Authors: Martin Holmén
‘And Sonja. I think Sonja saw the murderer leaving Zetterberg’s place.’
‘Yes. And as far as I’ve heard you’ve been looking for her? And I think you found her in the end, didn’t you?’
‘Unfortunately not. I was looking for her, half of Klara could back that up, but it was like she’d been swallowed up by the ground.’
‘I thought you were a bit of a bloodhound when it comes to women who are on the game?’
‘This one slipped through.’
‘Well, we did find her in the end, this evening in Regeringsgatan.’
Berglund runs his finger across his moustache. ‘Sadly, she was fairly quiet.’
‘Oh?’
‘She had holes in her. Lots of holes.’
I flinch, even though I already knew this, of course. I think of her in the rain on Kungsgatan and I think of her father in his little workshop on Bondegatan. Now he really doesn’t have anyone to follow him. Now it’s only him and his weeping wife.
‘Well that’s very bad news.’
‘For her. And for you. Where were you this afternoon?’
‘I spent the afternoon with a lady friend. You’ve probably heard of Doris Steiner?’ Now it’s my turn to smile.
‘She said you had luncheon at the Metropol?’ Berglund taps his notebook with his pen again.
‘Their Christmas table. I can recommend the pig’s trotters.’
‘And then?’
‘Then we went back to my home and spent the rest of the evening there… You know how it is.’ I raise my eyebrows pointedly, man to man, so to speak.
‘I didn’t think you bothered with the ladies?’ Berglund smiles again, but now even that feigned civility of his is missing, the one he likes to present to the outside. I feel anger rumbling inside of me like a heavy breaker at sea. I have a good mind to lean across the table and deck the bloke.
‘Well,’ Berglund goes on. ‘We have spoken to Mrs Steiner and indeed she does confirm that you lunched at the Metropol.’
‘There you are, then!’
‘And then, according to her version of events, you disappeared for several hours before coming back and burning your clothes down in the yard.’
They keep me rotting in the cell for a few days, to soften me up. The only human contact I get is the latrine cleaner and the screw who brings the porridge or opens the viewing slit and tells me to shut my gob if I start whistling some Ernst Rolf. One night the prisoner in the cell next door tries to communicate with me by means of the same old knocking. That, if anything, drives me half crazy. The wall lice don’t make things much better.
I pace back and forth to work up some warmth, my left hand on the waistband of my trousers to keep them from falling down, my clogs clattering with a hollow sound between the walls. The ash-grey light of dawn enters through the little barred window. I cough and spit in the galvanised shit bucket.
I’ve been here for four days. They can keep me locked up for three months if they want to. One of my co-prisoners during my first Långholmen stint claimed he was once detained here for sixteen days. I wipe my snot on my shirt sleeve. At least at Långholmen, if one needed to, one could tear out a page from the Bible or the catechism.
I sit down and very carefully squeeze my right hand. The worst of the swelling has gone down, but my little finger and its knuckle are somewhere between dark blue and purple, also far more crooked than usual. Something in there has broken.
‘Soon when old Kvisten shakes his fist, it’ll be like a rattle.’
My voice echoes hoarsely between the graffiti-strewn walls. I try to laugh but nothing comes out. I get up and start pacing again. I smell like a tramp and my body itches from the lice. How the hell do they manage to survive in this cold, in these stone walls?
I’m startled when the prisoner in the cell on the right starts howling. He does it at regular intervals. It’s impossible to make out what he’s yelling, he just yells.
For the hundredth time I read the graffiti on the door: names, lines in clusters of five, swastikas and insults. Somehow, what I remember best is what was written in my last cell, two weeks earlier:
What one knows, no one knows. What two know, the goons know
.
I have spent my every waking minute obsessing over Doris Steiner. Either she sold me out to protect herself, or Berglund is trying to lure me into a trap. I don’t know what to think. It’s best not to think anything at all; one gets a lot of silly ideas in one’s head while under lock and key.
‘All things in their time.’
Out in the corridor, rushing steps are heading for my neighbour’s cell. The door opens. One can’t hear what the screw is saying, but the thumps that follow are recognisable. Also the yells. The door closes and the steps fade once again. Hopefully the bird of ill omen will keep his mouth shut for a while.
Probably the goon doesn’t have a shred of evidence against me. At least there’s nothing to connect me to the two addresses on Regeringsgatan: no blood, no fingerprints, and no witnesses. I make a listless left-right combination in the air.
I go and stand in the window as dusk falls rapidly and the screw resumes his wandering. I wonder whether Doris has realised I have a weak spot for blokes. Maybe she got the green-eyed monster when she found the gold lighter, and maybe that was why she shopped me?
