He looked at her.
All these women.
What had the expression on her face been while he beat her?
What had she said?
Green- and white-clad staff came hurrying along and sought some kind of confirmation from the doctor with the dark, exhausted eyes, indicating that they were ready to start. The patient was wheeled into the trauma room, expertly lifted on to a theatre trolley and wired up for monitoring her pulse, ECG and blood pressure. They opened her mouth to introduce a tube into her stomach and sucked away its contents. She became less human, less of a body, more statistics and graphs, it was easier then, easier to deal with.
Had she actually said anything?
Or screamed? What do you scream when someone is beating you?
He, of the tired eyes, couldn’t bring himself to leave her.
He wanted to see… What? He didn’t know what he wanted to see.
One of his colleagues had now taken over and was standing about a metre away carefully moving the woman they knew was called Lydia Grajauskas, turning her light body on its side to inspect the blood-soaked, shredded skin.
The sight upset him.
‘Hey, somebody! I need a hand.’
The tired young doctor stepped forward and saw what the doctor beside him had seen.
He counted.
When he reached thirty he stopped.
The stripes were red and swollen.
He sensed the tears coming and forced himself to hold them back. It happened from time to time. The obligation to stay professional took a physical effort. Must see her as statistics, as a set of graphs. I don’t know her, I don’t know her; it didn’t do the trick, not this time. Today there had been too much of this pointlessness he couldn’t understand.
This torn, red mess.
He said it out loud, maybe to hear what it sounded like, maybe to inform everyone, he couldn’t be sure which.
‘She’s been flogged!’
He repeated it more slowly, in a quieter voice.
‘She has been flogged. Multiple injuries. From the back of her neck all the way down to her behind. Her skin is… has been lacerated.’
The flat was lovely, he had to admit it. High ceilings, sanded floorboards and a tall tiled stove in every room. A home like this ought to be peaceful. Ewert Grens had settled down on one of the four folding plastic chairs in the kitchen. With Sven and two technicians in tow, he had investigated all the rooms now.
Who was the woman called Lydia Grajauskas? Who was her friend, who said her name was Alena Sljusareva? And who was the would-be Lithuanian diplomat, who said the flat was foreign territory and was known as Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp for short?
After the beaten Grajauskas woman had been carried off on a stretcher and before the technicians turned up on the scene, the other one, Sljusareva, had disappeared. Both women were prostitutes and came from one of the Baltic states, or possibly Russia. He had come across the sort before. The story was always the same. Some guy with the gift of the gab would arrive in the village and target girls with promises of work and good money in a Scandinavian welfare state. Young and poor, the girls would bite on the bait. The moment they accepted the false passports, they were transformed from hopeful teenagers into supposedly horny female slaves. Their passports cost money, of course, and the debt was too big for them to pay off outright. It had to be recovered from their earnings. A few of them would try to refuse, but would promptly be taught a lesson and would learn with time what a beating could mean. The girls were raped, over and over again, until they bled. With a gun pressed to their heads, they would be told to do it again and again – spread your fucking legs and do it, you’ve got to pay for your passport and the sea crossing. If you won’t fuck them, I’ll take you up the arse again! He, the persuader, who had beaten them and raped them at gunpoint, would sell them on afterwards, three thousand euros for every teenage girl shipped from east to west, who had learnt to groan with desire whenever someone penetrated her.
Ewert sighed and looked up when Sven came into the kitchen. He was ready to report on the contents of a cupboard they had missed the first time round.
‘Not a damn thing there either. No personal belongings at all.’
Several pairs of shoes, a couple of dresses and quite a few sets of bra and panties. And bottles of perfume and plastic toilet bags containing assorted make-up, a box of condoms, dildos and handcuffs. That was all. They had found nothing in the flat that couldn’t have been predicted if you started with the assumption that their life stories were all about sexual penetration.
Impatient, Ewert flapped his arms about.
‘These children without faces.’
These girls did not really exist. They had no identity, no work permit, no life of their own. They breathed, cautiously, inside a fifth-floor flat with electronic door locks in a big city which was very different from the one they had left.
‘Ewert, do we know how many of them we’ve got here in Stockholm?’
‘As many as the market demands.’
Ewert sighed again and bent forward to finger the wallpaper. The pimp had beaten her in here and her blood had congealed on the flowered pattern. In fact blood had splashed all over the place; even the ceiling was dotted with red spots. He was angry and tired and felt like shouting, but found himself whispering instead.
‘She’s here illegally. She’ll need to be guarded.’
‘She’s being operated on now.’
‘I mean afterwards, in the ward.’
‘It will take another couple of hours, the hospital tells me. Before she’s done.’
‘Sven, please get a guard for her. I don’t want her to disappear.’
Outside the house with the imposing faзade the street was silent and empty.
Ewert examined the windows in the house opposite. Nothing new there; they looked as blank and as orderly, with the same sort of curtains and flowerpots.
He felt deeply ill at ease.
The beaten woman, the pimp in the shiny suit and Bengt and the rest of his colleagues, waiting for nearly an hour while she lay unconscious and bleeding.
He felt chilly and tried to shake it off, together with the bad feeling, but did not know how to get rid of something like that.
It was half past ten in the morning. Jochum Lang served himself from the breakfast buffet in Ulriksdal Inn. Typical Yugo tactic: treat someone to something expensive and then start talking business. They had driven through the northern suburbs, heading straight for the talk that was due to start any time soon. One more piece of omelette. A cup of coffee to follow. Might as well make use of the mint-flavoured toothpicks too.
Lang let his eyes sweep over the breakfast room, all white tablecloths and heavy silver-plated cutlery and conference delegates eating their fill. Women with red cheeks were lighting cigarettes, men sitting as close to them as they could, after pouring themselves yet another cup of coffee. He laughed at the encounters and expectations; he didn’t do things like that, never had done, had never understood the point of such a predictable game.
‘So what’s on your mind?’
They hadn’t exchanged more than a word or two on the way, since Slobodan had met him at the gate of Aspsеs prison in the shiny car and Jochum let himself be driven away, had sat in the leather passenger seat and thrown away the shreds of the standard one-way train ticket.
Now the two of them were waiting and watching each other across the beautifully laid breakfast table in the expensive restaurant ten minutes from the centre of Stockholm.