The Last Pilgrim (6 page)

Then he looked to the right.

Abrahamsen nodded somberly. He was dressed all in white, and a big digital camera hung over his stomach.

“So, that must be Gustav,” said Bergmann, pointing to the preliminary excavation they’d done next to the woman. Another skull had come into view, but this one lay more deeply buried in the dirt. The skeleton was positioned on its left side. The rib cage was almost intact. The rest of the body had not yet been exposed.

“Yes, but that’s not all,” said one of the Kripo men. Bergmann gazed at the man, a white-haired, self-appointed senior investigator whose name he could never remember. He carefully removed his heavy steel-framed glasses and wiped them with his shirtsleeve. Then he put them back on just as carefully.

“Come here,” he said, waving over Bergmann and Abrahamsen. Bergmann approached reluctantly. The older man squatted down, and Bergmann did the same. The Kripo man held a ruler. Abrahamsen leaned so far over them that he almost fell into the grave. For the first time that night, Bergmann felt an intense desire to throw up. Maybe it was only the rotten smell of damp earth and gnawed human bones. Or maybe the sight had dredged up the memory of the first time he’d seen a corpse: a battered young woman he had found in a garbage bag in the woods fifteen years before.

The Kripo man poked tentatively at the rib cage, which looked like it was filled with dark soil.

“There,” he said, pointing. “Between those two ribs there.”

There was a flash above Bergmann’s head, and the beam of a flashlight lit the end of the yellow ruler. He still didn’t see anything noteworthy, apart from the ribs.

The Kripo man rapped lightly with the ruler again. Bergmann felt the hairs on his arms rise and the oxygen leave his lungs. For a moment he felt like he was tipping over the edge.

“What the hell?” said Abrahamsen, standing next to Bergmann. Then he said what both of them were thinking: “There aren’t two bodies down there. There are three.”

Bergmann stared, his eyes wide. A fifth hand was visible in the dirt inside the rib cage. Slowly he counted the fingers on the little hand, which looked as though it was clenched into a fist. A little fist with tiny fingers.

“So,” he whispered to himself, “there’s a child on the bottom.”

Abrahamsen said something that Bergmann didn’t catch. He felt his colleague’s hand on his back.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Abrahamsen.

Bergmann was filled with an emotion he’d never felt before, a kind of déjà vu. As though he knew that the child who lay at the bottom of this grave had stood exactly where he himself had stood when he’d seen the deer’s eyes through the trees.

“A child,” he said into thin air. “Somebody killed a child.”

CHAPTER 7

Wednesday, May 30, 1945

Rindögatan 42

Gärdet

Stockholm, Sweden

Detective Inspector Gösta Persson’s stomach growled as he stood straddle-legged on the sidewalk in front of Rindögatan 42. He gazed up at the pale-yellow brick facade. A face disappeared behind the curtain in the tall window on the second floor. A light drizzle fell from the steel-gray sky, and it soon covered the lenses of his glasses. He searched his pocket for a clean cloth to wipe them off.

If only he could stop this growling in his stomach. Persson was a man who made few demands on life as long as he got three square meals a day at regular hours. But that was essential. So if he didn’t get lunch soon, he was going to explode. He nodded curtly to the officer who was standing guard at the entrance. Ruin his lunch? For what? A dead Norwegian? He almost chuckled to himself as he scanned the mailboxes inside the vestibule. There were still plenty of Norwegians in the world, even after this damned war. But lunch? Lunch was what made the world go round, and he’d been on his way to lunch when the damn phone rang.

Persson had just grabbed his hat from the coat rack and reached for the door handle when the phone on his massive teak desk began ringing. For a few seconds he had deliberated over whether to pick up, but being a man of ambition, he lifted the receiver to his ear instead of sneaking off to lunch. The watch commander had informed him that one of Stockholm’s ten radio cruisers had reported a suspicious death at Rindögatan 42 in Gärdet. The whole thing could have waited until after lunch, had the zealous watch commander not clarified that the apartment was owned by the Norwegian legation in Stockholm. And something like that couldn’t very well be ignored, could it? Persson could still hear the watch commander’s voice ringing in his ears. He had big plans for his career—maybe he would even make station chief one day—so this lamentable fatality definitely couldn’t be ignored.

