Box 21 aka The Vault

THURSDAY 6 JUNE

Ewert’s back ached.

The office sofa was really far too small; he had to get it changed. His sleep had been troubled. Bengt’s lie, Grajauskas and the other girl on the video, Anni’s hand that he couldn’t get hold of, the tears that had drained him. His clothes were wrinkled and his breath was stale. He had tried to work when the hours dragged, but he couldn’t concentrate on the investigation of the Oldйus and Lang case. Grajauskas and her friend had commandeered his thoughts. They had looked pale and spent when they talked about his best friend and the shame they hoped he would feel. He had tried to get back to sleep, twisting and turning until the light forced him to get up.

He absently touched the plastic parcel in his pocket. He had tried to wipe the tape and had failed. He had made up his mind and wasn’t going to change it. It had to go.

The police house was still totally empty. He bought a dry cheese sandwich and a carton of juice from the machines in the corridor, breakfasted and then went to the locker rooms and had a long shower.

I must see her again soon.

Last time I brought death.

This time must I bring shame?

The water was hammering on his skull and shoulders. That damned mortuary was being washed down the drain and the tension began to slip. He used somebody’s forgotten towel, dressed and got another coffee from the machine. Black, as usual. Slowly he woke up.

‘Good morning, sir.’

He heard her voice from one of the rooms in passing. She was sitting on a chair in the middle of the floor and surrounded by papers, on the sofa, the desk, the top of the bookshelf, and the floor.

‘Hermansson. You’re in early.’

She was so young. Young and ambitious. That usually wore off.

‘I’m reading the witness statements from the hospital. They’re really interesting. I wanted to have time to go through them properly.’

‘Found anything I should know about?’

‘I think so. Well, I haven’t got them all yet. The statements from Grajauskas’s guard and the boys who were watching TV in the dayroom are being printed now.’

‘And?’

‘For one thing, the link between Grajauskas and Sljusareva looks strong.’

Perhaps it was her nice dialect, or her calm manner, whatever it was, he listened to her now, just as he had listened to her yesterday in the temporary operations centre, though it was too late. He should tell her. That she was good, that he trusted her and that didn’t happen often.

‘Tell me more.’

‘Can you give me a couple of hours? I’ll have a clearer picture then.’

‘Right. See me after lunch.’

He was about to go. He ought to tell her.

‘Hermansson.’

‘Yes?’

She looked at him and he had to go on.

‘You did a good job yesterday. Your analysis… well, what you said. I’d like to work with you again.’

She smiled. He hadn’t expected that.

‘Praise! From Ewert Grens. That’s very special.’

He stood there, feeling something new. Abandoned perhaps, or exposed. He almost regretted having complimented her and switched tack; anything really, as long as it was different.

‘You know the store where electronic stuff is kept?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I need a couple of things from in there, but I’ve never been. Do you know where it is?’

Hermansson got up. She was laughing. Ewert didn’t understand why. She looked at him and laughed, making him feel uncomfortable.

‘Sir? Just between us?’

‘Yes?’

‘Tell me, have you ever praised a woman officer before?’

She was still laughing when she pointed out into the corridor.

‘And the store is right there, next to the coffee machine.’

She settled down on the chair again and started rooting around among the papers on the floor. Ewert looked at her and then walked away. She had laughed at him. He didn’t understand why.

Lisa Öhrström had kept her eyes closed for a long time.

She had heard the dark man who threatened her get up and leave; she had remained seated, not daring to move until Ann-Marie left her glass booth in the corridor and came to see how she was. The older woman had taken Lisa in her arms and talked soothingly, sat with her. At one point they had started playing the childish game of slapping one hand on top of the other.

Afterwards she had gone home. She had tried to see her patients, but was too frightened and drained. She had never felt such fear.

It had been a long night.

She had reasoned with herself, trying to banish the ache inside. Her heart was racing and she took deep, slow breaths to settle down, but instead was alarmed by the way she gasped for air. No peace of mind, she didn’t dare go to sleep, scared that she would never wake up, didn’t want to, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t close her eyes, not any more.

Jonathan and Sanna. She couldn’t keep them away.

All night long they had insisted on being let in.

She had tried to banish them by taking slow breaths, calm. She loved them like she had never dared to love anyone else, except perhaps Hilding, way back, before he had made her stop feeling. The children were different, they were part of her.

That man knew that the children existed. He had found her photos.

The damned pain in her chest.

The children were her weakness and her protection at the same time, little human beings she could not bear to lose and who strangely also made her able to control the panic that almost overwhelmed her.

The detective who had questioned her after Hilding’s body had been found, and who had made her identify that man Lang, DI Sven Sundkvist, had phoned early in the morning when she was still in bed, apologised, explained that they were working hard on the case and asked her to come to the station as soon as she could.

She was waiting in a dark room somewhere inside the main City Police building. She wasn’t alone. Sundkvist was there too and a lawyer, who presumably represented the accused, had just come through the door.

DI Sundkvist told her to take her time. There was no hurry and it was important that she did everything in the correct way.

She went and stood at the window. He assured her that it was a one-way view only. Only those on the police side could see through it. The men on the other side just saw their own images in the mirrored surface.

There were ten of them, all about the same height, roughly the same age, and all had shaved heads. Each man had a label hung round his neck, a large white board with a black number on it.

They stood shoulder to shoulder, staring straight at her. At least that’s how it felt – as if they were waiting and watching to see what she would do.

She looked at them without seeing.

A few seconds for each one, scanning them from their feet to the top of their head. She avoided their eyes.

‘No.’

She shook her head.

‘None of them.’

Sven Sundkvist took a step closer. ‘Are you quite certain?’

‘Yes, I am. He wasn’t one of these men.’

Sundkvist nodded at the window.

‘They’re going to walk in a circle now, one at a time. I want you to watch carefully.’

The man furthest to the left, number 1, took a few steps forward and walked slowly round the relatively spacious room. Her eyes followed him. She saw him this time, his slightly rolling gait, a self-assured way of moving. It was him.

That was Lang all right.

Bugger, bugger Hilding.

She saw him return to the line. It was number 2’s turn. The men ceased to look alike as she watched one after the other do the circuit of the room. They had all looked the same before when they were standing still, and now she saw their differences.

DI Sundkvist had been standing next to her, silently observing the parade. He turned to her when number 10 was back in his place.

‘So you’ve seen them again now: their faces, how they moved, their posture and so on. I need to know if you recognise any one of them.’

Lisa didn’t look at him. She couldn’t.

‘No.’

‘Nobody?’

‘Nobody.’

Sven took a step closer and tried to meet her evasive eyes.

‘Are you quite certain? Positive that none of these men was the one you observed before he killed Hilding Oldйus, your brother?’

He looked at the woman in front of him. Her reaction surprised him. The death of her brother did not seem to sadden her. Instead it seemed to make her angry, or something akin to that.

‘You’re thinking about sisterly love, aren’t you? I did love him once, the Hilding I grew up with. But not the one who died yesterday. That was Hilding the heroin addict. I hated him and hated the person he forced me to become.’

She swallowed. Everything she felt inside, the rage and hatred and fear and panic. She tried to swallow it all.

‘Anyway, I repeat, I don’t recognise any of the men in there.’

‘You haven’t seen any of them before?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘You are absolutely certain?’

The lawyer, who had come into the room last, spoke up for the first time. He was a man in his forties, dressed formally in suit and tie. His voice was edgy, almost upset.

‘That is surely enough, Inspector. The witness has stated quite clearly that she doesn’t recognise anyone, still you keep pressurising her.’

‘Not at all. There is a discrepancy between Dr Öhrström’s response today and her previous witness statement.’

‘You’re using undue pressure.’

The lawyer came closer to Sven.

‘And now I must insist that you let Mr Lang go. At once. You can’t hold him.’

Sven took the lawyer’s arm and led him towards the door.

‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I know the rules, don’t worry, but we still have some things to discuss.’

Once the lawyer had been ushered out of the room, Sven checked that the door was properly closed. Lisa had turned towards the viewing window, staring at it, into the empty room behind.

‘I don’t understand.’

Sven went over to the window and stood between her and the empty room.

‘I don’t understand. Do you remember our interview yesterday?’

Lisa’s neck blushed, her eyes pleaded.

‘Yes.’

‘Then you also recall what you said?’

‘Yes.’

‘You identified the man on photograph thirty-two. I told you that his name was Jochum Lang. You said, several times, that you were certain that he was the man who had injured and killed Hilding Oldйus. I know it and you know it, which is why I fail to understand why, when you see him directly in front of you today, you come nowhere near even a tentative identification.’

She didn’t answer, just shook her head and looked fixedly at the floor.

‘Have you been threatened?’

He waited for her reply. It didn’t come.

‘That’s how he usually operates. He silences people with threats. It allows him to carry on maltreating people at will.’

Sven was still trying to meet her eyes, still waiting.

Finally she looked up. She wanted to avoid this, but she stood her ground.

‘I’m sorry, Inspector. I really am sorry. Please understand – I have a niece and a nephew. I love them dearly.’

She cleared her throat.

‘You do understand, don’t you?’

The morning traffic had died down and it had been easy to cross the city centre. The motorway was clear and the journey took about half an hour this time. Suddenly he was there, for the second time in less than twelve hours.

Lena was happy to see him.

She came outside, stood on the steps waiting and then gave him a hug. Ewert was not used to physical contact and his first instinct was to back away, but he didn’t. They needed it, both of them.

She went in to get a jacket as the air was chilly, even though the rain had stopped. It was that kind of summer, no real warmth.

For almost twenty minutes they walked together in silence, deep in thought, following the path across the fields towards the Norsborg reservoirs. Then she asked again who that woman was. The girl who had shot Bengt, the one who had lain beside him on the floor.

Ewert asked her if it was important and she nodded. She wanted to know, but couldn’t bear to explain. He stood still, telling her about the first time he had seen Lydia Grajauskas, inside a flat with an electronic lock, where she had been beaten senseless, with great red, swollen welts all over her back.

She listened, walked on a little, then asked another question.

‘What did she look like?’

‘How do you mean? When she was dead?’

‘No, before that. I want a picture of who she was. She has taken the rest of our life together, Ewert. I know that you, of all people, can understand that. I watched the news for as long as I could bear. Then as soon as I woke up this morning I looked through both the morning papers, but there are no pictures of her. Maybe there aren’t any anywhere. Or maybe what she looked like doesn’t matter to anyone else. Maybe what people need is to know what she did, how she ended up.’

The rest of our life together.

Ewert had thought exactly that, said it too.

A wind had started to blow. He buttoned his jacket while they walked. I’ve got them here, he thought. In my inside pocket – the photographs we got from the Lithuanian police.

Lena, I have that bloody video too. The one that will soon disappear. There’s so much that you must never know.

‘I have a photo.’

‘A photo?’

‘Yes.’

He unbuttoned enough to get the envelope out and handed over a black-and-white photograph of a girl.

The girl was smiling. Her long blonde hair was pulled back and held with a ribbon tied into a bow.

‘That’s her. Lydia Grajauskas. She was twenty. From Klaipeda. The picture was taken about three years ago. She disappeared soon afterwards.’

Lena stood very still, fingering the photo, touching the face as if seeking something she could recognise.

‘She’s pretty.’

Lena wanted to say more, he could sense it, but she only looked at the picture of the girl who had killed the most important person in her life.

She said nothing.

Sven had got home late last night.

Anita had been waiting for him in the kitchen when he arrived a little before midnight, just as she said she would. He held her tight and then went to fetch a silver candelabra they were both very fond of. He lit the white candles and they looked at each other. They drank wine and ate half the birthday cake by candlelight, celebrating the start of his forty-second year.

Later he went upstairs to see Jonas, kissed him on the forehead and instantly regretted it when the boy woke and seemed confused, mumbling something inaudible. Sven stayed by his bedside, gently caressing his cheek, until Jonas fell asleep again. He found Anita in the bathroom and told her how lovely she was. He held her hand hard when they went to bed. She was naked, and afterwards they went to sleep in each other’s arms.

He had woken early.

Their little house was very quiet when he left.

He realised he was being a bit keen – they had a photo identification after all – but as soon as he got to his office he had contacted Lisa Öhrström and asked her to come in for an identity parade that morning. He was aware that it would be seen as unprofessional to put a witness through two identifications, but the pressure was on and he wanted to make sure. They needed all they could get to persuade the prosecutor, Еgestam, that he must not let Lang go free, not this time.

Which was why he was furious when he left Dr Öhrström by the one-way window that separated her from the ten men who were lined up with numbers on their chests. He tried not to show it, because he knew in his heart of hearts that she was not to blame. If anything, she was a victim too, terrified by the death threats. But he didn’t manage to control himself. He became sarcastic and condescending.

He hurried out, made his way to the Kronoberg interview room.

Lang would not be released.

Roadworks somewhere between Skдrholmen and Fruдngen made Ewert bang the dashboard and shout out loud. He was in a hurry to get back, would pass by Kronoberg and the City Police Building to run a quick errand, then walk over to the St Erik’s Street restaurant where he had just arranged to meet Sven for lunch.

He knew he wasn’t any good. He had stood with his arm around Lena and tried to say the kind of things he felt he ought to say, all the while feeling useless. He wasn’t any good at hugging or comforting people; he never had been. While the wind blew across the fields, Lena had stood with the photo of the Lithuanian girl clutched in her hand, until he gently made her give it back.

Why had he gone to see her? All he had done was intrude into her grief. Was it because he missed Bengt? Because there was nobody else for her just now? Or because he himself had nobody?

The cars crawled ahead, three lanes merged into one. The minutes dripped off his forehead. He would be late. He had no choice.

He had to get to the office electronics store before lunch.

Sven would have to wait.

The interview room was as bleak as ever.

When Sven got there he was out of breath, his anger had propelled him through the building at an unnecessary speed. Lang was sitting at the table. He was smoking and didn’t even look up.

Sven Sundkvist, interview leader (IL): You visited Hilding Oldйus, who was in one of the medical wards at the Söder Hospital, immediately before he died from the injuries inflicted on him.

Jochum Lang (JL): That’s what you say.

IL: We have a witness.

JL: Really, Sundkvist? That’s good news. You could bring them here and set up an identity parade.

IL: The witness showed you to the ward where Oldйus was.

JL: You know what I mean, don’t you? Like, they come along and look at me and nine other blokes through a one-way window. Fucking brilliant. You do it, Sundkvist.

Sven was raging inside. The man opposite him was trying to make him lose control and was close to succeeding. Must keep calm, must ask my questions and no matter what he says, just keep asking until I get what I want.

He saw that Jochum Lang was smiling. His lawyer would already have informed him that the parade had been a washout. Lawyers were quick off the mark with that kind of thing. Never mind, no way was this ruthless thug going to leave, not yet.

He was going to answer the questions again and sooner or later he would say more than he wanted to, enough to satisfy Еgestam that he should keep the suspect locked up and carry on with his preliminary investigation.

IL: We picked you up in a BMW that was parked illegally at the hospital entrance.

JL: Busy man, aren’t you? No idea you did parking fines as well.

IL: Why were you sitting in the passenger seat of a car left inside the cordoned-off area?

JL: I can sit wherever I fucking like.

IL: We won’t let you go this time.

JL: Sundkvist, get off my back. You’d better return me to the fucking cells! Or else I might do something that I could be charged for.

It was ten minutes past twelve when Ewert parked outside the police building. Sven was probably waiting impatiently in the restaurant by now.

He hurried inside, down the corridor leading to his room, and stopped near the coffee machine. Not for a coffee, though; he went into the storeroom, which was next to it, just where Hermansson had said.

Brown cardboard boxes containing blank videocassettes were stacked on shelves at the back of the stale-smelling little room. He took one out, tore off the plastic cover and checked that it looked exactly like all other videotapes. Then he went to his office, picked up Grajauskas’s carrier bag and placed the new video in it.

Lena’s shame? Or hers?

Lena was alive. She was dead.

Grajauskas’s true story did not exist any more. Well, it did, deep down in the water off Slagsta beach, where he had stopped on the way back from Eriksberg. The burden of shame is so much heavier when you’re alive.

Ewert yawned and swung the carrier bag with the new videotape in it a couple of times. Then he put it back in the box with the rest of her belongings.

Ewert found a table in one of the furthest, darkest corners, where he was unlikely to be seen by someone who had just stepped inside for a look. What a dump, he thought, this small restaurant on the busy corner of St Erik’s Street and Fleming Street, quite a walk from Kronoberg. Too bad. He had no choice. Reporters had been chasing him all over the Kungsholmen area and knew where he usually went for lunch. He had been on his way there when he spotted a few hacks already buzzing about outside.

He wouldn’t give them any answers. He’d give them nothing. The police press officers could work for their wages, they could explain as little as possible at one of those press conferences where everybody shouted at the same time.

He had turned on his heels, phoned Sven who was already sitting in there waiting, and walked to a place he knew a few blocks away where he had sheltered before when someone’s death had caused excited headlines and words. Here he would be left in peace to consume the foul food.

He picked up a newspaper someone had left behind, opening to a six-page news feature about the hostage drama at Söder Hospital.

‘I had just been served, you know.’ Sven patted him on the shoulder. ‘That’s sixty-five kronors’ worth down the drain.’

He sat down, looked around and shook his head.

‘And for what? Great place you’ve chosen.’

‘At least nobody hangs around asking questions here.’

‘I can see why.’

They ordered beef stew, Skеne style. Served with pickled beetroot.

‘How is she?’

‘Lena?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s grieving.’

‘She needs you to be with her.’

Ewert sighed, shifted about restlessly on his chair and put the paper down.

‘Sven, I have no idea what you’re supposed to do or say. I’m no good at things like that. Take this morning. Lena wanted to see what Grajauskas looked like and I showed her the photo.’

‘If that’s what she wanted.’

‘I’m not sure. It didn’t feel right. Her reaction was odd, as if she didn’t… almost as if she recognized Grajauskas. She looked at the picture, touched it and tried to say something, but didn’t.’

‘She is still in shock.’

‘She doesn’t need to know what her husband’s dead killer looked like. I felt like I was rubbing it in her face.’

A few pieces of meat, swimming in gravy. They ate because they had to.

‘Ewert.’

‘What?’

‘This morning was a complete disaster.’

Ewert chased a slice of beetroot across his plate, but gave up when it sank in a pool of brown gravy-powder sludge.

‘Do I want to know this?’

‘Not really.’

‘Tell me, all the same.’

Sven relived the morning.

He had sensed Lisa Öhrström’s fear and unwillingness from the moment they met, he said, and went on to describe the line-up, her first negative and his request that she should observe the men moving. All the time, he was aware that she neither dared nor wanted to engage with what she was shown. Then her give-away plea that she loved her nephew and niece, his own anger when he realised that she had been intimidated and her refusal to substantiate her earlier statement. Finally her shame, and the lawyer who insisted that Lang should be released.

Sven knew what would happen next.

Putting down his knife and fork, Ewert went bright red in the face, his eyes narrowed, a blood vessel began to pulsate at his temple. He was just about to thump the table when Sven grabbed his arm.

‘Ewert. Not here. We don’t want to attract attention.’

Grens’s breathing was ragged and sheer rage made his voice fall into a low register.

‘What the hell are you saying, Sven?’

He got up and walked round the table, kicking each one of its legs.

‘Ewert, I’m just as mad as you are. But pack it in now, we’re not in the office.’

He remained standing.

‘Intimidation! Lang threatened the doctor! Threatened the kids!’

Sven hesitated before he continued. The strange morning replayed in his mind. He took a small audio recorder from his jacket pocket and put it on the table between their half-eaten platefuls.

