Everything that had happened barely twenty-four hours earlier.
In detail.
Grajauskas had planned and written down precisely what she later put into action. She had worked out how the weapons would be delivered, together with a ball of string and the video, and left in a toilet waste bin. That she would hit the guard over the head, walk to the mortuary, take hostages, blow up corpses. And demand the services of an interpreter called Bengt Nordwall.
Ewert listened. Now and then he swallowed. It was all there, in black and white. If only I had known. If only I had had this stuff translated. I would never have sent him down there. He would have been alive now.
You would have lived!
If only you hadnt gone down there, you would be alive.
You must have known!
Why didnt you say?
You could have spoken to me. Or to her.
If only you had admitted that you knew who she was. At least you could have given her that.
Then you would still be alive.
She never wanted to shoot you.
She wanted confirmation that what had happened in those flats wasnt her fault. That she had never chosen to wait around, ready to undress for all those men
.
Alena Sljusareva asked if she could keep the notebook. Ewert shook his head, grabbed the blue cover and put it away in his briefcase. He waited until twenty minutes before the departure time, then accompanied her to the exit. Alena had her ticket in her hand, showed it to a uniformed woman in the booth, then turned to him and thanked him. Ewert wished her a good trip.
He left her in the queue of passengers and went over to a corner of the terminal building from where he had an overview of people arriving off the ferry, as well as those waiting to go on board. Leaning against a pillar, he tried to think about the other ongoing investigation, about Lang in his cell and Öhrström studying the faxed pictures. She would soon get some more. But his mind drifted, he was too preoccupied with the two women from Klaipeda. Absently he observed the strangers milling about, something he had always enjoyed doing. The arrivals walked with the sea still in their bodies. They all had somewhere to go, the ones with red cheeks and large duty-free bags full of spirits who had drunk, danced and flirted the night away before falling asleep alone in their cabins below deck. Others dressed in their best clothes had been saving for years for a weeks holiday in Sweden, on the other side of the Baltic. And there were a few who wore rumpled clothes and had no luggage at all, having left in a hurry just to get away. He studied them all it was all he could bear to do right now and forgot about time for a while.
Alena Sljusareva would be on her way soon.
Ewert was just about to walk away when he saw what was probably the last group of passengers coming off the ferry.
He recognised him immediately.
After all, it was less than two days since he had seen this man at Arlanda being given a dressing down by a plump little Lithuanian diplomat, and then manhandled through security flanked by two big lads there to see him off on the one-hour flight to Vilnius.
Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp.
He was wearing the same suit that he had been wearing when he was escorted up the steps to the plane, the shiny suit he had had on when he stood blocking the broken-down doorway on the fifth floor, having flogged Lydia Grajauskas unconscious two days earlier.
And he wasnt alone. Once through passport control, he waited for two young women, or rather girls, sixteen or seventeen years old. He held out his hand and they both gave him something they had ready for him. Ewert didnt need to see any more to know what it was.
Their passports.
In debt already.
A woman wearing a tracksuit with the hood pulled down over her head hurried forwards to meet the little group, keeping her back turned. Ewert watched her as she greeted the three arrivals and, as he believed was customary in the Baltic states, kissed them all, light little kisses on the cheek. Then she pointed towards the nearest exit and they followed her. None of them had much luggage.
Ewert felt sick.
Lydia Grajauskas had just shot herself in the temple. Alena Sljusareva had fled and was now only a short voyage from home. Both had been ruthlessly exploited for three years in flats with electronic locks. They had been threatened, abused and had to pretend they were turned on as they were going
to pieces inside. And it only took twenty-four hours, twenty-four hours, before they had been replaced. A day and a night was all it took to find two young women who had no idea of what lay ahead, who would be trained to smile when they were spat at, so that those who traded money for sex could still count on one hundred and fifty thousand kronor per girl every month.
In a couple of minutes, the ferry would pull away from the quay. He stayed where he was. They disappeared in the crowd, the hooded Baltic woman, Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp and the girls, barely old enough to have breasts, teenagers who had just given away their passports.
There was nothing he could do, not now. Lydia and Alena had dared to question and fight back, but that was unusual. At least, it was the first time Ewert had heard about it. The two new girls were children, frail and scared. They would never dare to testify at this point, and that motherfucking pimp would deny everything.
Consequently, no crime existed yet.
Maybe it didnt, but he was sure that he or a colleague would come across them. There was no telling where or when, but sooner or later they too would go straight to hell.
As soon as Sven had seen the entry in the technical account one videotape in a plastic bag with two sets of fingerprints, identified as Lydia Grajauskass and Alena Sljusarevas he put everything else to one side. First he looked for it in the forensic science department, where it should be.
It wasnt there.
He asked the language experts, who might have taken an interest in the Cyrillic writing, and the night duty crew.
It wasnt there either.
He also drew a blank in the impounded property store, which was the last of the likely places. Not there.
His stomach was contracting again. A sense of unease
that grew and intensified, turning into irritation, and then into anger, which wasnt like him, and he hated it.
He located the technician who had been first on the scene, good old Nils Krantz, who had been around for as long as Sven could remember, and well before that. Krantz was at work, a domestic violence case in a flat in Regering Street, but he took time off to speak to Sven on the phone. He described where they had found the video, what they had found with it, basically confirming what Sven already knew from the documentation.
Good, thanks. And what was on the tape?
What do you mean?
I mean, what was on the tape?
I dont know.
You dont know?
Thats not my job. Its up to you lot.
Thats why Im investigating it.
