Europa Blues Read online

  ‘Cinque?’ the old fisherman exclaimed.

  ‘Cinque,’ the chalk-white man nodded, taking the watermelons and staggering like a drunk tightrope-walker along the beach, clutching them in his arms. One by one, they dropped down into the sand by the parasol, like enormous seeds being planted by a giant. The chalk-white man practically threw himself into the shade, as though he had been wandering lost in a radioactive area and finally come across a protective safe zone.

  The old fisherman wondered for a moment how five watermelons could be divided between seven people. Then he asked himself the inevitable question:

  Why travel to Italy, to the Tuscan coast, to Maremma, to Castiglione della Pescaia, if you couldn’t bear the sun?

  Not even Arto Söderstedt knew quite what to say to that. ‘Beauty’ wasn’t really a satisfactory answer for taking five children out of school during an important few weeks in spring. ‘Peace’ wasn’t quite enough of a reason for two adults to take months off from their jobs in the public sector either, particularly when, as with his wife, Anja, you were a tax inspector and the self-assessments had just come flooding in.

  So, of course, his conscience was there, picking holes in both the ‘beauty’ and ‘peace’ arguments. The only thing his conscience hadn’t reached was his own situation. Arto Söderstedt didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty at having temporarily left the police corps.

  The A-Unit, or the National Criminal Investigation Department’s Special Unit for Violent Crimes of an International Nature, had certainly been busy over the past year, but since the Sickla Slaughter case had reached its peculiar conclusion, the big, all-consuming cases had been noticeable in their absence. They had come extremely close to a disaster of huge international proportions during the Sickla case. But that was almost a year ago now, and time does have a tendency to heal old wounds.

  And so when the money came pouring in like manna from heaven, Arto Söderstedt didn’t hesitate for a second.

  Besides, he also felt burnt out, without quite understanding what that meant. Everyone was burnt out nowadays, everyone but him – mainly because he had never quite understood the meaning of it. He had probably been burnt out for years without having been any the wiser.

  It was his turn now, in any case. In the name of ‘beauty’ and ‘peace’, he allowed himself to tend to his burnout – regardless of whether it existed or not. And there was plenty of both in Tuscany, that much he knew after having been there only a few days.

  The family had rented a house in the Tuscan countryside, nestled among the vineyards. It wasn’t a villa – in Italy, a villa was something completely different to elsewhere – but a rustic little stone house on a pine-scented slope not far from the village of Montefioralle and the town of Greve. At the foot of the slope, the wine estates spread out like eternity’s own fields, as though the sky had split to make room for small pieces of paradise to fall down to earth and form an other-worldly patchwork quilt.

  Arto Söderstedt was enjoying it to the full – all while feeling oddly unworthy. It felt as though St Peter had fallen asleep just as a chalky-white detective inspector had slipped his slender body in through the gates of paradise. Thoroughly undeserved. He often found himself sitting on the porch, waiting in the nights with a glass of Vin Santo or a majestic Brunello di Montalcino washing over his taste buds. He had deliberately and uncritically devoured the whole Tuscany myth and he was enjoying himself enormously. He would never forget a single moment from his trip to Siena, that magical town. Even though the kids had howled away in the heart of the cathedral. Organ pipes was all he could think, watching those five little creatures standing there, in order of both height and pitch, screeching at the top of their lungs. Until a guard had decided that enough was enough and thrown the whole rabble out, that was. When that happened, Söderstedt had denied his paternity without a single pang of conscience. The guard had glared suspiciously at his identical, albeit slightly larger frame. Lying about such a thing in the house of God … He had wandered around inside the cathedral for an utterly peaceful thirty minutes after that, drinking in Donatello, Michelangelo, Pinturicchio, Bernini, Pisano. When he came back out again, the children had been sitting calmly on the cathedral steps, slurping Italian gelati. Not even Anja, slurping worse than the children, had seemed particularly annoyed.

  He had even switched his mobile phone off.

  But sitting there now beneath the blue-and-white parasol, trying to remember how he had been planning to divide five watermelons between seven people of varying sizes, his thoughts turned to his Uncle Pertti. Thoughts of gratitude. And also of guilt.

