The Man with the Silver Saab Read online

  Anna, Ulf’s closest colleague, and one with whom he had for some time been secretly in love, was dubious. Erik was given to exaggeration, she thought, and was, by any standards, remarkably ill-informed on all subjects except fishing, on which his knowledge was extensive. What did Erik know about the doings of the Swedish criminal courts, bearing in mind that his only reading matter—as far as she could tell—was angling magazines such as Fish Today or Big Trout, copies of which were to be regularly spotted on his desk.

  “I don’t think you can say that, Erik,” she said mildly. “Or not in so many words. The courts try to balance interests.”

  “That’s probably true,” Ulf contributed. He was not entirely sure that this was the case, as he had seen many instances in which lawyers had managed to snatch manifestly guilty people from the jaws of justice. These people knew they were guilty as charged; their lawyers knew it too, as did the judges themselves, but the words of the penal code and the code of criminal procedure had somehow been interpreted in such a way as to allow wrongdoers to walk free. He had sometimes wondered how these notorious defence lawyers managed to sleep in their beds at night, knowing that their efforts had allowed anti-social elements of every stripe to be returned to society. Or did they not see it that way? Did they feel that it was better for the system to be weighted that way than to punish the occasional innocent defendant, the occasional victim of a police misjudgement? Nobody was perfect, and Ulf understood that this applied to police officers every bit as much as to others. At least his department, the Department of Sensitive Crimes, had, under his leadership, a reputation for being scrupulously fair to those whom they investigated. If he ever felt that they were investigating the wrong person, they would abandon the inquiry. That did not happen in some departments, where a far more cavalier approach was adopted and what seemed to count was that someone was apprehended, in order to keep the clear-up rate looking impressive.

  Ulf thought there was a grain of truth in what Erik said, but he could not express this view in front of Anna, lest she think he agreed with Erik’s general opinions. It would not do at all if Anna suspected him of having anything in common with the world view of Fish Today, which occasionally published articles on subjects of a political or social nature. That, thought Ulf, was inexplicable: Why should the editor of Fish Today stray outside his area of undoubted competence—fish—to opine on other matters? Was it journalistic frustration at being the editor of Fish Today when he might have wished to be the leader-writer on one of the national newspapers, or the editor of a respected political review? Plenty of people were in the wrong job altogether, or on a lowly rung of their chosen ladder; plenty of people were not where they wanted to be and might from time to time try to show what they saw as their true mettle.

  Now, on the subject of conjoined twins, Ulf was unequivocal. “It’s quite right that the courts would order the release of the innocent twin. It would be completely wrong to imprison a person who had nothing to do with the offence in question.”

  Erik thought about this for a few moments before replying, “Except for one thing, Ulf: How would you know that he—the other twin, that is—had nothing to do with the crime? How would you know that?”

  Ulf shrugged. “We’re talking about a hypothetical case here, aren’t we? Let’s imagine that one of the twins has been seen doing something illegal. Let’s assume there are witnesses who say: That twin did it, the one on the left—or the right, as the case may be. Let’s assume we know beyond any shadow of doubt which one did it.”

  Erik pointed out that this was not what he meant. What he meant was that the other twin—the one who had done nothing—might be guilty of abetting the offence because he’d failed to do anything to stop his twin from acting. “He becomes an accessory,” he said. “By doing nothing to stop his twin brother, he becomes party to the offence. Simple.”

  Anna thought ahead. “All right,” she said, “but let’s think this out. Let’s say that we’ve gone beyond the issue of whether a suspect might be detained. Let’s say that we’re at the trial stage and the guilty twin has been duly convicted. The issue of accessory guilt has not arisen and there’s just one convicted person. What then? How do you punish the guilty twin without punishing the innocent sibling?”

  “You can’t,” said Ulf. “You have to let him go free. He gets a warning, or something similar.”

  This was too much for Erik. “But what if the crime is really serious? What if it’s homicide? What if the court thinks the offender is a danger to the public?”

