Лейф Перссон - Another Time, Another Life

Wiijnbladh was now a rich man. He had had both motive and opportunity for a long time, but only one day ago he had secured the means required. So he was also a happy man and decided it would be best to wait for a long weekend or perhaps even until summer when all police officers worth the name were on vacation and only Bäckström and his constantly moonlighting fellow prisoners were left behind.

Chief Inspector Danielsson at the homicide squad did not sound equally happy when he called Jarnebring and asked if he wanted to have lunch with him out in town. Jarnebring had immediately figured out why he sounded like he did. But sure, lunch was still lunch. They had mashed potatoes and rutabaga with pickled pork and each had a light beer. Apart from the latter this was food for real policemen, and even before Danielsson stuck the fork into the large piece of meat on his plate he got to the point.

“You don’t need to say anything, Bo,” Danielsson grunted. “I talked with Gunsan this morning and she told me what happened at the meeting. I haven’t managed to get hold of that fat little shit because he’s hiding out as usual. Which is just as well, because otherwise I might have done something to him I would regret.”

“Have you read the material?” asked Jarnebring.

“Some of it,” Danielsson nodded. “Then Gunsan filled in the rest. If I understood it right both Welander and Tischler have alibis. It’s completely ruled out that either of them were holding the knife?”

“Yes,” said Jarnebring, shaking his head. “There isn’t a chance. Welander’s witnesses are too good for that, regardless of what you might think about their TV programs, and as far as Tischler is concerned Holt has checked with the airline and the personnel out at Arlanda.”

“Could they have used an accomplice?” asked Danielsson.

“Don’t think so,” said Jarnebring. “That seems both unlikely and far-fetched.”

“Why are you so in love with those two?” Danielsson wondered.

“Because I think they’re both lying,” said Jarnebring. “Even if they themselves are innocent of Eriksson’s murder, and perhaps didn’t even know that it would happen, I still get the idea that they know what went on.”

“Why do you think they’re lying then?” asked Danielsson. Perjury, conspiracy, protecting a criminal, he thought unhappily.

“Why in the name of common sense would two people like them keep associating year after year with a miserable character like Eriksson if it wasn’t because he had some kind of hold over them?” Jarnebring countered. “Take Tischler, for example. As far as I’m concerned he can have all the money in the world. I still don’t believe he helped Eriksson earn a few million just because he wanted to be nice to him. Without even having met Tischler, I really don’t think he’s the type.”

“Eriksson blackmailed them?” Danielsson looked questioningly at Jarnebring.

“I think that at the very least he had some kind of hold over them,” said Jarnebring.

“How do we open this up?” said Danielsson.

“Bring them in, lock them up, and pound the shit out of them,” said Jarnebring, smiling like a wolf. While the prosecutor climbs the walls, he thought.

“That won’t work,” said Danielsson, “and you know that as well as I do. So what do we do instead?”

“Don’t know,” said Jarnebring. Because if I had any idea we wouldn’t be sitting here, he thought.

“Let’s think about it,” said Danielsson. “We’ll talk after the weekend.”

For a Swedish police officer — which was the standard by which he should be measured — Detective Inspector Bo Jarnebring had been involved in a great many murder investigations. On a few occasions he had also happened to be present when a breakthrough occurred. That blessed moment when all the question marks straightened themselves out, when you went from total darkness to radiant insight, when the entire investigation force could bask in glory. All within the course of a few hours.

Even more often, and especially in recent years, he had been involved with just the opposite. The laborious, hopeless, drawn-out process by which you didn’t move forward no matter how long you kept trudging; in which suggestions and tips, initiatives, drive, and ordinary, simple, routine work dried up and ran out, and everyone’s combined efforts, all the good suggestions and sure tips as well as ordinary delusions, wild chances, pure shots in the dark, and completely excusable mistakes were transformed at last into mere paper, all of which ended up in the name of justice in the same binders on the shelf for unsolved crimes.

So too this week in December 1989 Jarnebring once again experienced how a murder investigation quietly went dormant and died, and his new colleague, Inspector Anna Holt, was involved in the same thing for the first time.

As early as Tuesday morning their boss at the detective squad called Danielsson and said he had to have his detectives back. That he completely understood his colleague Danielsson’s problems, but he cared even more about the ones that were being heaped on his own desk in a growing mass. Danielsson didn’t even try to protest. He just took a quick glance at his bookshelf and ascertained that there would surely be room to squeeze in one more binder.

On Wednesday evening the twentieth of December yet another murder occurred in a porn shop on Söder. The next day the tabloids had already made it the fifth in a series in which Eriksson appeared as victim number four. During the past year an unknown perpetrator had knifed three men, all of whom had in common that they worked in various stores that sold sex merchandise, showed porno films, and sometimes went the whole way and broke the law against procurement. This was bad enough in itself, especially as most of the details argued for it being the same perpetrator on all three occasions, but every thinking police officer also realized that the murder of Kjell Eriksson did not belong in that grouping because — simply put — there “was zero in common with the porn murders.”

With one exception no one on the homicide squad even considered linking the lapsing Kjell Eriksson investigation with the porn murder investigation. The exception was Bäckström, who went head-to-head with Danielsson in his office on Thursday morning. Bäckström had discovered that the porn murderer’s third victim (a) was working in a shop that catered to homosexual customers, and (b) was homosexual himself, and for the detective inspector the whole thing was suddenly as plain as the nose on his face.

During the first five minutes Danielsson just sat quietly and glared at Bäckström while the vein on his temple wriggled like a worm just set on a hook. Then he suddenly got up and despite his bad knees leaped over the desk to grab his coworker by the throat, finally put an end to the madness, and get a little needed calm in his own existence. Bäckström managed to dodge him, wriggled out through Danielsson’s door, was transformed into a gazelle, and fled down the corridor of the squad offices while Danielsson was hanging on to the door handle and howling at him as he disappeared into the stairwell of the police station.

“I’m going to kill you, you fat little bastard!” Danielsson roared, and despite the fact that this actually had nothing to do with it, in reality it also put an end to the investigation of the murder of Kjell Eriksson.

Danielsson put yet another binder on his shelf, but considering “all the old shit that was already there” it was basically more of the same. Besides, it would soon be time to take off for the holidays. Personally he would be going away over Christmas and New Year’s, and when he came back he could start counting the days until retirement.