Europa Blues (17 page)

Paul Hjelm watched him leave. Then, slightly awkwardly, he began wandering around the little flat; he counted two rooms and a kitchen. The light was pouring in through a line of sloping skylights and each of the walls was leaning inwards. It was some kind of slanted existence. And that slanted existence was, without a doubt, impeccably well kept. Not a speck of dust in sight.

First a Jewish poet in cosmopolitan Berlin during the 1920s and 30s. Then a wife and family. And then the concentration camp where his son, wife, mother, father and all other relatives had died under awful circumstances. The man emerged an undernourished and tortured surviver. All illusions, all beliefs, all hope was gone. He moved to a new country, away from it all. He started over, from scratch. Learned the language, began a new family, got an education and a respectable job, became an esteemed researcher, bought a functionalist house straight from the architect, saved a son spiralling out of control and lived in the house together with him after his wife’s death.

It sounded as though Leonard Sheinkman had managed the impossible – like such a remarkable number of others. He had managed to create a good, new life for himself. But how he had felt, deep down, that was impossible to know. His obsession with order and cleanliness was entirely natural after years in the concentration camp; you couldn’t draw any conclusions from that.

Paul Hjelm needed to read his diary.

It was essential.

He eventually found it on a shelf, resting on top of a row of books; it was the only thing in the entire flat which seemed slightly askew. The yellowed, dog-eared, handwritten pages had been intensively read, turned and thumbed. The little book was no more than ten or so pages thick.

And it was in German.

An unforeseen obstacle. But compared with Leonard Sheinkman’s achievement, it was nothing. It was simply a matter of brushing up his long-forgotten high-school German.

The pages were meticulously dated and numbered, and none seemed to be missing. It was just a matter of getting started.

Just …

He grabbed the little book and whirled down the spiral staircase. Harald Sheinkman was sitting on the sofa, looking exhausted. He stood up when Hjelm came spinning downstairs, walking over to him.

‘This must be the diary,’ Paul Hjelm said, fluttering the pages. ‘Is it OK if I take it with me? You’ll get it back.’

‘Sure,’ Harald Sheinkman said. ‘So you read Yiddish?’

Hjelm blinked, staring in confusion down at the yellowed pages. The words changed shape before his eyes. Then he looked up at Sheinkman. A faint smile was playing on his lips.

‘I was just joking,’ said Harald Sheinkman. ‘It’s German.’

Paul Hjelm looked at him and started chuckling. He liked this man.

‘One more question,’ he eventually said. ‘What kind of man was your father?’

Sheinkman nodded, as though he had been expecting the question.

‘I’ve spent a while thinking about that. It’s hard to say, really. When we were kids, he demanded a lot of us. He was always fairly strict, a classic patriarch. We were to be doctors, all three of us, there was never any discussion. His campaign succeeded, to an extent. It went best with my little brother, David; he works as a brain surgeon and lecturer at the Karolinska hospital, he’ll probably be made professor soon. Later than Dad was, though. He’s forty-three now.

‘Channa, the middle child, she’s the one who rebelled. She was active in the left-wing movement in the seventies; she’s teaching in a school of social studies now. And then me, the eldest son, I obediently went down the medicine route but then refused to specialise in anything other than general medicine. He took it hard to begin with; he’d seen me as the chosen one. And when I started working in the poorer suburbs, in Tensta and Rinkeby, he just shook his head. But eventually, I think he found a certain respect for what I was doing.

‘He wasn’t an impossible person. When I came up against the wall, he was a real rock. When the whole world seemed to be falling apart, he was my anchor point. Our relationship was really good back then. He’d just retired and was full of life, and he’d finally managed to pull himself back together after Mum’s death. He was a man who’d had a completely different life once, and we never made it into that life – not even Mum.’

Hjelm nodded and held out his hand.

‘Thanks very much, Harald,’ he said. ‘We’ll be in touch.’

‘I enjoyed our chat, Paul,’ Sheinkman said.

‘I did too.’

On his way out, Hjelm said goodbye to the daughter. He found himself sitting, for a while, in his old Audi. He leafed through the yellow pages. Text which had been written inside a concentration camp, in the terrible Buchenwald. Leonard Sheinkman, the poet from Berlin, had somehow got hold of paper and a pencil and managed to keep it all hidden from the guards. It was a remarkable achievement.

