About the Book
Lars Martin Johansson has just suffered a stroke. The retired Chief of the National Crime Police and Swedish Security Service is paying the price for a life of excess – stress, good food and fine wine. With his dangerously high blood pressure, his heart could fail at the slightest excitement.
In the hospital, a chance encounter with a neurologist provides an important piece of information about a twenty-five-year-old murder investigation and alerts Johansson’s irrepressible police instincts. The window for prosecution expired just weeks ago and that isn’t the only limitation. Lars Martin Johansson is determined to solve the atrocious crime – even from his deathbed.
The inimitable style, distinct voice and dark humour of Leif G. W. Persson, along with the fascinating exploration of a long-cold murder case, serves to make The Dying Detective a true masterpiece of the genre.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part II
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part III
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Part IV
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Part V
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Part VI
About the Author
Also by Leif G.W. Persson
Copyright
The Dying Detective
Leif G.W. Persson
Translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith
I
Eye for eye …
Book of Exodus, 21:24
1
Monday evening, 5 July 2010
Karlbergsvägen 66 in Stockholm is the location of Günter’s, the best hotdog kiosk in Sweden. It’s surrounded by sturdy stone buildings many storeys high, all constructed at the start of the last century. Solid brickwork, carefully laid, brick upon brick, with lime-mortar rendering, bow windows and old-fashioned leaded glass. There are generous lawns in front of the properties and – at this time of year – leafy trees lining the street. When you enter the buildings there is usually red marble in both the lobbies and stairwells, friezes on the ceilings, ornate plasterwork, even dado panelling in places. The skirting boards and doors are made of oak. It is an area that gives a bourgeois, affluent impression.
Günter’s is also located within the old city boundaries of the most beautiful capital in the world. Just a few hundred metres south of Karlberg Palace and Karolinska University Hospital, and close to two of the major roads leading away from the north of the city centre.
The former head of the National Criminal Police, Lars Martin Johansson, really ought to have been at his summerhouse up in Roslagen today, but that morning he had been obliged to come into the city for a meeting with his bank, to conclude a deal about a patch of forest that he and his eldest brother had an interest in.
Once that had been arranged, various other matters and errands of a miscellaneous and private nature which, for practical reasons, he might as well sort out then and there, had, as usual, cropped up. The list of things to do had rapidly become very long, and by the time he was ready to return to his wife and the summer tranquillity on Rådmansö it was almost eight o’clock in the evening and Johansson was as hungry as a wolf.
Just a few hundred metres before he would be passing the old tollgate at Roslagstull on his drive north, his hunger got the better of him. There was no way he was going to spend an hour driving when his stomach was already screaming at him. So he took a quick detour to the best hotdog kiosk in Sweden for a well-spiced Yugoslavian bratwurst with salt-pickled Åland gherkins, sauerkraut and Dijon mustard. Or maybe a Zigeuner sausage with its taste of freshly ground pepper, paprika and onion? Or should he stay true to his Norrland roots and partake of a lightly smoked elk sausage with Günter’s homemade mash of salad potatoes?
Absorbed in these pleasant considerations, he parked just a few metres from the kiosk, immediately behind one of Stockholm Police’s minibuses, and, like them, halfway on to the pavement, before getting out. Given that he had been retired for three years, this was not entirely legal, but it was eminently practical, and some of the habits he had developed during his almost fifty years in the force were deeply ingrained.
It was a warm and sunny day in early July, and the evening was as warm as the day had been – far from ideal weather for a hotdog, which presumably went some way to explaining why the queue ahead of him consisted of just four younger colleagues from the Stockholm rapid-response unit. Former colleagues, to be more precise, but they still recognized him. Nods, smiles, their commanding officer raising his right hand to his cropped head even though he had tucked his cap under his belt.
‘How’s it going, boys?’ Johansson asked, having made his mind up what to choose as soon as he detected the heavenly smells drifting towards him. The elk sausage could wait until the autumn. Smokiness, well-balanced flavours and Norrlandic stoicism were all very well, but an evening such as this required something stronger. But not too strong, nothing from the southern Balkans. Paprika, onion, pepper and lightly salted, coarse-ground pork would do very nicely indeed. In fact, considering the weather and his mood, he couldn’t think of anything better.
‘Nice and calm, so we thought we’d take the opportunity to refuel before the storm breaks,’ the offi
cer replied. ‘You’re welcome to go first, boss, if you like. We’re not in a hurry.’
‘I’m a pensioner,’ Johansson said, for some reason. ‘And you’ve got to work. Who’s got the energy to harass ne’er-do-wells on an empty stomach?’
