Bad Blood: A Crime Novel Read online

  ALSO BY ARNE DAHL

  Misterioso

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Translation copyright © 2013 by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Sweden as Ont blod by Bra Böcker AB, a division of Albert Bonniers Forlag, Stockholm, in 2003. Copyright © 1998 by Arne Dahl. This translation originally published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, an imprint of the Random House Group Limited, London.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data

  Dahl, Arne, [date] author.

  [Ont Blod. English]

  Bad Blood / Arne Dahl; translated from the Swedish

  by Rachel Willson-Broyles.

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-0-307-90853-7

  1. Police—Sweden—Stockholm—Fiction. 2. Serial murder investigation—Sweden—Fiction. 3. Stockholm (Sweden)—Fiction. 4. Mystery fiction.

  I. Willson-Broyles, Rachel, translator. II. Title.

  PT9876.14.A35O5813 2013 839.73’74—dc23 2012046772

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket photograph by Santiago Carrasquilla

  Jacket design by Pablo Delcán

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Other Books by This Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  About the Author

  1

  Pain beyond words, he thinks. Now I know what it is.

  Learn for life, he thinks, and his gallows-humor laugh is silent. Learn for death, he thinks, and instead of laughter: yet another mute, infernal scream.

  As the pain mounts its next attack, he knows with a kind of crystal-clear certainty that he has laughed his last laugh.

  The pain is no longer deepening. With what he can still make out as a mixture of satisfaction and terror, he feels that its intensity has reached its peak, and he understands just what process is now under way.

  The downward slope.

  The graph of pain is no longer rising; it is leveling out, and beyond it he can glimpse the steep incline that will, with the inevitability of a playground slide, end in nothingness. Or—and he fights the thought—with God.

  The pores of his body are wide open, small gaping mouths roaring the great Why that he can’t roar himself.

  The images start to come to him; he knew they would. They come even as the pain increases to levels he couldn’t have imagined even in his wildest fantasies. He is surprised at the possibilities that have lain hidden within him all these years.

  So they do exist.

  A person always carries these intense potentials within.

  While his entire being explodes in cascade after cascade, the pain seems more and more to shift from his fingers, genitals, and throat to a place outside himself. It somehow becomes general, rising above his body and invading his—and he can’t help thinking of the word—his soul. All the while he tries to keep his mind clear. But then come more images.

  At first he fought to maintain contact with the world outside, but now the world outside, beyond the small window, is nothing more than the giant aircraft lumbering past. Now and then the figure of his tormentor glides by, with the deadly tools. Soon enough the roaring planes blend with the images, and now even the planes are transformed into shrieking, infernal spirits.

  He can’t gain control over the images, how they come, their order, their structure. He sees the unforgettable interior of the labor room where his son has been born, but he hasn’t been there himself; rather, as his son is born, he hears himself throwing up in the bathroom. But now he is there, and it is beautiful, odorless, soundless. Life goes on, clean and pure. He greets people he recognizes as great authors. He drifts through elegant old corridors. He sees himself making love to his wife, and her expression is joyful in a way he’s never seen. He is standing at a podium; people applaud wildly. More corridors, meetings, conferences. He is on TV, showered with admiring looks. He sees himself writing with a white-hot passion, he sees himself read book after book, pile after pile of papers.

  But when the pain pauses and the rumble of the planes brings him back, it strikes him that all he sees is himself reading and writing, not what he is reading and writing. During those short pauses when he can catch his breath, he wonders what this means.

  It is clear now that the descent is starting. The pain no longer reaches him. He is fleeing his tormentor; he will be victorious. He even has the strength to spit on him, and the reply is a crunching sound and a small, slight increase in pain. Out of the darkness comes a roaring dragon, and it becomes an airplane that sweeps a lingering veil over a soccer field where his son is casting nervous glances at the sidelines. He waves to him, but his son doesn’t see; he waves more frantically and yells louder, but his son only looks more resigned until he scores a goal for the opposing team, out of distraction or protest.

  Then he sees the young woman next to the bookshelf, her impressed glances. They’re walking along the large street, eagerly demonstrating their generation-defying love. On the other side: two completely motionless figures, his son and his wife, and he sees them and stops and gives her a deep kiss. He’s running, working out. The little needle presses down into his scalp again and again, and finally his glorious thick hair is back again. His cell phone rings during a debate at the book fair—another son. Champagne corks pop, but when he gets home, they’re gone.

  And he’s reading again, and in a final burst of consciousness he thinks that something out of all he’s read and written ought to fly past, but the only thing he sees is himself reading and writing, and in one last shining second of lucidity that makes him think he is truly dying, he realizes that nothing he has read or written has meant anything. He might as well have done absolutely anything else.

