The Blinded Man (11 page)

‘Have you taken a look at the proposed murder scene?’ he asked with a smile.

He gave his wife a hug and then led the way out to Hjelm’s car, ready for a temporary but much-longed-for comeback in the machinery of justice.

The sun was still shining.

9

JAN-OLOV HULTIN AGAIN
made his entrance through the mysterious door on the far side of the room, which Jorge Chavez somewhat ironically called ‘Supreme Central Command’. The half-moon reading glasses were already perched on the wide bridge of his nose. Hultin turned to face the assembled members of the A-Unit. Everyone was leafing through their papers and notebooks.

‘So this morning the whole thing was made public,’ said Hultin grimly. ‘In all the newspapers simultaneously, by the way. Somebody was busy making calls. Or else there’s some sort of cooperation among all sectors of the media. We haven’t yet located the leak. Maybe it was simply impossible to keep such a major case secret. At least we had a day’s head start.’

He went over to the whiteboard, twisted the top off one of the felt markers and got ready to fire. The pen was now his service weapon.

‘At any rate, it looks as if some feverish activity has
been
going on inside your A-Unit brains today. Let’s see the results. Norlander?’

Viggo Norlander bent over his dark-blue notebook. ‘Modus operandi,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in contact with everybody from the FBI to Liechtenstein’s security force and done a whole bunch of cross-checking through the worldwide phone network. Three of the groups that are currently active consistently use shots to the head when it comes to blatant executions: a branch within the American mafia, under the mob boss Carponi, in Chicago, of all classic gangster cities; a semi-extinct separatist group from the Red Army Faction, under the command of Hans Kopff; and a minor Russian-Estonian crime group led by Mr Viktor X, which you might call a segment of the Russian mafia, whatever that label is now worth. Most cases have been executions of traitors or snitches; no instance has involved two, and only two, shots. So far I haven’t been able to track down any examples of two shots to the head. I’ll keep looking.’

‘Thanks, Viggo,’ said Hultin. He’d already filled a corner of the board with notes. ‘Nyberg and the enemies they had in common?’

The imposing Gunnar Nyberg seemed uncomfortable as he gripped a pen in his big right hand.

‘It looks like a dead end,’ he said dubiously. ‘I haven’t found any common enemies. Both men attended the Stockholm School of Economics, but Strand-Julén was seven years older, so they weren’t there at the same time. That’s the place where people tend to make friends and
enemies
for life. A couple of decades ago Daggfeldt kicked a colleague out of a business that they’d started together under the name of ContoLine. The man’s name is Unkas Storm. I located him, in a highly intoxicated state, at a small scrap-metal company in Bandhagen. He still harbours a deep hatred towards Daggfeldt. He said that he, quote, “danced on his coffin”, unquote, when he heard about the murder. But he doesn’t know Strand-Julén.

‘The latter has an ex-wife by the name of Johanna, whom he left without financial means after their divorce in ’72. Nobody could be as filled with hatred as she is, but it’s a strictly personal hatred. She hopes, quote, “to eat his liver before they cremate the swine, and that really should have been done while he could still feel the flames”, unquote. I spoke with the family members, who showed varying degrees of grief, and came to the conclusion that of the two, Daggfeldt, in spite of everything, will be missed more. Both his son, Marcus, aged seventeen, and his daughter, Maxi—’

‘Maxi?’ Hjelm interrupted him.

‘Apparently that’s her given name,’ said Nyberg, throwing out his hands.

‘Sorry. It’s just that Daggfeldt’s sailing boat is called the
Maxi
, so that’s why I … Go on.’

‘Marcus and Maxi, who’s nineteen, seem to be genuinely mourning their father, even though he made himself practically invisible at home. His wife, Ninni, is taking his death with what we might call great composure.
Speaking
of the sailing boat, she asked whether she would be allowed to sell it immediately. I told her yes. The same is true of Strand-Julén’s widow, Lilian. Great composure, I mean. Evidently she’d already more or less moved out of their apartment on Strandvägen, even though divorce was, quote, “out of the question”, unquote. She’d seen what had happened to his first wife, the one named Johanna. She made certain insinuations about Strand-Julén’s sexual preferences. And I quote: “Compared with my husband Saint Bernhard, the paedophiles in Thailand are God’s own angels.” Unquote. That may be something we should follow up.’

