He did what she wanted.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes.’
‘The woman wants me to read a name she has written on a piece of paper. It seems to have been torn from a notebook. It says Bengt Nordwall. That’s all.’
The voice asked him to repeat what he had just said.
‘Bengt Nordwall. Nothing else. What she has written is pretty hard to read, but I am certain I’ve got it right. Her English when she speaks isn’t that easy to understand either. My guess is that she comes from Russia. Or maybe one of the Baltic states.’
Lydia took the phone away from him and indicated that she wanted him to sit upright again.
She had heard him pronounce the name she had written down.
She had also heard him say Baltic.
She was satisfied.
Bengt Nordwall stared up at the sky. Grey, solid grey. The rain had followed his every step this summer. He sighed. This was supposed to be a time for winding down and relaxing, for gathering your strength for yet another winter. It would be one of those autumns again when, by mid-October already, people went into hiding in their offices, fed up with everything except their own company.
Silence everywhere, nothing to distract you from the sound of raindrops pattering on the cloth of the parasol.
Lena was sitting next to him, engrossed in a book. As usual. He wondered if she actually remembered the stories beyond the next day, let alone the next book, but reading was her way of unwinding. She would curl up in a chair, stuff a cushion behind her back and forget everything around her.
He was sitting in the same place as he had two days ago when Ewert had been next to him on the garden seat and it had rained just as hard. They had both been soaked to the skin, but their conversation was more important. They were so close, a closeness that can only develop with sufficient time.
He hadn’t guessed then that he would meet up with Ewert only the next day, outside that Baltic whore’s flat. Bengt could still see her. The skin on her back, torn apart by the whip. He felt bad, worse than uncomfortable. Not her. Not another terrible beating again. Not now.
Their garden wasn’t big, but he took pride in it. It was good for the kids, somewhere for them to run around. The last two years he had worked part-time, he was fifty-five and would never again experience young lives growing up around him. He had just this one chance and wanted to enjoy the children as much as possible. They were older now, of course, and could do most things on their own now, but he wanted to be there for them and joined in their playing from a distance. This summer even the kids had got fed up with playing outdoors. The sodden lawn was left alone, no footballs slammed into the roses and no one hid in the lilac bush while someone else counted to a hundred. Instead they sat holed up in their rooms, in front of their computer screens, caught up in an electronic world he knew absolutely nothing about.
Bengt looked at Lena again and smiled. She was so lovely. The long, blonde hair, her peaceful, intent face – a peace that he had never found. He remembered Vilnius. For a few years he had been the head of security at the Swedish embassy there and one day she had materialised at a departmental desk, a young and curious civil servant. He couldn’t understand why she had chosen him, but that was exactly what she had done: she had picked him, and somehow he, who had already been discarded once, had been lifted back into the realms of the eligible people who married and settled down.
A washed-up policeman, twenty years her senior.
He was still terrified that she might wake up one morning, look him in the eye, realise that she had made a mistake and ask him to leave.
‘Sweetie…’
She didn’t hear. He leaned towards her and lightly kissed her cheek.
‘Lena?’
‘What?’
‘Let’s go in.’
She shook her head.
‘Not yet. Soon. Just three more pages.’
Rain. He had been certain it couldn’t be any worse, but now it got heavier and sounded like it would soon rip through the protective material above their heads. The lawn around them slowly surrendered to the water and became boggy marshland.
Bengt looked at his wife. She was holding the book up in front of her face with both hands, hiding behind a chapter with three more pages to go.
But the other woman was insistent.
Lena was in front of him, but it wasn’t her he saw. Instead Bengt saw the other woman, her whipped back slashed, her skin ripped to shreds, congealing blood everywhere. He tried to push the sight out of his mind, but the image of the bloody whore wouldn’t go. When he closed his eyes it just got clearer; he saw her carried out on a stretcher, unconscious. He opened his eyes again but she was still there, her stretcher being manoeuvred through the splintered door. He cowered behind the feeling of unease, which then tipped over into a fear he didn’t want to feel.
‘What’s the matter?’
Lena had put the book down on the armrest and was looking at him.
He didn’t reply at first. Then he shrugged. ‘Nothing.’
‘I can see something’s up. Penny for your thoughts?’
Another light shrug of his shoulders, as carelessly as he could. ‘Nothing, really. I’m fine.’
She knew him too well, knew that whatever it was, it was definitely not nothing.
‘It’s a long time since I’ve seen you like that. You seem scared.’
The fucking awful welts on one of them, and the other one running round the flat screaming. Naked, beaten young bodies. Perhaps he ought to tell Lena. She had every right to know. The images haunted him. He had been utterly unprepared for it.
‘Your phone’s ringing.’
He looked at her, at her finger that was pointing at his jacket pocket, and he scrabbled to find the phone. The noise was stressing him out. Only four rings, then it would stop.
‘Nordwall.’
He held the phone pressed to his ear. The call didn’t take long, just a minute or so. He looked at his wife.
‘Something’s happened. They need an interpreter. I have to go.’
‘Where?’
‘Söder Hospital.’
He got up, kissed Lena’s cheek again and then bent his head to get out from under the parasol. Out into the pouring rain.
Söder Hospital. The Lithuanian girl. A mortuary.
Fear sunk its claws into him again.
The guard in the green uniform was sitting on the only bed in the room, with a bandage wound round his head. He had bled a great deal and the white fabric was stained a pale red. The nurse standing next to him had a Polish name on her ID tag. She had brought him two brown tablets that Ewert assumed were painkillers.
The guard didn’t have much to tell.
Lydia had been in the dayroom, quietly watching TV. The two lads from Ward 4 had been there too. The lunchtime news was on, some channel or other, he couldn’t remember which. She wanted to go to the toilet, no harm in that. Why refuse her? She was so small and frail, with one arm in plaster and a bad hip that made her limp. He hadn’t considered her dangerous, and besides, he couldn’t follow her when she went to the toilet, could he?
Ewert smiled. Of course you bloody well should. Your job was to watch her: when she slept, when she went for a dump.
The guard’s head hurt and he patted the bandage, touched the back of his neck. It had been a hard blow. She had flushed the toilet – he heard that, the water had rushed into the bowl twice. When she came out, she had signed to him that she wanted to go back to bed and that he should come with her. He didn’t think there was anything strange about that. He had followed her back here, to Room 2, and closed the door behind him, as per usual.