Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (11 page)

In the stairwell, Chavez said, “What the fuck did you bring me along for?”

“Kerstin thought you needed to get out in the sun,” Hjelm said heartily.

“Not much sun in there.”

“To be honest, I needed a sounding board, someone without any preconceived notions about Lars-Erik Hassel at all. So?”

They wandered down the stairs to Pipersgatan. The sun got caught up in some stubborn bits of cloud and cast the northern half of City Hall in shadow. The result was a strange optical double exposure.

“Right or left?” Chavez asked.

“Left,” said Hjelm. “We’re going to Marieberg.”

They walked quietly down Pipersgatan. Down at Hantverkargatan they turned right, wandered past Kungsholmstorg, and stopped at the bus stop.

“Well,” Chavez returned to conversing, “I wonder how Laban’s literature studies are going.”

“Check,” Hjelm said.

The bus had almost made it to Marieberg before Chavez, calling on his cell, managed to get past the switchboard at Stockholm University and reach the department of literature, whose telephone-answering hours were of the irregular variety. Hjelm followed the phone-call spectacle from a distance, like a director laughing covertly at the efforts of the actors. They were crammed into different parts of the overcrowded bus, Hjelm in the aisle in back, Chavez in the middle, leaning over a baby carriage that was cutting into his diaphragm. Every time he half-yelled into his phone, the baby in the carriage screamed back three times as loud, accompanied by the equally crammed-in mother’s increasingly acid remarks. By the time Chavez stepped
off the bus at Västerbroplan, he had a vague idea of what hell was like.

“Well?” Hjelm said again.

“You are an evil person,” Chavez hissed.

“It’s a difficult line of business,” said Hjelm.

“Laban Hassel was registered for basic studies in literature three years ago. There are no results listed in the register today. No courses at all.”

Hjelm nodded. They had arrived at the same conclusion from different directions. He was pleased with the synchronicity.

They reached the newspaper building. This time the elevator worked. They walked into the arts and leisure offices purposefully. If everything went well, this whole thing would be solved before the A-Unit’s evening meeting.

Erik Bertilsson was leaning over a jammed fax machine. Hjelm cleared his throat half an inch from the man’s red-mottled scalp. Bertilsson gave a start, looking as if he’d seen a ghost. Which, Hjelm thought, wasn’t far from the truth.

“We could use a little help,” Hjelm said with a neutrality that would have given Hultin’s a run for its money. “Can you get us into Hassel’s e-mail inbox? If it still exists.”

Bertilsson gaped wildly at the man upon whom he had unloaded his life’s disappointments, and who he had thought was out of his life. He didn’t move a muscle. Finally he managed to say, “I don’t know his password.”

“Is there someone here who knows it?” A shadow of a thought flew through Bertilsson’s diffuse consciousness. He shuffled over to a computer ten or so yards away, where he exchanged a few words with an overweight woman in her early forties. Her long hair, which was hanging free, was raven black; her tiger-striped glasses were oval; her flowery summer dress was tight. She sent a long, frosty look over at the duo of heroes and returned to her computer.

Bertilsson came back and pecked in a password; Chavez observed the keyboard concert attentively.

Bertilsson didn’t get in.
Access denied
. He hit the screen in an outburst of rage and returned to the woman with a substantially longer stride. A short palaver played out that Hjelm and Chavez observed in pantomime. The woman threw up her hands and let the corners of her mouth fall—her entire massive form radiated indifference. Then she lit up with a flash of inspiration, stabbed her index finger into the air, and uttered a word.

Bertilsson came back and wordlessly pecked out the key to the electronic remains of the deceased.

“You can leave us now,” Hjelm said, unmoved. “But don’t leave the office. We’ll need to talk with you some more in a bit.”

Chavez felt immediately at home in front of the monitor, but no exhibition of professionalism was forthcoming. He dug around a bit in the in- and outboxes and consulted “deleted messages” but found only empty pages.

“There’s nothing left here,” he said.

“Okay.” Hjelm waved to Bertilsson, who arrived like a dog that has been punished into loyalty.

“Why are all of Hassel’s messages gone?” Hjelm asked.

