Never Fuck Up: A Novel (35 page)

Niklas walked up to the next landing. Listened.

Heard Mats yell, “Come back, calm down.”

His military preparations were worthless—there was nothing Niklas could do.

He waited until Mats closed the door. Walked out to the Audi. Saw Helene farther down the street.

She was walking at a rapid pace, but it looked like she was swaying.

Niklas followed her.

On the outside: tan, fit, strong.

On the inside: anxious, expectant, nervous.

The verdict was coming today. Åsa and Thomas’d come home from Gran Canaria the day before. Åsa said that she thought it’d been wonderful. But Thomas knew: the worry was eating away at her too, maybe worse than at him.

The decision would be sent at some point after one o’clock. Åsa was at work.

He went grocery shopping at ten. The sky: hard and gray like concrete, pale like his spirit. The drunks outside the liquor store, the so-called A-team, quieted down when he walked past with his grocery bags—they knew he was a cop. He thought, The A-team must be so damn good at shooting the shit—that’s all they do all day, sit together and talk. Hard-core social workout. Maybe he should send Ljunggren there for a while. Thomas smiled to himself—his colleague might be a hopeless case.

Ljunggren: made him miss his job. But also made him think about everything that was strange. The fax machine at home’d been overflowing when he emptied it yesterday, as soon as he and Åsa’d set down their luggage. At least thirty pages from Tele2 Comviq, ten pages from a smaller carrier, and over forty pages from Telenor. Now he just had to dive right in. Organize the information. Work in a structured manner. Åsa wondered if he wasn’t tired from the long flight. “It took over nine hours with the layover and everything. I’m beat, anyway.” Sure, he was tired, damn tired. But the lists stoked the embers. No, more than that—the lists injected him with pure energy. He wanted Åsa to go to bed right away so that he could start working.

She passed out by nine o’clock. Thomas sat with the lists for four hours. The whole house was dark except for the desk lamp in the office. He crossed off numbers that’d been called from the phone, checked
for reoccurring numbers, searched on the Internet. He came up with names—lots of names.

He set down the bags of groceries. Opened the door slowly. Stocked the fridge. He packed in the butter, the pork tenderloin, the cheese, the milk. The last: organic. Åsa was stubborn about that. Thomas didn’t have the energy to argue, even though sensible people knew that that was all a crock of shit.

He took a seat by the telephone. Got out the phone lists. Four numbers stood out. Each of them’d been called at least twenty times between May and June. He was going to call the one with the most calls first—thirty-three of them in May alone. The number must be connected to a prepaid phone—he couldn’t find a registered contractual plan in any of his searches.

Someone picked up on the other end. “Yes.”

Answering the phone “Yes” was weird in and of itself.

“Hi, this is Thomas Andrén. I’m calling from the Stockholm Police Department . . .”

There was a click on the other end of the line.

Thomas called the number again. Got a busy signal like a raised middle finger right in his face.

The next number had been called a total of forty-two times during May and June. Went to a Kristina Swegfors-Ballénius. The third one was yet another unregistered number. The fourth was the most-called number: someone named Claes Rantzell.

He started with Kristina Swegfors-Ballénius.

A relatively young voice: “Yes, hello, this is Kicki.”

“Hi, my name is Thomas Andrén and I’m calling from the Stockholm Police Department.”

“Okay, and what do you want?” Blatant suspicion on the other end of the line.

“I’m calling in regards to an ongoing investigation into some very serious criminal activity. I need an answer to a simple question. I have a cell phone from which your number was called quite a bit in May and June of this year. The numbers vary, but in May, for instance, you were called eighteen times from this number.” Thomas read one of the numbers from a Telenor prepaid phone aloud to her.

“Could you repeat that?”

Thomas read the number again.

“No, I have no idea,” the woman said.

What was this bullshit? Kristina Swegfors-Ballénius’d been called over forty times from the phone in question—she must know whom the number belonged to. Thomas tried to gauge the tone in her voice. How much was she lying?

“This is in regards to a murder investigation—I mentioned that, right? Not some regular crime. Someone has called you a total of forty-two times. Someone with the same phone who apparently changes his number as often as regular people change toilet-paper rolls. Please try to remember.”

The woman on the other end of the line cleared her throat. “But that’s several weeks ago. How am I supposed to remember something like that, huh?”

Something was wrong—the woman didn’t even want to remember. Her hostility was too great to be regular old cop skepticism.

“Listen up, Kristina Swegfors-Ballénius. If you don’t try to remember fast as hell, I’m going to drive out to Huddinge and go through your cell phone personally.”

Thomas hoped she would take the bait—one, that he showed that he knew where she lived; two, the threat to go through her personal life—but, really, that kind of thing was not allowed. Especially not for a police inspector who was on sick leave, potentially soon to be transferred, maybe even fired.

It sounded like the woman on the other end of the line was sucking snot back up her nose. Then, silence. He could almost hear her thinking. This was perfect: she knew something. Finally: “Um, I’ll look through my cell phone and stuff. Can I call you back in a few minutes?”

Bingo.

He had a feeling she would call him back.

Ten minutes later, Kicki Swegfors-Ballénius called.

“So, I figured out who those numbers belong to. The calls were from my father, John Ballénius. Don’t ask me why, but he changes numbers often. I didn’t recognize them right away, because I usually screen his calls.” Thomas looked down at the lists in front of him. Correlated with what she said: none of the calls that’d been made to her’d lasted for longer than a second or so. Kicki sounded like she was in a better mood, or else she was just kissing ass. Thomas didn’t care either way.

John Ballénius was the name. A shady last name—probably made
up; the guy must’ve changed his name. But it didn’t matter. The likelihood that he was about to hit upon his first real breakthrough was greater than ever. The telephone number the dead guy’d had in his back pocket had to belong to this Ballénius guy.

