Europa Blues

18

THREE MEN IN overalls were wandering around among the broken gravestones, carting away the pieces in wheelbarrows. They handled the lumps of stone like critically injured living beings, on their way to intensive care.

Jorge Chavez was standing in the shadow of the oak where Leonard Sheinkman had hung; when he glanced up, he saw that the bark had been scraped away from a branch about four metres up. He tried to work out how they had climbed the trunk. It didn’t exactly look easy. The branches were thin and brittle, all the way up. Whoever had hanged the old man from the tree must have been exceptionally light, agile and strong.

And unbelievably cruel.

The sun was shining on Södra Begravningsplatsen, wrapping the scene in its redeeming light, but it would probably never be possible to atone for such an unsavoury, cowardly, wretched crime. The perpetrator would probably be doomed to eternal damnation.

The ground in a Jewish cemetery was, after all, eternal – Jorge Chavez knew that much. The cemetery, Bet Hachajim, is permanent and cannot ever be moved. It was a holy place, holy ground, eternity’s courtyard, and it was bound up by a number of unwritten rules which marked its holiness: you couldn’t eat, drink or smoke in the cemetery, you couldn’t take short cuts over the graves, and your head should be covered, as a mark of respect.

He leaned down and touched the remains of the gravestone which had once read ‘Shtayf’. He compared it with the other graves. They were all roughly similar. At the top, two Hebrew letters he knew meant ‘Here lies’, followed by the name, date of birth, date of death, and a symbol, often the Star of David or the menorah. Right at the bottom of all the graves he could see were five Hebrew letters which meant something like: ‘May his (or her) soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life.’

There was enough of Shtayf’s headstone left to reveal that neither a forename nor a date of birth had been inscribed on it, only ‘Shtayf’ and a date of death: 7 September 1981. The question was therefore whether this mysterious ‘Shtayf’, above whose broken grave Leonard Sheinkman had met his death, was in any way linked to him. It was all a touch vague.

A long shot, like they say in American films.

But even those worked out from time to time.

Chavez stepped into the sunshine and hopped gracefully over the blue-and-white plastic tape marked ‘Police’. The three men in overalls turned to look at him.

He had walked over a grave.

‘I’m sorry,’ he shouted, holding his police ID up for them to see. ‘I’m afraid I cut across a grave.’

The eldest of the three men came over to him. He looked Eastern European, Chavez thought with a certain bias – like one of the men you saw playing chess in the Kulturhus.

‘You shouldn’t walk over graves,’ the man said sternly, ‘and you should cover your head.’

It clearly wasn’t the first time he had uttered those words because, as if by magic, a small hat appeared from his pocket – a skullcap. Chavez took it and thanked him.

‘You wouldn’t happen to be Yitzak Lemstein, would you?’ he asked, placing the skullcap high on the crown of his head.

The old man looked sorrowfully at him.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I’m Jorge Chavez, from CID. You’re in charge of the cemetery?’

‘Yes,’ said Yitzak Lemstein. ‘My sons and I take care of it.’

‘I’m very sorry about the night’s events. Things like that shouldn’t happen in Sweden.’

‘They’ll always happen. At all times and in all places on earth.’

Chavez paused, slightly surprised. Then he said: ‘I understand there’s been a lot of damage over the past few years?’

‘Yes,’ Lemstein replied laconically.

‘I was planning on asking you a few questions, if you have time. You heard what happened to Professor Leonard Sheinkman here last night. Did you know him?’

‘No.’

‘And you have no idea what he might have been doing here?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve been wondering about the grave he was killed next to.’

‘When can we take care of it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When can we take care of the gravestone inside the plastic tape there? It’s not well.’

Chavez observed him for a moment. Then he said: ‘I don’t really know. It’s probably OK now. I can ring and check with our technicians as soon as you’ve answered a couple of questions about it. Who was “Shtayf”? And why is there no forename or date of birth on the stone?’

At that, the old man turned his back. He wandered slowly back to his wheelbarrow and began pushing it away.

Chavez stood where he was for a few seconds, slightly bewildered. Then he jogged after him.

‘Why don’t you want to answer that?’

‘It has nothing to do with you. It’s Jewish.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. We think Leonard Sheinkman may have been on the way to that grave. This is important.’

Yitzak Lemstein paused, set the wheelbarrow down with a clank and fixed his gaze on Chavez.

‘Are you familiar with Jewish humour?’ he asked solemnly.

‘Not really,’ Chavez admitted. ‘Woody Allen?’

Lemstein sighed and grabbed the wheelbarrow handles again. Chavez placed a gentle hand on his shoulder and said: ‘I’m sorry. You’ll have to explain what you mean.’

The old man stood for a moment, his hands still gripping the handles. He sighed once more, let go and turned to the stubborn Latino policeman.

‘Humour is how we’ve survived,’ said Yitzak Lemstein. ‘Jewish humour is a special kind of gallows humour, often using wordplay. There were a whole lot of jokes in the Nazi camps. It was just one part of our survival strategy. Believe me, I know.’

He held out his wrist for Chavez to see. The black digits were almost completely covered with thick grey hair. But sure enough, they shone with an utterly dark light.

Chavez nodded and said: ‘So “Shtayf” is what – a joke?’

