Jens Lapidus - Never Fuck Up

She smiled. Nodded. Continued to flip through the folder—uninterested in Thomas again. Almost as though she was trying to say, I agree with you, now leave.

“I don’t want to ruin that moment,” Thomas said. “And I don’t want to jeopardize it either. So we have to make certain changes. Together.”

Åsa’s smile faded.

“I am in the middle of a bad situation right now. A dangerous situation. It’s an investigation I’m involved with. Do you remember that Internal Affairs guy I was complaining about before?”

Åsa looked uncomprehending.

Thomas felt himself twist uncomfortably. “He and I are mixed up in something that I can’t handle, and the National Police can’t either. There are people who are out to get me on a personal level. Who have threatened to hurt me and who have already attacked me.”

“Why haven’t you said anything?”

“I didn’t want to worry you. Not now when Sander is coming and everything. But it’s gone too far now. And I can’t stop. I have to keep going, get to the bottom of this thing. There is no one else who can take over.”

“Can’t we get some sort of protection?”

“We can’t get enough protection. This is the price you have to pay as a police officer. I am so damn sorry. If it’d just been about me it would’ve been okay, but now it involves you, too. It might involve Sander too, when he gets here.”

“But there’s got to be some protection we can get. There’s got to be help for police officers involved in dangerous investigations. Right?”

“I’m sure that exists, but it won’t help now.”

“But it’s Christmastime!”

“That’s never mattered less.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I said. The police can’t help us now. Christmas won’t stop anyone. No one can stop what I’m involved in.”

She sat in silence. Thomas waited for her to say something. Instead, she flipped through the folder.

“You can stay with Jan for a few weeks, until this is all over,” he said. “And if it isn’t over in two months, then we can’t bring Sander here. That would be too dangerous.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Åsa, I’m just as upset about this as you are. But there is no other solution.”

The industrial area by Liljeholmen. Hägerström’s car was parked facing the water. Thomas’s car was parked next to him, but facing in the opposite direction. It was already dark out. Hägerström rolled down his window first.

“So, how was Christmas Eve?”

“We were at my brother’s place. They have a huge family. Tons of kids everywhere, dogs, cats, even a hamster. It was the first time I celebrated Christmas with him in more than fifteen years. How about you?”

“I was at my parents’ place, then I went to Half Way Inn. You been there?”

“Once or twice. It’s near the police station in Södermalm, right? The one that’s next door to that gay place?”

“That’s right. My haunt. Not the gay place, that is.”

“Maybe I should’ve come?”

“You’re welcome next year.”

“Next year I’ll have my own family. Hopefully no hamster, though.”

Hägerström looked unhappy.

“How long do we have to meet up like this?” he said. “We’d work better if we had some proper place to be.”

Thomas nodded. “I’ve sent Åsa away now. So I feel better, safer.”

“Damn, how’d it go?”

“Felt like shit. But I think she understood. We can meet up at my house later.”

“Good.”

Thomas turned up the heat even more. There was half an inch of snow on the hood of the car.

“So, what do we have to discuss today?”

Hägerström leaned out through the open window. “I actually have a whole lot to tell you. I was at work today and heard some talk in the hallway. They’ve arrested someone for the murder of Rantzell.”

Thomas felt himself stop breathing for a few seconds.

“His name is Niklas Brogren, the one I brought in for informational questioning a few months ago. The guy had a good alibi then. But it’s starting to fall apart. He said he’d been at a friend’s house the entire night of the murder, until late. The friend’s been in for questioning and confirms that Brogren was there, but the investigator is skeptical about his testimony. Apparently, the guy seems disjointed and stressed out. But the most important part is that the mother has started talking. She says that Niklas Brogren came home pretty early that night and that he was drunk and in a bad mood. You know how it is with alibis, either you have one or else you’re really deep in the shit ’cause you tried to lie.”

“Hm.”

“You sound skeptical.”

“That Niklas guy doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re looking at.”

“No, but his mom had a long-term relationship with Rantzell at the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties. So there are some connections and possible motives.”

“So, what’s the motive?”

“Rantzell apparently beat the mother.”

“How do they know that?”

“I guess the investigators ordered old medical records and stuff like that, I know I would’ve. They say she had to go to the hospital several times, sometimes with fractures.”

“Damn.”

“You can say that again.”

Thomas sighed. “Maybe I’m too set on our lead, but I don’t know. It just sounds too easy, that the son of an old battered woman is out for revenge. Like some pathetic crime thriller. The past visits the present, all that crap. But that’s never the way things are in reality.”

“I’ve got the same gut feeling. But what the hell. There’s a lot pointing at this Niklas Brogren. Except the forensic lab hasn’t found any matches.”

Thomas took a deep breath. “I don’t think we should end our project.”

“Absolutely not. But what does it give us? Adamsson died, but there’s nothing pointing to anything shady about it. Wisam Jibril died and we can’t get any further there. We haven’t gotten hold of Ballénius. What do we have, exactly? You’ve got a bunch of documents at home that we haven’t been able to get anything substantial from. You’ve tricked and forced answers out of a few old cops that suggest they’re right-wing extremists. So? It doesn’t lead anywhere.”

“Stop it, Martin. We have a lot. But so far, nothing that points to the actual murderer. But soon we’ll have gone through all the documents from Rantzell’s basement—I never would’ve been able to do it without you—and there are lots of weird things there. Lots of names of people to interrogate, companies to take a closer look at, payment streams to follow.”

It was true. Thomas and Hägerström’d divided the document piles between them. Thomas’d already gone through a bunch of it, but there was still too much he didn’t understand. They had to do it together. Hägerström knew numbers and finance stuff—explained as well as he could, but it wasn’t enough. The sheer amount of information almost felt overwhelming. All the numbers, addresses, names. They worked methodically. Thomas sorted and structured the material, Hägerström analyzed it. They were using a point system of their own divising. Graded the level of suspicion for the information they were investigating. Made lists of people, telephone numbers, company names. Created an order of priority: everything that pointed to a connection between Rantzell and Bolinder’s company, everything that pointed to a connection between Skogsbacken AB and something illegal.

So far, no traces led to Adamsson. But there was still so much they hadn’t gone through.

“It’s going to take us several months. Maybe years,” Hägerström said. “You can’t have Åsa living somewhere else for that long, and if they find out that I’m involved, I’ll have to look around for another job pretty quick. That won’t work. We need a breakthrough soon or else we’ll have to drop it and let the prosecutor nail that Brogren guy. Anyway, if you ask me, it doesn’t seem improbable that he did it.”