  He had completely forgotten the man was still alive. And now he wasn’t.

  Strictly speaking, Uncle Pertti had been his mother’s uncle, and during his childhood the legend of him had never been far away. The hero from the Winter War. The doctor who became one of the greats in Mannerheim’s army.

  Söderstedt himself had no siblings – that was presumably why he and his only-child wife had five children together – and his side of the family was microscopic. His parents, themselves both only children, were long since dead, and he had no other relatives. As a result, there had been no other heir.

  Arto Söderstedt fumbled with his knife and thought: five divided by seven, hmm, that’s 0.714 of a watermelon each, assuming everyone gets an equal amount, but if they went by bodyweight instead …

  He paused, glancing at his big, shadow-drenched family which, in turn and increasingly grumblingly, was looking at his passive knife. Were they really worthy heirs to Pertti Lindrot, the great hero of the Winter War, victor at Suomussalmi; one of the architects of the famous motti tactic, used to crack the Red Army’s road-bound troops by splitting them into smaller units as they passed through forests, surrounding them and defeating them?

  ‘Just cut it into pieces,’ his second oldest daughter Linda said impatiently.

  Arto Söderstedt looked at her, offended. He would certainly never work so sloppily. No, no. Arto was sixty-five kilos, Anja roughly the same; Mikaela weighed forty and Linda thirty-five, Peter too; Stefan weighed twenty-five and little Lina twenty. Two hundred and eighty-five kilos in total. Of that, twenty-three per cent – sixty-five divided by two hundred and eighty-five – should go to each of the parents. And twenty-three percent of five watermelons was …

  ‘Just cut it into pieces,’ little Lina echoed.

  … was 1.5 watermelons. More than one whole melon for each of the parents. Was that really how he had envisaged it?

  If that was the case, there would be only 0.35 of a watermelon for little Lina, and that didn’t seem fair.

  Fair.

  Was it fair that he, a man who had just gone up to his eyeballs in debt to buy a big family car, suddenly found that the whole thing had been paid off and that he had so much left over that he could, immediately and without the family’s knowledge, go online and rent a house in Tuscany for two months?

  No, it wasn’t especially fair.

  But what was fair in life?

  Certainly not 0.35 of a watermelon for the little one, he thought with sudden decisiveness, cutting the melon into pieces and dividing them fairly between the various members of his enormous family.

  More than a million. Who could have known that old Uncle Pertti, whose very existence he had forgotten, was sitting on such riches? With the money came memories, though Arto Söderstedt could really only remember him as a stinking mouth and a handful of half-rotten teeth. A hero who had let himself go, but whose heroic halo always shone brightly. As though he had the right to let himself go, that was how he understood his parents’ attitude. He had always had the impression that it had been his parents, Pertti’s last living relatives, who provided for the old man. And then it transpired he had been sitting on just over a million.

  Nothing was ever really as it seemed.

  When he reconstructed Pertti’s life, it must have gone something like this: young, enthusiastic, provincial doctor finds himself drawn into
the Finnish Winter War after an abrupt attack by the Soviet Union. He turns out to have a knack for guerrilla warfare in the frozen winter forests and quickly climbs the ranks. He becomes a hero after several decisive offences, and after the Russian victory, disappears into the forests like a classic guerrilla fighter. He returns after the Second World War, more or less a broken man. He starts drinking more and more and has trouble keeping his job as a doctor in increasingly remote backwaters. He eventually returns to Vasa and becomes an eccentric, living that sad old life until he turns ninety. End of story.

  Or so Arto Söderstedt thought.

  Until his inheritance arrived.

  The inheritance which was now being consumed, in the form of watermelon, beneath the growing shade of an umbrella. The Tuscan spring sun was now touching the curving horizon of the Ligurian Sea. Before long, it had sunk low enough for the chalk-white family to venture out into the water.

  After everyone else – shivering – had already left the beach.

