1

Eight weeks earlier, Wednesday, August 15.

Headquarters of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation on Kungsholmen in Stockholm

“Olof Palme,” said the chief of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Lars Martin Johansson. “Are you familiar with that name, ladies and gentlemen?”

For some reason he seemed almost joyful as he said it. Just back from vacation with a becoming suntan, red suspenders, and linen shirt with no tie as a lighthearted signal of the transition from relaxation to responsibility. He leaned forward in his seat at the short end of the conference table, letting his gaze wander across the four others gathered around the same table.

The joy seemed to be his alone. Doubtful looks were exchanged among three of the four—Police Superintendent Anna Holt, Detective Chief Inspector Jan Lewin, and Detective Chief Inspector Lisa Mattei—while the fourth in the group, Chief Inspector Yngve Flykt, who was head of the Palme group, seemed if anything embarrassed by the question and tried to compensate by looking politely preoccupied.

“Olof Palme,” Johansson repeated, his voice now sounding more urgent. “Does that ring any bells?”

The one who finally answered was Lisa Mattei, the youngest of the group, but long accustomed to the role of best in class. First she glanced at the head of the Palme investigation, who only nodded and looked tired, then she looked down at her notepad, which incidentally was free of any notes or the doodling with which she usually filled it, whatever was being discussed. Then in two sentences she summarized Olof Palme’s political career, and in four sentences his end.

“Olof Palme,” said Mattei. “Social Democrat and Sweden’s most well-known politician during the postwar period. Prime minister for two terms, from 1969 to 1976 and from 1982 to 1986. Was murdered at the intersection of Sveavägen and Tunnelgatan in central Stockholm twenty-one years, five months, and fourteen days ago. It was Friday the twenty-eighth of February 1986, twenty minutes past eleven. He was shot from behind with one shot and appears to have died almost immediately. I was eleven years old when it happened, so I’m afraid I don’t have much more to contribute,” Mattei concluded.

“Don’t say that,” said Johansson with a Norrland drawl. “Our victim was the prime minister and a fine fellow, and how common is this kind of crime victim at this sort of place? True, I’m only the head of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, but I’m also an orderly person and extremely allergic to unsolved cases,” he continued. “I take them personally, if you’re wondering why you’re here.”

No one had wondered about that. No one seemed particularly enthusiastic either. Regardless, the whole thing started as it almost always does, with a few police officers sitting around a table, talking about a case. No flashing lights, no sirens, and definitely no drawn service revolvers. Although when the crime happened, over twenty years ago, it had started with flashing lights, sirens, and drawn service revolvers. Nothing had helped. The case had ended badly.

Johansson elaborated on his ideas about what ought to be done, the motive for doing it, and how it should all be arranged in practical terms. As so often before, he also relied on his personal experience without the slightest trace of either genuine or false modesty.

“In my personal experience, when a case has come to a standstill so to speak, it’s often worth calling in some new folks who can look at the case with fresh eyes. It’s easy to overlook things,” said Johansson.

“I hear you,” Anna Holt answered, sounding more sarcastic than she intended. “But if you’ll excuse—”

“Sure,” Johansson interrupted. “Just let me finish my sentence first.”

“I’m listening,” said Holt. I never learn, she thought.

“When you’re starting to get up in years like me, unfortunately the risk increases that you don’t remember what you meant to say, if you get interrupted, that is,” Johansson explained. “Where was I now?” he continued.

“How you intended to organize the whole thing, boss,” Mattei interjected. “Our investigation, that is,” she clarified.

“Thanks, Lisa,” said Johansson. “Thanks for helping an old man.”

How does he do it? thought Holt. Even with Lisa of all people?

According to Johansson it was not a question of forming a new Palme investigation, and the investigators who were already in the Palme group—several of whom had spent almost their entire active time as detectives there—would of course retain sole responsibility.

“So I want to make that clear from the start, Yngve,” said Johansson, nodding at the head of the Palme group, who still seemed more worried than relieved.

“No way,” said Johansson. “You can forget any such ideas. I’ve imagined something a lot simpler and more informal. What I want simply is a second opinion. Not a new investigation. Just a second opinion from a few wise officers who can look at the case with fresh eyes.

“I want you to go through the investigation,” he continued. “Is there anything we haven’t done that we should have done? Is there anything in the material itself that we’ve missed and that’s worth looking into? That can still be looked into? If so, I want to know about it, and it’s no more difficult than that.”

Regardless of his hopes on the last point, the following hour was devoted to discussing objections from three of the four others in the room. The only one who didn’t say anything was Lisa Mattei, but when their meeting was over, her notepad was as full of scribbling as always. Partly with what her colleagues had said. Partly with her usual doodling regardless of what was being said.

