The No. 2 Global Detective (11 page)

He could have gone straight to the police station but instead diverted past the video shop in Hamngatan. It was from here that the police officers usually got their videos for the Ingmar Bergman Film Club and as such it was at the heart of this investigation. Yellow and blue police tape sealed off the door and a junior police officer was standing guarding the entrance.

He greeted Inspector Colander and removed some of the tape to let his superior into the shop.

Inside it was just as Colander remembered it. Nothing seemed to have changed. The man behind the counter was looking somewhat bored. Since the police had closed the shop he had had no customers. He looked at the inspector aggressively.

‘What do you want?'

‘Information,' snapped Colander. He was in no mood to talk. ‘Has the video been returned?'

‘How can it have been returned when you have closed my shop? No one can get in or out.'

‘Don't play games with me. Tell me who took it out and when.'

‘I keep telling you, my records are confidential.'

‘And I keep telling you that I am a policeman and I need to know everything.'

The two men stared at one another. Neither looked like yielding until the man behind the counter sighed.

‘I can't very well make a living like this,' he said. ‘All right. I will show you my files.'

Was this the breakthrough Colander had been looking for, he wondered. I have waited so long, he thought, but I must not expect too much. After all, what will this man's records reveal that I do not already suspect?

The man sat behind a monitor and began typing in the words necessary.

‘The film is due back on Saturday,' he said after a moment.

‘Saturday? Saturday is too late. I need it tomorrow.'

‘Well,' shrugged the man. ‘You cannot have it unless he brings it back early and since the shop is shut, I do not expect him to do that, do you?'

Colander thought for a minute. He would have to take the man off the door.

‘All right,' he said. ‘You can open the shop again, but I am going to have to have a name.'

There was a long pause. Finally the man behind the terminal read out a name and an address.

‘Knut Knutsson, Hamngatan 219, Ynstead. Just along the road.'

Knut Knutsson. The name of the highly-thought-of police officer from Stockholm. Could they be one and the same? And, if so, what was Knut Knutsson doing with the video tape? This was something for which Colander had not prepared himself. Knut Knutsson had only just arrived from Stockholm and already he had joined the video shop and taken out the very film the Film Club wanted. Colander left the man in the video shop and told the man on the door to clean up and get back to the station.

Toff Toffsson was back behind the desk in reception. He had with him a cup of coffee.

‘Good afternoon, Inspector,' he said. ‘I see you are in a tracksuit.'

‘Yes, that's right, Toff. A tracksuit.'

Toffsson looked up sharply. Toffsson had had no idea that Colander knew his given name. More alarming was the fact that ordinarily Colander only donned his tracksuit and trainers toward the end of his cases, when it was time for him to act out of character and blunder about the woods in the dark. As far as anyone had informed the receptionist, the case had not progressed that far yet.

Colander knocked on the door of Knut Knutsson's office. Although that music was still playing, there was no answer. He tried the door handle. It was locked.

Colander's meeting with Tord Tordsson started. Tordsson ran the meeting and he began by outlining the situation so far.

‘Although we do not know anything for sure,' he said, ‘we need a breakthrough. But we should bear in mind that, even if we do find a link between what we know and what we don't know, there is no guaranteeing it will lead us to what we want to know.'

‘I do not know why we bother,' said Colander quietly. He could hear that delightful music coming from Knut Knutsson's office.

‘Perhaps you would like to tell us about the film you have chosen for the Ingmar Bergman Film Club, Inspector,' rebuked Tordsson.

Colander explained what had happened at the video shop in Hamngatan.

‘Has anyone actually laid eyes on the highly regarded police officer from Stockholm?'

There was a general shaking of heads.

‘You mean the nationally known one? No. I have not seen him. It is somewhat mysterious.'

Silence followed, so that Colander thought he might as well mention the two foreigners who were coming to see him.

‘They are coming to Ynstead?'

‘Yes.'

