“Very pretty,” said Hjelm, feeling ghastly. The photograph was taken about the time of the golf course incident.
“What’s this about?” said Bergstrom, pushing up his glasses.
“When she was seventeen, she worked as a caddy at the Kevinge Golf Course. Do you remember that?”
Bergstrom gave a slight nod.
“Did she ever tell you anything about her job?” asked Hjelm.
“No,” he said with a sigh. There seemed to be something shattered about him.
“Nothing at all?”
For the first time Bergstrom looked Hjelm in the eye. Each of them was looking for something in the other.
“What’s this about?” Bergstrom repeated. “My sister has been dead for a couple of years now. Why are you coming here and talking about her as if she were alive? I’ve just gotten used to the idea that she’s gone.”
“She was fired from her job at the golf course in the fall of 1990. Do you recall that?”
“Yes, I remember. The season was over, and the golf course was about to close for the winter. She was still in school, so it was no big deal to lose a seasonal job.”
“But you don’t recall anything she told you about her time at the golf course?”
“She got the job through a friend; I don’t remember her name. I didn’t feel very comfortable in Danderyd, to be honest. I didn’t know anyone there. She didn’t really either. It wasn’t a happy time, not at all.”
“Shortly afterward, she tried to take her own life for the third time. Is that right?”
“How sensitive of you,” Bergstrom said glumly. “Yes, she did. A razor blade, for the first and last time. When she actually succeeded, it was by taking Alvedon. Did you know that all it takes to kill the liver and kidneys is one blister pack of Alvedon and some liquor? Lotta knew that. Nobody knew what she had planned. There were no warning shots or cries for help or any bullshit like that. She really did try to kill herself seven times. It was like a… miscarriage. As if she weren’t meant to be born. As if there were something seriously wrong with her view of life.”
“Do you know why?”
“I don’t know anything, and I don’t understand anything,” Bergstrom said tonelessly. “I’ll never understand anything.”
“Do you know about the murders of the three businessmen here in Stockholm?”
Bergstrom was off somewhere else. It took a moment for him to return. “How could anybody not know about that?”
“Did you murder them?”
Gusten Bergstrom looked at him in surprise. Then a strange spark appeared in his eyes, as if a gust of life had suddenly been blown into his withered lungs.
“Yes,” said Bergstrom proudly. “I murdered them.”
Hjelm studied the luminous figure. Something seemed about to happen in Gusten Bergstrom’s dreary life. His face would appear on newspaper placards. He would be in the spotlight for the first and last time in his life.
“Come off it,” said Paul Hjelm, and the spark was extinguished.
Gusten Bergstrom seemed to crumple, sitting on the armchair’s hard upholstery, as if he were its long-absent stuffing.
Hjelm poured a little oil on the waters of disappointment. “Why did you kill Kuno Daggfeldt, Bernhard Strand- Julen, and Nils-Emil Carlberger?”
“Why?” said Bergstrom, shrugging his hunched shoulders. “Well, because-because they were rich.”
“You don’t have the faintest idea what those three men did to your sister at the Kevinge Golf Course on September 7, 1990, a month before she made her third suicide attempt and was locked up in Beckomberga Hospital. Do you?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Gusten Bergstrom got up abruptly and tried to find something to hold on to. There was nothing. His fingers clutched wildly at the air.
“On that particular day, that trio of murdered men tried to rape your sister when she was acting as a caddy for them.”
Bergstrom’s hands stopped grabbing. “If I’d known,” he enunciated very clearly, “I would have killed them. But they wouldn’t have been allowed to live this long, I can promise you that.”
“But you didn’t know?”
“No,” he said and sat down. Then he got up again, standing in the midst of the evening light flooding in from Gamla Brogatan. “Now I understand,” he said, lighting up for one last time. “Now I understand.”
“What do you understand?”
“It’s Lotta! Lotta herself has taken her revenge! For a couple of days she stretched out her hand from the realm of the dead. Then she went back to that better world.”
Extremely agitated, Bergstrom went over to the bookcase and pulled out a worn, old book, holding it up and shaking it.
“Do you know about the Erinyes?” he asked without waiting for an answer. “They’re the most gruesome creatures in Greek mythology but also the most awe-inspiring. The ultimate hand of justice. They hunt their prey day and night until the grave opens up. Let me read you a short passage: ‘The Erinyes are nothing more than the murdered victim’s spirit, which, if no other avenger exists, take vengeance into their own hands, mercilessly and relentlessly, as the spirits of the dead are contained in their wrath.’ ”
He gave Hjelm an urgent stare. Hjelm didn’t say a word.
“Don’t you understand?” shouted Bergstrom. “There are no avengers, so she had to do it herself. She waited for an avenger, but none came. Everything fits! Those three men who hurt her were the ones she killed in quick succession all these years later. It’s amazing! Your killer is a murder victim’s spirit! An avenging goddess!”
Hjelm sat there for a moment, fascinated by Bergstrom’s onslaught. Without a doubt, the parallels were striking. The avenger who left no traces. The divine, posthumous avenger from the realm of the dead.
But the thought of a highly tangible bullet from Kazakhstan in a wall in Djursholm brought him back to the world of crass reality: “The Erinyes may have had a physical intermediary who pulled the trigger. Do you know if she might have talked about the incident at the golf course to anyone else?”
“There wasn’t anyone else! Don’t you understand? It was just the two of us, just Lotta and Gusten. Gusten and Lotta.”
“Papa? Mama? Anyone at the hospital?
“My father? Oh sure, that’s really likely!” laughed Gusten. He had now crossed a line. “Mother? That woman who could see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil? All three monkeys in one. Absolutely! Someone at Beckis? Where everybody sits in a separate corner, rubbing their private parts all day long? Highly likely! There you have your cold-blooded murderer! The Beckomberga man! The expert killer from the loony bin!”
Hjelm could tell it was time to leave.
Under other circumstances Hjelm would have gone over to the computer, turned up the light, and laughed crudely at the computerized figures, who by now were undoubtedly in the midst of fucking. But he didn’t.
In some ambiguous way, that was a victory.
Hjelm spent the next few days pursuing the golf lead. He drove out to Beckomberga Hospital and talked to the staff, to find out who Lotta’s friends were. She’d never had any. The only staff member who was still there from the early nineties, a stony-faced male nurse, remembered Lotta as an extreme loner. Morbidly withdrawn, a total introvert. The only person that Lotta Bergstrom could have conceivably told about the incident was her brother, and apparently she hadn’t done that. Or else Gusten Bergstrom was the best actor that Hjelm had ever seen.
He also directed his inquiries at Lena Hansson’s family and circle of friends. With equally disappointing results. She had truly allowed Daggfeldt and his pals to buy her silence. The only possibility that seemed to be left after a number of days of fruitless searching was that Lena Hansson had hired a professional killer. He let that lead drop.
At the same time he received a summons to appear in court for the trial of Dritero Frakulla. It was not something he was looking forward to. A couple of weeks after Frakulla seized the hostages at the immigration office in Hallunda, the refugee policies had suddenly changed, and several hundred Kosovar Albanians who had been threatened with deportation were allowed to stay in Sweden, including Frakulla’s family. But after his desperate
