Europa Blues

13

KERSTIN HOLM STARED at the short-haired man and tried to look stern. It wasn’t easy, considering it was eight o’clock on Sunday morning and she was suffering the after-effects of the previous night’s blowout with some of the others from the choir and the orchestra – a night which had lived up to the Mozart family’s party traditions. It had also been just five minutes since she was given a brief overview of the case. As she sat there, trying to look stern, she was also trying to bring together a lot of vague threads. It was a considerable balancing act, not least because she also felt awful.

‘I know you’re not really prepared,’ Hultin had said, having phoned and woken her to a splitting headache only forty-five minutes earlier; she wasn’t sure she would make it through the day without being sick, much less whether she could carry out a proper cross-interrogation of a suspect who was, per definition, reluctant.

‘But,’ Hultin had continued, ‘you’re our best interrogator. And Paul will be there, too.’

As though that was any consolation. Hjelm, sitting next to her, seemed to be in even worse shape than she was. Beyond all hope. She quickly read the papers in front of her and tried to look like she was ultra-competent.

She looked at the man sitting opposite her in the sterile interrogation room and tried to imagine him as a meticulous, sophisticated killer. It was hard work. He looked more like a petrified little brat. Though, she thought, hardening her heart, he was a skinhead.

‘Right then, Andreas Rasmusson,’ she said, fixing her gaze on him. ‘According to our preliminary report, you were wandering about Central Station “like a ghost” last night. And this morning, you’ve been identified by a family that was out laying flowers on their grandmother’s grave in Skogskyrkogården at half past eight yesterday evening. You were seen running away from the Jewish cemetery, where ten or so gravestones had been damaged. We’ve lifted your fingerprints from a broken bottle of schnapps found at the scene. You’re eighteen years old and you don’t have any priors, so you should just tell us what you saw right now. If you do that, maybe you can keep it that way.’

Paul Hjelm glanced at Kerstin Holm. He didn’t feel well. She, on the other hand, seemed completely unaffected by the difficult circumstances and the ungodly hour and the previous day’s activities. How could she be so unaffected?

Kerstin Holm felt like she was about to throw up. She stood up and said, with a harsh but somewhat stifled voice: ‘Think about what I just said for a few minutes.’

And with that, she was gone.

Aha, Hjelm thought. New interrogation technique. Nice.

He glanced at Andreas Rasmusson. In a couple of years, he would probably have left the skinhead life behind him and become an ordinary member of society. He would distance himself from his earlier life but never quite leave the ideas behind. He would say one thing and think another. That was an explosive kind of existence. Sooner or later, it would all blow up in his face.

For a moment, Paul Hjelm thought about the State of Affairs. The Swedish State of Affairs. He wasn’t quite sure he understood it. The market was king, that much was clear. Share worth had replaced human worth. And it wasn’t so much a question of what that meant for the present day, since that was quite obvious: economic redistribution from the poor to the rich. It was money that earned money now, not work, and that money had to have originally come from somewhere.

Talk of ordinary people being free to buy shares was a weak alibi for being able to get on with the real business: in order for money to make money, it needed to be big money. But, of course, ordinary people didn’t have big money. It was that simple. Ordinary people could earn thousands on the market, but it didn’t mean a thing – except for in the public’s view of the market. It was simply a matter of marketing. Playing the markets was just like playing Bingolotto. If you were lucky, you could earn a bit of money, and there was no problem at all with that. The marketing had succeeded. Virtually free of charge.

No, the question was what it meant in the long term. How would this unprecedented, general obsession with money change people?

Paul thought he knew. A fundamental change was under way. He had come across it so often at work. All forms of democracy and humanity were built on the ability to change places with the person you were talking to. That was all. Actually being able to see yourself in the other person’s shoes, to take on their collective experiences. Only when that occurred did you have two human beings really facing one another. And what he had seen over the past few years was that this basic, simple ability was starting to vanish. A screen of some kind had appeared between people, and they had started regarding one another as objects. Investment objects. What kind of return will my conversation with this person bring me?