‘I’m beginning to see a red thread,’ said Hjelm, ‘regarding their leisure activities. If you’re finished, that is?’

‘I’d like to finish by saying that I haven’t been able to get in touch with Strand-Julén’s children. A daughter, Sylvia, thirty years old, from his first marriage, and Bob, age twenty, from the second. Both are apparently employed abroad.’

Then it was Hjelm’s turn. ‘Strand-Julén’s Swan boat was evidently a pleasure craft, in the most literal sense of the word. I’ve talked to one of the members of his ever-changing crew, consisting of blond young boys. I don’t know how nauseated you’d like to feel, but I have a detailed description of what took place on that boat.’

‘A rough summary will do,’ said Hultin laconically.

‘And rough it is. He liked to watch and give orders, creating little, quote, “tableaux”, in which the crew members were supposed to freeze in the middle of the
act
while he walked around to study the scene. One boy, for example, might have another guy’s dick or some similar object stuck up his arse for fifteen minutes without being allowed to move an inch until Strand-Julén gave permission for the activities to resume. He himself never participated, other than as stage director. But there doesn’t seem to be any connection with Daggfeldt. I’ll keep looking. I have a lead on the procurer.’

‘Holm and the circle of friends,’ Hultin moved on to the next topic he had assigned. His notes already filled a significant area of the whiteboard. His handwriting was gradually getting smaller.

Kerstin Holm’s melodic Göteborg accent rippled through the room. ‘Nyberg and I have been crossing into each other’s territory; it can be difficult to distinguish between friends and enemies. At the risk of falling into cliché, I can say that people in the upper echelons seldom make friends with someone just because they happen to like each other. Of course, it’s an advantage if they do, but that’s mostly of secondary interest, an extra bonus.

‘In short, they acquire friends in order to exploit them. For the sake of prestige, to demonstrate what a large and impressive circle of friends they have, and for the sake of business, in order to expand their contact network – which is the alpha and omega in their lives – as well as for the sake of sex, to establish contacts with the former, sex-starved housewives of other men. The impression I get reinforces what I know from the other side of Sweden, meaning Göteborg: that the trading of
marital
partners is so sanctioned and so common that you can talk about generations of inbreeding and bastard progeny. Do you think I’m exaggerating?’

‘Go on,’ said Hultin with inscrutable terseness.

‘Ninni Daggfeldt hinted at a number of strange but heterosexual escapades that her husband engaged in while he was travelling around the country and especially while he was abroad, in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. But at home he seems to have been quite monogamous. And he always spent his holidays on the famous sailing boat with his family – no one but his family.

‘As mentioned, the daughter was named after the boat, which they’ve had since the early Seventies. The type of boat, that is, not the actual vessel – they’ve traded up to a larger version approximately every three years. Ninni hated, quote, “that disgusting dry dock”, but she decided to make the best of the situation. Daggfeldt had a standing joke about her and the boat that he never failed to cite.’ Holm leafed through her notebook.

‘“Hearty but seasick,”’ said Hjelm.

She gave him an appraising look and then went on. ‘Precisely. So Ninni put up a good front, but she was disgusted, and I quote again, “by the cloying family intimacy that was supposed to appear like a letter in the mail for two weeks a year, but never existed at any other time”. Lilian Strand-Julén was even more blunt. Gunnar has already quoted the Saint Bernhard passage and – Paul, is it? – has with the utmost clarity reported the facts of the Swan boat expeditions. It’s possible to imagine that
the
two widows, who are now free and financially independent for the rest of their lives no matter what they decide to do, might simply have joined forces to hire a professional hitman. If that’s the case, the whole idea of a serial killer is moot.

‘But the problem is that they don’t know each other. They have plenty of friends and acquaintances in common – they frequent the same social circles – but neither has any recollection of meeting the other. So they claim. Of course we’ll continue to check this out.

‘A woman named Anna-Clara Hummelstrand, wife of George Hummelstrand, vice president of Nimco Finance, seems to be close friends with both of them. She left for Nice this morning, which may be of interest. Mrs Hummelstrand could have acted as a sort of intermediary between Ninni and Lilian. In general, there are numerous potential motives on both sides, but no real link.’