‘It’s Yiddish,’ the old man said. ‘“Shtayf” means “stiff”. Corpse. We can make jokes in the cemetery, too.’

‘But why is it on the gravestone? What does it mean?’

‘It means it’s an unidentified body. The grave of the unknown soldier, as they say. Unknown dead Jew.’

‘Died in 1981 and still unidentified?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you there when they buried him? If it was a man?’

‘It was a man. And yes, I was there when they buried him. I’m part of Chevra Kadisha. It’s my duty in looking after the cemetery.’

‘Chevra Kadisha?’

‘The burial organisation.’

‘If he was unidentified, how did you know he was of Jewish origin?’

‘He was circumcised. And he had one of these.’

He showed his tattoo again.

Chavez nodded.

‘How did he die?’

‘Murdered. A stab wound, I think. I seem to recall he was found naked out in the woods. I don’t remember exactly where. No one could identify him. But you’re a policeman, you can find out more.’

‘Yes, I’m going to. Do you remember anything else? How old was he?’

‘Must’ve been in his forties. Oh yes, there was one other thing.’

‘What?’ asked Chavez.

‘He didn’t have a nose.’

Jorge Chavez felt utterly confused.

‘Didn’t have a nose?’

‘It was gone.’

‘Whoever killed him had cut it off?’

‘No,’ said Yitzak Lemstein. ‘It had been gone a long time. There was a big scar where it should have been.’

‘I understand,’ said Chavez, not understanding much. ‘Do you have anything else to add?’

‘No,’ said Lemstein. ‘But you do.’

Chavez stood for a moment, still feeling confused. Then he raised a finger to the sky, exclaimed ‘Ah!’ and phoned the National Forensic Laboratory.

‘Brunte,’ he snorted. ‘My dear old father-in-law. Our rock. How’s it going with Södra Begravningsplatsen? Is everything wrapped up?’

He listened for a few seconds. Then he hung up and turned back to Yitzak Lemstein with a nod.

‘You can take care of the headstone now,’ he said. ‘This “Shtayf” has suffered enough.’

Yitzak Lemstein stared at him, turned round, took hold of the wheelbarrow and moved off. Chavez stood there for a moment, watching him as, bow-legged, he pushed the sorry old gravestone away.

Chavez headed back to his car.

On the way, he phoned his wife.

‘Hi, Sara,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’

‘In my office,’ Sara Svenhagen replied. ‘I just got back from Slagsta.’

‘Did anyone recognise our Greek?’

‘His name was Nikos Voultsos, you know. Do you want me to call you “my Chilean”?’

‘During intimate moments, why not, Mrs I-don’t-want-to-be-called-Chavez-I’d-rather-stay-Svenhagen-like-Daddy-Brunte. Oh, I just spoke to your dad, actually. Lovable as ever.’

‘No,’ Sara replied calmly. ‘No one recognised our Greek. But it doesn’t really matter. Arto just got in touch from Italy. From what he said, it seems like Nikos Voultsos was in Sweden for some big crime syndicate in Milan. He was meant to take over the eight women in Slagsta and bring them in to some kind of enormous prostitution ring. We’ve got a probable translation of the message to your ninja feminist as well. “Everyone through OK. Three seven two to Lublin.” I’m busy checking all the ferries I can think of now.’

‘Lublin?’ said Jorge. ‘Poland?’

‘Yeah. Seems like it’s our eight women who came “through OK”. It’s probably something to do with a rival syndicate in Ukraine. I mean, their contacts in Slagsta were Ukrainian, and the message was in Ukrainian. In other words, the ninja feminist seems to be Ukrainian and part of some kind of sex syndicate.’

‘I don’t know whether that sounds good or bad,’ said Jorge, just as Sara was replaced by a strange metallic voice. ‘From a purely professional point of view, it’s good. Though it sounds a bit worrying. Are you there? Sara?’

Sara’s voice had now been replaced by some kind of industrial process. Robocop, Jorge thought.

Then suddenly, her normal voice was back: ‘… how’s it going for you?’

‘I’m worried you’re in the process of changing into something hard and cold,’ said Jorge Chavez.

‘What’s up with you?’ an awful metallic voice said.

‘Your voice sounds weird. It’s disappearing again now. Anyway, if you have a few minutes, I just wanted to ask if you could go through all the unidentified bodies from September 1981. Jewish man in his forties. Had a concentration camp tattoo but no nose. I repeat: no nose.’

But she was already gone. He cursed the invention of the mobile phone and hung up.

As he climbed into the car, a tiny little hat was still clinging to his head.

Sara stared down at the silent phone.

Something hard and cold?

She was in the office she shared with Kerstin Holm. Holm was, at that moment, absent. Sara didn’t know where she had gone.

She cast a quick glance at the computer screen in front of her. It was displaying a schematised timeline. She was working with a period of time which stretched from four in the morning on Thursday 4 May, when the women had left Slagsta, to three in the afternoon on Friday the 5th, when the call from Lublin had come through to the disembodied arm in Odenplan metro station. That meant that in thirty-five hours, they had made it from Stockholm to Lublin.

