The Invisible Man from Salem (2 page)

‘You from Violent Crime?' he asks.

‘Sure.'

He looks at the gloves in my hand and I look down, and I notice the pronounced shoe-prints that are visible on the floor. It's not a boot, more like a trainer of some sort. I put my own shoe alongside the print, noticing that I have the same-size feet as whoever's just been here.

‘Where are the other women?'

‘She was the only one here,' says Matilda.

‘Do you recognise her?'

‘She's been here several times this summer. I think her name's Rebecka.'

‘Rebecka with a “ck”?'

‘I don't know, but I think it's a “cc”.'

‘And her surname?'

She shakes her head.

‘As I said, I don't even know how she spells her first name.'

I carry on down the hall and into the dorm. The walls are sickly yellow, covered in pictures. A window is ajar, allowing the August night to seep in and making the room unusually cool. There are eight beds, arranged along both sides of the room. The bedclothes don't match: some are floral like the walls of a Seventies apartment; others are in bright colours — blue, orange, and green; still others have ugly, insipid patterns. Each bed is marked with a number, clumsily carved into the wood. In bed 7, second from the far wall, lies a body with its back to me, clothed in bleached jeans and a knitted jumper. Unkempt, dark hair is just visible. I leave my shoes on one of the beds and put the gloves on.

People shoot, stab, hit, kick, chop, drown, and strangle each other, attack each other with acid, and run each other over. The results vary from being as discreet and effective as a surgical intervention to being as messy as a mediaeval execution. This time, life has ended suddenly and neatly, almost unremarkably.

If it wasn't for the little maroon flower adorning her temple, she could be asleep. She's young, between twenty and twenty-five — maybe five years older than that — but a hard life leaves its mark on a person's face. I lean over her to get a better look at the entry wound. It's slightly bigger than the head of a drawing-pin, and the traces of blood and black dust from the weapon speckle her forehead. Someone has stood behind her with a small-calibre pistol.

I look at her pockets. They appear to be empty. Her clothes seem undisturbed; a glimpse of her vest is visible under the knitted jumper, but nothing suggests that her body has been searched, that someone was looking for something. I carefully place my hands on the body and feel along her side, shoulders, and back, hoping to find something that shouldn't be there. As I roll up the knitted sleeve, I notice the results of intravenous drug use, but they look neater than usual — she'd almost turned meticulous shooting-up into a competitive sport.

I hear Matilda's footsteps behind me. She stops in the doorway, as though scared to come in.

‘The window,' I ask. ‘Is it always open?'

‘No, we usually keep it closed. It wasn't open when I arrived.'

‘Was she dealing?'

‘I think so. She got here about an hour ago and said she needed somewhere to stay. Most of the women usually come a bit later.'

‘Did she have anything with her? Clothes, bag?'

‘Nothing apart from what she's wearing.'

‘Are those her own clothes?'

‘I think so.' She sniffs. ‘She didn't get them from us, anyway.'

‘Did she have any shoes?'

‘By the bed.'

They're black Converse sneakers, with white laces way too thick for them. She must have bought those later and replaced the original ones. They're lumpy and split — she's been hiding pills inside them. I hold up one of the shoes and inspect the sole, nondescript and grey, before carefully putting it back. I get my phone out and point it towards her face, take a picture, and for a split second the phone's tiny flash makes her skin painfully white.

‘How did she seem when she got here this evening?'

‘High and tired, like everyone else who comes here. She said she'd had a bad evening and just wanted to sleep.'

‘Where were you when it happened?' I ask.

‘I was washing up, with my back to the door, so I didn't see or hear anything. I always do it about this time; it's the only chance I get.'

‘How did you discover she was dead?'

‘I went in to see if she'd fallen asleep. When I went over to close the window I saw that she …'

She doesn't finish the sentence.

I walk in a wide arc around the body, over to the window. It's quite high up — it would take a serious jump to reach Chapmansgatan, down on the pavement below. I look again at the body, and in the light from the streetlamp something is glittering in her hand, like a small chain.

‘She's got something in her hand,' I say to Matilda, who looks puzzled.

From the hall I hear a voice I recognise. I take a last look at the body before I pick up my shoes and follow Matilda back into the hall, where I meet Gabriel Birck. I haven't seen him in a long time, but he looks the same, with his suntanned face and his dark, close-cropped hair. Birck has the kind of hair that makes you want to change your shampoo, and he's wearing an understated black suit, like he's just been yanked away from a party.

‘Leo,' he says, surprised. ‘What the hell are you doing here?'

‘I … woke up.'

‘Aren't you suspended?'

‘On leave.'

‘Badge, Leo,' he says, tightening his lips to an ashen line. ‘If you don't have your badge, you need to get out of here.'

‘It's in my wallet, which is in my flat.'

‘Go and get it.'

‘I was just leaving,' I say, holding up my shoes.

Birck observes me silently with a grey stare, and I put the gloves back and go towards the door and out into the stairwell again. The policewoman looks startled as I walk past her.

‘How the hell did he get in here?' is the last thing I hear from inside the hostel.

Instead of going back to my place, I head down the stairs and around the lift on the ground floor, out into the dark, empty courtyard. Only when I feel the cold ground on the soles of my feet do I realise that I've still got my shoes in my hand. I put them on and light a cigarette. Above me, the high walls of the building form a frame around the night sky, and I stand there a while, alternating between smoking and chewing my thumbnail. I walk across the courtyard and unlock a door that takes me back inside, but into a different part of the building. The stairwell here is smaller and older, warmer. I go towards the entrance and out onto Pontonjärgatan.

