Europa Blues (8 page)

‘You sly dog.’

He assumed Norlander had meant it as praise and not criticism, but Gunnar Nyberg had no idea. Just to be on the safe side, he never saw her again. He met other women instead, and as he became slimmer and slimmer, his confidence grew. By now, he felt nothing but excitement at the delights the opposite sex had to offer. He was ready for something more long-term.

He cleared his throat and said: ‘You all know the details of the so-called commuter train fight. Night train from Kungsängen. Three pro graffiti artists completely renovated the carriage where a group of alcoholics were sitting. Five full-blown alcoholics in their forties – apparently they were morally outraged at the damage and set on the vandals, who were fit young twenty-somethings. It turned into a real fight. Two of the alcoholics were left brain-damaged, one of the vandals died; everyone was hurt in one way or another. When the train arrived in Karlberg, a pensioner with a little lapdog boarded a real bloodbath. It really is as boring as it sounds, from an investigative point of view. I hope these new cases are a bit more stimulating. Viggo and I don’t have anything else to add. Everyone involved has been taken into custody and charged. Aside from the pensioner, who had a heart attack. He’s out of danger now though, finally.’

Hultin cast another glance at his watch. Everything seemed fine. He nodded and thanked Nyberg.

‘OK then,’ he said. ‘We can probably consider that one closed. Time for ferocious little animals.’

Jorge Chavez looked up from a pile of papers and cast a glance at Hjelm, who gestured for him to take charge.

‘OK,’ said Chavez. ‘Have any of you heard of the
Gulo gulo
?’

Clearly none of them had.

‘It comes from the Latin for glutton. It’s another name for the wolverine. As I’m sure you can guess, it’s hinting at the animal’s insatiable greediness. They eat small animals during the summer, but in the winter they’d happily eat a reindeer or two. The night before last, four of the wolverines in Skansen were clearly feeling quite wintery, because these little creatures – which don’t weigh more than about thirty kilos each, by the way – guzzled down a man, virtually every last bit of him. We’ve got some fibres from a pale pink suit, a section of his leg, complete with a piece of eight-millimetre red-and-purple polypropylene rope, plus a right index finger and this.’

He held up a dog-eared playing card.

The queen of spades.

‘We found traces of the probable basis for their greediness. Cocaine. An analysis of the flesh and blood samples showed the same: that our victim had recently consumed a pretty large amount of cocaine. Since the drug was in his blood, it added to the wolverines’ insatiability.

‘Everyone knows that the worst things always happen – in war, for example – under the influence of drugs. Apparently the animal kingdom isn’t much different from the human race in that respect. Put simply: the cocaine drove the wolverines crazy, and from what we can tell, they even managed to work their way through almost his entire skeleton, his head included. We haven’t found it yet, at least. Despite that, my father-in-law’s men from the lab have managed to produce both a DNA analysis and a usable fingerprint. Neither of them match anything in the Swedish databases, so we’ve sent them on to Interpol and Europol.

‘We didn’t find our man’s fingerprints on the wooden fence around the enclosure either. None of the fingerprints from the fence match any entries in the database. His finger, which was pretty cut up, was full of earth that we’ve managed to link to the soil in the southern corner of the wolverine enclosure – the area right beneath the viewing platform. We also found both blood and skin fragments from the victim in that area – in five letters which, from what we can tell, he scratched in the ground with his finger. The word, if it even is one, is: “Epivu”. Capital E, the rest lower case. Does that mean anything to anyone?’

It didn’t.

‘No,’ said Chavez. ‘It didn’t mean a thing to us either. Or the Internet. Not one single hit.’

‘Moving on from the wolverine enclosure,’ Paul Hjelm continued. ‘Because of the rope around his leg, we automatically assumed he’d been carried there, either unconscious or already dead. I took too long to react, if I’m honest. I’d just come from the Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital, where I’d been talking to a little girl who’d been shot just after 10 p.m. the night before. In Djurgården, not far from the eastern edge of Skansen. If we look at the path of the bullet and follow it back, you end up at the Skansen fence – parallel to the wolf enclosure. The lucky technicians had to expand their search to that enclosure too.

