Europa Blues

3

THE GIRL WHO had been fortunate in her misfortune was sitting on a hospital bed with a surprised look on her face. She probably hadn’t stopped looking surprised since the previous evening. It was now a permanent look of surprise.

Paul Hjelm found her surprise entirely understandable. When you were ten years old and walking hand in hand with your dad one spring evening, you hardly expected to be shot.

But that was what had happened.

She had felt cold; the wind had suddenly picked up, blowing straight through her thin quilted jacket and chilling her practically bare legs. She had been holding her dad’s hand and clutching a balloon shaped like a happy yellow face. She had been skipping slightly, mainly to keep warm but also because she was happy about the bag of sweets she had fished up out of the lucky dip. Aside from the cold, everything was just fine.

And then she had been shot.

A bullet had come flying from somewhere and buried itself in her upper right arm. That was where it came to rest. Fortunately.

She had been fortunate in her misfortune.

‘You’ll be fine, Lisa,’ Paul Hjelm said, placing his hand on hers. ‘It’s just a flesh wound.’

Lisa’s father’s eyes were puffy and red from crying and he was snoring loudly in the armchair. Paul Hjelm poked his shoulder gently. His head jerked upwards with a snort and he stared uncomprehendingly at the policeman standing by the edge of the bed. Then he saw his daughter with the bandage around her arm and the awful reality came crashing back down.

‘Excuse me, Mr Altbratt,’ Hjelm said courteously. ‘I just need to be absolutely certain you didn’t see any sign at all of a perpetrator. No movement in the trees? Nothing?’

Mr Altbratt shook his head and stared down into his hands.

‘There wasn’t a single person anywhere nearby,’ he said quietly. ‘Didn’t hear a thing. Suddenly Lisa just screamed and the blood started pouring out. I didn’t realise she’d been shot until the doctor told us. Shot! What kind of world do we live in?’

‘So you were walking along Sirishovsvägen in the direction of Djurgårdsvägen? Where had you been?’

‘Does it matter?’

Paul Hjelm’s phone rang. The timing wasn’t the best. He hoped no respirators or heart-lung machines would crash when he answered. He could just see the headlines: ‘TEDDY BEAR KILLER! EXTRA! EXTRA! FAMOUS POLICEMAN MURDERS FOUR CRITICALLY ILL PATIENTS WITH MOBILE PHONE.’

‘Hjelm,’ he answered laconically. Unless you’re severely disturbed – or an answering machine, perhaps – how exactly did you answer a phone using more words than that?

A moment of silence followed. The Altbratt man was looking at him like he was busy ripping the feathers from an endangered eagle. The Altbratt girl still just looked surprised.

‘Skansen?’ the eagle violator exclaimed. That was all he said. Then he got up from the bed, patted Lisa on the head and held his hand out to the father.

‘I’ve got to go, I’m afraid. I’ll be back.’

Cold morning sunshine greeted him on the steps of the paediatric accident and emergency department. The Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital. He searched his pockets as he wandered over to the car park. His keys were gone. Then again, this wasn’t an unusual occurrence and so he went through his patting ritual once more, and hey presto, they appeared from one of the pockets of his much-too-thin jacket. Same procedure as last year.

It was a fresh spring morning of the newly woken kind, the type often seen during the first week of May. The kind of day which looks so inviting from indoors but turns out to be a slyly masquerading winter’s day. Hjelm, always dressed too lightly, was now practically naked. His pitiful scraps of clothing offered absolutely no protection against the icy wind. He tried to pull them tighter around him but couldn’t find anything to pull.

It was nine in the morning and the traffic around Haga Södra and Nortull was at a complete standstill. Car traffic had increased dramatically in Stockholm over the last year. For some reason, it had suddenly become extremely attractive to be stuck in traffic. Cheap psychotherapy, presumably; a line of metal boxes full of screaming Mr Hydes. The alternative was the newly privatised commuter train which never seemed to be running, or else the metro which seemed to be forever standing in dark tunnels for hours on end, or else you could cycle along one of the sadistic cycleways no one dared to use since they seemed to have been deliberately designed to cause particularly awful injuries.

