“He needs to go to hospital. A broken rib has punctured his
lung.”
Sven had heard what he said. But didn’t leave his chair. He looked at the eighteen-year-old who was lying there and then at his boss.
“A lung? How long have you known that?”
Ewert Grens was already on his way out of the room.
“Ewert,
how long
have you known that?”
“As long as he’s known where Pereira was when he died.”
The Homicide corridor echoed when he turned around.
“And I care about it as much as he cares about how Pereira is.”
Twenty-four hours and four people between closed walls.
He’ll never go back once he’s left
. Grens followed the stumbling body between Sven and Hermansson through the dust and dark.
Figure it out for yourself
. Unsteady steps as he disappeared.
A member who’d defected and informed on his brothers.
And who had just been given a new identity and would soon be registered at Sankt Görans ER under that name, stay on the surgical ward and be taken care of for a couple of days under that name, be transported in a civilian car to the Hargebaden youth hostel just outside Askersund under that name, without drugs or family or friends, would get a contact person, pocket money, and food under that name.
Never ever to return.
He would live the rest of his life, perhaps even survive his brothers, under that name.
A piece of plastic, temporarily covering the blown-out window,
was in the way. He tore it down, wanted to see better, be able to lean out.
“
Ninety seconds
.”
He moved the communications radio closer to his mouth.
“
Seventy-five seconds
.”
Ewert Grens was standing in Råby police station and rested his gaze on the almost cloudless blue sky, then after a while looked for a window high up and far away, and another one much lower and closer, then the doors that were in between and hid the dark cellar passages. He had ordered a total of fifty-five officers from the special firearms command—MP5 reinforcement weapons, shock grenades, stun guns—to carry out simultaneous raids on an apartment in Råby Backe 4—seventh floor and
SUVOROV
on the door—and an apartment in Råbygången 68—first floor and
DAHL
on the door—as well as storeroom 86 accessed from Råby Allé 143, storeroom 342 accessed from Råby Backe 192, storeroom 798 accessed from Råby Allé 16, storeroom 976 accessed from Råbygången 146.
“
Sixty seconds
.”
The units ordered to strike against the apartments were to do it from two places: the front door and the windows. The units ordered to strike against the storerooms were to do it from three places: the two entrances from the cellar corridors and a third group would wait outside the narrow cellar windows.
“
Thirty seconds
.”
He had arrested his father, then his mother.
“
Fifteen seconds
.”
Was this the consequence?
If those arrests had become this arrest?
“
Ten seconds
.”
And then what?
If he was to arrest again now?
“
Five seconds
.”
It wasn’t his job to weigh up, assess.
“
Four seconds, three seconds, two seconds, one second
.”
It wasn’t his job to try to understand how long such a consequence might last.
“
Arrest him
.”
It was even darker outside the window. He had slept well and
long on the brown corduroy sofa.
He’d used the same cushion and it smelled a bit different, someone else had slept on the same sofa and under the same blanket, which also smelled a bit different. Not bad, just different, and he wasn’t used to anyone else.
An eighteen-year-old boy with a punctured lung, and not long ago.
Ewert Grens stretched and sat up on the edge of the sofa. The beige jacket was all creased, he should have taken it off. Half a cheese sandwich left on the table from breakfast, and still soft when he took a bite. A nearly full cup of cold coffee. He walked slowly through the silence over to the bookshelf with black files and two tired cacti in the place where a cassette player had once stood, beside the tapes that he’d recorded and mixed himself and the photo that he’d taken and framed, the voice and the picture of a woman who no longer sang in this room. Two steps over to the window and the dark over the Kronoberg courtyard and he looked up to the eighth floor in the next building and Gunnar Werner, who was walking around listening to new voices in new investigations, then to the next section of the building, Kronoberg remand jail, and another eighteen-year-old who had been detained there for about as long as Grens had been asleep.
He went out into the equally silent corridor and down three flights of stairs, through the two doors into the archives, past the metal cabinets full of investigations—he could choose to reopen any of them and find traces of his thirty-seven years as a working police officer in Stockholm.