  This question was greeted with silence. At last, Ulf said, “In practice, this is not really an issue, is it? We don’t hear of Siamese twins being arrested, do we?”

  “Perhaps that’s because they don’t do anything illegal,” suggested Anna. “If you’re a Siamese twin, you know there’s always going to be a witness to what you do—always—and so you watch your step.”

  That had been the end of the discussion, and now Ulf thought that it did not really help him in his uncertainty as to how to deal with Stig’s complaint about police inaction over the outrages in the park. And he was about to say to Stig, “Let me ask my colleagues in the vice squad about this,” when he heard a loud yelp from a clump of trees. Turning around sharply, he saw Martin engaged in a fight with what seemed to be an invisible enemy, struggling in a confusion of leaves and dust.

  “Your dog!” shouted Stig. “There’s something going on.”

  Ulf ran towards the trees. Martin had been off the lead, and Ulf had been vaguely aware of where he was, but had not been following him closely. Now he saw what had happened—what had been the consequences of his brief inattention.

  When Ulf reached the scene of the tussle, the squirrel had already escaped and could be seen clinging to a branch of one of the trees, its tail an electric question mark of bristling fur. Ulf did not spend much time looking up at the branch, though—his attention was focused on Martin, who had been badly bitten about the head, and who was now whimpering at his feet.

  A head wound in a human being can result in copious bleeding, and this also applied, it seemed, to dogs. Blood seemed to be pouring from the side of Martin’s muzzle and from his nose too, or from where his nose had once been. Ulf gasped in horror as he saw that the soft round bulb of the dog’s nose, to all intents and purposes like a small black truffle, had been almost severed. Instinctively he tried to press the nose back into place. It felt like a large crushed blackberry in his fingers, and the attempted act of restoration brought a marrow-chilling howl of protest from Martin. For a few moments it seemed as though the dog would shake his nose off altogether, but the sinews still connecting the snout were tough, and the nose remained attached.

  Stig had now joined Ulf, and his dog, Candy, tried to lick at Martin’s wounds, only to be discouraged by a further unearthly sound—something between a yelp and a howl.

  “You’ll need to get him to a vet quickly,” said Stig. “He’s already lost a lot of blood.”

  Ulf reached down to clip the leash back on to a collar now slippery with blood. He would have carried Martin back, although he was not a small dog, but he could not do so now as any approach to the injured animal was greeted with a baring of teeth and a savage growl. Yet once the leash was back on, Martin seemed keen to get back to the car, parked not far away, on the edge of the park.

  “You poor creature,” muttered Ulf as he bundled Martin into the back of the Saab. He was indifferent to the specks of blood that immediately splattered the car’s cherished leather upholstery; all that counted now was to get Martin to Dr. Håkansson as quickly as possible so that a painkiller of some sort might be administered. Ulf could not bear the thought of animal pain: pain and fear of death were things that we shared with the simplest of animal beings; we had more tricks than they did, but when it came to these basics, we shared that terrain with them, and were as vulnerable as they were.

  He set off, and wi
thin a block or two encountered a traffic jam. A wedding celebration was taking place somewhere, a colourful ceremony from a distant culture, and the guests had parked inconsiderately. This had led to a build-up of normally free-moving traffic, and at points cars were reduced to walking speed. Ulf looked anxiously in his rear-view mirror at the injured dog. Although Martin’s instinct was to lick his wounds, the almost-detached nose and its tiny bond of tissue made this form of self-administered canine first aid impossible. Their eyes met in the mirror, the dog gazing imploringly at his omnipotent master, unable to understand why Ulf, source of all authority, a human sun, should be unable to bid this pain cease.