‘I questioned Lang afterwards. Listen to this.’

Two voices.

One wanting to talk. The other determined to end the conversation.

Ewert listened with concentrated attention, his every muscle tensing when Jochum Lang spoke. When it was all over and Sven switched the tape recorder off, Ewert came to life.

‘Play that again. Only the last bit.’

Sounds, a chair scraping on the floor, someone breathing. Then Lang’s voice.

‘Sundkvist, get off my back. You’d better return me to the fucking cells! Or else I might do something that I could be charged for.’

This time Ewert howled, and every one of the few remaining customers turned to stare at the big man in the far corner standing by a table waving his fist in the air.

‘Ewert! For Christ’s sake! Sit down.’

‘That’s it! There’s no way I’ll let Lang decide any more. He’ll stay put in the cells and I don’t give a rat’s ass about the consequences.’

He was still standing. He pointed at Sven. ‘Her telephone number. Lisa Öhrström’s.’

‘Why?’

‘Do you have it or don’t you? Give me her number! We’re going to do some real police work, you and I, right here in the restaurant.’

The waitress, a girl rather than a woman, approached their table timidly and appealed to Sven, ignoring Ewert. It took great effort for her to tell them to please be quieter, show some respect for the other guests or she would have to call the police. Sven apologised and promised it wouldn’t happen again. They were just about to leave, could they have the bill?

‘Here.’ He handed Ewert his opened pocket diary. Dr Öhrström’s phone number was neatly written down. Ewert smiled. All the case contact names were ordered alphabetically. That was how he operated, this young colleague of his.

He got out his mobile phone and dialled her number. He caught her somewhere on the ward. She had gone in to work immediately after the identity parade.

‘Dr Öhrström? DSI Ewert Grens speaking. In an hour I’ll fax you some photographs. I want you to have a good look at them.’

She paused, as if she was trying to work out what he had said.

‘Please explain. What is this about?’

‘Robbery, grievous bodily harm and murder.’

‘I still don’t understand.’

‘What’s your fax number?’

Another pause. She wanted nothing to do with whatever it was. ‘Why do I have to see these pictures of yours?’

‘You’ll understand when you see them in an hour’s time. I’ll ring you back.’

Ewert waited impatiently while Sven finished his half of lager and fumbled for the money he said he knew he had somewhere. Ewert waved this away. No problem, he’d pay for both of them. He handed over a larger tip than the food had deserved.

They were just about to step out from the smell of stew into the snarled-up traffic on St Erik’s Street when Ewert spied two journalists of the kind he definitely wanted to avoid. He pushed Sven back into the restaurant, kept the door ajar and waited until they passed and disappeared down the street.

Back in his room, Ewert picked up a couple of black-and-white photographs and went off to find the fax machine.

‘Sir?’

There she was. She had laughed at him earlier on that morning.

‘Hermansson. You promised me a report after lunch. It’s after lunch now.’

He wondered if he sounded brusque. He hadn’t meant to.

‘It’s done.’

‘And?’

‘I’ve gone through all the statements now. Quite a few interesting points have turned up.’

Ewert was holding the photos and she gestured to him, Fax them, of course, I’ll wait, but he put them down and asked her to elaborate.

‘Take the hospital guard’s account. He mentions a woman who walked past and went into the toilet at the end of the corridor just before Grajauskas went in. From his description, I’m sure it was her friend Alena Sljusareva.’

He listened to her and remembered this morning, when he had praised her and then felt awkward, weak and exposed. He hadn’t quite understood why, still didn’t. He wasn’t normally laughed at by young women.

‘The next statement I read was given by the two lads who were sitting next to Grajauskas, watching the lunchtime news. One of them remembers the same woman going by and his description is identical to that of the guard. A perfect description of Alena Sljusareva again. I’m positive.’

Hermansson had brought a folder full of papers, a twenty-four-hour-old investigation into a murder and a suicide in a hospital mortuary. She handed it to him.

‘It was her, Grens. Sljusareva supplied Grajauskas with the firearm and explosives, I’m sure. In other words, she is an accessory to aggravated kidnap and murder. We’ll find her soon. She has got nowhere to go.’

Ewert took the folder and cleared his throat. The young detective was already walking away.

‘Look, Hermansson.’

She stopped.

‘By the way. You’re the second policewoman I’ve praised. And I ought to do it again, it seems.’

She shook her head.

‘Thanks. But that’s enough for now.’

She started to walk away again, when he asked her to wait. One more question.

‘What you said this morning. Am I to take it that you think I have a problem with female officers?’

‘Yes. That’s what I meant.’

Not a moment’s hesitation. She was as calm and matter-of-fact as ever, and he felt just as exposed.

He took the point, though, and remembered Anni.

He cleared his throat again and got himself a coffee from the machine. He needed the simplicity of it, black and hot in a plastic cup. It calmed him down and he pressed for a refill. He knew why he had a problem with female officers. With women in general. Twenty-five years. That was how long it was since he had held a woman in his arms. He could hardly remember what it felt like, but knew he missed it, what he couldn’t remember.

One more.

He drank the last coffee slowly. Mustn’t allow himself more than three, so better savour the peaceful feeling it gave him. He sipped and swallowed and sipped and swallowed until he realised that he was still holding the photographs.

He glanced at them, certain that they’d do the trick.

Lisa Öhrström replied after five rings.

‘One hour exactly. You’re very punctual.’

‘Please go to your fax.’

He heard her walk down the corridor, visualised the layout of the ward and knew where she was standing.

‘All right?’

‘Coming through.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t understand what it is you want.’

‘Describe what you see.’

He waited.

She sighed. He waited until she was ready to speak.

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘You’re the doctor. Look at the pictures. What do you see?’

Lisa Öhrström was silent. He could hear her breathing, but she said nothing.

‘Come on. What do you see?’

‘It’s a hand, a left hand, with three fractured fingers.’

‘The thumb. Is that right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Five thousand kronor.’

‘I’m sorry? I don’t understand.’

‘Index finger is one thousand, little finger is one thousand.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘Jochum Lang’s rates and his trademark. The photo was taken by a technician during an investigation into a case of GBH, which was later dropped. This guy, with a pretty useless hand, owed seven thousand kronor. One of Lang’s victims. That’s how he operates, the man you are protecting. And he’ll carry on doing this kind of thing for as long as people like you protect him.’

He said nothing more, just waited for a while before putting the receiver down. She would sit there with the three broken fingers in front of her until he got in touch again. A door opened along the corridor and Ewert turned to look. Sven was hurrying towards him with swift footsteps.

‘Ewert, they phoned just now.’

Ewert sat down on top of the fax. His leg ached the way it sometimes did and he didn’t register the machine’s thin plastic cover creaking under his weight. Sven did, but couldn’t be bothered to say anything. He looked at his boss.

‘From the ferry port. A Russian interpreter is on the way.’

‘And?’

‘She was about to board the boat to Lithuania.’

Ewert waved his arms about impatiently.

‘What’s this about?’

‘Alena Sljusareva. They’ve arrested her, just minutes ago.’

They had talked about it so many times.

He had sat with Bengt in interview rooms and pubs, in Bengt’s garden or sitting room, and time and again they had ended up talking about the truth and agreed that when all is said and done, it’s bloody simple, there’s the truth and the rest is lies. And truth is the only thing that people can bear to live with in the long run. Everything else is bullshit.

Lies feed on each other, one lie leads to another and then to another, until you’re so hopelessly caught up in the tangle that you no longer recognise the truth, even when that is all you have.

Their friendship had been built on this respect for the truth, their shared belief that you should always dare to say what you think, even when it saps your strength or undermines your position. Now and then, when one of them realised that the other was being evasive, maybe keeping quiet out of kindness, they would have a row, shout at each other, slam the door to the corridor shut and only open it again when everything had come out – the truth.

Ewert shuddered. What a bloody lie! How had he believed that he and Bengt shared the truth and nothing but the truth?

He sat hunched over his desk, his thoughts circling a video that he had carried around for the best part of a day and night, only to let it sink to the bottom of Lake Mдlaren.

And now I’m lying.

Lying for Lena’s sake.

The plain truth.

I’m lying in order to protect your lie.

Ewert Grens pulled over a cardboard box that was sitting on the edge of his desk. He leaned forward, opened the lid and peered inside. The contents belonged to Alena Sljusareva. She had been arrested a few hours earlier by two policemen, who had also impounded all she carried with her.

Ewert turned the box upside down. Her life scattered over his desk. Nothing much to it, only the essentials for someone on the run. He picked over her possessions, one by one.

A money clip with a few thousand kronor, her pay for opening her legs twelve times a day for three years.

A diary. He broke the lock and leafed through it. Cyrillic letters making up lots of words he didn’t understand.

A pair of sunglasses. Cheap plastic, the kind you buy when you have to.

A mobile phone. The model was quite up to date, more functions than anyone could ever cope with.

A single ticket for the ferry from Stockholm to Klaipeda for today, 6 June. He checked his watch. The ticket had ceased to be valid.

He started putting her life back in the box, read the chain-of-custody list, signed it and put it in with the rest.

Ewert knew more than he wanted to. Now he had to interrogate her. And she would repeat exactly the things he didn’t want to hear. So he would listen and forget, tell her to pack her bag and go home.

For Lena’s sake. Not for you. But for her.

He rose, followed the corridors to the lift that would take him to the custody cells. The duty officer was expecting him and led the way to the cell where Alena had spent the last hour and a half. The officer used the small square hole in the door to check on the prisoner. She was sitting on the narrow bunk, doubled up, her head resting on her knees. Her long dark hair almost reached the floor.

The guard unlocked and opened the door and Ewert stepped into the tired little room. She looked up. Her eyes… she had been crying. He nodded a greeting.

‘I am Detective Superintendent Grens. I believe you speak Swedish?’

‘I do, a bit.’

‘Good. I am going to ask you some questions now. We are going to sit here, in the cell, with the tape recorder between us. Do you understand?’

‘Why?’

Alena Sljusareva tried to make herself smaller. She did that sometimes when someone had been too rough, when her genitals hurt, when she hoped no one would look at her.

Ewert Grens, interview leader (IL): Do you remember seeing me before?

Alena Sljusareva (AS): In the flat. You’re the policeman who hit a stick on his stomach. Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp. He fell down.

IL: You saw me doing that, but you ran away all the same?

AS: I saw Bengt Nordwall too. I panicked. I just wanted to run away.

He was sitting on a hard bunk in a police cell, next to a young woman from a Baltic state; his back ached from sleeping for a few hours on the office sofa and his leg ached as usual. His breathing was laboured, he was tired and he didn’t want to be there any longer. He didn’t want to destroy the one thing he had left, his pride, his identity. He hated the lie that he had to live with, that forced him to carry on lying.

AS: I know now. Lydia is dead.

IL: Yes, she is.

AS: I know now.

IL: Before she died, she shot an innocent policeman dead. Then she killed herself, one shot through the head, using the same gun. A nine-millimetre Pistolet Makarova. I would very much like to know how she got hold of that gun.

AS: She is dead. She is really dead! I know now.

She had kept hoping, as one does. If I don’t know whatever it is, it hasn’t happened.

Alena crossed herself and burst into tears. She wept bitterly, the way you weep only when you finally understand that a person, whom you will miss, no longer exists.

Silently Ewert waited for her to stop, watching the tape unwind. Then he repeated his question.

IL: A nine-millimetre Pistolet Makarova.

AS: [inaudible]

IL: And plastic explosives.

AS: It was me.

IL: Me?

AS: I went to get it.

IL: Where from?

AS: The same place.

IL: Where is that?

AS: Völund Street. The basement.

Grens slammed his fist into the tape recorder, almost hitting her. How the hell had this broken, scared girl on the run managed to slip past the guard outside the building, raid the basement and carry off enough explosives to blow up a substantial part of a large hospital?

He frightened her, this man who hit out, just like the rest. She made herself smaller still.

He apologised and promised not to do it again.

IL: You knew what she was going to use it for.

AS: No.

IL: You handed over a loaded gun, without asking why?

AS: I knew nothing. And I asked nothing.

IL: She didn’t explain?

AS: She knew that if she did I would have insisted on being there.

Ewert switched off the recorder and removed the tape. The lie. Questions and answers which would never be transcribed. This cassette must vanish, just like the film of their shared story had vanished.

He looked at her, she looked away: didn’t want anything more to do with him.

‘You’re going home.’

‘Home? Now?’

‘Now.’

Alena Sljusareva got up quickly, stuck her feet in the regulation prison slip-ons, pulled her fingers through her hair and tugged at her blouse.

They had promised each other that they would go home together. That would never happen now.

Lydia was dead.

She was on her own now.

Ewert called a taxi. The fewer police involved, the better. He escorted her to the Berg Street door. An older man with his younger woman, or perhaps a father with his grown-up daughter. Few passers-by would have guessed at a detective superintendent from Homicide sending a prostitute back home.

Alena sat in the back as the taxi manoeuvred through the city afternoon traffic, from Norr Mдlarstrand to Stureplan, down Valhalla Way to join Lidingö Way, the route to the harbour. She would never come back here, never; she would never leave Lithuania again. She knew that; she had completed her journey.

Ewert paid the taxi driver and accompanied Alena into the ferry terminal. The next departure for Klaipeda was in two hours’ time. He bought her a ticket and she held it tightly, determined not to let go until she arrived in her home town.

It was so hard to imagine it, the place she had left as a girl of seventeen. She hadn’t hesitated for long when the two men had offered her a good, well-paid job only a boat trip away. All she was leaving behind was poverty, and little hope of change. Besides, she’d be back in a few months. She hadn’t discussed it with anyone, not even Janoz. She couldn’t remember why.

She had been a different person then. Just three years ago, but it was another life, another time. Now she had lived more than her peers.

Had he tried to find her? Wondered where she was? She saw Janoz, had kept an image of him in her mind that they had never managed to take away. They had penetrated her and they had spat at her, but they had never been able to get at what she had refused to let go of. Was he still there? Was he alive? What would he look like now?

Ewert told her to come along to the cafeteria at the far end of the terminal and bought her a coffee and a sandwich. She thanked him and ate. He bought two newspapers as well. They settled down to read until it was time to go on board.

The day was not over yet.

Lena Nordwall was sitting at the kitchen table and staring at something or other. When you stared, it had to be at something.

How long would it take? Two days? Three? One week? One year? Never?

She didn’t need to understand. She didn’t need to. Not yet. Did she?

Someone was sitting behind her. She sensed it now. Someone in the hall, at the bottom of the stairs. She turned; her daughter was looking at her, in silence.

‘How long have you been there?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Why aren’t you outside playing?’

‘’Cause it’s raining.’

Their daughter was five years old. Her daughter was five years old. Her daughter. No matter how hard she searched, she wouldn’t find another adult in this house now. She was the only one, alone. The responsibility was hers. The future.

‘Mummy, how long will it be?’

‘How long will what be?’

‘How long will Daddy be dead for?’

Her daughter’s name was Elin. Lena hadn’t noticed that she still had her wet, muddy wellie boots on. The little girl got up and walked to the kitchen table, leaving a trail of wet soil. Lena didn’t see it.

‘When will he come back home?’

Elin sat down on the chair next to her mother. Lena noted this, but nothing else, nor did she really hear that Elin kept asking questions.

‘Won’t he come home, ever?’

Her daughter reached out a hand and stroked her cheek; she could only just reach.

‘Where is he?’

‘Your daddy is asleep.’

‘When will he wake up?’

‘He won’t wake up.’

‘Why not?’

Her daughter sat there throwing questions at her. Each one made a physical impact; she was being bombarded with these things that crawled over her before boring into her skin, into her body. She stood up. No more attacking words. Enough. She shouted at the child, who was trying to understand.

‘Stop it! Stop asking questions!’

‘Why has he become dead?’

‘I can’t… it’s too much, can’t you see that? I can’t bear it!’

She almost struck the child. The impulse was there – it came in an instant, as the questions crashed against her head. Up went her arm. She could have slapped her, but she didn’t. She never had. She burst into tears, sat down again and hugged her daughter close. Her daughter.

Sven had laughed out loud as he walked back alone from the sad little restaurant to Kronoberg. It wasn’t the food, even though that was laughable, those small, fatty pieces of meat in slimy powder gravy. He had laughed at Ewert. He thought of his colleague marching round the table, kicking its legs and then stopping to curse the tape recorder and Lang’s threatening voice, until the waitress tiptoed over to ask him to calm down or she’d have to call the police.

Sven had burst out laughing without thinking and two women walking towards him looked concerned. One of them mumbled something about alcohol and not being in control. He took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Ewert Grens was a lot of things, but at least he was never boring.

Ewert was going to question Sljusareva, good. Sven Sundkvist felt sure that she had information that would help them understand more about the case. He decided to abandon the Lang case for the moment, concentrate on the hostage-taking instead, and walked faster, hurrying back to his office. The mortuary business made him feel deeply disturbed, and not just because it was all about death.

There was something else, something incomprehensible. Grajauskas had been so driven and brutal. Medics held hostage with a gun to their heads, corpses blown apart, her demand for Nordwall, only to shoot him and then herself. All that without letting them know what it was she really wanted.

Back at his desk he ran through the events again, scrutinising 5 June minute by minute, noting the exact time for each new development. He started at 12.15, when Lydia Grajauskas had been sitting on a sofa in the surgical ward watching the news, and ended at 16.10, when several people agreed that they had heard the sound of two gunshots in their earpieces. The two shots had been followed by one more. Then a great crash, when the Flying Squad men forced the door.

He read the statements made by the hostages. The older man, Dr Ejder, and the four students seemed to have the same impression of Grajauskas. They described her as calm and careful to make sure she stayed in control at all times. Also, she had not hurt anyone, except Larsen who had attacked her. Their descriptions gave a good picture, but not what he needed most. Why had she acted like this?

He went through the chain-of-custody list and the technical summary of the state of the mortuary at around 16.17, but no new angles came to mind. All very predictable, nothing he hadn’t expected.

Except that.

He read the two lines several times.

A videotape had been found in her carrier bag. The cassette had no sleeve, but had been labelled in Cyrillic script.

They swapped newspapers. He bought them another cup of coffee and a portion of apple pie and custard each. She ate the pie with the same hearty appetite as the sandwich.

Ewert observed the woman opposite him.

She was pretty. Not that it mattered, but she was lovely to look at.

She should have stayed at home. What a bloody waste. So young, so much ahead of her, and then… what? To be exploited every day by randy family men looking for a change from mowing the lawn. From their ageing wives and demanding kids.

Such a terrible waste. He shook his head and waited until she had finished chewing and put her spoon down.

He had brought it in his briefcase, and now he put it on the table.

‘Have you seen this before?’

A blue notebook. She shrugged. ‘No, I haven’t.’

He opened it to the first page and pushed it across the table so she could see it.

‘Do you understand what it says here?’

Alena read a few lines and then looked up at him. ‘Where did you find this?’

‘Next to her bed in the hospital. The only thing that was hers. Seemed to be, anyway. Is it hers?’

‘It’s Lydia’s handwriting.’

He explained that because it was in Lithuanian, no one had been able to translate the text during the hostage crisis, when she was still alive.

While Bengt was alive, he thought. While his lie didn’t yet exist.

Alena leafed through the book, then read the five pages of text and translated it for him. Everything.

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 hadn’t gone down there, you would be alive.

You must have known!

Why didn’t 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 wasn’t 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 week’s 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 wasn’t 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 didn’t 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 didn’t, 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 Grajauskas’s and Alena Sljusareva’s – he put everything else to one side. First he looked for it in the forensic science department, where it should be.

