‘One thing,’ Kerstin Holm said pensively. ‘Was there even anyone following him? Maybe it was just some kind of drug-induced psychosis? The only thing suggesting a crime is surely the rope around his leg. But maybe we should assume he had that there for some other reason. I don’t know, sexual maybe – some sort of bondage thing? He might have just been running from his own demons and fallen into the wolverines in blind panic?’
There was silence. Chavez leafed through his papers.
‘The rope had been chewed off,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s no evidence it was tied around both legs, so it might have just been around one of them. Some kind of decoration. But,’ he added more loudly, ‘is that really likely?’
‘The key thing’s got to be whether there’s any sign of anyone else there,’ Holm continued. ‘It could be in a number of places, if I’ve followed everything you’ve been saying: outside Skansen, on the fence, in with the wolves, on the wall at the edge of the wolf enclosure, on the ground between the wolves and the wolverines, in with the wolverines. It doesn’t seem too likely we’d find anything in with the wolverines, but what about the other places? If his blood is all over the fence then why don’t we have anything from whoever was following him? Why didn’t they leave a single trace behind?’
Chavez tore his papers.
‘Apparently there aren’t even any clear footprints from him. In the wolf enclosure, the ground’s practically all rock between the fence and the wall. There’s no trace of him on the asphalt – not on the fence around the wolverine enclosure, either.’
‘But in with the wolverines, surely his footprints have got to be there?’ said Holm. ‘I mean, he was writing in the earth with his fingers. It must be porous. Is there no sign of him there, by the letters?’
Chavez nodded – the way a man who has missed something nods.
‘I know, Kerstin, but there aren’t any. There are wolverine prints, a general kind of chaos, traces of the actual ingestion… but no footprints. It rained that night, remember that.’
‘But not enough to get rid of the letters…’
‘He might’ve been thrown down once he was already tied up,’ said Hjelm. ‘If he was thrown in, maybe he got injured. All he managed to do was write that word which, for some reason, was more important than getting up. And then the wolverines appeared.’
‘And there’s no sign of anyone else having been there at all?’ Kerstin Holm persisted. ‘Not even on the fence?’
‘No,’ Chavez replied doggedly.
‘So let’s try to work out what happened with the wolves,’ said Hjelm. ‘Let’s imagine he got rid of the gun because he’d emptied the magazine. Not a smart move, but understandable. Blind fury. Then why did he tear his expensive chain off, that ridiculous extension of his penis, and throw it to the wolves?’
‘Maybe that’s just another sign of drug psychosis,’ Holm said. Hjelm thought he knew her well enough to realise she was now doing it just to annoy Jorge, who had a dark look in his eyes. It didn’t help that Hultin concluded:
‘So in other words, we don’t even know if a crime has been committed-’
‘Yes,’ Chavez said irritatedly. ‘This is a murder. If it isn’t, I’ll throw myself to the wolverines. That’s a promise.’
The A-Unit stared at him. It was true that each of them had been hoping for a real case – for no more fights on commuter trains – but none more than Jorge Chavez. That much was obvious.
‘That’ll be a nice crowd-pleaser for the summer concerts in Skansen,’ Viggo Norlander said, blowing his nose. ‘Lasse Berghagen introducing the daring Wolverine Detective.’
‘Shut up,’ Chavez said.
‘Isn’t that my line?’ retorted Norlander.
‘Honestly,’ said Holm, ‘if we look at that incomprehensible writing and the fact that he wrote what he did instead of trying to get out… Doesn’t it all just suggest he was mad?’
‘Yeah,’ said Hjelm. ‘I think he was mad. Drugged up and mad with panic. But I also think his panic was justified.’
‘But whoever was following him doesn’t seem to have climbed into the wolf enclosure after him,’ said Holm. ‘Is there any other way in?’
Hjelm and Chavez exchanged glances. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
‘We’ll look into it,’ Hjelm said drily.
Hultin pulled himself together, glanced at his watch and continued.
‘Well, that took a while. We’ve still got another event to go through. Kerstin?’
Kerstin Holm looked slightly out of it. Her fingers touched the bare patch on her temple and she imagined she could feel her thoughts breaking up on the other side of the thin bone.
‘Could you start, Sara?’ she asked.
Sara, who had been sitting quietly, looked up in surprise. She still thought of herself as Kerstin’s inferior and had been expecting – at most – a word or two. She took a sip of her cold coffee, pulled a face and composed herself.
‘Eight asylum seekers, all strongly suspected of having worked as prostitutes, disappeared from the annexe of a refugee centre the night before last. From the Norrboda Motell in Slagsta, to be precise. Where they were living and working.
‘They’re all from Eastern Europe: three of the women from Ukraine, two from Bulgaria, two from Russia and another from Belarus. The two Russians, Natalja Vaganova and Tatjana Skoblikova, were in room 224; two of the Ukrainians, Galina Stenina and Lina Kostenko, were in room 225; the other one, Valentina Dontsjenko, and the Belorussian, Svetlana Petruseva, were in room 226; the two Bulgarians, Stefka Dafovska and Mariya Bagrjana, were in room 227. I’m sure you’ll remember all of that.
‘We worked late into the evening yesterday, talking to their neighbours. It seems like it was a pretty open secret that they were prostitutes. We’ve got names for some of the johns and we’ve managed to get a pretty good idea of how they were able to run their business. Jörgen Nilsson, the manager, didn’t just turn a blind eye to it; we’ve also got reports that he made use of their services. As a customer. I don’t think he’s got much of a future left in his job.’
Kerstin Holm had managed to collect herself and took over.
‘We had two key questions. When did the women disappear, and had their disappearance been preceded by anything unusual? We couldn’t expect to know much more than that by this point. What we do know is the following: for the past week or so, the women had been more uneasy than usual; something had clearly happened to make them nervous. Their neighbours were pretty much in agreement on that.
‘From what we can tell, the eight women were there all evening on Wednesday. One witness claims he heard them talking in a foreign language, probably Russian, as late as three on Thursday morning. They were meant to report to Nilsson at nine that morning, but they never showed up. None of their neighbours – and we’ve spoken to most of them by now – saw or heard them disappear. All that with a side note, most of the interviews were carried out using an interpreter.’
‘So we don’t even know if a crime has been committed,’ Chavez pointed out vindictively.
Holm gave him an amused look. Svenhagen gave him an angry one. The look of a wife whose husband was acting like a child.
‘No,’ Sara said, managing to sound restrained. ‘But we do have to ask whether it’s really just a coincidence that an unidentified pimp-like man was chased to his death just a few hours before eight prostitutes from a refugee camp disappeared into thin air. We can speculate a bit here. Was he their pimp? If that’s the case, then doesn’t it seem fair to assume that the whole brothel’s just been wiped out by the competition? They’re probably dead already, if that’s true. And then we’d have a real sex war on our hands. Plus, battles between brothels usually mean drug wars, too. Or maybe he was just a competing pimp, put to death by the eight’s pimp before he grabbed his women and went underground?’