The No. 2 Global Detective (10 page)

‘Whoever did this is playing with us,' he said.

‘I wouldn't pay 179 krona for a fucking duvet,' mumbled Mma Ontoaste. Sandi Rudisandi flinched, but Tom Hurst stopped for a second, his mouth gaping. Then he turned to her with a smile of triumph on his face.

‘Ms Ontoaste! You are a genius!'

‘How so?'

‘Krona!'

‘Krona?'

‘Yes. Krona.'

And then:

‘Sweden!'

‘What about Sweden?'

‘That's where we have to go next. To IKEA.'

Rain.

A silent curtain of rain shutting off everything and everyone. Coming in from the Baltic. Always rain at this time of year before the winter came. Neighbour turned against neighbour, dog against cat. Could we ever truly get away from it? Could we ever truly be free? Winter would be worse though, he thought. Then there would be snow and darkness. After that the sun would shine and then there would be slush and chaos.

It was 8.30 in the morning and he was sitting in his car staring at the shuttered front of the dry-cleaner's. They were closed again. His stained suit was roughly folded into a plastic bag on the seat next to him. He did not know what he should do. Then he looked at his coffee until it grew cold.

Why had he done it?

Why had he joined the police force in the first place? Did he even want to be a police officer any more? Every day was worse than the last. Every day things got worse. Every day as a police officer he saw terrible things. The police are a microcosm of society. He wondered how long it would be before he lost his fear of being with people.

The town of Ynstead on the southernmost tip of Sweden, overlooking the sea, was one of the few towns where the police actually outnumbered the population. Despite this and the lowest crime rate in Sweden, Colander would come to think of the days that followed as some of the most extraordinary in his long career as a policeman and, when he looked back upon them, he would wonder how he got through them without recourse to suicide.

He started the engine of the car. For a few moments he did not know whether to put the car in first gear or reverse. One action would mean the car went backwards, away from the grey wall in front of him, but the other action might mean the car went forward into the grey wall in front of him.

He arrived at the police station at 9.05. Toff Toffsson was on duty behind the desk in the reception area. If Toffsson was surprised to see the police officer from Ynstead, he did not show it. Colander went along the corridor to his office. He was sweating heavily. What is wrong with me now? he wondered. He removed his shirt and wiped his body with the curtains. Lemm Lemmingsson opened the door without knocking. The young policeman was surprised and embarrassed at seeing Inspector Colander naked from the waist up.

‘I am sorry if I have disturbed you, Inspector,' he said. ‘You called a meeting today for 8.10 and it is 8.10 already.'

Inspector Colander looked at his watch and thought for a minute. He recalled calling the meeting, but he could not remember if he had called it yesterday or a hundred years ago. I have become a stranger to time, he thought, and he could remember nothing.

Outside it was raining.

Lemmingsson stood at the door waiting.

‘You had better come in,' said Colander after a while, returning his body to the shirt.

Lemmingsson sat down on one of the chairs at the table. He had a cup of coffee with him.

‘Let us summarise what we know so far,' said Colander.

‘To be honest, Inspector,' replied the junior police officer. ‘I think we do not know very much at all.'

‘I have always found that a police officer usually knows more than he thinks he does,' said Colander with a trace of annoyance.

‘Perhaps you are right,' agreed Lemmingsson. He wrote something on a pad of paper with a pencil.

‘We need a breakthrough,' said Colander. ‘I do not think we can allow ourselves much more than a day following this line of approach.'

The two police officers agreed that they would have another meeting when they knew more and they scheduled it for eleven o'clock that evening. Just as Lemmingsson was leaving, Colander asked him something.

‘See if you can get Knut Knutsson to come along,' he said. ‘He may have something to add to what we have to say.'

‘Yes, I will,' said Lemmingsson.

Inspector Colander collected his car from the car park and drove out of Ynstead, following the road to Malmö. On the way he stopped at a service station and ordered himself a coffee. After that he drove on, concentrating on the road and thinking only vaguely about what had happened during the morning. He was sure he had forgotten something, but could not put his finger on what it might have been.

