Misterioso by Arne Dahl, Tiina Nunnally Read Free Book Online Page A

I think he still plays. On the senior team of the Stockholm police sports league. When he has time, which isn’t often. I can just picture him splitting open the eyebrows of his semiretired colleagues. That’d be a sight for the gods.”
    Hjelm decided to ask him straight out. “It didn’t happen to be you who …?”
    Bruun dropped the divine mental image of gray eyebrows gushing with blood and gave Hjelm a shrewd look. “It was pure luck that they were setting up a new group right now. The top, top secret A-Unit.”
    “There aren’t many ways to get around Internal Affairs.”
    “You have to take what you can get. Wooden-leg is always in the back of my mind.” Bruun took one last puff on his cigar, his mouth shaped like the hose of a vacuum cleaner. “Just do a good job, all right? I don’t want to have to go through this shit again.”

7
     
    The A-Unit had its first meeting in one of the smallest conference rooms in the enormous complex of police headquarters, located within the rectangle formed by Kungsholmsgatan, Polhemsgatan, Bergsgatan, and Agnegatan. The original headquarters building, constructed in 1903, still boasts dreams of power; its yellowish expanse faces Agnegatan. It is the central hub of the Stockholm police. The opposite side of the rectangle faces Polhemsgatan, mirroring the entirely different but equally absurd architectural ideal of the seventies. That’s where the offices of the National Police Board are located.
    And it was there that Paul Hjelm was headed a few minutes before three P.M . He was expected. A guard showed him on a map near the entrance how to find his way to the small conference room. Hjelm wasn’t paying attention, and so he arrived a bit late.
    Five people were already in the room, sitting at a table and looking almost as bewildered as he felt. As unobtrusively aspossible, he slipped into a vacant chair. As if on cue, a blond man in his fifties wearing a serious expression and a custom-tailored suit appeared. He took up position at the head of the table, placing his right hand on the telescope-like arm of the overhead projector. He glanced around, looking for a face that he didn’t see. He left the room again, clearing his throat. Just as he closed the door behind him, the door on the other side of the room opened, and in came Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin. He too glanced around, looking for a face that he didn’t see.
    “Where’s Mörner?” he asked.
    The constituents of what was evidently the proposed A-Unit stared in confusion at one another.
    “Who’s Mörner?” asked Hjelm, not offering much help.
    “A man was just here,” said the group’s only female member, a dark-haired woman from Göteborg who was in the process of acquiring the first wrinkles on her face but clearly didn’t give a damn. “But he left.”
    “That sounds like him,” said Hultin flatly. He sank heavily onto a chair and set a pair of half-moon reading glasses on his big nose. “Waldemar Mörner, the commissioner of the National Police Board, and the official boss of this group. He was planning to deliver a little welcome speech. Oh well, maybe he’ll come back.”
    Hjelm had a hard time picturing this distinguished and efficient man with the controlled, neutral voice as a vicious soccer player.
    “Okay, you all know what this is about,” Hultin continued. “You are now members of what for lack of a better term and for lack of much else is going to be called the A-Unit. You answer directly to the National Criminal Police, or NCP, but you’ll be working closely with the Stockholm police, primarily with their homicide department, which is housed in the Kungsholmsgatanwing, around the corner from here. Stockholm is the scene of the crime, at least for the moment. All right then.
    “The point is that all of you, regardless of rank, are in a position of higher authority than those who will be assisting you, whether it’s the Stockholm police or the NCP. This case has