We live in a time when people feel insecure among strangers. Somewhere close by, there's the sound of heavy, throbbing dance music. Pontonjär's Park is in front of me, silent and full of shadows; some distance away, the noise of screeching brakes is followed by the sound of an engine cutting out. At the crossing, a man and woman stand arguing, and the last thing I see before I head off is how one raises a hand to the other. I think about how they are hurting each other, about the dead woman in bed 7 and the little object that glittered in her hand, about the words I saw on the tunnel wall earlier today — Sweden must die' — and I think that whoever believes that and wrote it might be right.

I TURN ONTO
Chapmansgatan again and light another cigarette; I need to keep my hands busy. The mute blue lights drift across the wall and disappear, again and again. More uniformed police are moving around outside the building now, busy cordoning off parts of the road, diverting traffic and pedestrians. The police wave people on forcefully and irritably. Bright white light from large searchlights illuminates the tarmac. A big tent is unloaded from a van, as a precaution in case it starts raining.

Chapmansgården's open window is swinging and bumping gently in the wind. Inside I can see heads sweeping past — Gabriel Birck, a forensic technician, and Matilda. Under the window the pavement is waiting to be inspected; I want to study it more closely, but the commotion in front of the house hides it from my view.

I look at my phone instead. A new day started half an hour ago. I hear the humming noise of a nearby bar, and music coming through its open windows. I put the cigarette out, turning my back on Chapmansgatan.

A LITTLE STRIP
of pale tarmac links two of the larger streets on Kungsholmen. I don't know what it's called, but it's short enough that you could kick a ball from one end of the street to the other. In one of the buildings jammed along it there is a wine-red door. Written on it, in faded yellow paint, is a single word:
BAR
. I open it and see a head of blonde, tousled hair resting on the bar. As the door slams behind me, the head lifts slowly and the wavy hair falls down into a centre parting. Anna looks up, her eyes half-closed.

‘Finally,' she mumbles, as she runs her hand through her hair. ‘A customer.'

‘Are you drunk?'

‘Bored.'

‘A bit of advertising on the door would get more people in.'

‘Peter doesn't want advertising. He just wants to get rid of the place.'

BAR
is owned by an uninterested thirty-something entrepreneur, whose father bought the premises in the early Eighties, turned it into a bar, and owned the place until he died.
BAR
was left to Peter, who, in accordance with his father's wishes, was not allowed to sell it for five years. That was four-and-a-half years ago; so, barring Armageddon, Anna has six months left behind the taps.

BAR
is the sort of place you would only find if you were looking for it. Everything in here is made of wood: the counter, the floor, the ceiling, the empty tables, and the chairs that are strewn about the place. The lighting is warm with a yellow hue, making Anna's skin seem browner that it really is. She carefully dog-ears a page in her thick book and then closes it, pulls out a bottle of absinthe from a cupboard, grabs a glass, and pours what I guess is supposed to be a 20-ml measure but is in fact significantly more. It's illegal to sell the stuff, but a lot of what goes on in bars tends to be illegal.

‘It's quiet in here.'

‘Do you want me to put the music on? I turned it off — it was annoying me.'

I don't know what I want. Instead I sit on one of the bar stools and drink from the glass. Absinthe is the only spirit I can cope with. I only drink occasionally; but when I do, that's what I choose. I found this place early this summer; I'd been on my way home, high, and I stopped to light a cigarette. I needed to lean against the wall to keep still enough. Everything in my vision tugged leftwards the whole time, making it impossible to focus. When I finally did, and saw the word
BAR
on the wine-red door across the road, I was pretty sure it was a hallucination, but I stumbled over the road anyway and started banging on the door. After a while, Anna opened the door, baseball bat in hand.

I don't know how old she is. She could be twenty. Her parents own a mansion in Uppland, just north of Norrtälje. Fifteen years ago, Anna's father had started an internet business at exactly the right time, and then sold it just before the bubble burst. He invested the money in new companies, which he allowed to expand. It's this sort of manoeuvre that makes people rich nowadays. Anna fluctuates between needy self-interest and enormous contempt in her dealings with him. She's studying psychology, and works part-time at
BAR
, but I never see her reading textbooks. All she reads is great thick books with ambiguous covers. That's all I know about her. It's almost enough to pass as friendship.

I catch my reflection in the mirror hanging behind the bar. I look like I'm wearing borrowed clothes. I've lost weight. I'm pale for the time of year, which is a tell-tale sign that someone's been keeping a low profile. Anna puts her elbows on the bar and rests her head in her hands, looking at me with a cool gaze.

‘You look awful,' she says.

‘You're very perceptive.'

‘Am I, hell! It's completely bloody obvious.'

I drink some absinthe.

‘A woman was shot in my apartment block,' I say, putting the glass down. ‘There's something about it that … bothers me.'

‘In your block?'

‘In a homeless shelter on the first floor. She died.'

‘So somebody killed her?'

‘If anyone's likely to die an untimely death in this city, it's the addicts and the whores.' I stare at the glass in front of me. ‘But more often than not it's an overdose or suicide. The few who do get killed by someone else are nearly always men. This was a woman. It's unusual.' I rub my cheek and hear the scratchy sound. I could do with a shave. ‘It looked so … simple. Discreet and clean. That's even more unusual, and that's what bothers me most of all.'

In the courtyard of my building there are a few kids — all one family, I think — who are always racing each other across the yard, from one side to the other, noisily, laughing, so that the sound echoes between the walls. I don't know why I'm thinking about that now, but there's something about that image, the way they look and the way they sound, that means something to me — an image of something that has been lost.