The sun’s rays were wandering slowly across the room. Gunilla followed them leisurely. He was lying on the floor with no covers, curled up like a little baby in the womb. Slowly, slowly the light made its way up over his shoulder, then hit his chin. The passage of light across Lars Vinge was like a symphony, she thought, a silent symphony. She waited patiently, as usual. The sun found its way up his cheek and eventually nudged at his closed eyes. She could see movement behind the eyelids; he swallowed, opened his eyes, stared out across the floor, closed his eyes, swallowed again.
“Good morning,” she whispered softly.
He saw her sitting on the chair, looking down at him. Lars leaned up, still sitting on the floor, still drowsy, with a Ketogan hangover and as empty as a vacuum.
“What are you doing here?” he managed to croak.
“I’ve been trying to get hold of you, but I never get an answer, I wanted to see how you are.”
He looked at her with hazy eyes.
“How I am?”
“Yes.”
Lars tried to think, how had she gotten in? Had he been followed last night?
“Lars?”
He looked at her, wished he’d had more time, more time to figure out a plan of how to deal with her.
“I’m not feeling so great,” he said quietly.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I’ve probably been working too hard.”
She looked right through him, held up a bottle of pills that she had on her lap.
“What’s this?”
“Just medicine,” he said.
She studied him.
“You’ve got a whole drawer full?”
He didn’t answer that.
“This isn’t ordinary stuff, Lars.… Are you ill?”
He felt like saying Cancer, the late stages. People who were in the late stages of cancer got to do what they liked. No, she already knew everything about him.
“No.”
“So why are you taking Ketogan?”
“That’s my business.”
She shook her head.
“No, not as long as you’re working for me.”
Now he looked into her eyes; they were shut off somehow, empty and dead. As if someone had crawled in behind them and closed the curtains. Had she always had eyes like that? He didn’t know; he just knew that she was there at that moment, that she was lethal, that she probably hadn’t come alone. That his pistol was out of reach. That she may well know that he knew. Maybe she’d found the microphone in Brahegatan. Maybe he was going to die now?
Lars looked at the drugs on her lap. He thought about the time he lied to the priest in Lyckoslanten, how easy it was to lie when you made use of reality. The truth is the best lie.
“Lars? Answer my question.”
He sat on the floor and rubbed his eyes.
“I want to know what you’ve been doing these past few days, I want to know why you’re taking a cocktail of Ketogan, benzo, and anxiety medicine.”
He let time pass.
“Sorry, Gunilla …,” he whispered.
She looked at him intently.
“Sorry for what, Lars?”
“Sorry for letting you down …”
Her calmness turned into a tense curiosity.
“How have you let me down?” Now she was whispering too.
Lars took several deep breaths.
“When I was young …,” he began, “ten, maybe eleven, I was given medicine to help me sleep, drugs. My mom got them on prescription.… I soon became dependent on them. Later on, toward the end of my teenage years, I got help to stop … but the damage was already done. I’ve managed to abstain for most of my adult life. I’ve avoided alcohol, never taken any strong medicines. Recently I sought help for back pain,” Lars went on, “and when the doctor asked I said I was having trouble sleeping. I always have, and, well … I wasn’t really thinking. He prescribed something, painkillers and tranquilizers, and I took them.”
He looked up at her, she was still listening.
“It was nothing terribly dangerous, but it was like pressing a button. It made me happy … it made me happy in a way I hadn’t been since … well, I don’t remember when. My whole system responded to the pills, reacted and accepted them.… Then it just took off. I was hooked after a week or so.… I managed to get hold of stronger substances. I’ve been using them ever since.”
“You said you’d let me down?”
He looked at the floor and nodded almost imperceptibly.
“I haven’t been doing my job properly, I’ve spent the last few days lying here, knocked out.… I called you from here, said I was looking for Sophie, I lied to you.”
Gunilla was looking for truth and bluff at the same time. After a while she relaxed, he could see it.
“It doesn’t matter, Lars,” she said. “It doesn’t matter …,” she repeated.
Gunilla stood up, looked at him, seemed to want to say something more. But instead she started to walk out of the room. Lars watched her go.
“Gunilla,” he said.
She turned around.
“Sorry.”
She considered what he had said.
