The Hand that Trembles (33 page)

‘The things we hear,’ he said, and sat down in the chair that the county commissioner had just vacated. ‘What should we think?’

‘Either he’s a crazy cuckoo or else he is extremely clear on what he wants,’ Sammy Nilsson said.

‘He’s no cuckoo.’

‘He may have gone crazy in India,’ Sammy Nilsson said. ‘He may have gone there for spiritual reasons. I’m thinking of a guru or yogi or something along those lines.’

‘Hard to believe,’ Fredriksson said, and helped himself to a sandwich.

‘We should get in touch with Berglund. After all, it’s his “cold case”.’

‘I’ll call him at the hospital.’

‘Can you do that? I’d appreciate it. We’ll let the county commissioner sleep for an hour or two. I don’t know what you thought about breaking it off but he really did look wiped out. I’ll get the case files out in the meantime. Ask Lindell to come in so we can brief her too.’

Ann Lindell shook her head when Sammy Nilsson had finished his summation.

‘This is more than unlikely,’ she said. ‘I met with his uncle just the other day.’

Nilsson and Fredriksson stared at her, perplexed.

‘Do you know that his wife was run over on Luthagsleden a couple of weeks ago and is currently lying in a coma?’

‘Now you’ll have to tell us what is going on. Is it Berglund?’

Lindell nodded and then told them the whole story.

‘How does all this hang together?’ Allan Fredriksson said.

‘The answer is currently sleeping,’ Nilsson said.

‘Was it his wife’s accident that unleashed this whole thing, that he returned to Uppsala after twelve years to relieve his conscience? What role does the uncle play? Is he the connection between Dufva and Persson? What does “war criminal” mean in this context?’

Allan Fredriksson lined up the obvious questions.

‘The answer is sleeping,’ Nilsson repeated with a smile.

‘He does have crutches,’ Lindell said suddenly. ‘The uncle, I mean. I saw them in his room at Ramund.’

Allan Fredriksson shook his head.

After a brief discussion, they decided that Nilsson and Fredriksson would take on Sven-Arne Persson.

‘We’ll give him another hour before we question him,’ Nilsson said. ‘Then he can sleep on it again tonight and we’ll see if he sticks to his story tomorrow. After that we question the uncle. And at that point maybe you can help out, having met the guy?’

‘I have to get out to Östhammar first thing tomorrow morning,’ Lindell said. ‘But I could do it in the afternoon.’

She told them about Sune Stolt’s report from Thailand. In light of the county commissioner’s unexpected confession, the success in identifying the Thai woman appeared less extraordinary, and her colleagues did not look particularly impressed. Their thoughts were completely absorbed in Sven-Arne Persson and the murder of Nils Dufva.

‘Have you called Berglund?’ she asked.

‘He’ll come in tomorrow,’ Allan Fredriksson said.

‘How did he take it?’

‘He talked mostly about the motive. He got hung up on that thing about “war criminal.” He claimed that you had tipped him off about Dufva being a Nazi.’

‘Me?’ Sammy Nilsson exclaimed, and looked perplexed.

‘There was some book you had shown Berglund.’

‘That’s right. Damn. Now I remember. It was a catalogue of Swedish Nazis and Dufva was in some kind of register.’

‘Nazis,’ Lindell said, and recalled Ante Persson’s bookshelf. ‘If he was a Nazi then Ante Persson is very likely a Communist.’

‘And Sven-Arne is a socialist,’ Allan Fredriksson said.

‘Now all we have to do is come up with someone from the Folkpartiet and we’ll have a complete set.’ Nilsson grinned.

‘I have to go pick up Erik,’ Lindell said, getting up. ‘Good luck.’

Sven-Arne Persson woke up with a start, sat up in the camp bed dazed, and did not immediately recall where he was. He had dreamt of Lester and planting trees at Lal Bagh. He rubbed his eyes.

Then came the terror. He stared at the greyish, windowless walls, the attached sink and toilet, then lifted the blankets aside, and lowered his legs over the edge of the bed. The cell was several square metres. The solid door was fitted with a peephole.

He lay back down and curled his legs up into his body.

