Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Translation copyright © 2010 by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Sweden as Mellan sommarens längtan och vinterns köld: en roman om ett brott by Piratförlaget, Stockholm, in 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Leif GW Persson.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Persson, Leif GW
[Mellan sommarens längtan och vinterns köld. English]
Between summer’s longing and winter’s end : the story of a crime / Leif GW Persson ; translated from the Swedish by Paul Norlen.
p. cm.
“Originally published in Sweden by Piratförlaget in 2002.”
eISBN: 978-0-307-37947-4
I. Norlen, Paul R. II. Title.
PT9876.26.E7225M45 2010
833’.914—dc22 2010004678
www.pantheonbooks.com
v3.1
To the Bear and Mikael
The best informant is the one who hasn’t understood
the significance of what he has told.
The Professor
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
CHAPTER I
Free falling, as in a dream
Stockholm in November
CHAPTER II
Free falling, as in a dream
Stockholm in the 1970s and 1980s
CHAPTER III
Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End
Quantico, Virginia, in December
CHAPTER IV
Free falling, as in a dream
Stockholm in autumn
CHAPTER V
Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End
New York, New York, in December
CHAPTER VI
Free falling, as in a dream
Stockholm in October
CHAPTER VII
Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End
Albany, New York, in December
CHAPTER VIII
Free falling, as in a dream
Stockholm in November
CHAPTER IX
Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End
Albany, New York, in December
CHAPTER X
Free falling, as in a dream
Stockholm in November
CHAPTER XI
Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End
Albany, New York, in December
CHAPTER XII
Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End
Stockholm in November and December
CHAPTER XIII
And all that remained was the cold of winter
Stockholm in December
CHAPTER XIV
And all that remained was the cold of winter
Stockholm in December
CHAPTER XV
And all that remained was the cold of winter
Sundsvall over Christmas and New Year
CHAPTER XVI
And all that remained was the cold of winter
Stockholm in January and February
CHAPTER XVII
And all that remained was the cold of winter
Mallorca in February
CHAPTER XVIII
And all that remained was the cold of winter
Stockholm in February
CHAPTER XIX
And all that remained was the cold of winter
Stockholm in February
CHAPTER XX
For a great and noble cause
Stockholm, February 28–March 1
CHAPTER XXI
Falling free, as in a dream
Stockholm, February 28–March 1
CHAPTER XXII
Falling free, as in a dream
Stockholm in March
CHAPTER XXIII
And that wasn’t the life that I had imagined
Stockholm, March 12
A Note About the Author
CHAPTER I
Free falling, as in a dream
Stockholm in November
It was Charlie, age thirteen, who saved the life of Vindel, age fifty-five. At least that’s how Vindel described it at the preliminary police hearing.
“If Charlie hadn’t looked up and pulled me to the side, that damn thing would’ve hit me right in the skull and I wouldn’t be sitting here now.”
It was a peculiar story right from the start, for three main reasons.
First, Charlie was thought to be deaf in both ears. Not least by Vindel himself, who was convinced that the only things Charlie understood nowadays were eye contact, sign language, and physical touch. It’s true that Vindel talked with him more than ever, but that’s only to be expected when someone you liked grew old and slowed down, and Vindel had always been kind to Charlie. Just what you would expect.
Second, it is a long-established axiom in Western physics that a free-falling body precedes the sound that said body produces by friction against the surrounding atmosphere. Thus, according to said physics, there would have been no noticeable sound whatsoever.
Third, and this was the most remarkable. If Charlie had heard something, noticed the danger, pulled Vindel aside, and thereby saved his life … why didn’t he hear the sound of the victim’s left shoe, which, only a few seconds later, struck him right in the neck and killed him on the spot?
[FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22]
Between 19:56 and 20:01 hours on Friday the twenty-second of November, three calls were routed via emergency number 90 000 to the command center of the Stockholm Police.
The first came from a retired lawyer who had seen the entire incident in detail from his balcony at Valhallavägen 38. The lawyer introduced himself by name and title and appeared not the least bit upset. His story was wordy and systematically outlined. Factually, it was completely off the wall.
In summary, the premise was that a lunatic dressed in a long black coat and a ski cap with earflaps had just shot down a poor dog owner and his dog. Now the lunatic was running around in circles, shouting incoherently; the reason that the lawyer found himself out on his balcony with the temperature below freezing was that his wife suffered from asthma and cigarette smoke had an unpleasant tendency to cling to the curtains: “If you are wondering about that, sergeant?”