I go on with my pacing as it’s getting dark. Once it’s absolutely black outside, the screw’s endless patrolling outside my door comes to a stop, and the lock makes a snapping sound.
‘The prison doctor is here, as you’ve asked.’
The door closes behind an elderly, white-robed bloke with a bulbous schnapps nose and a receding hairline. There’s something pasty about his appearance. His cheeks hang like bags on the side of his skull. When he straightens up and pulls in his stomach, a double chin appears.
‘So?’ He puts his big doctor’s briefcase of leather on the stone floor. ‘I understand it’s about your hand?’
I sit down on the bunk and hold up my fist.
‘It needs to be dressed, preferably with a splint. I asked for medical help four days ago.’
‘It is Christmas, you know.’
The doctor, standing in front of me, takes my hand. He mutters something one cannot hear, and gently squeezes the swelling around the knuckle.
‘How did this happen?’
‘I was kicked.’
‘Your entire knuckle’s been crushed. It’s moved two centimetres.’
‘That’s an old injury.’ I sniff.
‘And the finger is wrongly aligned. I can feel a diagonal fracture in the middle bone.’
‘Old.’
‘And then there’s an injury in the outer phalanx.’
‘That swine has pointed the wrong way for ten years.’
‘And lastly, here.’ The doctor squeezes that part of the hand where the blue discolouring is most obvious. The sharpness of the pain takes me unawares.
‘Ow, damn!’ My voice bounces between the stone walls. I snatch
my hand back, while the doctor mutters something. ‘What did you say?’
‘I should have been called in much earlier. Now we have to pull it right.’
I sigh. ‘So pull the sod, then.’
I hold out my hand again. The doctor puts his thumb against one side of the finger, cups his fingers around the other side of it, and tugs. The pain that shoots up my hand makes me clench my jaws and close my eyes. My hand starts trembling.
‘There we are. And now it has to be bandaged very hard. If you’re still here in three weeks I can take a look at it then.’
‘As far as I know I’m not going anywhere.’
The doctor leaves me, my hand thumping with pain. My ring finger and the little finger are joined by means of a greyish bandage that winds through the gap at the base of my thumb and around the palm of the hand. I pace about for a moment, coughing and spitting and holding my hand above my head.
In the corridor, the latrine man is slamming with his buckets. The snapping sound of opening locks gets closer and closer until finally a key is inserted into my door. I look up at a young stripling with a double row of brass buttons on his uniform jacket, which is too big for him. He has a big bunch of keys and a truncheon in his belt.
‘Kvist has to go up to Berglund.’
I grunt and stand up slowly.
‘Hurry up!’
I hold out my hands and the handcuffs click into place around my wrists. The stripling shifts out of the way and I walk down the partially lit corridor. There’s a stink of shit. I stop.
Further down the corridor, the latrine man is carting off two galvanised buckets hanging on a pole carried across his
shoulders. He’s a bearded, stooping bloke in his sixties, wearing a grey overall and staring down at the floor.
‘There’s always someone worse off.’
‘What did you say?’ The stripling appears at my side.
‘What?’
‘You muttered something. What did you say?’
I stare at him for a second or so. ‘Did I? I don’t think so.’
He sighs. ‘Sometimes I think Kvist has more pomade than brains up there.’
My right fist tightens with pain when I instinctively try to clench it. ‘Are you calling me stupid?’
‘Straight on, the door on the right.’
The stripling taps me on my shoulder, and I clatter off in my wooden clogs, my hands clutching my waistband. I feel the vein on my forehead thumping in time with my hand. Behind me, I hear a match being struck and the glow of a cigarette sizzling as the boy takes a drag. He’s doing it just to be bloody-minded. I clench my jaw and move on.
When we come into Berglund’s room, I realise that it’s the same little interrogation chamber as the last time. I recognise a crack in the ceiling. The screw unlocks my handcuffs.
Berglund sits at the table. In front of him is a notebook, a black fountain pen and a thick brown file of documents. He’s wearing a black three-piece suit, a white shirt, and a blue, hand-tied bow-tie with narrow black stripes. When he raises his hand and slides his glasses down to the tip of his nose, a cufflink with a coat of arms on it emerges from under his sleeve.
‘Kvist. Please do sit.’
I do as I’m told. The chair legs scrape against the floor. Berglund pushes his glasses back up again and opens his file of documents. He caresses his ridiculous grey moustache.
‘We’ve conducted a personal investigation into your background in preparation for trial. I would ask you to confirm what I am reading out, and fill in any omissions.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Harry Kvist, residing at Roslagsgatan forty-three, born in Torshälla parish on thirty December, 1898. Is that correct?’
‘It’s correct.’ I hold my thumping right hand in my left. My stomach churns, the pain is making me feel nauseous.