First up was Chief Inspector Jan Lewin, who after some introductory, cautious throat clearing quickly zeroed in on Johansson’s fundamental motive, namely the need for fresh eyes. The idea as such was excellent. He himself had advocated it often enough. Not least during his time as head of the group that dealt with so-called cold cases. But for that very reason he thought he was particularly poorly suited for this case.

During the initial year of the investigation—while Lewin was working at the homicide squad in Stockholm—he had primary responsibility for the collection of significant portions of the material evidence. Not until the investigation was taken over by the national bureau did he return to his old assignment at the homicide squad in Stockholm. Several years later he moved over to the national bureau, and once there he had also helped on the Palme investigation for a few brief periods with the registration and review of new leads that had come in.

“I don’t know if you remember, boss, but the investigation leader, Hans Holmér, the police chief in Stockholm at that time, collected large quantities of information that perhaps didn’t have anything directly to do with the murder itself but might prove to be of value.” Lewin nodded at Lisa Mattei, who had been only a little girl in those days.

“I remember the police chief at that time,” said Johansson. Of unblessed memory, he thought. “Though most of what he found I’ve managed to repress. What was it that landed on your desk, Lewin?”

At best, quite a bit of questionable value, according to Lewin.

“All hotel registrations in the Stockholm area around the time of the murder. All arrivals into and departures from the country that could be substantiated with the usual passport and border checks, all parking violations in greater Stockholm around the time of the crime, all speeding violations and other traffic offenses in the whole country the day of the murder, the day before and the day after, all other crimes and arrests in the Stockholm area at the time of the crime. We took in everything from drunkenness and domestic disturbances to all ordinary crimes reported during the twenty-four-hour period in question. We also collected accident reports. Plus all suicides and strange causes of death that happened both before and after the murder. I know when I left the investigation they were still working on that part. As you know, it added up to quite a bit. Hundreds of pounds of paper, thousands of pages actually, and I’m only talking about what came in during my time.”

“The broad, unbiased effort,” Johansson observed.

“Yes, that’s what it’s called,” said Lewin. “Sometimes it works, but this time almost all of it remained unprocessed. There simply wasn’t time to do anything. I sat and skimmed through what came in, and I had my hands full just with what first jumped out at me. Ninety percent of the paperwork was basically put right back in the boxes where it had been from the start.”

“Give me some examples,” said Johansson. “What things jumped out at you, Lewin?”

“I remember four different suicides,” said Lewin. “The first took place only a few hours after the murder of the prime minister. I remember it in detail, because when I got the papers on my desk I actually felt some of those old vibrations you feel when things are starting to heat up.” Lewin shook his head thoughtfully.

“The man who committed suicide had hung himself in the rec room of his house. A guard who took early retirement who lived on Ekerö a few miles outside Stockholm. He was the neighbor of a police officer, so I got the tip through him. He also had a license for a handgun, to top it off a revolver that might very well have matched what we knew about the murder weapon at that time. He was generally considered strange by those who knew him. Antisocial, divorced for several years, problems with alcohol, the usual stuff. In brief, he seemed pretty good, but he had an alibi for the evening of the murder. For one thing, he’d quarreled with some neighbors who were out with their dog at about ten o’clock. Then he called his ex-wife from his home phone, a total of three times if I remember correctly, and carried on with her about the same time as Palme was shot. I had no problem ruling him out. We found his revolver in the house search. It was test fired, even though we already knew it was the wrong caliber.”

“And the others?” Johansson was looking almost greedily at his colleague.

“No,” said Lewin, “at the risk of disappointing you, and I was pretty careful about these cases. I remember when the media started making a row about the so-called police track, that it was some of our fellow officers who murdered Palme, I went into the material on my own and checked for that specifically—all the parking violations and other traffic offenses where the vehicle or the perpetrator could be connected to our colleagues, whether or not they were on duty.”

“But that didn’t produce anything either,” said Johansson.

“No,” said Lewin. “Other than some pretty imaginative explanations of why a particular officer shouldn’t have to pay his parking tickets or why his car ended up in such a strange place.”

“Exactly,” said Johansson. “The same old women problems if you ask me. Nevertheless, wouldn’t it be interesting for you to take another look at your old boxes? Now when you’ve got some perspective, I mean. I can’t help sensing that you don’t seem completely uncomfortable with the job. And you could take a look at all the rest, once you’re at it anyway, I mean.”

“With some reservations about fresh eyes,” said Lewin, sounding more positive than he intended. “Well, maybe so. The basic idea is good enough.”