Sven hung on while Krantz talked to someone in the room for maybe half a minute.
Anything else you want to know?
One more thing. Where is it now? The tape, I mean.
Krantz gave an exasperated laugh. Dont you lads ever speak to each other?
What do you mean?
Ask Grens.
Ewert?
He wanted the tape. I handed it over to him after we had done the prints. You know, down in the mortuary.
Sven took a deep breath. Pain in his stomach, irritation. And definitely anger.
He got up from his desk, went to Ewerts office four doors down, and knocked.
He knew that Ewert was interviewing Alena Sljusareva. He tried the door. It wasnt locked.
He went in and scanned the room. It was an odd feeling. He was there to pick up a scene-of-crime item, but in that
instant was an intruder, entering unbidden and without permission. He couldnt remember ever having been in Ewerts office alone. Had anybody? He only had to look for a few seconds. He saw the video on the shelf behind Ewerts desk, beside the old cassette player that filled the room with Siw Malmkvist. The label on the back was in Cyrillic script, which he couldnt read.
After putting on plastic gloves, he weighed the videotape in his hand, fingered it pointlessly. She had planned every move in detail, never hesitated, had a motive for every step she had taken towards her death. Sven flipped the video over, felt its smooth surface. This tape was not there by chance. There was a reason for it. She had wanted to show them something.
He left, closing the door carefully, and went along to the meeting room. He loaded the tape. He was sitting in the same chair where Ewert had been sitting the night before.
But watching something different. Jonas, his son, used to call such an image the War of the Ants. A tape with a loud rushing noise and no picture, just a white flicker against a grey background.
This was a tape that shouldnt exist. It was unregistered, had no entry in the official lists, held no filmed images.
That feeling in his stomach that had been unease earlier had now turned to anger, a sudden rage that made him sick.
Ewert, what the hell are you up to?
Alena was safely on board. The ferry had left the port and was negotiating the Stockholm archipelago on her way to the open sea. Her route crossed the Baltic Sea and ended in Klaipeda. Soon Alena would be home and would never look back.
Ewert Grens waited for a taxi that never came. He swore and called back to find out why. The operator apologised, but she had no record of a taxi request for Grens from the ferry terminal to Berg Street. Should she register a request
now? Ewert swore again, launched into a litany that included organisations and bureaucrats and clowns, demanded to know the operators name and altogether managed to be more offensive than he cared to remember afterwards.
Then finally a cab turned up and he got in.
He suddenly caught a glimpse of the house on the other side of the bay.
Blood was pouring from her head.
I leaned against the side of the van, holding her, and it never stopped pouring from her ears, her nose, her mouth
.
He missed her; he longed for her. The feeling was stronger now than it had been for years, and he didnt want to wait until next Monday morning. He should tell the driver to go across Lidingö Bridge, past the Milles Museum and stop in the car park outside the nursing home. Ewert would run inside and stay with her. Just be there, together.
But she wasnt there, not the woman he missed and longed for. She hadnt existed for twenty-five years.
Lang, you took her from me
.
The afternoon traffic was growing heavy and the taxi slowed to a halt more than once. It took half an hour to get to Kronoberg, and by the time he had paid and got out of the car, he had cooled down.
The air felt milder now. The effect of all that rain seemed to be wearing off and summer was making another attempt. The wind had died down and he felt the sun warming him. Weather: he had never got his head round it.
Back in his office he started his music machine and Siws voice came through the tinny mono speaker. Together they sang: Lyckans ost, (1968), original English version Hello Mary Lou.
Ewert opened the folder on the investigation into the Jochum Lang case. He knew the photos would be there.
He studied them, one at a time. Their subject was a dead person on a floor and the quality was not great. The photographs were grainy and so poorly lit the outlines had become
almost blurred. Krantz and his boys were good technicians, no question, but none of them could handle a camera. He sighed, picked three halfway decent ones and put them in an envelope.
Two telephone calls to round off the morning.
First he rang a stressed Lisa Öhrström, who answered from somewhere in the hospital. He told her briskly that he and DI Sundkvist would come to see her soon in order to show her some more pictures. She protested, saying that she had quite enough to do without spending her time on more photos of broken body parts. Ewert replied that he looked forward to seeing her and hung up.
His next call was to Ĺgestam, who was in his office at the State Prosecution Service. Ewert told the prosecutor that he had someone who was prepared to witness against Jochum Lang in connection with the Oldéus incident, a hospital doctor called Lisa Öhrström, who had unhesitatingly identified Lang as the perpetrator. Ĺgestam was unprepared for this and asked for further information, but Ewert interrupted him with a reassurance that there would be more to come, conclusive evidence clinching both the current cases by tomorrow morning, when they were due to meet.
She was still singing her heart out, was old Siw. He tuned in and sang along, moving about the room with a bounce in his step. Mamma är lik sin mamma, (1968), original English version Sadie the Cleaning Lady.
Not many passers-by noticed the car that had stopped in front of the door to number 3 Völund Street. It was a modest car, driven decorously. The driver was a middle-aged man, who climbed out and opened the rear door for two girls, teenagers of about sixteen or seventeen. They were both pretty and seemed curious about their surroundings.
Could be a father with his daughters.
The girls looked up at the building with its rows of identical windows, as if they hadnt seen it before. Presumably
they didnt live there, so maybe they were visiting somebody.
The driver locked the car and walked ahead to open the door. Just as he pulled at the door handle, he turned and said something which made one of the girls give a little scream and burst into tears. The other one, who seemed the stronger, put an arm round her, patted her cheek and tried to make her come with them.