There was no world outside of economics. And without that free zone, the coast was clear to treat people however you wanted. The number of people without a conscience was growing and growing. That was what Hjelm thought he had noticed, anyway.

Though on the other hand, there were lots of things he thought he had noticed.

Kerstin Holm was staring at him from above.

‘Knock knock,’ she said. ‘Anyone in?’

‘Humans aren’t the masters in their own house,’ Hjelm said, pulling himself together.

Her gaze lingered for a few seconds before she turned to the eighteen-year-old skinhead and said: ‘So, Andreas, what’ve you decided?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Andreas Rasmusson said, his face pallid.

Pallid, Hjelm thought. Where did these strange words come from?

‘OK,’ Kerstin said, straightening her papers. ‘We’ll go to the prosecutor and have you put in remand, then. It’ll be court after that, years in prison with all those ruthless immigrant gangs – you can look forward to life as an old jailbird.’

She left the interrogation room, taking the papers with her.

Paul stared at the door for a moment. Then he got up and followed her out. He went into the room behind the two-way mirror and saw Andreas Rasmusson blinking confusedly where he sat. He had expected to find Kerstin there, but she was conspicuous in her absence. He stood there for a while, watching the skinhead. Like vague outlines in a sea of fire, the old man’s upside-down figure came back to him. The grey strands of hair hanging down towards the broken gravestone.

He really didn’t feel well.

Kerstin came in and stood next to him. She smelled… awful. He turned round in surprise.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Have you been sick?’

‘Why else do you think I’ve been running in and out like an idiot all morning?’ she asked, her eyes on the mirror. ‘I had actually been planning on having the day off today. You don’t smell so great either,’ she added, turning towards him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Probably not.’

‘Did he react?’ she asked.

‘He just looks terrified.’

‘New try?’

‘I think so.’

They returned. Andreas Rasmusson looked up at them without any noticeable reaction.

‘Your retorts are normally more caustic,’ Kerstin Holm said. ‘According to your file, you’ve been called in for interrogation fourteen times and you’ve always put up some kind of a fight. Why are you so quiet today? Is it because it’s Sunday? The Christian Sabbath?’

He looked at her without really seeing her.

Paul Hjelm said: ‘According to the police in Central Station, you were practically mad with fear when they brought you in. What did you see?’

‘I want a lawyer,’ said Andreas Rasmusson.

Sunday 7 May was a peculiar day. Something that might have been called passive chaos was reigning in the corridors of the A-Unit. On the one hand, they had plenty of leads to be chasing up, from plenty of different directions; on the other hand, they had nothing concrete to grab hold of. It was Sunday, after all. The Christian Sabbath.

Waldemar Mörner, division head for the National Police Board and official boss of CID’s Special Unit for Violent Crimes of an International Nature, had lost the plot. Since this was part of everyday life rather than some special weekend event, he had been running around the department without anyone taking the slightest bit of notice of him. He opened the door to Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin’s office and pointed at the clock.

‘Press conference in fifteen, J-O. Top banana.’

And with that, he closed the door again.

Jorge Chavez and Sara Svenhagen, who had just been brought up to date on the case after having been unreachable all morning, paused at his expression. Top banana? What wisdom lay behind those particular words?

With a slight grimace, Hultin said: ‘He was actually a candidate for the Nobel Prize.’

Two seconds later, the door flew open and Mörner’s thick, blond hair – which everyone assumed to be a toupee – entered the room again. Thoroughly flustered, its owner snorted: ‘He was actually a candidate for the Nobel Prize.’

Sara and Jorge stared at Hultin, who simply shrugged.

Waldemar Mörner continued on his way down the corridor. There wasn’t much time now. He opened yet another door and peered in at two stout middle-aged men, throwing balls of crumpled paper into a waste-paper basket.

‘What’re you doing here?’ he exclaimed in confusion.

