The Blinded Man aka Misterioso

25

A week passed in which almost nothing happened. After that came an event that should have been decisive.

The criminal division of the Stockholm police made a routine raid on an illegal gambling club downtown. An alert officer by the name of Åkesson recognized one of the gamblers, even though he had affected a trendy goatee, was wearing hornrimmed glasses, and had shaved off all his hair.

The gambler was Alexander Bryusov, the slimmer half of Igor and Igor.

He was now sitting mute in the city jail. The members of the A-Unit were peering through the peephole, one after the other, like curious schoolchildren.

Hultin turned to the officer who had arrested Bryusov. Åkesson was looking worn out; he was desperate to go home.

“Not a word?”

Åkesson shook his head. “I’ve sat here almost all night trying to get something out of him. He’s pretending to be deaf and dumb.”

“Okay,” said Hultin. “Damned good job, in any case, Åkesson. Go home now and get some sleep.”

Åkesson left. They hoped he wasn’t planning to drive himself home.

The visiting schoolchildren of the A-Unit stood there, shifting from one foot to the other in the corridor of the jail. The guard was staring at them with a slightly indulgent expression.

“I’ll go in with Söderstedt,” said Hultin, and asked the guard to unlock the steel door. “The rest of you can leave,” he added, and slipped inside.

Söderstedt gave them an apologetic wave and followed.

No one left. They took turns looking through the peephole. The guard’s expression grew progressively less indulgent.

Hultin and Söderstedt sat down across from Alexander Bryusov. He didn’t look much like the police sketch.

It was Söderstedt who did the talking. He repeated each question he asked; first he posed the question in Swedish, then in Russian. But it was a very one-sided conversation.

Bryusov began by demanding a lawyer. The demand was denied with vague references to national security; an infallible excuse. The rest of the questions, including one about the Monk tape, Bryusov answered with an ironic smile. Once he said to Söderstedt, “I recognize you.” Otherwise he remained mute, up until the question: “Where is Valery Treplyov?”

Then Bryusov laughed loudly and said in crystal-clear Swedish, “That, my good sirs, is a profoundly religious question.” After that he said nothing more.

The chief prosecutor didn’t have an easy time of it at the indictment hearing.

Not only was there already an overwhelming lack of evidence. But when the case was presented in famed attorney Reynold Rangsmyhr’s rhetorically elaborated and sarcastic statements, it became downright ludicrous.

The members of the A-Unit were flabbergasted as they sat scattered among the spectators. They were far less concerned with whether one half of the Igor duet was going to be released than with the question of why the most prominent attorney in Sweden, and definitely the most expensive, was defending a Russian booze smuggler.

What they witnessed was a battle royal, Tyson versus Anders “Lillen” Eklund, which logically ended with the judge sternly admonishing both the office of the prosecutor as well as the police authorities for wasting the time and resources of the judicial system with a matter that could end in only one way. And the freed Alexander Bryusov actually managed to go underground while still inside the courthouse. No one even saw him leave the building.

“What just happened over there?” Gunnar Nyberg dared to ask at the afternoon meeting in Supreme Central Command. A thick haze of disappointment hovered over the A-Unit. Through the fog they could just make out their badly lacerated but not yet beaten commander, Hultin, sitting at the end of the table. He was deliberately rolling the shattered lance of his lead pencil between his fingers. Without looking up from this Sisyphean labor, he said grimly, “The question is quite simple. Does the Viktor X group have sufficient resources and contacts within the Swedish judicial system to get Bryusov off so easily? Or what is it we’re actually encountering here?”

The group tried as much as possible to relieve the Stockholm police and take over most of the nighttime surveillance of the Lovisedal board of directors, anno 1991.

Hjelm had spent a night keeping an eye on a man by the name of Bertilsson, and another night guarding a man named Schrödenius. He’d also spent a couple of nights at home in Norsborg.

He’d had no contact whatsoever with Cilla, who was staying at the Dalarö cabin and remained an enigma. Apparently the worst thing he could do would be to try and reason with her. He had seen her loneliness. And Danne and Tova were living their own lives, with Danne spending most of his time in his room. Tova was often with her friend Milla, whose parents had cheerfully promised to look after her but at the same time, it seemed to Hjelm, had given him a number of reproachful looks. He stocked the freezer with food, wondering who was really to blame and for what.

