Now things were getting serious for real. The revenge they had just achieved did not seem sweet at all, and it could get even worse. A halfway mild whack on the head was the sort of thing you could get away with, but now they were talking murder. Or at least homicide. Or at the very least, involuntary manslaughter.
Ole Mbatian enjoyed learning new things on his journey.
‘I’m familiar with murder, and homicide must be murder but not on purpose. But involuntary what now?’
‘Manslaughter. Like homicide, but even less on purpose,’ Jenny said.
Ole Mbatian weighed the import of all three.
‘I’m leaning towards homicide,’ he said.
Hugo blew up. He said that it didn’t seem Ole Mbatian understood what a serious situation they were in. They were all sitting around being murderers, every one!
‘Homiciders, don’t you think?’ said Ole. ‘Or manslaughterers.’
Jenny and Kevin were sitting next to each other, feeling the exact same feelings: relief, satisfaction, deep concern and incredible guilt all at once. Hugo was getting off easier, in an emotional sense: he managed to keep full focus on how they would get out of this. Ole Mbatian the Younger had seen worse. His main issue at the moment was the realization that they no longer had any lingonberries to accompany the cornflakes they’d bought. He considered asking the adman whether there were any eggs to go along with the caviar in a tube that was in the fridge for tomorrow morning, but something told him that question could wait.
Hugo’s creative mind was working hard. It was one thing that Sweet Sweet Revenge Ltd had devoted a lot of time and money to a loss-making project. Now the case was closed, which left them to make sure everything would end up as bad as it was, rather than getting much worse.
‘Right now the most important thing is for Jenny, Kevin and me to remain unknown to the police.’
This reminded Ole Mbatian that he had a message from Inspector Carlander. He and the inspector had agreed to meet at the police station along with Kevin the next morning.
‘We decided to meet at ten thirty, if I recall correctly. It’s possible that I don’t recall at all, but I don’t typically recall wrong once I remember.’
Much of what the Maasai said took twice as long as necessary.
‘Ten thirty is the same thing as half past ten,’ Ole went on. ‘I promised to show up with him.’
‘Not on your life,’ said Hugo.
‘A man should keep his word,’ said Ole.
Inspector Carlander stuck a TV dinner into the microwave. It was actually too late for Salisbury steak with mashed potatoes. It was past ten at night, but he needed comfort food.
As his retirement approached, he found himself returning ever more often to what he’d actually accomplished, mixed with a guilty conscience over what, during recent years, he had not bothered to accomplish. Furthermore, he’d skived off Spanish for the past week. It was like he couldn’t see the value in it or anything else. If a Spaniard turned up he could say his El perro está bajo la mesa, that the dog was under the table. But what if it wasn’t? Or what if it was a cat? Or, for that matter, what if the Spaniard turned out to be Portuguese? Or, worst of all, if the bastard knew English?
Carlander was aware that his musings verged on depression. Three days of work left. And then what? Even more Spanish? Why?
The phone rang. At this hour? The superintendent!
‘Hello, did I wake you?’
‘No, I’m eating Salisbury steak with lingonberries.’
‘Interesting.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Someone killed the goat-fucker today. With a jar of lingonberries.’
‘Am I a suspect?’
‘Oh, lay off.’
Until very recently, Carlander had had reason to close the case of the portrait-counterfeiting art dealer. Good reason, in fact. For one thing, it wasn’t illegal to paint in the same style as a world-renowned colleague. The law-twisting part only came in if you attached that colleague’s signature and tried to sell the paintings under false pretences.
And Alderheim had not done so.
For another thing, it was suddenly entirely possible that the paintings were authentic, and that meant there weren’t even any malicious intentions of which to suspect Alderheim.
For the third, fourth and fifth things, there was nothing illegal about sex toys, bags of flour, or keeping unusual pets in the cellar.
There was a sixth aspect as well. Among the few charges Victor Alderheim continued to deny after admitting to everything else, was the idea that he had ever called Bukowskis. If the trustworthy representative for Private Sales had been fooled by a prank caller, who was it and why? Apparently someone who wished Alderheim ill; Carlander imagined that there might be a few of those around.
Still, on the final line of his equations, Carlander had written: Close! There was no apparent crime upon which to hang this mess.
Until very recently.
For now Victor Alderheim was dead. What’s more, he’d been killed outside his own art gallery, brought down with the help of a jar of lingonberries.
The Maasai who said he had owned the paintings but had randomly sold them to Alderheim had directed the police to his Swedish son Kevin to find answers to the question of why the paintings had suddenly turned up in a Stockholm cellar. Kevin, for his part, had neither surname nor personal identity number, at least not that his father the Maasai knew of.
Until very recently, Carlander would not have found it more than vaguely interesting to meet Kevin and ask a few questions. The conversation would take place the next day at ten thirty. This was in conflict with the morning coffee break, but sometimes you had to grin and bear it.
Until very recently, again.
For now there was a murder to prop everything up.
Carlander tossed the Salisbury steak, the mashed potatoes, and – above all – the lingonberries into the bin, untouched.
To say that Hugo slept on it would be an exaggeration. That night, he didn’t get much sleep at all. But still, it was enough to see things with sufficient clarity. There was not a chance that Kevin would be able to explain to Inspector Carlander how the Irma Stern paintings ended up behind the closed doors of the premises where the owner was found dead a few days later. It was just as easy to rule out that he could deny knowledge of all of this, since his father the Maasai had been kind enough to direct the question to his son. The same Maasai who would sit at Kevin’s side during the questioning. An armed grenade would have felt safer.
‘I want you to listen to me carefully,’ he said at breakfast.
‘Can you pass the caviar in a tube, Kevin?’ said Ole Mbatian.
Hugo gave the medicine man a look, and Kevin another, before he went on with what he had to say.
Both Ole and Kevin must immediately leave the country. And head straight to Kenya. Without visiting Carlander. If the police didn’t have conclusive evidence already, they would need someone who provided incorrect answers to their curious questions. Without those, they might, in the best case, tire of the matter after a few months or a year.
‘You have to stay there until things calm down.’
Kevin nodded sadly.
‘What about me?’ said Jenny.
She wasn’t about to export her husband-to-be and end up alone.
Hugo realized in that instant that all three troublesome elements could vanish to another continent that very day. With that, he might be on his way to getting his life back, to starting over from the moment before Jenny and Kevin stepped into his office with their stories.
Getting. His. Life. Back.
So why wasn’t he satisfied?
Immediately after breakfast, just hours before their departure, Kevin realized that he didn’t have a valid passport. His old one had expired a few days earlier.
Hugo swore. Couldn’t something at some point just go smoothly for once?
Still, it might be okay. First a new passport for Kevin; after all, you could get provisional ones in just an hour or two. Then they would have to stay far away from that inspector until they were on the first flight they could find out of the country. From that moment on, and until the end of time, Hugo planned to have nothing to do with art in any form.
The adman put Kevin in a taxi, destination passport office, while the others packed their bags and the car. When the passportless one had completed his errand, he would call to be picked up.
Hugo thought extensively, and mostly cleverly.
But he wasn’t infallible.
The one thing he didn’t know, apropos the decision he’d just made, was that if you needed a new passport for a same-day departure you had to go to the passport police at Arlanda Airport, not the passport office in the city.
The second thing was that the passport office shared a wall with the police station where a certain Inspector Carlander was sitting, on his third-to-last workday, and waiting for a visit – from Kevin and his father.
The third thing Hugo didn’t know was that you can’t provide proof of identity with an expired passport alone if you need a new one. Kevin didn’t know this either, but that was of less significance for what was about to occur. Or, to put it another way:
Things went so badly anyway that it didn’t make a difference.
As Kevin stepped into the passport office to take care of business, Hugo briefed everyone else. They would, as mentioned, immediately make their way to the medicine man’s remote village on the savanna and remain hidden there until Hugo got in touch to let them know that the danger had passed. If they did as he said, they would successfully get away with murder, homicide, or involuntary manslaughter, whichever the prosecutor elected to call it.
