“What was the whole thing about? Really?”
“Ritual details. Ultrasecret. Especially from women.”
“Is it true that in 1978 Jan-Olov Hultin, who back then was a detective inspector with the Stockholm police, on the narcotics squad, arrested Rickard Franzen Jr. for drug possession and dealing; that Hultin was stubborn as hell and managed to get him arrested and arraigned in spite of tremendous opposition; and that your son was convicted by both the district court and the county court but was acquitted by the Svea Court of Appeals, where you were then serving as judge?”
“I was not the judge for my son’s case!”
“No one said you were. Is it also true that Hultin was transferred to the Huddinge police after this incident?”
There was silence for a moment. Hjelm imagined serious eyebrow raising. Franzen’s voice reappeared, faintly from the background.
“I didn’t think Hultin was the kind to tell tales… Well. It was an open-and-shut case. My son was acquitted. There wasn’t enough evidence.”
“Hultin hasn’t been telling tales. I reviewed the details of the case myself. There’s nothing out of the ordinary. Since then Rickard Jr. has been picked up a dozen times and released.”
A rattling sound started up, and it got worse. The judge said in a shrill, quavering, and utterly grotesque voice:
“I think you’d better start looking around for a new job, young lady. I know one that would be very suitable.”
“Let go of the tape recorder, judge,” said Kerstin Holm calmly.
Hjelm knocked cautiously on the door and went in. Nyberg was gone. Holm was still sitting at her desk, listening to a tape and typing on her laptop. It was quite dark in the room. She looked up and took off the headset.
“Yes?” she said, her tone of voice much the same as when she had said “Let go of the tape recorder, judge,” a few hours earlier. It was late.
Hjelm put the pile of tapes on her desk and shook his head. “Hopeless,” he said. “But Franzen was an unexpected bonus.”
“That might have been stupid.”
“You went there to give him a scare.”
“He’s been supplying that son of his with money for drugs all these years, and he’s bailed him out so many times that it’s become a standing joke down at the jail. He’s never going to let him go through the Passageway of Sighs again.”
Hjelm perched on the edge of the desk. The Passageway of Sighs was the underground tunnel between police headquarters and the courthouse, through which prisoners with bowed heads had passed for almost a century.
“What a hell of a lot of work you’ve done,” he said.
“So did you ever manage to get beyond the cliches?” she asked.
“I’ve never felt so far removed from other people.”
“I know what you mean. New threads keep appearing that you can track down further; new shoots keep growing out of the stalks. But the stalks themselves remain inaccessible. Maybe a human being merely consists of a bunch of threads and external connections. Who knows?”
“In any case, that’s all that’s left.”
Kerstin Holm closed her laptop, stretched, and said into the dark, “You have a zit on your cheek.”
“It’s not a zit,” said Hjelm.
14
They came from the cellar.
They poured out of a plain gray delivery van and rushed soundlessly toward the stairs. They carried submachine guns.
They opened the door and wound their way up the stone steps in the insulated stairwell. They moved in complete silence.
At every landing the first man barricaded the door leading to the apartments. The elevator started up somewhere outside.
At the seventh landing they stopped for a moment to assemble. The man at the door threw it open, and they spread out among the apartment doors on the eighth floor.
They rang the bell on a door labeled “Nilsson.”
No one opened it. Not a sound was heard.
A rough cement cylinder was brought forward. Affixed to one end was a thick metal plate, and there were two handles on either side. Two men grabbed the handles, and on signal they rammed the cylinder against the door.
It shattered into pieces around the lock.
They forced their way into the apartment, once again without making a sound. It was dark inside; all the blinds were drawn.
In the closest bed of the small two-room flat lay three little black children who had been awakened by the crash. Lying on mattresses on the floor were four more children. Five of the children had already started to cry.
They continued into the second room. On beds and mattresses lay four black adults, gaping at them. Half of the men stopped there with their guns raised. The rest made their way into the kitchen.
At the kitchen table sat a black man and a white pastor with cups of coffee in front of them. Paralyzed, they stared at the submachine guns, which were all pointed at them.
“What the hell!” said the pastor. Otherwise no one spoke.
Two well-built gentlemen in their forties wearing identical leather jackets came stomping into the kitchen, cast a quick glance at the pastor and the other man, then continued into the bedroom.
“Sonya Shermarke?” said the blonder of the men.
One of the women lying on the mattress on the floor sat up and looked at him in terror.
“Search her for weapons,” said Gillis Doos to his men.
“And drugs,” said Max Grahn.
15
Hjelm studied his face in the left rearview mirror and saw that the scaly red patch on his cheek had gotten bigger. He thought about skin cancer.
The sun was spreading a thick, illusory layer of summer as the police car struggled up the steep incline of Liljeholm Bridge. Hornstull Beach and the cottages of the Tanto allotment gardens basked in the spring sunlight, and he wondered for an instant whether the minigolf course was open. In the other direction the little pier of the Liljeholm swimming area stuck out into the bay.
“I told you we should have stayed on the Essinge road,” Gunnar Nyberg admonished as Hjelm leaned on the car horn.
He’d picked up Nyberg at his small, three-room bachelor apartment near Nacka Church.