  He thinks of the threat. “No one will be able to hear you scream.” Of how he didn’t take the threat seriously. Because he suspected—a final burst of pain stops his last thought.

  And so begins the end. His pain fades away. The images come quickly now. It’s as though there’s no time.

  He’s walking in the protest march; the police raise their batons above him. He’s standing in a summer pasture, the horse racing toward him. A little grass snake slinks into his rubber boots and winds its way between his toes. His father looks absent-mindedly at his drawing of the enormous snake. The clouds rush by above the edge of the stroller canopy, and he thinks he sees a cat moving around up there. Sweet milk is spraye
d over his face. The thick, pale green cord leads the way, and he travels through dark, fleshy canals.

  And then he is no longer traveling.

  Thinks somewhere: What a sleazy way to die.

  2

  Paul Hjelm was convinced that there was such a thing as a motionless morning, and that this late-summer morning was one of them. Not a leaf was moving on the slightly wilted plants in the courtyard. Nor was a speck of dust moving in the office where he stood gazing outside. Extremely few brain cells were moving inside his skull. In other words, it was a motionless morning at police headquarters on Kungsholmen in Stockholm.

  Unfortunately, the past year had also been motionless. Paul Hjelm was part of the police squad that had investigated the remarkable so-called “Power Murders,” in which a serial killer had single-mindedly started to wipe out the elites of Swedish business and industry. Because the investigation had been a success, the group was made permanent as a special unit within the National Criminal Police, an auxiliary resource for “violent crimes of an international character,” as the formal wording ran. In practice, they were tasked with keeping up with new forms of criminality that hadn’t yet really reached Sweden.

  And that was the problem. No other “violent crimes of an international character” had afflicted the country during the past year, so more and more internal criticism was being leveled against the existence of the A-Unit. It wasn’t really called the A-Unit; that was just the name that had come up a year and a half ago when, in a state of panic, the group had been formed on short notice. For purposes of formality and justification, the group was now called “The National Criminal Police’s Special Unit for Violent Crimes of an International Character.” Because this name, in accordance with convention, was impossible to utter without laughing, they continued to call themselves “the A-Unit,” which was itself pretty comical, but at least it had a certain sentimental value.

  But at this point, the group was close to being history. Idleness among civil servants was hardly in keeping with the times, and the group was slowly beginning to break up; it was given various bullshit tasks, and its members were being lent out all over the place. The group’s formal boss, Waldemar Mörner, deputy commissioner of the National Police Board, worked like a dog, but it seemed that the story of the A-Unit would soon be over.

  What the unit needed was a robust serial killer. Of a robust international character.

  Paul Hjelm, staring stupidly and motionlessly at the motionless morning, watched a small leaf, one of the few that was yellow, quiver and flutter to the courtyard’s dreary concrete. He gave a start, as though it forewarned a hurricane, and his start goaded him to pull himself together. He strode over to a flaking shaving mirror that was nailed to the wall in the generic office—and contemplated his blemish.

  During the hunt for the Power Murderer, a red spot had broken out on his cheek, and someone very close to him had said that the blemish looked like a heart. That had been a long time ago. She was no longer close to him, and the person who had taken her place mostly thought it repulsive.

  He looked back at the time of the Power Murders case with sadness and a sense of unreality. The case had brought a peculiar mix of professional success and personal disaster. And renewal, painful in the way renewal is always painful.

  His wife, Cilla, had left him. In the middle of one of the country’s most important murder investigations ever, he had ended up alone with the children out in the row house in Norsborg. This meant that the children had to drift around by themselves while he was sucked deeper and deeper into the case and found double-edged erotic relief with a colleague. He still had trouble separating what had actually happened between them from what he had imagined.

  But once the case was solved, the train of life returned to its customary rails, as he had put it in poetic moments. One car after another was pulled in from its sidetrack and resumed its place on the main track until the Hjelm train was once again its old self. Cilla returned; family life went back to normal; the A-Unit, and not least himself, were declared heroes; the group was made permanent; he was promoted and was assigned regular working hours; a few of his colleagues became close friends; the female colleague found a new man; peace and quiet returned; and everything was fine and dandy.

  The question now was whether he had gotten an overdose of peace and quiet, because suddenly one day, after the nearly six months it took to tie up the Power Murder case and come to a verdict, he realized that the mighty Hjelm train had been transformed into a little model railroad set. Wide-open spaces and endless skies turned out to actually be the cement floor, walls, and ceiling of a hobby room; and the train’s speedy departure turned out to be nothing more than a perpetually recurring circle.

  His first doubts about the purpose of the A-Unit’s existence were accompanied by a whole series of further doubts. His return to the same old ruts felt more and more like a bad stage production of his daily routine. As though everywhere he went were poorly constructed, as though there were no ground under the railroad tracks, as though the tiniest puff of air would blow it over.

