To the Top of the Mountain

39

‘KERSTIN’S DOING WELL.’

There was a moment of silence in the Supreme Command Centre. Then the rejoicing began. Briefly, intensely, a lid which lifted for a short moment. Then it closed again.

Paul Hjelm continued. ‘They just let me leave the hospital. I crept up to see her on my way out. The bullet caught her just above the ear, taking a bit of bone from behind her temple with it. It hit a blood vessel, so it looked a lot worse than it was. She’s got concussion, but sends her regards.’

‘How are you, though?’ Hultin asked from the desk at the front.

They exchanged a glance. The first since they were in Skövde. A glance between two men who had killed. Both realised at that moment what a strange threshold they had crossed. Neither of them had given much thought to it during the last twenty-four hours. Now it hit them with full force.

Both of us have killed another human being.

There was nothing to say.

‘Fine, thanks,’ said Hjelm. ‘The bullet went through my arm and hit the vest. One slightly fractured rib, but my arm’s fine. Just flesh wounds, but it hurts like hell.’

Hultin nodded and asked straight out: ‘Have all of you spoken to Internal?’

They nodded. All had spoken to Internal Affairs. Hjelm had already been confronted by an old tormentor named Niklas Grundström while he was in hospital in Skövde. It had been surprisingly painless.

No one had mentioned Hultin’s gun handling. It was as though it had never happened. He himself seemed to be remarkably unaffected.

‘Well, listen,’ he said, stretching. ‘There are both pluses and minuses in all of this. The biggest plus is that we saved Eurydice. The biggest minus that she escaped. That Niklas Lindberg had just left his friends was hardly our fault. Maybe we could’ve been fifteen minutes earlier, but it was out of our hands. A quick-thinking member of the group’ – Hultin cast a grateful glance in Söderstedt’s direction – ‘made sure the ambulance was diverted to minimise attention. Still, that wasn’t enough to get Lindberg to return. He must’ve smelt a rat and vanished into thin air.

‘The shooting of Roger Sjöqvist and of Dan Andersson must be seen as just. Obviously, it was a blunder that Sjöqvist had the chance to shoot Paul, and that Andersson managed to shoot Kerstin, but there was absolutely no misconduct. It all went so quickly. What we do have is Eurydice’s shoes, size 7 brown sandals, the briefcase and a safe-deposit-box key, and then Agne “Bullet” Kullberg. Besides that, we’ve got the right-wing extremist Risto Petrovic in safe keeping. Thorough interviews with both these two should give us some kind of idea about what Niklas Lindberg has got planned. Both are keeping surprisingly quiet at the minute. What we don’t have is Niklas Lindberg, the van and the loot from the robberies out west which, all told, should add up to about a million. If Lindberg is planning something, then he’s not likely to have shelved it. Unfortunately this wasn’t the end.’

‘The safe-deposit-box key is the Swedish standard,’ said Chavez. ‘It could be from any bank anywhere. If we’re going to reconstruct the entire thing, then we’ve got to assume that the mistrust we’ve already talked about, between Nedic and the “policeman”, was so great that Nedic didn’t even dare to hand over the money. Instead, he gave him a key and a top-of-the-range police radio. Presumably the “policeman” was going to be told which bank was holding the money as soon as something had happened. Exactly which that was is, for the moment, unknown. Anyway, it meant that the civil engineer, Bullet Kullberg, could make an electronic tracking device to find the briefcase stolen by Orpheus and Eurydice. They don’t have the key any more, so their role in the drama must be over. They’ll have to make do with still being alive and having one another. We can also add that, amazingly, we’ve managed to keep the entire thing out of the press.’ Chavez added with a sidelong glance: ‘Also largely thanks to Arto’s quick thinking, which was what led us there, after all.’

Söderstedt looked completely dumbfounded by this unexpected praise. He leafed through his papers, confused.

‘I’d been planning to tell a story,’ he mumbled. ‘About the metamorphosis of metamorphoses.’

They looked at him. This unlikely policeman went from clarity to clarity. They waited tensely for the next step.

‘It’s Monday today,’ said Arto Söderstedt with great precision. ‘Monday morning, the twelfth of July. Two hours after our Skövde incident, at one on Saturday, a short message appeared on Gula Tidningen’s THIS WEEK’S “I LOVE YOU” page. Since then, no other messages have appeared. We’ve got to assume that our young couple have now been reunited. The message went like this: “Philemon. Starting point. Baucis.”’

They stared at him.

‘Now, if the police had been mythologically ignorant,’ he continued, ‘then this cryptic little message would have passed us by. That’s not the case, though. Philemon and Baucis are another classical pair of sweethearts from antiquity, though in some ways the opposite of Orpheus and Eurydice. Instead of being stormy and dramatic, their relationship was settled and peaceful. If we weave the two stories together, it’s roughly as follows. The god of marriage, Hymenaeus, is called to Thrace, where Orpheus is going to marry his Eurydice. But Hymenaeus comes in vain, because Eurydice is dead: “ran joyful, sporting o’er the flow’ry plain, a venom’d viper bit her as she pass’d; instant she fell, and sudden breath’d her last”. Orpheus, the divine singer, makes his way to the kingdom of the dead and appeals to Hades: “all our possessions are but loans from you, and soon, or late, you must be paid your due”. Even Sisyphus stops his eternal rolling of the stone up the mountain. The entire kingdom of the dead allows itself to be seduced, and Eurydice is carried up from the shadows. As long as Orpheus doesn’t turn round and look at his bride before they’ve left the underworld, then he’ll have brought her back to the world of the living. But he couldn’t resist; in his care for her, he glances back over his shoulder anyway. Obviously it’s impossible for us to know what kind of hell our young pair has been through, but just as Eurydice is on her way back into the kingdom of the dead, just as Orpheus is on his way to return to be torn apart, alone, by the Thracean women, just then – they transform the transformation. The metamorphosis undergoes a metamorphosis. Instead of being Orpheus and Eurydice in Thrace, they become the industrious pair of Philemon and Baucis in Phrygia. A couple of gods in human form go there, to test the population. Everywhere they ask, they’re refused a room. Everywhere apart from with Philemon and Baucis. The penniless pair offer the gods everything they have, and they’re given their reward. The gods reveal themselves:

‘The neighbourhood, said he,

Shall justly perish for impiety:

You stand alone exempted; but obey

With speed, and follow where we lead the way:

Leave these accurs’d; and to the mountain’s height

Ascend; nor once look backward in your flight.

Philemon and Baucis’ old hut is transformed into a golden temple, and the couple become its keepers. Asked by the gods, they have just one single wish: to be able to die together. And eventually, both are transformed, simultaneously, into trees. “At once th’ incroaching rinds their closing lips invade,” or “ora frutex” in Latin.’

Söderstedt broke off, looking out over the dumbfounded congregation.

‘I hope you appreciate the subtle transition. Just as Eurydice is on her way back down into the kingdom of the dead, she’s saved and becomes the poor but industrious Baucis instead, the woman who, together with her husband, follows the gods up to the top of the mountain, and eventually dies at the same moment as him. ‘Cura deum di sint, et qui coluere colantur.’ Maybe you could call it maturity.’

‘Dare I ask what it is you’re citing from?’ asked Paul Hjelm.

‘Of course,’ said Arto Söderstedt. ‘It’s Ovid’s Metamorphoses.’