Europa Blues (3 page)

Nothing was ever really as it seemed.

When he reconstructed Pertti’s life, it must have gone something like this: young, enthusiastic, provincial doctor finds himself drawn into the Finnish Winter War after an abrupt attack by the Soviet Union. He turns out to have a knack for guerrilla warfare in the frozen winter forests and quickly climbs the ranks. He becomes a hero after several decisive offences, and after the Russian victory, disappears into the forests like a classic guerrilla fighter. He returns after the Second World War, more or less a broken man. He starts drinking more and more and has trouble keeping his job as a doctor in increasingly remote backwaters. He eventually returns to Vasa and becomes an eccentric, living that sad old life until he turns ninety. End of story.

Or so Arto Söderstedt thought.

Until his inheritance arrived.

The inheritance which was now being consumed, in the form of watermelon, beneath the growing shade of an umbrella. The Tuscan spring sun was now touching the curving horizon of the Ligurian Sea. Before long, it had sunk low enough for the chalk-white family to venture out into the water.

After everyone else – shivering – had already left the beach.

Arto Söderstedt saw the old fisherman pack up his stall of watermelons, cast a last astonished glance at the shadow-covered family, shake his head, and head off for a glass of wine in his local
osteria
. Once there, he would tell his friends about the sun-shy family and pay with money which had once belonged to a different eccentric from a completely different part of the world.

For a moment, Söderstedt was fascinated by the movement of money, its transfer, its origins.

Then he took off his crinkled suit and ran at the head of a line of children towards the edge of the water, testing it with his big toe. Its icy coolness reminded him of the Finnish lakes of his childhood.

On the beach, Uncle Pertti sat, necking Koskenkorva vodka and laughing hoarsely at his cowardice.

He ran in. The children wailed like organ pipes.

And in his rucksack, up under the blue-and-white parasol, his mobile phone was still switched off.

THE GIRL WHO
had been fortunate in her misfortune was sitting on a hospital bed with a surprised look on her face. She probably hadn’t stopped looking surprised since the previous evening. It was now a permanent look of surprise.

Paul Hjelm found her surprise entirely understandable. When you were ten years old and walking hand in hand with your dad one spring evening, you hardly expected to be shot.

But that was what had happened.

She had felt cold; the wind had suddenly picked up, blowing straight through her thin quilted jacket and chilling her practically bare legs. She had been holding her dad’s hand and clutching a balloon shaped like a happy yellow face. She had been skipping slightly, mainly to keep warm but also because she was happy about the bag of sweets she had fished up out of the lucky dip. Aside from the cold, everything was just fine.

And then she had been shot.

A bullet had come flying from somewhere and buried itself in her upper right arm. That was where it came to rest. Fortunately.

She had been fortunate in her misfortune.

‘You’ll be fine, Lisa,’ Paul Hjelm said, placing his hand on hers. ‘It’s just a flesh wound.’

Lisa’s father’s eyes were puffy and red from crying and he was snoring loudly in the armchair. Paul Hjelm poked his shoulder gently. His head jerked upwards with a snort and he stared uncomprehendingly at the policeman standing by the edge of the bed. Then he saw his daughter with the bandage around her arm and the awful reality came crashing back down.

‘Excuse me, Mr Altbratt,’ Hjelm said courteously. ‘I just need to be absolutely certain you didn’t see any sign at all of a perpetrator. No movement in the trees? Nothing?’

Mr Altbratt shook his head and stared down into his hands.

‘There wasn’t a single person anywhere nearby,’ he said quietly. ‘Didn’t hear a thing. Suddenly Lisa just screamed and the blood started pouring out. I didn’t realise she’d been shot until the doctor told us. Shot! What kind of world do we live in?’

‘So you were walking along Sirishovsvägen in the direction of Djurgårdsvägen? Where had you been?’

‘Does it matter?’

Paul Hjelm’s phone rang. The timing wasn’t the best. He hoped no respirators or heart–lung machines would crash when he answered. He could just see the headlines: ‘
TEDDY BEAR KILLER! EXTRA! EXTRA! FAMOUS POLICEMAN MURDERS FOUR CRITICALLY ILL PATIENTS WITH MOBILE PHONE
.’

