Another Time, Another Life (36 page)

“I see,” said Johansson. “That’s all well and good, but I still don’t understand—”

“The reason I never considered her is that in the picture she looks
ten years old at most,” Holt explained. “But sure, she’s there in the evidence.”

“The gang of four,” said Johansson doubtfully. “Is that something political?” Sweet Jesus, he thought. Please don’t let it be something political.

“No,” said Holt. “Not the Chinese. It’s a reference to characters in a novel by Conan Doyle—you know, Sherlock Holmes.”

“Jonathan Small, Mahomet Singh, Abdullah Khan, and Dost Akbar,” said Johansson, who had devoted hundreds of hours of his early youth to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and even now could recite long passages by heart.

“Excuse me,” said Holt. “Now I’m the one who’s not following.”

“Forget about that for now,” said Johansson politely. “The gang of four in the novel by Doyle. Those were their names. But I still don’t understand.”

“Then I’ll explain,” said Holt, and she did.

Holt told about Eriksson’s photo album and the picture she’d found, about the questioning of Tischler and what he’d said about his “delightful little cousin.”

“And that was all,” said Johansson.

“Yes,” said Holt.

“But for crying out loud,” said Johansson, who suddenly felt calmer again. “She was ten years old in the picture, you said—”

“About that,” said Holt.

“If Eriksson was out at Tischler’s summer place, I guess it’s not so strange that he had a picture of it,” said Johansson. “Someone like Tischler must have hundreds of cousins, and if I’ve got it right basically the whole extended family used that summer place.”

“Over sixty of them according to my searches, if you count both full and half cousins,” Mattei interjected after a quick glance at her notes.

“There, you see,” said Johansson, nodding toward Holt. Typical shot in the dark, he thought.

“No, no, no,” said Holt, shaking her head.

“What do you mean no, no, no?” said Johansson, who was starting to feel a trifle irritated.

“She could very well be the one who did it,” said Holt, looking
steadily at her top boss. “I hate chance. If she turns up at the West German embassy, then she must have known Eriksson when she was a lot older than ten, and unfortunately we missed that.”

“Did what then?” said Johansson, who was no longer trying to conceal his irritation. “What do you mean you hate chance?”

“That it was Stein who killed Eriksson,” said Holt. “You’re the one who said it, Boss. That we should hate chance.”

“Now let’s take it easy here,” said Johansson. What I might have said is that we should be skeptical of random coincidences, he thought.

“Sure,” said Holt, “and because now she suddenly shows up in the Eriksson investigation, I assume we have to check her out as a potential perpetrator.”

“Sweet Jesus,” said Johansson. “What in the name of heaven is there to indicate that?” And if we’re talking about probability, how often does it happen that women knife someone to death? One time in twenty? Tops, thought Johansson heatedly.

“Nothing,” said Holt. “It’s just that I suddenly have this unpleasant feeling that Stein evidently knew Eriksson and that she may have had something to do with the murder.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Johansson interrupted, now sounding very tired. And two minutes ago you were a hundred percent sure that she didn’t even feature in the investigation. And this is just too awful to be true, he thought sourly.

“It might very well be her,” said Holt. Don’t back down now, Anna, she thought.

“Listen, Holt,” said Johansson, fixing his eyes on his coworker. “And this concerns the rest of you too, for that matter,” he added, locking eyes with them too. “Now let’s take it easy. Before we do anything whatsoever that might cause the least trouble for anyone, and not least for me, we need to call and ask for permission first. Is that understood?”

“Understood,” said Holt, who did not seem the least bit dejected.

As soon as the meeting was finished Johansson took Wiklander with him to his office and asked him to investigate certain things that were to stay between him and Johansson. Wiklander was a male like himself, not
from Norrland to be sure but from Värmland, and in this situation that would have to do. Besides, what choice did he have?

“Women have a unique ability to get worked up about the least little thing,” Johansson explained, without naming names.

“Our colleague Holt is one of the best police officers we have,” Wiklander said.

