Frozen Tracks

2

IT WAS A QUIET NIGHT AT THE EMERGENCY DESK, AND IT FELT LIKE the calm before the storm. But there won’t be any storm tonight, thought Bengt Josefsson, the duty officer, gazing out at the trees that were also still, like they are before an autumn gale. But it’s too late for autumn gales now, he thought. Soon it’ll be Christmas. And after that maybe we won’t be around anymore. They’re talking about closing down this station, and Redbergsplatsen will be handed back to the enemy.

The telephone rang.

“Police, Örgryte-Härlanda, Josefsson.”

“Ah, yes. Well. Er, good evening. Is this the police?”

“Yes.”

“I called the police switchboard and they said they’d connect me to a station close to Olskroken. Er, that’s where we live.”

“You’ve got the right number,” said Josefsson. “How can I help you?”

“Well, er, I don’t really know what to say.”

Josefsson waited, pen at the ready. A colleague dropped something hard on the floor in the locker room at the end of the corridor.

“Just tell me what it’s about,” he said. “Who am I talking to?”

She gave her name and he wrote it down. Berit Skarin.

“It’s about my little boy,” she said. “He, er, I don’t know… He told us tonight, if we understood him correctly, er, that he’s been sitting in a car with a ‘mister,’ as he put it.”

Kalle Skarin was four, and when he got back home from the nursery school he’d had a soft-cheese sandwich and a cup of hot chocolate-he’d mixed the cocoa and sugar and a splash of cream himself, and then Mom added the hot milk.

Shortly afterward he’d said he’d been sitting in a car.

A car?

A car. Big car, with a radio. Radio talked and played music.

Did you and your friends go out on a trip today?

Not a trip. Playground.

Are there cars there?

The boy had nodded.

Toy cars?

Big car, he’d told her. Real car. Real, and he’d moved his hands as if he were holding a steering wheel. Brrrrm, brrrrmm.

Where?

Playground.

Kalle. Are you saying you went for a ride in a car at the playground?

He’d nodded.

Who did you go with?

A mister.

A mister?

Mister, mister. He had candies!

Kalle had made a new gesture that could have been somebody holding out a bag of candy, or maybe not.

Berit Skarin had felt a cold shiver run down her spine. A strange man holding out a bag of candy to her little boy.

Olle ought to hear this, but he won’t be back until late.

And Kalle was sitting there in front of her. She’d held him when he’d jumped up to go and watch a children’s program on TV.

Did the car drive away?

Drove, drove. Brrrrrrmm.

Did you go far?

He didn’t understand the question.

Was your teacher with you?

No teacher. Mister.

Then he’d run off to the TV room. She’d watched him go and thought for a moment, then gone to get her handbag from a chair in the kitchen and looked up the home telephone number of one of the nursery-school staff, hesitated when she got as far as the phone, but called anyway.

“Ah. Sorry to disturb you in the evening like this, er, it’s Berit Skarin. Yes, Kalle’s mom. He’s just told me something that I have to ask you about.”

Bengt Josefsson listened. She told him about the conversation she’d had with one of the nursery school staff.

“Nobody noticed anything,” said Berit Skarin.

“I see.”

“Can that kind of thing happen?” she asked. “Can somebody drive up in a car and then drive off with one of the children without any of the staff seeing anything? Then bring the child back again?”

Much worse things than that can happen, thought Josefsson.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The staff didn’t notice anything, you say?”

“No. Surely they would have?”

“You’d think so,” said Josefsson, but in fact he was thinking something else. Who can be on the lookout all the time? Thinking who’s that man standing under the tree over there? Sitting in that car?

“How long does your boy say he was away?”

“He doesn’t know. He’s a child. He can’t distinguish between five minutes and fifty minutes if you ask him afterward.”

Bengt Josefsson pondered this.

“Do you believe him?” he asked.

No reply.

“

Fru Skarin?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”

“Does he have, er, a lively imagination?”

“He’s a child. All children have lively imaginations if there’s nothing wrong with them.”

“Yes.”

“So what should I do?”

Bengt Josefsson looked down at the few sentences he’d jotted down on his notepad.

Two colleagues came racing past his desk.

“Robbery at the newspaper kiosk!” one of them yelled.

He could already hear the siren from one of the cars outside.

“Hello?” said Berit Skarin.

“Yes, where were we? Well, I’ve noted down what you said. Anyway, nobody’s missing. So, if you want to report it, then, er-”

“What should I report?”

That’s the point, thought Josefsson. Unlawful deprivation of liberty? No. An attempted sexual offense, or preparation for one? Well, perhaps. Or the imagination of a very young man. He evidently hadn’t come to any harm be-

“I want to take him to a doctor now,” she said, interrupting his train of thought. “I take this very seriously.”