‘They eventually managed to find three things: firstly, our victim’s blood, high up on the fence – including on the barbed wire at the top and then also on the concrete wall beneath the viewing area on the other side. Secondly, they found a thick, broken neck chain, eighteen-carat gold, and finally, a 9mm Luger with a silencer. The magazine was empty. They did some sample shots. The gun’s a perfect match for the bullet taken from ten-year-old Lisa Altbratt’s upper arm. She’ll be absolutely fine, by the way.’

‘So in summary,’ Chavez took over. ‘Who is our man? He was wearing a pale pink suit and he had a thick gold chain around his neck; he snorts cocaine from the queen of spades and he’s armed with a silenced Luger. The print from his one remaining finger – the right index finger to be precise – is on all three of them: the card, the chain and the gun. It’s unambiguous. So who is he?’

‘Hit man?’ asked Nyberg.

‘Drug dealer?’ rejoined Norlander.

‘Porn star?’ Nyberg countered.

‘Pimp?’ Holm and Svenhagen blurted out in unison.

The two women glanced at one another.

‘We’ll have to wait and see,’ Chavez said firmly. ‘At the very least, the whole thing screams underworld. He’s not in our databases, which means he’s probably foreign. If he was Swedish, the systems would’ve gone crazy with matches.’

‘So what happened to him?’ Hjelm continued. ‘Someone chased him through the Djurgården woods. He shot at them, but there’s no indication of him hitting anyone other than Lisa Altbratt. He made it to the fence and decided to climb up, even though there was a little path right alongside the fence. What does that tell us? Desperation, maybe? Blind panic? He ripped his fingers to shreds on the fence, didn’t care about grabbing the barbed wire – it cut deep into his hands – and then threw himself into the wolf enclosure. Luckily for him, they seem to have been well fed and content.’

‘One thing,’ Kerstin Holm said pensively. ‘
Was
there even anyone following him? Maybe it was just some kind of drug-induced psychosis? The only thing suggesting a crime is surely the rope around his leg. But maybe we should assume he had that there for some other reason. I don’t know, sexual maybe – some sort of bondage thing? He might have just been running from his own demons and fallen into the wolverines in blind panic?’

There was silence. Chavez leafed through his papers.

‘The rope had been chewed off,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s no evidence it was tied around both legs, so it might have just been around one of them. Some kind of decoration. But,’ he added more loudly, ‘is that really likely?’

‘The key thing’s got to be whether there’s any sign of anyone else there,’ Holm continued. ‘It could be in a number of places, if I’ve followed everything you’ve been saying: outside Skansen, on the fence, in with the wolves, on the wall at the edge of the wolf enclosure, on the ground between the wolves and the wolverines, in with the wolverines. It doesn’t seem too likely we’d find anything in with the wolverines, but what about the other places? If his blood is all over the fence then why don’t we have anything from whoever was following him? Why didn’t they leave a single trace behind?’

Chavez tore his papers.

‘Apparently there aren’t even any clear footprints from him. In the wolf enclosure, the ground’s practically all rock between the fence and the wall. There’s no trace of him on the asphalt – not on the fence around the wolverine enclosure, either.’

‘But in with the wolverines, surely his footprints have got to be there?’ said Holm. ‘I mean, he was writing in the earth with his fingers. It must be porous. Is there no sign of him there, by the letters?’

Chavez nodded – the way a man who has missed something nods.

‘I know, Kerstin, but there aren’t any. There are wolverine prints, a general kind of chaos, traces of the actual ingestion … but no footprints. It rained that night, remember that.’

‘But not enough to get rid of the letters …’

‘He might’ve been thrown down once he was already tied up,’ said Hjelm. ‘If he was thrown in, maybe he got injured. All he managed to do was write that word which, for some reason, was more important than getting up. And then the wolverines appeared.’

‘And there’s no sign of anyone else having been there at all?’ Kerstin Holm persisted. ‘Not even on the fence?’

‘No,’ Chavez replied doggedly.

‘So let’s try to work out what happened with the wolves,’ said Hjelm. ‘Let’s imagine he got rid of the gun because he’d emptied the magazine. Not a smart move, but understandable. Blind fury. Then why did he tear his expensive chain off, that ridiculous extension of his penis, and throw it to the wolves?’

‘Maybe that’s just another sign of drug psychosis,’ Holm said. Hjelm thought he knew her well enough to realise she was now doing it just to annoy Jorge, who had a dark look in his eyes. It didn’t help that Hultin concluded:

‘So in other words, we don’t even know if a crime has been committed—’

‘Yes,’ Chavez said irritatedly. ‘This is a murder. If it isn’t, I’ll throw myself to the wolverines. That’s a promise.’

