Free Falling, As If in a Dream Read online

  “So what did he say?”

  “That’s when he admitted that he knew Pettersson. Not least by appearance.”

  “And?”

  “No,” said Lewin, shaking his head. “This rang no bells in his head. He hadn’t recognized the perpetrator as Christer Pettersson when he ran past him on Tunnelgatan ten seconds after the murder. Neither had the famous lightbulb come on at any time over the next two years during which he’d seen Pettersson in the neighborhood where he lived. And it seems like it should have. If it had been Pettersson who shot Palme.”

  “So how does he explain that?” said Holt.

  “That the perpetrator and Pettersson were not especially alike,” said Lewin. “In other words, he thinks he would have thought of that, and in that case naturally he would have contacted the police. Witness One is a completely ordinary, honorable person. Not the slightest shadow on him, if you ask me.”

  “How many are there who know about this piece of information?”

  “A few, among those who count,” said Lewin, shrugging his shoulders. “And now you too,” he said, smiling faintly. “For the usual reason that it’s not something that was talked about very much. Among other police officers.”

  “Among other police officers,” Holt repeated, and for some reason it was Johansson she could see before her.

  “Among other police officers,” Lewin confirmed, and to be on the safe side he carefully cleared his throat as he said it.

  19

  As soon as Lisa Mattei left Johansson, she called her mother, Linda Mattei, one of the superintendents at SePo’s department of constitutional protection, located in the building next to her daughter—“the secret building”—in the big police headquarters at Kronoberg. She was exactly twice Lisa’s age. Apart from the fact that they were both blondes, they did not look particularly alike. Linda Mattei was a big, busty blonde. When she was a young police officer, she had been a “real bombshell” among her male colleagues. These days, and for almost twenty years, she was “still a very elegant woman,” according to the same sources.

  Her daughter, Lisa, was a thin, pale blonde. According to Johansson, like a young Mia Farrow. Lisa took after her father in appearance. Apart from the hair color, of course.

  Her father, Claus Peter Mattei, had come to Stockholm and the Royal Institute of Technology as a young chemistry student in the late sixties. Short, thin, and radical, dark with intense brown eyes and almost a political refugee from Munich. He’d left because it was no longer possible to live there if you were a young person who thought and felt the way he did. In the strange world in which we live he and Linda fell madly in love, had a daughter they christened Lisa, and divorced a few years later when the differences between them became too great to be papered over by a love that steadily lessened.

  What remained was Lisa. Apart from the hair color, recognizably like the father she seldom saw since he’d left her. He was the same father who for a long time now was different from the one who had left Lisa and Sweden. Still short, dark, and thin. His gaze was now melancholy and insightful in the way appropriate for every proper German investor with a PhD in chemistry and a job as research head of one of the Bayer group’s larger companies. Repatriated to his childhood Munich, he was a humanist, a conservative liberal, of course an opera lover, a wine connoisseur, and a philanthropist too.

  The mother, Linda, and her daughter, Lisa, had lunch together at a restaurant a comfortable walking distance from the big police building. Lisa’s suggestion. A bit too expensive to entice their colleagues and thus discreet enough for anyone who wanted to talk undisturbed. Sliced beef with onions for Linda, seafood salad for Lisa, mineral water for both of them, the introductory mother-and-daughter exchange, and as soon as they started eating Lisa made the same suggestion she had to Johansson, and because Linda was her mother she also talked about why.

  “Johansson,” said Linda Mattei with a frown. “You have to be a little careful with that man. Is this something you’ve cooked up together?”

  “My idea, but he bought it right away,” said Lisa Mattei. “Best boss I’ve had. The best police officer I’ve met. You know he can see around corners?” Almost always, she thought.

  “Yes, I’ve heard that. Ad nauseam,” said Linda Mattei, who did not seem particularly pleased. “You haven’t fallen in love with him?”

  “But Mom,” said Lisa, shaking her head, “he’s twice my age, at least. Besides, he’s already married.”

