Two Soldiers (29 page)

He had not thought about visiting her again that day, or
that week. But when the car turned out of the parking lot at Solna coroner’s office, it was as if it steered itself toward Solna kyrkväg and Norra cemetery and then chose to stop in front of Gate 1.

“Do you want to come?”

Ewert Grens was on his way to her grave. To Anni. And he had asked someone else to come.

Sven didn’t answer at first. Ewert had never even considered the question before. This was his private place, a part of Ewert Grens that no one would ever get close to.

An extraordinary question.

The uncomfortable silence while his boss stood there with the door open, waiting for an answer.

“No.”

He wouldn’t go.

“Thank you, Ewert, but no.”

Grens walked through the grounds with silent graves. For a short while something akin to peace was in his heart. The place he had so long feared and not dared to visit now gave him a peace that he found nowhere else.

He watered again, straightened and pushed down the white cross until it stood firm.

It felt good to stand by her grave and cross.

With her, on this day.

A bit more water, to be on the safe side.

———

Sven was sitting on the end of the hood when Ewert came through the gate from the cemetery, which was always open. His face resting in the September sun, he had his eyes closed, a scrap of summer left on his warm cheeks.

“A little longer, Ewert.”

The detective superintendent seemed to be calmer, his bulky body less in conflict with everything around him.

“Jump in. You can sunbathe more another day.”

Without being aware of it, Sven listened to the voice in the way he always did, comparing it with other Ewert voices. This one was friendly. He didn’t just look calmer, he
was
calmer.

“I’ve just spoken to one of the guys from the bomb squad.”

“And?”

“The apartment that you thought smelled like marzipan, the stain in the middle of the kitchen table.”

“Sven?”

“They’ve analyzed it. Nitroglycerine. The active component in dynamite.”

They were still standing outside the car, hadn’t gotten in.

“The dog noticed something on the same table, two centimeters away, something that looked like white cake crumbs. ANFO. Bulk industrial explosives. Extremely powerful, normally used for blasting tunnels.”

Hands on the warm metal body of the car.

“And on another visit, just now, they found some pieces of white and green plastic casing in the doorway to the sitting room. Detonator wires.”

In one single movement, one single breath, Ewert Grens lost the peace he had taken back with him.

“Dynamite. ANFO. Detonators.”

“Yes.”

“You know what that means.”

“I think so.”

“They’ve built a bomb, Sven.”

They had just reversed out of the parking space in front of
Gate 1 and started to drive down Solna kyrkväg toward Solnavägen and Vasastan when Grens pulled to the side and stopped.

Eight thousand council apartments in identical blocks.

“We won’t manage it in time.”

They would have to open every door, window, cellar.

“Sven,
we won’t manage in time
.”

He switched off the engine; it made it easier to speak.

“The six addresses that we’ve got a warrant to bug. Places where Jensen and Milton have been observed. Just bugging isn’t enough.
We have to go in
.”

“But we can’t. We’ve got a warrant to intercept, but not to search. None of them are suspected of a crime.”

“Six break-ins, Sven, at the same time in six apartments. Using the same tactic.”

“That’s illegal.”

“Stun grenade and tear gas and Sig Sauer 226 and Heckler and Koch MP5A2.”

“It would be a breach of duty.”

“Every person in every apartment on the floor. Every room and every wardrobe and every drawer, no matter how small it is, ransacked.”

“Ewert . . .”

“A dead young woman, Sven. A bomb. And you’re sitting there talking about Prosecution Authority forms?”

He opened the wardrobe. Mirror on the inside of the door.
The beige jacket, he liked it a lot.

He put out the plate of almond slices and bag of pastries, went down the corridor to the coffee machine and pressed first for a cup of hot water and then three coffees, one black, one with double sugar, and one with whitish-yellow powder that was supposed to resemble milk. Continued on to the kitchen, a teabag and a tray for carrying the four full cups.

“
Extra
sugar.”

He put the first warm cup down with great care by one of Hermansson’s notebooks.

“And this one . . . something like milk.”

He smiled vaguely at Sven, who moved his cell phone to make room.

“Tea. Yellow-and-red packaging. I’ve never managed to learn the different kinds.”

Lars Ågestam accepted a cup of the tea that was kept in square boxes in kitchens in soulless workplaces and tasted of absolutely nothing. Grens made sure that each of them had gotten the right cup while he himself held the one with black coffee.

“Help yourselves.”

He turned down the edges of the white paper bag and held out the plate. Sven and Mariana looked at each other, they were thinking the same thing: only once before had Ewert Grens ever gotten coffee for anyone other than himself.

“Almond slice. And pastries in the bag.”

Danish pastries with yellow custard in the middle. Almond slices with pink icing.

He took one of each when the others hesitated, and met their eyes, one at time.

Satisfied. That’s how he looked.

“Because it’s a perfect day for almond slices. Go on, take one. Before they’re all gone.”

He broke off another half, chewed, drank up what was left in the plastic cup, and then got up and went over to his desk.

Grens had a yellow mat on his desk.