It wasn’t there.

He asked the language experts, who might have taken an interest in the Cyrillic writing, and the night duty crew.

It wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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 don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘That’s not my job. It’s up to you lot.’

‘That’s why I’m 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. ‘Don’t 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 Ewert’s office four doors down, and knocked.

He knew that Ewert was interviewing Alena Sljusareva. He tried the door. It wasn’t 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 couldn’t remember ever having been in Ewert’s office alone. Had anybody? He only had to look for a few seconds. He saw the video on the shelf behind Ewert’s desk, beside the old cassette player that filled the room with Siw Malmkvist. The label on the back was in Cyrillic script, which he couldn’t 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 shouldn’t 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 operator’s 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t there, not the woman he missed and longed for. She hadn’t 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 Siw’s 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 Еgestam, 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 Oldйus incident, a hospital doctor called Lisa Öhrström, who had unhesitatingly identified Lang as the perpetrator. Еgestam 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 дr 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 hadn’t seen it before. Presumably they didn’t 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.

In the lobby, the man kept talking and the anxious girl kept crying.

Any native observer would have found their language strange-sounding and incomprehensible, which meant that even if the older man had said something to the effect that they owed him now and that was why he was going to break them in and screw them until they bled, nobody would have understood it.

Sven left the meeting room with the empty videotape in his hand. He stopped for a coffee, added plenty of milk because he needed nourishment but had to be careful. Now that he had become angry, his stomach was in constant protest.

That video was a blank. He was convinced Grajauskas hadn’t intended it, she had planned everything so meticulously and had stage-managed every aspect of her last hours. He knew that her tape had a purpose.

He phoned Krantz again from his office. The technician, still in the Regering Street flat, answered at once, preoccupied and cross.

‘What’s up with the damn tape now?’

‘All I want to know is – was it new?’

‘New?’

‘Had it been used?’

‘Yes, it had been used.’

‘And how do we know that?’

‘I can’t speak for you lot, but I know because when I checked there was dust inside. Another thing I know is that the safety tab had been broken off. Which is what you do if you want to make sure the recorded stuff won’t be wiped.’

Sven inspected the video under the desk lamp. It was so new it shone, not one grain of dust in sight. The safety tab was intact. He spoke again.

‘Krantz, I’m coming to see you.’

‘Later, I don’t have time now.’

‘I want you to look at this videotape again. Krantz, it’s important. Something’s not right.’

Lars Еgestam didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Grens had announced that he was going to provide conclusive data about the deaths of both Lydia Grajauskas and Bengt Nordwall – as well as Hilding Oldйus – and about Alena Sljusareva and Jochum Lang; about two simultaneous catastrophes linked by time and place. Almost a year had passed since he last worked with Ewert Grens. That too had been a strange business, a trial of a father who had shot his daughter’s killer. At the time, Еgestam had been the youngest prosecutor in the state service, keen to land a major case and was then almost crushed when the big one landed in his lap. He had been picked to be in charge of the interrogation, which formally meant that he outranked DSI Grens, a man he had heard much about and admired from a distance and whom he now would work with and against.

They were meant to work together, but their collaboration had been a disaster.

Grens seemed to have decided from the outset that mutuality simply wasn’t on his agenda and, collaboration or not, he couldn’t be bothered even to be civil.

Now Еgestam had a choice, and he decided to laugh, which was the easier option. Fate would have it that he was to work with Grens again, on not one, but two investigations in connection with the events at Söder Hospital. And the argument was – this was when he laughed rather than cried – that they had worked together the last time Grens had a big case; the powers-that-be had kept an eye on it and noticed that the teamwork gave good results.

Teamwork? My ass.

Еgestam’s thin body shook as he laughed. He pulled off his jacket, sat back with his shiny black shoes on the desk, tugged at his nicely cut blond hair and laughed until tears came to his eyes at the thought of Grens, the teammate from hell.

The sky above Regering Street should have been summer blue. Sven stared at it and it stared back, grey and dull and mean-looking. Soon it would rain again. He had been standing there for a while. He knew that he should get back to the office, but was uncertain whether he could take any more. Back in the office he would have to continue the work he had started, work that was pushing him to the breaking point.

Nils Krantz, stressed and irritable at being interrupted in the middle of a crime scene examination, had glanced at the videotape for a few seconds, no more, then he handed it back, saying that this was not the tape he had found and analysed in the mortuary. Sven knew that already, but hadn’t been able to stop hoping that he was wrong, as one does when all is not as it should be.

Still, now he knew for certain. Or, rather, he knew nothing whatsoever.

The Ewert Grens he knew and looked up to wouldn’t dream of interfering with evidence.

The Ewert Grens he knew was an awkward bastard, but a straight and honest bastard.

What he had done now was different, something else altogether.

The dull sky was still glaring down at him when his mobile rang. Ewert. Sven sighed, uncertain if he could deal with him now. No, he couldn’t. Not yet.

He listened to the voice message instead. They were going to drive over to Söder Hospital and show Lisa Öhrström a few more of Ewert’s photographs. Sven was to wait where he was; Ewert would pick him up soon.

It was difficult to look at Ewert, and Sven avoided all eye contact with his boss. He would do it later, he knew that, when the time was right, but not now. He settled gratefully in the passenger seat, where he could keep his gaze fixed on the anonymous car a few metres ahead in the slow-moving rush-hour mess on Skepp Bridge and up the slope up towards Slussen and Södermalm.

He wondered about the woman they were going to see. He was still feeling upset about the failure of the identity parade. Öhrström’s reneging on her previous statement had turned the whole thing into a fiasco. Members of her family had been threatened and he understood how terrified she was, but there had been something else as well, something more than fear. She was also riddled with shame, the shame he had tried to explain to Ewert earlier. This had become obvious during their first interview, when she had told him that she grieved over the loss of her little brother but was disgusted with Hilding for being an addict and angry with him for indirectly being the cause of his own death.

She hadn’t been able to prevent it and that was what made her feel ashamed and gave her another reason, in addition to the threats, for not recognising Lang behind that one-way window. Sven felt sure that she was one of those people who agonised about being inadequate, always tried to help, but never felt they had done enough. Hilding was probably the reason she had chosen to study medicine; she was family and therefore believed that she had to save and help and save and help.

And now he was dead, despite all her help.

She might never be rid of her shame now. She would have to live with it for ever.

When they walked into the ward, she was sitting in the ward sister’s glazed cubicle. Her face was pale; the look in her eyes was weary. Grief and fear and hatred can each corrode your strength; together they consume your whole life. She didn’t greet them when they stepped inside the glass box, only looked at them and radiated something close to loathing.

Ewert ignored her manner – or possibly didn’t notice it – he just reminded her briefly of their previous conversation. She didn’t seem to care. It wasn’t easy to read whether her indifference was pretence, or whether she simply couldn’t bear to listen to what he was saying.

Ewert asked her to turn around. He had brought more photos.

It took some time before she stopped studying something on the wall, before she looked at the black-and-white photograph on the table in front of her.

‘What do you see here?’

‘I still have no idea what you’re trying to prove with this game.’

‘I’m just curious. What do you see?’

She stared at Grens for a while, then she turned her head.

She glanced at the photo, noting that it was printed on unusual, slightly rough paper.

‘I see a fractured elbow. Left arm.’

‘Thirty thousand kronor.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Remember the pictures I faxed to you? I’m sure you do. Three broken fingers; that is, one thumb at five thousand and two fingers at a thousand each. I told you that Lang operates with fixed charges, and also that he usually signs off a job by breaking a few fingers. Then I said that the poor sod had owed seven thousand kronor. That wasn’t quite true. In fact he had been in debt to the tune of thirty-seven thousand. It meant the elbow had to go as well. Losing an arm is worth thirty thousand, you see.’

Sven was sitting a little to one side, behind Ewert. He felt bad, ashamed. Ewert, you’re trampling all over her, he thought. I know what you want and I agree we need her as a witness, but not this, you’re going too far.

‘I have another picture. What would you say this is?’

The photograph showed a naked man on a stretcher. The whole body was in the frame and the picture had been taken from the side, in poor light as before, but it was easy to see what it was all about.

‘You seem to have nothing to say. Let me help. This is a dead man. The arm you have been looking at is part of his body. Look! There are the fingers. You see, I told another fib. This guy didn’t just owe thirty-seven thousand kronor, his debt amounted to one hundred and thirty-seven thousand. Lang charges one hundred thousand for a killing. This man’s bad debt has been cleared. He has paid. One hundred and thirty-seven thousand in all.’

Lisa Öhrström clenched her jaw. She didn’t speak, didn’t move, pressed her lips tightly together to stop herself from screaming. Sven watched her, then looked at Ewert. You’re getting there. You’re close. But, Ewert, your tactics are out of order. You are hurting her and will soon do it again. I’ll put up with it, despite feeling ashamed, ashamed of you, ashamed because of what you’re doing, though I have to accept that you’re the most skilful operator I’ve ever met in the force. You need her to testify and you will make her do it. But what about the other investigation? I should be helping you here, should be happy that you’ll soon have her where you want her, but, Ewert, Ewert, how are you dealing with the Grajauskas case? What underhand tricks are you playing? I’ve just been to see Krantz, which is why I can’t concentrate on what is going on here, can’t even bear to look you in the eye. Which is also why I’d like to lie down on this table and shout until you listen. Krantz told me what I already knew. There’s another videotape, another video, Ewert!

Ewert sat back and waited for Öhrström to cave in. Let her take her time.

‘Come to think of it, I’ve got another set of pictures for you here.’

Lisa whispered. Her voice was too weak. ‘You make your point very clearly.’

‘Good. Excellent. You’ll find the new set even more interesting.’

‘I don’t want to see them. And… there’s something I don’t understand. If what you tell me is true, if this is what Lang does and the sums you mentioned are his fixed charges, as you say, why hasn’t he been locked away long ago?’

‘Why? You should know. You have been threatened, haven’t you? You know all you need to know about how Lang operates.’

That man who had come to the ward kitchen and had got hold of her photos of Sanna and Jonathan. She felt it again, the ache in her chest, the trembling that wouldn’t stop.

Ewert put another envelope on the table, opened it and pulled out the first photograph. A different hand. Five fractures this time. You didn’t need to be a qualified doctor to see that all the fingers had been crushed.

She was silent. He didn’t taunt her, only placed another picture next to the hand. A cracked kneecap, very clear too.

‘It’s a little like a jigsaw, isn’t it? A knee here, a hand there. It’s fair to assume they belong together. They do, but this time the motive had nothing to do with money. This time it was respect.’

Ewert held both pictures in front of her face.

‘This time the message was that you must never spike Yugoslav amphetamine with prison-issue washing powder.’

Still holding the two images in front of her face, Ewert took a third one from the envelope and held it even closer.

It had been taken by someone standing in a staircase, a few steps up, positioning the camera at head-height and pointing the lens at a recently dead man. An overturned wheelchair lay next to him. The blood that had flowed from the man’s head had formed a pool around him.

She realised what the picture was and quickly turned her head away. She was crying.

‘And that is what this guy had done. He had messed around with a big dealer’s product. His name, by the way, was Hilding Oldйus.’

Sven had made up his mind during the car journey back from the hospital. He would keep a low profile for now and say nothing; he would not leave the police building until he had located the videotape.

Back at his desk, he picked up the pile of transcribed interrogations from the floor and started to leaf through them. He knew he had seen it somewhere.

He would read all of them again. Slowly. It was in there and he mustn’t miss it.

It didn’t take long, just about a quarter of an hour.

He had started with the statement made by the female medical student. The interview session had been brief, presumably she was weak and in shock. It would be a while before she had digested it all. Next he read the older man’s statement. The interview with Dr Ejder had taken longer and been more like a conversation. Ejder had controlled his fear by using his logic. As long as he was rational, he could avoid getting over-emotional. Sven had come across the need to suppress fear many times before and noted different ways of keeping panic at bay. Ejder’s self-control and intellectual approach also made him an exceptional witness. He was one of those people who spoke in images detailed enough to make the listener feel that they had been there. In this case, sitting at Ejder’s side, tied up and powerless, on the mortuary floor.

Somewhere in the middle of this statement Sven found what he had been looking for. The doctor had been questioned about the plastic carrier bag where Lydia had kept her weapons. Suddenly, he described a videotape.

Sven followed the lines with his finger, reading one word at a time.

Ejder had seen the black tape when Lydia Grajauskas had pushed the sides of the bag down to take out the Semtex. It was at an early stage, when Ejder thought he should try to talk to her, win her confidence. At least it might help to calm the others. He had asked about the video, and after first refusing to answer, she had then decided to explain in her limited English.

She had said that the video was truth. He had asked her which truth, but she simply repeated the word. Truth. Truth. Truth. She had been silent while she concentrated on shaping the plastic dough, then she turned to him again.

Two tapes.

In box station train.

Twenty-one.

She had demonstrated the number by showing him first two fingers, then one.

Twenty-one.

Gustaf Ejder insisted that he recalled every single word, in the right order. She had said very little, with such effort, that it was easy to remember.

The truth. Two tapes. In box station train. Twenty-one. Sven read the passage once more. In a railway station. In box 21.

He was convinced now. There was another video in storage locker number twenty-one, almost certainly at the Central Station.

That tape would also have the safety tab removed and the video would contain images, not just a flickering greyness.

He put the pile of documents back on the floor and got up. He would be there soon.

The way he had forced those images on her, in her face.

Lisa was beyond hating anyone. Maybe she never had, and maybe she had never loved either; she had just filed hate and love away as two words for the same emotion, assuming that if she couldn’t feel one, she couldn’t feel the other either. But that had changed: she actually hated this policeman. The past twenty-four hours had been so strange; her grief for Hilding that wasn’t really grief and, after that vague threat, her fear for the children that wasn’t really fear. It was as if, at the age of thirty-five, all her feelings had been put under a spotlight; she had to force them all back in, throw away the key, hide behind her shame and not get to know herself. She had had no idea what they looked like, these unknown emotions, so strong and naked and impossible to escape.

And in the middle of it all that limping policeman had turned up and rubbed her face in it.

She had seen immediately that the last picture was of Hilding lying dead on the stairs and had got up from her chair, grabbed the photograph, torn it up and thrown the pieces against the glass wall.

She knew where she was going now, running down the corridor towards the main exit. She had a few more hours to do on her shift. For the first time in her life she couldn’t care less. She ran out on to the tarmac outside, and turned in the direction of Tanto Park, across the railway tracks and through the park, not even aware of the unleashed dogs that pursued her fleeing body, propelled by panic. She carried on running, past the Zinkensdamm housing estate, stopping only when she had crossed Horn Street and could stand in the shade of the huge Högalid Church.

She wasn’t tired, didn’t register the sweat that trickled down over her forehead and cheeks. She stood for a while to get her breath back before walking down the slope to the house where she stayed as often as she did in her own flat.

The door to the flat on the fifth floor of number 3 Völund Street had been replaced. The large hole in the panel was no more. There was nothing to show that just a few days earlier the police had broken in to stop an incident of gross physical violence, a naked woman lashed across the back thirty-five times.

The two girls, still in their teens, stood behind the man who could have been their father while he unlocked the door. When they went into the flat, they saw the electronic locks on the door, but didn’t know what they were. The man closed the door and showed the girls their passports. Then he explained again that the passports had cost him. Therefore they owed him money and would have to work to pay it off. The first customers were due two hours from now.

The girl who had started to cry downstairs was still crying; she tried to protest, until the man, who until only a few days earlier had been called Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp by two other young women, pressed the muzzle of a gun to her temple. For a brief moment she thought he would shoot.

He told them to undress. He was going to try them out. From now on it was important that they knew what men liked.

Lisa was feeling hot after running all the way from the hospital. She had only stopped when she could see Ylva’s house in Högalid Street.

She hadn’t been thinking straight earlier. She was capable of love, of course she was, not for a man, but for her nephew and niece; she loved them more than she loved herself. She had put off coming here. Normally she’d pop in to see them every day, but she had lacked the strength to walk into the house and tell them that their uncle had died, that he had crashed down a stairwell the day before.

They adored their Uncle Hilding. To them he wasn’t a hopeless junkie. They had only met the other Hilding, straight out of prison, round-cheeked and easy-going, full of a calm that had always vanished a few days later, when the world around him began to look dangerous, reminding him of the shadows he couldn’t cope with and couldn’t confront. They had never seen that awful junkie. They had never seen the change. He was only there for them for a few days at a time, and then when he changed into something else, he disappeared.

She had to tell them, though. They must not be informed by having black-and-white police photographs pushed into their faces.

Lisa held Ylva’s hand in hers. They had hugged each other before going to sit side by side on the sofa. Both were feeling the same way: not quite grief, more a kind of relief that they knew where he was and where he wasn’t. The sisters weren’t certain that they should feel that way, but now that they were together, it seemed easier to accept these impermissible feelings.

Jonathan and Sanna sat in the two armchairs opposite the sofa. They had sensed that this wasn’t one of Auntie Lisa’s usual visits. Not that she had said anything yet, but as soon as she opened the front door they had started to prepare themselves for what she would say. The way she had pressed down the door handle, said hello, and walked to the small sitting room all made it obvious that this was not just an ordinary visit.

She didn’t know how to begin. There was no need to worry.

‘What’s the matter?’

Sanna was twelve, and still in the zone between little girl and young teenager. She looked at the two grown women she trusted implicitly and repeated her question.

‘What is it? I know something’s wrong.’

Lisa leaned towards the children, reaching out to put one hand on Sanna’s knee and the other on Jonathan’s. Such a little boy, her fingertips met easily around his leg.

‘You’re right. Something is wrong. It’s to do with your uncle.’

‘Hilding has died.’

Sanna spoke unhesitatingly, as if she had been waiting to say this.

Lisa’s hands tightened their hold. ‘He died yesterday. In the hospital, on my ward.’

Jonathan, only six years of life inside his small body, watched as his mum and Auntie Lisa cried. He hadn’t grasped this, not yet.

‘Uncle Hilding wasn’t an old person, was he? Was he so old that he had to die?’

‘Don’t be so silly. You don’t understand a thing. He killed himself with drugs because he was a junkie.’

Sanna glared at her little brother, making him the target of the bad thoughts she didn’t want to have any more.

Lisa’s hand moved to stroke Sanna’s cheek. ‘Don’t think about him like that.’

‘But he was.’

‘Don’t say these things. What happened was an accident. He died because he lost control of his wheelchair and it fell down the stairs.’

‘I don’t care what you say. I know he was a junkie. And I know that’s why he’s dead. You can pretend what you like, because I know anyway.’

Jonathan listened but didn’t want to know. He got up from his armchair, crying now. His uncle wasn’t dead, he couldn’t be.

He shouted at his sister. ‘It’s your fault!’

He ran from the room and all the way downstairs and across the concrete flags on the courtyard, screaming all the way.

‘It’s your fault! You’re stupid! It’s your fault, if you say that!’

The afternoon was fading into evening. Lars Еgestam was surprised to see Ewert Grens open his office door without knocking. His looks, his massive body, thinning grey hair, the straight leg that made him limp, none of that had changed.

‘I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow.’

‘I’m here now. And I’ve brought you some information.’

‘Information about…?’

‘The murders. That is, the investigations into the incidents at Söder Hospital, both of them.’

He didn’t wait for Еgestam to offer him a seat, he simply grabbed the nearest chair and carelessly dumped a pile of papers on the floor. Then he sat down opposite the young prosecutor, whom he had mentally consigned to his large category of ‘stuck-up prats’.

