The office sofa was really far too small; he had to get it changed. His sleep had been troubled. Bengt’s lie, Grajauskas and the other girl on the video, Anni’s hand that he couldn’t get hold of, the tears that had drained him. His clothes were wrinkled and his breath was stale. He had tried to work when the hours dragged, but he couldn’t concentrate on the investigation of the Oldéus and Lang case. Grajauskas and her friend had commandeered his thoughts. They had looked pale and spent when they talked about his best friend and the shame they hoped he would feel. He had tried to get back to sleep, twisting and turning until the light forced him to get up.
He absently touched the plastic parcel in his pocket. He had tried to wipe the tape and had failed. He had made up his mind and wasn’t going to change it. It had to go.
The police house was still totally empty. He bought a dry cheese sandwich and a carton of juice from the machines in the corridor, breakfasted and then went to the locker rooms and had a long shower.
I must see her again soon.
Last time I brought death.
The water was hammering on his skull and shoulders. That damned mortuary was being washed down the drain and the tension began to slip. He used somebody’s forgotten towel, dressed and got another coffee from the machine. Black, as usual. Slowly he woke up.
‘Good morning, sir.’
He heard her voice from one of the rooms in passing. She was sitting on a chair in the middle of the floor and surrounded by papers, on the sofa, the desk, the top of the bookshelf, and the floor.
‘Hermansson. You’re in early.’
She was so young. Young and ambitious. That usually wore off.
‘I’m reading the witness statements from the hospital. They’re really interesting. I wanted to have time to go through them properly.’
‘Found anything I should know about?’
‘I think so. Well, I haven’t got them all yet. The statements from Grajauskas’s guard and the boys who were watching TV in the dayroom are being printed now.’
‘And?’
‘For one thing, the link between Grajauskas and Sljusareva looks strong.’
Perhaps it was her nice dialect, or her calm manner, whatever it was, he listened to her now, just as he had listened to her yesterday in the temporary operations centre, though it was too late. He should tell her. That she was good, that he trusted her and that didn’t happen often.
‘Tell me more.’
‘Can you give me a couple of hours? I’ll have a clearer picture then.’
‘Right. See me after lunch.’
He was about to go. He ought to tell her.
‘Hermansson.’
‘Yes?’
She looked at him and he had to go on.
‘You did a good job yesterday. Your analysis . . . well, what you said. I’d like to work with you again.’
She smiled. He hadn’t expected that.
‘Praise! From Ewert Grens. That’s very special.’
He stood there, feeling something new. Abandoned perhaps, or exposed. He almost regretted having complimented her and switched tack; anything really, as long as it was different.
‘You know the store where electronic stuff is kept?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I need a couple of things from in there, but I’ve never been. Do you know where it is?’
Hermansson got up. She was laughing. Ewert didn’t understand why. She looked at him and laughed, making him feel uncomfortable.
‘Sir? Just between us?’
‘Yes?’
‘Tell me, have you ever praised a woman officer before?’
She was still laughing when she pointed out into the corridor.
‘And the store is right there, next to the coffee machine.’
She settled down on the chair again and started rooting around among the papers on the floor. Ewert looked at her and then walked away. She had laughed at him. He didn’t understand why.
Lisa Öhrström had kept her eyes closed for a long time.
She had heard the dark man who threatened her get up and leave; she had remained seated, not daring to move until Ann-Marie left her glass booth in the corridor and came to see how she was. The older woman had taken Lisa in her arms and talked soothingly, sat with her. At one point they had started playing the childish game of slapping one hand on top of the other.
Afterwards she had gone home. She had tried to see her patients, but was too frightened and drained. She had never felt such fear.
It had been a long night.
She had reasoned with herself, trying to banish the ache inside. Her heart was racing and she took deep, slow breaths to settle down, but instead was alarmed by the way she gasped for air. No peace of mind, she didn’t dare go to sleep, scared that she would never wake up, didn’t want to, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t close her eyes, not any more.
Jonathan and Sanna. She couldn’t keep them away.
All night long they had insisted on being let in.
She had tried to banish them by taking slow breaths, calm. She loved them like she had never dared to love anyone else, except perhaps Hilding, way back, before he had made her stop feeling. The children were different, they were part of her.
That man knew that the children existed. He had found her photos.
The damned pain in her chest.
The children were her weakness and her protection at the same time, little human beings she could not bear to lose and who strangely also made her able to control the panic that almost overwhelmed her.
The detective who had questioned her after Hilding’s body had been found, and who had made her identify that man Lang, DI Sven Sundkvist, had phoned early in the morning when she was still in bed, apologised, explained that they were working hard on the case and asked her to come to the station as soon as she could.
She was waiting in a dark room somewhere inside the main City Police building. She wasn’t alone. Sundkvist was there too and a lawyer, who presumably represented the accused, had just come through the door.
DI Sundkvist told her to take her time. There was no hurry and it was important that she did everything in the correct way.
She went and stood at the window. He assured her that it was a one-way view only. Only those on the police side could see through it. The men on the other side just saw their own images in the mirrored surface.
There were ten of them, all about the same height, roughly the same age, and all had shaved heads. Each man had a label hung round his neck, a large white board with a black number on it.
They stood shoulder to shoulder, staring straight at her. At least that’s how it felt – as if they were waiting and watching to see what she would do.
She looked at them without seeing.
A few seconds for each one, scanning them from their feet to the top of their head. She avoided their eyes.
‘No.’
She shook her head.
‘None of them.’
Sven Sundkvist took a step closer. ‘Are you quite certain?’
‘Yes, I am. He wasn’t one of these men.’
Sundkvist nodded at the window.
‘They’re going to walk in a circle now, one at a time. I want you to watch carefully.’
The man furthest to the left, number 1, took a few steps forward and walked slowly round the relatively spacious room. Her eyes followed him. She saw him this time, his slightly rolling gait, a self-assured way of moving. It was him.
That was Lang all right.
Bugger, bugger Hilding.
She saw him return to the line. It was number 2’s turn. The men ceased to look alike as she watched one after the other do the circuit of the room. They had all looked the same before when they were standing still, and now she saw their differences.
DI Sundkvist had been standing next to her, silently observing the parade. He turned to her when number 10 was back in his place.
‘So you’ve seen them again now: their faces, how they moved, their posture and so on. I need to know if you recognise any one of them.’
Lisa didn’t look at him. She couldn’t.
‘No.’
‘Nobody?’
‘Nobody.’
Sven took a step closer and tried to meet her evasive eyes.
‘Are you quite certain? Positive that none of these men was the one you observed before he killed Hilding Oldéus, your brother?’
He looked at the woman in front of him. Her reaction surprised him. The death of her brother did not seem to sadden her. Instead it seemed to make her angry, or something akin to that.
‘You’re thinking about sisterly love, aren’t you? I did love him once, the Hilding I grew up with. But not the one who died yesterday. That was Hilding the heroin addict. I hated him and hated the person he forced me to become.’
She swallowed. Everything she felt inside, the rage and hatred and fear and panic. She tried to swallow it all.
‘Anyway, I repeat, I don’t recognise any of the men in there.’
‘You haven’t seen any of them before?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘You are absolutely certain?’
The lawyer, who had come into the room last, spoke up for the first time. He was a man in his forties, dressed formally in suit and tie. His voice was edgy, almost upset.
‘That is surely enough, Inspector. The witness has stated quite clearly that she doesn’t recognise anyone, still you keep pressurising her.’
‘Not at all. There is a discrepancy between Dr Öhrström’s response today and her previous witness statement.’
‘You’re using undue pressure.’
The lawyer came closer to Sven.
‘And now I must insist that you let Mr Lang go. At once. You can’t hold him.’
Sven took the lawyer’s arm and led him towards the door.
‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I know the rules, don’t worry, but we still have some things to discuss.’
Once the lawyer had been ushered out of the room, Sven checked that the door was properly closed. Lisa had turned towards the viewing window, staring at it, into the empty room behind.
‘I don’t understand.’
Sven went over to the window and stood between her and the empty room.
‘I don’t understand. Do you remember our interview yesterday?’
Lisa’s neck blushed, her eyes pleaded.
‘Yes.’
‘Then you also recall what you said?’
‘Yes.’
‘You identified the man on photograph thirty-two. I told you that his name was Jochum Lang. You said, several times, that you were certain that he was the man who had injured and killed Hilding Oldéus. I know it and you know it, which is why I fail to understand why, when you see him directly in front of you today, you come nowhere near even a tentative identification.’
She didn’t answer, just shook her head and looked fixedly at the floor.
‘Have you been threatened?’
He waited for her reply. It didn’t come.
‘That’s how he usually operates. He silences people with threats. It allows him to carry on maltreating people at will.’
Sven was still trying to meet her eyes, still waiting.
Finally she looked up. She wanted to avoid this, but she stood her ground.
‘I’m sorry, Inspector. I really am sorry. Please understand – I have a niece and a nephew. I love them dearly.’
‘You do understand, don’t you?’
The morning traffic had died down and it had been easy to cross the city centre. The motorway was clear and the journey took about half an hour this time. Suddenly he was there, for the second time in less than twelve hours.
Lena was happy to see him.
She came outside, stood on the steps waiting and then gave him a hug. Ewert was not used to physical contact and his first instinct was to back away, but he didn’t. They needed it, both of them.
She went in to get a jacket as the air was chilly, even though the rain had stopped. It was that kind of summer, no real warmth.
For almost twenty minutes they walked together in silence, deep in thought, following the path across the fields towards the Norsborg reservoirs. Then she asked again who that woman was. The girl who had shot Bengt, the one who had lain beside him on the floor.
Ewert asked her if it was important and she nodded. She wanted to know, but couldn’t bear to explain. He stood still, telling her about the first time he had seen Lydia Grajauskas, inside a flat with an electronic lock, where she had been beaten senseless, with great red, swollen welts all over her back.
She listened, walked on a little, then asked another question.
‘What did she look like?’
‘How do you mean? When she was dead?’
‘No, before that. I want a picture of who she was. She has taken the rest of our life together, Ewert. I know that you, of all people, can understand that. I watched the news for as long as I could bear. Then as soon as I woke up this morning I looked through both the morning papers, but there are no pictures of her. Maybe there aren’t any anywhere. Or maybe what she looked like doesn’t matter to anyone else. Maybe what people need is to know what she did, how she ended up.’