“So you say,” said Johansson curtly. Not you too, he thought, and then he put an end to the conversation and took the elevator down to the garage to drive home.

If this is a background check, then the direction it has taken is somewhat disturbing, thought Johansson as he sat in the car en route to Söder in the dense inner-city traffic. It has to work out, he thought. Where do I stand now? I still like the situation, even if I liked it better just a short while ago than I do now. We needn’t make things unnecessarily complicated. It should be possible to find a fellow who stabbed Eriksson to death. If that really was the problem, he thought. It always worked out, well, it almost always worked out, he corrected himself, so why wouldn’t it work out here? Besides, this wasn’t about solving an old murder for the homicide squad in Stockholm.

He had to admit that he was troubled by what Holt had said about hating chance. It didn’t seem to be simply a matter of chance that among a large number of Tischler’s cousins this particular one had probably been involved with his best friend Welander when she herself was only a child, and that she had shown up in the Eriksson investigation too. That was not good. It was bad enough that she appeared in the investigation on the West German embassy. Enough and more than enough. Damn it all, thought Johansson.

“You seem worried, Boss,” his driver noted, and when Johansson looked up he saw that he was being observed in the rearview mirror. “Is there anything I can help you with, Boss?”

His driver was named Johan—Johansson had forgotten his surname but he wouldn’t forget Johan—and looked like a twenty-years-younger copy of his best friend Bo Jarnebring. When he wasn’t carting Johansson around, Johan worked at SePo’s bodyguard squad. I’m sure there’s a
great deal you can do, thought Johansson as he encountered his driver’s narrow, watchful eyes.

“You wouldn’t be able to shoot Holt for me?” said Johansson.

“Holt,” said Johan with surprise. “Do you mean Chief Inspector Holt, Boss?”

“One and the same,” said Johansson.

“What has she done?” asked Johan.

“Talked back,” said Johansson.

“Well, in that case,” said Johan, grinning.

“Let’s forget it,” said Johansson, smiling wryly. “It’s the weekend after all, so I’ll let her live.”

After an irritated Lars Martin Johansson had marched out of the meeting to have a private talk with Wiklander and then go home to sulk over the weekend, and the others had escaped to their respective offices to try to get something accomplished, Holt stopped by to see Mattei.

Mattei was sitting in front of her computer, pecking with concentration at what would eventually become the supporting structure of the biography of Helena Stein. “Little biography” as it was called in police Swedish, although in this particular instance there was reason to believe it would be rather lengthy.

“Can I help you with anything, Anna?” Mattei asked without taking her gaze from her computer.

“If you could make a copy of what you’ve got,” said Holt.

“Sure,” said Mattei.

“You see, I have an idea,” Holt continued, “that it might—”

“Be easier to find Stein in the Eriksson investigation if you know what you’re looking for,” Mattei interrupted, without taking her gaze from her screen.

“Exactly,” said Holt. Lisa is probably the smartest person in this place, thought Holt.

“If you go and check your e-mail, it’s already there,” said Mattei.

“Thanks,” said Holt. She’s almost a little too smart, she thought.

• • •

Wiklander had already ordered the binders on the Kjell Eriksson murder to be brought up from the archives in Stockholm, and Holt didn’t need to think for very long to realize that it was unlikely anyone would miss them. There was nothing that even hinted that anyone had worked on the investigation since she and Jarnebring left it in December 1989.

There were ten letter-sized binders with several thousand pages of text. Mostly it was interviews, file searches, and other computer lists, plus the forensic investigation, crime scene investigation, and various technical reports, which, based on experience and at such a late date, were usually more interesting than anything else. In a context like this ten binders with several thousand pages were almost conspicuously little.

The papers were neatly organized, and it was quite obvious that Gunsan had done it. The traces of the leader of the investigation, Bäckström, primarily consisted of a long list of searches on individuals who came up in connection with various violent crimes directed at homosexual men, and quite certainly it was Gunsan who had made sure that this list also ended up in the right place in the investigation materials.

What an indescribably dreadful person, thought Holt, and she was thinking about her colleague Bäckström.

