Europa Blues (4 page)

It was quarter to ten when Paul Hjelm marched in through Skansen’s gates, was handed a little map and sent in the direction of ‘the wild animals’ in the north-east corner of the big open-air museum. As he stepped onto the long, covered escalator heading up the hill, Hjelm wondered which animals
weren’t
wild. Was man a wild animal? He reached the top and stepped out into completely different weather from at the bottom. It was as though winter had been blown away. In its place, he found himself wandering through the museum’s mock-nineteenth-century town in highest possible summer. April weather, he was on the verge of thinking, even though it was in fact May. Thursday the fourth of May, in the two thousandth year of Our Lord. Twenty hundred. As the sun reflected on red-painted walls, his thoughts drifted to the way people spoke about the year. In general, they had naturally gravitated towards calling it ‘the year two thousand’, a perfectly logical choice. But Paul couldn’t help but wonder why it wasn’t twenty hundred, like the beginning of the previous century. He found a certain pleasure in taking what he called the either/or approach, occasionally using both. It never failed to raise an eyebrow or two.

That was what was playing on Detective Inspector Paul Hjelm’s mind in this, the two thousandth year of Our Lord – a year in which the kingdom of Sweden had been singled out by Amnesty International for a sharp rise in police violence; a year in which the police had regularly turned their batons around to strike out with the hard end; a year in which Kosovans and Albanians had been sent back to their war-torn homelands with five thousand noble Swedish kronor in their pockets.

For a short moment, it felt like
someone else
had taken over his thoughts.

He wondered where all the good old-fashioned sexual fantasies had gone, those fantasies the latest research said should grip us at least fifteen times a day.

One last thought flashed through his mind before he caught a whiff of the predatory animals: who the hell were these model people who had enough time for fifteen sexual fantasies a day? But then the stench took over and Paul Hjelm found himself feeling genuine expectation, like a child in the minutes before Father Christmas turns up, at that moment when fathers sneak off to the toilet with an utterly expressionless look plastered on their faces. In this case, Father Christmas’s real name was Jorge Chavez and he was a detective inspector in Sweden’s national CID.

Just like Paul Hjelm.

The smell disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. Paul Hjelm was lost. He would later deny all knowledge of the incident, but he really was lost inside Skansen. His children were nearing twenty and it had been years since the cheap trip-to-Skansen trick had last worked on them, the thing you resorted to when you ran out of other ideas. The section for wild animals had been completely rebuilt during that time, and he suddenly found himself talking to an utterly listless, cud-chewing male elk that looked more mechanical and stuffed than real. He had no one else to converse with. It was nearing ten, and Skansen was still closed. There wasn’t a person in sight and the bloody elk didn’t have much to say.

Above all, he seemed remarkably clueless about where the bestial predatory animals could possibly be living.

Eventually, Hjelm found his way to the bear mountain. This was unknown territory. Everything was heavily reinforced and he finally made it out of the labyrinthine construction with the feeling that he was following an unravelled ball of yarn. He passed horses and lynx, wild boar and wolves, and suddenly he was there.

At the wolverine enclosure.

There were considerably more people around him now. He immediately recognised the white-clad technicians who, like amateur mountain climbers, were moving up and down the little hills inside. He recognised the blue-and-white plastic tape stretched here and there in front of the safety fence, screaming ‘Police’. He recognised the more or less weather-beaten, eighty-odd-year-old face belonging to the chief medical examiner, Sigvard Qvarfordt. He also recognised the stern Germanic-looking face of the chief forensic technician, Brynolf Svenhagen. And he recognised the particularly energetic face of his close colleague – who was also Chief Forensic Technician Svenhagen’s son-in-law. His name was Jorge Chavez.

Chavez caught sight of Hjelm and his face lit up. He moved towards the deep moat separating the wolverine enclosure from the rest of the park, holding out his hands and shouting, as though he had rehearsed it (which he probably had): ‘Cast off your human shell, O crown of creation, and enter into our animalistic orgy.’

Paul Hjelm sighed and said: ‘How the hell do I do that, then?’

Jorge Chavez raised an eyebrow in surprise and glanced around. Eventually, he turned to Brynolf Svenhagen, who didn’t seem to be doing much other than wandering around looking stern. As though it was his life’s mission.