  “They usually are,” Linda Mattei observed. “Which seldom seems to hinder them.”

  Though Lisa is probably not Johansson’s type exactly, thought Linda Mattei. Even though I’m her mother.

  “Nothing like that,” said Lisa Mattei. “But what do you think about the idea itself?” I wonder if they’ve ever been together. Dear mother and Johansson.

  “I promise to call Söderberg,” said Linda Mattei, and then nothing more was said about it.

  After her second meeting with Lewin, Holt started grappling with the witnesses from the crime scene. She had meticulously read each and every interview with the thirty witnesses to the murder itself. As well as the half a dozen who might have seen the perpetrator as he fled from the scene. Plus the dozen or more who several years later recalled that in any event they had seen Christer Pettersson right before and right after the murder. Plus the hundred others the police chose to disregard.

  For example, Madeleine Nilsson, who for some reason ended up on the same computer list as the two teenage girls who admitted at the second interview, a week after the murder, that they had made it all up. True, they had been to the movies on Kungsgatan, but when the screening was over they ended up at a club down at Stureplan. They had not walked past on Sveavägen just as Olof Palme was shot.

  Young punks, thought Holt with sudden vehemence, because just reading through all the papers had taken her almost a full day. She’d come up with no answers, only new question marks. And the big question mark, which Lewin had put in her hands, was just as big as before.

  She could live with Lewin’s calculations in principle. Perhaps something completely unexpected had happened to the perpetrator as he stood up there on Malmskillnadsgatan and no one saw him. Maybe he’d stood there only a minute or so before he finally collected himself and ran down David Bagares gata, where he saw Witness Two coming toward him further up the street. If that’s really how it was, then suddenly the times were neat and tidy and there were no longer any broken links in the chain of witnesses. Although considering Witness One and his knowledge of Christer Pettersson, or Witness Three and the “fucking gook” who actually shoved her, it could hardly have been Pettersson who stood there collecting himself before he ran on to the next link.

  Thought Anna Holt, sighing deeply.

  Johansson’s intuitive observation—dead sure and incomprehensibly spot-on—she could live with too. True, Johansson was almost always right, but now and then he was wrong, and in some isolated instance he might even have been completely out-in-left-field wrong. The few times Holt reminded him of this he grinned and shrugged his shoulders. If you were going to say wise things, it was also necessary to say something really stupid, and handled correctly that was an unbeatable way to learn something new, according to Johansson.

  The problem was the improbable alliance between Lewin’s monomaniacal calculations, his anxiety-driven exactitude, and Johansson’s merrily unrestrained intuition. An angst-ridden accountant teamed up with a male fortune-teller, and to hell with both of them, thought Holt. To hell with Lewin, who was almost always right but hadn’t been man enough to stand up for what he believed when he had the chance twenty years ago. To hell with Johansson, who was almost always right despite his big ego, his self-centeredness, and all his vices. But if both of them believe it, the bad thing unfortunately is that it’s true, thought Holt. So what do you do about it? she thought. Shrug your shoulders, act like it’s raining, and go on with your life?

  Linda Mattei called her daughter within a
n hour after they’d finished their lunch.

  “This evening at seven o’clock,” said Linda Mattei. “Björn is going away fishing for the weekend. He was supposed to meet a former colleague down in Strömstad and be there all next week. But because it’s Johansson who’s insisting, there’s probably some urgency too, and he had nothing against coming here as soon as this evening.”

  Rapid response, thought Lisa.

  “He must have a little crush on you, Mom,” she teased. “As soon as you call he comes rushing over.”

  “Certainly,” said Linda Mattei. Who doesn’t, she thought. The problem was that they were all considerably older than she was.

  “What will you be serving?” asked Lisa.

  “No salad anyway,” her mother answered. “Be sure to arrive on time, by the way.”

