‘Worst case, we have gang warfare in progress.’
Sara was sitting clutching a mug of coffee while listening to Axel Bielke. She felt far more alert than she had feared after some half dozen alcoholic beverages. Anna, on the other hand, looked like she hadn’t slept in a fortnight. She was sitting there nodding along and seemed totally worn out. Martin had got home at half past seven in the morning, absolutely hammered and practically euphoric. With Ed Sheeran’s autograph scrawled on his chest in black marker pen, and hearts drawn around each nipple. Sara had helped him into bed, given him a kiss and left for work.
Now she was sitting in the white meeting room together with her colleagues. White walls, white furniture and a whiteboard that was far too white; bottles of mineral water and a bowl of fruit. As if a nineties aesthetic was what the Swedish police needed more than anything else. There was, however, nothing aesthetic about the fluorescent strip lighting on the ceiling. Regardless of decade.
‘The deceased in the plastic wrap is a guy called Cesar Bekas,’ Bielke continued. ‘He’s a prominent member of a gang in Alby. We don’t know who the other two are, but the manner in which Bekas was killed, the way they were going to dump the body and the fact that the duo opened fire on a group of hunters indicates that they weren’t exactly law-abiding citizens.’
‘Does that mean we can expect revenge?’ Sara asked.
‘Or perhaps his gang will settle for the fact that the other two men are already dead. Hard to tell, when we have no idea what the conflict was about.’
‘What have we got on Bekas then?’
‘The usual, I was about to say. Drugs, weapons. He’s been questioned on multiple occasions about rumbles between different gangs, but he’s never said anything. Went down for the first time as a twelve-year-old when he kept watch while some older boys broke into a corner shop. No punishment at the time, but it meant there were eyes on him.’
‘So we should find out more?’ asked one of Sara’s colleagues, who was sitting beside the sleepy Anna.
‘Talk to the other members of the gang, to his friends, family, neighbours. Yes, you know the drill. Ah, yes. The car’s been traced. We’ve been able to map some of their journey. They came via Bromma – it’s not clear exactly where they set off from.’ Their boss paused and leafed through his papers. ‘And the boat. Yes. Apparently it had been there a while, so it’s possible it had been used before. I’ve requested diving assistance, but apparently it’s hard to get them out on a Sunday. I’m hoping they’ll get started tomorrow. Well, I think that’s everything for now.’
Bielke closed his laptop, gathered up his papers and sat down. Sara turned towards Anna, who contorted her face into a grimace.
‘How long did you stay?’ said Sara.
‘Not that long. Until Lina got off.’
‘Lina?’
‘The waitress.’
‘The waitress? The one you said was flirting with you?’
‘Yes. And she was, so it turned out.’
‘So you went home with her?’
‘Not right away. First we had our own crawl of three or four places. Did some shots. Then we went to hers. At about five, half five. I think.’
‘So you’ve had how much sleep?’
‘Zero. Not even a minute. You don’t fall asleep next to a girl like that.’
Anna smiled, tired but happy.
‘What about that TV show?’
Bielke looked up from his papers. It was Ergün who had asked the question. He had even put up his hand like a schoolboy, which looked funny when it was done by a slab of muscle who was one hundred and ninety centimetres tall and weighed in at one hundred and twenty kilos.
‘Which one?’ Bielke said, looking at him in confusion.
‘They wanted to make a show about us.’
‘That docusoap?’ said their boss, who was either unable or unwilling to conceal his distaste. ‘I said no. We’re not circus chimps, we’re police officers.’
‘Pity,’ said Ergün, looking genuinely disappointed. ‘I mean, not for me, but people are interested. It’d be cool to show them how we do our jobs.’
‘They just want to gorge themselves – see people who’ve been hurt, drunks fighting. I’ve no desire to encourage such tendencies. It’s not the police’s job to contribute to public ignorance.’
‘It’s fun, though,’ Ergün said by way of a second attempt. ‘I remember watching Cops on TV when I was growing up. That’s what made me want to join the force. Didn’t you watch Cops?’
