It’s not yet two in the afternoon, but it feels like a grey twilight is settling in around Klara as she sits in the car in front of Trattoria Romana and opens the black notebook to the first page. She holds it close to her eyes, trying to make our Gabriella’s messy handwriting.
‘Cucumber. Yoghurt. Garlic. Bread.’
A grocery list.
Beside the insight that Gabriella was probably planning on making tzatziki, this doesn’t give her much, and Klara keeps flipping forward.
Gabriella seems to use the notebook for all sorts of scribbling. Most notes are lists, a couple about work, a few sentences about a meeting or a conversation with a client.
Klara flips quickly until she gets to the middle of the book where the notes end abruptly. With a sigh she starts from the beginning, reading each page a bit more carefully. But there’s nothing, as far as she can see, that seems to be linked to what happened this morning.
Disappointed, she flips even faster through the notebook until something stops her. She thinks she might have seen something, some note, some numbers. She goes back until she finds the page again. Holds the book at another angle trying to get more light on its pages. There are a few words dashed down. Just a few lines.
‘Palais de Justice. In front of the elevator,’ she reads. ‘24/11, 16:00’. Then a name. ‘Karl’. Then no more.
24 November? That’s in two days, Tuesday.
Klara recalls Gabi’s phone call yesterday at the hostel. Tuesday in Brussels, she said. Terrorism crackdown, the police said.
She puts the notebook back in Gabriella’s bag and takes out her phone. First, she needs to figure out where they’ve taken Gabriella.
She looks up the number for the city jail, and a young woman answers almost immediately. She can only confirm what Klara vaguely remembers from studying criminal law in Uppsala.
‘The police have seventy-two hours to decide if they want to detain your friend,’ the girl says. ‘The detention will be decided by one of the Stockholm district courts, and all you can do is wait for a detention order to be established. You’ll have to contact the district court this week. That’s all the advice I can give you for now.’
Klara hangs up and leans back. Seventy-two hours. Three days. Gabriella is unreachable until Wednesday unless they release her early.
*
It takes less than fifteen minutes to drive to Bastugatan on Södermalm and find a parking spot. She grabs Gabriella’s bag and locks the car, then walks shivering through the early evening light towards her friend’s apartment.
The weather has shifted quickly and heavy clouds are rolling in above the rooftops. She can already see tiny, fleeting raindrops shining in the streetlights. She’s not quite sure what she’s going to do in the apartment, but it feels like the natural place to start.
She unlocks the front door with one of the keys on Gabriella’s keychain and turns the light on in the stairs. The apartment is on the third floor, with French doors that open onto a stunning view of Stockholm. Gabriella bought the small one-bedroom when she became a partner at the firm, and the price made Klara almost faint. But Gabriella just shrugged.
‘I don’t have anything else to spend my money on right now,’ Gabrielle told her.
There were many who’d dreamed of a life like this when they were studying in Uppsala. Partner in a law firm. A beautiful apartment in central Stockholm. But Gabi and Klara used to consider it a prison. They wanted to be free. Be creative. The law was just a starting point for them, a foundation while they figured out what they were going to do to change the world. Gabriella as a defence attorney and Klara in international relations. But then they ended up with those ten-hour days just like everyone else. Gabriella at a prestigious law firm, Klara as a political adviser in Brussels. Or not Klara any more. Not after everything that’s happened.
On the second floor she stops to listen. It occurs to her that since the police have arrested Gabriella, they might search her apartment, or at least have it under surveillance. Why didn’t she think of that until now? She feels so stupid.
She cocks her ear, but can’t hear anything beside her own breath echoing between the stone walls of the staircase.
As quietly as she can, she starts up the final flight of stairs to the third floor. She can see it’s empty when she peers around the corner. She exhales and takes the last steps two at a time.
But when she gets to the landing, she freezes. Slowly she lowers the bag onto the stone floor and approaches Gabriella’s door. Police tape crisscrosses the doorframe. The lock seems broken, like someone drilled into the mechanism itself, leaving it completely unusable.
She’s not surprised, but it still feels like an assault, almost worse than the arrest itself. That somebody would go into her friend’s home, rifle through it, paw at her most private possessions.
She presses down on the handle to test it and feels the door start to open. The only thing keeping it closed is the tape. Couldn’t they at least have replaced the lock? Do they really intend to leave Gabriella’s door unlocked, protected only by just a few strips of tape?
Not caring about the implications, she carefully pulls away just enough police tape to be able to open the door and go inside.
She’s barely set one foot inside when she hears someone behind her on the staircase.
‘Stop!’ a muffled voice says behind her. ‘Not another step.’