Jenny and Kevin had already resigned themselves to the fact that they must emigrate, but Ole Mbatian thought there were alternatives to simply fleeing.
‘Such as?’
‘Back home we have a saying.’
‘Oh, really?’ said Hugo, who had no desire to know.
‘We like to say it’s better to act than to react.’
Jenny lit up.
‘We say that in Sweden too! Fantastic.’
‘It sure is,’ said Hugo. ‘That changes everything.’
‘It does?’ said Ole Mbatian.
He understood neither rhetorical questions nor sarcasm.
The medicine man went on.
‘The last time I involuntarily manslaughtered, we gave ten kilos of dried meat and a spare tyre to the policeman who was sent to the scene. I don’t think he cared much about the meat, but the tyre was almost new. He closed the inquiry and it hasn’t been opened again in the forty years since.’
The adman asked if Ole had just suggested they contact Inspector Carlander with a bribe.
‘That’s the word I was looking for.’
Hugo was certain that no spare tyre in the world could make Carlander forget what he might potentially know. Now it was about keeping him from knowing it in the first place. The best way to avoid that was to keep him uninformed. And the best way to keep him uninformed was never to meet him.
Just then, the business phone rang. Jenny answered.
‘Hi, it’s Kevin. I’m waiting for Inspector Carlander. He wants to meet with you and Ole too.’
‘But you were going to the passport office!’
‘That’s where they arrested me.’
The meeting between Ole Mbatian, Kevin and Inspector Carlander was scheduled to begin at ten thirty. According to Hugo’s original plan, they should by that point have started on their journey to Arlanda and out of the country well before Carlander realized what was going on.
Now, it happened to be about ten twenty when the alarm went off at the passport office and Kevin was arrested. And it was almost ten thirty on the dot when he was brought through the doors of the police station-slash-remand prison.
Carlander was already in the lobby to meet the Maasai and his son. He was more than a bit surprised when the son showed up with handcuffs but without a Maasai.
‘What’s going on here?’ he asked the two colleagues who were shoving the delinquent ahead of them.
‘Suspected fraud or forgery or something,’ said one of the officers. ‘Was trying to obtain a passport on improper grounds.’
He didn’t know much more than that, nor did he want to. His job was just to get hooligans off the street. That was enough for him.
But Carlander had put in years on the job. Once he’d ascertained that Kevin was Kevin, he said:
‘Remove the cuffs. I’ll take responsibility for this guy.’
His colleague shrugged. If old Carlander wanted to land himself in the shit, that was his problem. He did as the inspector said, handed over the suspect’s passport in a sealed bag, and went on his way.
Carlander invited Kevin to his office.
‘Would you like anything to drink?’
Kevin said he was just fine and could hear for himself how silly that sounded.
The inspector asked the young man to tell him what was going on, to explain why he had arrived at their meeting accompanied by handcuffs instead of his father the Maasai.
Kevin told him.
He came to the passport office to renew his passport. He provided his old passport as identification. The alarm went off. He was arrested.
That was about it.
Carlander gave a hmm. He took the passport from the sealed bag and opened it.
‘Kevin Beck,’ he said. ‘Not Mbatian.’
‘I’m thinking about changing it.’
‘I see you have a personal identity number as well. Look at that, twelve digits.’
Kevin was a little confused, but he sat quietly as the inspector typed at his keyboard.
‘I’ll be damned.’
Kevin wondered what was going on.
‘I see here that you’re dead.’
Shostakovich apparently once said that only someone who still has reason to hope can feel despair. That was about where Hugo found himself. Everything seemed to be over. There was no more than a small chance that any of them would make it past this. Not least considering the material Hugo had to work with. And here he was primarily thinking of the Maasai.
But curling up to die was not an option. Not yet. In the car on the way to the police station, he made one last attempt.
‘Ole, I know you greatly value the truth.’
‘That’s true,’ said the medicine man.
‘Still, I’m going to get down on my bare knees and beg you.’
‘You’re going to get down on what now?’
‘My knees. I’m going to beg you to lie as much as you possibly can to Inspector Carlander. Don’t try to bribe him. Just lie. As much as you can.’
‘Well, you said it. On your bare knees.’
There was no need to beg Jenny. She was sitting in the passenger seat, quiet and sad. Imagining what awaited them. When they were almost there, though, she managed to speak.
‘Do you have any tips, Hugo? For how best we can lie?’
He didn’t, actually. But still, he said:
‘Victor Alderheim is dead? God, that’s terrible. You’d be hard-pressed to find a nicer person.’
Jenny nodded. The question was, which was worse? Life in prison, or saying that?
Hugo dropped Jenny and the Maasai off about a block from the police station he so strongly disliked. He wished them luck and asked if Ole understood how important it was to say anything but the truth on this particular day. The medicine man nodded. It might be exciting to try something new.
After Jenny and Ole signed in at the lobby, they were led to a waiting room, where Kevin was already seated.
‘Where’s the inspector, then?’ said Ole Mbatian. ‘The one whose name I almost remember?’
‘He’ll be here soon. I’ve only spoken briefly with him so far.’
‘How did you end up here?’ Jenny asked.
Kevin didn’t quite know. First he had queued at the passport office, and then he queued a little more. When it was his turn, he produced his old passport and asked for a new one. Then he was informed that he needed another valid form of ID. He said he didn’t have any, the woman at the window typed something on her computer – and then the alarm went off. The doors closed, two guards arrested him, the police arrived, and … well, it wasn’t a long journey to the police station.
‘But you don’t look arrested,’ said Jenny.
‘That’s all thanks to the inspector. He says it’s not possible to detain dead people. According to his computer, I’m in that category.’
‘I thought it was the art dealer we killed,’ said Ole Mbatian.
Jenny shushed him and asked Kevin to continue.
When Carlander was finished sighing over what he’d just discovered about Kevin, he said it was time to get to the bottom of this, once and for all. He wanted to immediately summon not only Ole, but also his friend, the one he’d met so briefly in the lobby the day before.
‘He said that anyone who was a friend of Stockholm’s resident Maasai must have something to contribute. He even knew your name, Jenny.’
‘I know. Ole was kind enough to share it with him. Then what happened?’
‘Then he said it was time for his break. And he brought me here.’
A moment of silence ensued. It was interrupted by Kevin:
‘What did Hugo have to say about all this?’
‘That we should lie as much as we can,’ said Ole Mbatian. ‘Not bribe, just lie.’
‘But how?’
Apparently, Ole listened more than one might expect.
‘The angry man is dead? Oh my God, that’s awful. He was such a good and lovely person.’
The morning coffee break was over. Two and a half days left until retirement.
‘Everyone’s here, I see. Please, step into my office.’
Carlander began by pouring a glass of water for each of the three across the desk, and one for himself, as was his routine.
‘Cheers, and welcome,’ he said, and voilà, he had fingerprints for all three.
Not that the inspector had any particular suspicions, but now that was done.
Carlander’s main goal for this meeting was to find out how the oil paintings by Irma Stern had ended up at Victor Alderheim’s place. The art dealer himself seemed to have no clue, and the former owner, Ole Mbatian, had referred the question to his son, Kevin. But to discuss this without first talking about the latest developments would be too odd.
‘Victor Alderheim is dead,’ he said, and saw three stony faces in a row.
‘God, that’s awful,’ said Jenny.
Part of her felt that way. Two other parts felt something else.
‘A lovely man,’ said Ole Mbatian.
His entire being meant the opposite.
Kevin said nothing. Carlander sensed that something was a little off.
‘Why don’t we start with you Kevin, could you tell me what your relationship to Alderheim is, or rather, was? Your father Ole said at one point that I should ask you how those two oil paintings ended up in his cellar.’
‘He was my guardian for a number of years,’ Kevin said quietly.
