Free Falling, As If in a Dream Read online

  How much simpler it all would have been if it had been the watchman after all, thought Lewin and sighed.

  The copies of old parking tickets required a separate box. From the afternoon of Friday, February 28, 1986, until Saturday afternoon on March 1, the traffic wardens and police had ticketed almost two thousand illegally parked vehicles in the Stockholm region, at Arlanda airport; the central stations in Uppsala, Enköping, and Södertälje; plus the ferry terminals in Nynäshamn, Norrtälje, Kapellskär, and Hargshamn up in north Uppland. They were sorted into piles for the various police districts as well as the various traffic districts in Stockholm. Arranged in chronological order according to the time on the ticket. Neatly bundled with rubber bands, and he was probably the one who had organized most of them.

  At the top of the piles was a blue binder. In it were copies of nineteen different parking tickets that Lewin had traced to his own agency or to individual police officers. Six of them involved civilian service vehicles, and all the tickets were canceled. The remaining thirteen applied to cars whose registered owners were fellow police officers.

  Nine of them paid their fines within the stated time, and because their vehicles were parked near their home addresses there was certainly nothing remarkable about those tickets. Two of them paid after a reminder, and Lewin hadn’t been able to find anything strange there either.

  He talked with both of the vehicle owners, and one of them frankly admitted he’d been at home with a woman other than the one he was married to. A colleague of his moreover, and if the Palme investigators didn’t have anything better to do then of course it would be fine to talk with her too. Better that than ending up on TV as part of the so-called police track. If Lewin would be so kind as to not talk with his wife about it, no one would be happier than he. Lewin let the matter rest with the female police officer/lover, and after that conversation crossed out yet another person as a conceivable perpetrator in the murder of the prime minister.

  Remaining were two tickets dated the day of the murder for illegally parked vehicles owned by police officers who used their own cars on duty; both of the parking tickets had been canceled. One was a detective with the narcotics squad who’d met one of his informants and preferred his own Alfa Romeo because he felt that the police agency’s Saabs and Volvos were a red flag for the people he was after.

  The other was an officer with the secret police who had looked in on a person that SePo kept hidden at one of their secure addresses. Otherwise everything seemed in order. Both the addresses where the vehicles were parked and the times the tickets had been written argued strongly that these events did not have the least thing to do with the assassination of the country’s prime minister. In addition he’d received papers on the matter from both the narcotics squad and the secret police.

  I don’t understand how I managed, even at that time, thought Lewin as he closed up his old boxes and placed them in a pile of their own to spare his back.

  After that he started doing what he had promised Holt and Mattei he would do. Simply finding the investigation files he needed for his work kept him occupied far into the evening. He was not able to leave the police station until ten o’clock. He took the subway home to Gärdet. Hesitating a moment outside the 7-Eleven store in the block where he lived, he went in and bought a sandwich and a bottle of mineral water. When he stepped into his apartment everything was as usual. What awaited him was yet another night of loneliness and the next morning yet another day with the same substance. A series of nights and days that never seemed to end, thought Lewin as he finally fell asleep.

  7

  Anna Holt had no intention of sitting in the Palme room. Not at a wobbly card table they’d brought in themselves with barely enough room for the computers Lisa Mattei had set up for them. So Lisa, with the help of those same computers, located the documents Holt needed for her review of “Palme assassin” Christer Pettersson. Finally they carried the material over to Holt’s office themselves, where she intended to read in peace and quiet. A total of ten binders, only a small portion of the material on Pettersson. At the same time, those portions, according to Mattei, ought to cover the essentials about the suspect up to the indictment in May 1989, the sentence of life imprisonment in Stockholm District Court a few months later, and how all this had been turned on end when a unanimous court of appeals released him in November of the same year.

  As Holt disappeared with her burden she noticed a worried glance from Jan Lewin. In Lewin’s world, files of that type were not something you stuck under your arm and simply walked away with. Not least the kind that were stored in the Palme room. Files that were removed should be signed for on a special list, returned as soon as you were done with them, and checked off on the same list. Date, time, signature. True, all his colleagues did the same as Holt, but this was also the sorry explanation for why meticulous individuals such as himself often had a terrible time finding the documents they needed for their work.

  Pity that Jan is so anxious. He’s actually very good-looking, thought Holt as she and Lisa disappeared through the door, headed toward the peacefulness of Holt’s office.

  “Is there anything else I can help you with?” asked Lisa Mattei as she set the binders down on Holt’s desk.

  “That’s plenty,” Holt said. “You’ve got a few things to do yourself.”

  “I pulled this out for you,” said Mattei, giving Holt a plastic folder she’d carried squeezed under her arm.

  “What’s in there?” asked Holt.

  “A few interesting dates on Christer Pettersson plus his police and court records. I’m sure you’ll find it in one of the binders too, but an extra copy is never a bad thing if you want to make your own notes. Otherwise there’s nothing special about most of it as I’m sure you already know. But sometimes it’s good to have exact dates and so on.”