‘They cannot join our Ingmar Bergman Film Club.'

‘No.'

The meeting broke up when Lemmingsson entered the room with a cup of coffee to start his meeting with Colander and Tordsson. Tordsson recapped on the earlier meeting and then Lemmingsson took over and ran the meeting.

‘Perhaps the two foreigners might be allowed to join the Ingmar Bergman Film Club if we are not watching an Ingmar Bergman film?' he suggested.

‘That is one idea,' said Tordsson dismissively. Why should foreigners appreciate Bergman?

‘We do not know if the foreigners will even be in time for the screening of the film anyway, so all this might be academic,' said Nog Noggsson, who had come in to join the meeting.

‘We should find out when they are arriving.'

Lemm Lemmingsson agreed that he would ring the airline company in Stockholm.

‘Are there enough chairs in the television room?'

Again Lemmingsson agreed to check. He is shouldering the lion's share of the investigation, thought Colander. Tordsson suggested they ask Knut Knutsson to come to the screening.

‘It might smoke him out,' he said.

‘And he can bring his own chair if it is an issue.'

Again Lemmingsson agreed to count the chairs.

‘Do you know why the foreigners are coming to our shores, Inspector Colander?'

Inspector Colander was doodling love hearts in a pad of paper with a pencil and was thinking about something else. The meeting broke up. The police officers went their separate ways. Colander drove to see his father. Why am I so cheerful? he wondered. He had felt elated all day. It was true that he could not concentrate for a second, but still. What, he wondered, would the next day bring?

Later Colander would recall the next few hours as among the most ordinary he had ever spent as a police officer. He drove along the E13 towards Sjöbo, to where his father lived. There was too much left to chance. He felt as if he were shooting off in the wrong direction and yet there was something that Lemmingsson had said, or perhaps had left out, that made Colander think. He rang the police officer on the car telephone. Lemmingsson picked up the phone on the third ring.

‘Why are you ringing me?' he asked.

‘There was something you said in the meeting. Or something you did not say in the meeting. It makes me think we are on to something.'

‘I can show you my notes of that meeting at the meeting this afternoon.'

‘I thought the meeting was scheduled for this evening?'

‘We are having another meeting first at the police station to go over the case so far at four o'clock. I can bring my notes then.'

‘I am sure it is nothing.'

Colander put down the phone.

His father had married a Thai bride almost exactly 30 years Inspector Colander's junior. To begin with, their relationship had been strained. What was a Thai woman doing in Sweden? Inspector Colander had tried to have her deported. The wedding ceremony was rushed but nonetheless official, even if the garbled vows to love one another ‘long time' were not completely by the book.

When he arrived at his father's house it was almost seven o'clock in the evening and it had been dark for eight hours. His stepmother greeted him at the door with a rice dish and a slight bow. His father was in the sauna, she said, painting the parrot. When she had first said this, Colander had thought it was a euphemism for something far darker, but that in fact was what his father was doing.

Inspector Colander's father only ever painted interiors of his sauna, but they were so lavishly detailed that one could see the grain of wood of each plank and in this way they differed subtly. Another difference was that in some there was a parrot while in others there was none. To be completely honest, Burt Colander did not know the significance of the parrot. He was not completely sure his father did either.

‘I will not disturb him,' said Colander.

‘Okay,' said the woman from MyThaiBride.org.

‘Is he all right? I worry about him.'

‘Yeh yeh,' she said. ‘Same same but different.'

Colander drove home. We are not always alone, he thought, for the first time in many years. It is possible to find consolation. It might be with a parrot. Or it might be with an Ingmar Bergman double bill. Or it might be with a young Thai girl.

Before he drove home, Colander removed the scatter cushions on the back seat of the car and dabbed at his armpits. Then he returned the cushions to the car and set off. As he drove, he had an idea. It was a desperate gamble, but it might just work. He picked the phone up again and rang Tord Torddsson. Tord Tordsson could not believe what the inspector asked him to do but, once Colander explained his plan, he agreed to do it nonetheless.