‘This is our room,’ Gunnar Nyberg replied.

‘We’ve been called in on a Sunday,’ said Viggo Norlander.

And so they had. The entire A-Unit had been called in. Once there, however, there was little for them to do. It wouldn’t have been unjust to call the decision to bring them in – one which had been made by Waldemar Mörner – hasty.

‘Where’s Holm?’ he bawled, the collective wonder of the universe behind him.

‘Wouldn’t be unheard of,’ said Nyberg, ‘for her to be in her room.’

‘And not in ours,’ Norlander finished.

Mörner rushed off down the corridor with his eyes on his brand-new, albeit very fake, Rolex. It was thirteen minutes to one. The world’s press was waiting. Very soon, he would have to walk out in front of them and disclose information about the Nobel Prize candidate in six different languages.

No, there was something wrong there somewhere.

He tore open another door with excessive force. Still not the right room. It was the door to the women’s toilets.

He was just about to plough his way through the rest of the police station when he suddenly realised Kerstin Holm was staring up at him from the sink where she had been splashing water onto her pale-looking face.

‘What’re you doing here?’ he shouted.

‘Shouldn’t I be the one asking that?’ she asked, gargling.

‘You’re actually just the person I’ve been looking for,’ he said in confusion.

‘And…?’ she said slowly, drying her face with a hand towel which looked like it had seen better days.

‘I need you,’ Mörner said, sounding like an impassioned lover from beneath a balcony.

Kerstin Holm put the towel to one side, pulled a face and stared at him sceptically.

‘The press conference,’ he explained, pointing at his fake Rolex. ‘We’re in a bit of a hurry. Twelve minutes. No, eleven.’

‘You need a female hostage,’ she said in an icy tone.

‘Exactly,’ said Mörner, not registering even the slightest shift in temperature.

‘I’m ill,’ Kerstin Holm said, still drying her face. ‘Try Sara.’

‘But she’s the baby.’

‘Even better.’

Waldemar Mörner stood there in the women’s toilets, thinking it over for a few seconds.

And so it came to pass that Sara Svenhagen, without having been brought fully up to date on the case and fresh from a session in the swimming pool, found herself standing behind a podium next to Waldemar Mörner and Jan-Olov Hultin, an enormous bouquet of saliva-drenched microphones in her face. She stared at the television cameras and felt her chlorine-soaked hair stand on end.

Paul Hjelm was in his office, making notes in the form of a system of coordinates, when she and her greenish hair appeared on the TV screen.

‘Green?’ he said.

‘Chlorine,’ Kerstin Holm, sitting next to him, replied. ‘They swim a kilometre every Sunday. After a while, blonde hair goes green.’

‘A kilometre? Jorge?’

‘Twenty lengths. Quiet.’

Waldemar Mörner cleared his throat. That always boded well. Language lovers were in for a real treat.

‘Distinguished members of the press corps and other honoured guests,’ Mörner began. ‘Since we realise that rather considerable demands will be made for official transparency in connection to the recent racial killing of a well-known Swedish scientist, active in the cerebral branch, we have decided to anticipate your utterly just demands and enter into a state of openness now, for we live in an open society and the resources of the police force are finite; with that said, we now await your finely honed questions regarding Professor Emeritus Leonard Sheinkman.’

The members of the press looked expectantly at one another, hoping that someone else had understood. Eventually, a brave youngster said: ‘Who was he?’

Waldemar Mörner blinked forcefully and exclaimed: ‘He was actually a candidate for a Nobel Prize.’

The picture vanished. Paul looked indignantly up at Kerstin.

‘Now’s not exactly the time to be revelling in Mörner’s howlers,’ she said, putting the remote control down on the desk.

He would just have to agree with her. He saw a series of numbers looping around a wrist and felt a distinct sensation of unease.