The room at the back, and the glass booth farthest in, he knocked on the closed hatch and a man with small, round glasses and thick gray hair popped up from behind a computer screen.
“I’m looking for a document that only people like you can authorize.”
Ewert Grens nodded in the direction of the room without windows behind the glass office, the archives’ innermost room and the special documentation that was stored there on behalf of the Swedish Security Service, Interpol, the CHIS unit, the witness protection program, and the division that he disliked the most, Control Unit: internal investigations. He himself accounted for some of the content in the division’s files, reported and investigated on twenty-two occasions, disciplined four times.
“OK.”
“Witness protection. Nineteen ninety-three. Sonny Steen.”
The round glasses and gray hair pressed some keys on the keyboard, looked at the screen.
“It’s here.”
“I’d like to sign it out. A few days, maybe a week.”
The archivist gently shook his head.
“It’s one of the documents that are subject to particular secrecy and can only be signed out by the head of investigation or investigation authority at the time.”
“Yes.”
“So . . .”
“It was me. The . . . head of investigation
at the time
.”
More tapping on the keyboard and a couple of seconds over onto the next page without looking up.
“ID, please.”
“You know who I am.”
Grens met the eyes that he’d always disliked and that disliked him back. He smiled briefly, didn’t have time, put his police ID down on the glass plate under the hatch.
“I’ve been signing things out here for thirty-five years. You’ve been sitting here almost as long. But still insist on all this nonsense.”
“What’s secret should be kept secret.”
The gray-haired man disappeared through the door into the heart of the archives and was very careful to close it behind him, returning a few minutes later.
On top of the police ID on the glass plate.
CONFIDENTIAL
in black capitals against a yellow background, across the front of the file.
“A week.”
“Don’t you worry.”
“And what is the purpose?”
“I’m terribly sorry. This is one of the documents that are subject to particular secrecy and can only be signed out by the head of investigation or investigation authority at the time.”
Ewert Grens picked up the folder of documents, which was several centimeters thick and turned to go.
“But you have to be careful with it!”
The heavy, rather cumbersome detective superintendent stopped abruptly.
It was as if the man sitting behind the glass window, who lived his life among secret documents, was signing out something that belonged to him personally, that he would prefer it to stay just where it was under lock and key, so that it would remain untouched and in perfect order.
Grens turned around.
“I’m just going to photocopy it. And then distribute it. To the editor’s desks at all the national papers. So no need to worry at all.”
Then he carried on walking without listening to the voice that followed him down the gloomy corridor and into the elevator up to the seventh floor and Kronoberg remand prison. He got out, approached another glass booth, with two prison wardens sitting comfortably on chairs, and one of them got up when he requested it and then walked ahead of him when he said that he wanted to visit one of the cells in the left-hand remand corridor.
He waited while the blue-uniformed arm opened up a rectangular hatch in the middle of the cell door and looked into an enclosed space.
“Visitor.”
His voice jumped in the silence.
“You’ve got a visitor, Jensen.”
“You know that I don’t want any fucking visitors, bastard pig!”
The remand warden noticed that the detective superintendent was moving impatiently behind his back and took a step to the side just as Grens stepped forward.
“My name is Ewert Grens.”
He was there.
He flashed past the hatch as he moved swiftly to the only place in the five-meter-square remand cell where he couldn’t be seen. Right beside the hatch, with his shoulders pressed hard against the inside of the door.
“I don’t want any visitors. And I’m not going to talk to any more pig bastards.”
“If I want to talk to you, then I will. But that’s not why I’m here. I’m not here to chat. I’m here because I want to
show
you something that I know you want to see.”
“Not interested.”
“You will be interested when you see what—”
“If you want to flash your dick around, show it to someone else.”
Half a meter between them. On either side of a green metal door.
And completely without contact.