The press conference was called for eight o'clock that evening – in time for the late editions – and it was to be held in the conference room. It may be too late, thought Colander, but it was worth one last desperate try. He spent the next hour rehearsing his answers, trying to imagine every conceivable question. The journalists – a man from the
Ynstead Examiner
and another from the
Sjöbo Chronicle
– sat and took notes in their pads of paper as Inspector Colander explained the developments in the case so far. When he had finished, there was silence for a while, except for a reedy buzzing snore from the nose of the man from the
Sjöbo Chronicle
.

He had time for only one question afterwards and it came from the man from the
Ynstead Examiner
.

‘Yes,' said Colander, pointing at the man with his hand up. ‘You.'

‘So you cannot find a copy of
The Hour of the Wolf
on video and you would like any member of the public who might be able to help to get in touch with the Ynstead police station? Is that right?'

‘Yes,' agreed Colander. From the back of the room Tordsson gave him a nod of approval. It was a desperate gamble, but time was very tight. If they could not find the film, what then?

Colander called the press conference to a close.

‘Okay, that's it. A full lid.'

After the press conference Colander collected his car and then went home. He slept soundly that night and was only woken by the telephone trilling damply from the sitting room.

‘Hello,' he said, standing naked by the window. Even in the cold air he could tell that his problems with erectile dysfunction seemed to be clearing themselves up of their own accord.

The voice on the other end said something in English. Inspector Colander listened and then agreed that he would drive to the airport in Stockholm to collect the two foreigners. He had to be back in time for the Film Club. He thought perhaps that he had been premature in his thoughts about his erectile dysfunction.

The meeting began promptly at ten and, as soon as he saw the faces gathered around the table, Colander knew that the breakthrough they had all been hoping for had not occurred. No one had found a copy of the film. They had only a very few hours before they were due to show it and Colander was still trying to think desperately of a way in which he might discover a copy.

He picked up Lemm Lemmingsson on the way to the airport and, as they drove towards Stockholm on the E22, Lemmingson asked Inspector Colander about the two foreigners whom they were going to collect. Colander saw that Lemmingsson had brought a gun with him.

‘The man from England is from my old College,' he explained. ‘He is a Lecturer in Transgression and Pathology.'

‘Why is he coming to Sweden? Why is he coming here to Ynstead?'

‘He is here because he wants to buy a duvet.'

‘A duvet?'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh.'

A silence followed. Inspector Colander concentrated on the road. They passed the turn-offs to Kristianstad and Karlskrona and then Västervik before Lemmingsson spoke again.

‘And what about the other foreigner?'

‘The other foreigner is a private detective from Botswana.'

‘Botswana?'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh. What does he want?'

‘Also to buy a duvet.'

The car reached the turn-offs for Norrköping and then Nyköping before Lemmingsson asked if there was much call for duvets in Botswana.

‘To tell you the truth,' said Colander. ‘I am as much in the dark about Botswana as you are.'

‘Perhaps we can ask him when we see him?'

‘That is a good idea,' agreed Colander. Lemmigsson was coming along as a police officer, he thought.

At the airport, the policemen went through security channels and met the two foreigners straight from the jet. They were easy to spot. The man was wearing a beige safari suit and a hunting hat while the other, who transpired to be a woman, and who was extremely large and black, was wearing a dress made from a vast amount of gaudy red material that looked as if it might have been bought at a street market. They had obviously not had time to pack properly.

The police officer from Ynstead identified himself to the foreigners.

Inspector Colander recalled Delicious Ontoaste instantly. It had been long ago, some time in a past with which he was by now only distantly familiar, but she had been such a well-thought-of character that she was not easily forgotten. She seemed to remember him as well.

‘Oh Rra! I know you! You were at Cuff College in Oxford, weren't you? What is your name again? Fred Sieve? Something like that.'