‘First, Alena Sljusareva. The other woman from Lithuania. She is on her way home now. I have questioned her and she has got nothing to offer us. Didn’t know who Bengt Nordwall was, didn’t know where or how Grajauskas had got hold of arms and explosives. She had never heard of any kidnapping plans. I helped her to catch the ferry to Klaipeda and so forth. She needs her home and we don’t need her.’

‘You sent her home?’

‘Any objections?’

‘You should have informed me first. We should have discussed the entire matter, and if we both agreed that sending her home was reasonable, the final decision would still have been mine.’

Ewert Grens stared at the young man with distaste. He felt the urge to shout, but refrained. He had just created a lie and presented it to the prosecutor. For once he chose to hide his anger.

‘Anything else?’

‘You have sent home a person who could be guilty of a serious gun crime, as well as being an accessory to the potential destruction of property and aggravated taking of hostages.’ Lars Еgestam shrugged.

‘But if this woman is on board a ferry… that’s it. End of story.’

Grens fought his contempt for the young man on the other side of the desk. He couldn’t explain it properly; he always despised people who used their university education as a reference for life, who hadn’t actually lived, only pretended to experience.

‘Right. Next, about Jochum Lang.’

‘Yes?’

‘Time to lock him up for good.’

Еgestam pointed at the papers which Ewert Grens had dumped on the floor.

‘Grens, that pile is interview transcripts, one after the other. No result. He’s stonewalling. I can’t hold him for much longer.’

‘You can.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You can and you can even inform him that he is a suspect for the murder of Hilding Oldйus. We have a positive identification.’

‘Do you indeed? Who?’

Lars Еgestam was slightly built, wore small round glasses and his short hair combed forward in a half-fringe, and, although he had just celebrated his thirtieth birthday, looked more like a little boy than ever as he leaned back in the large leather chair and listened.

‘A doctor in the ward where Oldйus was a patient. Woman called Lisa Öhrström. She is Oldйus’s sister.’

Еgestam didn’t reply at first. He pushed his chair back and got up.

‘According to a report from your colleague, DI Sundkvist, an identity parade did not have the expected outcome. Not so good. Lang’s lawyer won’t leave me alone, of course. He demands that his client be released instantly, as no one has identified him.’

‘Listen to me. You will get your identification. I’ll bring it in tomorrow.’

The prosecutor sat down again, dragging his chair closer to the desk, and then raised his arms in the air, as people do in films when someone points a gun at them.

‘Grens, I give in. Explain what you’re up to, please.’

‘You will get your identification tomorrow. No further explanation required.’

Еgestam pondered over what he had just been told.

He was in charge of two separate investigations into three deaths that had taken place in the space of a few hours in the same building, and in both cases Ewert Grens was the man who reported directly to him. Somehow the stories Grens had just told didn’t ring true. Too simple.

Sljusareva had been sent home already, Lang had been identified – he should be satisfied that the superintendent running both shows insisted that everything was well in hand.

But Еgestam was not reassured. Something wasn’t right, something just wasn’t right.

‘The media are pestering me, you know.’

‘Sod them.’

‘I’m being asked about Grajauskas’s motive. Why would a young female prostitute want to kill a policeman and then herself? In a closed room, for Christ’s sake, a mortuary? I don’t know. I need answers.’

‘We haven’t got the answers. The case is under investigation.’

‘In that case we’re back to square one. I simply don’t understand you, Grens. If the motive is still unknown, why let Sljusareva go? A woman who is possibly the only person who might know something.’

Ewert Grens’s anger welled up, his permanent rage at these interfering prats. He was just about to raise his voice, but his burden, Bengt’s damned lie, stopped him, making him again into someone he was not, someone who looked before he jumped. He had to be cautious, just for once. Instead his voice dropped, almost to a hiss.

‘Look Еgestam, don’t treat me like you’re interrogating me.’

‘I’ve been reading the transcripts of the communications you had with the mortuary before the shooting started.’

Еgestam pretended not to hear the threat in his voice, didn’t look at the large policeman as he searched for the right sheets of paper in the bundle on his desk. He knew where they were, somewhere in the middle. He found what he had been after. He followed a few lines with his finger and read out loud.

‘Grens, this is you speaking, or shouting, actually. And I quote: “This is something personal! Bengt, over! Fuck’s sake, Bengt. Stop it! Squad, move in! All clear. Repeat, move in!”’

Еgestam looked up and spread his thin, suit-sleeved arms in a gesture.

‘End of quote.’

The telephone on the desk between them suddenly started to ring. Both men counted the signals, seven in all, before it stopped to make space for their exchange.

‘Quote away. You weren’t there, were you? Sure enough, that’s how I felt at the time. That some personal issue was at stake. I still think that, but I don’t know what it was.’

Lars Еgestam looked Grens in the eye for a while before turning to the window and scanning the view of the restless city. You couldn’t get your head round it all, it was too much.

He hesitated.

The intrusive sense that something was not right had made him formulate what could be taken as an accusation against this powerful man, and he didn’t want to say it out loud. But he should, he must.

He turned to face Grens again.

‘What you’re telling me is… nothing. I don’t know what it is, I can’t put my finger on it, Ewert – I think that’s the first time I’ve called you that, Ewert – but what are you doing? I am aware that you’re investigating the murder of your best friend and understand that it must be hard for you, maybe too hard. I can’t help wondering if it is a good idea. Your grief… you’re grieving, I’m sure, it must hurt.’

Еgestam took a deep breath and jumped in.

‘What I’m trying to say is… do you want to be replaced?’

Ewert Grens rose quickly.

‘You sit here behind your desk with your precious documents, you ambitious little penpusher, but you’d better get this. I was investigating crimes, flesh-and-blood crimes, before your daddy got into your mummy’s knickers. And I’ve not stopped.’

Grens half turned, pointing at the door.

‘Now I’m going off to do exactly that: investigate crimes, that is. Back down there, with the hard men and the whores. Unless there was something else you wanted?’

Lars Еgestam shook his head and watched as the other man left.

Then he sighed. Detective Superintendent Grens seldom failed. It was well known. He simply didn’t make silly mistakes. That was fact, regardless of what you thought about his social skills or ability to communicate.

He trusted Ewert Grens.

He decided to carry on trusting him.

The evening had patiently dislodged those who spent hours of their lives commuting between their suburban homes and city-centre jobs. Stockholm Central Station was quiet now, preparing for the following morning when the commuters would be back, scurrying from one platform to the next.

Sven Sundkvist sat on a seat in the main hall, pointlessly staring at the electronic Departures and Arrivals board. Half an hour earlier he had gone in search of the downstairs storage boxes. He knew of them, of course, lock-ups intended as a service for visitors, but mostly used by the homeless and criminals in need of somewhere to stash belongings, drugs, stolen goods, weapons.

He had located box 21 and then stood in front of it considering what he should do. Would it not be best if he were to forget about having checked the hostages’ statements? No one else would read through them again.

Then he could go home to Anita and Jonas.

Nobody would give it another thought.

Home sweet home. No more of this shit.

As he hovered, he felt the rage come back, the pains in his stomach; it was more than just a feeling now. He remembered the talk with Krantz earlier and how certain the elderly technician had been. He had recorded the find of a used videotape with a broken safety tab.

Now, it was nowhere.

You’re risking thirty-three years of service in the force. I don’t understand you.

That’s why I’m here, standing in front of a locker door in Stockholm Central Station. I have no idea what I will find, what it was Lydia Grajauskas wanted to tell us, only that it will be something I’d rather not know.

It had taken him the best part of a quarter of an hour to persuade the woman inside the cramped left-luggage office that he really was a detective inspector with Homicide and needed her help to examine the contents of one of the boxes.

She had kept shaking her head until he got fed up with arguing and raised his voice to emphasise that it was within his rights to order her to open the locker. When he had added a reminder that it was her duty as a citizen to assist the police, she had reluctantly contacted the station security officer, who held spare keys to the boxes.

When Sven Sundkvist saw the green uniform in the main station entrance, he went to meet the man. He identified himself and they walked together to the lock-ups.

In the heavy bunch of keys, number 21 was indistinguishable.

The door opened easily and the security officer stepped aside to let Sven Sundkvist come closer. Sven peered inside the narrow dark space, divided by two shelves.

There wasn’t much to see.

Two dresses in a plastic bag. A photo album with black-and-white studio photographs of relatives wearing their nicest clothes and nervous smiles. A cigar box full of Swedish paper money in one- or five-hundred kronor notes. He counted quickly. Forty thousand kronor.

The estate of Lydia Grajauskas.

He held on to the metal door. It struck him that her life had been stored in this box, what little past she still had, as well as her stake in the future, her hope, her escape, her sense of existing somewhere other than in that flat, in a real place.

Sven Sundkvist put the things he had found into his briefcase.

Then he reached up to the top shelf and took down a video with a label on the back in Cyrillic script.

She had run after him, across the courtyard, through the hallway and out on to Högalid Street. He stopped there, barefoot and tearful. She loved him and hugged him close and carried him home in her arms, saying his name over and over again. He was Jonathan, her nephew, and what she felt for him must surely be what you feel for your own child.

Lisa Öhrström stroked his hair; she had to go soon. It was late and dark, as dark as it could be a few weeks before midsummer; darkness was gently edging into what had been daylight until now. She kissed his cheek. Sanna had already gone to bed. Ylva was there and she met her sister’s eyes before closing the door behind her.

There were so few of them left. Their father was gone, and now Hilding. She had seen it coming, of course, and now there it was, the enveloping loneliness.

She decided to walk. She had been there before and knew the way, across Vдster Bridge, along Norr Mдlarstrand, then through side streets to the City Police building. It would take half an hour or so, not long on a summer’s night. She knew that he usually worked late, he had said so, and he was that sort, one of those who didn’t have anything else. He would sit hunched over the investigation that had to be completed, just as the week before there had been an investigation to complete and next week would bring another one to serve as a reason for not leaving the office.

She phoned to tell him that she was coming. He replied quickly, sounded as if he was expecting her, possibly even certain that she would come.

He met her at the main entrance and led the way along a dark, stale-smelling corridor, his uneven steps slapping and resounding against the walls. Christ, how grim it was. How strange that anyone should choose to work in surroundings like these. She looked at him from behind, broad and overweight, a bald patch on the back of his head, his limping, slightly bent body. How odd that he should seem strong, but he did; at least in this shabby place he radiated the kind of strength that gives a sense of security, the result of having made a choice. Which was what he had done, he had actually chosen to work in this place.

Ewert Grens ushered her into his office and offered her a seat in his visitor’s chair. She looked around and thought it a bleak room. The only things with a personality setting them apart from the dull, mass-produced office furniture were an ancient monster of a ghetto-blaster and a sofa, ugly and sagging, which she felt sure he often slept on.

‘Coffee?’

He didn’t really mean it, but knew that he should ask.

‘No thank you. I’m not here to drink coffee.’

‘I guessed not. Anyway.’

He raised a plastic cup half full of what looked like black coffee from a machine and drank the lot.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘You don’t seem surprised. To see me.’

‘I’m not surprised. But I am pleased.’

Lisa Öhrström realised that what had come over her, what was tugging at her mind, was tiredness. She had been so tense. Now she relaxed as much as she dared to and the recent past weighed heavily on her.

‘I don’t want to see any more of your photographs. I don’t want any more images of people I don’t know and never want to know thrust in my face. I’ve had enough. I’ll testify. I will identify Lang as the man who came to see my brother yesterday.’

Lisa Öhrström put her elbows on the desk, leaning forward with her chin on her clasped hands. So very tired. Home soon.

‘But there’s one thing I want you to know. It wasn’t only the threats that made me hold back. Quite a long time ago I decided that I would never again allow Hilding and his addiction to influence how I lived. This last year, I haven’t been there for him any more, but it didn’t make any difference. I still couldn’t escape him. Now that he’s dead, he still drains me of strength, perhaps more than ever. So I might as well testify.’

Ewert Grens tried to keep the smile from his face. This was it, obviously.

Anni, this is it.

Closure.

‘Nobody is blaming you.’

‘I don’t need your pity.’

‘Your choice, but that’s how it is. Nobody blames you because you didn’t know what to do.’

Grens went over to root among his audiotapes, found what he wanted and put it into the player. Siw Malmkvist. She was sure it would be.

‘One thing more. Who threatened you?’

Siw Malmkvist. She had just taken the hardest decision in her life and he was listening to Siw Malmkvist.

‘That’s not important. I will stand witness. But on one condition.’

Lisa Öhrström stayed where she was, chin resting on her hands. She was leaning forward, getting closer to him.

‘My nephew and niece. I want them to have protection.’

‘They already have protection.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘They have been under protection ever since the identity parade. I know, for instance, that you went to see them today. One of the kids ran outside without his shoes on. And they will continue to be protected, of course.’

Fatigue paralysed her. She yawned without even trying to hide it.

‘I must get home now.’

‘I’ll get someone to drive you. In a plain car.’

‘Please, to Högalid Street. To Jonathan and Sanna. They’ll be asleep.’

‘I suggest that we step up the level of protection and put someone inside the flat as well. Do you agree?’

Evening had really come.

Darkness. Silence, as if the whole big building were empty.

She looked at the policeman and his tape recorder; he was humming along, knew the jolly tune and the meaningless text by heart.

He sang under his breath and she felt sorry for him.

FRIDAY 7 JUNE

He had never liked the dark.

Winter darkness that lasted for an eternity had been part of his childhood in Kiruna, well to the north of the Arctic Circle, and police college in Stockholm had meant a series of night shifts, but he couldn’t resign himself to the dark, couldn’t get used to it. To him, the dark would never be beautiful.

He was standing in the sitting room, looking out through the window at the dense forest. The June night lay as deep under the trees as summer darkness ever can be. Sven Sundkvist had got home a little after ten o’clock with the video in his briefcase. First he had gone to see the sleeping Jonas, kissed the boy’s forehead and stood for a while listening to his quiet breathing. Anita had been in the kitchen doing a crossword. He managed to squeeze in next to her on the chair, and after an hour or so, only three squares in three different corners were empty. Typical, just a few letters short of posting the completed crossword to the local paper in the hope of winning one of three Premium Bonds.

Afterwards they made love. She had undressed him first and then herself; she wanted him to sit on the kitchen chair and she settled in his lap, their naked bodies so close, needing each other.

He had waited until she had gone to sleep. It was after midnight when he got out of bed and pulled on a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. He carried his briefcase into the sitting room.

He thought it better to be alone when he watched the video.

Alone with the overwhelming feeling of unease.

What Anita and Jonas didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.

The dark outside. Staring into it he could just make out some of the trees.

He checked his watch. Ten past one. He had spent an hour looking at nothing in particular. He couldn’t put it off any more.

She had told Ejder about two videotapes.

She had made a copy. Just in case. Someone might wipe one of the tapes, or record on top of her film, or simply try to lose the whole thing and replace it with an empty cassette.

Sven Sundkvist could not be sure that what he was watching was identical to the recording on the other tape.

He assumed that it was.

They look nervous, the way people do when they are not used to staring at the single eye that preserves what it looks at for posterity.

Grajauskas speaks first.

Two sentences. She turns to Sljusareva, who translates.

‘This is my reason. This is my story.’

Grajauskas speaks again, two sentences, with her eyes fixed on her friend.

Her face has a serious expression. She nods and again Sjusareva turns to the camera and translates.

‘When you hear this, I hope that the man I am going to talk about is dead. I hope that he has felt my shame.’

They speak very distinctly, careful to enunciate every word in both Russian and Swedish.

He leaned forward and stopped the tape.

He didn’t want to go on.

What he felt was no longer unease or dread, rather an overwhelming anger of a kind he only rarely had to confront. No more doubt. He had hoped, as everyone always does. But now he knew, he knew that Ewert had manipulated the tape and had a motive for doing it.

Sven Sundkvist got up, went into the kitchen and put on the coffee machine, a strong brew to help him think. It would be a long night.

The crossword was still lying on the kitchen table. He moved it to make room for a sheet from Jonas’s drawing pad, picked up one of the boy’s marker pens, a purple one, and drew lines, haphazard at first, on the white surface.

A man.

An older man. Massive torso, not much hair, piercing eyes.

Ewert.

He smiled at himself when he realised. He had in fact drawn Ewert in purple marker ink.

He knew why, of course. A long night was staring him in the face.

He had known Ewert for nearly ten years. To begin with he had been ordered about and shouted at – they all had – but at some point he had suddenly become aware of something like friendship with his difficult boss and had become one of the few who were addressed normally, men whom Ewert invited into his office and confided in, as much as he ever did. Later Sven had come to know Ewert Grens well enough to realise how little he understood him. He had never been to Ewert’s flat, and you couldn’t really know people whose homes you’d never seen. On the other hand, Ewert had been here, for supper or just for a cup of coffee, and had sat at this very table flanked by Anita and Jonas.

Sven had invited Ewert to his home, a place where he could be himself. Ewert had never reciprocated.

He looked at the drawing and started to fill in the purple man’s jacket and shoes with more purple. He knew nothing about the private person. He knew the policeman, DSI Grens, who was first in the office every morning, long before everyone else, played Siw Malmkvist songs with the volume turned up, worked all day and all night, often stayed overnight in his office to carry on with an unfinished investigation when dawn broke. He was the best policeman Sven had ever encountered, incapable of making simple errors and always prepared to pursue every case to its conclusion, regardless of consequences. To him, the investigation alone mattered, to the exclusion of everything else.

But now he didn’t know any longer.

He drank the rest of the coffee in his cup and refilled it. He needed more.

Another marker pen, a screaming shade of green this time. He used it for making notes in the space next to the purple man.

Ejder sees the video in LG’s carrier bag.

Krantz finds it at the scene, notes that it has been used. He records two sets of probably female fingerprints. One set is LG’s.

Krantz hands it to EG in the mortuary. EG takes charge of it, but does not record anywhere, i.e., not with the duty staff or the forensic boys.

SS finds a video in EG’s office. The tape is blank.

In the interview, Ejder states that LG told him that a copy of the video is deposited in a Central Station storage locker.

SS gets access to the locker, brings the tape home. SS creeps around the house at night, watches the video and can confirm that it is not blank.

He stopped making notes. He could have added, SS is too soft to carry on watching it, but instead he just sat and looked at the ink version of Ewert. What have you done? I know that you deleted evidence, and I know why. He scrunched up the paper and threw it across the table towards the sink. Then he tried to solve the crossword, testing one letter after another in the three empty squares, but gave up after a quarter of an hour.

He wandered back to the sitting room.

The videotape demanded attention.

He could have not collected it. Or not brought it home.

Now he has no choice. He has to watch it.

Lydia Grajauskas again. The camera slips out of focus, a few seconds pass and then the cameraman signals to carry on.

She looks at her friend, waiting for her to translate. Sljusareva strokes Lydia’s cheek before she turns to the camera.

‘When I met Bengt Nordwall in Klaipeda, he said it was good job and very well paid.’

Sven Sundkvist stopped the tape and fled into the kitchen again. He peered into the fridge, drank some milk straight from the carton and closed the door quietly. Mustn’t wake Anita.

He had not put it into words, but this was exactly what he had feared.

A different truth.

When the truth changes, lies emerge. A lie can only be dealt with when it is known to be a lie.

He went back into the sitting room and settled on the sofa.

He had just started to be part of Bengt Nordwall’s big lie.

He was convinced that Ewert had watched this very film and realised the same as he had. Ewert had watched and then wiped it, to protect his friend. Now Sven faced the same dilemma. Bengt Nordwall’s lie had become Ewert’s. If he himself did nothing, he too would have to live with it. He could do the same as Ewert: look away to protect a friend’s reputation.