Tova said that she thought the blemish on his cheek looked like an astrological sign, but she couldn’t decide which one. Not until the following morning, just as he was about to leave for work, did she say that it was Pluto she meant-a P with a little line through the loop. He asked her what the significance was. She replied merrily and innocently that she had no idea.

“Are you coming to the closing ceremonies at school?” she asked him. “Mama is coming.”

“I’ll try,” he said, feeling a pang.

In the car on his way into town he thought about what Pluto might mean for Tova: a cute Disney dog, the most distant planet in the solar system, or an archaic god of death.

When he entered the office, Chavez hadn’t yet turned on the computer. That was very unusual. He was sitting at his desk, grinding coffee beans. “It’s going to be June soon,” he said tersely.

“Do you have plans for the summer that are going to end up frozen?” said Hjelm as he sat down.

“I suppose frozen is the right word.” Chavez looked out the window of the small office. The clear blue sky was peeking through the upper-right corner. Then he seemed to remember something. “Oh, that’s right,” he said, invoking his rather distracted memory banks. “A guy called. Said he’d call back.”

“Who was it?”

“No idea. I forgot to ask.”

It was a fundamental dereliction of duty, but Hjelm stopped himself from criticizing his colleague. “What did he sound like?”

“What did he sound like? Someone from Göteborg, I think.”

“Ah,” said Hjelm with renewed hope. He punched in a long string of numbers and waited. “Hackzell?” he shouted into the phone. “Hjelm here.”

“I think I’ve come up with something,” said Roger Hackzell, his voice crackling on the line from Hackat & Malet in Växjö. “Something actually did happen a couple of years ago when I played a jazz tape here in the restaurant.”

“Don’t go anywhere!” Hjelm slammed down the phone. Already out to the hall, he said to Chavez, “Tell Hultin that Kerstin and I have gone to Växjö. We’ll be in touch.”

“Wait!” yelled Chavez.

Hjelm rushed into room 303. Gunnar Nyberg and Kerstin Holm were sitting there singing a complex Gregorian chant. He stopped and stared at them in astonishment. Without seeming to notice him, they sang to the end. Chavez threw open the door behind him and also halted abruptly. When they were done, Hjelm and Chavez applauded for a long time. Then Hjelm said, “I think we’ve got a nibble regarding the cassette tape in Växjö. Want to come along?”

Kerstin Holm wordlessly put on her little black leather jacket.

“Is there room for me?” asked Chavez.

The three of them flew to Växjö. Jorge’s presence made any intimate conversation between Paul and Kerstin impossible. Neither of them seemed to mind. Their tunnel vision had been activated.

Just after eleven o’clock they found Roger Hackzell inside Hackat & Malet. The restaurant had just opened for early lunch customers.

Hackzell showed them in to his office, leaving the restaurant in the hands of a waitress. “Misterioso” was playing loudly inside the office. Hackzell turned off the tape player, which was set up to play the same tune over and over.

“Yes, well,” he said, motioning for them to sit down on the sofa. “A couple of days ago I got a feeling that there was something special about that tune, so I’ve been listening to it like a maniac. And then I remembered. It was late one night a few years back. We’d been running the restaurant here in town for several years and were the only place open until three A.M. It could get a little rowdy, with all the late-night partiers gathered here. Later the rules were changed, and now we’re open only until midnight. On that particular night, though, the restaurant was deserted, and I was just about to close.

“There were two men still here. One of them, Anton, big as a house, requested that I play this tape again. I had just played it and then put in a new one with some rock music. But Anton had a kind of crazy look in his eyes, and he wanted the jazz back on. So I put in the tape again, and I’m positive that it was this tune. Then he started shouting wildly and lit into the other guy, punching and pummeling him.

“I remember it all very clearly now; it was nasty as hell. Anton kept screaming the same thing over and over. I can’t recall what it was, something really incoherent. He was drunk as a skunk, and I was fucking scared. First he delivered a couple of blows to the stomach, then a kick to the knee and one to the groin, and finally a hell of a knockout punch right on the jaw, making the guy’s teeth fly. He fell to the floor, and Anton kicked him as he lay there, again and again.

“But he was conscious the whole time, the guy who was lying there getting beaten; he just stared up at Anton with a strange expression. Then Anton stepped back to take aim for a fucking big kick that definitely would have killed the guy. I screamed at him. Anton stopped himself and instead picked up a bottle and hurled it against the wall. Then he left.