“I don’t want to lose this job. You gave me a chance … give me another, I’m begging you.…”
She didn’t answer and disappeared into the hall. Lars heard the front door open. Anders Ask walked past the office doorway, smiled at Lars, pretended to shoot him with his forefinger, then followed Gunilla out into the stairwell. The front door closed and the apartment was left in silence.
He lay there until the sound of their footsteps on the stairs had faded. Lars got up, gathered his pills, waited a bit, then left the apartment and made his way to the subway. He traveled around, paranoid, changing trains several times, trying to see if he was being followed. When he was sure he was alone, he went back to the hotel on Strandvägen and hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. He was trembling down to his very marrow, aware that he had just managed to cling to his life by a hairbreadth. Lars realized that time was pressing. He got to work, and began to figure out a plan of how he should proceed.
Leszek was frying bacon.
One arm was strapped up, but he was managing to do everything with the left one. Raimunda was sitting in an armchair reading a book by Annie Proulx, Sonya was asleep on the sofa, Hector was lying on his back in bed, in another dimension, perhaps.
Chopin was playing quietly from a stereo, Raimunda’s choice. Hector should hear beautiful music the whole time, she had said. Sophie listened from the edge of the sofa. It was the Bernstein recording, the Second Piano Concerto … En fa mineur. She had played parts of it herself as a child. She had stopped playing sometime when she was a teenager, she couldn’t remember why.
Sophie got up and went over to Leszek, who was turning the bacon in the pan; he was staring down vacantly into the grease, looking sad. She patted him gently on his healthy shoulder.
“Do you want me to cook?” she asked. He shook his head.
She got plates out of the cupboard, started setting the table, then there was the sound of a car outside. Leszek was quick, pulling the frying pan off the heat, taking his pistol from the spice shelf, and hurrying over to one of the windows. The car door opened, and Aron got out of the driver’s seat. Leszek relaxed, went out, and met him. Sophie watched through the window as they embraced, then fell into conversation, with Leszek doing most of the talking, presumably telling Aron in detail about everything that had happened over the past few days.
Aron came in, hugged Sonya, and exchanged a few words with her. He introduced himself to Raimunda, then went and sat beside Hector, talking quietly to him in Spanish and stroking his hair. He met Sophie’s gaze.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
They left the house and took a narrow sandy path that led up toward the mountains. Aron had his hands in his pockets. They walked on for a while, it got cooler the higher they got. Sophie looked at the ground, the gravel here was different, browner, finer than the gravel at home in Sweden, but there were still a few larger stones. She tried to avoid them as she walked.
“Any more news about your son?”
She shook her head.
“What do the doctors say?”
“I don’t know,” she replied.
He paused for a moment before getting to the point.
“Hector said on the phone that you were to have power of attorney, do you know why?”
She didn’t say anything, just shook her head.
“Me neither. At least not at first.”
Now she looked over at him.
“I’ve come to two conclusions, very different conclusions,” he said.
They walked a bit farther before he went on.
“You’ve seen a lot, you’ve heard things, maybe you’ve understood things you weren’t meant to understand, I don’t know. Maybe Hector realized that we couldn’t just let you go, maybe the power of attorney is a way of keeping you here with us, close, where you can’t do any harm.”
He glanced quickly at her. “That was what I thought at first. Hector knew he was injured.…”
Aron waited a few moments.
“But there could also be another reason,” he said. “I don’t know if this still applied when he called me from the car.…”
A breeze caught her hair. She pushed it back.
“Hector often talked about you, before all this happened.… About what you were like … your qualities. He appreciated you in a way that I realized he’d never appreciated a woman before.”
She looked down at the ground.
“He saw something different in you.”
“What?” she whispered.
Aron shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t know. But he saw something.”
They had gotten a fair way up, and had a view across a valley that stretched hundreds of yards down into dark green vegetation. Aron stopped, resting his eyes on the view.
“He said that you didn’t understand what sort of person you really are.”
The reasoning seemed unclear.
“What sort of talk’s that? That’s just words,” she said.
“No, not when it comes from him.”
He stared at something in the distance.
“He wanted something with you. But I don’t understand what, I still don’t understand exactly what he meant in our last conversation.”
“Do you need to?”
He looked at her.
“Yes, I do.”
There was new sharpness in his eyes. Decisions were being made deep inside.
“I’m putting you in a kind of quarantine until things clear themselves up, or until Hector wakes up and can explain his choice.”
“And what does that mean?”
