‘And they didn’t pass that earphone around?’
‘No, it was just one of them that had it. He was sitting with his back to the room.’
‘And they didn’t drink much?’
‘A beer each at most.’
‘And none of them stayed behind to pay the bill?’
‘No, no, same thing. There wasn’t a bill. But one of them did stay behind. Shaved head and moustache.’
‘And the other four hadn’t left before the killing?’
‘No, but they left before anybody else. As soon as the glass broke. One of them pointed at the one who stayed behind and said something. Then he sat down again and waited.’
‘So they deliberately left Eskil Carlstedt behind?’
‘If that’s what he’s called, yeah. It looked that way. I was standing in the middle of the Hammarby gang next to them, trying to take an order. It was slow. I was standing with my back to… the killing…’
Hjelm tried to catch Holm’s eye. She was drawing heavy lines in her notebook. Eventually, she looked up. She looked composed.
‘Shall we step out a moment?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Holm. ‘But I just have one question for you,’ she added, pointing to one of the waitresses. Hjelm saw the underlined word: ‘pretending’. Holm continued. ‘Why did you say that the kid was pretending to read?’
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
‘He didn’t turn a single page in that book.’
‘What was he doing, then?’
‘Don’t know. Thinking. Or listening.’
They went out into the corridor.
‘We’re sending a patrol to Eskil Carlstedt right now,’ said Hjelm. ‘He lives here on Kungsholmen.’
‘We should’ve picked up on the music, the demo tape, the reaction when we asked,’ said Holm. ‘Christ.’
‘And the bloody rest,’ said Hjelm.
Holm went away to send a patrol car after Carlstedt. Hjelm returned to the waitresses.
‘Well, ladies,’ he said, stretching. ‘We need the most exact descriptions you can possibly give us of the southern Europeans, the Swede, and the four who disappeared from beside the door.’
The oldest of the waitresses stood up abruptly.
‘What the hell is it you’re working on?’ she demanded.
‘I don’t have the faintest idea,’ said Paul Hjelm truthfully.
Three burly, traditional-looking doormen were sitting in a row, almost like the three wise monkeys who want to see, hear and say nothing.
Though only almost.
They actually talked quite a lot, even if it was exclusively about how heroically they had blocked the door despite everyone trying to get out. They described it as though they had been courageous UN troops, preventing genocide with nothing but their bare hands.
‘Considering at least twenty people got out, maybe your reaction wasn’t exactly lightning-fast,’ said Hjelm quietly.
They stared at him.
‘There’s actually a door between the cloakroom and the pub,’ said the oldest, insulted. ‘We can’t hear everything that goes on inside.’
‘We had a pretty bloody rowdy queue to deal with,’ said the biggest. ‘Lots of difficult immigrants.’
‘Immigrants?’ exclaimed Hjelm. It was clear that the man wasn’t used to using any other word than ‘wog’. He continued. ‘Still, you let thirty or so drunk Hammarby fans in, one of whom turned out to be a murderer.’
‘You know where you are with Hammarby fans,’ said the third one.
‘I see,’ Hjelm said sourly, letting the subject lie. ‘Couldn’t you have reacted a bit quicker when twenty men came running out of the pub all at once?’
‘There was a hell of a crush then, so it wasn’t exactly easy to move in the opposite direction.’
‘Anyway, our job’s to check people going in, not coming out.’
‘We didn’t know what had happened, did we? We can’t just stop people leaving the pub.’
‘What kind of people were coming out?’
‘Men. Just men. Hammarby fans, mainly, some older builders too.’
‘Builders? Like construction workers?’
‘No, like bodybuilders. There aren’t any construction jobs any more.’
‘Any… immigrants?’
‘Eventually some wo- gentlemen with darkish hair, yeah,’ said the biggest. ‘I seem to remember that.’
‘But you must know all this,’ said the oldest. ‘You had a man there.’
Hjelm stared at Holm. Holm stared at Hjelm.
‘A man there?’ they said in unison. It didn’t exactly sound professional, but what can you do? What were they supposed to do with their surprise?
‘Yeah,’ said the biggest of the doormen. ‘We’d just managed to push our way in and block the inner door. He hadn’t quite made it out. I pushed him back. Then he flashed his ID and ran out.’
‘His ID?’ they said in unison.
‘His police ID.’
They were paralysed.
Eventually, Kerstin Holm said: ‘You didn’t think it was strange that a policeman wanted to get out after a crime had been committed?’
‘I don’t know how you work, for Christ’s sake.’
‘And you can’t remember what he looked like?’
‘It was pretty crazy, to put it mildly. Some guy was lying in a pool of blood. Everyone was screaming, people were pushing towards the door. All I saw was a police ID being waved, and let him out.’
‘To freedom,’ said Paul Hjelm.
7
VIGGO NORLANDER WAS on great form. On the ball. With it.
To an external observer, he might have seemed like a highly ambitious policeman who wanted to solve a complicated murder case whatever the cost. He gave orders, directed and dashed around. He interrogated, bossed about and shone.
Arto Söderstedt wasn’t an external observer. He was a sceptical observer. And Viggo Norlander wasn’t a highly ambitious policeman who wanted to solve a complicated murder case whatever the cost. He was a highly ambitious new father who, whatever the cost, wanted to spend Midsummer with his baby daughter.
Söderstedt didn’t find that quite as honourable. He thought back to all the times he had cancelled Midsummer celebrations, remembering the faces of his disappointed, sobbing sons and daughters, and felt a pang of envy for Norlander’s purposefulness. He had never been so single-minded himself.
On the other hand, his fatherhood hadn’t been as exceptional. On the contrary, he considered himself an unusually normal father. Anja’s five pregnancies had passed with customary minor complications, and the children had plopped out a few weeks too early or a few weeks too late, completely healthy and white as chalk. His paternity could never have been in doubt. Unless there was another ghostly-white Finn living in one of the Söderstedt wardrobes, springing out like a jack-in-the-box as soon as he had cleared off to the police station.
Or the courtroom. Because Söderstedt’s own little quirk had nothing to do with family life. It was the way his career had panned out that was the unusual thing. And the secret one. When he was very young, he had almost unconsciously raced his way through Finnish law school at record speed, become the young legal genius at a well-regarded law firm and, aged barely twenty-five, been defending the scum of the earth. The well-off scum of the earth, that is. Those who had the means to appoint a top lawyer like Arto Söderstedt in order to escape the long arm of the law. And to piss all over it just as naturally as a dog pisses on a lamp post.
Eventually, he had simply had enough. Cast his Hugo Boss suits and Armani ties aside, scrapped the Porsche, given up his Finnish citizenship and fled the limelight to Sweden, becoming… a policeman. In the stubborn, lingering belief that, despite everything, the system can only be changed from within.