He was lying in this position when he heard a key turn and the door open. He shut his eyes. This is when I die, he thought. He imagined that they would crowd into the cell, strike him with bamboo sticks without saying a word, and thereafter drag him out into the courtyard in order to continue the beating. He knew it was an absurd thought – he was no longer in India – but he still steeled himself for the first blows.

‘It’s time,’ he heard a voice say, and he opened his eyes.

Sammy Nilsson was standing in the doorway. He was smiling.

‘Did you sleep well?’

Sven-Arne nodded, stood up, picked the blanket up off the floor, and started to fold it. Nilsson waited.

‘Yes, I have slept,’ Sven-Arne said. ‘And I …’

He did not complete the sentence. He arranged the blanket at the foot end of the camp bed with great care before looking up at the policeman.  

‘Should we talk a little more?’  

Sammy Nilsson nodded.

The session took two hours. It started with questions about India. Persson realised it was employed as a way to put him at ease and he spoke eagerly about the botanical garden and life in Bangalore. But soon the policemen started in on what had happened that autumn day in 1993. Again and again they made Persson go through the sequence of events. He answered Nilsson and Fredriksson’s questions vaguely and in monosyllables. They kept asking for clarification.  

‘How did you enter the house?’  

‘The door was unlocked.’  

‘If you did not know him from before, how did you know where he lived?’  

‘It was in the phone book.’  

‘How was it furnished?’  

‘I can’t remember.’  

‘Nothing at all?’  

‘Nothing. Well, maybe a little. There was some darkish furniture, a table, some sort of bureau … I tripped on a rug, I think … it was windy that day and I remember that there was some kind of tree outside the window that … well, you know, it was moving. The fact is that I don’t remember very much. Everything went so quickly.’  

Sammy Nilsson stared searchingly at him.  

‘You want us to believe that a respected politician walks in on an unknown old man and brutally kills him,’ he said finally.

During the entire session Sven-Arne Persson had been sitting leant over the table, taking a sip of coffee from time to time, even after it had grown cold, and rarely met Nilsson’s gaze, but now he lifted his head and looked him straight in the eye.

‘That man—’ he started, but stopped at once before continuing with a considerably sharper tone in his voice as if the former politician had awakened for a moment. ‘He was a miserable excuse of a human being and I regret nothing. Yes, one thing. I should have gone straight to the police, twelve years ago.’

‘But you left,’ Fredriksson observed.

‘I left.’

‘Why?’

That simple question was followed by a couple of minutes of silence. The interrogators had learnt not to hurry Sven-Arne.

‘I guess I was too much of a coward,’ he said finally. ‘I didn’t have the guts. I thought of Elsa, my wife, how much shame she would endure. Not that things were so well between us, but she was still my wife. I thought of the party. I was a leading figure and it would have hurt the movement. I thought of myself, how I wouldn’t be able to stand being locked up.’

‘And now Elsa is in a coma at the Akademiska Hospital, so now it doesn’t matter anymore. Is that what you mean? Did you hear about the accident before you returned home?’

Sven-Arne nodded.

‘And that got you to come back?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you haven’t made any attempts to see her?’

‘No.’

‘Do you even want to see her?’

‘No. It is over between us. It ended many years ago.’

‘Has your fear of prison left you?’

‘I’m older,’ Sven-Arne said simply, ‘there isn’t much left. I can take it. Can I have some more coffee?’

Allan Fredriksson stood up and left the room. Sammy Nilsson pressed the pause button of the tape recorder.

Sven-Arne Persson drew a deep breath and closed his eyes. He had lied. He was in fact afraid of being locked up. When he left Ante he had visualised a scenario in which his incarceration consisted of weeding, tending flower beds, and raking leaves in a country setting. He knew this was wishful thinking. A murderer was not likely given such privileges.

Of course he wanted to see Elsa, but for one reason only: in order to ask for forgiveness. Not for Dufva or because he had left her and fled the country. No, he wanted to ask her forgiveness that they had married in the first place, that he had talked her into sharing her life with him.

The party? Deep inside he had never believed in it. He had realised that when he was in India.

Thoughts of Elsa returned. He knew she was the sore point. That was why he had returned. And now he was betraying her again. He did not even want to visit her sickbed. He would always feel guilty for it. He could take a prison sentence of eight, ten years, if with some anxiety, but the knowledge that he had time and again betrayed the person he had lived with was something he would never be free of.

