Europa Blues (22 page)

And so she started in Nynäshamn. One of the Polferries boats, either the M/S
Rogalin
or the M/S
Nieborow
, had departed at 17.00 on Thursday 4 May, arriving in Gda
ń
sk at 11.30 the next day. The question was whether it would have been possible to make it from Gda
ń
sk to Lublin by 14.55, when the call had come in to the phone at Odenplan metro station. That was something she needed to work out. Stena Lines had a ferry, the M/S
Stena Europe
, departing Karlskrona at 21.00, arriving in Gdynia at 07.00. Both of these needed to be followed up.

Sara felt like she needed assistance, and for a moment thought Kerstin’s absence slightly irresponsible. It was a purely egotistical opinion, of course; it was also a fleeting one. Instead, she phoned up her old friend from the paedophile unit, the rock she could always count on.

‘Yeah?’ Gunnar Nyberg answered.

‘Are you in the building?’ asked Sara. ‘I need your help with something.’

‘No, Sara,’ Nyberg answered, unusually bluntly. ‘I’m a bit busy right now, I’m afraid. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.’

And with that, he was gone. She cursed the invention of the mobile phone and hung up.

Gunnar Nyberg flipped his phone shut with a click and shoved it back into the pocket of his beige lumber jacket. He hoped it wouldn’t get broken. He didn’t want to go to his meeting that evening – it wasn’t a ‘date’, he refused to call it a ‘date’ – covered in cuts and bruises, either. That would hardly make a good impression on a professor of Slavic languages.

He sighed deeply and glanced around the filthy, beer-drenched cellar bar just outside of Åkersberga. A Swedish flag was hanging on one of the concrete walls; on another, a Nazi flag. Standing in the right angle created by the two flags were four enormous skinheads, baseball bats raised.

Behind him, the door was in pieces.

‘Fucking pig, you broke the door!’ one of the skinheads shouted.

‘Sorry,’ Gunnar Nyberg replied courteously. ‘But you should’ve opened up when I knocked, kiddies. I could hear you in here, even though you were trying to hide like Girl Guides.’

A growl emerged from their ranks.

He continued: ‘I’m looking for Reine Sandberg. Is he here? I just want to talk to him.’

The skinhead closest to him swung the baseball bat violently. Gunnar Nyberg didn’t appreciate that. He had promised himself to never again use violence at work, but now he had no choice.

With a well-aimed sucker punch, he sent the skinhead flying into one of the concrete walls. The others drew back slightly. Winded, the man he had punched curled up into the foetal position and groaned faintly.

‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said to the muscular, adrenalin-fuelled skinheads. Coming from most people, such a statement would have sounded overambitious.

Not so coming from Gunnar Nyberg.

He took a step forward.

‘Come on, help an old man out. I’m Swedish fourteen generations back. My forefathers ate raw eel together with Erik XI. Are any of you Reine Sandberg?’

The three skinheads still standing glanced at one another. They put down their baseball bats and the biggest of them said: ‘I am. What d’you want?’

‘Were you kicking over Jewish gravestones in Södra Begravningsplatsen yesterday evening?’

Reine Sandberg grabbed his baseball bat and aimed a fierce blow at Gunnar Nyberg. With a sigh, Nyberg grabbed him. He moved round behind Sandberg and twisted the piece of wood from his hand. Then he pushed him down to the ground so that he was sitting with the baseball bat between his legs, and shoved him over to the concrete wall. He lifted the bat like a lever. Reine Sandberg bellowed.

‘Give us a minute, will you?’ Nyberg said to the two remaining skinheads.

They did. Quickly.

‘I’ve tried being nice,’ Gunnar Nyberg said, lifting the bat slightly higher. ‘Let’s try again. Andreas Rasmusson is your friend, correct?’

‘Yeah,’ said Reine Sandberg.

‘Great. The two of you were out drinking and breaking gravestones in the Jewish cemetery last night, correct?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Good. What exactly did you see that put Andreas Rasmusson – eighteen years old – in critical care in the psych ward, while you, Reine Sandberg – twenty-six years old – are swinging a baseball bat at a policeman as though nothing had happened?’

‘Fuck all,’ Sandberg groaned. ‘It was dark.’

‘Are you sure you want to do it like this? I don’t.’

And with that, Gunnar Nyberg raised the baseball bat slightly higher once more. He could feel it crunching strangely against one of Sandberg’s testicles.

