When he came to he had a taste of blood in his mouth and his pullover was sticky and wet. He must have been hit. Just then the boy and the woman passed him, and he tried to grab hold of the boy’s leg. At least he thought he did. But suddenly he was gasping for breath.
He no longer understood what was going on. Except that he was beaten, but by whom? By a woman? That insight became a part of his pain as he lay on the floor amidst glass and his own blood, breathing heavily, his eyes shut. He hoped it would be over soon. When he opened his eyes again he was surprised to see the woman still there. Had she not just left? No, she was standing by the table, he could see her thin boyish legs. He tried his utmost to get up. He looked for his weapon, and at the same time heard voices through the broken window, and then he moved once more to attack the woman.
But before he could do anything the woman exploded into motion and stormed out. From the terrace she threw herself headlong into the trees. Shots resounded in the dark and he muttered to himself, “Kill the bastards.” But it was all he could do to get to his feet and he cast a dull glance at the table in front of him.
There was a mass of crayons and paper which he looked at without really taking it all in. Then it was as if a claw had taken hold of his heart. He saw an evil demon with a pale face raising his hand to kill. It took a second or so for him to realize that the demon was himself, and he shuddered.
Yet he could not take his eyes off the image. Only then did he notice something scribbled at the top:
Mailed to police 4.22.
Chapter 27
When Aram Barzani of the Rapid Response Unit made his way into Gabriella Grane’s house at 4.52 he saw a large man dressed in black spreadeagled on the floor next to the round table.
He approached cautiously. The house seemed to have been abandoned. But he was not taking any risks. There were recent reports of a fierce gunfight up at the house and he could hear the excited voices of his colleagues outside on the steep rock slope.
“Here!” they shouted. “Here!”
Barzani did not understand what was going on, and for a moment he hesitated. Should he go to them? He decided to see first what condition the man on the floor was in. There was broken glass and blood all around, and the table was strewn with torn-up pieces of paper and crushed crayons. The man on the ground was crossing himself feebly. He was mumbling something. Probably a prayer. It sounded Russian; Barzani caught the word “Olga”. He told the man that a medical team was on its way.
“They were sisters,” the man said in English.
But it sounded so confused that Barzani attached no importance to it. Instead he searched through the man’s clothes, made sure that he was unarmed, and thought he had probably been shot in the stomach. His pullover was soaked in blood, and he looked alarmingly pale. Barzani asked what had happened. He got no reply, not at first. Then the man gasped out another strange sentence.
“My soul was captured in a drawing,” he said, and seemed to be about to lose consciousness.
Aram stayed for a few minutes to watch him, but when he heard from the ambulance crew he left the man and went down to the rocky slope. He wanted to discover what his colleagues had been shouting about. The snow was still falling and it was icy underfoot. Down by the water voices could be heard and the sound of more cars arriving. It was still dark and hard to see and there were many uneven rocks and straggly pines. The landscape was dramatic and steep. It could not have been easy to fight in this terrain and Barzani was gripped with foreboding. He noticed that it had become strangely quiet.
But his colleagues were not far away behind an overgrown aspen. He felt afraid — unusual for him — when he saw them staring down at the ground. What had they seen? Was the autistic boy dead?
He walked over slowly, thinking about his own boys, six and nine now. They were crazy about football — did nothing else, talked about nothing else. Björn and Anders. He and Dilvan had given them Swedish names because they had thought it would make their lives easier. What kind of people come out here to kill a child? He was gripped by a sudden fury. But in the next moment he breathed a sigh of relief.
There was no boy there, but two men lying on the ground, apparently both shot in the stomach. One of them — a brutal-looking type with pockmarked skin and a stubby boxer’s nose — tried to get up, but was easily pushed down again. His face betrayed his humiliation and his right hand was shaking with pain or rage. The other man, who was wearing a leather jacket and had his hair in a ponytail, seemed in worse shape. He lay still and stared in shock at the dark sky.
“No sign of the child?” Barzani said.
“Nothing,” his colleague Klas Lang said.
“And the woman?”
“No sign.”
Barzani was not sure if this was good news and he asked a few more questions. But no-one knew what had happened. The only certainty was that two automatic weapons, Barrett REC7s, had been found thirty or forty metres away, close to the jetty. They were assumed to belong to the men, but when asked how they had ended up there, the man with the pockmarked face spat out an incomprehensible answer.
Barzani and his colleagues spent the next fifteen minutes combing the terrain. All they could find were further signs of combat. More and more people began to arrive on the scene: ambulance crew, Detective Sergeant Modig, two or three crime scene technicians, a succession of regular policemen and the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who was accompanied by a massive American with a crew cut who immediately commanded everyone’s respect. At 5.25 they were informed that a witness was waiting to be interviewed down by the seashore and parking area. The man wanted to be addressed as K.G. He was actually called Karl-Gustav Matzon. He had fairly recently bought a new-build on the other side of the water. According to Lang, he needed to be taken with a pinch of salt: “The old boy has a very vivid imagination.”
Modig and Holmberg were standing in the parking area, trying to make sense of what had happened. The picture so far was fragmented and they were hoping that the witness K.G. Matzon would bring a measure of clarity to the night.
But when they saw him coming towards them along the shoreline, that seemed less and less likely. K.G. Matzon was resplendent in a Tyrolean hat, green checked trousers and a red Canada Goose jacket and he was sporting an absurd twirly moustache. He looked as if he were trying to be funny.
“K.G. Matzon?” Modig said.
“The very same,” he said, and without any prompting — maybe he realized that his credibility needed a boost — he explained that he ran True Crimes, a publishing house which produced books on notable crimes.
“Excellent. But right now we’d like a factual account — not some sales pitch for a forthcoming book,” Modig said, to be on the safe side. Matzon said that, of course, he understood.
He was after all a “respectable person”. He had woken up at a ridiculous hour, he said, and lain there listening to “the silence and the calm”. But just before 4.30 he heard something which he immediately recognized as a pistol shot, so he quickly got dressed and went onto his terrace — which had a view of the beach, the rock promontory and the parking area where they were now standing.
“What did you see?”
“Nothing. It was eerily quiet. Then the air exploded. It sounded as if a war had broken out.”
“You heard more shots?”
“There were cracks of gunfire from the promontory on the other side of the inlet and I stared across, stunned, and then... did I mention I was a birdwatcher?”