What are these Norwegians supposed to be good for?
Persson wondered as he paused on the third-floor landing. Sweat had soaked into the brim of his hat. No lunch and now he was drenched with sweat. And on top of all that, these goddamned Norwegians. Nothing but trouble from them for five long years, hassles and more hassles. If it wasn’t the Finns drinking and fighting and stabbing each other, then it was the Norwegians. No, he damned sure missed the good old days when law and order had reigned in Scandinavia. Persson summoned what motivation he could find and hauled his bulk up the last thirteen steps.

A uniformed officer, a young kid Persson had never seen before, stood outside the open door of the fourth-floor apartment. He was about to say something, but Persson motioned dismissively and stepped over the threshold. He didn’t want anyone spoiling his first impression of the deceased. He’d stopped trusting anything else years ago. In the kitchen another officer sat talking in a low voice to a trembling woman who was weeping softly, her face buried in her hands. Persson nodded to the officer, an old acquaintance, and put his finger to his lips. Then he stepped past the kitchen doorway and went down the hall toward the living room.

The body lay on the bed in the bedroom, and even Persson had to admit it was a sad sight. In his stiff right hand the deceased held a pistol that Persson recognized as a Colt Llama. The barrel was pointing at the ceiling. He had an appalling hole in the middle of his forehead. Black blood had congealed over half his face and left huge stains on the white pillow. The Norwegian’s eyes stared in the same direction as the pistol that had blown him into history. A faint odor of old vomit filled the room. Persson stood for a moment observing the man before him. He sighed a couple of times, as he always did when some unpleasant thought tickled the back of his mind. Then he took a couple of steps and began rummaging through the pockets of the coat hanging over the back of the chair by the door. The only thing of interest—aside from Kaj Holt’s ID card, which had been issued two weeks before—was a rather fat wallet. Persson quickly counted the bills, then studied the photo of the deceased on the ID card. The inspector scratched his head. He recalled what it was he’d reacted to and walked over toward the bed. He gave the man in the bed a quick look. The frozen expression on Holt’s face made him shudder. Persson had witnessed similar scenes many times before, but that didn’t make it any easier.

Quite right,
he thought, taking a ballpoint pen out of his pocket. The thought that had festered ever since he first glimpsed the Spanish-made miniature Colt pistol was now scintillatingly clear. Persson poked at the muzzle with the cap of the ballpoint. It had obviously been tapped so a silencer could be screwed on. But where in the world was the silencer? And it was highly unlikely that anyone would use one to commit suicide.

Persson inspected Holt’s skull. Besides, the distance between the gun and the bullet hole simply seemed too great for him to have been certain to hit the right spot. People who took their own lives with firearms most often put the weapon in their mouth because then there was no way out, no room for remorse. Those who put the gun to their temple were most likely to change their minds while pulling the trigger, with the result that they ended up with a less accurate wound than the one poor Holt had in his forehead. Not to mention that it would be much more effective to hold the pistol to the temple at an angle, pointing toward the back of the head. A man like Kaj Holt should have known that.

As if that weren’t enough, Detective Inspector Persson knew that the neighbors would most likely have woken up when a nine-millimeter projectile that broke the sound barrier made its way into Holt’s skull. But with a silencer those same people would have probably just turned over in bed and continued sleeping.

Persson went around to the other side of the bed to study Holt from the other side. He looked blue and ashen gray in the cold light coming in the bedroom window. Persson set his hat cautiously on the nightstand and pulled out his handkerchief to wipe his bald pate. Then he lay down on the floor and looked underneath the bed. He got back up with some effort and put his hand on the right side of Holt’s skull. He tried to lift his head carefully, but the rigid neck resisted. Finally he managed to produce a gap between the hair and the pillow. And quite right, there was no exit hole. The bullet was still inside Holt’s head. A silencer would have reduced the bullet’s velocity so that it wouldn’t have penetrated all the way through the skull.

