Лейф Перссон - Another Time, Another Life

Poor thing, Holt thought gloomily. He doesn’t seem to have had it easy.

But there was one photo that stood out from the others. It was not even pasted into the album, just loosely inserted between two pages in the middle. It was a summer picture of three young men about twenty-five years of age and a little girl who seemed to be ten years old at the most. Green grass and glistening water in the background. The three men were in short-sleeved shirts, shorts, and sandals. Two of them smiled openly at the camera, one seemed more reserved. The pluckiest was the little girl. She had her hair put up in Pippi Longstocking braids and stuck her tongue out happily at the photographer.

Swedish archipelago, late sixties or early seventies, thought Holt. Welander, Tischler, and Eriksson, she thought, and was reasonably confident. The little girl held Tischler by the hand, and despite the differences in size and age there was a striking resemblance between them. Something in the posture itself, the self-assured expression in body and face.

That could hardly be his child, thought Holt. Probably a sibling, or half sibling perhaps, and in the back of her head she had a vague memory that Gunsan had said something about Theo Tischler having inherited not only the brokerage firm but also his view of marriage from his long-dead father.

On the back side someone had written in a childish handwriting, “The gang of four. Sten, Theo, Kjell, and me.”

“You know what we’re going to do now?” said Jarnebring as he sealed the door to Eriksson’s apartment.

“I’m listening,” said Holt, looking almost as plucky as the little girl in the photo.

“We’re going to go back to the office, unplug the phone, lock the door, and sit down in peace and quiet and try to work out what the hell this is really about.”

“Sounds good,” said Holt. “Only I get to make coffee first.”

First they discussed Bäckström’s so-called homo lead in detail. On that they had somewhat different ideas. Holt simply didn’t believe in it. She was convinced that the murder was not about sex at all, regardless of what orientation anyone wanted to ascribe to their victim. Jarnebring was in agreement with her “in principle,” while at the same time he had a hard time letting go of the idea that Eriksson could have been completely uninterested in sexual matters.

“Personally I have a very hard time understanding that,” said Jarnebring. Despite what that Polish woman said, he thought.

“I can very well imagine that,” said Holt cheerfully. “But if you disregard yourself—”

“Wait now,” said Jarnebring. “Don’t interrupt me. I’ll buy what you’re saying about Eriksson being a disagreeable bastard who was snooping around all the time to try to get power over people — you only have to listen to his coworkers — but the one thing doesn’t rule out the other, does it?”

“I don’t really know,” said Holt. “I guess I’m not particularly good at guys.”

“You’ll just have to work on that,” said Jarnebring unperturbed. “Where was I... yes... there’s something about the act itself that I have a hard time letting go of. It’s completely obvious that the person who stabbed Eriksson was someone he both knew and trusted. Or in any case was not the least bit afraid of. But that can hardly have been Welander, Tischler, or his cleaning woman. Who was it then? We haven’t found anyone.”

“Some neighbor that we’ve missed,” Holt suggested. “Some casual acquaintance that we’ve also missed.”

“It doesn’t appear to be so,” said Jarnebring, shaking himself uncomfortably. “Eriksson seems to have been one highly suspicious bastard, not to mention anxious as hell. Here he sits on the couch drinking a highball in peace and quiet while our perpetrator calmly and quietly stabs him from behind, and then he crawls around on the floor and raises holy hell — if we’re to believe his neighbor — before he folds up and dies. Who the hell would he let get that close to him?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Holt, “but aren’t so-called gay murders usually dreadful stories? With a lot of aggravated assault, lots of emotions and hatred?”

“Yes,” said Jarnebring. “As a rule it’s like that but far from always. They’re just like all other stoned, jealous, crazy people. But it wasn’t like that here.”

“What do you mean?” asked Holt.

“The whole thing seems both cowardly and random. Just a stab from behind... normally he wouldn’t even have died from it. And then the perpetrator darts into the bathroom and vomits, making a nice little mess. Doesn’t seem to be one of our motorcycle-riding friends exactly.”

“No,” said Holt, who had been thinking along the same lines.

“So what have we got?” Jarnebring continued.

A lonely person, a scared and suspicious person, a dissatisfied person, a person who felt unjustly treated by life, a person who should have had considerably more if there had been any justice in this world and if he himself had been the one to decide.

“A snoop,” said Jarnebring.

“Someone who wanted to acquire power through snooping, to get emotional power over people around him by ferreting out their weaknesses,” Holt continued.

“Who exploited the friendship and feelings of others, who even profited from them if he got the chance,” Jarnebring added.

“It’s certainly not out of the question that he extorted money from them if he felt sufficiently confident,” Holt concluded.

“Snoop, profiteer, extortionist,” Jarnebring summarized. Not the type I’d want to share an office with, he thought.

“I have a buddy,” said Jarnebring, sounding pretty much as if he was thinking out loud. “He’s also my best friend. We shared a front seat here on the squad a helluva lot of years ago... and a lot of other things for that matter, but we can leave that aside.”

“I can almost guess who it is,” said Holt. “What is it our colleagues at the riot squad call him? The Butcher from Ådalen? Police superintendent at the National Police Board, Lars Martin Johansson.”

“People here in the building talk too much shit,” said Jarnebring. “Do you know what’s remarkable about Lars Martin?”

“No,” said Holt. “Tell me. I’m listening.”

“He’s downright fiendish at figuring out how things stand,” said Jarnebring. “Sometimes it’s uncanny.”

“What are we waiting for?” said Holt, nodding toward the telephone. “Call him and get him over here.” It’s never too late to meet God, she thought, and if only half of what she had heard about Johansson were true then it was high time.

“I don’t think so,” said Jarnebring. Even if it would be fun to see Bäckström’s face, he thought. “One thing that Lars Martin always used to nag about where murder investigations are concerned is that you should forget about the motive.”

“You shouldn’t worry about the motive?” Holt was surprised.

“Nope,” said Jarnebring. “According to Lars Martin, the motive is either something obvious or else some out-and-out craziness that you would never figure out in a million years no matter how much you thought about it, and uninteresting in any event. Johansson used to say that it’s like the cherry on the cake, and the court can put it there if it’s really necessary once the cake is baked and ready. It doesn’t help us police officers. Other than in thrillers and TV series and that kind of shit.”

“Sounds maybe a little too simple,” Holt objected, being seriously fond of at least two police series that were showing on TV.

“Lars Martin is a very simple man,” said Jarnebring, smiling contentedly. “That is what’s so strange about the whole thing. I mean with the head that he has. Lars Martin is almost always right,” said Jarnebring. “We’ve talked through dozens of these kinds of cases over the years and I cannot think of a single time when he was wrong.”