OK, so he was a whiner.

He didn’t really have anything to complain about. The red metro line was relatively free from stupidity. He continued to devote his long daily journey from Norsborg in to central Stockholm to intense, reality-fleeing jazz listening. After a jaunt into the world of opera, like some kind of slightly depraved Inspector Morse, he had gone back to jazz. He couldn’t quite tear himself away from the bebop years around 1960. But at the moment, he was hooked on Miles Davis. Kind of Blue. It was, quite simply, a masterpiece. Every single track on it. Five classics: ‘So What’, ‘Freddie Freeloader’, ‘Blue In Green’, ‘All Blues’ and ‘Flamenco Sketches’ – all more or less improvised in the studio during the golden year of 1959. The musicians went to the studio not having seen the music before, Miles turned up with a bundle of notes, and all five tracks were said to have been recorded on their very first attempt. Somehow, it felt like music that had been created as it was performed, music which immediately and naturally took shape. A new kind of blues, infinitely down to earth, infinitely sophisticated. Every second of it a pleasure.

But during work hours, he had his service vehicle. He pushed the key which had miraculously appeared into the lock on the old beige Audi, looked out at the traffic and sighed deeply. It would probably be quicker to swim over to Djurgården.

That was where he was headed. His colleague and partner in crime Jorge Chavez had had that mysterious, expectant tone in his voice, the kind Paul Hjelm had been longing for for months. ‘I think you should head over here, Paul. To Skansen.’

The fact that he had just come from another case with links to the area around the Skansen open-air museum and zoo made it even more interesting.

He got caught up in traffic within the gates of the hospital and made a conscious decision not to turn into Mr Hyde. It just wasn’t worth the effort. Instead, he slipped the Kind of Blue CD into the car stereo and smiled as its opening notes spread their honey over his eardrums. As he meekly fought his way out of the enormous hospital area, he started ranking strange surnames. Wasn’t Altbratt a candidate for strangest? He’d come across heavyweights like Kungskranz and Riddarsson before, Äppelblohm and Sarkander, but did they really stand a chance against Altbratt?

Anton Altbratt was the wealthy owner of a fur shop in Östermalm, living in Djurgårdsstaden and currently on his second marriage, of which ten-year-old Lisa was the fruit. He also had a couple of adult children from his previous marriage, and they hadn’t been able to get in touch with his new wife, Lisa’s mother. She was on a business trip to some unknown location. To Hjelm, the whole thing stank of intricate erotic arrangements, but he decided not to enquire further.

Instead, he was trying to work out what could be behind the shooting of poor little Lisa. With any luck, her father Anton had been the intended victim. It was much easier to imagine a rational motive if that was the case – the young wife, the upper-class business activity, maybe even an attack by militant vegans. Though the lack of sound implied a silencer, which in turn implied some kind of professional criminality – in other words, it sounded more like the wife had wanted to get her husband out of the way for financial or sexual reasons, or else it was down to some kind of dodgy business links, or maybe even illegal fur dealings. Something like that. If any of those were true, it didn’t seem half as dangerous. An unsuccessful one-off attack. But if Lisa had been the target, it was much, much worse. That would mean the majority of plausible motives disappeared, making some kind of madman more likely. A madman specialising in children.

Paul Hjelm didn’t really want to follow that thought through to its logical conclusion.

But of course there was a third alternative: that neither father nor daughter had been the intended target, and the bullet had simply found its way into Lisa’s arm by pure chance. If that was what had happened, the picture which emerged was of some kind of underworld dispute in among the trees of Djurgården.

There was, in other words, plenty to be done. They needed to check the wife’s activities the previous evening, what her relationship with Lisa’s father was really like; they had to check who knew about the children’s party up in Rosendal, any possible irregularities in the business, any possible threats from militant vegans or similar, and search the wooded area from which the shot had, in all likelihood, been fired. Et cetera, et cetera.

And then they had to wait and see whether it was anything other than a coincidence that two crimes had been committed so close to one another – whatever it was Jorge had to offer up at Skansen.