He started the video again and fast-forwarded it to find out how long the film was. Twenty minutes. He checked the time. Half past two. If he started from the beginning and watched the whole of Lydia Grajauskas’s story, he would be finished before three. Then he could tiptoe into the bedroom, leave a note on the pillow explaining that he had a night job, get dressed and take the car into town. The drive took only twenty minutes.

It was nearly four o’clock when he opened his office door. Morning had already arrived, bringing light from somewhere out at sea, from the east, light that had followed him along the deserted stretch of motorway between Gustavsberg and central Stockholm.

He got himself more coffee, not so much to stay awake – his mind was alive with ideas, and sleep was simply not an option – but because he hoped the coffee would help him to sharpen up and get a grip before the buzzing in his head took over and crystallised into its own conclusions, the way thoughts do at night.

He cleared his desk by piling papers and photographs and folders on the floor. When he sat down at the bare desktop, the wooden surface seemed new to him. He had probably never seen it like this, not for years anyway; he had worked here for five or six years.

He took a ball of paper from his pocket. It was the drawing of Ewert, rescued from the kitchen sink. He flattened it out in the middle of the desk. Now he knew that the purple man had gone beyond the point of no return and tampered with evidence, in order to protect his own interests, to protect a lie that wasn’t his.

Absently retracing the outline of the man he had drawn, Sven Sundkvist felt an impotent rage. He had no idea what to do with this knowledge.

Lars Еgestam did what he usually did when he couldn’t sleep. He dressed in his suit and black shoes, put only the minimum in his briefcase and left his house to walk into work with the dawn – three hours through Stockholm’s western suburbs.

It had been an odd conversation, hard to follow too. As a rule he didn’t have problems understanding but this time Ewert Grens, a man he both admired and pitied, had insisted that on the one hand the police had no notion of Lydia Grajauskas’s motive for knocking out her guard, taking five hostages and killing a policeman before shooting herself, but that, on the other hand, her best friend Alena Sljusareva knew nothing that had any bearing on the case and could therefore be left to her own devices back home in Lithuania.

Sleep had been impossible.

At the time, he had decided to trust Grens after all.

Now, in the light of the rising sun, he walked with purpose. He had already phoned Söder Hospital to say he wanted to visit the mortuary once more.

He didn’t knock. Nothing odd about that, Ewert Grens never knocked.

Sven started and looked at the door.

‘Ewert?’

‘Bloody hell, you’re early, Sven. What’s up?’

Sven blushed, aware of how obvious it was. He stared down at his desktop, embarrassed and exposed. There he was, staring at his purple version of Ewert.

‘I don’t know. It seemed a good idea.’

‘For Christ’s sake, it’s just gone five in the morning. Normally there isn’t another soul around at this time.’

Grens made a move to step into the room. Sven Sundkvist glanced nervously at his drawing and covered it with his hand.

‘Come on, son. What’s on your mind?’

Sven was not much good at lying, especially not to people he liked.

‘Nothing special. There’s just such a lot to do at the moment.’

He was suffocating. Must be as red as a beetroot.

‘Ewert, you know how it is. Söder Hospital, all that. The media are on our backs. And you’d rather give all that a miss. But we need some kind of basic story for the press office.’

No more of this, I can’t handle it, he thought, looking down at the desktop.

Ewert Grens took a step forward, stood still for a moment, then backed out, talking as he went.

‘Good. I’m sure you know what you’re doing, Sven. And I’m pleased you’re dealing with the hacks.’

Söder Hospital was a huge lump of a building, usually ugly, but now in the early sunlight it was almost beautiful, coated in a pale red glow that cast its reflection on gleaming windows and roofs. It was nearly six o’clock when Lars Еgestam walked through the main hall, which was barely awake.

He took the lift down to the basement, the same route Grajauskas had taken two days ago, a badly injured woman with a plastic bag hidden under her hospital clothes, whom no one would beat up again.

The last part of the corridor was cordoned off with blue and white police tape, from roughly the point where Sven had been lying in wait, some thirty metres away from the door, but close enough to see that it was no longer there. Еgestam bent down under the tape, avoided the bits of broken wall, and made for the hole where the door had been. It was sealed with a criss-cross of tape that he ripped off.

A hallway, then the room where they had been found on the floor. Their outlines in white chalk were close. Her body so near his. Their blood mingling. He had died with her. She had died with him. Еgestam felt certain it had been deliberate, this final resting place of theirs, side by side.

It was silent down there. He looked around the room. Death terrified him; he didn’t even wear a watch any more as it just measured time. And yet here he was in a mortuary, alone, trying to understand what had happened.

The tape recorder. He placed it in the middle of the floor.

He wanted to listen to them talking.

He wanted to be part of it, afterwards, as he always did.

‘Ewert.’

‘Receiving.’

‘The hostage in the corridor is dead. No visible blood, so I can’t make out where she shot him. But the smell is odd, strong. Harsh.’

Bengt Nordwall’s voice. Steady, at least it sounded steady. Lars Еgestam had never met him and never heard his voice before.

He was trying to get to know a dead man.

‘Ewert, it is all one fucking big con. She hasn’t shot anyone. All the hostages are still here. All four of them are alive. They’ve just walked out. She has got about three hundred grams of Semtex round the doors, but she can’t detonate it.’

He noticed the man’s fear. Nordwall continued to observe and describe what he was seeing, but the tone of his voice had changed, as if he had understood something which the listeners upstairs had not and which Еgestam, a late listener, was trying to grasp now.

‘You are naked.’

‘That’s how you wanted it.’

‘How does that feel? What is it like to be here, in a mortuary, standing naked in front of a woman with a gun?’

‘I have done what you asked me to do.’

‘You feel humiliated, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘All alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Afraid?’

‘Yes.’

‘Kneel.’

Not even two days had passed. The recorded voices were alive still, even the Russian interpreter’s version. Every word was distinct. They were speaking in a closed room. She had made up her mind, Lars Еgestam was certain of that. She had decided from the start what would happen. She was to die there. He was to die there.

She would humiliate him and afterwards they would both cease to breathe.

For all eternity they would lie together on a mortuary floor.

Еgestam didn’t move from where Nordwall had stood, wondering if he had known that he had only a few seconds left, a fraction of a moment, and then nothing.

Ewert Grens couldn’t concentrate.

He hadn’t slept at all and told himself that he should’ve kipped down on the office sofa. There was too much on his mind that needed attention, stuff that had to be mulled over and over, interminably. Sleeping at home was not an option.

He had promised to have lunch with Lena, who wanted to carry on talking about Bengt. He said no at first, he didn’t want to. He missed his old friend, of course he did, but he was also aware that the man he missed was someone other than the Bengt Nordwall he had learnt more about recently.

If only I had known then what I know now.

Did you think about her? Did you ever? And when you came home, did the two of you make love? I mean, afterwards?

I’m doing this for Lena.

You are not alive.

When she had asked him again later, he agreed to have lunch with her.

Lena ate nothing, only played with the food on her plate and drank mineral water, two whole bottles. She had been weeping, mostly for the children, she said, it is so hard for them and they don’t understand, and if I don’t understand either, Ewert, how can I explain to them?

Afterwards he was glad that he had been with her. She needed him, needed to say the same things so many times that they gradually sank in and she could begin to understand.

He didn’t have the courage to grieve properly.

It felt right to watch somebody else doing it.

Lars Еgestam listened to the tape over and over again. He had stood in the middle of the room listening, and then sat with his back to the wall just like the hostages. He had lain down one last time where Bengt Nordwall had been, protected his genitals with his hands, and stared at the ceiling. He was aware of the white chalk outline, drawn around a body larger than his own. He listened to the whole exchange between Bengt Nordwall and Ewert, and was now convinced that Nordwall, who had ended his life just where he himself was lying now, had known exactly who Lydia Grajauskas was, and that they somehow belonged together, which was what Grens had sensed or maybe even knew and why for some reason he was prepared to throw away a whole life in the police force in order to protect the truth.

By the time he was ready to leave, Еgestam had spent two full hours in the mortuary. Suddenly he was panicking about death, had to get away, needed to eat breakfast in a large cafй packed with people who were noisy and hungry and alive.

‘I had this area cordoned off.’

Lars hadn’t heard him come in: Nils Krantz, a technician from Forensics. They had met, but didn’t know each other.

‘I’m sorry, I had to get in. I was looking for some answers.’

‘You’re trampling all over the crime scene.’

‘I am the prosecutor in charge of the investigation.’

‘I know, but to be frank I don’t give a damn who you are. You stick to the marker lines like everyone else. I’m responsible for any evidence here that’s worth having a look at.’

Еgestam sighed loudly, suggesting that he wouldn’t waste time arguing about trivia. He turned away, picked up his tape recorder and his notebook, put them in his bag. Time for breakfast.

‘You’re in a hurry.’

‘You gave me the impression I was to get off site as quickly as possible.’

Nils Krantz shrugged, started studying the remains of explosive round the door frame to the store and suddenly spoke in a loud voice.

‘Thought you might be interested to hear that the test results are in.’

‘What test results?’

‘From the other investigation, the one involving Lang. We did a body scan.’

‘Yes?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What do you mean, nothing?’

‘We went over every square inch. No trace of Oldйus anywhere on his body.’

Lars Еgestam had been on his way out, but stopped when Krantz raised his voice. Now he felt empty, couldn’t muster the energy to move.

‘There you go.’

He stood still, looking glumly at Krantz, who carried on prodding the area round the door frame with his gloved hands. Finally he managed to pull himself together enough to pick up his briefcase and start off towards what had once been the door. He was just about to step through the hole in the wall when Krantz called after him again.

‘Wait.’

‘What is it now?’

‘Lang’s clothes, we did them too, of course. And the shoes. There it was. Traces of blood and DNA – Oldйus’s blood and DNA.’

After lunch, Ewert Grens had left Lena alone in the restaurant. She told him that she wanted to sit for a bit longer, ordered a third bottle of mineral water and hugged him. He had started walking towards Homicide when he changed his mind and took the slightly longer route via the police cells.

He couldn’t resist it.

It wouldn’t be enough to have a reliable doctor identifying him from photographs, even if she insisted with one hundred per cent certainty that he was the killer. If that same killer managed to threaten and frighten the witness once more, neatly timed for the identity parade, so that no identification was made after all, then the law said that he could go free to kill again.

This time was different. This time it would be enough.

Grens took the lift and got out on the second floor, where he told the guard he wanted a word with Jochum Lang, that he wanted to fetch him himself and take him to the interrogation room.

The guard led the way past silent, closed doors, stopped in front of number eight. Ewert nodded to the guard who then pulled back the little flap to let Ewert peer inside.

He was lying on his back on the bunk, his eyes closed. He was sleeping. There was nothing much else he could do, locked up for twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours, confined to a few lousy square metres without newspapers or radio or TV.

Grens shouted through the opening.

‘Hey, Lang! Time to wake up!’

No response, not a twitch. He had heard all right.

‘Now. Time for a chat. Just you and me.’

Lang moved a little, lifted his head when Grens shouted, then turned on his side with his back towards the door.

Irritated, Grens slammed the flap shut.

He nodded to the guard, who unlocked the door. Grens stepped inside the cell, saying that he wanted to be alone with the prisoner. The officer hesitated. Jochum Lang was classified as dangerous. He decided to stay put. Grens explained, as patiently as he could, that he would take full responsibility for the prisoner for the duration, and that if there was a cock-up, it would be his fault and his alone.

The officer shrugged, and closed the door behind him.

Grens took a step closer to the bunk.

‘Lang, don’t mess with me. Get up.’

‘Piss off.’

One last step and he was close enough to touch the body lying there. Instead he grabbed the edge of the bunk and shook it until Lang got up.

They stood facing each other. Staring hard. Staring.

‘Interview time, Lang. Get moving.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘We’ve found matches with his blood group and DNA. We have a witness. You’ll be put away, Lang. For murder.’

Ten or twenty centimetres between their faces.

‘Grens, you’re a stupid twat. I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about. Perhaps you should take it easy, be a bit more careful. You know that policemen have hurt themselves falling out of cars before.’

Ewert Grens smiled, showing plenty of stained teeth.

‘You can threaten me as much as you like. Whatever. There’s nothing I can lose now that isn’t worth putting you away for good. You’ll be wanking behind bars until you’re sixty.’

It was hard to tell which of them hated the other more.

Each man looked into his enemy’s eyes, searching for something that should be there. When he spoke, Lang’s voice was low, warm puffs of air in Grens’s face.

‘I’m not taking part in any more of your interrogations. Period. Just so you know, you old shit. If you or any other pig turns up to drag me off to just one more chat show, I’ll hurt the poor fucker badly. Take my word for it. Fuck off now. And shut the door behind you.’

Sven Sundkvist had phoned home and tried to explain why he had disappeared in the middle of the night without a word, just leaving a note. Anita had been upset; she didn’t like the fact that he hadn’t spoken to her, especially as they had promised never to take off suddenly like that without saying why. They ended up having a row, and when Sven tried to make it better, it just made things worse.

He had been on his way home, feeling cross at the world, speeding a bit now that the queues had thinned out. He had just passed the stupid oversized boats moored at the Viking Line terminal, when Lars Еgestam rang and started to speak quietly.

He wanted Sven to come to the prosecutor’s office for a meeting after hours. Just the two of them.

Sven Sundkvist had stopped the car, phoned Anita again and made everything worse still. Now he was back in town again, alone, not sure what to do with all the spare time. It was in fact only an hour or two, but just then an eternity.

It was one of those mild, warm June evenings. He walked slowly from Kronoberg, circling the streets, not taking in the music from far away and the smells from the restaurant terraces and pavement tables. Life was all around him and he should have been smiling, should even have joined in for a while, but he didn’t, hardly even noticed.

He was beginning to feel tired after a long night and what seemed like an even longer day.

He couldn’t bring himself to think about the video and about the awful truth he carried with him.

Is that what did Еgestam wanted to go over?

Did he want to have a go at shaking Sven’s loyalty?

He was too tired for that kind of thing. No such decisions, not yet.

They met at the Kung Bridge entrance a few minutes after eight o’clock. Еgestam was waiting. He looked the same as ever: fringe, suit, shiny shoes. He shook hands and opened the door with his ID card. They didn’t say much in the lift. Time enough for that later.

They got out on the eighth floor and Еgestam ushered Sven into his office, where he caught a glimpse of the view of the city through the window, the summer night overpowering the day.

He found a chair and sat down. Еgestam went off for a moment to get them both a cup of coffee. He also brought a plate of biscuits, which he put down next to a couple of massive investigation reports.

‘Sugar?’

‘Just milk, please.’

Еgestam was doing what he could to lower the palpable tension, to tone down any hint of drama, but his efforts weren’t 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 didn’t sleep well last night.’ Еgestam stretched, raised his arms above his head, as if to demonstrate how tired he was.

Nor did I, Sven thought. I didn’t sleep at all, what with that damned video and worrying about Ewert. Is that what you want to talk about? I still don’t 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 there’s a problem.’

Еgestam cleared his throat, shifted in his chair, but didn’t get up.

‘You know that Ewert and I are not the best of friends.’

‘There’s 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. I’m 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 didn’t get one.

‘Early this morning I went back to the hospital mortuary, in an attempt to understand. During the day I’ve 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. It’s 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 Еgestam repeated his question.

‘Is there something?’

He had to answer.

‘No. I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

Еgestam began pacing the room again, breathing rapidly, nervously. He had barely begun.

‘One of the best officers in the force, so I should relax, shouldn’t I? Sit back and wait for the results of his investigative work, right?’

A couple of deep breaths before he carried on.

‘But I can’t relax because something is not right. Don’t 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 man’s eyes, but stayed silent. He knew that no matter how much he said, it would never be enough.

‘Sven, I phoned Vilnius.’

Еgestam didn’t 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 doesn’t hold water.’

He paused.

‘I have no idea why. I think Grens is tampering with the evidence in this investigation.’

Еgestam 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? That’s a bloody boat! This is something personal! Bengt, over! Fuck’s 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 couldn’t 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 didn’t 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 didn’t 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 wouldn’t 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 clichйs 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 Aribт 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 didn’t 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 hadn’t realised it would be so warm. The grey clichй 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 didn’t know why, maybe he was afraid of what she would tell him, afraid of her voice explaining what he didn’t 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 wasn’t 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 Ewert’s aggressiveness, Lang’s stubborn self-belief, Grajauskas’s 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 hadn’t 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 didn’t show, not on the outside. She looked like women do in their twenties, life just starting. Inside, he knew, she was old inside. That’s 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 I’d never met you. I’ve 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.

‘I’m 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.

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you how long this will take. It depends. But of course I understand. I’ll do my best to keep it as brief as possible.’

He couldn’t really see the point of aquariums. Or zoos, for that matter. Caged creatures didn’t appeal to him and he found it easy to block it all out of his mind: the strolling groups of people, the fish they were meant to be looking at. He would concentrate. On Alena Sljusareva, on her and her answers to his questions.

On her story, the story he had been dreading.

The tale of events he wished hadn’t taken place.

It wasn’t a normal interview, but whatever it was went on for almost three hours. She spoke about her flight from the flat and her time spent alone in the city, how her body rejoiced at being free, how she was scared that she would be found, anxious about Lydia. The worry about her unconscious beaten friend never let up. They had sworn never to leave each other until they were both free together, but just then, the instant when Alena had decided to run away, she had been convinced that she would be of more use to Lydia well away from that fifth-floor flat.

He interrupted her whenever she seemed to hesitate, and she would clarify, never try to change the story, at least not as far as he could make out.

They walked slowly among the people watching fish. She told him about going to the harbour and Lydia calling from her hospital bed to ask for the weapons and the other things that she would later put to use in the mortuary.

Her voice was a near-whisper when she begged him to believe that she had had no idea of what her friend had been planning to do.

He stopped, looked into her eyes and explained that the purpose of his inquiry was not to establish whether she had been an accessory to kidnapping and murder.

She asked what his reason was, in that case.

‘Nothing. And everything. Leave it like that.’

A cluster of simple chairs and tables. He bought them each a cup of coffee and they sat down among the parents and children and the big fish on the blue plastic tablecloths.

She told him about the locker in Central Station, how she had broken in to the cellar and the carrier bag, which she was to deposit in the hospital toilet.

He decided to check the truth of what she was telling him.

‘What was the number?’

‘Number?’

‘The box at the station.’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘What was in it?’

‘Mostly my things. Lydia wanted only money for extras.’

‘Extras?’

‘Hitting. Spitting. Filming. Use your imagination.’

Sven Sundkvist swallowed, sensing her discomfort.

‘And Lydia? What did she keep in your box?’

‘Her money. And her two videotapes.’

‘What tapes were they?’

‘The truth. That’s what she named them. My Truth.’

‘Which was…?’

‘She told it like it was. How we came to Sweden. Who was buying and selling us as products. And what the policeman she shot had done to make her hate him. I helped her translate.’

‘Nordwall?’

‘Bengt Nordwall.’

Sven Sundkvist did not tell her that he had opened their box 21 and watched the tape, listening to them both. He did not mention that one of the tapes had gone missing because one policeman was protecting another and had decided to lose it, nor did he explain how ashamed he felt at his own inability to decide whether their humiliations were more or less important than his loyalty towards a colleague and a friend, and whether he ever would make official what only he knew now: there was another tape, a copy of the truth.

‘I saw him.’

‘Who?’

‘Bengt Nordwall. I saw him in the flat.’

‘You saw him?’

‘He saw me too. I know he recognised me. And I know he recognised Lydia.’

After that he found it difficult to listen to her.

She carried on talking and he asked her his questions, but his mind was elsewhere.