I am empty inside, he thought, although I am also so full that I am about to burst. Why am I in such pain?

When he got to Malmö he remembered that he had not taken his suit in to the dry-cleaner's. He wondered if this was the thing that he had been trying to remember. He took a pencil and wrote the words ‘dry cleaning' down on a scrap of paper that he found in his pocket.

Then he parked the car illegally across the road from the video rental shop in Malmö and waited until there was no traffic before crossing. When he opened the door a bell pinged and a man in a cardigan came from a back office.

Burt Colander introduced himself as a police officer. The owner of the video shop introduced himself as the owner of a video shop.

‘Although we also stock DVDs,' he said, pointing with one hand to a long rack of DVD films. Colander turned to look at the display that the man had alerted him to, where a single man with dark hair and an old-fashioned elk-skin jacket stood with his head bowed over the selection, and then Colander looked back at the man in the cardigan.

‘I will tell you why I am here,' he said.

‘Good,' said the man. ‘I was wondering.'

Colander explained that he was looking for a video tape. The man explained that he did not have the video tape that Colander was looking for. Colander had not expected much more than this but anyway asked him to ring the police station in Ynstead if there was anything he remembered.

‘What is there to remember?' asked the man as he closed the door behind Colander and watched him cross the road to where his car was parked.

Once again Colander was struck by the thought that perhaps he was missing something. He drove back to Ynstead in the rain, trying not to think about the welcome that waited for him. When he thought of his lonely flat he thought that something had ended for him in the past. Something that he had never wanted in the first place but he was now sure had gone. He had started sweating again. He ought to go and see the doctor. But not yet. After this investigation perhaps. He took off his shirt and looked around for something with which to dry himself. Nothing, of course. He put his shirt back on.

Tord Tordsson was in charge of the one o'clock meeting. Colander informed them about his visit to the video shop in Malmö. There was a silence after he had spoken.

‘Let's just be honest with ourselves,' Tordsson said. ‘We do not really know anything for sure. How can we? We are just insignificant humans. We can make all the plans we like, but when something like this happens it makes you stop and wonder why.'

They all agreed with Tordsson.

‘Perhaps we should divide ourselves into two groups?' Colander suggested. Everybody in the meeting room stopped and listened to him. It was if he had taken on the mantle of someone who knew what would happen next. And yet Colander had not sought out the position.

‘Go on,' said Tordsson.

‘Perhaps if one team concentrated on working the telephones, while the other team concentrated on door-to-door?'

‘That is a good idea. Let's do that.'

They divided themselves up into teams. Colander and Lemmingsson agreed they would work together. Tordsson suggested they should have another meeting at five o'clock that afternoon to see if anyone had had a breakthrough.

‘Let's keep in touch, though,' said Tordsson. ‘We all know this is getting towards the most dangerous time.'

The end of the week was always bad, but Friday evenings were the worst. This was when the utter hopelessness of their existence often became intolerable and suicide became a definite option. To prevent this, the police officers kept in touch and had formed an Ingmar Bergman Film Club, which met every Friday evening to watch the Swedish master's old films.

Colander asked Lemmingsson to come to his office after the one o'clock meeting. Before he could speak, Lemmingsson asked a question.

‘What will we do if we cannot find the film we are looking for?' he asked.

‘We still have until tomorrow, don't we?' replied Colander.

‘Yes, but the Film Club begins at four. What if we do manage to find the film but cannot manage to get it back in time?'

‘It is a problem.'

‘Have you tried Helsingborg?' Lemmingsson asked.

‘No,' Colander said. ‘To be honest I am somewhat in the dark about Helsingborg.'

‘I see.'

‘In the meantime why are you always talking to me as though we were standing at the top of a hill with a strong wind blowing all around us?'

‘Everyone in this area speaks like this. It is the Swedish way.'

‘By the way, where is Knut Knutsson? I heard that he had arrived and yet I have not had a chance to meet this new highly-thought-of police officer from Stockholm.'