‘Was it you who nicked the gangplank, Brunte?’

Brynolf Svenhagen looked at his son-in-law with sincere distaste and helpfully replied: ‘My name isn’t Brunte.’

Whereby he continued his stern wandering.

Chavez scratched his head.

‘Porn police probably took it,’ he said. ‘They’ll be letting the wolverines in soon.’

Paul Hjelm climbed up onto the shaky wooden fence, balancing for a moment before taking a reckless leap into nothingness. He floated like a butterfly over the deep, water-filled moat and landed safely on dry ground next to his colleague. It was highly surprising.

‘Nice,’ Chavez said appreciatively.

‘Thanks,’ Hjelm replied, still not quite believing that he wasn’t covered in wolverine shit, having stumbled backwards into the moat and cracked a couple of vertebrae.

He glanced around. The wolverine enclosure was fairly extensive, a piece of hilly terrain which stretched up to a relatively high peak. There were holes dotted here and there, presumably dens, and large areas of the grass-covered ground seemed to be littered with tiny shreds of material, almost like feathers, all different colours and different materials. The forensic technicians were doing all they could to stop the light morning breeze from blowing them away.

Paul pointed at the fibres. Jorge nodded, grabbed hold of his arm and pulled him in the direction of the enclosure’s bottom corner, where the moat was nothing more than a three-metre vertical concrete drop down to the earthy floor.

‘Let’s start from the beginning,’ Jorge said.

The two men stopped. Over in that corner, the fibres had slightly more coherent shapes, most notably the leg of a pair of light pink-coloured trousers.

A few inches of chewed-off bone were sticking up out of it.

Probably a tibia and a fibula.

‘That’s the biggest bit left,’ Chavez said calmly, squatting down. Hjelm did the same and waited for him to continue. He did.

‘
Gulo gulo
, they’re called. Latin for wolverine. Cute little things. Look like fluffy little bear cubs. Their closest relatives are the badger, pine marten, polecat, weasel, otter and mink. They’re endangered, there are just a hundred or so left in Sweden. High up in the mountains. They can grow up to a metre in length and as a rule they live on voles and lemmings. Though sometimes they change their prey—’

Hjelm stood up and stretched his back.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Someone got drunk, climbed into Skansen and ended up among the predators. Can’t be the first time.’

‘Would I have called you here if that were the case?’ Chavez asked, meeting his eye. ‘These are specially evolved killing machines. Don’t you know your Ellroy? They’ll tear a man to pieces at the slightest provocation, especially if there’s a pack of them. They’ve got jaws like bolt cutters. They can break bones and grind them up like they’re nothing. It’s pure luck we’ve got so much left here.’

Using a pencil, Chavez carefully lifted the trouser leg up. There was still some flesh clinging to the bone a bit further up, holding it together. There was also a knot. On a piece of rope.

‘Ah,’ Hjelm said, squatting down once more.

‘Exactly,’ Chavez replied, adding: ‘M.’

‘U,’ said Hjelm.

‘R,’ said Chavez.

‘D,’ said Hjelm.

‘E,’ said Chavez.

‘R,’ said Hjelm.

‘No doubt,’ said Chavez. ‘And it would be nice if we could find a head. At least it’s a variation on a theme,’ he continued, stopping Qvarfordt as he was passing by. ‘Any news, my good man?’ he asked gallantly.

‘Negative,’ the eternally-working Sigvard Qvarfordt replied, pushing his loose dentures into place with a well-practised movement. ‘No head, no fingers. It’ll be hard to get an ID. We’ll be able to get some DNA, but as you know the system isn’t especially well developed. It is a man though. An adult male. The coagulation level of the blood suggests the time of death was yesterday evening or last night. I’d be surprised if he’d been here longer than that. There would definitely have been some complaints from the parents if our friend here had been eaten in broad daylight. That’s all I’ve got for you.’

Just then, they heard a shout from the hill. One of the forensic technicians was waving something he had fished out of a hole in the air. It looked like a wolverine turd.

Paul Hjelm tried the phrase a few times. Wolverine turd. How many times had he said that in his life? Zero.

‘Probably a wolverine dick,’ Chavez whispered loudly.

‘Let’s just hope the wolverine wasn’t still in the hole,’ Hjelm half whispered back.