‘Hjelm,’ he answered laconically. Unless you’re severely disturbed – or an answering machine, perhaps – how exactly
did
you answer a phone using more words than that?

A moment of silence followed. The Altbratt man was looking at him like he was busy ripping the feathers from an endangered eagle. The Altbratt girl still just looked surprised.

‘Skansen?’ the eagle violator exclaimed. That was all he said. Then he got up from the bed, patted Lisa on the head and held his hand out to the father.

‘I’ve got to go, I’m afraid. I’ll be back.’

Cold morning sunshine greeted him on the steps of the paediatric accident and emergency department. The Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital. He searched his pockets as he wandered over to the car park. His keys were gone. Then again, this wasn’t an unusual occurrence and so he went through his patting ritual once more, and hey presto, they appeared from one of the pockets of his much-too-thin jacket. Same procedure as last year.

It was a fresh spring morning of the newly woken kind, the type often seen during the first week of May. The kind of day which looks so inviting from indoors but turns out to be a slyly masquerading winter’s day. Hjelm, always dressed too lightly, was now practically naked. His pitiful scraps of clothing offered absolutely no protection against the icy wind. He tried to pull them tighter around him but couldn’t find anything to pull.

It was nine in the morning and the traffic around Haga Södra and Nortull was at a complete standstill. Car traffic had increased dramatically in Stockholm over the last year. For some reason, it had suddenly become extremely attractive to be stuck in traffic. Cheap psychotherapy, presumably; a line of metal boxes full of screaming Mr Hydes. The alternative was the newly privatised commuter train which never seemed to be running, or else the metro which seemed to be forever standing in dark tunnels for hours on end, or else you could cycle along one of the sadistic cycleways no one dared to use since they seemed to have been deliberately designed to cause particularly awful injuries.

OK, so he was a whiner.

He didn’t really have anything to complain about. The red metro line was relatively free from stupidity. He continued to devote his long daily journey from Norsborg in to central Stockholm to intense, reality-fleeing jazz listening. After a jaunt into the world of opera, like some kind of slightly depraved Inspector Morse, he had gone back to jazz. He couldn’t quite tear himself away from the bebop years around 1960. But at the moment, he was hooked on Miles Davis.
Kind of Blue
. It was, quite simply, a masterpiece. Every single track on it. Five classics: ‘So What’, ‘Freddie Freeloader’, ‘Blue In Green’, ‘All Blues’ and ‘Flamenco Sketches’ – all more or less improvised in the studio during the golden year of 1959. The musicians went to the studio not having seen the music before, Miles turned up with a bundle of notes, and all five tracks were said to have been recorded on their very first attempt. Somehow, it felt like music that had been created as it was performed, music which immediately and naturally took shape. A new kind of blues, infinitely down to earth, infinitely sophisticated. Every second of it a pleasure.

But during work hours, he had his service vehicle. He pushed the key which had miraculously appeared into the lock on the old beige Audi, looked out at the traffic and sighed deeply. It would probably be quicker to
swim
over to Djurgården.

That was where he was headed. His colleague and partner in crime Jorge Chavez had had that mysterious, expectant tone in his voice, the kind Paul Hjelm had been longing for for months. ‘I think you should head over here, Paul. To Skansen.’

The fact that he had just come from another case with links to the area around the Skansen open-air museum and zoo made it even more interesting.

He got caught up in traffic
within
the gates of the hospital and made a conscious decision not to turn into Mr Hyde. It just wasn’t worth the effort. Instead, he slipped the
Kind of Blue
CD into the car stereo and smiled as its opening notes spread their honey over his eardrums. As he meekly fought his way out of the enormous hospital area, he started ranking strange surnames. Wasn’t Altbratt a candidate for strangest? He’d come across heavyweights like Kungskranz and Riddarsson before, Äppelblohm and Sarkander, but did they really stand a chance against Altbratt?

Anton Altbratt was the wealthy owner of a fur shop in Östermalm, living in Djurgårdsstaden and currently on his second marriage, of which ten-year-old Lisa was the fruit. He also had a couple of adult children from his previous marriage, and they hadn’t been able to get in touch with his new wife, Lisa’s mother. She was on a business trip to some unknown location. To Hjelm, the whole thing stank of intricate erotic arrangements, but he decided not to enquire further.