“The power of attorney gives you a partial right to make decisions about our work. It means that you’ll become initiated into and complicit in what we do, and if you’re complicit, then you’re no threat. Something like that.”
“What about me, what does it mean for me?”
“It means that you’re going to help me. I have to stay here, stay hidden until everything’s settled down a bit.”
“What do I have to do?”
“We can’t let the world think he’s out of the game, that would be disastrous for us and a lot of other people who are dependent on him. You know him, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“He knows you, he says. So you must know him?”
“I think so,” she said cautiously.
“Then you know what he would do?”
Was that something like pleading she saw in Aron? Something beseeching that was peeping out from in there?
“Maybe. But you know him as well, Aron.”
“Yes, but in a different way.… We’ll do this together.”
“And what about in the future?”
He thought.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you know?” she asked.
He looked at her.
“If everything goes to hell for us, you’re coming down with us. Pretty much.”
She thought about his words, it all sounded so absurd.
“Hector has a son,” she said.
Aron nodded. “Lothar Manuel,” he said.
“Why not him? Why not you? Why not Sonya, Leszek, Thierry, Daphne … Ernst?”
Aron met her gaze and shrugged. That was his answer.
She tried to make sense of her thoughts.
“What if I refuse? If I walk away from here and never look back again?”
“That won’t be possible, I’m afraid,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because Hector told me that you were to have power of attorney, and that’s what’s going to happen.”
He shook his head.
“No,” he said in a low voice.
She stared at him. He let her, then she looked away.
“The police know who I am,” she said. “They saw me at the restaurant.”
“That’s a risk we’ll have to take. Those police officers were after our money. They don’t care about you. Leszek will go home with you, he can protect you if necessary.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to stay hidden, and tell you what to do.”
She had a thousand questions, a thousand pleas.
“I’ll give you an introduction into our work. We’ll take a few days here in the mountains to do that, then we’ll see how things develop in Stockholm.” He turned around and began to walk back down the sandy path.
She stood there with thoughts flying around inside her head, unable to settle anywhere. After a while she followed him, walking slowly. Aron stopped some way ahead and waited for her. They walked back side by side.
“They beat up my son, Aron. Ran him down with a car. He’s probably going to be paralyzed for the rest of his life.”
Aron didn’t respond.
“He hadn’t done anything,” she whispered. “It’s not fair.…”
Aron had a folded document in his hand, and held out the power of attorney that Hector had signed. Sophie took the document and put it in her pocket.
They walked the rest of the way back to the house in silence.
Tailing Anders Ask had been simple. After work a quick visit to the 7-Eleven on the corner of Odengatan and Sveavägen to buy an evening paper, drink, and candy, a bit of chat with the girl behind the counter, then a pit stop at the Italian place with checkered tablecloths to pick up a pizza. Then home to his apartment opposite Vanadislunden.
Lars had gotten into the building and taken a photograph of the lock on Anders’s door, an Assa that looked pretty old. The next morning he had found a similar one at a locksmith’s on Kungsholmen, bought it, and practiced picking it back in his hotel room. That turned out to be pretty difficult, it took time even though he had the best tools for the job. He worked until long into the night, wishing he had been born with three hands.
The next day, as the sun rose somewhere over by Djurgården, he managed to get the lock open for the first time. Lars practiced hard all morning, over lunch, and into the afternoon, and finally managed to pick the lock in less than seven minutes.
He got himself ready and headed off to Sveavägen on foot. It was half past three in the afternoon when he stepped in through the door of the building for the second time and took the rickety elevator up to the third floor, pushed the gate back, and stepped out in front of the door to Anders Ask’s apartment.
Anders had two neighbors, Norin and Grevelius. There was no sound from Norin, and a television was buzzing quietly in Grevelius’s apartment. He pulled a hood over his head, took out his tools, got down on his knees on the cold stone floor, took a few deep breaths, and got to work. Lars worked methodically; it all went as it should, the picklocks found their way in and pressed the little notches inside the drum of the lock. A door opened and closed on the floor above and the elevator started to chew its way upward. Lars had to stop, pull out his tools, and hide on the stairs while the elevator made its way down again. But after that he got his seven minutes with the lock. It let out a click.
Lars pulled on his shoe covers, breathing mask, and gloves—then stepped into Anders Ask’s hallway.
