Лейф Перссон - Another Time, Another Life

Maybe she’s another Mary Bell, thought Holt, smiling to herself.

Helena Stein was born in the autumn of 1958 and graduated from the French School in the spring of 1976, not yet eighteen years of age. Then she matriculated at the university in Uppsala, became a member of the organization of students from Stockholm, and studied law. She earned her degree in three years compared to the usual four and a half, and she had the highest grades in all subjects except two. After that she did her internship at the district court in Stockholm, practiced at an upscale law firm on Östermalm, was hired as an assistant attorney at the same firm, and just over five years after her degree she was accepted as a member of the Bar Association. At twenty-seven years old Stein was the youngest attorney that Holt had ever heard of. Having come this far in Stein’s biography, Holt suddenly realized what she was searching for, and it took her only five minutes to find the papers she hoped would be in the files.

This is almost a little ridiculous, thought Holt. It’s so damn easy as soon as you know what you’re looking for.

In her hand she held three papers that she herself had entered into the investigation in the middle of December over ten years before. It was a program from a SACO conference held in Östermalm in Stockholm on the thirtieth of November 1989, the same day Eriksson was murdered. Between ten o’clock and ten-thirty in the morning attorney Helena Stein had given a presentation on a case she had conducted on SACO’s behalf at the Labor Court in Stockholm. According to the conference program her talk was the third item of the day, right before a fifteen-minute break. A list of participants revealed that one of those sitting in the audience listening to her was bureau director and TCO representative Kjell Eriksson.

Holt had read through the same papers herself when she and Jarnebring had had lunch on the day after Eriksson’s murder, and she was the one who had made sure to conduct the fruitless search in the police department’s files of all the participants, presenters, and conference organizers. But because she had not known who she was looking for, Helena Stein had been invisible to her.

What a strange feeling, thought Holt, weighing the papers in her hand. I wonder if my fingerprints are still there after ten years, she thought.

“How’s it going?” asked Mattei, who had suddenly appeared in the door to her office.

“I’ve found her,” said Holt.

“That conference,” said Mattei.

This is not true, thought Holt.

“Yes,” she said. “How did you know that?”

“An idea I had. That’s why I’m here. I thought I’d give you a tip about what you should be looking for. It struck me suddenly when I was running Eriksson’s biography and the log of what he’d been doing on the day of the murder against Helena Stein’s biography. Conference on labor law issues, then-attorney Stein — if you want I can make a copy of the computer hits I got — I got two hits, one on ‘attorney’ and one on ‘labor law.’ It’s pretty interesting software actually. First you enter the documents you want to search in plain text and then you run them against each other.”

“I believe you,” said Holt, smiling. Lisa is unbelievable, she thought.

“You’re the one who found her,” said Mattei, shrugging her shoulders. In this building that’s the only thing that counts, she thought.

“I’m satisfied,” said Holt. So there, she thought, and the person she was thinking about was her top boss, Lars Martin Johansson, who right now was probably settled on the couch in front of his TV dreaming his way back to the good old days when he was a legend who was never contradicted.

“In any event you’ve connected Stein with Eriksson on the day in question,” said Mattei. “I actually had an idea too.”

“I’m listening,” said Holt.

While Mattei sat and waited for Johansson to show up at the Friday afternoon meeting, she had taken the opportunity to read the two interviews with Eriksson’s closest neighbor, Mrs. Westergren. The reason she had chosen them in particular was simply that after quickly thumbing through the otherwise rather thin binder, she judged them to be the most interesting.

“Those interviews with his buddies were really worthless,” Mattei said. “That Bäckström doesn’t seem quite healthy. He’s trying to direct them the whole time, get them to confirm that Eriksson was homosexual. I don’t understand why he didn’t just question himself?”

Mrs. Westergren, in Mattei’s estimation, had made at least one interesting observation, namely that Eriksson had shown signs of increased alcohol intake during the months preceding his death. That was how she had expressed it: “increased alcohol intake.”

“Personally I hardly ever drink,” said Mattei, “but sometimes when I’m really wound up I have a small one when I come home, mostly to get my head to quiet down. I got the idea that Eriksson increased his alcohol intake because he was nervous about something and that this was happening during the autumn — the same autumn he was murdered.”

“Jarnebring and I thought so too,” said Holt. “Yes, that was the colleague I was working with at that time. The problem was that we couldn’t find anything. One idea we had was that it must have involved his business dealings, but they seemed to be going better than ever.”

“That was probably because you weren’t aware of Eriksson’s involvement in the occupation of the West German embassy,” said Mattei.

“No,” said Holt. “I only found that out today.” Typical for this place, she thought.

“What I was thinking,” said Mattei, as if she were working on it out loud, “is that if I had been involved in that incident, I would probably have been going out of my mind in the autumn of 1989.”

“What do you mean?” asked Holt. “Fourteen years later? Why then? Shouldn’t you have been used to the idea that you would get off?”

“East Germany,” said Mattei emphatically. “East Germany collapsed in November 1989. The Stasi, their secret police, collapsed. The Stasi’s archives were suddenly everyone’s property. Hordes of people like our esteemed boss Johansson poured in from the Western powers and started rooting through their papers. What I mean is simply that if I had been involved with West German terrorists in the mid-seventies, wouldn’t there be a high probability that my name was somewhere in the Stasi’s files? The Stasi and the Red Army Faction and the Baader-Meinhof gang and all the rest were buddies. They helped each other, it has been shown. It’s clear that the Stasi knew who the terrorists were.”

“It’s as plain as the nose on your face,” said Holt. “And if my name was Eriksson, Welander, Tischler, or Stein I would have been really nervous.” Not least if my name was Stein and someone like Eriksson knew something about me that he could exploit, thought Holt. And now you can shove it, old man, she thought, rerunning the conversation she’d had with her boss, the legendary Johansson, only a few hours before.

“That is a possible motive,” said Mattei thoughtfully. “A little speculative, perhaps, but completely possible. They needn’t have been in the Stasi archives — it would have been enough for them to believe that they might be there. For them to be nervous, I mean.”

“But they were there,” said Holt. “Both Johansson and Wiklander have confirmed that.”

“Of course,” Mattei objected, “but they didn’t need to know that for certain. If they simply believed it they would start getting worried.” Anna seems mainly practically oriented, she thought.

“How’s it going, gals?” Martinez asked, after suddenly materializing in the door to Holt’s office. “Now there are three of us, so it’s a girl party. All the boys have gone home to knock back a few beers and stare at the TV.”