‘Stop it! Stop asking questions!’
‘Why has he become dead?’
‘I can’t… it’s too much, can’t you see that? I can’t bear it!’
She almost struck the child. The impulse was there – it came in an instant, as the questions crashed against her head. Up went her arm. She could have slapped her, but she didn’t. She never had. She burst into tears, sat down again and hugged her daughter close. Her daughter.
Sven had laughed out loud as he walked back alone from the sad little restaurant to Kronoberg. It wasn’t the food, even though that was laughable, those small, fatty pieces of meat in slimy powder gravy. He had laughed at Ewert. He thought of his colleague marching round the table, kicking its legs and then stopping to curse the tape recorder and Lang’s threatening voice, until the waitress tiptoed over to ask him to calm down or she’d have to call the police.
Sven had burst out laughing without thinking and two women walking towards him looked concerned. One of them mumbled something about alcohol and not being in control. He took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Ewert Grens was a lot of things, but at least he was never boring.
Ewert was going to question Sljusareva, good. Sven Sundkvist felt sure that she had information that would help them understand more about the case. He decided to abandon the Lang case for the moment, concentrate on the hostage-taking instead, and walked faster, hurrying back to his office. The mortuary business made him feel deeply disturbed, and not just because it was all about death.
There was something else, something incomprehensible. Grajauskas had been so driven and brutal. Medics held hostage with a gun to their heads, corpses blown apart, her demand for Nordwall, only to shoot him and then herself. All that without letting them know what it was she really wanted.
Back at his desk he ran through the events again, scrutinising 5 June minute by minute, noting the exact time for each new development. He started at 12.15, when Lydia Grajauskas had been sitting on a sofa in the surgical ward watching the news, and ended at 16.10, when several people agreed that they had heard the sound of two gunshots in their earpieces. The two shots had been followed by one more. Then a great crash, when the Flying Squad men forced the door.
He read the statements made by the hostages. The older man, Dr Ejder, and the four students seemed to have the same impression of Grajauskas. They described her as calm and careful to make sure she stayed in control at all times. Also, she had not hurt anyone, except Larsen who had attacked her. Their descriptions gave a good picture, but not what he needed most. Why had she acted like this?
He went through the chain-of-custody list and the technical summary of the state of the mortuary at around 16.17, but no new angles came to mind. All very predictable, nothing he hadn’t expected.
Except that.
He read the two lines several times.
A videotape had been found in her carrier bag. The cassette had no sleeve, but had been labelled in Cyrillic script.
They swapped newspapers. He bought them another cup of coffee and a portion of apple pie and custard each. She ate the pie with the same hearty appetite as the sandwich.
Ewert observed the woman opposite him.
She was pretty. Not that it mattered, but she was lovely to look at.
She should have stayed at home. What a bloody waste. So young, so much ahead of her, and then… what? To be exploited every day by randy family men looking for a change from mowing the lawn. From their ageing wives and demanding kids.
Such a terrible waste. He shook his head and waited until she had finished chewing and put her spoon down.
He had brought it in his briefcase, and now he put it on the table.
‘Have you seen this before?’
A blue notebook. She shrugged. ‘No, I haven’t.’
He opened it to the first page and pushed it across the table so she could see it.
‘Do you understand what it says here?’
Alena read a few lines and then looked up at him. ‘Where did you find this?’
‘Next to her bed in the hospital. The only thing that was hers. Seemed to be, anyway. Is it hers?’
‘It’s Lydia’s handwriting.’
He explained that because it was in Lithuanian, no one had been able to translate the text during the hostage crisis, when she was still alive.
While Bengt was alive, he thought. While his lie didn’t yet exist.
Alena leafed through the book, then read the five pages of text and translated it for him. Everything.
Everything that had happened barely twenty-four hours earlier.
In detail.
Grajauskas had planned and written down precisely what she later put into action. She had worked out how the weapons would be delivered, together with a ball of string and the video, and left in a toilet waste bin. That she would hit the guard over the head, walk to the mortuary, take hostages, blow up corpses. And demand the services of an interpreter called Bengt Nordwall.
Ewert listened. Now and then he swallowed. It was all there, in black and white. If only I had known. If only I had had this stuff translated. I would never have sent him down there. He would have been alive now.
You would have lived!
If only you hadn’t gone down there, you would be alive.
You must have known!
Why didn’t you say?
You could have spoken to me. Or to her.
If only you had admitted that you knew who she was. At least you could have given her that.
Then you would still be alive.
She never wanted to shoot you.
She wanted confirmation that what had happened in those flats wasn’t her fault. That she had never chosen to wait around, ready to undress for all those men.
Alena Sljusareva asked if she could keep the notebook. Ewert shook his head, grabbed the blue cover and put it away in his briefcase. He waited until twenty minutes before the departure time, then accompanied her to the exit. Alena had her ticket in her hand, showed it to a uniformed woman in the booth, then turned to him and thanked him. Ewert wished her a good trip.
He left her in the queue of passengers and went over to a corner of the terminal building from where he had an overview of people arriving off the ferry, as well as those waiting to go on board. Leaning against a pillar, he tried to think about the other ongoing investigation, about Lang in his cell and Öhrström studying the faxed pictures. She would soon get some more. But his mind drifted, he was too preoccupied with the two women from Klaipeda. Absently he observed the strangers milling about, something he had always enjoyed doing. The arrivals walked with the sea still in their bodies. They all had somewhere to go, the ones with red cheeks and large duty-free bags full of spirits who had drunk, danced and flirted the night away before falling asleep alone in their cabins below deck. Others dressed in their best clothes had been saving for years for a week’s holiday in Sweden, on the other side of the Baltic. And there were a few who wore rumpled clothes and had no luggage at all, having left in a hurry just to get away. He studied them all – it was all he could bear to do right now – and forgot about time for a while.
Alena Sljusareva would be on her way soon.
Ewert was just about to walk away when he saw what was probably the last group of passengers coming off the ferry.
He recognised him immediately.
After all, it was less than two days since he had seen this man at Arlanda being given a dressing down by a plump little Lithuanian diplomat, and then manhandled through security flanked by two big lads there to see him off on the one-hour flight to Vilnius.
Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp.