak or scrape, the sound is drowned out by the noise of the city.

‘Fifth floor.' Birck reads the list of residents. ‘Second from the top. No, you can keep it,' he says when he spots the chewing-gum packet in my hand. ‘You need it more than I do.'

Outside the door — light brown with
HEBER
above the letterbox — I take my boots off, and Birck steps carefully out of his black shoes. The lock looks untouched; there's no sign of anyone having tried to force their way in.

‘Shall we ring the bell?' I ask.

‘What for? He's dead, you know.'

‘There might be someone else in there. A friend or a girlfriend. Or boyfriend.'

‘Didn't you see his shoes? A man who wears shoes like that is definitely not gay.'

‘You know what I mean.'

Birck looks for a doorbell, finds it, and then pushes it. There's no sound from inside. I place my knuckles against the door instead, and knock three times, hard. When nothing happens, Birck puts the key in and opens the door.

The place where Thomas Heber lived the last few years of his life is a little one-bedroom flat with high ceilings. It's sparsely furnished, with three fully laden bookshelves along one wall of the first room, next to some kind of reading chair whose only companion in the flat is a floor lamp peering over its shoulder. Otherwise, the room is empty, apart from a pile of packing boxes against the opposite wall, the traces of a man who lived his real life outside his home.

‘How long had he lived here?' Birck asked.

‘According to Markström's background check, two years.'

‘Looks more like two weeks. I would've had a nervous breakdown if my home looked like this after two years.'

‘Will you do the bedroom?'

Birck walks off without saying anything. I walk over to the bookcase and tilt my head to one side, reading the titles of well-thumbed books about sociology and philosophy. In one corner of the bookcase there's a collection of books that really stick out, like
The Activists Handbook, Manual for Militant Political Siege
,
and
The Occupy Movement: an instruction for practice.
I pull one out. It's been read in great detail — the pages are marked and annotated with the illegible handwriting of an academic. In another corner of the bookcase are several copies of the same book, his own PhD thesis in sociology,
Studies in the Sociology of Social Movements: stigma, status, and society.

I take a couple of steps back. Nothing grabs my attention. That's annoying. I head for the kitchen instead. It's narrow, with units along both sides, and then opens up into a small square space with a smaller but equally square wooden table and four chairs. The windowsills are empty, with no plants or lamps, and each window is framed by a light-blue curtain. On one windowsill is a little saucer, empty and clean.

‘Did he smoke?'

‘Not as far as I know,' Birck's voice comes back.

I open the fridge. Inside are two bottles of Czech lager, a jar of Taco sauce, some butter, and a sad little piece of cheese with less than a day to go before its sell-by date.

I go into the bedroom, where Birck is kneeling in front of the wardrobe and pulling out a pair of shoes. He investigates the laces, and then the soles and the inside of the shoes, before putting them back.

‘Nothing?' I ask.

Birck shakes his head.

The bed is unmade. I put my nose to the bed sheets and smell them. They haven't been washed in a long time. A desk is next to the bedroom's only window, and I flip carefully through the papers lying on it — an invoice for December's rent, a wage slip from the Stockholm University, and a mobile-phone bill. I pick up the bill and find the number, get my phone out, dial the number, and put the phone to my ear. A cold, robotic voice tells me that the person I have called is unavailable.

‘Switched off or no coverage.'

‘Wasn't expecting anything else,' says Birck.

Under the phone bill is a scrunched-up piece of paper. I carefully pick it up between two fingers and unfold it.

‘What's that?' Birck asks.

‘A receipt. Heber bought a coffee at Café Cairo on the eleventh of December. Looks like he paid by card. That's it.'

‘Cairo. That's near us, isn't it?'

‘Mitisgatan,' I read. ‘Yes, it's near the bunker.'

‘Put it back.' Birck stares at my hand, which is heading for my coat pocket. ‘It has to be here when the technicians arrive.'

‘Shall I scrunch it up for them, too?'