‘He is in his office, I understand,' Lemmingsson said. ‘Working on something.'

The telephone call came at about two o'clock in the afternoon. Toff Toffsson had been relieved on the reception desk by Son Sonsson who put the call through to Burt Colander at 2.05. At 2.06 Burt Colander picked up the telephone and spoke into the receiver.

Lemmingsson was surprised to see his boss stand up when he heard the voice on the other end of the line. Oh no, he thought, another narrative voice. Colander listened for a moment with his eyes wide in slight confusion. Lemmingsson had the impression that the call was important.

‘Of course,' said Colander into the receiver. ‘I will do anything I can to help.'

He wrote something on a pad of paper with his pencil. When he put the phone down, Lemmingsson thought the senior police officer looked strained and pale. He too hated it when information was rationed like this.

‘Someone is coming to see me,' he said. ‘Someone from abroad. An Englishman and a woman from Botswana. Where does that leave us? The world is closing in on us.'

‘Yes,' agreed Lemmingsson.

Colander drank some coffee and then turned to face the wall. Will we ever truly be alone? he wondered. Or are we all destined to be tossed hither and thither until we can stand it no more. He thought of suicide often.

His coffee was cold and he could hear music coming from the office next door.

‘Who has the office next door now?' he asked Lemmingsson, just as the young police officer was about to turn and walk out of the office with his by now cold cup of coffee.

‘That is Knut Knutsson,' said Lemmingsson. ‘He has brought a radio with him.'

‘I do not like music generally,' said Colander.

‘Nor me,' agreed Lemmingsson.

‘But this is nice. It has a nice rhythm. It seems as if the person playing the instrument knows how to play a tune.'

‘He might not be Swedish,' cautioned Lemmingsson.

Lemmingsson gathered his coffee cup and said goodbye to Colander. Inspector Colander followed him down the corridor but, instead of turning left at the end, as Lemmingsson had, the inspector turned right and out into the car park.

He got into his car and drove home. He was just about to park outside his flat when he remembered his dry-cleaning. He drove to the dry-cleaner's and gave them the suit, remembering to point out that there was a stain on the lapel from when he had spilled some pizza. When he got back into the car, despite the distant rumble of mental thunder to remind him there was still the problem of the foreigners who were coming to see him, Colander felt he had achieved something. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove, recalling the music he had heard through Knut Knutsson's wall.

He intended, as usual, to lie down when he got to his flat, but instead he felt unnaturally energised. All the while that tune from Knut Knutsson's office ran through his mind as he found a roll of black bin bags and swept all the pizza cartons from the kitchen table into one of them. Next he changed the sheets on his bed. Then he flushed all the whisky and vodka down the lavatory pan and then all the pills and the coffee. There was almost nothing left in the flat now. He took down one of the five oil paintings from the wall. He removed the simple wooden frame and broke it into pieces over his knee. He pushed the pieces in the wood-burning stove and then set them alight with a match that lit first time. He studied the picture at arm's length. A picture of a parrot in a wooden sauna. It had to go. It was a shame that they were his father's paintings, but never mind. He folded it up and forced it into the flames. When the fire took hold the oil paint burned with an acrid black smoke that poured out of the wood-burner. Soon the overhead sprinklers activated and a fine rain soaked everything that was left in the house.

Such things happen in a sophisticated modern society, thought Inspector Colander. I should be glad that the smoke did not asphyxiate me, nor the building set itself on fire. Besides, the water was refreshing. He undressed and stood for a while in the sitting room, enjoying the feel of it falling on his back and also the mossy feel of the carpet between his toes. Then he rubbed his clothes with soap from the bathroom. Soon they were clean enough to put back on.

All in all, a good day.

It was too far to drive to Helsingborg that evening and he had a meeting with Lemm Lemmingsson scheduled for later, so Inspector Colander decided to run to the police station. He felt the need for some exercise. Maybe he should lose a little weight, he thought. He dug out an old tracksuit and a pair of trainers and set off at a decent pace.