The Blinded Man (20 page)

Just as Hjelm was thinking about it, Söderstedt replied to Chavez’s question, although it was hard to remember what the question had been.

‘I wouldn’t exactly call it an apartment, but it’s close by. On Agnegatan, in fact. A one-room place with a kitchen in an alcove, while my whole family is back in Västerås. I have five children,’ he added, looking at Hjelm.

Hjelm’s feeling of being out of the loop soared to astronomical heights. He pushed it aside.

‘Five?’ he exclaimed, thinking that his voice sounded convincing. ‘Is Västerås really that boring?’

‘Oh, yes. But two of them were conceived in Vasa.’

‘You were working in Finland? How was that?’

‘No, well, I wasn’t … a police officer back then. I became a cop rather late in life. Some people think I never should have joined the force.’

Hjelm felt a bit smug about his intuition. He tried to interpret the mood around the table. Maybe Söderstedt meant some colleague in Västerås had criticised him, or maybe he meant someone sitting at the table. It was impossible to tell. Hjelm had a vague impression that he was the only one who didn’t know what Söderstedt was referring to. But it turned out that he needn’t have taxed his brain over the subject.

‘All I said was that you don’t need to give a campaign speech for the Communists,’ Viggo Norlander muttered testily. The fork he was holding started to shake.

‘No, that wasn’t all you said.’ Söderstedt fixed his eyes on Norlander.

‘Okay, boys,’ Kerstin Holm said suddenly.

Norlander slammed his fork down on the tray and rose, carrying it away without another word. Even in that state of monumental anger, he felt compelled to put the tray in its proper place on the rack, crumple up his napkin and toss it into the proper wastebasket.

Hjelm glanced around the staff cafeteria. A few openly sarcastic smiles came from the neighbouring tables. He smiled grimly.

To be an outsider even among the outsiders.

Right in the eye of the storm.

Holm said to Söderstedt, ‘Cut that out. We have other things to do than pick fights in the sandbox.’

‘He socked me right in the jaw,’ muttered Söderstedt sullenly. For a second, a bucket and shovel might have been visible in his hands. When they disappeared, he went on: ‘And then he dragged in the whole foreigner thing. Except for the black-head, of course.’ Söderstedt ran his hand over his thin, chalk-white hair.

Hjelm laughed. He didn’t know why, but Nyberg joined in. Söderstedt also chuckled a bit. Holm smiled that ironic smile of hers, as did Chavez. The peace pipe went around the whole group.

‘To exclude the political aspects of this case would be like working on only half a case,’ said Söderstedt at last. ‘Come on, give me some support, somebody!’

‘I agree,’ said Chavez. ‘But there are different ways to handle it. To back up a bit, what exactly happened in Vasa?’

‘Oh no. No, no,’ said Söderstedt, laughing. ‘We’re not on those kinds of personal terms yet. How’s it going with
your
hole in the wall, by the way?’

‘Mine is definitely not an apartment. Just a room rented from an old woman at the intersection of Bergsgatan and Scheelegatan. Like when I was in training.’

‘So what about you, Kerstin?’ asked Söderstedt. ‘Where are you staying, my dear?’

‘With my ex-husband’s second ex-wife in Brandbergen,’
said
Holm. ‘We get on well together. We share an identical and highly productive hatred.’

More laughter, about everything and nothing. About the fact that they had taken a small step closer to each other. About the fact that nobody had been murdered in several days. About themselves and their absurd situation at police headquarters.

Nyberg left, followed by Chavez and Söderstedt. Holm finished her light beer and was about to get up when Hjelm said, ‘Kerstin. Did you get hold of George Hummelstrand?’

She sank back down onto her chair, giving him a surly look. ‘I really didn’t like the fact that you took credit for the Hummelstrand lead,’ she said.

‘I’ve already apologised. Besides, it’s not really a matter of taking credit, is it? I was still on the track of the Mimir lead. I’ll apologise again, if that’s what you want. And again. And again.’

A reluctant smile appeared on her disturbingly beautiful face.

‘And again,’ he said, feeling rather pleased. ‘So. How did it go with George?’

The smile abruptly vanished. Her dark eyes seemed to X-ray right through him. ‘Are you happily married?’ she asked.

