He was wearing the same suit that he had been wearing when he was escorted up the steps to the plane, the shiny suit he had had on when he stood blocking the broken-down doorway on the fifth floor, having flogged Lydia Grajauskas unconscious two days earlier.
And he wasn’t alone. Once through passport control, he waited for two young women, or rather girls, sixteen or seventeen years old. He held out his hand and they both gave him something they had ready for him. Ewert didn’t need to see any more to know what it was.
Their passports.
In debt already.
A woman wearing a tracksuit with the hood pulled down over her head hurried forwards to meet the little group, keeping her back turned. Ewert watched her as she greeted the three arrivals and, as he believed was customary in the Baltic states, kissed them all, light little kisses on the cheek. Then she pointed towards the nearest exit and they followed her. None of them had much luggage.
Ewert felt sick.
Lydia Grajauskas had just shot herself in the temple. Alena Sljusareva had fled and was now only a short voyage from home. Both had been ruthlessly exploited for three years in flats with electronic locks. They had been threatened, abused and had to pretend they were turned on as they were going to pieces inside. And it only took twenty-four hours, twenty-four hours, before they had been replaced. A day and a night was all it took to find two young women who had no idea of what lay ahead, who would be trained to smile when they were spat at, so that those who traded money for sex could still count on one hundred and fifty thousand kronor per girl every month.
In a couple of minutes, the ferry would pull away from the quay. He stayed where he was. They disappeared in the crowd, the hooded Baltic woman, Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp and the girls, barely old enough to have breasts, teenagers who had just given away their passports.
There was nothing he could do, not now. Lydia and Alena had dared to question and fight back, but that was unusual. At least, it was the first time Ewert had heard about it. The two new girls were children, frail and scared. They would never dare to testify at this point, and that motherfucking pimp would deny everything.
Consequently, no crime existed yet.
Maybe it didn’t, but he was sure that he or a colleague would come across them. There was no telling where or when, but sooner or later they too would go straight to hell.
As soon as Sven had seen the entry in the technical account – one videotape in a plastic bag with two sets of fingerprints, identified as Lydia Grajauskas’s and Alena Sljusareva’s – he put everything else to one side. First he looked for it in the forensic science department, where it should be.
It wasn’t there.
He asked the language experts, who might have taken an interest in the Cyrillic writing, and the night duty crew.
It wasn’t there either.
He also drew a blank in the impounded property store, which was the last of the likely places. Not there.
His stomach was contracting again. A sense of unease that grew and intensified, turning into irritation, and then into anger, which wasn’t like him, and he hated it.
He located the technician who had been first on the scene, good old Nils Krantz, who had been around for as long as Sven could remember, and well before that. Krantz was at work, a domestic violence case in a flat in Regering Street, but he took time off to speak to Sven on the phone. He described where they had found the video, what they had found with it, basically confirming what Sven already knew from the documentation.
‘Good, thanks. And what was on the tape?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, what was on the tape?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘That’s not my job. It’s up to you lot.’
‘That’s why I’m investigating it.’
Sven hung on while Krantz talked to someone in the room for maybe half a minute.
‘Anything else you want to know?’
‘One more thing. Where is it now? The tape, I mean.’
Krantz gave an exasperated laugh. ‘Don’t you lads ever speak to each other?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Ask Grens.’
‘Ewert?’
‘He wanted the tape. I handed it over to him after we had done the prints. You know, down in the mortuary.’
Sven took a deep breath. Pain in his stomach, irritation. And definitely anger.
He got up from his desk, went to Ewert’s office four doors down, and knocked.
He knew that Ewert was interviewing Alena Sljusareva. He tried the door. It wasn’t locked.
He went in and scanned the room. It was an odd feeling. He was there to pick up a scene-of-crime item, but in that instant was an intruder, entering unbidden and without permission. He couldn’t remember ever having been in Ewert’s office alone. Had anybody? He only had to look for a few seconds. He saw the video on the shelf behind Ewert’s desk, beside the old cassette player that filled the room with Siw Malmkvist. The label on the back was in Cyrillic script, which he couldn’t read.
After putting on plastic gloves, he weighed the videotape in his hand, fingered it pointlessly. She had planned every move in detail, never hesitated, had a motive for every step she had taken towards her death. Sven flipped the video over, felt its smooth surface. This tape was not there by chance. There was a reason for it. She had wanted to show them something.
He left, closing the door carefully, and went along to the meeting room. He loaded the tape. He was sitting in the same chair where Ewert had been sitting the night before.
But watching something different. Jonas, his son, used to call such an image the War of the Ants. A tape with a loud rushing noise and no picture, just a white flicker against a grey background.
This was a tape that shouldn’t exist. It was unregistered, had no entry in the official lists, held no filmed images.
That feeling in his stomach that had been unease earlier had now turned to anger, a sudden rage that made him sick.
Ewert, what the hell are you up to?
Alena was safely on board. The ferry had left the port and was negotiating the Stockholm archipelago on her way to the open sea. Her route crossed the Baltic Sea and ended in Klaipeda. Soon Alena would be home and would never look back.
Ewert Grens waited for a taxi that never came. He swore and called back to find out why. The operator apologised, but she had no record of a taxi request for Grens from the ferry terminal to Berg Street. Should she register a request now? Ewert swore again, launched into a litany that included organisations and bureaucrats and clowns, demanded to know the operator’s name and altogether managed to be more offensive than he cared to remember afterwards.
Then finally a cab turned up and he got in.
He suddenly caught a glimpse of the house on the other side of the bay.
Blood was pouring from her head.
I leaned against the side of the van, holding her, and it never stopped pouring from her ears, her nose, her mouth.
He missed her; he longed for her. The feeling was stronger now than it had been for years, and he didn’t want to wait until next Monday morning. He should tell the driver to go across Lidingö Bridge, past the Milles Museum and stop in the car park outside the nursing home. Ewert would run inside and stay with her. Just be there, together.
But she wasn’t there, not the woman he missed and longed for. She hadn’t existed for twenty-five years.
Lang, you took her from me.
The afternoon traffic was growing heavy and the taxi slowed to a halt more than once. It took half an hour to get to Kronoberg, and by the time he had paid and got out of the car, he had cooled down.
The air felt milder now. The effect of all that rain seemed to be wearing off and summer was making another attempt. The wind had died down and he felt the sun warming him. Weather: he had never got his head round it.