At least, that’s what it looked like when he lifted it up and held it toward them. But if they leaned closer they could see that it was yellow Post-it notes side by side, on top of each other, each one with something written on it.

“Every time I come in here it looks like this.”

He put down the underlay and pulled off one of the notes.

“Vincent Carlsson, Swedish Television.”

He crumpled it up and dropped it in the trash can.

“Johanna Linder, Swedish Radio.”

He crumpled that one too, then ripped it to pieces to be sure and let the pieces float down toward the first one.

“Viveka Lind, Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå. Jovan Mravac,
Expressen
. Sune Johannesson,
Kristianstadsbladet
. Riita Strömberg,
Göteborgs-Posten
. Lisa Erixon,
Sydsvenska Dagbladet
.”

One at a time, scrunched up and tossed into the trash can on top of the others.

“No doubt they’re all good people, from reputable newspapers. But none of them will talk to me or you. I don’t want anything public yet. I have no intention of helping to bolster a murderer’s criminal status.”

Half of them remained. His palm against the mat when he swept them all at once to the floor.

“I’m not going to answer a single question. And you’re not going to either. You won’t hear
gang war
and
murder hunt
. The only thing you’re going to do is to make sure that any press conferences arranged by the people who are paid to do that, are as far away as possible and
about as little as possible. They have . . . to see themselves on TV . . . they thrive on the attention and are not going to get any air from me.”

Ewert Grens bent down to the floor and gathered up the yellow Post-it notes that hadn’t landed where they should, and then he went back over to the sofa and the plastic cups standing beside a paper bag and a greasy cake plate. Sven, Hermansson, and Ågestam had all drunk nearly half of their cups and eaten an almond slice as well as a pastry.

Thus far it had been a very good first case meeting.

“We know that they’ve committed murder. That they have a bomb at their disposal. And that they are expanding fast and about to succeed.”

And in exactly thirty seconds everything would be even better.

“We have no choice.”

They would go in where they could, close in on the fugitives, and then disappear.

“From now on, we have to use coercive measures.”

———

Wanda roamed aimlessly through the rooms she so seldom visited, her own apartment in the middle of Råby. It felt good to be here and her body relaxed, music in the kitchen and the hall, and she danced a few steps. Gabriel didn’t like listening to voices singing, it made his head spin, and here she could choose whoever she liked and turn the volume up loud. It was the middle of the day and she had just woken up, she was so tired. As she swayed and twisted to the refrain she held a hand on her stomach that had not yet started to swell, but still felt so big. It must have been later that everything happened at once. The crash of a window being broken in the kitchen and the black thing that wobbled, then rolled fast across the sitting room floor and the terrible bang and the light that was all white so she couldn’t see and then the next bang from the sitting room with more bright white light and the door in the hallway was broken in two and everything moving around her and she couldn’t see properly, could only make out shadows that came closer and pushed her to the floor and held her
neck down firmly and pulled her hands behind her back and clicked hard metal around her wrists. She guessed four or five or six from the front door and one or two from the kitchen and maybe one or two from the balcony, and if all the movement around her was people and if the black things on their heads were helmets and the thing in front of their faces was a visor, if that was the case, then there were about ten of them up close and even though blood was running from her eardrums she heard them shouting and the one on top of her was so heavy and pushed even harder when she tried to get up.

———

Lars Ågestam took another small bite of the pastry that seemed to swell in his mouth and get even bigger whenever he tried to swallow. He couldn’t do it. He sat still and looked straight ahead while he pushed it back between the cake plate and the cup of tea.

“Coercive measures?”

The public prosecutor wouldn’t lift up the brown plastic cup once more.

“Later, Ågestam.”

Lars Ågestam had thought of asking again, but chose to nod instead, pretended to carry on chewing and then smiled when he pointed to Grens.

“You’ve got a new jacket. And bought us cakes.”

Ewert Grens didn’t smile back. He tried, he did every time, but it didn’t work and he was still not entirely sure why. Perhaps because the young prosecutor who had risen to chief district prosecutor within only a few years represented everything he wasn’t, he worked as hard, spent just as much time in the corridors of the police headquarters, but for different reasons—Grens worked because he liked working more than not working, Ågestam did it because he liked promotion. Perhaps it was because one had been educated by life, the other by university, so they viewed the way forward very differently. Perhaps it was because one of them was younger and still had all the big decisions ahead of him, and one of them was older and could only make the decision once more.

Grens moved the plate of cakes and two of the cups and then went to get his computer, which he positioned in the middle of the coffee table so that everyone could see. The image that had assaulted
CAMERA
7
, Österåker prison wall, top corner.

He had looked straight into the camera, posed, his face uncovered.

His posture, his features, it could have been the same person, they were even the same age.

“Leon Jensen. He looks the same, moves the same. As his father.”

The cursor on his face, he froze the picture, zoomed in.

“Daniel Jensen. That is what his father was called before he disappeared. The first person in our witness protection program.”

Ewert Grens’s hand knocked the screen as he pointed, the finger that outlined the face had tried to push it down from the wall.