“I helped him up, the guy who was lying on the floor. He was beaten real bad, his teeth were rolling around under his tongue, and he spat them out, one after the other. One arm was hanging limply, bent at an odd angle, and he had terrible pain in his stomach and abdomen. ‘I’m going to call the police,’ I said, ‘and an ambulance.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘he was totally justified.’ That’s what he actually said about the lunatic who had just beaten him to a pulp: ‘He was totally justified.’ Okay, I thought, it was great not to have to bring in the police, because then we’d lose our nighttime license. I helped him sop up the worst of the blood, and he left. And that was it.”

“I think that’s good enough,” said Hjelm. “This Anton, who is he?”

“Anton Rudström is his name. He’d opened a gym here in town-that must have been back in 1990. But when this happened, it was about a year later, in the spring, and the gym had gone bankrupt. He’d gotten a bank loan without having to provide any collateral-you know how easy that was in those days-and then he couldn’t pay it back. That happened a lot in the late eighties. At the time of the episode in the restaurant, Anton had just started on his drinking career. Now he’s a full-blooded alcoholic, one of the drunks who usually hang around outside the state liquor store.”

“Although he still looks like a bodybuilder,” said Hjelm pensively, amazed at the coincidence.

Roger Hackzell, Kerstin Holm, and Jorge Chavez all looked at him in surprise.

“What about the other man?” said Chavez. “The victim. Who was he?”

“I don’t know. I’d never seen him before or since. I don’t think he was from here in town. But he was a fucking expert at darts, I do remember that. Stood there for several hours, throwing them.”

“Throwing them?” said Kerstin Holm.

“Darts,” Roger Hackzell clarified.

He was sitting with a group passing around a bottle of cheap Rosita sherry. He was the youngest and the biggest on the park bench.

“I thought vodka was your poison,” said Hjelm.

Anton Rudström recognized him at once.

“Will you look at that!” he said jovially. “The Stockholmer with the taste test. Gentlemen, you see before you the man who gave me a half bottle of vodka so that I’d drink more vodka.”

“Hell, I was sure you were making him up,” said an old, toothless man, stretching out his hand toward Hjelm. “I’d be willing to help with a taste test.”

“No taste test this time,” said Hjelm, showing them his police ID. “Now clear out.”

Rudström tried to clear out too, but without success. “Right now I want to hear a little about the fight in the restaurant Hackat & Malet in the spring of ’91,” said Hjelm, sitting down next to the man. Chavez and Holm remained standing. Neither of them seemed particularly impressive compared to the enormous Rudström.

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said sullenly.

“We’re not here to arrest you. There’s not even a police report about it. Just try to answer my questions as precisely as you can, and there’ll be another half bottle in it for you, I promise. First we’d like to know why you wanted to hear that particular piece of jazz called ‘Misterioso,’ by Thelonious Monk, while you beat that man to a pulp.”

Anton Rudström paused to think. He had to dive down through cubic yards of ethanol to return to the opposite shore. He fumbled his way along its shifting sands.

“I remember vaguely that I was about to kill somebody. That was after the plug was pulled for good.”

“You owned a gym, right?” Hjelm ventured.

“The Apollo,” said Rudström cockily. “The Apollo Gym. Fuck.”

“Tell us about it.”

“Yeah, well, okay. Let me see. I’d been working out at Carlo’s place all those years, and I finally got a job there. Then I happened to walk past a great vacant space in the center of town, a little expensive, of course-an old boutique of some kind. Well, then I decided to go to the nearest bank and ask for a loan to open a gym there; it was just an impulse, I didn’t have any collateral or anything. And suddenly I was coming out of the bank with a huge loan in my pocket. Everything was going so well back then; it was easy to get a loan.

“I bought the best equipment available and created a real fancy gym. Of course it wasn’t going to make it in little Växjö. It took only six months or so for the whole shitload to go bankrupt, and I stood there with a fucking debt in the millions of kronor, with no idea how it all happened. I’d lost everything, just like that.”

Rudström snapped his fingers, then floated off to happier hunting grounds.

Hjelm cautiously prodded him back. “It was about that time that you were in Hackat & Malet one night. The only people in the place were you, the owner, and one other person. It was almost closing time. In the middle of the night. Do you remember?”