As the technician struggled down the hill, Hjelm thought for a moment about association paths and their meanings. The technician made it over to his boss, who still had a stern look on his face. Brynolf Svenhagen took the object, twisting and turning it in his hands for a while before wandering over in the direction of Hjelm, Chavez and Qvarfordt. He held it out to old Qvarfordt, who peeped at it through inch-thick glasses and nodded.

‘Fantastic,’ was all he said.

The stern Svenhagen reluctantly turned to his son-in-law and his equally detestable colleague. He held the object up for them.

It was a finger.

‘Fantastic,’ Chavez said, without showing any desire to get a closer look at it. ‘Fingerprints,’ he added unnecessarily.

Svenhagen turned on his heels. Chavez grabbed his flapping white arm and pulled it towards him. It looked like a foretaste of the football World Cup.

‘For God’s sake,’ Svenhagen said doggedly.

‘Can we go over the letters, Brunte? If it’s not too much to ask?’

Brynolf Svenhagen nodded gravely.

‘We are policemen,’ Hjelm added helpfully.

Svenhagen made yet another non-verbal expression of his distaste and then overcame himself. He led the two inspectors towards the edge of the wolverine enclosure, right next to the three-metre drop beneath the viewing area. The ground here was dark earth, and it was where the concentration of multicoloured fibres was greatest. They could also make out the only trace of blood – a darker spot which had been almost entirely soaked up by the earthy ground.

‘Tread carefully here,’ Svenhagen said.

‘How many wolverines were there?’ Hjelm asked.

‘Four.’

‘Four bestial creatures devoured a person and there’s hardly a trace of blood anywhere. Isn’t that strange?’

Svenhagen paused and directed an icy-blue don’t-you-know-anything look at Hjelm.

‘It rained last night,’ he said, squatting down. ‘Fortunately, this is still here,’ he continued, pointing.

In the ground directly beneath Brynolf Svenhagen’s index finger, Hjelm could make out some depressions. After some effort, he realised they were letters. Five of them. He worked his way through them.

‘Epivu?’ he said.

‘That’s what it looks like,’ Svenhagen confirmed. ‘Just don’t ask me what it means.’

‘Did he write it?’

‘We don’t know. The size of the letters is consistent with a human finger, I can say that much. And the number of fibres around here suggests that it might be where the actual … ingestion took place. If that’s the case, we might assume that our victim, with his hands and feet bound, wrote a last message. We’ve taken samples from the letters to see whether there’s any trace of blood or skin in the soil. Maybe that finger can help shed a little light on all of this.’

‘Have we got any idea at all about how he ended up here?’

‘No,’ Svenhagen replied. ‘Plenty of fingerprints on the fence, of course, but otherwise nothing. We’ll have to go through everything.’

‘If we assume he was the one who wrote “Epivu”, then he didn’t end up here without a head. How can a head disappear?’

‘There are several possibilities,’ Svenhagen replied, looking at Hjelm. Perhaps the man wasn’t the utter idiot he had previously assumed him to be. But Brynolf Svenhagen wasn’t someone who enjoyed having his preconceived notions overturned. If possible, that made him even harsher. He continued sternly: ‘The wolverines might simply have eaten it. It’s really not so unlikely that they gobbled up the entire thing, cranium and teeth and cerebral cortex. Everything. Then of course it might be the case that he didn’t write those letters at all. You’ll have to check with the keepers, that’s your job. One of the wolverines might be called Epivu, what do I know?’

Hjelm didn’t let him go. He glanced around the rugged terrain.

‘So the skull could just as easily be here somewhere? We’ll have to keep looking. I assume you’ll be having to sift through plenty of wolverine shit in the near future. It might not be just
one
person, maybe those naughty wolverines gobbled up two or three or an entire football team.’

At the mention of wolverine droppings, Hjelm noticed the space between Svenhagen’s eyes twitch. The hyper-organised chief forensic technician clearly hadn’t thought that far ahead. It felt quite gratifying. These odd little power struggles which fill our social environment …

Why do we find it so difficult to spend time together without being transformed into children?

Svenhagen moved off. Hjelm looked at Chavez.

‘What do we have here?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Chavez answered, ‘but it’s certainly not normal.’

‘No,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘It’s certainly not normal.’