The Falling Detective by Christoffer Carlsson Page B

doesn’t find out it was me who tipped you off.’

Birck, Olausson, and Mauritzon are sitting in one of the numerous meeting rooms. Mauritzon is holding the handle of her coffee cup in one hand, a task that appears to be the only thing keeping her awake.
    â€˜I’ve got two grandchildren,’ she says. ‘Five and two. When my daughter can’t cope, they come to me. They arrived this morning, just as I was getting ready for bed. I’ve hardly slept.’
    â€˜You poor thing,’ says Olausson, his eyes half-closed.
    Prosecutor Ralph Olausson is a lanky man. His nose makes a quiet whistling sound as he breathes, and his suit needs pressing. A rough scar high on his chest becomes visible as he loosens his tie and unbuttons his collar.
    â€˜Where are the others?’ I ask.
    â€˜What others?’
    â€˜You mean this is it? This is a tenth of what we need.’
    â€˜This is it, for now,’ is Olausson’s only comment.
    â€˜But you’ll sort out some more bodies, right? We can’t run a murder investigation with three people.’
    â€˜That’s where we are right now.’ Olausson studies his hands, as though they were more interesting than this business. ‘Okay, let’s get started, shall we?’
    We spend half an hour going over Thomas Heber’s death. The other witness statements appear to corroborate little John Thyrell’s version of events. Heber arrives, then another person, presumably the assailant, who then leaves and is followed by a third, who emerges from behind the bin. No one knows when the third person got there, because nobody saw anything. A taxi-driver stops to pick up a fare on the other side of Döbelnsgatan and notices two people emerge from the alley, one at a time. The timing puts this just after the murder has taken place. In one of the apartments overlooking Döbelnsgatan, a sixty-seven-year-old insomniac who is watering her pot plants sees the same sequence of events. Neither she nor the taxi-driver is able to give a more detailed description than young Thyrell’s.
    â€˜A six-year-old,’ says Birck. ‘Our best witness is a six-year-old boy.’
    â€˜But the sequence of events is nonetheless pretty clear,’ says Olausson.
    â€˜Er,’ I say. ‘There are still plenty of questions to be answered.’
    â€˜I know, I know,’ Olausson mumbles, pulling out his phone without looking at me. ‘But I’m sure they’ll sort themselves out eventually.’
    â€˜Eventually? As in?’
    Olausson glances up, and blinks once.
    â€˜As in when you lot get on with the job.’
    â€˜To do that we’re going to need people,’ says Birck.
    â€˜We’ll see what we can do.’
    Olausson smiles weakly, and that’s that.
    â€˜I reckon that whoever was behind the bins wasn’t standing there for more than a few minutes,’ Mauritzon says, perhaps to keep herself awake. ‘That’s what the prints in the snow would indicate. There were just a few. And it could be a woman. Not that many men wear size-38 shoes.’
    â€˜I might know who it is,’ I say, and give a brief account of my visit to the university, and tell them about the anonymous emails Heber had received, the research he was working on, how he had seemed recently, the field notes and 1599, the person he was on the way to meet when he died. ‘He also wrote that he had heard something, that he wasn’t sure whether to mention it to 1599. I’ve got no idea what it was, but I did get the distinct impression that it was something important. I didn’t have time to read the whole thing, and I wasn’t allowed to take the notes with me.’
    â€˜So you left them there,’ Birck says, without looking up from his notebook.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜You didn’t take any copies?’
    â€˜No.’
    Olausson is absent-mindedly staring at something through the window, his eyes