  Arto Söderstedt saw the old fisherman pack up his stall of watermelons, cast a last astonished glance at the shadow-covered family, shake his head, and head off for a glass of wine in his local osteria. Once there, he would tell his friends about the sun-shy family and pay with money which had once belonged to a different eccentric from a completely different part of the world.

  For a moment, Söderstedt was fascinated by the movement of money, its transfer, its origins.

  Then he took off his crinkled suit and ran at the head of a line of children towards the edge of the water, testing it with his big toe. Its icy coolness reminded him of the Finnish lakes of his childhood.

  On the beach, Uncle Pertti sat, necking Koskenkorva vodka and laughing hoarsely at his cowardice.

  He ran in. The children wailed like organ pipes.

  And in his rucksack, up under the blue-and-white parasol, his mobile phone was still switched off.

  3

  THE GIRL WHO had been fortunate in her misfortune was sitting on a hospital bed with a surprised look on her face. She probably hadn’t stopped looking surprised since the previous evening. It was now a permanent look of surprise.

  Paul Hjelm found her surprise entirely understandable. When you were ten years old and walking hand in hand with your dad one spring evening, you hardly expected to be shot.

  But that was what had happened.

  She had felt cold; the wind had suddenly picked up, blowing straight through her thin quilted jacket and chilling her practically bare legs. She had been holding her dad’s hand and clutching a balloon shaped like a happy yellow face. She had been skipping slightly, mainly to keep warm but also because she was happy about the bag of sweets she had fished up out of the lucky dip. Aside from the cold, everything was just fine.

  And then she had been shot.

  A bullet had come flying from somewhere and buried itself in her upper right arm. That was where it came to rest. Fortunately.

  She had been fortunate in her misfortune.

  ‘You’ll be fine, Lisa,’ Paul Hjelm said, placing his hand on hers. ‘It’s just a flesh wound.’

  Lisa’s father’s eyes were puffy and red from crying and he was snoring loudly in the armchair. Paul Hjelm poked his shoulder gently. His head jerked upwards with a snort and he stared uncomprehendingly at the policeman standing by the edge of the bed. Then he saw his daughter with the bandage around her arm and the awful reality came crashing back down.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Altbratt,’ Hjelm said courteously. ‘I just need to be absolutely certain you didn’t see any sign at all of a perpetrator. No movement in the trees? Nothing?’

  Mr Altbratt shook his head and stared down into his hands.

  ‘There wasn’t a single person anywhere nearby,’ he said quietly. ‘Didn’t hear a thing. Suddenly Lisa just screamed and the blood started pouring out. I didn’t realise she’d been shot until the doctor told us. Shot! What kind of world do we live in?’

  ‘So you were walking along Sirishovsvägen in the direction of Djurgårdsvägen? Where had you been?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  Paul Hjelm’s phone rang. The timing wasn’t the best. He hoped no respirators or heart–lung machines would crash when he answered. He could just see the headlines: ‘TEDDY BEAR KILLER! EXTRA! EXTRA! FAMOUS POLICEMAN MURDERS FOUR CRITICALLY ILL PATIENTS WITH MOBILE PHONE.’

  ‘Hjelm,’ he answered laconically. Unless you’re severely disturbed – or an answering machine, perhaps – how exactly did you answer a phone using more words than that?

  A moment of silence followed. The Altbratt man was looking at him like he was busy ripping the feathers from an endangered eagle. The Altbratt girl still just looked surprised.

  ‘Skansen?’ the eagle violator exclaimed. That was all he said. Then he got up from the bed, patted Lisa on the head and held his hand out to the father.

  ‘I’ve got to go, I’m afraid. I’ll be back.’

  Cold morning sunshine greeted him on the steps of the paediatric accident and emergency department. The Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital. He searched his pockets as he wandered over to the car park. His keys were gone. Then again, this wasn’t an unusual occurrence and so he went through his patting ritual once more, and hey presto, they appeared from one of the pockets of his much-too-thin jacket. Same procedure as last year.

  It was a fresh spring morning of the newly woken kind, the type often seen during the first week of May. The kind of day which looks so inviting from indoors but turns out to be a slyly masquerading winter’s day. Hjelm, always dressed too lightly, was now practically naked. His pitiful scraps of clothing offered absolutely no protection against the icy wind. He tried to pull them tighter around him but couldn’t find anything to pull.

