'Police cells.'
'So fucking what, of course it's the cells, don't mess with me. Do you have your papers?'
Once more.
'Listen, Icky-dicky. That's you, isn't it? You must know I'm not allowed to bring my sentence in here.'
Dickybird shifted his weight from left to right leg. Per was dead long ago, a corpse with not much left of its balls. The ice-pick had been kept as evidence, shown over and over to the authorities, on the long way from Blekinge to the young offenders' institution.
'Fuck your sentence, I'm not interested. What I want to know is what's the score. Like, I don't want no sodding nonces or faggots in this place.'
Weird how a room can suddenly shrink, how sounds become words that turn into spoken messages that bounce off the walls and take up space, suck up energy until there is no more, only intakes of breath in the silence, and piled- up expectations.
The new guy shouldn't have been able to get any closer but somehow he did. He was hissing, sending a shower of saliva into the air between them.
'You asking for special treatment then? Is that it?'
One of them must give way, look down or away, but they stayed facing each other.
'There's just one thing you've got to fucking remember, Dickybird. No one, and I mean no one, calls me a faggot or a nonce. And if it comes from some shot-up, junk-crazed old wanker, then there'll be bad, bad trouble.'
The skinhead poked at Dickybird's chest with his index finger, several times, hard. Still hissing, he mumbled something incomprehensible.
'Hotikar di rotepa, burobengf
Prison lingo.
Then he poked Dickybird's chest once more, turned and walked back to the cell with the wide-open door.
Dickybird stood quite still.
His unseeing eyes followed the newcomer until he had disappeared. Then he focused, first on Hilding and then on the rest of them, and shouted down the empty corridor.
'What the fuck. What the fuck.'
No one showed. Nothing but an open door.
That finger poking at his chest. Dickybird shouted again.
'You fucking listen. Racklar di romani, tjavon?'
Lennart saw him, waiting by the tower on the east side of the wall. It was their usual meeting place, at lunchtime or in the afternoon, when the shifts had changed over. Nils looked young, in shirtsleeves with his jacket thrown over one shoulder. A mere boy, waiting for his sweetheart.
Only a few seconds left to watch him unnoticed. Lennart slowed down. Nils was facing the other way, the way Lennart normally took; today was different because he had gone out for lunch at the old inn on the village square, he and Bertolsson had feasted on steak and fresh garden peas. Bertolsson had dropped him off halfway to the prison, because Lennart had said that he wanted to walk, needed time to think over what had happened, to try to get his mind round the note-scribbling and the microphones and the camera being shoved into his face. Strange to think that for a few minutes of midday news he had been inside all those homes, with his ready-made statements about how criminals ought to be managed.
It was still windy, a change after weather dominated by high pressure for the best part of a month. It had been an eternity of stagnant heat, sweating and irritation, always something itching, always something troubling around the corner.
Nils smiled. He had caught sight of Lennart and couldn't wait. He started strolling towards his lover, came close, held him and wouldn't let go, kissed his forehead and then his cheek.
'Did you see it?'
'I did.'
They walked across the grassy slope, keeping a space between them. Seventy metres to go before they were safely into the wood. Behind the first fir tree they reached out and found each other's hand. They walked on, holding hands tightly.
'We've done all we could. At all levels of the service.'
'Stop worrying.'
'Environmental adjustment training. Pills. Group therapy. Person-to-person stuff.'
'It wasn't about that, I mean, not about what you or the service had done or not done. It was television, for Christ's sake, a reality entertainment show. Point the camera at the culprit, strip him naked, make him sweat and lose his cool and jabber. Make him look shifty. Then the editorial people think it's a red-hot show and your average couch-potato enjoys every minute, because it lets him forget his own bloody awful life. He can laugh at the bureaucrat who's looking sad and stupid and dead ignorant. Screw them all. It's not about content and meaning, it's about scoring points, making people look weird.'
'Nils, you don't see what I'm after. We did try, we threw everything we've got at Lund. What happened? He grabs the first chance he gets, makes mincemeat of two guards and runs off. Now he's on the loose some damned place. All he's after is getting to toss off on dead little girls.'
They were out of the wind now, following a path that wound its way through the dense, untidy forest of fir and spruce to the water-tower on the hill. It was a two-and-a- half-kilometre round-trip. Walking briskly, they'd have half an hour to themselves behind a shed near the tower; now and then they made love there. Few walkers came that way and were easily spotted because the path was the only possible route. Everywhere else the forest formed an impenetrable wall.
Nils clutched Lennart's hand harder, pulling him towards the shed.
'Come on.'
'Listen, I can't. I'm really sorry. I said different, I know, but I can't now. I needed to talk, quite simply. Freely, away from the damned camera. That's all. Talk to you, Nils. You're so sane. Please help me. Explain things to me.'
Nils stroked his temples, then his hair.
'My beloved.'
Lennart closed his eyes, feeling Nils's breath as he spoke.
'Listen, it's over now, done. Finished. No one can hope to understand people like Bernt Lund and that's what makes him so dangerous. To us, but also a danger to himself too. Sometimes it's impossible to defend oneself against another human being. They are there. Man is the only species of mammal capable of such acts against itself, of cold-blooded killings, to the point of extinction. We're worse than animals, more like demons, uniquely prepared to self-destruct. It's incomprehensible, but true.'
They held each other.
Someone was walking along the path, and was about to pass the shed without noticing them, tricked as usual by the wall of spiky conifers. Lennart clung to Nils, who hugged him tight, and was overwhelmed by a sudden wave of longing, of desire for Karin, of wanting her body. He could see her thighs, her breasts. He felt for her, and missed her.
They both wanted to tug at the foil wrapping, their probing fingers colliding, fumbling.
Inside the foil was a square piece of blackish-brown, glassy resin. They had ordered top-class pressed kif. It gave best sucks, each single drag kicked like a fucking horse.
It had been hard putting up with waiting for it, and once they knew it was there, they had longed to telescope the empty spaces of Aspsås, the hours of waiting.
They had ordered from the Greek, pooling enough dough to pay for half the order, which meant owing more than was really healthy. They should've kept their heads down and stuck to ordinary compressed Moroccan or even green mix, but Hilding had been eager, nagged and pleaded and brown-nosed until Dickybird caved in. When the pure hashish order had been placed all they could do was sit around waiting for three days.
The Greek had delivered. Glowing with satisfaction, they held the piece of hash close to the shower-room lamp and admired the shiny fragments.
'Hey! Spot the glass?'
'Course I fucking spotted it.'
'Looks like good shit.'
Hilding produced a lighter and handed it to Dickybird, who used the flame to heat the foil from underneath. About one minute usually did the trick. The flat brown lump softened enough to be kneaded and shaped with his fingertips. Hilding had brought tobacco. Three-quarters baccy to one Turkish worked just fine.