To the Top of the Mountain

23

SUNDAY AFTERNOON. TIME to sum up the blood-soaked Midsummer weekend. Unusually high levels of drunkenness. Unusually high numbers of rapes. Unusually high levels of violence. Unusually high levels of Midsummer.

Though that wasn’t their concern.

Paul Hjelm hoped that there wouldn’t be a repeat of the meeting the day before. It had been a painful affair. Partly because half of the team was missing, with Söderstedt and Norlander at Kumla and Nyberg piecing together the remains of his ongoing cases, partly because it had taken a far from heroic course. Hultin had come in through his mystical old side door, dumped some papers on the desk, sat down and looked out over the gathering. No one in the unimpressive little congregation – Hjelm, Holm, Chavez – wanted to be the one to begin. All were going to say the same thing anyway: that nothing had happened. Hultin didn’t want to say it openly, either. And so they had just left, somewhat bewildered.

Their chances seemed slightly better today. Everyone was there, and the cat seemed to have loosened its grip on their tongues. There was small talk in the Supreme Command Centre, a faint murmur. Jan-Olov Hultin regarded them through his owl-like glasses, silencing the small talk with: ‘I have an confession to make.’

A strange opening line. They let him continue.

‘I warned Rajko Nedic.’

They looked at one another.

Chavez wrinkled his nose; otherwise, the outcry failed to materialise.

‘I thought it would be best to keep him under a tight rein. Also, I just wanted to introduce myself. I visited him at his house out in Danderyd. He wasn’t celebrating Midsummer. On the contrary, he was pottering about in a garden that looked like Eden.’

‘The toilet paper?’ asked Söderstedt.

‘Not Edet,’ Hultin retorted neutrally. ‘Eden.’

‘East of Eden,’ Hjelm alluded silkily.

‘What did he say, then?’ asked Chavez.

‘Nothing really,’ said Hultin. ‘He was talking about columbines being proof of God. Denied everything.’

‘How unexpected,’ Nyberg muttered.

‘So, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Hultin. ‘Time to go over the weekend’s successes. Anyone feel inclined?’

‘I’ve been thinking about something,’ said Chavez. ‘Something Åkesson said, out by the slaughter site in Sickla. About those bloody footprints next to the dry spot left by the briefcase. Eight prints, as it turned out. Four-year-old Reeboks, size 7.’

‘Four-year-old?’ Norlander asked, perplexed.

‘Apparently,’ said Chavez, glancing down at one of Brynolf Svenhagen’s forensic reports. There were a lot of them. Svenhagen was in ecstasy. The reports were flooding in. He had gone mad with excitement.

‘You can work it out from the model,’ Kerstin Holm said, in the know. ‘The soles look different every year.’

‘Get to the point,’ said Hultin.

‘One: the tracks are going in the wrong direction,’ said Chavez stringently. ‘Two: Niklas Lindberg’s men don’t exactly seem the type to take any careless steps in blood.’

‘They were careless enough to get shot,’ said Hultin, shrugging. ‘Actually, half of them were shot, and by men they’d already frisked, judging by appearances. Maybe we’re overestimating their professionalism. And the fact that the footprints were going in the wrong direction surely only means that the person who picked up the briefcase and saw it covered in his friend’s blood was nervy. He took a couple of careless steps in the blood. In the wrong direction. By then he’d walked the blood off his trainers. He turned and went back. Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill.’

‘It was just an observation,’ Chavez mumbled, thinking about basket weaving and other stimulating activities for pensioners.

‘Size 7,’ said Hjelm. ‘Is that a small man? Or a woman? Eskil Carlstedt was at least a 12.’

‘11,’ said Chavez, his eyes on Qvarfordt’s forensic report.

‘There’s no real correspondence between shoe size and body size,’ said Holm. ‘Or any other anatomical size, for that matter…’

‘What else?’ asked Hultin. ‘Kumla?’

Söderstedt and Norlander looked at one another. Both seemed to to be leaving the next word to the other. Eventually, Norlander said: ‘Everyone’s keeping their mouths shut.’

‘That’s because you always tell everyone to shut up,’ said Söderstedt. ‘I’m holding you personally responsible for all the shut mouths.’

