What struck Söderstedt now, as he sauntered through this very city, was that this whole manner of thinking was dictated by a drummed-in guilty conscience.
What kind of societal stereotypes truly determined the picture of happiness?
Not, in any case, the five-room apartment on Bondegatan where the seven-person household was without doubt a bit cramped. The question was whether it really mattered that much.
Since Anja had taken care of the day’s deliveries of their children, he permitted himself to walk from Söder to Kungsholmen; he had a feeling that it would be the last time he would be allowed that luxury for a long time. When he stepped into the police station on that beautiful early-autumn morning, he continued straight to the service vehicle pool and checked out a robust Audi. He pocketed the keys and stepped into the elevator.
Arto Söderstedt caught a glimpse of himself in the elevator mirror. He’d made it through another summer without getting skin cancer, he thought, looking for some wood to knock on. He had the kind of skin that only Finns and Englishmen have, he thought with jovial prejudice, the absolutely white-through kind that doesn’t have a chance of turning anything other than red in the sun. It was the fourth of September, and he had just managed to take the crucial leap from SPF 15, the variety for newborns, to SPF 12.
Actually, he liked autumn best.
Except maybe not this autumn.
He had read up on serial killers in connection with the Power Murders, and as usual he found himself giving a few lectures to the group. Since then he had rationed them out. He was afraid that the time for rationing would soon be over. Sweden’s last levee had broken, and violent crime of an international character, to cite a familiar source, had arrived. It would hardly be an isolated incident.
The fact was, he recognized the Kentucky Killer. He had read about him and vaguely remembered him. He had been one of the first in a long series of such killers.
There was something strange about his modus operandi, something that didn’t really match up with the profile of a serial killer. Those terrifying pincers… he couldn’t put his finger on it, but something was wrong. He needed to speak directly with Ray Larner at the FBI, but he didn’t know how to get past Hultin. Certainly Hultin was the best boss he’d ever worked under, but he lacked Söderstedt’s own insights into the gray areas of the workings of justice. Söderstedt had once been a defense attorney, one of the most prominent in Finland, and he had defended the worst of the worst in the upper echelons. Then his conscience had rebelled; he’d quit, fled to Sweden, enrolled in police college at a slightly advanced age, and settled down as a policeman in Västerås. He had gotten it into his head that an attorney’s role as a vicarious criminal could be useful in this case. There had to be some sort of identification in order to catch a serial killer, he knew that.
So lost was he in his reflections about inner-city parents and serial killers that he didn’t notice he was late. Which wasn’t like him. So he was quite surprised to open the door to “Supreme Central Command” and find not only everyone already gathered there but Waldemar Mörner himself sitting at Hultin’s lectern, drumming his fingers.
Because he hadn’t had a chance to prepare himself for the confrontation, he burst into spontaneous peals of laughter. This didn’t go over very well. Mörner looked audaciously fresh, unaffected by the incident at Arlanda, but Söderstedt’s laughter caused him to put a small, permanent mental mark on Söderstedt’s record. He wrinkled one eyebrow for a short but murderous second. Then he was himself again.
“I hope lateness won’t become a habit for you, Söderstedt,” he said sternly. “We’re facing a task of a nature we have never come close to in modern times in this country. But tempus fugit, and we will too. Don’t allow the four complaints from Arlanda to disturb your work; instead let’s move forward with the extensive investigation.”
“Four?” said Norlander.
“Currently,” Hultin said neutrally.
Mörner didn’t hear them but continued with glowing passion: “After extensive work in the upper echelons, I have persuaded them that this case should be entrusted into your warm hands, and I sincerely hope that you don’t fall short of the confidence that I have placed in you. Inasmuch as a mustering of strength is needed, I urge you to develop expanded horizons and widened scopes. Your joint capital is firmly rooted in the visions of the management team, and the future looks bright. The light is visible at the end of the tunnel. Ahead of your great burden lies a fair reward. Seize the day, make the most of every minute, pull out all the stops. Work hard now, gentlemen. And lady, of course. Lady. The welfare of Sweden rests in your hands.”
With these words of wisdom, Mörner departed, glancing at the clock.
The room fell silent. Language itself seemed to have become constipated. After this address, no word would be innocent. Any one might become a weapon of murder aimed at the heart of the Swedish language.
“With friends like that, who needs enemies?” Hultin said neutrally, grasping wisely at a proverb in order to normalize the linguistic situation. “I have spent the night with the Kentucky Killer,” he continued.
“Then he ought to be easy to locate,” said Söderstedt, who hadn’t quite collected himself yet.
Hultin ignored him. “A summary has been distributed to your offices. There is an enormous amount of material, and somewhere in there is the hidden link to Sweden. My examination didn’t turn up anything new, but if you have extra time, you can study it in detail. I’m afraid, however, that the killer will have to start up again for us to obtain any adequate clues.”
“What if he’s come here to retire?” Gunnar Nyberg longed profoundly for retirement himself. “Then we’d sit here twiddling our thumbs until we’re retired.”
The thought did not seem entirely repellent to Nyberg. He had been shot in the throat during the hunt for the Power Murderer. The industrious church vocalist had been close to having sung his last note. After six months’ convalescence, he had returned to the Nacka church choir; his bass had become deeper, taken on a more extensive tone, and these days he sang in jubilation, less at the benevolence of God, even if that were in his thoughts, than at the fact that he had a voice at all. For Nyberg, the Kentucky Killer’s vocal cord pincers were identical to the devil’s pitchfork. He ran the risk of becoming personally engaged in a way that he carefully avoided these days, in anticipation of his retirement. His problem was that that lay twenty years in the future.
“He came here with fresh blood on his hands,” Hultin answered. “I don’t think that’s how a person ends his career. He could very well have slunk in completely unnoticed, but his craving got the upper hand. No, he has some sort of target-”
“That’s something I’ve been thinking about,” said the other church singer, Kerstin Holm. She was dressed in black as always, with a little black leather skirt of the type that Hjelm couldn’t help reacting to. It suddenly threw him back in time to just over a year ago. Yesterday’s homey feeling seemed to have opened the forbidden doors, and he found himself wondering how she really felt, who the new man in her life was, and what she thought of him now, afterward. Their relationship had been intense but unreal. Did she hate him? Sometimes he imagined so. Had he left her? Or was she the one who had left him? Everything was still shrouded in mist. Misterioso, he thought.