Two Soldiers (51 page)

another day later

It was light outside.

If he lay down, if he stared hard enough at the blind without blinking either of his eyes, it could for a blurred moment become a blanket that not long ago was red shot with yellow and had a thin white stripe around the edge. He’d never liked that blanket. It hadn’t covered the whole dirty window; the sun had forced its way into the room and onto the bed and in between his and Wanda’s naked bodies. Now he missed it. Or maybe it was the room he missed. Maybe the days when they lived in the dark and slept through the light and woke again when the evening and night returned.

The blind closed everything in, hid everything outside.

Gabriel blinked and it was clear again.

If he lay on his side, if he looked around the room with a bed and a wardrobe and a sink and a small table and a chair. Cell. But it wasn’t, no metal door, no bars in front of the window, but the same emptiness lived here, it stood still, and the same air that he’d breathed in Mariefred prison and Johannisberg secure training unit and Sundbo secure training unit, breath that was black and tasted of dust and was never enough even though he breathed and breathed.

It had been seven days and seven nights now. He was sure of that, because he drew a line with a ballpoint pen on the head of the bed every morning. When he was in hospital, he’d been given a piece of paper with four pictures of different houses and a map with four red circles on it and had then been given the choice between a youth hostel some way outside Växjö, one somewhere between Karlstad and Säffle, and one between Hudiksvall and Ljusdal, and then this one that was called Hargebaden, which was quite close to Aksersund. The
policewoman had told him that from the same day, Wanda was being held in the women’s unit in Kronoberg remand prison and would be charged with serious drug offenses and be sentenced to at least four years and a couple of months, and that there was only one possible prison, Hinseberg. This circle on the map had been closest. Eighty-three kilometers. It had been easy to choose and point.

She had been the last one.

On his way from the police headquarters, he had given her up too.

But only when he’d understood that she would otherwise give birth and live under constant threat in a Råby that he could never go back to.

The first floor of a yellow wooden house with white frames around every window, door, and corner. If he pulled up the blind. Grass and trees and water a hundred meters away, Hargeviken, a big sandy beach; he had walked there once.

Oscar.

Once he’d chosen the youth hostel, he was given another choice, Oscar, Erik, or Carl.

Oscar Hansson.

He couldn’t even think it.

He lay on a bed and looked up at the ceiling. He didn’t need it. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the police station in Askersund was open between nine and three and if he wanted to walk along the cobbled streets past the other wooden houses and visit the policeman who was now his contact person, he could. He’d been there a couple of days ago. He probably wouldn’t do it again.

He thought about Leon sometimes.

He hadn’t understood at first when they sat there talking about him. One of the happy families at the table in the dining room, eating their youth hostel breakfast, as he made his way, thirsty, to the fridge. They were holding the papers and reading out loud to each other about an eighteen-year-old who had escaped and murdered two people and then was himself found dead in a cell in Aspsås prison. Gabriel had heard what they were saying and moved closer to the table and looked at several black-and-white pictures of Leon’s face, but hadn’t
understood until he got back to his room with the rolled-down blind and lain down on the bed and closed his eyes. He had decided not to feel anything and then lain there all day and all night and occasionally with his fingertips had traced the five round scars from a glowing cigarette pressed against the skin on his face, and could have stayed lying there even longer. Until he couldn’t anymore. In the morning he’d drawn a line on the head of the bed and breathed in the black and dusty air, and then started to cry silently. Not much, but more than he had done since before the fire and his dad and in a different way from when he’d sat in the car between Råby and Södertälje a couple of weeks ago with a gun loaded with one single bullet and pressed it hard against his temple. He’d sat up on the edge of the bed and forced the fucking tears back down his throat to his chest, to his stomach, and whispered
I love you, brother
until there was nothing left.

He pulled out the chair by the small table and sat down. Strong sunlight outside, sharp light through the blind fabric. He looked again at the door that wasn’t metal, which he could open whenever he wanted and go out. He wouldn’t do it today. He’d stay in his room. As he had yesterday. As he would tomorrow. There was nowhere else to go.

That fat fucking pig with the stiff neck and gammy leg had explained that he would live like this. No contact with Råby
meant
no contact with Råby. That someone who first informs on his brothers and then his woman in order to live under a witness protection program might feel that breathing is black and dusty and give up, relapse, go back.

He wasn’t going to do that. He had decided.

He would wait here in an empty house exactly eighty-three kilometers from Hinseberg, close to Wanda, who was pregnant and in eight months would give birth to his son in a cell that was much bigger than the others, maybe he would even visit them one day, get to know someone who would get to know him.

yet another day later

The brown corduroy sofa was too soft—especially on the
nights when he slept several hours in a row. It was too short—with a stiff left leg that couldn’t stretch out. And it was too warm—the fabric was worn and rubbed against his back. But he slept so much better there than anywhere else, he belonged in it in the way that it belonged in the room. It had stood there in the corner, as far from the wardrobe as the window, longer than most people had worked in the building.