The rest of our life together.
Ewert had thought exactly that, said it too.
A wind had started to blow. He buttoned his jacket while they walked. I’ve got them here, he thought. In my inside pocket – the photographs we got from the Lithuanian police.
Lena, I have that bloody video too. The one that will soon disappear. There’s so much that you must never know.
‘I have a photo.’
‘A photo?’
‘Yes.’
He unbuttoned enough to get the envelope out and handed over a black-and-white photograph of a girl.
The girl was smiling. Her long blonde hair was pulled back and held with a ribbon tied into a bow.
‘That’s her. Lydia Grajauskas. She was twenty. From Klaipeda. The picture was taken about three years ago. She disappeared soon afterwards.’
Lena stood very still, fingering the photo, touching the face as if seeking something she could recognise.
‘She’s pretty.’
Lena wanted to say more, he could sense it, but she only looked at the picture of the girl who had killed the most important person in her life.
She said nothing.
Sven had got home late last night.
Anita had been waiting for him in the kitchen when he arrived a little before midnight, just as she said she would. He held her tight and then went to fetch a silver candelabra they were both very fond of. He lit the white candles and they looked at each other. They drank wine and ate half the birthday cake by candlelight, celebrating the start of his forty-second year.
Later he went upstairs to see Jonas, kissed him on the forehead and instantly regretted it when the boy woke and seemed confused, mumbling something inaudible. Sven stayed by his bedside, gently caressing his cheek, until Jonas fell asleep again. He found Anita in the bathroom and told her how lovely she was. He held her hand hard when they went to bed. She was naked, and afterwards they went to sleep in each other’s arms.
He had woken early.
Their little house was very quiet when he left.
He realised he was being a bit keen – they had a photo identification after all – but as soon as he got to his office he had contacted Lisa Öhrström and asked her to come in for an identity parade that morning. He was aware that it would be seen as unprofessional to put a witness through two identifications, but the pressure was on and he wanted to make sure. They needed all they could get to persuade the prosecutor, Ågestam, that he must not let Lang go free, not this time.
Which was why he was furious when he left Dr Öhrström by the one-way window that separated her from the ten men who were lined up with numbers on their chests. He tried not to show it, because he knew in his heart of hearts that she was not to blame. If anything, she was a victim too, terrified by the death threats. But he didn’t manage to control himself. He became sarcastic and condescending.
He hurried out, made his way to the Kronoberg interview room.
Lang would not be released.
Roadworks somewhere between Skärholmen and Fruängen made Ewert bang the dashboard and shout out loud. He was in a hurry to get back, would pass by Kronoberg and the City Police Building to run a quick errand, then walk over to the St Erik’s Street restaurant where he had just arranged to meet Sven for lunch.
He knew he wasn’t any good. He had stood with his arm around Lena and tried to say the kind of things he felt he ought to say, all the while feeling useless. He wasn’t any good at hugging or comforting people; he never had been. While the wind blew across the fields, Lena had stood with the photo of the Lithuanian girl clutched in her hand, until he gently made her give it back.
Why had he gone to see her? All he had done was intrude into her grief. Was it because he missed Bengt? Because there was nobody else for her just now? Or because he himself had nobody?
The cars crawled ahead, three lanes merged into one. The minutes dripped off his forehead. He would be late. He had no choice.
He had to get to the office electronics store before lunch.
Sven would have to wait.
The interview room was as bleak as ever.
When Sven got there he was out of breath, his anger had propelled him through the building at an unnecessary speed. Lang was sitting at the table. He was smoking and didn’t even look up.
Sven Sundkvist, interview leader (IL): You visited Hilding Oldéus, who was in one of the medical wards at the Söder Hospital, immediately before he died from the injuries inflicted on him.
Jochum Lang (JL): That’s what you say.
IL: We have a witness.
JL: Really, Sundkvist? That’s good news. You could bring them here and set up an identity parade.
IL: The witness showed you to the ward where Oldéus was.
JL: You know what I mean, don’t you? Like, they come along and look at me and nine other blokes through a one-way window. Fucking brilliant. You do it, Sundkvist.
Sven was raging inside. The man opposite him was trying to make him lose control and was close to succeeding. Must keep calm, must ask my questions and no matter what he says, just keep asking until I get what I want.
He saw that Jochum Lang was smiling. His lawyer would already have informed him that the parade had been a washout. Lawyers were quick off the mark with that kind of thing. Never mind, no way was this ruthless thug going to leave, not yet.
He was going to answer the questions again and sooner or later he would say more than he wanted to, enough to satisfy Ågestam that he should keep the suspect locked up and carry on with his preliminary investigation.
IL: We picked you up in a BMW that was parked illegally at the hospital entrance.
JL: Busy man, aren’t you? No idea you did parking fines as well.
IL: Why were you sitting in the passenger seat of a car left inside the cordoned-off area?
JL: I can sit wherever I fucking like.
IL: We won’t let you go this time.
JL: Sundkvist, get off my back. You’d better return me to the fucking cells! Or else I might do something that I could be charged for.
It was ten minutes past twelve when Ewert parked outside the police building. Sven was probably waiting impatiently in the restaurant by now.
He hurried inside, down the corridor leading to his room, and stopped near the coffee machine. Not for a coffee, though; he went into the storeroom, which was next to it, just where Hermansson had said.
Brown cardboard boxes containing blank videocassettes were stacked on shelves at the back of the stale-smelling little room. He took one out, tore off the plastic cover and checked that it looked exactly like all other videotapes. Then he went to his office, picked up Grajauskas’s carrier bag and placed the new video in it.
Lena’s shame? Or hers?
Lena was alive. She was dead.
Grajauskas’s true story did not exist any more. Well, it did, deep down in the water off Slagsta beach, where he had stopped on the way back from Eriksberg. The burden of shame is so much heavier when you’re alive.
Ewert yawned and swung the carrier bag with the new videotape in it a couple of times. Then he put it back in the box with the rest of her belongings.
Ewert found a table in one of the furthest, darkest corners, where he was unlikely to be seen by someone who had just stepped inside for a look. What a dump, he thought, this small restaurant on the busy corner of St Erik’s Street and Fleming Street, quite a walk from Kronoberg. Too bad. He had no choice. Reporters had been chasing him all over the Kungsholmen area and knew where he usually went for lunch. He had been on his way there when he spotted a few hacks already buzzing about outside.
He wouldn’t give them any answers. He’d give them nothing. The police press officers could work for their wages, they could explain as little as possible at one of those press conferences where everybody shouted at the same time.
He had turned on his heels, phoned Sven who was already sitting in there waiting, and walked to a place he knew a few blocks away where he had sheltered before when someone’s death had caused excited headlines and words. Here he would be left in peace to consume the foul food.
He picked up a newspaper someone had left behind, opening to a six-page news feature about the hostage drama at Söder Hospital.
‘I had just been served, you know.’ Sven patted him on the shoulder. ‘That’s sixty-five kronors’ worth down the drain.’
He sat down, looked around and shook his head.
‘And for what? Great place you’ve chosen.’
‘At least nobody hangs around asking questions here.’
‘I can see why.’
They ordered beef stew, Skåne style. Served with pickled beetroot.
‘How is she?’
‘Lena?’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s grieving.’
‘She needs you to be with her.’
Ewert sighed, shifted about restlessly on his chair and put the paper down.
‘Sven, I have no idea what you’re supposed to do or say. I’m no good at things like that. Take this morning. Lena wanted to see what Grajauskas looked like and I showed her the photo.’
‘If that’s what she wanted.’
‘I’m not sure. It didn’t feel right. Her reaction was odd, as if she didn’t . . . almost as if she recognized Grajauskas. She looked at the picture, touched it and tried to say something, but didn’t.’
‘She is still in shock.’
‘She doesn’t need to know what her husband’s dead killer looked like. I felt like I was rubbing it in her face.’
A few pieces of meat, swimming in gravy. They ate because they had to.
‘Ewert.’
‘What?’
‘This morning was a complete disaster.’
Ewert chased a slice of beetroot across his plate, but gave up when it sank in a pool of brown gravy-powder sludge.
‘Do I want to know this?’
‘Not really.’
Sven relived the morning.
He had sensed Lisa Öhrström’s fear and unwillingness from the moment they met, he said, and went on to describe the line-up, her first negative and his request that she should observe the men moving. All the time, he was aware that she neither dared nor wanted to engage with what she was shown. Then her give-away plea that she loved her nephew and niece, his own anger when he realised that she had been intimidated and her refusal to substantiate her earlier statement. Finally her shame, and the lawyer who insisted that Lang should be released.
Sven knew what would happen next.
Putting down his knife and fork, Ewert went bright red in the face, his eyes narrowed, a blood vessel began to pulsate at his temple. He was just about to thump the table when Sven grabbed his arm.
‘Ewert. Not here. We don’t want to attract attention.’
Grens’s breathing was ragged and sheer rage made his voice fall into a low register.
‘What the hell are you saying, Sven?’
He got up and walked round the table, kicking each one of its legs.
‘Ewert, I’m just as mad as you are. But pack it in now, we’re not in the office.’
He remained standing.
‘Intimidation! Lang threatened the doctor! Threatened the kids!’
Sven hesitated before he continued. The strange morning replayed in his mind. He took a small audio recorder from his jacket pocket and put it on the table between their half-eaten platefuls.
‘I questioned Lang afterwards. Listen to this.’
Two voices.
One wanting to talk. The other determined to end the conversation.
Ewert listened with concentrated attention, his every muscle tensing when Jochum Lang spoke. When it was all over and Sven switched the tape recorder off, Ewert came to life.
‘Play that again. Only the last bit.’
Sounds, a chair scraping on the floor, someone breathing. Then Lang’s voice.
‘Sundkvist, get off my back. You’d better return me to the fucking cells! Or else I might do something that I could be charged for.’
This time Ewert howled, and every one of the few remaining customers turned to stare at the big man in the far corner standing by a table waving his fist in the air.
‘Ewert! For Christ’s sake! Sit down.’
‘That’s it! There’s no way I’ll let Lang decide any more. He’ll stay put in the cells and I don’t give a rat’s ass about the consequences.’
He was still standing. He pointed at Sven. ‘Her telephone number. Lisa Öhrström’s.’