Oh dear. Carlander had sensed wrong. Clearly the boy was upset. What the inspector had worked out so far was that Kevin’s last name was not Mbatian, like his father, but Beck, like his deceased mother. She had been dead for seven years; Kevin himself had been reported missing just over five years ago – and declared dead a day or so after he returned to Sweden. The one who reported him missing must have been his former guardian. Who was now dead himself, for real. And Carlander had just thrown this in poor Kevin’s face. He offered his condolences and apologized for his clumsiness.
What was the plan again? Kevin thought. Lie as much as possible.
‘How did he die? Was he sick?’
‘No, he was a victim of grave assault. We don’t yet know by whom. The indirect cause of death seems to have been a blow on the temple with a glass jar. He was attacked outside his gallery.’
Then Inspector Carlander was struck by something he’d noticed much earlier when he was considering the Alderheim case. He hit a few keys on his computer and his vague mental image was confirmed.
‘Alderheim was divorced. His ex-wife’s name is Jenny Alderheim. There are quite a few Jennys in our country, but a long police career has taught me to dig where I stand. Would I be correct in guessing that it’s you?’
He looked at Jenny, who nodded.
‘My beloved Victor,’ she said. ‘He didn’t want me anymore.’
Ole Mbatian had never lied before, except to his wives, his children, the chief, and the smith’s sister. It seemed like fun.
‘There was nothing but good in that man,’ he said.
Carlander turned his gaze on the Maasai.
‘Didn’t you call him “unpleasant” last time?’
‘But that was then, my dear Inspector.’
‘It was yesterday.’
‘There you go. It reminds me of a girl from my youth, the girl from the hut next door. For a long time I thought she was only prickly and troublesome, but then one day we were married. This isn’t a terrific example, now that I think about it, because the prickliness and troublesomeness remained. What I think I mean is that you should have been there with me and the art dealer at the restaurant after the last time you and I met. We had such a wonderful time. And so much fun! They had sticks to eat with, can you imagine? We shared a hearty laugh over that.’
Two and a half days.
Carlander backed up to his original question. He was done grieving Alderheim’s death on behalf of the others.
‘Exactly how did those paintings end up with the now-deceased?’
He looked at Kevin, who, in the midst of this unfolding nightmare, took a certain amount of inspiration from his father Ole. Speaking first and thinking later sometimes worked for him. He decided to try the same thing.
‘Victor was like a father to me. He took care of me, gave me an apartment in Bollmora, and often surprised me with pizza. Each time he came, we would sit there for hours, talking about art. The last time, if I recall correctly, the Grünewald-Hjertén couple came up. The pair of them endured quite a bit of criticism in their day. For him, because he was an expressionist and a Jew. For her, because she was an expressionist and depressed. In fact, they lobotomized the Hjertén woman so she would think the better of things. But she died instead.’
‘Please answer the question,’ said Carlander.
‘What was it? Right, I brought the paintings with me when I came home from Kenya. I wanted to surprise Victor and hid them in the cellar when he wasn’t looking.’
This was the best idea he could come up with.
‘So you entered the art gallery when neither he nor anyone else was looking, you went down to the cellar, put up two paintings, and left, still without being discovered?’
Kevin could tell this didn’t seem plausible. Not until Jenny added:
‘Meanwhile I distracted Victor with my own issues. He had started talking about increasing my alimony, but I didn’t want his money – I wanted him. We were discussing that as Kevin snuck in and out.’
‘How much was he paying in alimony?’
‘Nothing.’
‘And that’s what he wanted to increase?’
‘Well, it would have been hard to decrease,’ said Ole Mbatian.
Two and a half days. Soon, only two. The inspector soldiered on.
‘Victor reported you missing, presumed dead,’ he said.
‘Well, could he have presumed anything different?’ Kevin said, searching frantically for a reasonable way to continue.
‘En-Kai,’ said Ole Mbatian.
‘What’s that?’
‘The Great God. Kevin came to find himself. What he found was me and the Great God. Through Him, you can be born again. But you must leave the old ways behind.’
Kevin was on board now.
‘So I called my guardian and said farewell. I might have said farewell to life, but I meant my old life, the person I was before.’
‘Victor was inconsolable,’ Jenny recalled.
‘And how are things between you and En-Kai these days?’ the inspector inquired.
‘Thanks for asking. I suppose things have developed into more of what you might call a friendship relation. I feel comfortable wandering between worlds.’
‘I would like to emphasize, in this context, that En-Kai does not demand circumcision,’ said Ole Mbatian.
‘Oh, is that so,’ said Inspector Carlander.
Two days. And a bit.
‘So, Mr Mbatian, you encountered Victor Alderheim yesterday afternoon, after you and I had our meeting?’
‘First the inspector, then the art dealer. What a super afternoon.’
‘Kevin and I were at the restaurant too,’ said Jenny. ‘A pleasant time, like he said.’
Inspector Carlander took out the document he’d just received from his superintendent.
‘And during that pleasant dinner, you signed this?’
‘Dinner, lunch, or something in between,’ said Ole Mbatian.
The inspector said that the medicine man could call their gathering whatever he liked. The important part now was the bill of sale. Had Mr Mbatian signed it, or was the signature a forgery?
Ole looked at it and spoke the truth for the first time in a while.
‘Sure, I signed it. I was happy to! Or maybe not happy, exactly, but we Maasais keep our word. Paper and pen seem unnecessary. But when in Rome. If brown leaves with milk is on the menu, so be it.’
‘Leaves?’
‘Cornflakes,’ said Jenny.
Could the inspector muster the strength for another round? He must.
‘After this early dinner – or late lunch! – Alderheim went to his art gallery and was killed just outside it. Where were you all at that point?’
‘Please, Inspector,’ said Kevin. ‘We only just found out … what time did this horrific event take place?’
‘Sometime in the late afternoon or early evening. He can’t have had time to do much else between eating and dying.’
‘Then I expect we were on our way to Lidingö,’ said Jenny, regretting the words as soon as they had left her mouth.
‘What were you doing there?’
Yes, what were they doing there?
Ole Mbatian decided to buy the other two some time.
‘En-Kai is love and the sun, did I mention that?’
‘What?’
‘He lives in Kirinyaga, the mountain he created with his own hands. Many people believe that in the beginning of time he married the moon goddess Olapa, and they had Gikuyu and Mumbi, the first two people, who in turn had nine daughters, can you imagine? I only had eight, but then again, I’m no god. Just a medicine man.’
‘What does this have to do with anything?’
Kevin was done thinking by now.
‘Victor loved pizza, you know, he would surprise me with it back home in Bollmora. There’s supposed to be a wonderful pizzeria on Lidingö, right by the water, so we were heading there.’
Hugo talked about it nonstop, but Kevin refused to go. Pizza: never again.
‘But hadn’t you just eaten?’
Ole Mbatian had a certain talent for this.
‘Eaten? Inspector, have you ever tried to eat with sticks? I was as hungry after the meal as I was before it.’
‘So you went to Lidingö and ate pizza?’
‘No,’ said Jenny. ‘We changed our minds and went home to Bollmora.’
‘And now here we are,’ said Kevin.
‘Why did you need a new passport?’
‘My old one had expired.’
‘Are you planning to travel somewhere?’
‘We’re thinking about going to Kenya with Ole. If you allow it, of course, Inspector.’
Three days from now they could do whatever they liked. But in the meantime … he needed to know more. But what?
Right, in Alderheim’s jacket pocket the police had discovered an old boarding pass for flights from Nairobi to Frankfurt to Stockholm. Kenya was, of course, Ole Mbatian’s stomping ground. Could Kevin or Ole explain what Alderheim had been doing there, especially while, as far as Carlander understood, the two of them were here?
Kevin had really got into the swing of lying.
‘It was so unfortunate. I called Jenny from Nairobi and asked her to tell Victor I would be on my way home as soon as I scraped together enough money for the ticket. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that he thought I was dead. He got all worked up and came down to see me and lend a hand. Before he got there, I was already here. I managed to sell Papa Ole’s gold necklace in Kenya, and that’s how I got the money.’
‘Gold necklace?’ said Ole.
He’d never owned such a thing. But then he realized that nothing was for real anymore.
Jenny leapt in to distract the interrogator.