Ewert Grens started to walk back to the door. The young voice
fucking bastard pig
continued to scream
fucking pig cunt
at him several times until the detective superintendent stopped and screamed back
exactly what your father said when I locked him up
, and he didn’t wait, he knew that the shouting would stop immediately.
He looked at the alarm clock on the desk between the telephone
and the lamp; nearly two, he wouldn’t have to wait that much longer, he was certain of it.
Grens ran his middle finger over the letters that shouted
CONFIDENTIAL
, opened the folder, and read the only line of text on the first page of the document.
Daniel Jensen
Then photographs of him taken on the day he was arrested, a crime officer’s documentation of a staring face, profile left, full face, profile right.
He looked through the first couple of pages, another picture, a red house in open forest. A youth hostel. The place where he was sent under the witness protection program once he’d been exploited. An eighteen-year-old photograph. Ewert Grens remembered it well, he had taken it himself on the first of three visits.
He closed the folder. An absent father. And it went on and on. He still didn’t understand it. He himself had had an absent father, but he hadn’t become a damn criminal as a result.
He left the desk in favor of the corduroy sofa.
He’d had a father. It wasn’t something he often thought about. He had long since grown up and an absent father was still just an absent father.
Someone knocked on the door, opened it carefully, looked in.
One of the young security guards he recognized and sometimes spoke to briefly as he passed the night entrance on Kungsholmsgatan.
“I knew that you sometimes sleep here.”
Behind him, another face, a uniformed prison warden from Kronoberg remand prison.
“I’m not sleeping, I’m working.”
The guard pointed at his uniformed colleague.
“From the remand jail. They’ve tried to call you several times. But your phone’s switched off.”
“It always is. At night. I don’t want to be disturbed when I’m
working
.”
Ewert Grens got up from the corduroy sofa with great difficulty just as the remand warden came into the room.
“I know that it’s a bit late . . . I just wanted to ask you if you’d come with me to the seventh floor, left-hand corridor. To a detainee who’s been screaming nonstop in his cell for several hours. And every time any of us ask him to calm down he just threatens us,
I’m going to kill them all
. He even managed to set a couple of books and a sheet on fire not long ago.”
The detective superintendent pulled his fingers through his thin hair, listened, and smiled.
He had been certain that he wouldn’t need to wait particularly long.
“He’s got one demand. He wants to talk to you.”
Grens looked at the alarm clock. It had taken eight and a half hours.
“He does, does he?”
“Yep.”
“How did he articulate it?”
“Sorry?”
“What did he call me when he explained that he wanted me, in particular, to come? I hardly think he remembers my name.”
He was still smiling, whereas the warden’s pale cheeks took on a pink tinge.
“He asked for . . . a meeting. With you.”
“If you want me to come with you, then tell me what he said.”
The pink deepened to a darker shade.
“Exactly?”
“Exactly.”
And the throat that was flushed the same color was cleared.
“He said, well . . . that he wanted to talk to—and I’m quoting now—
the pig bastard who limps
.”
A thick folder from the archives with confidential papers under his arm and two plastic cups of black coffee from the machine in the corridor. There was a total of six locked doors between Grens’s office and the left corridor on the seventh floor: the three first still in the City Police section and opened with Grens’s square plastic card, the last three in the Prison Service’s section and the warden’s identical plastic card was the key.
It was half past two in the morning. But the left remand corridor was brightly lit.
Outside the locked metal door where Grens had waited a few hours earlier, there were now five uniformed wardens armed with thick mattresses in the event that an attacker needed to be forced back against the wall, and behind them, a doctor in a white coat with a syringe in his hand.
“I would like you all to leave before you open up.”
Ewert Grens nodded to the warden who had walked with him through the police headquarters.
“And . . . yes, you, too.”
“We’ll stay here.”
“Right now, your uniforms alone will provoke him. I’ll deal with this myself.”
“He murdered one of our colleagues!”
“I’m aware of that. And he’ll go down for it. For a long time. But if you want to put a stop to the threats and any more fires, you let me go in and you’ll disappear along with your colleagues.”
