Arne Dahl - Misterioso

Then he pulls out, almost out, and plunges back in, all the way.

It’s not over yet, Hjelm .

He had put down his helmet and was Paul. Simply Paul.

Breakfast. Paul and Cilla and Tova were sitting at the table. He blearily scanned the morning paper. Tova gulped down the last of her orange juice and jumped up to look in the mirror.

“Ohhhh,” she groaned.

She pulled the rubber bands off her pigtails and ruffled her hair, frantically dragging a comb through her tresses.

“That looks great,” Hjelm said. “Come here.”

She dashed over to the table, gave him a quick hug, and ran back to the mirror. She grabbed her shoulder bag just as the doorbell rang. She opened the door, and Milla came in.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” said Hjelm.

“Come on, let’s go!” yelled Tova. “We’re already late!”

The door banged shut.

Danne came downstairs and gave them a sullen look.

“You’re home?” he said to his father, then left. The door rattled for a while after he slammed it behind him.

Cilla sighed deeply and said, with half a piece of liverwurst sandwich in her mouth, “So the whole thing went to hell?”

“Yes.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“Oath of confidentiality,” he said, giving her a droll look.

“Oh, right,” she said, her expression exactly the same as his. That happened frequently. He recognized his own facial expressions in hers and could never figure out which of them had influenced the other.

“We were at the wrong place. It was as simple as that.”

“Do you think something happened somewhere else?”

“I’m absolutely convinced it did. You’ll probably be able to read about it in the noon edition of the evening paper. At any second, that phone is going to ring,” he said, pointing at his cell on the table. He finished his coffee, went out to the coat rack in the hall, and took down his denim jacket with the sheepskin collar. He was holding it as he went back to the table and gave her a little kiss. “Are you working tonight or are you off?” he asked.

She shook her head, playfully admonishing him. “I’m working tonight.”

He pulled on his jacket, blew her another kiss, opened the door, and stepped outside, heading for his unmarked Mazda. Before he closed the door, she cleared her throat. She was holding his cell between her thumb and index finger, her expression slightly disgusted. It was ringing. She dropped it onto the table.

With a chuckle he picked it up and answered. He didn’t say a single word during the entire conversation.

“Exactly as I said,” he told her, slipping the cell into his jacket pocket. She blew him a kiss as he stepped out into what looked, strangely enough, like a midsummer day.

No wind. Bright sunshine. Only in the shade was it possible to feel that it was still a hesitant spring.

Love , he found himself thinking, to his surprise. Love and daily life. Daily life and love .

He turned the key in the ignition and drove out toward Norsborg.

It was time, once again, to exchange the southern suburbs for the north.

It was 9:03 A.M. on April 3. The same date on which Gustav IV Adolf was crowned the king of Sweden in the year 1800 in Norrköping, somebody thought, thus deviating from the group’s otherwise synchronized thoughts.

Although at that particular moment everyone’s thoughts were quite disparate, not to mention listless.

Jan-Olov Hultin, on the other hand, looked very composed. No evidence of the previous night’s misfortune. With great care he set his reading glasses on his nose and leafed through a stack of documents that were far from kind.

Hjelm looked around in the grandiose kitchen. The other members of the A-Unit were displaying various effects from the day before. Gunnar Nyberg sneezed loudly; he was thinking about singing in the choir with inflamed vocal cords. Viggo Norlander merely looked annoyed. Kerstin Holm was having what used to be called a catnap, but had become commonly known as a micro-nap after various politicians had been discovered asleep in the parliament chambers. She was dozing with her elbow propped on the table supporting her head. Arto Söderstedt was without a doubt on some other planet. He was standing at the kitchen window, looking out and pondering mysterious coincidences.

The day on which the first murder occurred was the anniversary of Emmanuel Swedenborg’s death in London in 1772.

Söderstedt let his thoughts evaporate and flutter upward into the ether of the clear April sky.

The only people at work inside the villa were a medical examiner, a couple of crime techs, and Jorge Chavez, who was studying every last inch of the house. Every once in while the techs would chase him out of the living room, but he kept returning, again and again, to the scene of the crime, like some stupid criminal.

The officers who had arrived first had now gone back to the police station on Golfvägen. A couple of NCP plainclothes assistants were keeping watch at the police cordon outside. Strangely enough, the media hadn’t yet gotten wind of what had happened. Aside from the technical team at work in the living room, the A-Unit was able to sit in the villa undisturbed.

That is, until two well-built gentlemen in their forties wearing identical leather jackets came stomping into the kitchen.

“Don’t say a word,” said the blonder of the men to Hultin. “We just want to see the crime scene for ourselves.”

“You’ll have my report as soon as it’s done, as usual,” Hultin told him. Much against their will, he introduced them to the rest of the group.

“Gillis Döös and Max Grahn from Säpo.”

“The Security Police,” said the man who apparently did all the talking. Evidently he was Döös. “We won’t disturb you.”

They went into the living room and carried on a low-voice conversation with the M.E. and the tech in charge. Then they walked through the house, peering in all the nooks and crannies. All of a sudden they were gone-their car gave an audible screech as it pulled away.

“We may have more to do with them from now on,” said Hultin, keeping his tone neutral. Nobody cared to think about what that might entail.

Chavez came into the kitchen and sat down next to Hultin. “It’s exactly the same,” he said.

“Not really,” said Hultin. “We need to hear more from the techs. Apparently one bullet was left behind.”

They were sitting in the kitchen of a huge mansion in the suburb of Djursholm, just a couple of blocks from the house owned by Eric Blomgren, the retired judge, with whom the other retired judge, Rickard Franzén, had spent an uneventful evening over a chessboard while drinking cognac. It was at the latter address that Chavez and Norlander had sat in their police vehicle, keeping watch all evening. Presumably that fact bothered both of them.

The villa belonged to a man by the name of Nils-Emil Carlberger. His body was discovered in the living room just after eight-thirty in the morning, when his house cleaner arrived. She called the police and then vanished. Nobody knew who she was or where she was now. In all likelihood she was a refugee who was supposed to be deported and thus had gone underground, making a living by cleaning houses for minuscule wages. The Carlberger family consisted of a wife and two grown sons. They would be notified shortly. The wife, Nancy, was staying at the family summer house outside Halmstad, getting it ready for the season. The sons lived in Landvetter and Lund, respectively. Neither of them was active in the business empire owned by Nils-Emil Carlberger. One was an air traffic controller and the other a doctoral candidate in sociology. Nancy had been a secretary in one of the firms belonging to the Carlberger conglomerate before she gave it up to become a housewife. She was not the mother of his two sons.