If she stuck to the assumption that they had travelled in some kind of bus – and not in the bin lorry – then the ferries were key. Between Sweden and Poland, ferries went from Nynäshamn-Gda

sk, Karlskrona-Gdynia and Ystad-Świnoujście. But then there was also the Copenhagen-Świnoujście line. When Jorge phoned, she had been busy working out possible options. The Öresund Bridge was still two months away from opening, but that wouldn’t have stopped a route via Denmark: Gothenburg-Frederikshavn, Helsingborg-Helsingør or Malmö-Copenhagen.

It was also possible to take the ferry to Germany from somewhere like Ystad or Trelleborg, heading for Sassnitz or Rostock. But then what about Gothenburg-Kiel? The nightmare scenario was surely a route via Helsingborg-Helsingør and then Rödby-Puttgarten. If the women had taken that route, there wouldn’t have been any checks anywhere; for all the other routes, locating a bus with at least eight women on board should be possible.

Most of the options were perfectly doable within thirty-five hours. At worst, they all were. That meant it was simply a case of going through all of the timetables. The task facing her seemed fairly hopeless.

And so she had nothing against taking on Jorge’s peculiar request. During the challenging time she had spent with CID’s child pornography unit, still headed up by an unaffected party policeman called Ragnar Hellberg, she had become unusually good at finding all kinds of data. She had no problem finding that particular case from almost twenty years earlier in the crime database.

An unidentified male in his early forties, a John Doe, had been found naked in the woods by a little lake called Strålsjön to the south-west of Stockholm on the morning of Wednesday 9 September 1981. Death, caused by two deep knife wounds to the back, was found to have occurred sometime on Monday 7 September. The spot where the body was found hadn’t been the murder scene, that much was clear. The body had, in other words, been dumped there, in all likelihood from a car. The man was dark-haired and, according to Medical Examiner Sigvard Qvarfordt’s notes, ‘moderately hirsute’. The most remarkable feature was the absence of a nose. Qvarfordt had continued: ‘Even the nasal bone is missing; all that remains is a rather disfiguring scar. The relative smoothness of the scar suggests that the nose was removed surgically, possibly sawn off.’

Besides that, the man was circumcised and had, on his arm, a tattoo ‘resembling a concentration camp tattoo, but with illegible digits, as though he had attempted to remove them, using a knife or similar’. That was why Stockholm’s Jewish congregation had taken it on themselves to bury the unknown man. The case, undersigned by Erik Bruun, was still open.

Sara saved the information and decided that it was, without a doubt, Jorge’s ‘Shtayf’. Then she returned to her ferry traffic.

If I wanted to take the bus from Stockholm to Ukraine, would I really go via Denmark or even Germany? Wouldn’t I just go direct from Sweden to Poland? It was a likely first choice, anyway. And if I did that, then it would preferably be to Gdynia or Gda

sk rather than Świnoujsście, slightly out of the way on the Bay of Pomerania, right by the German border. From the twin cities of Gdynia and Gda

sk, the E77 went straight to Warsaw, from which the E372 continued on to Ukraine via Lublin. Logic dictated that Nynäshamn should have been their first choice, since the shipping company Polska Żegluga Baltycka, now known as the snappier Polferries, had boats running to Gda

sk. Otherwise, they would probably have chosen the Stena Lines ferry from Karlskrona to Gdynia.

And so she started in Nynäshamn. One of the Polferries boats, either the M/S Rogalin or the M/S Nieborow, had departed at 17.00 on Thursday 4 May, arriving in Gdańsk at 11.30 the next day. The question was whether it would have been possible to make it from Gdańsk to Lublin by 14.55, when the call had come in to the phone at Odenplan metro station. That was something she needed to work out. Stena Lines had a ferry, the M/S Stena Europe, departing Karlskrona at 21.00, arriving in Gdynia at 07.00. Both of these needed to be followed up.

Sara felt like she needed assistance, and for a moment thought Kerstin’s absence slightly irresponsible. It was a purely egotistical opinion, of course; it was also a fleeting one. Instead, she phoned up her old friend from the paedophile unit, the rock she could always count on.

‘Yeah?’ Gunnar Nyberg answered.

‘Are you in the building?’ asked Sara. ‘I need your help with something.’

‘No, Sara,’ Nyberg answered, unusually bluntly. ‘I’m a bit busy right now, I’m afraid. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.’

And with that, he was gone. She cursed the invention of the mobile phone and hung up.

Gunnar Nyberg flipped his phone shut with a click and shoved it back into the pocket of his beige lumber jacket. He hoped it wouldn’t get broken. He didn’t want to go to his meeting that evening – it wasn’t a ‘date’, he refused to call it a ‘date’ – covered in cuts and bruises, either. That would hardly make a good impression on a professor of Slavic languages.

He sighed deeply and glanced around the filthy, beer-drenched cellar bar just outside of Åkersberga. A Swedish flag was hanging on one of the concrete walls; on another, a Nazi flag. Standing in the right angle created by the two flags were four enormous skinheads, baseball bats raised.

Behind him, the door was in pieces.

‘Fucking pig, you broke the door!’ one of the skinheads shouted.

‘Sorry,’ Gunnar Nyberg replied courteously. ‘But you should’ve opened up when I knocked, kiddies. I could hear you in here, even though you were trying to hide like Girl Guides.’

A growl emerged from their ranks.