Because Holt knew that it could be as tricky to find things in binders as in a house search, she started by printing out the information on Stein that Mattei had e-mailed to her.

If you were going to search for something you might as well do it properly—for some reason she happened to think about what Jarnebring had said about checking the curtain rods in Eriksson’s apartment. Because it was Stein she was searching for, it ought to be simpler to find her the more she knew about her, assuming that she was there in the investigation for an important reason and not simply because at the age of ten, through the luck of the draw and ordinary human interaction, she had wound up in Eriksson’s photo album.

Maybe she’s another Mary Bell, thought Holt, smiling to herself.

Helena Stein was born in the autumn of 1958 and graduated from the French School in the spring of 1976, not yet eighteen years of age. Then
she matriculated at the university in Uppsala, became a member of the organization of students from Stockholm, and studied law. She earned her degree in three years compared to the usual four and a half, and she had the highest grades in all subjects except two. After that she did her internship at the district court in Stockholm, practiced at an upscale law firm on Östermalm, was hired as an assistant attorney at the same firm, and just over five years after her degree she was accepted as a member of the Bar Association. At twenty-seven years old Stein was the youngest attorney that Holt had ever heard of. Having come this far in Stein’s biography, Holt suddenly realized what she was searching for, and it took her only five minutes to find the papers she hoped would be in the files.

This is almost a little ridiculous, thought Holt. It’s so damn easy as soon as you know what you’re looking for.

In her hand she held three papers that she herself had entered into the investigation in the middle of December over ten years before. It was a program from a SACO conference held in Östermalm in Stockholm on the thirtieth of November 1989, the same day Eriksson was murdered. Between ten o’clock and ten-thirty in the morning attorney Helena Stein had given a presentation on a case she had conducted on SACO’s behalf at the Labor Court in Stockholm. According to the conference program her talk was the third item of the day, right before a fifteen-minute break. A list of participants revealed that one of those sitting in the audience listening to her was bureau director and TCO representative Kjell Eriksson.

Holt had read through the same papers herself when she and Jarnebring had had lunch on the day after Eriksson’s murder, and she was the one who had made sure to conduct the fruitless search in the police department’s files of all the participants, presenters, and conference organizers. But because she had not known who she was looking for, Helena Stein had been invisible to her.

What a strange feeling, thought Holt, weighing the papers in her hand. I wonder if my fingerprints are still there after ten years, she thought.

• • •

“How’s it going?” asked Mattei, who had suddenly appeared in the door to her office.

“I’ve found her,” said Holt.

“That conference,” said Mattei.

This is not true, thought Holt.

“Yes,” she said. “How did you know that?”

“An idea I had. That’s why I’m here. I thought I’d give you a tip about what you should be looking for. It struck me suddenly when I was running Eriksson’s biography and the log of what he’d been doing on the day of the murder against Helena Stein’s biography. Conference on labor law issues, then-attorney Stein—if you want I can make a copy of the computer hits I got—I got two hits, one on ‘attorney’ and one on ‘labor law.’ It’s pretty interesting software actually. First you enter the documents you want to search in plain text and then you run them against each other.”

“I believe you,” said Holt, smiling. Lisa is unbelievable, she thought.

“You’re the one who found her,” said Mattei, shrugging her shoulders. In this building that’s the only thing that counts, she thought.

“I’m satisfied,” said Holt. So there, she thought, and the person she was thinking about was her top boss, Lars Martin Johansson, who right now was probably settled on the couch in front of his TV dreaming his way back to the good old days when he was a legend who was never contradicted.

“In any event you’ve connected Stein with Eriksson on the day in question,” said Mattei. “I actually had an idea too.”

“I’m listening,” said Holt.

While Mattei sat and waited for Johansson to show up at the Friday afternoon meeting, she had taken the opportunity to read the two interviews with Eriksson’s closest neighbor, Mrs. Westergren. The reason she had chosen them in particular was simply that after quickly thumbing through the otherwise rather thin binder, she judged them to be the most interesting.