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

door. All I saw was a police ID being waved, and let him out.’
    ‘To freedom,’ said Paul Hjelm.

7
    VIGGO NORLANDER WAS on great form. On the ball. With it.
    To an external observer, he might have seemed like a highly ambitious policeman who wanted to solve a complicated murder case whatever the cost. He gave orders, directed and dashed around. He interrogated, bossed about and shone.
    Arto Söderstedt wasn’t an external observer. He was a sceptical observer. And Viggo Norlander wasn’t a highly ambitious policeman who wanted to solve a complicated murder case whatever the cost. He was a highly ambitious new father who, whatever the cost, wanted to spend Midsummer with his baby daughter.
    Söderstedt didn’t find that quite as honourable. He thought back to all the times he had cancelled Midsummer celebrations, remembering the faces of his disappointed, sobbing sons and daughters, and felt a pang of envy for Norlander’s purposefulness. He had never been so single-minded himself.
    On the other hand, his fatherhood hadn’t been as exceptional. On the contrary, he considered himself an unusually normal father. Anja’s five pregnancies had passed with customary minor complications, and the children had plopped out a few weeks too early or a few weeks too late, completely healthy and white as chalk. His paternity could never have been in doubt. Unless there was another ghostly-white Finn living in one of the Söderstedt wardrobes, springing out like a jack-in-the-box as soon as he had cleared off to the police station.
    Or the courtroom. Because Söderstedt’s own little quirk had nothing to do with family life. It was the way his career had panned out that was the unusual thing. And the secret one. When he was very young, he had almost unconsciously raced his way through Finnish law school at record speed, become the young legal genius at a well-regarded law firm and, aged barely twenty-five, been defending the scum of the earth. The well-off scum of the earth, that is. Those who had the means to appoint a top lawyer like Arto Söderstedt in order to escape the long arm of the law. And to piss all over it just as naturally as a dog pisses on a lamp post.
    Eventually, he had simply had enough. Cast his Hugo Boss suits and Armani ties aside, scrapped the Porsche, given up his Finnish citizenship and fled the limelight to Sweden, becoming . . . a policeman. In the stubborn, lingering belief that, despite everything, the system can only be changed from within.
    And that afternoon, with the midsummer sun slowly starting to descend outside the walls, he was sitting in the Kumla Bunker with the other kind of scum of the earth. The kind that didn’t have the means to appoint a top lawyer like Arto Söderstedt in order to escape the long arm of the law.
    He didn’t feel entirely satisfied.
    But Viggo Norlander was in his element. Completely disinterested in formal rank, he had relegated Bernt Nilsson from the Security Service and Lars Viksjö from Närke CID to the sidelines. Or was it the substitutes’ bench?
    Norlander raised his inward-backward-sloping mug, beaming with energy, from the stack of papers in front of him, and peered out over the gathering in the cold little interrogation room.
    ‘Shall we see if we can sum up before we let him in?’ he asked, without waiting for an answer. ‘Erik Svensson, the guard, saw that Lordan Vukotic was still curled up in his bed after they were woken up at half six. Vukotic announced from under the covers that he wasn’t feeling well and asked to skip breakfast, which he was allowed to do. When the bomb went off at 08.36, that meant he hadn’t been out of his cell since the evening before. Can we draw any conclusions from that?’
    Here – possibly – he paused for an answer.
    ‘It’s surely not out of the question that there’s a connection between him missing breakfast and the explosion,’ said Bernt Nilsson. ‘But in that case, what kind of connection? Was he really