‘It just came to me,’ Sara said with a hint of smugness, running her hand through her cropped blonde hair. ‘What reason could he have for keeping quiet about prostitution in the refugee centre?’
‘Just when I’d started to like him. I actually fell for his whole civil disobedience thing. Me, an old dear, I’m more naive than you. That feels weird.’
‘Don’t say that. All the crap I saw when I was working with the paedophile unit… It’s nothing to be jealous of. And you’re not an old dear.’
‘Mmm,’ Kerstin Holm replied, gravely serious.
They came to the rooms, four doors next to one another in the middle of a seemingly endless corridor two floors up. Rooms 224, 225, 226 and 227. After fumbling with the keys, they made their way into number 224. Unmade beds against two of the walls; an empty desk; a couple of empty wardrobes, doors flung wide; ugly strip lighting on the ceiling and the same piss-coloured wall-to-wall carpet and institutional fabric as everywhere else. It was clear that the atmosphere wasn’t part of what the brothel had to offer. People came here for raw sex, nothing more, nothing less. Even the reading lamps were bare strip lights.
They stood for a moment, taking in the scene.
‘What’s your intuition telling you?’ Kerstin asked, a question aimed as much at herself as Sara. ‘Is it worth calling the technicians in? Do you think they’ve just done a runner? Or has something happened to them? Sara?’
‘Fingerprints, semen…’ Sara thought aloud. ‘Yeah, well… should we take a look at the other rooms first?’
The other rooms were remarkably similar. In fact, there was barely anything to distinguish them. It was like that classic nightmare: no matter which door you opened, the very same room was waiting on the other side.
Both women knew that it would take multiple, time-consuming interviews before they would even start to form an idea about what had happened here. And by then, it would be too late for the technicians. They would have to go on their intuition. Breathe the rooms in. Try to find some small clue as to what had happened.
They thought about the decree from above – from the CID department head, Waldemar Mörner – which obliged staff to minimise their use of the National Forensic Laboratory, since its services were, in his view, ‘criminally overpriced’.
They stood for a moment, trying to get a sense of the atmosphere. Then they nodded, both at the same time.
‘Yup,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Something’s not right.’
‘No,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘Something’s not right.’
And so they called in the technicians. Not that it was easy; they were busy elsewhere.
‘Skansen?’ Kerstin Holm exclaimed into her mobile. ‘What the hell are they doing there? Wolverine shit?? OK, OK, someone’s been reading their Ellroy…’
She hung up on her boss, Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin, and shook her head. Doing so still hurt slightly. Just over a year ago, she had been shot, leaving her left temple paper-thin. Her hair was still refusing to grow back over it. She poked at the little bald spot which her dishevelled black hair was managing, with some trouble, to cover.
‘Don’t ask,’ was all she said as they relocked the doors and headed back downstairs.
When they reached the manager’s office, Jörgen Nilsson had already filled ten or so sheets of A4. They looked at one another and groaned.
It would be a long afternoon.
6
DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT JAN-OLOV Hultin was sitting in a traffic jam, trying to work out how much of his life he had spent sitting in traffic jams. He gave up once the numbers started reaching astronomical heights. From what he could tell, he had spent more than a year in traffic jams. The thought was unbearable. He was sixty-three years old, and of those sixty-three years, more than one had been spent in traffic. That must be what people meant by progress.
He pulled out onto the E4 by Norrviken in Sollentuna, where he lived, on a highly sought-after plot of land on the shore of Lake Ravalen. Gravely criminal estate agents still stopped by every now and then, trying to buy the land for a song. He had chased the latest of them away with a needle-sharp rake. The estate agent had wet himself and screamed, tears in his throat: ‘Tool killer!’ Jan-Olov Hultin had regretted it for the rest of the day. It had been less than a year since he had actually killed a man. In a hotel room in Skövde. In addition to that, he had jammed his service weapon into the mouth of an unarmed man and had come damn close to shooting him too. Only Arto Söderstedt had stopped him, a debt he would forever struggle to repay. Granting him a few months’ leave without a word had been a matter of course – despite the fact that it went against all the usual rules and regulations.
It often happened – much too often – that Hultin found himself back in that hotel room in Skövde. Of course, it could just be called a dream – it probably was a dream. Only, it didn’t feel like one. He was really there. It was so strange. The whole sequence of events, every little detail, repeated itself, and the odd thing was that throughout it all, he knew exactly what was going to happen. But despite that, he still couldn’t do a thing about it. He was reliving the whole thing – fully aware of what would happen – night after night. Paul Hjelm shot a thug and was shot in the arm, Kerstin Holm was shot in the head. And Jan-Olov Hultin killed one man and jammed his pistol into the mouth of another.
Killing a man wasn’t so easy.
The events in Skövde were just one part of the previous summer’s strange, complicated, eye-catching series of crimes. The media had been able to summarise the A-Unit’s earlier cases with relative ease, talking about ‘The Power Killer’ and ‘The Kentucky Killer’, but this third case had proved trickier, and thankfully the press hadn’t managed to cling on to every single twist and turn. There had been a patchwork of unusual names instead – ‘The Kumla Explosion’, ‘The Sickla Slaughter’, ‘The Skövde Shooting’ and the ‘Kvarnen Killing’ – and not even the most eagle-eyed of readers had managed to link these diverse incidents to one another.
But there had been a link, and it hadn’t been pretty.
It had been relatively tough for them all to get back to work again afterwards. Hultin had officially returned as operating chief of the A-Unit, having been involuntarily retired before the case began. That was something for which he would never forgive Waldemar Mörner, the group’s official boss.
Usually, he hit the first traffic jam as soon as he turned off onto the E4 at Norrviken. Those were slow mornings. But this particular early May morning, however, it was plain sailing all the way to Ulriksdal. Now the rain was lashing down and he was sitting in a motionless traffic jam, feeling bitter.
Not least because he had wet himself.
It wasn’t really a problem, because he was wearing a pad specially designed for the purpose. He had chronic incontinence and there was nothing to be done but swallow the bitter pill. Give up and retire on health grounds or say to hell with it and ignore it. He had chosen the latter.
But the more he thought about it, the clearer the link became between his condition and those bouts of rage which, just over a year ago, had resulted in a couple of headbutted eyebrows and escalated to a climax in Skövde. Though for the past year he had – the tool-killer incident aside – actually managed to stick to his mantra of ‘live and let live’. Also in relation to the weeds in his garden, now thriving like never before.
Their last case might well have resulted in a number of his team giving up; it had been unbelievably demanding. Thankfully, though, they had all stayed put. Thankfully, they were all still alive.