‘Shut up,’ said Viggo Norlander.

Söderstedt continued, egged on by his own quick wit. ‘According to the guards, there was some kind of Nazi clique in Kumla. Nothing new, I know. Organised criminals always seem to be either immigrants or Nazis nowadays. Maybe what we’re seeing in the underworld is some kind of nasty prelude to a wider development in society. Or rather, some kind of clearer, less veiled version of the polarisation which is becoming more and more obvious in society.

‘I mean, what’s it really like when it comes to racism, if we really ask around in society? If we scratch the surface a little. At the moment, we don’t need to be especially worried about any political parties with Nazi tendencies or anything like that; but on the other hand, we should be more vigilant than ever when it comes to the enemy within. The enemy within ourselves, I mean. That’s where attitudes seem to have changed. A barrier has been lowered. It’s not easy to detect, but it’s a change from a few years back. It suddenly seems to be much easier to think of people as objects. As non-people. As people whose blood isn’t quite as red as our own. Is the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Bosnia really a strictly internal, historical Balkan affair, or does it have something to do with the wider change in… well, enlightened mentalities after all? How big a difference is there between sending all the immigrants to the outskirts, to Rinkeby or Hammarkullen or Rosengård, and driving people out of their home towns?’

‘Back to Kumla,’ Hultin said, remaining completely neutral.

Söderstedt changed tracks without much of a problem.

‘Niklas Lindberg and Sven Joakim Bergwall were both part of this Nazi clique. Lindberg might’ve been the leader. Otherwise, we’ve scraped together about twenty or so names. Eight of them are out now. Some of the other criminals might be part of this eight, but at the moment we can’t say for sure. As many as three of the men released have AB negative blood: Christer Gullbrandsen, Dan Andersson and – no joke – Ricky Martin.

‘On the other hand, we’ve got a rookie like Eskil Carlstedt, a used-car salesman, in their gang. Linking this too closely to the Kumla Bunker is probably a mistake. The question is whether we’re right to link it to these Nazis at all. We’ll see. We spoke to several members of this clique, the ones that’re still inside. Viggo’s laconic description fits well there: they’re all keeping their mouths shut. Our ex-Yugoslav friends are keeping their mouths even tighter shut. No one is saying a word. They pretend they don’t understand a single word of Swedish. Still, they listened carefully to our account of Lordan Vukotic’s torture. And Göran Andersson didn’t have much else to say. He did tell us quite a lot of interesting things about how Fra Angelico played with different shades of blue, though.’

‘What else?’ said Hultin.

‘I spoke with Eskil Carlstedt’s workmates at Kindwall’s Ford garage in Hammarby harbour,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘With his old mother out in Bromma, too. A picture of a man with quite extreme opinions when it comes to racial issues is emerging, so we can keep that Nazi connection for the time being. Violent tendencies aren’t lacking, either. His workmates described a pretty scary paintball game, the start to some company party, where Carlstedt gave two of them a beating under the cover of darkness. He’d gone berserk. Actually, no one there really seemed to like him at all. A couple of them said he was a strange character, impossible to get to know. But on the other hand, he sold cars better than anyone else. Easily the best. It was this car-seller trait that Sven Joakim Bergvall trusted when he let Carlstedt stay behind in Kvarnen. And now both of them are dead. All that trust was in vain.

‘We’ve also tried to recall the witnesses from Kvarnen to get some better descriptions of this so-called “policeman” who was sitting with Gang One. News of his existence came so late that we didn’t have time to ask earlier. Most of the witnesses had left the city for Midsummer, and the ones who’d stayed behind didn’t have anything useful to add. So we don’t have any description of the “policeman”. The same’s generally true of Gang Two. Everyone remembers Carlstedt clearly, the broad one with the shaved head and moustache. A couple thought that they recognised Bergwall when we showed them his photo. Someone mentioned a man with a purple face. Otherwise, nothing. The man with the earphones was neither Carlstedt nor Bergwall, so we can assume this means that the technician in the group is still alive and well.’