He turned the ignition, left Bofinksvägen and drove out onto Breviksvägen. The sky was still clear and blue, but it was as though the film had been pierced and wiped away – and the sky was actually blue behind it. The weight which had been pressing down on the landscape had been evened out. Nature was peaceful and beautifully springlike.

Summer would come once more this year, in spite of everything.

His mobile phone rang. Jorge Chavez said: ‘Yup.’

He said no more, but Paul Hjelm immediately understood.

‘They found it?’ he asked.

‘The technicians managed to gather an unbelievable amount of stuff from the wolverine enclosure, I have to say. Everything from pieces of bread – as though the things were ducks – to rat traps. They found two rat traps in there. One of them was still set.’

‘It’s a new pastime. Tormenting animals. Horses are regularly abused in our open countryside.’

‘Plus eight beer cans. The long, sharp wire was inside one of the cans. A drug-addled wolverine must’ve gobbled down the skull, found the wire in its mouth like a fishbone and somehow spat it out into a beer can.’

‘The Lord works in mysterious ways,’ Paul Hjelm said, heading home.

Home to the police station.

AT HALF EIGHT
in the morning on Monday 8 May, a miracle occurred in the police station in Kungsholmen, Stockholm. For the first time in the history of the world, the sun was shining in the Tactical Command Centre.

One by one, the members of the A-Unit entered the gloomy lecture theatre; one by one, they paused at the sight of the little patch of sunlight just inside the doorway. They crept reverently past it and headed for their seats, further inside the room. When the last of them arrived and closed the door, the little patch of sun disappeared. Viggo Norlander opened the door and just like that, it came darting back.

The people gathered in the Tactical Command Centre were detectives, not mystics. A cause needed to be ascertained and a miracle shattered. Joint efforts deduced that the little pool of sunshine had been made possible by five factors. First, the fact that the sun was actually shining outside. Second, that it was shining in through the window of the ladies’ toilet. Third, that the door of the ladies’ toilet was slightly ajar, having caught on a crumpled cigarette packet on the floor. Fourth, that the sunlight from the window in the ladies’ toilet was also falling on the glass of a third-rate painting which had been temporarily placed against the wall directly opposite the door to the Tactical Command Centre, waiting to be hung in Waldemar Mörner’s office whenever the aforementioned dignitary arrived. Fifth, that the sunlight hitting this painting of a bawling child was being reflected in through the open door of the Tactical Command Centre.

The door was closed. The miracle shattered. Jan-Olov Hultin let his owl-like glasses slide down his enormous nose until they were practically level with his invariably well-shaven upper lip.

‘Good news,’ he said neutrally, ‘but we’ll save that for later. Firstly, I want to apologise to Sara for being dragged into yesterday’s TV debacle. A person should be thoroughly prepared before they take their place next to Waldemar Mörner.’

‘And a person shouldn’t move an entire bunch of microphones.’

Who had said that? Who was this reckless person who had, so daringly, stuck their head into the lion’s mouth? They glanced around the room, waiting for the headbutt to come.

This time, their combined efforts deduced that the words had, in fact, come from Jan-Olov Hultin himself. Self-criticism? A drastic change of personality was clearly under way.

Was it a stroke? wondered four people whose names shall, for all eternity, remain anonymous.

‘It was a bit of a surprise,’ Sara Svenhagen said mildly.

‘Let’s move on,’ Hultin said as though nothing had happened. ‘The forensic technicians’ preliminary survey of Södra Begrav-ningsplatsen gave us nothing. Not a single usable footprint; not a single fingerprint on the rope or the body. They found Leonard Sheinkman’s fingerprints on a few pieces of the broken headstone below him, though. Should we just interpret that as a sign of pain? Or is it an indication that the gravestone had some kind of significance to him? Had he been on his way to that particular grave?’

‘The name on the grave,’ Jorge Chavez said, ‘has been reconstructed as “Shtayf”. That’s all. We’ll have to find out more about that body.’

‘That can be your job, Jorge,’ Hultin said. ‘What else? What happened with our skinhead, Andreas Rasmusson?’

Kerstin Holm glanced at her papers.

‘Apparently he had some kind of psychosis last night. He’s been moved to hospital.’

‘Under guard?’

‘If you’re arrested as a suspect, you’re treated as a suspect. Yes, there’s an assistant watching over him day and night. From what they’ve said, he seems to be completely out of it.’

‘I think it’s very important we find out what those skinheads saw,’ said Hultin. ‘There must be some way of finding out who he was with, who he met that day, et cetera, et cetera. Gunnar?’

