‘2B was Sven Joakim Bergwall. He was alone on the right-hand side of the car. 2A took the briefcase and then stood in front of the car, from where he ran. 2D and 2E were also standing in front of the car. 2C and 2F were standing to the left, where 2C was shot and injured. 2D and 2F hit both 1B and 1C. What else can we say? Which of them went up to an injured man and put eighteen bullets into him? The group’s crazy man, or the group’s leader? Intuitively, I’d say: yes. The group’s crazy man and its leader. I’d bet the leader is 2D. But we’ve got nothing on him.’
‘What about the explosion?’ said Söderstedt.
‘Well, that’s our lead, other than Sven Joakim Bergwall. A couple of white, middle-aged men had just dragged the whole of the national forensic squad to Närke. Every single forensic technician in service is scraping walls in the Kumla Bunker.’
‘Get to the point,’ said the white, middle-aged Norlander gruffly.
‘It’s the same explosive and the same detonation device,’ said Chavez, letting the information sink in before he continued. ‘Both as yet unidentified, but the same. And it’s obvious that if we put the details of the Kumla explosion together with the details of the Sickla Slaughter, then something not-too-pleasant emerges.’
Söderstedt and Norlander glanced at one another knowingly. Pattern, they thought simultaneously.
When does a pattern start to emerge?
Arto Söderstedt suddenly felt alive. For the first time since he had driven Norlander’s service Volvo to Kumla. It had been driven back by some rank-and-file officers while they took a plane from Örebro in order to make it back in time for 10 a.m.
Suddenly it all made sense.
‘We’d like to deliver a greeting,’ he said. ‘To all of you, but mainly to Paul and Jorge. From a two-year-old called Jorge Paul Andersson, nicknamed Jorjie.’
There was a moment of confusion in the ‘Supreme Command Centre’. Söderstedt smiled covertly. He liked confusing introductions.
‘Göran Andersson’s son,’ he continued, with dramatic precision.
Paul Hjelm and Jorge Chavez exchanged glances for the first time in almost a year. Was the old connection still there? They could read one another like a book, in any case. The serial killer Göran Andersson had named his son after the policemen who had sent him to prison. It felt peculiar.
Arto Söderstedt continued. ‘Andersson’s eardrums burst in the Kumla explosion. At 08.36 yesterday morning, he was studying art history in his cell, the one next to Lordan Vukotic’s. The night before, he’d seen Vukotic stagger back to his cell with – as the post-mortem jigsaw puzzle later showed – a ruptured spleen, broken shin bone and both shoulders pulled out of joint. The next morning, he was blown up. Not into pieces, but into a bloody mess splattered all over the walls, and maybe by the same man who, about eighteen hours later, blew up the Mercedes down in the Sickla industrial estate. Which means that we were both right and wrong. Four policemen – the two of us, one from Närke CID and another from the Security Service – came to some fantastical conclusions yesterday, but we spent the evening on completely the wrong track. We assumed the following: that Vukotic had been tortured and talked; that that was why he didn’t want to let anyone know he’d been tortured, least of all Nedic’s henchmen in Kumla. Maybe he lay there in his cell all night, trying to put his shoulders back into joint. But why, you might ask, when he was just going to be blown up the next day? Why was he blown up the next day? That was the next question.
‘Our conclusion was that the perpetrator realised his exploits would be discovered and so he got rid of all traces of his crime. So we were searching for inmates with a knowledge of explosives. We spent the night interrogating a whole range of people who had some connection to explosives. I’ve only just realised how wrong we were. If the perpetrator really wanted to “cover up his tracks”, as Göran Andersson put it, then we’re assuming that he hadn’t really understood the consequences of torturing Vukotic. But of course he had. He knew that Vukotic was Rajko Nedic’s right-hand man, that he was untouchable. Closest to what might be Sweden’s most dangerous man. Of course he knew what he was doing when he got Vukotic out of the way. The explosion was hardly a display of regret or the result of some kind of fear of being discovered. It was more like a challenge, a statement. One which said: “Pay attention, you fucking foreigner, we’re coming!” But not just that. It also said: “Pigs, I don’t give a damn if you identify me, you can’t catch me!”’
It was silent in the Supreme Command Centre. Once again, in the blink of an eye, it seemed to have lost the quotation marks around its name. Something unpleasantly – but also attractively – big was emerging.
‘So,’ said Arto Söderstedt, ‘now you see what I’m getting at. Two points. First: the Kumla bomber wasn’t a man rotting away in the clink, full of fear. He was someone leaving Kumla – guns blazing. Second: what we’re looking at is a confrontation between neo-Nazi, professional, maybe even paramilitary attackers on the one hand, and one of Sweden’s leading drug dealers, Rajko Nedic, and his group of war criminals from the former Yugoslavia on the other. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? And maybe that explains why no one from Gang One – not 1A, 1B or 1C – left any identifiable fingerprints behind. They’d been imported directly from… well, maybe even from Kosovo. In any case, from the centre of the conflict in the Balkans.’
‘And all three die,’ Jorge Chavez said, breathless. He hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. He looked at Arto Söderstedt, languid, gangly and chalk white in appearance, and throwing out these horrible truths almost in passing.
Söderstedt continued, waving a piece of paper. ‘I’ve got the fax in my hand. It’s from the governor of Kumla. At half eight yesterday morning a prisoner was released from the Kumla Bunker. Six minutes before the explosion. He’d been inside for three years, sentenced to six for grievous bodily harm, but got out halfway through for good behaviour. He’s known on the fringes of racist and Nazi organisations, too. He beat up two Kurdish citizenship campaigners when they were taking part in a demonstration in Solna Centrum three years ago. There were explosives involved too, meant for a Kurdish cultural centre, but nothing could be proved. His name sounds so harmless, Niklas Lindberg. He’s thirty-four and comes from Trollhättan. He trained as an officer in the army, quickly climbed the ranks, went on a few campaigns with the UN in Cyprus – and then joined the French Foreign Legion. Apparently – though this isn’t confirmed – he has good ties with xenophobic organisations around the world. Not least in the US. My guess, if that kind of thing’s allowed, is that Niklas Lindberg is your 2D, Jorge. The leader and the crazy man. The man who fired eighteen shots from close range into an injured person.’
‘Who, in all probability, was a war criminal from the former Yugoslavia,’ Jan-Olov Hultin nodded. ‘It’s beginning to make sense now, even for an old pensioner like me. Jorge, you said that Sven Joakim Bergwall did his last stint in prison in Kumla. Does the time frame overlap with Niklas Lindberg’s?’
‘Lindberg’s name is new to me,’ Chavez confessed immediately, leafing through his papers, ‘but Bergwall was released from Kumla a month ago. So it’s not exactly unlikely that two violence-prone Nazis like these met inside. Bergwall arranged things on the outside, Lindberg the inside. We can look at it like that.’
‘What is it they’re up to?’ Hultin continued. ‘The night before he was released, Niklas Lindberg tortured Lordan Vukotic, but it seems to be better planned than that. The night before. It surely must go further back in time. Six men in a well-planned attack – that surely wasn’t something they decided on eighteen hours before?’