He continued: ‘I’m looking for Reine Sandberg. Is he here? I just want to talk to him.’

The skinhead closest to him swung the baseball bat violently. Gunnar Nyberg didn’t appreciate that. He had promised himself to never again use violence at work, but now he had no choice.

With a well-aimed sucker punch, he sent the skinhead flying into one of the concrete walls. The others drew back slightly. Winded, the man he had punched curled up into the foetal position and groaned faintly.

‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said to the muscular, adrenalin-fuelled skinheads. Coming from most people, such a statement would have sounded overambitious.

Not so coming from Gunnar Nyberg.

He took a step forward.

‘Come on, help an old man out. I’m Swedish fourteen generations back. My forefathers ate raw eel together with Erik XI. Are any of you Reine Sandberg?’

The three skinheads still standing glanced at one another. They put down their baseball bats and the biggest of them said: ‘I am. What d’you want?’

‘Were you kicking over Jewish gravestones in Södra Begravningsplatsen yesterday evening?’

Reine Sandberg grabbed his baseball bat and aimed a fierce blow at Gunnar Nyberg. With a sigh, Nyberg grabbed him. He moved round behind Sandberg and twisted the piece of wood from his hand. Then he pushed him down to the ground so that he was sitting with the baseball bat between his legs, and shoved him over to the concrete wall. He lifted the bat like a lever. Reine Sandberg bellowed.

‘Give us a minute, will you?’ Nyberg said to the two remaining skinheads.

They did. Quickly.

‘I’ve tried being nice,’ Gunnar Nyberg said, lifting the bat slightly higher. ‘Let’s try again. Andreas Rasmusson is your friend, correct?’

‘Yeah,’ said Reine Sandberg.

‘Great. The two of you were out drinking and breaking gravestones in the Jewish cemetery last night, correct?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Good. What exactly did you see that put Andreas Rasmusson – eighteen years old – in critical care in the psych ward, while you, Reine Sandberg – twenty-six years old – are swinging a baseball bat at a policeman as though nothing had happened?’

‘Fuck all,’ Sandberg groaned. ‘It was dark.’

‘Are you sure you want to do it like this? I don’t.’

And with that, Gunnar Nyberg raised the baseball bat slightly higher once more. He could feel it crunching strangely against one of Sandberg’s testicles.

‘OK, OK, OK, take that off and I’ll tell you. Take it away!’

Given that his voice had gone up an octave or so, it was probably time. Nyberg pulled the bat away from the skinhead’s genitals. Sandberg sank down with his hands to his crotch.

‘So,’ said Nyberg. ‘Let’s hear it.’

‘It was fucking horrible. They came gliding out of the shadows, these thin, dark figures. Like they were coming right out of the trees or something. All in black with, like, tights covering their bodies and black hoods on, like executioners. They hung that guy up in the tree. Upside down. That’s when we ran off. We fucking ran. We lost Andreas somewhere. He must’ve been running around the cemetery, totally lost. After seeing that, ’course he flipped.’

‘How many of them were there?’

‘Dunno. It felt like they were everywhere. Just gliding. A… presence.’

‘A presence?’

‘I don’t know how to describe it. Yeah, for fuck’s sake, a presence. At least five of them anyway, I think.’

‘What do you mean by thin?’

‘The opposite of you, you pig.’

Gunnar Nyberg looked down at his newly slimmed body with slight surprise. Could he really still be described as fat?

‘So they were little? Little people?’

‘No, not really. I don’t know. Thin. Light. Like they’d just detached from the trees. Strips of bark.’

‘Strips of bark?’

‘Don’t just repeat what I’ve just said. For fuck’s sake, we ran off as fast as we could. We thought they’d come after us, like mythological beings or whatever.’

‘Mythological beings?’

‘You’re doing it again,’ Reine Sandberg said, annoyed.

Gunner Nyberg was thinking. Mythological beings? Wasn’t there someone he should contact about this – in the absence of Arto? Yes, there was.

‘I’ve got to make a call,’ said Nyberg. ‘Then I’m going to arrest you and take you down to the station for vandalising Jewish gravestones. You’re not going to get away with that. Your testimony might just count as an extenuating circumstance, what do I know?’

And so Gunnar Nyberg made a call.

‘Paul Hjelm’ came the answer at the other end.

‘Paul, it’s Gunnar.’

‘Hey, Gunnar. You busy bothering skinheads?’

‘You could say that. I’ve just been talking to one who said they saw some kind of “gliding presence” among the gravestones. At least five thin figures dressed in black, he called them “mythological beings”. Thought it might be something for you, my old bookworm.’

‘Don’t say anything like that to your “date” tonight.’

‘It’s not a “date”. And how do you know about it, anyway?’

‘The whole station knows. We’ll be sitting at the table next to you with tape recorders.’

Gunnar Nyberg cursed the invention of the mobile phone and hung up. Then he phoned Sara Svenhagen back. She had been waiting long enough.

‘One call, you said,’ Reine Sandberg shouted from behind him.

Paul Hjelm was in his office at the police station, increasingly convinced that he had haemorrhoids. It seemed like all he did was sit these days.

The tones of Miles Davis were streaming uninterruptedly across the room. It had become more a fixation than a pleasure by this point. A need.