‘We’re still making up our minds.’ The officer smiled and nodded. ‘So, please, go ahead.’
‘Well, in that case,’ Johansson said, and turned to the man behind the counter, ‘a Zigeuner with sauerkraut and French mustard. And something to drink. A bottle of water, with bubbles. The usual, you know.’
He nodded encouragingly to the latest in the succession of Günter’s associates. This one was a youngster called Rudy, an Austrian like Günter himself, and even though Günter had been dead for almost a decade, new staff were almost always recruited from his former homeland. Günter’s best friend, Sebastian, who had already taken over before Günter died; Udo, who had worked there for many years; and Katja, who was only there occasionally. There was another one, whose name he had forgotten, and finally there was Rudy. Johansson knew them all, and they had known him over the course of several hundred hotdogs, and while Rudy was putting together his order Johansson turned to make some agreeable small talk with his younger colleagues.
‘This year it will be forty-six years since I started as a beat officer in Stockholm,’ Johansson said. Or is it forty-seven? he thought. Sod it – who cares?
‘Back when you still carried sabres?’ A broad grin from the youngest-looking one.
‘Watch yourself, kid,’ Johansson said. Nice lad, he thought.
‘And then you moved to surveillance,’ the younger officer’s boss said, evidently well schooled in Johansson’s history.
‘Ah, you know about that? Fifteen years,’ he added.
‘Together with Jarnebring,’ another of them said.
‘That’s right. You remember the big beasts, then.’
‘Used to work there. Jarnis – Bosse – was my commanding officer. Best boss I’ve ever had,’ he added, for some reason.
‘Would you like it in French bread, or would you like it on a tray, sir?’ Rudy interrupted, holding up the freshly cooked sausage.
‘The usual,’ Johansson said. ‘Take a baguette, pull the innards out, then stuff it with sausage, sauerkraut and mustard.’ That can’t be too hard to remember, can it? he thought.
‘Where were we?’ he asked, nodding to the colleague who had worked under his best friend.
‘Jarnebring, Bo Jarnebring.’
‘That’s right,’ Johansson said, with unnecessary emphasis, given that he was the one who had forgotten what they were talking about. ‘Jarnebring, yes. He’s a pensioner as well now, retired at sixty-five, last year. Doing well, by the way. We meet up regularly and fabricate old memories to tell each other.’
‘Send him my best, sir. I’m Patrik Åkesson, P-2. There were two Patriks in the group and I was second to arrive, so Jarnis called me that to avoid unnecessary confusion when we were out on jobs.’
‘Sounds like Jarnebring,’ Johansson said. He nodded, pocketed his change and took the sausage and water he had ordered. Then he nodded again, mostly because he didn’t have anything else to say.
‘Take care of yourselves, lads,’ he added. ‘As I understand it, it’s not like it was back in my day.’
They all nodded back, suddenly serious, and their commanding officer once again signalled his respect by raising his hand to his close-cropped head.
In my day you’d have been fired for saluting without your cap on, Johansson thought as he managed, not without some difficulty, to squeeze into the driver’s seat, put his drink into the cup-holder between the seats and move the sausage from his left hand to his right.
At that moment someone must have driven an ice-pick into the back of his neck. No rumbling forewarning of an ordinary headache, but a sharp, searing pain that tore through the back of his head. The sounds from the street blurred and became hard to hear, and then disappeared altogether. Darkness spread across his eyes, first the right one, then the left, as if someone had pulled a blind that had been hung up askew. His arm went numb and his fingers felt stiff and unresponsive. The sausage fell between the seats.
Then nothing but darkness and silence.
2
Monday evening, 5 July, to Wednesday afternoon, 7 July
Lars Martin Johansson is unconscious. Just after midnight, and as soon as his condition has been stabilized, he is moved from intensive care to neurosurgery. Close at hand, in case complications should arise and an operation be required.
Hypnos is the god of sleep in Greek mythology, the twin brother of Thanatos, the demon of death, both the sons of Nyx, goddess of the night, but none of them, not even Nyx, is Johansson’s divinity, because Johansson is unconscious. He reacts to light in a purely physiological sense, whenever any of the white coats who come and go at his bedside get it into their heads to hold his eyelid up and shine a light into his eye, but because he is unconscious he is unlikely to be bothered by this.