  The silver Saab nosed its way through a cluster of cars, their drivers drumming fingers on their steering wheels, impatient or accepting, according to personal disposition. Ulf craned his neck to get a better view of what was happening ahead, where the long line of cars snaked out as far as a distant junction. It could be half an hour or even more before the tangle of vehicles sorted itself out, and by then it might be too late for Martin. The bleeding had not abated, as far as Ulf could tell, and there must be a point at which the dog’s heart would simply give out, as a pump does when it runs dry. How much blood did a dog’s body contain? Ulf knew that we had about five litres—a fact that he remembered from forensic medicine lectures at the police college—but he was not sure about dogs. A couple of litres, perhaps; certainly not much more, and Martin must by now have lost a good cupful or two. Then he remembered another curious detail, dredged from memory, not thought about for years. The lecturer in forensic medicine at police college, a desiccated-looking pathologist with a slight nervous tic, had remarked that while we made do with that five litres, an African elephant had roughly fifty times that volume. That was one of the few details that Ulf remembered of those ten lectures from Dr. Åström, along with the pathologist’s explanation of death by shock—a cause of death he said he had encountered twice in his professional career, with one of the victims being a householder who had opened a cupboard door to find not one but two intruders hiding inside. The intruders had not raised a finger to the householder, but the shock of their presence was enough to cause his heart to fail. The other shock-induced death he had dealt with was that of a lottery winner who had died on realising that he had chosen the exact six figures that would bring him a jackpot of millions. He was a bachelor with no close family, and the millions, claimed on his behalf by his estate, had ended up in the hands of a charity dedicated to expanding public knowledge of coastal geology.

  His thoughts returned to Martin, and to the urgency of the situation, and at the same time his eye fell on the detachable blue lamp that he could put on the top of the car if an urgent summons came through. Powered from the power socket of his car, this light would flash intermittently, as might a lighthouse in the darkness. And it worked: seeing the blue light coming up behind them, drivers would slow down and pull in—exactly the course of action recommended in the Highway Code. This would allow Ulf to sail past unimpeded—something that was useful at some points in police work but that was not to be abused—as the Commissioner made clear in his circular on emergency procedures.

  “Police vehicles,” he wrote to his section commanders, “are subject to the ordinary rules of the road, and I shall not countenance any abuse of the occasional—and I underline occasional—licence that we have to break these rules in the interest of a rapid response.”

  Ulf hesitated. Was this an emergency of such a nature as to justify a blue light? It was certainly a matter of life and death, even if only canine life and death. And yet why should we distinguish between our lives and the lives of dogs? Dogs were meant to be our friends and felt so many of the things that we felt. Dogs had a sense of self. Dogs understood loyalty and friendship; dogs loved us, and would do anything for us, so why should we not do anything for them?

  Ulf retrieved the light. Reaching out of his open window, he placed it on the roof of his car, where its powerful magnet sucked at the metal of the Saab’s bodywork. Ahead of him, a driver looked in his mirror and then obligingly pulled over to allow Ulf to pass. On the back seat, Martin bled onto the upholstery, whimpering, puzzled. He had forgotten what had caused his injury—dogs do not remember these things—but he knew that he was in pain and that the epicentre of this pain was his nose, or the place where his nose had once been.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I NEED TO FALL IN LOVE

  The blue light made a difference, but, even so, the journey to Dr. Håkansson’s clinic took half an hour longer than normal. With the usual stoicism of the injured animal, Martin quietened down, his earlier whimpering replaced by a low snuffling sound, probably caused, Ulf thought, by the near detachment of his nose. Ulf kept an eye on him in his rear-view mirror, and although he felt a momentary alarm when he noticed that Martin had become quite still, he was relieved to see a twitching a few seconds later that showed this to be sleep rather than death.

  Ulf’s thoughts wandered. He assumed that Dr. Håkansson’s clinic would be open and that the vet would be able to deal with Martin as a matter of urgency. This thought led to more general reflection on how we rely on certain people in our lives and how we tend to assume they will always be there, ready to attend to our needs. And it is in this spirit that we use the possessive my when referring to them. My dentist, my doctor, my hairdresser…He had to smile. My dentist…in Ulf’s case the somewhat unusual Dr. Melker Grahn, whom he saw every six months for his check-up. Dr. Grahn was widely appreciated for his gentle touch—a quality that ensures a dentist’s popularity. But there was something else that singled him out amongst dentists: his passionate interest in genealogical matters, and in particular his own roots, parlous to the point of unlikelihood, in the Swedish nobility.

