She pointed at him. Spoke. ‘Bengt Nordwall.’
Her voice sounded as calm and collected as ever.
‘Turn around, Bengt Nordwall. Hands up all the time.’
He turned, observing the explosives covering every door frame.
One turn, then he faced her again. She nodded.
‘Good. Tell these people they can leave. Go through the door one by one.’
Ewert sat down on the floor of his temporary operations office and listened to the voices from the mortuary. John Edvardson was back at his side to translate the Russian. Hermansson had also got hold of a pair of earphones and sat at her trolley making notes of the absurd exchanges, attempting to alleviate the stress by giving her hands something to do.
Bengt was in there. He had done what Grajauskas had asked and told the hostages they could leave. Now he was the only one left.
Suddenly he spoke again in Swedish, his voice strained but managing to stay calm. Ewert recognised the tone well, knew how close he was to cracking up.
‘Ewert, it is all one fucking big con. She hasn’t shot anyone. All the hostages are still here. All four of them are alive. They’ve just walked out. She has got about three hundred grams of Semtex round the doors, but she can’t detonate it.’
Her voice now, sounding agitated. ‘Speak Russian!’
Ewert heard what Bengt had said. Heard it, but didn’t understand. He looked at the others and saw his own bafflement reflected in their faces. There must have been more people in there from the start, more than five. One of them had been kneecapped, one blown to bits and one more had been dragged outside the door a few minutes ago. But there were still four people who left, walked out of there alive.
There was Bengt’s voice again, still speaking Swedish. He seemed to be standing still, facing her.
‘All she’s got is a handgun. A nine-millimetre Pistolet Makarova. Russian army officer’s sidearm. The explosive. She can’t detonate it without a generator or a battery. I can see a battery, but it isn’t connected to any cables.’
‘Speak Russian! Or you’ll die!’
Ewert sat there, listening to John’s translation.
She told Bengt to stay still in front of her. No talking.
She spat on the floor in front of him, then demanded that he take off his underpants.
When he hesitated, she took aim at his head and threatened him until he obeyed.
Grens got up quickly. She had tricked them somehow and Bengt was defenceless. He looked at John, who nodded.
He radioed the men, issued instructions for an immediate break-in and gave permission for the marksmen to use live rounds.
‘You are naked.’
‘That’s how you wanted it.’
‘How does that feel? What is it like to be here, in a mortuary, standing naked in front of a woman with a gun?’
‘I have done what you asked me to do.’
‘You feel humiliated, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘All alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Afraid?’
‘Yes.’
‘Kneel.’
‘Why?’
‘On your knees. Hands behind your head.’
‘Haven’t you done enough?’
‘On your knees.’
‘Like this?’
‘There, you can do it.’
‘Now what?’
‘Do you know who I am?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you remember me?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I say. Do you remember me, Bengt Nordwall?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t?’
‘No.’
‘Klaipeda, Lithuania. The twenty-sixth of June, two thousand and two.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘The Stena Baltica. The twenty-sixth of June, two thousand and two. At twenty-five minutes past eight in the evening.’
Ewert had seen Lydia Grajauskas only once, just over twenty-four hours ago. She was unconscious inside the flat with the broken-down door; he had just pushed past the shit they called Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp and was walking quickly through the hall towards Lydia’s naked body. One of her arms was broken, her face was swollen and bruised and her back was a mass of bleeding gashes, more wounds than he could count. He had come across girls like her before, different names, but the same old story. Young women who opened their legs and were beaten up, then cared for until they healed, so they could open their legs and be beaten again. They would go off the radar as suddenly as they had turned up, moved on to a new flat somewhere else and a new set of customers, do the rounds a couple of times before they disappeared for good and were replaced by new women. There were always new ones to be bought from people who traded in people, three thousand euros for young girls, who also coped better with the beatings.
He had seen her carried out on a stretcher.
He could understand her hate; it wasn’t hard to understand that constant humiliation would force you in the end to choose between giving up and going under, or trying to humiliate someone else as a payback.
But how she found the strength to keep her broken body upright, to occupy a mortuary and threaten people in her faint voice, that was utterly beyond him. And why was she targeting doctors and policemen? What was she actually after? He didn’t understand, not even at the point when he interrupted John’s translation and shouted out loud.
‘The Stena Baltica? That’s a bloody boat! This is something personal! Bengt, over! Fuck’s sake, Bengt. Stop it! Squad, move in! All clear. Repeat, move in!’
Afterwards all their accounts differed slightly, mostly in the time dimension, but then it’s often a fact that time is the most difficult thing to pin down when someone stops breathing. In general, their observations with regard to the events were consistent, what happened and when. After all, they had stood side by side in the Casualty operating theatre, listening to the same radio and heard the sounds of two shots in quick succession, then one more shot shortly after, followed by the crash when the Flying Squad battered down the door to the mortuary suite and went in.
Every death has its consequences.
Ewert Grens knew that. He had worked with the police for thirty years; most of them had been spent investigating murders, which meant that his work often started with death. That was what he did, worked with death and its consequences.
And the way the dead continued to live on afterwards was always so different.
Some just disappeared quietly, no one asked for them, no one missed them, it was as if they never existed.
Others seemed to be more alive in death than in life, with all the commotion, all the investigation, the endless words from friends and strangers that had never been spoken out loud before, but were now repeated over and over again until they became true.
You breathe and then a moment later you don’t breathe any more.
But the consequences, the consequences of your death, depend entirely on what caused you to stop breathing. When the sound of the three shots rang out in his earphones, Ewert knew instantly that something terrible had happened. The sound invaded his mind, his very being.
So he should have been able to understand his grief, the grief he did not allow himself to feel, but that would continue to gnaw at him until he too ceased to exist. He should perhaps have also sensed the loneliness that would follow, that it would be even worse than he had feared.
But not the rest.
Despite having listened to the strange and violent death, Ewert Grens could never have anticipated that he would think back on the days that followed, and the consequences of this death, as the most hellish time of his life.
He did not cry. It is hard to say why – he himself has no explanation – but he could not cry. He doesn’t cry now. Afterwards, he didn’t cry when he entered the mortuary through the splintered door – when he saw two people on the floor with holes through their heads, the blood that had not yet dried.