Another Time, Another Life (47 page)

“While the rest of us toil and moil,” sighed the undersecretary. “Take our dear German foreign minister, for example. I’ve met him myself on a number of occasions. He seems completely normal, even pleasant, though that environmental bullshit leaves me cold—and then one day an old picture shows up from some political demonstration during his youth. He’s kicking a policeman who’s lying on the street, and it isn’t at all clear who the real villain is.”

The way you talk, thought Johansson.

“Yes, I’ve seen that too,” said Johansson, nodding curtly. “As far as Stein is concerned, I’ve simply told my coworkers to be extra careful. Neither you nor we and least of all she will be well served if there’s any carelessness in that respect. And you know as well as I do that it takes a hell of a lot of time to do something properly. I’m estimating you’ll get a report in time next week.”

“Sounds good,” said the undersecretary, appearing to be almost satisfied as he leaned back among all the pillows on the large couch. “One other thing, by the way …”

“I’m listening,” said Johansson.

“It would be nice if I had the pleasure of seeing you over a bite of food, when the report does come in,” said the undersecretary. “In my own humble abode, with the resources the house can offer.”

“I’ve heard a good deal about them,” said Johansson, smiling.

“Nothing bad I hope,” said the undersecretary.

“The little I’ve heard sounded good enough,” said Johansson.

“Well all right then,” said the undersecretary. “I’ll ask my secretary to call your secretary and see if they can find a time that suits us both.”

I wonder what he really wants? thought Johansson sitting in the car on the way back to work. It’s all the same anyway, he thought. Because if it’s important enough it will come out sooner or later. And if not, you only risk becoming like your unfortunate predecessor.

“How’d it go with that fuckup Bäckström?” Johansson asked as soon as he stepped into his department’s corridor and caught sight of Wiklander.

“Above all expectations,” said Wiklander. “By the way, did you know he has a position as chief inspector at the crime bureau?”

“But that’s just excellent,” said Johansson, who knew the score when it came to things like that, and had already made note of his impending promotion sometime before Bäckström’s appointment. “With those amazing testimonials he had this can’t have been completely unexpected, and you have to admit there’s something reassuring about a consistent development,” he said.

“I’ve told the others to reserve the afternoon,” said Wiklander, who was not really clear what Johansson meant and in any case did not intend to go deeper into the subject.

“Good,” said Johansson. “Then I’ll see you after lunch.”

The entire afternoon was spent on the meeting with the investigation team. First, Anna Holt reported on where they were in her usual efficient manner.

The attempts to chart the dealings among Stein, Tischler, and Eriksson by means of telephone and financial transactions had not produced any interesting results beyond what was already in the old murder investigation, which was meager enough. On the other hand, a number of conversations between Stein and her cousin Tischler had been logged, which indicated that they’d kept in constant touch with each other. For a
rather long time Stein had also had a deposit account at Tischler’s banking firm, but she had closed it when her cousin formally left the family firm several years ago.

“So my proposal is that we discontinue that aspect,” said Holt.

“That’s okay with me,” Johansson agreed. These lines of inquiry were fucking expensive too, he thought. Telia and the other operators start robbing you blind as soon as you want any information from them.

After that Holt touched on Stein’s fingerprints and the forensic analysis of the traces on the lost hand towel. Stein had offered an explanation for how the prints were left in Eriksson’s apartment, and it could not be immediately dismissed, even if Holt and Wiklander were firmly convinced that she had been lying to their faces. Same with the traces of vomit and the lipstick on the hand towel. In both cases they pointed to Stein, but at the same time they didn’t rule out alternative explanations strongly enough to have legal significance.

“And as far as our witness the major is concerned, he can’t point out Stein from among a group of pictures,” Holt stated.

“Do you think there’s any point in questioning Tischler?” asked Johansson, although he already knew the answer.

“Only if we want him to confirm Stein’s version and you want to tip them off that she’s the one we’re interested in,” said Holt.

“And that’s all we have,” Johansson summarized.

