Free Falling, As If in a Dream Read online

  “And the others?” Johansson was looking almost greedily at his colleague.

  “No,” said Lewin, “at the risk of disappointing you, and I was pretty careful about these cases. I remember when the media started making a row about the so-called police track, that it was some of our fellow officers who murdered Palme, I went into the material on my own and checked for that specifically—all the parking violations and other traffic offenses where the vehicle or the perpetrator could be connected to our colleagues, whether or not they were on duty.”

  “But that didn’t produce anything either,” said Johansson.

  “No,” said Lewin. “Other than some pretty imaginative explanations of why a particular officer shouldn’t have to pay his parking tickets or why his car ended up in such a strange place.”

  “Exactly,” said Johansson. “The same old women problems if you ask me. Nevertheless, wouldn’t it be interesting for you to take another look at your old boxes? Now when you’ve got some perspective, I mean. I can’t help sensing that you don’t seem completely uncomfortable with the job. And you could take a look at all the rest, once you’re at it anyway, I mean.”

  “With some reservations about fresh eyes,” said Lewin, sounding more positive than he intended. “Well, maybe so. The basic idea is good enough.”

  Coward, thought Anna Holt, who didn’t intend to let Johansson get off that easily.

  “With all due respect, boss, even though I also believe the part about fresh eyes, and even though I’ve never been anywhere near this investigation, I really don’t believe in the idea,” said Holt. Now it’s said, she thought.

  “I’m listening, Anna,” said Johansson, with the same expression in his eyes he’d learned from his first elkhound. The gaze that naturally ensues from undivided positive attention. As when he and the dog took a break in the hunt, when he told him to sit nicely, just before he gave him a slice of sausage from the lunch sack. “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is that I can’t imagine a more thrashed-out case in Swedish police history. Investigated over and over again in every conceivable and inconceivable respect. Without technical evidence worth the name. With witnesses who were pumped dry twenty years ago, most of whom are now probably either dead or in no shape to be talked with. Where the only suspect worth the name, I’m thinking of Christer Pettersson, obviously, was convicted in Stockholm District Court almost twenty years ago, only to be released by Svea Court of Appeal six months later. The same Pettersson they tried to indict again ten years ago, but the prosecutor couldn’t even get a new trial. The same Pettersson who died a few years ago. As if everything that happened before wasn’t more than enough to close the investigation against him.”

  “You’re making me think of that classic skit, Anna. I think it won a prize as the world’s best TV sketch. That Monty Python thing about the dead parrot,” said Johansson. “Wasn’t it a Norwegian blue? Wasn’t that what it was called? The parrot that is.

  “‘This parrot is dead.’ You know that scene where the upset customer is in the pet shop and slams the dead parrot on the counter,” Johansson explained as he slammed his desktop to illustrate.

  “Sure,” said Holt. “If you like. This investigation is dead. Just as dead as Monty Python’s parrot.”

  “Maybe it’s just a little tired,” said Johansson. “Isn’t that what the shop owner says—the one who sold the customer the parrot, when the customer comes in to complain? ‘He’s not dead, just a little tired.’”

  Don’t try that with me, thought Holt. Giving in was the last thing she intended to do, regardless of all the smoke screens and easy-to-see-through jokes from her boss.

  “The Palme investigation has not come to a standstill,” Holt repeated. “The Palme investigation has been thrashed to death. It’s not a cold case; it’s not even an ice-cold case. The Palme investigation is dead.”

  “You don’t need to get upset, Holt. I hear what you’re saying,” said Johansson, who suddenly didn’t sound the least bit nice and friendly anymore. “Personally I think it’s maybe just a little tired. And maybe it should be looked at with fresh eyes. That you proceed from the basic police ground rule that always applies when you’re involved in such things.”

  “Like the situation,” said Holt, who knew Johansson after a number of years and cases.

  “Exactly,” said Johansson, smiling again. “Nice to know we’re in agreement, Anna.”