He spent a moment looking down at his mobile phone, as though it had been producing entirely unfamiliar sound waves. Something was starting to come together. The edges of a wound slowly growing closer.

He had spent the day going through the list of calls to and from the four rooms in the Norrboda Motell. After several hours’ fruitless work, it had clicked. A phone number appeared, demanding his attention.

From Monday 24 April onwards, calls had been made to all four phones from a room in Stockholm’s Grand Hôtel, room 305. The calls had been made at three-minute intervals around half four in the afternoon; in other words, this had taken place a week or so before Nikos Voultsos had died and the women had disappeared. A few days later, on Saturday 29 April, the women had also been contacted by the ninja feminist from Odenplan.

Grand Hôtel. If you were going to do something, you might as well do it properly. He phoned the hotel and spoke to a receptionist.

‘Can you tell me who was staying in room 305 from the twenty-fourth of April?’

The porter was silent. Then he said: ‘Aha.’

‘Aha?’

‘Apparently he disappeared. I don’t actually remember him myself, but he signed in as Marcel Dumas, French citizen.’

‘Disappeared? What does that mean?’

‘Sometimes guests leave the hotel without informing us. That’s why we always take their credit card number, as a precaution.’

‘Instead of their passport?’

‘Exactly.’

‘So you don’t have his passport?’

‘No, but we’ve got his Visa card number.’

‘So guests can disappear without any report being made to the police, because you can just take the payment from their card number?’

‘That’s right. The police are overburdened enough as it is.’

‘True,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘But that means you’re taking the law into your own hands. What if something had happened to him? Imagine he’d been, I don’t know, eaten by wolverines?’

The porter was silent. Hjelm continued.

‘When did this happen?’

‘The fifth of May. He arrived on Sunday the twenty-third of April. We got suspicious on the evening of Thursday the fourth – we hadn’t seen him for twenty-four hours. So when he didn’t show up for a second night in a row, we emptied the room and charged the bill to his account. Twelve nights. The bill came to sixty-three thousand kronor.’

‘Sixty-three thousand?!’

‘Yes.’

‘Now I can understand why you didn’t report it.’

More silence.

‘Anyway, please can I have the Visa card number?’

‘I can’t just give that out.’

‘I’m a policeman, for God’s sake.’

‘How do I know that? Honestly: careless handling of card numbers will be the downfall of civilisation. We’re told to be extremely careful with them.’

‘OK,’ said Paul Hjelm, thinking about that particular kind of Armageddon; maybe it wasn’t so crazy. There was already a huge volume of account numbers from Visa and American Express floating around on the Internet, available for general use. He came up with a quick solution.

‘I’ll give you a fax number. You can check with the directory listing, make sure that it’s a police number. Will that do?’

The porter thought for a moment. Then he said: ‘That’ll do.’

Paul Hjelm gave him the fax number and continued: ‘What happened to the guest’s things?’

‘We packed them up in his bag and put them into storage.’

‘Storage where?’

‘We’ve got a storeroom for stuff people leave behind. If no one gets in touch within a few months, we give it away to charity.’

‘What did he leave?’

‘I don’t know, I wasn’t the one dealing with it.’

‘And this storeroom is in the hotel?’

‘In the basement, yeah.’

‘Someone will be over to pick up his bag today.’

‘Great.’

‘Though not for charity,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘I’m going to send you a JPEG of a face. I want you to show it to all the staff you can think of, right away, to see whether it’s a picture of the guest who disappeared from room 305. What’s your name?’

‘Anders Graaf.’

‘Fitting,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘Email address?’

He was given the address and ended the call with the words:

‘If you send that fax right away, I’ll send the picture right away too.’

Anders Graaf was clearly good at his job, because the fax whirred into life only a minute or two later. During those two minutes, Paul Hjelm had time to send Nikos Voultsos’s photo and to think about the increasing risks of the modern digital society. Ultimately, Graaf had been right, but he had also been inconsistent. Paul Hjelm hadn’t really needed to be a policeman. Plenty of information had been handed out with no qualms, practically everything but the card number. That was because it related to the most important thing in the world: money. They had neglected to report a missing person to the police in order to be able to charge the sixty-three thousand kronor to the man’s account, but they hadn’t wanted to give his account number to the police.

There were some interesting conclusions to consider there.

The fax came in; the card number was in Paul Hjelm’s hand. He phoned the Swedish arm of Visa and was told someone would get back to him with information about the account holder.

He returned to his long list of telephone numbers. After an eventless thirty minutes, the phone rang. He answered.

‘Hello, is that Detective Inspector Hjelm?’ a woman’s voice asked.

‘The one and only,’ Hjelm replied modestly.

‘This is Mia Bengtsson. I work at the Grand Hôtel.’

‘Hi,’ Hjelm said expectantly.

‘Hi. Anders showed me the picture of that man. It’s him.’

Paul Hjelm felt a great inner peace. He waited for her to continue.

‘He groped me a couple of times when I was delivering room service. He was at it down in the bar, too. And in the French Dining Room as well.’

‘The guest from room 305, between the twenty-third of April and the fifth of May?’

‘Exactly. Rich drug addict. Had cocaine around his nostrils like some kind of rock star.’

‘Don’t hold back. He’s dead, after all.’