“Yes,” said Josefsson.

“Should I take him to a doctor?”

“Have you, er, examined him yourself?”

“No. I called right after he told me.”

“Oh.”

“But I will now. Then I’ll see where we go from there.” He heard her shouting for the boy, and a reply from some distance away. “He’s watching TV,” she said. “Now he’s laughing.”

“Can I make a note of your address and phone number?” said Josefsson.

There were the sirens again. It sounded as if they were heading east. Chasing the robbers. A couple of thugs from one of the ghettos north of the town, drugged up to the eyeballs. Dangerous as hell.

“OK, thank you very much,” he said, his mind miles away, and hung up. He made his handwriting clearer in a couple of places, then put the page to one side, ready for keying into the computer. Later on he’d put his notes into the file, if he got around to it. Filed under… what? Nothing had happened. A crime waiting to be committed?

There were other things that had already happened, were happening right now.

The phone on his desk rang again, phones were ringing all over the station. Sirens outside, coming from the south. He could see the flashing blue light on the other side of the street, whirling around and around as if the officers in the patrol car were about to take off and fly over to where all the action was.

Jakob, the student, was conscious but very groggy and in a world of his own. Ringmar by his side, wondering what had happened and how. There were flowers on the bedside table. Jakob was not alone in this world.

Somebody entered the ward behind Ringmar. Could that be a flash of recognition in Jakob’s eye? Ringmar turned around.

“They said it was alright for me to come in,” said the girl, with a bunch of flowers in her hand. She seemed to be about the same age as his own daughter. Maybe they know each other, he thought, getting to his feet as she walked over to the bed, gave Jakob a cautious little hug, and then put the flowers down on the table. Jakob’s eyes were closed now; he’d probably nodded off again.

“Even more flowers,” she said, and Ringmar could see that she would have liked to take a look at the card with the other bouquet but couldn’t bring herself to do it. She turned to face him.

“So you’re Moa’s dad, are you?”

Good. Moa had done her job.

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe we should go to the waiting room and have a little chat.”

“I suppose he was just unlucky,” she said. “Wrong man in the wrong place, or however you put it.”

They sat down by a window. The gray light of day outside seemed translucent. The room was in a strange sort of shadow cast by a sun that wasn’t there. A woman coughed quietly on a sofa by a low wooden table weighed down by magazines with cover photos of well-known people, smiling. Well-known to whom? Ringmar had wondered more than once. Visiting hospitals was part of his job, and he’d often wondered why

Hello and similar magazines were always piled up in dreary hospital waiting rooms. Maybe they were a kind of comfort, like a little candle burning on the tables of these huge wards. All of you in that magazine, who are photographed at every premiere there is, maybe used to be like us, and maybe we can be like you if we get well again and are discovered in the hectic search for new talent. That search was nonstop, never ending. The photos of those celebrities were proof of that. There was no room for faded Polaroids of crushed skulls.

“It wasn’t bad luck,” said Ringmar now, looking at the girl.

“You look younger than I expected,” she said.

“Based on Moa’s description of me, you mean,” he said.

She smiled, then turned serious again.

“Do you know anybody who really disliked Jakob?” Ringmar asked.

“Nobody disliked him,” she said.

“Is there anybody he dislikes?”

“No.”

“Nobody at all?”

“No.”

Maybe it’s the times we live in, Ringmar thought, and if so it has to be a good thing. When I was young we were always mad at everything and everybody. Angry all the time.

“How well do you know him?” he asked.

“Well… he’s my friend.”

“Do you have more mutual friends?”

“Yes, of course.”

Ringmar looked out of the window. Some fifty meters away two kids were standing at the bus stop in the rain, holding their hands up to the sky as if giving thanks. Not an enemy in the world. Even the damned rain was a dear friend.

“No violent types in your circle of friends?” asked Ringmar.

“Certainly not.”

“What were you doing when Jakob was attacked?”

“When exactly was it?” she asked.

“I’m not really allowed to tell you that,” he said, and proceeded to do so.

“I’d been asleep for about two hours,” she said.

But Jakob wasn’t asleep. Ringmar could see him in his mind’s eye, walking across the square named after Doktor Fries. Heading for the streetcar stop? There weren’t any streetcars at that time of night. And then somebody appeared out of nowhere, and one hell of a bash on the back of his head. No help from Dr. Fries. Left there to bleed to death, if the guy who’d called the police hadn’t passed by shortly after it had happened and seen the kid lying there.

Jakob, the third victim. Three different places in town. The same type of wound. Could have been fatal, really. But none of them actually had died. Not yet, he thought. The other two victims had no idea. Just a blow from behind. Saw nothing, just felt.

“Do you live together?” he asked.