“Yup,” said Holt, “and unfortunately it’s not very likely we’ve missed anything either. Not this time,” she added, smiling faintly.

“Okay then,” said Johansson, who sounded unexpectedly cheerful. “Now I want all of you to close your eyes.…”

The four in the room exchanged surprised glances but did as he said, even if Martinez looked like she was trying to peek.

“Everyone who is completely convinced that Helena Stein stabbed Kjell Göran Eriksson to death, raise your hand,” said Johansson. After a pause of a few seconds he said, “You can open your eyes now.”

There were five raised hands including his own, and a unified investigation.

“Please put down your hands,” said Johansson, smiling. “The day before yesterday I took the opportunity to go through the tech report and the autopsy report, as well as a few other goodies that Anna alerted me to,” said Johansson, nodding at Holt, “so I’m pretty clear now on
how the whole thing went down. If any of you are interested, I can tell you about it,” said Johansson.

“I am,” said Holt before any of the others managed to say the same thing. We’re already sitting on pins and needles, she thought. You don’t need to show off.

“Okay then,” said Johansson. “Then I’ll tell you what happened when Helena Stein stabbed Kjell Göran Eriksson to death.”

And he did, with the help of his pictures, in the same way as he had when he talked through the case with his best friend, Bo Jarnebring. It took about half an hour, and whether what he said was true or false—for some of it he couldn’t have known without having been there, and in any case he couldn’t have known what was going on in the heads of Stein or Eriksson—regardless of that he had mesmerized his audience. When he was finally silent they too sat silently.

Now I understand what Jarnebring and everyone else here was talking about, thought Holt, who had finally experienced the true Lars Martin Johansson. Although naturally she didn’t say that.

“I’m in complete agreement,” said Holt. “That must have been what happened.” At least in the essentials, she thought.

“And that woman is going to get off … It’s just too much,” said Martinez with poorly controlled anger and her police instincts still intact.

“Yes,” said Wiklander with a heat he seldom showed and the ambivalence that naturally ensues when reality is no longer black or white. “This is an extraordinarily gloomy story.”

“It’s probably the sorriest story I’ve heard,” said Mattei, who looked like she might start crying.

And for some reason it was to her that Johansson turned when he began to speak again.

“Yes, of course it is,” said Johansson. “Sometimes it’s a real shame about us humans. And this time it’s a real shame about Helena Stein. Speaking of her,” Johansson continued, smiling at Mattei, “I understand that you, Lisa, have produced quite a bit about Stein. It would be interesting if you’d give us a summary.” But not a novel, thought Johansson, for he tried to avoid that sort of thing.

“I could write a whole novel about Helena Stein actually, but for now I’ll concentrate on two moments in her life: the mid-seventies when the occupation of the West German embassy took place, and the late eighties, when Kjell Göran Eriksson was murdered.”

Sounds good, thought Johansson, but be very careful not to put it in book form and publish it or I will personally see to it that you end up in the slammer.

“Looks like you’ve uncovered a lot of information about her,” said Johansson.

“There’s plenty if you know where to look,” said Mattei, who had a hard time concealing her enthusiasm. “Not least on her political involvement, despite the fact that she seems to have made an effort to keep a low public profile the whole time. For example, I have hundreds of pictures of her published in various books and newspapers, which I’ve gathered from open sources. The first one is a book cover that came out in 1975, but the book isn’t at all about her. She’s not even mentioned by name, which in itself isn’t so strange considering her age. The book is called
The New Left
and was published in 1975 by Fischer & Co., and there’s Helena Stein on the cover. It’s a news photo the publisher used from a demonstration outside the American embassy in 1973, and Stein is only fifteen years old at the time. She’s standing in front of the barricades waving a placard, dressed in jeans and one of those padded jackets girls wore back then. The last photo I have is the official portrait taken of her when she was appointed undersecretary a few years ago. There she’s dressed in a graphite-colored dress with a dark blue blouse and black pumps. She is extremely attractive. So there are twenty-five years between the first and the last picture, and it gets really amazing when you look at all the pictures of her in chronological order—I’ve put them on a separate CD-ROM in case you want to do that yourselves,” said Mattei with enthusiasm blossoming on her pale cheeks.

