It was getting darker, but still light when they parked the
car by the corner of a seven-meter-high wall.
Leon opened the trunk and looked into the eyes of the taped-up bitch as he shoved her legs to one side so he could get the aluminum stepladder, the arc torch, and two Kalashnikovs, one real and one replica. He handed the cutter to Alex, who ran with it in his arms to the metal shell protection fence by the first wall, got down on his knees, turned it on.
Forty-five minutes ago they had cut their way out.
Now they were going to cut their way in.
———
The prison warden on duty that evening in the central security glass office was keeping an eye on sixteen monitors showing black-and-white sequences from thirty-three security cameras in Österåker prison and had just sat down with a cup of coffee when he saw something odd on the middle screen. Three dark shadows transformed into a flaring light by the first protection fence, then again by the next one. He didn’t really understand what he was seeing until the shadows ran up to the wall, put up a stepladder, and started to climb.
———
Marko had crawled through the holes in both fences, then extended the four-part stepladder to its full eight-meter height and put it up against the wall, Alex a couple of steps behind with the cutter, Leon last with the loaded rifle on his back.
The wind was stronger up there, it felt so good on their faces when they stood on the top of the wall, pulled the ladder up and then dropped it down on the other side.
———
It had happened so fast.
He’d worked in central security for nearly two years. This was like nothing he’d ever seen before.
First, he pressed the blazing red button that was the direct line to the County Communication Center in Stockholm,
three armed men, a breakout
, next the button right beside it that raised the alarm on six pagers in the breast pockets of six uniforms of the Österåker task force,
protective equipment, prison yard
, then on the keyboard in front of him formulated a silent alarm on each screen in each wardens’ office in each unit,
escape attempt, secure from inside
. And then he turned back to the moving images on the screen again, two shadows climbing down the ladder on the inside of the wall that then started to run toward the metal cages in the prison yard.
———
Leon stood on top of the wide wall and watched Alex getting down on his knees again with the gas-fueled arc torch and a few seconds later cutting out a rectangle in the corner of the metal cage as three inmates stormed over the yard. The first one, tall and broad with a shaved head, threw himself down toward the hole, forced his way through, the second one immediately behind.
“Only Reza! No one else!”
The two others had heard but didn’t stop and Marko aimed his gun at the ground near them, then fired three shots.
“
No one else
!”
They looked so small to someone standing on the top of a concrete wall, seven meters up.
Alex, Marko, and Reza ran toward the ladder and Leon breathed in and out and in and out and in and this was easy, no one in the way, it was just him and the wall and the wind that meant he had to stand
a bit firmer on his feet. A Kalashnikov weighed four kilos and had a magazine of thirty bullets. He lifted it and aimed at them, he wanted to laugh and fired into the sky and then at the woods over there, five six seven shots, one for each breath. He swayed a bit as he tended to do when he was concentrating, and after a while looked straight into the security camera on one corner of the wall, straight at someone who right then was sitting in a security office looking straight at him. He felt a tickling from his legs up to his arms and he laughed into the camera, giggled, aimed, fired, and the glass shattered and showered down, close to Alex and Marko and Reza, who were almost up now; they helped to pull up the ladder and drop it down on the outside.
———
The man in the blue prison service uniform, who was sitting by himself in the central security fish tank, had seen a face on the screen and through the air vent heard the sound of a Kalashnikov, counted eight shots.
Alarm, secure from inside, lock.
He knew the security regulations. And had done exactly what he was supposed to. But he was trembling all the same.
He knew that a total of eleven police units were now on their way from Stockholm and Arlanda and Norrtälje, that Österåker’s own task force was already out in the prison yard, forcing the prisoners back in, including the two who had crawled through a square hole, only to stand still at the base of the wall, that the prison wardens in each unit had locked all the cell and unit doors and were in their secure office. It didn’t help. He was still shaking as he, on the screen, saw the four men leave an eight-meter ladder and run toward a waiting car through two protective fences that had been cut open. He could still hear the unfamiliar sound of automatic gunfire in the late summer evening, and his colleagues were out there, and he hoped that none of them had been injured.