“Vaguely,” said Rudström. “Shit, I need a drink.”

“You’ll get plenty of drinks afterward. Try to think back.”

Anton Rudström dove once again into the deep sea. “He was standing in the corner, throwing darts. At least I think it was that night… I can’t really recall.”

“Yes, it was. That’s right. Go on.”

“Well… He was already there, throwing his fucking darts when I came in. The place was packed, but he stood over there in the corner, throwing one dart after another, for hours. It was starting to annoy me.”

“Why?”

“Somebody said something earlier that night… something that made me pay attention to him. Otherwise he’d have been easy to overlook. But somebody said that he was… that he…”

Rudström was about to fade away and slip through their fingers. All three noticed it.

“Was it something he said or did?” asked Chavez quickly. “Some annoying behavior? Or maybe something about him personally? Some trait? A particular type of person? Or profession? Was he an immigrant?”

“Something about him personally, that’s what it was.” Rudström looked at Chavez in surprise. “He was something that made me fucking mad, and the more beers I drank, the madder I got. I blamed him for all the shit that had been dumped on me.”

“Why him?” said Hjelm.

“He was a bank guy,” said Rudström clearly. “That’s what it was. Somebody said that he worked in a bank. Finally it drove me crazy.”

“He worked in town?”

“No, in some hole-in-the-wall town, I think. I’m not sure. He wasn’t from Växjö, I know that. I have no clue who he was. But he was a real ace at darts. I hope he wasn’t seriously injured.”

They exchanged glances, all four of them.

“It’s possible that he was injured worse than you might imagine,” said Hjelm. “But not in the way you mean.”

He pressed two hundred-krona bills into Rudström’s hand. The man now seemed to be totally immersed in the memory that he’d initially thought the booze had drowned out forever.

“My God, how I hit him,” he said. A couple of tears quietly ran down his steroid-scarred cheek. “My God.”

They were just about to leave when Kerstin Holm crouched down in front of him. “I have to ask you one thing, Anton,” she said. “Why did you want to hear ‘Misterioso’ while you beat him up?”

He looked her right in the eye. “It was such a fucking great tune. But now I’ve forgotten how it goes.”

She patted his arm lightly. “But he probably hasn’t.”

They were so distracted that they ended up at what they thought was an outdoor café until they got their hamburgers with a big M on the wrapper. They found themselves sitting on the McDonald’s terrace on the big pedestrian street in Växjö. It was afternoon.

“Misterioso,” said Kerstin. “It’s a play on words, typical Monk. There’s an inaudible mist in the title. Behind the mystery, the mysterium, there’s a mist. When you say the word, you don’t hear the mist. It’s hidden by the more pronounced mystery. And yet it’s there and has an effect. It’s in the tune too. The mystery is immediately apparent, intangible, of course, and yet physically manifest. The mist inside is harder to distinguish. But it’s there in the mist that we go astray.”

Hjelm had gone astray. There was something somewhere that he had overlooked, something that had passed him by and yet had been there the whole time; okay, he thought, something altogether physically manifest. Someone had said something. It was driving him crazy.

“Have you thought of anything?” asked Chavez, biting into his Quarter Pounder.

“It’s there, just below the surface,” said Hjelm.

“I know how you feel,” said Chavez, chewing. “It’s like Fawlty Towers, right? A difficult guest is served the wrong dish three times. Basil’s wife, what’s her name? Sybil. She finally serves the wrong dish on purpose. Basil says between clenched teeth, ‘I know how she feels.’ ”

“What does that have to do with any of this?” said Holm in surprise.

“Not a damned thing. Just making conversation, as I’m told it’s called.”

A bank, thought Hjelm, digging through his own memory bank. He came up with nothing, not even a statement of account.

“What do we do if you can’t come up with anything?” said Chavez. “Line up every banker in Småland in a row and let Mr. Serious Alcoholic take a look at them, one after the other?”

“He must have been treated for the teeth that were knocked out, and the broken arm, if that’s what it was,” said Holm.

“This whole thing is still such a long shot.” Chavez smacked his lips. “Not something we can present to Hultin, at any rate. He beat up a guy listening to Hackzell’s ‘Misterioso’-but it’s a big leap from there to actually having the tape.”

“There’s a connection,” Hjelm said doggedly.

