Don’t try that with me, thought Holt. Giving in was the last thing she intended to do, regardless of all the smoke screens and easy-to-see-through jokes from her boss.
“The Palme investigation has not come to a standstill,” Holt repeated. “The Palme investigation has been thrashed to death. It’s not a cold case; it’s not even an ice-cold case. The Palme investigation is dead.”
“You don’t need to get upset, Holt. I hear what you’re saying,” said Johansson, who suddenly didn’t sound the least bit nice and friendly anymore. “Personally I think it’s maybe just a little tired. And maybe it should be looked at with fresh eyes. That you proceed from the basic police ground rule that always applies when you’re involved in such things.”
“Like the situation,” said Holt, who knew Johansson after a number of years and cases.
“Exactly,” said Johansson, smiling again. “Nice to know we’re in agreement, Anna.”
Last up was Chief Inspector Yngve Flykt, head of the Palme group. If he’d had anything to say about it, this meeting never would have happened. Personally he was a man of peace, and what he’d heard about his top boss, not least that he was capable of thinking up all kinds of things to happen to co-workers who didn’t do what he said, made him irretrievably lost from the start.
With all due respect for his boss, and being both happy and grateful for the boss’s clear and definite opinion that any changes in a well-established, functioning organization were not even an issue, with respect for all this and everything else that in haste he might have forgotten, he would still, however, and obviously with all good intentions, like to point out a few practical problems, which his colleague Lewin had already touched on.
“What are you talking about?” interrupted Johansson.
“Our case files,” said the head of the Palme investigation, looking almost imploringly at Johansson. “It’s no ordinary body of material even for a very big case. I don’t know if you’ve been down and looked at it, but it’s a colossal amount of material. Gigantic. As perhaps you know, it takes up six whole cubicles in the corridor where we’re located. We’ve already taken down five partitions, and soon it’ll be time for the next one. There are binders and boxes from floor to ceiling.”
“I’m listening,” said Johansson, forming his long fingers into an arch and leaning back in his chair. Flykt, thought Johansson. It must be congenital.
“From what my colleagues and I have understood, it’s actually the largest amount of investigative material in world police history. It’s supposed to be even larger than the pre-investigation material on the Kennedy assassination and the investigation of the attack on the jumbo jet over Lockerbie in Scotland.”
“I hear what you’re saying,” Johansson interrupted. “What’s the problem? A lot of it must be entered on computers by now.”
“Obviously, and there’s more and more every day, but it’s not something you just sit down and browse through. We’re talking about roughly a million pages. Most are transcripts of interviews, and there are thousands of those that are tens of pages and sometimes longer. In round numbers, a hundred thousand different documents stored in almost a thousand binders. Not to mention all the boxes where we’ve stored the things you can’t keep in binders. There was an expert in the latest government commission who calculated that even then, and this must have been two years ago, it would have required ten years of full-time work for a qualified investigator simply to scan through the material. If you ask me, I think it would take even longer, and new information is coming in all the time.”
“I hear what you’re saying,” said Johansson, making a slightly dismissive gesture with his right hand. “But some type of sorting out must still be possible, no? If I’m not mistaken, there are tens of thousands of pages of the usual crazy tips. Couldn’t those be set aside?”
“I’m afraid that’s not enough,” Flykt objected. “There are a lot more crazy tips than that. The problem with them too, and you know this as well as I do, boss, is that some may appear convincing to start with. I saw a newspaper interview a while ago with our own professor here at the National Police Board where he maintained that if we suddenly solved the Palme assassination and knew what had happened, it would prove that ninety-nine percent of the whole case file was irrelevant, and that almost everything we’d collected had been directly misleading. For once we were in complete agreement, he and I.”
“That’s a pity,” said Johansson. “To hear that you’re in agreement with such a person, I mean. What I’m trying to say is simply that of course there must be a way to sort the material. For some clever colleagues with fresh eyes. Personally I’ve gotten by well enough over the years with the event description, the most important eyewitnesses, that is, the technical investigation and the forensic report,” Johansson said, counting on his fingers as he spoke, smiling as he held up three of them.
“Besides,” he continued, “there must be a nice summary or two in this case that explains the usual where, when, and how. Even the officers in the uniformed police seem to have understood who the victim was a few minutes after the crime.”
“That’s correct.” Flykt nodded and seemed almost relieved, as if suddenly he was on firmer ground. “Our own perpetrator profile group produced both an analysis of the crime and a profile of the perpetrator in collaboration with the FBI. Besides that there were several other analyses made by external experts that we turned to. Both of the crime itself in its main features and of various details. For example, the murder weapon and the two bullets that were secured at the crime scene. We got quite a bit actually.”
“Of course,” said Johansson, throwing out his hands with the secure conviction of a Bible-thumper from his provincial childhood. “So what are we waiting for?”
As soon as Johansson released his hold on the head of the Palme group, everyone in the room started carefully inching their chairs back, but Johansson ignored their hopes.
“I realize you’re eager to get going, ladies and gentlemen,” said Johansson with a crooked smile, “but before we part company there’s one thing I want to emphasize. A word of warning on the way.” He nodded emphatically and looked at them in turn with a stern expression.
“You must not say a word about this. You may talk with each other as needed in order to do what you should. If for the same reason you need to talk with anyone else, you must first obtain my permission to do so.”
“What do I say to my co-workers?” The head of the Palme group did not look happy. “I mean-”
“Nothing,” Johansson interrupted. “If anyone wonders about anything, you can send him or her to me. You should understand that better than anyone,” he added. “What a hell the media has created for the Palme investigation all these years. I don’t want a lot of other officers running around talking nonsense. How do you think the media gets hold of all the shit they write about? The last thing I want to read in the newspaper when I open my eyes in the morning is that I’ve appointed a new investigation of the assassination of Olof Palme.”
“Which is precisely why I think providing a little information to the people in my group would be good. To avoid a lot of unnecessary talk, I mean.” Flykt looked almost imploring as he said this. “One solution would be to say that we’ve asked Holt, Lewin, and Mattei to look over the case indexing. I mean that sort of work goes on all the time and is often done by colleagues outside the group. Or perhaps it’s a purely administrative overview.”
“Like I said,” said Johansson, “not a word. Send all the curiosity seekers to me so I can slake their thirst for knowledge, and if they’re not satisfied I’m sure I can arrange other duties for them. All of us in this room will meet in a week. Same time, same place. Any questions?”