  “When did you find time to do this?”

  “Did it as soon as I knew what Johansson wanted to talk about.”

  “But that was before we decided I should look at Pettersson.”

  “One of us had to do it,” Mattei observed, shrugging her shoulders. “That much I could figure out anyway,” she said, smiling.

  “Thanks,” said Holt. Dear, dear Lisa, she thought. She’s got more in her head than the rest of us in this place combined.

  When she finally shut the door, Holt cleared her desk of everything else. Placed her binders within comfortable reach, took out notebook and pen, leaned back in her not at all uncomfortable desk chair, took out the plastic folder about Christer Pettersson that Mattei had given her, and finally put her feet up on the desk. All in accordance with the general advice and life tips that her boss so regularly shared with his co-workers when he was in the mood.

  According to Lars Martin Johansson, the “Genius from Näsåker,” as co-workers who didn’t think he could “see around corners” called him when they were sure he couldn’t hear them, this was the most ideal body position for engaging in “more demanding reading.” The feet and legs should be placed high in relation to the head in order to facilitate the flow of blood to the brain, and the very best choice was lying on a comfortable, sufficiently long couch equipped with the necessary number of pillows.

  It was also important that it not be too warm in the room where the couch was. According to Johansson, who would usually make reference here to a major sociomedical study from Japan, including the names of the authors, this type of reading demanded approximately the same temperature as for the storage of fine wines.

  The first time Johansson had expounded on this burning issue was when they were sitting in the bar toward the end of a nice staff party a few years earlier.

  “That sounds really cold,” Holt objected.

  “Depends on what you mean by cold,” Johansson snorted. “It should be cold around you. Then you think your best. It should be just cold enough that your noggin feels clear but without having to freeze your rear end off.”

  “Well, I thought wine should be s
tored at about fifty degrees.”

  “That depends,” said Johansson evasively. “But it can’t be more than sixty degrees in the room. For reading, that is,” he clarified. “If we’re talking about sleeping it should be a lot colder.”

  “Too cold,” said Holt, shaking her head firmly. “Much too cold for me. Couldn’t even think if it were that cold in my office.” Wonder whether his poor wife is an Eskimo? she thought.

  “Yes, I might have guessed that,” Johansson observed, and no more was said about it for the rest of the evening.

  I don’t suppose I can even think about opening the window on a day like this, sighed Anna Holt, glancing at the sunshine behind the drawn blinds. She could also forget about a couch of her own. In any event Johansson hadn’t implemented any concrete measures in that direction, and he was the only one at the entire bureau, of course, who had a sufficiently large, comfortable couch. According to well-informed sources he used it exclusively for his regular midday slumber. So far no one had seen him reading on it.

  That man is like a large child, thought Holt. She sighed again and started reading the papers on Palme assassin Christer Pettersson that Mattei had given her.

  Christer Pettersson was born on April 23, 1947, in Solna. He had passed away less than three years ago at the age of fifty-seven, on September 29, 2004. He showed up for the first time in the Palme investigation’s material on Sunday the second of March 1986, less than two days after the assassination of the prime minister.

  By then Jan Lewin and his colleagues who were responsible for the internal investigation were done with their first compilations of previous violent crimes that had occurred in the vicinity of the intersection of Sveavägen and Tunnelgatan, where the prime minister was shot. It was an extensive list that included thousands of crimes and more than a thousand persons. One of them was Christer Pettersson, who sixteen years earlier, in December 1970, had gotten into a quarrel with a man unknown to him down in the subway, only fifty yards from the place where the prime minister was murdered. Pettersson chased the man up to the street, where he finished the discussion by stabbing his victim through the heart with a bayonet he was carrying. Within the course of a week the police had arrested him, and in June the following year he was convicted of homicide and sentenced to a closed psychiatric ward.

  To be sure, it was not the first time he’d run afoul of the Swedish legal system. In the court records there were notations on several hundred crimes, from the first time in 1964, when he was seventeen years old, and up to his death. The final notations were made in the crime registry during the summer of the year he died. Pettersson had spent almost half of his adult life in prisons, mental hospitals, and rehabilitation centers for addicts. Based on what was known about his criminal activity there was a strong element of violence. At the same time there were no notes indicating that he made use of a firearm, either before or after the murder of the prime minister. No signs either of any political or ideological motives. Pettersson’s violence seemed to have been vented on persons in the same social situation as himself or who were expected to maintain control of people like him. Men he’d argued with or robbed of money and drugs, women he’d known or lived with, whom he’d also assaulted. Plus police officers, watchmen, store security guards.

  Ordinary theft and shoplifting charges dominated his criminality in terms of numbers, and the particular crime victim who appeared most often as the complainant in his record was the state liquor store. That was also how he acquired three of the four nicknames that the police had noted, “Hit-and-Run,” “Dasher,” and “Half Bend.”

