The first day’s journey appeared slowly before his eyes. First a vertical line.
The train stopped at the station. The doors opened. The station was almost completely deserted. He didn’t know where he was.
First a vertical line and then three horizontal. A letter.
On the first day, he had travelled in the shape of a letter.
A lone woman was standing on the platform, talking on her mobile phone. A group of teenagers spilled out of the carriage behind his.
It was an E. An upper-case E.
The train doors closed. The teenagers were approaching the woman. As the train gathered speed, he saw the flash of a knife.
He couldn’t do a thing.
Other than reconstruct the second day’s letter.
Sometimes, the right conditions just came together entirely by chance.
Usually, though, it needed lots of planning: the right time, the right place, the right person. You had to bide your time – waiting, watching and sneaking glances. You had to spread out and make it seem like you weren’t together. That was when you struck. Once you’d grabbed enough, you went straight online. Sometimes there was as little as an hour between theft and sale.
‘Freshly nicked phone for sale.’ And then the time.
The responses always came quickly. As though there were people just sitting at their computers, waiting for their moment. The pigs didn’t stand a chance.
But then, every once in a while, one of those chance occurrences appeared. They were the best. Unplanned openings. Some bird all by herself on a platform, for example.
Hamid saw her straight away. He exchanged a quick glance with Adib and stepped off the train. The small fry tagged along. There were five of them and they were dangerous. No one ever put up any resistance. They just handed over their phones. If anyone tried to be clever, they got a punch. If anyone put up a fight, they got a cut.
Sometimes people shat themselves. It was disgusting.
She was good-looking, the woman. He could see that even though she was standing with her back to him, talking on her phone. Long black hair, red leather jacket, tight black trousers, black trainers. She turned round and caught sight of them. She ended the call.
She really was good-looking. If they had been somewhere more secluded than the station, he would have given her a little extra treatment.
The adrenalin had started pumping through his body. Hamid pulled out the knife. Her lower lip should be starting to tremble right about now.
In the distance, he could hear a train coming from the other direction.
‘Phone, you whore,’ he snarled.
Her lip wasn’t trembling. It tightened. Her dark eyes narrowed.
The knife went flying. He didn’t know what was happening. Suddenly, she kicked him in the face. He saw the bottom of her shoe. Reebok. He felt his teeth bend inwards. Upside down, and as though at high speed, he saw Adib being thrown onto a bench and then slumping to the floor. He heard the small fry running away.
He found the knife and struggled to his feet. Fucking hell, he thought, running his tongue along his front teeth. They were angled towards the roof of his mouth. He could feel a broken root poking through his upper lip.
All he could taste was blood.
‘You slut,’ he lisped, grabbing the knife from the platform and holding it out.
She was standing opposite him, completely motionless. He threw himself forward and grabbed the phone. In return, she kicked him hard in the stomach. Unable to breathe, he felt himself being pushed away, across the platform. He heard the train. He saw the lights appear in the tunnel.
He was struggling like a madman. His arms were flailing, his chin grazing the platform. He was fighting for his life but there was nothing to fight against. His body was pushed out over the edge, slowly, inexorably slowly, and the increasingly loud noise from the metro became a deafening, maddening scream – the last sound Hamid would ever hear.
And just like that, he became a split personality.
8
THE LITTLE DEARS were drinking water. Like cute little bear cubs, they crouched awkwardly down and lapped at it, their tiny pink tongues like kittens’. They were the kind of animal children wanted to take home and cuddle.
Though that would have been an unwise move on the part of the parents.
The little dears were wolverines.
Paul Hjelm watched them wander off, slightly pudgy and happily swishing their squirrel-like tails. He really was struggling to picture these good-natured little things chewing on a human skull.
‘Come on,’ Jorge Chavez said impatiently. ‘Don’t let them hypnotise you. Think of Ellroy.’
Hjelm leaned back against the wooden railing, took a deep breath and asked, loudly and clearly: ‘Who the hell is Ellroy?’
But by then Chavez had already left Skansen’s wolverine enclosure and moved on to the wolves on the other side of the road. When Hjelm caught up with him, Chavez said: ‘The wolf pen is pretty big. It stretches all the way from the lynxes. Ends right here. So what happened?’
It had stopped raining but the ground was still dangerously sodden. They turned at the edge of the wolf enclosure and every step they took was treacherous; a slippery downhill slope stretching all the way to the outer fence. A gangly man dressed in overalls and protective goggles was squatting by something which looked like a gate. He was busy welding. Bluish flames curled up around him like a stray firework.
They waited for him to finish. The firework fizzled out. He pushed his goggles – more like a face mask with built-in glasses – up onto his head. They cleared their throats and he turned round.
‘Hi,’ said Hjelm. ‘We’re from the police.’
The man in overalls nodded quickly and looked like he was about to get back to work. Chavez grabbed his shoulder.
‘One minute,’ he said. ‘What happened here?’
The man took off his mask, stood up and stared down at Chavez.
‘I think it costs a fortune to get into Skansen these days too,’ the man said. ‘And then the kids want to go into that bloody aquarium as well, to see that man with the beard from TV. That’s five hundred gone, just like that. And then you’ve got to eat and ride those stupid cars and buy tickets to win all that Pokémon crap Nintendo makes millions and millions from, and then you’re suddenly nearing a thousand. So then you wish you’d just gone to the theme park next door instead, but if you’d done that it would’ve been a few thousand more gone up in smoke. Though at least you would’ve been able to go on that free-fall ride.’
Both policemen turned round in confusion to check whether the man was talking to someone behind them. There was no one there.
‘Sorry,’ Hjelm said. ‘I don’t understand…’
‘Someone cut the wire to get in,’ the man said, nodding towards the mesh fence. ‘And I can understand why.’
‘When did it happen?’
‘They found it yesterday, apparently. I don’t work here.’
‘It looks like you work-’
The tall man in overalls sighed deeply.
‘I’m from the fence company. We’re repairing it temporarily. It’s Friday – we can’t deliver the new fence before the start of next week.’
‘So this happened – when? Wednesday night?’
‘Must’ve been. And two days later, we’ve got a couple of plain-clothes policemen on the scene to catch the trespassers. Nice to see such good priorities in these austere times. Don’t you think they might’ve disappeared by now?’
‘Yes,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘Most definitely.’
A policeman in uniform came running out of Odenplan metro station and threw up at Viggo Norlander’s feet.
So, Norlander thought, examining his new Italian shoes and sighing inwardly. It’s one of those.
Once he had checked that his shoes had made it through unscathed and accepted the guilty police assistant’s apologies, he turned to Gunnar Nyberg, who met his gaze with a look that said: Yep, one of those.