‘Oh! I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead-’

‘That’s when you can really let rip,’ Paul Hjelm replied to loosen her vocal cords.

‘Yeah, OK. I’d say he was an unusually nasty type, simple as that. We do sometimes see them at the Grand. Drug people have a lot of money, and always get room service; it’s the worst – you’re alone with them in their rooms. I tried speaking French but he didn’t understand a word, he just poked my breasts and smiled horribly. He wasn’t even French.’

‘No,’ said Paul Hjelm, ‘he was no Frenchman.’

‘Plenty of money though. Was throwing it around. I saw him rip a thousand-krona note to shreds. Just to show he was cool. There were a few women up in his room, too. I’m pretty sure they were prostitutes.’

‘Were you the one who realised he was missing?’

‘I was the one who sent a message to management saying that the room hadn’t been touched, anyway. I don’t know what happened after that. Only that he was gone when I got there on the seventh. His room had been cleaned and emptied.’

‘Anything you want to add?’

‘Not really. But I can’t claim I’m really sad about him being dead.’

‘Thanks a lot for your help, Mia. Bye.’

‘Bye.’

Paul Hjelm sat still. The link between Nikos Voultsos and Slagsta had been established. It was now a fact. As though the Ghiottone hadn’t been enough. Paul Hjelm laughed. He had done the same when Arto Söderstedt phoned from Tuscany to tell him about wolverines and ghiottoni.

A picture of Nikos Voultsos’s murderer was starting to emerge and it was multifaceted.

Hunting down a man with links to a crime syndicate like the Ghiottone and then throwing him to the wolverines in Skansen was tremendously subtle. A clear, direct message to Milan. Perhaps they hadn’t expected his body to supply the wolverines with such a high level of drugs that they essentially obliterated him. The police had been very close to not being able to identify him at all. That was the first aspect of it: the message to Milan.

The second was the wire, which seemed to be more at home in the scientist Leonard Sheinkman’s cerebral cortex. That said, Sheinkman’s link to the whole thing was still unclear. There were German diaries waiting to be read. Aspect two, then: the metal wire in the brain. Was that a message too? Did the two belong together? Was that another message for Milan?

A third aspect was that which had been immediately apparent in the Odenplan metro station, and certainly in both Skansen and Södra Begravningsplatsen: enormous cruelty and a great deal of skill in the noble art of neutralising someone. They had a female suspect, which was in itself extremely unusual. Professionalism or… hate? Or both? Wasn’t it a case of passionate feelings whichever way you looked at it? That was the impression he had, anyway. It wasn’t just a message that was being sent, it was something more, something deeper.

Then there was the journey to Ukraine. ‘Everyone through OK.’ It was, of course, nothing more than a Slavicist’s interpretation of fairly shaky foundations, but still. If they were to believe the latest information, direct from the mouth of a skinhead, then there was a league involved, not a lone killer. That league had transported at least eight prostitutes across Europe. Would that have been possible if they had kidnapped them and forced them to move using violence? ‘Everyone through OK.’ Didn’t that sound more… considerate? A crime syndicate would have treated the women like objects. Would they have expressed it like that? ‘Everyone through OK.’ It was vague, but it was a hunch he had. They couldn’t afford to let things like that slide. Besides, it was a case of a call being made from woman to woman. ‘Not a bloke as far as the eye could see,’ as old Maja had put it at the cottage in Dalarö. ‘Everyone through OK.’ Aspect four: the female.

And then there was the fifth. That which had already been hinted at by Nikos Voultsos’s mad flight across Djurgården. The blind panic. He had shot wildly, ripped his hands to shreds, thrown his gun away and torn off his gold chain – the very symbol of his dominance. The same panic had sent a group of skinheads running across Skogskyrkogården at breakneck speed. All but one, who had been left behind in his own private inferno, and ended up in the psych ward. A dark, gliding presence among the gravestones, one which made a seasoned skinhead talk about ‘mythological beings’.

Paul Hjelm sat still. Something was calling to him. Something was starting to come together. The edges of a wound slowly growing closer. All the different languages which had turned up during this case… It was like the Tower of Babel. A God, saying: ‘Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ The richness of European languages. ‘Everyone through OK’ in Ukrainian. ‘Shtayf’ in Yiddish. ‘Ghiottone’ in Italian. ‘Wolverine’ in English. And then ‘Epivu’ in…

For God’s sake. It didn’t say ‘Epivu’ at all.

Hjelm searched wildly on the computer. The folder of photographs from the case. The wolverine enclosure. There: the letters in the earth. ‘Epivu’. He enlarged the image so that it filled the screen. Then he enlarged it further. He stared at the last letter: ‘u’. He enlarged it further. Didn’t it look like there were a couple of commas above and below the ‘u’? Of course.

It wasn’t a ‘u’ at all. It was a ‘upsilon’. Broadly speaking, a ‘y’.

On closer inspection, he saw that the middle letter had no dot above the ‘i’.

Of course, it was Greek.

Nikos Voultsos was thoroughly Greek.

That meant that the ‘p’ wasn’t a ‘p’ after all, but ‘ro’. In other words, an ‘r’. The ‘v’ was no ‘v’ but ‘ny’, or ‘n’.

