Hultin looked at them. He tried to inventory his intuitions one by one. “It must have something to do with this, right?” His question mark was nearly an exclamation point.
They nodded.
“Gallano’s car, left behind, without fingerprints, a break-in, two bodies,” Hjelm summarized, and concluded, “Oh, yeah.”
“The body wasn’t him, was it?” Chavez asked.
“If it were, the fingerprints would have screamed it out,” said Hjelm. “But he must have played some part in the drama.”
“The only thing we don’t have any indication of is the Kentucky Killer,” Hultin mumbled.
“Except hunches,” said Hjelm. “Latest address?”
“Same as ten years ago.”
“We’ll take it.”
The duo were on their way-Chavez’s BMW got to play service car. They raced wordlessly through the rain-soaked city and came out on Essingeleden. Riddarfjärden seemed to have risen to biblical-flood proportions. It would gush up over the city at any moment, and who, in these times, would have received forewarning to build an ark?
No one, Hjelm thought misanthropically, sitting beside the violently accelerating Chavez. Not a single one of us would be forewarned by God. We would all drown in the same sticky sludge and be swallowed up by the angry earth, and from out in the universe, the earth would look exactly the same. A negligible little disturbance in the balance of eternity, nothing more.
He raised his eyes from his morass of pessimism and launched a vain attack against evil. It felt as though they were tilting at windmills.
No passersby out on the E4 could have told Alby from Fittja or Norsborg from Hallunda. The crazy buildings climbed sky-high, brutally similar along the hills, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, they had filled up with criminals. The building was the result of the same social-building spirit that had once planned to level Gamla Stan to the ground so that Le Corbusier could build a row of glass and concrete palaces.
But no one knew better than Paul Hjelm that this place also contained an inaccessible alternative culture, with small-scale everyday heroism, infinite inventiveness, and a continuous battle against all odds. He had been stationed here for all of his working life up until the remarkable change just over a year ago, when, instead of being booted from the force, he was transported to inner-city mode, more specifically A major, A as in the A-Unit, major as in success.
His transfer had come in large part thanks to Erik Bruun, his old chief at the Huddinge police, whose contacts with his former colleague Jan-Olov Hultin had been crucial, and it was outside his office that they now stood. Hjelm had succeeded in walking past his former colleagues unnoticed and knocked on Bruun’s door. The light system on the doorpost shone yellow as in “wait,” and Hjelm was seized by apprehension. Bruun’s light was never yellow as in “wait.”
They waited in the hallway for three excruciating minutes, under continual threat of discovery, before Hjelm had had enough and barged in.
The Bruun room, once covered in health-injurious rings left behind by smoke, was now bright yellow. The wallpaper paste didn’t seem to have dried yet.
Behind Bruun’s desk sat a forty-year-old man in a suit and tie, his chestnut-colored hair brushed back over the beginnings of a bald spot. As they entered, his hand moved instinctively in the direction of his service weapon.
“Where is Bruun?” Hjelm demanded.
The man refrained from drawing his pistol, but he kept his hand at the ready. “It says to wait out there, in case you can’t read.”
“It says wait, and it says Bruun. This is yellow. Where is Bruun?”
“Who are you?”
“Hjelm. I worked here once. Under Bruun. Where is he?”
“Hjelm. Aha, the man who was kicked upward.”
“Exactly. Where’s Bruun?”
“Hjelm, well-not long ago I sat down and went through your file. I hope you’re not here to get your old job back now that the A-Unit has packed it in. There’s no room for you here.”
“Where’s Bruun?”
“There’s no room for heroes and mavericks here. It’s time to clean up. Close up the ranks a little.”
“Where’s Bruun?”
“I guess you’ll have to brush off the old uniform, then, and get ready for a good old time on patrol.”
Hjelm had had enough. He did an about-face and nearly ran into Chavez, who was waiting at the door. Behind him he heard: “Bruun had a heart attack a week ago. Just thinking about how this office looked ought to be enough to cause one.”
Hjelm did another about-face. “Is he dead?”
The man at the desk just shrugged. “I have no idea.”
Hjelm had to leave immediately; otherwise time on patrol would have seemed like utopia. He went downstairs to the break room.
It was as though no time had passed. Every mug and sugar cube seemed to be in the same place as they had a year and a half ago. And every cop. They were all sitting there: Anders Lindblad and Kenneth Eriksson, Anna Vass and Johan Bringman. And there was Svante Ernstsson, who had been his partner for over a decade. They had been best friends; now it had been many months since they’d spoken.
“Well, look at that,” Ernstsson said with surprise. “A special visitor.”
Their handshake was firm and almost ridiculously manly.
“First off,” said Hjelm, “is Bruun dead?”
Ernstsson looked at him gravely, then burst into a smile. “Just a scratch, as he said himself.”
“Who’s the clown?”
“New chief inspector, Sten Lagnmyr. A stain on our department. Instead of Bruun we got a real brown-noser. With a taste for yellow, to boot.”
“This is Jorge Chavez, by the way. Sorry. My new colleague.”
Chavez and Ernstsson shook hands. Hjelm was struck by a strange vision-for a split second, he saw Cilla and Kerstin shaking hands. He pulled himself together. “We’re not here to socialize ourselves, as Lena Olin said, but to get some help. Do you have any more active investigations going on about our old friend Andreas Gallano?”
Ernstsson shrugged and raised a curious eyebrow. “Not more than what you’d usually have on a fugitive.”
“Do you know if he’s here at all?”
“What is this all about?”
“The murder in Frihamnen.”
Ernstsson nodded and stopped being stubborn. “We have no indication that he’s returned; that’d be pretty stupid after escaping from Hall. His apartment was empty and undisturbed. There was six-month-old milk in the fridge. As usual, we’re overloaded with work, and he’s not a top priority. We were going to start working on it next week.”
“I’m going to make sure that Hultin takes care of Lagnmyr-then you can help out a bit more officially. Is it still best to go through, what was his name, Stavros?”
“Stavropoulos. No, he died. Overdose. Gallano had to get new contacts and fought his way into a new gang with slightly greater resources, synthetic drugs. We got him through a dealer, Yilmaz. We still have pretty good means of investigating him, if you’re not too worried about privacy protection.”
“It’ll all work out. What could we get from Yilmaz?”
“Gurra gets his junk there. You remember Gurra?”
“Hell, yes!” Hjelm exclaimed. “Crazy Gurra. Childhood friends.”
“If anyone has any idea where Andreas is, it would be Gurra. For old times’ sake,” Ernstsson added a bit ambiguously.
“How should we go about this?”
“Yilmaz distributes in a pretty good place, stakeout wise, so we’ve let him be. The old storeroom of the ICA that shut down. We just lie there on the upper floor and look right down. Ideal.”
“It’s not possible to get hold of Gurra some other way?”
“He keeps out of sight. This is best.”
“Right away?”
Ernstsson shrugged. “Let’s just do it,” he said briskly.
Jorge Chavez was trying to get an idea of the partnership between Hjelm and Ernstsson. Had it been like his and Hjelm’s was now? Had they been close to each other? Did their teamwork work as well? He observed them as they all waited in the filthy old upper floor of the ICA store. Wasn’t there something hesitant, even guilty, about the way Hjelm related to his former colleague, something strained in their body language? But then how colored was his own view?