Just milk, please.
Ĺgestam was doing what he could to lower the palpable tension, to tone down any hint of drama, but his efforts werent all that successful. Both of them of course knew that their meeting had nothing to do with sharing a nice coffee break. It was too late for a start; everyone else had gone home by now, allowing them to talk together in confidence, without being overheard.
I didnt sleep well last night. Ĺgestam stretched, raised his arms above his head, as if to demonstrate how tired he was.
Nor did I, Sven thought. I didnt sleep at all, what with that damned video and worrying about Ewert. Is that what you want to talk about? I still dont know what to think.
I kept thinking about your friend, your colleague, Ewert Grens.
Not now. Not yet.
I had to discuss this with you, Sven. I believe theres a problem.
Ĺgestam cleared his throat, shifted in his chair, but didnt get up.
You know that Ewert and I are not the best of friends.
Theres quite a few people who feel the same.
Yes, I know. However, I thought it was necessary to point out that this has nothing to do with my personal feelings for him. Im worried about Ewert Grens in his professional capacity. Especially as he is in charge of the police work in an investigation that I am ultimately responsible for.
He shifted position again. This time he got up, glanced at Sven and started pacing the room, clearly upset.
Take yesterday. I had a very strange meeting with Grens. He was just back from the Baltic ferry terminal. He had put Alena Sljusareva on board a ferry back to Lithuania. Without checking with me first.
He stopped and waited for a reaction. He didnt get one.
Early this morning I went back to the hospital mortuary, in an attempt to understand. During the day Ive interviewed some of your colleagues. One of them, Detective Sergeant Hermansson, a very sensible officer who was new to me, quoted statements by two independent witnesses confirming that a woman went into the toilet at the end of the corridor before Lydia Grajauskas went in, just before she started running around with a gun and taking hostages. Both witnesses describe a woman who could be Sljusareva. Its easy then to suppose that it was Sljusareva who provided Grajauskas with weaponry. So why then was Grens in such a hurry to send her back home?
Sven Sundkvist did not answer.
The video. He had feared this meeting would be about the lost evidence, removed by a serving policeman in order to protect a colleague. The video that he now knew about. The video that would soon force him to choose between speaking the truth and lying.
Sven, I must ask you this. Is there anything you know that I ought to know?
Sven still did not answer. He had no idea what he should say.
Lars Ĺgestam repeated his question.
Is there something?
He had to answer.
No. I have no idea what youre talking about.
Ĺgestam began pacing the room again, breathing rapidly, nervously. He had barely begun.
One of the best officers in the force, so I should relax, shouldnt I? Sit back and wait for the results of his investigative work, right?
A couple of deep breaths before he carried on.
But I cant relax because something is not right. Dont you see? Which is why I lie awake at night. Which is why I feel compelled to go to work absurdly early and lie inside the chalk lines around the position of a dead body on a mortuary floor.
He turned round and stopped in front of Sven, looked at him. Sven tried to meet the other mans eyes, but stayed silent. He knew that no matter how much he said, it would never be enough.
Sven, I phoned Vilnius.
Ĺgestam didnt move away.
I asked our Lithuanian colleagues to locate Sljusareva. They found her in Klaipeda, back at her parental home.
He perched on the edge of his desk and held up a bundle of papers, the documentation on the case he was talking about.
There is no transcript of the interview with Sljusareva that Grens claims to have carried out. He decided unilaterally that she should leave this country. What he says is all we know.
His voice cracked, knowing well that he was about to say something he should never say, not to a policeman, not about a colleague in the force.
Ewert Grens is telling a story and it doesnt hold water.
He paused.
I have no idea why. I think Grens is tampering with the evidence in this investigation.
Ĺgestam pressed Play on the tape recorder on his desk and the two men listened to the end of an exchange they had both heard before.
Stena Baltica
? Thats a bloody boat! This is something personal! Bengt, over! Fucks sake, Bengt. Stop it! Squad, move in! All clear. Repeat, move in!
No decision about choosing loyalty or truth. Not a word. Not yet.
Sven!
Yes?
I want you to go to Klaipeda. You are not to mention this to anyone, nor that you are going to interrogate Alena Sljusareva. You will report the results of the interrogation directly to me. I want to know what she really has to say.
SATURDAY 8 JUNE
A strong smell hung in the air at Palanga Airport. The moment he passed the gate on his way to the luggage carousels, the smell of perfumed disinfectant hit his nose. The floor was still wet from washing and the smell told him that he was abroad, in a foreign place where they used chemicals and scents long since banned in Sweden. One hour and twenty minutes, he thought, one bleeding hour and they even clean the floors differently.
This was his second visit to Lithuania. He couldnt remember much from his first trip, not even which airport they had flown into. It had been a big thing for him, a new recruit to the force, to be asked to escort a high-profile criminal on a journey outside Swedish borders. Now that prison was probably all that was left of his memory. It had felt like travelling back in time, with barking dogs, damp corridors, stale air that weighed on his lungs, tuberculosis warnings posted everywhere and pale, silent prisoners with shaved heads sitting in their small, overcrowded cells. A strange experience, one he had never really spoken about, not even with Anita.
He left the terminal building and summoned one of the waiting yellow cabs. Klaipeda was twenty-six kilometres
south of Palanga. He was going to see Alena Sljusareva and hear things he didnt want to know.
He had phoned home from Arlanda to say good morning to Jonas and promised him a present, something secret, a surprise. Sweets, no doubt, bought in a hurry in the airport shop. He didnt have much time in Lithuana; he was due back in Stockholm early the next morning, and he knew that what he had to do here would take up every waking hour.