Time, time, time. He was really stuck; as usual, the engine temperature of his Audi shot up drastically the moment it found itself in the slightest hint of a queue. The car lacked all patience. Since the driver refused to become Mr Hyde, the car would have to do it instead. As though every queuing car and its driver were, by definition, forced to explode. Paul Hjelm turned the heating up high and thanked his Maker that it was winter and not summer in Stockholm. With one eye on the engine temperature gauge, he allowed his thoughts to drift along with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb’s unrivalled improvisations.

A picture of his life, it struck him.

A stony, controlling eye on an engine about to explode. Trains of thought taking the form of reckless improvisations. All while the vehicle crept forward extremely slowly.

Yup, that was exactly how it was. Though the picture wasn’t quite complete.

Just as ‘So What’ faded out into ‘Freddie Freeloader’ and a more familiar twelve-bar blues started streaming out into Hjelm’s sauna masquerading as a car, a gap appeared in the right-hand lane at Roslagstull. He sped forwards, accelerating so violently that the tyres screeched, made it through on the newly introduced European-standard amber light, and suddenly found the whole of Birger Jarlsgatan empty ahead of him.

Well, he thought. That’s it, now the picture’s complete.

‘Freddie Freeloader’, he thought, putting his foot down.

It was remarkably smooth-going all the way to Stureplan, where he found himself in a slight, inevitable tussle with one of those reckless drivers, the type who worked in advertising, who thought they were in the right regardless of how wrong they were. Paul Hjelm didn’t care. Let them have their way, he thought, mumbling along with the final notes of ‘Blue In Green’. Even down in the confusion of traffic by Nybroplan, he held his tongue. Just as he was singing along like a fool to a favourite line from ‘All Blues’, windows down, he saw Ingmar Bergman staggering up the steps into the National Theatre, cane in hand. The old man turned round, astonished, and met his eye for a brief moment. It seemed like more than a coincidence.

Strandvägen was worse. It seemed awfully big.

No, he thought. Now the picture was complete. A brief free stretch and then back to the slow, sluggish, grind. A plod.

The traffic eased slightly and he crossed Djurgården Bridge without problem. By that point, the picture had already gone up in smoke. As he parked, terribly, outside the entrance to Skansen, the last Spanish-tinged harmonies of ‘Flamenco Sketches’ were playing. That was what you called precision. His route – from Astrid Lindgren to Skansen via Ingmar Bergman, practically a trip through the heart of Sweden – was the exact same length as Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. That was that.

It was quarter to ten when Paul Hjelm marched in through Skansen’s gates, was handed a little map and sent in the direction of ‘the wild animals’ in the north-east corner of the big open-air museum. As he stepped onto the long, covered escalator heading up the hill, Hjelm wondered which animals weren’t wild. Was man a wild animal? He reached the top and stepped out into completely different weather from at the bottom. It was as though winter had been blown away. In its place, he found himself wandering through the museum’s mock-nineteenth-century town in highest possible summer. April weather, he was on the verge of thinking, even though it was in fact May. Thursday the fourth of May, in the two thousandth year of Our Lord. Twenty hundred. As the sun reflected on red-painted walls, his thoughts drifted to the way people spoke about the year. In general, they had naturally gravitated towards calling it ‘the year two thousand’, a perfectly logical choice. But Paul couldn’t help but wonder why it wasn’t twenty hundred, like the beginning of the previous century. He found a certain pleasure in taking what he called the either/or approach, occasionally using both. It never failed to raise an eyebrow or two.

That was what was playing on Detective Inspector Paul Hjelm’s mind in this, the two thousandth year of Our Lord – a year in which the kingdom of Sweden had been singled out by Amnesty International for a sharp rise in police violence; a year in which the police had regularly turned their batons around to strike out with the hard end; a year in which Kosovans and Albanians had been sent back to their war-torn homelands with five thousand noble Swedish kronor in their pockets.

For a short moment, it felt like someone else had taken over his thoughts.

He wondered where all the good old-fashioned sexual fantasies had gone, those fantasies the latest research said should grip us at least fifteen times a day.

