UP AND DOWN, back and forth, over and over.
Like the pendulum of a clock. Tick-tock.
Five or six boys aged about ten or twelve were skateboarding in Björns trädgård, a park in Södermalm. Two hardened police officers watched them from a bench.
The last time Paul Hjelm had been in Björns trädgård, it had been the city’s shabbiest, most run-down public space. A playground for junkies and drunks. Now it was more like an oasis with its elegant little cafe, Viva Espresso, its abundance of greenery, its play area and skateboard ramp. And, soon, Stockholm’s first mosque.
You really could talk about a metamorphosis there, Paul Hjelm thought.
And not only there. The whole area around Medborgarplatsen had changed character. Now it was the beating heart of Södermalm. The district around the crossroads of Götgatan and Folkungagatan was not only the area that newly arrived provincials first made their way to, was not only known as the most dangerous place in Stockholm, but was also the city’s most pub-filled area. Within a five-minute radius from Medborgarplatsen metro station, there were no fewer than sixty-five pubs. People were always hanging around the traditional hot-dog stand on the corner of Götgatan and Tjärhovsgatan. And opposite, on the other side of Götgatan, on the edge of Medborgarplatsen, the lavish establishment called London New York had a big outdoor serving area. On the other side of Medborgarplatsen, the queue to the always-packed pub with the rather more domesticated name of Schnapps snaked.
In other words, there must have been plenty of witnesses out there when twenty men came rushing out of Kvarnen, some ten or so metres away. The hardly stimulating task of finding them had been delegated to the Södermalm local police.
On the other hand, though, what would these potential witnesses actually have seen? A bunch of men charging out of the pub and running away? That wasn’t anything especially remarkable in these parts. The local police had a fairly hopeless search ahead of them.
Hjelm sighed gently and tried to count the people. From the bench where he was sitting, on the edge of Björns trädgård, he managed to count around fifty.
With the summer solstice just a few days before, it was still light. It was eight at night, and the sun was still shining as though it was the middle of the day. The air felt fresh, the summer-evening scents not differing in any tangible way from those in the city’s more rural districts. Birds were singing cheerfully and clearly. Rays of sunshine glittered on the windows of the buildings along the neighbouring street. Small children were still playing enthusiastically, watched over by drowsy parents. And the skateboarders would probably be there until darkness fell.
There was nothing to suggest that, less than a day earlier, a man had bled to death just a few metres away.
The general public’s fear of the Kvarnen Killer was limited, despite the efforts of the tabloids to whip up a panic. Presumably people had simply had enough of panicking.
It had been a violent year so far. The acute stages of NATO’s long bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, eighty days of ceaseless bombardment, were over. War from a distance. The ethnic cleansing in Kosovo had finally come to an end; the refugees had started to return to their mine-strewn homeland. Two American high-school students had celebrated Hitler’s birthday by cutting down their classmates with all manner of firearms. The parents had been bewildered. In Sweden, a twenty-two-year-old in Örebro had been exposed as one of the country’s worst ever paedophiles. Videotapes of rapes, an enormous collection of films and pictures and Web contacts. Within a few days, the trial would begin, but it was already clear that he would be sentenced to psychiatric care. Then there was the police murderer in Malexander. All three of the perpetrators had finally been caught. Three young men with Nazi sympathies who, cold as ice, had executed two policemen from Östergötland. One of them was a war veteran from Bosnia. Another had topped his acting career with a couple of shots to the back of a policeman’s head. He had been in Lars Norén’s deftly staged play Seven Three, where three Nazis advocated ethnic cleansing from the stage before the eyes of the powerless author, leading to a heated debate in the cultural pages of the papers. But hardly anywhere else. Not before the country united in horror over the Malexander murders, and placed the blame on the theatre.
A strange year.
Kerstin Holm turned towards him on the park bench.
‘What did your family say?’ she asked.
‘They’re at the cottage out on Dalarö,’ Hjelm replied. ‘I can paint the town red all night if I want to. Party all night with an old flame in Kvarnen.’
‘All in good time,’ Kerstin Holm smiled. ‘How are they?’
‘Good. Danne’s finally over the worst of his teenage madness. He’s seventeen and wants to join the police, strangely enough. I’m hoping it’ll pass. Tova’s fifteen, and absolutely unbearable. Every cell in her body is unbearable.’
‘And… Cilla?’
Paul laughed and looked at Kerstin. She peered back. He could see the thin rings around her irises, giving away her contact lenses. Her upper lip, bulging like she had been mistreated. Though only by the tobacco company, Gothia Snus AB.
‘Good, thanks,’ he said. ‘She’s ward sister now, rehab at Huddinge hospital. Normal hours. And enjoying a long holiday at the minute, thanks to all the leave they owed her.’
They sat in silence a while. The past moved like a ghost between them. Though it was like Little Ghost Godfrey. Or Casper. The world’s friendliest ghost.
It was a time they both looked back on with an open heart. And completely without bitterness.
Eventually, Kerstin Holm said: ‘Shouldn’t we feel guilty about not focusing one hundred per cent on finding the Kvarnen Killer?’
‘We have been, by the book. We can just look at this as… a private investigation. Outside working hours.’
‘We don’t dare put it down as overtime, then?’
‘That depends on the result, I guess.’
Kerstin sighed deeply, and stretched her arms out sideways. Her fingertips grazed the hair at the nape of his neck.
‘Let’s just hope there won’t be any more violence this summer,’ she said, without seeming to believe her own words.
‘We’ll have to see whether the Police Olympics’ll be enough to discourage them. World Police and Fire Games. You know there’s going to be a party in a couple of days? You’ll probably get to meet all of the others there, from the A-Unit.’
‘How embarrassed should I be that I don’t really get the appeal of these games?’
‘Very. You’re police, you know.’
They laughed for a moment.
‘It’s an American thing,’ Hjelm eventually said. ‘The world’s police, prison guards, customs officers and firemen are getting together to compete against each other for the first time in Europe. The boxing in particular should see a lot of criminals in the spectators’ seats. Watching the law going at one another.’
A chilly breeze blew life into the evening. It quickly turned cold, sobering their thoughts. Focusing them on the task.
‘It’s probably time to say what we’ve been thinking,’ said Kerstin.
When the one concrete bit of action – picking up Eskil Carlstedt – had gone down the drain, there hadn’t been much left to do. The barmaid, Karin Lindbeck, had produced a drawing of the Kvarnen Killer that seemed more reliable than the three earlier attempts. That was the one they had chosen to give to the press. It was already in the papers. There wasn’t much more they could do at that point. All of the city’s police districts were busy conducting their own separate hunts for Hammarby fans. The fate of the Kvarnen Killer was now in their hands. It was very much a regional case.
They had been listening to the interview tapes all afternoon. What was the sequence of events that was emerging? They had both been drawn to the same sections.