‘Speaking of technicians, our own have gone through Eskil Carlstedt’s hard drive,’ said Hjelm, glancing down at yet another forensic report. ‘The problem is that it was empty. Completely empty, I mean. Which means it was new. The computer wasn’t new, but the hard drive was. As far as we can tell, it was replaced for our benefit. Which, again, tips the balance in favour of professionalism. The night before Carlstedt came and let himself be interviewed by us, the same night that they cobbled their story together, the hard drive seems to have been swapped. They realised we’d be making a visit. Scrapping the whole computer was too risky; there’s always the chance of someone finding a scrapped computer. So they swapped the hard drive so that they didn’t leave any evidence. That means there must’ve been something on the hard drive, in all probability of a racial character. Now we’ve got a swapped hard drive, a sophisticated listening device in Kvarnen, and two utterly subtle bombs. They don’t seem to be lacking technological competence.’

‘Can you commit a crime without technical competence nowadays?’ asked the technologically minded Chavez.

‘Meat cleavers and penises are still popular,’ said the less technologically minded Kerstin Holm. ‘The latter have worked especially well as instruments of crime for millennia.’

There was a moment of silence. Everyone seemed to be thinking about their penis as a potential crime tool. Kerstin Holm smiled covertly.

‘I suppose that’s a kind of technique, too,’ Hultin said eventually.

‘Speaking of those two ingenious bombs,’ said Norlander, glancing briefly at Kerstin Holm’s notes. ‘In one of Svenhagen’s reports, I’ve finally managed to find some information on the bombs. It’s a case of highly explosive, highly concentrated liquid, like nitroglycerine but more effective and easier to handle. It’s detonated by electricity alone; not warmth, not impact, just that little microscopic trigger that sends a short, sharp burst of electricity through the liquid, causing it to explode. Works brilliantly with a remote detonator, as we’ve seen. It’s an explosive that hasn’t been used in Sweden before, but there are certain hints of something similar in the US. They’ve not found a name for it yet, though.’

‘In any case, we can probably assume that Niklas Lindberg’s stock isn’t empty,’ said Chavez. ‘Do you want to hear a bit more about him, by the way? I’ve devoted my life to him for the time being. Searched all the databases I could think of, interviewed a whole load of former friends and colleagues over the phone, even been down to Trollhättan to talk to his parents and ex-wife.

‘He was married for a while when he was still living there, even though he was mostly away on military exercises and in UN service in Cyprus. Just as his relationship was breaking down, he left the army and joined the Foreign Legion. Apparently you can still do that. His ex-wife is still called Lindberg, which might suggest that it wasn’t an acrimonious divorce. It didn’t sound that way, either. She got tired of him being away all the time, she had lovers, he had lovers among the nurses over in Cyprus. Popular with women in general. But let’s start from the beginning. Niklas Lindberg was born in January 1965, took the science route in high school in Trollhättan, leaving with good grades in 1983. Did his compulsory military service in a commando unit in 1985, went through that with top grades, started officer training in autumn 1986, was a cadet in Boden in 1988, an officer in Cyprus in 1990 and 1992, climbed up the ranks and had just become a major with the commandos in Arvidsjaur when he left in 1994. Twenty-nine-year-old major, pretty good, no?’

‘Yeah,’ said Hultin. ‘That’s great.’

‘A couple of friends from school talked about him as a fun-loving guy who it was generally going well for,’ Chavez continued. ‘A high-flyer. A golden boy, you could say. Loads of women. His friends saw the thing with the commandos as a way to… get good grades in his enlistment, too. He liked getting good grades. His friends didn’t take it seriously. There was nothing soldier-like about him. He doesn’t seem to have done his service with his eye on a regular officer’s career, either. And his childhood seems to have been a comfortable, small-town, middle-class one. His parents seem nice. A sweet couple, you could say. High-school teacher and occupational therapist. No racist tendencies, and believe me, I can normally get an instinctive feel for that. They were talking about a little tow-head who had always landed on his feet, always been happy, always taken care of those weaker than him. The pictures from his childhood didn’t suggest anything else. His parents really were immensely sad about his inexplicable transformation into a violent offender. A deep, internal sorrow. He stayed in Trollhättan even once he’d become an officer, married an old flame and seems to have been a nice enough guy. Smart, handsome, kind, or thereabouts. Then there seems to have been some kind of breakdown linked to his divorce five years ago. Spring 1994. A critical point.