Coward, thought Anna Holt, who didn’t intend to let Johansson get off that easily.

“With all due respect, boss, even though I also believe the part about fresh eyes, and even though I’ve never been anywhere near this investigation, I really don’t believe in the idea,” said Holt. Now it’s said, she thought.

“I’m listening, Anna,” said Johansson, with the same expression in his eyes he’d learned from his first elkhound. The gaze that naturally ensues from undivided positive attention. As when he and the dog took a break in the hunt, when he told him to sit nicely, just before he gave him a slice of sausage from the lunch sack. “What do you mean?”

“What I mean is that I can’t imagine a more thrashed-out case in Swedish police history. Investigated over and over again in every conceivable and inconceivable respect. Without technical evidence worth the name. With witnesses who were pumped dry twenty years ago, most of whom are now probably either dead or in no shape to be talked with. Where the only suspect worth the name, I’m thinking of Christer Pettersson, obviously, was convicted in Stockholm District Court almost twenty years ago, only to be released by Svea Court of Appeal six months later. The same Pettersson they tried to indict again ten years ago, but the prosecutor couldn’t even get a new trial. The same Pettersson who died a few years ago. As if everything that happened before wasn’t more than enough to close the investigation against him.”

“You’re making me think of that classic skit, Anna. I think it won a prize as the world’s best TV sketch. That Monty Python thing about the dead parrot,” said Johansson. “Wasn’t it a Norwegian blue? Wasn’t that what it was called? The parrot that is.

“‘This parrot is dead.’ You know that scene where the upset customer is in the pet shop and slams the dead parrot on the counter,” Johansson explained as he slammed his desktop to illustrate.

“Sure,” said Holt. “If you like. This investigation is dead. Just as dead as Monty Python’s parrot.”

“Maybe it’s just a little tired,” said Johansson. “Isn’t that what the shop owner says—the one who sold the customer the parrot, when the customer comes in to complain? ‘He’s not dead, just a little tired.’”

Don’t try that with me, thought Holt. Giving in was the last thing she intended to do, regardless of all the smoke screens and easy-to-see-through jokes from her boss.

“The Palme investigation has not come to a standstill,” Holt repeated. “The Palme investigation has been thrashed to death. It’s not a cold case; it’s not even an ice-cold case. The Palme investigation is dead.”

“You don’t need to get upset, Holt. I hear what you’re saying,” said Johansson, who suddenly didn’t sound the least bit nice and friendly anymore. “Personally I think it’s maybe just a little tired. And maybe it should be looked at with fresh eyes. That you proceed from the basic police ground rule that always applies when you’re involved in such things.”

“Like the situation,” said Holt, who knew Johansson after a number of years and cases.

“Exactly,” said Johansson, smiling again. “Nice to know we’re in agreement, Anna.”

Last up was Chief Inspector Yngve Flykt, head of the Palme group. If he’d had anything to say about it, this meeting never would have happened. Personally he was a man of peace, and what he’d heard about his top boss, not least that he was capable of thinking up all kinds of things to happen to co-workers who didn’t do what he said, made him irretrievably lost from the start.

With all due respect for his boss, and being both happy and grateful for the boss’s clear and definite opinion that any changes in a well-established, functioning organization were not even an issue, with respect for all this and everything else that in haste he might have forgotten, he would still, however, and obviously with all good intentions, like to point out a few practical problems, which his colleague Lewin had already touched on.

“What are you talking about?” interrupted Johansson.

“Our case files,” said the head of the Palme investigation, looking almost imploringly at Johansson. “It’s no ordinary body of material even for a very big case. I don’t know if you’ve been down and looked at it, but it’s a colossal amount of material. Gigantic. As perhaps you know, it takes up six whole cubicles in the corridor where we’re located. We’ve already taken down five partitions, and soon it’ll be time for the next one. There are binders and boxes from floor to ceiling.”

“I’m listening,” said Johansson, forming his long fingers into an arch and leaning back in his chair. Flykt, thought Johansson. It must be congenital.

“From what my colleagues and I have understood, it’s actually the largest amount of investigative material in world police history. It’s supposed to be even larger than the pre-investigation material on the Kennedy assassination and the investigation of the attack on the jumbo jet over Lockerbie in Scotland.”

“I hear what you’re saying,” Johansson interrupted. “What’s the problem? A lot of it must be entered on computers by now.”

“Obviously, and there’s more and more every day, but it’s not something you just sit down and browse through. We’re talking about roughly a million pages. Most are transcripts of interviews, and there are thousands of those that are tens of pages and sometimes longer. In round numbers, a hundred thousand different documents stored in almost a thousand binders. Not to mention all the boxes where we’ve stored the things you can’t keep in binders. There was an expert in the latest government commission who calculated that even then, and this must have been two years ago, it would have required ten years of full-time work for a qualified investigator simply to scan through the material. If you ask me, I think it would take even longer, and new information is coming in all the time.”