He was furious. As furious as he had ever been. He wanted to scream.

He didn’t, of course. He was after all one of the ordinary blokes, a little dull. He suppressed the scream, sensing the pressure inside his chest.

Instead he carried on pretending to be calm, unafraid of what she had to tell him. He mustn’t frighten her. He understood how brave she was, how the memories gnawed at her.

He cried out.

Cried out, then apologised to her. He had a pain, he explained. It wasn’t her, he had a pain here, in his chest.

By the time they had boarded the ferry back to the centre of town, he knew in detail what had happened during her hours of freedom, from her escape down the stairs at Völund Street to her arrest at the harbour. Fury was churning inside him, from chest to belly and back, but he felt their talk had not yet ended. He wanted to know more, about how it all worked: about those three years, the slave trade, how it was possible for a woman’s body to be sold so that someone else could top up his bank account or buy himself a new car.

He asked if she would have dinner with him.

She smiled.

‘I don’t think I can cope with any more now. Home. I want to go home. I haven’t been at home for three years.’

‘The Swedish police will not trouble you again in this matter. You have my word on that.’

‘I don’t understand. What more do you want to know?’

‘I spoke to the Lithuanian ambassador to Sweden just a couple of days ago. He had gone to the airport to see off the man you call Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp, and spoke to us afterwards about the extent of the world you’ve just escaped from. He was despairing. I want to learn more about it. Tell me.’

‘I’m so tired. Too tired.’

‘Just one evening? Just talking. Then never again.’

He blushed suddenly when he saw himself demanding her attention like the Swedish men she had learnt to hate.

‘Please forgive me. I didn’t intend this as some kind of come-on. You mustn’t take it that way. I truly want to know more. And I’m a married man and a father.’

‘They always are.’

He marched back to the hotel quickly. Another shower to wash away the heat and another change of clothes, the second in the eight hours since his arrival.

She had asked two older women coming to board the ferry about a good place for a meal and they had suggested a Chinese restaurant called Taravos Aniko, saying that the portions were nice and big, and if you were lucky enough to get one of the right tables you could watch the food being prepared.

She was already there when he arrived, wearing the same jeans and sweater. She smiled, he smiled. They ordered bottles of mineral water and a set menu that someone else had worked out, starter, main course, dessert for two, all suitably put together and priced.

She searched for words and he waited quietly. He didn’t want to push her.

Then she started speaking, beginning somewhere in the middle, with a remembered impression, and afterwards unravelling their story. She took him on a journey to a world that he thought he knew something about and made him realise he knew nothing. She cried and whispered for a while, but she couldn’t stop talking and he didn’t interrupt. This was the first time she had described to someone else what her adult life so far had been; it was the first time she had listened to herself. He listened too and was increasingly amazed at her strength and her integrity. Despite everything, she had stayed whole.

He waited until she had finished or maybe couldn’t bear to say any more. Until she fell silent, her unseeing eyes empty. Now it was over, she was done and would never again tell her story on demand.

Sven reached down for his briefcase and put it on the table.

‘I’ve brought a few things which don’t belong to me.’

He took out a small brown box and two neatly folded dresses.

‘I believe these things are Lydia’s.’

She stared at the box, at the dresses. She knew where they had been. There was still a question in her eyes when she met Sven’s. He nodded, confirming that she was right.

‘Your locker is empty now. Let to someone else. I wanted to give you these. I suppose the dresses are hers. And the box too. It contains forty thousand Swedish kronor, in smallish notes.’

Alena didn’t move, said nothing. ‘Do what you like. Keep the money. Or give it to her family, if there is anyone left.’

She leaned forward and caressed the smooth, black material of one of the dresses.

All that was left.

‘I went to her home yesterday. I wanted to see her mother. Lydia often talked about her.’ She lowered her eyes. ‘She is dead. She died two months ago.’

Sven waited. Then he gently pushed Lydia’s belongings towards Alena.

‘I would like to know more about Lydia. Who she was. All I have seen is a badly beaten human being who stood up again and took hostages.’

Alena shook her head. ‘It’s enough now.’

‘I think some part of me understands why she acted as she did.’

‘No more, not today. Not ever.’

They stayed for a while longer, without talking much. The waiter finally asked them to please leave, the restaurant was closing. They got up and were just about to go when the front door opened and a man in his early twenties came in. Sven gave him a quick once-over. He was tall, blond and suntanned, easy-going, not confrontational. Alena walked over to him, kissed his cheek and put her arm through his.

‘Janoz. I left him. He was still here. I am so grateful for that.’

She kissed his cheek again and pulled him closer as she told Sven how Janoz had tried to find her for seven long months, spending time and money until he had to give up.

And she laughed. For the first time that evening, she laughed. Sven smiled and congratulated them both. For a moment, at least, not everything seemed hopeless.

‘What about Lydia? Was there someone waiting for her?’

‘There was someone called Vladi.’

‘And now?’

‘He got what he wanted from her.’

She said no more and he didn’t ask. They went out in the street. Before going their different ways Sven Sundkvist repeated his promise that she would never again have to speak to the Swedish police about this case.

A few steps only and then she turned round.

‘One more thing.’

‘Of course.’

‘Today, in the aquarium. The interview. Why was that necessary?’

‘The case is still open. The police have to gather all the evidence.’

‘Yes, I see. I have no problem with that. But you, the police, you already knew.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What you asked, it was the same as the other policeman.’

‘The other policeman?’

‘He was there in the flat too. Older than you.’

‘His name is Grens.’

‘That’s the one.’

‘The same questions?’

‘Everything I told you this afternoon in the aquarium I have already said to him. The same questions, the same answers.’

‘Everything?’

‘Everything.’

‘You told him about Lydia calling you from the ward and the mortuary? About how you went to look for the things she wanted? About the video from the locker? About the gun and the explosives? About how you left it in the hospital toilet?’

‘All of it.’

It was two o’clock in the morning by the time Sven was ready for the narrow hotel bed. He hadn’t got anything for Jonas. He decided to sleep for a few hours and then go to St John’s Lutheran church and light a candle for Lydia Grajauskas and her mother, who had been buried there. Then take a taxi to the airport. There was a duty-free shop there, where he could get sweets, the jelly ones and the shiny gold chocolate bars.

He lay in the dark. The window was open on a silent Klaipeda.

He knew his time was running out.

He must decide. The truth was there and now he had to decide what to do with it.

SUNDAY 9 JUNE

He had test-fucked the two new girls and they hadn’t been up to much.

True, they were practically virgins, apart from that incident in the ferry cabin, and weren’t actually too bad; they seemed to be getting the hang of it. It was their third day in the Völund Street flat and it wouldn’t be long now before they too serviced twelve a day, like that mad bitch Grajauskas and her dirty little friend had. Or had done, until they lost their cool and went berserk.

The new girls needed to get their act together, though. Not hot and eager enough, he reckoned. Customers paying good money had a right to feel they were attractive and drove girls crazy, and that they were part of a couple, just for a while. Otherwise they might as well wank in the toilet.

He had knocked the new girls around a bit, just to keep them in order. Just a few more days and he’d have put a stop to their snivelling. It got on his nerves, all their bloody whining.

He had to admit it, Grajauskas and Sljusareva were pros. They got on with it, took their kit off and acted randy as hell. But it was a relief not to have their sneering grins in your face all the time. And he was tired of being called Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp every time he showed them who was boss.

The first one would be here soon. It was just after eight in the morning.

Mostly they came straight from home, having left the wife who was starting to get fat, just wanting to experience something, an extra stop going to work.

He would watch the girls today. Exam time. Find out if their fucking was up to standard or if they needed some more tuition.

He’d start with the one in Grajauskas’s room. She looked a bit like her and he had put her there deliberately; it was easier on the old customers. She was tarting herself up, as she should, and putting on the bra and panties her client wanted her to wear. So far, so good.

A knock on the door. She looked at herself in the mirror. The locks were disabled now that he was keeping an eye, so she could open the door and greet the man outside with a smile. The client wore a grey suit of some kind of shiny material, pale blue shirt and black tie.

She kept smiling, used her smile even when he spat or, more like, let the gob just fall to the floor in front of her feet in their high-heeled black shoes.

He pointed.

His finger was straight, pointing downwards.

She bent down, still smiling as she had been told. Then down on her hands and knees, almost folding double as her nose touched the floor. Her tongue came out to take the spit into her mouth and she swallowed.

Then she stood up straight, her eyes shut.

The client slapped her with his open hand. She smiled and smiled at him, just as he had taught her.

Dimitri liked what he saw, gave the thumbs-up to the man in the grey suit, got thumbs-up in return.

She had passed.

He would book her up now.

Lydia Grajauskas didn’t exist any more, not even here.

He always felt a pang of fear when a plane touched down and the ground came into clear view, the snap when the wheels were released and the thump when they made contact. And it never got easier; rather his fear seemed to increase the more he travelled. In little planes like this one, only thirty-five seats and so cramped that you couldn’t stand up straight, take-off and landing were especially scary. He kept worrying until the bouncing changed into a smooth forward movement.

Sven Sundkvist breathed out again and went to find his car. If the traffic was reasonably light it took only half an hour to drive from Arlanda to central Stockholm.

Anywhere, just anywhere not to think about Ewert.

He was sixteen for a while and with Anita who he had just met and held naked for the first time and he was with Jochum Lang who stood at the top of a staircase in Söder Hospital and beat the life out of Hilding Oldйus and with Lydia Grajauskas lying on the floor in the mortuary next to the man she had hated and with one-year-old Jonas in Phnom Penh saying Dad just two weeks later and with Alena Sljusareva sitting in a Chinese restaurant in Klaipeda in her big red sweater telling him the story of a three-year-long humiliation and with…

With anyone at all, in order to avoid thinking about Ewert.

Roadworks outside Sollentuna meant that the cars were confined to one lane and there was a long queue. He inched forward in low gear, sped up a bit, slowed again, came to a halt. Everyone else was doing the same, sitting and waiting for the time to pass, staring blankly ahead. They probably had their own Ewerts to think about.

He gave an involuntary shudder, as you often do when you’re tense.

Then he decided to take the long way round by keeping south, via Eriksberg, where she lived. Lena Nordwall.

He needed more time to think.

The wooden bench was hard. In his time, he had sat on it for hours on end, enduring pointless court cases against refusenik villains. They were alone in the back row and the tired room was silent. Ewert Grens quite liked the old high-security court in the Town Hall, despite the hard seats and the chattering lawyers, because coming here was a kind of settlement, confirmation that his investigation had led to something concrete and the case could be closed.

He looked at his watch. Five minutes to go. Then the guards would open the doors, escort Lang into the room and tell him where to sit during the remand proceedings, the lead-in to a long prison sentence.

Grens turned to Hermansson, who was sitting next to him.

‘Feels good, doesn’t it?’

He had asked her to come along. Sven had disappeared without a trace, refusing to answer the phone; Bengt had been found dead on a floor, and he couldn’t offer Lena any comfort. He had wanted to be here with someone and that someone turned out to be Hermansson. He had to admit it, he really liked her. Her barbed comments about him and policewomen, or all women, should have infuriated him, but she had sounded so down-to-earth and calm, maybe because she was right. He would ask her to consider staying with the City force when her locum came to an end; he’d like to work with her again and perhaps talk to her more. She was so young that he didn’t want to come across as a dirty old man, because what he felt had nothing to do with the beauty of a younger woman, it was more a kind of surprise that there were still people around whom he wanted to get to know better.

‘Yes, it does. It feels good. I know what we’ve achieved, what with Lang and the hospital hostages and everything. Makes my time to Stockholm worthwhile.’

A courtroom is a bare, dull place without judges, magistrates, prosecutors, lawyers, accused and accuser and, of course, a curious public. The drama of a crime needs to be articulated, in terms of interference and vulnerability, a process in which every word adds to the act of recognising and then measuring the offence.

Without all that, no heart.

Grens looked around at the dark wooden panelling, the large filthy windows facing Scheele Street, the far-too-beautiful chandelier, inhaled the smell of an old legal tome.

‘It’s strange, Hermansson. Dealing with professional criminals like Lang is my job, I’ve done it all my life, but I still don’t understand any more now than I did when I started. Take the way they act up under interrogation or in court. Well, clam up. Whatever we say or ask, they ignore it. Don’t know. Never heard of it. They deny everything. I can see some point in their strategy, of course. For a start, it leaves it up to us to prove that they’ve done whatever we say they’ve done.’

Ewert Grens raised his arm, pointing at the wall opposite, at a door made of the same heavy, dark wood as the panelling.

‘In a few minutes Lang will come in through that door. And he’ll play the same lousy old game. He’ll say nothing, deny, mumble I don’t know, and that is, Hermansson, that is exactly why he’ll lose this time. This time that game will be the biggest mistake in his life. You see, I think he’s innocent. Of murder, that is.’

She looked surprised, and he was just about to explain when the door opened and four guards came in, followed by a uniformed and armed constable on either side of Jochum Lang, who was handcuffed and dressed in prison-issue clothing, blue and baggy. He looked up, Ewert Grens smiled and waved.

Then he turned to speak to Hermansson, lowering his voice.

‘You see, I have read the technical report and what Errfors has to say in the autopsy report. Oldйus wasn’t murdered. Lang broke five of his fingers and crushed one kneecap, as he was instructed. But no one had ordered and paid for death. I think Oldйus lost it and the wheelchair careered down the stairs and into the wall.’

Ewert pointed ostentatiously at Lang.

‘Watch him. There he sits, the stupid bastard. Today he’ll get himself ten years in the jug for keeping his mouth shut. He’ll receive a sentence for murder when he could have talked himself into two and a half years for GBH.’

Grens waved again, in the direction of his hate. Lang stared, as forcefully as the day before when they had confronted each other in his cell, before turning away. Behind him, behind his shaved skull, people were filing into the room.

Еgestam came in last. He and Grens nodded at each other.

Briefly, the policeman’s thoughts touched on their last meeting and he wondered what the prosecutor had made of it and of the lies he had dished out.

He dismissed the thought – he had to – and leaned towards Hermansson, whispering: ‘I know that’s what happened. It wasn’t murder. But believe you me, I’m not going to say a word. Lang is going down. Boy, is he going down!’

Dimitri was pleased. Both girls were young, nice smooth skin, fucked like rabbits. He had bought them on credit and decided from the outset that if they were no good he wouldn’t pay.

But they worked. He’d pay up.

The cop wasn’t around any more, of course, but the woman he worked with had done a good job without him. She had delivered two new whores, as agreed. She was waiting for him now. Time for his second payment, one third of the total cost: three thousand euros for each girl.

He opened the door to Eden. A naked woman on the stage, her tits against an inflated doll, making provocative thrusts and groans, whining a bit. Everyone at the tables, all men without exception, had their hands down their trousers.

She was sitting in her usual place, in a far corner near the fire exit.

He went over to her table and they nodded at each other.

She always wore the same tracksuit. Always, with the hood pulled down around her face.

She wanted him to call her Ilona, and he did, even though it annoyed him. It wasn’t her name, he knew that.

They didn’t talk much, never did. A few polite phrases in Russian, that was all.

He gave her the envelope. She didn’t bother to check the money, just put it away in her bag. Agreed to meet next month.

One more month, one more payment and then the girls would be his. His property, both of them.

Ewert Grens got up and waved at Hermansson that she was to follow him. They left just as the remand procedure was concluded. He hurried down the three flights of stairs to the basement and along the corridor to the underground car park. Hermansson asked where they were going, and he replied that she would soon see.

This haste had made him gasp for breath, but he didn’t stop until he was almost suffocated by the stuffy underground dust. He looked around, saw what he wanted and then walked towards a metal door which led to the lifts that went all the way up to the cells.

He planted himself in front of the door, knowing that Jochum Lang would be brought here on the way back to his cell.

He only needed to wait for a minute or so before the four guards, two policemen and Lang came into view, heading towards the metal door.

Ewert Grens went to meet them and asked the officers to wait a few metres away while he had a word with Lang. The officer in charge of the prisoner wasn’t best pleased, but agreed. Grens normally got what he wanted in the end anyway.

They glared at each other, as they always did. Grens waited for Lang to react, but he just stood there, handcuffed, his large frame swaying as if he couldn’t decide whether to hit Ewert or not.

‘You stupid bastard.’ They were standing so close, Grens need do no more than whisper for Lang to hear. ‘You kept your mouth shut, as you always do. But you were remanded and you’ll be sentenced later. I know you didn’t kill Oldйus. But what are people to believe? As long as you behave like a villain, refusing to say anything, only to deny everything, I’ll tell you what they’ll do. They will make you pay. It will cost you six or seven years, on top of what you might have got regardless. Enjoy!’

Ewert Grens turned and called the guards back.

‘That’s all, Lang.’

Jochum Lang didn’t say a word, didn’t move, didn’t even turn to look at Grens when he was moved on by the guards.

Not until the guards had opened the door and he was on his way through and Grens shouted for him to turn round. Then Lang turned and spat on the ground as the superintendent shouted at the top of his voice, reminding Lang about the body scan session, the way he had taunted him about his dead colleague and made kissing noises. Grens screamed, Do you remember? And the kisses were returned, flying through the air. Grens stood with pursed lips and made loud smacking sounds as Lang was led back to the lift and the cells.

Sven Sundkvist parked in a street of terraced houses, crowded with kids playing hockey in between two home-made goals that blocked the traffic. They had noticed the car, but didn’t bother about it at first. He had to wait until two nine-year-olds finally moved the cages, sighing loudly about the old fart who was messing things up.

He knew now. Knew that Lydia had already decided to kill Bengt and then herself. She had wanted to tell the truth, give voice to her shame. Ewert had denied her that.

What gave him the right to do that?

Lena Nordwall was sitting in the garden. Her eyes closed, she listened to the radio, a commercial station of the kind that interrupts the music with jingles about its name and frequency.

He hadn’t seen her since the evening they came to tell her about Bengt’s death.

Ewert wanted to protect a friend’s wife and children.

But by doing so, he denied a dead woman the right to speak out.

‘Hello.’

It was a warm day and he was sweating, but she had greeted the sun in trousers and a denim jacket over a long-sleeved sweater. She hadn’t heard him arrive, and when he went closer, she jumped.

‘Oh. You startled me.’

‘I apologise.’

She made a gesture inviting him to sit down. He moved the chair, now sitting facing her, the sun burning his back.

They looked at each other. He had phoned and asked if he could come. It was up to him to start talking.

He found it hard. He didn’t really know her. They had of course met on birthdays and so on, but always in the company of Bengt and Ewert. She was one of those women who made him fumble for words, feeling inadequate and too old. He didn’t know why. She was beautiful, true, but beauty didn’t usually affect him. It was her poise that made him insecure, like some people do.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you.’

‘Well, you’re here now.’

He looked around. The only other time he had been in this garden was some five, six years earlier, on Ewert’s fiftieth birthday, when Bengt and Lena had had a dinner for their friend. It was the only celebration Ewert had ever permitted. Sven and Anita had sat on either side of him at the table. Jonas had been a toddler then and had run around on the grass with the Nordwall children. There were no other guests. Ewert had been unusually quiet all evening; Sven had thought he was happy, just uncomfortable about being celebrated.

She kept rubbing the sleeves of her jacket.

‘I’m so cold.’

‘Now?’

‘I’ve felt frozen ever since you were here last, four days ago.’

He sighed.

‘Please forgive me. I should have understood.’

‘I have to dress warmly even on a day like this, almost ninety degrees in the shade. Can you understand that?’

‘Yes. Yes. I think I can.’

‘I don’t want to be cold.’