The second call came from the taxi switchboard. One of their drivers had picked up an older woman at Valhallavägen 46, and as he held open the door to help his passenger into the backseat, he noticed from the corner of his eye “a poor fellow who fell down from the roof of that tall building where all the students live.” The driver was forty-five years old and had come to Sweden from Turkey twenty years earlier. He had seen worse things as a child and had learned early on that there is a time and a place for everything; that is why he called the switchboard on the radio, told what he had seen, and asked them to call the police, while he drove the old woman to her daughter, who lived on a farm outside of Märsta. It was a good fare and life went on.
Phone call number three came from a man who, judging by his voice, seemed to be middle-aged. He refused to say what his name was and where he was calling from, but he sounded exhilarated in a way that indicated that h
e had ingested some stimulating substance. In addition he had some good advice. “Now one of those crazy students has jumped off the roof again. Don’t forget to bring a few buckets along when you come to pick him up.”
At the command center everything was running along tracks laid down long ago. When the on-duty operator sent out an area alert on the radio, she had already lowered the priority of the verbose lawyer and raised that of the taxi driver and the exhilarated man with the good advice about buckets; she omitted the shooting, the dog, and the buckets.
Her message was that a person had fallen or jumped from the student dormitory called Rosehip on Körsbärsvägen and landed on the walkway above the parking lot across the street from the intersection of Valhallavägen and Frejgatan. A lifeless body would be found at the scene and a distraught male, dressed in a black coat and a peaked cap, wandering around in the vicinity. Was there a patrol car in the area that could take care of the whole thing?
There was one, only a hundred yards farther down Valhallavägen. It belonged to the Östermalm precinct—VD 2—and at the moment the alarm went out over the radio, the car was stopping in front of the hot-dog stand at the driveway to the Roslagstull hospital. In the car were two of the Stockholm Police Department’s finest. In the driver’s seat sat police officer in training Oredsson, age twenty-four. He was blond, blue-eyed, and broad-shouldered. He was doing his last round as a trainee and in a month he would become a police officer. A conviction also burned in Oredsson’s soul that, once he joined the police force, the struggle against the steadily increasing crime rate would enter a decisive phase in which good would come out the victor.
In the passenger seat beside him sat his immediate superior, police assistant Stridh, who was almost twice Oredsson’s age and went by the name Peace at Any Price among his older colleagues. Ever since they started their beat two hours ago his thoughts had focused exclusively on the plump sausage with mashed potatoes, cucumber-and-shrimp salad, mustard, and ketchup that would provide at least temporary relief from his miserable existence. Now he could smell it, but in the struggle over the microphone that was placed between him and Oredsson he had, of course, lost.
“Two thirty-five here. We’re listening,” answered Oredsson. Energetic and alert as always.
. . .
Approximately at the same time as the retired lawyer contacted the female radio operator at the police department’s command center, police superintendent Lars M. Johansson (“M” for Martin), head of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, stepped out through the entryway of his residence on Wollmar Yxkullsgatan in Södermalm. Johansson disappeared down the street with brisk steps and in an excellent mood, en route to his first date with a woman who he knew was lovely to look at and in all likelihood nice to talk with as well. This would take place in a neighborhood restaurant nearby with food both excellent and reasonably priced. Outside it was a cold and starry evening without the least fleck of snow on the streets and sidewalks; all in all an almost ideal combination for a person who wanted to keep his head clear, his spirits high, and his feet dry.
Lars Martin Johansson was a solitary man. In the legal sense he had been so since the day almost ten years ago when his first, and so far only, wife left him, took their two children with her, and moved in with a new man, to a new life in a new house. In a spiritual sense he had been solitary his entire life, in spite of the fact that he’d grown up with six siblings and two parents who had met more than fifty years ago, were still married to each other, and would remain so until death did them part. In Johansson’s case, loneliness was not something inherited. It wasn’t security, intimacy, and companionship that he lacked when he was growing up. Those had been there to excess and were still to be had, if that was what he wanted, but when as an adult he started to ransack his consciousness for happy memories from his childhood, the only ones he found were times when he’d been left entirely in peace. When he stood alone on the stage, the only actor in the piece, by himself.
It would be quite an understatement to maintain that Johansson felt at home in his solitude. According to conventional models of human coexistence, it was considerably worse than that. Solitude was the necessary prerequisite for Johansson to function, in the ordinary human sense of shaping the days into a respectable life or in the purely professional sense of acquitting oneself well before other people without consideration for family and friends and feelings in the most general sense. In that respect, his wife’s having left him and taken the children with her made existence almost ideal.