Bertilsson, looking at the monitor rather than at Hjelm, shrugged. “He’s probably deleted them.”

“No one else has cleaned them out?”

“Not that I know of. Either the whole mailbox and all the addresses should be gone, or else they should still be there. And that
is
probably everything. Maybe he was in the habit of cleaning it all out—what do I know?”

“There are no shortcuts?” Hjelm asked Chavez. “And no chance of finding out who deleted them?”

“Not from here,” said Chavez. “Network trashes are hard to manage.”

Since Chavez was speaking in tongues, Hjelm had to accept
this remark without understanding, like a true believer. He turned to Bertilsson again. “Who is your colleague Elisabeth B something? Is she still in the office?”

“Everyone is still here,” Bertilsson said, in a tone of
Everyone is always still here
. Then he roused himself: “You’re talking about Elisabeth Berntsson, I assume.”

“Probably,” said Hjelm. “Is she here now?”

“She was the one I was just talking to.”

Hjelm glanced over toward the black-haired woman, who was typing like mad. “What was her relationship with Hassel like?”

Bertilsson cast a nervous glance around, one that ought to have triggered the curiosity of anyone who wasn’t asleep. But no one reacted. Möller, sitting behind his glass doors, was staring out the window. He didn’t appear to have moved an inch since Hjelm’s previous visit.

“You’ll have to ask her,” Bertilsson said resolutely. “I’ve said more than enough.”

They walked over to the writing woman, who looked up from her computer. “Elisabeth Berntsson?” Hjelm said. “We’re with the police.”

She peered at them over her glasses. “Your names?” she said in a slightly hoarse smoker’s voice, clearly experienced at this.

“I’m Detective Inspector Paul Hjelm. This is Detective Inspector Jorge Chavez. From the National Criminal Police.”

“Aha,” she said, recognizing their names from the headlines. “That means there’s more behind Lars-Erik’s death than we’re allowed to know.”

“Can we go somewhere a bit more private?”

She raised an eyebrow, stood, and walked toward a glass door. They followed her into an empty office that was a carbon copy of Möller’s.

“Have a seat.” She sat down behind the desk.

They found a pair of chairs sticking up among the mess of papers and took a seat.

Hjelm jumped straight in. “Why did you call the maternity ward at Karolinska Hospital during the book fair in 1992 to inform the mother of Lars-Erik Hassel’s newborn son that her husband was engaged in copious amounts of sexual relations in Gothenburg while her son was being born?”

Her jaw ought to have dropped, but it remained as steady as her gaze. “Well, what do you know,
in medias res
,” she said, not missing a beat. “Very effective.”

“It ought to have been,” Hjelm replied. “But apparently you’ve been expecting the question.”

“Because you two are who you are, I realized that you would have ferreted it out.” Had she said it in another tone, they could have taken it as a compliment.

“What was it? Revenge?” Hjelm asked abruptly.

Elisabeth Berntsson took off her glasses, folded them up, and placed them on the desk. “No,” she said. “Drunkenness.”

“Maybe as a catalyst. Hardly as a reason.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

Hjelm switched tactics. “Why did you delete all of Hassel’s e-mails?”

Chavez pointed out, “That wasn’t very difficult to trace.”

Hjelm gave him a look that he hoped would not be too easily interpreted as grateful.

Elisabeth Berntsson, however, seemed to have other things on her mind. An inner battle was being waged behind the naked concentration on her hardened face. Finally she said, “The copious relations you were talking about took place primarily with me. Larsa needed something a bit more solid than that twenty-year-old. It was practically over already; all I did was hurry the process up a little. A catalyst,” she said with a sardonic touch.

“And then? Was it the two of you forever and ever amen?”

Berntsson snorted. “Neither of us was particularly interested in forever and ever amen. I suppose we were both too scarred by the downsides of cohabitation. And had developed a taste for the alternative. One-night stands are really nothing to sneeze at. Me, I lead an active social life and want to be free to do what I want. And Larsa’s tastes were probably more in the vein of … the younger age groups. For me, he was a decent lover and a more or less reliable part of my life. Like a TV show, maybe. Same time, same channel. And I do mean channel.”

