Лейф Перссон - Another Time, Another Life

“And that’s all we have,” Johansson summarized.

“Yup,” said Holt, “and unfortunately it’s not very likely we’ve missed anything either. Not this time,” she added, smiling faintly.

“Okay then,” said Johansson, who sounded unexpectedly cheerful. “Now I want all of you to close your eyes...”

The four in the room exchanged surprised glances but did as he said, even if Martinez looked like she was trying to peek.

“Everyone who is completely convinced that Helena Stein stabbed Kjell Göran Eriksson to death, raise your hand,” said Johansson. After a pause of a few seconds he said, “You can open your eyes now.”

There were five raised hands including his own, and a unified investigation.

“Please put down your hands,” said Johansson, smiling. “The day before yesterday I took the opportunity to go through the tech report and the autopsy report, as well as a few other goodies that Anna alerted me to,” said Johansson, nodding at Holt, “so I’m pretty clear now on how the whole thing went down. If any of you are interested, I can tell you about it,” said Johansson.

“I am,” said Holt before any of the others managed to say the same thing. We’re already sitting on pins and needles, she thought. You don’t need to show off.

“Okay then,” said Johansson. “Then I’ll tell you what happened when Helena Stein stabbed Kjell Göran Eriksson to death.”

And he did, with the help of his pictures, in the same way as he had when he talked through the case with his best friend, Bo Jarnebring. It took about half an hour, and whether what he said was true or false — for some of it he couldn’t have known without having been there, and in any case he couldn’t have known what was going on in the heads of Stein or Eriksson — regardless of that he had mesmerized his audience. When he was finally silent they too sat silently.

Now I understand what Jarnebring and everyone else here was talking about, thought Holt, who had finally experienced the true Lars Martin Johansson. Although naturally she didn’t say that.

“I’m in complete agreement,” said Holt. “That must have been what happened.” At least in the essentials, she thought.

“And that woman is going to get off... It’s just too much,” said Martinez with poorly controlled anger and her police instincts still intact.

“Yes,” said Wiklander with a heat he seldom showed and the ambivalence that naturally ensues when reality is no longer black or white. “This is an extraordinarily gloomy story.”

“It’s probably the sorriest story I’ve heard,” said Mattei, who looked like she might start crying.

And for some reason it was to her that Johansson turned when he began to speak again.

“Yes, of course it is,” said Johansson. “Sometimes it’s a real shame about us humans. And this time it’s a real shame about Helena Stein. Speaking of her,” Johansson continued, smiling at Mattei, “I understand that you, Lisa, have produced quite a bit about Stein. It would be interesting if you’d give us a summary.” But not a novel, thought Johansson, for he tried to avoid that sort of thing.

“I could write a whole novel about Helena Stein actually, but for now I’ll concentrate on two moments in her life: the mid-seventies when the occupation of the West German embassy took place, and the late eighties, when Kjell Göran Eriksson was murdered.”

Sounds good, thought Johansson, but be very careful not to put it in book form and publish it or I will personally see to it that you end up in the slammer.

“Looks like you’ve uncovered a lot of information about her,” said Johansson.

“There’s plenty if you know where to look,” said Mattei, who had a hard time concealing her enthusiasm. “Not least on her political involvement, despite the fact that she seems to have made an effort to keep a low public profile the whole time. For example, I have hundreds of pictures of her published in various books and newspapers, which I’ve gathered from open sources. The first one is a book cover that came out in 1975, but the book isn’t at all about her. She’s not even mentioned by name, which in itself isn’t so strange considering her age. The book is called The New Left and was published in 1975 by Fischer & Co., and there’s Helena Stein on the cover. It’s a news photo the publisher used from a demonstration outside the American embassy in 1973, and Stein is only fifteen years old at the time. She’s standing in front of the barricades waving a placard, dressed in jeans and one of those padded jackets girls wore back then. The last photo I have is the official portrait taken of her when she was appointed undersecretary a few years ago. There she’s dressed in a graphite-colored dress with a dark blue blouse and black pumps. She is extremely attractive. So there are twenty-five years between the first and the last picture, and it gets really amazing when you look at all the pictures of her in chronological order — I’ve put them on a separate CD-ROM in case you want to do that yourselves,” said Mattei with enthusiasm blossoming on her pale cheeks.

“Do you have any more like that?” said Johansson, who himself was passionate about this kind of research. During his most active period as a police officer he used to devote hours to going through photo albums, home videos, and diaries he’d acquired from both crime victims and thugs.

“I have a whole CD filled with film clips of her too. There are news reports and interviews that I downloaded from our various TV channels. Then I have a third disk with the written material and my summary of her biography.”

The weekend is saved, thought Johansson, who was already mentally rubbing his hands.

“The mid-seventies and late eighties,” he reminded her. “What were things like for her then?”

In the fall of 1975 Helena Stein turned seventeen. Just over six months later she would graduate from the French School, which was one year earlier than normal because when she was little she had been an unusually precocious child and had started school a year before her classmates. But as a teenager she seemed completely normal and displayed a sampling of the usual problems of puberty and conflicts with her parents and teachers.

Her father was a pediatrician with his own private practice; her mother was an art historian and worked for the Nordic Museum. Helena had grown up in Östermalm and the French School was the only school she attended. She was an only child, and when she was seven her parents divorced and had other children with their new partners. Gradually she acquired four half siblings. At the time of the divorce Helena chose to remain at home with her father.

In the fall of 1974 her father was appointed as an expert at UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund. He temporarily turned his practice over to a colleague, took his new wife and Helena’s two younger half-siblings and moved to New York where they remained for over a year. Helena remained at home in the apartment on Riddargatan, and the contact she had with her mother seemed not to have intensified as a result of her father’s absence. Helena seems to have taken care of herself.

That same autumn she started a relationship with her cousin Theo Tischler’s best friend, Sten Welander. Helena had just turned sixteen; Welander was twenty-seven, the father of two and still married to his first wife. When he finally divorced her in the fall of 1975, he had also broken up with Helena Stein.

Helena Stein seemed to have devoted most of her time during these years to political activism, which led to recurring conflicts with her mother and some of her teachers.

As a young radical Helena initially hopped among various minor leftwing groups until she finally settled on the Swedish Communist Party. Helena Stein was a young Communist and no one in her bourgeois milieu was particularly happy about that, but it was hoped that this phase would soon pass, and that by and by it would be seen as a youthful aberration in the spirit of the time.