“Okay,” said Chavez. “Does your connection have anything to do with Igor and Igor? It almost has to. The cassette is the only link between the beating in the spring of ’91 in a restaurant in Växjö and the ex-Soviet bullets in the upper-class walls in Stockholm. And the path of the tape from the restaurant to the villa in Saltsjöbaden follows the same route as Igor and Igor. They took the tape from Hackzell, after all, as partial payment for the Estonian vodka on February fifteenth.”

Hjelm shook his head. The whole thing was unclear. Misterioso.

“Let’s start from the point of view of the banker who was beaten up,” said Kerstin Holm. “According to Hackzell, right after the beating, as he’s spitting out teeth, he said, ‘He was totally justified.’ About the guy who pounded him! Strange, don’t you think? The years pass, the wounds heal, but at the same time the accumulation of distrust, insight, confusion, powerlessness grows-”

“Wrede!” shouted Hjelm, jumping to his feet.

Holm looked at him in surprise.

“Wrede. Jonas Wrede, from the Växjö police. He said something about an incident in a bank. I lost it in all the other damn incidents he kept talking about. Albertsboda, or someplace like that. Shit, what time is it?”

“Three-thirty,” said Chavez. “What’s going on?”

“We have to go to the Växjö police station,” said Hjelm, and dashed out.

Detective Inspector Jonas Wrede stood at attention three times, once for each member of the NCP Power Murders team that came into his little office. Finally he was standing so erect that the top button of his shirt popped off.

“Relax,” said Hjelm. “Sit down.”

Wrede obeyed the command. Ordered to relax, he sat there looking like a sack of hay.

“The last time I was here, you said something about a previous contact with the NCP. It had to do with a bank incident somewhere.”

“That’s right,” said Wrede hopefully. “The bank incident in Algotsmåla. But of course you must know about that. The NCP sent a man down there. He never introduced himself, said his identity was confidential. He put a lid on the whole thing. Nothing got out to the press. I’m quite proud of that: no leaks from here whatsoever. Even the bank personnel kept their mouths shut. A matter of self-preservation, I assume.”

“What happened?”

“All the documents were confiscated by your man, so obviously you already know.”

“Just tell us everything you can remember.”

Wrede looked a bit disoriented, since he wasn’t able to make use of his computer.

“Yes, well, let’s see. It happened this year, on February fifteenth. When the staff arrived at the bank that morning and opened the vault, they found a dead body inside. And a lot of money was missing. We immediately brought in Stockholm; it was a real mystery. Your man came down here and took over the whole investigation. That’s all.”

“Our man…” said Chavez.

“February fifteenth,” said Holm.

“Tell us about the dead man,” said Hjelm.

“I was the first officer on the scene, and I was the one who contacted Stockholm. I saw it as my duty to keep the whole staff there until your man arrived. He gave me high praise and imposed a gag order on the police officers on site as well as the bank personnel. Consequently I was the first to examine the body properly. He was a big, stocky man, powerfully built. A long, sharp object of some kind, possibly a slender stiletto, had pierced his eye and gone right into his brain. A very unpleasant sight.” Wrede looked more excited than upset. “But I’m sure that you already know all this,” he insisted.

“Okay,” said Hjelm. “If you could arrange to have all the personnel who were present at the time, come to the bank in Algotsboda, then we’ll go out there right away.”

“Algotsmåla,” said Wrede, and put in a call to the bank office.

Jonas Wrede personally drove the police car that carried all of them about thirty miles from Växjö. The sun was sinking toward the horizon.

Wrede was all fired up and in full subtlety mode, meaning he urgently prodded them to reveal what this was all about. None of the NCP officers said a word. All they saw was the narrowest of tunnels in front of them, the tunnel that would lead to a serial killer.

Wrede pounded fiercely on the locked door of the bank. A short, timid, middle-aged woman opened it. The only other person inside the minuscule bank office was an elderly gentleman wearing a pin-striped suit.

“This is the bank president, Albert Josephson, and the bank teller, Lisbet Heed.”

The officers looked at both with a certain skepticism. “Is this the whole staff?” asked Chavez.

Lisbet Heed brought them cups of freshly brewed coffee. They accepted, without really paying attention.

Josephson cleared his throat and spoke in a shrill, pedantic voice. “We lost a number of staff members in February this year, a cost-saving measure that also involved cutting back our business hours. It was part of the bank’s austerity policy, as a result of the deplorable conditions at the end of the last decade and the beginning of this one.”

