The Blinded Man (25 page)

‘React violently?’

‘Just the opposite, I think. He would think I was lying. No, I haven’t told anyone. They bought my silence. But I don’t know whether they bought Lotta’s.’

‘Did she have a boyfriend? A brother? A father?’

‘If I understood correctly, her father, Bengt-Egil, was at the root of all her problems. She would never have told him about it, and he would never have tried to avenge her honour. And she never had a boyfriend – that was another source of anxiety. But she was close to her brother, Gusten. In fact, Gusten and Lotta were inseparable.’

‘Do you think he knew?’

‘We lost contact when she got really sick, so I don’t know. But if Gusten is behind this, then I’m grateful to him. I’ll visit him in prison.’

Hjelm paused to think. Gusten Bergström.

‘Shall we find out what Carl-Gustaf’s last name was? After that I won’t bother you any more. At least I don’t think I will.’

Lena Hansson got up and stretched. He saw a pride that he hadn’t noticed before. Once a possible witness, now a whole and complete human being.

‘Keep the anger alive,’ he found himself saying to her.

She gave him a sarcastic look.

Count Carl-Gustaf af Silfverbladh had moved in 1992 to his family’s estate in Dorset, England. Having sown his wild oats, he sought to obtain a proper education at Oxford, as his father and grandfather had done. He hadn’t returned to Sweden, and in all likelihood never would.

Hjelm wondered how the English would pronounce the man’s last name.

Gusten Bergström was twenty-eight, a few years older than his sister Lotta would have been had she lived. His apartment was on Gamla Brogatan in central Stockholm. He worked as a computer operator for Swedish Rail in the long-distance office at Central Station.

He doesn’t have far to go every morning
, thought Hjelm as he rang the doorbell of Bergström’s apartment, which was a couple of floors above the old Sko-Unos shop.

A shadow appeared in the door’s peephole.
Not a great idea to have a peephole near the window
, he thought.

‘Police!’ he bellowed, pounding on the door.

The man who opened it was as thin as a stick, with a
haircut
that looked like a toupee but probably wasn’t. He wore glasses with thick lenses. He looked like a combination of a teenage hacker and a middle-aged accountant.

Hjelm looked at Gusten Bergström with dismay. This was no murderer. He’d bet his life on that.

‘I’m from the Criminal Police,’ said Hjelm, showing his ID.

Gusten Bergström let him in without saying a word. The apartment was spartan, to say the least. The walls were bare, and at one end of the room a computer was on. Before Bergström could go over and turn down the light, Hjelm caught a glimpse of a naked woman on the coloured screen, incredibly true to life. It made him feel old.

‘Have a seat,’ said Bergström politely.

Hjelm sat down on a quasi-antique sofa and Bergström on a matching armchair, if it could be called that.

‘I’d like to talk to you about your sister,’ said Hjelm cautiously.

Bergström got up at once and went over to the bookcase near the computer. From one of the shelves he took down a photo in a gold frame and showed it to Hjelm. A girl in her mid-teens was smiling at him. It was astonishing how much she looked like her brother.

‘This is Lotta before things went bad for her,’ said Bergström sadly. ‘On her seventeenth birthday.’

‘Very pretty,’ said Hjelm, feeling ghastly. The photograph was taken about the time of the golf-course incident.

‘What’s this about?’ said Bergström, pushing up his glasses.

‘When she was seventeen she worked as a caddy at the Kevinge Golf Course. Do you remember that?’

Bergström gave a slight nod.

‘Did she ever tell you anything about her job?’ asked Hjelm.

‘No,’ he said with a sigh. There seemed to be something shattered about him.

‘Nothing at all?’

For the first time Bergström looked Hjelm in the eye. Each of them was looking for something in the other.

‘What’s this about?’ Bergström repeated. ‘My sister has been dead for a couple of years now. Why are you coming here and talking about her as if she were alive? I’ve just got used to the idea that she’s gone.’

‘She was fired from her job at the golf course in the autumn of 1990. Do you recall that?’

‘Yes, I remember. The season was over, and the golf course was about to close for the winter. She was still at school, so it was no big deal to lose a seasonal job.’

‘But you don’t recall anything she told you about her time at the golf course?’