  Ulf had become aware of Dr. Grahn’s interest in these matters on the first occasion on which he sat in the dentist’s chair, gazing into the bright surgical light above his head. Dr. Grahn had commented on Ulf’s name—something that many did, or thought of doing until prevented by politeness. “These wolf-based names are very interesting,” the dentist said as he probed Ulf’s mouth. “I remember when I was at school there was a boy whose family name was Adolf. That’s rare these days, for obvious reasons. But this boy was called Adolf—Gustav Adolf, if I remember correctly.” He paused; the fine pick scratched against the surface of a tooth. “Which is interesting, because there was, as you probably know, a Gustav II Adolf back in the seventeenth century. But the surname actually comes from Adalwolf, which means noble wolf. Did you know that? I bet you didn’t—not many do.” A further pause. “You could be Adalfvarg, perhaps, which would be much the same thing—were you to think of changing your name, which I’m sure you feel no need to do.”

  Ulf listened. Dr. Grahn went on and on. He was quite content with his own name, he intoned as he hovered over the dental chair, but had a perfectly legitimate claim to call himself something rather different, were he to pursue the matter. “I am descended, you see, from a very old family. I don’t say that in any boastful way, of course, I merely mention it as a matter of historical interest. There is a family connection, admittedly not close, with a certain distinguished family which, as I’m sure you know, is one of the oldest noble families in Sweden. We—and I feel entitled to say we—go back to the thirteenth century. My connection with the family is through the maternal line, and they take a very limited—unduly limited in my view—position on inheritance through the maternal line. So, too, does the House of Nobles, I’m afraid to say. They have flatly refused to recognise my connection, would you believe it? I have the documentation—screeds of it—and yet they refuse to acknowledge its legitimacy.”

  Ulf sighed. He wanted to sympathise, but the instruments in his mouth made it difficult. A sigh would have to do.

  “I should be in the Adelskalendern, the peerage register, but I am not. I don’t care, though, because everybody knows that the Adelskalendern is incomplete. That is
why I have not bought the latest edition and never—never—recommend it to anybody seriously interested in genealogical matters.”

  And so it went on—on every visit to the dentist, Ulf would be treated to a lengthy account of Dr. Grahn’s claims to nobility and to an account of the perfidy of the genealogical establishment. He wondered whether every patient sat through this, but eventually decided that they did not, he being singled out because Dr. Grahn knew that he worked in the Department of Sensitive Crimes and might therefore be able to pursue, in some vague and undefined way, cases of genealogical injustice.

  Those others who looked after Ulf—his hairdresser, his psychotherapist, the mechanic who tuned and serviced his Saab—none of them was as seemingly monomaniacal as Dr. Grahn. Admittedly, his hairdresser tended to discuss television shows at greater length than they merited, and his mechanic frequently complained, with some passion, about taxation, but they could talk about other things, and often did. And as for Dr. Håkansson—he was the most balanced of all, and the most reassuring in his professional manner. And so, as Ulf drew up in front of his clinic and began the task of gently coaxing Martin out of the car, he knew that Dr. Håkansson would do his best to allay his own anxiety and to calm the injured dog.

  The receptionist, a fresh-faced young woman who appeared to remember the name of every animal that crossed the clinic’s threshold, showed immediate concern.

  “Oh, poor Martin!” she exclaimed. “Look at you, you poor darling. What on earth has happened!”

  “A squirrel, I’m afraid,” said Ulf. “Is Dr. Håkansson…”

  She did not let him finish. “He’s dealing with a cat at the moment, but I shall interrupt him. This is clearly an emergency.”