He had influenced many people’s lives by his engagement in politics, but then in a more impersonal way. Now that it was about his wife it was different. He knew, and had known all this time, that he had treated her badly. He had known it but had never done anything about it. Instead he had allowed it to continue, and slowly but surely ground her down. It was his fault.

Allan Fredriksson’s return with a new thermos of coffee interrupted his thoughts. Persson realised how much he had missed Swedish coffee in India.

‘I’ve lied a bit,’ Sven-Arne Persson said. ‘About the motive. You know that Nils Dufva was a Nazi. He fought on the Eastern front and in Finland and was even in Berlin at the end of the war. One of the last enthusiasts. Then he came home and almost immediately got a job in the Swedish department of defence. What do you say about that?’

‘What should we say?’ Sammy Nilsson said.

‘He was too valuable and he could be of use,’ Persson said.

‘In what way was he valuable?’

‘He was both an anti-Communist and he was capable. His private register of radicals was one of the most exhaustive in the country. He was, in a word, useful. He fit in the cold war. You know what happened after 1945?’

‘Tell me,’ Fredriksson said.

‘The war continued,’ Sven-Arne said. ‘I don’t know how you think in political matters and frankly I don’t really care, I don’t ask that anyone should understand. Not today. But Sweden would have looked different if …’

He did not complete the sentence. It didn’t matter. It was too late to try to convince someone now. He sighed heavily and reached for the coffee.

‘But it was a Social Democratic government after the war,’ Allan Fredriksson said. ‘I mean …’

‘That doesn’t change anything,’ Persson said, and for the first time during the questioning he raised his voice.

‘You are, or at least were, a Social Democrat. It must have been painful when you discovered that someone like Dufva, who you claim is a Nazi, came back from Berlin and was immediately accepted.’

‘It took a couple of years before he got his defence job, but it makes no difference,’ Persson said. ‘And it was secret. But of course, it is not exactly flattering that it was a Social Democratic government, but I have felt a great deal of pain during my time as a politician.’

‘So your motive was political? Dufva’s political preferences,’ Fredriksson went on, ‘gave you the right to club him down like an animal?’

‘You could put it that way,’ Persson said.

‘That’s how the prosecutor will put it,’ Fredriksson said.

Sven-Arne Persson shrugged.

‘How did you know all this, I mean about his activities during and after the war?’

‘I came across some papers.’

‘What kind of papers?’ Sammy Nilsson went on.

‘That doesn’t matter. And in any case they have been destroyed now. But I can tell you that there were those who didn’t like it. Not everyone was an IB agent.’

‘What is IB?’ Sammy Nilsson asked.

‘You are apparently too young to know about it,’ Persson said. ‘You’ll have to read up on it. But IB was a half-military communications organisation that was basically run by the Social Democratic party. The mission was to map everything leftist and oppositional within the union movement. There were moles in every county and in every large workplace, even within the National Radio. What IB was doing was pure opinion documentation and spying, and they even committed burglaries and threats of crime. It was enough to be an opponent of the Swedish nuclear industry or to cast a wrong vote in the yearly union election or subscribe to the wrong newspaper to have your name end up in their registers. Dufva cooperated with the IB.’

‘And you found out about this because you had an elevated position among the Social Democrats?’

‘Yes, but I don’t think that was intentional. It was an old acquaintance who worked at the Televerket communications company who bragged about his secret work once when he was drunk. When IB was later uncovered by some journalists, they ended up in prison. A backward world. And their work continued after the revelation, except in another form.’

Persson turned to Allan Fredriksson and sighed again.

‘Isn’t that enough? You know that I killed him. What more do you have to know?’

‘The fact is I’m having trouble getting this to add up,’ Sammy Nilsson said. ‘But sure, we can continue tomorrow. We’re going to see a lot of each other over the next little while.’

‘I have a final question,’ Allan Fredriksson said. ‘What did you tell your uncle?’

‘What?’

‘He must have heard or read about the murder. You had both been there. Didn’t he put two and two together?’

‘He was an old man,’ Persson said.

‘And by that you mean that he either didn’t follow what was going on, or that he was too old to care?’