Siren Song: A Different Scandinavian Crime Novel (14 page)

Lena parks her car in the parking lot. With luck, she will not wake up and find it buried under a mountain of snow, although that is wishful thinking.

“Twenty-four flats and ten parking spots,” she says to Agnes and turns off the engine. “It makes you wonder what they were thinking. Let’s go before we’re snowed in.”

Lena turns the car alarm on and trudges to the entrance of a three-storey block of flats. Squares slabs of concrete painted white and grey, square windows, square tiles in the stairwells. The building always reminds her of a chessboard gone mad. She would not be surprised if the architect had argued for square doors as well.

Two flights of stairs later, Lena and Agnes stop outside Lena’s front door. Lena kicks the concrete wall to get the snow off her shoes, opens the door, and flicks the light on. “Enter at your own risk,” she says. “It’s even more chaotic than usual.”

Most of the flat is visible from the doorstep: yellow walls, worn wooden floor, stacks of fitness magazines, piles of pocketbooks and sideboards laden with folded clothes. A mountain bike is leaning against a wall. Behind it are rows of protein supplement jars.

Agnes walks into the hall and pauses at a four-storey shoe rack filled with neatly paired shoes.

“You collect shoes?” Agnes cannot hide her surprise.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Lena says. “That would ruin my she-man image at the office. Let’s eat.” She squeezes past Agnes, walks into the kitchen, and drops her coat on a chair at the kitchen table. Agnes follows and sits down hesitantly by the table.

“I’m making tea,” Lena says. “I’d rather have coffee, but seeing as I’ve been ordered not to work, I might as well catch some sleep. Do you want some? Tea, I mean. Not sleep.” She runs a hand through her hair and opens the fridge.

“If it isn’t too much trouble,” Agnes says.

“There’s a coat hanger in the bedroom,” Lena says from the other side of the open fridge door. “The light switch is on the left, near the desk. Just leave your jacket on the floor if you can’t find it. Living room’s in there; bathroom’s through that door.”

Agnes’s phone chimes, and she looks down. “The team going over the files in the box just emailed me,” she says.

“Have they found out what John did yet?”

Agnes frowns slightly while she reads. “I replied on our way here and asked them to widen the search, and they’ve found more complaint records. Over forty of them, in fact.”

“Christ.” Lena braces herself for more news on John’s unknown past. The box of files was a huge cardboard can of worms. “Let me guess,” she says. “John’s behaviour spiralled out of control?”

Agnes looks up. “It’s not John,” she says. “All these complaints are about the art teacher. The one who tried to get John kicked out. His name was Lennart Holm.”

“Past tense,” Lena notes. “Has he passed away?”

Agnes nods. “Cancer, eight years ago. The team looked him up against the tax authorities.”

“So John made objections of his own,” Lena says. “I suppose they were engaged in some kind of vendetta. A student gets on the nerves of a teacher, the teacher wants the kid gone, and the boy blames the teacher back. That can’t be unique, so I can’t see why the school would’ve kept silent about that?”

“Because it was other teachers who complained,” Agnes says. “Not John.”

“Oh.” Lena looks at Agnes for a long moment while her image of John is realigned. There had been a problem at the school, but perhaps she had the victim wrong. “Go on,” she says.

“Lennart’s colleagues thought Lennart was unfit for his job,” Agnes says. “They described him as overly authoritative, condescending, and prone to anger. They also accused him of actively trying to damage his students’ self-esteem. He regularly took works he didn’t like and tore them to pieces, even threw some of them out the window.”

“So in short,” Lena says, “he was a tyrant. And he singled John out as his pincushion, probably because he couldn’t take that John was talented. What a fucking bastard.” She imagines John’s boot camp for adult life: daily fear of a man twice his size who couldn’t handle bright children.

“He didn’t sound like a pleasant man.” Agnes pockets her phone and looks up at Lena. “But did he really make a murderer out of John?”

