The Blinded Man (40 page)

‘For what?’

‘For me,’ said Paul Hjelm.

Absolute silence now. The small bursts of noise from the night-time traffic off in the distance slipped into the silence, becoming part of it. An owl hooted quietly. That too was part of the silence.

Chavez stirred. He’d pulled out his gun.

Time stood still.

Then a crackling in their earpieces.

‘I saw it,’ said Arto Söderstedt. ‘I saw a gun in the gap next to the window blind. It moved past for a second. He’s walking around inside.’

Time contracted. Long, muffled waves for each second that ticked by in their brains.

Hultin’s silence.

The decision.

Still no sound from the little target cottage. But something had changed inside, not visible, but palpable.

Moving through the cottage was a presence, possibly several.

Then Hjelm’s mobile phone rang.

A ringtone that was normally quite faint magnified itself in the silence to a mad peal of bells.

He answered as fast as he could.

‘There, I heard the ringtone,’ Göran Andersson said on the line. ‘Very clearly. So you’re in the cottage across the way. I’ve been waiting for you.’

For a good long moment Hjelm couldn’t utter a sound.
Then
he merely said, in an unrecognisable voice, ‘Are they alive?’

‘In the case of one of them, it’s a matter of definition,’ said Göran Andersson. ‘The girl is scared, but alive. The other one already looked dead by the time he got here.’

Again silence. Chavez held his walkie-talkie close to the mobile phone. The conversation was being transmitted to the other cottages.

‘What are you going to do?’ said Hjelm.

‘What am I going to do?’ Andersson said sarcastically. ‘What are
you
going to do?’

Hjelm took a deep breath. ‘I’m coming in.’

Now it was Andersson’s turn to be silent.

‘All right,’ he said then. ‘But no gun stuck in the back of your waistband this time. And no walkie-talkie.’ Andersson hung up.

‘Jan-Olov?’ Hjelm said into Chavez’s walkie-talkie.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ said Hultin.

‘I know.’ Hjelm handed his service revolver to Chavez, then put his jacket, walkie-talkie and mobile phone on the floor.

Jorge looked at him through the darkness, placed his hand on Hjelm’s arm and whispered, ‘Make some sort of noise for a few seconds when you go in, so I can get over to the left window. I’ll keep watch outside.’

Hjelm nodded, and they stepped out into the night. Jorge stopped behind the cottage, while he continued on round the corner.

Wearing only a T-shirt and trousers, with his hands
raised
, he crossed the little path between the cottages. Those few yards seemed endless. He thought he would freeze in the cold.

For a moment he thought he was running up the stairs to the immigration office in Hallunda.

The door opened slightly. No one was visible. Only the glare of a light.

He stepped onto the small terrace and slipped through the doorway. Seeing a little metal wind chime hanging from the doorpost, he purposely bumped his head against it. While it jangled, out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw Chavez crossing the path.

The light from the small ceiling lamp was actually quite weak, but it blinded him because his eyes had become accustomed to the dark. It took a moment before he could distinguish anything else.

On the floor in the far right corner were two figures, tied up, with tape over their mouths. Anja Parikka’s pale-blue eyes were staring at him above the tape; Alf Ruben Winge’s eyes were closed. She was sitting up; he was lying down, curled in a foetal position. Their bodies were not touching.

Along the wall on the left stood a small, unmade bed.

The love nest
, thought Hjelm without thinking.

On a chair just to the left of the door sat Göran Andersson. He looked exactly like the photographs and was smiling a bit shyly at Hjelm. In his hand he held Valery Treplyov’s gun with the silencer attached. It was aimed straight at Hjelm’s chest, six feet away.

‘Close the door,’ said Göran Andersson. ‘And go over there and sit down on the bed.’

Hjelm did as he was told.

‘All right then,’ said Andersson, keeping the gun aimed at him. ‘And the sharpshooters are swarming all over the Tanto cottages, am I right?’

Hjelm didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say.

‘Do you remember what I said I’d do if you kept pestering Lena?’ Andersson said with a crooked smile. ‘I just talked to her. From here. She’s not doing very well.’

‘That’s hardly our fault, is it?’ Hjelm said tentatively.

