Somewhere in the middle of this statement Sven found what he had been looking for. The doctor had been questioned about the plastic carrier bag where Lydia had kept her weapons. Suddenly, he described a videotape.
Sven followed the lines with his finger, reading one word at a time.
Ejder had seen the black tape when Lydia Grajauskas had pushed the sides of the bag down to take out the Semtex. It was at an early stage, when Ejder thought he should try to talk to her, win her confidence. At least it might help to calm the others. He had asked about the video, and after first refusing to answer, she had then decided to explain in her limited English.
She had said that the video was truth. He had asked her which truth, but she simply repeated the word. Truth. Truth. Truth. She had been silent while she concentrated on shaping the plastic dough, then she turned to him again.
Two tapes.
In box station train.
Twenty-one.
She had demonstrated the number by showing him first two fingers, then one.
Twenty-one.
Gustaf Ejder insisted that he recalled every single word, in the right order. She had said very little, with such effort, that it was easy to remember.
The truth. Two tapes. In box station train. Twenty-one. Sven read the passage once more. In a railway station. In box 21.
He was convinced now. There was another video in storage locker number twenty-one, almost certainly at the Central Station.
That tape would also have the safety tab removed and the video would contain images, not just a flickering greyness.
He put the pile of documents back on the floor and got up. He would be there soon.
The way he had forced those images on her, in her face.
Lisa was beyond hating anyone. Maybe she never had, and maybe she had never loved either; she had just filed hate and love away as two words for the same emotion, assuming that if she couldn’t feel one, she couldn’t feel the other either. But that had changed: she actually hated this policeman. The past twenty-four hours had been so strange; her grief for Hilding that wasn’t really grief and, after that vague threat, her fear for the children that wasn’t really fear. It was as if, at the age of thirty-five, all her feelings had been put under a spotlight; she had to force them all back in, throw away the key, hide behind her shame and not get to know herself. She had had no idea what they looked like, these unknown emotions, so strong and naked and impossible to escape.
And in the middle of it all that limping policeman had turned up and rubbed her face in it.
She had seen immediately that the last picture was of Hilding lying dead on the stairs and had got up from her chair, grabbed the photograph, torn it up and thrown the pieces against the glass wall.
She knew where she was going now, running down the corridor towards the main exit. She had a few more hours to do on her shift. For the first time in her life she couldn’t care less. She ran out on to the tarmac outside, and turned in the direction of Tanto Park, across the railway tracks and through the park, not even aware of the unleashed dogs that pursued her fleeing body, propelled by panic. She carried on running, past the Zinkensdamm housing estate, stopping only when she had crossed Horn Street and could stand in the shade of the huge Högalid Church.
She wasn’t tired, didn’t register the sweat that trickled down over her forehead and cheeks. She stood for a while to get her breath back before walking down the slope to the house where she stayed as often as she did in her own flat.
The door to the flat on the fifth floor of number 3 Völund Street had been replaced. The large hole in the panel was no more. There was nothing to show that just a few days earlier the police had broken in to stop an incident of gross physical violence, a naked woman lashed across the back thirty-five times.
The two girls, still in their teens, stood behind the man who could have been their father while he unlocked the door. When they went into the flat, they saw the electronic locks on the door, but didn’t know what they were. The man closed the door and showed the girls their passports. Then he explained again that the passports had cost him. Therefore they owed him money and would have to work to pay it off. The first customers were due two hours from now.
The girl who had started to cry downstairs was still crying; she tried to protest, until the man, who until only a few days earlier had been called Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp by two other young women, pressed the muzzle of a gun to her temple. For a brief moment she thought he would shoot.
He told them to undress. He was going to try them out. From now on it was important that they knew what men liked.
Lisa was feeling hot after running all the way from the hospital. She had only stopped when she could see Ylva’s house in Högalid Street.
She hadn’t been thinking straight earlier. She was capable of love, of course she was, not for a man, but for her nephew and niece; she loved them more than she loved herself. She had put off coming here. Normally she’d pop in to see them every day, but she had lacked the strength to walk into the house and tell them that their uncle had died, that he had crashed down a stairwell the day before.
They adored their Uncle Hilding. To them he wasn’t a hopeless junkie. They had only met the other Hilding, straight out of prison, round-cheeked and easy-going, full of a calm that had always vanished a few days later, when the world around him began to look dangerous, reminding him of the shadows he couldn’t cope with and couldn’t confront. They had never seen that awful junkie. They had never seen the change. He was only there for them for a few days at a time, and then when he changed into something else, he disappeared.
She had to tell them, though. They must not be informed by having black-and-white police photographs pushed into their faces.
Lisa held Ylva’s hand in hers. They had hugged each other before going to sit side by side on the sofa. Both were feeling the same way: not quite grief, more a kind of relief that they knew where he was and where he wasn’t. The sisters weren’t certain that they should feel that way, but now that they were together, it seemed easier to accept these impermissible feelings.
Jonathan and Sanna sat in the two armchairs opposite the sofa. They had sensed that this wasn’t one of Auntie Lisa’s usual visits. Not that she had said anything yet, but as soon as she opened the front door they had started to prepare themselves for what she would say. The way she had pressed down the door handle, said hello, and walked to the small sitting room all made it obvious that this was not just an ordinary visit.
She didn’t know how to begin. There was no need to worry.
‘What’s the matter?’
Sanna was twelve, and still in the zone between little girl and young teenager. She looked at the two grown women she trusted implicitly and repeated her question.
‘What is it? I know something’s wrong.’
Lisa leaned towards the children, reaching out to put one hand on Sanna’s knee and the other on Jonathan’s. Such a little boy, her fingertips met easily around his leg.