  Last up was Chief Inspector Yngve Flykt, head of the Palme group. If he’d had anything to say about it, this meeting never would have happened. Personally he was a man of peace, and what he’d heard about his top boss, not least that he was capable of thinking up all kinds of things to happen to co-workers who didn’t do what he said, made him irretrievably lost from the start.

  With all due respect for his boss, and being both happy and grateful for the boss’s clear and definite opinion that any changes in a well-established, functioning organization were not even an issue, with respect for all this and everything else that in haste he might have forgotten, he would still, however, and obviously with all good intentions, like to point out a few practical problems, which his colleague Lewin had already touched on.

  “What are you talking about?” interrupted Johansson.

  “Our case files,” said the head of the Palme investigation, looking almost imploringly at Johansson. “It’s no ordinary body of material even for a very big case. I don’t know if you’ve been down and looked at it, but it’s a colossal amount of material. Gigantic. As perhaps you know, it takes up six whole cubicles in the corridor where we’re located. We’ve already taken down five partitions, and soon it’ll be time for the next one. There are binders and boxes from floor to ceiling.”

  “I’m listening,” said Johansson, forming his long fingers into an arch and leaning back in his chair. Flykt, thought Johansson. It must be congenital.

  “From what my colleagues and I have understood, it’s actually the largest amount of investigative material in world police history. It’s supposed to be even larger than the pre-investigation material on the Kennedy assassination and the investigation of the attack on the jumbo jet over Lockerbie in Scotland.”

  “I hear what you’re saying,” Johansson interrupted. “What’s the problem? A lot of it must be entered on computers by now.”

  “Obviously, and there’s more and more every day, but it’s not something you just sit down and browse through. We’re talking about roughly a million pages. Most are transcripts of interviews, and there are thousands of those that are tens of pages and sometimes longer. In round numbers, a hundred thousand different documents stored in almost a thousand binders. Not to mention all the boxes where we’ve stored the things you can’t keep in binders. There was an expert in the latest government commission who calculated that even then, and this must have been two years ago, it would have required ten years of full-time work for a qualified investigator simply to scan through the material. If you ask me, I think it would take even longer, and new information is coming in all the time.”

  “I hear what you’re saying,” said Johansson, making a slightly dismissive gesture with his right hand. “But some type of sorting out must still be possible, no? If I’m not mistaken, there are tens of thousands of pages of the usual crazy tips. Couldn’t those be set aside?”

  “I’m afraid that’s not enough,” Flykt objected. “There are a lot more crazy tips than that. The problem with them too, and you know this as well as I do, boss, is that some may appear convincing to start with. I saw a newspaper interview a while ago with our own professor here at the National Police Board where he maintained that if we suddenly solved the Palme assassination and knew what had happened, it would prove that ninety-nine percent of the whole case file was irrelevant, and that almost everything we’d collected had been directly misleading. For once we were in complete agreement, he and I.”

  “That’s a pity,” said Johansson. “To hear that you’re in agreement with suc
h a person, I mean. What I’m trying to say is simply that of course there must be a way to sort the material. For some clever colleagues with fresh eyes. Personally I’ve gotten by well enough over the years with the event description, the most important eyewitnesses, that is, the technical investigation and the forensic report,” Johansson said, counting on his fingers as he spoke, smiling as he held up three of them.

  “Besides,” he continued, “there must be a nice summary or two in this case that explains the usual where, when, and how. Even the officers in the uniformed police seem to have understood who the victim was a few minutes after the crime.”

  “That’s correct.” Flykt nodded and seemed almost relieved, as if suddenly he was on firmer ground. “Our own perpetrator profile group produced both an analysis of the crime and a profile of the perpetrator in collaboration with the FBI. Besides that there were several other analyses made by external experts that we turned to. Both of the crime itself in its main features and of various details. For example, the murder weapon and the two bullets that were secured at the crime scene. We got quite a bit actually.”