  Pettersson would go into the liquor store, order a bottle of vodka, schnapps, or cream liqueur, snatch the bottle as soon as the clerk set it down on the counter between them, and without further ado “run” or “dash” out of the store. A “half bend” was the body movement the liquor store employee was expected to execute when he pulled out the half-bottle of aquavit that for practical reasons was often stored under the counter near the cash register and that seemed to be one of the most common orders in Pettersson’s life.

  Against this background his fourth alias was even more astonishing. Pettersson was also known as “the Count.” A title he often emphasized to his acquaintances. A real “count.”

  Why he was called that did not appear in the police papers, but for Holt the mystery was already solved by the precise Lisa Mattei. Under an asterisk in the margin she’d made the following note in her neat handwriting: “CP born and grew up in Bromma. Middle-class home. Father self-employed. Mother a housewife. Dropped out of high school. Went to drama school for a few years. In his association with like-minded in the same situation often presented himself and his background as considerably finer than was actually the case.”

  Heavy drug user, professional criminal of the simplest type—all these were known facts, thought Holt, but it wasn’t what she knew that made her feel less comfortable after the introductory reading. Already on day three, Sunday, March 2, 1986, he ended up on a list among thousands of similar types because of a knife murder that had happened sixteen years earlier. After that none of her colleagues seemed to have given a thought to either him or his doings for more than two years. Only during the summer of 1988 did they start to investigate him, and in December the same year he was arrested.

  Why just then? thought Holt. And why in the name of God did it take so long?

  8

  Without lowering the level of either her precision or her objectivity, Mattei nonetheless tried to facilitate her task. Using her computer, she pulled out all the summaries and analyses in the Palme material. Then she organized them in chronological order to get an easy understanding of what information was deemed so important at a certain point in time that it required special consideration.

  Because the material was a bit thin for her taste, she then used the various registries in the investigation to extract a selection of documents that she pulled out and leafed through to see what they were about. Approximately every tenth document couldn’t be located, because it had ended up in the wrong binder, the whole binder had gone astray, or the document had simply been lost.

  Wonder if Johansson is aware of that? thought Mattei.

  Then she carried out a number of simple, volume-related estimates of how much work her previous colleagues had expended on various working hypotheses or investigation leads. All those “tracks” as the first investigation leader, police chief in Stockholm Hans Holmér, had chosen to call them, even though the word had a completely different, very specific criminological meaning.

  There were lots of Holmér’s tracks, thought Mattei. But almost none of the usual clues. No foot- or fingerprints, no fibers, bodily fluids, or abandoned belongings that might lead to a perpetrator. Obviously no DNA, for that didn’t even exist in the material world of the police when the prime minister was assassinated. All they had were the two revolver bullets that had been put to use the night of the murder, and the circumstance that it was ordinary people who found them at the crime scene and turned them over to the police had not made the burden easier to bear.

  By means of a number of documents that could be ascribed to the various tracks, within a day Mattei had already formed a reasonable understanding of what her fellow officers had been doing for twenty years. The various tracks had appeared and vanished. As in a winter landscape, where certain track marks are more common than others.

  First in and first out was the person who to start with was called the “thirty-three-year-old” in the media, but shortly thereafter appeared under his given name, Åke Victor Gunnarsson. In the first days after the murder the police received a number of tips about Gunnarsson. He possessed a reasonable likeness to the description of the perpetrator, was said to own a revolver of the type the perpetrator had used, to have contacts with an organization hostile to Palme, and to have expressed himself hatefully about the murder victim on several occasions. Last but not least he had been in the immediate vicinity of the crime scene at
the time of the murder, and in the hours afterward he had been running around in the area, behaving strangely to say the least.

  Less than a fortnight after the murder, Wednesday the twelfth of March, he had been arrested. A week later he was released, and after another two months, on May 16, 1986, the prosecutor decided to close the preliminary investigation on him.

  During those two months a number of things happened that concerned Gunnarsson and in time filled half a dozen thick binders in the Palme investigation’s files: technical investigations of his residence and his clothes, interviews with relatives and witnesses, photo arrays, diverse expert statements, as well as a major charting of his background and way of life. After that there had been mostly silence about him for several years. Freed from the suspicion of having assassinated the prime minister, he emigrated to the USA in the early nineties, and it was only when the American police made contact in January 1994 and reported that Gunnarsson had been found murdered—shot several times and dumped in a wooded ravine in the wilds of North Carolina—that he once again landed in the headlines.

  It proved to be an ordinary drama of jealousy. That the perpetrator on whom Gunnarsson set horns was also a policeman was in some way consistent, considering the life Gunnarsson seemed to have lived. The investigator in the Palme group who was responsible for the preliminary investigation of Gunnarsson had a hard time handling his disappointment in any case. In his world it was still Gunnarsson who had murdered Olof Palme, and only a few years after Gunnarsson’s demise he published a book in which he tried to prove it.

  Mattei found a copy stuffed into one of the binders, with a personal dedication: “From the author to his colleagues in the Palme room,” and when Lewin left the room to get coffee for them both she took the opportunity to slip the book into her handbag to read in peace and quiet as soon as she got home.