  It was nine in the morning and the traffic around Haga Södra and Nortull was at a complete standstill. Car traffic had increased dramatically in Stockholm over the last year. For some reason, it had suddenly become extremely attractive to be stuck in traffic. Cheap psychotherapy, presumably; a line of metal boxes full of screaming Mr Hydes. The alternative was the newly privatised commuter train which never seemed to be running, or else the metro which seemed to be forever standing in dark tunnels for hours on end, or else you could cycle along one of the sadistic cycleways no one dared to use since they seemed to have been deliberately designed to cause particularly awful injuries.

  OK, so he was a whiner.

  He didn’t really have anything to complain about. The red metro line was relatively free from stupidity. He continued to devote his long daily journey from Norsborg in to central Stockholm to intense, reality-fleeing jazz listening. After a jaunt into the world of opera, like some kind of slightly depraved Inspector Morse, he had gone back to jazz. He couldn’t quite tear himself away from the bebop years around 1960. But at the moment, he was hooked on Miles Davis. Kind of Blue. It was, quite simply, a masterpiece. Every single track on it. Five classics: ‘So What’, ‘Freddie Freeloader’, ‘Blue In Green’, ‘All Blues’ and ‘Flamenco Sketches’ – all more or less improvised in the studio during the golden year of 1959. The musicians went to the studio not having seen the music before, Miles turned up with a bundle of notes, and all five tracks were said to have been recorded on their very first attempt. Somehow, it felt like music that had been created as it was performed, music which immediately and naturally took shape. A new kind of blues, infinitely down to earth, infinitely sophisticated. Every second of it a pleasure.

  But during work hours, he had his service vehicle. He pushed the key which had miraculously appeared into the lock on the old beige Audi, looked out at the traffic and sighed deeply. It would probably be quicker to swim over to Djurgården.

  That was where he was headed. His colleague and partner in crime Jorge Chavez had had that mysterious, expectant tone in his voice, the kind Paul Hjelm had been longing for for months. ‘I think you should head over here, Paul. To Skansen.’

  The fact that he had just come from another case with l
inks to the area around the Skansen open-air museum and zoo made it even more interesting.

  He got caught up in traffic within the gates of the hospital and made a conscious decision not to turn into Mr Hyde. It just wasn’t worth the effort. Instead, he slipped the Kind of Blue CD into the car stereo and smiled as its opening notes spread their honey over his eardrums. As he meekly fought his way out of the enormous hospital area, he started ranking strange surnames. Wasn’t Altbratt a candidate for strangest? He’d come across heavyweights like Kungskranz and Riddarsson before, Äppelblohm and Sarkander, but did they really stand a chance against Altbratt?

  Anton Altbratt was the wealthy owner of a fur shop in Östermalm, living in Djurgårdsstaden and currently on his second marriage, of which ten-year-old Lisa was the fruit. He also had a couple of adult children from his previous marriage, and they hadn’t been able to get in touch with his new wife, Lisa’s mother. She was on a business trip to some unknown location. To Hjelm, the whole thing stank of intricate erotic arrangements, but he decided not to enquire further.

  Instead, he was trying to work out what could be behind the shooting of poor little Lisa. With any luck, her father Anton had been the intended victim. It was much easier to imagine a rational motive if that was the case – the young wife, the upper-class business activity, maybe even an attack by militant vegans. Though the lack of sound implied a silencer, which in turn implied some kind of professional criminality – in other words, it sounded more like the wife had wanted to get her husband out of the way for financial or sexual reasons, or else it was down to some kind of dodgy business links, or maybe even illegal fur dealings. Something like that. If any of those were true, it didn’t seem half as dangerous. An unsuccessful one-off attack. But if Lisa had been the target, it was much, much worse. That would mean the majority of plausible motives disappeared, making some kind of madman more likely. A madman specialising in children.

  Paul Hjelm didn’t really want to follow that thought through to its logical conclusion.