Another Time, Another Life

XIII

On April 24, Easter Monday, the media made note of the fact that twenty-five years to the day had passed since six young German terrorists occupied the West German embassy in Stockholm, murdered two people in cold blood, and carelessly or intentionally blew up the embassy building.

The occupation was described as one among a well-known series of events from a different time, and the anniversary provided an opportunity to show the classic images of a now legendary TV reporter screaming at his technicians to start filming him live. He crouches with microphone raised while in the background the embassy building shakes and there are shock waves and flames from the explosions. He too was interviewed on this anniversary, of course, and everything he had to say showed clearly that nowadays he was living a different life and that the exuberant interest of his younger colleagues mostly just made him feel tired.

The legal consequences of the twenty-fifth anniversary were for the most part not touched on. Only in passing was the fact mentioned that in a legal sense, right before midnight the statute of limitations would run out on the legal case based on the occupation of the embassy, and from now on the event would live on only in history. Of the intimation of Swedish involvement in the drama, there was not a peep.

At the beginning of May, Undersecretary Helena Stein left her position at the Ministry of Defense, and according to the briefly worded press release-for the most part passed over in silence by the media-the reason she did so was that she had decided to return to private legal practice. She did, however, intend to retain some of her political involvement on the local level, and she also expressed a hope that the change in her work situation would give her more time for such involvement.

The same day as the press release about her departure became public, the former bureau chief of the National Police Board Erik Berg passed away at a private nursing facility in Bromma.

During the spring the cancer had spread like a wildfire in his body, and on this particular day he had decided to release his hold. Now I’ll let go, he had thought. Let go so I can fall freely, like in a dream. And so he did.

Both Johansson and Berg’s old squire, Persson, attended the funeral.

Berg’s widow was there too, of course, but not many others, especially considering who Berg had been. The undersecretary, on the other hand, sat in the front pew in the church and surprised them all by showing visible signs during the funeral that he was deeply moved. On one occasion he even snuffled audibly and rubbed the corner of his eye with a giant handkerchief.

After the funeral service, when both Persson and Johansson were about to go their separate ways, the undersecretary came up to them and asked if he might invite them to lunch at Ulriksdals inn.

“I need a couple of good shots in the company of someone I can talk to, so I can gather my courage to say goodbye to Erik,” he explained. Johansson and Persson did not make any objections, but instead immediately accepted his invitation, and when they thought back on this afterward it really had been pleasant.

The following week Johansson met the undersecretary to ask him for a favor.

“I want a new job,” said Johansson.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said the undersecretary, sounding as though he meant what he was saying. “What kind of job do you want?” he asked. “You can have whatever you want.” Finally, he thought.

Oh, well, thought Johansson.

“I’m a policeman,” said Johansson, “but these last twenty years I’ve mostly been involved with other things. Before I retire I would like to have a job where I get the opportunity to put away the occasional bad guy who has done ordinary, decent people harm. That was why I wanted to become a policeman in the first place,” Johansson concluded.

An extremely honorable ambition according to the undersecretary, and as far as the details were concerned he did not intend to interfere.

“If you give me a proposal, I’ll arrange it,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Johansson.

A week before Midsummer the chief inspector at the National Bureau of Investigation’s homicide squad, Evert Bäckström, entered the police hall of fame. The reason was that the almost eleven-year-old murder of Kjell Göran Eriksson had been cleared up after an almost heroic investigation by Bäckström. For once, and in the sphere in which the police department’s homicide investigators ordinarily live and act, it was also justified to describe the formidable investigative effort as having been solely thanks to Bäckström. It proved that Bäckström had been right the whole time. The murder of Eriksson was an almost classic gay murder, allowing for the fact that the perpetrator was, fortunately, a highly unusual gay.

The murder of Eriksson was yet another deed in an apparently endless series of senseless outrages with homosexual overtones and motives that had been committed by the now nationally known and even internationally renowned serial killer who went under the name the Säter-Man in the media-named after the well-known mental hospital in Dalarna where, by the way, he had spent more or less half his life.

