To the Top of the Mountain (7 page)

The whole group had then jumped into a police car which, blue lights flashing, had set off for Stockholm Stadium, where they stood on the running track, all with blue flashing lights on their heads, cheering home their exhausted marathon hero.

Gunnar Nyberg had felt strange with the flashing light strapped to his head. It was almost five o’clock, and he had been doing his best to join in, to have just as much fun as the others seemed to be having, to avoid thinking that it was for
this
he had given up his weekend with his grandson Benny in Östhammar.

And when he saw his stick-thin old friend receive the fabulous Sara Svenhagen’s heartfelt hug there in Stockholm Stadium, in the shadow of its fine old clock tower, he had felt like he could almost reconcile himself with it. Her golden hair wonderfully glossy in the gleaming late-afternoon sun.

That was then.

Now it was gone. Sara Svenhagen had chopped it all off. She looked like a different person. Just as appealing, of course, but in a completely different way. More interesting, maybe. Less of a luminary and more of a person. With everything that entailed.

‘What got into your head?’ said Nyberg, straight off.

Ludvig Johnsson didn’t really seem to understand, sitting
stick-thin
in the café by the police station, wolfing down his third Danish pastry of the day. But Sara understood. She smiled slightly.

‘A fresh start,’ was all she said.

Gunnar Nyberg stared down into his untouched cup of black coffee and had nothing to say. For his part, he’d had enough fresh starts for a while.

Though there was that thing with women, of course . . .

Ludvig Johnsson shifted in his creaky chair on the narrow pavement outside the pleasantly named Annika’s Café & Restaurant by the police station on Kungsholmsgatan.

‘Still going with your ascetic’s coffee breaks, Gunnar?’ he asked.

Johnsson looked almost too fit, with his wiry body and neat bald patch just above his monk-like band of black hair. He was wearing a thin, pale linen suit, a greenish tie and a beige shirt, and he looked at least ten years younger than Nyberg, despite them being the same age, just under fifty. It always grieved him so much to see such a fit and healthy man gobbling down unhealthy food so often.

On the whole, it had been a strange experience to meet Ludvig Johnsson again. They had been very close for a short time twenty-five years ago. Gone through Police College together, virtually lived on top of one another, day in and day out. The division had been clear even then: Gunnar spent most of his time in the weights room, Ludvig running amok down on the track. Gunnar became Mr Sweden and an ugly Norrmalm policeman with a baseball bat. Ludvig went out to the provinces and became a friendly local policeman in Vänersborg. And now they had been reunited. As paedophile police, as an evening paper had carelessly called them. And surprisingly little had changed. They had both lost their families, in completely different ways, and on the other side of the abyss, they had found each other once more. Again, more a result of differences than similarities. Ludvig was nimble, supple, elegant, European. Gunnar was big, strong, a fighter; out-and-out Swedish.

‘I
have
to do it,’ said Gunnar Nyberg. ‘I’ve still got twelve kilos to go before I’m down to being Sweden’s Second Biggest Policeman.’

Ludvig Johnsson laughed. ‘Yeah, I read that story. Did they talk to you first?’

‘Someone rang and asked if I still weighed a hundred and thirty-nine kilos. I said no, a hundred and forty-six. The entire story’s built on that conversation. Sweden’s Biggest Policeman.’

‘Well, listen,’ Ludvig Johnsson said abruptly, slapping his marathon-runner knees. ‘It’s bloody well time for Midsummer. One day to go. May the country’s paedophiles rest easy, at least for a couple of days. What’re you all doing?’

‘I’m going to see my grandson,’ said Nyberg without hesitation. ‘Dance around the Midsummer pole in Östhammar.’

‘I’m just going to relax,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘Unwind. There’s been a lot on for a bit too long now.’

‘I’m going to renew myself,’ said Ludvig Johnsson cryptically.

Suddenly, a familiar voice could be heard on Kungsholmsgatan.

‘Well, well! If it isn’t Sweden’s Very Biggest Policeman!’

A short-haired, medium-blond man dressed in a red T-shirt, jeans and sandals, a red pimple on his cheek, had appeared in sharp relief against the greyish facade of the police station. Nyberg allowed himself the trouble of standing up and spreading his arms. The two men hugged. When Nyberg let go, the other man looked as though he had just been embraced by an anaconda.