‘Why?’
‘Do you have it or don’t you? Give me her number! We’re going to do some real police work, you and I, right here in the restaurant.’
The waitress, a girl rather than a woman, approached their table timidly and appealed to Sven, ignoring Ewert. It took great effort for her to tell them to please be quieter, show some respect for the other guests or she would have to call the police. Sven apologised and promised it wouldn’t happen again. They were just about to leave, could they have the bill?
‘Here.’ He handed Ewert his opened pocket diary. Dr Öhrström’s phone number was neatly written down. Ewert smiled. All the case contact names were ordered alphabetically. That was how he operated, this young colleague of his.
He got out his mobile phone and dialled her number. He caught her somewhere on the ward. She had gone in to work immediately after the identity parade.
‘Dr Öhrström? DSI Ewert Grens speaking. In an hour I’ll fax you some photographs. I want you to have a good look at them.’
She paused, as if she was trying to work out what he had said.
‘Please explain. What is this about?’
‘Robbery, grievous bodily harm and murder.’
‘I still don’t understand.’
‘What’s your fax number?’
Another pause. She wanted nothing to do with whatever it was. ‘Why do I have to see these pictures of yours?’
‘You’ll understand when you see them in an hour’s time. I’ll ring you back.’
Ewert waited impatiently while Sven finished his half of lager and fumbled for the money he said he knew he had somewhere. Ewert waved this away. No problem, he’d pay for both of them. He handed over a larger tip than the food had deserved.
They were just about to step out from the smell of stew into the snarled-up traffic on St Erik’s Street when Ewert spied two journalists of the kind he definitely wanted to avoid. He pushed Sven back into the restaurant, kept the door ajar and waited until they passed and disappeared down the street.
Back in his room, Ewert picked up a couple of black-and-white photographs and went off to find the fax machine.
‘Sir?’
There she was. She had laughed at him earlier on that morning.
‘Hermansson. You promised me a report after lunch. It’s after lunch now.’
He wondered if he sounded brusque. He hadn’t meant to.
‘It’s done.’
‘And?’
‘I’ve gone through all the statements now. Quite a few interesting points have turned up.’
Ewert was holding the photos and she gestured to him, Fax them, of course, I’ll wait, but he put them down and asked her to elaborate.
‘Take the hospital guard’s account. He mentions a woman who walked past and went into the toilet at the end of the corridor just before Grajauskas went in. From his description, I’m sure it was her friend Alena Sljusareva.’
He listened to her and remembered this morning, when he had praised her and then felt awkward, weak and exposed. He hadn’t quite understood why, still didn’t. He wasn’t normally laughed at by young women.
‘The next statement I read was given by the two lads who were sitting next to Grajauskas, watching the lunchtime news. One of them remembers the same woman going by and his description is identical to that of the guard. A perfect description of Alena Sljusareva again. I’m positive.’
Hermansson had brought a folder full of papers, a twenty-four-hour-old investigation into a murder and a suicide in a hospital mortuary. She handed it to him.
‘It was her, Grens. Sljusareva supplied Grajauskas with the firearm and explosives, I’m sure. In other words, she is an accessory to aggravated kidnap and murder. We’ll find her soon. She has got nowhere to go.’
Ewert took the folder and cleared his throat. The young detective was already walking away.
‘Look, Hermansson.’
She stopped.
‘By the way. You’re the second policewoman I’ve praised. And I ought to do it again, it seems.’
She shook her head.
‘Thanks. But that’s enough for now.’
She started to walk away again, when he asked her to wait. One more question.
‘What you said this morning. Am I to take it that you think I have a problem with female officers?’
‘Yes. That’s what I meant.’
Not a moment’s hesitation. She was as calm and matter-of-fact as ever, and he felt just as exposed.
He took the point, though, and remembered Anni.
He cleared his throat again and got himself a coffee from the machine. He needed the simplicity of it, black and hot in a plastic cup. It calmed him down and he pressed for a refill. He knew why he had a problem with female officers. With women in general. Twenty-five years. That was how long it was since he had held a woman in his arms. He could hardly remember what it felt like, but knew he missed it, what he couldn’t remember.
One more.
He drank the last coffee slowly. Mustn’t allow himself more than three, so better savour the peaceful feeling it gave him. He sipped and swallowed and sipped and swallowed until he realised that he was still holding the photographs.
He glanced at them, certain that they’d do the trick.
Lisa Öhrström replied after five rings.
‘One hour exactly. You’re very punctual.’
‘Please go to your fax.’
He heard her walk down the corridor, visualised the layout of the ward and knew where she was standing.
‘All right?’
‘Coming through.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t understand what it is you want.’
‘Describe what you see.’
He waited.
She sighed. He waited until she was ready to speak.
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘You’re the doctor. Look at the pictures. What do you see?’
Lisa Öhrström was silent. He could hear her breathing, but she said nothing.
‘It’s a hand, a left hand, with three fractured fingers.’
‘The thumb. Is that right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Five thousand kronor.’
‘I’m sorry? I don’t understand.’
‘Index finger is one thousand, little finger is one thousand.’
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘Jochum Lang’s rates and his trademark. The photo was taken by a technician during an investigation into a case of GBH, which was later dropped. This guy, with a pretty useless hand, owed seven thousand kronor. One of Lang’s victims. That’s how he operates, the man you are protecting. And he’ll carry on doing this kind of thing for as long as people like you protect him.’
He said nothing more, just waited for a while before putting the receiver down. She would sit there with the three broken fingers in front of her until he got in touch again. A door opened along the corridor and Ewert turned to look. Sven was hurrying towards him with swift footsteps.
‘Ewert, they phoned just now.’
Ewert sat down on top of the fax. His leg ached the way it sometimes did and he didn’t register the machine’s thin plastic cover creaking under his weight. Sven did, but couldn’t be bothered to say anything. He looked at his boss.
‘From the ferry port. A Russian interpreter is on the way.’
‘And?’
‘She was about to board the boat to Lithuania.’
Ewert waved his arms about impatiently.
‘What’s this about?’
‘Alena Sljusareva. They’ve arrested her, just minutes ago.’
They had talked about it so many times.
He had sat with Bengt in interview rooms and pubs, in Bengt’s garden or sitting room, and time and again they had ended up talking about the truth and agreed that when all is said and done, it’s bloody simple, there’s the truth and the rest is lies. And truth is the only thing that people can bear to live with in the long run. Everything else is bullshit.
Lies feed on each other, one lie leads to another and then to another, until you’re so hopelessly caught up in the tangle that you no longer recognise the truth, even when that is all you have.
Their friendship had been built on this respect for the truth, their shared belief that you should always dare to say what you think, even when it saps your strength or undermines your position. Now and then, when one of them realised that the other was being evasive, maybe keeping quiet out of kindness, they would have a row, shout at each other, slam the door to the corridor shut and only open it again when everything had come out – the truth.
Ewert shuddered. What a bloody lie! How had he believed that he and Bengt shared the truth and nothing but the truth?
He sat hunched over his desk, his thoughts circling a video that he had carried around for the best part of a day and night, only to let it sink to the bottom of Lake Mälaren.
And now I’m lying.
Lying for Lena’s sake.
The plain truth.
I’m lying in order to protect your lie.
Ewert Grens pulled over a cardboard box that was sitting on the edge of his desk. He leaned forward, opened the lid and peered inside. The contents belonged to Alena Sljusareva. She had been arrested a few hours earlier by two policemen, who had also impounded all she carried with her.
Ewert turned the box upside down. Her life scattered over his desk. Nothing much to it, only the essentials for someone on the run. He picked over her possessions, one by one.
A money clip with a few thousand kronor, her pay for opening her legs twelve times a day for three years.
A diary. He broke the lock and leafed through it. Cyrillic letters making up lots of words he didn’t understand.
A pair of sunglasses. Cheap plastic, the kind you buy when you have to.
A mobile phone. The model was quite up to date, more functions than anyone could ever cope with.
A single ticket for the ferry from Stockholm to Klaipeda for today, 6 June. He checked his watch. The ticket had ceased to be valid.
He started putting her life back in the box, read the chain-of-custody list, signed it and put it in with the rest.
Ewert knew more than he wanted to. Now he had to interrogate her. And she would repeat exactly the things he didn’t want to hear. So he would listen and forget, tell her to pack her bag and go home.
For Lena’s sake. Not for you. But for her.
He rose, followed the corridors to the lift that would take him to the custody cells. The duty officer was expecting him and led the way to the cell where Alena had spent the last hour and a half. The officer used the small square hole in the door to check on the prisoner. She was sitting on the narrow bunk, doubled up, her head resting on her knees. Her long dark hair almost reached the floor.
The guard unlocked and opened the door and Ewert stepped into the tired little room. She looked up. Her eyes . . . she had been crying. He nodded a greeting.
‘I am Detective Superintendent Grens. I believe you speak Swedish?’
‘I do, a bit.’
‘Good. I am going to ask you some questions now. We are going to sit here, in the cell, with the tape recorder between us. Do you understand?’
‘Why?’
Alena Sljusareva tried to make herself smaller. She did that sometimes when someone had been too rough, when her genitals hurt, when she hoped no one would look at her.
Ewert Grens, interview leader (IL): Do you remember seeing me before?
Alena Sljusareva (AS): In the flat. You’re the policeman who hit a stick on his stomach. Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp. He fell down.
IL: You saw me doing that, but you ran away all the same?
AS: I saw Bengt Nordwall too. I panicked. I just wanted to run away.
He was sitting on a hard bunk in a police cell, next to a young woman from a Baltic state; his back ached from sleeping for a few hours on the office sofa and his leg ached as usual. His breathing was laboured, he was tired and he didn’t want to be there any longer. He didn’t want to destroy the one thing he had left, his pride, his identity. He hated the lie that he had to live with, that forced him to carry on lying.
AS: I know now. Lydia is dead.
IL: Yes, she is.
AS: I know now.
IL: Before she died, she shot an innocent policeman dead. Then she killed herself, one shot through the head, using the same gun. A nine-millimetre Pistolet Makarova. I would very much like to know how she got hold of that gun.
AS: She is dead. She is really dead! I know now.
She had kept hoping, as one does. If I don’t know whatever it is, it hasn’t happened.