‘OK,’ said Gunnar Nyberg.

‘After you’ve been to the university, though. You and Viggo and Police Assistant Andersson are meeting a Slavicist called Ludmila Lundkvist in the Department for Slavic Languages at ten o’clock. Get hold of Andersson and get yourselves up there to Frescati.’

‘
Da
,’ Nyberg said like a good linguist.

‘Now,’ Hultin said with brutal neutrality, holding up a piece of paper on which a large plus sign had been drawn, ‘this diagram was sent anonymously to me. There are four segments—’

‘Quadrants,’ said Chavez.

Hultin gave him a very long, very neutral look.

‘… four segments labelled, in turn, “Skansen”, “Skogskyrkogården”, “Slagsta” and “Odenplan metro station”. Beneath Skansen, it says “fingerprints, pistol, metal wire, rope, Epivu”. Beneath “Skogskyrkogården” it says “relatives, modus operandi check, brain surgeon’s verdict on the impact of the metal wire on the brain, skinhead witness, other witnesses, check of the murder scene”. I’ve taken the liberty of adding “Shtayf”. Is that acceptable to my superiors in the congregation?’

‘Yup,’ said Chavez. ‘Good work, young man.’

Yet another tremendously long look.

Then he said: ‘Moving on. Under “Slagsta” it says: “phone call check, forensics technician’s report, vehicle phantom pimp”. And beneath “Odenplan metro station”, it says: “phone, list of calls, language expert”.’

Jan-Olov Hultin stood up and moved over to the whiteboard. With a dramatic gesture, he spun it round so that the back was facing forward. It revealed the same plus sign as the paper.

‘So let’s use this anonymous masterpiece as the hub of the investigation. Don’t let me stand in your way. If we work backwards, we’ve got the “language expert”. That detail will be settled today. The following points, “mobile phone, call list”, are with the technicians, who are working on the SIM card and things like that. With any luck, we’ll have the contract details and a list of calls sometime today. So then the previous … quadrant: “Slagsta”. We’ve got the “phantom pimp”, the face reconstructed by Jörgen Nilsson. Viggo, you’ll work on identifying him when you get back from Frescati. OK?’

‘OK,’ said Chavez.

Norlander looked at him sternly and said: ‘OK.’

‘Then what does “vehicle” mean? An unidentified vehicle heard in Slagsta at half three or four on Thursday morning. Not so easy, but interesting nonetheless. More neighbours to talk to, bus companies and bus departures from Sweden via different tollbooths to be checked. Does that sound unbearable, Sara Svenhagen?’

‘No, it’ll be fine,’ said Sara, sighing inwardly.

‘I can answer the “forensics’ findings” point myself, because I went through the material last night. In the four motel rooms, they found – listen carefully now – semen from eighteen different men. Such is life in a Swedish refugee centre. They found a large number of fingerprints as well, but so far none of them have been a match in the database. That means that these eighteen men seem to be normal, respectable Swedes.’

‘Plus a neighbour or two from the Norrboda Motell?’ added Kerstin Holm.

‘There were no bloodstains, at least, no signs of violence. Physical violence, that is. Basically nothing. The rooms had been emptied of all personal items. Finally, the point called “phone call check”. Could that be something for Paul Hjelm? As thanks for this.’

Hultin pointed to the plus sign on the whiteboard.

‘If I’m given time.’

‘You can have time,’ Hultin said neutrally, continuing: ‘Quadrant two: “Skogskyrkogården”. The new point, “Shtayf”, is Jorge’s. Then there’s “check of the murder scene”, which is done: no answers. After that, we’ve got “skinhead witness” and “other witnesses”: Gunnar will be looking into the other skinheads. As far as we know, there weren’t any other witnesses, but the media’s been blowing it up for a whole day now; maybe someone else will come forward today. We’ll see.

‘The cumbersome point called “brain surgeon’s verdict on the impact of the metal wire on the brain” is now in the material world – if incomprehensible in places. Qvarfordt reports in his usual style that: “The eighty-eight-year-old body is well maintained for its age. No sign of atherosclerosis of any kind. Absolutely no sign of age-typical encephalomalacia. Unusually large cerebrum. Digits tattooed above the left wrist. Evidence of cervical spondylosis. Circumcisio post-adolescent. Rheumatoid arthritis, early stage, presenting in the wrists and ankles.