Birck rolls his eyes. I leave the receipt on the desk, and we go through the bathroom and the closet together, but the flat says very little about its owner. Next to nothing, in fact.

‘Do you reckon he was on his way home?' I ask. ‘That he'd stopped off on Döbelnsgatan to see someone he'd arranged to meet there.'

‘I don't reckon anything,' Birck says, his eyes glued to the floor in the hall.

‘Everyone always thinks something.'

‘I reckon that whatever has happened, we're not going to find the answer here.' Then he stops, and crouches down. ‘Is this yours? This shoeprint?'

‘How could it be mine? We took our shoes off out there. I thought you were a good cop. Anyway, what footprint? I can't see anything.'

‘I think you need to be right over here, crouching down where I am.'

I take two steps forward, crouch down, and it appears. The print is a bit bigger than mine, and from a heavier boot. There are two, three, four more in the hall. The pattern is smeared, as though someone has hastily tried to hide them.

‘Have we ruined them?'

‘I don't think so. We walked along the wall.'

‘It's not the same person,' I say. ‘The one who was hiding behind the bins on Döbelnsgatan, and whoever's been here. Not the same tread.'

‘How did we miss this on the way in?' says Birck. Then he stands up, and takes two steps towards the door. He laughs. ‘Bugger me.'

Light and shade often play games with your eyes. In Heber's hallway the ceiling light makes the shadows scatter and the light reflect off the floor. It's probably a coincidence but when you stand by the door, you can't see the prints unless you know they're there.

Birck pulls out his phone and takes a picture of the prints.

‘They're not dry,' he says. ‘We'll have to get Mauritzon to check them out.'

‘How the hell did they get in?' I say. ‘The door was untouched.'

‘Must've had a key. Like we did. Maybe it was Heber himself. I don't fucking know,' Birck adds when he sees my confused expression.

Clues like these, just like the stuff found by the body, mean nothing in isolation, without the story that ties them all together. They are like road signs without symbols or letters.

Somewhere halfway between Vanadisvägen 5 and the scene of the crime on Döbelsgatan, two cars collide head-on at a junction. A violent confrontation ensues. We stop and observe it from a distance.

‘You do realise,' Birck says, ‘that if word gets out that you're trying to come off Serax, but that your withdrawal symptoms are so bad that you're throwing up, you'll be pulled off duty again?'

‘I'm clean. Ask my psychologist.'

Birck sniggers. From a nearby bar, a child's voice sings
I believe in Santa, and he's coming to my house.

‘How long did you believe in Santa for?' I ask.

‘We didn't have Santa. You?'

‘Long enough that it made me sad when I found out he wasn't real.'

‘You're breaking my heart,' says Birck.

A stream of loud, drunk men and women walk past us. They're laughing.

‘How on earth did you not have Santa?' I ask.

Morning. Another St Lucia procession sloshes through the sludge on the other side of the road, led by a woman about my age. The children are wearing long tunics and red Santa suits, holding battery-powered candles. Cones, hoods, and glitter adorn their heads. None of them seem particularly enthusiastic. Stockholm is still swathed in darkness, but the city woke up a long time ago, if it had even been asleep. Out on Hantverkargatan, the exhaust fumes from the heavy traffic rise into the hazy glow of the streetlamps.

The floor of the building that is home to the City and Norrmalm Violent Crime Unit is quiet, apart from a photocopier in a room a little way away spitting out paper, and a radio playing St Lucia songs. A waist-high plastic Christmas tree fills one corner. It's covered with gold and silver handcuffs, red and blue truncheons, candy-striped pistols, and wooden policemen which are supposed to have been hand-painted by the previous, now retired, chief constable Skacke. At the top is a perfectly normal Christmas star.

My office comprises a desk with a computer on it, a desk chair, and a rickety old wooden chair for any visitors. Behind that is a row of empty bookcases. All the furniture came with the room, and several days passed before I even noticed the cigarette-burn marks on the surface of the desk.

A little square window in one of the walls gives a view of a little square piece of the world — of the snow, which has started falling again. That's it.

