Arne Dahl - Misterioso

The mystery was gone. But the mist still remained.

Misterioso.

They got out of the police car in front of a small house on the edge of town. It looked tranquil and peaceful, basking in the evening sun. The police car drove away.

None of them wanted to be the first to go in and talk to the woman who was expecting the Power Murderer’s child.

The underside of the crackle-glazed altocumulus cloud cover gleamed dark orange in the early summer evening. An infinite number of small, just barely separated wisps plunged Lilla Värtan and all of Lidingö into a strange, fractured, bewitching twilight. It was as if the sky were pressing down with superhuman force.

Gunnar Nyberg, sitting in a police car up on Lidingö Bridge, thought he’d never seen such a glow before. It had a fateful music about it.

Maybe it’s my time to die , he thought, then shook off the idea.

He was on his way to the villa of Lovisedal board chairman Jacob Lidner in Mölna, located on the southern spit of Lidingö. Arto Söderstedt had the night watch; he would be gazing out across the water as he sat in that living room that radiated resistance to the police presence. Nyberg sympathized with the living room.

He had nothing to do and had decided on his own initiative to spend the night keeping Söderstedt company. There were worse things he could be doing. Besides, he was feeling an acute need for human companionship. Loneliness had suddenly overwhelmed him and sucked the breath from his throat, propelling him inexorably out into this appallingly lovely early summer evening. The beauty on the Lidingö Bridge took his breath away again.

After the bridge Gunnar Nyberg turned right and took Södra Kungsvägen all the way out to Mölna. When he caught sight of Lidner’s palatial villa, he stopped the car, parking it a safe distance away on the little entrance drive. Dusk had fallen. The peculiar cloud formations now glowed only faintly; then during the minute it took him to walk to the house, they disappeared entirely.

He reached the hedge surrounding the garden. The gate appeared in the middle of all the vegetation. It was ajar. He opened it all the way and stepped into the yard.

Out of the corner of his eye, off to the left, he saw a faint movement, and long before the pain hit him, he heard the dull pop of a gun with a silencer.

He threw his huge body full length onto the gravel path and pulled out his service weapon. Yet another shot whined right over his head.

Something was ignited in Gunnar Nyberg’s eyes.

He got up and with a wild bellow ran like a crazed buffalo, firing one shot after another at the spot where he’d seen the movement a couple of seconds earlier.

A car started up a little farther down the road. He heard it approaching. He tossed aside his empty gun and, still bellowing, crashed like a bulldozer right through the thick hedge and came out onto the road just as the car came up.

Gunnar Nyberg tackled it like a professional hockey player.

He hurled his furious giant’s body against the left side of the accelerating vehicle. It flung him off, and he landed with his face pressed to the asphalt.

The pain came. His field of vision was shrinking drastically, but he saw the car drive into a lamppost a dozen yards away.

Arto Söderstedt, with gun raised, rushed over to the car, yanked the driver out, and pulled him over to the other side of the road. The last thing Nyberg saw before everything vanished in a sea of fire was Alexander Bryusov’s bloody face being dragged across the asphalt.

Maybe it’s my time to die , thought Gunnar Nyberg, and he was gone.

I miss the music .

That’s the only thing he’s thinking.

Here the sensitive fingers should have started on their cautious promenade .

He sits motionless for a while on the living room sofa, imagining that he’s listening.

Here’s where the sax should come in .

The body performs no dance of death, as it lies there on the floor, without moving, with two holes in the head. It’s a piece of dead meat; nothing more.

Yet another corpse .

Without joy, he mentally checks another name off the list.

Art has become a trade, and a mission has become an execution. All that’s left is an inexorable, imperative list.

I miss the music , he thinks as he picks up the gun from the table and leaves via the terrace.

In the wall he leaves behind two slugs from Kazakhstan.

It’s night and they’re sitting in Hjelm’s hotel room in central Växjö. Each of them is holding a photo of Göran Andersson; three pictures that they’ve brought along, given to them by Lena Lundberg.

Kerstin Holm is half-reclining on the bed. In her hands she’s holding a group photo of the staff at the bank in Algotsmåla from the summer of 1992. They’re posing outside the bank, all four of them smiling pleasantly. It’s a PR shot. In the front stands Lisbet Heed and a young woman who is Mia Lindström; in back are Albert Josephson and Göran Andersson. Andersson is tall, blue-eyed, blond, wearing a nice suit. He has one hand on Lisbet Heed’s shoulder, and his wide smile shows very white teeth. The bridge in his mouth is apparently in place. There’s nothing special about him. Just like hundreds of similar-looking Swedish bank tellers.

“He was always a model employee,” Lena Lundberg had said, speaking in the distinct, broad accent of Småland as she glanced up from her coffee cup for a moment. “Almost a perfectionist, you might say. Never a day’s absence, except after the accident. A real asset to the bank.”

On the wall behind her was a little framed embroidery that elegantly declared, MY HOME IS MY CASTLE.

Lena kept her hands clasped over her stomach, where a slight bulge had started to show.

“Would you say that he lived for his job?” asked Holm. “That he had a personal investment in his work?”

“Yes, I think so. He lived for the bank. And for me,” she added hesitantly. “And he would have lived for our child.”

“He can still do that,” Kerstin Holm had said without really believing it.

Jorge Chavez is sitting on the edge of the bed at Kerstin’s feet. In his hand he has a photo of an utterly focused Göran, who holds a dart out in front of him and is just about to throw it. There is a tremendous, ice-cold purposefulness in his supremely attentive gaze. The date 12/3/1993 is printed faintly in pencil on the back of the photo.

On the wall directly across from the embroidery was a dartboard with three darts stuck in it. Chavez went over to the board and pulled out one of them. He studied with fascination the strange shape of the dart with its extraordinarily long point.

“Is this how darts usually look?” he asked.

Lena Lundberg stared at him with her sorrowful green eyes. It took a moment before she managed to shift gears:

“He special-ordered them from a company in Stockholm. Bows & Arrows, I think it’s called. In Gamla Stan. A dart can be as long as seven inches,” she told them. “Half for the point and body, half for the flights. He experimented until he found a certain weight that suited him, and the ideal shape turned out to be that long point. But it does look rather strange.”

“Was he a member of any dart club?” Chavez weighed the dart in his hand to find the center of gravity.

“The dart club in town. In Växjö, I mean. That was where he’d been on the night you were talking about, when somebody beat him up. He’d won some sort of record, and when the club closed, he wasn’t ready to stop, so he went over to that restaurant and kept on practicing. Otherwise he doesn’t usually go out to pubs very often.”