One last thought flashed through his mind before he caught a whiff of the predatory animals: who the hell were these model people who had enough time for fifteen sexual fantasies a day? But then the stench took over and Paul Hjelm found himself feeling genuine expectation, like a child in the minutes before Father Christmas turns up, at that moment when fathers sneak off to the toilet with an utterly expressionless look plastered on their faces. In this case, Father Christmas’s real name was Jorge Chavez and he was a detective inspector in Sweden’s national CID.

Just like Paul Hjelm.

The smell disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. Paul Hjelm was lost. He would later deny all knowledge of the incident, but he really was lost inside Skansen. His children were nearing twenty and it had been years since the cheap trip-to-Skansen trick had last worked on them, the thing you resorted to when you ran out of other ideas. The section for wild animals had been completely rebuilt during that time, and he suddenly found himself talking to an utterly listless, cud-chewing male elk that looked more mechanical and stuffed than real. He had no one else to converse with. It was nearing ten, and Skansen was still closed. There wasn’t a person in sight and the bloody elk didn’t have much to say.

Above all, he seemed remarkably clueless about where the bestial predatory animals could possibly be living.

Eventually, Hjelm found his way to the bear mountain. This was unknown territory. Everything was heavily reinforced and he finally made it out of the labyrinthine construction with the feeling that he was following an unravelled ball of yarn. He passed horses and lynx, wild boar and wolves, and suddenly he was there.

At the wolverine enclosure.

There were considerably more people around him now. He immediately recognised the white-clad technicians who, like amateur mountain climbers, were moving up and down the little hills inside. He recognised the blue-and-white plastic tape stretched here and there in front of the safety fence, screaming ‘Police’. He recognised the more or less weather-beaten, eighty-odd-year-old face belonging to the chief medical examiner, Sigvard Qvarfordt. He also recognised the stern Germanic-looking face of the chief forensic technician, Brynolf Svenhagen. And he recognised the particularly energetic face of his close colleague – who was also Chief Forensic Technician Svenhagen’s son-in-law. His name was Jorge Chavez.

Chavez caught sight of Hjelm and his face lit up. He moved towards the deep moat separating the wolverine enclosure from the rest of the park, holding out his hands and shouting, as though he had rehearsed it (which he probably had): ‘Cast off your human shell, O crown of creation, and enter into our animalistic orgy.’

Paul Hjelm sighed and said: ‘How the hell do I do that, then?’

Jorge Chavez raised an eyebrow in surprise and glanced around. Eventually, he turned to Brynolf Svenhagen, who didn’t seem to be doing much other than wandering around looking stern. As though it was his life’s mission.

‘Was it you who nicked the gangplank, Brunte?’

Brynolf Svenhagen looked at his son-in-law with sincere distaste and helpfully replied: ‘My name isn’t Brunte.’

Whereby he continued his stern wandering.

Chavez scratched his head.

‘Porn police probably took it,’ he said. ‘They’ll be letting the wolverines in soon.’

Paul Hjelm climbed up onto the shaky wooden fence, balancing for a moment before taking a reckless leap into nothingness. He floated like a butterfly over the deep, water-filled moat and landed safely on dry ground next to his colleague. It was highly surprising.

‘Nice,’ Chavez said appreciatively.

‘Thanks,’ Hjelm replied, still not quite believing that he wasn’t covered in wolverine shit, having stumbled backwards into the moat and cracked a couple of vertebrae.

He glanced around. The wolverine enclosure was fairly extensive, a piece of hilly terrain which stretched up to a relatively high peak. There were holes dotted here and there, presumably dens, and large areas of the grass-covered ground seemed to be littered with tiny shreds of material, almost like feathers, all different colours and different materials. The forensic technicians were doing all they could to stop the light morning breeze from blowing them away.

Paul pointed at the fibres. Jorge nodded, grabbed hold of his arm and pulled him in the direction of the enclosure’s bottom corner, where the moat was nothing more than a three-metre vertical concrete drop down to the earthy floor.

‘Let’s start from the beginning,’ Jorge said.