Damn it,
Persson thought as his stomach growled again, even worse than earlier. He would eat his damn hat if it turned out that poor Kaj Holt had really committed suicide.

Persson cursed himself as he headed back down the hall to the kitchen.
Why did I have to pick up that damn telephone?
He pictured himself back in the office, deliberating over whether to take the call.

Before he reached the kitchen he made a detour to the entry hall and knelt down to inspect the doorframe. There were no marks to suggest a break-in. Ergo, the door must not have been locked—or else someone had a key. Or Holt could have come in with the killer, or let in someone he knew. It was that simple and that difficult.

Provided he didn’t fall for the idea that Holt had taken his own life. But Persson knew himself too well for that. He’d been in the apartment only a few minutes, and already he could sense that something was amiss. And he was not a man to let it go.

Captain Kaj Holt,
Persson thought, getting up from his knees with a grunt. The officer who still stood in the hallway offered a helping hand, but he waved him off. Detective Inspector Persson may have been too fat for his own good, but he could still stand up on his own.

He leaned in the doorway and met the uncertain gaze of the young officer.

“So you talked to the neighbors, am I right?”

The country boy gave a nod.

“And nobody heard a thing?” Persson wiped the sweat from his head again and recalled that his hat was still lying next to Kaj Holt’s shattered skull in the bedroom.

“That’s right,” said the officer. “No one was home next door, but across—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Persson broke in.

In the kitchen he managed to calm down the crying woman enough that he was able to get some reasonable answers out of her. Persson learned that she was twenty-five years old and that she lived on the next block. She claimed that she’d had a relationship with Kaj Holt until a few months before, but she no longer wanted to keep seeing him after she found out he was going to be a father. And that he was married.

“No, of course not,” said Inspector Persson.

The young woman wiped away a tear. The last she’d shed for him, Persson hoped.

“And he rang your doorbell last night?”

She nodded. Then she began to fiddle with her hat lying on the kitchen table.

“Did you get the impression that he was . . . how should I put it . . . depressed?”

“I think so, maybe. Kaj was like that a lot.”

“Like what?” Persson asked.

“Depressed,” she said.

“I see. But you didn’t let him in.”

“No, he sounded really drunk.”

“And so you went to work today?”

“No. I was sick.”

Persson scrutinized the woman. She didn’t look very sick. Maybe Holt wasn’t the only one she had that sort of relationship with.

“And you came over to check on him?”

“He sounded so sad,” said the young woman, bursting into tears again.

Right,
Persson thought.
Sad people are always the ones who commit suicide. That’s just the way it is.

“And the door was open?”

The woman nodded. Persson reached out his hand to touch her shoulder, but changed his mind. Instead he stood up without a word and went back to the bedroom to get his hat. He stood for a long while gazing at the dead captain.
This is just too terrible,
he said to himself.
A wife and a kid and everything.

Out in the living room he picked up a note lying on the coffee table. He held it gingerly by the top corner.

Sorry. Kaj.

He put it back on the table and went out to the hall.

“Run downstairs to the patrol car, get hold of the station, and ask them to call the Norwegian legation for me,” he told the officer.

If nothing else, he needed them to identify the dead man. They might as well do that right away, even though it wasn’t really necessary. The man on the bed was clearly the same as the man in the photo on his ID card.

The rookie cop rushed down the stairs at once.

“And pick up something for me to eat,” Persson called after him.

Back in the living room he sat down on the sofa next to the coffee table.

After Holt’s girlfriend had left the apartment with the other officer, he went over to the end table and turned on the Silver Super 2 shortwave radio. It was set to Aachen. Zarah Leander’s voice filled the room. Persson thought his ears were deceiving him. Had the Americans gotten the station back up and running? Was that really possible?

And that damned Nazi whore,
he thought.
That goddamned Nazi whore.

Even so he hummed along as he fished a cigarette out of the pack that the officer must have left lying on the table.