Julia tried to turn over, stretch out her legs, arms. If she put
up with the tape cutting into her skin, if she made small, small movements, she could manage to kick the metal, but the sound was muffled; she heard it best in her head.
She would have been walking back from Slussen by now, slowly up Götgatsbacken, it was warm and that kind of evening—people, bicycles, cafés, and friends laughing at tables outside restaurants. They’d meet at Medborgarplatsen by the hot-dog kiosk with the Danish-sounding name, like they usually did. She’d be a bit late and start to run, and Jocke would be sitting on one of the benches waiting for her—he always was.
She kicked again. That damned metal sound.
The car had been standing still for several minutes by the red thing that she was certain was
another
prison wall.
It had been a short drive. There was only one other prison nearby.
Österåker.
It was easier to breathe when there were no violent stops and sharp bends, when she could keep the socks away from her throat. A couple of times she imagined that someone had walked past, someone who might find her, she’d tried to shout but the words just got stuck on the tape and her lips and she had kicked the metal again that was still muffled.
She heard someone shooting. An automatic, she knew that. First seven shots in quick succession, then one more, she had identified the sound of splintered glass and maybe metal falling somewhere nearby.
Who were they aiming at? Who had they injured? Who wasn’t alive any longer?
Footsteps running, coming closer, the doors were wrenched open, the engine started.
She curled up, it was difficult to get enough air again, the more she breathed in the less seemed to reach her lungs, she was dizzy and what had previously gone to sleep from her feet up, started again. There were more voices now, a new one that was higher than the others, but didn’t sound as loud. And soon there were smaller roads with sharper bends and she felt even dizzier, and she tried to focus on the only thing that was important, counting, thirty-five right-hand turns and thirty-four left-hand turns and fifty-two slowdowns before they suddenly stopped.
Sirens.
She could hear them clearly.
She tried to scream, kick, police cars were nearby.
And then disappeared.
They were going to go to the movies, have a glass of wine. Jocke would be sitting on the bench waiting, she was normally late, but not this late, she was seldom this late.
She guessed it was another ten minutes until they stopped the next time and left the road. She was thrown against the trunk wall as the car drove over grass, maybe a field or a meadow. They opened the doors and jumped out and she recognized the voice, the one who had cut her throat, Jensen, he was the one who yelled
cunt
as he passed the trunk and hit the metal hard with his hand.
———
The sun was setting. Half an hour until dark.
He aimed his gun at the third prison in ninety minutes, one of the low security ones with no wall, held the butt hard and aimed while Alex cut the first square out of Storboda prison’s outer fence, twelve seconds, moved on to the next, which was thinner, eight seconds, and that was precisely when Uros ran over the asphalted prison yard. Leon looked at his watch, 19:25, five minutes until lockup.
———
They hadn’t stayed there as long this time.
She had heard a machine, then running, tried to work out where she was.
The doors opened, closed.
Now there were five of them, shouting and laughing loudly, punching the roof and the windows, stopped suddenly, repeated shots from an automatic rifle, then drove on again, fast and on small roads with sudden movements, and it was now that she heard for the first time that they were talking about her. At first she thought she was imagining it, but the voice was clear; it was explaining that they didn’t need her anymore and another one asked if they should kill her here or wait a while. She wondered if Jocke was still waiting for her, if he was worried and had gotten up, maybe even walked around to look for her and then started to make phone calls. She could see him in the middle of Medborgarplatsen surrounded by men and women holding hands when her toes and feet and knees and thighs gradually left her body, she tried, she did, but couldn’t get any air, great gulps of air and the socks got stuck in her throat, and it was hard to swallow as she slipped away, gone.
Silence.
