Hjelm turned to Wrede. “Do you have a sketch artist in Vaxjo?”
“A police sketch artist?” said Wrede, still looking pale. “There’s an artist here that we sometimes use, yes.”
“The three of you are going to help each other produce a drawing of the man from NCP who was down here and took over the case. Be as specific as you can. But first I want you to drive us over to see Lena Lundberg.”
It wasn’t far to the other side of Algotsmala. But while sitting crowded together in a police cruiser, each of them put all the information together in their minds to form one big picture.
In the spring of 1991, the bank employee Goran Andersson from Algotsmala had been beaten up in a restaurant in Vaxjo. It was a result of the Swedish banking world’s grotesque borrowing practices during the late eighties: those borrowing practices contributed not only to the bank crisis and to Sweden’s general economic crisis in the early nineties but also to scores of unnecessary personal bankruptcies. One of these bankruptcies was suffered by Anton Rudstrom, who at the sight of a banker went berserk and beat up the man. That man turned out to be Goran Andersson. Andersson apparently had already suspected that something was wrong with the bank’s policies, because after the beating he said that Rudstrom’s actions were justified. Yet he continued to work at the bank, maybe out of loyalty, or maybe because there simply wasn’t any other job available.
Later, as a direct result of these shady business dealings, he lost his job, and that’s when he snapped. Even though he’d been fired, he went to the bank just as he usually did, arriving before the normal opening time. He let himself in through the staff entrance, using the keys that he hadn’t yet relinquished,
But for some unknown reason, he opened the bank doors as usual. That was strange, because the opening hours at the bank had been cut back, and because he’d been fired and was in the process of robbing the bank. Maybe it was the power of habit, or maybe he was distracted by a dart game that he’d started playing. Five-oh- one.
To top it all off, he was robbed just as he was planning his own robbery. A brutal Russian mafia man by the name of Valery Treplyov came into the bank in the middle of Andersson’s robbery and game of darts. The situation was grotesque. The world fell in on Andersson. The mafioso on the other side of the counter had the same gigantic build as the man who had beaten Goran up a couple of years earlier. Maybe he was holding the dart in his hand. Regardless, he threw it with infallible precision right into Valery Treplyov’s eye.
Now Andersson had killed a man; in self-defense, of course, but no matter what, he was standing there with a dead body in his old bank office, which he was in the process of robbing. He dragged the body inside the vault and locked it. He had appropriated Treplyov’s gun, perhaps in a state of confusion, and he’d emptied the man’s pockets. In addition to a lot of ammunition from the notorious factory in Kazakhstan, he also found a cassette tape.
He took the money, locked the bank doors, and left through the same entrance he’d come in, the back door, which was for employees only. In front of the bank was the truck containing Estonian vodka, ready to be delivered to other parts of the country. In the vehicle, the other Igor, Alexander Bryusov, waited for his partner to appear. After a while he might have gone over to the bank, only to find the doors locked and the place deserted. A mystery.
By then Goran Andersson had already driven off in his car, which he’d parked in back, in the employees’ lot. Maybe it was then that he popped the cassette into the car tape player and listened to the very jazz tune he’d heard a few years earlier while he was being beaten up: the inexplicable hand of coincidence. It was as if some higher power were behind it all. An unexpected element that was simply impossible to explain. That absurd Russian-who had come into the bank while Goran was making a radical break with everything he’d ever believed in-had supplied him with not only a weapon but also a motivation in the form of this music.
It was too much. He was transformed into the instrument of a larger power, seeking revenge against the banks, on behalf of the greater public, and at the same time against Anton Rudstrom, for himself personally. He decided to go after the bank’s board of directors from the year when Rudstrom had so hastily been granted a loan, the year 1990. That loan had resulted in the beating in Hackat & Malet in the spring of 1991. Both banks were branches of Sydbanken, but it could just as well have been any of Sweden’s larger banks. Goran Andersson presumably went to Stockholm on February 15, right after the incident at the bank in Algotsmala. There he planned the first of three murders to be committed in less than a month. He started on his path as the avenging angel between March 29 and 30. After the first three murders, he retreated to his lair to plan the next series of killings. Which they were in the middle of right now. Goran Andersson was very determined, very accurate, very damaged, and very dangerous. He was beyond desperate.
The mystery was gone. But the mist still remained.
Misterioso.
They got out of the police car in front of a small house on the edge of town. It looked tranquil and peaceful, basking in the evening sun. The police car drove away.
None of them wanted to be the first to go in and talk to the woman who was expecting the Power Murderer’s child.
26
The underside of the crackle-glazed altocumulus cloud cover gleamed dark orange in the early summer evening. An infinite number of small, just barely separated wisps plunged Lilla Vartan and all of Lidingo into a strange, fractured, bewitching twilight. It was as if the sky were pressing down with superhuman force.
Gunnar Nyberg, sitting in a police car up on Lidingo Bridge, thought he’d never seen such a glow before. It had a fateful music about it.
He was on his way to the villa of Lovisedal board chairman Jacob Lidner in Molna, located on the southern spit of Lidingo. Arto Soderstedt had the night watch; he would be gazing out across the water as he sat in that living room that radiated resistance to the police presence. Nyberg sympathized with the living room.
He had nothing to do and had decided on his own initiative to spend the night keeping Soderstedt company. There were worse things he could be doing. Besides, he was feeling an acute need for human companionship. Loneliness had suddenly overwhelmed him and sucked the breath from his throat, propelling him inexorably out into this appallingly lovely early summer evening. The beauty on the Lidingo Bridge took his breath away again.
After the bridge Gunnar Nyberg turned right and took Sodra Kungsvagen all the way out to Molna. When he caught sight of Lidner’s palatial villa, he stopped the car, parking it a safe distance away on the little entrance drive. Dusk had fallen. The peculiar cloud formations now glowed only faintly; then during the minute it took him to walk to the house, they disappeared entirely.
He reached the hedge surrounding the garden. The gate appeared in the middle of all the vegetation. It was ajar. He opened it all the way and stepped into the yard.
Out of the corner of his eye, off to the left, he saw a faint movement, and long before the pain hit him, he heard the dull pop of a gun with a silencer.
He threw his huge body full length onto the gravel path and pulled out his service weapon. Yet another shot whined right over his head.
Something was ignited in Gunnar Nyberg’s eyes.
He got up and with a wild bellow ran like a crazed buffalo, firing one shot after another at the spot where he’d seen the movement a couple of seconds earlier.
A car started up a little farther down the road. He heard it approaching. He tossed aside his empty gun and, still bellowing, crashed like a bulldozer right through the thick hedge and came out onto the road just as the car came up.
Gunnar Nyberg tackled it like a professional hockey player.
He hurled his furious giant’s body against the left side of the accelerating vehicle. It flung him off, and he landed with his face pressed to the asphalt.
The pain came. His field of vision was shrinking drastically, but he saw the car drive into a lamppost a dozen yards away.
Arto Soderstedt, with gun raised, rushed over to the car, yanked the driver out, and pulled him over to the