She stood up suddenly.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’

‘No, you mustn’t trouble yourself.’

‘No trouble. Do you want one?’

‘Yes please.’

She went in through the open French windows and he listened to the kitchen noises and the shouting of the hockey players. Maybe someone had scored a goal, or another boring old bloke was interfering with their game.

She served the coffee in tall glasses, topped up with foaming hot milk, the way they served it in the cafйs he never had time to go to.

He drank a mouthful, then put the glass down.

‘How well do you know Ewert?’

She studied him with that special look in her eyes, which made him feel awkward. ‘Is that why you’re here? To discuss Ewert?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is this? Some kind of interrogation?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘What is it then?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Not sure?’

‘No.’

She rubbed her sleeves again in that chilly gesture.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I wish I could be more helpful, but I can’t. Please see it as me thinking aloud. As far from police work as you can get.’

She sipped from her glass, finishing her coffee before she spoke.

‘What can I say? He was my husband’s oldest friend.’

‘I know. And you, how well do you know him?’

‘He isn’t an easy man to know.’

She wanted Sven to go, didn’t like him. He was aware of her dislike.

‘Tell me something. Please try.’

‘Does Ewert know about this?’

‘No, he doesn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘If he did, I wouldn’t need your answers.’

It was hot, his back was soaking. It would have been better to sit somewhere else, but he felt he shouldn’t fuss, the situation was tense enough.

‘Has Ewert spoken to you about what happened? In the mortuary? About what happened to Bengt?’

She wasn’t listening any longer. Sven could tell. She was pointing at him, holding her hand up for so long that he felt uncomfortable.

‘He was sitting there.’

‘Who?’

‘Bengt. When you lot called him in. To the mortuary.’

He should not have come. He should have left her in peace with her grief. The trouble was that he was desperate to hear about another side of Ewert, the positive side, and surely Lena would be able to help him. He repeated his question.

‘What has Ewert said to you about that day? About what happened to Bengt?’

‘I asked my questions. He didn’t tell me anything I couldn’t have read in the papers.’

‘No? Nothing else?’

‘I don’t care for this conversation.’

‘For instance, you haven’t asked him why the prostitute chose to shoot Bengt?’

She was quiet for a long time.

He had put off asking the question, his real reason for being here. Now it was done.

‘What are you implying?’

‘I just wanted to know what Ewert might have said to explain why it was Bengt she killed.’

‘Do you know why?’

‘I asked you.’

Her eyes were fixed on him.

‘No.’

‘And you never wondered?’

Suddenly she burst into tears. She looked so small, curled up in the chair, shaking with grief.

‘Of course I’ve wondered. And asked. But he won’t say, he’s said nothing that makes sense. It was chance, that is all he says. It could’ve been anyone. It was Bengt.’

Someone was standing behind him. Sven Sundkvist turned. A little girl of five or six, younger than Jonas, was dressed in white shorts and a pink T-shirt. She had come from the house, now stopped in front of her mother, observing how she was upset.

‘Mummy, what’s wrong?’

Lena Nordwall leaned forwards and gave her a hug.

‘Nothing, sweetheart.’

‘You’re crying. Is it that man? Is he being horrid to you?’

‘No, no, he isn’t horrid at all. We’re just talking.’

The little pink-and-white body swung round. Sven met her wide-open eyes.

‘You see, Mummy is very sad. My daddy is dead.’

He swallowed, trying to look kind and serious at the same time.

‘I knew your daddy.’

Sven Sundkvist looked at the woman who had been left a widow with two young children for four days now. He could sense her deep pain and realised why Ewert thought the last thing she needed was the truth and had chosen to protect her.

Ewert Grens couldn’t wait until the next day. He longed to be with her.

Sunday traffic meant that it was easy to cross the city and the Vдrta motorway was almost empty. He put on a tape and was singing along with Siw as he crossed Lidingö Bridge. The rain started up again, but he didn’t notice.

He pulled into the usually empty car park and realised that it was full. He was baffled, thought for a moment that maybe he had taken a wrong turn, until he remembered that today was a Sunday, the most popular day for visiting the sick.

The receptionist looked surprised. Mr Grens didn’t normally come on Sundays. He smiled at her surprise.

She called out after him.

‘Mr Grens. She isn’t there.’

He didn’t catch it.

‘She isn’t in her room.’

He stopped. In the time it took for her to draw breath before continuing, he felt all that he had felt back then. He died. Again.

‘She’s with the others on the terrace for Sunday afternoon coffee. We try to get everyone outside in the summer. Even when it rains, the parasols are big enough.’

He didn’t hear what she was saying. Her lips were moving, but he didn’t hear.

‘Go out and see her. She’ll be pleased.’

‘Why isn’t she in her room?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Why isn’t she in her room?’

He felt dizzy. A chair. He took off his jacket and sat down.

‘Are you all right?’

The young woman knelt in front of him. He saw her now.

‘On the terrace?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

Most of the decking outside was protected from the rain by four large parasols, emblazoned with an ice-cream manufacturer’s logo. Ewert recognised some of the staff and all of those who were sitting about in wheelchairs or with Zimmer frames parked next to their chairs.

She was sitting in the middle of the group, with a cup of coffee beside her, a half-eaten cinnamon pastry in her hand. He heard her childish laugh above the patter of rain on the umbrellas and the sporadic singing. He waited until the group of singers had finished their tune and then joined the crowd on the terrace. His jacket was already wet.

‘Hello.’ He greeted one of the white-coated women, who had a familiar face.

She smiled pleasantly.

‘Mr Grens, how nice to see you. And on a Sunday too!’

She spoke to Anni, who stared blankly at them. ‘Anni, look! You’ve got a visitor.’

Ewert went to her. As usual he put his hand on her cheek. He turned to the care assistant.

‘Do you mind if I take her inside? I’ve got something to tell her. Good news.’

‘Of course. We’ve been here for quite a while. Anyway, Anni, you don’t want all of us around when you have a gentleman visitor.’

She released the brake on Anni’s wheelchair and he took over.

Anni was wearing a different dress today, a red one. He had bought it for her a long time ago. It was still raining, but only lightly, and she barely got wet as they dashed from the parasols to the side of the building. He steered the wheelchair in through the door and down the long corridor to her room.

They sat as they always did. She in the middle of the room. He, on a chair at her side.

He caressed her cheek again, kissed her forehead and took her hand in his. For a moment he thought she squeezed his hand in return.

‘Anni.’

He tried to make sure that she was looking at him before continuing.

‘It’s over now.’

It was one o’clock and Dimitri had promised her an hour’s rest. She had been working non-stop since the morning, since the first customer came and spat on the floor and she had to lick it up with a smile.

She was crying.

That man. Then seven others. Four more later. Twelve a day. The last one was coming just after half past six.

One hour’s rest. She lay on the bed in the room she thought of as hers.

It was in a pleasant flat, on the fifth floor in a nice block.

A couple of the men had called her Lydia. She had told them that that wasn’t her name, but they insisted that for them, that was what she was called. She knew now that Lydia was the woman who had been there before her and a lot of the men had been Lydia’s customers. She had inherited them from her.

Dimitri didn’t beat her so much these days.

He had said she was learning the ropes, she had to make more noises, that was what was missing, she had to groan when they pushed inside her, and whimper a little, with pleasure, of course. The customers liked noises; it made them feel they weren’t paying her to do it.

She only cried when she was alone. He hit her more if he saw her cry.

One hour. She had closed the door and would cry in peace for an hour. Then she had to smarten up and smile in the mirror and cup her hand over her genitals, as the two o’clock man wanted.

Ewert Grens had been back in his office for only an hour or so, but already he felt restless. He couldn’t concentrate on anything. He went to the toilet, got a coffee from the machine and asked reception to fix a pizza delivery for him, but that was that. Now, all that was left to him was his office.

It was almost as if he were waiting.

He listened to Siw Malmkvist’s warm voice and held her close, dancing with her in the tight space between his desk and the sofa.

He had no idea where Sven was and Еgestam hadn’t been in touch.

He turned up the volume. Soon it would be evening once more and he could hardly figure out how. His room was warm after a day of summer sunshine and he sweated as he moved to the rhythms of the Sixties.

Bengt, I miss you.

You pulled a fast one on us.

You see that, don’t you?

Lena knows nothing.

Not a thing.

You, who had her.

You, who had the children.

You, who had something!

He switched off the tape recorder and put the tape back in its box.

He looked around. No, not this place, not tonight.

He left, walked along the empty corridors and stepped outside into the fresh air, to the car left unlocked as usual. Settling in the seat, he decided to go for a drive. He hadn’t done that for a long time.

It was half past six and she had spread her legs for the twelfth and last time today.

He had been quite quick and he hadn’t wanted to hit her or anything, and no spitting. He had only penetrated her anally, but barely, and told her to whisper that it turned her on, so it hadn’t hurt much at all.

She showered for a long time, even though she had washed several times already. It was the best time for crying, when the water was pouring over her.

Dimitri had told her that she was to be fully dressed and smiling by seven o’clock, sitting on her bed. The woman who called herself Ilona, the one who had met them when they came off the ferry, was coming to see them, to check that they were all right. Dimitri explained that the woman still owned a third share of them, so her approval was important. For another month, anyway.

The woman arrived punctually. The kitchen clock: thirty seconds to seven. She was wearing her tracksuit with the hood up, just as before. She didn’t take it down as she passed the electronic locks and came into the flat.

Dimitri said hello, asked if she wanted a drink. She shook her head. She was in a hurry, just wanted to give the girls a quick once-over. After all, she did still have a stake in them.

When the woman popped her head round the door, the girl looked as happy as she could, just as Dimitri had instructed her. The woman asked how many men she had seen today and she replied twelve. That pleased her and she said that was good going for such a young Baltic pussy.

She lay down on the bed and cried again. She knew that Dimitri didn’t allow it and that he would soon come in and hit her, but she couldn’t help it.

She thought of the men who had forced themselves on her, the woman with the hood and that Dimitri had said that they had to pack their bags again as they were moving to another flat in Copenhagen, and all she wanted to do was die.

Ewert Grens had been driving aimlessly for almost two hours. He had started in the centre of the city, navigating the most heavily congested streets with their traffic lights and jaywalkers and imbeciles who punished their car horns. Later, he crossed to Södermalm via Slussen, made his way along Horn Street and Göt Street; the south side, which was supposed to be so damn bohemian, but to him this looked like any sad provincial dump.

Back to the northern side again and past the soulless facades in posh Östermalm, a loop round the TV building at Gдrdet and then a run on Vдrta Road to the harbour, where large ships were arriving packed with Baltic whores. He yawned. Valhalla Road next, endless roundabouts as far as Roslag Junction.

All these people. All these people on their way somewhere.

Ewert Grens envied them. He had no idea where he going.

He was tired. Just a few minutes more.

He drove through the city centre to St Erik’s Square in the slowing evening traffic. After drifting on along the smaller streets for a while, he turned left, past the Bonnier building and into Atlas Street. Downhill, left again. He parked in front of the door, suddenly surprised at the thought that less than a week had passed since he had come here for the first time.

He turned the engine off. How silent it was, as silent as a big city can be when the working day is over. All those windows, all those fancy curtains and potted plants. Places where people lived.

He sat in the car and time passed. Maybe a minute. Or ten. Or sixty.

Her back had been torn and inflamed. She had lain naked and unconscious on the floor. Alena Sljusareva had been screaming in the next room, hurling abuse at the man she called Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp.

Bengt had been on the landing. He had been waiting there for almost an hour. Grens recalled the scene perfectly, where Bengt had stood.

You must have known even then.

Ewert Grens stayed where he was for a little longer. Not time to leave yet. Another minute, several minutes, whatever it took for him to calm down. He had to go to the place he still called home, although he often had no wish to be there.

Another couple of minutes.

Suddenly the heavy door opened.

Four people came out. He looked at them, recognised them.

Only a couple of days ago, he had taken Alena Sljusareva to the port to ensure that she boarded a ferry that would take her over the Baltic Sea, back to Lithuania and Klaipeda.

They had got off the ferry when it docked on Swedish soil. The man was wearing the same suit he had previously, another time in Völund Street. Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp. As soon as he had cleared passport control, he turned round and waited for two young women – girls, in fact, of sixteen or seventeen. He held out his hand and demanded to have their passports, their debt. A woman in a tracksuit, with the hood pulled up over her head, had come forward to meet them and kissed them lightly on each cheek, the way people from the Baltic states do.

Now, they filed out of the door in front of him: Dimitri first, followed by his two new girls with bags in hand, and the hooded woman.

Grens watched them walk away.

Then he phoned the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was put through to the person he wanted and asked a few questions about Dimitri Simait.

God knows he had enough on his plate, but never mind. He wanted to know if that fucking pimp still had the right to claim diplomatic immunity and asked to find out who his female contact was.

A little additional information and then he’d have both of them in the bag.

When this was all over. When Lang was inside. When Bengt had been buried.

When he was certain that Lena was able to go on, without the lie.

The day had passed without him noticing.

He had woken up in a narrow hotel bed, in Klaipeda, then driven from Arlanda to Lena Nordwall, where she sat freezing in the hot sun, then on to his Kronoberg office and from there to the Prosecution Service building, where Еgestam had been waiting, nearly at the end of his patience.

Sven Sundkvist wanted to go home.

He was tired, but the day that was almost done had not quite finished with him yet. Instead it seemed its longest hours were waiting for him.

Lena Nordwall had run after him as he walked away from their futile talk in the garden, towards the hockey kids and his car. She had been short of breath when she grabbed his arm and asked if he knew about Anni. Sven had never heard the name before. He had known Ewert for ten years, had worked closely with him and come to regard him as a friend, but he had never heard the name before. Lena Nordwall told him about a time when Ewert had been in charge of a patrol van, a story about Anni and Bengt and Ewert and an arrest which had ended in tragedy.

He tried to stand still, but wasn’t able to stop trembling.

There was so much in life he didn’t understand.

He had no idea where Ewert lived. He had never, not once visited him. Somewhere in the centre of Stockholm, that was all he knew.

He laughed a little, but his face wasn’t smiling.

Strange, how one-sided their friendship had been.

He kept inviting and Ewert allowed himself to be invited. Sven believed in sharing, thoughts, emotions, strength, while Ewert hid behind his right to privacy.

He got Ewert’s home address from the police staff records. He lived on the fourth floor of quite a handsome block of flats in the middle of the city, on a busy stretch of Svea Road. Sven had been waiting outside for nearly two hours. He had tried to distract himself by scanning the rows of windows. Not that he got much out of it. From a distance they all looked identical, as if the same person inhabited all the flats.

Ewert arrived just after eight o’clock, his big body rolling on his stiff leg. He opened the door without looking round, and disappeared into the building. Sven Sundkvist waited for another ten minutes, feeling nervous and lonelier than he could ever remember.

He took a deep breath before pressing the intercom button. No reply. A longer ring this time.

The loudspeaker crackled as a heavy hand picked up the receiver on the fourth floor.

‘Yes?’ An irritated voice.

‘Ewert?’

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s me, Sven.’

The silence was audible.

‘Hello, Ewert? It’s me, Sven Sundkvist.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’d like to come up.’

‘Come up here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now?’

‘Now.’

‘Why?’

‘We need to talk.’

‘We can talk tomorrow. Come to my office.’

‘It would be too late. We have to talk this evening. Open up, Ewert.’

Silence again. Sven stared at the still live intercom. A long time passed or, at least, it felt like that. Then the lock clicked and Ewert’s voice spoke, low and indistinct.

‘Fourth floor. Grens on the door.’

The pain in his stomach was bad now, as bad as when he’d watched that video. He had carried this pain for long enough. Time to hand it over, as it were.

He didn’t need to ring the bell. The door was open. He peered into the long hall.

‘Hello?’

‘Come in.’

He couldn’t see anyone, but Ewert’s voice was calling from a room further in. He stopped on the doormat.

‘Second door to your left.’

Sven Sundkvist wasn’t quite sure what exactly he had expected, but whatever, it wasn’t this.

It was the biggest flat he had ever seen.

He looked around as he walked slowly down a hall which never ended. Six rooms so far, possibly seven. High ceilings, elegant tiled stoves everywhere, plush rugs on perfect parquet floors.

Above all, it was empty.

He tiptoed, hardly breathed, feeling like an intruder even though nobody was about. He had never before been anywhere that felt so deserted. It was so large and clean and unimaginably lonely.

Ewert waited in something that might be called the library, one of the smaller rooms with bookshelves along two walls, from floor to ceiling. He was sitting on a worn black leather armchair in the light of a standard lamp.

Sven hardly noticed the rest of the room, because a few things caught his attention. On the wall by the door was a small embroidered wall hanging with MERRY CHRISTMAS in yellow letters on a red background. Next to it two black-and-white photographs, one of a man and the other of a woman, both in their twenties, both in police uniform.

A huge, never-ending place. But it was obvious. The two photos and the embroidered cloth were at its very heart.

Ewert looked at him, sighed, gestured to him to come in. He kicked a stool that he had been resting his feet on in the direction of his guest. Sven sat down.

Ewert had been reading when he rang the bell and interrupted. Sven tried to see what the book was, to find a way of starting the conversation, but it was lying to one side and he couldn’t see the title. So instead he got up and pointed at the door.

‘Ewert, what is this?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Have you always lived like this?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘I spend less and less time here.’

‘Our little terraced house would fit into your hall.’

Ewert nodded at him, wanted him to sit down. He closed his book, leaned forwards, red in the face. He was getting impatient with this meaningless chitchat.

‘Sven, it’s Sunday night, I believe.’

Sven did not answer.

‘After eight o’clock. Isn’t that so?’

It wasn’t really a question.

‘I have a bloody right to be left alone. Don’t I?’

Silence.

‘Why this invasion of my privacy? Can you tell me that?’

Sven tried to stay calm. He had encountered this anger before, but never the fear. He was certain of that. Ewert had never shown that before. But here, sitting in his own leather armchair, his aggression was masking his fear.

He looked at his older colleague.

‘The truth, Ewert – you know how hard it is to face.’

Sven ignored Ewert’s obvious wish that he should stay put. He stood up and wandered over to the window, stopped to look down at the cars in the street as they hurried from one red light to the next, and then went to lean against a bookshelf.

‘Ewert, I spend more time with you, just about every day of my life, than with anyone else, more than with my wife and my son. I haven’t come to see you because it seemed like a nice idea. I’m here because I have no choice.’

Ewert Grens was leaning back, looking up at him.

‘What a lie, Ewert. What a fucking big lie!’

The man in the armchair didn’t move, only stared.

‘You have lied and I want to know why.’

Ewert snorted.

‘Seems I’m being visited by the inquisition.’

‘I want you to reply to my questions, yes. Snort away. Call me names, by all means. I’m used to it.’

He went back to the window. There were fewer cars and they drove more slowly. He longed to get out there, once this was over.

‘Officially, I’ve been on sick leave for two days.’

‘You seem fine to me. Well enough to play the interrogator anyway.’

‘I wasn’t ill. I was in Lithuania. In Klaipeda. Еgestam asked me to go.’

Sven Sundkvist had anticipated an outburst, of course. He knew that Ewert would stand up and shout.

‘That little prat! You went to Lithuania on his orders? Behind my back!’

Sven waited until he had finished. ‘All right. Sit down again, Ewert.’

‘Fuck off!’

‘Sit down.’

Ewert looked briefly at Sven and sat down, putting his feet on the stool.

‘I met Alena Sljusareva in an aquarium, a Klaipeda tourist trap. I got the answers we needed, step by step, the whole story. How she delivered the gun and explosives to Grajauskas. Very instructive.’

