To the Top of the Mountain

13

IN FRONT OF us is a house that very few policemen have ever seen. It stands alone by a lake with the unusual name of Ravalen. This lake is in Sollentuna municipality, just over ten kilometres north of Stockholm.

The fact of the matter is, only one policeman has ever seen this modest villa at the edge of the dense forest. And he’s no longer a policeman.

He is the owner of the villa. He can say that in all honesty now. The last payment was made to the bank on the same day he retired, something that seemed like more than just a coincidence.

And isn’t it him we see there now? Isn’t he the sixty-two-year-old man we can see on that hilly little patch of land that’s really nothing more than a parenthesis between the lake and the forest? Isn’t it him dressed in the Hawaiian shirt and shorts which are a touch too small, pushing a lawnmower up and down the slope like Sisyphus?

Cutting grass is an endless job.

It has a tendency just to grow back again, after all.

As a policeman, this man had a defect. Former policeman, that is. Not a policeman, a former policeman. This defect consisted of not being able to tell grass from weeds. Obviously he could have taught himself that this little green tangle is grass and that little green tangle is a weed, but he had never, ever understood the more fundamental difference between grass and weeds.

Policemen should definitely be able to tell grass from weeds.

Not by looking in a manual which says that certain types of plants are grasses and others are weeds, but by instinctively being able to say what distinguishes grass from weeds.

That was where he was lacking.

He paused his Sisyphean work and bent down towards a little clump. He sighed, feeling the green strands between his fingers.

Grass or weed?

He stood up again and swung the lawnmower in an arc around the clump. Since he had retired, he regularly practised the mantra ‘Live and let live’.

Who was he to decide what was grass and what was a weed?

None of his colleagues had ever visited him at home. He was known by most as ‘the man without a private life’ and he never let anyone into his world. When he retired, he had relaxed his principles a touch, and actually spent time – even if it was never at his home – with an old colleague, his former boss, Erik Bruun from Huddinge Police. Bruun had also retired early, but following a heart attack rather than out of… necessity. They met once every other week at the Kulturhus in Stockholm, drinking coffee and playing chess for a few hours. It was Bruun who, once upon a time, had picked out Paul Hjelm from the Huddinge police force to work in the A-Unit.

The pensioner’s equally retired wife came out and sat on the porch with a cup of coffee and the morning paper, her hair in curlers. She waved at him. He waved back. Behind her, the waters of Ravalen glittered invitingly in the morning sun.

Everything was all right, it was just a matter of enjoying life. Fixed monthly outgoings at a minimum. Full supplementary pension. A tangible surplus in their account every month. A piece of land which, after thirty-five years, he had only just begun to find attractive. He would even be able to leave a decent inheritance to both of his adult sons.

Rowing boat and fishing rod down on the lake. Sauna on the shore. Binoculars hanging from a nail on a tree up at the edge of the forest. Two decent trips abroad per year. A healthy couple, retired early, who could be confident that they could be full of life for twenty years to come.

Fit as a fiddle, apart from the incontinence.

But that could be managed. The future was theirs.

The former boss of the former A-Unit, former Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin had, in other words, every reason to be happy with his life. He had no reason whatsoever to grieve over what had happened at the end of his career. He didn’t regret a thing. Of course there were one or two less successful decisions to look back on in connection with the Kentucky Killer, but there was absolutely no misconduct, nothing which should have forced him into early retirement. Nothing of that calibre at all.

He had nothing to dwell on.

There was nothing to dwell on.

He had no reason whatsoever to dwell on it.

And so on.

Day after day.

He paused in his doubly Sisyphean work. He could hear the crunching of gravel up by the garage. Not another grossly criminal estate agent who wanted to ‘make a fantastic offer’ on the place? He pushed the lawnmower aside with a clang and trudged determinedly up the steep grassy slope.

The man who stepped out of the shiny new Saab certainly looked like a grossly criminal estate agent. Neat blond hair in a hurricane-proof style that looked confusingly similar to a toupee, artificially bronzed face, toned body, and even a thick gold wrist chain to go with his stylish, summery suit.

Still, Jan-Olov Hultin’s jaw dropped.

‘For Christ’s sake, JO,’ the man panted, as though he had galloped the whole way like an elk and not driven in a luxurious, air-conditioned car, ‘there’s something wrong with your phone. Some old cow was going on about how it’s been disconnected. Haven’t you paid the bill?’

‘My name’s not JO,’ said Hultin neutrally. ‘It’s Jan-Olov. And the phone has been disconnected. We don’t need a phone.’

‘Connect it again, for God’s sake,’ said the bleach-blond man, who wasn’t a grossly criminal estate agent but Head of Division from the National Police Board, and the Police Commissioner’s right-hand man. His name was Waldemar Mörner, a man with a speciality for legendary blunders.

