Though it can hardly have been out of concern for the completely inconsequential Christer Pettersson that he gave such advice to Jan Hugo Stenbeck, thought Johansson as he sat in the taxi on the way back to his office.
78
Hedberg’s parents were dead. He had never been married. Had no children. None that were in the records, at any rate. What remained was his younger sister. Birgitta Hedberg, age sixty. Also single with no children. Lived in a condominium with three rooms and a kitchen on Andersvägen in Solna. The same apartment in which Hedberg had lived previously, before he reported that he had moved out of Sweden.
It’ll have to do, thought Jan Lewin, for he had to start somewhere.
Hedberg’s sister had worked as a secretary at a large construction firm until four years ago when she took early retirement after a car accident. As she drove her boss to a conference in Södermanland her car had been rear-ended; she suffered whiplash and became unable to work. The general pension system took over and gave her early retirement. Her employer and the insurance company added another couple million in damages for her suffering, and this was possibly the main reason that her assessed net worth came to over five million kronor in bank deposits, interest-bearing bonds, and fund shares.
Although perhaps not, thought Jan Lewin. Even before the insurance money was disbursed, she had reported assets of just under three million, and with the salary she had been drawing this seemed like quite a bit to Lewin.
A frugal life, good investments, a rich lover, or perhaps simply an older brother she helped by taking care of his money, thought Jan Lewin. The same brother who according to Johansson was supposed to have robbed the post office on Dalagatan in May of 1977 of 295,000 kronor. Five years’ salary before tax for a detective inspector at that time. Lewin knew that as well as Johansson, because he had been working at the homicide squad when it happened and even remembered the case. Over thirty years later, this corresponded to almost two million, still five years’ salary before tax for a detective inspector, thought Lewin, making a note of it.
If it’s the case that she’s acting as the bank for her brother, then they must have contact with each other, thought Lewin. Even if it isn’t, she may be communicating with him anyway, he thought, even though sibling affection was unknown territory for someone like him.
Then he proceeded to fill out all the forms that were needed so he could make the usual checks on her in the registries that were at the disposal of the police, and he concluded that part by requesting a telephone check on her. So far everything had been routine, and there was still the more creative aspect to tackle before it was time to go home.
First he found a picture of her. Fortunately it was a current one, taken when she renewed her passport in February earlier that year. It showed a dark-haired woman in her sixties with her hair pulled back in a tight bun, regular facial features, straight nose, prominent jawline and chin, dark, vigilant eyes. Looks good, thought Jan Lewin. If it weren’t for that austere, vigilant expression. Wrong, he thought. She looks mean.
Passport, foreign travels, credit cards, travel bureaus. Start with the credit cards, and if that doesn’t produce anything, then check the travel bureaus in the area where she lives, wrote Jan Lewin.
Whiplash injury, disability pension, home help, complaints? Talk with home services, Lewin noted. If she’s the way she seems in the picture, they’ll probably remember her, he thought.
Then he wrote out his usual to-do list on his computer, for otherwise he wouldn’t have been Jan Lewin. For the same reason he read it three times, added to it, deleted, changed and changed back again, before with a deep sigh he was finally ready to send it to Johansson. Then he shook his head meditatively once again. It was the fifteenth and final point that worried him, “Question Birgitta Hedberg?” It feels completely wrong, thought Jan Lewin.
First he deleted the question mark and then, after further pondering, the entire short sentence. Finally he replaced it with a new one. “Suggest that we wait as long as possible before questioning Hedberg’s sister,” wrote Lewin. Breathing deeply, he nodded and pushed the send button as the last official action of another day of all the days that made up his life.
Wise, thought Johansson ten minutes later when he was sitting in front of his computer reading what Lewin had written. Not only wise but necessary, he thought, if there was something in what Helena Stein had told him. Then he called in half a dozen of his most taciturn co-workers and gave them some quick instructions.
“Questions,” said Johansson, letting his gaze sweep over the group.
They all shook their heads, three had already stood up, and colleague Rogersson had even managed to open the door on his way out.
“Good,” said Johansson. “Get going.”
Then he asked his secretary to immediately contact his counterpart with the Spanish national police, Guardia Civil, at their headquarters in Madrid. His Spanish colleague called back within fifteen minutes. Johansson told him in a suitably roundabout way about his errand and was promised all the help that matters of that nature required. Or more, if that were to prove necessary.
Never bad to have a few contacts, thought Johansson as he hung up and for some reason happened to think about the back room in that pleasant bar in Lyons. The bar where he and other really big owls sometimes had the privilege of being nighthawks together.
All the strategic planning had taken him only a little more than an hour. Obviously without having said a word about it to Lewin, Mattei, and least of all to Holt, because he now found himself in a situation where the one hand shouldn’t know what the other hand was up to. That was well and good, as long as he alone was guiding both.
Further information will be given on a need to know basis, thought Johansson contentedly. As he leaned back in his chair for some reason the one person he was thinking about was Anna Holt.
79
Lisa Mattei also looked at the pictures of Hedberg and his family that Johansson had distributed, and true to her systematic disposition she started with the ones who were already dead. Master pilot Einar Göran Hedberg, born in 1906, died in 1971 at the age of sixty-five. Then his wife, Ingrid Cecilia, born in 1924. She was eighteen years younger than the man she married the same year she gave birth to his son. Died in 1964, at the age of only forty.
He doesn’t look nice, thought Mattei as she considered the Hedbergs’ wedding picture. Einar Hedberg dressed in the ship pilot uniform, standing at an angle behind his wife, broad-shouldered, more than a head taller than she was. He would have looked good if it hadn’t been for the vigilant expression, the absence of a smile, his military posture and body language.
His wife, Cecilia. That was apparently what she was called. Small, dainty, cute, anxiously smiling at the camera. Gaze directed a little to the right, and her husband’s hand heavily protective as it rested on her shoulder.
Wonder what he did to her? thought Lisa Mattei.
Einar Hedberg seemed to have been a man accustomed to ruling over other people’s lives, who not only piloted shipping vessels past shoals, reefs, and islets through narrow passages in the Stockholm archipelago. His obituary in Norrtelje Tidning mentioned his natural leadership qualities, his firmness of principle, and his considerable nautical and maritime knowledge. His “prematurely departed wife” had “stood faithfully by his side” in life, and if he was now mourned and missed in death, it did not appear so from his obituary notice. Einar Hedberg had “two surviving adult children,” and there was nothing more than that.
Wonder what he did to them, thought Lisa Mattei.
Regardless of what the master pilot did to his two children, judging by Johansson’s pictures things seemed to have turned out differently. If he had done anything, that is, thought the meticulous Lisa Mattei, aware as she was that pictures could be just as treacherous as words.