Jens Lapidus - Never Fuck Up

Furthermore: they’d looked up the auditors in a couple of the companies. Hägerström’d talked to them. In some cases, he’d done regular interrogations, according to the rules. Or as close to the rules as you could get in an investigation that was being carried out completely outside the rules. The most important part: he got them sufficiently scared. They didn’t want to be involved in any illegalities, blamed everything on the bookkeepers. And the bookkeepers—the companies all used the same accounting firm—had gone bankrupt. The two owners, who were also the only employees, lived in Spain. Maybe Thomas and Hägerström would be able to find them—further down the line.

More: the apartment on Tegnérgatan was empty. Ballénius was really lying low. Thomas dug up two acquaintances of Ballénius and Rantzell’s, from recent years. They said they didn’t have a clue. They were probably lying too—but no one really seemed to know too much about Rantzell’s last months alive.

The day after the fiasco at Solvalla, Thomas and Hägerström went to see Ballénius’s daughter, Kristina Swegfors-Ballénius, in Huddinge. She was younger than Thomas’d imagined when they’d spoken on the phone. Kicki knew right away that they were cops. Thomas thought, How come people always know?

“Are you the one who called me this summer?” she asked before they’d even introduced themselves.

They pressured her like crazy—ran over her whole story with a fine-toothed comb. She worked off the books as a waitress at a restaurant in the city. Still, she reacted just like the two old front men. Thomas told her how it was. “We’re going to make sure you lose your job and are reported to the tax authorities if you don’t tell us how we can get ahold of your father.” But she held firm to the same story the whole time: “I don’t know where he is; it’s been a long time since I heard from him.”

They gave her a day to get back to them with instructions on how to find him.

They could look up places where the companies’d had their business. Check if there were people there who knew Ballénius. They ought to talk to the banks, check if there was a specific bank office that usually made payments to him. Maybe look up the customers—see if anyone’d ever met the people who supposedly ran the company they were doing business with. There was a lot left to do and it would take time. Thomas couldn’t drop the thought: on New Year’s Eve, that Bolinder character was going to have a party that Ratko and the other Yugos were helping to organize. He must be able to make use of that somehow. There must be some way.

Hägerström was chugging beer and chewing chocolate. Dropping lame jokes that Thomas grinned at. Even if the guy was a quisling, he was pretty fun, after all. Sharp, a good investigator. He was sitting bent over a pile of paperwork when he suddenly looked up.

“I don’t think Kicki will get back to us.”

“Why?” Thomas asked.

“I could just see it in her face. My unfailing instinct.”

“What do you mean, unfailing instinct? I didn’t think cops had anything like that.”

“Maybe you’re right. But I let a colleague get ears on Kicki Swegfors-Ballénius’s cell phone. We’ve been tapping it since our little visit yesterday. She called him.”

“You’re kidding? So we’ve got a number.”

“We’ve got a number, but he killed it right after that call. It doesn’t exist anymore. And she told him that someone was looking for him and that he shouldn’t call her for a while. She’s protecting him.”

Thomas felt angry, at the same time, mystified—why hadn’t Hägerström told him earlier? “That’s fucked up,” he said. “What a cunt.”

“You can put it that way. Basically, I don’t think the Kicki trail is going to lead anywhere. That’s why I didn’t say anything at first. But I have another idea.”

Thomas leaned forward from the couch.

“I’ve looked up the addresses that Ballénius has had over the years. There’s a pattern with those P.O. boxes. For all the companies that are still alive, he still uses or recently used a P.O. box in Hallunda.”

“And?”

“And that means that address is probably still in use. Which is to say, that he still uses it to pick up mail.”

“Let’s go there right now.”

They reached Hallunda an hour later. Thomas’d driven carefully. He was thinking about all the chaos in the city. A huge snowstorm was blowing in over Stockholm like a premonition: the citizens needed to be protected in the face of a catastrophe. Soon a new year would begin—with plenty of white snow, for once. Without there being time for it to be soiled and turn the usual color of snow in Stockholm: grayish-brown, full of gravel, dirt, and the inhabitants’ melted expectations.

Welcome to the Hallunda Mall . They’d created a logo for the mall that appeared on every sign: a red H followed by a period. Thomas thought about the way it’d been when he was growing up—early eighties, before the age of the malls—he and his buddies used to travel in to Södermalm and wander all the way downtown, to Sergels Torg, by cruising between shops. Records, clothes, stereo equipment, comics, and porn magazines. Maybe he saw a connection: that was the time before the malls and before the scum from the projects took over the city.

The P.O. box company didn’t have any windows facing out toward the actual mall. Instead, you entered through an anonymous glass door. They looked up the company’s name on a board, took an elevator up, above all the stores. It said, P.O. BOX CENTER in the same colors as the letters of the Hallunda Mall signs. The tagline was: Do you need a P.O. box? Are you new in town and haven’t been able to secure a permanent residence? What bullshit—everyone knew what type of people used P.O. boxes like this.

A door. A doorbell. A surveillance camera.

Thomas rang the doorbell.

“P.O. Box Center, how may I help you?”

“Hi, this is the police. May we come in?”

The voice on the other end fell silent. The speaker crackled like it was trying to speak on its own. A few too many seconds passed. Then the lock clicked. Thomas and Hägerström stepped inside.

The space: max 320 square feet. The walls: lined with two different sizes of metal-colored mailboxes with Assa Abloy keyholes. Along one short end: a small built-in booth covered with a sheet of Plexiglas. In the booth was an overweight man with a downy mustache.

Thomas walked up to him, flashed his badge. The guy looked scared out of his mind. He was probably trying frenetically to remember the instructions he’d been given in case a cop stopped by for a visit.

“Would you mind stepping out from behind there?”

The guy spoke in broken Swedish: “Do I have to?”

“You don’t have to, but I guess then we’ll have to drag you out.”

Thomas tried to smile—but he could sense that it wasn’t a very pleasant smile.

The guy disappeared for a few seconds. A door opened next to the booth.

“What do you want?”

“We want you to get in touch with one of your customers and tell him that he has to come here.”

The guy thought it over. “Is this a search?”

“You’d better fucking believe it, buddy. We have every right to get information about your customers. You know that. And if you don’t know that, I’ll make sure that every single box in here is broken into at your expense, and you’ll have to take full responsibility for the damage. Just so you know.”

The P.O. box guy started going through a binder with customer contracts. After a few minutes, he seemed to find Ballénius’s contract.