“He gave us his friends. His girlfriend. And we gave him a new identity and a stay in a hostel in Småland where he had no contact with his past. It worked for six months. Drugs. If you’re craving drugs and don’t have any money, you have to turn to crime. He went to prison again, under his new name, a destructive but intelligent young man who changed into a bumbling small-time dealer, in and out all the time.”

The quality of the security camera picture wasn’t particularly good, and when Grens took them even closer by zooming in a bit more, Leon Jensen’s face turned into big dots that didn’t stick together and his eyes became two empty holes.

“Since last night, I’ve tried to go back,
remember
, but all I can pull out is as blurred as this damn picture. Only one day is clear. The third and last time that I visited him. A red house in the woods, just outside Nässjö. I’d gone there to tell him that his girlfriend had been pregnant. And that she’d given birth to his son the day before. It was later that evening that he told me to go to hell; he fell off the wagon again and left both the red house and the witness protection program.”

———

Deniz was standing in the bathroom when she heard the elevator stop on the sixth floor and the doors open without anyone getting in
or coming out. She adjusted the mirror and then brushed her newly washed hair and smiled at the naked woman who was over forty and now dared to look at herself without seeing and magnifying the things that no one else saw but that it was so easy to imagine that was all they saw. She had learned to identify the sounds in the building that housed forty-eight apartments and in the past few minutes had heard several different kinds of feet. Midday on a Sunday, there weren’t usually that many people around so high up, even on a weekday morning—she guessed there were four or five pairs that stopped when they got to this floor. She toweled her hair one more time, a quick glance in the mirror, long enough to be proud of herself—all the energy that young women wasted on trying to outrun self-loathing—and the acceptance that comes with middle age. A ring on the front doorbell. Someone had pressed it, two short signals. She didn’t open. She never did. But she could hear voices and then one of them opened the mailbox and shouted in, and when she left the bathroom to see what it was all about, she heard the noise of a ten-centimeter piece of steel in the lock and another sound that was a crowbar breaking open the door, mixed with the screams of her five-year-old daughter who came running out of the sitting room, but most of all, the noise of her own thoughts about Eddie, who was still out there, somewhere.

———

“Does she know?”

“I’m sorry?”

“That you took her boyfriend from her? She was pregnant and she wasn’t told where he was. He just disappeared. Does she know now?”

“Does she know what?”

“What happened? Where he went?”

“No.”

Mariana Hermansson didn’t take her eyes off Ewert Grens, it was important that he should feel it, even though she had learned long ago that that face meant the same as no answer. And she wasn’t going to ask any more either. About why a pregnant woman hadn’t been told. Not yet. He probably couldn’t even answer the question himself.

Grens emptied the plastic cup that had already been empty for some time, the final few drops hiding at the bottom. He put a hand on the coffee table, drew it across the surface, as with the Post-it notes a while ago, only now it was pastry crumbs and he swept them over the edge of the table onto the floor.

The picture on the computer screen that was zoomed in on a face that was dots and holes now turned into a film sequence that was almost six years old, from a security camera that was far from any prison wall.

A jeweler’s shop. One of the wide avenues in Skärholmen Shopping Center. The camera was positioned high up behind the counter.

They all leaned in again.

The picture was black-and-white. It wasn’t as jumpy as security camera films often are, and the focus was good. Jewelry in glass cases. A shop assistant straightening a pearl necklace on one of the shelves by the window. Then someone comes in through the door. Light-colored shoes. Dark track pants. A gray top with the hood over his head. Another person behind him. And another. Until there are about twenty of them. A couple of them in puberty, the others yet to reach it.

“There’s no sound. But several witnesses describe the same silence in real life. They say nothing, just walk in and position themselves.”

Twenty-one hoodies all in a row, a big U along the walls. And at the edge of the picture, a further ten outside the shop. One of them has a paving stone in his right hand, raises it, throws it at the window. The shop assistant, a middle-aged woman, runs out of the shop and then disappears out of the picture at the moment when the line of twenty-one turns around and smashes all the display cases with hammers and stones and gloved hands, then takes out folded plastic bags from the front pocket of their hoodies and empties the shelves of wedding rings, engagement rings, necklaces, watches, christening gifts, earrings, bracelets, silver plates.

Until Ewert Grens pressed pause and froze the picture.

“Leon Jensen was twelve years old. And had already learned how to exploit his friends for his own means.”

Grens pressed the tip of his index finger against the screen, against the one who had thrown the paving stone and then taken a few steps into the shop and stood there, directing every movement without speaking once.

The sequence carried on.

Twenty-one bulging plastic bags, as they calmly walk out of the empty shop and through the shopping center’s wide main avenue, held triumphantly high above their heads.

“That very same morning, he’d run away from a special training center in Örkelljunga, five hundred kilometers away. And in order to get home, to get here, and rob this jeweler’s shop in the afternoon, he’d stolen a total of four cars, all Mercedes. Each to their own. But the head of the center had a Mercedes. And Leon Jensen was shown by the others who were there how to steal it. He
learned
Mercedes. School for crime, twelve years old, that would be sixth grade, wouldn’t it?”