It sat in his chair, possibly bent forward with its elbows on the wooden surface, looking at him. It stood over by the closed door, leaning back, looking at him. It lay beside him on the old corduroy sofa that was brown and had lost most of its stuffing and, what’s more, was too short to accommodate his stiff leg. It lay there and snuggled closer, touched his shoulder.
Detective Superintendent Ewert Grens smiled at it, a nod of recognition.
He wasn’t frightened anymore.
He had been, to begin with, when the noise from Hantverkargatan and the cars accelerating at the bottom of the steep hill crowded in through the window, and the footsteps and voices that passed in the corridor didn’t dissipate. He had started to hear things he had never heard before, because the music used to block them out, Siw Malmkvist’s voice, so soft, and the songs from so long ago, connected to a part of his life long gone. It had taken a whole year and he had on several occasions rushed down the stairs to the City Police property store, run with the shadows looming in his chest, filled out the reclaim form in detail at the wooden counter and then regretted it, closed his eyes for a moment and turned his back to the shelves, breathing deeply until he could face leaving again—they were there, so close, waiting among the property confiscated during criminal investigations, the sealed cardboard boxes of cassettes and a cassette player and loudspeakers and a black-and-white photo of the singer that he’d taken himself and then mounted in a silver frame, the boxed-up music that had accompanied him every day for thirty years and had taken up all his space and thoughts.
And all the silence.
He started by managing to get through one day. The next morning, he had decided to try for one more day.
Then another day.
And then, some months ago, he’d fallen asleep and woken up on the sofa and felt what he had avoided for so long—he wasn’t frightened, the silence could scream at him as much as it wanted, sitting leaning forward or standing leaning back or squeezing onto the sofa that was his alone—what couldn’t be heard was almost beautiful.
He got up and walked through the room at one end of the Homicide corridor, opened the window that faced out into the Kronoberg courtyard, the air pleasant and warm, looked at the buildings that housed various parts of the Swedish police force and dealt with a criminality that was growing by the hour. More and more. More frequent. More violent. It had also changed appearance and clothes in recent years, a widening gap between the small-time junkies who ran around wielding kitchen knives and the open executions that were intended to send messages about respect.
He left the window open, as warm outside as it was inside, went back to the desk and the files that were stacked one on top of the other, lifted them up one at time, looked through documents that described violations and lives that would never be the same. He wondered where it was all coming from, the contempt, the illusion of the right to injure.
And despite it all, he could hear the birds.
The ones sitting in the small trees that would soon turn yellow, which were planted here and there, too far apart, along the asphalt path that led from the City Police to Swedish National Police Board, sinewy trunks that seemed to lack branches, but there the birds sat, looking up at the thin moon and singing their hearts out.
He dropped the files down on the desk, filling the surface between the telephone and coffee cups. They would stay there and he wouldn’t return to them for another couple of hours, other people’s violence and lives where he always sought refuge, but not now, not today. He
opened the white wardrobe that was squeezed into a corner of the room with two full bookshelves and an unlocked safe. The training gear that he never used next to uniforms he had long since grown out of. In between them, still in its plastic covering, a jacket—he took it out; it smelled new.
Ewert Grens held it, lifted it up to the strong ceiling light. A beige color that he liked a lot. The protective plastic covering clung to the arms; he pulled it off with great difficulty, bit by bit, filling the trash can. It fit him just as well as it had in the shop. He looked at the small mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door, turned around, his head craning to have a look. There was a comb on the small shelf under the mirror, he picked it up and pulled it through his thin hair that was more like a gray halo around his crown.
Someone walked past in the corridor.
The birds started up again, singing even louder; there seemed to be more of them.
Otherwise, silence.
Until the damn phone on his desk launched an attack, shrill signals, despite being covered by one of the files.
He let it ring.
Hand over the smooth fabric. It was a long time since he had worn a new jacket. Ten years. To the day. What if he did up two buttons? Maybe three. He angled the wardrobe door slightly—it was hard to see from shoulder to shoulder in the narrow, rather dirty mirror.
The phone was still ringing. He counted twelve. Sixteen. Twenty-two.