‘My question was whether you remember what I said I’d do,’ said Andersson, his tone a bit harsher.

‘I remember.’

‘And yet you still came in here?’

‘You’re not a murderer.’

Göran Andersson laughed loudly, but it sounded strained. ‘A rather strange thing for a man to say with a gun pointed at him that’s already killed five people.’

‘Come on,’ said Hjelm. ‘I know you want to put a stop to this whole thing.’

‘Is that right?’ Andersson said calmly.

‘I’m not really sure when that change happened. It’s possible to pinpoint it to several different moments. Do you know?’

‘No.’

‘The first two murders were perfect crimes. You left not a single scrap of evidence. Carried them out with real thoroughness. Then all of a sudden, in Carlberger’s
living
room, as you stood there wrapped in that marvellous music and pulling the slugs out of the wall with your tweezers, something happened. You left a bullet behind. Was that when you started to think about things?’

‘Go on.’ Göran Andersson’s face was impassive.

‘Then you took a long break, which made us draw a lot of erroneous conclusions. You could have stopped there and returned home to your pregnant wife.’

‘Is that actually what you think?’

‘Not really,’ said Hjelm. ‘No one who shoots another human being will ever be the same. Believe me, I know. But it’s still possible to go on living. Put down your gun, and you’ll get to see your child grow up.’

‘Cut that out, and go on.’

‘Okay. It took some time for you to plan the first three murders in such an elegant fashion. The victims had to come home late and alone, and within a reasonably tight time frame. It took two days in both cases. Then you had to plan the rest. Although I wonder whether you really needed a month and a half for the planning, from the early-morning hours of April the third until the early-morning hours of May the eighteenth. What were you doing all that time? Hesitating? Pondering?’

‘Mostly I was listening. As I told you on the phone. I travelled around on public transportation back and forth, taking subways and buses and commuter trains. Everywhere people were talking, I sat and listened; listened to their theories and ideas and thoughts and
feelings
. Maybe you’re right that I hesitated. But everyone’s reactions made me go on.’

‘One little question,’ said Hjelm. ‘Why the two shots to the head? Why such … symmetry?’

‘You’ve been to Fittja,’ Andersson said wearily. ‘Didn’t you count the bullets? Seventeen board members, thirty-four bullets. Everything fit together. Can you even understand how well everything fit? That ox in the bank gave me my weapon, the tape that was playing while I was getting beat up, and two bullets per board member. It was all so precise. And two shots to the head are the surest way to kill a victim if you only have two bullets at your disposal. It was as simple as that.’

‘But then there was the cassette you left behind. Surely you could have grabbed it and taken it along, even without killing the daughter. But you left it. Why? It was your great source of inspiration. And then what happened? Was it unbearable without the music? Did it force you to look deep into your heart?

‘And then the conversation with me, which you very deliberately sprinkled with the clues. And finally this. You knew all about Winge’s habits, you knew that he’d be coming out here with Anja. And you knew that you wouldn’t be able to kill Anja. You sat here as usual, waiting for your victim to arrive. Maybe they’d gone out for a walk, left their love nest and gone to a restaurant, and then you slipped inside. But this isn’t the usual living room. You knew very well that Winge wouldn’t be coming here alone. You set yourself up for this situation.
It’s
your own, possibly subconscious, but very intentional creation. You wanted to bring me in here. Why me? And why did you want this particular situation?’

Göran Andersson stared at him. Only now did Hjelm notice how tremendously tired the man looked. Tired of everything.

‘There are so many reasons,’ Andersson said. ‘All the strange connections that have landed me here. Coincidences piling up that I thought were fate. Maybe that’s what I still think. But without the music, the mystery disappeared. And you, you in particular, Paul Hjelm, were the final nail in the coffin. The empty apartment that I heard about turned out to be right next door to the police station in Fittja. Okay, that was to be expected; it was part of the overriding pattern. The fact that the hostage drama took place out there, at the very same time as my first murder, and that it stole all the media attention from me … that was also only natural. Everything was conspiring.