Waldemar Mörner’s feet skidded on the gravel, he hopped delicately over the little fence that marked the divide between gravel and grass, and realised that his expensive Italian shoes weren’t non-slip. He lost his footing on the dewy grass and suddenly his feet were pointing straight up in the air in an upside-down pirouette. He rolled unstoppingly and with gathering speed down to the porch, where his body hit the steps with a faint thud and his mobile phone flew out of his pocket, up onto the porch, and straight into Hultin’s wife’s coffee. Mörner got to his feet, bewildered, held out his hand to Hultin’s wife, missed her by over a metre, sidestepped the entire porch, fell over the railing and landed, with a splash, in the waters of Ravalen.

Then his phone rang. Mrs Hultin fished it out from her coffee and answered: ‘Waldemar Mörner’s phone. Yes, he’ll be here in a minute.’

No.

No, that wasn’t what happened.

That was just what happened in Jan-Olov Hultin’s vindictive mind. But Mörner had actually stumbled when he stepped over the fence onto the grass. He grabbed at Hultin’s strong shoulders, keeping himself upright.

‘Oops!’ he said cheerfully, clapping him on the shoulder. ‘Good job there are some mainstays left in the force!’

‘That’s exactly what there aren’t,’ said Hultin neutrally.

He hoped it wasn’t obvious that his heart was pounding. At the same time, he knew he didn’t need to worry about that. No one had ever looked deep into Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin’s soul. It was so well hidden behind all his neutrality that he sometimes wondered if it hadn’t disappeared back there.

It hadn’t.

‘Yes,’ said Waldemar Mörner.

The magic word.

‘Yes,’ he continued, still panting. ‘There are, if you want it. We need you. I’ve talked the NPC into launching again. We’ve got a really nasty mass murder on our hands.’

The NPC, Hultin thought to himself. Who the hell called the National Police Commissioner, NPC? It sounded like something from an old seventies crime novel. Instead, with emphasis on every syllable, he said: ‘Launching again?’

‘Piling it on again,’ explained Mörner. ‘Checking the nets. Pulling out the aces we’ve got up our sleeves. Changing to winter tyres. Reactivating the potential. Taking our secret weapons off safety.’

Hultin managed to keep up with the flood of metaphors. He replied clinically: ‘The A-Unit?’

‘Yup,’ said Mörner, bursting into song with ‘Born to be Wild’.

It was too much. Hultin stared at him blankly.

‘In what shape?’ he managed to ask. Utterly neutrally.

‘In good shape,’ said Mörner, giving him a friendly little punch on his upper arm; against all odds, Hultin managed to ignore it. ‘In its good old shape.’

‘So its original shape, then?’

‘Yep. Who’d dare to upset an old man’s calculations?’

‘And everyone agreed?’

‘Even Chavez happily agreed to give up command. But only to you. Norlander just wants to spend Midsummer’s Eve with his newborn daughter. And there’s a bit of a question mark around Gunnar Nyberg – it’s been going so well with the paedophiles. But he’s coming to the meeting at ten, too.’

Newborn daughter, thought Hultin. Those two words didn’t seem to tally with the name Viggo Norlander. He said nothing. Instead, he looked at his watch. Ten past nine. Not much time to make a decision which would change his life.

‘I need to talk to my wife,’ he said.

‘Go for it,’ said Mörner. ‘But don’t take too long.’

‘Can I borrow your mobile as well?’ asked Hultin, taking it and walking down the slope towards the porch.

He went over to his wife, who listened neutrally – a family trait, apparently – before eventually nodding and putting in a few words. He went into the house to change out of his Hawaiian shirt and too-small shorts into something more respectable, which turned out to be a baggy lumberjacket, a slightly frayed lilac shirt and an ancient pair of gaberdine trousers. The fact was, they were his old uniform trousers. He also phoned Erik Bruun, who listened patiently but by no means neutrally. It wasn’t his style. When he eventually responded, Hultin imagined he could see the reddish-grey beard bobbing around the ever-present black cigar, which no heart attack in the world would manage to prise from his jaws.

‘For Christ’s sake, Jan-Olov. This is what you’ve been secretly dreaming about for ten months.’

‘Is it?’ Hultin asked sincerely.

‘Yes, stop pussyfooting around.’

‘So I should forgive and forget?’

‘Neither. Ignore. To hell with them. It’s not about them, it’s about you. You’ve got a lot left to give. And you can start playing football with the veterans again. Just think how many of those ageing strikers have missed having a brute like Wooden-Leg Hultin to deal with. You can start splitting people’s eyebrows with your headers again. It’ll be like a rebirth.’

Hultin’s mouth was watering. He thanked Bruun and hung up.

He kissed his wife on the forehead; one of her curlers caught on the collar of his lumberjacket. Mörner untangled it for him.

‘That doesn’t make a good impression,’ he said.

‘We’ve got a holiday to Greece booked for the end of September,’ said Hultin, looking with some surprise at the curler in Mörner’s hand.

‘No problem,’ said Mörner, throwing the curler like a champagne glass over his shoulder, opening the Saab’s door in a smooth motion and adding: ‘By then, this little debacle will be dealt with.’

As Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin stepped into the car, a luminous aura followed him.

The aura of a policeman.