The woman was paging with obvious reluctance through a folder. After a great deal of toil, during which she almost groaned audibly, she answered, “Yes.”
An exquisite answer, Söderstedt thought. “Who is their closest supervisor?”
More groaning, toiling, and effort. Then: “Anders Wahlberg.”
“Is he here?”
“Now?”
No, the first Tuesday after the Ascension Day before last, Söderstedt thought, but said with an ingratiating smile, “Yes.”
Then she began again the customary procedure of extreme effort; in this case it consisted of pushing two keys on the computer. After this almost superhuman amount of work, the woman was unable to answer with more than an absolutely breathless “Yes.”
“Do you suppose I might be able to speak with him?”
The look she gave him was the sort that had once met plantation owners with ox whips. The black slave was once again forced to demean herself. She pressed no fewer than three buttons on an internal telephone and, with the last remnants of her anguished voice, said, “The police.”
“Oh?” an indifferent male voice rasped out of the telephone.
“Is it okay?”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
As a result of this inspiring dialogue, Söderstedt wandered through one chandelier-lit corridor after another. He got lost twelve times. Finally he found the venerable door behind which the department’s deputy director-general, Anders Wahlberg, kept himself. He knocked.
“Come in” came a thunderous voice.
Arto Söderstedt opened the door into an elegant atrium with a mute secretary and then entered an even more elegant office with a view of the Stockholm Sound. Anders Wahlberg was in his early fifties and wore his corpulence with the same tangible pride as he did his mint-green tie; it looked like Arto’s youngest daughter’s bib after a full-blown food fight.
“Arto Söderstedt,” said Arto Söderstedt. “National Criminal Police.”
“Wahlberg,” said Wahlberg. “I understand it’s about Lindberger. What a story. Eric couldn’t have had a single enemy in the whole wide world.”
Söderstedt sat on a chair across from Wahlberg’s candelabra-adorned mahogany desk. “What did Lindberger work on?”
“Both of the spouses concentrate on the Arab world. They have primarily devoted themselves to business with Saudi Arabia and have worked with the embassy there. They’re young and promising. Future top diplomats, both of them. We thought. Is it really an American serial killer?”
“It seems so,” Söderstedt said curtly. “How old are they? Or were?”
“Justine is twenty-eight; Eric was thirty-three. Dying at thirty-three…”
“That was the average age of death in the Middle Ages.”
“Certainly,” said Wahlberg, surprised.
“Did they always work together?”
“Essentially. They had slightly different concentrations with their business contacts. In general, their tasks were the same: to facilitate trade between Sweden and, first and foremost, Saudi Arabia. They had close cooperation with industry representatives from both countries.”
“Different concentrations?”
“Eric worked primarily with the big Swedish export firms. Justine worked with the somewhat smaller ones. Simply put.”
“Did they always travel together?”
“Not always, no. They made lots of trips back and forth and weren’t always synchronized.”
“And no enemies at all?”
“No, absolutely not. Not a single problem. Irreproachable and solid work, in general. Cash cows, you could have said, if it didn’t sound so vulgar. Justine was to have traveled down there one of these days, but I’m assuming she won’t be able to now. The plan was for Eric to be based at home for a few more months. Now it will be home base forever and ever amen.”
“Do you know what Justine’s trip ‘one of these days’ was about?”
“Not in detail. She was going to brief me today, actually. Some kind of problem with new legislation about small business trade. A meeting with Saudi government representatives.”
“And with the best will in the world, you can’t imagine that Eric’s death was because of anything other than randomness or fate?”
Anders Wahlberg shook his head and looked down at his desk. He seemed on the verge of tears.
“We were friends,” he said. “He was like a son to me. We had booked time to play golf this weekend. It’s inconceivable, horrible. Was he-tortured?”
“I’m afraid he was,” said Söderstedt, realizing that his sympathetic tone sounded false, so he changed to a harsher one. “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you how important it is that we catch this murderer. Is there anything else you can remember, professionally or privately, that might be of significance? The tiniest little thing could be important.”
Wahlberg shoved his sorrow behind the mask of a true diplomat and appeared to think it over.
“I can’t think of anything. Between you and me, they were probably the only truly happy couple I know. There was a natural affinity between them. I don’t have any children of my own, and I’ll miss Eric as I’d miss a son. I’ll miss his laugh, his natural integrity, his humble composure. Shit.”
“Can you think of any reason for him to have been at Frihamnen at two-thirty in the morning?”
“No. It sounds crazy. He hardly ever even went out for a beer after work on Fridays. He always went straight home to Justine.”
“I need to take a peek at his office. And if you could make sure that all his data files are copied and sent to me, I would be extra grateful.”
Anders Wahlberg nodded mutely and stood. He took Söderstedt out into the corridor and stopped in front of Lindberger’s door. Then he disappeared back into his den of sorrow.
Söderstedt took a few steps. The door to the right of Eric Lindberger’s was Justine’s. The spouses lived and worked literally side by side. He went into Eric’s office.
It was smaller than Wahlberg’s, it lacked the secretary’s atrium, and the view wasn’t of the Sound but of Fredsgatan. There was a connecting door into his wife’s office; he checked and found it unlocked.
The desk contained a moderate jumble of work papers, nothing more. A wedding picture showed a very young, dark Justine and a slightly older but just as dark Eric. They were smiling the same broad smile, and it didn’t seem nearly as pasted-on as the genre invites; it was professionally practiced but natural nonetheless. The happy couple gave the impression of belonging to a higher class of citizen by virtue of birth and force of habit, with full knowledge of all its etiquette. Neither of them appeared to have fought particularly hard for their career; on the contrary, both seemed born to be diplomats.
But perhaps he was reading too much into a standard photograph.
As for the rest of the room, Söderstedt found some notes written on everything from official Ministry of Foreign Affairs stationery to yellow Post-its, as well as a rather thick planner; he hunted for the correct term, fax something, Filofax-was that it? In any case, he collected everything, put it into his briefcase, and took it with him as he opened the connecting door and slipped into Justine’s office. It was all but identical to her husband’s.
He inspected her desk, too. It was decorated with the same wedding photo, or rather another from the same series. Their smiles were a bit less pronounced, and there was something less self-sufficient in it; a vague sense of unease hovered over them, a disturbance. The minor difference between the photos spoke to Söderstedt’s extremely well-developed sense of nuance.
Just as in her husband’s office, in Justine’s there were many notes scribbled on various pieces of paper, on the desk and in the drawers, which he rooted through even though the act could hardly be characterized as legitimate. He copied the occasionally cryptic notes and fished an identical Filofax out of a desk drawer. He peered around the room and spotted what he was looking for, a small copy machine, and he nervously copied a month forward and a month backward in the planner; that ought to be enough.