The apartment had two rooms plus a relatively large kitchen. He glanced into the living room. A sofa with flattened cushions, a crooked, rickety coffee table from IKEA. A glass cabinet with dusty glass figurines on one shelf. Pictures by famous artists on the walls. An enormous flatscreen television, speakers on the floor, and little treble speakers up by the ceiling. Anders liked his surround sound. Lars went into the bedroom. An unmade bed, closed blinds, a paperback on the bedside table, Arto Paasilinna’s The Year of the Hare. Lars saw a suitcase standing by the wall. He crouched down and opened it. Clothes, passport, money … Anders was planning to take off.
Into the kitchen again. Lars sat down on a chair, the clock on the wall moved slowly, he pulled the mask from his mouth, let it hang from the elastic cord around his neck. The sound of traffic from Sveavägen was soporific and Lars nodded off.
After a couple more hours he woke up when a key was inserted into the lock. The front door opened and then closed again. Anders clearing his throat in the hallway, keys being put on a table, shoes being kicked off, a zipper being pulled down—the slippery sound of nylon as a jacket was taken off. A loud sigh, the smell of freshly made pizza. Steps from the hall. Anders jumped when he saw Lars from the corner of his eye, put his arms out to defend himself, the pizza box landed on the floor.
“What the fuck?! Christ, you scared me!”
Anders stared at Lars, angry and worried at the same time.
“What are you doing here?” He looked around, confused. “How the fuck did you get in?”
Lars was pointing Gunilla’s Makarov at him.
“Come in and sit down.”
Anders hesitated, looked into the barrel, then at the pizza box by his feet. Lars nodded toward a chair; Anders looked bewildered at first, then stepped into the kitchen and sat down hesitantly.
“How are things going with you, Anders?” Lars asked, with the barrel of the gun aimed at Anders’s stomach.
“What did you say?”
Lars didn’t repeat the question. Anders swallowed.
“With what?”
“With everything.”
Anders saw the breathing mask around Lars’s neck.
“It’s all right, I suppose.… I don’t get it, Lars.”
He sounded scared.
“What is it you don’t get?”
“This! What you’re doing here … with a pistol?” Anders tried to smile.
“Oh, you know, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t!”
He suddenly sounded annoyed now.
“Are you angry, Anders?”
Anders held out his hands.
“No, no, sorry, I’m not angry. I’m just … surprised.”
Anders’s submissive smile returned.
“Come on, Lars, what is it? We can sort this out. Please, just put the gun down.”
Lars stared blankly at him, kept the pistol where it was.
“How shall we sort this out?” he asked.
“However you like, you decide,” Anders said desperately.
Lars pretended to think.
“What is it we need to sort out, exactly?”
Anders didn’t understand. “What?”
“What do we need to sort out? You said we could sort this out. What?”
Anders stared at Lars.
“I don’t know, whatever you’re here for.”
“What do you think I’m here for?”
“I don’t know!”
Anders glanced down at Lars’s shoe covers, and his fear rose into his throat.
“Yes, you do.…”
“No, I don’t!” Anders’s voice sounded a bit too high.
Lars let the seconds tick, a long, painful, dramatic pause. “Sara.”
Anders tried to look quizzical.
“Oh? Who’s that?”
Lars stared at Anders.
“Stop it,” he said calmly.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lars.”
Anders was a bad liar when he was frightened. Lars pulled a face to let him know, and weirdly enough that seemed to make Anders relax. He sat silently, glancing out the kitchen window, taking deep breaths.
“It wasn’t me. It was Hasse … and Gunilla gave the order. I had nothing to do with it.”
“What happened?” Lars asked.
Anders’s mouth was dry.
“Sara had worked something out from reading your wall. You’d written everything on a wall.… Hadn’t you?” Lars didn’t answer.
“So she gave the order, Gunilla, I mean. The girl knew everything, even something that Gunilla was involved in before, some girl. Patricia something … something I don’t know about.”
Lars shook his head.
“No, Sara didn’t know anything, she was trying her luck.”
Anders didn’t understand.
“You saw the wall, didn’t you? How the hell could anyone have made any sense of that? There was hardly any notion of coherence there. I wrote it all in a kind of totally wired fucking chaos! She didn’t know anything, I didn’t know anything.…”
“But you do now?”
Lars nodded.
Something almost like pride came over Anders.
“Are you surprised?”
Lars had no answer to that, and shrugged.