Two years after the divorce his then seven-year-old daughter had given him an LP record, A Single Man by Elton John, for Christmas. Apart from feeling his heart wrench as he read the words on the cover, he saw evidence of unusual human insight for someone her age. As an adult she would either become very strong and independent or else run the risk of being crushed under her own insight.
What disturbed the whole equation—this secure, controlled, predictable life—was his interest in women: their scent, their soft skin, the hollow in the neck between the hairline and the slender throat. It sought him out in dreams at night when he couldn’t defend himself other than by rolling the sheets into a sweaty cord in the middle of the bed; it sought him out in broad daylight; awake, sober, and clearheaded, he would twist his neck out of its socket for a regal posture and a pair of tanned legs he would never see again.
Now a specific example of this interest of his was sitting half an arm’s length away at the same table in a neighborhood restaurant where excellent food was served at a very reasonable price. He had met her two days earlier when he gave a lecture to a group of police chiefs with a legal education on the operation of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Now she was eating her pasta with shellfish and mushrooms with evident enjoyment, which made him happy. It was a good sign. If a woman poked at her food, it was a bad indication of something other than food.
The first time they talked to each other was at the break between the two hours of his lecture. About the obvious tedium of staying at a hotel in Stockholm when your life, home, and friends were in Sundsvall. Then to the point.
“If you don’t have anything better to do on Friday evening, there’s a very good restaurant in my neighborhood.” Johansson nodded, looking down into his white plastic coffee cup. His Norrland dialect was somewhat more marked than usual.
“I thought you’d never dare ask. Where, when, and how?”
Now she was sitting there, half an arm’s length away.
I really ought to say something about my solitude, thought Johansson. Warn her, in case I become really fond of her and she of me.
“Pasta, olive oil, basil, tomato, shellfish, and a little mushroom. What’s wrong with potato pancakes and fried bacon? I was brought up on that kind of thing.”
Johansson nodded and laid down his fork. “I think you know. Otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here.”
She had set aside her fork and looked rather charmed.
Okay, thought Johansson. Shook his head and tilted his wineglass.
“I don’t have the faintest idea. I’m a simple country boy. Tell me about it.”
Seven minutes past eight, only two minutes after they’d responded to the alarm, Stridh and Oredsson arrived at the scene. Oredsson had driven in on the walkway that ran above the parking lot parallel to Valhallavägen, and before he stopped the car he turned on the searchlights. A few yards in front of the car sat an older man in a peaked cap and dark coat. He was rocking his upper body; in his arms he was hugging a dog that looked like a small German shepherd. He didn’t seem to have even noticed their arrival. Some ten yards farther away, exactly at the border between the walkway and the grassy area leading to the nearby wall of the building, lay a lifeless body. Around the head a pool of blood with a radius of close to half a yard shone like melted pewter in the beam of the headlights.
“I can check if he’s alive.” Oredsson looked inquiringly at Stridh while he was undoing his seat belt.
Oredsson shook his head and opened the car door.
“It’s okay. I’ve seen much worse, actually.”
Stridh contented himself with nodding. Didn’t ask where a twenty-four-year-old police trainee might have picked up such experience.
It must have been somewhere. When he reported to the command center a few minutes later he was concise and clear and his voice didn’t sound the least bit shaken. At the scene was a dead male, therefore an ambulance was not needed. Judging by the extensive injuries and the position of the body it appeared most probable that the male in question had fallen or jumped from one of the upper floors in the adjacent apartment building, a high-rise of at least twenty stories that contained student apartments and for unclear reasons was named the Rosehip. There was a witness at the scene, an older man who had been out walking his dog. His colleague Stridh had just spoken with him. It would be great if they could send someone from the after-hours unit plus a technician. Meanwhile, Oredsson would set up the cordon around the dead body, but no other reinforcements were required, in any event not at the present time.
“Yes. That’s the situation,” concluded Oredsson. I’m not going to bother saying anything about the mutt being dead too, he thought.
Police Inspector Bäckström was sitting in the break room at the after-hours unit, staring at the TV; up until now everything had gone well. For a Friday evening it had been unusually calm, and when the riot squad had carried in a street brawler half an hour earlier, Bäckström had seen what was coming and managed to sneak into the restroom. One of his colleagues would have to take care of that piece of crap. A gook, of course, and just as messy as those types always were.
Normally Bäckström worked with the homicide squad, but because he was always in financial straits, he was forced to work a great deal of overtime. True, only fools slaved at the after-hours unit on a Friday evening, but three days before payday he had no choice. Everything had gone fine—up until now, that is, when the chief inspector on duty stood in the door looking just as surly as usual while staring urgently at Bäckström.