‘Distinguished paedophile hunters,’ said Nyberg jovially, ‘meet the hero of Hällunda. The pride of the police force, Paul Hjelm. Ludvig Johnsson and Sara Svenhagen.’

‘Hullo,’ said Johnsson.

‘Hi,’ said Svenhagen.

‘Hi,’ Hjelm panted, regaining his breath. ‘Congratulations on your latest crackdown, it seems to have gone really well.’

‘Thanks,’ said Svenhagen. ‘Yeah, it was a little reward for our efforts.’

‘Finally, we should add,’ said Johnsson.

‘What’re you busy with nowadays?’ asked Nyberg, patting Hjelm on the shoulder. ‘Where did you end up? Local CID?’

‘In the mundane, you could say, yeah. Right now it’s the Kvarnen Killer, if you’ve heard about that criminal mastermind.’

‘Pub brawl?’ Nyberg said thoughtlessly. ‘Aren’t you a bit . . . overqualified?’

‘Don’t say that,’ said Hjelm. ‘It’s shaping up to be something really interesting. We’ll see. I’m working with Kerstin by the way, Gunnar.’

‘That’s right!’ exclaimed Nyberg. ‘My old room-mate. She was meant to be going back home. So you ended up together? Good fit.’

‘A great fit,’ said Hjelm. ‘I’ve got to buy a couple of sandwiches from the delicious Annika’s, then we’re pressing on with the interrogations. It has its unexpected moments.’

‘What d’you say about Östhammar for Midsummer? Come up and meet the boy. Tommy.’

‘Thanks, but I can’t. I think the kids’ve got a lot going on. We’re renting the cottage on Dalarö again.’

‘Yeah, yeah, go and buy your killer sandwiches then,’ said Nyberg, ‘otherwise you’ll get a telling-off from Kerstin.’

Hjelm went in, bought a couple of well-made sandwiches from Annika’s Café & Restaurant and, waving, started off in the direction of the police station.

Though his mind was in another place.

Elsewhere.

The Kvarnen bar at 21.42 the previous evening, to be precise.

He stopped on Kungsholmsgatan. The enormous police station complex towered above him. Turning to the right would take him up to CID on Polhemsgatan. Turning left would mean wandering through the leafy park, past the elegant entrance to local CID’s building on Agnegatan, and out onto Bergsgatan where the City Police District had their considerably more humble entrance.

The right belonged to the golden past.

The left the more dull present.

Without really knowing why, he stood there hesitating at the crossroads like Hercules in Stiernholm’s epic poem.

Only then was he forced to express what had been floating around, unexpressed, for several hours in the interrogation room that Thursday morning before Midsummer’s Eve. He had read it time and time again in Kerstin Holm’s eyes as, time and time again, they had looked searchingly at one other to make sure that their instincts weren’t wrong.

Yes – this was a perfectly normal, boring, everyday crime in inner-city Stockholm.
But was that all?

Was it just their intense hopes for a
proper
crime which meant that they saw something else looming behind this messy killing?

Paul Hjelm stood at the crossroads for a moment. He felt Nyberg’s searching look on his back. Then he accepted the state of affairs and turned off to the left. Returned to the local police, to the violent crimes division of City Police District, and to the dull, raw, violent crimes.

But something within him suspected that a metamorphosis was approaching.

6

HER STOMACH WASN’T
rumbling, it was roaring. Like when a lone Indian is sneaking through the jungle, his heart in his mouth, and suddenly hears the sound he knows he’ll hear only once in his life.

Late in his life.

The roaring of a tiger.

On this occasion, though, the tiger was a far from terrifying female policewoman in her mid-thirties, and the Indian a young man from Kalmar, aged barely twenty, his eyes red and swollen from crying. And it was hardly late in his life.

It had been late in his best friend’s life, though. The evening before. 23 June, 21.42, in the Kvarnen bar on Tjärhovsgatan in Södermalm.

Kerstin Holm was longing for Paul Hjelm. But even more – she had to admit it – for the sandwiches he would be bringing with him.

Her stomach growled again, even more murderously.

