Europa Blues

12

‘FOR GOD’S SAKE,’ said Jan-Olov Hultin. ‘Is that gin I can smell?’

‘No, not at all,’ Paul Hjelm replied. ‘Dry Martini.’

The moon floated silently from behind invisible clouds and the place was transformed. It was no longer a damp, dark, ancient forest, crawling with invisible life; it was the barren, cruel place where death dwelled. With the emergence of the moon, the gravestones came into vision, one by one, until the scene looked like more like something from a poem by Edward Young.

Grave poetry.

‘Are the others here?’ Hjelm asked.

‘The only one I could get hold of was Gunnar, but he’s in Östhammar. The others had their phones off – and I don’t blame them. You – how the hell did you get here? I hope you didn’t drive…’

‘Taxi,’ Hjelm said curtly as they wandered along the narrow path where the Christian graves gave way to the Jewish. Södra Begravningsplatsen. The gravestones looked slightly different – but essentially, it was all the same thing.

A place for the dead.

‘Let’s hear it,’ Hjelm said as they turned a corner and a cluster of uniformed policemen came into view. They looked ghostly in the faint moonlight. Around them was the obligatory blue-and-white plastic tape, and both detectives ducked under it into the circle.

‘I’ll start without words,’ Hultin said, nodding to one of the police assistants. He reached into the darkness and a bright spotlight burst into life. Hjelm was blinded. Somewhere in the burning, corrosive sea of fire which had replaced his field of vision, he saw a person. When the blaze abated, he saw – still with eyes half closed – that the person was upside down. He finally managed to open his eyes.

Things grew clearer.

An extremely old man was hanging from an oak. A rope looped from his bound ankles up into the tree. His hands were dragging in the gravel and his wispy grey hair was almost touching the ground, where a walking stick and a broken gravestone were lying. From his temple, a thin metal wire was protruding. A strange smile was playing on the man’s face.

It was an eerie sight in the bright glow of the spotlight. Like the final scene of a play. An ancient tragedy.

‘Jesus,’ Paul Hjelm said.

Hultin plucked the rope a few times, as though playing a double bass. A dull tone rang out through the night.

‘Feet bound with a reef knot, polypropylene rope, eight millimetres thick, red-and-purple stripes.’

‘Racial killing?’ Hjelm asked, pointing to the broken gravestone.

‘Seems that way,’ Hultin replied. ‘There are a few tipped or broken graves over there. Broken schnapps bottles, too.’

‘No footprints,’ Hjelm nodded.

‘No. Not exactly.’

‘No footprints in the wolverine pen, I meant. He was hanging like this. And wrote words in the ground with his bloody fingers.’

‘From what we can tell. Do you know who this is?’

‘No. Jewish?’

Hultin pushed the old man’s jacket sleeve back. His cuffed white shirt moved with it.

Down his arm was a line of tattooed numbers.

Hjelm felt himself grimace and recoiled.

‘Oh shit,’ he muttered.

‘Professor Emeritus Leonard Sheinkman,’ Hultin said quietly. ‘World-renowned medical researcher. Born in Berlin in 1912, making him eighty-eight years old.’

‘Strung up like this? Christ.’

‘Exactly.’

Hjelm crouched down to get a better look at Sheinkman’s wrinkled old face. Carefully, he poked at the metal wire jutting out from his temple. He shuddered and thought back to an earlier case in which terrible metal instruments had been pushed into heads. It wasn’t a case he particularly wanted to think about.

‘Bad blood comes back around.’

Though they would never say so again.

‘I don’t know what that is,’ Hultin said, squatting down next to him. ‘But it certainly reminds me of something.’

‘Torture?’

‘Maybe.’

They stood up.

‘We’ll have to send Brunte back to the wolverines,’ Hjelm said.

‘Doesn’t seem much better…’

Hultin gestured to the police assistant by the spotlight and the glare vanished. They were enveloped in darkness once more. Their ability to see in the dark had been destroyed and the moon had passed back behind the invisible clouds.

‘Witnesses?’ Hjelm asked.

‘I just talked to a family who saw a gang of skinheads running flat out through the Christian part of the cemetery at about half eight.’

‘Skinheads?’ Hjelm exclaimed.

‘It’s their style, isn’t it?’ Hultin said, shrugging slightly. ‘Kicking Jewish gravestones over. Wouldn’t be the first time.’

‘But this,’ Hjelm said, pointing to the old man dangling from the branches in the darkness, ‘this would be a first.’

‘True, but we’ve still got to find those skinheads.’

‘Sure. Of course.’

The words were so small and irrelevant. It all felt so awful. Their shudders said more than a thousand words ever could. An old Jewish concentration camp survivor strung up and tortured in a Jewish cemetery in Sweden. It was beyond all words.

Could Swedish skinheads really have done such a thing? And if so, what was their link to the anonymous wolverine man in Skansen? Had skinheads really chased that – by all appearances – foreign-looking man through Djurgården’s wooded areas in the same way that they must, in that case, have followed the old Jewish professor through the cemetery’s?

It seemed… unlikely. It was true that the A-Unit had, not so long ago, been faced with a terror group made up of right-wing extremists, with contacts anywhere that undemocratic and inhumane activities held sway; and sure, they had seen all those so-called patriotic web pages which named well-known Swedish Jews they considered to be involved in the great, global Jewish conspiracy – but this was something new.

It certainly wasn’t normal.

With one final glance at the old man, Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin said, slightly unexpectedly: ‘Breathe on me.’

Paul Hjelm stared at him.

‘What?’ he exclaimed into the face of his boss.

‘Thanks,’ Hultin said. ‘I needed a pick-me-up.’