‘I’m older than you.’
‘What did you like then? My old man says he watched stuff like Kojak and Columbo in the seventies.’
‘I didn’t watch Swedish TV.’
Ergün put his index finger to the tip of his nose and Bielke couldn’t help smiling.
‘No, I’m not being a snob. We didn’t live in Sweden when I was growing up. Dad worked abroad.’
‘Well, I think it’s a shame. People want to see how we do our jobs.’
‘I’m sure there are others who will be happy to show off.’
‘It’s not about showing off.’
‘What then?’
‘People are just interested.’
Bielke returned to his papers. Sara and Anna got up. Anna did so with some difficulty.
‘So can we participate in the capacity of individual officers then?’
Bielke didn’t even dignify Ergün’s question with a response.
They began with the members of the deceased’s gang, in case there was some act of vengeance in the offing. The mobile numbers they’d been given were out of use. These were guys who changed numbers frequently. And on a Sunday morning they were less accessible than usual. The fact that none of them had opened up when Sara and Anna had rung on their doorbells could be because they were paranoid and never opened up to strangers, or because they were actually at war with a rival gang and keeping their heads down, or quite simply because they were hungover and sleeping too deeply to hear the doorbell or someone knocking.
They had the names and addresses of four guys in Cesar Bekas’s gang, but no one opened up. And when Sara called the parents she could find details for, all they said was that their son had moved out and they didn’t know where he was.
‘He might come home for Christmas,’ said one father. ‘Why don’t you call then?’ Then he hung up.
They were obviously getting nowhere with the gang members, so they went to the home of the dead man’s parents instead – after they had stopped at a hot dog stand so that Anna could buy a fizzy drink and some hangover food.
Devrim Bekas lived on the ninth floor of a block of flats on Servitutsvägen. As far as Sara’s prejudices pertaining to the architecture of Alby went, this building was rather tall and drab, reminiscent of her own suburb of Vällingby. On the other hand, it was very well-tended. Just like the shrubs around the building.
Cesar’s mother, Devrim, was a woman of about Sara’s age, with black hair and a firm, almost strict gaze behind her black-rimmed glasses. She was wearing a black blouse and trousers and clasping a thick book when she opened the door. She looked at Sara and Anna and seemed to realise almost immediately what it was about. She put down the book and greeted them with a curt:
‘Come in.’
They followed her into the living room, which was decorated with a mixture of eastern trinkets and IKEA furniture. Gilded mirrors, golden candleholders, tasselled cushions and functional Scandinavian furniture with names like Hemnes and Sollerön. She sat down on the large armchair in the centre of the room while the police officers took the sofa. Devrim waved to someone behind them and Sara turned her head just in time to catch sight of a child disappearing from the doorway back into what must have been a bedroom.
‘Your husband?’
‘At the university. He’s doing research. They’re in the final stages now. What’s happened?’
‘Your son Cesar is dead,’ said Sara, letting the words sink in before she carried on. ‘And he was murdered. You can call on a talk therapist in the event of tragic deaths like this, and I really would recommend you make use of that help.’
Devrim immediately began to cry. She let the tears run down her cheeks without wiping them away. Sara just sat there, immobile. The woman’s eyes were unyielding rather than crushed.
‘Who did it?’ she said after a while. ‘Who killed him?’
‘We don’t know. Two men were trying to dump the body in Lake Mälaren – that much we’re fairly certain of, and those two are also dead, shot by a hunter whom they opened fire on.’
Devrim seemed to be doing her best to digest what she had been told. Sara was unsure whether she had been too detailed. She wondered how it would feel to receive this kind of news herself about her own child. Would she be able to take it in? Would she be able to master her emotions like this mother? Devrim almost seemed to have expected this kind of news, judging by her reaction, or at least she had feared it. For Sara, it had come close to the opposite – one of her colleagues having to come to her home to tell her children that their mother had died. How would the kids have taken it? She had no idea. Would Ebba have been as tough as she always seemed to be? Or would Sara’s death have knocked the wind out of her? Sometimes, the person you were angry with was the foundation of your whole life. How Olle would have handled the news she couldn’t tell. She didn’t know much about the spiritual lives of fourteen-year-old boys. Did they even have them?