Alena crossed herself and burst into tears. She wept bitterly, the way you weep only when you finally understand that a person, whom you will miss, no longer exists.
Silently Ewert waited for her to stop, watching the tape unwind. Then he repeated his question.
IL: A nine-millimetre Pistolet Makarova.
AS: [inaudible]
IL: And plastic explosives.
AS: It was me.
IL: Me?
AS: I went to get it.
IL: Where from?
AS: The same place.
IL: Where is that?
AS: Völund Street. The basement.
Grens slammed his fist into the tape recorder, almost hitting her. How the hell had this broken, scared girl on the run managed to slip past the guard outside the building, raid the basement and carry off enough explosives to blow up a substantial part of a large hospital?
He frightened her, this man who hit out, just like the rest. She made herself smaller still.
He apologised and promised not to do it again.
IL: You knew what she was going to use it for.
AS: No.
IL: You handed over a loaded gun, without asking why?
AS: I knew nothing. And I asked nothing.
IL: She didn’t explain?
AS: She knew that if she did I would have insisted on being there.
Ewert switched off the recorder and removed the tape. The lie. Questions and answers which would never be transcribed. This cassette must vanish, just like the film of their shared story had vanished.
He looked at her, she looked away: didn’t want anything more to do with him.
‘You’re going home.’
‘Home? Now?’
‘Now.’
Alena Sljusareva got up quickly, stuck her feet in the regulation prison slip-ons, pulled her fingers through her hair and tugged at her blouse.
They had promised each other that they would go home together. That would never happen now.
Lydia was dead.
She was on her own now.
Ewert called a taxi. The fewer police involved, the better. He escorted her to the Berg Street door. An older man with his younger woman, or perhaps a father with his grown-up daughter. Few passers-by would have guessed at a detective superintendent from Homicide sending a prostitute back home.
Alena sat in the back as the taxi manoeuvred through the city afternoon traffic, from Norr Mälarstrand to Stureplan, down Valhalla Way to join Lidingö Way, the route to the harbour. She would never come back here, never; she would never leave Lithuania again. She knew that; she had completed her journey.
Ewert paid the taxi driver and accompanied Alena into the ferry terminal. The next departure for Klaipeda was in two hours’ time. He bought her a ticket and she held it tightly, determined not to let go until she arrived in her home town.
It was so hard to imagine it, the place she had left as a girl of seventeen. She hadn’t hesitated for long when the two men had offered her a good, well-paid job only a boat trip away. All she was leaving behind was poverty, and little hope of change. Besides, she’d be back in a few months. She hadn’t discussed it with anyone, not even Janoz. She couldn’t remember why.
She had been a different person then. Just three years ago, but it was another life, another time. Now she had lived more than her peers.
Had he tried to find her? Wondered where she was? She saw Janoz, had kept an image of him in her mind that they had never managed to take away. They had penetrated her and they had spat at her, but they had never been able to get at what she had refused to let go of. Was he still there? Was he alive? What would he look like now?
Ewert told her to come along to the cafeteria at the far end of the terminal and bought her a coffee and a sandwich. She thanked him and ate. He bought two newspapers as well. They settled down to read until it was time to go on board.
The day was not over yet.
Lena Nordwall was sitting at the kitchen table and staring at something or other. When you stared, it had to be at something.
How long would it take? Two days? Three? One week? One year? Never?
She didn’t need to understand. She didn’t need to. Not yet. Did she?
Someone was sitting behind her. She sensed it now. Someone in the hall, at the bottom of the stairs. She turned; her daughter was looking at her, in silence.
‘How long have you been there?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Why aren’t you outside playing?’
‘’Cause it’s raining.’
Their daughter was five years old. Her daughter was five years old. Her daughter. No matter how hard she searched, she wouldn’t find another adult in this house now. She was the only one, alone. The responsibility was hers. The future.
‘Mummy, how long will it be?’
‘How long will what be?’
‘How long will Daddy be dead for?’
Her daughter’s name was Elin. Lena hadn’t noticed that she still had her wet, muddy wellie boots on. The little girl got up and walked to the kitchen table, leaving a trail of wet soil. Lena didn’t see it.
‘When will he come back home?’
Elin sat down on the chair next to her mother. Lena noted this, but nothing else, nor did she really hear that Elin kept asking questions.
‘Won’t he come home, ever?’
Her daughter reached out a hand and stroked her cheek; she could only just reach.
‘Where is he?’
‘Your daddy is asleep.’
‘When will he wake up?’
‘He won’t wake up.’
‘Why not?’
Her daughter sat there throwing questions at her. Each one made a physical impact; she was being bombarded with these things that crawled over her before boring into her skin, into her body. She stood up. No more attacking words. Enough. She shouted at the child, who was trying to understand.
‘Stop it! Stop asking questions!’
‘I can’t . . . it’s too much, can’t you see that? I can’t bear it!’
She almost struck the child. The impulse was there – it came in an instant, as the questions crashed against her head. Up went her arm. She could have slapped her, but she didn’t. She never had. She burst into tears, sat down again and hugged her daughter close. Her daughter.
Sven had laughed out loud as he walked back alone from the sad little restaurant to Kronoberg. It wasn’t the food, even though that was laughable, those small, fatty pieces of meat in slimy powder gravy. He had laughed at Ewert. He thought of his colleague marching round the table, kicking its legs and then stopping to curse the tape recorder and Lang’s threatening voice, until the waitress tiptoed over to ask him to calm down or she’d have to call the police.
Sven had burst out laughing without thinking and two women walking towards him looked concerned. One of them mumbled something about alcohol and not being in control. He took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Ewert Grens was a lot of things, but at least he was never boring.
Ewert was going to question Sljusareva, good. Sven Sundkvist felt sure that she had information that would help them understand more about the case. He decided to abandon the Lang case for the moment, concentrate on the hostage-taking instead, and walked faster, hurrying back to his office. The mortuary business made him feel deeply disturbed, and not just because it was all about death.
There was something else, something incomprehensible. Grajauskas had been so driven and brutal. Medics held hostage with a gun to their heads, corpses blown apart, her demand for Nordwall, only to shoot him and then herself. All that without letting them know what it was she really wanted.
Back at his desk he ran through the events again, scrutinising 5 June minute by minute, noting the exact time for each new development. He started at 12.15, when Lydia Grajauskas had been sitting on a sofa in the surgical ward watching the news, and ended at 16.10, when several people agreed that they had heard the sound of two gunshots in their earpieces. The two shots had been followed by one more. Then a great crash, when the Flying Squad men forced the door.
He read the statements made by the hostages. The older man, Dr Ejder, and the four students seemed to have the same impression of Grajauskas. They described her as calm and careful to make sure she stayed in control at all times. Also, she had not hurt anyone, except Larsen who had attacked her. Their descriptions gave a good picture, but not what he needed most. Why had she acted like this?
He went through the chain-of-custody list and the technical summary of the state of the mortuary at around 16.17, but no new angles came to mind. All very predictable, nothing he hadn’t expected.
Except that.
He read the two lines several times.
A videotape had been found in her carrier bag. The cassette had no sleeve, but had been labelled in Cyrillic script.
They swapped newspapers. He bought them another cup of coffee and a portion of apple pie and custard each. She ate the pie with the same hearty appetite as the sandwich.
Ewert observed the woman opposite him.
She was pretty. Not that it mattered, but she was lovely to look at.
She should have stayed at home. What a bloody waste. So young, so much ahead of her, and then . . . what? To be exploited every day by randy family men looking for a change from mowing the lawn. From their ageing wives and demanding kids.
Such a terrible waste. He shook his head and waited until she had finished chewing and put her spoon down.
He had brought it in his briefcase, and now he put it on the table.
‘Have you seen this before?’
A blue notebook. She shrugged. ‘No, I haven’t.’
He opened it to the first page and pushed it across the table so she could see it.
‘Do you understand what it says here?’
Alena read a few lines and then looked up at him. ‘Where did you find this?’
‘Next to her bed in the hospital. The only thing that was hers. Seemed to be, anyway. Is it hers?’
‘It’s Lydia’s handwriting.’
He explained that because it was in Lithuanian, no one had been able to translate the text during the hostage crisis, when she was still alive.
While Bengt was alive, he thought. While his lie didn’t yet exist.
Alena leafed through the book, then read the five pages of text and translated it for him. Everything.
Everything that had happened barely twenty-four hours earlier.
In detail.
Grajauskas had planned and written down precisely what she later put into action. She had worked out how the weapons would be delivered, together with a ball of string and the video, and left in a toilet waste bin. That she would hit the guard over the head, walk to the mortuary, take hostages, blow up corpses. And demand the services of an interpreter called Bengt Nordwall.
Ewert listened. Now and then he swallowed. It was all there, in black and white. If only I had known. If only I had had this stuff translated. I would never have sent him down there. He would have been alive now.
You would have lived!
If only you hadn’t gone down there, you would be alive.
You must have known!
You could have spoken to me. Or to her.
If only you had admitted that you knew who she was. At least you could have given her that.
Then you would still be alive.
She never wanted to shoot you.
She wanted confirmation that what had happened in those flats wasn’t her fault. That she had never chosen to wait around, ready to undress for all those men.
Alena Sljusareva asked if she could keep the notebook. Ewert shook his head, grabbed the blue cover and put it away in his briefcase. He waited until twenty minutes before the departure time, then accompanied her to the exit. Alena had her ticket in her hand, showed it to a uniformed woman in the booth, then turned to him and thanked him. Ewert wished her a good trip.
He left her in the queue of passengers and went over to a corner of the terminal building from where he had an overview of people arriving off the ferry, as well as those waiting to go on board. Leaning against a pillar, he tried to think about the other ongoing investigation, about Lang in his cell and Öhrström studying the faxed pictures. She would soon get some more. But his mind drifted, he was too preoccupied with the two women from Klaipeda. Absently he observed the strangers milling about, something he had always enjoyed doing. The arrivals walked with the sea still in their bodies. They all had somewhere to go, the ones with red cheeks and large duty-free bags full of spirits who had drunk, danced and flirted the night away before falling asleep alone in their cabins below deck. Others dressed in their best clothes had been saving for years for a week’s holiday in Sweden, on the other side of the Baltic. And there were a few who wore rumpled clothes and had no luggage at all, having left in a hurry just to get away. He studied them all – it was all he could bear to do right now – and forgot about time for a while.
