Free Europa Blues by Arne Dahl Page B

his eyes. It didn’t help that Hultin concluded:
    ‘So in other words, we don’t even know if a crime has been committed—’
    ‘Yes,’ Chavez said irritatedly. ‘This is a murder. If it isn’t, I’ll throw myself to the wolverines. That’s a promise.’
    The A-Unit stared at him. It was true that each of them had been hoping for a real case – for no more fights on commuter trains – but none more than Jorge Chavez. That much was obvious.
    ‘That’ll be a nice crowd-pleaser for the summer concerts in Skansen,’ Viggo Norlander said, blowing his nose. ‘Lasse Berghagen introducing the daring Wolverine Detective.’
    ‘Shut up,’ Chavez said.
    ‘Isn’t that my line?’ retorted Norlander.
    ‘Honestly,’ said Holm, ‘if we look at that incomprehensible writing and the fact that he wrote what he did instead of trying to get out … Doesn’t it all just suggest he was mad?’
    ‘Yeah,’ said Hjelm. ‘I think he was mad. Drugged up and mad with panic. But I also think his panic was justified.’
    ‘But whoever was following him
doesn’t
seem to have climbed into the wolf enclosure after him,’ said Holm. ‘Is there any other way in?’
    Hjelm and Chavez exchanged glances. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
    ‘We’ll look into it,’ Hjelm said drily.
    Hultin pulled himself together, glanced at his watch and continued.
    ‘Well, that took a while. We’ve still got another event to go through. Kerstin?’
    Kerstin Holm looked slightly out of it. Her fingers touched the bare patch on her temple and she imagined she could feel her thoughts breaking up on the other side of the thin bone.
    ‘Could you start, Sara?’ she asked.
    Sara, who had been sitting quietly, looked up in surprise. She still thought of herself as Kerstin’s inferior and had been expecting – at most – a word or two. She took a sip of her cold coffee, pulled a face and composed herself.
    ‘Eight asylum seekers, all strongly suspected of having worked as prostitutes, disappeared from the annexe of a refugee centre the night before last. From the Norrboda Motell in Slagsta, to be precise. Where they were living and working.
    ‘They’re all from Eastern Europe: three of the women from Ukraine, two from Bulgaria, two from Russia and another from Belarus. The two Russians, Natalja Vaganova and Tatjana Skoblikova, were in room 224; two of the Ukrainians, Galina Stenina and Lina Kostenko, were in room 225; the other one, Valentina Dontsjenko, and the Belorussian, Svetlana Petruseva, were in room 226; the two Bulgarians, Stefka Dafovska and Mariya Bagrjana, were in room 227. I’m sure you’ll remember all of that.
    ‘We worked late into the evening yesterday, talking to their neighbours. It seems like it was a pretty open secret that they were prostitutes. We’ve got names for some of the johns and we’ve managed to get a pretty good idea of how they were able to run their business. Jörgen Nilsson, the manager, didn’t just turn a blind eye to it; we’ve also got reports that he made use of their services. As a customer. I don’t think he’s got much of a future left in his job.’
    Kerstin Holm had managed to collect herself and took over.
    ‘We had two key questions. When did the women disappear, and had their disappearance been preceded by anything unusual? We couldn’t expect to know much more than that by this point. What we do know is the following: for the past week or so, the women had been more uneasy than usual; something had clearly happened to make them nervous. Their neighbours were pretty much in agreement on that.
    ‘From what we can tell, the eight women were there all evening on Wednesday. One witness claims he heard them talking in a foreign language, probably Russian, as late as three on Thursday morning. They were meant to report to Nilsson at nine that morning, but they never showed up. None of their neighbours – and we’ve spoken to most of them by now – saw or heard them disappear. All that with a