The gleaming new car gathered speed on its way through the landscape as it changed from rural to urban, and then through the northern suburbs, on towards central Stockholm.
Suspects were questioned in a room below the custody cells.
Wasn’t much of a room, really.
Filthy walls, which had been white once, a heavily barred window at the far end, a worn pine table in the middle of the floor and four plain wooden chairs, straight out of some school canteen.
Sven Sundkvist, interview leader (IL): Please remain seated. Hilding Oldйus (HO): Why the fuck are you picking up innocent people?
IL: Mixing amphetamines with washing powder, you call that innocent?
HO: Don’t know what you’re on about.
IL: Crap drugs. Cut. So far we’ve got three users with corroded veins. They gave us your name.
HO: What the fuck are you talking about?
IL: And you were in possession.
HO: Wasn’t mine.
IL: We took the bags of white powder from you at the time of your arrest. All six were sent to the labs.
HO: Weren’t fucking mine.
IL: Twenty per cent amphetamine, twenty-two per cent Panadol Extra and fifty-eight per cent washing powder. Oldйus, sit down.
Ewert Grens opened the door and went in. He had to pass through eight locked doors to get here, but hadn’t even noticed. His mind was on the reports, and he could still hear Sven’s voice reading aloud, ‘causing serious injury’, over and over in his head. And he saw the police van that hadn’t stopped in time, him holding her in his arms until the paramedics put her on a stretcher and carried her off, away from him.
He was fighting Sven’s voice, trying to rid himself of the words, and looked up briefly into the harsh overhead light. Then he concentrated on the man sitting opposite Sven, noted his thin face and how a finger was scratching nervously at a wound on one nostril, the drops of blood trickling down towards his mouth and chin.
IL: DSI Ewert Grens enters at oh nine twenty-two.
HO: [inaudible]
IL: What was that, Oldйus?
HO: Wasn’t fucking mine.
IL: Stop messing about. We know you sold cut speed on the Plain.
HO: Know fucking everything, don’t you?
IL: We arrested you there. With the bags full of washing powder.
HO: Wasn’t fucking mine. Some guy handed it to me when I got there. What a cunt, passing on crap like that. I’ll sort him when I get out of here.
Ewert Grens (eg): You’re going nowhere.
HO: What? Fucking pig.
IL: Plenty of people who’d like to get hold of you, Oldйus. And if just one customer who bought that shit off you reports it, we’ll charge you with attempted murder. That’s you inside for between six months and eight years.
Hilding got up, walked jerkily about in the tight space, suddenly stopped and struck out with one arm, lowered it and walked on a few more steps, stopped again and started speaking incoherently. He rambled on, his head first shaking, then tossing from side to side. His thin body, that was screaming for heroin, that ate and spewed, was disintegrating as they watched.
Ewert looked at Sven. They had seen all this before, of course, and knew he might sit down again and tell them all they wanted to know. Or he might lie down on the floor in the foetal position and shake himself unconscious.
EG: Six months at least. Up to eight years. But you’re in luck. We’re in a good mood today. What if the impounded bags got lost?
HO: What the fuck d’you mean, lost?
EG: Well, there are things we’d like to hear more about. Tell us about a friend of yours called Lang. Jochum Lang. You know him.
HO: Never heard of him.
Hilding’s face was twitching violently. He grimaced, his eyes rolled back, his head turned this way and that. He scratched the wound. He was terrified. Jochum’s name clawed at his mind and he wanted to shake it off, dump it, he didn’t want it.
Not here. He was about to protest when someone knocked on the door. A woman detective put her head in. Ewert couldn’t remember her name, but she was a summer locum, Skеne dialect.
‘Sorry to interrupt. It’s for you, Superintendent. I think it’s important.’
Ewert waved her inside.
‘Don’t worry. This is all going to hell anyway. This little smack head seems to be in a rush to get out and die.’
Sven nodded when she glanced at him. She walked towards the table to stand behind Hilding. He got up, pointed at her, thrust his crotch at her lamely a few times.
‘Got yourself new pussy, Grens? Pig’s pussy, eh!’
She swung around, slapped him hard with the flat of her hand.
He lost his balance, stumbled forward holding both hands against his cheek, which flared bright red.
‘Fucking pig!’
She stared at him.
‘Inspector Hermansson to you. Get out. Now.’
Hilding, one hand covering his flushed cheek, kept swearing while Sven took a firm grip on his arm and escorted him out of the room.
Surprised, Ewert glanced at Sven, then turned to his young female colleague.
‘You’re Inspector Hermansson?’
‘That’s right.’
She was young, maybe twenty-five, no doubt in her eyes. She showed nothing. Neither surprise nor anger, unfazed by being called ‘pig’s pussy’, unexcited by having dealt a violent blow to Hilding’s face.
‘Something important, you said?’
‘The central switchboard called. You’re needed at an address in the Atlas district. Völund Street. Number three.’
Ewert took note and searched his memory; he’d been there before, not long ago.
‘It’s somewhere along the main railway line, isn’t it? St Erik’s Square area?’
‘That’s right. I checked it on the map.’
‘What’s up?’
She had a sheet of paper in her hand, torn from a police notebook, and she looked at it quickly, didn’t want to make a mistake. Not in front of Ewert.
‘Our local colleagues have forced entry, following a report of serious physical abuse in a flat on the fifth floor.’
‘And?’
‘It’s… quite urgent.’
‘Anything else?’
‘There’s a problem.’
It was one of the older properties in a good area and had been carefully restored. Each street door was flanked by well-kept lawns with small trees dotted about, despite the lack of room, and narrow borders glowed with red and yellow flowers.
Ewert Grens got out of the car and scanned the long faзade with its rows of windows. Turn-of-the-century building, the sort where you could hear your neighbours, their heavy steps in the kitchen, when they turned up the volume for the news, when they went out to put something in the rubbish chute. He looked at the windows with their expensive curtains. Flat after flat where people lived and died, only a breath away from their neighbours. But they never met, never knew anything about the person next door.
Sven Sundkvist, who had parked the car, joined him.
‘Völund Street. Looks expensive. Who can afford to live here?’ he muttered.
Eight windows on the fifth floor. Violence had broken out behind one of them. Ewert compared them. They all looked the same, the same damn curtains, the same damn plants – different colours, different patterns, but still the same.
He snorted in the general direction of the decorous faзade.
‘I don’t like physical abuse cases anywhere, but it’s worse in this sort of place. Which is as a rule where they happen.’
He looked around. An ambulance and two police cars with their chilly blue lights rotating. Maybe ten or so curious neighbours standing about near the parked cars, not crowding in on the place, decent enough to show a little proper respect, something that didn’t always happen. The street door was held open by a rope tied to a bicycle rack. Ewert and Sven walked along the flagged path and into the lobby. Large wrought-iron numerals set into the wall near the doorway said ‘1901’. So it was built at the turn of the century. Satisfied, Ewert nodded to himself and started to study the list of tenants’ names. Four of them on the fifth floor: Palm, Nygren, Johansson, Löfgren.