Alena Sljusareva would be on her way soon.
Ewert was just about to walk away when he saw what was probably the last group of passengers coming off the ferry.
He recognised him immediately.
After all, it was less than two days since he had seen this man at Arlanda being given a dressing down by a plump little Lithuanian diplomat, and then manhandled through security flanked by two big lads there to see him off on the one-hour flight to Vilnius.
Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp.
He was wearing the same suit that he had been wearing when he was escorted up the steps to the plane, the shiny suit he had had on when he stood blocking the broken-down doorway on the fifth floor, having flogged Lydia Grajauskas unconscious two days earlier.
And he wasn’t alone. Once through passport control, he waited for two young women, or rather girls, sixteen or seventeen years old. He held out his hand and they both gave him something they had ready for him. Ewert didn’t need to see any more to know what it was.
Their passports.
In debt already.
A woman wearing a tracksuit with the hood pulled down over her head hurried forwards to meet the little group, keeping her back turned. Ewert watched her as she greeted the three arrivals and, as he believed was customary in the Baltic states, kissed them all, light little kisses on the cheek. Then she pointed towards the nearest exit and they followed her. None of them had much luggage.
Ewert felt sick.
Lydia Grajauskas had just shot herself in the temple. Alena Sljusareva had fled and was now only a short voyage from home. Both had been ruthlessly exploited for three years in flats with electronic locks. They had been threatened, abused and had to pretend they were turned on as they were going to pieces inside. And it only took twenty-four hours, twenty-four hours, before they had been replaced. A day and a night was all it took to find two young women who had no idea of what lay ahead, who would be trained to smile when they were spat at, so that those who traded money for sex could still count on one hundred and fifty thousand kronor per girl every month.
In a couple of minutes, the ferry would pull away from the quay. He stayed where he was. They disappeared in the crowd, the hooded Baltic woman, Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp and the girls, barely old enough to have breasts, teenagers who had just given away their passports.
There was nothing he could do, not now. Lydia and Alena had dared to question and fight back, but that was unusual. At least, it was the first time Ewert had heard about it. The two new girls were children, frail and scared. They would never dare to testify at this point, and that motherfucking pimp would deny everything.
Consequently, no crime existed yet.
Maybe it didn’t, but he was sure that he or a colleague would come across them. There was no telling where or when, but sooner or later they too would go straight to hell.
As soon as Sven had seen the entry in the technical account – one videotape in a plastic bag with two sets of fingerprints, identified as Lydia Grajauskas’s and Alena Sljusareva’s – he put everything else to one side. First he looked for it in the forensic science department, where it should be.
It wasn’t there.
He asked the language experts, who might have taken an interest in the Cyrillic writing, and the night duty crew.
It wasn’t there either.
He also drew a blank in the impounded property store, which was the last of the likely places. Not there.
His stomach was contracting again. A sense of unease that grew and intensified, turning into irritation, and then into anger, which wasn’t like him, and he hated it.
He located the technician who had been first on the scene, good old Nils Krantz, who had been around for as long as Sven could remember, and well before that. Krantz was at work, a domestic violence case in a flat in Regering Street, but he took time off to speak to Sven on the phone. He described where they had found the video, what they had found with it, basically confirming what Sven already knew from the documentation.
‘Good, thanks. And what was on the tape?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, what was on the tape?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘That’s not my job. It’s up to you lot.’
‘That’s why I’m investigating it.’
Sven hung on while Krantz talked to someone in the room for maybe half a minute.
‘Anything else you want to know?’
‘One more thing. Where is it now? The tape, I mean.’
Krantz gave an exasperated laugh. ‘Don’t you lads ever speak to each other?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Ask Grens.’
‘Ewert?’
‘He wanted the tape. I handed it over to him after we had done the prints. You know, down in the mortuary.’
Sven took a deep breath. Pain in his stomach, irritation. And definitely anger.
He got up from his desk, went to Ewert’s office four doors down, and knocked.
He knew that Ewert was interviewing Alena Sljusareva. He tried the door. It wasn’t locked.
He went in and scanned the room. It was an odd feeling. He was there to pick up a scene-of-crime item, but in that instant was an intruder, entering unbidden and without permission. He couldn’t remember ever having been in Ewert’s office alone. Had anybody? He only had to look for a few seconds. He saw the video on the shelf behind Ewert’s desk, beside the old cassette player that filled the room with Siw Malmkvist. The label on the back was in Cyrillic script, which he couldn’t read.
After putting on plastic gloves, he weighed the videotape in his hand, fingered it pointlessly. She had planned every move in detail, never hesitated, had a motive for every step she had taken towards her death. Sven flipped the video over, felt its smooth surface. This tape was not there by chance. There was a reason for it. She had wanted to show them something.
He left, closing the door carefully, and went along to the meeting room. He loaded the tape. He was sitting in the same chair where Ewert had been sitting the night before.
But watching something different. Jonas, his son, used to call such an image the War of the Ants. A tape with a loud rushing noise and no picture, just a white flicker against a grey background.
This was a tape that shouldn’t exist. It was unregistered, had no entry in the official lists, held no filmed images.
That feeling in his stomach that had been unease earlier had now turned to anger, a sudden rage that made him sick.
Ewert, what the hell are you up to?
Alena was safely on board. The ferry had left the port and was negotiating the Stockholm archipelago on her way to the open sea. Her route crossed the Baltic Sea and ended in Klaipeda. Soon Alena would be home and would never look back.
Ewert Grens waited for a taxi that never came. He swore and called back to find out why. The operator apologised, but she had no record of a taxi request for Grens from the ferry terminal to Berg Street. Should she register a request now? Ewert swore again, launched into a litany that included organisations and bureaucrats and clowns, demanded to know the operator’s name and altogether managed to be more offensive than he cared to remember afterwards.
Then finally a cab turned up and he got in.
He suddenly caught a glimpse of the house on the other side of the bay.
Blood was pouring from her head.
I leaned against the side of the van, holding her, and it never stopped pouring from her ears, her nose, her mouth.
He missed her; he longed for her. The feeling was stronger now than it had been for years, and he didn’t want to wait until next Monday morning. He should tell the driver to go across Lidingö Bridge, past the Milles Museum and stop in the car park outside the nursing home. Ewert would run inside and stay with her. Just be there, together.
But she wasn’t there, not the woman he missed and longed for. She hadn’t existed for twenty-five years.
Lang, you took her from me.
The afternoon traffic was growing heavy and the taxi slowed to a halt more than once. It took half an hour to get to Kronoberg, and by the time he had paid and got out of the car, he had cooled down.
The air felt milder now. The effect of all that rain seemed to be wearing off and summer was making another attempt. The wind had died down and he felt the sun warming him. Weather: he had never got his head round it.
Back in his office he started his music machine and Siw’s voice came through the tinny mono speaker. Together they sang: ‘Lyckans ost’, (1968), original English version ‘Hello Mary Lou’.
Ewert opened the folder on the investigation into the Jochum Lang case. He knew the photos would be there.
He studied them, one at a time. Their subject was a dead person on a floor and the quality was not great. The photographs were grainy and so poorly lit the outlines had become almost blurred. Krantz and his boys were good technicians, no question, but none of them could handle a camera. He sighed, picked three halfway decent ones and put them in an envelope.
Two telephone calls to round off the morning.
First he rang a stressed Lisa Öhrström, who answered from somewhere in the hospital. He told her briskly that he and DI Sundkvist would come to see her soon in order to show her some more pictures. She protested, saying that she had quite enough to do without spending her time on more photos of broken body parts. Ewert replied that he looked forward to seeing her and hung up.
His next call was to Ågestam, who was in his office at the State Prosecution Service. Ewert told the prosecutor that he had someone who was prepared to witness against Jochum Lang in connection with the Oldéus incident, a hospital doctor called Lisa Öhrström, who had unhesitatingly identified Lang as the perpetrator. Ågestam was unprepared for this and asked for further information, but Ewert interrupted him with a reassurance that there would be more to come, conclusive evidence clinching both the current cases by tomorrow morning, when they were due to meet.
She was still singing her heart out, was old Siw. He tuned in and sang along, moving about the room with a bounce in his step. ‘Mamma är lik sin mamma’, (1968), original English version ‘Sadie the Cleaning Lady’.
Not many passers-by noticed the car that had stopped in front of the door to number 3 Völund Street. It was a modest car, driven decorously. The driver was a middle-aged man, who climbed out and opened the rear door for two girls, teenagers of about sixteen or seventeen. They were both pretty and seemed curious about their surroundings.
Could be a father with his daughters.
The girls looked up at the building with its rows of identical windows, as if they hadn’t seen it before. Presumably they didn’t live there, so maybe they were visiting somebody.
The driver locked the car and walked ahead to open the door. Just as he pulled at the door handle, he turned and said something which made one of the girls give a little scream and burst into tears. The other one, who seemed the stronger, put an arm round her, patted her cheek and tried to make her come with them.
In the lobby, the man kept talking and the anxious girl kept crying.
Any native observer would have found their language strange-sounding and incomprehensible, which meant that even if the older man had said something to the effect that they owed him now and that was why he was going to break them in and screw them until they bled, nobody would have understood it.
Sven left the meeting room with the empty videotape in his hand. He stopped for a coffee, added plenty of milk because he needed nourishment but had to be careful. Now that he had become angry, his stomach was in constant protest.
That video was a blank. He was convinced Grajauskas hadn’t intended it, she had planned everything so meticulously and had stage-managed every aspect of her last hours. He knew that her tape had a purpose.
He phoned Krantz again from his office. The technician, still in the Regering Street flat, answered at once, preoccupied and cross.
‘What’s up with the damn tape now?’
‘All I want to know is – was it new?’
‘New?’
‘Had it been used?’
‘Yes, it had been used.’
‘And how do we know that?’
‘I can’t speak for you lot, but I know because when I checked there was dust inside. Another thing I know is that the safety tab had been broken off. Which is what you do if you want to make sure the recorded stuff won’t be wiped.’
Sven inspected the video under the desk lamp. It was so new it shone, not one grain of dust in sight. The safety tab was intact. He spoke again.
‘Krantz, I’m coming to see you.’
‘Later, I don’t have time now.’
‘I want you to look at this videotape again. Krantz, it’s important. Something’s not right.’