‘OK,’ he said, pointing to the piece of paper on which he had drawn a system of coordinates that looked like a big plus sign. ‘Four squares, four incidents. The horizontal line is a dividing one. “Skansen” and “Skogskyrkogården” above it, “Slagsta” and “Odenplan metro station” beneath. Do we have anything concrete linking the things above with the things below?’

‘The rope links the two above,’ Kerstin said. ‘A reef knot on an eight-millimetre red-and-purple polypropylene rope. Anything else?’

‘Not exactly,’ Paul said. ‘Maybe the fact there weren’t any footprints in the wolverine enclosure. He could’ve been hanging upside down from the railing, I suppose, completely out of his mind on drugs and drawing in the earth with his fingers; Professor Sheinkman’s hands weren’t bound, after all. We need to check whether the technicians found anything like this when they went back to the wolverines.’

He held up a long, rigid, millimetre-thick metal wire with a needle-sharp point. Kerstin took it from him and examined it.

‘And this was… where? In his head?’

‘Jammed into his right temple. We’re waiting for more information from the brain surgeon helping Qvarfordt with the autopsy. I don’t know if they’re finished yet.’

‘Should we infer anything from the fact that this wire was found in the brain of a brain scientist?’ Kerstin asked, putting the wire – not without a certain repulsion – down.

‘Maybe,’ Paul said. ‘We’ll need to speak to the relatives anyway. What about revenge for an old case of misconduct? Scalpel accidentally left behind in the cerebral cortex or something?’

The door flew open. Jorge Chavez came rushing in, grabbing the remote control and switching on the television. He sat down in the middle of Hjelm’s system of coordinates, crumpling it.

‘Look,’ he said breathlessly.

His wife’s face filled the television screen. Her short, straggly hair had an undeniable greenish tinge to it.

‘I understand what you mean,’ Sara Svenhagen said to the crowd, ‘but at present we have no reason whatsoever to suspect that the Kentucky Killer has struck again.’

‘What does she know about the Kentucky Killer?’ Paul Hjelm asked darkly.

‘Everything I know,’ Jorge said. ‘Quiet.’

‘We aren’t even certain it’s race-related,’ Sara continued. ‘It’s too early to speculate.’

‘Though judging by appearances, it’s a racial killing,’ Waldemar Mörner interrupted. ‘We’ve already arrested a suspect.’

In the right-hand corner of the screen, half of Hultin’s face came into view. It was twisted, as though he had just passed half a dozen kidney stones.

‘For God’s sake!’ Paul Hjelm said, throwing his pen at the wall.

‘You’ve arrested a suspect?’ at least six members of the press clamoured. One of them, a fierce woman from Rapport, continued: ‘So have you been sitting there lying to us this whole time?’

There was a moment of violent crackling. Hultin had grabbed the entire cluster of microphones and hauled them towards him.

‘An individual has been brought in for questioning,’ he said in a crystal-clear voice. ‘We will shortly be bringing in more people for questioning. At present, however, no one has been arrested. I repeat: no one has been arrested.’

‘Waldemar Mörner, why did you claim that a suspect had been arrested?’ the fierce lady from Rapport continued.

Mörner blinked intensely. His mouth moved but no sound came out.

‘Can we move the microphones back?’ an irritated technician piped up.

Jorge Chavez switched the television off. The trio exchanged glances which veered between rage, irritation and hilarity.

‘How long is it possible for someone like Mörner to cling on to his job?’ Kerstin Holm eventually asked. ‘Where’s the limit?’

‘Far, far away,’ Jorge answered. ‘She was good, wasn’t she?’

‘Television makes colours look brighter,’ Paul said. ‘Twenty lengths?’

‘Say no more,’ Jorge replied in English, pursing his lips. ‘What’re you working on?’

‘Could you get up?’

‘If you tell me what you’re working on.’

‘I can’t until you get up.’

They had, in other words, reached a deadlock. A clinch. An unprecedented power struggle playing out between the room’s two males. Kerstin Holm sighed deeply. Eventually Chavez shifted slightly so that Hjelm could pull the paper out from beneath him.

