They studied the grainy, jumping image in silence.
A section of green grass. A slice of the asphalt-covered yard.
And—Grens guessed around thirty, maybe even forty meters away—the rectangular, three-story building that the prison staff called Block D.
He moved the cursor back an hour.
He let the recorded sequence of images age one second at a time, concentrated eyes watching from the corduroy sofa and the plain
chairs, one after the other, grainy, jumpy, the grass, the asphalt, the concrete building, a bit later a bird flew past the camera, then another, otherwise all calm.
Perhaps it was a bit lighter, maybe the colors were stronger, or maybe it was just their imagination—a late afternoon should feel good in early September.
There.
There
.
A flash.
Like sparks, or even flames in a cell window, quite far to the left on the first floor of the gray building.
They all leaned closer to the screen without being aware of it.
Fifty-seven seconds.
The gray building, the rows of crossed bars, everything was calm.
There
.
The same window. Sparks.
“Do you see what I see?”
Ewert Grens had turned his head, he hadn’t received an answer, their faces, frozen.
They saw it a third time.
A flash.
Mariana Hermansson nodded, her voice a touch too loud.
“Like . . . I don’t know . . . a welding flame, only more, bigger.”
The solid detective superintendent with a stiff neck and gammy leg threw himself back on the corduroy sofa, sinking deep into what was far too soft.
“So now we know
how
.”
He snorted.
“Now we’ll check
when
.”
———
He moved the cursor closer to the long, thin black worm that went across the screen, a peculiar line that decided time and moved the viewer forward, backward, even farther back, something that had happened recently could reoccur or never have happened.
Cell 2. Unit D1 Left.
It had been empty at
18:10
.
There had been sparks from a window at
17:14
.
The difference between being locked up and freedom. Prisoner and on the run. Violent, full of hate, classified as dangerous and monitored, or violent, full of hate, classified as dangerous and someone anyone could meet on the street at any moment.
He moved forward through the seconds that became minutes, first at normal speed, then twice that, four times, eight times.
Nothing.
No movement, no sparks, not even a bird.
He let time stop by the slightly broader line that marked
18:00
, rubbed his bloodshot, tired eyes, then normal speed, second by second.
Just as empty, just as silent.
Perhaps not quite so light, slightly more wind if you looked carefully at the uncut grass that could be seen and the rebellious halyard on the bare flagpole.
A few minutes.
One more.
Now.
An obvious movement to the left of the picture. The same cell window. A head. A person.
Him. It is a man, gradually appearing from the graininess, the fuzz.
Then the movement stopped, the hunched body waits, presses against one side of the barred window.
You’re on your way
.
Ewert Grens looked at the two colleagues he trusted most in the building where he’d spent his entire adult life. Sven Sundkvist and Mariana Hermansson were sitting close together, faces watching a body that was half out, half in.
You, who don’t want to go anywhere, don’t want anything
.
He looked at Sven’s concentrated eyes, at Hermansson’s concentrated eyes, and wanted to explain to them that they were watching much more than a body with an unclear outline, that you could build a machine with a cursor that moved time back and forward, but that what had happened had damn well happened and that
only someone who had been there from the start could know what and why.
You’re on your way, and I know where to
.
This damn unease that he couldn’t shake off no matter how hard he tried.
He ran the cursor over the screen back to the folder with nineteen documents,
CAMERA
9
, the same time from a different angle, from above, installed on the roof of Block D, looking over the edge, straight down.
The empty asphalt.
A bird again, probably a seagull, flying close to the camera lens that watches the plaster façade from above.
There
.
A blurred body that slowly gets bigger, forcing its way out. Feet in light-colored shoes on the windowsill, arms and hands and fingers around the metal bars, back pressed against the bars and gray concrete.
Thirty seconds. Sixty. Ninety.
Then the picture changes.
In the right hand corner—a warden in uniform, a woman, she’s young and on her own, approaching the corner of the building, coming around it.
A strange feeling, watching him waiting while she knows nothing, to be there and not be able to shout, warn her.
He can clearly hear the footsteps that aren’t there in the silent film.
He bends his legs, prepares himself.
She passes, doesn’t look up, why would she?
So she doesn’t notice someone landing behind her, taking two, maybe three steps and raising an arm, hitting her on the neck with great force.
———
Sven Sundkvist leaned back and looked at the older man who was sitting on the worn corduroy sofa, wearing a beige jacket that looked new, with small pieces of plastic still stuck to the top right sleeve and middle of the left shoulder.
Ewert Grens.
His boss, a colleague that few could bear to approach. His intoxicating quickness that so easily tipped over into anger, lashing out, sometimes into cruelty.
A large man who could look so small.
One of the informal powers of the police headquarters, who had spent his whole life with a crutch under each arm: Anni, Siw Malmkvist—an absent wife, a present voice; a past that had never ended but then abruptly did, and once he had fallen he had slowly gotten to his feet, started to walk on his own, still limping with a gammy leg, but under his own steam. There wasn’t anyone to visit every Tuesday anymore, no longer a wall of sixties music, not as much fear masked with aggression.
But this, he’d never seen this. Ewert’s face—it could perhaps be rage.
Sven looked for the vein on his right temple that should be pulsing, for his mouth that should be twisted, eyes that should be narrowed.
But they weren’t there.
This, this rage was like sorrow.
Sven Sundkvist had a sudden urge to lean forward again, touch the cheek that he had never been near, the person who no one was allowed to touch.
———
“She’s just a thing.”
The mouth that wasn’t twisted had raised its voice.
“A pawn for negotiation, something to exert pressure with.”
The temple that wasn’t pulsing was flushed red.