Ewert Grens lay down to avoid the piles of paper on the equally aging coffee table. It didn’t move, the letter on top didn’t disappear. He’d been standing out in the Homicide corridor, two cups of blackness and an almond slice, when he looked over at his pigeonhole and the note that someone had written encouraging him to empty it. Why do they bother? He’d sighed, gone over, stuffed the pile under his arm, and then lain down to open one letter at a time, but he hadn’t got any further. The envelope on top—it must have been put there that morning—white, A4,
Prison Service
and
Fridhemsplan Probation
in the right-hand corner. He had looked at it for a long time, had chosen to drop it, and had been lying there avoiding it for half an hour now.

He sat up. Fingered it, lifted it up, weighed it in his hand. He went over to the window and the view out to Kronoberg courtyard. Back to the coffee table. It was still there. He lifted it up again, coughed, pulled his index finger from the opening on one side of the envelope to the other side.

A single sheet of paper. An official form he’d seen before. And at the bottom, a request.

He folded the sheet, walked over to his desk and one of the piles that lay there, went through the files until he found the one he was
looking for. Another letter that had been found in a red Adidas bag during a house search, sent from an inmate in Block D at Aspsås prison to a peer in an apartment on the second floor of Råby Allé 67.

He held both documents out in front of him, side by side, compared the signature at the bottom of one with that on the other.

It was written by the same hand.

He hurried out into the corridor again, three rooms down, Erik Wilson’s office. His boss was sitting hunched in front of the computer screen when Grens crossed the threshold and went in.

“I got a commission from you.”

He held out an envelope, newly opened,
Prison Service
and
Fridhemsplan Probation
in the right-hand corner.

“Because I was
suited
.”

They had stood together in a cell in Hinseberg prison for women. Neither of them had understood then that it was a day that would live on. It had. This morning in a white envelope.

“I got this today.”

Erik Wilson opened it and read the single sheet inside. An official form that he’d seen before too. And that was always followed by a request. It was remarkable how often criminals, just as they were on their way to being locked up, sat in the remand prison and filled out a form about their probation officer—the person on the other side of the prison wall who would be their contact person and who they had to trust—and wanted the very policeman who had questioned them for days and wrangled with them over the truth, or even the policeman who had pursued them for so long and made sure that they were arrested.

“A request, Ewert . . .”

This form, this request for a probation officer, had been signed by Leon Jensen.

“. . . that I would have immediately turned down.”

Wilson looked at the detective superintendent in front of him, who somehow managed to make every room feel small, folded the piece of paper, and handed it back together with the envelope.

“If it had still been relevant, that is.”

Someone had died. Someone they had both seen being born. They had never talked about it, and they never would.

“Not for his sake. For
your
sake, Ewert.”

A third cup of black coffee in the corridor on the way back. And another almond slice.

He couldn’t bear lying down anymore, looked at the cassette player and the tapes on the shelf, and listened to the silence, then sat down at his desk and randomly pulled something out of the other piles that were there—the explosions three days earlier in six buildings with the same address, Råby Allé. Slowly, and somewhat distracted, he leafed through the thick and until now unread documents. One at a time. Interviews, possible chain of events, more interviews, witness statements, yet more interviews. The last file was Krantz’s technical report. As soon as he read it, he started to get that feeling in his chest that he’d learned to trust and put it to one side, waited a while, and then decided, when the feeling in his chest didn’t let go, to read it again.

The first pages, overexposed and underexposed photos of cut-off electric wires and undetonated explosives, of burned-out and blasted stairwells and apartments, blackened cellar rooms and a garage.

Ewert Grens fought to keep down whatever it was in his chest. He couldn’t.

Almost certainly
.

In a forensic scientist’s world, in Nils Krantz’s world, about as close to the absolute truth as you could get.

Index finger over the smooth photographic paper on the last page of the report and pictures from the elevator shafts, enlarged fragments of cell phones and the kind of jute that had once been part of sacks of bulk industrial explosives.

Ewert Grens looked up, took a deep breath, looked down.

Very probable
.

In a forensic scientist’s world they still had a different way of expressing the truth.

He got up and went over to the window.

04:34.

That could be true. Eight to twelve seconds. That
could
be true.

Grens left the window and went over to the bookshelf and the tapes and the two photos of someone who calmed him down and took his hand when she sang. He put on a tape, closed his eyes, waited.

That feeling. The one that lingers in your stomach, a bit in your chest.

It didn’t let go. Her voice, the words, melodies he knew so well, not even they helped.

It
could
be true.

The car was parked on Bergsgatan and he drove too fast up the hill on Hantverkargatan and through the tunnel on Drottningholsmvägen and the first part of Essingeleden, slowed down around Gröndal, and continued at the speed limit in the middle lane. He’d just thought of lying down on the sofa for a while. He hadn’t imagined that two different documents within an hour would lead him back to the place he’d thought he would never return to.

Krantz’s report, the pictures of what had previously been cell phones, and 04:34 in the morning had linked together restless radio waves and blown up a building every eight seconds. And a white piece of paper in a white envelope sent by the Prison Service, a request to act as probation officer for an inmate named Leon Jensen.

