I can’t bear this.
Lena is in there and she knows nothing.
He is alive and well as far as she’s concerned.
As long as she doesn’t know, he’s still alive. He dies only when I tell her.
He knocked on the door. There were young children in the house and they might be asleep; with any luck they would be. When did children go to sleep? He waited on the gravel path, with Sven and Ludwig close behind him. She was slow in answering. He knocked again, a little harder, more persistently, heard her quick footsteps, saw her take a look through the kitchen window before coming to unlock the front door. He had been a messenger of death many times before, but never to someone he actually cared about.
I shouldn’t have to stand here.
If you were alive, I wouldn’t be standing here at your door, with your death in my hands.
He didn’t have to say anything. He just stood there and held her in his arms, on the steps, with the door wide open. He had no idea for how long. Until she stopped crying.
Then they all went to the kitchen and she made some coffee while he told her everything he thought she might want to know. She didn’t say a word, nothing at all, until the first cup of coffee, when she asked him to repeat everything in detail. Who the woman was, how Bengt’s execution had been set up, what he had looked like and what the woman had really wanted.
Ewert did as she asked, describing the events blow by blow until she couldn’t take any more. He knew it was the only thing he could do, talk to her, tell her again and again, until she finally started to understand.
Lena wept for a long time, now and then looking up at him, Sven and Errfors.
Later she edged close to him, grabbed his arm and asked him how he thought she should tell the children. Ewert, what do you want me to tell the children?
Ewert’s cheek was burning.
They were back in the car, going along the almost empty E4 towards the city centre. The street lamps would come on soon.
She had hit him hard.
He hadn’t expected it. They were just about to leave, out in the long hall, when she rushed over to him, shouting, You can’t say things like that and slapped him. He was baffled at first, but had had time to think that she had the right to hit out before she raised her arm again, screaming, You can’t say things like that. He stopped. What else could he do? He couldn’t do any of the usual things he did when people threatened to hit him. When her voice rose to a shriek, Sven grabbed her arm and led her firmly to the kitchen.
He looked at Sven now, sitting beside him. He was driving back to town a little too slowly in the middle lane, lost in thought.
Ewert rubbed his cheek. It felt numb; her hand had hit the bone.
He didn’t blame her.
He was the bringer of death.
It was past ten o’clock, but a light summer’s night, quite beautiful now that the incessant rain had actually stopped. Sven had dropped him off at the police headquarters. They had been just as silent on the way back, as they had on the way there. Lena’s despair had lingered, more powerful than words.
Ewert Grens went into his office. His desk was laden with yellow and green Post-it notes, informing him about journalists who had tried to contact him and would call again. He binned all the messages. He would arrange more press conferences as far away from here as possible and get the PR pros to field the questions he didn’t want to hear. Sitting at his desk, he spun on his chair a couple of times, stopped and listened to the silence, spun round again, stopped. He couldn’t really think, tried to go through the events of the last hours in his mind. Bengt’s death and Grajauskas’s death. The unharmed hostages. Bengt, unseeing, on the floor. Lena holding his arm and wanting him to tell her every detail, one at a time. It was hopeless. He couldn’t do it. They weren’t his thoughts, so he sat there, spinning around and around, without pursuing anything.
One and a half hours alone, spinning on his chair without a single thought.
The cleaner, a smiling young man who spoke decent Swedish, knocked and Ewert let him in. His presence broke the monotony. For a few minutes there was someone who emptied the waste-paper basket and pushed a mop around. Better than the thoughts he could not think.
Anni, help me.
Sometimes he missed having people, sometimes loneliness was just ugly.
He dialled the number he knew by heart. It was late, but he knew she would be awake. When life is one long half-sleep, maybe rest matters less.
One of the young care assistants answered. He knew who she was. She had worked extra in the evenings for a few years now, to top up her student loan, to make life a little easier.
‘Good evening. Ewert Grens speaking.’
‘Hello, Mr Grens.’
‘I’d like to talk to her.’
A pause. She was probably looking at the clock in reception.
‘It’s a little late.’
‘I know. Sorry to trouble you, but this is important.’
He heard the young care assistant get up and walk down the corridor. A few minutes later her voice came back.
‘She’s awake. I told her that you’re waiting to talk to her on the phone and asked someone to help her with the receiver. Connecting you now.’
He heard Anni breathe, between the gurgling and mumbling she usually made on the phone. He hoped someone was around to wipe away the dribbles.
‘Hello, Anni. It’s me.’
Her shrill laughter. His body grew warm, almost relaxed.
‘You have to help me. I don’t understand what’s going on.’
He spoke to her for nearly quarter of an hour. She panted and laughed now and then, mostly staying silent. He missed her the moment the call ended.
Getting up from the chair his body felt heavy, but not tired. He walked along the corridor to the far too large meeting room. The door was never locked.
He fumbled about in the dark, looking for the switch on the wall and found it higher up than he remembered. It was for not only the lamps, but also the TV and the video and the whirring overhead projector. He had never got a grip on how these bloody things worked and swore a great deal before he managed to find a channel that worked with the video.
Wearing plastic gloves, he extracted the cassette from the bag he had been given at the mortuary, which he had kept hidden in the inner pocket of his jacket.
The first images were drowning in bright bluish light. Two women were sitting on a sofa in a kitchen with sunlight pouring in through a window behind them. Obviously whoever was holding the camera wasn’t sure how to balance brightness and focus properly.
The women were easy to recognise all the same.
Lydia Grajauskas and Alena Sljusareva. They were in the flat with the electronic locks, where he had seen them for the first time.
They wait in silence, while the cameraman moves the lens up and down, then turns the microphone on and off, presumably to test it. They look nervous, the way people do when they are not used to staring at the single eye that preserves whatever it looks at for posterity.
Lydia Grajauskas speaks first.
Two sentences. She turns to Alena, who translates.
‘This is my reason. This is my story.’
Grajauskas looks at her friend and says two more sentences.
She nods with a serious expression and waits, for Alena, who turns to the camera again and translates.
‘When you hear this, I hope that the man I am going to talk about is dead. I hope that he has felt my shame.’
They speak slowly, careful to enunciate every word in both Russian and Swedish.