“No,” Lena says. “Not yet. Did you want tea?”

“Yes, please. Black, if you have it.”

“Tea comes in colours?” Lena frowns at the box of tea bags in her cupboard. “I’ve got Pricesmart extra, and that’s it. I’m not much of a tea person.”

“Any tea is good, really.” Agnes flashes a smile.

“Pity.” Lena turns on the gas stove and fills a saucepan with water. “I was hoping you’d demand coffee. That would’ve given me an excuse to have some too.”

“If you want, I could–”

“Never mind. Help yourself to anything in the fridge if you’re hungry. I’m having this.” Lena holds up a small metal bowl. “Tuna and cottage cheese. Emergency food.”

Agnes watches in silence as Lena spreads the mix on slices of dark bread. “I’m good, thank you.”

“If you want some,” Lena says, “you know where to look.” She turns the blinds open and nods at the curtain of snowflakes outside. “Would you look at this? I could’ve slept in a sofa at the office, but no, I need to rest at home. Gren’s fussing is driving me insane.” She yawns so wide her jaws ache.

“I think he means well,” Agnes says. “He cares about you.”

“He fusses.” Lena gestures at the snow with the sandwich in her hand. “We could’ve stayed at the headquarters and gone over our data. Maybe we missed something important. In fact, we can go over all we know right here. I know you won’t tell Gren. I think your tea’s ready.”

“Thank you.” Agnes uses a fork to fish the tea bag out of her cup.

“The bin’s over there. Ignore the obvious need to take it out. Do you have any new ideas about John?”

Agnes shakes her head. “I think he’s still near the crime scene, looking for the other man.”

“That’s my thought too.” Lena takes another bite of her sandwich and looks at the parking lot below the window. “But John must be indoors, or he’d die.”

“Lena?”

“What?” Lena turns from the window, takes another bite from her sandwich, and raises her eyebrows at Agnes.

Agnes sits perfectly still and holds her cup in both hands. “Why am I here?”

Lena stops chewing. She looks away, out the window, down at the floor and at the kitchen table. There is no escape. Then again, she had chosen this battle the moment she took Agnes here. She moves piles of advertising and post from the table to make room for her cup and her sandwich, then sits down with her arms crossed and looks at her tea.

“Why do I have this feeling you already know what I’m going to say?” Lena asks.

Agnes looks perplexed, but Lena continues to watch her, waiting for an answer. “You’re going to tell me not to worry about you?” Agnes hazards.

Lena blinks. “Why would you do that?” she asks. “Gren is already troubled enough for ten people. No, that’s not it.”

“I’m listening.”

Lena nods. Agnes always listens. She often feels as if she babbles in the younger officer’s company. No matter how she tries, she cannot remember anyone else having that effect on her. Despite the weather, the kitchen is warm and stuffy; her back is prickled with sweat.

She opens the window a fraction. When the air has cooled, she reaches for her coat, takes out her badge, and puts it on the table. After a moment, she tentatively places her gun next to the badge. The leather-encased weapon seems to suck in the light from the low lamp above the table.

Lena takes a deep breath. “We talked about nicknames before,” she says. “When we were outside John’s flat.”

“I remember.”

“And you’ve heard them,” Lena says. It is a statement, not a question.

Agnes grimaces, but she has the grace to nod. “Yes. But like I said, I don’t care.”

“I do, although I don’t let it show very often. I want to tell you the reason behind some of those names.”

“I already know you’re not queer.”

“Not that.” Lena pushes the window open a little more and watches the snow. “The reason for the other nicknames.” She ticks them off on her fingers. “She-man, Bella bicep, bag lady.”

“The first two are easy,” Lena says. “They’re coined by idiots who can’t cope with women who work hard or work out. Or have any brains at all. The last one, though, has a history. And you need to know.”

“Are you sure?” Agnes asks.

“I’m definite.” Lena’s eyes flutter to the gun and back at Agnes.
Keep your voice steady. Just talk.