“Do you understand how smart we’ve been?”
Lars looked up. “Why didn’t you let me join in?” His voice was almost beseeching.
“We would have, Lars, of course we would. We just had to be certain. But it’s not too late, is it? Come on, we can do this together.”
“But you’ve murdered Sara.”
Anders looked down at the floor.
“OK, Lars, think about this. Gunilla’s our problem. Together we can change all this. You’re nothing on your own, I’ve got access to everything. Put the gun down.… We’ll do it together, Lars, we’ll sort her out once and for all … OK?”
Lars hesitated, thinking, and looked up at Anders.
“How would that work?”
Anders saw an opening, a bit of self-confidence started to creep out. He looked at the pistol, then up at Lars.
“We’ll gather everything we’ve got, put together a plan, report her, you keep quiet about me, I keep quiet about you.…”
“What about Hasse?”
“Up to you, Lars. We could take him out, I can do it for you. Remember, he was the one who killed your girlfriend, not me.”
Lars nodded to himself.
“Yes, that sounds like a good idea.…”
Anders smiled with relief, slapped the palm of his hand on his thigh.
“Good! That’s it, Lars! Christ, we’re going to get her now, together, you and me, a team.”
Anders breathed out, rocking on his chair.
“Where do we start?” Lars asked.
“The important thing is that we mustn’t make Gunilla or Hasse suspicious.… We carry on as usual for a few days, we meet in the evenings, draw up plans, then we pick one and stick to it. This is going to work out fine, as long as we do it together, you and me, Lars!”
Lars hesitantly lowered the gun slightly.
“Sorry I came here like this, Anders, with a gun and everything.”
Anders waved his hand, convinced that his powers of persuasion had worked on Lars Vinge the idiot. But Lars raised the pistol, let it rest against the palm of his left hand for a couple of seconds, then aimed and shot him squarely through his half-open mouth. A loud bang rang out in the kitchen. The bullet tore through Anders Ask’s throat and neck and kept going, into the fridge door behind him. Then the kitchen was totally still. Anders was staring at Lars in astonishment. The chair he had been rocking on ended up in a kind of weightless no-man’s-land, balancing on its two back legs for a moment before gravity got the better of it and it fell backward to the floor, taking Anders Ask with it.
Lars pulled on the face mask, stood up, went over to him, and crouched down. Anders stared at Lars, a trickle of blood running out onto the floor under his head.
“You’re an asshole, Anders Ask, do you think I’m totally stupid?”
Lars could detect a faint smell of burned meat.
“Let’s take a moment to consider the situation.… I live, you die.”
Anders tried to say something, no sound came out, just a mouth moving laboriously, like a fish on dry land.
“I can’t hear you, Anders,” he whispered. “It’ll be straight to hell for you. You’ve killed women. A boy’s lying in the hospital, possibly paralyzed for life. They’ve probably got a special section for people like you down there.”
Lars looked on patiently as Anders Ask’s life ran out onto the linoleum floor. When he was dead Lars stood up, opened the kitchen window, and wiped the gun on a kitchen towel, all the while staring at Anders’s corpse as it lay there. What was he feeling? Regret? No … Liberation? No, he wasn’t feeling anything. Lars turned the kitchen radio on at full volume.
He crouched down beside Anders again, put the dead man’s right hand on the pistol, aimed the barrel at the open window, angled his own hand away from the gun so the flash of powder would hit Anders’s hand as much as possible. Lars fired. The news drowned out the bang, the bullet flew out through the window, shot over Vanadislunden, and kept going, past Eastern Station, finally coming to earth somewhere on Lidingö. Maybe the neighbors would have heard two shots, but that couldn’t be helped.… Witnesses were usually wrong. Every police officer assumed that. Witnesses were basically a bit thick.
He closed the window and looked at Anders’s position in the room, working out how the pistol would most likely have fallen from his hand. He put it on the floor a little way from the body. Then he went into the bedroom, opened Anders’s suitcase, and unpacked it, putting the clothes back in the closet, his passport in a drawer, and pocketing the money, then shut the empty case and slid it under Anders Ask’s bed.
Lars backed out of the apartment, pulled off the latex gloves and face mask, and shut the door behind him.
Lars slept soundly that night, waking up at half past five in the morning. He ordered coffee in his room, didn’t feel any need for food. He waited until eight o’clock before making the call. The man at the other end was dubious, but Lars was insistent.