Lars Ågestam didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Grens had announced that he was going to provide conclusive data about the deaths of both Lydia Grajauskas and Bengt Nordwall – as well as Hilding Oldéus – and about Alena Sljusareva and Jochum Lang; about two simultaneous catastrophes linked by time and place. Almost a year had passed since he last worked with Ewert Grens. That too had been a strange business, a trial of a father who had shot his daughter’s killer. At the time, Ågestam had been the youngest prosecutor in the state service, keen to land a major case and was then almost crushed when the big one landed in his lap. He had been picked to be in charge of the interrogation, which formally meant that he outranked DSI Grens, a man he had heard much about and admired from a distance and whom he now would work with and against.
They were meant to work together, but their collaboration had been a disaster.
Grens seemed to have decided from the outset that mutuality simply wasn’t on his agenda and, collaboration or not, he couldn’t be bothered even to be civil.
Now Ågestam had a choice, and he decided to laugh, which was the easier option. Fate would have it that he was to work with Grens again, on not one, but two investigations in connection with the events at Söder Hospital. And the argument was – this was when he laughed rather than cried – that they had worked together the last time Grens had a big case; the powers-that-be had kept an eye on it and noticed that the teamwork gave good results.
Teamwork? My ass.
Ågestam’s thin body shook as he laughed. He pulled off his jacket, sat back with his shiny black shoes on the desk, tugged at his nicely cut blond hair and laughed until tears came to his eyes at the thought of Grens, the teammate from hell.
The sky above Regering Street should have been summer blue. Sven stared at it and it stared back, grey and dull and mean-looking. Soon it would rain again. He had been standing there for a while. He knew that he should get back to the office, but was uncertain whether he could take any more. Back in the office he would have to continue the work he had started, work that was pushing him to the breaking point.
Nils Krantz, stressed and irritable at being interrupted in the middle of a crime scene examination, had glanced at the videotape for a few seconds, no more, then he handed it back, saying that this was not the tape he had found and analysed in the mortuary. Sven knew that already, but hadn’t been able to stop hoping that he was wrong, as one does when all is not as it should be.
Still, now he knew for certain. Or, rather, he knew nothing whatsoever.
The Ewert Grens he knew and looked up to wouldn’t dream of interfering with evidence.
The Ewert Grens he knew was an awkward bastard, but a straight and honest bastard.
What he had done now was different, something else altogether.
The dull sky was still glaring down at him when his mobile rang. Ewert. Sven sighed, uncertain if he could deal with him now. No, he couldn’t. Not yet.
He listened to the voice message instead. They were going to drive over to Söder Hospital and show Lisa Öhrström a few more of Ewert’s photographs. Sven was to wait where he was; Ewert would pick him up soon.
It was difficult to look at Ewert, and Sven avoided all eye contact with his boss. He would do it later, he knew that, when the time was right, but not now. He settled gratefully in the passenger seat, where he could keep his gaze fixed on the anonymous car a few metres ahead in the slow-moving rush-hour mess on Skepp Bridge and up the slope up towards Slussen and Södermalm.
He wondered about the woman they were going to see. He was still feeling upset about the failure of the identity parade. Öhrström’s reneging on her previous statement had turned the whole thing into a fiasco. Members of her family had been threatened and he understood how terrified she was, but there had been something else as well, something more than fear. She was also riddled with shame, the shame he had tried to explain to Ewert earlier. This had become obvious during their first interview, when she had told him that she grieved over the loss of her little brother but was disgusted with Hilding for being an addict and angry with him for indirectly being the cause of his own death.
She hadn’t been able to prevent it and that was what made her feel ashamed and gave her another reason, in addition to the threats, for not recognising Lang behind that one-way window. Sven felt sure that she was one of those people who agonised about being inadequate, always tried to help, but never felt they had done enough. Hilding was probably the reason she had chosen to study medicine; she was family and therefore believed that she had to save and help and save and help.
And now he was dead, despite all her help.
She might never be rid of her shame now. She would have to live with it for ever.
When they walked into the ward, she was sitting in the ward sister’s glazed cubicle. Her face was pale; the look in her eyes was weary. Grief and fear and hatred can each corrode your strength; together they consume your whole life. She didn’t greet them when they stepped inside the glass box, only looked at them and radiated something close to loathing.
Ewert ignored her manner – or possibly didn’t notice it – he just reminded her briefly of their previous conversation. She didn’t seem to care. It wasn’t easy to read whether her indifference was pretence, or whether she simply couldn’t bear to listen to what he was saying.
Ewert asked her to turn around. He had brought more photos.
It took some time before she stopped studying something on the wall, before she looked at the black-and-white photograph on the table in front of her.
‘What do you see here?’
‘I still have no idea what you’re trying to prove with this game.’
‘I’m just curious. What do you see?’
She stared at Grens for a while, then she turned her head.
She glanced at the photo, noting that it was printed on unusual, slightly rough paper.
‘I see a fractured elbow. Left arm.’
‘Thirty thousand kronor.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Remember the pictures I faxed to you? I’m sure you do. Three broken fingers; that is, one thumb at five thousand and two fingers at a thousand each. I told you that Lang operates with fixed charges, and also that he usually signs off a job by breaking a few fingers. Then I said that the poor sod had owed seven thousand kronor. That wasn’t quite true. In fact he had been in debt to the tune of thirty-seven thousand. It meant the elbow had to go as well. Losing an arm is worth thirty thousand, you see.’
Sven was sitting a little to one side, behind Ewert. He felt bad, ashamed. Ewert, you’re trampling all over her, he thought. I know what you want and I agree we need her as a witness, but not this, you’re going too far.
‘I have another picture. What would you say this is?’
The photograph showed a naked man on a stretcher. The whole body was in the frame and the picture had been taken from the side, in poor light as before, but it was easy to see what it was all about.
‘You seem to have nothing to say. Let me help. This is a dead man. The arm you have been looking at is part of his body. Look! There are the fingers. You see, I told another fib. This guy didn’t just owe thirty-seven thousand kronor, his debt amounted to one hundred and thirty-seven thousand. Lang charges one hundred thousand for a killing. This man’s bad debt has been cleared. He has paid. One hundred and thirty-seven thousand in all.’
Lisa Öhrström clenched her jaw. She didn’t speak, didn’t move, pressed her lips tightly together to stop herself from screaming. Sven watched her, then looked at Ewert. You’re getting there. You’re close. But, Ewert, your tactics are out of order. You are hurting her and will soon do it again. I’ll put up with it, despite feeling ashamed, ashamed of you, ashamed because of what you’re doing, though I have to accept that you’re the most skilful operator I’ve ever met in the force. You need her to testify and you will make her do it. But what about the other investigation? I should be helping you here, should be happy that you’ll soon have her where you want her, but, Ewert, Ewert, how are you dealing with the Grajauskas case? What underhand tricks are you playing? I’ve just been to see Krantz, which is why I can’t concentrate on what is going on here, can’t even bear to look you in the eye. Which is also why I’d like to lie down on this table and shout until you listen. Krantz told me what I already knew. There’s another videotape, another video, Ewert!
Ewert sat back and waited for Öhrström to cave in. Let her take her time.
‘Come to think of it, I’ve got another set of pictures for you here.’
Lisa whispered. Her voice was too weak. ‘You make your point very clearly.’
‘Good. Excellent. You’ll find the new set even more interesting.’
‘I don’t want to see them. And . . . there’s something I don’t understand. If what you tell me is true, if this is what Lang does and the sums you mentioned are his fixed charges, as you say, why hasn’t he been locked away long ago?’
‘Why? You should know. You have been threatened, haven’t you? You know all you need to know about how Lang operates.’
That man who had come to the ward kitchen and had got hold of her photos of Sanna and Jonathan. She felt it again, the ache in her chest, the trembling that wouldn’t stop.
Ewert put another envelope on the table, opened it and pulled out the first photograph. A different hand. Five fractures this time. You didn’t need to be a qualified doctor to see that all the fingers had been crushed.
She was silent. He didn’t taunt her, only placed another picture next to the hand. A cracked kneecap, very clear too.
‘It’s a little like a jigsaw, isn’t it? A knee here, a hand there. It’s fair to assume they belong together. They do, but this time the motive had nothing to do with money. This time it was respect.’
Ewert held both pictures in front of her face.
‘This time the message was that you must never spike Yugoslav amphetamine with prison-issue washing powder.’
Still holding the two images in front of her face, Ewert took a third one from the envelope and held it even closer.
It had been taken by someone standing in a staircase, a few steps up, positioning the camera at head-height and pointing the lens at a recently dead man. An overturned wheelchair lay next to him. The blood that had flowed from the man’s head had formed a pool around him.
She realised what the picture was and quickly turned her head away. She was crying.
‘And that is what this guy had done. He had messed around with a big dealer’s product. His name, by the way, was Hilding Oldéus.’
Sven had made up his mind during the car journey back from the hospital. He would keep a low profile for now and say nothing; he would not leave the police building until he had located the videotape.
Back at his desk, he picked up the pile of transcribed interrogations from the floor and started to leaf through them. He knew he had seen it somewhere.
He would read all of them again. Slowly. It was in there and he mustn’t miss it.
It didn’t take long, just about a quarter of an hour.
He had started with the statement made by the female medical student. The interview session had been brief, presumably she was weak and in shock. It would be a while before she had digested it all. Next he read the older man’s statement. The interview with Dr Ejder had taken longer and been more like a conversation. Ejder had controlled his fear by using his logic. As long as he was rational, he could avoid getting over-emotional. Sven had come across the need to suppress fear many times before and noted different ways of keeping panic at bay. Ejder’s self-control and intellectual approach also made him an exceptional witness. He was one of those people who spoke in images detailed enough to make the listener feel that they had been there. In this case, sitting at Ejder’s side, tied up and powerless, on the mortuary floor.
Somewhere in the middle of this statement Sven found what he had been looking for. The doctor had been questioned about the plastic carrier bag where Lydia had kept her weapons. Suddenly, he described a videotape.
Sven followed the lines with his finger, reading one word at a time.
Ejder had seen the black tape when Lydia Grajauskas had pushed the sides of the bag down to take out the Semtex. It was at an early stage, when Ejder thought he should try to talk to her, win her confidence. At least it might help to calm the others. He had asked about the video, and after first refusing to answer, she had then decided to explain in her limited English.