Bäckström’s effort had come in the nick of time. During recent years public doubts about the guilt of Säter-Man had been growing at the same pace as the number of murders attributed to him had increased. As usual the media hadn’t picked up on the fact that “the critical voices”-that was how they preferred to describe themselves-consisted of an exceedingly mixed company of professional backbiters who made envy a virtue and raising doubts a meal ticket-but then the media and the backbiters were closely allied. True, the Säter-Man had already been convicted of half a dozen murders, but he had confessed to another thirty, and among those who had worked on the investigation there was a strong conviction that everything argued for this being only the “tip of the iceberg” and that there were thus indispensable values of criminal policy at stake.

A recurring theme in the criticism centered on the fact that the Säter-Man had always been convicted solely on his own admissions and without a shred of either witness testimony or technical evidence. Confessions that were alleged to have little in common with the actions he maintained he had committed. But Bäckström had succeeded where his colleagues had failed for more than ten years. He had silenced the critics and finally managed to create the peace and quiet necessary for continued, successful work.

For several years, long before he came to the National Bureau of Investigation, Bäckström had come, through his own persistent inquiries, to believe that the Säter-Man was also guilty of a series of five bestial knife murders of homosexual men that had been committed in Stockholm in 1989, and of which, moreover, the murder of Eriksson was the fourth. After lengthy questioning of the Säter-Man he got him to confess that in the early nineties he had access to an out-of-the-way, long since abandoned sheep pasture in northern Dalarna. “A holy place” that the Säter-Man frequented when he was “visited by elves and visions of the hereafter,” as soon as he managed to obtain the necessary permissions from the mental hospital to make “these pilgrimages to his inner borderland” possible in a purely practical sense.

Bäckström ordered a search of the sheep pasture in question and “in a cabin at the sheep pasture in question” had secured technical evidence that unambiguously and beyond any reasonable human doubt connected the Säter-Man to his victim Kjell Göran Eriksson. For one thing, a leather suitcase bearing the victim’s initials, for another a pair of terry-cloth hand towels, and finally a plastic bag from the tax-free shop at Kastrup Airport, that contained an unopened bottle of banana liqueur as well as the signed copy of the credit card receipt that showed that the referenced bottle had been purchased by the victim in September 1989, only a few months before he was murdered.

At the trial the Säter-Man had testified that the suitcase, hand towels, and banana liqueur were not the only things he had stolen from his victim. Besides numerous bottles of Eriksson’s alcohol he had emptied in his solitude up at the hut, he had also devoted himself to a number of videocassettes and a large number of magazines containing “brutally sadistic violent pornography of a homosexual nature.” He had later brought these pornographic works with him to the hospital after his leave was over, and there they had unfortunately been lost in the general handling. “I guess they were simply read to pieces,” he tearfully explained to the members of the court and other listeners.

Johansson and his wife had celebrated Midsummer in the city. The weather had been excellent, and after a nice dinner out at Djurgården they had walked home at a leisurely pace through the empty summer streets to their apartment on Wollmar Yxkullsgatan on Söder. As soon as they came into the hallway Johansson reached out his hand for the hollow in his wife’s neck and then… when at last they had wound up in bed, and at that point Johansson was already gliding from serene lethargy to deep and undisturbed sleep, his wife had something she absolutely had to say.

“Are you sleeping, Lars Martin?” she asked at the same time as she slowly drew the nails of her right hand through the hair on his neck.

Not any more, thought Johansson, because reality had just jerked him back.

“I was thinking about that Waltin,” she said.

“Yes,” said Johansson. Not now, he thought.

“The one who was murdered on Mallorca,” she continued.

“I remember him,” said Johansson, who was suddenly wide awake. “You mean the one that the Smurfs killed when he was down there swimming?”

“I’m serious,” said his wife. “Are you listening?”

“Yes,” said Johansson. What choice do I have? he thought dejectedly.

“You don’t think he might have been involved in the Palme assassination?” his wife asked.

This is, God help me, not true, thought Johansson, sitting up in bed and turning on the light on his nightstand.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Actually I don’t think so. Why in the name of heaven should Waltin have been involved in the Palme assassination?”

“I don’t know,” said his wife, shrugging her shoulders. “It was just a thought that struck me.”

Then everything returned to normal and they didn’t talk about it anymore. Not about Waltin, not about the assassination of the prime minister, who nowadays of course belonged to another time and another life, which had nothing to do with Pia and Lars Martin Johansson’s lives. They talked about other things. About things going on right then, about things in their lives and in their time.