The driver took his time on the road from Palanga to Klaipeda. Sven Sundkvist considered telling him to speed up, but refrained. Settling into his seat, he told himself that the few minutes gained wouldnt make up for the time it would take him to explain to the driver what he wanted.
It looked pretty, the landscape lit by the sun. He knew that it was a poor country, with eight out of ten of its people living precariously close to the poverty line, but he felt that there was a kind of dignity in what he saw this time, something likeable. Nothing to remind him of that prison. The news reports at home showed clichés every time, so like everyone else he believed what he was shown, because it looked like what he had been fed before: all these grey people living in permanently grey weather. This was different. It was summer in a place full of real people, real lives, real colours.
He told the driver to take him straight to the hotel. He was too early to check in, but Hotel Aribň was far from full and he was given a room at once.
He wanted a little rest and tried the bed, the narrowest he had ever seen. Only a few minutes while he tried to visualise the woman he was about to meet, to remember what she looked and sounded like.
The scene in the flat had been chaotic. Alena Sljusareva had been upset, screaming about her friend who was lying unconscious on the floor, and about the man in a shiny suit, whom she called Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp, who was standing
nearby next to a hole in the apartment door. Sven Sundkvist didnt have a chance to take a proper look at her and of course had had no idea that later the same week he would watch her in a video and meet her in a strange city on the other side of the Baltic.
Alena Sljusareva had been standing in the room next door, just as naked as her unconscious friend.
She was dark, darker than most of the Baltic prostitutes who had ended up as items in the documents on his desk.
While they took care of the injured woman and confronted the pimp, who was making a fuss about his Lithuanian passport and diplomatic status, she had disappeared. That is, until she was arrested at the Baltic ferry terminal, about to board a boat that was ready to depart.
Ewert had interrogated her and, a few hours later, decided that she could go home to Lithuania after all.
Sven Sundkvist got up and had a shower. He put on lighter clothes; he hadnt realised it would be so warm. The grey cliché must have stuck in his mind. He opened his briefcase, looked thoughtfully at the small tape recorder and then closed the case again. He would interrogate her, but the old-fashioned way, taking notes. He didnt know why, maybe he was afraid of what she would tell him, afraid of her voice explaining what he didnt want to record.
He walked through the centre of the town, the buildings beautiful but breathing from another time, the people he met, traces of Lydia Grajauskas in their faces, over and over again.
She had instructed him to walk to the lakeside and take the small ferry across Lake Curonia to Smilty Island. The heat that had struck him first in Palanga, then in Klaipeda, was now more intense. The sun scorched the back of his neck during the short boat trip and he realised he should have brought some sunscreen. He would turn brick red before the evening.
Once he stepped off the ferry he was to turn right and
walk along the beach to an old fort housing an aquarium, a big one, the posters told him, with one hundred species of Baltic fish and a dolphinarium. She had explained that she wanted to be among people, and at lunchtime this place was full of schoolchildren and other visitors who came along to watch the fish. The two of them could stroll about among the tanks and talk for as long as they liked without anyone taking notice.
He stopped at the main entrance, where she had told him to wait for her, and checked the time. He was early, with almost twenty minutes to spare. It wasnt easy to estimate how long it would take from the centre to this aquarium-cum-museum of Baltic fish on the island of Smilty.
He picked a seat with a good view of the aquarium entrance. The sun played over his skin, and he leaned back and narrowed his eyes to watch the comings and goings, searching among the strangers for somebody like himself, as he always did. Somewhere, in this flow of people he would never know, was someone who was him, or at least like him; a man his age, with a woman he loved at his side and, walking a little ahead of them both, their beloved child. A man, who wanted to be at home but who spent most of his time elsewhere, and who might be a policeman or something else that required a strong sense of duty and long evenings at work. Someone in this crowd who lacked Ewerts aggressiveness, Langs stubborn self-belief, Grajauskass capacity to resist, stay upright and take her revenge on those who had humiliated her. Perhaps the man who was Sven would be a little dull, ordinary, lacking in all the qualities you needed to be anything other than predictable.
He did see himself. Several versions. Had he been born here, he might have been any one of them. He studied them and smiled when he spotted a man in a short-sleeved shirt and light slacks on his way into the aquarium.
Then she tapped his shoulder.
He hadnt seen her arrive, nor heard her call him, so
preoccupied had he been with his little game. She stood in front of him, hidden behind sunglasses, wearing a thin sweater and jeans that were a little too big. She fitted his image of her quite well. Not tall, lovely face and long dark hair. Traded for three years, humiliated countless times a day. It didnt show, not on the outside. She looked like women do in their twenties, life just starting. Inside, he knew, she was old inside. Thats where she kept her scars. It was that woman who would never be whole again.
Sundkvist?
He nodded and stood up.
Yes. I am DI Sundkvist.
They had no trouble speaking to each other. His English was a little rusty, hers had been polished during three years abroad and she seemed to prefer it to Swedish.
You recognise me?
I saw you in the flat.
It was very chaotic.
I would know you were Swedish anyway, even if Id never met you. Ive got to know what Swedish men look like.
She made a gesture towards the entrance and they walked side by side. He paid for their tickets, and once in, tried to sense when would be the right time to start questioning her. She helped him.
Im not sure what you want to know. I will tell you everything. I would like to begin now, please. I trust you. I saw you at work in the flat. But I would like to get this over with. I want to go home. Forget. Do you understand?
She looked pleadingly at him. Behind her, a wall of glass, and fish slipping through the water. He tried to appear calm, calmer than he was, now that he was going to hear the answers he had been anticipating.
