Unfortunately, he was forced to admit that the woman who had been granted the dubious honour of freeing him from his celibacy had almost entirely slipped his mind. It wasn’t enough that he couldn’t remember her name, he couldn’t even remember what she looked like. He had been so nervous that he had been climbing the walls of his old bachelor pad in Nacka. All he could remember was that Viggo Norlander had been behind it. She was a colleague of Norlander’s partner Astrid, a woman in her forties. They had planned to meet at his flat and then go out for a drink in Nacka Centrum. That much he remembered, but after that his memory failed him. He didn’t think they had even gone for that drink. All he had was a vague recollection of surprisingly immediate sexual activity. Nothing more, nothing less. The two had never met again, and the only lasting impression was something Viggo Norlander had said a few days later, with an ambiguous smile on his lips:
‘You sly dog.’
He assumed Norlander had meant it as praise and not criticism, but Gunnar Nyberg had no idea. Just to be on the safe side, he never saw her again. He met other women instead, and as he became slimmer and slimmer, his confidence grew. By now, he felt nothing but excitement at the delights the opposite sex had to offer. He was ready for something more long-term.
He cleared his throat and said: ‘You all know the details of the so-called commuter train fight. Night train from Kungsängen. Three pro graffiti artists completely renovated the carriage where a group of alcoholics were sitting. Five full-blown alcoholics in their forties – apparently they were morally outraged at the damage and set on the vandals, who were fit young twenty-somethings. It turned into a real fight. Two of the alcoholics were left brain-damaged, one of the vandals died; everyone was hurt in one way or another. When the train arrived in Karlberg, a pensioner with a little lapdog boarded a real bloodbath. It really is as boring as it sounds, from an investigative point of view. I hope these new cases are a bit more stimulating. Viggo and I don’t have anything else to add. Everyone involved has been taken into custody and charged. Aside from the pensioner, who had a heart attack. He’s out of danger now though, finally.’
Hultin cast another glance at his watch. Everything seemed fine. He nodded and thanked Nyberg.
‘OK then,’ he said. ‘We can probably consider that one closed. Time for ferocious little animals.’
Jorge Chavez looked up from a pile of papers and cast a glance at Hjelm, who gestured for him to take charge.
‘OK,’ said Chavez. ‘Have any of you heard of the Gulo gulo?’
Clearly none of them had.
‘It comes from the Latin for glutton. It’s another name for the wolverine. As I’m sure you can guess, it’s hinting at the animal’s insatiable greediness. They eat small animals during the summer, but in the winter they’d happily eat a reindeer or two. The night before last, four of the wolverines in Skansen were clearly feeling quite wintery, because these little creatures – which don’t weigh more than about thirty kilos each, by the way – guzzled down a man, virtually every last bit of him. We’ve got some fibres from a pale pink suit, a section of his leg, complete with a piece of eight-millimetre red-and-purple polypropylene rope, plus a right index finger and this.’
He held up a dog-eared playing card.
The queen of spades.
‘We found traces of the probable basis for their greediness. Cocaine. An analysis of the flesh and blood samples showed the same: that our victim had recently consumed a pretty large amount of cocaine. Since the drug was in his blood, it added to the wolverines’ insatiability.
‘Everyone knows that the worst things always happen – in war, for example – under the influence of drugs. Apparently the animal kingdom isn’t much different from the human race in that respect. Put simply: the cocaine drove the wolverines crazy, and from what we can tell, they even managed to work their way through almost his entire skeleton, his head included. We haven’t found it yet, at least. Despite that, my father-in-law’s men from the lab have managed to produce both a DNA analysis and a usable fingerprint. Neither of them match anything in the Swedish databases, so we’ve sent them on to Interpol and Europol.
‘We didn’t find our man’s fingerprints on the wooden fence around the enclosure either. None of the fingerprints from the fence match any entries in the database. His finger, which was pretty cut up, was full of earth that we’ve managed to link to the soil in the southern corner of the wolverine enclosure – the area right beneath the viewing platform. We also found both blood and skin fragments from the victim in that area – in five letters which, from what we can tell, he scratched in the ground with his finger. The word, if it even is one, is: “Epivu”. Capital E, the rest lower case. Does that mean anything to anyone?’
It didn’t.
‘No,’ said Chavez. ‘It didn’t mean a thing to us either. Or the Internet. Not one single hit.’
‘Moving on from the wolverine enclosure,’ Paul Hjelm continued. ‘Because of the rope around his leg, we automatically assumed he’d been carried there, either unconscious or already dead. I took too long to react, if I’m honest. I’d just come from the Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital, where I’d been talking to a little girl who’d been shot just after 10 p.m. the night before. In Djurgården, not far from the eastern edge of Skansen. If we look at the path of the bullet and follow it back, you end up at the Skansen fence – parallel to the wolf enclosure. The lucky technicians had to expand their search to that enclosure too.
‘They eventually managed to find three things: firstly, our victim’s blood, high up on the fence – including on the barbed wire at the top and then also on the concrete wall beneath the viewing area on the other side. Secondly, they found a thick, broken neck chain, eighteen-carat gold, and finally, a 9mm Luger with a silencer. The magazine was empty. They did some sample shots. The gun’s a perfect match for the bullet taken from ten-year-old Lisa Altbratt’s upper arm. She’ll be absolutely fine, by the way.’
‘So in summary,’ Chavez took over. ‘Who is our man? He was wearing a pale pink suit and he had a thick gold chain around his neck; he snorts cocaine from the queen of spades and he’s armed with a silenced Luger. The print from his one remaining finger – the right index finger to be precise – is on all three of them: the card, the chain and the gun. It’s unambiguous. So who is he?’
‘Hit man?’ asked Nyberg.
‘Drug dealer?’ rejoined Norlander.
‘Porn star?’ Nyberg countered.
‘Pimp?’ Holm and Svenhagen blurted out in unison.
The two women glanced at one another.
‘We’ll have to wait and see,’ Chavez said firmly. ‘At the very least, the whole thing screams underworld. He’s not in our databases, which means he’s probably foreign. If he was Swedish, the systems would’ve gone crazy with matches.’
‘So what happened to him?’ Hjelm continued. ‘Someone chased him through the Djurgården woods. He shot at them, but there’s no indication of him hitting anyone other than Lisa Altbratt. He made it to the fence and decided to climb up, even though there was a little path right alongside the fence. What does that tell us? Desperation, maybe? Blind panic? He ripped his fingers to shreds on the fence, didn’t care about grabbing the barbed wire – it cut deep into his hands – and then threw himself into the wolf enclosure. Luckily for him, they seem to have been well fed and content.’