“It’s about time we investigated those people,” Anna said one day. “They must be up to something.”
“On what grounds?” asked Ulf. “We have to have a reason, wouldn’t you say? You can’t just investigate people because you don’t know what they do.”
Anna sighed. “Pity.”
From the other side of the room, their colleague Erik joined in. “No smoke without fire,” he said.
Ulf glanced at Anna. That was typical Erik: as if detective work could be based on adages. “But where’s the smoke, Erik?” he asked.
Erik shrugged. “We could just call in on some pretext. We could say that it’s a crime prevention visit—one of those advisory programmes HQ keeps going on about. Then, while we’re talking about that, we could have a quick look round. We might find incriminating papers—you never know.”
Ulf shook his head. “No, Erik. We can’t do that. That would amount to using false pretences.”
Carl intervened without looking up from his desk. “Gaining access to premises under false pretences is an offence. Penal code...I forget the number of the article, but it’s there all right. Just an observation.”
Erik returned to his papers. “It’ll blow up in our faces,” he muttered. “Then the press will be plastered with accusations that they were carrying on their illegal activities right under our noses. We’ll look pretty stupid then, I can tell you.”
Ulf was firm. “All right, but what will we look like if we’re found doing something illegal?” He paused. “And even if we aren’t found out, how will we feel if we do something that the book says nej to?”
Nobody spoke. Anna looked pointedly at Erik, but he remained unabashed. They each returned to what they had been doing before speculation on the Olafssonssons had begun.
There were no Olafssonssons in the café that morning when Ulf arrived. Some of the engineers, though, were huddled at a table, discussing the collapse of a bridge in Italy. Ulf had heard about this on the radio news, and now he caught references to sub-standard concrete and low-quality steel. The finger was pointing, one of the engineers suggested, at a firm of contractors in Calabria, said to be an arm of the ’Ndrangheta. “Not surprising,” another remarked, “in view of the fact that their activities amount to almost three per cent of Italy’s GDP.”
Ulf was tempted to join in. Three per cent? He found it difficult to believe that a criminal organisation could penetrate a country to that extent. Three people in every hundred would be involved—full-time; if one could extrapolate the figures in that way. Three per cent! Of course, in Calabria itself the proportion of the population involved would be much higher than that, because that was where things were concentrated. So it might well be that thirty per cent of the population was implicated in organised crime—one in three people. And if you excluded children—or at least those children too young to assist their corrupt parents—then the figure could be even higher.
He looked about the café. There were perhaps fifteen people seated at the various tables or standing at the bar. If this were Calabria, then five of those might be Mafiosi, or the equivalent. That man standing near the display case in which the café kept its pastries, the one reading his copy of the Sydsvenska Dagbladet, would be on his way to committing an organised crime—and the newspaper he would be reading would be the Camorra Chronicle or the Organised Times.
He wondered whether this corrupt, sub-standard Mafia cement had found its way into any Swedish bridges. He had never heard of such a thing, yet wherever there was money to be made, there would be criminals, and many of these were only too willing to put the public at risk in pursuit of illicit gains. Human wickedness, thought Ulf, is both persistent and pervasive. You fought it, you did your best to deal with it in one place, and no sooner had you chopped off its head there than it reappeared, Gorgon-like, elsewhere. And here they were, just four of them in their rather small office, engaged in this losing battle; five, if you included poor Blomquist, who had been allocated to them but who was still in uniform and not a fully fledged detective. Ulf sighed; poor Blomquist.
Ulf picked up the newspaper that a previous customer had left lying on the table. It had been scribbled upon in ballpoint pen—a few meaningless figures in the margins, a telephone number, and then a note: Tell Maria. Tell her what? Ulf looked up at the ceiling. Was this note to self a rallying cry, designed to spur the writer into action? Perhaps Maria already suspected. Perhaps she already knew, because she had stumbled upon a previous annotation on a page of her husband’s newspaper—just as, in fiction, a woman hears her lover mutter another woman’s name in his sleep—and had waited for the confession that never came. Or did he simply want to remind himself or herself to let Maria—the cleaning lady—know that they would be away next week but that it would be appreciated if she unloaded the dishwasher. That was more likely, thought Ulf, because if the note had been intended as an exhortation, it would have read Must tell Maria, which was quite different in tone. The conclusion pleased him. He did not like to think that Maria was being deceived. This innocent interpretation meant that Maria was not in for a disappointment; one fewer personal world was about to be destroyed through the selfishness or inconstancy of another. That, at least, was cause for gratitude.
He began reading an item in the arts pages: an interview with an artist who was bemoaning the lack of commercial sponsorship for installation art—something that Ulf had always thought of as a mere random collection of objects. Ulf grimaced; art was his major interest, particularly nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Scandinavian painting. That inured him to the posturing of conceptual artists, but he still found it hard to believe that anybody would pay for the banal and impermanent. And where would one put installation art? If a commercial concern displayed it in the foyer of their office, it would be mistaken for office detritus and removed by the cleaners. That often happened to installation art, Ulf believed: some exorbitantly expensive collection of objets trouvés would be found to have been thrown away by cleaners who understandably failed to see how it could be anything but abandoned rubbish. People loved that, seeing the cleaners as the agents of common-sense aesthetics who spoke for the general public.
He sighed and turned the page. The arts modulated into football, which was a subject of no interest to him at all. Somebody had scored a goal, somewhere, and for some team, and the newspaper’s sporting correspondent was analysing this momentous event in great detail. Ulf sighed again, and then looked up and saw that his colleague Anna had entered the café and was ordering her usual latte at the bar. She turned, caught his eye, and waved, mouthing the words I’ll be over in a mo. Anna was always chatted to by the barista, who now leaned across the bar and whispered something to her. She made a gesture of understanding, and laughed dutifully. Ulf had seen these exchanges before and asked her about them. “He likes weak jokes,” she said. “Vulgar ones, mostly. He thinks I find them funny.”