His first day back in Sweden was off to a good start. Thomas was hoping for a lucky day in more ways than one—soon he would be informed about the verdict on his future.

He heated a mini pizza in the microwave and started frying two eggs. Scarfed down the pizza with bizarre speed: less than a minute. A hidden talent: no one ate as fast as he could.

He wasn’t going to give up, even if those fuckers did transfer him. He was going to run his own murder investigation on the side. Without that Hägerström clown. Without anyone. Make a triumphant comeback. At the same time, in the back of his mind, a darker thought: What if they didn’t drop the preliminary investigation, what if they weren’t satisfied with a transfer? What if he was convicted like a criminal, lost his job completely?

He Googled John Ballénius. Zero hits. John Ballénius was apparently not a Web celeb. But on the other hand—who the hell was? Ballénius’s address according to the population registry: a post office box. The Internet was useless. He needed access to the police’s databases. But that was a problem. Even if he weren’t officially on sick leave, every search was registered—not even cops were allowed to snoop around in criminals’ lives. You had to swipe your access card to even start up the computer database and every word you punched in was logged.

Despite that, he made an attempt. Called Ljunggren and asked him to run a search through all the central criminal databases at once. Ljunggren was skeptical. “Dammit, Andrén, what is this? You’re supposed to be chilling out. We’re looking forward to having you back.”

At the same time: Ljunggren knew that from one perspective, it was his fault that Thomas was in the shit right now. That had to be exploited. “Come on,” Thomas said. “If you’d showed up as usual, I wouldn’t even be sitting here. Just do me this one favor.”

“Don’t tell me this has to do with that dead guy we found at Gösta Ekman Road?”

“Come on, just one search.”

Unbelievably enough: Ljunggren agreed. Ran a search while Thomas remained on the line.

Searching all the databases at once meant any relevant hits showed up in the general reconnaissance database, the databases of the tax and the traffic authorities, the National Police’s criminal records, the passport database, and the national database of suspected persons. If someone was shady, he’d turn up somewhere.

Ballénius was there: convicted of assault and a drug-related crime in the eighties. There’d been extensive surveillance done on the guy in the mid-nineties. They’d thought he was a front man for a bunch of companies. But he’d only been convicted for a few DUIs and one minor drug offense. Later in the nineties: personal bankruptcy. Debt-rehabilitation measures were decided upon in 2001. A prohibition against owning and running companies was lifted the same year. So-called consumption debt’d apparently been what cracked him. The guy was down in the bankruptcy pit again in 2003. What the fuck was Ballénius doing? He was right back on track by 2006—registered as a board member in seven companies. Thomas could feel it getting warm. Wrong. Warm was an understatement—suddenly this thing was on fire. The dude was shady. Shady as hell.

What’s more, there was a street address for Ballénius: Tegnérgatan 46. But there were no listed phone numbers.

It was one o’clock already. Still no call from work about the results from the internal investigation. Should he call? He made up his mind: if he hadn’t heard anything by two o’clock, he was going to call.

Åsa called at five past—wanted to hear if the verdict’d come yet. Thomas was irritated. It wasn’t her problem. “I’ll call you after they’ve been in touch. Okay?”

She sounded sad.

The clock struck one-thirty. Still nothing. What pigs—making him wait like some humiliated nobody.

At a quarter to two, his home phone rang. Thomas recognized the numbers on the display.

It was Adamsson’s extension at the station.

“Good afternoon, Andrén. This is Adamsson.”

“Yes, I can see that. Everything okay?”

Adamsson didn’t seem steely or stressed, but the stillness in his voice gave him away. No good news was coming.

“All’s well with me. And you? How are you doing?”

“Åsa and I were on Gran Canaria for two weeks. Really damn nice. Other than that, it’s been a real drag.” Thomas made an effort not to sound too bitter. Adamsson would be his boss again if he came back, and Adamsson was the enemy.

“I understand. But it was the right decision. Strong move, Andrén.” Dramatic pause. Adamsson made it sound like going on sick leave’d been Thomas’s own idea. He continued, “The verdict’s in from IA.” Thomas was holding the receiver so tightly that his knuckles looked white. “It looks good, actually. They’re dropping it. Congrats.”

Thomas felt himself sink into the armchair. Exhale. There were still some sane people left in the police department, it seemed.

Adamsson kept going: “But the police commissioner didn’t like this whole mess. He’s ordering a transfer. And he offered a suggestion, too. Traffic control.”

Thomas didn’t know what to say. A joke. Ridicule. A fucking spit bomb in his face. Worse than that: this was a matter of police honor.

Adamsson tried to sound sympathetic. “I completely understand that this might be difficult, Andrén. But look on the bright side, you’re not being prosecuted. I’ve always liked you. But you know how it is, the police commissioner doesn’t have a choice. It’s too bad that things ended up this way, you’re a good man. Made of the right stuff. And trustworthy too, as I like to say. But now things are the way they are.”

Thomas thought: Thank you, you fucker.

Adamsson continued, “I can just give you one piece of advice. You have to learn self-control. I think you’d do better if you gained a deeper understanding of the situations police work may put you in. Sometimes it’s the right time to act forcefully, but sometimes there is no need for that. Believe me, I’ve been around for enough years to’ve seen pretty much everything. Hopefully, you’ll learn one day.”

Åsa came home two hours later. Thomas was under the car with his headlamp switched off. First, he’d tried to concentrate on the chassis. After forty minutes, he’d given up. Everything just went to hell. He kept forgetting tools so that he had to roll out four times, kept dropping stuff, hit his elbow. He just wasn’t meant to be working on the car right then.

The door to the garage opened. He saw Åsa’s legs and slippers.