‘Draw,’ Chavez said, jumping down from the table, grabbing the spare chair and sitting down.

‘I suppose so,’ said Hjelm, smoothing the crumpled sheet of paper. He pointed at the big plus sign and continued: ‘A little system of coordinates for the past couple of days. We asked ourselves if there was anything concrete linking the top part with the bottom.’

Chavez pored over the paper. At the top, ‘Skansen’ and ‘Skogskyrkogården’. At the bottom, ‘Slagsta’ and ‘Odenplan metro station’. Between ‘Skansen’ and ‘Skogskyrkogården’, the word ‘rope’ had been written.

‘So the rope was the same?’ Chavez asked. ‘I’ve been looking into it. The combination of colours, red and purple, seems to be quite unusual. But otherwise it seems to be a perfectly normal polypropylene rope, the kind you can buy anywhere. I’ve been in touch with a couple of manufacturers in Sweden and abroad and they said they’d send some samples over. Those should be coming this week.’

‘Eastern Europe?’ Hjelm asked.

‘That too, yeah. Russia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and a couple of others.’

‘Good,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Then there’s the link between the two squares below, “Slagsta” and “Odenplan metro station”. The fact that someone in one of the rooms in the motel in Slagsta made calls to and received them from the ninja feminist from the metro platform. The link goes both ways, in other words. It was room 225, where the Ukrainians Galina Stenina and Lina Kostenko were staying.’

‘Ninja feminist?’ Hjelm asked.

‘It was a popular term a few years back. Nothing you blokes would understand.’

‘Nina Björk,’ Chavez said nonchalantly. ‘About the construction of femininity. She objects to certain strands of feminism – to difference feminism, those people who think there’s a kind of innate maternity in women or ninja feminists who take man’s weapons and turn them against him.’

Both Hjelm and Holm stared at him in surprise.

‘Clearly it’s not just swimming you’ve taken up,’ Hjelm noted.

‘It’s more of an all-round workout,’ Chavez said. ‘All the muscle groups.’

‘Can we try to concentrate now?’ Kerstin Holm said, turning man’s weapons against him. ‘Some rational thinking please, guys. This is interesting. The last conversation between them came from our ninja feminist, who called Galina Stenina and Lina Kostenko in Slagsta at 22.54 on Wednesday evening. As you might remember, the bullet hit ten-year-old Lisa Altbratt in the arm at 22.14 that same night. It might not be a coincidence.’

‘Or maybe it is,’ Paul Hjelm said reluctantly.

‘Think about it,’ Kerstin continued. ‘Our eight women in the refugee centre had been uneasy for a few weeks. Something happened. Then the first call from the ninja feminist to room 225 – that’s Galina Stenina and Lina Kostenko’s room – was made on the twenty-ninth of April, just about a week before they disappeared. We know she speaks some kind of Slavic language, judging from what Gunnar and Viggo heard on the phone. They were in contact back and forth for five days after that, nine calls in total. The last call was made to Slagsta just before eleven on Wednesday night; it’s the very last registered call. After that, they must’ve discussed it among themselves in rooms 224, 225, 226 and 227 until at least half two in the morning. Then the women disappeared. But a couple of neighbours heard some kind of loud engine sometime between half three and four in the morning. The bin lorry or a bus that’d lost its way, they thought.’

Jorge nodded enthusiastically. ‘That’s the link then,’ he exclaimed.

Paul nodded too. Then he said: ‘Can we work out where our ninja feminist was ringing from? Was it always from Sweden?’

Kerstin leafed through her papers.

‘What I’m reading comes from the four contracts in Slagsta. The list from Telia which Brunte faxed to Jan-Olov on Friday night. You can’t tell where the calls were coming from using this, no – not whether she dialled a country code or anything like that. They’re working on getting a list of calls from the mobile phone. I think it’s possible to get that from the SIM card.’

‘So what does that mean for the link?’ Paul Hjelm asked. ‘That it was the ninja feminist who threw our man to the wolverines?’