  Just about the time Linda Mattei’s two guests were sitting down at her neatly set kitchen table, Anna Holt decided to bite the bitter apple and visit a crime scene more than twenty years old. Embrace the situation. What alternative do you really have? thought Holt in the taxi on her way into town. It was another completely ordinary evening, nothing on TV, no movies she wanted to see, no friends or even acquaintances who had called and wanted to see her. Definitely no guys, despite the fact that there was more than one to choose from, and none of them should have any reason to complain. Not even her only child, her son, Nicke. He could be reached only by voice mail on his cell phone, where she would hear a message announcing with youthful naturalness that he didn’t have time right now but feel free to try again later. He doesn’t even need money anymore, thought Holt and sighed.

  Holt spent over two hours in the neighborhood around the scene of the crime. Followed the perpetrator along the trail and even did so in the various walking styles described by the witnesses. She leafed through her bundle of old crime scene photos, paced out distances, pressed on her stopwatch, walked, jogged, and ran at full speed. She did everything the witnesses said the perpetrator or they themselves had done. Finally she considered the various alternatives and boiled them down to two conclusions.

  Lewin was probably right. If it were the perpetrator Witness Two had seen, then she’d seen him much too late. The only possibility—it was unclear why and highly improbable—was that in that case he had stopped on Malmskillnadsgatan above the stairs to Tunnelgatan and that he stood there for approximately one and a half minutes. Why in the name of God would he do something that stupid? thought Holt.

  Johansson was definitely right. There were no objections to his hypothetical line of reasoning. Other than that it was hypothetical, of course. The escape route he proposed was decidedly the best if you wanted to get away from the scene undetected. Up the stairs from Tunnelgatan to Malmskillnadsgatan, turn right, sixty yards’ brisk walk, and then down the next set of stairs on the same street. The one that led from Malmskillnadsgatan down to Kungsgatan.

  It was Friday after payday, and all the people walking down there were unaware of what had happened only a few hundred yards away. All the restaurants, cafés, cinemas, all the stairs down to the subway, and it could hardly be more safe than that for a perpetrator who had just shot the prime minister in the street. Times Square, Piccadilly, or Kungsgatan in Stockholm, if it was about hiding yourself in the crowd it was all the same, thought Anna Holt. An ice-cold soul who knows the area, without mercy and with no butterflies in his stomach. I only wonder whether Johansson read the interview with witness Nilsson, she thought.

  The former chief inspector with the secret police bodyguard squad, Björn Söderström, had not felt better in a long time, and considering that it actually should have been a completely ordinary day, this was completely incomprehensible. First an unexpected invitation to dinner at home with a still very elegant woman he had known for almost thirty years and who had been a real bombshell when she started with the police.

  Then there was the eighteen-year-old malt whiskey that she offered almost as soon as he stepped inside the door. Things having come that far, the whole thing appeared to be signed, sealed, and delivered. If it hadn’t been for her daughter, of course. She seemed both quick-witted and well brought up, but nonetheless her appearance was a surprise because her mother had not said a word about her when she had called and invited him a few hours earlier.

  “Cheers and welcome, Björn,” said Linda Mattei, raising her glass. What one won’t do for one’s only child, she thought.

  “I’m the one who should thank you,” said Söderström. “It’s not every day an old bachelor like me gets an invitation like this.” The daughter is certainly here only as a cover, he thought hopefully.

  “Nice to see you, Björn,” Lisa Mattei concurred. “I don’t know if you remember, but we are actually former colleagues too.”

  “Of course I remember,” said Söderström heartily. “You were one of those youngsters who came over with Johansson when he became operations head with us. It was you and Holt and a few others, if I remember correctly. Now he’s put you on Palme, if I understand things right. I saw something in the newspaper the other day.”

  “He’s asked us to look over the registration of the material,” said Lisa Mattei.

  “It’s about time that something happens,” Söderström said. “I can promise you, Lisa, that you’ve ended up with the right man, because what I don’t know about Olof Palme isn’t worth knowing.”

  What do you say if you’re a girl and just had a shot of aquavit? thought Lisa Mattei. Nothing, she thought.

