‘Sit down,’ Anna Holt said. ‘Can I offer you anything?’
‘Thanks, I’m fine,’ Toivonen said, sitting down.
‘Tell me,’ Holt said.
‘There’s a connection between the raid out at Bromma and the murder of Kari Viirtanen. I believe forensics will be able to prove that when they’re finished with their examination of the van used in the robbery. Viirtanen was the one who shot the guards. But we still don’t know who was doing the driving for him. We’ve got several names to choose from, as I’m sure you can imagine. We’re working on it.’
‘So why did he shoot them?’
‘Because that poor sod who died set off the dye capsules in the bag. Which made Kari mad because there weren’t supposed to have been any capsules in that bag.’
‘Tell me,’ Holt said.
The money came from London. Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian notes that had been exchanged in England and Scotland. As well as British pounds that Swedish banks and currency exchange companies had ordered. They had been brought into Bromma from London by private jet, with a two-man crew and four passengers, British businessmen. They had no idea that they had been joined at the last minute by about eleven million kronor in a small cloth bag.
‘Security firms are doing that more and more these days. Unless the amounts are extremely large, they improvise and send them with unscheduled flights. For safety reasons there must never be dye capsules in that sort of bag. Apparently changes in air pressure, among other things, can set them off, and obviously that might be a bit tricky if they happened to be on a plane when they went off.’
‘I can imagine,’ Holt said.
‘Because the guards themselves aren’t allowed to open the bags when they arrive, which was a demand pushed through by the unions to stop staff being suspected of theft, what usually happens is that once the money has been transferred to a security van, it’s taken to a security depot without dye capsules. They usually use unmarked vehicles, and because the depot they were heading for was just a fifteen-minute drive from Bromma Airport, and because the amount in question was so small, just eleven million, that’s what happened on this occasion.’
‘A small amount? So what counts as a large amount?’ Holt said with a smile.
‘Three- or four-figure multiples of millions,’ Toivonen said, smiling back.
‘So what went wrong this time?’
‘The guard who was shot was sadly too ambitious for his own good. Without asking his boss for permission, he had taken a spare empty bag containing dye capsules along with them, and he put the bag from London inside that. As soon as the raiders had made off with the bag and he felt safe, he set off the capsules by remote control. It has a range of about two hundred and fifty meters, but this time he was clearly too impatient, because the capsules went off when they were just fifty meters away.’
‘But would that be enough?’ Holt interrupted. ‘To stain all the notes in the inner bag, I mean?’
‘No,’ Toivonen said with a wry smile. ‘It wasn’t, and there wasn’t much wrong with the notes we found in the abandoned vehicle. Which they dumped, by the way, just twenty meters from the Hells Angels HQ about a kilometer from the airport. Maybe they wanted to cause trouble for them too before they ran off.’
‘The problem was that Kari Viirtanen didn’t know that,’ Holt concluded. ‘That the money was still usable.’
‘That’s right,’ Toivonen said with a nod. ‘And he got as mad as Mad Kari often did. The driver did a U-turn. Kari wound down the window and started firing at the guards who were trying to run. The one running on the driver’s side was run down as well, so whoever was driving wasn’t particularly pleasant either.’
‘What do we know about the weapon?’ Holt asked.
‘An Uzi automatic pistol, twenty-two-caliber,’ Toivonen said. ‘The weapons experts are fairly sure of that. The smallest magazine contains sixty bullets, and about thirty cartridges have been found at the scene. The guard who died was hit five times in the back, and his padded vest stopped those, and three times in the head, which killed him instantly. The other one was also shot ten times, but none of them was fatal. The remaining ten shots must have missed,’ Toivonen concluded.
‘Sounds like an inside job,’ Holt said.
‘Definitely,’ Toivonen agreed. ‘Our British colleagues are looking for him at their end and we’re trying to trace his contacts at our end. If we’re lucky, something will give, and once one end is sorted, the other usually follows.’
‘Viirtanen was shot by the people behind the raid?’ Holt asked.
‘Yes, he wasn’t the only one who’s furious.’
‘What about the driver?’
‘I daresay he’ll turn up in due course,’ Toivonen said with a wry smile.
‘If I understood you correctly at the meeting yesterday, you believe the Ibrahim boys and their unsavory cousin are behind this?’
‘There’s always a lot of talk,’ Toivonen said. ‘Something like this takes a lot of work and the involvement of a lot of people. There are cars to be stolen, then number plates that match the make and model, you need to get hold of caltrops to scatter as you make your escape. There’s always someone who talks. The Ibrahim brothers and Hassan Talib have got pretty low odds this time. And you should always put your money on a surefire winner,’ Toivonen said. He was fond of visiting Solvalla racecourse even outside of his official duties.
‘What about the connection to the murders of Danielsson and the paperboy?’
‘Well, to take it step by step, everything suggests that there’s a connection between Danielsson and the paperboy, the poor boy they fished out of Ulvsundasjön last night. Our colleague Niemi is even prepared to put money on the fact that they were killed by the same person or persons. One, two, possibly more,’ Toivonen said.
‘But have the murders of Danielsson and Akofeli got any connection to our robbery?’
‘If you asked me that this morning, I would have said no. But now I think I know better,’ he said, handing a slim plastic folder to Holt.
‘See for yourself,’ he said. ‘My conversation with an anonymous informant, plus information that Nadja Högberg has found in Danielsson’s pocket diary, along with her own conclusions...’
‘Okay,’ Holt said. ‘Give me five minutes.’
‘Well, I agree with you,’ Holt said four minutes later.
‘Yes, most people who think like you and me probably would,’ Toivonen said. ‘What remains is to slot the details into the right places, but we can probably assume that Karl Danielsson was acting as a private banker to the Ibrahim brothers and their cousin.’
‘Who just two days after the robbery suffer an acute shortage of funds to the tune of two million kronor,’ Holt concluded.
‘It costs a lot to clean up your own mess,’ Toivonen said.
46.
After her meeting with Toivonen, Holt had walked home to her flat in Jungfrudansen in Solna, stopping to do some shopping on the way. Her flat was only a couple kilometers from the police station and she liked to walk whenever she got the chance, especially on a day like today. Sun shining in a blue, cloudless sky. Twenty-six degrees and high summer in Sweden, even though it was still only the end of May.
Since she had become police chief of the Western District she had found herself thinking of it more and more often as her own kingdom, or possibly queendom, and of the importance of being a good and enlightened monarch who cared for justice and fairness and all the other people who lived there. Holt County, Holt thought, because presumably that’s what it would have been called, at least colloquially, if she had been a female sheriff in the Midwest or southern States.