Instead, he was trying to work out what could be behind the shooting of poor little Lisa. With any luck, her father Anton had been the intended victim. It was much easier to imagine a rational motive if that was the case – the young wife, the upper-class business activity, maybe even an attack by militant vegans. Though the lack of sound implied a silencer, which in turn implied some kind of professional criminality – in other words, it sounded more like the wife had wanted to get her husband out of the way for financial or sexual reasons, or else it was down to some kind of dodgy business links, or maybe even illegal fur dealings. Something like that. If any of those were true, it didn’t seem half as dangerous. An unsuccessful one-off attack. But if Lisa had been the target, it was much, much worse. That would mean the majority of plausible motives disappeared, making some kind of madman more likely. A madman specialising in children.

Paul Hjelm didn’t really want to follow that thought through to its logical conclusion.

But of course there was a third alternative: that neither father nor daughter had been the intended target, and the bullet had simply found its way into Lisa’s arm by pure chance. If that was what had happened, the picture which emerged was of some kind of underworld dispute in among the trees of Djurgården.

There was, in other words, plenty to be done. They needed to check the wife’s activities the previous evening, what her relationship with Lisa’s father was really like; they had to check who knew about the children’s party up in Rosendal, any possible irregularities in the business, any possible threats from militant vegans or similar, and search the wooded area from which the shot had, in all likelihood, been fired. Et cetera, et cetera.

And then they had to wait and see whether it was anything other than a coincidence that two crimes had been committed so close to one another – whatever it was Jorge had to offer up at Skansen.

Time, time, time. He was really stuck; as usual, the engine temperature of his Audi shot up drastically the moment it found itself in the slightest hint of a queue. The car lacked all patience. Since the driver refused to become Mr Hyde, the car would have to do it instead. As though every queuing car and its driver were, by definition, forced to explode. Paul Hjelm turned the heating up high and thanked his Maker that it was winter and not summer in Stockholm. With one eye on the engine temperature gauge, he allowed his thoughts to drift along with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb’s unrivalled improvisations.

A picture of his life, it struck him.

A stony, controlling eye on an engine about to explode. Trains of thought taking the form of reckless improvisations. All while the vehicle crept forward extremely slowly.

Yup, that was exactly how it was. Though the picture wasn’t quite complete.

Just as ‘So What’ faded out into ‘Freddie Freeloader’ and a more familiar twelve-bar blues started streaming out into Hjelm’s sauna masquerading as a car, a gap appeared in the right-hand lane at Roslagstull. He sped forwards, accelerating so violently that the tyres screeched, made it through on the newly introduced European-standard amber light, and suddenly found the whole of Birger Jarlsgatan empty ahead of him.

Well, he thought. That’s it, now the picture’s complete.

‘Freddie Freeloader’, he thought, putting his foot down.

It was remarkably smooth-going all the way to Stureplan, where he found himself in a slight, inevitable tussle with one of those reckless drivers, the type who worked in advertising, who thought they were in the right regardless of how wrong they were. Paul Hjelm didn’t care. Let them have their way, he thought, mumbling along with the final notes of ‘Blue In Green’. Even down in the confusion of traffic by Nybroplan, he held his tongue. Just as he was singing along like a fool to a favourite line from ‘All Blues’, windows down, he saw Ingmar Bergman staggering up the steps into the National Theatre, cane in hand. The old man turned round, astonished, and met his eye for a brief moment. It seemed like more than a coincidence.

Strandvägen was worse. It seemed awfully big.

No, he thought.
Now
the picture was complete. A brief free stretch and then back to the slow, sluggish, grind. A plod.

The traffic eased slightly and he crossed Djurgården Bridge without problem. By that point, the picture had already gone up in smoke. As he parked, terribly, outside the entrance to Skansen, the last Spanish-tinged harmonies of ‘Flamenco Sketches’ were playing. That was what you called precision. His route – from Astrid Lindgren to Skansen via Ingmar Bergman, practically a trip through the heart of Sweden – was the exact same length as Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue
. That was that.