She had said that the video was truth. He had asked her which truth, but she simply repeated the word. Truth. Truth. Truth. She had been silent while she concentrated on shaping the plastic dough, then she turned to him again.
Two tapes.
In box station train.
Twenty-one.
She had demonstrated the number by showing him first two fingers, then one.
Twenty-one.
Gustaf Ejder insisted that he recalled every single word, in the right order. She had said very little, with such effort, that it was easy to remember.
The truth. Two tapes. In box station train. Twenty-one. Sven read the passage once more. In a railway station. In box 21.
He was convinced now. There was another video in storage locker number twenty-one, almost certainly at the Central Station.
That tape would also have the safety tab removed and the video would contain images, not just a flickering greyness.
He put the pile of documents back on the floor and got up. He would be there soon.
The way he had forced those images on her, in her face.
Lisa was beyond hating anyone. Maybe she never had, and maybe she had never loved either; she had just filed hate and love away as two words for the same emotion, assuming that if she couldn’t feel one, she couldn’t feel the other either. But that had changed: she actually hated this policeman. The past twenty-four hours had been so strange; her grief for Hilding that wasn’t really grief and, after that vague threat, her fear for the children that wasn’t really fear. It was as if, at the age of thirty-five, all her feelings had been put under a spotlight; she had to force them all back in, throw away the key, hide behind her shame and not get to know herself. She had had no idea what they looked like, these unknown emotions, so strong and naked and impossible to escape.
And in the middle of it all that limping policeman had turned up and rubbed her face in it.
She had seen immediately that the last picture was of Hilding lying dead on the stairs and had got up from her chair, grabbed the photograph, torn it up and thrown the pieces against the glass wall.
She knew where she was going now, running down the corridor towards the main exit. She had a few more hours to do on her shift. For the first time in her life she couldn’t care less. She ran out on to the tarmac outside, and turned in the direction of Tanto Park, across the railway tracks and through the park, not even aware of the unleashed dogs that pursued her fleeing body, propelled by panic. She carried on running, past the Zinkensdamm housing estate, stopping only when she had crossed Horn Street and could stand in the shade of the huge Högalid Church.
She wasn’t tired, didn’t register the sweat that trickled down over her forehead and cheeks. She stood for a while to get her breath back before walking down the slope to the house where she stayed as often as she did in her own flat.
The door to the flat on the fifth floor of number 3 Völund Street had been replaced. The large hole in the panel was no more. There was nothing to show that just a few days earlier the police had broken in to stop an incident of gross physical violence, a naked woman lashed across the back thirty-five times.
The two girls, still in their teens, stood behind the man who could have been their father while he unlocked the door. When they went into the flat, they saw the electronic locks on the door, but didn’t know what they were. The man closed the door and showed the girls their passports. Then he explained again that the passports had cost him. Therefore they owed him money and would have to work to pay it off. The first customers were due two hours from now.
The girl who had started to cry downstairs was still crying; she tried to protest, until the man, who until only a few days earlier had been called Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp by two other young women, pressed the muzzle of a gun to her temple. For a brief moment she thought he would shoot.
He told them to undress. He was going to try them out. From now on it was important that they knew what men liked.
Lisa was feeling hot after running all the way from the hospital. She had only stopped when she could see Ylva’s house in Högalid Street.
She hadn’t been thinking straight earlier. She was capable of love, of course she was, not for a man, but for her nephew and niece; she loved them more than she loved herself. She had put off coming here. Normally she’d pop in to see them every day, but she had lacked the strength to walk into the house and tell them that their uncle had died, that he had crashed down a stairwell the day before.
They adored their Uncle Hilding. To them he wasn’t a hopeless junkie. They had only met the other Hilding, straight out of prison, round-cheeked and easy-going, full of a calm that had always vanished a few days later, when the world around him began to look dangerous, reminding him of the shadows he couldn’t cope with and couldn’t confront. They had never seen that awful junkie. They had never seen the change. He was only there for them for a few days at a time, and then when he changed into something else, he disappeared.
She had to tell them, though. They must not be informed by having black-and-white police photographs pushed into their faces.
Lisa held Ylva’s hand in hers. They had hugged each other before going to sit side by side on the sofa. Both were feeling the same way: not quite grief, more a kind of relief that they knew where he was and where he wasn’t. The sisters weren’t certain that they should feel that way, but now that they were together, it seemed easier to accept these impermissible feelings.
Jonathan and Sanna sat in the two armchairs opposite the sofa. They had sensed that this wasn’t one of Auntie Lisa’s usual visits. Not that she had said anything yet, but as soon as she opened the front door they had started to prepare themselves for what she would say. The way she had pressed down the door handle, said hello, and walked to the small sitting room all made it obvious that this was not just an ordinary visit.
She didn’t know how to begin. There was no need to worry.
‘What’s the matter?’
Sanna was twelve, and still in the zone between little girl and young teenager. She looked at the two grown women she trusted implicitly and repeated her question.
‘What is it? I know something’s wrong.’
Lisa leaned towards the children, reaching out to put one hand on Sanna’s knee and the other on Jonathan’s. Such a little boy, her fingertips met easily around his leg.
‘You’re right. Something is wrong. It’s to do with your uncle.’
‘Hilding has died.’
Sanna spoke unhesitatingly, as if she had been waiting to say this.
Lisa’s hands tightened their hold. ‘He died yesterday. In the hospital, on my ward.’
Jonathan, only six years of life inside his small body, watched as his mum and Auntie Lisa cried. He hadn’t grasped this, not yet.
‘Uncle Hilding wasn’t an old person, was he? Was he so old that he had to die?’
‘Don’t be so silly. You don’t understand a thing. He killed himself with drugs because he was a junkie.’
Sanna glared at her little brother, making him the target of the bad thoughts she didn’t want to have any more.
Lisa’s hand moved to stroke Sanna’s cheek. ‘Don’t think about him like that.’
‘But he was.’
‘Don’t say these things. What happened was an accident. He died because he lost control of his wheelchair and it fell down the stairs.’
‘I don’t care what you say. I know he was a junkie. And I know that’s why he’s dead. You can pretend what you like, because I know anyway.’
Jonathan listened but didn’t want to know. He got up from his armchair, crying now. His uncle wasn’t dead, he couldn’t be.
He shouted at his sister. ‘It’s your fault!’
He ran from the room and all the way downstairs and across the concrete flags on the courtyard, screaming all the way.
‘It’s your fault! You’re stupid! It’s your fault, if you say that!’
The afternoon was fading into evening. Lars Ågestam was surprised to see Ewert Grens open his office door without knocking. His looks, his massive body, thinning grey hair, the straight leg that made him limp, none of that had changed.
‘I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow.’
‘I’m here now. And I’ve brought you some information.’
‘Information about . . .?’
‘The murders. That is, the investigations into the incidents at Söder Hospital, both of them.’
He didn’t wait for Ågestam to offer him a seat, he simply grabbed the nearest chair and carelessly dumped a pile of papers on the floor. Then he sat down opposite the young prosecutor, whom he had mentally consigned to his large category of ‘stuck-up prats’.
‘First, Alena Sljusareva. The other woman from Lithuania. She is on her way home now. I have questioned her and she has got nothing to offer us. Didn’t know who Bengt Nordwall was, didn’t know where or how Grajauskas had got hold of arms and explosives. She had never heard of any kidnapping plans. I helped her to catch the ferry to Klaipeda and so forth. She needs her home and we don’t need her.’
‘You sent her home?’
‘Any objections?’
‘You should have informed me first. We should have discussed the entire matter, and if we both agreed that sending her home was reasonable, the final decision would still have been mine.’
Ewert Grens stared at the young man with distaste. He felt the urge to shout, but refrained. He had just created a lie and presented it to the prosecutor. For once he chose to hide his anger.
‘Anything else?’
‘You have sent home a person who could be guilty of a serious gun crime, as well as being an accessory to the potential destruction of property and aggravated taking of hostages.’ Lars Ågestam shrugged.
‘But if this woman is on board a ferry . . . that’s it. End of story.’
Grens fought his contempt for the young man on the other side of the desk. He couldn’t explain it properly; he always despised people who used their university education as a reference for life, who hadn’t actually lived, only pretended to experience.
‘Right. Next, about Jochum Lang.’
‘Yes?’
‘Time to lock him up for good.’
Ågestam pointed at the papers which Ewert Grens had dumped on the floor.
‘Grens, that pile is interview transcripts, one after the other. No result. He’s stonewalling. I can’t hold him for much longer.’
‘You can.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You can and you can even inform him that he is a suspect for the murder of Hilding Oldéus. We have a positive identification.’
‘Do you indeed? Who?’
Lars Ågestam was slightly built, wore small round glasses and his short hair combed forward in a half-fringe, and, although he had just celebrated his thirtieth birthday, looked more like a little boy than ever as he leaned back in the large leather chair and listened.
‘A doctor in the ward where Oldéus was a patient. Woman called Lisa Öhrström. She is Oldéus’s sister.’
Ågestam didn’t reply at first. He pushed his chair back and got up.
‘According to a report from your colleague, DI Sundkvist, an identity parade did not have the expected outcome. Not so good. Lang’s lawyer won’t leave me alone, of course. He demands that his client be released instantly, as no one has identified him.’
‘Listen to me. You will get your identification. I’ll bring it in tomorrow.’
The prosecutor sat down again, dragging his chair closer to the desk, and then raised his arms in the air, as people do in films when someone points a gun at them.
‘Grens, I give in. Explain what you’re up to, please.’
‘You will get your identification tomorrow. No further explanation required.’
Ågestam pondered over what he had just been told.
He was in charge of two separate investigations into three deaths that had taken place in the space of a few hours in the same building, and in both cases Ewert Grens was the man who reported directly to him. Somehow the stories Grens had just told didn’t ring true. Too simple.
Sljusareva had been sent home already, Lang had been identified – he should be satisfied that the superintendent running both shows insisted that everything was well in hand.
But Ågestam was not reassured. Something wasn’t right, something just wasn’t right.
‘The media are pestering me, you know.’
‘Sod them.’
‘I’m being asked about Grajauskas’s motive. Why would a young female prostitute want to kill a policeman and then herself? In a closed room, for Christ’s sake, a mortuary? I don’t know. I need answers.’