‘Your mother’s name was Gerda Kvist. Your father is not known. Your mother died in childbirth.’
‘She got a fever. You want me to sign somewhere?’
‘One moment. After that your grandmother took care of you and your twin brother John. He died at the age of four. The cause of death was whooping cough.’
‘His blasted coughing kept me up through the night. We slept head to foot on the kitchen sofa.’
‘And then the parish placed Kvist in the care of the workhouse committee?’
‘When grandmother grew too frail.’
‘You were more or less five years old. Do you remember it?’
‘There was a workhouse auction to the lowest bid on the church hill. It was snowing that day and the bidding never really took off.’
‘You were sent to live with a farmer in the area.’
‘He made a partition in the pigsty in the barn with a couple of planks. I lived on one side and the boar on the other. Every morning I woke up when he scratched himself against the planks. Nice company.’
‘How were things for you there?’
‘What difference does it make? I didn’t kill them, not Zetterberg and not the others either. You know I didn’t kill them. You just need someone to blame.’
‘Just answer the question, if you’d be so good.’
‘You have nothing that connects me to Regeringsgatan, and the only witness on Kungsgatan freed me, isn’t that so?’
‘The only witness that’s still alive, yes. Would you be kind enough to answer my questions? How long did you stay at the farm?’
I sniff, and scratch my head. Berglund checks his watch and goes back to fingering his moustache.
‘A couple of years. I ran away.’
‘And where did you stay after that?’
‘With the other workhouse inmates, usually. In all I had two years in school.’
‘They were hardly days of plenty, were they?’
‘What do you think, Detective Inspector?’
‘I think blood puts its stamp on a human, but there are instances where circumstance comes into play.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Berglund leafs through the papers in his file of documents. Most are handwritten, yellow sheets of foolscap, full of smudged ink.
‘When did you go to sea?’
‘Early on.’
‘And when did you permanently sign off?’
‘After the war, with good references.’
‘Always something. And since then you have lived in Stockholm?’
‘I don’t get this, what’s the bloody good of it?’
‘While doing various labouring jobs, such as working as a stevedore, you made a career as a boxer, I understand.’
I sigh. ‘Undefeated to date.’
‘In 1920 you marry Emma, born Jönsson, on the fourth of March.’
‘What concern is that of yours?’
‘And not quite nine months later, on the twenty-fourth of
October, she gives birth to a daughter at Södra maternity hospital. She’s baptised Ida.’
‘A Monday. It was a Monday.’ My nausea gets more intense. I feel as if I’ve been running up a hill without water. I want to vomit. I lean back, stare at the crack in the ceiling and let my stomach settle.
‘So she got knocked up, did she?’
‘That wasn’t the reason.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She did, but that wasn’t why we got married. Not only that.’
I scratch my scalp again. I hear the second hand of Berglund’s wristwatch ticking away. I meet his gaze.
‘A few years later, in August 1923, your wife and daughter emigrate to America. They embark from Gothenburg. You do not go with them?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why not?’
‘The Swedish Championships were a few months later. Just a formality, they said. It would look better if I had that on the pro contract.’
I look up again. Berglund’s pen scrapes the paper as he makes a few notes.
‘America?’
‘Where else?’
Berglund makes a few more notes.
‘Are they alive?’
‘As far as I know.’
‘Where do they live?’
‘The last I heard from them they were living somewhere near Grand Forks in a place called North Dakota. But that’s almost ten years ago now.’
‘Do you want them to be informed about your current situation?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have any others, relatives or such like, whom we should contact?’
‘None.’ I sniff. Gradually, the nausea dissipates.
Berglund nods thoughtfully and looks through his documents. ‘The following year you made your debut in our protocols. Paragraph eighteen, indecent behaviour, in 1924. You were fined seventy-five kronor.’
‘It was worth it.’
Berglund doesn’t see the joke.
‘Then you were sentenced for grievous bodily harm and spent most of 1926 at Långholmen.’
‘Innocent as God’s little lamb.’
‘Really? And yet you signed the declaration of satisfaction. Then you were only out for a year before you had to go back in again. The same crime. You seem to like it at Långholmen, don’t you, Kvist?’
‘Like hell I do, it takes an age to get your hair back in order when you’re released.’
‘Further to that you’ve faced charges for assault on three occasions between 1924 and now without a conviction. I assume you’re involved in some sort of extortion activity…’
‘I’m mainly involved with private investigations.’
‘Things should be known by their proper names. It’s called extortion, mark my words.’
‘If you prefer.’
Berglund puts down his pen and leans back in his chair. He puts his hands together over his stomach. I splutter and cough, and Berglund watches me calmly.
‘Let’s go back for a moment to your wife and daughter.’
My body tenses up, as if in preparation for a punch. I lean across the table. ‘What for?’