‘One of the best things about Victor was his big heart and his spontaneous ways.’
It felt dreadful to say.
The inspector missed the bit about the necklace. He was lost in his thoughts about the time his ex-wife got so upset with him because he didn’t meet her at Arlanda when she came home after a fourteen-day conference in New York. Perhaps someone who flew to Africa and back on a similar errand had healthier ideas about how to nurture a relationship.
Carlander recommended that Kevin contact the Tax Authority and ask them to return him to the realm of the living. In the meantime, he should avoid trying to get a new passport, because he’d probably be arrested again.
Then he suggested that this informal questioning could be over with.
‘Just one more thing. When you snuck into the cellar with the paintings, Kevin, did you by any chance see a goat?’
‘No.’
‘Or any inflatable naked rubber women? Bags of what looked like heroin?’
‘No.’
Carlander didn’t want to prolong this meeting any further. Next up was lunch, afternoon coffee, and a quick visit to the pathologist. If he kept the coffee break on the short side he would have time to make a list of suspects as well. He wouldn’t rule out including one or more of the people in his office right this second.
‘With that, I’ll say thank you for this enlightening conversation. I will be delving deeper into the circumstances surrounding Victor Alderheim’s death, and I would like you all to remain available for follow-up questions.’
‘Of course,’ said Kevin.
‘Absolutely,’ said Jenny.
‘It will be a pleasure to be of assistance,’ said Ole Mbatian the Younger.
Hugo was sitting in the car two blocks from the police station. It wasn’t likely that any of the three would be released, but it was still possible. At least temporarily. In which case, they knew where he was waiting.
No more than half an hour had passed, but it felt like an eternity. Would Kevin and Jenny manage to keep Hugo out of it in all the interrogations? He wasn’t as worried about the Maasai. He couldn’t tell Lidingö from Bollmora, and he probably didn’t even know Hugo’s name, or at least nothing past his first name. Then again, that would be bad enough.
His phone rang. Had the police found him already?
It was Malte.
‘This isn’t a good time. I’m busy. Can I call you back?’
His big brother didn’t listen.
‘She kicked me out,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘Karolin. Who the hell do you think?’
This was a conversation Hugo really didn’t want to have. And certainly not right now. Malte went on:
‘Can I stay with you tonight?’
As if there weren’t already enough people staying at his place.
Malte and Karolin had met in a hospital corridor eight years earlier. She was a doctor as well, an ear, nose and throat specialist. In this way, she and the eye doctor really completed one another.
Karolin already had a house on Lidingö, not far from where Malte had grown up. After three years, her boyfriend moved in, and there he stayed. It wasn’t all that important to get married, and kids could wait.
The years passed. Their relationship had lost its spark, but it worked. Malte and Karolin had sort of merged together, and on the whole it felt pretty good.
Thought Malte.
At which point Karolin went to Sundsvall for a conference and hooked up with a urologist. The world’s funniest and most cheerful urologist. She came straight home to Malte and told him. She suggested that he move out, for everyone’s sake. After all, the house was hers. She strongly preferred that he pack his bags at once, because the urologist was coming by after work. It might be awkward for all three of them to hang out on the couch, watching Solsidan and eating popcorn. Didn’t he think?
‘A urologist?’ said Hugo.
He didn’t know what else to say.
‘I don’t have anywhere to live now, Hugo! Don’t you get it? She kicked me out!’
‘Yes, so you said.’
At that moment, he spotted Jenny, Kevin and the Maasai walking towards the car. All three of them. It was like a mirage.
‘Like I said, I’m swamped here. But of course you can stay with me. The couch in the living room is free. You know where to find the key. See you later.’
Hugo was certain that a greater miracle was not possible. Jenny, Kevin and the medicine man were all sitting in the car.
‘How on earth? What happened? What did Carlander say?’
‘That we should remain available,’ said Jenny.
‘Available?’
That was the last thing they would be.
None of the three had been remanded, or even officially named a suspect of any crime. And Hugo himself remained under the radar.
But they had no way of knowing what Carlander would find as he continued his murder investigation, which had likely hardly even begun. Like, for instance, the medicine man’s fingerprints on the lingonberry jar, Hugo suddenly realized.
‘I sleep with my gloves on,’ said Ole. ‘I took them off for a moment while we were chatting with the inspector, the one whose name is something. I thought someone who wants to appear as innocent as a leopard cub would do best to show his bare hands. But during the lingonberry affair they were where they were.’
Imagine that, another minor miracle. Of course, that didn’t mean there was any reason not to stick to their original plan: Jenny, Kevin and the Maasai would vanish to Kenya as soon as possible. Their top priority, the next morning, would be to convince the Tax Authority of Kevin’s continued and ongoing existence.
‘By the way, we’ve got another problem on our plates. Karolin kicked Malte out.’
‘Who’s Karolin?’ said Jenny.
‘And Malte?’ said Kevin.
‘That’s a lot of names,’ said Ole Mbatian.
Inspector Carlander’s third-to-last afternoon at work turned out to be the most intense in many years. He began by visiting Victor Alderheim – or rather, Pathologist Eklund – in the morgue. Not that Carlander expected to learn more than he already knew, but this was what he had always done back when he actually did his job, and old habits die hard.
The cause of death, of course, was listed as a brain bleed that had robbed Alderheim of his ability to breathe.
‘Respire or expire,’ said Eklund with a smile.
Carlander had never liked him.
‘And what was the cause of the brain bleed?’
‘Blunt trauma to the head. With an object. A jar of lingonberries, I’d say. Felix brand, raw sugared, 410 grams. Our friend here has lingonberry spatter on his face and in his hair.’
‘Why Felix raw sugared in particular?’ Carlander asked, falling into Eklund’s trap.
‘Well, how should I know? Will you never learn, Carlander?’
Just over two days left.
The meeting was a waste of time; he gained nothing but a bad mood. The inspector was bolstered by the thought, though, that he had likely had his last ever dealings with a corpse, not counting his own, when his time came.
Carlander skipped his coffee break to make it home well before his workday was officially over. He took a cup of coffee to his office and started on a list of suspects, together with possible motives.
First there was the unknown spontaneous violent actor X. No one planned to assault someone with lingonberries. Nor did anyone walk around town with jars of lingonberries in their pockets. Thus X must have been grocery shopping right before the spontaneous act, for instance at the store a few hundred metres north of the crime scene.
On his way home, X caught sight of the goat-sex man, whose very existence upset him. He looked for a weapon in his recently purchased groceries, perhaps ruling out a cucumber and a loaf of syrup bread, figuring that the jar of lingonberries had better heft.
In this case, X’s fingerprints must be among the shards. Perhaps he had even cut himself.
X might still be hard to track down. See above: a spontaneous perpetrator. Likely not a habitual offender. But in any case, the store would have statistics on the number of jars of lingonberries sold on the afternoon in question, and they probably had security cameras on top of that. If X had in fact shopped at Hemköp, that is. There was a Coop down by Sveavägen too. And a 7-Eleven across the street. And another hundred shops in the vicinity.
Carlander decided, for the moment, to put X on the back burner.
Person Y, from Alderheim’s circle of acquaintances, was a possibility, but there was no way of knowing anything about that circle before the technicians had reconstructed the victim’s life by way of his emails, texts, multimedia messages, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and all the other asocial channels Carlander knew far too little about.
After X and Y, he would turn to the victim’s next of kin. That was to say, his ex-wife Jenny and his former ward Kevin. They had seemed honestly dismayed over Alderheim’s death, and there was no direct motive in sight. The divorce was legally final, the division of assets was complete. Jenny had nothing to gain from her ex-husband’s death. And if the motive was to be found in the bill of sale that had been found in Alderheim’s inner pocket, then wouldn’t it have been preferable not to leave it there?
What about Ole Mbatian? He was certainly good at hitting people in the head. But not with lingonberries. And if the motive was the paintings, he could have simply not sold them in the presence of everyone over a pleasant lunch, dinner, or something in between just a few hours earlier.