“Do you see? For him, from now on, there . . .
there
when he hits her . . . from now on she’s just something he can harm, destroy, cast aside.”
The eyes that weren’t narrowed, raged.
Ewert Grens had said nothing when the piece of metal was pressed against her throat and when it cut deep into the back of her thigh and
when she fell to the ground in pain and was forced back up and used as a shield.
He had moved the cursor back, studied the sequence again, and now, now he screamed.
A hand slammed the coffee table.
Then he opened a new file on the screen—
ÖSTERÅKER
, twenty-two documents,
CAMERA
2.
Another prison and the security camera on the drive up to the main gate. He froze the picture when a large white car passed at high speed at
18:44
.
“How many can you see?”
Sven studied the grainy faces.
“Three.”
“And you?”
Hermansson nodded.
“Three.”
He hit out again. The plastic casing on the computer. Sufficiently hard for a small, but obvious crack.
“One person is missing.”
Ewert Grens pointed at the picture.
“She’s already lying there. In the trunk.”
Finger pointing at the screen, at the back of the white car.
“Something that will soon be thrown away.”
“. . . like a piece of meat. She’s not a person. No one he knows. For Christ’s sake, she could have been out there drinking a latte with all the others. Meat! Until he throws her aside and looks for someone else he doesn’t know and for that very reason can tear them apart.”
———
Grens looked at the alarm clock standing on his desk between the telephone and one of the piles of ongoing investigations. The young woman named Julia Bozsik had been taken hostage at exactly eighteen oh five. Forty minutes later, she was lying locked in the trunk when the escape car passed camera number 2, which was installed on the driveway up to Österåker prison.
If she was alive.
That was eight hours ago.
If she was alive
.
———
His large body back and forth in the room that felt cramped without music to hide the sound of restless feet on a tired floor and open hands on ulcerated walls. He had continued to open document after document, different angles and distances and time intervals, then stopped at what was called
CAMERA
7
, Österåker prison’s high red-painted wall seen at an angle from the front, clear focus on the upper corner.
A face that stared straight at him.
Ewert Grens had studied the neck and back standing on the concrete that was supposed to keep him in, far below the shadow of someone kneeling by the inner fence. The neck and back had been on guard, that was obvious, the powerful gun in his hands when he turned and aimed at the lens. Such a proud smile, as if he was posing, for a second like every picture of young gang members that filled every cell phone seized in connection with every criminal investigation, always photographed by another gang member, with their logo on the front of a black hoodie, someone who was eighteen, waving one hand in the air while he held death in the other, every time the same weapon, the same hate.
Unmasked. Smiling.
Ewert Grens closed his eyes, took a deep breath, looked at the face on the screen one more time.
The gestures, stature, features.
He looked just the same.
He was even the same age.
As his father.
———
The obvious crack in the middle of the computer’s casing, Ewert Grens had hit it hard and when he grabbed the screen and turned it, the gap seemed to grow, even longer.
The last file. The third and final prison.
STORBODA
.
He selected two pictures.
CAMERA
14
. The white car drives up to the prison that has a high fence with rolls of barbed wire on top, instead of a wall. Three men get out and start to run toward the fence when one of them, the driver, stops by the trunk, punches it, and shouts something.
Grens froze the picture, zoomed in, his mouth in close-up.
“She’s lying in there.”
The detective superintendent rewound the sequence and they all saw the same fist again slamming into the trunk, driving home the message to the person inside, someone who not long ago had controlled him, opening his cell door if he wanted to piss and locking it again before he went to sleep, someone who was now lying there and had to listen.
“She’s still alive.”
CAMERA
18
. The white car leaving the driveway to the prison, accelerating and then stopping abruptly.
I hate you
. The one driving leans out of his window, turns to the camera and holds up the automatic in one hand, shoots at the building for five seconds.
I hate this fucking place
. Ewert Grens froze the picture again, paused on a face that was eighteen and had the kind of power that only those who have never had power can have.
I could have killed you
. And the kind of control only those who have never had control can have.
If I’d wanted
.
———
A frozen face.
He recognized it. He didn’t recognize it.
Every step a person takes changes them. Every action, every thought has a consequence.
Whether what I do is right. Or wrong.
Ewert Grens scrolled down the picture on the screen, the mouth that was shouting something, the eyes that didn’t see.
He knew it. He had always known it.
Every intervention a policeman makes will have consequences. Every intervention he himself had ever made, makes, or would make, would have consequences.
It wasn’t his job to assess them, to weigh them up, try to understand how long the consequences would last.
Not even now.
In front of a frozen face that he almost recognized.
———
“At eighteen twelve the duty guard called on all available units, twenty-three patrols, to come to Aspsås prison.”
He had seen it all before.
“Redirected them to Österåker prison at eighteen forty-six.”
Just as all of them had seen it all before.
“Redirected them again to Storboda prison at nineteen twenty-seven.”
The escape from a cell was reminiscent of Popescu’s escape at the end of the eighties.
“Three breakouts, five prisoners.”
The escape from Österåker was a copy of Maiorana’s escape from Kumla prison fifteen years before.
“All—and we’re certain of this—members of what was previously called Råby Warriors and now is called Ghetto Soldiers. And apart from that . . .”
And this one, Grens looked at the frozen face that still filled the computer screen and the driveway up to Storboda prison, planned and executed step by step like the escape from Norrtälje prison a year or so ago.
“. . . we know nothing.”
He pointed at the paused picture sequence, leaned in toward the computer and pressed play again,
STORBODA
and
CAMERA
18
and a young man laughing as he fired with a big black gun in his hand.