Free Falling, As If in a Dream Read online

  “She got agitated, scared simply,” said Holt.

  “What would you have expected?” Johansson snorted. “The way he looked on that video?”

  “Then she spontaneously points out that the perpetrator did not have a mustache. Pettersson had a mustache on the lineup video, but according to the investigation he didn’t have one at the time of the murder.”

  “But sweet Jesus,” said Johansson. “A type like Christer Pettersson, do you think he shaves every day? He probably has a mustache every other week if you ask me.”

  “There’s another thing I’ve wondered about,” said Holt. “The reason that the court of appeal rejected Lisbeth Palme’s testimony was, in part, what you’ve said just now: all the errors committed in connection with the lineup.”

  “Obviously,” said Johansson. “How the hell would it have looked otherwise?”

  “Assume that it had been Lisbeth who was murdered and that Olof Palme had survived. That he was the one who testified and had to be involved in the same worthless lineup she had to go through. Assume that he pointed out Christer Pettersson and did it in exactly the same way that Lisbeth did. How do you think things would have gone in the court of appeals then?”

  “Then Pettersson probably would have been convicted. Even courts make mistakes.”

  “You have no other observations in that connection,” said Holt.

  “No,” said Johansson. Could it be so bad that Holt and little Mattei have been plotting a gender perspective? thought Johansson. Though she seems innocent enough, he thought, glaring acidly in Mattei’s direction.

  Holt’s fifth and concluding argument was that Christer Pettersson corresponded well with the description of the perpetrator in the profile that their colleagues at the national crime bureau had produced in collaboration with experts at the FBI.

  “In the profile the perpetrator is described in the following way,” Holt began.

  “This concerns a solitary perpetrator with primarily chaotic and psychopathic features, an intolerant, disloyal, and merciless person who is governed by impulses and whims. A disturbed person who has a hard time maintaining normal relationships with other people. Who in a superficial sense may appear self-confident, but who is both conceited and affected. A person lacking an inner compass. He is not interested in politics but probably harbors considerable hatred for society and its representatives. A solitary person living a failed life. Who has had poor contacts with his own family since childhood. It is completely ruled out that he would have participated in any conspiracy, whether large or small.”

  “Imagine that,” Johansson snorted.

  “Yes, imagine that,” said Holt. “He is thus about six feet tall and relatively powerfully built. He is right-handed and not in particularly good shape. He was probably born sometime in the 1940s, and he has some experience with firearms. He lives alone, has only sporadic contact with women, and probably has no children of his own. He is probably poorly educated and has no job. If he has had a job it has been for short periods and involved unskilled tasks. He has bad finances, lives in an apartment with low rent, and has a low standard of living. He is probably known to the police for previous criminal offenses of a less serious nature. He lives, works, or for other reasons has often spent time in the vicinity of the crime scene and the Grand cinema.”

  Holt glanced up from her papers and looked at Johansson.

  “The same man who according to the same profile, correct me if I’m remembering wrong, was not supposed to have had any contact with the mental health system. Who is not a serious abuser of either alcohol or narcotics,” said Johansson. “So it can’t have been Sigge Cedergren in any case, Pettersson’s spigot and official purveyor, whom the perpetrator would visit to buy dope,” said Johansson. “Maybe he was going to the movies after all?”

  “I hear what you’re saying,” said Holt. “Ninety percent of this is still about Christer Pettersson, although—”

  “Ninety percent? I really wonder about that,” Johansson interrupted. “A person who according to the profile might possibly have committed minor crimes against property, but never killed anyone with a bayonet, never robbed or assaulted or threatened a lot of people. Pettersson was in various jails and nuthouses for over ten years for that very reason. Not to mention all the years he did for drug offenses and all the other shit he was up to. Plus the fact that he’d been drinking and doing drugs on a daily basis practically since he was a little boy.”

  “You think this speaks to Christer Pettersson’s advantage,” said Holt with an innocent expression.

  “Right here I actually think it does,” said Johansson. “Do you want to know what I personally think about the perpetrator?”

  “Gladly,” said Holt. I really do, she thought.

  “For one thing, I believe he had help. Nothing remarkable, but I think he had some contact or contacts. Before he went to work.”

  “Okay,” said Holt.

  “This is a well-organized, alert perpetrator. He is in good physical condition. Strong. He has no criminal record, and he’s not an abuser. He has both authority and presence, and he seizes his opportunity on the wing the moment he gets the chance. He has considerable personal experience where resorting to violence is concerned, and he is a very skilled shot, right-handed. The weapon he uses is probably his own, and in any event he didn’t buy it on the cement down at Sergels Torg. He’s very familiar with the area, has a driver’s license, car, good residence, and good financial and other resources. In short he has all the qualities required for him to be able to disappear without a trace, even though it should be impossible considering the way in which he did it.”

  “In other words, he’s the exact opposite of the profile,” Holt summarized.

  “No,” said Johansson, shaking his head. “I’ll buy the fact that he hated Palme. That psychological drivel about him and his upbringing leaves me cold. He’s an evil person. Sure. Normal people don’t shoot someone like Palme from behind, regardless of who they vote for.”