‘But later, when it turned out that
you
had been out to my house in Algotsmåla and talked to Lena, that
you
were the one who was hunting me, then I realised that our fates were interlinked, yours and mine. I know that you were about to lose your job because of that hostage drama. I know that you, just like me a few months earlier, stood in your terraced house in Norsborg and looked at yourself in the mirror, but saw no reflection. I know that you felt the ground being ripped out from under your feet. I know that you were dangling in mid-air and
wishing
death on the police top brass because they didn’t back you up, but just hovered somewhere high over your head. Maybe you even thought about killing the whole lot of them.

‘Don’t you understand how alike we are? We’re just two ordinary Swedes that time has left behind. Nothing we believed in exists any more. Everything has changed, and we haven’t been able to keep up, Paul. We signed up for a static world, the most Swedish of all characteristics. With our mother’s milk we imbibed the idea that everything would always remain the same. We’re the paper that people reuse because they think it’s blank. And maybe it is. Completely blank.’

Göran Andersson stood up and went on.

‘The next time you look at yourself in the mirror, it’ll be me that you see, Paul. In you I will live on.’

Paul Hjelm sat mutely on the bed. There was nothing to say. There was nothing he could possibly say.

‘If you’ll excuse me,’ said Göran Andersson, ‘I’ve got a darts game to finish.’

He took out of his pocket a measuring tape and a dart. He placed the dart on the table in front of him, and with the gun still aimed at Hjelm, he eased over to the two figures in the corner. From Alf Ruben Winge’s passive, corpulent body he measured a specific length, and then drew a mark on the floor a short distance from the chair. Then he sat down again, put the measuring tape on the table and picked up the dart, weighing it in his hand.

‘You know how to play five-o-one,’ he said. ‘You count backwards from five-o-one down to zero. When I hit that bull’s-eye in the bank in town, I only had the checkout left. I still do. And I’ve never left a game unfinished. Do you know what the checkout is?’

Hjelm didn’t answer. He just stared.

Andersson held up the dart. ‘You have to hit the right number inside the double ring in order to get down to zero. That’s what I’m going to do now. But the game doesn’t usually go on for four months.’

He stood up and went over to the mark on the floor.

‘Ninety-three and three-quarter inches. The same distance that I measured in the living rooms.’

He raised the dart towards Hjelm. Hjelm merely watched. Anja Parikka stared wildly. Even Winge had opened his eyes. They were fixed on the dart.

‘The same dart that I pulled out of the bull’s-eye back home in Algotsmåla on February the fifteenth,’ he said. ‘It’s time for the checkout.’

He raised the dart, aimed and hurled at the spare tyre that was Alf Ruben Winge’s stomach. The dart stuck in his paunch. Winge’s eyes opened wide. Not a sound slipped out from under the tape.

‘The double ring,’ said Göran Andersson. ‘Checkout. The game is over. It was certainly a long one.’

He went over to Hjelm and crouched down a short distance from the bed. The gun was still aimed at Hjelm.

‘When I play,’ said Göran Andersson lightly, ‘I’m a very focused person. When the game is over, I’m very
ordinary
. The tension is released. I can go back to daily life with renewed energy.’

Hjelm still couldn’t get a sound across his lips.

‘And daily life,’ said Göran Andersson, ‘daily life involves dying. I’d like you to grab my body when I fall.’

He stuck the silencer into his mouth. Hjelm couldn’t move.
The hostage hero turned to stone
, he managed to think.

‘Checkout,’ Göran Andersson said thickly.

The shot was fired.

But the report was louder than it should have been.

Andersson fell forward. Hjelm caught his body. He thought the blood running over him was his own.

He looked up at the window above Anja and Winge. Shattered glass was everywhere. The blind had been pulverised. Jorge Chavez stuck his black head into the room.

‘The shoulder,’ he said.

‘Ow!’ said Göran Andersson.

32

EVEN GUNNAR NYBERG
was present. He was sitting in his usual place with his head wrapped in bandages and looking like the mummy in the old horror film. He really shouldn’t have been there.

But there they all sat, ready to say goodbye to each other and return to the police stations in Huddinge, Sundsvall, Göteborg, Västerås, Stockholm and Nacka. It would be June in two days. Their summer was saved.

The mood was ambivalent. No one said a word.