  Hjelm looked at himself in the mirror: about forty, with medium-blond, standard Swedish hair and a receding hairline. In general, his was hardly an appearance that attracted attention—aside from his blemish, from which he now removed a small flake of skin and onto which he rubbed a bit of skin cream. Then he returned to the window. The morning was still motionless. The small yellow leaf was lying still where it had landed. No breeze had descended upon the police headquarters courtyard.

  What they needed was a robust serial killer, of a robust, international character, thought Paul Hjelm as he slid back into his orgy of self-pity.

  Sure, Cilla had returned. Sure, he himself had returned. But not once had they ever discussed what they’d really done and felt during their separation. At first he’d seen this as a sign of mutual trust, but then he began to suspect that it was a chasm they would never be able to bridge, other than by artificial means. And how were the children doing, really? Danne was sixteen now, and Tova would be fourteen soon, and sometimes when he caught their averted, sidelong glances, he wondered whether he had used up all the store of trust they had in him. Had the strange summer almost a year ago left traces that would distort their lives long after his own death? It was mind-boggling.

  And his relationship with Kerstin Holm, his colleague, also seemed to have entered a new phase. They ran into each other several times a day, and each time it felt more strained. Hiding behind their exchanged glances were abysses that hadn’t been touched upon but that seemed more and more to demand attention. Not even his good relationships with his boss, Jan-Olov Hultin, and with his colleagues Gunnar Nyberg and Jorge Chavez seemed quite the same, as the little model train circled around and around in its stuffy room.

  And then finally came the awful suspicion that the only thing that had changed was—him. Because he really had changed. He listened to music he’d never even considered before, and he found himself glued to books he’d never heard of. On his desk, a portable CD player lay next to a tattered paperback. In the CD player was John Coltrane’s mysterious Meditations, one of the sax master’s last albums, a strange mixture of wild improvisation and quiet reverence; and the book was Kafka’s Amerika, the least renowned of his novels but in some ways the most curious. Paul Hjelm would never forget the chain of events that is set into motion when the young Karl lands in New York Harbor, realizes that he’s forgotten his umbrella, and returns to the steamer. He was convinced that that kind of scene comes back to you when you’re about to die.

  Sometimes he blamed the books and the music for his metaphor of the model railroad. Maybe he would have been happier if he still saw wide, open spaces and long, straight roads around him.

  His gaze returned to the courtyard. The little yellow leaf was still there. Everything was motionless.

  Suddenly and without warning, the leaf was lifted up into a spiraling whirlwind, and several more leaves were torn away, ye
llow ones as well as green ones; they performed a wild, multicolored dance between the walls of police headquarters. Then the dance stopped as suddenly as it had started; the lone whirlwind continued invisibly on its way, and all that was left was a lonely pile of leaves on the dreary cement.

  The door was flung open. Jorge Chavez came in. The presence of this thirty-year-old dynamo of a desk mate always made Hjelm feel a decade older. But he could deal with it—Chavez was one of his best friends these days. He had come to the A-Unit from the precinct in Sundsvall, where he had given himself the title of the only blackhead cop in Norrland. Actually, though, he was a Stockholmer, the son of Chilean refugees in Rågsved. Hjelm never really understood how Chavez had passed the physical requirements for entry to the police college; he was no more than five foot six. On the other hand, he was one of the sharpest policemen in the country—certainly the most energetic one Hjelm had ever come across. In addition, he was an elite-level jazz bassist.

  Chavez’s compact little figure slid silently to his end of the double desk. He took his shoulder holster from the chair, fastened it onto himself, checked his service pistol, and pulled on his summer jacket of light linen.

  “Something’s up,” he said curtly. “Full speed ahead down the corridor.”

  Hjelm copied Chavez’s movements, while asking a bit doubtfully, “What do you mean, ‘full speed ahead’?”

  “Hard to define. But we’re going to hear Hultin’s voice within thirty seconds, for sure. Want to make a bet?”

  Paul Hjelm shook his head. He looked at the CD player and the book on the desk, then at the pile of leaves in the courtyard, shook some life into himself, and jumped onto the locomotive. Time took on a new form.

  A curt voice boomed over the intercom; it belonged to the A-Unit’s operative director, Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin: “Quick meeting. Everyone. Immediately.”

  Hjelm pulled his leather jacket over his shoulder holster and was wholeheartedly present. He and Chavez half-ran toward the room that had once gone by the name “Supreme Central Command” and that—he thought hopefully—might do so once again. On their way through the hall, a door flew open in Chavez’s face, and Viggo Norlander hurtled out. Though he had once been the group’s dependable rule follower, since the Power Murders Norlander had become their bad boy; he had replaced his old, worn-out bureaucrat suits with trendy polo shirts and leather jackets, and his slight midlife flab was upgraded to a genuine six-pack.