“Do you have any more like that?” said Johansson, who himself was passionate about this kind of research. During his most active period as a police officer he used to devote hours to going through photo albums, home videos, and diaries he’d acquired from both crime victims and thugs.

“I have a whole CD filled with film clips of her too. There are news
reports and interviews that I downloaded from our various TV channels. Then I have a third disk with the written material and my summary of her biography.”

The weekend is saved, thought Johansson, who was already mentally rubbing his hands.

“The mid-seventies and late eighties,” he reminded her. “What were things like for her then?”

In the fall of 1975 Helena Stein turned seventeen. Just over six months later she would graduate from the French School, which was one year earlier than normal because when she was little she had been an unusually precocious child and had started school a year before her classmates. But as a teenager she seemed completely normal and displayed a sampling of the usual problems of puberty and conflicts with her parents and teachers.

Her father was a pediatrician with his own private practice; her mother was an art historian and worked for the Nordic Museum. Helena had grown up in Östermalm and the French School was the only school she attended. She was an only child, and when she was seven her parents divorced and had other children with their new partners. Gradually she acquired four half siblings. At the time of the divorce Helena chose to remain at home with her father.

In the fall of 1974 her father was appointed as an expert at UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund. He temporarily turned his practice over to a colleague, took his new wife and Helena’s two younger half-siblings and moved to New York where they remained for over a year. Helena remained at home in the apartment on Riddargatan, and the contact she had with her mother seemed not to have intensified as a result of her father’s absence. Helena seems to have taken care of herself.

That same autumn she started a relationship with her cousin Theo Tischler’s best friend, Sten Welander. Helena had just turned sixteen; Welander was twenty-seven, the father of two and still married to his first wife. When he finally divorced her in the fall of 1975, he had also broken up with Helena Stein.

Helena Stein seemed to have devoted most of her time during these years to political activism, which led to recurring conflicts with her mother and some of her teachers.

As a young radical Helena initially hopped among various minor leftwing groups until she finally settled on the Swedish Communist Party. Helena Stein was a young Communist and no one in her bourgeois milieu was particularly happy about that, but it was hoped that this phase would soon pass, and that by and by it would be seen as a youthful aberration in the spirit of the time.

In addition she was involved in a number of other radical groups and societies, the Swedish NLF movement of course but also KRUM, which worked for humane treatment of criminals.

“That’s the recurring theme in her life,” Mattei summarized, “her strong political involvement, always to the left.”

“Yeah,” said Johansson with a drawl. “Judging by her upbringing, she sounds like a typical young radical from the happy seventies.”

“No,” said Mattei, shaking her head. “There you’re wrong, Boss. That’s actually a prejudice.”

“I see,” said Johansson, not looking as though he was particularly offended. “How so?”

“It wasn’t the case that the young left of the time was dominated by a few upper-class kids. Those involved were a rather representative selection of the populace,” said Mattei.

“So Stein was an exception,” said Johansson.

“Yes. Her background was unusual within the young left,” said Mattei.

“Her involvement then,” said Johansson, “how genuine was it?” Given her background, thought Johansson.

“I’m completely convinced that her political involvement was genuine,” said Mattei. “Otherwise she never would have thrown herself into it the way she did.”

“You mean the West German embassy,” said Johansson. “Don’t you think that was mostly a desire for adventure? Exciting and romantic, or so she believed. Not at all like what it turned out to be.”

“It’s possible that was part of it,” said Mattei, “but there were other things that might not have been so pleasant for her.”

“Such as?” asked Johansson.

“If I’ve gotten this right, she was pretty badly bullied during her whole time at high school, and the first year she studied law at Uppsala a couple of her male classmates gave her a good beating after a party at the Stockholm student organization,” Mattei said in a serious tone. “According to the police report it was a political discussion that went downhill. If you’re interested in counting her bruises, I’ve placed a copy of the medical examination from Academic Hospital in her background material,” Mattei said.