“So you say,” said Johansson.
“In that case I propose the fifteenth of August of this year,” said Lewin.
“Why then?” asked Falk.
“It’s his birthday,” said Lewin. “I think she’s the type who’s meticulous about calling her older brother and only relative on his birthday. Even if he might prefer that she didn’t.”
“I think so too,” Johansson agreed. Every thinking colleague must understand that, he thought, glaring at Falk.
“If we ping from the relevant cell towers for the fifteenth of August this year we’ll be sitting with tens of thousands of calls,” said Wiklander. “Considering all calls made from cars en route to and from Arlanda, thousands of them are going to be calls abroad. It’s going to take months to follow them up. We’ve got to have her number. Otherwise it won’t work. If we just have the number, we’ll manage it in a few hours tops. Assuming she’s called, of course.”
Birgitta Hedberg was a disability pension recipient and as such she had the right to home services. And she’d had run-ins with those same home services since the first day. The current controversy was over a promised major cleaning that had not yet happened. The primary reason was that the majority of those who worked with home services would have rather quit than set foot in Birgitta Hedberg’s apartment.
Wiklander tugged on a few of the usual threads. Almost immediately he found a colleague at the Solna police who had a wife who worked as a supervisor with the municipal home services. Discretion a matter of honor. Already by Tuesday afternoon the colleague’s wife had called Ms. Hedberg and reported that they could initiate the promised major cleaning as soon as the following morning.
High time, according to Birgitta Hedberg, and she could receive the long-promised help herself as early as eight o’clock the following morning. Then she hung up without a word of thanks.
Hope the old bag gets life, thought the Solna colleague’s wife, because her dear husband’s involvement in this particular home services matter gave her some hope on that score.
“Well, well then,” said Birgitta Hedberg for some reason when on Wednesday morning she opened the door to her apartment and scrutinized Linda Martinez. The same Martinez who nonetheless did her best to play the role of submissive immigrant in the service of Swedish Cleanliness.
For the next two days Linda Martinez scurried around like a white tornado in Birgitta Hedberg’s three-room apartment. Swept and scrubbed so that even Cinderella in the classic Disney film looked like a real shirker in comparison. On the third day she was then granted all the favor that someone like Birgitta Hedberg could offer someone like her. First she was allowed to go along with her to do the shopping and carry all the bags. Then she stood outside the bank and waited while her new matron did errands that didn’t concern someone like her. Finally they went to a nearby bakery where Birgitta Hedberg bought two Napoleon pastries. Once back in the apartment Martinez first had to help with lunch. Then set out the coffee. Two cups this time, and a pastry for each.
When the coffee was finished Martinez was given additional instructions for the rest of the day. Then Birgitta Hedberg went to the bathroom and left her handbag behind on the kitchen counter.
As soon as she shut the door, Martinez fished the red cell phone out of the bag. She entered the number Wiklander had given her, and then ended the call the moment after she’d made contact with the recipient. Deleted the call from the phone’s memory. Put it back in the handbag and proceeded to clean away the traces of their little kaffeklatsch.
Hope the old bag gets life, thought Linda Martinez, even though she had no idea why Birgitta’s cell phone number seemed to have almost decisive importance for her top boss.
Fifteen minutes before Jan Lewin meant to go home for the day, Wiklander stepped into his office and his contented smile was answer enough to the question Lewin had had in mind for the past week.
“The fifteenth of August at zero eight zero two hours Birgitta Hedberg made a call outside the country from her prepaid cell phone to a Spanish prepaid cell phone. The same time there as here,” Wiklander clarified. “The last cell tower that forwarded the call is on north Mallorca. A little over a mile from a little town called Puerto Pollensa. The call went on for seventeen minutes. You have both numbers and all the rest of it in your e-mail.”
“I’ll call Holt immediately,” said Lewin.
“Do that,” said Wiklander.
93
On Friday morning the fifth of October, Holt, Mattei, and their Spanish colleagues finally detected a sign of life from Kjell Göran Hedberg. True, it was seven months old, but compared with what they’d had before this was fresh produce. It was irritating that the tip had been there all along. Not at the detective squad in Palma, but instead with the so-called terrorist squad at Guardia Civil’s headquarters in Madrid.
In early March Hedberg had rented a car at the Hertz office at the airport in Málaga. It was the day after his sister had arrived there on vacation and checked into a hotel in the vicinity. Three days later he called Hertz and reported that the car had been stolen. They asked him to come to their main office in central Málaga. There a theft report had been filled out. A photocopy of Hedberg’s passport had been made and he told the little he knew.
In the evening he had left the vehicle at the parking spot outside the hotel where he was staying. When he came out in the morning it was gone. That was all, and if they wanted to discuss it further they could reach him at his residence at 189 Calle Asunción in Palma de Mallorca.
In the tourist country of Spain thousands of rental cars were stolen every year, and for many years such crimes had been routine matters in the pile. Something that the car rental company, the police, and the insurance company handled without involving the person who rented the car. In later years this had changed. Domestic and international terrorism was the cataylst. The Basque separatists in ETA, the Islamist terrorist bombing at the railroad in Madrid where two hundred Spaniards had lost their lives.
Rental cars that were stolen, and especially those that were rented by foreign nationals, suddenly became interesting as a so-called pre-incident crime, one of several stages in the preparations for a terrorist attack. The registry that had been built up to sort out both stolen rental cars and those who had rented them already included tens of thousands of vehicles and individuals.
One week earlier, Friday the twenty-eighth of September, the terrorist squad in Madrid had received an inquiry from their counterparts with the intelligence department at the Swedish National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. A fast-track inquiry because their own top boss had already been in contact and given orders that everything that came from that Swedish agency should be handled with the highest priority. For the time being at least.
The basis for their questions was also nicely detailed. They were interested in the female Swedish citizen Birgitta Hedberg, age sixty, and her brother, Kjell Göran Hedberg, three years older. Birgitta Hedberg was said to have been in south Spain between the third and the tenth of March, where she stayed at the Aragon Hotel outside Marbella. On the other hand, where her brother was to be found was unknown, but at the same time his whereabouts were extremely interesting.
They found Birgitta Hedberg immediately. Inquiries at the scene indicated that she had stayed at “the hotel in question during the week in question.” The computers in Madrid had already found her brother the following day in the registry of stolen rental cars. On the other hand he had not stayed at the Aragon Hotel in Marbella, as he had stated in his theft report to Hertz. There was no registration in his name in any event, and if he had shared a room with his sister, this must have happened in secret and in an ordinary twin bed. Considering that the car was picked up at the airport in Málaga, it was also strange to say the least that the man who rented it could not be found in the lists of flight passengers. Neither from Palma nor from any other destination on the day in question.