He had showered and ironed a shirt. The shirt was smooth and unbuttoned as he stood in front of the bathroom mirror and combed his hair into something vaguely neat. He was high, but in a controlled way, and was combing very slowly.…
His shoes were polished, his trousers had been under the mattress all night. He looked respectable, and tried out his face in the mirror, he never had any problems with that when he was high. He practiced an expression. An expression that would be hard to read. Lars came up with something vacant and neutral, buttoned the shirt, took his jacket from the back of the chair and put it on. On his way out he picked up the sports bag from the bed and left the room.
Daylight was dangerous for him. But he had no choice. This had to happen during the day so that his target didn’t suspect anything. He had chosen Mariatorget, an open square that he knew he could get a good view of.
He was standing in the stairwell at the top of a neighboring building, looking down on the square through a pair of binoculars. The time was now 11:44. The meeting was supposed to take place at half past eleven. He scanned the people down below with the binoculars. Mostly mothers with strollers, children on swings, one or two dads with their backs bent, holding hands with their toddlers who were insisting on walking. He looked farther away, toward Sankt Paulsgatan. People who were in a hurry, a group of laughing youths, a few elderly people sitting on benches.
Lars turned the binoculars back toward Hornsgatan, nothing there, either. Cars, people walking around aimlessly, fat tourists from the country eating ice cream by the little kiosk.
He lowered the binoculars, checked his watch—11:48, should he get going? He took a last look at the square.… And there, in the middle of his sweep, a single man on a bench. The man was sitting with one arm along the back of the bench, he had fairly long hair with a bald patch on top. The man turned slightly and Lars saw his cop’s mustache. Hell, that had to be him.
Lars keyed in a number on his cell phone. Put the phone to his ear and watched the man through the binoculars, saw him feel for his cell in his pocket, pull it out, answer.
“Yes?”
“Tommy?”
“Yep.” Almost inaudible.
“I’m running a bit late, five minutes.”
Lars hung up. Tommy remained seated on the bench, glaring at the people in the square. He didn’t call anyone, didn’t give any signal. He just sat there waiting—bored, restless, and hot. Lars scanned around with the binoculars. Looked at the people in the vicinity. Looked between the trees on the far side by the old cinema, saw nothing. It seemed as if Tommy had come alone.
He put the binoculars in the bag and walked back down the stairs. Lars stepped out into the sunlight and headed toward the bench where Tommy was sitting. The next bench was empty, and Lars sat down there. Tommy glanced at him, then looked out across the square again. Lars waited and waited, nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. Tommy sighed and looked at his watch. Lars stood up, went over, and sat down next to him.
“I’m Lars.”
“You’re an arrogant bastard, Lars. Making me sit and wait like this, I don’t like that. What do you want?”
Tommy had a Södermalm accent. Maybe his mom had given birth to him right where they were sitting …?
“I want to talk to you about a few things.”
“Yes, so you said on the phone.… You work for Gunilla, why don’t you talk to her? You’re aware of the chain of command, aren’t you?”
Lars glanced around, a lot of people milling about. He suddenly felt nervous again.
“Can we go somewhere else?”
Tommy snorted.
“Forget it, I’m sitting here on overtime.… Come on, spit it out, or I’m leaving.”
Lars pulled himself together, looked at Tommy. Doubt hit him like a tidal wave. Was this the right man to talk to, or was he about to make the mistake of his life?
“I’ve got information,” Lars said.
“About what?”
“About Gunilla.”
The frown on Tommy’s forehead was fairly set. “Oh?”
“Gunilla isn’t running any investigations, it’s all a bluff,” he said in a low voice.
Tommy stared hard at him.
“What makes you say that?”
“Because I’ve been working for her for the past few months.”
Tommy looked at Lars sternly.
“You don’t think four dead in Vasastan counts as an investigation?”
“There’s an investigation because of the murders, but she was never interested in that.”
“What do you mean?” Tommy asked.
Lars wanted to give him the whole picture.
“It started when we bugged the nurse.”
Tommy’s irritation was still visible on his forehead.
“What nurse?”
Lars was tense. “Wait, let me go on.… Hector Guzman was in the hospital, Gunilla was there, and started to take an interest in a nurse on the ward who had evidently developed some sort of relationship with Guzman. Either way, we bugged the nurse’s home, Anders Ask and I.”