Hjelm made a quick decision. “Did he let you read the threatening e-mails?”

“I got tired of them. They were all different variations on the same theme. An almost unbelievable amount of persistence. A fixation. Someone had found a scapegoat he could lay all his life’s frustrations on.”

“He?”

“Everything suggested it was a man. Male language, if that makes sense.”

“How many were there?”

“There were only scattered sprinklings of them for the first six months. During the past month, they accelerated into a veritable flash flood.”

“So it’s been going on for just over six months?”

“About that.”

“How did Hassel react?”

“At first he was pretty shaken up. But when he realized that they seemed to be written mostly for therapeutic purposes, he became more thoughtful. As though he were pondering his past actions and what he was being punished for. But later, when they started to come more frequently, he got scared again and decided to fly the coop for a while. That’s how the New York idea was born.”

Hjelm didn’t comment on the cost of this escape. Instead he
said, “Can you describe the contents of the e-mails in greater detail?”

“Very explicit descriptions of how evil Larsa was and, above all, what would be done to his body. They said nothing about what wrong he had actually committed. That was what made him nervous, I think: that the source was so vague.”

“Who do you think it was?”

She fingered her eyeglasses, turning them at different angles on the desk. Then she finally said, “It must have been an author.”

“Why?”

“You’ve read what Larsa wrote.”

“How do you know that?”

“Möller told me. Which means you know that he didn’t mince words about things he disliked. That was what made him stand out as a critic. That was how he built up his nationwide reputation. But when you do that, you hurt people. And sometimes when people are hurt, they never get back on their feet. Bad blood always comes back around.”

Hjelm wondered at her strange final comment. Was she quoting someone?

“Did the sender write like an author?” he asked.

“A fallen author. Yes.”

Hjelm usually didn’t touch his cheek in public, but now he scratched his blemish absentmindedly. A small flake of skin floated down toward his pant leg. Elisabeth Berntsson watched it expressionlessly.

He gave Chavez a meaningful glance, then said, “So we’re back where we started: why did you delete all of Hassel’s e-mails?”

“I didn’t.”

Hjelm sighed and turned to Chavez. His partner had had enough time to fabricate a story, but Hjelm wasn’t sure he was in on the plan; after all, they’d gotten a little rusty.

Chavez was in. “We arrived here at the editorial office at
15:37. At 15:40, Bertilsson asked you about Hassel’s password. At 15:41, he entered it; it was wrong. He went back to you, and you came up with the correct password at 15:43. We got into Hassel’s inbox at 15:44. By then everything had been deleted. I found the time stamp of the deletion: 15:42, two minutes after you had learned what we were doing and given us the wrong password.”

Chavez had done his homework and had outdone his teacher by a mile:
if you’re going to lie, lie in great detail
.

Elisabeth Berntsson stared deep down into her desk.

Hjelm leaned toward her. “If you weren’t the one who wrote them, then why delete them? To salvage Larsa’s reputation? Hardly. Where were you on the night between the second and third of September?”

“Not in Newark,” she said quietly.

“Have you been going around hating him all these years? How did you have time to write all this hate mail? Did you do it during working hours?”

Elisabeth picked up her glasses, unfolded the earpieces, and settled them onto her distinguished nose. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them to meet Hjelm’s. The gaze he saw was a completely new one.

“I suppose you could say I loved him. The hate mail was about to break me.”

“So you hired a hit man to make the pain end?”

“Of course not.”

“But he told you who he suspected was behind them, right? And you deleted everything to protect his murderer. Sort of strange behavior toward the dear departed, isn’t it?”

Now she looked determined, but not in a self-confident way; rather, she was determined not to speak at any price. She wasn’t going to say anything more.

But she said more than words could have: “It’s private.”

Then she broke down. It was unexpected for everyone present, including herself, but the repressed sadness came tumbling out in long, sweeping waves.

When they stood up, Hjelm realized he liked her. He would have liked to place a comforting arm around her, but he knew the comfort he was capable of offering wouldn’t go very far. Her sorrow was much deeper than that.

They left her alone with her pain.

In the elevator, Chavez said, “A pyrrhic victory—isn’t that what it’s called? Another victory like that, and I’m done for.”