  You smile shyly and nod.

  It’s already ten, thought Anna Holt, looking at her watch. Time to go home and get your beauty sleep, she decided. Then she walked down the stairs from Malmskillnadsgatan to Tunnelgatan and out onto Sveavägen. Taxis went by there all the time, and considering the sparse traffic she ought to be home in her apartment on Jungfrudansen in Solna, brushing her teeth, in twenty minutes, she thought.

  It had gone faster than that. Holt hardly managed to set foot on the sidewalk down on Sveavägen—two yards from the place where a Swedish prime minister, just shot in the back, had fallen headlong onto the street—before a patrol car from the police in West Stockholm braked and stopped alongside her. The older officer who sat next to the driver rolled down the window and nodded toward the backseat.

  “If you’re going home, superintendent, it’s fine to ride with us,” he said.

  “Nice of you,” said Holt. She opened the door to the backseat and sat behind the driver. It’s a small world, she thought, because she recognized the older officer almost immediately.

  “We’re going back to the police station,” he explained. “Coming from an appointment down at Grand Hôtel, and you live up on Jungfrudansen if I remember correctly.”

  They had not driven more than fifty yards from the country’s most famous crime scene of all time before he started talking.

  “I was there,” he said. “I was working at the Södermalm riot squad, and we were the second patrol at the scene. According to one of all those know-it-all chief inspectors, we were supposed to have been getting out of the bus three minutes after he was shot. The victim, Palme that is, was still on the scene, and at first I didn’t understand who it was, but I could see it was bad. People were screaming and pointing, so me and the other three officers ran down Tunnelgatan and up the stairs, and there was another couple standing and waving, pointing down to David Bagares gata. I ran so hard I could taste blood in my mouth, and you should know, Holt, at that time I didn’t look the way I do today.”

  Then more police streamed in. The Norrmalm riot squad, several patrol cars, at least two detective units and one from narcotics.

  “After ten minutes there were at least twenty of us searching the blocks around Malmskillnadsgatan. We tried to bring a little order into the general chaos. What were we doing there? ’Cause the man who shot Palme must have been halfway to the moon by then.”

  “I thought Christer Pettersson lived a good ways north of the city,” said Holt.

  �
�Pettersson,” said the officer, shaking his head. “If only it had been that good. No, this was probably a guy of a completely different caliber, if you ask me.”

  “So you say,” said Holt. Seems like Johansson has his own little fan club, she thought.

  Former chief inspector Björn Söderström had not felt better in a long time. First this unexpected invitation from a very elegant former colleague who had the good taste besides to invite her young daughter. Also a former colleague, but above all a very delightful young woman. Then the malt whiskey, and all the good food. Food that an old bachelor like himself was certainly not treated to every day. First he ate pickled herring with chopped egg, dill, brown butter, and potato. A cold beer and an even colder shot of aquavit. The steaming carafe on the table promised more if he desired.

  “Well, this I have to say,” said Söderström, raising his glass. “This sort of thing doesn’t happen every day for an old bachelor like me. You ladies ought to know that.”

  “It was really nice that you could tear yourself away, Björn,” said Lisa Mattei with a well-mannered smile. The way to a man’s brain goes through his stomach, she thought. Just like all other animals.

  “Cheers, Björn,” said her mother, raising her glass to the topmost button of the cleavage that had made her famous in the corps forty years ago. What one won’t do for one’s own daughter, she thought.

  Fifteen minutes later Holt’s colleagues let her off outside the building where she lived. Her older colleague, who had been there when Palme was killed, followed her to the entryway.

  “The corps has probably never taken as many lumps as after the assassination of Palme. The Swedish police department’s own Poltava,” he summarized as he held open the door for her. “Imagine all the misery we would have avoided if the regular old colleagues from homicide had been in charge of it. Ask me about it. I don’t know how many years those crazies on TV went on and on about the police track and alleged that it was me and the colleagues in the riot squad who were behind the murder of the prime minister.”