‘Thank you,’ said Hultin as he finished writing a flurry of words on the board. ‘Hjelm.’

‘I’d like to give the rest of my report last, if that’s okay. We need to finish with a discussion of how to carry out the surveillance tonight.’

‘Do you have such a strong candidate that we’ll need to do a stake-out tonight?’

‘That’s what we have to decide. But I think it’d be good if we heard all the other reports first. Provided that Söderstedt and Chavez don’t have an equally strong candidate, of course.’

Both men shook their heads.

Hultin gave a slight nod. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Söderstedt?’

‘I’ve been thinking about this idea of a serial killer,’ he said, speaking with a Finnish intonation. ‘From an international perspective, we’re a bit premature. Two similar murders really means nothing more than two similar murders—’

‘Granted,’ Hultin interrupted him. ‘But in the guidelines presented by Commissioner Mörner and the NCP director, as well as the inner circle of the National Police Board, the aspects of protection were emphasised. That’s why we’re treating this as a serial murder case even before it officially takes on that definition. Besides, I’m convinced that that’s what it is. And when it comes right down to it, my judgement is what steers the direction of this investigation.’

Whoops
, thought Hjelm.
That’s Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin’s first display of power
.

But Söderstedt wasn’t about to budge. ‘I was just thinking about the fact that serial murders are very “in” at the moment. It’s easy to be led astray by American perversities. That madman Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced to life in prison for having killed, dismembered and eaten seventeen black youths. His father wrote a best-seller about what it was like to have such a monster for a son. Both the father and Dahmer himself have become rich on the crimes. Sympathisers, some of them from South Africa, have sent him money in prison, and plenty of magazines in the United States make heroes out of serial killers and mass murderers. It’s related to the fact that
their
society is on the verge of collapse. A widespread feeling of general frustration makes it possible for an entire nation to empathise with extremists and sick outsiders. Their disregard for all social rules exerts a strong fascination, so strong that people will even send money to a mass murderer. Sort of a retroactive reward. But the victims are always small and weak, and their only shared characteristic, as reported in the media, is the fact that they became victims. We need to ask ourselves what sort of effect this kind of mess could have on the national soul of the Swedish people. There’s no such thing as a simple act.’

Hjelm flinched.

‘Söderstedt, I’ve heard from Västerås that you have a tendency to go off on tangents,’ said Hultin, his tone neutral. ‘Let’s stay on topic. What about the financial aspect?’

‘I just think we shouldn’t lose perspective,’ muttered Söderstedt as he looked through his thick stack of printouts. ‘As you mentioned, Hultin, it’s a real hotchpotch. I’ve only been able to scratch the surface. Daggfeldt had two large companies that were under his sole ownership: the finance firm of DandFinans AB with four subsidiaries; and the import company MalackaImport AB. He was also part owner of eight other smaller enterprises, three of them holding companies. And he had a huge stock portfolio, primarily with shares in all five of the country’s biggest export corporations. Strand-Julén’s main company is called simply Strand-Julén Finans AB, with a bunch of
interlocking
holding companies attached to it. His business ventures are even more difficult to delineate than Daggfeldt’s, if that’s possible.’

‘One question,’ said Hjelm. ‘What’s a holding company?’

All eyes of the A-Unit seemed to turn on him at once.

‘All muscles and no brains,’ he said apologetically.

‘A holding company is a management company that owns shares in other businesses,’ said Söderstedt.

‘Is that all it does?’

‘Yes. The only company that I’ve found with any connection to trade and industry – to the production of goods – is Daggfeldt’s import firm, which imports canned goods from the Far East. You can find them in any well-stocked grocery shop. And that’s only
indirect
production. We still use industrial yardsticks when we look at the post-industrial world of business. So in that sense Strand-Julén owned shares en masse, but he also had a personal portfolio comparable to Daggfeldt’s. I haven’t been able to find any link between their business activities. But both owned stock in Electrolux, Volvo and ABB – as do so many people. Perhaps the most interesting connection is the fact that they both owned shares in the little glass factory Hyltefors in Småland. Maybe that has some significance.’