‘She got the job through a friend; I don’t remember her name. I didn’t feel very comfortable in Danderyd, to be honest. I didn’t know anyone there. She didn’t really, either. It wasn’t a happy time, not at all.’

‘Shortly afterwards she tried to take her own life for the third time. Is that right?’

‘How sensitive of you,’ Bergström said glumly. ‘Yes, she did. A razor blade, for the first and last time. When she actually succeeded, it was by taking Alvedon. Did you know that all it takes to kill the liver and kidneys is one blister pack of Alvedon and some liquor? Lotta knew that. Nobody knew what she had planned. There were no warning shots or cries for help or any bullshit like that. She really did try to kill herself seven times. It was like a … miscarriage. As if she weren’t meant to be born. As if there were something seriously wrong with her view of life.’

‘Do you know why?’

‘I don’t know anything, and I don’t understand anything,’ Bergström said tonelessly. ‘I’ll never understand anything.’

‘Do you know about the murders of the three businessmen here in Stockholm?’

Bergström was off somewhere else. It took a moment for him to return. ‘How could anybody not know about that?’

‘Did you murder them?’

Gusten Bergström looked at him in surprise. Then a strange spark appeared in his eyes, as if a gust of life had suddenly been blown into his withered lungs.
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak
, Hjelm thought blasphemously.

‘Yes,’ said Bergström proudly. ‘I murdered them.’

Hjelm studied the luminous figure. Something seemed about to happen in Gusten Bergström’s dreary life. His face would appear on newspaper placards. He would be in the spotlight for the first and last time in his life.

‘Come off it,’ said Paul Hjelm, and the spark was extinguished.

Gusten Bergström seemed to crumple, sitting on the armchair’s hard upholstery, as if he were its long-absent stuffing.

Hjelm poured a little oil on the waters of disappointment. ‘Why did you kill Kuno Daggfeldt, Bernhard Strand-Julén and Nils-Emil Carlberger?’

‘Why?’ said Bergström, shrugging his hunched shoulders. ‘Well, because – because they were rich.’

‘You don’t have the faintest idea what those three men did to your sister at the Kevinge Golf Course on 7 September 1990, a month before she made her third suicide attempt and was locked up in Beckomberga Hospital. Do you?’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

Gusten Bergström got up abruptly and tried to find something to hold on to. There was nothing. His fingers clutched wildly at the air.

‘On that particular day, that trio of murdered men tried to rape your sister when she was acting as a caddy for them.’

Bergström’s hands stopped grabbing. ‘If I’d known,’ he enunciated very clearly, ‘I would have killed them. But they wouldn’t have been allowed to live this long, I can promise you that.’

‘But you didn’t know?’

‘No,’ he said and sat down. Then he got up again, standing in the midst of the evening light flooding in
from
Gamla Brogatan. ‘Now I understand,’ he said, lighting up for one last time. ‘Now I understand.’

‘What do you understand?’

‘It’s Lotta! Lotta herself has taken her revenge! For a couple of days she stretched out her hand from the realm of the dead. Then she went back to that better world.’

Extremely agitated, Bergström went over to the bookcase and pulled out a worn, old book, holding it up and shaking it.

‘Do you know about the Erinyes?’ he asked without waiting for an answer. ‘They’re the most gruesome creatures in Greek mythology, but also the most awe-inspiring. The ultimate hand of justice. They hunt their prey day and night until the grave opens up. Let me read you a short passage: “The Erinyes are nothing more than the murdered victim’s spirit, which, if no other avenger exists, take vengeance into their own hands, mercilessly and relentlessly, as the spirits of the dead are contained in their wrath.”’

He gave Hjelm an urgent stare. Hjelm didn’t say a word.

‘Don’t you understand?’ shouted Bergström. ‘There are no avengers, so she had to do it herself. She waited for an avenger, but none came. Everything fits! Those three men who hurt her were the ones she killed in quick succession all these years later. It’s amazing! Your killer is a murder victim’s spirit! An avenging goddess!’

Hjelm sat there for a moment, fascinated by Bergström’s onslaught. Without a doubt, the parallels were striking. The avenger who left no traces. The divine, posthumous avenger from the realm of the dead.

But the thought of a highly tangible bullet from Kazakhstan in a wall in Djursholm brought him back to the world of crass reality: ‘The Erinyes may have had a physical intermediary who pulled the trigger. Do you know if she might have talked about the incident at the golf course to anyone else?’

