‘And you don’t think he’ll see straight through all this?’ Marconi asked, turning round, immediately more interested.
‘Of course,’ said Söderstedt. ‘And that means he’ll feel pleased. I think he’ll just have realised that he felt pleased during our conversation. That’s why he doesn’t want to talk to me any more. I made him feel pleased and now he’s mortified about it. He’ll be wandering around wondering what he revealed while he felt pleased. That uncertainty is good.’
‘Seems like you’re playing his game,’ said Marconi, sitting down with a thud.
‘It’s good if it seems that way,’ Söderstedt replied with a crazy look in his eye. Marconi looked at his facial expression, finding it fundamentally flawed. He nodded and smiled.
‘And that’s why you need a sketch of his palace? Utterly logical.’
Arto Söderstedt smiled too.
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Logical is an understatement.’
Marconi was still nodding.
‘So you think…?’
‘Yes. That he’s in danger.’
‘Marco di Spinelli is in danger? Do you know what kind of fantastical security systems that palace has? How many guards he has? Breaking in there would be like breaking into Fort Knox.’
‘You know you agree, Commissioner,’ said Arto Söderstedt. ‘They’re coming for him.’
‘Who are?’ Italo Marconi asked, without really asking.
Arto Söderstedt’s answer wasn’t quite an answer.
‘The Erinyes.’
29
IT WAS FRIDAY 12 May. Time had started moving more sluggishly. It would probably be possible to relax a little at the weekend.
But time was also being difficult. It wasn’t acting like normal.
It was probably out of sync.
Paul Hjelm suspected it was because there was a spanner in the works. Whenever the prelude to a chain of events was clear, time would trundle on like normal. Whenever the past was in order, with conflicts and injustices being discovered and revealed, and wounds were being healed, a certain degree of reconciliation was possible; time could move in a nice, linear fashion. But whenever the past was in some way false, deliberately falsified, then history would start to rot, a fly would appear in time’s ointment, a spanner in its works, and time itself would start to act strangely. That was one theory, anyway.
Time was out of sync and who was Paul Hjelm to put it right again?
It would be a painful process.
Times of misfortune, that was what people used to call it. Back when people hoarded, built barricades, and refused to let any damn person cross their bridges. All while they hoped that their children would be born with one head rather than two.
They never understood that their behaviour was the very reason their children were occasionally born with two heads rather than one. Precisely because they always refused to let any damn person cross their bridges.
‘Wake up.’
‘Time is falling now. Here, before my eyes. As I write.’
Leonard Sheinkman’s words had sunk their claws deep into Paul Hjelm. He had deliberately avoided going back to the diary. He knew he wouldn’t be able to read it with a clear, sober and analytical approach, though that was precisely what it needed.
Not that his decision had stopped it coming back to him. In actual fact, Sheinkman’s words were constantly coming back to him. But only diverse phrases. The text in its entirety was still too difficult.
‘Hello, wake up.’
Leo Sheinkman’s fate…
First he convinced his family to stay in Germany rather than fleeing. Then he watched as they were taken away to be shot – he didn’t say a word. After that, he ended up in some kind of unit where he was forced to await his own painful death, something he could literally see coming closer. That was the state of mind in which he had been writing. That was the state of mind in which he had been released. That was the state of mind in which he had come to Sweden. It was hardly strange that he had needed to turn a new page in the book of his life, as his son Harald had put it when they spoke on Bofinksvägen. The newly arrived Leonard Sheinkman had needed to obliterate the past. He had needed to banish it. And so he became a scientist. He came to understand just how the brain worked. He consciously spent his time doing mental gymnastics. And he managed to turn the page. The side on which he wrote his new life was completely blank.
Maybe, every now and then, he had caught sight of a faint, blurred, back-to-front text through the paper.
‘Wake up, for God’s sake!’
‘Wha’?’ said Paul Hjelm.
The whole of the Tactical Command Centre was staring at him. Lots of eyes. He counted twelve of them before he properly woke up.
‘Whoops,’ he said. ‘I think I got lost in a time hole.’
‘Those seem to be pretty rife at the minute,’ Jan-Olov Hultin said neutrally.
Hjelm stared at a pile on Hultin’s desk. Chavez was standing next to it. It was messy, but the dominant colours were red and purple.
‘Samples from Europe so far,’ said Jorge Chavez. ‘Forty per cent of them aren’t even red-and-purple stripes. Some manufacturers sent entire boxes of samples. We got a ten-centimetre-thick sample of rope for mooring oil tankers from a Czech company. It was white, made from hemp, and the postage was eight hundred kronor.’
‘Specially designed for the Czech coast,’ said Norlander.
They looked at him.
‘There isn’t one,’ he explained.
Chavez cleared his throat, slightly confused.
‘Three of the samples could be a fit. The technicians are looking at their chemical make-up to see whether they match our rope.’
He gathered up the samples, shoved them into a sports bag and returned to his seat.
‘A model of conciseness,’ Jan-Olov Hultin said, brushing his desk with his hand.
Hjelm glanced at his watch. His feet were still dangling into the time hole. It was three o’clock. Three on a Friday afternoon. Almost the weekend. Almost time to go back to the diary.
‘Do you think you could continue, Paul?’ Hultin asked with ominous gentleness.
Hjelm tried to pull himself together.
‘You’ve all heard about Henry Blom, aka Olli Peltonen. As you know, Gunnar and I have been working with Frihamnen for a while now. That was where Peltonen’s illegal taxi picked up our noseless friend sometime after seven in the evening on the fourth of September 1981. It hasn’t been easy, finding the old port archives, but I think we’ve finally managed. Seems like quite a lot of ferries arrived there that day. If we assume that Peltonen is right, and he drove him just after seven that evening, it narrows our scope a bit. That’s also assuming our man without a nose – Shtayf from Södra Begravningsplatsen from now on – didn’t just wait around, enjoying the sun down by the dock all day; it seems more likely that he headed straight for his final destination. In that case, three ferries seem interesting. Gunnar?’
Gunnar Nyberg had been keeping a relatively low profile since his confrontation with the skinheads in Åkersberga. That had very little to do with the skinheads themselves, however, and more to do with a certain professor of Slavic languages. He had, quite simply, been wondering what these strange sensations rushing through his enormous body were. Was he really in love? It had been such a long time, and if he was really honest, he wasn’t even sure he had ever been properly in love before. He had, of course, felt love for his children, but before that? Had he ever been in love with poor Gunilla? He’d been horny, yes. But in love? No. Maybe, just maybe, he was now in love with Professor Ludmila Lundkvist.
They had gone to a little Russian pub down on Drottninggatan. For the first time in his life, Gunnar had eaten borscht and bear meat. A drop or two of vodka might also have passed his lips. Then they had gone back to her flat on Luntmakargatan; it had been so utterly obvious that they would. The night had been wonderful. Looking back, he couldn’t remember whether they had even ‘had sex’, as people so nicely put it nowadays. It was all just a feeling, sweeping sensations coursing through him. Then they had met again, at his house in Nacka. They had definitely ‘had sex’ that second time, and it had been magnificent. She had also gone with him to his church to listen to the choir practice. The session had ended with the choir master saying that Gunnar’s bass had sounded unusually pure and clear that day. After that, they had gone home and made love. Unusually purely and clearly.