‘We haven’t got the answers. The case is under investigation.’
‘In that case we’re back to square one. I simply don’t understand you, Grens. If the motive is still unknown, why let Sljusareva go? A woman who is possibly the only person who might know something.’
Ewert Grens’s anger welled up, his permanent rage at these interfering prats. He was just about to raise his voice, but his burden, Bengt’s damned lie, stopped him, making him again into someone he was not, someone who looked before he jumped. He had to be cautious, just for once. Instead his voice dropped, almost to a hiss.
‘Look Ågestam, don’t treat me like you’re interrogating me.’
‘I’ve been reading the transcripts of the communications you had with the mortuary before the shooting started.’
Ågestam pretended not to hear the threat in his voice, didn’t look at the large policeman as he searched for the right sheets of paper in the bundle on his desk. He knew where they were, somewhere in the middle. He found what he had been after. He followed a few lines with his finger and read out loud.
‘Grens, this is you speaking, or shouting, actually. And I quote: “This is something personal! Bengt, over! Fuck’s sake, Bengt. Stop it! Squad, move in! All clear. Repeat, move in!”’
Ågestam looked up and spread his thin, suit-sleeved arms in a gesture.
‘End of quote.’
The telephone on the desk between them suddenly started to ring. Both men counted the signals, seven in all, before it stopped to make space for their exchange.
‘Quote away. You weren’t there, were you? Sure enough, that’s how I felt at the time. That some personal issue was at stake. I still think that, but I don’t know what it was.’
Lars Ågestam looked Grens in the eye for a while before turning to the window and scanning the view of the restless city. You couldn’t get your head round it all, it was too much.
He hesitated.
The intrusive sense that something was not right had made him formulate what could be taken as an accusation against this powerful man, and he didn’t want to say it out loud. But he should, he must.
He turned to face Grens again.
‘What you’re telling me is . . . nothing. I don’t know what it is, I can’t put my finger on it, Ewert – I think that’s the first time I’ve called you that, Ewert – but what are you doing? I am aware that you’re investigating the murder of your best friend and understand that it must be hard for you, maybe too hard. I can’t help wondering if it is a good idea. Your grief . . . you’re grieving, I’m sure, it must hurt.’
Ågestam took a deep breath and jumped in.
‘What I’m trying to say is . . . do you want to be replaced?’
‘You sit here behind your desk with your precious documents, you ambitious little penpusher, but you’d better get this. I was investigating crimes, flesh-and-blood crimes, before your daddy got into your mummy’s knickers. And I’ve not stopped.’
Grens half turned, pointing at the door.
‘Now I’m going off to do exactly that: investigate crimes, that is. Back down there, with the hard men and the whores. Unless there was something else you wanted?’
Lars Ågestam shook his head and watched as the other man left.
Then he sighed. Detective Superintendent Grens seldom failed. It was well known. He simply didn’t make silly mistakes. That was fact, regardless of what you thought about his social skills or ability to communicate.
He trusted Ewert Grens.
He decided to carry on trusting him.
The evening had patiently dislodged those who spent hours of their lives commuting between their suburban homes and city-centre jobs. Stockholm Central Station was quiet now, preparing for the following morning when the commuters would be back, scurrying from one platform to the next.
Sven Sundkvist sat on a seat in the main hall, pointlessly staring at the electronic Departures and Arrivals board. Half an hour earlier he had gone in search of the downstairs storage boxes. He knew of them, of course, lock-ups intended as a service for visitors, but mostly used by the homeless and criminals in need of somewhere to stash belongings, drugs, stolen goods, weapons.
He had located box 21 and then stood in front of it considering what he should do. Would it not be best if he were to forget about having checked the hostages’ statements? No one else would read through them again.
Then he could go home to Anita and Jonas.
Nobody would give it another thought.
Home sweet home. No more of this shit.
As he hovered, he felt the rage come back, the pains in his stomach; it was more than just a feeling now. He remembered the talk with Krantz earlier and how certain the elderly technician had been. He had recorded the find of a used videotape with a broken safety tab.
Now, it was nowhere.
You’re risking thirty-three years of service in the force. I don’t understand you.
That’s why I’m here, standing in front of a locker door in Stockholm Central Station. I have no idea what I will find, what it was Lydia Grajauskas wanted to tell us, only that it will be something I’d rather not know.
It had taken him the best part of a quarter of an hour to persuade the woman inside the cramped left-luggage office that he really was a detective inspector with Homicide and needed her help to examine the contents of one of the boxes.
She had kept shaking her head until he got fed up with arguing and raised his voice to emphasise that it was within his rights to order her to open the locker. When he had added a reminder that it was her duty as a citizen to assist the police, she had reluctantly contacted the station security officer, who held spare keys to the boxes.
When Sven Sundkvist saw the green uniform in the main station entrance, he went to meet the man. He identified himself and they walked together to the lock-ups.
In the heavy bunch of keys, number 21 was indistinguishable.
The door opened easily and the security officer stepped aside to let Sven Sundkvist come closer. Sven peered inside the narrow dark space, divided by two shelves.
There wasn’t much to see.
Two dresses in a plastic bag. A photo album with black-and-white studio photographs of relatives wearing their nicest clothes and nervous smiles. A cigar box full of Swedish paper money in one- or five-hundred kronor notes. He counted quickly. Forty thousand kronor.
The estate of Lydia Grajauskas.
He held on to the metal door. It struck him that her life had been stored in this box, what little past she still had, as well as her stake in the future, her hope, her escape, her sense of existing somewhere other than in that flat, in a real place.
Sven Sundkvist put the things he had found into his briefcase.
Then he reached up to the top shelf and took down a video with a label on the back in Cyrillic script.
She had run after him, across the courtyard, through the hallway and out on to Högalid Street. He stopped there, barefoot and tearful. She loved him and hugged him close and carried him home in her arms, saying his name over and over again. He was Jonathan, her nephew, and what she felt for him must surely be what you feel for your own child.
Lisa Öhrström stroked his hair; she had to go soon. It was late and dark, as dark as it could be a few weeks before midsummer; darkness was gently edging into what had been daylight until now. She kissed his cheek. Sanna had already gone to bed. Ylva was there and she met her sister’s eyes before closing the door behind her.
There were so few of them left. Their father was gone, and now Hilding. She had seen it coming, of course, and now there it was, the enveloping loneliness.
She decided to walk. She had been there before and knew the way, across Väster Bridge, along Norr Mälarstrand, then through side streets to the City Police building. It would take half an hour or so, not long on a summer’s night. She knew that he usually worked late, he had said so, and he was that sort, one of those who didn’t have anything else. He would sit hunched over the investigation that had to be completed, just as the week before there had been an investigation to complete and next week would bring another one to serve as a reason for not leaving the office.
She phoned to tell him that she was coming. He replied quickly, sounded as if he was expecting her, possibly even certain that she would come.
He met her at the main entrance and led the way along a dark, stale-smelling corridor, his uneven steps slapping and resounding against the walls. Christ, how grim it was. How strange that anyone should choose to work in surroundings like these. She looked at him from behind, broad and overweight, a bald patch on the back of his head, his limping, slightly bent body. How odd that he should seem strong, but he did; at least in this shabby place he radiated the kind of strength that gives a sense of security, the result of having made a choice. Which was what he had done, he had actually chosen to work in this place.
Ewert Grens ushered her into his office and offered her a seat in his visitor’s chair. She looked around and thought it a bleak room. The only things with a personality setting them apart from the dull, mass-produced office furniture were an ancient monster of a ghetto-blaster and a sofa, ugly and sagging, which she felt sure he often slept on.
‘Coffee?’
He didn’t really mean it, but knew that he should ask.
‘No thank you. I’m not here to drink coffee.’
‘I guessed not. Anyway.’
He raised a plastic cup half full of what looked like black coffee from a machine and drank the lot.
‘What can I do for you?’
‘You don’t seem surprised. To see me.’
‘I’m not surprised. But I am pleased.’
Lisa Öhrström realised that what had come over her, what was tugging at her mind, was tiredness. She had been so tense. Now she relaxed as much as she dared to and the recent past weighed heavily on her.
‘I don’t want to see any more of your photographs. I don’t want any more images of people I don’t know and never want to know thrust in my face. I’ve had enough. I’ll testify. I will identify Lang as the man who came to see my brother yesterday.’
Lisa Öhrström put her elbows on the desk, leaning forward with her chin on her clasped hands. So very tired. Home soon.
‘But there’s one thing I want you to know. It wasn’t only the threats that made me hold back. Quite a long time ago I decided that I would never again allow Hilding and his addiction to influence how I lived. This last year, I haven’t been there for him any more, but it didn’t make any difference. I still couldn’t escape him. Now that he’s dead, he still drains me of strength, perhaps more than ever. So I might as well testify.’
Ewert Grens tried to keep the smile from his face. This was it, obviously.
Anni, this is it.
Closure.
‘Nobody is blaming you.’
‘I don’t need your pity.’
‘Your choice, but that’s how it is. Nobody blames you because you didn’t know what to do.’
Grens went over to root among his audiotapes, found what he wanted and put it into the player. Siw Malmkvist. She was sure it would be.
‘One thing more. Who threatened you?’
Siw Malmkvist. She had just taken the hardest decision in her life and he was listening to Siw Malmkvist.
‘That’s not important. I will stand witness. But on one condition.’
Lisa Öhrström stayed where she was, chin resting on her hands. She was leaning forward, getting closer to him.
‘My nephew and niece. I want them to have protection.’
‘They already have protection.’
‘They have been under protection ever since the identity parade. I know, for instance, that you went to see them today. One of the kids ran outside without his shoes on. And they will continue to be protected, of course.’
Fatigue paralysed her. She yawned without even trying to hide it.
‘I must get home now.’
‘I’ll get someone to drive you. In a plain car.’
‘Please, to Högalid Street. To Jonathan and Sanna. They’ll be asleep.’
‘I suggest that we step up the level of protection and put someone inside the flat as well. Do you agree?’
Evening had really come.
Darkness. Silence, as if the whole big building were empty.
She looked at the policeman and his tape recorder; he was humming along, knew the jolly tune and the meaningless text by heart.
He sang under his breath and she felt sorry for him.