“Yes?”
“Ewert?”
Erik Wilson. He talked louder than his predecessor, Göransson, had done. The younger they were, they more effort they had to make to sound as small as they didn’t want to be.
“What do you want?”
“I know you’re not on duty. But you’re here.”
“I’m always here.”
“I need your help.”
Farther down one of the jacket sleeves, a crease. If he rubbed his fingertips back and forth over it . . . it disappeared, slowly.
“When?”
“Now.”
The metal comb through his hair once more, like a whirlpool on the right-hand side, but it normally flattened after a while.
“I haven’t got time. I was on my way out.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Sometimes it is.”
The voice that was nearly twenty years younger, that was about to give an order, coughed, took a deep breath.
“I wouldn’t be calling unless it was important.”
If he pulled the sleeves. That almost made them longer. Covered his wrists and part of his hand, and then the shirt, white, the cuff showing.
“What do you think, Wilson? A beige jacket?”
“I’m sorry?”
“At the start of September, do you think it works?”
He was still there. His breathing was audible. But the words, they took longer.
“Ewert?”
“Yes? Do you think it works? Or should it be something darker? Stripes, maybe?”
“Have you been drinking?”
“Jackets, Wilson! What color are you wearing?”
“Gray.”
“Not beige?”
“No.”
Ewert lowered the receiver, looked in the wardrobe mirror again. He had somehow imagined that today would be different.
If he’d wanted that, he would have slept at home.
He didn’t sigh.
“How important?”
“Eighteen zero five hours. Aspsås prison. An eighteen-year-old, a nineteen-year-old, and a twenty-year-old. Escape, hostage, knives.”
“I see.”
“Eighteen forty-five hours. Österåker prison. A nineteen-year-old. Escape, automatic weapon. We’re certain of it. Same guys.”
“Right.”
“Nineteen twenty-five hours. Storboda prison. A twenty-year-old. Escape, automatic weapon. Same guys.”
“Right.”
“I want you to take over.”
“Take over?”
“Gold command.”
Ewert Grens slipped the shiny metal comb into a narrow plastic sleeve, pushed the training gear and uniform back in with one hand while he used the other to close the wardrobe door, crossed the worn linoleum through the silence that was no longer music, to the large window and the courtyard that still refused to accept the dark completely.
He snorted.
“Gold command. I thought that sort of thing was for bureaucrats. Really senior police commanders. Like . . . you.”
“Ewert, I—”
“And . . . it’s twenty to two in the morning. More than seven and a half hours have passed. Half the Swedish police must be running around in the woods and the other half will be at home watching it on TV. So why the hell are you phoning me in your
gray
jacket, Wilson, interrupting . . . now?”
A late summer’s night with air that was almost warm. He opened the window a fraction more, followed the shadows that lengthened where the lamps along the asphalt met forgotten lights in offices here and there in the sleeping body of the building.
“Because I now know something I didn’t know then.”
“Which is?”
“That you’re the best suited.”
“Suited?”
“Yes.”
Four floors down. He leaned out. He was heavy, falling from here wouldn’t take many seconds.
“Aspsås prison. The one we think planned it. His name is Leon.”
“And?”
“Leon Jensen.”
Grens straightened up and left the window, hobbled in agitation across the floor, his stiff leg resisting more than usual.
“Jensen?”
“Yes.”
“Youth unit?”
“Yes.”
“Born in nineteen hundred and ninety-two . . . three?”
“Yes.”
Like the others
.
“I want you to be in charge from now on.”
Like all the others
.
“Ewert?”
A short strip of plastic on one sleeve. Hard to get hold of. His nails kept slipping; he pulled it a couple of centimeters, and then again, uneven edges that were too small, he let it stay where it was.
“I’m going to hang up. I’ve got some phone calls to make.”
———
It usually didn’t take very long. He’d seen the telephone upstairs, on the small table with rounded legs, Anita’s side.
“Sven?”
“Yes.”