“No.”

Ringmar said nothing for a moment. The two kids had just jumped aboard a bus. Maybe it was getting a bit brighter in the west, a slight glint of light blue. The waiting room was high up in the hospital, which itself was on top of a hill. Maybe he was looking at the sea, a big gray expanse under the blue.

“You weren’t worried about him?”

“What do you mean, worried?”

“Where he was that night? What he was doing?”

“Hang on, we’re not married or anything like that. We’re just friends.”

“So you didn’t know where Jakob was that night?”

“No.”

“Who does he know out there?”

“Where?”

“In Guldheden. Around Doktor Fries Square, Guldheden school, that district.”

“I don’t have the slightest idea.”

“Do you know anybody around there?”

“Who lives there, you mean? I don’t think so. No.”

“But that’s where he was, and that’s where he was attacked,” said Ringmar.

“You’ll have to ask him,” she said.

“I’ll do that, as soon as it’s possible.”

Winter had taken Elsa to the nursery school. He sat there for a while with a cup of coffee while she arranged her day’s work on her little desk: a red telephone, paper, pencils, crayons, newspapers, tape, string. He would get to see the result that afternoon. It would be something unique, no doubt about that.

She barely noticed when he gave her a hug and left. He lit a Corps in the grounds outside. He couldn’t smoke anything else after all those years. He’d tried, but it was no use. Corps were no longer sold in Sweden, but a colleague made regular visits to Brussels and always brought some back for him.

It was a pleasant morning. The air smelled of winter but it felt like early autumn. He took another puff, then unbuttoned his overcoat and watched children hard at work: building projects involving digging and stacking, molding shapes; every kind of game you could think of. Games. Not much sign of games in the sports grown-ups indulge in nowadays, he thought, and noticed a little boy running down the slope toward a gap in the bushes. Winter looked around and saw the two staff members were fully occupied with children who wanted something or were crying or laughing or running around in all directions, and so he strode swiftly down the hill and into the bushes where the boy was busy hitting the railings with his plastic shovel. He turned around as Winter approached and gave him a sheepish grin, like a prisoner who’d been caught trying to escape.

Winter shepherded the little boy back to the fold, listening to some story he couldn’t quite understand but nodding approvingly even so. One of the ladies in charge was standing halfway up the slope.

“I didn’t know there was a fence there,” said Winter.

“It’s a good thing there is,” she said. “We’d never be able to keep them on the premises otherwise.”

He caught sight of Elsa on her way out into the grounds: She’d clearly decided it was time to take a rest from all that paperwork.

“Hard to keep an eye on all of them at the same time, eh?” he said.

“Yes, it is now.” He detected a sort of sigh. “I shouldn’t stand here complaining, but since you ask, well, it’s a case of more and more children and fewer and fewer staff.” She made a gesture. “But at least we’ve got them fenced in here.”

Winter watched Elsa playing on the swings. She shouted out when she saw him, and he waved back.

“How do you manage when you take them out for trips? Or take the whole class to the park, or to a bigger playground?”

“We try not to,” she said.

Ringmar was with the student, Jakob Stillman. The latter had been living up to his name, but now he seemed able to move his head slowly, and with some difficulty he could focus on Ringmar from his sickbed. Ringmar had introduced himself.

“I’d just like to ask you a few questions,” he said. “I suggest you blink once if your answer is yes, and twice if it’s no. OK?”

Stillman blinked once.

“Right.” Ringmar moved the chair a bit closer. “Did you see anybody behind you before you were hit?

One blink.

“Ah, so you did see something?” Ringmar asked.

One blink again. Yes.

“Was it far away?”

Two blinks. No.

“Were you alone when you started walking across the square?” Yes.

“But you were able to see somebody coming toward you?”

No.

“So somebody was behind you?”

Yes.

“Could you make anything out?”

Yes.

“Did you see a face?”

No.

“A body?”

Yes.

“Big?”

No blinking at all. This boy is smarter than I am, thought Ringmar.

“Medium-size?”

Yes.

“A man?”

Yes.

“Would you recognize him again?”

No.

“Was he very close when you saw him?”

Yes.

“Did you hear anything?”

Yes.

“Did you hear the sound before you saw him?”

Yes.

“Was that why you turned around?”

Yes.

“Was it the sound of his footsteps?”

No.

“Was it the sound of some object scraping the ground?”

No.

“Was it a noise that had nothing to do with him?”

No.

“Was it something he said?”

Yes.

“Did it sound like Swedish?”

No.

“Did it sound like some other language?”

No.

“Was it more like a shriek?”

No.

“More like a grunt?”

Yes.

“Something deeper?”

Yes.

“A human sound?”

No.

“But it came from him?”

Yes.