“He was seventeen years old.”
Ågestam shook his head and looked at the others.
“Do you have any idea of how rare it is to impose the death sentence on a minor? Schwarz, or maybe we should call him Frey, was obviously considered to be and judged as an adult. Seventeen years old and such a serious penalty—that takes one hell of a lot.”
He heard that Grens had put on his stupid music again, low; it provided an awkward backdrop when he continued.
“This is how it works in the United States: jurors serving on a case where the crime might lead to a death penalty are only selected if they are not opposed to capital punishment. You see? Right from the start the selected jury is made up of people who
support
the death penalty. And when the pro-death jury has decided that someone, in this case Frey,
is
guilty of a capital crime, in other words, that the crime might result in a death sentence, then it has to be decided whether to impose
life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after twenty-five or thirty years, life imprisonment with no possibility of parole,
or the third alternative
, the death penalty
.”
Ewert Grens nudged up the volume on the Siw Malmkvist tape, the calm that helped him to think, but he also listened with interest to the prosecutor, who had knowledge that he lacked. Ågestam looked at Grens and his music machine in irritation, but Grens just flapped his hands,
go on, I’m listening
.
“They choose to find him guilty, and they pick the third choice, the death penalty. Yes, his fingerprints were found everywhere in the house. Yes, it probably was his sperm inside her, according to the blood-group determination that seems highly likely. But good God, several witnesses have confirmed that the two had had sexual relations for over a year! Of course his fingerprints would be there, then, of course the pathologist could find traces of his sperm. It shouldn’t take a jury long to work that out.”
Lars Ågestam’s face was getting redder, his thin body more agitated. He had stood up and was walking around the room as he talked.
“I’m not saying that it
wasn’t
him. It
might possibly
have been. All I’m saying is that it’s remarkably weak evidence to base a conviction on, and what’s more, to then impose a death sentence on a seventeen-year-old boy.
The prosecutor who succeeded in that did a damn good job. I would never have managed that. I don’t even know if I would have started a prosecution with so little to go on.”
He looked around the room with something close to anger, raised his voice without being aware of it.
“No one saw him there at the time of the murder. No blood belonging to him was found at the scene of the crime. Not a single sentence to say that traces of gunpowder were found on him or his clothes. All that we have, all that the jury had, is the sperm and fingerprints of a boyfriend who had frequented the house and had regular sex with the girl for a year. We also have a record of his background: he’d resorted to violence on previous occasions, and in two cases spent some months in a juvenile correctional institution. John Meyer Frey doesn’t appear to have been a very nice young man. But that doesn’t make him a murderer. Not even with a flimsy chain of circumstantial evidence.”
Ruben Frey presented himself at the counter, showed his ID, and asked to talk to a Detective Superintendent Ewert Grens. He made great efforts to speak clearly and to sound as calm as he was not. The security guard was wearing a green uniform and sitting behind a glass wall, surrounded by a number of monitors that showed black-and-white images from different parts of the building’s exterior, and he spoke English in the same correct, but rather stiff way that the taxi driver had, recommended brusquely that the visitor should sit down and wait on one of the three chairs that were lined up in the small reception area.
The lack of sleep was catching up with him. He had tried, but the hum of passengers talking incessantly and the sharp lights on the ceiling of the cabin had made it impossible. Ruben rubbed his itching eyes, he yawned twice, he leafed absentmindedly through a magazine that he didn’t understand a word of but recognized in a way: photos of celebrities posing in pairs on a red carpet that led the way into some important cultural premiere. The same sort of gossip magazine that he would pick up at the barber’s in Marcusville or in the newspaper rack at Sofio’s restaurant; another language and different people, but the same content.
After a quarter of an hour he heard the green-clad guard call out his name and he hurried over, the clumsy brown travel bag in his hand. He was introduced to a woman wearing the same green uniform—she used her whole hand to indicate which direction to go in. Her English was considerably better than her colleague’s, she didn’t say much but when she did it was without hesitation. A couple of grim corridors and a couple of locked doors, then they stopped outside an office where the door was ajar and the music playing inside was slightly too loud.