For the time being, X seemed more likely. Or possibly Y.
Malte was in a sorry state. After a restless night on Hugo’s sofa, one of the first things he did was call the eye clinic and quit, effective immediately. His employer was taken aback.
‘What on earth? What’s going on? Do you want a bigger salary? We can make that happen.’
It wasn’t the salary. Malte had been blind not to see what was coming, and the blind shouldn’t be eye doctors. He had seven months of overtime saved up and said he would use it to offset the notice he was required to give according to his contract.
Still, Hugo’s now-unemployed big brother took comfort from his conversations with the medicine man. These had begun on that very first night, while everyone else was still moaning and groaning about something, it was unclear what, an activity they returned to right after breakfast the next day.
Ole Mbatian told Malte all he knew about how unpredictable woman was. Sure, you could loan her out on special occasions, if she didn’t have anything against it, but this must never happen behind her husband’s back!
For his part, as it happened, he got a double dose of all these problems. First one was peevish because he slept at the other one’s house; then the other one was the same when he slept at the first one’s house. Then things calmed down for a while before taking a new turn. His wives had got on the same page somehow and asked him to move up the hill to the third hut. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think they had grown tired of him.
It was nice for Malte to hear that someone else could be cast off too. But he and Ole had more in common: for instance, an affinity for healing people. The medicine man thought the eye doctor demonstrated an amazing breadth of his relative knowledge, considering what limited scope he’d had in his practice. Malte thanked him for his praise and explained that in Sweden, one first became a medicine man of all sorts of things before specializing. What was Ole’s speciality, by the way?
Ole Mbatian considered the question. He was outstanding in many ways, but most renowned for his ability to help women who didn’t want more children to avoid just that.
Malte was eager to learn the Maasai’s contraceptive recipe right away, but that was where Ole Mbatian drew the line. It was a bottle of the medicine man’s secret concoction, which one had to drink each time one ovulated. He called the prescription inatosha, which means something like ‘that’s enough’ in Swahili. Anyone with their senses of smell and taste intact could guess their way to some of the ingredients, but it was a big step from there to a perfected medicine. A quack in the next village had once tried to copy inatosha. He undercut Ole by half but didn’t even put bitter melon in his mixture.
‘Before the long rains were over, he’d made himself two hundred enemies among the women of Maasai Mara. Two hundred! That’s a very different story from my two back home. And your one, now that I think about it.’
‘I don’t even have my one left,’ said Malte.
In light of Ole Mbatian’s experiences, this no longer seemed so terrible.
The work of a modern police detective no longer depended on door-knocking or hiding behind someone’s curtains. Today it was all about technology. Involuntary investigation leader Carlander requested, and received on his desk, an initial report right around time for morning coffee on his penultimate day.
Thus far the most interesting part was what the technicians had not found, either on the victim or in his apartment: a phone.
It was beyond the realm of possibility that a businessman in Stockholm wouldn’t have a smartphone. The technicians had confirmed its existence by way of a quick search. The mobile phone subscription both existed and was available for review.
Alderheim had hardly called anyone in several weeks. Didn’t he have any friends? For surely none of the three locksmiths he’d called, to no avail, would fit in that category. Apparently none of them had installed the padlock on the inside of his front door.
And by the way – a padlock? Who or what was he afraid of? Perhaps the person who had painted PERVERT in metre-high letters on his windows.
Carlander had no time for further pondering; his favourite colleague was coming through the door. It was forensic technician and IT expert Cecilia Hulth, best known for breezily getting into phones, tablets and computers that were impossible to get into.
Among the few things Hulth couldn’t hack was a missing phone. Still, she was able to tell him what it had been up to during Alderheim’s final hours of life. It was all to do with the placement of the 4G towers, and the mobile provider’s logbook.
She gave a report to her investigation leader.
‘The phone was located on Kungsholmen, near the police station, in the hours before the art dealer died.’
Alderheim had been too. So far, Carlander saw no red flags.
‘Then it travelled to the neighbourhood where the art gallery is located.’
Still logical.
‘From there, it went to Högdalen.’
‘What did you say? What did it do there?’
‘It stopped making contact with outside world.’
The correct answer was, it had gone up in smoke. The bin lorry travelled from Östermalm to the municipal incineration plant in Högdalen, which was about ten kilometres south of central Stockholm. There it was dumped, along with a few tonnes of household waste, and lay at a depth of five metres among potato peels and used coffee filters until it was all burned up.
Hardly anything can survive a temperature of 960 degrees Celsius. Not potato peelings, not coffee filters, and definitely not mobile phones.
Hulth went on to say that Alderheim must have been an odd duck. He had not a single contact listed in his phone. Nor was there much of interest in his email inbox. But there was a little. One round-trip ticket to Nairobi, very recently.
‘I’m aware of that,’ said Carlander.
Beyond the ticket, there were a vast amount of ordered and confirmed pedicures from known high-end prostitutes.
‘Pedicures?’ said Carlander.
‘A rose by any other name,’ said Cecilia Hulth.
Dammit. Carlander had just been saddled with another interrogation.
‘Anything else?’
‘A brief exchange with an American art expert in New York, or rather, his secretary. It seems Alderheim wanted to get his forgeries declared authentic.’
Carlander didn’t bother to inform the forensic technician of the forgeries’ presumed genuine nature; it no longer had any bearing on the situation.
‘Anything else?’
‘Well, just this one incoming call in the past week. From an anonymous prepaid number. One minute and twenty seconds long.’
The inspector knew that the government was considering banning anonymous phone cards. Given that the issue had been relevant for fifteen years by this point, it couldn’t be ruled out that a decision might be made any decade now. This was of no help to him at the present moment.
‘Anything more?’
Cecilia Hulth was notorious for always having a little bit more.
‘We haven’t been working on this more than a day or so, Carlander. What do you expect? There were faint fingerprints on the lingonberry jar, but nothing that matched the three you gave us. On the day of the murder, no lingonberries were sold in any of the three nearby grocery stores. That makes it pointless to look through their security tapes. If you like, I can dig deeper in the emails. He could have deleted something, after all. It’s typically possible to recreate those things, although it’s a little tricky. Actually, it’s a lot tricky.’
The inspector wanted to be done with all of this by seventeen hundred hours the following day, at the latest. If Alderheim hadn’t bothered to delete his conversation with the high-end prostitute, what else did he have to hide?
‘Forget it. I want you to dig up the numbers and names of everyone who threatened Alderheim on the big hate-and-threat site.’
‘Everyone?’
‘About five hundred posts, maybe three hundred different threats. Can you have a list ready for me in an hour?’
Since Hulth and Carlander had known each other for twenty-five years, she had no qualms about asking the inspector whether the Maasai’s blow to his head had done more harm than it had seemed at first.
‘Pick three of your five hundred and I’ll see what I can do.’
The fact was, it was part of the hate-and-threat site’s business idea to protect their accounts at any price. Not even Cecilia Hulth could get in through a backdoor. But a chain was only as strong as its weakest link. She had a contact on the inside. It typically cost fifteen hundred kronor per IP address, but it would work.
With one and a half days left to retirement, the alleged forgery turned murder or manslaughter by an unknown perpetrator began to grow beyond what the soon-former inspector could handle. For the past day his breaks had been all out of whack.
Carlander selected four of the worst threats from the hate-and-threat site and sent them to Hulth. Then he approached his boss and made an attempt to dump this case on Gustavsson, who would have been in charge from the start if only he hadn’t been faking a cold. But the superintendent’s response was that the goat-sex man sat where he sat in Carlander’s lap, dead or no.
‘Just find the perpetrator, you have a few days.’
‘One day, to be precise,’ said Carlander.
‘One and a half.’
Carlander realized that his afternoon coffee break, too, was cancelled. He decided to track down a certain person in town for a discussion about foot care.
She called herself Lola, but her name was Elsa-Stina Lövkvist. He found her in the hotel lobby, just where the forensic technician suggested he look.
