The Department of Sensitive Crimes Read online

  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.

  Copyright © 2019 by Alexander McCall Smith

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Little, Brown, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, a Hachette U.K. company, London, in 2019.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: McCall Smith, Alexander, [date] author.

  Title: The Department of Sensitive Crimes : a Detective Varg novel / Alexander McCall Smith.

  Description: First United States edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018040221. ISBN 9781524748210 (hardcover). ISBN 9781524748227 (ebook).

  Subjects: BISAC: FICTION/Humorous. FICTION/Mystery & Detective/Police Procedural. GSAFD: Humorous fiction. Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6063.C326 D47 2019 | DDC 823/.914—dc23 | LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2018040221

  Ebook ISBN 9781524748227

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover photograph by Ilona Wellmann/Millennium Images, U.K.; (wolf head) Croisy/Shutterstock

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Free Association, Charged at Normal Rates

  Chapter Two: A Very Low Crime

  Chapter Three: The Singing Tree

  Chapter Four: Bim

  Chapter Five: He Went to the North Pole

  Chapter Six: The Smell of Envy

  Chapter Seven: A Dead Dog Floats

  Chapter Eight: He Repaired the King’s Bicycle

  Chapter Nine: Biscuits, Cats, Basket, Sweden

  Chapter Ten: The Sudden Urge to Cry

  Chapter Eleven: Hormones Come into It

  Chapter Twelve: Being Swedish Is Not Always Easy

  Chapter Thirteen: Pericarditis

  Chapter Fourteen: Lycanthropy

  Chapter Fifteen: Nihil Humanum Mihi Alienum Est

  About the Author

  This book is for Bob McCreadie.

  Chapter One

  FREE ASSOCIATION, CHARGED AT NORMAL RATES

  “Søren,” said Dr. Svensson, gravely, but with a smile behind his horn-rimmed glasses; and then waited for the response. There would be an answer to this one-word sentence, but he would have to wait to see what it was.

  Ulf Varg, born in Malmö, Sweden, the son of Ture and Liv Varg, only too briefly married, now single again; thirty-eight, and therefore fast approaching what he thought of as a watershed—“After forty, Ulf,” said his friend Lars, “where does one go?”—that same Ulf Varg raised his eyes to the ceiling when his therapist said, “Søren.” And then Ulf himself, almost without thinking, replied: “Søren?”

  The therapist, kind Dr. Svensson, as so many of his patients described him, shook his head. He knew that a therapist should not shake his head, and he had tried to stop himself from doing it too often, but it happened automatically, in the same way as we make so many gestures without really thinking about them—twitches, sniffs, movements of the eyebrow, the folding and unfolding of legs. Although many of these acts are meaningless, mere concomitants of being alive, shaking one’s head implies disapprobation. And kind Dr. Svensson did not disapprove. He understood, which is quite different from disapproving.

  But now he disapproved, and he shook his head before he reminded himself not to disapprove, and not to shake his head. “Are you asking me or telling me?” he said. “Because you shouldn’t be asking, you know. The whole point of free association, Mr. Varg, is to bring to the surface—to outward expression—the things that are below the surface.”

  To bring to the surface the things that are below the surface... Ulf liked that. That, he thought, is what I do every time I go into the office. I get out of bed in the morning to bring to the surface the things that are below the surface. If I had a mission statement, then I suppose that is more or less what it would be. It would be far better than the one foisted on his department by Headquarters: We serve the public. How bland, how anodyne that was—like all the communications they received from Headquarters. Those grey men and women with their talk of targets and sensitivity and more or less everything except the one thing that mattered: finding those who broke the law.

  “Mr. Varg?”

  Ulf let his gaze fall from the ceiling. Now he was staring at the carpet, and at Dr. Svensson’s brown suede shoes. They were brogues, with that curious holed pattern that somebody had once explained to him was all to do with letting the shoes breathe, and was not just a matter of English aesthetics. They were expensive, he imagined. When he first saw them, he had decided that they were English shoes, because they had that look about them, and that was precisely the sort of thing that a good detective noticed. Italian shoes were thinner, and more elegant, presumably because the Italians had thinner, more elegant feet than the English. The Dutch, of course, had even bigger feet than the English; Dutchmen, Ulf reflected, were tall, big-boned people. They were large—which was odd, in a way, because Holland was such a small country... and so prone to flooding, as that story he had been read as a child made so clear—the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke...

  “Mr. Varg?” There was a slight note of impatience in Dr. Svensson’s tone. It was all very well for patients to go off into some reverie of their own, but the whole point of these sessions was to disclose, not conceal, and they should articulate what they were thinking, rather than just think it.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Svensson. I was thinking.”

  “Ah!” said the therapist. “That’s precisely what you’re meant to do, you know. Thinking precedes verbalisation, and verbalisation precedes resolution. And much as I approve of that, what we’re trying to do here is to find out what you think without thinking. In other words, we want to find out what’s going on in your mind. Because that’s what—”

  Ulf nodded. “Yes, I know. I understand. I just said Søren because I wasn’t quite sure what you meant. I wanted to be sure.”