‘There wasn’t anyone else! Don’t you understand? It was just the two of us, just Lotta and Gusten. Gusten and Lotta.’

‘Papa? Mama? Anyone at the hospital?’

‘My father? Oh, sure, that’s really likely!’ laughed Gusten. He had now crossed a line. ‘Mother? That woman who could see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil? All three monkeys in one. Absolutely! Someone at Beckis? Where everybody sits in a separate corner, rubbing their private parts all day long? Highly likely! There you have your cold-blooded murderer! The Beckomberga man! The expert killer from the loony bin!’

Hjelm could tell it was time to leave.

Under other circumstances Hjelm would have gone over to the computer, turned up the light and laughed crudely at the computerised figures, who by now were undoubtedly in the midst of fucking. But he didn’t.

In some ambiguous way, that was a victory.

Hjelm spent the next few days pursuing the golf lead. He drove out to Beckomberga Hospital and talked to the staff, to find out who Lotta’s friends were. She’d never
had
any. The only staff member who was still there from the early Nineties, a stony-faced male nurse, remembered Lotta as an extreme loner. Morbidly withdrawn, a total introvert. The only person that Lotta Bergström could have conceivably told about the incident was her brother, and apparently she hadn’t done that. Or else Gusten Bergström was the best actor that Hjelm had ever seen.

He also directed his enquiries at Lena Hansson’s family and circle of friends. With equally disappointing results. She had truly allowed Daggfeldt and his pals to buy her silence. The only possibility that seemed to be left after a number of days of fruitless searching was that Lena Hansson had hired a professional killer. He let that lead drop.

At the same time he received a summons to appear in court for the trial of Dritëro Frakulla. It was not something he was looking forward to. A couple of weeks after Frakulla seized the hostages at the immigration office in Hallunda, the refugee policies had suddenly changed, and several hundred Kosovar Albanians who had been threatened with deportation were allowed to stay in Sweden, including Frakulla’s family. But after his desperate attempt to save them, he would be forced to leave the country as soon as he had served his prison sentence. The irony of fate seemed to Hjelm an understatement.

He sat in the chair in the courtroom of City Hall, giving his testimony. He tried to be as clear and objective as he could, almost managing to ignore the press, who
harassed
him before, during and after the trial. But he couldn’t escape Dritëro Frakulla’s surly gaze directed at him from the defendant’s bench. Frakulla still had his arm in a sling, and he never took his eyes off Hjelm. It was not an accusatory look, but rather an open, candidly shattered gaze. Even so, Hjelm couldn’t rid himself of the impression that he was being accused; perhaps that emotion was to be found only within himself. He thought that Frakulla was not accusing him of having shot him, but of not having killed him. If he had been killed, his family would have been able to stay; now they would loyally follow him back to the Serbs in a few years’ time. Frakulla’s lawyer was a jaded old man who asked all the right questions. Why hadn’t Hjelm waited for the special unit? Why hadn’t the Department of Internal Affairs investigated the case? Apparently Bruun and Hultin and Mörner had managed to erase all trace of the interrogation conducted by Grundström and Mårtensson. And yet the lawyer’s attacks were nothing compared to Frakulla’s unyielding eyes.

When Hjelm stepped down from the witness stand and walked through the courtroom between the rows of spectators, he met the gaze of a little boy. His expression was identical to his father’s.

It took a while before Paul Hjelm could think again about the investigation.

A couple of days later Viggo Norlander suddenly appeared at Supreme Central Command during a morning meeting. He was actually still on sick leave, but he came
in
, hobbling on crutches and looking quite subdued. Something had been extinguished in his already extinguished expression. Gauze bandages were wrapped around his hands. They all greeted him warmly, and Kerstin Holm jumped up to get the bouquet of flowers that they had bought. They’d taken up a collection and were planning to deliver it to him that evening. Norlander looked genuinely touched and sat down in his usual seat at the table.

It had been left vacant. No one had replaced him.

While he was convalescing in the hospital in Tallinn and then in Huddinge, he had been convinced that Hultin had kicked him off the investigation and that Internal Affairs might even be after him. When he sank down onto the chair, he understood that he was … forgiven. He couldn’t come up with any other word. He wept openly.