The two men stopped. Over in that corner, the fibres had slightly more coherent shapes, most notably the leg of a pair of light pink-coloured trousers.

A few inches of chewed-off bone were sticking up out of it.

Probably a tibia and a fibula.

‘That’s the biggest bit left,’ Chavez said calmly, squatting down. Hjelm did the same and waited for him to continue. He did.

‘Gulo gulo, they’re called. Latin for wolverine. Cute little things. Look like fluffy little bear cubs. Their closest relatives are the badger, pine marten, polecat, weasel, otter and mink. They’re endangered, there are just a hundred or so left in Sweden. High up in the mountains. They can grow up to a metre in length and as a rule they live on voles and lemmings. Though sometimes they change their prey-’

Hjelm stood up and stretched his back.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Someone got drunk, climbed into Skansen and ended up among the predators. Can’t be the first time.’

‘Would I have called you here if that were the case?’ Chavez asked, meeting his eye. ‘These are specially evolved killing machines. Don’t you know your Ellroy? They’ll tear a man to pieces at the slightest provocation, especially if there’s a pack of them. They’ve got jaws like bolt cutters. They can break bones and grind them up like they’re nothing. It’s pure luck we’ve got so much left here.’

Using a pencil, Chavez carefully lifted the trouser leg up. There was still some flesh clinging to the bone a bit further up, holding it together. There was also a knot. On a piece of rope.

‘Ah,’ Hjelm said, squatting down once more.

‘Exactly,’ Chavez replied, adding: ‘M.’

‘U,’ said Hjelm.

‘R,’ said Chavez.

‘D,’ said Hjelm.

‘E,’ said Chavez.

‘R,’ said Hjelm.

‘No doubt,’ said Chavez. ‘And it would be nice if we could find a head. At least it’s a variation on a theme,’ he continued, stopping Qvarfordt as he was passing by. ‘Any news, my good man?’ he asked gallantly.

‘Negative,’ the eternally-working Sigvard Qvarfordt replied, pushing his loose dentures into place with a well-practised movement. ‘No head, no fingers. It’ll be hard to get an ID. We’ll be able to get some DNA, but as you know the system isn’t especially well developed. It is a man though. An adult male. The coagulation level of the blood suggests the time of death was yesterday evening or last night. I’d be surprised if he’d been here longer than that. There would definitely have been some complaints from the parents if our friend here had been eaten in broad daylight. That’s all I’ve got for you.’

Just then, they heard a shout from the hill. One of the forensic technicians was waving something he had fished out of a hole in the air. It looked like a wolverine turd.

Paul Hjelm tried the phrase a few times. Wolverine turd. How many times had he said that in his life? Zero.

‘Probably a wolverine dick,’ Chavez whispered loudly.

‘Let’s just hope the wolverine wasn’t still in the hole,’ Hjelm half whispered back.

As the technician struggled down the hill, Hjelm thought for a moment about association paths and their meanings. The technician made it over to his boss, who still had a stern look on his face. Brynolf Svenhagen took the object, twisting and turning it in his hands for a while before wandering over in the direction of Hjelm, Chavez and Qvarfordt. He held it out to old Qvarfordt, who peeped at it through inch-thick glasses and nodded.

‘Fantastic,’ was all he said.

The stern Svenhagen reluctantly turned to his son-in-law and his equally detestable colleague. He held the object up for them.

It was a finger.

‘Fantastic,’ Chavez said, without showing any desire to get a closer look at it. ‘Fingerprints,’ he added unnecessarily.

Svenhagen turned on his heels. Chavez grabbed his flapping white arm and pulled it towards him. It looked like a foretaste of the football World Cup.

‘For God’s sake,’ Svenhagen said doggedly.

‘Can we go over the letters, Brunte? If it’s not too much to ask?’

Brynolf Svenhagen nodded gravely.

‘We are policemen,’ Hjelm added helpfully.