At first Lola was clueless about everything, but once she realized that Carlander wasn’t out on a morality errand she transformed into Elsa-Stina and began to tell it like it was. Alderheim had been a regular client of her special variety of foot care for several years. He wasn’t a pleasant one, but nor was he worse than many others. Still, Elsa-Stina had had enough when she read about what he did with goats in his cellar; there was, of course, no way of knowing what sort of diseases this might transmit.
‘Is it possible that you called Alderheim from a prepaid mobile phone and spent one minute and twenty seconds telling him he was no longer welcome?’
Elsa-Stina hadn’t timed the call, but she confirmed that this was an accurate description of the situation.
Beyond this she had no information of value. She had cared for his feet at least a hundred times. At no point had they chit-chatted before, during, or after the session.
‘Was he married?’ she asked.
‘They got divorced a while ago.’
‘Give the ex-wife my congratulations.’
Carlander promised he would. He stood up, took both Lola and Elsa-Stina’s fingerprints with him by way of the plastic bottle of water he’d offered her, and said there were other jobs than pedicurist out there, but that he otherwise didn’t want to interfere.
‘Goodbye then, Lola.’
‘Goodbye to you,’ said Elsa-Stina.
Kevin headed for the Tax Authority offices in the neighbourhood of Södermalm, where he had to wait an eternity for his turn. He didn’t want to get Hugo a parking ticket on top of everything else.
But at last he was able to meet with a caseworker who introduced himself as Kjell and asked the young man to have a seat.
‘Hi Kjell, my name is Kevin. I hope you can solve my problem quickly, because my parking meter is about to run out.’
Kjell promised to do his best and asked how he could be of service.
‘The thing is, I’m dead. Could you please bring me back to life?’
Kjell responded that this type of errand was best handled by Jesus, but of course no one had spotted him around for some time.
‘Perhaps we could begin with your providing some ID,’ said Kjell. ‘And an obituary won’t cut it.’
Kjell was the type of guy who liked to have some fun at work.
Kevin could provide his passport if Kjell promised not to hit the alarm. The caseworker said he had only pushed it once during his eighteen years at the Tax Authority. That client had provided not a passport but a hand grenade. Sad story in a lot of ways.
With the help of his passport, Kjell brought up all the information about twenty-three-year-old Kevin Beck. He nodded and said that the rumours of this client’s formal death had not been exaggerated.
‘But I see, of course, that you are you, and there is a lot to suggest that you are alive. The problem is, you must prove it beyond all reasonable doubt before I can do anything. Your passport is expired – do you have any other form of ID?’
Kevin did not.
‘What about a driver’s licence?’
‘I don’t have a driver’s licence.’
‘So who parked the car?’
Goddammit, Kjell.
‘I was in a hurry. It’s hard to bring charges against a dead man, is it not?’
Kjell smiled and said death had its advantages. Besides, he was a caseworker with the Tax Authority, not a traffic cop.
‘But I do need a formal witness statement from a relative who can, in turn, positively identify themselves. Judging by the information on my computer, there aren’t many to choose from. But you have a father. Might he be close at hand?’
Ole Mbatian? What could his word be worth?
‘I don’t see any Ole Whatever-you-just-said listed on my screen, I was thinking first and foremost of Victor Alderheim.’
Kevin felt thoroughly muddled.
‘For one thing, he’s not my father, and for another he’s dead. Dead dead.’
What had started out as an interesting matter had become even more intriguing to caseworker Kjell.
‘The fact that Victor is your father has been proven beyond all doubt. I understand you might not have been very close throughout your life; the fact of paternity was determined when you were fifteen. Parents who need that much time to think it over are seldom the most attentive sort. I see that you haven’t exactly grieved yourself to death, if you’ll pardon the choice of words.’
Was he saying Victor was Kevin’s father? For real?
‘Whatever the case, he no longer exists. It was even in the paper.’
Caseworker Kjell nodded contemplatively. He said that one couldn’t believe everything one read in the paper but admitted that if the death had occurred recently the Tax Authority computers might not have been updated yet. They had no direct link to the morgue.
‘So what do we do now?’ said Kevin.
Kjell had no idea.
‘Come back tomorrow. I will have figured something out by then. Feel free to bring your next of kin, to the extent that they exist.’
Solving an unsolved murder in one workday requires the existence of a known suspect and for the only missing piece to be evidence sufficient to prompt the guilty party to confess by seventeen hundred hours that same day. In practice, this meant that Carlander needed to get either Kevin Beck, Jenny Alderheim, Ole Mbatian the Younger, or all three to crack. The problem was that the inspector had no idea why they would do that. The relationships between all involved were muddy, but none of them had an obvious motive. Nor did the fingerprints that had been lifted from a few shards of the lingonberry jar match any of theirs. Or foot-care specialist Lola’s, for that matter.
Thus the prints belonged instead to perpetrator X. Or grocery store worker Z. Since X hadn’t bought his lingonberries in any of the three closest grocery stores, at least not immediately prior to the crime, it was pointless to look for him by way of the shops’ security cameras.
But what if one assumed X lived in Högdalen – then what? Perhaps he came driving down Birger Jarlsgatan and caught sight of the man he and many others already hated and threatened on the hate-and-threat forum they frequented online. In this case there could have been no mistaking him, for the subject was standing directly outside the gallery windows upon which someone had painted PERVERT.
The man from Högdalen stopped his car; perhaps he even found an available parking spot, although that seemed far-fetched. Then he climbed out, opened the boot to grab a wrench or some other weapon, and for lack of other options ended up with the jar of lingonberries in his hand. He snuck up behind Alderheim, aimed for his skull with the jar, maybe said ‘Take this, you goddamn …’ at which point Alderheim whirled around, causing the jar to strike him more unpropitiously than intended.
With an unconscious PERVERT at his feet, X discovered the victim’s mobile phone and took it with him. Why? Out of panic? Because Alderheim had managed to capture an incriminating photograph? Whatever reason the man from Högdalen preferred – he took the phone, went back to his car, and drove home.
Carlander was a bit ashamed. This wasn’t the proper way to handle investigations into murder or manslaughter. Then again, he had historically apprehended more criminals than had got away. The inspector convinced himself that he had delivered. He wasn’t doing so anymore, but still.
Or maybe he was? The Hulth was back with information about the people behind the four worst hates and threats from the hate-and-threat site.
Vaguely suspect poster number one called himself Uzi1970. His real name was Lennart Helmersson and he lived in the forest outside Jukkasjärvi, thirteen hundred kilometres north of Stockholm. This was where he’d posted from. Lennart was an electrician and had a wife and two grown daughters. He had no criminal record, but for the past five years he had been plagued by an onerous, unsettled debt to the Enforcement Authority. This might explain why the majority of his posts involved suggestions of what one ought to do to the Enforcement Authority’s offices in general and its staff in particular. He’d been a member of the forum since just after being saddled with the debt. Over the years, Uzi1970 expanded his hatred to encompass others as well.
His threats against the goat-sex man could be summarized as a series of opinions on what should most preferably be shoved up the victim’s rear end in the interest of administering justice. Lennart Helmersson was not particularly imaginative; he went back and forth between a baseball bat and a hockey stick in a total of seven separate posts.
Carlander was unsure whether either of those objects would fit in the space suggested, but that didn’t matter – in contrast to the fact that Uzi1970 lived north of the Arctic circle, where it was dark around the clock at this time of year. People had become embittered for lesser reasons.
‘Nope, not him,’ said Carlander. ‘Next.’
Vaguely suspect poster number two called themselves Everyonemustdie. The profile picture suggested it was a man, but the account traced back to one Helena Segerstedt, who lived on Centrumslingan in Solna, less than twenty minutes from the scene of the crime.
‘A pretty negative view of humanity, that everyone must die,’ said Carlander, but he thought there might be something to it. ‘What do we know about the lovely Helena?’
‘Animal-rights activist. One conviction after far too frequent and long-winded threats against a particular mink farmer in Blekinge. Seven years ago. Has since learned how not to cross the line. Or not. She wants to emasculate Alderheim. Literally. Expresses it a different way each time, five times in all, but the common denominator is that his dick has got to go.’
