Лейф Перссон - Another Time, Another Life

“I don’t know,” said Jarnebring. “That may be so, doesn’t need to be, but I think it was papers in any case. Not his old sheets or his corset, if he had something like that.” Jarnebring smiled wryly and exchanged a glance with Holt.

“I hear what you’re saying,” said Bäckström defensively, for there was something in the eyes of the gorilla-like psychopath that made him feel extremely ill at ease. “If you hear me, all I’m saying is what his two closest acquaintances have said — and what the forensic doctor said.”

“When I read the interviews,” said Jarnebring, “I wonder what was actually said. Welander possibly makes an insinuation, and that applies to Tischler too, even if otherwise he appears to be a motor mouth, but neither of them knows anything. One of them possibly thinks something; the other may possibly imagine something. After twenty years’ acquaintance. Talk about buddies.”

“The forensic doctor then,” said Bäckström. I didn’t know you could even read, thought Bäckström sourly, and who the hell gave that half-ape my interviews anyway?

“Don’t interrupt me,” said Jarnebring. “I’m getting to her. First let’s finish with our witnesses, and the way I see it there are three possibilities. Either it’s the way at least one of them suggests, in which case we’ve missed something. Or else it’s just that they’ve imagined things. Or else they’ve tried to get us to believe that their friend Eriksson was... well, homosexual. And if that’s the way it is, then it suddenly becomes damned interesting, considering what you’ve said to them.”

Never underestimate a colleague, even if he looks like something that lives in a cave and woke up on the wrong side of the bed, Holt thought, smiling almost sweetly at Jarnebring.

“My colleague Jarnebring and I are in complete agreement,” said Holt. “We’ve both read the interviews, and as you know I’ve talked with Tischler myself. He was not exactly taciturn, but it was mostly noise and little substance.” My colleague Jarnebring, thought Holt, who a moment earlier and in a most unequal manner felt that she had received a major distinction.

“Glad to hear you’re in agreement,” said Bäckström. “To return to reality for a moment, what do you say about the forensic doctor’s report? Has he only been imagining things too?”

“I’ve actually talked to her,” said Jarnebring. “I happened to be in the neighborhood on another errand and I ran into her at the forensic lab. Briefly, she hadn’t the faintest idea of what either Esprit or Wiijnbladh are running around fabricating. Esprit hasn’t had anything to do with Eriksson whatsoever. And he’s on sick leave. Because she is Esprit’s boss, she needs to talk to him as soon as he locates his cane and finds his way back to work.”

“You’ve talked with the forensic doctor?” said Bäckström. This is complete mutiny, he thought.

“Yes,” said Jarnebring, looking at him. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“No,” said Bäckström quickly. The guy is lethal, he thought. How could someone like that run around loose? And what the hell was going on when he became a cop?

“Good,” said Jarnebring. “Where was I now... yes,” he continued. “She had also spoken with Wiijnbladh, and he simply asked her if there was anything to indicate that Eriksson might have been homosexual in the sense that it actually showed up in the forensic inspection and the autopsy. Do you know what she said?”

“No,” said Bäckström. Where the hell was Wiijnbladh anyway? Typical of the little rat to sneak away in a situation like this, he thought.

“No,” said Jarnebring. “She said no. And if you want I can trot over to Wiijnbladh and take it up directly with him.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Bäckström. Even if it would be funny because he would probably shit his pants, he thought.

“That’s good,” said Jarnebring. “Glad to know we’re in agreement.”

“I’m listening,” said Bäckström. “Give me a name.”

“He’s here,” said Jarnebring, tapping his finger on the investigation files binder on the table in front of him. “You can bet your sweet ass he’s here, but we’ve missed him because we’ve been looking for the wrong things.”

The guy is completely insane, thought Bäckström.

The reason that Wiijnbladh had been absent from the meeting the day before was that he was saddled with a poisoning. A medical student who lived at home with his elderly father had been having problems with his studies. He had missed a number of exams, fallen seriously behind, and after a period of brooding decided to solve his academic problems by lacing his dad’s breakfast yogurt with an ample dose of thallium. His success far exceeded the progress of his studies. Considered as a motive, this was an excellent illustration of Lars Martin Johansson’s thesis of the cherry on the cake.

Now the former future doctor was sitting in the jail at Kronoberg. On Wiijnbladh’s workbench at the tech squad was the bottle of thallium that the perpetrator had swiped from the chemistry department at the Karolinska Institute, and there was enough poison remaining to depopulate half the police headquarters on Kungsholmen. In Wiijnbladh’s pleasure-filled fantasies, this enchanted bottle with its death-bringing genie was a gift from above that probably, within the not too distant future, would solve his problems as well.

Wiijnbladh’s difficulties were not related to his studies, for he had never really devoted himself to any such things. Apart from six years of elementary school, less than a year at the old police academy, and a few weeklong courses for crime technicians, Wiijnbladh had studiously avoided all theoretical extravagances, and just like the majority of his colleagues on the squad he was firmly convinced that the only abilities worth the name were those he had acquired by practice.

“We have to distinguish between theory and practice the same way we distinguish between imagination and reality,” as his legendary boss Commissioner Blenke had so eloquently summarized the matter when, in connection with a review of the squad’s operations, he explained to the inspectors from the National Police Board why the entire library appropriation was spent on fingerprint powder.

Wiijnbladh’s problem was different, and relatively simple in the sense that it made up approximately 99 percent of all his problems.

It was bad enough that Wiijnbladh’s wife cheated on him quite openly, which was contrary to the basic idea. Worst of all, however, was that she preferred to do it with other police officers, and because this had been going on for a number of years there was not a division nowadays within the Stockholm Police Department that didn’t contain one or more coworkers who had put horns on their colleague Wiijnbladh.

Like his spiritual brother, the former medical student, after lengthy speculations Wiijnbladh had come to the conclusion that the only way to solve the problem was to eliminate his wife. Because Wiijnbladh deeply disliked both blunt trauma and knife attacks, was nauseated by their consequences, and obviously did not want to go to jail, he had decided to poison her. Murder by poison was a completely unknown practice at the tech squad where he worked, and the fact that the case of the medical student was solved was not due to dogged fieldwork by the squad’s collaborators but rather to the perpetrator himself, who in complete confidence had told an even larger number of classmates about his little caper with his dad.

What could be more certain than using poison, thought Wiijnbladh, for it was common knowledge that lightning never strikes twice in the same place.