The middle-aged detective at the centre of the whole mess was called Magnusson. He stood with his feet apart, in the middle of a floor that was covered in brochures and cups and crushed rubble, trying to get a handle on the situation.
Christina Sandberg, her name was. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, she had materialised in their midst, amongst all the technicians and firemen, then marched right into the lobby despite the tape and flashed her press badge and asked a stream of questions–was it an accident? Was anyone hurt? Any connection with the power cut earlier?
He’d ended up having to physically stop her. Through gritted teeth, he’d explained to her that if she didn’t get lost this instant he would personally make sure that she was locked up and put on bread and water, and even if that wasn’t a particularly plausible scenario the message had got through at last and the woman had allowed herself to be escorted out.
Now he stood there, trying to get a grip.
‘Magnusson?’
A young voice behind him. It was the same constable who had led the woman away just seconds earlier.
‘She wants us to call her a taxi. Says her phone is dead.’
Magnusson felt his energy waning.
‘You know what?’ he said. ‘Go back out and tell her we don’t cordon off scenes because it looks attractive. Tell her that she committed a crime when she shoved her way in here and tell her I’ve been on since this morning and my patience runs out at lunchtime.’
The constable stayed put. Had he just been given an order he was expected to carry out, or had it just been his boss blowing off steam?
‘And when you’ve done that you can call her a cab and make sure she gets out of here. The further away the better.’
That was an order, and his young colleague headed off down the long concrete walkway towards the car park.
It had only been twenty minutes since Sergeant Eskil Magnusson had walked that route in the other direction. When the call went out he and the youngster had been down by Frihamnen docks. They’d put on their blue lights and had been the first unit at the scene. A big explosion, the radio operator had said–gas, maybe a bomb, nobody knew.
Even so, his first thought had been that the whole thing was a false alarm. The walkway had brought him to a lobby entrance with glass panes polished to the point of invisibility, and behind them an organised chaos of books and T-shirts and Stockholm souvenirs.
Only after a few seconds had he registered the crunch underfoot. The concrete ground was strewn with tiny shards of glass, razor-sharp and ground to a lethal white flour, and now he realised that the immaculate glass doors were nothing of the sort. They weren’t transparent; they were no longer there. The panes had been shattered from the inside, and spread down the walkway, and the chaos that greeted him wasn’t so organised after all. Like someone had grabbed the whole structure and shaken it, that’s what it looked like, and a shaken Magnusson had reached for his phone and asked the control room to send the Fire Brigade and an ambulance.
At this point he’d heard a voice in the middle of the mess.
‘The lift,’ it said.
She was no older than twenty-five, was wearing a top emblazoned with Stockholm’s coat of arms, and was sitting on the edge of an upturned bench, her eyes glazed and her face and hands flecked with blood.
‘I was the one who called.’
She had seen the whole thing, and only now she made things come together. The explosion had not been an explosion. The force that had shattered the lobby had come from the lifts. As Magnusson clambered further inside, past piles of debris and junk, he found the lift doors lying on the floor, thrust out of their frames like the buckled lid of a tin of herring left for too long. Concrete and plaster had collapsed, leaving both lift shafts open, and inside them thick cables ran straight upwards into the darkness.
The lift itself had fallen thirty storeys. A couple of metres down were the remains of what had been the lift car, hugely crumpled and compressed, and within ten minutes the whole of Kaknäs Tower’s lobby was cordoned off and pulsating with emergency blue.
Then they had found the body.
This information came courtesy of the young constable, explaining it all in a lowered voice as he waited for the taxi switchboard to answer. His hand held his work phone, his pocket contained five hundred newly earned krona in hundred-krona notes, and opposite him in the car park stood Christina Sandberg who promised not to name him in her article.
Finally they were told that a car would be with them in ten minutes, and Christina gave him her card, shook his hand and asked him to call her if anything else turned up. Then she made her way through the car park, past the array of emergency services vehicles parked there. Kaknäs Tower was veiled in fluttering blue light. An amazing shot, if her mobile hadn’t been dead.
Somehow, she thought, this had to be linked to the power cut. Which was true–only not in the way she thought.