Of all damned people, Jensen had written down the name of the one person who wouldn’t be able to answer, since Grens had ceased to understand what he was feeling a long time ago.

“Where are you?”

The earpiece didn’t transmit the sound, so he pulled it out and held the telephone on the steering wheel right in front of him with the loudspeaker function on.

“Can you hear me, Hermansson?”

“I can hear you.”

“Where are you?”

“In my room.”

“By yourself?”

She paused.

“What do you want?”

A request I would have refused. If it had still been valid
.

“How many murders had I investigated?”

“What?”

Not for his sake. For your sake, Ewert
.

“Which towers did you triangulate those intercepted calls from?”

“What?”

“How many . . .”

“I heard what you said. Both times.”

He’d called her, as he usually did, asked about something different as he usually did, and to be sure, had asked her everything again.

He wanted something. And had no idea how to do it.

“What is it that you want, Ewert? Really?”

He was driving. She could hear the constant sound curtain of heavy traffic.

“I don’t want anything else. How many . . .”

“Ewert?”

“Yes?”

“What you
really
don’t want . . . I think . . . we’ve talked about it . . . if it’s about that, at least . . . you’re on your way.”

“Huh?”

“You’re on your way, Ewert. Don’t you understand? I saw it, the anger when you went to tell Pereira’s wife that he’d been killed. You thought you were hiding it. I have never seen such anger before. Pereira’s wife could feel it; Sven, the children, and it was good for them, for me. It was the kind of anger that goes hand in hand with real grief.
You can feel
,
Ewert
. In a way that you haven’t before . . . as long as I’ve known you. And if you can feel that anger and manage it, then you can also fall in love, dare to fall in love, maybe feel something that isn’t just about you.”

He didn’t answer.

The fucking phone, it shouldn’t really be on the steering wheel. It wasn’t good to have it in view of the traffic. He moved it down to the passenger seat, but then it was difficult to hear what she was saying, so he hung up.

It looked as it had when he had left two days earlier.

He parked by the blue-and-white plastic that cordoned off the area around six buildings that housed a total of four hundred and twenty apartments. Black, torn buildings that had collapsed and the smell of soot hit him as the wind moved around the burned-down jungle gym in the playground and the ash from the trees and park benches that had been set out some years earlier to break up the asphalt that now was the only thing left.

He had thought it already.

This is not a crime scene where I have to tread carefully. This is a tragedy. Someone else’s everyday.

He counted eight cars from the bomb unit, who had resumed their search after the arrest of Leon Jensen; three cars from Forensics, who were there to get down on their knees and search for things that no one else could see; and two patrol cars and a van from Södertörn Police with uniformed officers who stood guarding the cordons. If he went up on his toes, he could see the bomb dogs and experts moving between two entrances on the other side of Råby Torg. The past three days equaled fifteen hundred apartments in twenty-five buildings, as well as elevator shafts, cellar corridors, and garage sections, which had all been searched. He pulled the summary that he received regularly from the inner pocket of his jacket. Bomb technicians in protective clothing had now searched a fifth of Råby and found four thousand three hundred and five rifle cartridges, seven hundred and six pistol bullets, two hundred and nine revolver bullets, seven smoke grenades, six fragmentation grenades, five sticks of dynamite, three anti-tank weapons, three stick grenades, and a good kilo of military explosives. In the course of their search, they had also seized twenty-five homemade ninja stars, twenty-two sawed-off shotguns, fourteen army knives of various sorts, nine nunchucks, seven bayonets, five AK4 automatic rifles, three Kpist submachine guns, and two Kalashnikovs.

Grens looked around.

Another time. And still the same.

He started to walk, his body close to the plastic cordon. He was on his way. She’d said that and he’d had no idea. His anger had been grief. She’d said that as well. He stopped and held on to the blue and white. She’d stood beside him, Sven on the other side, the first funeral he had chosen to go to because he
wanted
to go and he hadn’t been ashamed or given himself a hard time afterwards for not having gone to hers. They had stood at a distance and watched as José Pereira’s coffin was lowered, he hadn’t known that there were still people who did that.

He walked on toward the building that lacked walls in several places, where faces had recently looked out through the windows, and he stopped again.

José Pereira. Julia Bozsik. Leon Jensen.

What if a police sergeant named Ewert Grens had not arrested a young woman and taken a young man away nearly twenty years ago? If a boy who had been born had grown up somewhere else?

He looked at all the soot, a deep intake of the acrid smell, the wind was playing with the ash again.

Råby Allé 12.

He got closer. According to Krantz’s report and several unanimous witness statements, Råby Allé 12 was the building that had exploded first and then collapsed completely.

Pictures from the former Yugoslavia. Or Lebanon. From news programs with serious voices, houses that had been destroyed by civil war, it looked like that.

Her voice.

It had been calm and he’d done as she asked.

The cell phone with the earpiece that wasn’t working was in his pocket; he got it out and pulled up the menu for outgoing calls, ran his finger down to three days ago. He had made fourteen calls that day. Four in the morning.