‘I’ve been talking to two of his superiors from the commando unit in Arvidsjaur; no one understood why he quit. There were no complaints. From either side. He just quit and went straight into the Foreign Legion. Two weeks later. It must’ve been well planned. But why? I haven’t managed to get in touch with any of his Foreign Legion colleagues, they’re a bit secretive after all, but I’ll keep working on it. He quit that after a year, in any case, went to Stockholm and took part in a failed bomb attempt against a Kurdish cultural centre. There’d been a party there, but the bomb went off when everyone had gone home. It turned out there was something wrong with the timer. The bomb was meant to go off right in the middle of the party, and it was powerful enough to kill a lot of people, a hell of a lot. It was generally assumed that Lindberg himself was behind the bomb, but they never managed to pin it on him. There was no doubt the day after, though, at a Kurdish demonstration in Solna Centrum, where he violently assaulted two Kurds. In the investigation, it transpired that he had good contacts with Nazi organisations in both Sweden and the US, and presumably elsewhere, too. So we can assume that his departure from the army had its roots in some kind of Nazi conversion.’

‘In that case, the Foreign Legion sounds like a really strange choice,’ said Hjelm. ‘Isn’t it a truly multicultural army?’

‘Maybe that’s what he discovered,’ said Chavez, shrugging. ‘But he had a year-long contract. All he wanted was to make war, for real. And maybe his racial hatred reached unexpected heights among all of those foreigners. Well, from my conversations with the police and lawyers involved, I got a picture of an unusually cold, violent man, with a great love of bombs. Acute lack of empathy, that’s what his own defence lawyer said off the record.’

‘He always wants to be best,’ said Kerstin Holm, thoughtful. ‘Could he really be challenging the man he views as best? Sweden’s smartest drug dealer, Rajko Nedic? Who’s also an unusually well-integrated foreigner.’

‘There’s probably only one who’s better assimilated,’ boasted Jorge Chavez. ‘Sweden’s best-educated policeman.’

‘Let’s not get cocky now,’ Hultin said neutrally. ‘Anyone else have anything?’

‘One strange thing which might not be that important,’ said Viggo Norlander, deep in the reports, one of which he waved in the air. ‘Forensics’ report from the crime scene in Sickla. The dead men, Bergwall and Carlstedt, they were wearing black balaclavas. The same brand. A whole load of black fibres from other, similar hats have been found there, too. But also some gold-coloured ones.’

‘Gold?’ an uncoordinated chorus exclaimed.

Chavez smiled and said: ‘Aha. The golden one…’

‘What’re you talking about?’ Hultin asked, irritated.

‘Could it be possible that Niklas Lindberg marks his dominance over the others by wearing a golden balaclava?’ Chavez asked.

There was a momentary pause in the Supreme Command Centre. Suddenly, they felt that they knew Niklas Lindberg much better.

‘Of course it could,’ Hultin nodded.

After yet another pause, he continued.

‘How’re you getting on, Gunnar?’

Gunnar Nyberg had been sitting in silence. He was torn. Was this his team? Or was it Sara Svenhagen, Ludvig Johnsson, Ragnar Hellberg and the others? He felt deeply and sincerely torn.

‘I’ve been switching between paedophile and Nazi sites online,’ he said, ‘and I haven’t been able to work out where I belong. I’m starting to get a feel for the extent of these secret networks, in any case. And for how they’ve grown massively since the Internet became commonplace. But I can’t find Lindberg online. Or Carlstedt, aside from as a seller at Kindwall’s. Bergwall’s name crops up on certain racist home pages. He seems to have been the group’s ideologue.’

‘So now they’re ideologically homeless,’ said Söderstedt.

‘But no less dangerous for it,’ said Hultin. ‘Let’s keep going as before. Don’t forget that there’s a little party tomorrow afternoon for the Police Olympics. They need all the support they can get. So, 16.00 in the Police Board’s assembly halls, Polhelmsgatan. You’re guests of honour. Waldemar Mörner hinted subtly that you’ve got orders to be there. Anyone missing will be kicked out, quote “arse first”.’

‘Good job his priorities are in order,’ said Paul Hjelm.