“I’ll take care of that in a moment,” said Johansson, signaling to his friend the restaurant owner.
But how did she or he know my home address? he thought.
[WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 27]
The night before had been a late one. Jarnebring had gone home with him and they had stayed up drinking and talking until one o’clock. Then Johansson looked at the clock and declared that he for one had had enough and that if Jarnebring was considering staying he could choose between the couch in the living room and the one in the study. Jarnebring thanked him for the invitation, called a taxi, and went home. He was rather in the mood and she had been unusually affectionate lately. I guess she’s heard all that talk about my good morals, thought Jarnebring contentedly as he journeyed through the night.
Johansson woke at six as usual, got up, took two aspirin and a large glass of water before he set the clock for eight and went back to sleep again. He had to be at a conference out on Lidingö at ten o’clock, and because he wasn’t a speaker but a member of the audience, he didn’t have anything in particular to be concerned about. Except for that annoying little slip of paper.
Now he was sitting where he should be according to the calendar on his desk, but as one speaker followed another at the podium, his thoughts were going their own way, and every time they came back to that slip of paper.
My address, thought Johansson, for he could not let go of that thought. How did he get hold of my address? I’m not in the phone book. I don’t give it out at work, and no one in my family or among my friends would do so either. On the other hand, it would be no big deal to get hold of it for someone who really wanted to. But why would Krassner have his name and address? Johansson had a good memory for both names and people and their appearances and various dealings, as you should have if you’re an old detective; he had truly ransacked his memory these past twenty-four hours. No Krassner, thought Johansson.
Assume that Jarnebring was on the right track. That Krassner was an ordinary scatterbrain, the type who liked to be a little important and secretive and could even imagine gadding about in shoes with hollow heels. Hollow heels. Johansson shook his head. Of all the thousands of crooks he’d run into during his years as a policeman, he couldn’t recall any who’d had shoes with hollow heels. On the other hand there were several who hadn’t had any shoes at all. Dope, thought Johansson. There were sure to be one or two who had chosen to store the goods that way. A tall tale was even circulating in the building about a black guy who was extremely tall to start with, who had tried to bring in a pound of heroin through customs at Arlanda in a pair of knee-high, crocodile-leather platform boots. He didn’t know if it was true, and that wasn’t the point anyway, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to talk with one of the boys in narcotics? How can I do that? thought Johansson gloomily, and if he knew Jarnebring it had already been done. Wonder what we’ll get for lunch, he thought, looking at his watch.
Jarnebring was not the type to surrender unnecessarily to brooding. Krassner was a closed chapter. It only remained for him to write up the case and put it in the files. He would do that as soon as Hultman called to report on what the American police had come up with regarding Krassner, and he was already convinced that this would not essentially change anything. Suicide, concluded Jarnebring, and after that he’d devoted the morning to practical matters and the afternoon to physical training. What he was going to do after work was his own business.
Good news, thought Wiijnbladh. If police-station gossip was true, it was evidently the acting head of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Lars Martin Johansson, who had written the statement about the officers who had missed the two corpses in the elevator shaft. The type who gladly steps over the bodies of his colleagues, thought Wiijnbladh, and he would scarcely miss that dilettante Olsson when he let the ax fall. True, Olsson had not been at the scene of the crime, he’d been somewhere else, which only further underscored his negligence and general incompetence, but he was still the chief of the group at the tech squad where the officers were working. The job that rightly should have been mine, thought Wiijnbladh, and yet it was clearly not too late. Now it was a matter of making an extra effort before the celebration of the chief’s sixtieth birthday. I’m of course in charge of both the collection and the party, thought Wiijnbladh contentedly.
…
On Monday morning Bäckström had returned to his usual job as murder investigator on the homicide squad, and with him he had an as good as completely investigated case of wife abuse. Normally he wouldn’t have touched shit like that with a pair of tongs. The homicide squad had yielded to political pressure from a lot of red-stockings and leftist pansies and established a special investigative group for violence against women, to which the closet fags and dykes in the corps had of course applied. Violence against women? thought Bäckström. A bunch of drunken hags who both needed and wanted a little regular ass-whipping. The problem was just this case: a pile of dough and boobs like melons and the drunk she was married to was still sitting in stir. Bäckström himself had seen to that.
First he had thought about playing the good cop and simply asking his immediate superior to let him finish up the case himself. For one thing, the investigation was as good as done, and for another, there were no fresh murders that required his efforts. Just piles of old, unsolved shit that no normal person could bear to poke into, but the problem was more complicated than that. Bäckström’s boss was an old idiot, six foot six and 280 pounds who completely lacked a fuse. When Bäckström saw him on Monday he had been monumentally hungover, and only a suicidal person with impaired vision would have asked the question, so Bäckström decided to lie low and not say a peep about the matter. All he needed was a couple of extra follow-up sessions with the poor victim. He was already halfway there, he’d heard it in her voice when he was talking with her on the phone. In the worst case he could always change the date on the interviews.
Jarnebring wasn’t what he seemed to be, thought Oredsson, and when he talked with his older comrades he also understood why. Jarnebring was clearly an old colleague and best friend of that fifth columnist Johansson, who was head of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Too bad, thought Oredsson. If you’re going to tackle crime in earnest it’s important to have people like Jarnebring on the right side.
…
When Stridh came home he turned on the TV to watch the evening news, but it was the same old pile of misery so he turned it off again. It never ends, thought Stridh; the only bright spot was that he would soon be off again.
[THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 28]
Hultman was not one to hesitate to pull the trigger, thought Jarnebring with delight, and the Americans weren’t either. When he checked his mailbox after morning prayers he found a fax from the American embassy. A record of an interrogation carried out by the police in Albany, New York, a few short official lines from the legal attaché at the embassy, as well as a handwritten letter from Hultman that summarized the essentials: Ten years ago Krassner had tried to take his own life by jumping from the balcony of the house where he was living. The local police had pulled out an old investigation of the incident. His girlfriend at that time had also been questioned, and to make a long story short, she could confirm everything that Jarnebring had suspected right from the start. Krassner was, to say the least, a complicated person. Krassner had tried to take his life before, and in the same way as now.
As a suicide attempt it was not much to write home about. Krassner had suffered a concussion and a broken leg. This time you were more successful, thought Jarnebring; he decided to finish up the investigation of the cause of death as soon as he received the final statement from the forensic doctor. Suicide, thought Jarnebring once again, and the simplest thing would be to just forget that annoying little slip of paper with his best friend’s name on it. Perhaps that ridiculous shoe with the hollow heel too, thought Jarnebring. He could, of course, have found the safe-deposit box key somewhere else, and the very simplest thing was just to include it along with everything else in the confiscation report. I’m not going to write a spy novel, thought Jarnebring, so that might as well stay between Lars Martin and me.