The female guard knocked on the door and a voice shouted something like
come in.
It was quite a large office, much bigger than the FBI room in Cincinnati where he’d sat answering questions for several hours the day before. The man who was standing in the middle of the room and who had asked them in a loud voice to come in was big, dressed in a rather fine gray suit and, Ruben guessed, about the same age as himself. Farther in, in front of a window that lacked curtains, three more people—a woman and two men—were sitting on a brown sofa.
He took another step into the room and put down his voluminous bag.
“My name is Ruben Meyer Frey.”
He assumed that they understood and spoke English, everyone in this country seemed to. They stared at him, said nothing at all, waiting for the short, overweight American with red cheeks and tired eyes to continue.
“I’m here to talk to Yoo-ert Grens.”
The big man in the suit winced a little, but nodded.
“That’s me. Ewert. And what is it you think I can help you with?”
Ruben Frey tried to smile as he pointed toward the cassette player.
“I recognize that. Connie Francis. ‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool.’
Though I’ve never heard it in another language before.”
“
Tunna skivor
.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what it’s called. In Swedish. Siw Malmkvist.”
Ruben felt as if he’d got something that at least resembled a smile in return. He took a photograph out from his shirt pocket. It wasn’t a particularly good one, the person in the picture was fuzzy and the sun was too strong for the real colors to come through. The grainy person was sitting on a stone, he had a bare chest and was pretending to tense his muscles for the photograph. A young boy, a teenager, long dark hair over his eyes and tied in a braid down his back, acne on both cheeks, a sparse mustache on his upper lip.
“This is my son. John. Many years ago. It’s him that I want to talk to you about. Alone, if that’s possible.”
A person who knew Connie Francis and “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool”
had already by virtue of that won a little respect from Ewert Grens. No more than half an hour later the two men were sitting on either side of the detective superintendent’s desk and that respect seemed to have grown on both sides.
Ruben Frey had quite quickly decided to be as honest, as open as possible. Everything that he hadn’t been the day before. He quite simply had no choice. Ewert Grens had also emphasized that the presumed crime they were going to talk about had taken place in the United States and was therefore well beyond his jurisdiction, which meant that even if he had wanted to, there wasn’t much he could do.
It was blowing hard outside the window, early morning fast turning into midmorning as the wind pounded regularly against the glass, dull explosions, a force that made them fall silent a couple of times and turn around to check that it hadn’t smashed.
Ruben Frey declined the offer of coffee, mineral water perhaps, and Ewert Grens had pressed a can for each of them out of the machine in the corridor that swallowed ten-kronor coins and always had a note taped to the front, in scrawled handwriting by whoever it was who was sick of a machine eating their money without giving anything in return and now demanded their money back, always with a telephone extension at the bottom. Ewert Grens often wondered why they bothered, or if any of them had ever been contacted by the machine owner and had, with an apology, been able to hold the swallowed ten-kronor coin in their hand again.
Frey drank directly from the can, a couple of mouthfuls and then it was empty.
“Do you have children?”
He was serious when he asked the question and Grens suddenly looked down at the desk.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“With all due respect, that’s none of your business.”
Ruben rubbed a hand against his smooth, round cheeks and Ewert mused that it wasn’t fair that some people didn’t get wrinkles.
“OK. I’ll put it differently. Can you understand how it feels to be about to lose your only child?”
Ewert Grens thought about another father, the father of the five-year-old girl who had been sexually assaulted and murdered two years ago. He remembered how terrible his face had been, the pain that was impossible to avoid.
“No. As I don’t have any. But I’ve been faced with parents’ grief, I’ve seen it and I could certainly feel the grief eating them up inside.”
“Can you then understand how far a parent is prepared to go to avoid that?”