On my desk is a pile of paper that Birck has printed out, consisting of the preliminary investigations into Thomas Heber's two convictions, and the first reports from Döbelnsgatan. Nine or ten hours have passed, and the victim's family have been informed and interviewed. Circumstances meant that this had to be done by telephone, and now the transcripts are lying in front of me, signed by Birck. The last report is recorded at 5.27 am, and it's details like that which make me wonder if Birck ever actually sleeps.

Witness accounts have started to emerge and to be processed, but so far nothing significant has surfaced. A prosecutor, Ralph Olausson, has been assigned to the case, and will lead the preliminary investigations. I've never heard of him, but a note on my desks instructs me to contact him as soon as possible. I wonder who wrote it.

Thomas Heber's parents were devastated by the news of the death of their only son, and Frederika Johannesson, who was apparently the dead man's most recent girlfriend, took it almost as hard. In terms of the investigation itself, none of them had anything relevant to tell Birck. The parents described their son as likeable and popular, but had great difficulty in telling Birck who his close friends were. He worked as a sociology lecturer at Stockholm University and, according to the mother, he had twice won prizes for his work. He'd split with the girlfriend more than two years before, when he was finishing his thesis, and apparently it had been the work that had caused the split. It had torn them apart. Frederika Johannesson had no idea whether Heber had had any romantic involvement since then, but she assumed he had. Who that may have been with, she
h
ad no idea.

I put the reports away, go out of the room and past the Christmas tree, over to the coffee machine, and push out a black cup. As I wait for it to fill, several sleepy colleagues file past with snow on their shoulders, pale cheeks, and bloodshot eyes. They avoid eye contact, and say nothing. It's been like this since I got back on duty. To them, I'm just the rookie from Internal Affairs, the idiot who lacks team spirit and who put a bullet in a colleague's neck. The old lag who, since that day, has been unable to hold a firearm without being crippled by panic.

I want a Serax, but I don't take one. I wonder when the anxiety and the fear of weapons will subside. The psychologist insisted that it was important for me to give it time, but he was never any more specific than that. I should have asked him before he got rid of me.

Back in my room, I turn to the preliminary investigation into Heber's breach of the peace in November 2001, and the assault in December 2002. Attached to the reports are the subsequent court verdicts.

On the thirteenth of November 2001, neo-Nazis gathered in central Stockholm to commemorate the anniversary of the death of King Karl XII. The number of skinheads who came to pay tribute to the old king was greater than it had been for many years. Counter-demonstrations were organised by groups on the far left, and one was led by Thomas Heber, a young sociology student considered at the time to be a leading figure in
AFA
, the Anti-Fascist Action network.
AFA
had not applied for a permit for their demonstration, and their protest against the neo-Nazis was broken up by police, who also made sure that the youths were hit with pretty hefty fines.

The following year, in December 2002, demonstrations took place in Salem in honour of another Swede, Daniel Wretström, who was seen as another victim of anti-Swedish violence and immigrants' hatred of Swedes. By then I had moved away from Salem, and so never attended the annual demonstrations, but my parents sometimes talk about them. It's an event that makes the residents of the town steel themselves, as they would before a violent storm. Windows are boarded up, cars parked in their garages, and if possible, people spend the day and night somewhere else entirely.

Every year, Salem becomes a battlefield. During the 2002 demonstration, the third since the murder of seventeen-year-old Wretström, Thomas Heber assaulted a man. He hit a neo-Nazi with an empty bottle, which, unfortunately, broke. Was this down to an existing crack, which Heber could not possibly have known about, or was the strike so powerful that the bottle shattered? The prosecution claimed the latter. The question was considered at great length and in great technical detail during the investigation and, indeed, the trial. In spite of this, the answer could not be established beyond doubt, and Heber was given a two-year suspended sentence and community service.

The sins of youth?

Perhaps.

I stand up and walk over to the window. Outside, the Stockholm morning is lighter now. Need to talk to someone. Need to keep moving.