Arne Dahl - Misterioso

Söderstedt and Hjelm struggled to locate the other two members of the Sydbanken board of directors anno 1990.

Arto Söderstedt visited Alf Ruben Winge’s company, UrboInvest, as well as his home in Östermalm. Nobody seemed especially concerned about his absence; apparently he would occasionally disappear from the surface of the earth for a few days at a time and then show up again as if nothing had happened. He had the pecuniary wherewithal to afford this type of luxury, as an astute employee expressed it. Söderstedt made a trip out to the archipelago, to Winge’s impressive summer place on the island of Värmdö, but found the house closed up. And that was about as far as he got.

It had fallen to Paul Hjelm to track down the other missing former board member, Lars-Erik Hedman. Fallen , in a different sense of the word, was also what had happened to Hedman. He’d been the TCO union representative on the Sydbanken board from 1986 until 1990. At the time he was also a leading negotiator within TCO, with aspirations to become the union’s president; he was married, with two children, and he owned an exquisite apartment in Vasastan. Now he lived alone in a two-room place in Bandhagen. He’d been thrown out of TCO and stripped of all board assignments. During a couple of years in the late eighties, he’d managed to combine a serious drinking problem with his work, convincing everyone to keep a lid on it. But after a number of bizarre performances in semipublic situations, the union had lost patience, and Hedman was out in the cold.

Via the social welfare office in Bandhagen, Hjelm traced Hedman to a park bench outside the state liquor store and roughly dragged him home to the man’s filthy apartment. There he ushered in the police officers who had been given the dubious pleasure of protecting Lars-Erik Hedman’s health-by definition, an impossible job.

Hjelm returned to police headquarters, certain that another fallow period in the case lay ahead. He hated the thought. Another dreary month. With the whole summer vacation frozen. And with an elusive Göran Andersson roaming the streets holding an aimed but invisible dart in his hand.

Hjelm was sitting in his office, staring blindly through the police building window at the other police building outside, when the phone rang.

“Hjelm,” he said into the phone.

“Finally,” said a quiet voice with an accent that made Hjelm instinctively switch on the phone tape recorder. The man was speaking a Småland dialect. “It was hard to find you. A difficult switchboard staff. Paul Hjelm, the hero from Botkyrka. You’ve been given nearly as many labels as I have this spring.”

“Göran Andersson,” said Hjelm.

“Before you even think about trying to trace this call, I’ll tell you the best way to avoid being tracked. Steal a cell phone.”

“Forgive me for saying this,” Hjelm said a bit recklessly, “but it goes against the picture we’ve formed of you that you’d call up to brag. It doesn’t fit the psychological profile.”

“If you find somebody who does, let me know,” said Göran Andersson faintly. “No, I’m not calling to brag. I’m calling to tell you to stay away from my fiancée. Otherwise I’ll have to break even more with the psychological profile and take you out too.”

“You’d never be able to take me out,” Hjelm declared, contrary to all recommended psychological advice.

“Why not?” said Andersson, sounding genuinely interested.

“Helena Brandberg, Enar Brandberg’s daughter. You could easily have shot her too and taken along the cassette, but instead you chose to flee and leave the tape in our hands.”

“Was it the tape that identified me?” Göran Andersson said in surprise. “That couldn’t have been easy.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Hjelm. “How did you think we’d found you?”

“Because of the bank robber in the vault, of course. I was just waiting for that whole episode to come out and for you to start hunting me. But when nothing happened, I decided to proceed. Later he showed up in that police sketch in the newspapers, as if he were still alive. What was that all about?”

Why not tell him the truth? thought Hjelm.

“Säpo buried the investigation out of concern for national security.”

Göran Andersson laughed loudly. Hjelm was on the verge of doing the same. “I guess their original intent kind of backfired,” Andersson said after a moment.

“Why don’t you put a stop to all this and turn yourself in?” said Hjelm quietly. “You’ve very clearly demonstrated your displeasure with the actions of the banks in the late eighties and early nineties. So why not stop? By now you know that we’re watching every damned member of the board.”

“Not exactly… Besides, it’s not a question of demonstrating anything; there have been so many coincidences that it’s no longer a matter of chance. It’s fate. There’s a very fine line separating chance and fate, but once you’ve crossed that line, it’s irrevocable.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you read the newspapers?” Göran Andersson said in surprise.

“Not very often,” Hjelm admitted.

“I’m a folk hero, for God’s sake! Haven’t you read the letters to the editor? Getting a hangover without having had even a glimpse of the party is no fun. That’s the mental state of Sweden today. Everybody who has the opportunity and authority to speak is telling us that we’ve participated in some sort of party, and now we have to pay the price. What party? So that’s what I’m doing; this is the party, the people’s retroactive party! Read the letters, listen to what people are talking about in the city! That’s what I’m doing, and maybe you should too. But no, you’re stuck in an enclosed space, and you think this case is playing out inside there. All the conversations going on in the city are about this. It’s easy to see who’s scared and who’s cheering.”

“Don’t try to tell me that this is some kind of political mission!”

“I’ve only been to one party during those giddy days,” said Andersson a bit calmer. “At the restaurant Hackat & Malet in Växjö on the twenty-third of March 1991. That’s when I found out what the buying frenzy had done.”

“You’re no people’s revolutionary,” Hjelm insisted. “This is all something you’ve invented after the fact.”

“Of course,” said Andersson soberly. “Personally, I’ve always voted conservative.”

This is a very strange conversation , thought Hjelm. This was not the obsessed serial killer who sat and waited for hours in an empty living room, fired two shots through his victim’s head, and afterward listened to jazz. The mystery shattered into a thousand pieces, the myth crumbled away. Misterioso , he managed to think. Maybe the murders had somehow made him sane. On the other hand, maybe this was just the daytime version of Göran Andersson that he was having such a relatively normal conversation with; maybe the nighttime version looked entirely different.

People , thought Hjelm, and then he said, “Just one question, purely from a factual point of view. How did you get into the houses?”

“If you follow somebody long enough, sooner or later you’ll have access to their keys,” said Andersson indifferently. “Then all you have to do is make a quick impression on a lump of clay and grind your own key. It’s no harder than grinding a dart point. And then you check out their habits and anticipate them.”

“Have you been following your next victim long enough?”

There was silence for a moment. Hjelm was afraid the man had hung up.

“Long enough,” said Andersson at last and went on: “But we digress. I just called to tell you to stay away from my fiancée. Otherwise I’ll be forced to kill you too.”