It wasn’t ‘Epivu’, it was ‘Ερινυ’, pronounced something like ‘Erini’, with the emphasis on the last vowel. And which, in all likelihood, was a word.

Paul Hjelm even thought he recognised it.

He went online and found a Greek dictionary. No hits. Damn it. Then it struck him that there were several different types of Greek. Modern Greek had surprisingly little in common with Old Greek. This had to be Old Greek. Ancient Greek. After some effort, he managed to find an old Greek dictionary on an American website called ‘Perseus’. He searched for ‘Ερινυ’. He found a result.

Erinyes.

He realised why he had recognised it. It was something he had come across during the A-Unit’s very first case. A young man called Gusten Bergström had been convinced that his sister, who had committed suicide following an attempted rape, was being avenged from beyond the grave by ancient goddesses of revenge. By Erinyes.

The Erinyes were antiquity’s most terrifying figures. Known as the Furies, they came from the kingdom of the dead and demanded revenge for past injustices. To restore the balance. And they never gave up.

The Erinyes were female goddesses of revenge.

Nikos Voultsos’s last act in this life had been to write down precisely who was killing him. He wrote it in Old Greek, the language of mythology. The man who had murdered three prostitutes in Piraeus and who had been about to take over a group of prostitutes in Stockholm was convinced that he was being hunted by female goddesses of revenge. Was it simply his conscience finally catching up with him?

Paul Hjelm shuddered. At least five thin, dark figures; a gliding presence among the gravestones in Södra Begravningsplatsen, like mythological beings…

No, he thought. No, this wasn’t just some crime syndicate among others. This was no Eastern European mafia group, selling women like pieces of meat. No, sir.

He phoned Kerstin. It was a reflex.

‘Kerstin Holm,’ she said.

‘Are you in the building?’

‘I’m in my room. Viggo’s here.’

‘Well, what do you know,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘This “Epivu”, it’s the Erinyes, the ancient goddesses of revenge. “Ερινυ”. It’s Old Greek.’

‘Jesus,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘How did you work that out?’

‘Long story. But it’s not some Mafia syndicate.’

‘I never thought it was. You said it yourself: the ninja feminist.’

‘I think you were the one who said that. We just clarified it.’

‘Viggo’s found our phantom pimp. The man who did the deal with the manager of the Norrboda Motell. His name was Finn Johansen, he was Norwegian.’

‘Was?’

‘He committed suicide on the twenty-fourth of April. Shot himself in the head. With a silenced Luger that wasn’t his. The serial number is pretty similar to Nikos Voultsos’s gun. They’re sister guns. From the same line.’

‘What time?’

‘Time?’

‘What time of day on the twenty-fourth of April?’

There was a moment’s silence. Then Viggo Norlander’s not-quite-so-pleasant voice came down the line.

‘What’re you playing at, Freddie Freeloader?’

‘When did he shoot himself?’

‘Never, I’d guess.’

‘Me too.’

‘About one, half past one in the afternoon, apparently. His prostitute girlfriend came home from the day’s shift at about quarter to two and found him lying in a pool of his own blood.’

‘Nikos Voultsos came to Stockholm on the twenty-third of April. At half four on the twenty-fourth, he phoned each of the four rooms in the motel. 224, 225, 226 and 227. They’d lost their pimp, Finn Johansen, only a couple of hours earlier, and to a weapon almost identical to Voultsos’s.’

There was a scratching sound on the line.

‘I hear you,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘It’s Sunday. Sunday the twenty-third. That’s when the unease starts spreading through the four rooms. The girls know they’ve been taken over by another, bigger, and presumably worse gang than Finn Johansen’s. The wolverines. Ghiottoni. A couple of days later, your ninja feminist rings-’

‘She’s not mine. And she’s not a ninja feminist. She’s a goddess of revenge; she’s an Erinye.’

‘Whatever. Somehow, she offers the girls an alternative to the situation they’ve found themselves in; exactly what, we’ve got no idea. A week goes by, Nikos Voultsos cements his position as their new pimp; maybe he gives them a display of his power, probably in combination with some kind of drugged-up, hardcore sex. Maybe he’s also taken over other groups in the same way, we’ll have to check that. Maybe that bus to Lublin really is a bus, maybe it’s full.’

‘Full of – what? Saved whores?’

‘I don’t like that word,’ said Kerstin, ‘but OK. Maybe. While he’s busy carrying out his orders from the Ghiottone, someone is planning his downfall. And carrying it out. They creep up on him somewhere in Djurgården. They probably know that he liked to sit and snort cocaine out there. Then, with precision, they drive him towards the Skansen fence, right by the wolves. They’d probably already clipped a hole in the fence next to it, alongside the wolf enclosure. That’s how they get in while he’s struggling up the fence, over the barbed wire and into the wolves.

‘Then they stand and wait for him at the top of the hill. They see him go crazy, throwing his pistol away and tearing his gold chain off, and they follow him. Then they catch him, bind his legs with a red-and-purple rope, push the metal wire into his brain and lower him to the wolverines. The animals take a first bite, maybe a bit cautiously, but there’s enough cocaine in that bite to drive those greedy little creatures to a massacre. He’d probably already died by that point; he probably died in the same incomprehensible way as Leonard Sheinkman. Of pure pain.