‘What?’ he said. For a moment Cilla’s desolate expression obscured his field of vision.

‘Happily married?’ said Kerstin Holm with the utmost seriousness. ‘Really happily?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said inscrutably, and got up and left.

The image of Cilla slowly faded.

Finally the whole world went pale.

17

VIGGO NORLANDER WAS
sitting in a warehouse in Frihamnen, waiting.

Waiting
, he thought.
Waiting to wait. Waiting to wait to wait. Waiting to wait to wait to wait
.

In other words, he was feeling tired.

He felt even less inclined to put on the kid gloves. He’d already taken out the other kind of gloves.

The boxing gloves. Metaphorically speaking.

Something has to happen now
, he thought. He was damned sick and tired of all the desk work and all the phone calls to condescending Interpol officers and recalcitrant former Soviet policemen and burned-out customs agents. He’d been waiting long enough.

He’d forced entry into the small office of the warehouse and was crouched down behind a cabinet. There he’d been sitting for three hours, and it would soon be evening. He was extremely angry.

Soon everything was going to have to proceed at an entirely new pace.

He kept his anger alive by thinking about Arto Söderstedt, that Finnish bastard, who came from somewhere out in the sticks and despised everything that he’d ever believed in. Of course money had to be coming in so that it could be divided up. If Swedish companies made the money, then it would benefit the Swedish people. It was as simple as that.

He fanned his anger by thinking about his own name. Viggo, for God’s sake, the hearty little Viggo, Viggo the fucking Viking. It was his only inheritance from the travel-happy Danish seaman who for some inexplicable reason had become his father. A quick ejaculation into the womb of a starving woman, and then he was on his way again. No responsibility. No responsibility at all. Like Söderstedt, he thought. Exactly the same.

His thoughts weren’t following any particular order.

Once in his youth he’d tried to find out something about this loathsome name of his. Its origin went back to the thirteenth century when the Danes’ great history writer, Saxo Grammaticus, latinised the Danish word
vig
, meaning ‘battle’, and gave the name to one of King Rolf Krake’s men.

Viggo, Jan-Olov Krake’s henchman
, Norlander thought incoherently as the door opened. A man with a ponytail and wearing a jogging suit came in and sat down at the desk a couple of yards away. Norlander took a few seconds to ascertain that the man was alone.

Then he rushed out and slammed the man’s head against the desk.

Once, twice, three times, then four.

Taking a firm grip on the man’s ponytail, he stuck his service revolver deep into his ear and snarled, ‘Little Strömstedt, you’ve got three seconds to give me the name of your mafia contact. Otherwise you’re dead, big-time. One. Two.’

‘Wait, wait, wait!’ cried the man. ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘Three,’ said Norlander and pulled the trigger.

The gun clicked.

‘There’s a bullet in the next chamber,’ said Norlander. ‘Be damn quick about it now!’

The man was like jelly in his hands, thought Norlander with a rush of adrenaline. He was shaking all the way down to the bottom of his dark soul.

He laid it on thick: ‘A shipment of 120-proof Estonian vodka from Liviko intended for little Strömstedt was confiscated by customs a couple of months ago. Who sent it to you?’

‘I’m just a middleman,’ said little Strömstedt, shaking. ‘Damn it, I’ve told them everything. I don’t know anything!’

‘Right now there are other factors in play. Every complaint for police brutality that you submit is going to end up in the wastebasket. You hear me? Top priority. National security. Spit out everything you know. Now. The bullet’s in the chamber.’

‘Who the fuck are you? Dirty Harry?’

Norlander took a chance and shot little Strömstedt’s computer to smithereens.

‘You fucker!’ he bellowed, trying to twist his body
around
. Norlander, in turn, took an even tighter grip on the man’s ponytail until he felt the roots pull halfway out. Little Strömstedt let out a scream.

‘Igor and Igor!’ he screamed. ‘That’s all I know! They do their own pickups!’

‘Igor and Igor are your Russian mafia contacts? Is that right?’

‘Yes, yes, yes! Damn it, that’s all I know!’

‘I know all about you,’ said Norlander. ‘You speak Russian. You know what these guys Igor and Igor said to each other. I need more!’

