To the Top of the Mountain

32

THEY WERE AS close to one another as they could get. Though the blinds couldn’t stop the sun in its tracks, they lay pressed up close to one another, as much of their bodies as possible touching the other’s. The heat could never be oppressive.

It was forty degrees in the little flat on Surbrunnsgatan.

They had done something that neither of them had done before. They had skipped work. Suddenly, as if following a simultaneous, shared impulse, they had just gone home and made love. As though they had been following orders from some higher and more important being than the National Police Commissioner.

Both realised – around the same time – that they had wandered into an emotional wilderness of work, work and nothing but work, and that they had only now found an oasis; not another mirage, but an oasis. That was where they planned to stay. That was where they planned to settle down.

Nothing else would have been able to tear them from their duties.

Only this. A higher calling, a higher right.

They would get to know one another inside and out, out and in. Nothing would be kept secret any longer.

Still, that was exactly what happened. Two walls were raised between their tightly entwined bodies. Walls of sworn secrecy, built from both sides. And between them, a strange minefield.

They tried to convince themselves that the walls didn’t affect them, that they didn’t have anything to do with their being together – only with their jobs. But it didn’t quite work. Their jobs were a part of them.

There are, essentially, only two real attitudes to work. Either you can take any job at all, so long as the pay cheque falls into your hands at the end of the month, or you can deliberately look for a job that, in some way, chimes with your character.

Both Sara Svenhagen and Jorge Chavez had done the latter. When they worked on their investigations, when they slowly but surely worked their way towards hidden truths, they were also doing something else. Something more important. They were restoring an order, finding patterns in their environment, exposing hidden structures, slowly approaching the meaning itself. They were devoted. There was no other word for it.

And now they were also devoted to one another. Two devotees in an embrace.

Jorge agonised over how ungrateful he had been. Determined ‘only’ to help find the Kvarnen Killer, Sara had given the A-Unit photographic material which had enabled them to identify the whole of Gang Two and also provided them with pictures of all of Gang One. It was like a token of her affection. Unfortunately, the picture of the ‘policeman’ was as good as non-existent, and it was ultimately this policeman that was the reason behind his ungratefulness. If a policeman really was involved, then the strictest possible secrecy was absolutely essential, and that meant it was impossible to discuss any of the main points of the Sickla Slaughter. He was convinced that an exchange of ideas about Niklas Lindberg and Bullet Kullberg really would help move the case forward; he would have loved to hear Sara’s thoughts on Rajko Nedic and Lordan Vukotic, on Danne Blood Pudding and Roger Sjöqvist, Sven Joakim Bergwall, Eskil Carlstedt and a gang of probable war criminals from the former Yugoslavia. And, above all, on the ‘policeman’. But he couldn’t. A wall was preventing it.

Of course, Sara had wondered what the strange cry of ‘The policeman’ had meant, the thing Jorge had blurted out when the photograph of the hidden man was developed. But it had quickly disappeared behind a dilemma of her own. Her wall. Her boss, Detective Superintendent Ragnar Hellberg, had silenced her investigation, classified it as top secret – and the question was whether that was a case of misconduct. Or even a crime. He had deliberately erased all traces of an email address that had appeared quite frequently on various paedophile websites: ‘brambo’. Judging by all appearances, ‘brambo’ was a paedophile, active online. She had two possible options. Either she could confront Ragnar Hellberg, or she could keep searching for ‘brambo’s’ identity. The only thing she couldn’t do was talk to Jorge. That was her wall and no one else’s.

And so they lay there, as close to one another as they could possibly be. But still oceans apart.

Between them, a strange minefield.