Leif Persson - He Who Kills the Dragon

She’ll turn out to be pretty good, Annika Carlsson had thought the first time she met her.

‘You know how to get to Ekensbergsgatan, Felicia?’ Annika asked, once she had settled into the passenger seat and fastened her seat belt.

‘Yes, boss,’ Felicia Pettersson said, nodding.

‘I don’t suppose you happen to speak Polish as well?’ Annika asked.

‘Yes, boss. Of course. Fluently. I thought everyone could?’ Felicia said with a smile.

‘Anything else I should know about?’ Annika Carlsson asked. She’s sharp too, she thought.

‘My friends usually call me Lisa,’ Felicia said. ‘You can too, if you like.’

‘They usually call me the Anchor,’ Annika Carlsson said.

‘Do you like being called that?’ Lisa said, glancing at her in surprise.

‘Not really,’ Annika Carlsson said, shaking her head. ‘I mean, what have I got to do with an anchor?’

‘Not sure,’ Lisa Pettersson said, and giggled. ‘But I think you’re pretty cool. And I mean that.’

Annika Carlsson and Felicia Pettersson were in luck. It may have been only nine o’clock in the morning, but Jerzty and the others were already eating lunch. They had got up before it was light, had breakfast at four, and had started work at half past. By nine o’clock it was high time for lunch if they were going to have the energy to keep working until the evening.

‘Sorry to disturb you in your breakfast,’ Annika Carlsson said in English, smiling and showing her police ID. ‘My name is Detective Inspector Annika Carlsson, and this is my colleague, Detective Constable Felicia Pettersson. By the way, does any one of you speak Swedish? Or understand Swedish?’

‘I speak a bit of Swedish,’ Jerzty said, as three of his workmates shook their heads and one nodded hesitantly. ‘I can interpret, if you like.’

‘We’d just like to ask a few questions,’ Annika went on. ‘Is it okay if we sit down?’

‘Sure,’ Jerzty said, quickly getting up. He removed a toolbox from a spare chair that was already standing beside their homemade table while one of his colleagues went to fetch a stool and offered his own chair to Detective Constable Pettersson.

Two beautiful young women. Who also happened to be Swedish police officers, even though one of them looked like she came from the West Indies. Friendly, cheerful, easy on the eyes, and well worth fantasizing about as you hammered in yet another nail. They would stay for an hour. But what did that matter? Eighty kronor was only eighty kronor, and they missed other things much more than work.

Had they noticed anything during Wednesday evening or early Thursday morning?

They had worked until eight o’clock that evening. Then they had stopped because the neighbors usually complained if they carried on after that. Then they had eaten. Chatted, played cards, went to bed at ten or so. None of them had left the building throughout that time, since it had been raining all evening.

What about during the night, then? Did any of them see or hear anything?

They had been asleep. None of them had any trouble sleeping. None of them had seen or heard anything. They had been lying asleep in their beds. One of them had got up briefly to go to the toilet. That was all.

‘Leszek, he’s a plasterer,’ Jerzty clarified, nodding toward the man who had emptied his bladder. ‘The toilet faces the street, it’s got a window,’ he added, preempting Annika Carlsson’s next question.

‘Ask him if he knows what time it was.’

‘He doesn’t know,’ Jerzty said after a few quick sentences in Polish and a shake of the head in answer to her question. ‘He didn’t look at the time. He had taken his watch off and put it beside his bed.’

‘Was it still raining?’ Annika Carlsson asked, having already read the report they had received from the meteorological office. Rain getting lighter though Wednesday evening, stopping half an hour after midnight on Thursday, May 15.

‘Not much,’ Jerzty summarized after a short exchange in Polish. ‘It was dark as well. As dark as it gets. When we woke up, the weather was beautiful. That was at four o’clock in the morning.’

About midnight, Annika Carlsson thought.

‘Ask him if he saw or heard anything. People, cars, any sort of noise. Or if he didn’t see or hear anything. As you can understand, absolutely everything is of interest to us.’

More Polish. Hesitant shakes of the head. Smiles from both Jerzty and Leszek. Then the latter had nodded firmly, said something more in Polish, and shrugged.

‘I’m listening,’ Annika Carlsson said. Watch yourself, Anchor, she thought. You’re starting to sound like Bäckström, and you don’t do that if you’re pretty cool.

‘He saw a cat,’ Jerzty said, smiling happily.

A little ginger cat. They often saw it and presumed that it lived somewhere nearby, even though it didn’t have a collar. They’d even given it some milk once.

But no people, no cars, no human sounds. It was dark, it was quiet, it was drizzling. No television or radio on anywhere, no lights in any windows. Not even a dog barking. A solitary ginger cat that had strolled past outside. That was all.

Detective Inspector Lars Alm, sixty, had worked in the crime unit of the Solna Police for about ten years. During the years before he arrived there he had first worked in the old violent crime section in police headquarters on Kungsholmen in Stockholm, and then had moved on to the investigative unit covering the city center itself. Then he had moved out to Solna. He had got divorced and remarried, and he and his new wife, a nurse at the Karolinska Institute, had a nice apartment in the center of Solna. Alm could walk to work in two minutes, so it didn’t matter to him if it was snowing or raining cats and dogs.

That was one good reason to move to the Solna force, but there were several others. Alm was burned-out. His years in violent crime in Stockholm had taken their toll. Solna ought to be a bit better, he had reasoned. He could finally escape the waves rippling out from the weekend’s nightlife that would wash over his desk every Monday without fail. But his hopes had been dashed on that score. Ideally he would have liked to take early retirement, but after looking at the numbers he had decided to try to hold out until he was sixty-five. A nurse didn’t earn much, and neither of them wanted to starve when they got old.

He had tried to organize things as best he could. He had avoided the violent crime unit, the surveillance unit, drugs, and robbery. He had taken over the simpler things like petty crime, crimes that affected ordinary people, break-ins to homes and vehicles, the less serious cases of abuse, fights, criminal damage. Personally, he thought he had succeeded pretty well, and he used to keep an eye on the number of cases expected of him. Tried to slot himself somewhere into the average range for people like him.

On Monday, May 12, a tornado had swept through the Western District. Two as yet unknown individuals had robbed a security van out at Bromma Airport. They had shot and killed one of the guards and came close to killing his partner. Aggravated theft, murder, and attempted murder. Just a few hours later the minister for justice had appeared on every television news program. Their new boss, police chief Anna Holt, had no cause for complacency. One month into the job and this happens.

He had survived the first wave. Even though the head of the crime unit, Superintendent Toivonen, had moved a lot of officers in from other departments and responsibilities, he had spared Alm. But on Thursday morning Alm had been dragged in as well. Toivonen had stormed into his office and explained that it was all hands on deck.