Svenhagen made yet another non-verbal expression of his distaste and then overcame himself. He led the two inspectors towards the edge of the wolverine enclosure, right next to the three-metre drop beneath the viewing area. The ground here was dark earth, and it was where the concentration of multicoloured fibres was greatest. They could also make out the only trace of blood – a darker spot which had been almost entirely soaked up by the earthy ground.

‘Tread carefully here,’ Svenhagen said.

‘How many wolverines were there?’ Hjelm asked.

‘Four.’

‘Four bestial creatures devoured a person and there’s hardly a trace of blood anywhere. Isn’t that strange?’

Svenhagen paused and directed an icy-blue don’t-you-know-anything look at Hjelm.

‘It rained last night,’ he said, squatting down. ‘Fortunately, this is still here,’ he continued, pointing.

In the ground directly beneath Brynolf Svenhagen’s index finger, Hjelm could make out some depressions. After some effort, he realised they were letters. Five of them. He worked his way through them.

‘Epivu?’ he said.

‘That’s what it looks like,’ Svenhagen confirmed. ‘Just don’t ask me what it means.’

‘Did he write it?’

‘We don’t know. The size of the letters is consistent with a human finger, I can say that much. And the number of fibres around here suggests that it might be where the actual… ingestion took place. If that’s the case, we might assume that our victim, with his hands and feet bound, wrote a last message. We’ve taken samples from the letters to see whether there’s any trace of blood or skin in the soil. Maybe that finger can help shed a little light on all of this.’

‘Have we got any idea at all about how he ended up here?’

‘No,’ Svenhagen replied. ‘Plenty of fingerprints on the fence, of course, but otherwise nothing. We’ll have to go through everything.’

‘If we assume he was the one who wrote “Epivu”, then he didn’t end up here without a head. How can a head disappear?’

‘There are several possibilities,’ Svenhagen replied, looking at Hjelm. Perhaps the man wasn’t the utter idiot he had previously assumed him to be. But Brynolf Svenhagen wasn’t someone who enjoyed having his preconceived notions overturned. If possible, that made him even harsher. He continued sternly: ‘The wolverines might simply have eaten it. It’s really not so unlikely that they gobbled up the entire thing, cranium and teeth and cerebral cortex. Everything. Then of course it might be the case that he didn’t write those letters at all. You’ll have to check with the keepers, that’s your job. One of the wolverines might be called Epivu, what do I know?’

Hjelm didn’t let him go. He glanced around the rugged terrain.

‘So the skull could just as easily be here somewhere? We’ll have to keep looking. I assume you’ll be having to sift through plenty of wolverine shit in the near future. It might not be just one person, maybe those naughty wolverines gobbled up two or three or an entire football team.’

At the mention of wolverine droppings, Hjelm noticed the space between Svenhagen’s eyes twitch. The hyper-organised chief forensic technician clearly hadn’t thought that far ahead. It felt quite gratifying. These odd little power struggles which fill our social environment…

Why do we find it so difficult to spend time together without being transformed into children?

Svenhagen moved off. Hjelm looked at Chavez.

‘What do we have here?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Chavez answered, ‘but it’s certainly not normal.’

‘No,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘It’s certainly not normal.’

They went for a coffee in the cafe at the top of the museum’s observation tower. They sat there munching dry cheese sandwiches and looking down at the sun-drenched museum and the crowds growing in size with each moment that passed. Stockholm’s assembled pensioner corps seemed to be there, clutching lethal pieces of bread which would soon be transformed into monstrous, deadly lumps, responsible for the death of more seabirds than the country’s poachers combined.

Though that wasn’t exactly what Paul Hjelm and Jorge Chavez had on their minds. They were thinking about a murder.

If it was in fact a murder.

‘Underworld,’ Chavez said, trying in vain to bite through the slice of cheese in his sandwich. He wished he had bolt cutters for teeth.

‘Ellroy?’ Hjelm asked, staring blindly out at the magnificent view of Stockholm. ‘Which Ellroy?’

‘In one way or another, it’s the underworld,’ Chavez explained.

‘In one way or another, yes. But not in any way at all. This isn’t a simple drugs deal, it’s not a normal execution. If it was, we wouldn’t have this. This is something special. There’s a message here.’

