Åkesson looked at Chavez, raising his eyebrows in surprise, and said: ‘Completely agree, I’m afraid. I don’t have anything to add. Other than that we’ve found the tracks of a van that was parked by the nearest shed, Sickla Boats and Building. And,’ he added, giving Chavez a furtive glance, ‘that the men from the Mercedes look obviously foreign.’
‘What about the robbers, then?’ asked Chavez, unflustered. ‘Have you dared look under the balaclavas?’
Åkesson grimaced. ‘It wasn’t pretty,’ he said. ‘But yeah, they seem more Swedish…’
Chavez looked at him. He seemed to have something else on the tip of his tongue.
‘And…?’ he asked.
‘I’m not exactly happy with those “careless steps in the blood”,’ Åkesson said eventually. ‘They don’t seem the type to take careless steps in blood.’
Chavez nodded for a good while. The weak link in the chain of his story, immediately laid bare. He tried to convince himself: ‘We can imagine they were in shock, I suppose. There’d been a slaughter. Five bodies. One injured. Three of them friends.’
He looked out over the ugly scene. The woman with the dog and the mobile phone had said that she was ringing from the scene of a slaughter. She wasn’t wrong, but something was. Here and there, the occasional policeman was walking around, looking at the crime scene. Otherwise, it was empty.
‘Where the hell are forensics?’ he exclaimed.
‘On the way from Närke,’ said Åkesson, shrugging.
‘Where?’
‘From Närke. It’s a province.’
‘Thanks,’ said Chavez.
‘No doubt they’ve been flat out with the Kumla explosion. The whole force is there. And your friends.’
‘My friends?’
‘Söderstedt and Norlander. We’ve been colleagues at local CID for a while.’
Chavez allowed himself a smile. He was standing at the scene of a slaughter, smiling.
‘Those white, middle-aged men,’ he said.
Though he was thinking about something else.
Hmm, he thought.
The Kumla explosion, he thought.
13
IN FRONT OF us is a house that very few policemen have ever seen. It stands alone by a lake with the unusual name of Ravalen. This lake is in Sollentuna municipality, just over ten kilometres north of Stockholm.
The fact of the matter is, only one policeman has ever seen this modest villa at the edge of the dense forest. And he’s no longer a policeman.
He is the owner of the villa. He can say that in all honesty now. The last payment was made to the bank on the same day he retired, something that seemed like more than just a coincidence.
And isn’t it him we see there now? Isn’t he the sixty-two-year-old man we can see on that hilly little patch of land that’s really nothing more than a parenthesis between the lake and the forest? Isn’t it him dressed in the Hawaiian shirt and shorts which are a touch too small, pushing a lawnmower up and down the slope like Sisyphus?
Cutting grass is an endless job.
It has a tendency just to grow back again, after all.
As a policeman, this man had a defect. Former policeman, that is. Not a policeman, a former policeman. This defect consisted of not being able to tell grass from weeds. Obviously he could have taught himself that this little green tangle is grass and that little green tangle is a weed, but he had never, ever understood the more fundamental difference between grass and weeds.
Policemen should definitely be able to tell grass from weeds.
Not by looking in a manual which says that certain types of plants are grasses and others are weeds, but by instinctively being able to say what distinguishes grass from weeds.
That was where he was lacking.
He paused his Sisyphean work and bent down towards a little clump. He sighed, feeling the green strands between his fingers.
Grass or weed?
He stood up again and swung the lawnmower in an arc around the clump. Since he had retired, he regularly practised the mantra ‘Live and let live’.
Who was he to decide what was grass and what was a weed?
None of his colleagues had ever visited him at home. He was known by most as ‘the man without a private life’ and he never let anyone into his world. When he retired, he had relaxed his principles a touch, and actually spent time – even if it was never at his home – with an old colleague, his former boss, Erik Bruun from Huddinge Police. Bruun had also retired early, but following a heart attack rather than out of… necessity. They met once every other week at the Kulturhus in Stockholm, drinking coffee and playing chess for a few hours. It was Bruun who, once upon a time, had picked out Paul Hjelm from the Huddinge police force to work in the A-Unit.
The pensioner’s equally retired wife came out and sat on the porch with a cup of coffee and the morning paper, her hair in curlers. She waved at him. He waved back. Behind her, the waters of Ravalen glittered invitingly in the morning sun.
Everything was all right, it was just a matter of enjoying life. Fixed monthly outgoings at a minimum. Full supplementary pension. A tangible surplus in their account every month. A piece of land which, after thirty-five years, he had only just begun to find attractive. He would even be able to leave a decent inheritance to both of his adult sons.
Rowing boat and fishing rod down on the lake. Sauna on the shore. Binoculars hanging from a nail on a tree up at the edge of the forest. Two decent trips abroad per year. A healthy couple, retired early, who could be confident that they could be full of life for twenty years to come.
Fit as a fiddle, apart from the incontinence.
But that could be managed. The future was theirs.
The former boss of the former A-Unit, former Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin had, in other words, every reason to be happy with his life. He had no reason whatsoever to grieve over what had happened at the end of his career. He didn’t regret a thing. Of course there were one or two less successful decisions to look back on in connection with the Kentucky Killer, but there was absolutely no misconduct, nothing which should have forced him into early retirement. Nothing of that calibre at all.
He had nothing to dwell on.
There was nothing to dwell on.
He had no reason whatsoever to dwell on it.
And so on.
Day after day.
He paused in his doubly Sisyphean work. He could hear the crunching of gravel up by the garage. Not another grossly criminal estate agent who wanted to ‘make a fantastic offer’ on the place? He pushed the lawnmower aside with a clang and trudged determinedly up the steep grassy slope.
The man who stepped out of the shiny new Saab certainly looked like a grossly criminal estate agent. Neat blond hair in a hurricane-proof style that looked confusingly similar to a toupee, artificially bronzed face, toned body, and even a thick gold wrist chain to go with his stylish, summery suit.
Still, Jan-Olov Hultin’s jaw dropped.