“Sit up.”
Ewert Grens always wondered whether his colleague got out of bed and hurried around on the cold floor to the phone so as not to wake her and then went back so that he could lie down again. Or whether he carefully rolled closer and stretched out his arm.
“I’m sitting up.”
“
Sit up
.”
The telephone always makes an irritating scratching sound when someone holds it in one hand and presses it against wrinkled sheets as he tries to haul himself up and clear his throat to rouse a voice that has just gone to sleep.
“Sven?”
A terraced house in Gustavberg that resembled a home. One of the few, the only one, where Ewert Grens was a regular visitor and felt welcome.
“Are you sitting up properly and listening?”
Sixteen years, working together.
The telephone calls could come at any time. But mostly, any time of night. And the man sitting naked on the hard edge of a bed, fumbling for the light switch, had long since realized he had either to switch jobs or accept.
He had accepted.
“Ready.”
“Good. I want you sitting here. In half an hour.”
———
He didn’t know many telephone numbers by heart. But dialed the next one as soon as he got the tone.
It kept ringing.
He looked at the clock. Ten to two. He let it ring.
Then he smiled, got up from the desk, went out into the dark Homicide corridor.
He could hear it. A few closed doors down.
Past the coffee machine, the vending machine, the photocopier, toward the noise that got louder.
Her door was open. The desk lamp was on.
“You’re not answering?”
She hadn’t heard him coming. A quick glance at someone leaning a heavy body against the doorframe.
“Ewert?”
“It’s ringing.”
“I haven’t got time.”
“It’s me that’s calling.”
She looked at the cell phone, then at her boss.
Now it was her turn to smile.
“It’s you that’s calling.”
His voice. Something about the tone. Like a pleased parent. If he’d had children, that is.
“Hermansson.”
“Yes?”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
That voice again.
“And you’re still here.”
“It just happened.”
He wasn’t aware that it was noticeable. As it probably wasn’t there. Whatever it was that sounded like he was proud.
“How’s it going?”
She ran her index finger down the spines of the thick files.
“I’ve gone through fifty-two open cases with a fine-toothed comb. We can close twelve of them.
No conclusion
. All minor crimes.
Preliminary investigation closed
. We won’t get any further.”
She was wearing a uniform, the black one that was more like a boiler suit and was still in a box in his office, he hadn’t even bothered to unpack it.
“Put the rest to one side.”
He was still standing in the doorway, filling it, as if he’d put it on and it had got stuck.
“Hermansson?”
“You’ve got a new jacket.”
“
Hermansson
?”
“Yes?”
“Put them aside.”
He turned and was already walking away down the corridor, echoing in the emptiness.
“My office. In twenty-five minutes.”
———
He lay on the faded brown corduroy sofa, fingers against the stripy fabric that no longer ran the same way, as he stared at the ceiling, looking for the newest cracks, he couldn’t remember them being so tangled. It had until very recently been a quiet weekend. Ten armed robberies and four rapes. Now he had a pain in the middle of his chest, he couldn’t understand it, it was so long ago.
He looked at Sven and Hermansson. Each sitting on a chair, waiting. There was no music in the room, but her voice hung in the air, filled their weariness and confusion. Two more beats, then he would get up, lean in toward the computer, see what he couldn’t face seeing.
“Ewert?”
A hand in the air.
“One moment.”
The last verse. She went up half a note. He was convinced he could hear her, there, the refrain one more time. He listened and then sat up.
“Could you open the window, Sven?”
“You’ve already opened it. Wide.”
“The air is so stuffy in here.”
The laptop was waiting in the middle of the rickety coffee table. Ewert Grens selected the file named
ASPSÅS
and double-clicked, nineteen documents, moved the cursor to one on the top left called
CAMERA
4
. He clicked again and slid along the thin, black timeline to a sequence of pictures on the stretch that marked 18:10, which according to the governor was the exact time that the search patrol opened the heavy metal door and went into the empty cell with only half a window.