  “We’re in agreement there,” said Holt.

  “Forget about that now,” said Johansson. “Someone like that shouldn’t be running around loose. He should be in prison for life, and if I could choose I would boil the bastard for glue.”

  “That last part I won’t sign on to but otherwise we’re in agreement,” said Holt.

  “Good,” said Johansson, getting up quickly. “We’ll meet in a week. Same time, same place. Then I want a name.”

  “Our boss seems to have taken this case to heart, “ said Lewin as he and Holt left the meeting.

  “It’s not his commitment I’m questioning,” said Holt.

  “I understand what you mean,” Lewin agreed. “The major problem with this particular case is that it’s completely impossible to just sit down and read your way to the truth. Like I already said, regardless of what you think or believe, you can always find testimony to support it.”

  “You’re thinking about that female witness who called the perpetrator a gook bastard,” said Holt. “Careless of me to miss her.”

  “No,” said Lewin. “I was actually thinking about a completely different witness. Although she disappeared from the process early on. Removed from the investigation. Her testimony was judged to be uninteresting. I actually saved a copy of it. I have it in my office if you’re interested. I never did anything about it. It never happened,” Lewin observed, sighing.

  “I’d be glad to read it,” said Holt.

  “Sure,” said Lewin. “You’ll get it. Although perhaps I should warn you ahead of time: This is far from a problem-free witness.”

  “She has all the usual problems that witnesses aren’t allowed to have? The kind of witnesses that our boss calls nutcases, glowworms, and bag ladies?” Holt looked inquisitively at Lewin.

  “Of course,” said Lewin. “But in this particular case that’s not the problem.”

  “So what is it?” said Holt.

  “The major problem arises if you get the id
ea that what she says adds up,” said Lewin as he opened the door to his office. He held it open for Holt and made sure to close it behind them.

  “So what do you mean?” Holt repeated.

  “You can only hope that she’s mistaken,” said Lewin. “Here it is.”

  Lewin opened a binder he’d taken out of his well-organized bookshelf, removed a thin plastic folder with papers, and gave it to Holt.

  “You’re welcome to it, Anna. You’re certainly braver than I am,” said Lewin.

  “So what happens if what she says is correct?” said Holt while she weighed the thin folder in her hand.

  “Then there are problems,” said Lewin, looking at her seriously. “Major problems.”

  16

  The day after the second meeting, Lisa Mattei concluded her small sociological investigation. She had interviewed thirteen old Palme investigators, all of them men of course, of which six were retired, three were still working in the Palme group, and four had left for other assignments within the agency. Combined, her thirteen older colleagues had devoted almost a hundred years of their professional lives to searching for the perpetrator who just over twenty years earlier had assassinated the prime minister.

  None of them seemed to have any problem with her explanation for wanting to talk with them. On the contrary, almost all of them thought it was an excellent idea. That it was high time someone did something about the mountain of papers that nowadays were mostly collecting dust. Several of them had also gone directly to what the actual purpose of her visit was, without her even having to ask.

  “It’s an excellent idea. I saw your boss Johansson on TV when he read the riot act to those journalists. That’s a real cop for you. Not one of those paper pushers with a law degree. We’ve known each other since our time in the detective unit down in Stockholm, and if there was anyone who had the right feel for the job it was Lars Martin. Though he was just a young kid at that time. You can tell him from me that he can carry everything that’s not about Christer Pettersson down to the basement, and I guess the simplest thing to do would be just to burn it. You can tell him that too, while you’re at it. He’s never been a coward. I’ll be the first to testify to that…

  The Kurds. It was the Kurds who shot Palme. Those terrorists within their so-called revolutionary workers party, PKK. I and many of our colleagues realized that right from the start, so all the piles of paper the group collected later are really not our fault, and now it’s too late to correct that mistake. The really big scandal is that we never got to finish our case. The politicians and the journalists took it away from us, for political reasons. It was the journalists who put the pressure on, and the prosecutors who couldn’t stand up to them, and the politicians just chimed in as usual. Even though Palme was a Social Democrat and we have a Social Democratic government. What they did to our first investigation leader, Hasse Holmér—he was county police chief in Stockholm as I’m sure you know, and I say that mostly because it was before your time—it was a pure scandal if you ask me. He got fired simply because he refused to let a lot of politicians and newspaper people run the investigation…”

  “Sounds like an excellent suggestion. Start by subtracting everything that deals with those Kurds. They had nothing to do with the assassination of Palme. It was thanks to him that people like that could come here. Palme was pro-immigrant, and I have nothing to say about that per se. When people got riled up about him it was usually for other reasons that mostly had to do with his personality. I don’t believe someone like Christer Pettersson could have done it either. He was just too mixed up to manage a thing like that. Probably barely even knew who Palme was. Besides he’s been dead now a few years, so that alone is enough to take him out of the Palme case. Then there were all those political speculations about Iran and Iraq and India and the Bofors affair and South Africa and God knows what. I think, even if it were that way, that’s nothing we police can do anything about, is it? Besides, I don’t believe in it. I think the explanation is much simpler. Some ordinary citizen who got tired of Palme and his politics and maybe even believed he was working as a spy for the Russians. Quite a few did at the time, I’ll tell you. Someone who simply took matters into his own hands when he happened to run into him by chance outside the Grand on Sveavägen…”

  There was an ongoing pattern in what Mattei heard. An expected pattern. You believed in what you had worked with or in any event what you’d worked with the most. On the other hand, you seldom set much store by anything you hadn’t been involved in investigating. On one point, however, with one very surprising exception, they were in agreement. All except one of those asked categorically rejected the so-called police track, and the one who believed in it the least was the investigator who at various times had devoted five years of his life as a police officer to trying to find out what his colleagues had actually been up to when Palme was murdered.

  “I promise and assure you,” he said, nodding seriously at his visitor. “All those leads that the media inflated all those years. Once you sit down and figure out what it’s really about, at best it’s pure nonsense. I say at best because far too often there was real ill will on the part of a lot of extremists and criminals who fingered our colleagues.”

  There’s still a certain something about old murder investigators, thought Mattei as she got into her service vehicle to leave the little red-painted Sörmland cottage where the last of her interview victims now enjoyed his rural retirement. Where she had been offered coffee and rolls and juice and cookies. Especially the retired ones, she thought. Retirement loosened the tongue and gave them both the time and the desire to talk about how things really were. Especially when they could do so for a younger female colleague who seemed both “quick-witted and humble.”

  If they only knew, Mattei thought. Although it was mostly pretty harmless, and most of them were good storytellers at least. There was only one she dreaded meeting, and during that meeting she mostly sat gritting her teeth while her small tape recorder whirled and her interview subject expounded about Olof Palme and everything else under the sun.

  Chief Inspector Evert Bäckström, “legendary murder investigator with thirty years in the profession and considered by many the foremost of them all,” according to the anonymous source that was frequently quoted in Dagens Nyheter’s most recent article about mismanagement at the national crime bureau. This in combination with the Swedish Envy was also, according to the same source, the only explanation for why just over a year ago the head of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation had banished said Bäckström from the National Homicide Commission to the Stockholm police department’s property investigation squad.

  “So that genius from Lappland needs help clearing up Palme,” said Bäckström, while leaning back in his chair and scratching his belly button through the biggest gap in the Hawaiian shirt that stretched across his stomach.

  “No, that’s not how it is,” said Mattei. “We’ve been given the task of doing an overview of the registration of the material in the Palme investigation, and he was interested in your viewpoints. How the various parts of the material should be prioritized.”

  “Sure, sure, like I believe that,” said Bäckström with a crafty look behind half-closed eyelids. “Imagine that, look over the registration.”

  “I understand you were involved in the initial stage and that it was you, among others, who ferreted out the thirty-three-year-old, Åke Victor Gunnarsson.”

  “That’s right,” said Bäckström. “I was the one who found that little piece of shit, and if I’d just been allowed to run the case, then I would have seen to it that we got to the bottom of it. Instead some older so-called colleague came in and took over. Someone who’d licked his tongue brown up the backside of the so-called police leadership. If you’re wondering about all the question marks that still remain around Gunnarsson, then he’s the one you should go to. Not me.”

  “Is there any particular track you think ought to be prioritized?” said Mattei
to change the subject.

  “Paper and pen,” said Bäckström, nodding encouragingly. “So you have something to take notes with,” he explained as he put his own ballpoint pen in his right ear to remove some irritating deposits of wax.

  “In the material there’s quite a bit you can carry down to the basement,” said Bäckström, viewing the outcome of his hygienic efforts and wiping the pen on the desk blotter. “Start by taking out all the old ladies. Motive, modus operandi, and all conceivable perpetrators that are old ladies, whether or not they wear trousers. I won’t go into what I thought about the so-called victim, but an old lady would never have managed to take the wrapping off Palme in that way. Not even an old lady like Palme,” he clarified. “It was a competent bastard who was holding the ax-handle that time.”

  After that Bäckström talked for almost an hour without letting himself be interrupted. About conceivable perpetrators, motives, and methods.

  According to Chief Inspector Bäckström, for the most part everyone, that is to say completely normal Swedish men like himself, had a motive to assassinate the prime minister. The driving force—according to his definitive, professional experience—also would be stronger the more you had to do with the victim. At the same time the good thing about that was that the frequency of old ladies, regardless of whether they wore pants or skirts, was especially high around someone like Palme, which in turn provided more opportunities to do a thorough cleanup in all those papers.

  “Tell me who you associate with, I’ll tell you who you are,” Bäckström summarized. “There’s a lot worth considering in our old Bible.”

  “I interpret this to mean that you don’t believe in the often stated hypothesis of a solitary madman who by chance happened to catch sight of Olof Palme outside the Grand cinema,” Mattei alertly interjected.

  Pure nonsense, according to Bäckström. First, you didn’t need to be crazy to have good reason to shoot Palme. On the other hand, secondly, you had to have “a fucking lot of spine,” and thirdly, it would naturally be the very best if you were sitting on a little inside information about what someone like Palme was up to.