‘OK, OK, OK, take that off and I’ll tell you. Take it away!’

Given that his voice had gone up an octave or so, it was probably time. Nyberg pulled the bat away from the skinhead’s genitals. Sandberg sank down with his hands to his crotch.

‘So,’ said Nyberg. ‘Let’s hear it.’

‘It was fucking horrible. They came gliding out of the shadows, these thin, dark figures. Like they were coming right out of the trees or something. All in black with, like, tights covering their bodies and black hoods on, like executioners. They hung that guy up in the tree. Upside down. That’s when we ran off. We fucking ran. We lost Andreas somewhere. He must’ve been running around the cemetery, totally lost. After seeing that, ’course he flipped.’

‘How many of them were there?’

‘Dunno. It felt like they were everywhere. Just gliding. A … presence.’

‘A presence?’

‘I don’t know how to describe it. Yeah, for fuck’s sake, a presence. At least five of them anyway, I think.’

‘What do you mean by thin?’

‘The opposite of you, you pig.’

Gunnar Nyberg looked down at his newly slimmed body with slight surprise. Could he really still be described as fat?

‘So they were little? Little people?’

‘No, not really. I don’t know. Thin. Light. Like they’d just detached from the trees. Strips of bark.’

‘Strips of bark?’

‘Don’t just repeat what I’ve just said. For fuck’s sake, we ran off as fast as we could. We thought they’d come after us, like mythological beings or whatever.’

‘Mythological beings?’

‘You’re doing it again,’ Reine Sandberg said, annoyed.

Gunner Nyberg was thinking. Mythological beings? Wasn’t there someone he should contact about this – in the absence of Arto? Yes, there was.

‘I’ve got to make a call,’ said Nyberg. ‘Then I’m going to arrest you and take you down to the station for vandalising Jewish gravestones. You’re not going to get away with that. Your testimony might just count as an extenuating circumstance, what do I know?’

And so Gunnar Nyberg made a call.

‘Paul Hjelm’ came the answer at the other end.

‘Paul, it’s Gunnar.’

‘Hey, Gunnar. You busy bothering skinheads?’

‘You could say that. I’ve just been talking to one who said they saw some kind of “gliding presence” among the gravestones. At least five thin figures dressed in black, he called them “mythological beings”. Thought it might be something for you, my old bookworm.’

‘Don’t say anything like that to your “date” tonight.’

‘It’s not a “date”. And how do you know about it, anyway?’

‘The whole station knows. We’ll be sitting at the table next to you with tape recorders.’

Gunnar Nyberg cursed the invention of the mobile phone and hung up. Then he phoned Sara Svenhagen back. She had been waiting long enough.

‘
One
call, you said,’ Reine Sandberg shouted from behind him.

Paul Hjelm was in his office at the police station, increasingly convinced that he had haemorrhoids. It seemed like all he did was sit these days.

The tones of Miles Davis were streaming uninterruptedly across the room. It had become more a fixation than a pleasure by this point. A need.

He spent a moment looking down at his mobile phone, as though it had been producing entirely unfamiliar sound waves. Something was starting to come together. The edges of a wound slowly growing closer.

He had spent the day going through the list of calls to and from the four rooms in the Norrboda Motell. After several hours’ fruitless work, it had clicked. A phone number appeared, demanding his attention.

From Monday 24 April onwards, calls had been made to all four phones from a room in Stockholm’s Grand Hôtel, room 305. The calls had been made at three-minute intervals around half four in the afternoon; in other words, this had taken place a week or so before Nikos Voultsos had died and the women had disappeared. A few days later, on Saturday 29 April, the women had also been contacted by the ninja feminist from Odenplan.

Grand Hôtel. If you were going to do something, you might as well do it properly. He phoned the hotel and spoke to a receptionist.

‘Can you tell me who was staying in room 305 from the twenty-fourth of April?’

The porter was silent. Then he said: ‘Aha.’

‘Aha?’

‘Apparently he disappeared. I don’t actually remember him myself, but he signed in as Marcel Dumas, French citizen.’

‘Disappeared? What does that mean?’

‘Sometimes guests leave the hotel without informing us. That’s why we always take their credit card number, as a precaution.’

‘Instead of their passport?’

‘Exactly.’

‘So you don’t have his passport?’

‘No, but we’ve got his Visa card number.’