“Five years ago,” Lena says, “in October, I was in a raid outside Stockholm. Gren was in charge. It was part of Operation Guardian. You look as if you remember it?”

“That child abuse ring?” Agnes asks.

“Child porn. Things you would not believe. Thousands of photos, hours of film, all swapped around on a secret website. They’d been running it for years before we learned about them. If you scraped the bottom of human nature, you’d still have to drill down to find the like of these people.”

Lena rises from her chair, fills a glass with water, and sits back down. “But we found them out, and we got them. Part of the gang was Swedish. I was on the team set to bring them in, only the raid didn’t go as planned.

“The house was an old, large one-storey villa. Red walls, tiled roof, small backyard shed. Surrounded by fields and woods, almost a kilometre to the nearest neighbour. A little idyllic place full of rot and horror. The house is gone now. Someone torched it.

“We knew from recon that the suspect was in the house, but we didn’t know about his friends. No one had come or left for days, and there was only one car outside, so we thought he’d be alone. As it turned out, the suspect was running a little molesting-party for five of his friends.”

“Oh, God.” Agnes’s face goes stiff. “There were children there?”

“No children, but films and photos. It was an orgy. They had even rigged a projector. I had been naïve enough to think these perverts did their thing alone, in private. I was wrong.

“Just before we were meant to go in, minutes before our reinforcements and our helicopter got there, they started to leave. To this day, I don’t know if they had an alarm set up. The bastards were sophisticated. We had to move.”

Lena clears her throat and continues. “There were twelve officers, including me. A two-to-one ratio, as it turned out. Most of the time, that’s enough, but these men fled and fought like possessed. They knew what they faced, the prison sentences and the media attention. Maybe they knew what happens to their ilk in prison, too. I’ve heard stories about inmates who use pins and shards of glass to get creative on rapists.”

“So they ran,” Agnes says.

“Our suspect’s friends did. It was the middle of the night, and the whole area was a circus of torches, shadows and shouts. At that point, we didn’t know how many there were. The helicopter was nowhere near and had no infrared scanners.

“While the other officers ran after the people who fled,” Lena continues, “a colleague and I went to the house to search for anyone hiding and to seize any evidence we found. The house was dark; the only light was our torches and a film projected on the wall. One of their films.”

Lena pauses to refill her glass. She has to use both hands to keep it from shaking under the tap. Agnes is sitting even more still than she was before Lena began to speak.

“We came upon two men in the living room,” Lena says and sits down. “They were throwing hard drives and DVDs into a wood-fired stove. When we ordered them to lie down, one of them tried to tackle my colleague, and they both tumbled into the room next door, wrestling and shouting. I was left with the last man.

“He was in his fifties, almost bald, small glasses, bright blue hooded sweater, new trainers. Your classic office grunt on downtime. He stands there and screams nonsense at me, backlit by that film. The projector was in the ceiling, and I couldn’t reach it to switch it off.

“The man I faced was the main suspect, but I didn’t realise that in the chaos. I told him again to drop down on the floor, but instead he walked closer, pointed at his chest, and screamed about rights and warrants, lawyers and laws, how he’s going to sue me. And so on.”

“You must have been so furious,” Agnes says quietly.

Lena nods. “I wanted to rip his tongue out. I wanted to point at the film behind him and ask him what fucking rights he thought he had. I wanted to see what happened to him in prison, every minute of it. But I didn’t.

“All I did was keep my pistol trained on the floor, in front of his feet, and tell him to back away, to lie down, over and over. But he didn’t. He was too busy justifying what he was doing and telling me I had no right. Breaking into his house was against the law; this was his private property
,
et cetera.”

Lena shakes her head. “I pointed to the movie and screamed at him, ‘Do you think I’m blind? That’s a
child
.’ I may have added something about what he could expect in prison. He looked over his shoulder as if he’d never seen the film before, turned back to me and said, ‘He likes it. You all do.’”