Not that Johan Larsson from Kalmar noticed. He was crying uncontrollably. He was completely lost, understood nothing. Nothing at all. Four high-spirited young men from Kalmar had followed their football team, Kalmar FF, the unexpectedly successful newcomers in the league, on an exciting little adventure to Stockholm. At 19.00 on Wednesday 23 June, they had been in the Södermalm Stadium, cheering the team on to a far from poor 2–2 result. Reasonably happy with their evening, they had made their way to Kvarnen, a pub they had heard about near Medborgarplatsen. It would be lively there, or so they had heard. But what they didn’t know was that it would be packed with disappointed Hammarby fans, whose collective frustration over finishing last in the league was coming to a head. No one had believed them when, like St Peter, they denied, three times, any dealings with their champions. Instead, one of them had died. His blood had flowed out into Johan Larsson’s hands, gushed out through the seams of his red-and-white football shirt, and life would never be the same again.

Maybe he would forget the sea of blood, maybe he would even forget Anders Lundström, his childhood friend. But he would never forget the blind hate, the inordinate rage. Those eyes that just
wanted to kill
. Those would be there until the very last moment of Johan Larsson’s humble time on earth. That much he understood.

But nothing else.

Kerstin Holm did what she could. She tried to be motherly; she said to herself: I could be his mother, but it didn’t really work. She wasn’t exactly sure what being motherly involved.

She didn’t have any children, didn’t know if she wanted to have children. A year ago, she had known that she
didn’t
want to have any, but now she wasn’t even sure of that. Time had begun to run out for her. Her relationships hadn’t really lived up to what had been promised. As a child, she had been sexually abused by a relative. Her engagement to a colleague in Gothenburg had been one long, drawn-out rape. Her strange, short, intense relationship with Paul Hjelm over two years ago was mainly a gilded memory from which the gold leaf had begun to flake away, and the most important relationship of her life, an equally intense love affair with a terminally ill sixty-year-old priest, had ended the way she knew it would.

He died.

She was with him when he died, and he had left memories behind that she didn’t really know what to do with. They had an aura of
holiness
which she just didn’t feel worthy of.

Paul Hjelm came into the room, brandishing a plastic bag. She gave a sigh of relief, and her stomach growled violently, as though it knew about the contents of the bag. He heard it, waved the bag once more, and got an immediate response from the tiger in her abdomen. He raised his eyebrows, surprised.

‘The mysteries of biology,’ he said, sitting down and skimming through her notes. ‘
Gang of seven people
,’ she had written. ‘
Blind hate
.
Three main figures, the perpetrator really a minor character
.
The one who helped (Jonas A): fucking furious. At us, because we’d gone there. At perp, because he’d ruined things
.
Anders pushed him over so we could follow Hjalle and Steffe out
.
Completely unexpected
.
Unbelievably hostile looks, like there was nothing human in those eyes
.
The whole gang disappeared. In a flash
.’

She hadn’t written anything else.

Hjelm looked up at Johan Larsson from Kalmar. He was hunched over, sobbing.

So-called meaningless violence.

For a brief moment, he felt sick to his stomach.

He looked at the new drawing, lying alongside the other two. Three police sketches of the perpetrator, completely independent of one another. So similar, and yet so different. Per Karlsson’s, Eskil Carlstedt’s and Johan Larsson’s.

Dishevelled, mid-length, sand-coloured hair; a little moustache that went just past the corners of his mouth; blue eyes. On these points, the pictures were in agreement. But on the shape of the face, the nose and the eyes, here they differed on these most basic of points. It wasn’t possible to come up with a single coherent picture from the three sketches. The question was whether they could even be used in the media.

Hjelm held up Eskil Carlstedt’s drawing for Johan Larsson.

‘Is this what he looked like?’

Larsson looked up, all red and puffy. Snot was running freely from his nose. Hjelm passed him a tissue without lowering the picture. Eventually, Johan Larsson managed to focus on it. He nodded. His head sank back down to his arms. Hjelm picked up Per Karlsson’s sketch.

‘So like this, then?’

The young Smålander looked up again.

‘Exactly like that,’ he said.

Hjelm sighed and put the drawing down.

‘How drunk were you?’

‘Pretty,’ was all Johan Larsson said.

‘And you didn’t see anything else noteworthy in the pub?’

Kerstin studied Paul once again. He studied her back. When they returned their attentions to the young man, they saw that he had been studying them. It was getting a bit tedious.

‘I only saw one thing worth mentioning,’ he said clearly.