‘So guests can disappear without any report being made to the police, because you can just take the payment from their card number?’

‘That’s right. The police are overburdened enough as it is.’

‘True,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘But that means you’re taking the law into your own hands. What if something had happened to him? Imagine he’d been, I don’t know, eaten by wolverines?’

The porter was silent. Hjelm continued.

‘When did this happen?’

‘The fifth of May. He arrived on Sunday the twenty-third of April. We got suspicious on the evening of Thursday the fourth – we hadn’t seen him for twenty-four hours. So when he didn’t show up for a second night in a row, we emptied the room and charged the bill to his account. Twelve nights. The bill came to sixty-three thousand kronor.’

‘Sixty-three thousand?!’

‘Yes.’

‘Now I can understand why you didn’t report it.’

More silence.

‘Anyway, please can I have the Visa card number?’

‘I can’t just give that out.’

‘I’m a policeman, for God’s sake.’

‘How do I know that? Honestly: careless handling of card numbers will be the downfall of civilisation. We’re told to be extremely careful with them.’

‘OK,’ said Paul Hjelm, thinking about that particular kind of Armageddon; maybe it wasn’t so crazy. There was already a huge volume of account numbers from Visa and American Express floating around on the Internet, available for general use. He came up with a quick solution.

‘I’ll give you a fax number. You can check with the directory listing, make sure that it’s a police number. Will that do?’

The porter thought for a moment. Then he said: ‘That’ll do.’

Paul Hjelm gave him the fax number and continued: ‘What happened to the guest’s things?’

‘We packed them up in his bag and put them into storage.’

‘Storage where?’

‘We’ve got a storeroom for stuff people leave behind. If no one gets in touch within a few months, we give it away to charity.’

‘What did he leave?’

‘I don’t know, I wasn’t the one dealing with it.’

‘And this storeroom is in the hotel?’

‘In the basement, yeah.’

‘Someone will be over to pick up his bag today.’

‘Great.’

‘Though not for charity,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘I’m going to send you a JPEG of a face. I want you to show it to all the staff you can think of, right away, to see whether it’s a picture of the guest who disappeared from room 305. What’s your name?’

‘Anders Graaf.’

‘Fitting,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘Email address?’

He was given the address and ended the call with the words:

‘If you send that fax right away, I’ll send the picture right away too.’

Anders Graaf was clearly good at his job, because the fax whirred into life only a minute or two later. During those two minutes, Paul Hjelm had time to send Nikos Voultsos’s photo and to think about the increasing risks of the modern digital society. Ultimately, Graaf had been right, but he had also been inconsistent. Paul Hjelm hadn’t really needed to be a policeman. Plenty of information had been handed out with no qualms, practically everything but the card number. That was because it related to the most important thing in the world: money. They had neglected to report a missing person to the police in order to be able to charge the sixty-three thousand kronor to the man’s account, but they hadn’t wanted to give his account number to the police.

There were some interesting conclusions to consider there.

The fax came in; the card number was in Paul Hjelm’s hand. He phoned the Swedish arm of Visa and was told someone would get back to him with information about the account holder.

He returned to his long list of telephone numbers. After an eventless thirty minutes, the phone rang. He answered.

‘Hello, is that Detective Inspector Hjelm?’ a woman’s voice asked.

‘
The one and only
,’ Hjelm replied modestly.

‘This is Mia Bengtsson. I work at the Grand Hôtel.’

‘Hi,’ Hjelm said expectantly.

‘Hi. Anders showed me the picture of that man. It’s him.’

Paul Hjelm felt a great inner peace. He waited for her to continue.

‘He groped me a couple of times when I was delivering room service. He was at it down in the bar, too. And in the French Dining Room as well.’

‘The guest from room 305, between the twenty-third of April and the fifth of May?’

‘Exactly. Rich drug addict. Had cocaine around his nostrils like some kind of rock star.’

‘Don’t hold back. He’s dead, after all.’

‘Oh! I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead—’

‘That’s when you can really let rip,’ Paul Hjelm replied to loosen her vocal cords.

‘Yeah, OK. I’d say he was an unusually nasty type, simple as that. We do sometimes see them at the Grand. Drug people have a lot of money, and always get room service; it’s the worst – you’re alone with them in their rooms. I tried speaking French but he didn’t understand a word, he just poked my breasts and smiled horribly. He wasn’t even French.’