‘Charlotte’ was the third thing that Viggo Norlander said.
He had no idea where it had come from.
This had been only a couple of weeks ago. They had been together every day since. He enjoyed Astrid’s unexpected company, and found himself immediately dependent, like an addict, on the little person with the inward-backward-sloping mug.
Viggo Norlander, the man who had scarcely seen a photo of a baby before.
And now, for the first time, he had spent a night alone with Charlotte. A night somewhere between hope and despair. As a parting gift, she had vomited robustly onto the shoulder of his leather jacket. Since he hadn’t slept a wink the entire night, he had no energy to do anything about it, and went straight out onto Banérgatan and into the service Volvo which he had, despite repeated reprimands, refused to hand back. He sat down in the passenger seat, showing no surprise at seeing Artö Söderstedt behind the wheel, and was immediately transformed into a hay sack with bird shit on it. He was asleep before they even started talking.
‘Something’s happened at Kumla,’ said Söderstedt. ‘We’re heading there as national CID officers. It’s been a while. What was it that you rang in, by the way? Looking after a sick child, was it? Charlotte’s not ill, is she?’
‘No, me.’
‘It’s best that I drive, then. Not that I really drive.’
‘Night.’
And so Arto Söderstedt drove. Really drove. Since Viggo Norlander had transformed into a hay sack, he also had to manage the map reading himself. He kept one of his out-of-practice hands on the wheel and held the map in the other. It wasn’t exactly easy. He looked up Kumla in the index of his road atlas, Motormännens vägatlas över Sverige, and found the answer ‘44 8E 2’. Given that he was stuck in a disorderly queue at the turn-off to the main road out of Stockholm, that impenetrable combination of letters and numbers felt particularly cruel. When he finally started to understand how the system worked, he realised that he had looked up a little church village in Östergötland province. This reminded him vaguely of an earlier time when something similar had happened, and he realised that it must be the wrong Kumla and turned back to the index. To stop the atlas from closing as soon as he turned a page, he had to press the open book against the wheel with his left thigh, resulting in some difficulties steering. There were five further Kumlas. He sighed gently and went through them, one by one. Eventually, he found the right one. ‘61 10F 1’. He needed to take the E18 via Västerås and Örebro, he realised, just as he passed the turn-off. He jolted onwards on the northbound E4, thinking positively. It was lucky that Viggo was asleep. See what luck he was having! He turned off by Kista, not losing too much time. No one had noticed a thing. He felt great. Nothing was as uplifting as discreetly correcting an embarrassment. One consequence of this cheerful mood meant that, as he finally pulled up to the security barrier outside Kumla prison, also known as the Kumla Bunker, even driving seemed fun.
‘Good morning,’ said the guard.
Don’t say shut up, Söderstedt thought to himself.
‘Shut up,’ said Viggo Norlander.
The guard seemed more surprised than angry. He checked their IDs, confused.
‘Local CID, Stockholm? We’ve got our own CID.’
‘We’re national CID,’ said Söderstedt. ‘On loan to local. It’s about an explosion,’ he added.
The guard made a few phone calls and got confirmation. The gates slid open.
‘You can’t say shut up to everyone who talks to you,’ said Söderstedt, releasing the clutch with pleasure. ‘It’s an untenable life strategy.’
‘Shut up,’ said Viggo Norlander.
They parked the car in a carefully marked-out space, passed through a series of security checks and entered the Kumla Bunker. They wandered along corridors which would remain bluish-grey no matter what colour they were painted, and were shown into the prison governor’s office. He was sitting in a leather swivel chair behind a highly polished, empty desk, and looked like male prison governors tend to. A special combination of civil servant, social worker and army officer.
It was 10.22 on Thursday 24 June, the day before Midsummer’s Eve.
At this point, they still thought that they would be able to celebrate it.
The prison governor stood up to greet them.
‘How much do you know?’ he asked laconically.
‘Not much,’ Söderstedt replied, equally laconically. ‘Just that it’s obviously a matter of national concern.’
‘It involves class-A prisoners, so it’s automatically a matter of national concern. But we don’t even know if it’s a crime we’re dealing with.’
‘Looking after a sick child,’ Norlander thought aloud.
The prison governor looked at him, surprised, and came to the conclusion that it was Söderstedt he should talk to. So that was what he did.
‘A powerful explosive charge went off in one of the cells this morning. The inmate was in the cell at the time, and had to be scraped from the walls afterwards. At present, we have absolutely no idea how it can have happened, what kind of explosive it was, how it was triggered, etc., etc. The inmate in question was Lordan Vukotic, if that rings a bell.’
Söderstedt thought it over. Norlander didn’t.
‘Vaguely,’ said Söderstedt. ‘We brought the file with us but… er… didn’t have the chance to read it on the way here. Drugs, isn’t it?’
‘Serious drug offences and aggravated assault. Eight-year sentence. He’d been in for three. Model inmate. Studying to become a business lawyer, and was going out on his first period of day release soon.’
‘Vukotic… Part of the group around Nedic?’
The prison governor nodded gravely.
‘Definitely in the group around Rajko Nedic. One of the biggest drug dealers. Not that Vukotic has ever admitted it. Lordan Vukotic has never mentioned Rajko Nedic at all. It’s that kind of loyalty that counts when you get out.’
‘Nedic has never done time, has he?’
‘Never, and he was just about to get a personal lawyer of his own. Still, that’s not how it turned out. They’re still scraping bits of would-be lawyer off the walls.’
‘What happened? Was anyone else hurt?’
‘The precise nature of the damage leads us to suspect foul play. A perfectly measured charge. It completely destroyed Vukotic’s cell, but nothing else. The cells next door are fine. An old friend of yours is in one of them, by the way. An old friend of the A-Unit.’
‘The A-Unit doesn’t exist any more,’ said Norlander morosely.
‘It did then. You were bloody good, as I understand it. The best. Though I never understood what happened with that Kentucky Killer.’
‘Who does?’ said Söderstedt apathetically. ‘An old friend?’
‘Göran Andersson. Another model inmate.’
Neither Söderstedt nor Norlander could avoid a short laugh. The crime landscape of the past…
‘Is he still alive?’ asked Norlander.
No one uttered another word. Instead, they followed the prison governor out into the corridor, and were escorted to various areas of the Kumla Bunker by a couple of burly guards, noticing the walls changing colour. They grew successively greyer. Eventually, they went through the very last, almost spectacular security check, and found themselves in the inner sanctum. There were no inmates in sight. The long, concrete corridor was closed off, and an acrid smell of burnt rubber, plastic and meat was coming from the only place where life and movement could be seen. Forensics were running in and out of the doorway. The enormous door was wide open and seemed to be completely intact. Jet black, but intact. A fat civilian policeman was leaning against the wall, smoking a badly rolled cigarette. He was talking in a drawling voice to a well-dressed, fit-looking man who immediately registered on Söderstedt’s Security Service radar.