“So the basic staff,” said Hjelm, “had to pay the price for the failed speculations and absurd borrowing practices instigated by the higher-ups, who later retired with their multimillion-kronor golden parachutes. Is that it?” He sounded like Söderstedt.

“Not an unreasonable way of viewing the matter,” said Josephson impassively. “The fact is that this”-he glanced at Wrede-“incident… occurred on the very day when the new business hours went into effect. And on the same day the staff had been cut in half. I opened the vault myself and found… the blinded man.”

The blinded man, thought Hjelm.

“Here’s the vault,” said Josephson, pointing to the open vault. They went inside. There was nothing to see.

“So you found him lying inside the locked vault?” said Chavez.

“You can imagine what a shock it was,” said Josephson, without looking especially shocked.

“Do you remember what the… blinded man looked like?” asked Hjelm.

“Big,” said Josephson. “Huge, in fact.”

“A real bull of a man,” said Lisbet Heed surprisingly.

“Worn out by the matador,” said Chavez, even more surprisingly.

Kerstin Holm dug around in her bag and took out the sketches of Igor and Igor.

Time for a decisive moment.

“Was it one of these men?” she asked.

Hjelm hardly recognized her voice. A tunnel voice, he thought.

“So that’s why I thought I recognized the drawing!” cried Lisbet Heed. “It was in the newspaper for days!”

Jonas Wrede froze. What an oversight on his part! Bye-bye to any chance of being transferred to the NCP.

“I knew I’d seen that face somewhere!” Lisbet went on. “But I didn’t even think about the man in the vault. I did everything I could to repress the whole thing. It was so horrible.”

“That’s him, all right.” Josephson pointed at the sketch of Valery Treplyov’s face. “Even though his face looked slightly different, of course.”

“Wrede?” said Holm, wickedly, holding up the drawing to the pale man, who nodded mutely. Bye-bye, inspector training course.

Hjelm, Holm, and Chavez gave each other meaningful looks. One important thing was still missing. Hjelm went to the back of the office, behind the wall that divided it from the public section of the bank.

He stopped in his tracks, then gestured for Holm and Chavez to join him.

For a long time they all looked at the dartboard hanging on the wall.

Wrede, Josephson, and Heed came over to stand next to them.

“Yes, it’s still there,” said Lisbet Heed. “I haven’t had the heart to take it down.”

Chavez asked the question: “What are the names of the two people who were let go on February fifteenth?”

“Mia Lindström,” said Heed.

“And Göran Andersson,” said Josephson.

Göran Andersson, thought the three officers.

“Was it Andersson who played darts?” asked Chavez.

“Yes,” said Lisbet Heed. “He was really good at it. He was the first to arrive every morning, and he always started the day with a… What was it called?”

“A five-oh-one,” said Josephson. “You start at five-oh-one and work your way down to zero.”

“What happened to Göran Andersson after he was fired?” asked Hjelm. “Did he stay here in town?”

“No,” said Lisbet, looking sad. “No, he left his girlfriend high and dry and vanished. I don’t think even Lena knows where he went.”

“Lena?”

“Lena Lundberg. They lived in a little house on the other side of Algotsmåla. Now she lives there alone. And she’s pregnant, the poor thing. Göran probably doesn’t even know that he’s going to be a father.”

“Do you remember whether Göran was injured sometime during the spring of ’91?”

“Yes.” Josephson had the personnel list filed in his mind. “He was out sick for a couple of months back then. It had something to do with his teeth-”

“I think he had to get a bridge, or something like that,” said Heed. “He mostly stayed indoors during that time. He didn’t want to talk about what had happened. But I saw him with a plaster cast on his arm too. I think it was a car accident.”

“One more thing,” said Hjelm. “Had Göran Andersson turned in his bank keys?”

“I don’t think he’d done that yet,” said bank president Albert Josephson, for the first time sounding a bit uncertain.

The three members of the A-Unit exchanged glances again. Things were falling into place. Loose threads were getting tied up.

Göran Andersson.

There wasn’t much more to add.

Hjelm turned to Wrede. “Do you have a sketch artist in Växjö?”

“A police sketch artist?” said Wrede, still looking pale. “There’s an artist here that we sometimes use, yes.”