  “I meant Søren. The name. Søren.”

  Ulf thought. Søren triggered nothing. Had Dr. Svensson said Harald or Per, he would have been able to respond bully or teeth, because that was what he thought of. They had been boys in his class, so had Dr. Svensson said Harald, he might have replied bully, because that was what Harald was. And if he had said Per, he would have replied teeth, because Per had a gap in his front teeth that his parents were too poor to have attended to by an orthodontist.

  Then it came to him, quite suddenly, and he replied, “Kierkegaard.”

  This seemed to please Dr. Svensson. “Kierkegaard?” the therapist repeated.

  “Yes, Søren Kierkegaard.”

  Dr. Svensson smiled. It was almost time to bring the session to a close, and he liked to end on a thoughtful note. “Would you mind my asking, why Kierkegaard? Have you read him?”

  Ulf replied that he had.

  “I’m impressed,” said Dr. Svensson. “One doesn�
�t imagine that a...” He stopped.

  Ulf looked at him expectantly.

  Dr. Svensson tried to cover his embarrassment, but failed. “I didn’t mean, well, I didn’t mean it to sound like that.”

  “Your unconscious?” said Ulf mildly. “Your unconscious mind speaking.”

  The therapist smiled. “What I was going to say—but stopped myself just in time—was that I didn’t expect a policeman to have read Kierkegaard. I know that there’s no earthly reason why a policeman should not read Kierkegaard, but it is unusual, would you not agree?”

  “I’m actually a detective.”

  Dr. Svensson was again embarrassed. “Of course you are.”

  “Although detectives are policemen in essence.”

  Dr. Svensson nodded. “As are judges and public health officials and politicians too, I suppose. Anybody who tells us how to behave is a policeman in a sense.”

  “But not therapists?”

  Dr. Svensson laughed. “A therapist shouldn’t tell you how to behave. A therapist should help you to see why you do what you do, and should help you to stop doing it—if that’s what you want. So, no, a therapist is certainly not a policeman.” He paused. “But why Kierkegaard? What appeals to you about Kierkegaard?”

  “I didn’t say he appealed. I said I had read him. That’s not the same thing as saying he appealed.”

  Dr. Svensson glanced at his watch again. “I think perhaps we should leave it at that,” he said. “We’ve covered a fair amount of ground today.”

  Ulf rose to his feet.

  “Now what?” asked Dr. Svensson.

  “Now what, what?”

  “I was wondering what you were going to do next. You see, my patients come into this room, they talk—or, rather, we talk—and then they go out into the world and continue with their lives. And I remain here and think—not always, but sometimes—I think: What are they going outside to do? Do they go back to their houses and sit in a chair? Do they go into some office somewhere and move pieces of paper from one side of the desk to another? Or stare at a screen again until it’s time to go home to a house where the children are all staring at screens? Is that what they do? Is that why they bother?”

  Ulf hesitated. “Those are very profound questions. Very. But since you ask, I can tell you that I’m going back to my office. I shall sit at my desk and write a report on a case that we have just closed.”

  “You close cases,” muttered Dr. Svensson. “Mine remain open. They are unresolved, for the most part.”

  “Yes, we close cases. We’re under great pressure to close cases.”

  Dr. Svensson sighed. “How fortunate.” He moved to the window. I look out of the window, he thought. The patients go off to do significant things, such as closing cases, and I look out of my window. Then he said, “I don’t suppose you could tell me what this case involved.”

  “I can’t give you names or other details,” replied Ulf. “But I can tell you it involved the infliction of a very unusual injury.”

  Dr. Svensson turned round to face his patient.

  “To the back of somebody’s knee,” said Ulf.

  “How strange. To the back of the knee?”

  “Yes,” said Ulf. “But I can’t really say much more than that.”

  “Odd.”

  Ulf frowned. “That I should not explain further? Is that odd?”

  “No, that somebody should injure another person in the back of the knee. Of course, the choice of a target is hardly random. We injure what we love, what we desire, every bit as much as that which we hate. But it is odd, isn’t it? The back of a knee...”

  Ulf began to walk towards the door. “You’d be very surprised, Dr. Svensson, at how odd people can be. Yes, even in your profession—where you hear all sorts of dark secrets from your patients, day in, day out. Even then. You’d be surprised.”

  “Would I?”

  “Yes,” said Ulf. “If you stood in my shoes for a few days, your jaw would hit the table in astonishment. Regularly.”

  Dr. Svensson smiled. “Well, well.” His smile faded. The jaw. Freud, he remembered, died of a disease that affected his jaw. Alone in London, with enemies circling, that illuminating intelligence, liberating in its perspicacity, flickered and died, leaving us to face the darkness and the creatures that inhabited it.