The prison warden unlocked the door and then joined the group of seven people who stood waiting and watching at a distance, from the end of the corridor.
Grens stood on his own outside the door.
Then he opened it. Two steps into the small cell. Careful to close the door behind him.
A strong smell of burning. On the floor, two blackened books. He tried to make out the titles but couldn’t, the text was no longer there. Farther away, a half-burned pillow. Grens looked at the mattress, he’d tried to set fire to that too, obvious signs of soot at the end. Leon Jensen was lounging on the bunk, supporting himself on one arm.
The detective superintendent put one of the plastic cups of black coffee down on the table that was attached to the wall, the other on the window ledge in front of the bars. He drank half of his, then pointed to the one by the window.
“It’s good.”
“That?”
“Coffee machine. It doesn’t get better.”
The plastic cup stood untouched.
“You wanted to talk to me?”
“I don’t talk to pigs.”
“You don’t know me.”
Now he said nothing.
“But I know you.”
An eighteen-year-old who remained silent because he didn’t know how to talk about what he wanted to talk about.
“I’ve got plenty of time. Nights generally just get in the way.”
But when he finally started to talk after several minutes of silence, he talked about something completely different.
“The walls.”
“Which walls?”
“The pictures. Of us.”
Grens knew precisely what it was like not to talk about the only thing you wanted to talk about.
He was like that himself.
“What about it?”
“Have you seen them?”
“Yes.”
Leon Jensen raised himself up.
“Where were we?”
Now he was sitting up, still on the bunk, with the pillow behind his back and his knees pulled up.
“On the wall that we bombed. Where were we?”
“Is it important?”
“On the one to the left? Or the one to the right?”
“Well, is it?”
“Left or right, you pig bastard!”
Grens emptied the plastic cup.
“Left.”
“Left?”
“Yes.”
He was proud, Ewert Grens was sure of it, something about the expression around his mouth.
“Fuck, the left. High up?”
“Yes.”
“How high?”
“As high as you can get.”
That expression. Tight lips that caught a smile.
Grens pointed at his plastic cup.
“Are you not having any?”
“I don’t drink pig slop.”
“OK if I take it then?”
The eighteen-year-old who looked so proud shrugged. Ewert Grens reached over for the brown cup, drank the now cold coffee.
“You have no idea what you’re missing.”
Three long gulps.
“You wanted . . . you said, you bastard, that you wanted to show me something.”
A cup of coffee. Some meaningless chat about a wall. Maybe it didn’t seem like much. But something like that could sometimes be the kind of warmth that a tired detective superintendent only occasionally felt all the way from his feet to his belly.
“Yes, I did.”
He picked up the folder and opened it.
“A fucking investigation report? I’ve seen it all before.”
“Not this one.”
Ewert Grens held the first document up in front of the boy on the bunk and he moved back.
“You should read it.”
Even farther back.
“Or, maybe, would you like me to read it for you?”
Leon Jensen still didn’t answer. Grens moved the document closer to the young face again.
“Maybe it should’ve been you, you fucking pig.”
Ewert Grens arrested his movement, about halfway between the two of them.
“Maybe it’s you I should have blown up. Not Pereira.”
And now retracted it, put it back in the folder.
“Excuse me?”
“Maybe it should have been you who spewed up your own intestines. Maybe it should have—”
Grens stood up, opened the door, walked out, and closed it behind him, then turned to the hatch.
“As you like. Your choice.”
He started to walk away, seven blue uniforms and one white coat over there, mattresses and injection at the ready.
“Oi, you, pig.”
He screamed through the hatch, like yesterday.
“Listen to me, you pig bastard!”
And perhaps Grens walked a bit slower.
“Yes. I’m listening.”
“What was his name? You said yesterday . . .”
“Jensen.”
“I fucking well know his name was Jensen!”
“Daniel Jensen.”
He didn’t shout anymore, and Ewert Grens didn’t stop walking.