His only problem was money.
He didn’t have enough of it.
But what that word—“enough”—meant, he couldn’t say.
Michel Maloof’s family, his four siblings and happily married parents, were the bedrock of his life. Thanks to the combined strength of the family, the children had made it through the Swedish school system with only superficial bruises and established themselves in the society their parents still frequently misunderstood. All but him. And the reason was that he had never been able to define the word “enough.”
Even Niklas Nordgren’s parents’ near forty-year marriage had survived the strains that many of their friends’ relationships had collapsed beneath. Niklas didn’t have the same feeling of belonging to a flock as Maloof, he had only one sister, but neither she nor his parents had ever come close to the kind of life he ended up living.
Their sons’ criminality had come as shock to both Nordgren’s and Maloof’s families. All the same, they had done nothing but be supportive, both when the two men made their pathetic calls for help from prison that very first time, and when they broke their promises never to do it again and ended up calling a second, third and fourth time. Their crushed mothers and brooding fathers had loyally waited outside the prison on leave days, and furious siblings had angrily had a go at them when they came home.
And worse than the thought of the isolation cells in prison was the thought of being a disappointment in the eyes of their families when the blue lights of the police appeared in the rearview mirror.
Unlike the majority of other people Nordgren and Maloof met in their line of work, they were both exceptions in their respective families.
And the fact that their friendship, once it had been established, grew strong was because they could both see themselves in the other person’s self-appointed isolation.
The rain was still falling when they arrived, and it would have been difficult to find a more abandoned and gloomy place. The idea that planes had ever taken off and landed on this tiny strip of ground was hard to imagine. They drove a few loops around the area to make sure there was neither a living soul nor a threadbare helicopter hangar in sight.
Maloof sighed and ran his hand over his beard.
“This is… different.”
Nordgren laughed. “Some people go fishing in the archipelago. We’re on a helicopter safari in the Stockholm suburbs.”
But there was no police helicopter to be found in Tullinge.
Before they parted ways, they divided Google Earth between themselves. Nordgren had printed out and drawn a line right through Stockholm County. He would take the eastern half, Maloof the western.
“What is it we’re… looking for?” Maloof asked.
“A hangar. In a forest. Big enough for a helicopter or two. With asphalt in front of it. It doesn’t need to be as big as a landing strip for planes.”
“Right, right.” Maloof nodded with a smile. “It’s… it sounds… more like a hangar in a haystack.”
“We don’t have any other option, do we?” Nordgren said firmly.
The rain had grown heavier again, and was now hammering against the windshield as he drove along Hågelbyvägen, back toward Fittja.
24
It was three thirty in the morning, and no one would be coming out of the door they had been watching since midnight. Caroline Thurn, task force leader with the National Police Authority’s Criminal Investigation Department, had already given up hope an hour earlier. Still, she had chosen to stay.
They were parked on Karlavägen, almost at Karlaplan. The building on the other side of the road functioned as a covert brothel for foreign ambassadors stationed in Stockholm, but it seemed like the diplomats’ testosterone levels must be low that night.
Thurn glanced at Detective Chief Inspector Mats Berggren, her colleague for the past three weeks. He was asleep in the passenger seat. The whistling noise coming from his throat, along with the sound of his fleshy cheeks vibrating, would be difficult to get used to. But so far, Thurn had managed to work well with every colleague she had ever been subjected to, and she had no intention of failing with Berggren. The secret was respect and distance.
Thurn didn’t become friends with anyone, or enemies. It was about being professional. Her job wasn’t to make friends, it was to maintain and defend their democratic society.
“Mats,” she whispered, and he jerked awake. “Let’s give up for tonight.”
She had never met anyone as big as Berggren before. He had to weigh around 300 pounds, and she had heard that he was always struggling with one diet or another. Clearly it was an unequal struggle. She herself weighed only 135 pounds, despite being five foot nine. She had denied herself sweet things and white bread since her teens, though she no longer thought about pushing her food around her plate rather than eating it, to avoid any questions about why she wasn’t eating.
Thurn wasn’t the missionizing type. Everyone could do as he or she liked, and if her new colleague didn’t manage to lose any weight, that wasn’t something she had any opinions on.
“Maybe we just got the wrong night?” Berggren said.
He had a rough voice, which definitely wasn’t improved by only just having woken up.
“Wrong night,” she agreed. “Or day, or date, or time? Or maybe they’ve just managed to move somewhere else.”
Berggren mumbled something inaudible, and then added,
“Jesus Christ, I’m tired. Just the thought of making my way home…”
He was the whining type, she had realized that the very first day.
“I live around the corner,” she replied. “If you want, you can get a few hours’ sleep on my sofa before you go back to Hägersten.”
In Caroline Thurn’s world, not making the suggestion wasn’t even an option. That kind of good-mannered consideration had been drummed into her from a young age; it was a reflex, like breathing. Being kind was also risk free, because the answer was always no.
“Yeah, sure,” said Berggren, who hadn’t grown up in the same kind of social environment.
They drove into a garage on Väpnargatan, around the corner from Strandvägen, and took the elevator straight up to the top floor, where Caroline Thurn lived. As Mats Berggren stepped into the hallway and looked around, he had to fight to hide his surprise.
The words that popped into his head were straight out of an estate agent’s ad: “Grand apartment at the city’s most exclusive address.”
The dawn light cast a warm glow through the windows, and the fishbone parquet flooring in the suite of rooms seemed never to end. But as Berggren peered around, he saw that the apartment was in need of renovation. There were cracks in the ceiling, though hopefully just in the paint. Someone had started to take down the yellowed wallpaper in the hallway and given up before he or she finished the job, and the parquet was almost black in places. But what made the greatest impression on Berggren was that the place was almost completely empty.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” he mumbled, not knowing what else to say.
Berggren had been working for the National Criminal Police for only a week when he was asked if he wanted to be Thurn’s new partner. He had been equal parts terrified and curious. Thurn had a reputation. She kept her distance. She was respected because she rarely failed, she was approachable and obliging, and yet none of her colleagues could be counted among her friends.