Malmberg hesitated. He was obviously unpleasantly affected.
“Do you know or do you suspect anything that you ought to cough up?”
“Well, no…”
“But you think-”
“No! In a way I was completely floored when I heard you’d arrested Fredrik, but at the same time not particularly surprised, because he’s a really smarmy type. But to be honest I had a hard time believing that kid would have the nerve to kill someone and then bury the body. I didn’t believe that about Fredrik. He’s a bastard, but-”
“Have you talked with him lately?”
“No, not since he left the club. I thought I saw him in town last winter.”
“Alone?”
“I don’t know,” said Malmberg.
“Don’t know?”
“It was so quick. He went past in his dad’s car and maybe there was someone in the car.”
“Klara Lovisa?”
“It was a light-haired girl anyway.”
Lindell tried to ferret out more detail about where and when Malmberg thought he had seen Fredrik and a possible passenger, but he could not remember more than that it was on Kungsgatan, near Stadsteatern and that it was some time in March, because it was before he had taken his motorcycle out for the season.
“When do you do that?” Lindell asked.
“It depends on the weather, but usually in the middle of April.”
“Have you talked with anyone else about this, I mean since Klara Lovisa was found? Anyone in the club?”
“I’ve been out with the bike and got home yesterday. My sister called right away. I’m going to help her move.”
“Can you imagine anyone else in Klara Lovisa’s surroundings who may have anything to do with the case?”
Malmberg shook his head.
“So to summarize: You haven’t heard or seen anything, and you think Fredrik in principle is an oily bastard but not capable of murder?”
“He’s probably capable, but I was a little surprised.”
“Okay,” said Lindell, extending her hand. “Thanks for taking the time for this social hour.”
Håkan Malmberg smiled at her. She guessed that smile had put ideas in the heads of many soccer players.
Ann Lindell accompanied him to the entrance, watched him leave the building and straddle the motorcycle, which he had parked right outside. He waved to her, pulled on his helmet, kick-started the motorcycle, and disappeared onto Svartbäcksgatan.
A feeling of calm came over her: She looked down at the notebook. There was a single word noted: March.
Forty-one
“Shadows,” said Allen Fredriksson. “They’re there, but we don’t see them, other than as shadows.”
He said this quietly, as if he had thought of something but did not have the whole context clear.
“What do you mean?”
Sammy Nilsson sensed what his colleague wanted to say but wanted to hear more, how Fredriksson developed a theme that he had never put into words before.
“Kumlin, that Fedotov guy, and now consultant Millgren in Moscow, and then everything behind that. There must be a lot. Gränsberg and the others, we understand them well enough. They assault and kill each other, get drunk, throw up and act out, stink, yell and scream, lie and make flat denials. But this gang is just formless figures. We know they exist, we see them on TV, and read about them in the newspapers-successful, promising, but that’s just bullshit. Just the surface. Kumlin, for example, who the hell would believe he was good for over two hundred million? Where does the money come from?”
Fredriksson threw out his arms and stared encouragingly at Myhre, as if he could explain.
“You’re just jealous,” said Beatrice. “You play the horses and want to win the big pot every week. You wouldn’t turn down a few million.”
“No, of course not!” Fredriksson hissed.
He was unrecognizable. Obviously he had spent Sunday thinking and concluded that life was unfair. Seldom had they seen or heard him so upset.
“Where Russia is concerned it’s a little different,” said Myhre thoughtfully.
It was noticeable that he was slightly ill at ease being the center of everyone’s attention, perhaps also due to Fredriksson’s unexpected aggressiveness.
“In what way?” Sammy Nilsson asked.
“It’s a sick bandit economy,” Myhre resumed. “The ones who enter the Russian game, like Kumlin, have to be prepared to apply somewhat unorthodox business methods. For one thing this concerns enormous sums of money, for another the mafia runs the economy, and third, the forces that could serve as a corrective are completely out of commission or even mixed up in it. I’m thinking about the politicians, the police, and the courts. But the price is high. I think Russia is the only industrialized country where the average life span is going down, and drastically, it’s not a matter of six months or so. The country is heading for a demographic catastrophe, and mostly for the Russian population, which is declining the most, while other peoples in the Federation are increasing. The result will be black as night, with ethnic cleansing and civil war. I can picture to myself how Putin starts a crusade, more Chechnyas in other words. The ones who are drinking themselves to death today may be the most fortunate.”
Myhre paused and turned toward Fredriksson.
“There’s the answer, Allan, to where all Kumlin’s millions come from: liquor, oil, corruption, and misappropriation of everything that can be sold.”
“So we can’t count on any help from the authorities?” Sammy Nilsson asked.
“Hardly,” replied Myhre.
“And Millgren will probably not cooperate?”
“Not in the slightest now,” said Myhre.
Sammy Nilsson smiled at the expression and how the modest Myhre was so sure of himself.
“The process goes on,” Myhre resumed. “Russia’s economy is like a giant organism that floats around. If a tentacle is cut off, the body twitches, but the cut surface heals quickly and new tentacles grow out.”
“Kumlin was only a tentacle, good for two hundred million,” Beatrice observed.
Myhre nodded and continued his lecture.
“Millgren continues his activity, his agreement with Fedotov and Kumlin probably rests on relatively solid legal grounds, he’s probably not that dense. Maybe he has to take a little shit, there will be some talk about divided loyalties, but who will really be surprised?”
“There is a catch,” said Sammy Nilsson. “The neighbor lady with the dog, the one who walked past Kumlin’s house, maintains that the man by the fence did not sound foreign, that he said something about the dog. She maintained that he said the word “pooch,” “nice pooch,” or something like that. How probable is it that a Russian-”
“But she wasn’t sure, and besides her hearing is very bad,” Beatrice objected. “When I talked with her I had to more or less shout.”
“The lady with the dog,” said Fredriksson. “It’s always some bastard with a dog.”
“You’re in top form,” Sammy Nilsson grinned. “Did the system break down over the weekend? Was there a free-for-all in the fourth race?”
Fredriksson only glared. The fact was that Nilsson’s dig was right, his system had broken. If Nelson Express had behaved himself Fredriksson would have taken home almost four hundred thousand. Now he had to be content with a miserable eighteen grand.
“I won,” he muttered.
“It shows,” said Sammy Nilsson ironically. “And how does it feel when you lose?”0
“But why does Kumlin have to die?” Beatrice said suddenly.
Her question expressed what they were all thinking, that the motive was decisive for whether they would have a reasonable chance to solve the murder. If there was a connection to the Russian mafia, the probability was great that the murderer was already out of the country and forever inaccessible to justice.
“Maybe he was playing both sides,” Sammy Nilsson threw out at last.
“With who?” asked Myhre, well aware that they would probably never get a clear picture of the whole thing.