Tommy was listening, and the frown of annoyance gradually became one of curiosity.
“I was instructed to watch the nurse, Gunilla was certain she and Hector would end up having a relationship, which they did. As usual, she was right, but nothing came out of it, not from the bugging, or the wider surveillance.”
Tommy was about to say something, but Lars continued.
“As time went on, Gunilla got more and more stressed when nothing useful emerged. She called in an old riot-squad gorilla from the Arlanda Police, Hasse Berglund, and turned him into her weapon, together with Erik and Anders. As her frustration grew, she reacted in a very odd way.”
“How?” Tommy asked in a low voice.
Lars looked out across the square.
“She went for the nurse’s son.”
Tommy wasn’t with him.
“Hasse and Erik brought him in for questioning, a faked-up interview. They’d concocted a story about the boy forcing himself on a girl, rape.…”
Tommy didn’t know what to think.
“That way they’d have a hold on her.… I think they were trying to get her to shop Hector in return for her son’s problem disappearing, something like that.”
Tommy was thinking.
“So did she do it?”
Lars shrugged.
“Don’t know … I don’t think so, I don’t think she had anything to tell.”
Tommy slapped his right thigh.
“OK, this is terrible, Lars, if what you’re saying is true. Gunilla’s always used unconventional methods. But now she’s gone too far, no question. I’ll talk to her. Thanks for contacting me.”
Tommy stood up and held out his hand. “Let’s keep this between us, OK?”
“Sit down, that’s only the start of it.”
Lars gave Tommy Jansson everything he had, from start to finish. It took twenty minutes.
Tommy was glowering. His face had changed.
“Fucking hell …,” he whispered.
He was no longer stroking his mustache, and was scratching hard at his stubbly cheeks instead.
“Holy fuck …”
He stared at Lars.
“And you’ve got all this on tape, you say?”
“I’ve got recordings where she discusses Sara’s murder, with Anders Ask and Hasse Berglund present. The murder of Patricia Nordström is also mentioned. There are also recordings of the conversations about how to frame the nurse’s son, how they ran him down, about the illegal surveillance, her whole method of working. There are notes and accounts detailing the numerous millions that she, her brother, and Anders Ask have stolen from the investigations they’ve worked on over the years.”
Tommy swore quietly to himself for the tenth time.
“And the boy? Is he still in the hospital?”
Lars nodded.
“He’s in a bad way.”
Tommy sighed, trying to fit the puzzle together.
“What are you going to do?” Lars asked.
The question seemed to hit Tommy Jansson hard, as if he didn’t want to hear it.
“I don’t know.… Right now, I don’t know,” he said quietly.
“You probably do know.”
He looked at Lars. “Oh?”
“She’s a murderer, a criminal … and a police officer. You’re her boss, so she’s your responsibility.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The fact that you’ve got two choices.”
“And they are?”
Lars waited for a couple of elderly people to walk past.
“Either you arrest her for murder, extortion, making illegal threats, breaking and entering, impeding the course of justice, bugging … well, the whole lot. And you as her boss will go down with her. At a guess you’d get caught for something once this gets examined by every police officer and journalist in the whole country. No one’s going to believe that you were completely ignorant.”
“But I am. I didn’t know any of this.”
“Do you think anyone’s going to care about that?”
Tommy leaned back against the bench.
“Option two, then?” he asked quietly.
Lars had been waiting for him to ask.
“Option two is to let her go.”
Lars leaned forward.
“That way you avoid problems, questions, responsibility. She just resigns. Age, grief at Erik’s death, I don’t know. But she has to disappear from here, go far away. In return for keeping quiet about this, I want her job … or something better in National Crime. I want you as my immediate superior. I don’t want you looking over my shoulder while I work. And after a few years I want to be promoted.…”
Something hard came over Tommy.
“You’re a beat cop who for some inexplicable reason ended up in Gunilla’s group. You have no experience, no track record, nothing. How the hell am I going to explain that when people ask?”
“You’ll think of something.”
Tommy bit his lip.
“How do I know what you’re saying is true? Maybe you’re just sitting here making it all up.”
Lars pushed the sports bag toward Tommy.
“Take a look for yourself and get back to me, preferably this evening,” Lars said.
Tommy was trying to think. Lars stood up and walked away. Tommy watched him go, then he picked the bag up and headed in the opposite direction.