He waited. No reaction from Ewert.

‘I know that the two women communicated by mobile phone, several times. Before and during the hostage drama.’

He watched the silent man in the armchair.

Say something!

React!

Don’t just stare at me!

‘Before Sljusareva and I parted company outside a Chinese restaurant at the end of the evening, something odd happened. She wanted to know why I had asked all those questions, as she had already answered them. In an interview with another Swedish policeman.’

He said nothing.

‘Has the cat got your tongue?’

Nothing.

‘Say something!’

Ewert Grens burst out laughing. He laughed until tears came to his eyes.

‘What do you want me to say? What’s the point? You’re fucking babes in the wood, you two! Haven’t got a clue!’

He laughed even louder, wiping his eyes with his shirtsleeve.

‘As for Еgestam, it goes without saying. But you, Sven! Christ, little boy lost!’

He stared at his uninvited guest, who had invaded his house and taken away his right to be alone.

He was still chuckling, though, and shaking his head.

‘The perpetrator, Grajauskas, is dead. The plaintiff, Nordwall, is dead. Who cares about the whys and wherefores? Who? Eh, Sven? Not the taxpayers who pay our wages, that’s for sure.’

Sven Sundkvist stayed by the window. He felt like shouting to drown all this out, but kept quiet. He knew what it was about, after all, this fear masquerading as anger.

‘Is that how you see it, Ewert?’

‘It’s how you should see it too.’

‘I never will. You see, we talked for a long time, Alena Sljusareva and I. We went for a meal together. And when I asked, she told me about the three years she and Grajauskas spent in flats all over Scandinavia, being bought and sold as sex slaves. Made to perform twelve times a day. I thought that I was well informed, but she told me things about imprisonment and humiliation that I will never truly understand: about Rohypnol to endure it and vodka to deaden their senses, just to be able to live, to cope with the shame, in order to never let it get close.’

Ewert got up and walked towards the door, waving at Sven to come with him.

Sven delayed a little, looking at the photos of the two young people. Full of hope. The man’s eyes fascinated him especially, so alive and eager, different eyes which he hadn’t seen before. They didn’t fit in with this flat.

They had dreams, were full of life.

There was only emptiness here, as if life had ground to a halt.

He tore himself away from the eyes and the room, walked past two more rooms and into a third. It was a kitchen of the kind Anita dreamt about, large enough to cook in comfort and have space left for people to sit down together.

‘Hungry?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Coffee?’

‘No.’

‘I’m having a cup. Sure?’

The electric coil glowed bright neon red. Ewert filled a saucepan with water.

‘I don’t want your bloody coffee, Ewert.’

‘Sven, get off your high horse.’

Sven Sundkvist searched inside himself for the strength to carry on. He had to keep going with this.

‘Alena also told me about how they came here. About the journey here on the ferry. Who arranged it and came with them. Ewert, I know that you know who it was.’

The water boiled. Ewert made a mug of instant coffee. Turned the cooker off.

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘Am I not right?’

Grens took his mug and went to sit down at the kitchen table. It was round and there were six chairs to go with it. Ewert’s face was still flushed. Sven wondered if he was still angry or if it was fear.

‘Are you listening to me, Ewert? Of course they couldn’t shut out what was happening to them. Rohypnol and vodka weren’t enough. So they tried other ways of dealing with it. Lydia Grajauskas didn’t have a body. She couldn’t feel it when they penetrated her and abused her, it wasn’t her body.’

Ewert Grens scrutinised his mug of coffee, drank some, said nothing.

‘And Alena Sljusareva, she did the opposite. She was aware of her body, and how they exploited it. But she didn’t register any faces. They didn’t have any.’

Sven took a step forwards and pulled the mug away from Ewert, forcing him to look up.

‘But you knew that, didn’t you? Because they said it all in that video of theirs.’

Grens said nothing, only looked at his mug in Sven’s hand.

‘You see, I knew something wasn’t right. I went through the reports to chase up the videotape she had brought to the mortuary. The scene-of-crime photos showed it lying on the floor and I got on to Nils Krantz, who confirmed that he had given it to you.’

Ewert Grens reached out for his mug, and finished his coffee. Once more he asked if Sven wanted one and once more Sven said no. They stayed in the kitchen, facing each other across a large island unit set out with cooking kit and a full set of kitchen knives.

‘Where is your TV?’

‘TV? Why?’

Sven went into the hall to fetch his case.

‘Where did you say it was?’

‘In there.’

Ewert pointed at the room across from the kitchen. Sven crossed the hall and asked Ewert to follow.

‘We’re going to watch a video.’

‘I haven’t got a VCR.’

‘Thought not, which is why I’ve brought a portable one.’

He unpacked it and connected it to Ewert’s TV.

‘Right. Now we’re going to watch this together.’

They settled in opposite corners of the sofa. Sven had the remote control. He used it to start the video he had just loaded.

Blackish image, lots of white flicker. The War of the Ants.

Sven turned to Ewert.

‘This one appears to be empty.’

No answer.

‘And it’s probably supposed to be, because it isn’t the tape you were given by Krantz. Is it?’

The tape was crackling, an irritating noise, letting his thoughts turn over and over in his head.

‘I know it isn’t, because Krantz confirmed that the tape found in the mortuary was used, rather dusty and with two sets of female fingerprints. None of which fits this cassette. There will be prints all right, but only yours and mine.’

Ewert turned away. He couldn’t bear to look at the man whose boss he was.

‘Ewert, I’m curious. What was on the original tape?’

He flicked the remote at the TV, shutting off the invasive noise.

‘OK, let me put it another way. What was on the original tape that made it worth risking thirty-three years of service in the force?’

Sven bent down to get something out of his case.

Another videotape. He took out the first one and loaded the second.

Two women. They are out of focus. The cameraman moves the camera about and twists the lens. The women look nervous as they wait for the signal to start.

One of them, a blonde with frightened eyes, speaks slowly in Russian, two sentences at a time. Then she turns to the dark woman, who translates into Swedish.

Their faces are serious and their voices strained. They haven’t done anything like this before.

They speak for more than twenty minutes. That’s how long it takes, their story of the past three years.

Sven stubbornly stared straight ahead, waiting for Ewert’s reaction.

There was none, not until the women had reached the end of their account.

Then he burst into tears.

He covered his face with his hands and wept, letting thirty years of grief flow out of him as he had never dared before in case he drained away and disappeared.

Sven couldn’t bear to watch. Please, not this. He cringed with embarrassment at first, and then anger surged through his body. He got up, stopped the tape and put it on the table in front of them.

‘You see, you only replaced one of the copies.’

Sven prodded it lightly and began pushing it towards Ewert.

‘I reread the statements made by the hostages. Ejder mentioned that Grajauskas talked about two tapes. And a locker at the Central Station.’

Ewert took a deep breath, looked at Sven, but couldn’t talk, still crying.

‘I found it there.’

Sven pushed the tape past a vase with flowers until it was in front of Ewert. His anger, it had to be released.

‘How dare you take away that right? They had every fucking right in the world to tell their story. And what was your reason? To keep the truth about your best friend from getting out!’

Ewert looked at the video in front of him, picked it up, but still said nothing.

‘Not only that. You actually committed a criminal offence. You withheld and later destroyed evidence. You kept a self-confessed criminal out of court by sending her home, because you were scared of what she had to say. How much further were you prepared to go? How much is this lie worth to you, Ewert?’

Grens fingered the hard plastic case.

‘This?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think I did it for my own sake?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘What?’

‘For your own sake.’

‘So it wasn’t enough that she lost her husband? Why should she have to face this as well? The bastard had lied to her!’ He threw the cassette back on the table. ‘Her empty life is more than enough! Lena doesn’t need this crap! She doesn’t ever need to know!’

Sven Sundkvist couldn’t take any more.

He had confronted his friend, seen him weep and now knew about the grief that had filled most of his adult life. He just had to get away. This day had been too much, he didn’t want another minute of today.

‘Alena Sljusareva.’

He turned towards Grens.

‘You see, she spoke about her shame. The shame she had tried to wash down the drain, twelve times daily. But this…’

Sven slapped the TV screen, hit out against what they had just watched.

‘This was because you couldn’t face it, Ewert. You can’t cope with the guilt you feel when you remember what you’ve done to other people, and the shame you feel when you think of what you’ve done to yourself. You can live with guilt. But shame is unendurable.’

Ewert sat there, his eyes fixed on the person, who kept talking.

‘You felt guilty because it was your decision to send Bengt into the mortuary, to his death. That’s understandable. There’s always an explanation for guilt.’

Sven’s voice grew louder, as often happens when you don’t want to show how close you are to a breakdown.

‘Shame, now, that’s different. Much harder to understand! You were ashamed because Bengt had managed to trick you so completely. And you felt ashamed that you would have to tell Lena who Bengt actually was.’

Sven became louder still.

‘Ewert, you weren’t trying to protect Lena. You were protecting yourself. From your own shame.’

It was strangely cold outside.

June is meant to be midsummer and warm.

He waited at the crossing outside the building where Ewert Grens lived. The lights turned red eventually.

Now he had finally shed the burden of the lies he had been carrying.

The story of two young people, erased to protect a man from the truth.

Bengt Nordwall was a swine, the kind that even Sven Sundkvist could hate. Until the end, he had behaved exactly like the swine he was, unable to change even when facing a gun, naked, in that tiled place of death. He had refused to acknowledge the shame she felt, even then. And Ewert had carried on refusing, reducing her shame to a mere flicker, a War of the Ants.

The green man showed, and he crossed the road and started walking northwards. He needed to get away, deep into the summer night. At the Wenner-Gren Centre he turned towards Haga Park.

Lydia Grajauskas was dead. Bengt Nordwall was dead.

Ewert had put it succinctly. A case with no perpetrator and no plaintiff.

He had always liked Haga Park, so near the city centre and yet so silent. A man was shouting despairingly for his dog, a black Alsatian. A couple were lying on the grass, holding each other tight. No one else was in sight. The green space was as empty as all city places are during the few summer weeks when life happens elsewhere.

No one was going to speak for the dead, not now and not ever. He was breathing heavily. What if he testified against the best policeman he knew? What good would that do? Would it matter? Should he demand answers from those who were still alive? What was better, Ewert Grens working with the City Police, or Ewert Grens lost in that silent home of his?

The water’s edge. He had reached the lakeside and saw the evening sun reflected in it, as it always was.

Sven Sundkvist was still carrying his case. A small VCR, some papers, two videotapes. He opened it and picked up the tape he had taken from box 21 at Central Station. The label with Cyrillic script was still there. He let the cassette fall to the ground and stamped on it until the plastic casing was in pieces. Then he ripped the tape out, metre after metre of curling ribbon, as if for a birthday present.

The Brunnsviken water was almost perfectly still, a rare kind of absolute calm.

He took a few steps closer, twisted the twirling ribbon round the remains of the cassette, lifted his arm and threw it as far as he could.

He felt both heavy and light. There might have been tears in his eyes, maybe he felt some of Lydia Grajauskas’s sadness. As he observed the scene from afar, he realised that he had done exactly what he had just condemned.

He had stolen from her the right to be heard.

Еgestam would never know what Sljusareva had really said.

He felt ashamed.

THREE YEARS EARLIER

The flat is small, just two rooms and a kitchen.

There are five of them. Mum and Grandma. Her older brother and little sister. And herself, of course. She has never really thought about it before. It has always been like that.

She is seventeen years old now.

Her name is Lydia Grajauskas.

She longs to be somewhere else.

She wants a room of her own and a life of her own. This place, this life is so cramped. She is a woman now, or almost. Soon she will be a woman, grown up and needing space.

She misses him.

She often thinks of him. Dad, who was always there for her and always understood her.

She has asked, many times, but nothing can make her understand why he had to die.

She misses their walks together most of all. He would take her hand in his as they walked, lost in plans about the day they would leave Klaipeda.

They used to walk to the edge of town, just as she and Vladi do now. Then they would turn round to look back at the town, really take in what it looked like. Dad often sang for her, songs he had learnt as a child, which she had never heard anyone else sing. Their heads would be filled with longing. That was what they did; they longed together.

This flat. Too small, too crowded! Always someone underfoot. Always someone.

She remembers last night, the two men who came to the cafй. She had never seen them before. They shook hands with Vladi and they seemed nice.

Her Vladi, who has been her friend for ever, who had been next to her on the sofa when the military police burst in, shouting Zatknis! and pinning Dad to the floor.

The two men smiled at her and chatted while they ordered coffees and sandwiches. They spoke Russian, but one of them, the older man, didn’t look Russian, more like people from Sweden or Denmark.

They had stayed for quite a long time. She refilled their cups twice. Then Vladi had left and she talked to them for a bit. They wanted to know what she was called and how long she had worked in the cafй and how much she earned. They seemed interested, nice and polite, not slimy at all. They didn’t try anything on, didn’t flirt, nothing like that. She sat down at their table later. She wasn’t allowed to, but the place was almost empty right then and there was nothing much to do.

They talked about a lot of things. She enjoyed the talk, she really did. It was weird, she thought, to be with men who were so pleasant and easy. She laughed a lot and that was new too. There wasn’t much laughter at home.

They came back.

Late today, just as she was getting ready to close, they both came back.

She knows now that their names are Dimitri and Bengt. Dimitri comes from Vilnius and Bengt is from Sweden. Bengt is a policeman, in Klaipeda to work on an investigation.

They seem to know each other well. They met many years ago. Although she isn’t sure, she guesses that Dimitri must be part of the Lithuanian police force.

They were just as nice to her and asked again about her job. They seemed shocked when she told them what she earns waitressing at the cafй. Bengt told her what she could earn in Sweden for doing just the same thing. It is almost twenty times as much. Every month. It seems incredible, but they insisted. Twenty times as much!

She told them about her dreams. Told them about the small, cramped flat that is her home, about her walks with Vladi, about wanting to leave Klaipeda, which somehow doesn’t offer her enough any more.

They ordered more sandwiches and invited her to sit down at their table.

They talked and laughed, which was lovely. Laughter clears the air.

They come back for the third day running.

She almost expects them now and before they order she has laid their table for coffee and sandwiches.

Yesterday they offered to help her, said that they could fix the paperwork, work permits and that kind of thing, if she was keen to work in Sweden. Just imagine, getting twenty times what she could earn here.

She laughed and told them it was crazy, she couldn’t.

Today she brings the subject up herself, asks them what has to be done.

She needs a passport, but one which says she is older than she is. They can arrange it. It will cost a fair bit, of course, but they’re happy to lend her the money until she gets paid in Sweden.

They have actually done this for other Lithuanian girls. When she asks who they are, they give her some names, but Lydia doesn’t recognise them.

They tell her that they have a female contact in Sweden who makes the girls feel really welcome.

She says the coffee is on her and they sit about for quite a while.

She mustn’t make up her mind until she’s quite, quite sure, they tell her. It’s important that she thinks about it. If she really wants to stop just dreaming about other places and break free, she has to let them know soon. The next ferry, which they’re travelling on themselves, leaves two days from now, and they assure her they can fix the passport in time.

It’s warm when she gets to the harbour. The pouring rain has stopped, the sun is shining and there is hardly any wind. Vladi holds her hand and says he’s happy for her. Her things are packed in one suitcase, mostly clothes and as many toiletries as she dared to take. A handful of photographs, her diary.

She hasn’t told anyone. Mum wouldn’t understand. She doesn’t long to get away.

But she will phone as soon as she gets there. From her new workplace. She will tell them how much she is earning and how much money she will send home every month. Then Mum will realise what it’s all about. Her new, different life.

They agreed to meet at the entrance to the ferry terminal.

She spots them easily. Dimitri, the dark-haired one, is wearing a grey suit. Bengt has got almost blond hair and is a little shorter than Dimitri. His eyes are so kind. He gives Vladi an envelope. Vladi looks very pleased, but doesn’t meet her eyes afterwards, just gives her a hug and hurries away. A young woman, about her own age, comes and joins them. She has dark hair and looks pretty and friendly.

They say hello and introduce themselves. Her name is Alena. She too has brought just one suitcase and also has a false passport.

The ferry is so impressive. Lydia has never been on board such a large ship. Quite a few of the other passengers are Swedish, some are Lithuanian and some she can’t place. She smiles as she steps on board and leaves her past behind.

She and Alena share a cabin.

They get on really well. Alena is easy to make friends with; she’s the sort who seems to invite you in, curious and eager to listen. She laughs a lot and it’s easy to laugh with her. Lydia has a special feeling all over, now that she’s on her way.

Soon it will be time to go for a meal.

First, they have to go up to meet Bengt and Dimitri in their cabin, which is just upstairs. Then they will go to the dining room, all four of them together.

They knock on the door to the cabin.

They wait. Just a little while.

Bengt opens the door with a smile, and gestures with his hand to invite them in. They exchange glances and feel a little shy. Stepping inside the men’s cabin doesn’t feel quite right.

Then everything falls apart.

One single breath.

That’s all it takes.

The two men raise their hands and slap them hard in the face.

They keep hitting until the girls collapse.

They tear at their best frocks, rip the fabric to pieces and push balls of cloth into the girls’ mouths.

They force open their legs and push deep inside them.

Lydia will never forget the sound of his panting in her face.

That night she doesn’t sleep. She lies in her bed clutching a pillow.

They shouted at her. They hit her. They held the cold metal of a gun’s muzzle to her head and told her that she could choose now to shut up or die.

She cannot grasp what has happened.

All she wants is to go home.

Alena is lying in the lower bunk. She doesn’t cry quite so much. She says nothing, makes hardly any noise at all.

Lydia looks at her case. It’s on the floor, next to the basin. The case she packed without telling anyone. She left home less than twenty-four hours ago.

She hears the noise of the waves hitting the ship’s metal sides. She hears it through the window, which can be opened, but is too small to climb out through.

The journey ends in the morning.

She is still in bed.

She hasn’t dared to move.

She tries to ignore them when they bang on the cabin door and shout that it’s time to leave, they have to go ashore.

Dimitri walks just ahead of her, Bengt is behind her. They walk towards the exit and through passport control.

She wants to scream.

She doesn’t dare.

She remembers the blows to her face and the pain when they penetrated her. She begged them to stop, but they didn’t.

It’s a large place, much larger than the terminal in Klaipeda. People meet and hug each other, delighted to be together again.

She feels nothing.

Only shame.

She doesn’t know why.

She hands her passport to the uniformed official. Shut up. He leafs through it, looks at her, nods her through. Or die. She walks away. Alena is next.

Outside the gate, Dimitri turns to Lydia and tells her that he will take the passport. She owes him for it and he wants his money back, so now she has to work.

She doesn’t really hear what he says.

The large hall empties slowly as the people around her leave. They wait at a newsagent’s kiosk, a small distance from passport control.

Then she comes, the woman they are waiting for, who works with Dimitri and Bengt.

She is wearing a grey tracksuit. The top has a hood and she wears it pulled down over her face. She is quite young. The woman smiles at Dimitri, gives him a peck on the cheek, then smiles at Bengt and kisses him on the lips, as if they belong together. She turns to Lydia and Alena, still smiling, and says something they don’t understand, presumably in Swedish.

‘Well, hello there. So you are our two new little Baltic pussies.’

She kisses their cheeks, first Lydia, then Alena. She smiles and they try to smile back at her.

They don’t notice when Bengt Nordwall leans close to the woman and whispers to her, his hand gently pushing back the edge of the hood.

‘Lena, I’ve missed you so.’

But they hear what she says next, still turned towards them and smiling. She has switched to Russian.

‘Welcome to Sweden. I hope you’ll enjoy your stay.’