  Chapter Two

  A VERY LOW CRIME

  Ulf’s office was in a high-gabled building in the old town of Malmö, the Gamla Staden. The visitors who flocked to the area had no idea that behind the unmarked doorway, halfway down the winding lane that led to the Malmö Konstmuseum, was the home of the Sensitive Crimes Department of the Malmö Criminal Investigation Authority. Those visitors who sat for any length of time in the café directly opposite this entrance would, if observant, notice that this was an unusually busy office, judging by the number of people who went in and out of the otherwise unexceptional doorway. Had they lingered for any length of time, such visitors would also have noticed that many of these people walked directly across the street and into the café itself, where they conversed, either at the bar or at a table, in hushed tones, as people do who are discussing, in a public place, those matters that are not to be talked about openly.

  Ulf’s desk was in Room 5 of this office. He shared the room with three others: two colleagues, Anna Bengtsdotter and Carl Holgersson, and a clerical assistant, Erik Nykvist. Anna and Carl were rough contemporaries of Ulf’s, although Carl was a few years older. Erik, though, was in his late fifties, and was talking about retirement. His career had hardly been stellar: after thirty-eight years in the department he had progressed from postal clerk to clerical assistant—a progression of three steps on a ladder with seventeen well-defined rungs. He did not particularly care: his passion was fishing, and the need to earn a living was nothing more than a minor distraction in the battle between man and fish that dominated his waking thoughts. Retirement would be bliss, he believed, as his wife had inherited a modest cabin on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, a stone’s throw from the sea. His pension was generous enough, and they would have few expenses in such a place. The cabin had a small patch of land attached to it—enough to grow sufficient vegetables for their needs—and they would eat fish five days a week, just as they currently did. “What could be a better prospect than that?” he once remarked to Ulf. And Ulf replied that he found it difficult to imagine a more ideal existence than the one that Erik would almost certainly be leading once his retirement began.

  Anna Bengtsdotter, whose desk faced Ulf’s, was from Stockholm, where her father was the proprietor of a small travelling circus. This circus had been in the family for three generations, and Anna had been under pressure to join several cousins who fielded a highly popular musical ride. She refused, and insisted instead on taking a college course in human resource management. This had led to a job in the police, in the personnel department, from which she had transferred, by dint of persistent and determined application, to the Criminal Investigation Authority. Anna was married to an anaesthetist, Jo Dahlman, a quiet person whose abiding passion was philately. She had twin daughters who were keen swimmers, and already making their mark in Malmö swimming circles.

  Although both Anna and Ulf were conscientious in their approach to their work, they freely admitted that Carl was the hard worker of the team. He was always first in each morning and last out in the evening, in spite of having a young family. It was Carl who willingly—and remarkably cheerfully—took on the extra shifts when the exigencies of the department’s undermanning required somebody to stand in for a sick colleague. It was Carl who volunteered for assignments that were either extremely tedious or exceptionally distressing. “If I don’t do these things,” he said, “then somebody else has to. He or she won’t like it any more than I will, and so I might as well do it, don’t you think?”

  This was a distributive logic t
hat Ulf felt was somehow flawed, unless altruism was the central value that underpinned one’s universe. And for most people, Ulf thought, this was not the case. “You have to look after yourself, Carl,” was his reply.

  To which Carl responded, “Not if you’re Immanuel Kant, Ulf.” And quickly added—for Carl was always somewhat diffident, “Not that I am, of course.”

  Erik, who had overheard this exchange from the other side of the room, interjected, “Which section is he in?”

  Carl might have laughed, but did not, and nor did Ulf. “He retired a long time ago,” Carl said. There was no point, he thought, in explaining Kant to somebody like Erik, whose universe seemed restricted to fish, and ferry timetables, and island weather.

  Ulf had wondered where Carl’s sense of duty came from, and had concluded that it was probably attributable to his father, a Lutheran theologian who made regular appearances on a television programme, What You Should Think. This dealt with practical moral issues of the day, such as vegetarianism, the reception of refugees, environmental protection—all the dilemmas and headaches that could make life a moral minefield. Professor Holgersson spoke in a slow, grave way that made for compulsive television. People could not take their eyes off him as he made his contribution to the debates, nor could they stop listening to his sonorous, measured tones. He had become well known—even to people who would otherwise have no interest in such issues—and there was now a radio advertisement in which an actor, imitating the professor’s voice with that mimetic genius that some actors seem to possess, exhorted the listener to buy a particular brand of pre-packed, home-assembly furniture.

  It was no surprise to Ulf, then, that Carl should be so hardworking, methodical, and utterly reliable. Nor that he should be bookish—professors’ sons, surely, could be expected to be bookish. This meant that at odd moments, perhaps during a coffee break in the café over the road, or travelling in a car to the scene of some crime, Carl would regale Ulf and Anna with unexpected facts about some issue he had encountered in a book or article that his father happened to have mentioned to him. On occasion these had to do with philosophy, or even theology, but it seemed that the professor’s reading was much broader than that, and included books and magazines dealing with subjects as diverse as primatology, civil engineering, and medicine. An auto-didact in any of these fields might not be the ideal work companion, but Carl was never boring, and there had been many occasions on which one of his passing remarks had sent Ulf off to the library to read up on some abstruse subject or other.