‘Do you know whether Cesar’s gang was at war with anyone else?’ said Anna.
‘His gang . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘It wasn’t his gang any longer. He’d left it – he wanted to get out of crime. He was good at school. Like all my children. He’d got into an economics degree. Wanted to do his own thing.’
‘How did his gang take that?’ said Sara, leaning forward on the sofa.
‘Not very well. There’s so much talk of togetherness, being brothers, loyal to the death. But when Cesar wanted to do his own thing, they got scared.’
‘Of what?’
‘That he’d succeed. He’d become something.’
‘You meant that they . . .?’ Anna didn’t manage to finish the sentence before the bedroom door opened again and a girl of around five years old emerged clutching a piece of paper.
‘I’ve done a drawing for you,’ she said, giving the paper to her mother. Sara caught a glimpse of a shining sun and a princess in a colourful dress. Devrim looked at the drawing and smiled at her daughter.
‘Thank you, sweetheart. Isn’t that lovely?’ Then she turned to Sara and Anna. ‘Our afterthought.’
The daughter examined her mother’s tears, climbed up onto the armchair and gently wiped them away with her small hands.
‘Sweetheart, I need to talk to these ladies. Go back to your room and make me another drawing. Why not a prince or a crocodile? Or a cake! You’re so good at drawing cakes.’
‘OK.’
The little girl disappeared back into the bedroom and Devrim turned towards the officers.
‘Where were we?’ she said.
‘Togetherness,’ said Sara.
‘Oh yes.’ The woman snorted. ‘They show off their cars and watches and weapons and burn through their cash down at the clubs, trying to impress each other and the younger guys, but they’re constantly terrified – of being shot. They get paranoid. They numb it with drugs, which only intensifies the anxiety. If they don’t get shot, they end up killing themselves.’
Sara and Anna nodded their quiet assent. They waited for the grieving mother to go on.
‘They know what’s ahead of them. But they can’t get out. They say they can’t let their mates down. They destroy their chances. Cesar’s best friend growing up was an incredible talent on the football pitch. English and German teams wanted to sign him when he was fourteen. Now’s he’s doing life for shooting someone in another gang. Because his mates told him to do it.’ Devrim’s voice trembled slightly.
‘Are you aware of any specific threats? Has anything happened recently? Perhaps connected to the fact that he wanted to quit?’
‘Does it matter? We won’t get him back whatever you do. And even if you find out who did this, you won’t be able to get a conviction – no one ever talks,’ said Devrim, adjusting the three remote controls sitting on a gold platter so that they were all neatly in line with each other. TV, set-top box, Apple TV, Sara thought to herself, wondering why she was bothered by that detail.
‘Let us try,’ said Anna.
‘Why? If you find out who it is, then all it means is that others have to retaliate. You keep the feuds alive. It’s absurd, but that’s how it is.’
‘We’re constantly working to break the spiral,’ Sara protested.
‘I know. You work and you work. But neither you nor we succeed in doing anything about it.’
‘“You or we?” You mean parents?’
‘I mean us politicians. I’m on the local council in Botkyrka.’
It was the first time Sara had ever encountered a next-of-kin who was willing to share responsibility for gang violence with the police.
‘I have to get Ismail to come home,’ said Devrim, pulling out her mobile. ‘Cesar’s little brother,’ she explained to Anna and Sara. ‘He worshipped Cesar.’
She left a brief message on her son’s voicemail. Then she looked at the officers again.
‘Would you like us to tell your husband?’ said Sara.
‘No. I’ll do it. Once you’ve gone.’
Sara understood her and nodded in confirmation. They stood up to leave.
‘Have you told Abeba?’ said Devrim.
‘Who?’
‘His girlfriend.’
‘No.’
‘She’s a good girl. She helped Cesar to get away from the gang.’ She paused and fresh tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘They’d just started planning their wedding . . .’