‘And now they’ve been overshadowed by the Sickla Slaughter,’ said Kerstin Holm, grinning.
The door banged. Viggo Norlander entered, bluish bags under his eyes. They went nicely with the pink stigmata on his hands. He waved at them, taking the seat closest to the door and falling asleep immediately. On the way down, Hjelm thought.
Then Sweden’s Biggest Policeman arrived. Gunnar Nyberg raised a cup of coffee to them.
‘They sent me with my ascetic’s coffee,’ he shouted incomprehensibly, sitting down next to the loudly snoring Norlander. ‘Hi, Kerstin,’ he said with a wave. ‘Welcome back to the right side of the country.’
‘Sweden’s shithole,’ she shouted back.
Nyberg laughed, surprised, and placed the coffee on the little folding table in front of him. It could stand there until it cooled down. He had no intention of touching it.
A toilet flushed. Viggo Norlander woke with a start; it was a familiar sound. They waited while the taps ran. Eventually, the other door opened, and Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin entered the room from his private toilet, incontinence pad in place.
He nodded neutrally at them and sat down at the table at the front, a thick pile of papers in front of him.
Kerstin Holm went forward and placed a large bouquet of red roses in front of him. He stared at them. For a good while. Then he fished out the card from deep within their thorny depths. Silence. Absolute silence. They watched him. His expression was completely neutral, but his eyes were lowered. For a little too long. When he looked up, a couple of tears ran down his enormous nose.
‘Thanks,’ was all he said.
‘Just a little whip-round,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Welcome back.’
‘Thanks,’ Hultin said again, stiffly. Then he straightened up and turned the situation on its head. ‘But now we’ve got a job to do. Is anyone missing?’
They looked around the ‘Supreme Command Centre’. The joker in the pack was missing.
The very energy source.
Almost on demand, the door opened. Energetically.
As if it’s even possible to open a door energetically, Paul Hjelm thought to himself, watching as Jorge Chavez walked purposefully towards the front the steps. He sat down on the empty row of chairs nearest to Hultin, turned round and waved cheerfully to the others before standing up again and greeting the operative head of the A-Unit more formally.
‘Welcome back, Jan-Olov,’ he said, shaking his boss’s hand. Then he sat down and waited.
Hultin raised his eyebrows briefly, before regaining his wits and getting straight down to business.
‘Fifty minutes ago, Waldemar Mörner pulled up on my driveway in his Saab. I was just about to finish cutting the lawn and take my first dip of the day when he told me what was what. I tried to get up to speed with things in the Saab on the way into town, but I know almost nothing about this damned Sickla Slaughter. But Jorge does, so I’ll hand you over to him right away. There you go.’
Chavez was ready. He climbed up onto the platform and started fastening photographs to the whiteboard using magnets in the shape of sweet little ladybirds.
‘You’ll have to excuse the insects,’ he said. ‘Someone ordered the wrong thing down in the stockroom. Anyway, these are the pictures from the industrial estate in Sickla, down by Södra Hammarby harbour. From every conceivable angle. There’s even a bird’s-eye picture from a helicopter. Here. Five dead in what seems to be a typical underworld showdown. Unusually brutal, I have to say. One of the victims had twenty-four bullets in his body. Here. Another was blown up. His intestines were stuck to the roof of the car. Here.
‘Let’s start from the beginning. This was between two gangs. Gang One: three armed with pistols (1A to 1C on this sketch). Gang Two: six armed with sub-machine guns (2A to 2F). Gang Two attacks Gang One, probably with the aim of stealing a briefcase.
‘This black Mercedes, registered to a car rental place in Örnsköldsvik and hired by a non-existent Anders Bengtsson from Stockholm two weeks ago, pulled up on this side road in the Sickla industrial estate at about two this morning. The three members of Gang One were in the car. A well-placed explosive charge detonated underneath it and killed the man in the back seat. The car kept rolling for a few metres before it stopped. The men in the front seat were injured in the explosion, but not fatally. They were forced out of the car by Gang Two, who’d driven there in a van with new Continental tyres – we don’t know any more about it than that at the moment. In all probability, they were frisked by Gang Two, though obviously not very well, since both men later managed to draw their weapons, killing two and injuring one member of Gang Two.
‘Cartridges, the angle of the shots and the location of the bodies show that six of the nine available weapons were fired. Those not fired were the pistol belonging to the man in the back seat and the sub-machine guns belonging to the dead robbers. None of them had time to shoot before they died; otherwise, they’d definitely have done so. No one present seems to have flinched at the thought of using a weapon.
‘Now look at the sketch. It seems to have played out as follows. One: the car explodes, person 1A is killed. Two: 1B and 1C are forced out of the car and frisked. Three: 1A is relieved, posthumously, of his briefcase, probably by 2A. Four: 1B and 1C take out their weapons. Five: 1B shoots over his shoulder and kills 2B, hitting him right in the eye. Six: 2A runs away towards the nearest shed with the briefcase, maybe because it’s stopping him from using his gun. Seven: 1C shoots 2A in the back and kills him. Eight: 1B shoots and injures 2C. Nine: 1C is shot and killed by five shots from 2D, 2E and 2F. Ten: 1B is shot and injured by six shots from 2C, 2D and 2F. Eleven: 1B is shot and killed at close range by eighteen shots from 2D. Twelve: the briefcase is taken from the pool of blood in front of 2A, and bundled, along with the injured 2C, into the van. Thirteen: the van drives away. 1A, 1B, 1C, 2A and 2B are left behind. The injured one, 2C has AB negative blood. So that means that the people with the briefcase, whoever they are, are the surviving passengers from the van: 2D, 2E and 2F, along with the injured 2C.
‘And now for the interesting part. We’re pretty much in agreement that this is some kind of underworld dispute, right? So our fingerprint recognition software should be going crazy, but that’s not the case. Of the five bodies – we obviously don’t have any other fingerprints – there’s just one who’s got a criminal record. It’s one of the robbers, Gang Two, the one who was shot in the eye. 2B. His name was Sven Joakim Bergwall, and he’s been inside twice – the first time in Tidaholm and the second time in Kumla. A real first-class criminal. Bank robbery, manslaughter, attempted murder, grievous bodily harm and incitement to racial hatred.
‘Incitement to racial hatred?’ asked Hultin, when he finally managed to get a word in edgeways.
‘Organised Nazi,’ said Jorge Chavez, letting his words sink in. ‘Was a member of the White Aryan Resistance, when it existed. Was also a member of the Nordic Reich Party, when it existed. Etc., etc. He was also active on the edges of the Maskeradliga, if you remember it. An armed gang carrying out robberies across the country. Military character. But the other four don’t have records. No one from Gang One. Not 1A, 1B or 1C. Nor, for that matter, 2A.’
‘I’m a bit confused by all these codes,’ Gunnar Nyberg confessed. ‘So 2A was the one who ran away with the briefcase and got shot in the back? The big guy?’
‘Yeah,’ Chavez confirmed. ‘Though you’re more of a big guy, if we’re being accurate. The point of the codes is that we can pinpoint their positions and movements. We’ve got sub-machine-gun bullets with four different firing pin marks. Four sub-machine guns. Plus the two who never fired, but whose guns are still there: 2A, who was shot in the back, and 2B, who was shot in the face.