The intercom beeped shrilly. The secretary informed them that Birgitta had to be at the doctor’s as soon as possible.
“Okay. Take off now. Go straight home afterward and get a good rest. We’ll try to find Bobo Torsson and arrest him for assault on a civil servant,” said Andersson soothingly.
He stood up from his chair and went over to her. He almost patted her reassuringly on the shoulder, but her rigid neck and stiff back made him reconsider. Uncertainly he continued, “That stuff with Jonny, we can forget that for now. I’ll talk to him. He probably doesn’t mean any harm with his jokes. And I’m sure he understands that you were upset and angry after what happened with Torsson-”
He cut himself off when she turned to look at him. Her face was completely blank and expressionless. Her eyes were again pools of molten lead. Her voice sounded hoarse and quavering when she said, “You still don’t get it.”
Stiffly and mechanically she got up. Without looking at him she vanished down the corridor. He didn’t understand this female nonsense! That thing with Jonny, anyway. He could understand that she would be mad and scared when Bobo Torsson attacked her. On the other hand, he had no idea what else he was supposed to understand.
What a day. And it wasn’t over yet. The only positive thing was that his headache was starting to ease.
Chapter Eleven
THE SOBS WERE SEARING her throat. She tried to call but Jenny and Katarina couldn’t hear her. Their liquid laughter faded away in the air. They whirled away, higher and higher toward the shimmering mother-of-pearl sky. She tried to fly after them, but the thousands of meadow flowers held her back in the warm earth with their soft, invisible hands. In vain she tried to brace her feet against the ground to push herself off. But her toenails only dug deeper and molten metal ran in her veins. “Good God, don’t let them be sucked into the tunnel!” She cried and pleaded until she realized that there wasn’t any light tunnel, only a crevice between the pearly pink clouds, through which the friendly light blue summer sky appeared.
With a jolt Irene awoke and sat up in bed. Sammie grunted reproachfully. He was lying comfortably with his head across her shins. No wonder her feet had gone to sleep and felt heavy as lead. He wasn’t allowed to be on the bed but always crept up in the early morning. At that point there was little risk that anyone would feel like arguing with him. It was five-thirty, and she had slept for almost five hours. Now she was wide awake. That was the risk of sleeping several hours on the train.
Krister was snoring heavily next to her. He didn’t have to be at work until nine. With a thrill of joy she remembered that tonight they were going to have a cozy evening together. She would peel potatoes and make the salad. Maybe open a bottle of wine. He would create something delicious at the stove and graciously accept her applause. She had nothing against applauding, as long as she got out of making dinner. She lay back down, tried to push the dog aside, but he just rolled around on his back with his paws in the air and pretended to be asleep. Which he soon was. Dog and master began to snore to the beat of a schottische. With a sigh she realized she might as well get up.
THE DREAM had been clear as glass. She remembered all the details as sharp as a knife. You didn’t have to be a trained dream analyst to understand its meaning. Was she really so distressed about the twins becoming independent? She was filled with a sense of powerlessness, the feeling that she could no longer protect them against every danger. Something she had read or heard occurred to her: “You can never teach your children to grow up based on your own experiences. As a parent you can only try to hide your sorrow and worry. Try to offer careful guidance when things go awry. Be available.”
She felt a pang in her heart and grimaced at the dense November darkness outside her windshield. Even though the road was almost deserted, she drove below the speed limit, not her usual habit. Why was she having such a hard time shaking off that dream? Could it be because she had seen so much misery during her years as a cop? Youths, mercilessly kicked out of society, who died violent deaths and were mourned by few or none. They were victims of poverty, unemployment and hopelessness, the wrong friends, and drugs. Or else they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like John. She shivered at the memory of one of her most trying experiences as a cop.
She and Tommy had been loaned out to the Kungälv Police to assist in the investigation of the murder of John, age fourteen. It had happened in August, in unusually warm and fine weather. John and a friend had gone to Ingetorps Lake to go camping. In the evening four skinheads showed up. At least two of them were seriously drunk. The only one of them who actually knew John was a fifteen-year-old who went to the same school and had been following and bullying him for a long time. The other three had never seen John before. In the next two hours the four skinheads played a grim game of cat and mouse. Sometimes they were “nice” and sometimes they abused John and his friend. They threw John in the lake, but when he started to swim away they forced his friend to yell, “Please, John, come back. They’re going to beat me!” He went back and thus saved his friend’s life. Then he himself was kicked unconscious and thrown into the lake. As he drowned, they rolled cigarettes and stood talking on the beach.
She suddenly realized that she was clenching her teeth so hard that her jaws ached. Her grip on the steering wheel was so hard her fingers were cramping. Memory refused to loosen its grip: the sniggering skinheads during the trial who seemed unmoved as they whispered and rustled their papers. The attorneys who talked about leniency for the young killers: They could be damaged for life. The fact that they had already taken an even younger life suddenly didn’t seem so important. The parents’ unspeakable despair. The mother’s bitter whisper outside the courtroom: “They plead for leniency for the defendants, but not for the victim. There’s no sense of respect or morality.”
Irene swung into the parking garage at police headquarters, turned off the engine, but remained sitting in her car. The projection of her memories was still playing against the windshield of her car. The pictures that the prosecutor showed of John’s mangled body: The boy had injuries over his entire body, but the perps had mostly aimed for his face. His head was swollen, eyes glued shut, and his lips split. His head and neck were a grotesque violet-black color from internal bleeding. After this senseless lethal beating, he was unrecognizable.
Many of the spectators couldn’t stand it, but left the courtroom crying. The despairing father had had enough. He stood up and screamed at the four unmoved skinheads, “Look at him now, for God’s sake!”
Several of them raised their heads, but didn’t look at the slide screen. The fifteen-year-old stared straight ahead with an ice-cold expression. None of them batted an eye when the prosecutor related how they had gone about the murder.
She had seen primal instincts reverberating through the parents. Revenge! Revenge! But was there any justice in a case like this? Over the years she had often asked herself that question, but never found a satisfactory answer. Maybe there wasn’t any.
Why were these painful memories coming up just now? Evidently it was because of the CD she had stepped on as she sneaked in through the front door around midnight. The disc had fallen out of Jenny’s open school bag. First she stuffed it back in the bag, but a subconscious signal made her pull it out again. Yes, she had seen correctly in the weak light of the hall lamp. There was a swastika on the cover. The group’s name seemed to be “Swastika.” It took great self-control to quell the impulse to rush into Jenny’s room and ask what this meant! She peeked in through the doorway as she always did and saw her little girl sound asleep, with her golden blond hair spread over the pillow. It would have to wait until this evening. Or tomorrow. This evening was their night for cocooning, they had decided.