‘Once it’s all over, they pull the rope back up. There’s nothing left. The wolverines have managed to jump high enough to bite off the knot. It doesn’t really matter, so they take the rope and clear off. Then, virtually right away, they phone Slagsta. One of the Ukrainians in room 225, either Galina Stenina or Lina Kostenko, answers. They find out that their tormentor, Nikos Voultsos, is out of the game and that their transport will depart as planned, at four in the morning. When no one is watching. They blissfully talk the night away. They’re free. They’re finally free. No more pimps. No more bad drugs. Never again. New lives. Time to turn over a new leaf.’

Yes, thought Paul Hjelm. Of course, Kerstin, that’s it.

He said: ‘But the league stays behind. To murder an old man.’

‘Yeah, that’s the blow. You know what I mean – when everything seems to be making sense and then along comes the disappointment, flooding in and muddying everything else.’

‘I know all too well,’ said Paul Hjelm.

‘Do you know what I’m doing?’ asked Kerstin.

‘You’re wondering about the fate of the girls. Lublin onwards.’

‘Aside from that? Practically?’

‘I haven’t got the faintest idea. Washing your underwear? Pulling burrs from your hair? Cutting your toenails with hedge clippers?’

‘Looking at a growing list.’

Kerstin Holm was in her office, looking at a growing list. Viggo Norlander was sitting right next to her, looking at her as she looked at the growing list. She was a glorious woman. He wondered why he had never realised that before. Him, an expert after several years’ intense interaction with the opposite sex in all of Stockholm’s imaginable and unimaginable singles bars – before suddenly finding himself, at the age of fifty, with a live-in partner and a small baby. And all that had happened as a direct result of being crucified by the Russian-Estonian mafia, on a floor in Tallinn.

It was complicated.

It was probably because little Charlotte was learning to walk that he had regained his eye for the opposite sex. He didn’t quite understand the link, but it was a fact. Fortunately, Astrid kept him busy, meaning that this eye remained theoretical.

The growing list on the screen was simply Kerstin Holm’s inbox. It was growing bigger and bigger until eventually she had received emails from eight different police authorities.

‘Eight,’ she said to the astonished mobile phone.

‘Explain right now,’ the astonished mobile phone exhorted.

‘The big inquiry through Europol and Interpol is starting to bring in results. General appeal for information to all the bigger police authorities in Europe. Something like the three hundred biggest cities on the Continent. I don’t know if the answers are affirmative yet, but eight of these three hundred cities have something to say about our modus operandi.’

The eight emails were sitting there, their titles in bold. Once she clicked on them, the font normalised after a few seconds. Once they had emptied their bowels.

Message one: Information from Dublin. Detective Superintendent Radcliffe. ‘I’m wondering whether I didn’t hear about something similar in the former DDR. Get in touch with Benziger in Weimar. No idea what his title is, but he’s friendly. As you also seem to be, Ms Holm.’

Message two: A telling-off from Paris. Chief Superintendent Mérimée. ‘Misuse of Europol resources. Should be used exclusively for combating the following points: unlawful drug trafficking, crimes involving illicit immigration networks, illicit vehicle trafficking, the trafficking of human beings (including child pornography), the forgery of money and other means of payment, the illicit trafficking of nuclear or other radioactive material, terrorism and the illicit laundering of money in relation to any of the above crimes.’

Message three: Confirmation from Budapest. Detective Superintendent Mészöly. ‘Very interesting. We had a similar case in October ’99. Twenty-nine-year-old man, active in the prostitution branch, hung upside down and with a kind of metal wire inserted into his temple. We would gladly familiarise ourselves with your investigation, and you can, of course, have access to ours.’

Message four: Another confirmation, this time from Maribor, Slovenia. Police Chief Sremac. ‘Same thing here in March. Serious criminal strung up, skull penetrated. Awaiting further information.’

Messages five, six and seven: Yet more confirmations, from Wiesbaden in Germany, Antwerp in Belgium, and Venice, Italy. Chief Inspector Roelants in Antwerp added: ‘Don’t be surprised, Ms Holm, if more confirmations turn up. Those of us who have experienced this crime have been in internal, official contact for several months. My judgement, however, is that, so far, none of us have managed to establish any direct links between the cases.’

Message eight: Inquiry from Stockholm. Division Chief Waldemar Mörner. ‘Who in high heavens authorised this inquiry? Whose budget will this come out of? WM.’

Kerstin Holm called Paul Hjelm.

‘They’ve been at it just over a year,’ she said.

‘In Europe?’ he asked.

‘In Budapest, Maribor, Wiesbaden, Antwerp and Venice so far. If we include our victims, that means seven people have been strung up and had their cerebral cortex pierced. Add to that Hamid al-Jabiri from Odenplan metro station and it’s eight dead. There don’t seem to have been any wolverines anywhere else.’

‘What kind of victims?’

‘They seem to have been serious criminals, the lot of them. Everyone but Leonard Sheinkman.’

‘Do any of your contacts suspect a link to Ghiottone?’

‘No. But it’s all rudimentary so far. We’ll exchange investigations.’

‘Online? Is that really secure?’

‘What is secure nowadays?’ asked Kerstin Holm.

And with that, she was gone. Paul Hjelm cursed the invention of the mobile phone and hung up.