It struck him that as time went on, he saw them more and more as his children. He knew it was wrong. He, more than anyone else, had always managed to draw a line between his work and his private life; he thought perhaps he had gone sentimental in his old age. They had been through so much together and they had formed a bond like no other group he had worked with before.
The Devil had found religion in his old age.
In a brief moment of reckless honesty, he decided that Paul Hjelm and Kerstin Holm, Jorge Chavez and Arto Söderstedt, Viggo Norlander and Gunnar Nyberg – even Sara Svenhagen, the competent newcomer – were more like his children than his biological sons, both business-minded bachelors who visited him once a year at Christmas and then spent the time clock-watching and talking on their phones.
Jan-Olov Hultin could feel himself sinking into a muddled pool of mixed emotions. Then he decided enough was enough with the sentimental whining. He had arrived at the police station and no matter how good a detective he was, he would never be able to work out where the time had gone. Those gaps in time were one of life’s great mysteries.
A car was parked. A detective superintendent wandered through a station. A detective superintendent reached an office. A briefcase was put down by a desk. A watch was checked. A toilet visited. An incontinence pad was changed. Sleep was rubbed from a left eye. Corridors were walked down. Doors were opened. The Tactical Command Centre was empty. Stop.
The world took on a near-telegraphic style when everything went according to routine. But then suddenly it changed. Stop. Where was his team? Why was the sad little meeting room which – not without a slight sense of irony – went by the name ‘Tactical Command Centre’ completely empty?
Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin checked his watch again. It was thirty-three minutes past eight. Their morning run-through was meant to have started three minutes earlier. Even if the A-Unit wasn’t a marvel of temporal precision, at least one of them should have been there by now.
With resolute steps, Hultin headed for the desk where he usually sat waiting and watching like an old high-school teacher who was still refusing to retire. He picked up the phone and dialled the number for the talking clock. In its human – much too human – voice, it said: ‘eight, sixteen and ten seconds. Peep.’
Not that the voice actually said ‘peep’.
Hultin’s mind drifted to black holes in the space-time continuum, to gravitational time dilation and other such things. Had he been transported to another, parallel universe while he was wallowing in that pool of mixed emotions? For forty years, his wristwatch – an expensive Patek Philippe – had never been more than a few seconds out. Suddenly it was fifteen minutes fast. And during a period of time which seemed like it had disappeared, at that. He shuddered and allowed his thoughts to drift on. It was common knowledge that time passed more slowly inside a gravitational field than outside of it. The weaker the gravitational force, the quicker the time. A clock on top of Mount Everest will always be quicker than a clock at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Einstein had long since demonstrated what happened to time at high speeds with his theory of relativity – not that a traffic jam snaking through Stockholm really moved that fast. But just imagine if the opposite was true. Imagine if those traffic jams were so unnaturally slow that they reduced the gravitational force for a moment and made time pass more quickly. Imagine it was God’s way of saying: ‘Now, my children, enough of the madness. You sit alone in your cars as they spew out the carbon dioxide that’s devastating this world. In addition to that, you’re barely budging an inch. I need to give you a sign, a sign that you should stop making fools of yourselves and carpool, at the very least. No fewer than three in a car, and you can use the bus lanes whenever you like.’ Thus spoke the Almighty to the Not-Quite-So Almighty, who now looked up and saw twelve more or less attentive eyes fixed on him. He looked at his watch. Thirty-three minutes past eight. The second hand was moving as normal.
Jan-Olov Hultin froze. He realised he was faced with a choice. It was a parallel to his incontinence – he could have sunk down into it; he could have devoted the rest of his life to searching for explanations as to why he in particular had been struck by such an evil, mocking, relentlessly embarrassing condition. But he had realised he would never find any answers. He had realised it would lead to nothing more than an endless state of hopeless brooding which, in all likelihood, would result in either drug abuse or suicide. And so he had accepted the unfair hand fate had dealt him, put his incontinence pad in place and got on with his life.
But now, though? Was that a real, mystical experience he had just had? A modern-day Meister Eckhart or Francis of Assisi? Or was it nothing more than his tired old watch going crazy?
What had happened to time?
He came to a decision. He would drop the watch off for repair. If it happened again, he would book himself in for a CT scan to check whether he was having a stroke.
Because God’s voice had sounded remarkably like his own. At one point, years from now, he would experience the same sensation of complete disengagement with life. By then, he would have managed to retire no fewer than three times, but he would be back in charge of an investigation into an explosion on the Stockholm metro. Sitting in a room with both the A-Unit and the top brass from the Security Services, the same feeling of utter surreality would pass over him. As state secrets of the highest order were being discussed, he would once again experience that exact same sensation. But that was a long way off yet.
He looked out at the A-Unit, cleared his throat, leafed through the pile of papers on the desk in front of him and said, in his most ordinary voice: ‘Right then, my friends: today’s business.’
He stole a glance at them through his owl-like glasses, to see if anything had shown. They looked like they always did. Not a sign that any of them had noticed anything unusual. He breathed a sigh of relief and continued.
‘Yesterday, as you know, we had a couple of unusual events for the first time in a long while. None of you hesitated to use the forensic technicians and I’m sure the bill will be enough to turn Mörner’s stomach. But you did the right thing, of course. So this means we’ve got three ongoing cases, since Viggo and Gunnar are looking after the commuter train fight. Are we getting anywhere there, Gunnar?’
Before he fixed his gaze on Gunnar Nyberg, his eyes passed over his watch. It was twenty-five to nine. Time seemed to be back to normal again.
The sight of Gunnar Nyberg’s face was nearly as much of a surprise as it often had been lately. Though only nearly. By now, Hultin had – against all odds – started to get used to the idea of Sweden’s Biggest Policeman having abdicated the role. Nyberg’s 146 kilograms were more like 100 these days. He had done the impossible: he had lost weight. And since the former Mr Sweden rarely did anything by halves, he had really lost weight. Forty kilograms, something he put down to the whole dieting package: healthy food, jogging, swimming, and even acupuncture and reflexology. It was deeply impressive.
Nyberg knew all too well that not a single member of the team had failed to see through his all-encompassing motive; they were even helping him along the way. So far, though, he hadn’t really had much luck.
Gunnar Nyberg needed a woman.
Some of his A-Unit colleagues had ‘set him up’ with ‘single women’ from their groups of acquaintances. He had been on a few ‘dates’ and was starting to get tired of all the Anglo-American expressions which seemed to go hand in hand with the opposite sex. Though he was far from tired of the opposite sex. On the contrary – a decades-long, self-imposed celibacy had come to an end; Gunnar Nyberg no longer felt the need to lash himself like a medieval monk. He had managed to repair his relationship with his children and even his ex-wife who, during the dark years of his bodybuilding period, he had mistreated in the worst way possible. These days, he regularly spent time with his grandson Benny, who was almost three now and would soon be getting a sibling – a sister, the ultrasound had mistakenly revealed.