‘Could see it that way,’ Kerstin Holm replied.

‘Fine, so there are links in different directions,’ Jorge Chavez said, ‘but the connection to an eighty-eight-year-old professor emeritus, and one who survived Buchenwald at that – it was there, right? – how the hell does that fit?’

‘Buchenwald,’ Hjelm nodded. ‘Yeah, Kerstin, what’s the link there?’

‘It ruins the whole thing,’ Holm said, throwing her pen at the wall.

‘Don’t pick up bad habits like that,’ Chavez said sternly.

‘Who is she then?’ Hjelm asked abruptly. ‘If we’re assuming what we’ve said is right – who is she, the ninja feminist? And what does she have to do with eight prostitutes? Is she busy setting up some kind of mega-brothel somewhere behind the former Iron Curtain?’

‘Of course,’ Kerstin Holm said sourly. ‘An anti-Semitic mega-brothel with a sideline in wolverines, right in the centre of Moscow. It goes without saying.’

‘Don’t get sarcastic on us now,’ Chavez said, feeling like a bachelor again. ‘Let’s save that for later. Should we try linking everything up before we go to the Sheinkman children? Three of them, aren’t there?’

‘Three,’ Hjelm nodded.

‘Seems like a coincidence, one Sheinkman for each of us. Let’s look at each part of your square first. Quadrants, I think they’re called. Everything that needs to be done and everything we’re still waiting for. Quadrant one: “Skansen”. Left to do: identification. We’re waiting for a response from Interpol about the fingerprints. Should come soon. Our man’s in a crime database somewhere, I’d bet my neck on it. The serial number from the silenced Luger has been sent to Interpol as well. We’re also waiting for a response on that. What else?’

‘The metal wire,’ Hjelm said. ‘The technicians collected half a ton of rubbish from the wolverine enclosure. It’s been sent to the national forensic lab. Whoever finishes with their Sheinkman kid first can head over there. Maybe they’ve already found a sharp, rigid metal wire and just haven’t linked it to the wolverine man.’

‘Under way with the rope, like I said,’ Chavez added.

‘And then there’s this “Epivu”,’ said Holm.

‘Oh God, yeah,’ Hjelm said. ‘That word’s been bothering me for a few nights now. I’m getting absolutely nowhere with it.’

‘Summary,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Fingerprints, pistol, metal wire, rope, “Epivu”. We’re waiting for answers on all of them apart from the last one. We’ll have to find an answer to that ourselves. Write, Paul.’

Paul wrote.

‘Quadrant two,’ Chavez said. ‘The empty one. “Skogskyrkogården”. Slightly inaccurate, since it should really be “Södra Begravningsplatsen”, but we’ll let that slide. Conversations with his relatives are about to take place. What else?’

Hjelm took over. ‘I guess the broken gravestones will be solved just as soon as Andreas Rasmusson starts talking. They probably don’t have a thing to do with the case. A gang of skinheads probably just happened to be up to their repulsive business when an even more repulsive event came their way. Rasmusson’s fear is probably the result of him witnessing something more awful than even he could’ve imagined.’

‘Two things,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘First: modus operandi. Why such an unusual method of execution? Hanging someone upside down by a rope and pushing a long nail into their head, it’s not the usual.’

‘No,’ said Chavez. ‘It’s not usual.’

‘It suggests something really specific, doesn’t it? That there’s some kind of history. We’ll have to look everywhere we can think of and try to find similar cases. If we don’t turn up any leads, you can hang me up by the scruff of my neck.’

‘We don’t want to do that,’ said Hjelm. ‘But a bottle of whisky would do.’

‘I won’t say no to that,’ Kerstin replied tersely. ‘What kind?’

‘Cragganmore.’