It was difficult for Carlander to recalibrate. He had got it into his head that the perpetrator was a man. What was wrong with people? One wanted to shove things up his rear; another wanted to snip off the dangly bits next door. After a moment’s consideration, he decided that Helena Segerstedt would have used organic lingonberries as a weapon, and that at the very least she would have kicked the crotch she was so obsessed with. For the time being, she too was ruled out.
‘Vaguely suspect poster number three, please.’
‘Lives in Buenos Aires. Want to know the address?’
‘Number four, please.’
Number four was HellHell84, an alias that was rather hard to interpret. Perhaps it was simply an homage to hell. The man behind it was named Linus Forsgren, thirty-eight, a single churchwarden with no criminal record who lived on Trollesundsvägen, south of the city. No skeletons in his closet, but he was the most industrious poster of the four on the hate-and-threat site. A member since 2009 and still going strong.
‘Any obvious pattern in his posts, historically?’ Carlander asked.
‘In general it seems he wants anyone he turns against to be gravely tortured.’
‘Does he want to kill?’
‘Nah, just gravely torture. Twist a knife around in some intestines and so forth.’
Carlander reflected that you could die from less than a knife to the gut. Like a jar of lingonberries to the head.
‘Trollesundsvägen, where’s that?’
‘In Högdalen.’
Kevin brought his father Ole and his girlfriend Jenny to vouch for his identity in the presence of the caseworker at the Tax Authority. He thought Jenny might make a difference. Ole was less of a sure bet.
It took up quite a bit of the morning. Caseworker Kjell elected to consult a colleague in Karlstad, an expert in extra-complicated matters of the national registry. In essence, what they needed was a sworn testimony from a brother, sister, mother, or father. There were no siblings in this instance; the mother had been dead for many years; the father had just followed her example.
The colleague in Karlstad attended the meeting by speakerphone. Around the table at the Tax Authority in Stockholm sat Kjell, Kevin, Jenny and Ole. The latter was in a bad mood because Kevin had made him leave his throwing club in the car.
‘Don’t come crying to me if they start fighting and I can’t object.’
‘Your club has objected plenty for the time being, Papa. But thanks anyway.’
Kjell wanted to know more about the witnesses and their relationship with the subject. Jenny was just about to respond when the medicine man budged in line. He was done sulking; now he wanted to declare that no one could swim among crocodiles like his Kevin.
Neither Kjell nor his colleague in Karlstad understood what this had to do with anything. The Maasai said that if they would just provide a river full of crocodiles, they would see.
Kjell asked his colleague about the current crocodile level in Klarälven. The colleague, who did not have a sense of humour, replied that they would do best to focus on the woman.
Jenny introduced herself as Kevin’s girlfriend and said that they hadn’t known each other terribly long, but it was long enough to have become engaged, and she could both promise and swear that he was who he said he was.
It’s impossible to keep any secrets from the computers of the Tax Authority. Kjell, who thoroughly enjoyed having fun at work, suddenly had a lot of fun when he determined that Jenny had previously been married to Victor Alderheim. The caseworker quickly calculated that Kevin’s future wife was thus also his stepmother.
There came a sigh from the speakerphone on the table. The colleague in Karlstad had been cast from too traditional a mould of authority to laugh at such a serious matter. Or at matters in general. Furthermore, he knew his Greek mythology. According to which, Oedipus married his own mother. Next thing you knew it would turn out that Kevin was the one who had just killed his father.
No one around the table in Stockholm caught on to the dramatic train of thought in Karlstad. Kevin suggested they call upon the passport officer from Arlanda Airport, the one who had recently let him into the country. That officer must, after all, be able to attest that he was the person he said he was. Perhaps based on that information, the Tax Authority could assume he had not become anyone else since.
‘If we all hold hands and pray to En-Kai, perhaps we’ll have a vision,’ said Ole Mbatian.
This wasn’t something he actually believed would happen. He just wanted to be included in the conversation.
Whether it was En-Kai, the passport officer, the potential crocodiles in Klarälven, or the spirit of Oedipus that was the final straw, Kevin and the others never knew. But suddenly the expert in Karlstad declared he’d heard enough. He asked Kjell if they shouldn’t just decide in Kevin’s favour before one of them went bananas.
‘Good idea,’ said Kjell.
For lack of other next of kin, Jenny got to sign a document in which she solemnly swore that the expired passport she was shown was identical to the same passport that had been valid a few days previously. Ole Mbatian asked where he should sign and was informed by Kjell that it wouldn’t be necessary. Armed with the signature and a James Bond quote, he extended his right hand over the table to Kevin.
‘“You only live twice.” Use your second chance wisely.’
Kevin thanked him and promised to do his best.
A breakthrough with four hours left to retirement! Christian Carlander felt a thrill of work-related joy he hadn’t experienced since … well, since when? Was it 1991, when he and his wife were in Torekov on vacation? He had just forgotten their anniversary and she spent the first two days expressing her dissatisfaction with his character. At which point, on day three, he was miraculously called home to Stockholm for a double homicide at a nightclub.
The inspector sent a car to HellHell84’s place of work to pick him up and deliver him to Carlander.
Linus Forsgren’s plans for the afternoon were to grease the hinges on the cemetery gates. Eight gates times four hinges makes thirty-two. It would take some time.
When he had seven and a half gates left, two police officers showed up, asked if he was who he was, and asked him to come with them, in such a tone that the hinges didn’t even matter anymore.
It happened so fast that Linus Forsgren didn’t have time to be afraid before he was sitting opposite Inspector Carlander in the police station in Kungsholmen.
‘You know why you’re here, don’t you?’
Linus Forsgren did not.
‘What would you say if I said HellHell84?’
Linus Forsgren’s eyes went wide. He said he didn’t know what the inspector was talking about.
‘I’m talking about how you like to torture people, isn’t that so?’
The churchwarden was living his worst nightmare.
Carlander went on to say that there was evidence Linus Forsgren was the same as HellHell84 on Sweden’s biggest hate-and-threat site, and that the latter, which is to say the former, had wished death upon a certain art dealer with a possible predilection for four-legged creatures.
‘And just think – your wish has been granted.’
Now Linus Forsgren appeared to be crying. He said that this was all a terrible misunderstanding, and that he certainly neither threatened nor hated people. He was a servant of God, a churchwarden in a lively and life-affirming congregation.
When the churchwarden attempted to deny everything yet again, the inspector said that he respected his response, but the problem was that the hatred and threats had been formulated by the account of Linus Forsgren and published from a computer that belonged to his church.
‘So I won’t trouble you any further. However, I must get to the bottom of this and I have no choice but to call in all the priests, deacons, choirmasters, organists, and educators from your church. I promise to be very tough on them so we can find out which of them hacked your account.’
At that point, Linus Forsgren confessed.
And began to cry for real.
Had it not been for a damned churchwarden conference, Carlander could have solved the murder-or-manslaughter case on his very last day of work.
With Linus Forsgren still in shock as he faced the possibility that everyone at church would come to know him as HellHell84, Carlander dealt the fatal blow. He shared with Forsgren the date and time of the homicide on Birger Jarlsgatan and recommended that he confess his whereabouts at that time to avoid being locked up for murder.
To Carlander’s surprise, Forsgren’s despair was interrupted. Was the officer suggesting he was guilty of killing someone? That was impossible.
Linus Forsgren emphatically declared that he had an alibi, that he had been standing on a stage in Gothenburg and delivering a lecture on biodegradable methods of keeping weeds out of gravel paths at the very moment he was supposedly smashing a jar of lingonberries into the head of Victor Alderheim in Stockholm, 470 kilometres away.
Carlander wasn’t born yesterday. Crime suspects in a state of desperation could make up just about anything. ‘I definitely didn’t rob that bank last Wednesday, I was with my dog at the time, just ask him.’ It was pitiful enough, directing inquiries to one’s own dog or cat. But what man with even a shred of good reason intact would lie about a whole conference? That was practically like saying ‘I can’t be the murderer, because at the time in question I was playing in the World Cup final.’ Few things were easier to confirm.