  “Of course,” said Johansson, throwing out his hands with the secure conviction of a Bible-thumper from his provincial childhood. “So what are we waiting for?”

  As soon as Johansson released his hold on the head of the Palme group, everyone in the room started carefully inching their chairs back, but Johansson ignored their hopes.

  “I realize you’re eager to get going, ladies and gentlemen,” said Johansson with a crooked smile, “but before we part company there’s one thing I want to emphasize. A word of warning on the way.” He nodded emphatically and looked at them in turn with a stern expression.

  “You must not say a word about this. You may talk with each other as needed in order to do what you should. If for the same reason you need to talk with anyone else, you must first obtain my permission to do so.”

  “What do I say to my co-workers?” The head of the Palme group did not look happy. “I mean—”

  “Nothing,” Johansson interrupted. “If anyone wonders about anything, you can send him or her to me. You should understand that better than anyone,” he added. “What a hell the media has created for the Palme investigation all these years. I don’t want a lot of other officers running around talking nonsense. How do you think the media gets hold of all the shit they write about? The last thing I want to read in the newspaper when I open my eyes in the morning is that I’ve appointed a new investigation of the assassination of Olof Palme.”

  “Which is precisely why I think providing a little information to the people in my group would be good. To avoid a lot of unnecessary talk, I mean.” Flykt looked almost imploring as he said this. “One solution would be to say that we’ve asked Holt, Lewin, and Mattei to look over the case indexing. I mean that sort of work goes on all the time and is often done by colleagues outside the group. Or perhaps it’s a purely administrative overview.”

  “Like I said,” said Johansson, “not a word. Send all the curiosity seekers to me so I can slake their thirst for knowledge, and if they’re not satisfied I’m sure I can arrange other duties for them. All of us in this room will meet in a week. Same time, same place. Any questions?”

  No one had any questions, and as they were leaving Johansson first nodded curtly at Flykt. Then he smiled broadly at Lisa Mattei, asked for a copy of her typed-up meeting notes, and told her to take care of herself. Holt he completely ignored, and as they left he took Lewin aside.

  “There’s one thing that disturbs me about this case,” said Johansson.

  “That it may have been wrongly conceived from the start,” Lewin replied, who had been around before and heard Johansson expound on the same text on more than one occasion.

  “Exactly,” Johansson agreed. “A lone madman who by pure chance runs into a completely unprotected prime minister and just happens to have a revolver the size of a suckling pig in his pocket. That’s what most people seem to believe, including the majority of our dear colleagues. So—a quiet question from a man in mature middle age: Just how common is that?”

  “I understand what you mean,” said Lewin.

  “Good,” said Johansson. “Then I’ll see you in a week, and if you happen to get hold of the bastard before that please let me know.”

  2

  After the meeting with Johansson, Anna Holt returned to her office at the national liaison office where she’d been working as a superintendent for over a year. She was careful to close the door before sitting down at her desk and exhaling deeply three times. Then she swore loudly and fervently on the theme of adult boys forty pounds overweight with red suspenders and the dual role of country boy comedian and head of the country’s National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. That gave her some relief, but not as much as she’d hoped, so when Lisa Mattei knocked on her door half an hour later she was still in a bad mood.

  “How’s it going, Anna?” said Mattei. “You seem a little down.”

  “What do you think?” interrupted Anna.

  “Don’t get hung up on Johansson,” Mattei said for some reason. “Johansson is who he is, but he’s also actually Johansson. I’ve talked with Flykt, so we can jump right in. He’ll arrange it so we have our own access cards.”

  “It’s time to embrace the situation,” said Holt. “High time to resurrect a dead parrot.”

  “Exactly,” said Mattei. “You know yourself there’s more than one way to skin a cat, as Lars Martin would say.”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” said Holt, sighing and getting up. So now we’re suddenly on a first-name basis with the world’s best Johansson, she thought. Lisa of all people.