Hypnos is not his god, because he isn’t asleep, and there certainly aren’t any dreams to exacerbate, or perhaps alleviate, his torment. Dreams require the presence of people and events, and in the absence of those one might perhaps manage with irrational creatures or inert objects such as a green casting net, even one that is the wrong colour, or perhaps a sledge one used to ride on as a child, but above all dreams require a degree of consciousness upon which to act, and Johansson does not have this.
Nor is he governed by Thanatos. Because Johansson is alive, he is breathing and his heart is beating under its own power. Never mind the fact that he needs medication to stabilize its rhythm, lower his blood pressure and thin his blood. Medication to ease his pain, sedate and calm him; all the needles, wires, tubes and pipes that had been attached in or on his body. But he is alive, and now he is in the care of Nyx, he is in night and darkness, so it doesn’t really matter that he isn’t aware of this. It’s probably just as well, in fact, because Nyx isn’t a particularly pleasant woman, even in a mythological sense. Among other things, she is also the goddess of vengeance, but what decent person could possibly hold a grudge against Lars Martin Johansson?
Perhaps Hypnos is actually the one closest to him, after all. In ancient depictions he is usually shown as a young man with poppy seedheads in his hand, and, if nothing else, this shows that even extremely ancient Greeks knew things that it had taken medical science and the international narcotics trade another couple of millennia to work out. And if only Johansson had been aware of what was dripping into his veins, he would surely have nodded in appreciation. No matter. Johansson is unconscious. He isn’t dead, he isn’t asleep, and he certainly isn’t dreaming, there’s zero chance of him nodding his head, and all this business of light and dark makes no difference whatsoever.
3
Wednesday afternoon, 7 July
It starts as a rumbling ache in the back of his head and a faint perception of light, quite when and why is unclear, but suddenly he has woken up. He realizes he is lying in a bed, and that he must have been lying on his right arm, because it feels numb. His fingers feel clumsy and he can’t clench his fist properly. Beside his bed sits a short-haired woman in a white coat. A stethoscope is sticking out of her breast pocket, to remove any lingering doubts as to her role.
What the hell is going on? Johansson thinks.
‘What’s going on?’ he says to the woman in the white coat.
‘My name is Ulrika Stenholm,’ the woman says, looking at him with her head tilted. ‘I’m acting senior consultant here at Karolinska Hospital, and you’re on my ward. I thought I might start by asking you if you can remember your name.’
She smiles and nods amiably, straightening her head as if to soften her question.
‘My name?’ Johansson asks. What the hell is going on? he thinks again.
‘Your name. Can you remember?’
‘Johansson,’ Johansson replies. ‘My name is Johansson.’
‘W
hat else?’ Another nod, another friendly smile, another tilt of the head, to the other side this time. But she’s not backing down.
‘Johansson. Lars Martin Johansson,’ Johansson replies. ‘If you want my ID number, my driving licence is in my wallet. I usually keep that in my left trouser pocket. What happened?’
An even broader smile now from the woman beside his bed.
‘You’re in the neurology department of Karolinska Hospital,’ she replies. ‘On Monday you suffered a blood clot in your brain and were brought here.’ Her head changes position again, short, blonde hair, a long, thin neck without any trace of wrinkles.
‘What day is it?’ Johansson asks. She can’t be a day over forty, he thinks, for some reason.
‘It’s Wednesday today. It’s five o’clock in the afternoon and you ended up here with me almost two days ago.’
‘Where’s Pia?’ Johansson asks. ‘That’s my wife.’ He suddenly remembers sitting in his car and feels a severe anxiety that he can’t explain.
‘Pia’s on her way. She’s fine. I spoke to her a quarter of an hour ago and told her that you were waking up, so she’ll be here soon.’ Dr Stenholm goes so far as to nod this time, twice. As if to underline what she’s just said.
‘So she’s fine? I can remember driving my car,’ he adds. The anxiety that he can’t explain is relenting now.
‘You were alone in the car. Your wife was out in the country, and we called her as soon as you arrived in A&E. She’s been with you pretty much the whole time since then. And, like I said, she’s fine.’
‘Tell me,’ Johansson said. ‘What’s happening? Or what happened, I mean?’
‘Well, if you think you’re up to it.’ Another nod, serious, and a questioning expression.
‘Tell me. I feel great. Never felt better. Like a pig in shit,’ he adds, just to be on the safe side. What the hell is really going on? he thinks once more, because suddenly he feels unfathomably elated.
‘I must have slept on my arm,’ he adds, even though he already has a suspicion of why he can’t lift it off the bed.
‘We’ll get to that,’ she replies, ‘a bit later. There’s no need for you to worry. If we work together, you and me, I’m sure we’ll be able to sort your arm out.’