The A-Unit stared at him. It was true that each of them had been hoping for a real case – for no more fights on commuter trains – but none more than Jorge Chavez. That much was obvious.

‘That’ll be a nice crowd-pleaser for the summer concerts in Skansen,’ Viggo Norlander said, blowing his nose. ‘Lasse Berghagen introducing the daring Wolverine Detective.’

‘Shut up,’ Chavez said.

‘Isn’t that my line?’ retorted Norlander.

‘Honestly,’ said Holm, ‘if we look at that incomprehensible writing and the fact that he wrote what he did instead of trying to get out … Doesn’t it all just suggest he was mad?’

‘Yeah,’ said Hjelm. ‘I think he was mad. Drugged up and mad with panic. But I also think his panic was justified.’

‘But whoever was following him
doesn’t
seem to have climbed into the wolf enclosure after him,’ said Holm. ‘Is there any other way in?’

Hjelm and Chavez exchanged glances. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

‘We’ll look into it,’ Hjelm said drily.

Hultin pulled himself together, glanced at his watch and continued.

‘Well, that took a while. We’ve still got another event to go through. Kerstin?’

Kerstin Holm looked slightly out of it. Her fingers touched the bare patch on her temple and she imagined she could feel her thoughts breaking up on the other side of the thin bone.

‘Could you start, Sara?’ she asked.

Sara, who had been sitting quietly, looked up in surprise. She still thought of herself as Kerstin’s inferior and had been expecting – at most – a word or two. She took a sip of her cold coffee, pulled a face and composed herself.

‘Eight asylum seekers, all strongly suspected of having worked as prostitutes, disappeared from the annexe of a refugee centre the night before last. From the Norrboda Motell in Slagsta, to be precise. Where they were living and working.

‘They’re all from Eastern Europe: three of the women from Ukraine, two from Bulgaria, two from Russia and another from Belarus. The two Russians, Natalja Vaganova and Tatjana Skoblikova, were in room 224; two of the Ukrainians, Galina Stenina and Lina Kostenko, were in room 225; the other one, Valentina Dontsjenko, and the Belorussian, Svetlana Petruseva, were in room 226; the two Bulgarians, Stefka Dafovska and Mariya Bagrjana, were in room 227. I’m sure you’ll remember all of that.

‘We worked late into the evening yesterday, talking to their neighbours. It seems like it was a pretty open secret that they were prostitutes. We’ve got names for some of the johns and we’ve managed to get a pretty good idea of how they were able to run their business. Jörgen Nilsson, the manager, didn’t just turn a blind eye to it; we’ve also got reports that he made use of their services. As a customer. I don’t think he’s got much of a future left in his job.’

Kerstin Holm had managed to collect herself and took over.

‘We had two key questions. When did the women disappear, and had their disappearance been preceded by anything unusual? We couldn’t expect to know much more than that by this point. What we do know is the following: for the past week or so, the women had been more uneasy than usual; something had clearly happened to make them nervous. Their neighbours were pretty much in agreement on that.

‘From what we can tell, the eight women were there all evening on Wednesday. One witness claims he heard them talking in a foreign language, probably Russian, as late as three on Thursday morning. They were meant to report to Nilsson at nine that morning, but they never showed up. None of their neighbours – and we’ve spoken to most of them by now – saw or heard them disappear. All that with a side note, most of the interviews were carried out using an interpreter.’

‘So we don’t even know if a crime has been committed,’ Chavez pointed out vindictively.

Holm gave him an amused look. Svenhagen gave him an angry one. The look of a wife whose husband was acting like a child.

‘No,’ Sara said, managing to sound restrained. ‘But we do have to ask whether it’s really just a coincidence that an unidentified pimp-like man was chased to his death just a few hours before eight prostitutes from a refugee camp disappeared into thin air. We can speculate a bit here. Was he their pimp? If that’s the case, then doesn’t it seem fair to assume that the whole brothel’s just been wiped out by the competition? They’re probably dead already, if that’s true. And then we’d have a real sex war on our hands. Plus, battles between brothels usually mean drug wars, too. Or maybe he was just a competing pimp, put to death by the eight’s pimp before he grabbed his women and went underground?’