  Lewin had also returned to his desk. There he sat for a good quarter of an hour, criticizing himself for once again ending up in a situation that he could have avoided. Together with his top boss, Lars Martin Johansson, besides, with whom he tried not to have any contact otherwise.

  The man who can see around corners, thought Lewin mournfully. That was how many officers always described him, especially when they had a few shots under their belt. The legend Lars Martin Johansson from north Ådalen in the province of Ångermanland. Policeman and hunter, with the same view of both justice and hunting, regardless of whether he took it out on people or on innocent animals. Johansson with his large nose and uncanny ability to sniff out the faintest scent of human weakness. With his jovial image and human warmth that he could switch on and off as he pleased. Shrewd, hard, and merciless as soon as it mattered, as soon as his prey came within reach and was worth the trouble.

  Then he had a twinge of conscience. Johansson was in spite of it all a fellow officer, his boss besides, and who was he to judge a fellow human being he’d never had close contact with and really didn’t know that well?

  High time to embrace the situation, Lewin thought. He picked up his desk phone and entered Flykt’s direct number.

  “Welcome to the holy of holies,” said Flykt, nodding at the mountain of papers that surrounded Lewin, Holt, and Mattei. Binders and boxes lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Stacks of boxes arranged in neat rows out on the floor. A room of over two hundred square feet that already seemed too small.

  “Well, Jan, I know you’ve been here before,” Flykt continued, turning to Lewin, “but for you, Anna and Lisa, this may be the first time?”

  “I’ve been here on a guided tour,” said Holt. “True, it was a few years ago, but the piles don’t look any smaller.” If Johansson has been here he’s either blind or crazy, she thought.

  “A question,” said Holt to Flykt. “Has Johansson seen this material? At our meeting this morning I got the feeling he hadn’t.”

  “I thought so too,” said Flykt, “but a little while ago one of my colleagues here at the group said that evidently the boss stopped by before his vacation. Although I was out so I missed that visit. I also suspect he’s gone through the parts of the material that are with SePo. I remember we got a request for additional information wh
ile he was head of operations there. Though perhaps you know better than I do, because you’ve worked there. And we shouldn’t forget that he’s been called in as an adviser to all the government commissions that reviewed how we more humble police officers have conducted ourselves over the years. If you ask me Johansson probably knows more than most of us.”

  “God moves in mysterious ways,” Holt answered.

  “So true, so true,” Flykt agreed with a smile. “Any questions, anyone?” For some reason he looked at Mattei.

  Oy, thought Lisa Mattei, who had a hard time taking her eyes off all the papers. Working with this stuff must be like climbing a mountain. And I’m afraid of heights.

  “It’s my first time here,” she said. “It will be interesting to see what you’ve collected.” Like climbing a mountain, she thought again as she let her gaze wander over the rows of binders.

  “Yes, it has turned into quite a lot over the years, and there’s still a new binder every week. Mostly so-called crazy tips if you ask me,” said Flykt. “So I guess the least I can do is wish you luck,” he continued. “If you do happen to find something that my colleagues and I have missed, no one will be happier than we will be.”

  Sounds like a pretty risk-free promise, thought Holt, who just smiled and nodded.

  Unfortunately the age of miracles is probably past, thought Lewin, which of course he didn’t say.

  And I’m scared of heights, thought Mattei, but that was not something she intended to tell her colleagues, not even Anna.

  Lars Martin Johansson was in a great mood. He was satisfied in general terms and even more so with himself. He was most satisfied that he’d finally decided to do something about the police misfortune that went by the name of the Palme investigation. For more than twenty years the case had been the responsibility of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, for a few years ultimately his own, and it was about time for something to happen. During the last decade, after the last failure with the now deceased “Palme assassin” Christer Pettersson, the group that worked on the case had mostly been engaged in other things.