“An excellent ground rule in all analytical work,” agreed the retired diplomat.
“Exactly,” assisted Kudo, who realized that it was high time to say something if he wasn’t going to be run past by a bunch of civilians.
Strange characters, by the way. If it hadn’t been an impossible thought he himself would have guessed that all three were homos. That character in the leather jacket who was some sort of spokesman at the National Police Board was hardly the type you’d want to run into in a dark alley. Especially not in Skeppar Karls gränd, for wasn’t it there that they had their little society? thought Kudo, who had a history with the Stockholm Police Department’s old vice squad.
“Agent Bülling and I already work like that,” added Kudo.
“Always from the top down,” mumbled Bülling, carefully pulling his foot in because there was clearly someone who was stepping on his toes the whole time.
“Excellent, excellent,” praised the chief constable, who thought it was now high time that he unveiled one of his analytical innovations. “Gentlemen, if I say ‘the wrong track,’ what do you think of?”
“Well,” said Grevlinge. “That’s the kind of thing that crooks get up on the dupe front. To dupe you and your colleagues, that is.” Grevlinge looked around with a certain hesitation, since it was a while since he himself had been involved.
I must do something about Grevlinge, thought the chief constable. Send him to a course or something.
“In a traditional sense, yes,” said the chief constable. “But if I say ‘police wrong track,’ what do you think of then?”
Nothing, judging by the empty faces looking back at him.
“An innovation,” the chief constable explained with a certain pride. “Everyone around this table has surely at some point landed in a situation where you want to confuse your opponent, lead him astray, deceive him, quite simply. Thence also the police wrong track or simply the wrong track, as I myself prefer to call it since it’s we in the police who in this connection have both the initiative and the advantage of interpretation.”
“Obviously,” agreed Kudo. “If you lose the initiative you’re lost.”
“For the same reasons I would like to propose a change of terminology, namely that from now on we reserve the expression ‘wrong track’ for those consciously false clues that we ourselves choose to set out, while the earlier ‘wrong track’-that is, what the crooks have set out-will be called ‘false tracks’ from now on. In addition this gives the right signals,” the chief constable underscored with a certain emphasis. “The crooks set out false tracks while we ourselves set out wrong tracks.”
“I have a suggestion,” said his best friend.
“I’m all ears,” said the chief constable, because his best friend was a highly talented man.
“I was thinking about suggesting that we complement your otherwise extraordinary analytic model with something I myself would like to call ‘dead-end track,’ ” said his best friend.
Dead-end track, thought the chief constable, feeling the intellectual excitement growing in his head like the bubbles in a newly opened bottle of soda pop. Crystal clear but at the same time stimulating.
“Would you mind developing that?” he said.
This his best friend had done with both joy and all the brainpower of which he was capable. From his own activity in state-owned industry-it was there he’d gotten the idea-he had discovered that sometimes you were compelled to have a workforce in reserve in order to be able to meet what was new and unexpected or simply the strain of additional demand in general. So that these people wouldn’t have to sit around dawdling in the meantime, or even worse get up to something, he created a reserve of duties of a purely make-work nature. A kind of completely harmless nonwork that at the same time had all the outward characteristics of work.
“The advantage with a dead-end track is that it doesn’t lead anywhere,” summarized his best friend. “At the same time it looks exactly like an ordinary clue,” he added.
“What do you mean, exactly?” said the chief constable slyly. “If you could expand that somewhat in the police context, I mean.”
“Imagine that you have a large surveillance force where you can’t keep everyone occupied but at the same time you want to have a reasonable reserve just in case,” said his best friend. “Drive them out onto a dead-end track until you need them.”
Ingenious, thought the chief constable. His best friend hadn’t become his best friend by chance.
“It would be excellent if you could write this down for the next time we meet,” said the chief constable, nodding with genuine warmth. “Yes, gentlemen. Should we perhaps be thinking about moving along? Any concluding questions?”
There was only one who had raised his hand. He hadn’t said anything the entire time. A skinny little character, the one who came from the tech squad, and whose name he hadn’t even needed to learn since he was here for the first and the last time.
“My name is Wiijnbladh,” said Wiijnbladh. “I work at tech and I have a small question.”
Get to the point sometime, thought the chief constable sourly and contented himself with nodding. The fellow looks like a sparrow, he thought. How he got into the academy is a pure mystery.
“What do we do about the ordinary clues?”
What the hell is he saying? thought the chief constable. Ordinary clues?
“Ordinary clues?”
“Yes, fingerprints and bloodstains and that sort of thing,” Wiijnbladh clarified.
“I see, those,” said the chief constable. “Those I was thinking about coming back to in another context.”
The sparrow was content to nod, which was a good thing for him since there were always vacant positions at the parking bureau out in Västberga, and instead the chief constable rounded off their meeting with a few well-chosen words.
“To quote the greatest detective that ever lived…” said the chief constable. “To quote the greatest of all detectives,” he amended, for on closer thought he of course hadn’t lived in a formal sense but rather only in a novel or two…
“When we have ruled out everything that is obvious or merely believable and only the unbelievable remains… then, gentlemen… then nonetheless it’s that which is the truth, however unbelievable that might seem,” said the chief constable, nodding solemnly.
That man has The Gift, thought Kudo.
…
The special adviser didn’t go to Forselius’s funeral, but when all the others had left and before the cemetery workers had filled in the family grave where he would rest, he took the opportunity to lower a final greeting to him: an ordinary plastic bag with a couple of bottles of Frapin 1900 plus a copy of his own old dissertation on stochastic processes and harmonic functions. Then he drove back to Rosenbad, where there was a great deal to tackle, and from now on he would be forced to do it himself. What do I do about Krassner? he thought. After he’d spoken with the minister of justice he understood that the message to Berg had been delivered, and he hoped he would get a period of peace and quiet. Hopefully he wouldn’t need to think about it at all.
He’d gone through a few economic analyses that he’d gotten from the military, and if he were to believe them the Russian bear was in the process of falling to its knees. The economy wasn’t up to it, quite simply, and sooner or later something would happen. But what would happen? he thought. And when?
His boss didn’t appear to be very cheerful either, and within the party there was a great deal of talk in more or less closed circles about the prime minister’s falling approval ratings and how that would influence the party’s possibilities in the next election. At the same time a palace revolution didn’t appear particularly likely. Social democrats didn’t get involved in that kind of thing, but it wasn’t good, and sooner or later something would have to be done. The well-being of the individual was secondary to the well-being of the party, he thought, and for a moment-it must have been Krassner who flickered past in his awareness-he was a hair’s breadth away from starting to think along the forbidden lines that solved the majority of both his own and the party’s problems. Stop, he thought, for such things don’t happen here. They were still living in Sweden, after all.