Free To the Top of the Mountain by Arne Dahl Page A

for you,’ she added, pointing to one of the waitresses. Hjelm saw the underlined word: ‘pretending’. Holm continued. ‘Why did you say that the kid was pretending to read?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You heard me.’
    ‘He didn’t turn a single page in that book.’
    ‘What was he doing, then?’
    ‘Don’t know. Thinking. Or listening.’
    They went out into the corridor.
    ‘We’re sending a patrol to Eskil Carlstedt right now,’ said Hjelm. ‘He lives here on Kungsholmen.’
    ‘We should’ve picked up on the music, the demo tape, the reaction when we asked,’ said Holm. ‘Christ.’
    ‘And the bloody rest,’ said Hjelm.
    Holm went away to send a patrol car after Carlstedt. Hjelm returned to the waitresses.
    ‘Well, ladies,’ he said, stretching. ‘We need the most exact descriptions you can possibly give us of the southern Europeans, the Swede, and the four who disappeared from beside the door.’
    The oldest of the waitresses stood up abruptly.
    ‘What the hell is it you’re working on?’ she demanded.
    ‘I don’t have the faintest idea,’ said Paul Hjelm truthfully.
    Three burly, traditional-looking doormen were sitting in a row, almost like the three wise monkeys who want to see, hear and say nothing.
    Though only almost.
    They actually talked quite a lot, even if it was exclusively about how heroically they had blocked the door despite everyone trying to get out. They described it as though they had been courageous UN troops, preventing genocide with nothing but their bare hands.
    ‘Considering at least twenty people got out, maybe your reaction wasn’t exactly lightning-fast,’ said Hjelm quietly.
    They stared at him.
    ‘There’s actually a door between the cloakroom and the pub,’ said the oldest, insulted. ‘We can’t hear everything that goes on inside.’
    ‘We had a pretty bloody rowdy queue to deal with,’ said the biggest. ‘Lots of difficult immigrants.’
    ‘Immigrants?’ exclaimed Hjelm. It was clear that the man wasn’t used to using any other word than ‘wog’. He continued. ‘Still, you let thirty or so drunk Hammarby fans in, one of whom turned out to be a murderer.’
    ‘You know where you are with Hammarby fans,’ said the third one.
    ‘I see,’ Hjelm said sourly, letting the subject lie. ‘Couldn’t you have reacted a bit quicker when twenty men came running out of the pub all at once?’
    ‘There was a hell of a crush then, so it wasn’t exactly easy to move in the opposite direction.’
    ‘Anyway, our job’s to check people going in , not coming out .’
    ‘We didn’t know what had happened, did we? We can’t just stop people leaving the pub.’
    ‘What kind of people were coming out?’
    ‘Men. Just men. Hammarby fans, mainly, some older builders too.’
    ‘Builders? Like construction workers?’
    ‘No, like bodybuilders. There aren’t any construction jobs any more.’
    ‘Any . . . immigrants?’
    ‘Eventually some wo— gentlemen with darkish hair, yeah,’ said the biggest. ‘I seem to remember that.’
    ‘But you must know all this,’ said the oldest. ‘You had a man there.’
    Hjelm stared at Holm. Holm stared at Hjelm.
    ‘A man there?’ they said in unison. It didn’t exactly sound professional, but what can you do? What were they supposed to do with their surprise?
    ‘Yeah,’ said the biggest of the doormen. ‘We’d just managed to push our way in and block the inner door. He hadn’t quite made it out. I pushed him back. Then he flashed his ID and ran out.’
    ‘His ID?’ they said in unison.
    ‘His police ID.’
    They were paralysed.
    Eventually, Kerstin Holm said: ‘You didn’t think it was strange that a policeman wanted to get out after a crime had been committed?’
    ‘I don’t know how you work, for Christ’s sake.’
    ‘And you can’t remember what he looked like?’
    ‘It was pretty crazy, to put it mildly. Some guy was lying in a pool of blood. Everyone was screaming, people were pushing towards the