The mourning father had in that case sought out and shot to death the man who had taken his daughter’s life, and Ewert had discovered in the course of the investigation that he didn’t think that was entirely wrong.
“Yes. I think I can.”
Ruben Frey rummaged for something in one of his trouser pockets. A pack of cigarettes. A red pack, a brand you couldn’t buy in Sweden.
“Is it OK if I smoke?”
“Not in this fucking building. But I have no intention of arresting you if you do.”
Frey smiled and lit up a cigarette. He leaned back, tried to relax, took a couple of drags and blew the smoke out in front of him in small grayish white puffs.
“I believe in the death penalty. I’ve voted for every governor who’s campaigned for it. If my son, if John had been guilty, he would have deserved to die. I believe in an eye for an eye. But you see . . . John
is not
a murderer. A fucking troublemaker, true. Low impulse control is what the psychologists called it. A couple of them tried to link it to the loss of his mother, who died early, that his grief for Antonia triggered it. I don’t believe that for a moment, all these quasi-hypotheses that in some way absolve the individual of responsibility. He was difficult, Superintendent Grens, but he
was not
a murderer.”
From then on, for about half an hour, Grens did not need to ask a single question. Ruben Frey smoked and talked without interruption. He described the bitter atmosphere that was whipped up when the Finnigan girl was found dead. The sort of murder that the press decides to serialize and turn into a matter of principle, and Elizabeth Finnigan obviously sold well in the greater part of the state of Ohio. The public’s demands to find a culprit and then have that person punished with the strictest possible penalty grew louder as the days passed, with each article that was published. The murder became public property and ignited public grief, and above all, politics. No bastard in Ohio was going to be able to take the life of a beautiful young woman with everything before her and get away with it. Ruben Frey was quite calm, collected, as he told the story chronologically; calm and collected when he spoke of the day that John was arrested and the hate they were confronted with from then until the jury announced their fucking verdict in the courtroom.
He told a story he had perhaps never told before. His cheeks were flushed, his brow shiny, he hadn’t changed clothes since leaving home in Marcusville and he was starting to smell—sweat and something else—not that it bothered Grens but he noticed it and he asked Frey if he’d like to wash away his journey in one of the City Police showers once they had finished talking. Frey thanked him and apologized for the fact that he wasn’t as clean as he might be, it had been a long day.
The strong wind continued to pound against the window with even greater force. The snow swirled outside, whirling up as much as falling down, old loose snow being harried to life again. Ewert Grens went over to the window and looked out at the whiteness. He waited. Frey was clearly tired but there was more.
“And his escape?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you know about that?”
Ruben Frey had known that the question would come. He looked for yet another cigarette in the pack that was empty.
“Is this conversation strictly between you and me?”
“I don’t see anyone else here.”
“Do I have your word when I ask that it stays between us?”
“Yes. You have my word. I don’t report to anyone.”
Frey scrunched up the cigarette pack with the red symbol on it, took aim at the wastepaper basket under Grens’s desk—he wasn’t even close. He bent his bulky body forward and got hold of the crumpled cardboard, threw it again. Even farther away.
He shrugged, left it lying on the floor.
“Everything.”
“Everything?”
“I knew everything. I was there, all the way. Until the airplane took off in Toronto and disappeared in the clouds heading for Moscow. A detour, but people we trusted often used that route. It was my money that financed every stage of the escape.”
He sighed.
“That was six years ago. I haven’t seen him since then, and I don’t know if you understand, but each day that has passed without me hearing anything, each silent day, has been a good day.”
By the time that Ruben Frey undressed and stepped into a shower at City Police, he had explained in detail the escape that his son had already described parts of. There had been several gaps in John’s story, but everything he’d told of what he remembered was confirmed by his father in a closed room. Ewert Grens decided to believe what he had heard; Ruben Frey, a prison officer called Vernon Eriksen, and two doctors who had subsequently changed their identities and lives had together planned and implemented the escape of a person they believed was innocent.