Arne Dahl - Misterioso

“Have you thought of anything?” asked Chavez, biting into his Quarter Pounder.

“It’s there, just below the surface,” said Hjelm.

“I know how you feel,” said Chavez, chewing. “It’s like Fawlty Towers , right? A difficult guest is served the wrong dish three times. Basil’s wife, what’s her name? Sybil. She finally serves the wrong dish on purpose. Basil says between clenched teeth, ‘I know how she feels.’ ”

“What does that have to do with any of this?” said Holm in surprise.

“Not a damned thing. Just making conversation, as I’m told it’s called.”

A bank , thought Hjelm, digging through his own memory bank. He came up with nothing, not even a statement of account.

“What do we do if you can’t come up with anything?” said Chavez. “Line up every banker in Småland in a row and let Mr. Serious Alcoholic take a look at them, one after the other?”

“He must have been treated for the teeth that were knocked out, and the broken arm, if that’s what it was,” said Holm.

“This whole thing is still such a long shot.” Chavez smacked his lips. “Not something we can present to Hultin, at any rate. He beat up a guy listening to Hackzell’s ‘Misterioso’-but it’s a big leap from there to actually having the tape.”

“There’s a connection,” Hjelm said doggedly.

“Okay,” said Chavez. “Does your connection have anything to do with Igor and Igor? It almost has to. The cassette is the only link between the beating in the spring of ’91 in a restaurant in Växjö and the ex-Soviet bullets in the upper-class walls in Stockholm. And the path of the tape from the restaurant to the villa in Saltsjöbaden follows the same route as Igor and Igor. They took the tape from Hackzell, after all, as partial payment for the Estonian vodka on February fifteenth.”

Hjelm shook his head. The whole thing was unclear. Misterioso.

“Let’s start from the point of view of the banker who was beaten up,” said Kerstin Holm. “According to Hackzell, right after the beating, as he’s spitting out teeth, he said, ‘He was totally justified.’ About the guy who pounded him! Strange, don’t you think? The years pass, the wounds heal, but at the same time the accumulation of distrust, insight, confusion, powerlessness grows-”

“Wrede!” shouted Hjelm, jumping to his feet.

Holm looked at him in surprise.

“Wrede. Jonas Wrede, from the Växjö police. He said something about an incident in a bank. I lost it in all the other damn incidents he kept talking about. Albertsboda, or someplace like that. Shit, what time is it?”

“Three-thirty,” said Chavez. “What’s going on?”

“We have to go to the Växjö police station,” said Hjelm, and dashed out.

Detective Inspector Jonas Wrede stood at attention three times, once for each member of the NCP Power Murders team that came into his little office. Finally he was standing so erect that the top button of his shirt popped off.

“Relax,” said Hjelm. “Sit down.”

Wrede obeyed the command. Ordered to relax, he sat there looking like a sack of hay.

“The last time I was here, you said something about a previous contact with the NCP. It had to do with a bank incident somewhere.”

“That’s right,” said Wrede hopefully. “The bank incident in Algotsmåla. But of course you must know about that. The NCP sent a man down there. He never introduced himself, said his identity was confidential. He put a lid on the whole thing. Nothing got out to the press. I’m quite proud of that: no leaks from here whatsoever. Even the bank personnel kept their mouths shut. A matter of self-preservation, I assume.”

“What happened?”

“All the documents were confiscated by your man, so obviously you already know.”

“Just tell us everything you can remember.”

Wrede looked a bit disoriented, since he wasn’t able to make use of his computer.

“Yes, well, let’s see. It happened this year, on February fifteenth. When the staff arrived at the bank that morning and opened the vault, they found a dead body inside. And a lot of money was missing. We immediately brought in Stockholm; it was a real mystery. Your man came down here and took over the whole investigation. That’s all.”

“Our man…” said Chavez.

“February fifteenth,” said Holm.

“Tell us about the dead man,” said Hjelm.

“I was the first officer on the scene, and I was the one who contacted Stockholm. I saw it as my duty to keep the whole staff there until your man arrived. He gave me high praise and imposed a gag order on the police officers on site as well as the bank personnel. Consequently I was the first to examine the body properly. He was a big, stocky man, powerfully built. A long, sharp object of some kind, possibly a slender stiletto, had pierced his eye and gone right into his brain. A very unpleasant sight.” Wrede looked more excited than upset. “But I’m sure that you already know all this,” he insisted.

“Okay,” said Hjelm. “If you could arrange to have all the personnel who were present at the time, come to the bank in Algotsboda, then we’ll go out there right away.”

“Algotsmåla,” said Wrede, and put in a call to the bank office.

Jonas Wrede personally drove the police car that carried all of them about thirty miles from Växjö. The sun was sinking toward the horizon.

Wrede was all fired up and in full subtlety mode, meaning he urgently prodded them to reveal what this was all about. None of the NCP officers said a word. All they saw was the narrowest of tunnels in front of them, the tunnel that would lead to a serial killer.

Wrede pounded fiercely on the locked door of the bank. A short, timid, middle-aged woman opened it. The only other person inside the minuscule bank office was an elderly gentleman wearing a pin-striped suit.

“This is the bank president, Albert Josephson, and the bank teller, Lisbet Heed.”

The officers looked at both with a certain skepticism. “Is this the whole staff?” asked Chavez.

Lisbet Heed brought them cups of freshly brewed coffee. They accepted, without really paying attention.

Josephson cleared his throat and spoke in a shrill, pedantic voice. “We lost a number of staff members in February this year, a cost-saving measure that also involved cutting back our business hours. It was part of the bank’s austerity policy, as a result of the deplorable conditions at the end of the last decade and the beginning of this one.”

“So the basic staff,” said Hjelm, “had to pay the price for the failed speculations and absurd borrowing practices instigated by the higher-ups, who later retired with their multimillion-kronor golden parachutes. Is that it?” He sounded like Söderstedt.

“Not an unreasonable way of viewing the matter,” said Josephson impassively. “The fact is that this”-he glanced at Wrede-“incident… occurred on the very day when the new business hours went into effect. And on the same day the staff had been cut in half. I opened the vault myself and found… the blinded man.”

The blinded man , thought Hjelm.

“Here’s the vault,” said Josephson, pointing to the open vault. They went inside. There was nothing to see.

“So you found him lying inside the locked vault?” said Chavez.

“You can imagine what a shock it was,” said Josephson, without looking especially shocked.

“Do you remember what the… blinded man looked like?” asked Hjelm.

“Big,” said Josephson. “Huge, in fact.”

“A real bull of a man,” said Lisbet Heed surprisingly.

“Worn out by the matador,” said Chavez, even more surprisingly.