“I hear what you’re saying,” said Johansson, making a slightly dismissive gesture with his right hand. “But some type of sorting out must still be possible, no? If I’m not mistaken, there are tens of thousands of pages of the usual crazy tips. Couldn’t those be set aside?”

“I’m afraid that’s not enough,” Flykt objected. “There are a lot more crazy tips than that. The problem with them too, and you know this as well as I do, boss, is that some may appear convincing to start with. I saw a newspaper interview a while ago with our own professor here at the National Police Board where he maintained that if we suddenly solved the Palme assassination and knew what had happened, it would prove that ninety-nine percent of the whole case file was irrelevant, and that almost everything we’d collected had been directly misleading. For once we were in complete agreement, he and I.”

“That’s a pity,” said Johansson. “To hear that you’re in agreement with such a person, I mean. What I’m trying to say is simply that of course there must be a way to sort the material. For some clever colleagues with fresh eyes. Personally I’ve gotten by well enough over the years with the event description, the most important eyewitnesses, that is, the technical investigation and the forensic report,” Johansson said, counting on his fingers as he spoke, smiling as he held up three of them.

“Besides,” he continued, “there must be a nice summary or two in this case that explains the usual where, when, and how. Even the officers in the uniformed police seem to have understood who the victim was a few minutes after the crime.”

“That’s correct.” Flykt nodded and seemed almost relieved, as if suddenly he was on firmer ground. “Our own perpetrator profile group produced both an analysis of the crime and a profile of the perpetrator in collaboration with the FBI. Besides that there were several other analyses made by external experts that we turned to. Both of the crime itself in its main features and of various details. For example, the murder weapon and the two bullets that were secured at the crime scene. We got quite a bit actually.”

“Of course,” said Johansson, throwing out his hands with the secure conviction of a Bible-thumper from his provincial childhood. “So what are we waiting for?”

As soon as Johansson released his hold on the head of the Palme group, everyone in the room started carefully inching their chairs back, but Johansson ignored their hopes.

“I realize you’re eager to get going, ladies and gentlemen,” said Johansson with a crooked smile, “but before we part company there’s one thing I want to emphasize. A word of warning on the way.” He nodded emphatically and looked at them in turn with a stern expression.

“You must not say a word about this. You may talk with each other as needed in order to do what you should. If for the same reason you need to talk with anyone else, you must first obtain my permission to do so.”

“What do I say to my co-workers?” The head of the Palme group did not look happy. “I mean—”

“Nothing,” Johansson interrupted. “If anyone wonders about anything, you can send him or her to me. You should understand that better than anyone,” he added. “What a hell the media has created for the Palme investigation all these years. I don’t want a lot of other officers running around talking nonsense. How do you think the media gets hold of all the shit they write about? The last thing I want to read in the newspaper when I open my eyes in the morning is that I’ve appointed a new investigation of the assassination of Olof Palme.”

“Which is precisely why I think providing a little information to the people in my group would be good. To avoid a lot of unnecessary talk, I mean.” Flykt looked almost imploring as he said this. “One solution would be to say that we’ve asked Holt, Lewin, and Mattei to look over the case indexing. I mean that sort of work goes on all the time and is often done by colleagues outside the group. Or perhaps it’s a purely administrative overview.”

“Like I said,” said Johansson, “not a word. Send all the curiosity seekers to me so I can slake their thirst for knowledge, and if they’re not satisfied I’m sure I can arrange other duties for them. All of us in this room will meet in a week. Same time, same place. Any questions?”

No one had any questions, and as they were leaving Johansson first nodded curtly at Flykt. Then he smiled broadly at Lisa Mattei, asked for a copy of her typed-up meeting notes, and told her to take care of herself. Holt he completely ignored, and as they left he took Lewin aside.

“There’s one thing that disturbs me about this case,” said Johansson.

“That it may have been wrongly conceived from the start,” Lewin replied, who had been around before and heard Johansson expound on the same text on more than one occasion.

“Exactly,” Johansson agreed. “A lone madman who by pure chance runs into a completely unprotected prime minister and just happens to have a revolver the size of a suckling pig in his pocket. That’s what most people seem to believe, including the majority of our dear colleagues. So—a quiet question from a man in mature middle age: Just how common is that?”

“I understand what you mean,” said Lewin.

“Good,” said Johansson. “Then I’ll see you in a week, and if you happen to get hold of the bastard before that please let me know.”