“The three of you are going to help each other produce a drawing of the man from NCP who was down here and took over the case. Be as specific as you can. But first I want you to drive us over to see Lena Lundberg.”

It wasn’t far to the other side of Algotsmåla. But while sitting crowded together in a police cruiser, each of them put all the information together in their minds to form one big picture.

In the spring of 1991, the bank employee Göran Andersson from Algotsmåla had been beaten up in a restaurant in Växjö. It was a result of the Swedish banking world’s grotesque borrowing practices during the late eighties: those borrowing practices contributed not only to the bank crisis and to Sweden’s general economic crisis in the early nineties but also to scores of unnecessary personal bankruptcies. One of these bankruptcies was suffered by Anton Rudström, who at the sight of a banker went berserk and beat up the man. That man turned out to be Göran Andersson. Andersson apparently had already suspected that something was wrong with the bank’s policies, because after the beating he said that Rudström’s actions were justified. Yet he continued to work at the bank, maybe out of loyalty, or maybe because there simply wasn’t any other job available.

Later, as a direct result of these shady business dealings, he lost his job, and that’s when he snapped. Even though he’d been fired, he went to the bank just as he usually did, arriving before the normal opening time. He let himself in through the staff entrance, using the keys that he hadn’t yet relinquished, in order to rob the bank. That would be his revenge.

But for some unknown reason, he opened the bank doors as usual. That was strange, because the opening hours at the bank had been cut back, and because he’d been fired and was in the process of robbing the bank. Maybe it was the power of habit, or maybe he was distracted by a dart game that he’d started playing. Five-oh-one.

To top it all off, he was robbed just as he was planning his own robbery. A brutal Russian mafia man by the name of Valery Treplyov came into the bank in the middle of Andersson’s robbery and game of darts. The situation was grotesque. The world fell in on Andersson. The mafioso on the other side of the counter had the same gigantic build as the man who had beaten Göran up a couple of years earlier. Maybe he was holding the dart in his hand. Regardless, he threw it with infallible precision right into Valery Treplyov’s eye.

Now Andersson had killed a man; in self-defense, of course, but no matter what, he was standing there with a dead body in his old bank office, which he was in the process of robbing. He dragged the body inside the vault and locked it. He had appropriated Treplyov’s gun, perhaps in a state of confusion, and he’d emptied the man’s pockets. In addition to a lot of ammunition from the notorious factory in Kazakhstan, he also found a cassette tape.

He took the money, locked the bank doors, and left through the same entrance he’d come in, the back door, which was for employees only. In front of the bank was the truck containing Estonian vodka, ready to be delivered to other parts of the country. In the vehicle, the other Igor, Alexander Bryusov, waited for his partner to appear. After a while he might have gone over to the bank, only to find the doors locked and the place deserted. A mystery.

By then Göran Andersson had already driven off in his car, which he’d parked in back, in the employees’ lot. Maybe it was then that he popped the cassette into the car tape player and listened to the very jazz tune he’d heard a few years earlier while he was being beaten up: the inexplicable hand of coincidence. It was as if some higher power were behind it all. An unexpected element that was simply impossible to explain. That absurd Russian-who had come into the bank while Göran was making a radical break with everything he’d ever believed in-had supplied him with not only a weapon but also a motivation in the form of this music.

It was too much. He was transformed into the instrument of a larger power, seeking revenge against the banks, on behalf of the greater public, and at the same time against Anton Rudström, for himself personally. He decided to go after the bank’s board of directors from the year when Rudström had so hastily been granted a loan, the year 1990. That loan had resulted in the beating in Hackat & Malet in the spring of 1991. Both banks were branches of Sydbanken, but it could just as well have been any of Sweden’s larger banks. Göran Andersson presumably went to Stockholm on February 15, right after the incident at the bank in Algotsmåla. There he planned the first of three murders to be committed in less than a month. He started on his path as the avenging angel between March 29 and 30. After the first three murders, he retreated to his lair to plan the next series of killings. Which they were in the middle of right now. Göran Andersson was very determined, very accurate, very damaged, and very dangerous. He was beyond desperate.

The mystery was gone. But the mist still remained.

Misterioso.

They got out of the police car in front of a small house on the edge of town. It looked tranquil and peaceful, basking in the evening sun. The police car drove away.

None of them wanted to be the first to go in and talk to the woman who was expecting the Power Murderer’s child.