Linus Forsgren was surely guilty of a lot of things.
But he hadn’t killed Victor Alderheim.
‘Thanks, I’m out,’ Carlander said to his boss at one minute past five on his very last day of work.
But the superintendent didn’t feel like letting him have a pain-free goodbye.
‘You’re not getting off that easy, Christian,’ he said with a smile.
He only called Carlander by his first name when he was about to get personal.
‘Cake and bubbly and the whole kit and caboodle await you in the break room. Everyone will be there soon, except for the ones who are out nabbing hooligans.’
‘I’ll be goddamned,’ said Carlander.
‘But we have a minute or two. Tell me about the man from Högdalen. It was a close one, from what I heard. Forsgren, was that his name?’
‘I thought I had him,’ said Carlander. ‘It all seemed to track right up until we got to the crime itself. Then that bastard claimed to have been at a churchwarden conference in Gothenburg at the same moment he supposedly whacked Alderheim in the head with his jar of lingonberries.’
‘And?’
‘I checked it out on the spot, so to speak. And learned that four hundred churchwardens from all over the country were in the audience, and could act as witnesses in Forsgren’s favour. As if that wasn’t enough, the whole thing is on YouTube.’
His boss smiled and said that churchwardens could be a sly bunch. Carlander was amazed at the whole phenomenon. What even was a churchwarden conference? Who the hell arranged such a thing?
In any case, it was now several minutes past five and the boss wanted to wish his longstanding colleague good luck with his pigeon-feeding or however he planned to occupy himself.
‘How’s the Spanish going, by the way?’
‘The dog is under the table and won’t leave.’
‘Huh?’
Carlander asked to be spared from explaining. He returned to the previous topic and asked that the case of the goat-sex man and the lingonberry jar not land in the archive quite yet. It was back on Gustavsson’s desk now, wasn’t it? Carlander had already carefully investigated four suspects from the leading hate-and-threat site. All that was left for Gustavsson was the other four hundred and ninety-six.
‘Do I detect a certain amount of Schadenfreude here?’
‘Definitely. If I know Gustavsson, he won’t make it through the 496 entries before the statute of limitations runs out.’
‘There is no statute of limitations on murder anymore.’
‘I know.’
The superintendent mused that perhaps he had the colleagues he deserved. He stood up, rounded his desk, and said it was high time for cake and celebration.
‘Your very last coffee break at the station.’
It felt strange. For many years, Carlander had escaped his job to go to morning or afternoon coffee, with lunch in between. What would he escape from now that he no longer had a job? He supposed he would find out. For the escape must go on.
Tragically unaware of the fact that the greatest threat to their future freedom had just retired, Jenny and Ole Mbatian went to Mall of Scandinavia to shop for necessities ahead of their move or escape to Kenya. Kevin had been assured he would receive his new passport within the next few days.
First it was time for double silver necklaces at Albrekts Gold.
‘Should I go in, or should you?’ said Ole.
‘I’ll do it,’ said Jenny.
After that, Ole very much wanted a couple of extra throwing clubs of the Clas Ohlson variety. The model had its downsides – it made an unpleasant sound as it sailed through the air – but there might, with some effort, be something there. Ole knew his brother Uhuru would appreciate the gift.
Last but not least, the Maasai had asked to bring some cornflakes and lingonberry jam. Milk – from goats or cows – was something they already had in abundance back home.
The world is so large, and yet so small. Just as Jenny was putting four jars of raw sugared lingonberries in her cart, she found herself standing eye to eye with someone she recognized.
‘Inspector Carlander? What are the chances?’
Ole Mbatian didn’t always understand everything that was going on, but at that moment he joined up with Jenny, the cart, and the inspector. He had six boxes of cornflakes in his arms, and he quickly placed them on top of the jars of lingonberries. There was no reason to give the inspector any ideas if they could help it.
‘Yes, what indeed,’ said Carlander. ‘Once again, allow me to express my condolences for the fate of your ex-husband.’
‘Hard to process,’ said Jenny. ‘How is the murder investigation going?’
An anxious question, but she had to say something.
‘It’s not going at all, you might say. I retired yesterday, and my successor is looking for suspects on the big hate-and-threat site. But it’s no easy job, not when you’ve got an unknown perpetrator of a spontaneous crime. You shouldn’t get your hopes up.’
‘That’s too bad,’ said Jenny.
‘The art dealer was a fine fellow,’ said Ole Mbatian. ‘I miss him.’
Another general meeting at Hugo’s. Under the leadership of Jenny, for the first time. She told them about how she and Ole had run into the now-former inspector, about the medicine man’s lightning-fast manoeuvre that kept Carlander from seeing what he absolutely must not see, and about the conversation that ensued.
‘We’re not suspects anymore, if we ever were in the first place. So why do we have to flee to the savanna?’
‘It’s nice there,’ said Ole Mbatian.
Jenny was sure it was, and she would be happy to visit, but the question was, why did they have to flee?
Hugo had no immediate response. Suddenly the cardinal reason the Maasai and the others had to leave was something other than sheer survival. The idea was that, once they left, everything would go back to normal for Hugo himself. Sweet Sweet Revenge Ltd could start anew and go back to making money.
Jobs awaited. As recently as the day before, a well-to-do widow in Seoul had contacted him. She was careful to point out that she was of the posh sort and lived in one of the city’s most fashionable retirement homes. Now she had learned from the home’s director that her one-point-nine kilo Pomeranian would not be allowed to remain on site, the reason being that the other residents were scared of it. Accordingly, the widow wanted Hugo to scare the director to the tune of twenty-five million South Korean won. The dog could, of course, have done so for free if it had even a shred of talent for such a thing.
Now, twenty-five million won wasn’t as much as it sounded like – converted to euro it was about twenty thousand. Still, this was enough for Hugo to scare just about anyone to death.
But he hesitated, partly because killing in general must not become a habit, and partly because Hugo had his hands full trying to clean up the current situation. He declined the widow’s offer and said he was fully booked. Which, in a broader sense, was entirely true.
If they all stayed in Sweden, what would happen? Jenny and Kevin no longer had any incentive to work for free, but perhaps they would work on commission? Malte the unemployed eye doctor was now part of the equation. Big brother could probably live on his assets for a year or two, and if he had nothing better to do Hugo could train him in the art of revenge.
But how much fun would that be, really? Hugo had known from the start that revenge as a business idea had intrinsic growth potential. If someone stepped on someone else’s toe, the wronged party felt that the toe-stepper ought to lose their whole foot. At which point the newly footless party wanted the guilty one to lose their head. There was definitely money in this, but it certainly wasn’t a meaningful contribution to a better world. Even less so than umami-flavoured marmalade, in fact.
‘Can’t I come with?’ Malte suddenly said, turning everything upside down.
‘Come with?’ said Hugo. ‘Where to?’
‘Kenya. What is there for me here?’
Kevin had said almost nothing all day long. He elected not to accompany Jenny and Ole on their shopping trip, muttering that he had things to think about. Jenny thought she recognized this feeling; sometimes a person needed to withdraw. What was more, her dear Kevin had just gained and lost a father within the span of a few days, but in the opposite order.
In any case, now he had something to say. Hugo hoped it would spark some ideas, because he felt generally out of sorts. Was he so badly off that he didn’t want to get rid of the three worrying elements? Or did it have something to do with Malte, who wanted to go along to Kenya? Hugo would be left behind, all alone, with no one to hang out with but all the clients who wanted each other dead.
‘Victor Alderheim is dead,’ said Kevin.
Was that all he had to contribute? Hugo said that he’d read something along those lines in the paper.
‘At the time of his death, he had considerable assets,’ Kevin continued. ‘Including two genuine Irma Sterns.’
‘Right, thanks,’ said Hugo. ‘So?’
Kevin had arrived at the idea he’d been brooding over all day.
‘Shouldn’t his only begotten son inherit all that?’