In his thoughts he curses all the paperwork. He’s still shocked at the amount of paper and documents one single person can produce in the course of a short lifetime. And he’s just as fed up with the amounts of money all that paper-shuffling can produce.
Smoke thick in his lungs.
Where’s the justice in a paper-shuffler like Petersson living in a castle, when ordinary, decent workers end up practically on the street when factories and workshops close down? Hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in Swedish industry. What happens to the blues’ false promises of solidarity then?
What’s going to happen to them, the workers?
The less intelligent.
He stubs his cigarette out in the coffee tin half-filled of sand.
Thinks: What about me, what would I be doing if I wasn’t a cop? Maybe I’d be a security guard at some supermarket, accused of using excessive force on a difficult customer.
‘Walle! Walle!’
His old woman shouting indoors. Best see what she wants. Without her, I’d be nothing but my own stupid self.
Johan Jakobsson is lying stretched out in bed, his children on either side of him, having got home from their grandparents early yesterday evening.
His wife asleep alongside.
A blessed harvest, he thinks, listening to his wife’s breathing. That’s what his family is. He thinks of her, and the way they apologised to each other, the way they always do.
They’re best friends, through thick and thin.
What’s a good friend worth? he thinks.
As much as a family? As much as a father?
No. But almost.
30
Early morning.
The world grey-blue like a newborn infant outside the windows of the open-plan office.
Sven Sjoman looks out over the empty chairs and desks, breathes in the smell of paper and lingering sweat. The light from the fluorescent tubes overhead merges with the grey light from outside. Sven thinks about how many detectives he has seen come and go through the course of his career. Malin is one of the best, possibly the best of them all. She understands about listening to the silent voices of an investigation, weaving together the choir of hunches and words into a clear truth.
But it’s taking its toll on her.
The conversation with her husband, or ex-husband, yesterday. Janne. A decent fellow. He called again, worrying about her.
I’m worried as well, Sven thinks. But now I’ve finally had an idea about what I can do without her realising that I’m trying to help her. If she suspected, she’d be furious. Maybe refuse to go. But at least Janne thought it was an excellent idea.
Everything seems to affect Malin badly right now. Everything’s on the surface, and gets scorched by the slightest touch.
Johan, Zeke, Borje, Waldemar.
Borje at home with his wife, the next attack of her MS will in all likelihood mean death.
It’s taking its toll on Borje. But Borje doesn’t seem to be affected by everything the way that Malin is. He seems to have an ability to take pleasure in what he has with his wife, in what he has had.
Waldemar. He’s going to go mad in that room full of paper. But I can probably use his questionable talents. I’m not in favour of the way he conducts police business, his brutality, but not so stupid that I can’t see the value of it at times. That’s why I didn’t veto his transfer from Mjolby. God knows where he got those latest bruises, but he doesn’t complain, and if you work the way that Waldemar does, you have to take the knocks.
Petersson. Who knows what might be lurking under his unturned stones? Give people a whiff of money and they’re capable of almost anything.
Sven pulls in his stomach, sighs, thinks about his brother, self-employed, when he was about to start another business, and how he guaranteed the loan himself and had to sell his house in Karlstad to repay the bank when the business went bankrupt.
Several years later his brother got rich when he sold his next company. Sven asked for his money back, and they were standing on the terrace of his brother’s house, and his brother replied, with a blank look on his face: ‘That was business, Sven. You took a gamble and you lost. Let’s not get apples and pears mixed up now.’
Sven stayed to dinner, that evening.
But he hasn’t spoken to his brother since then.
He opens the
Money, fraternity.
Who could have got so angry, or upset, or disappointed with Jerry Petersson that he ended up in the castle moat, beaten to death and stabbed, among the walled-in prisoners-of-war?
The others look as tired as me, Malin thinks as she looks around at the detectives who have gathered for the first meeting of the week in the preliminary investigation into the murder of Jerry Petersson.
The time is 8.30.
Johan Jakobsson has dark rings under his eyes. Waldemar Ekenberg is ragged from smoking, Lovisa Segerberg looks as if she slept badly in her hotel; they probably have lousy beds in the Hotel du Nord down by the station. Sven Sjoman is the only one who looks alert. Karim Akbar is sitting listlessly at the end of the table, but his shiny grey wool suit is as well pressed as usual, and the pinkish-red tie has been chosen with care.
Silence has descended on the room. The sort of silence that can occur in a room full of detectives searching their minds for a sense of where to go next, waiting for something that is hidden to reveal itself before their eyes.
They’ve been through the Fagelsjos’ lies about their finances, that Fredrik Fagelsjo had lost money on bad investments and had to sell up. And that they had come into an inheritance and tried to buy the estate back, but that Petersson had turned down the offer, in spite of it being a good deal. That Axel Fagelsjo had refused to let Malin and Zeke in, but that Katarina had spoken to them, and that Fredrik had spoken openly and admitted that he had gone out to see Petersson the evening before the murder, but claimed that nothing had happened apart from him confronting Petersson and demanding to be allowed to buy the castle back.
‘If he was there the previous evening, he can’t have killed Petersson then, Karin’s reports says he died in the early hours of the morning and that the blow to the head killed him outright,’ Sven said. ‘From what we know about Petersson’s last twenty-four hours, he doesn’t seem to have met anyone apart from Fredrik Fagelsjo. He only made one call on his mobile, and that turned out to be to his cleaner. A Filipino woman with a solid alibi, and who hadn’t been there for a week.’
‘If Fredrik did kill him,’ Malin said, ‘then he must have gone back the next morning. But his wife has given him an alibi. But we’ve got no way of knowing, that could just be a married couple’s alibi.’
‘And the Filipino cleaner?’ Waldemar asked. ‘Could she have any crazy relatives?’
‘Aronsson’s spoken to her,’ Sven said. ‘She’s clean as a whistle. Anyway, if that were the case, surely he’d have been robbed?’
Then they went through the rest of the case, but there wasn’t much new to report.
‘We’ve checked Petersson’s emails,’ Johan said. ‘And we received the log of telephone calls from Telia late yesterday. Both his mobile and landline. But we haven’t found anything unusual there, apart from the two calls from a phone-box out at Ikea.’
‘Is that so unusual?’ Karim asked.