Norlander lowered his gun and aimed the barrel at the man’s hand lying on the desk.

‘A little more, please,’ he said, and fired.

The bullet passed between the man’s middle finger and ring finger, singeing the skin. Strömstedt screamed even louder.

‘Gotlanders!’ he wailed.

‘Go on,’ said Norlander, moving the gun until it was pointing at the man’s wrist.

‘The Gotland black-head smugglers! They belong to the same gang! That’s all I know, I swear! They talked about Gotland and how clumsy the guys had been down there!’

Viggo Norlander lifted Strömstedt up by his ponytail, yanked on the door handle behind his back and hurled the man into the nearest cupboard. Then he barricaded the door and left him there. He could hear a flood of curses coming from inside.

He thought they were Finland-Swedish.

A barrier
, thought Norlander as he sped away from Frihamnen. He received the go-ahead from Hultin on his mobile to drive straight out to Arlanda Airport.

A barrier had been lifted.

Now he was really going to be fucking dangerous.

Viggo Norlander was forty-eight years old, divorced, with no children. End of story. The bare spot on the top of his head had long ago acquired its final shape; not so his stomach, which slowly continued to grow. He wasn’t fat, just pre-fat.

There wasn’t a single blot on his record. Nor much of anything else. He’d always been an exemplary if not always terribly active officer, whose only guides through the journey of life had been the police handbook and the book of law. He’d always believed in legal methods, in defending established society and in the slowly grinding wheels of the justice system.

His life had stagnated and, like his bald spot, had long ago achieved its final form. It was a deliberate stagnation. The humdrum was his very essence, the correct, the legal, what could be described in black and white. He’d always believed that people were generally like himself: hard-working, never making up excuses to take sick days, paying their taxes without complaint, and following the universal rules, with no extremes, either highs or lows.

Everything else was shit and had to be removed.

And in his world all law-abiding citizens intuitively wanted the shit removed, and naturally they appreciated his efforts to get it off the streets.

No matter what he happened to encounter in the course of his daily work in the Stockholm criminal division, he still managed to retain these crystal-clear guidelines in his job and in his life. He’d always been quite satisfied both with himself and with the police force in general. In spite of occasional slumps and increases, everything was moving in the right direction and at the right speed, which meant at a steady pace: growth, progress, development. A stable societal advancement.

He was a tranquil man.

He would never be able to put his finger on where the rupture first appeared, or where the wall had finally burst.

Not even if subjected to torture would he admit to the presence of a rupture, simply because it didn’t exist in his worldview.

But it did exist in his present world of action.

Now as he walked through Visby, on the island of Gotland, moving along the medieval ring wall in the morning mist, his beliefs were still intact. Conditioned by trust. The lingering vestiges of the previous days. What he had done and was about to do were necessary. No more unsolved Palme murders.
Legal security
, he thought. Trust. Societal responsibility. Daggfeldt, Strand-Julén, Carlberger. That was enough. He would see to that.

He was defending the most important thing of all.

Even though he didn’t really know what it was.

After a long walk through an almost-deserted Visby, encircled by a sort of Mediterranean morning mist as much as by the ring wall, he reached the police station. It was seven-thirty
A.M
.

He went inside and was directed to the jail. There he found an officer on duty who was about his own age. They immediately recognised the policeman in each other. That was how he looked – Policeman with a capital
P
. And Swedish.

‘Norlander,’ said Norlander.

‘Jönsson,’ said Jönsson, speaking with a distinct accent stemming from both Skåne and Gotland. ‘Vilhelm Jönsson. We’ve been expecting you. Peshkov is ready whenever you are.’

‘I assume that you’re aware of the gravity of this investigation. There is nothing more important in Sweden today.’

‘I’m aware of that.’

‘So how do we do this? Does he speak English?’

‘Fortunately, he does. An old, international seaman. I assume that it would have been inconvenient to have an interpreter present. If I understood you correctly.’

‘We certainly do understand each other. Where is he?’

‘In a soundproof room, as agreed. Shall we?’

Norlander nodded, and Vilhelm Jönsson led the way along several corridors, recruiting a couple of guards from the break room as they walked past. Then they all went down to the basement. The four men stopped outside a grey-painted steel door with a peephole.