‘Hang on a second now,’ said Hultin. ‘What are you up to, Sara? Do we have anything at all suggesting a link between these two cases – which might not actually even be cases?’
‘Nothing concrete, no,’ Sara replied, slightly browbeaten. ‘It’s just a hunch.’
‘I’m starting to get very tired of all these vague hunches,’ their great leader emphasised clearly, stealing a glance at his watch.
‘Slightly more concrete, then,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Unidentified men with that kind of brash, high-up-in-the-underworld appearance aren’t exactly common; we normally know who they are, it’s that simple. Which means this man is, in all likelihood, a new arrival. The women in Slagsta had been uneasy since a few weeks back. On that basis, it’s not unreasonable for us to check for any possible sightings of a cocaine-snorting man in a light pink suit and with a thick gold chain around his neck in the area around the Norrboda Motell over the past few weeks, is it? We might even get a description of him if we do that.’
‘Sounds better,’ Hultin muttered.
‘It could be Lasse Berghagen himself,’ said Viggo Norlander.
‘If we turn that reasoning around,’ Gunnar Nyberg suddenly said, ‘did those ladies chase after the pimp and push him into the ghouls?’
‘Gulo gulo,’ Chavez corrected him sourly.
‘Hardly,’ said Holm. ‘They were in Slagsta until at least three in the morning. Several witnesses saw and heard them around ten, when our man was busy climbing over the fence into the wolves.’
‘Did they have any johns then?’ asked Hjelm. ‘Was it business as usual?’
Kerstin Holm turned to him and gave him a look he struggled to interpret, but which almost made him recoil. The relationship between them had been slightly tense since the incident in Skövde, a year ago. Both of them had been shot – him in the arm and her in the head – and they were lying next to one another on the ground, their blood mixing together beneath a sky which had just opened, and she, utterly exhausted, utterly drenched, utterly bloody, had whispered: ‘Paul, I love you.’
Her words had been difficult to take. Not least because he was a married man.
Eventually, she answered: ‘We haven’t been able to get a clear picture of that. We need to check more closely. There might be indications that their entire prostitution business had been quiet lately.’
‘Right then,’ Hultin said, gathering a pile of papers together. ‘The day’s activities are starting to become clear. Paul and Jorge, you can go back to Skansen and look for alternative routes around the wolves. We need to know if it’s a murder we’re looking at. Kerstin and Sara, work with Viggo and Gunnar and talk to more people from the Slagsta brothel. We really need to know whether it’s a crime we’re looking at there, too. We might be completely wrong. Oh, this came too.’
He held up a postcard covered with pictures of wine bottles.
‘Ah, yeah,’ Chavez said, still sourly. ‘The heirs.’
‘From Arto Söderstedt in Chianti, yes,’ Hultin said, pulling his owl-like glasses down to the end of his nose and reading: ‘“You rascals. Here I am, toiling away trampling grapes while you laze about in glorious spring Stockholm. Fate apportions her favours unequally. By the way, do you know the best way to split five watermelons between seven people? All suggestions gratefully received. Pieces is just lazy. Greetings from a warm, pine-scented, Vin Santo-hazy Tuscan afternoon.”’
‘That piece of shit,’ said Viggo Norlander.
7
HE TRAVELLED. LIKE a worm, he moved in distinctive patterns beneath the city. He had got it into his head that these underground shapes formed letters, a subterranean script identical to the text on the reverse of his page. The text that was growing increasingly legible. That was becoming clearer and clearer – and increasingly impenetrable.
Simultaneously.
He was nearing ninety, professor emeritus. As a former brain scientist, he had made a conscious decision not to go senile in his old age, not to let his brain cells wither away. He had deliberately devoted his time to mental gymnastics, keeping his cerebral cortex in shape. He enjoyed literature and read the news in four different languages, he solved the most difficult crosswords in Dagens Nyheter, forced himself through at least one differential equation a day, and viewed the world with a sober, analytic, penetrating gaze.
Until a few days ago. When a vague, shifting presence had found its way into his life.
It was death.
Death didn’t normally make demands. Death didn’t normally walk alongside you for days, waiting for something to happen.
He was starting to understand what was expected of him.
Once upon a time, more than fifty years ago, he had turned a new page in his life. The old page had been full. It told a story which couldn’t go on. One which had reached its conclusion. He had realised that to keep on living, he had no choice but to turn to a new page and pretend it was blank. Doing so would mean he could keep writing. Could keep living.
And so he had turned the page. He had left the past behind him and consciously – with precise, deliberate mental gymnastics – eradicated it. The text on the reverse of the page disappeared and a completely new life began. A Swedish life.
But now that his Swedish life was also about to end, he understood what was required of him. He had to turn the page once more and reread his old story. The problem was that it wasn’t something you could just do. His old story came towards him like a punch, like a blow from an axe, like a metal wire jammed into his temple.
He hadn’t realised that such old people could experience such intense feelings. It went completely against the very latest brain research.
He looked at his arm. The numbers were peeping out from beneath the sleeve of his coat. The numbers on his arm. As soon as he looked at them, they began moving. Just like he was. They were on their way away from him.
It was one of the things he didn’t understand.
And then came the pictures, like a blow from an axe.
There were arms on top of him, legs on top of him, thin, thin legs, thin, thin arms. He was moving through a pile of people. Dead people. He saw an upside-down face and he saw a thin wire being pushed into a temple, he saw the upside-down face contort in pain. And he wrote in a book. He read the words which he himself had written and the book was talking about pain, about pain, pain, pain.
And then he saw another image. One which took his breath away. He opened a door. The outer door to his own house. Here. In Sweden. That picture didn’t belong. He opened the outer door from within and found a man without a nose waiting on the step outside.
And then the man without a nose was dead on the floor in front of him.
He woke up. He was sweating more than a ninety-year-old should be able to sweat. The metro was speeding through the dark tunnels, on and on. He had no idea where he was. It didn’t matter. The pattern was all that mattered.
He didn’t understand. The pages were mixed up. The front and the back of the page were mixed together. Why?
Then he saw an extremely pale man dressed in uniform. The extremely pale man in uniform was holding a thin metal wire in his hand.
The image vanished.
His train was approaching a station. He was alone in the carriage.
He closed his eyes for a moment. Mental gymnastics. Come back. You don’t have the right to close your eyes. You’re not allowed to close your eyes to anything.
He returned to the pattern his journey beneath the city had been creating. He was increasingly convinced it was forming symbols, letters. The Stockholm metro system was hardly as complex as the network of streets in New York, but symbols could still be formed. And formed they had. He had travelled and he knew how he had travelled. Not where, but how.