‘OK. Second: the murder scene. Going by Andreas Rasmusson’s reaction, Södra Begravningsplatsen was also the murder scene; I don’t think there’s any doubt he witnessed a murder, nothing less. Sheinkman probably made his way to the scene himself. What was he doing there? Did he have any reason for visiting the cemetery? Was he visiting a grave? Was it purely coincidence that he was strung up right there? Which graves are nearby? Et cetera et cetera.’

‘Good,’ said Hjelm, writing on his sheet of paper. ‘Relatives, modus operandi check, brain surgeon’s verdict on the impact of the metal wire on the brain, skinhead witness, other witnesses, check of the murder scene. What else?’

‘Nothing else,’ Chavez said firmly. ‘Quadrant three: “Slagsta”. Go through the rest of the incoming and outgoing calls to the motel – that’s a whole load. Read through the forensic report on rooms 224, 225, 226 and 227. So far, not much has come up. Throwing money away, calling the technicians out. Must be female logic behind it.’

‘The vehicle,’ Kerstin said, ignoring him completely. ‘If something like a bus passed through little Slagsta at half three in the morning, it shouldn’t have gone unnoticed. I’ll put some uniforms on it.’

‘Great,’ Paul said. ‘Then we’ve got our phantom pimp, right?’

‘Sure, yeah,’ Kerstin replied. ‘The john, aka the manager Jörgen Nilsson, was in touch with a pimp back in November. You don’t want to know what I had to do to get that out of him.’

‘Oh?’ Jorge said, utterly ignored once again.

‘There’s an e-fit being put through the system. Are you writing, Paul?’

‘Non-stop. Phone call check, forensic technicians’ report, vehicle, phantom pimp.’

‘Do our eight runaways have their passports, by the way?’ Jorge asked.

‘No, they were in the manager’s office,’ Kerstin replied.

‘Last quadrant, then,’ said Jorge. ‘The incident in the metro station. Can we get any more out of – what’s his name? – Tamir?’

‘Adib Tamir,’ Paul replied. ‘Gunnar was looking into that and I think he’s squeezed him enough. The main point under “Odenplan metro station” has to be the mobile phone. Hopefully its owner can be identified and we can get a list of calls from it. It’s probably our biggest hope. And I’ve got to admit, I’ve been messing about with that phone – it’s a good old Siemens E10, by the way – wondering how you can handle a phone without leaving a single fingerprint on it.’

‘Then there’s the language expert,’ said Kerstin, ‘who has the dubious honour of discussing phonetics and Slavic languages with Gunnar, Viggo and a police assistant called Andersson.’

‘Do we have anything else?’ Paul asked, scribbling as though his life depended on it. ‘Phone, list of calls, language expert.’

‘I’m wondering what we can get out of our ninja feminist’s behaviour on the platform,’ Jorge Chavez said. ‘It all seems so neat. Bish, bosh and the people attacking her are gone. But then she leaves the phone behind. What happened? True, she was attacked by Hamid – he was waving a knife and everything – but still. Did she really have to carry him like a wheelbarrow across the platform and hold him out in front of the train? Wouldn’t it have been enough to give him another kick in the face? He must’ve been groggy already. What happened? Pure sadism?’

‘I actually think,’ Kerstin said, ‘that she was busy calculating. She was counting on the phone being smashed to pieces. It’s a miracle it wasn’t. According to the autopsy report, both arms went right under the train and were ripped clean off, bouncing along beneath the carriages. The fingers were like a shield for the phone, they stopped it from breaking. There’s not a scratch on it.’

‘Siemens quality,’ said Hjelm. ‘Just think of the ovens.’

‘What ovens?’

‘The crematorium ovens in the Nazi concentration camps. They were Siemens.’

There was a moment of silence. A ghost passed through the room. The ghost of Professor Emeritus Leonard Sheinkman. It was as though he wanted something.

They shuddered.

‘There’s one thing we’ve forgotten,’ Paul Hjelm said after a moment, glancing down at his extensive diagram.

‘What’s that then?’ two hopeful voices asked simultaneously.

‘Isn’t this Hultin’s job?’