‘Epivu?’

Hjelm shook his head but said nothing. Chavez continued to think aloud.

‘He was probably tied up and then thrown to the wolverines. Then he had time to write “Epivu”. But why did he do it? Why didn’t he try to get away instead? I mean, even a mediocre sportsman like Paul Hjelm can make it over the ditch without any real bother.’

‘His right groin,’ Hjelm said, taking a sip of his remarkably viscous coffee. ‘Pain in the right groin. Radiating to the knee.’

‘Sounds like cancer,’ said Chavez. ‘Groin cancer, the most dangerous kind. Ninety-seven per cent death rate according to the latest research.’

‘In his defence, it’s easier to jump in than out.’

‘If you get thrown in to a wolverine enclosure, you don’t just sit down and write in the ground with your fingers. That’s not the first thing you do. You try desperately to get out.’

‘But then even assassins aren’t likely to throw someone in to the wolverines and run off immediately. They’d probably stay there to watch. They’d probably be pointing a gun at you. They’d probably stop you from escaping. They’d probably stand there enjoying the show. Like some kind of gladiator games.’

‘Doesn’t that sound a bit complicated?’ asked Chavez. ‘You decide someone’s going to be killed. You tie that person up, take them into Skansen after hours, carry them through the animal park where straggling keepers might turn up at any moment, and you do all that just so you can throw them to the wolverines? Doesn’t sound like something you’d do unless you had a very specific reason for it.’

‘Which takes us right back to Ellroy,’ said Hjelm. ‘Who is this Ellroy?’

‘Or,’ Chavez shouted, slamming his coffee cup down with such force that the saucer broke into two neat half-circles, ‘or maybe they were chasing him and ended up in Skansen by chance.’

‘And if that’s what happened,’ Hjelm said, nodding, ‘it makes sense that he fired a couple of shots somewhere along the way, and that one of those bullets made its way into a ten-year-old girl’s arm.’

Chavez gave him a slightly surprised look. Hjelm paused for effect long enough that Chavez started squirming with anticipation.

Yes, he knew it was childish.

‘At 22.14 yesterday, a 9mm bullet got lodged in the arm of ten-year-old Lisa Altbratt as she wandered down Sirishovsvägen.’

‘And where’s Sirishovsvägen?’ asked Chavez.

‘It joins Djurgårdsvägen, coming down from Rosendal.’

‘Skansen map,’ said Chavez. Hjelm pulled the crumpled paper from his inner pocket and handed it to Chavez.

‘Sirishovsvägen is here,’ Hjelm said, pointing.

‘And where was Lisa Alstedt when she got shot?’

‘Altbratt,’ Hjelm corrected him. ‘About here.’

He pointed to a spot close to the point where Sirishovsvägen joined Djurgårdsvägen, not far from the Oakhill villa and the Italian embassy. The Skansen fence ran right alongside it.

‘Hmm,’ Chavez said. He sounded like Sherlock Holmes when he was thinking. ‘Lisa Altbrunn here. Wolverine man here.’

‘Altbratt,’ Hjelm corrected him, following Chavez’s pencil with his eyes. Chavez continued.

‘The bullet?’

‘Right arm, walking down towards Djurgårdsvägen.’

‘Meaning it came from somewhere inside Skansen. Here. Can you get over the fence here? Which part is that?’

‘What does it say? Wolves?’

‘Exactly: right there. Yeah, wolves. There.’

Hjelm followed the pencil as it moved up from the map to the window of the observation tower. Chavez pointed it out at the real Skansen. Hjelm could make out the labyrinthine bear enclosure and his gaze swept further, past horses and lynx, wild boars and buffalo; past the wolverine enclosure where the blue-and-white tape was fluttering in the morning breeze, finally reaching the extensive pen which housed the wolves. The fence was high but not impossible to scale, though there was barbed wire on top of it.

Paul Hjelm nodded. His face cracked into a malicious smile.

‘I think Brunte’s going to have to expand his search area slightly. Do you want to break it to him?’

‘With the greatest pleasure,’ Jorge Chavez replied, grinning.