Knock Knock

by Anders Roslund

  “I want you to take a look at it. Now.”

  He sat up on the edge of the sofa, stretching a little, and pointed to his desk and its mountains of paperwork.

  “I don’t work break-ins. Too many people dying in this town. And that, as you very well know, takes all of my time.”

  She wouldn’t give up, he knew that.

  “Dala Street 74.”

  “Yes?”

  “Third floor.”

  “And?”

  “Apartment 1301.”

  She held out an envelope to him, and he stared at it but didn’t reach for it.

  “Is your office this stuffy too, Hermansson? The AC doesn’t seem to be working.”

  She settled down next to him on the sofa; it was so worn out that they both sank to the floor.

  “A break-in, Ewert. But nothing was taken. So I put it aside. Since I too don’t have time.”

  She nodded at his paperwork. He knew what her desk looked like. The piles even higher. And just as many on her floor.

  “I did what I always do, glanced at it, then put it back on top of the pile. Then I did a quick search in RAR to see if any other crimes were reported at nearby addresses in the last few years.”

  Ewert Grens stretched a second time, but with no yawn. He wasn’t completely aware of it, but ever since she’d stormed in here, turned off his music, and started speaking to him in that demanding way she had, he’d been smiling.

  RAR. The localized crime report for a specific address or area. He was the one who’d taught her to start there.

  “And?”

  “Nothing unusual. Just some burglaries. More domestic abuse than those expensive addresses might like us to think. Drug busts. And a few manslaughters.”

  She leaned forward, the envelope in her hand, poked it into his chest until he took it.

  “But nothing I could connect to the break-in. Nothing that would explain why a person breaks into an inner city apartment in the middle of the day, walks around inside—and chooses to leave without taking anything with them.”

  “May I open the door to my office again, Officer Hermansson? Would that be okay with you? Maybe someone else has a window open and we can get a little draft flowing in here. It’s already twenty-seven degrees. And it’s supposed to hit thirty-two!”

  “I was about to log out of the system. Put the case aside again, deprioritize down to one of this county’s fifty-six thousand open cases. And in a few months, I’d recommend Wilson close it.”

  Ewert Grens was fanning himself with the envelope now, his eyes closed, trying to herd some air onto his damp forehead—she ripped it out of his hand and pulled out a document, put it down on the rickety coffee table, and pointed impatiently to the first three lines.

  “Then I saw this. An annotation at the very bottom of the file. A red flag warning that there’s an older case filed away in the restricted archive, available only in paper form. A seventeen-year-old investigation at the same address, same floor, and according to the apartment number, even the same apartment. The kind of investigation you do—when people die in this city.”

  He was listening now. But still didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “The note. The red flag.”

  In the case of any report regarding Dala Street 74, regardless of the classification of the crime, please contact Detective Inspector Ewert Grens immediately.

  “You wrote that, Ewert. Signed it.”

  The document lay on the table between them, her fingers still tapping on the lines she wanted him to look at.

  Until he finally did.

  “Seventeen years ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Murder?”

  “Yes. Or . . . rather, four murders. A mother. A father. A daughter. A son.”

  Strange.

  How memory works. How it’s not there at all until it is, until it comes back and hits you at full force, pushing everything else aside, demanding space.

  All the space.

  Because he did remember.

  Ewert Grens leaned out through the open window into the inner courtyard of the Kronoberg Police Station, where his colleagues sat on park benches, some in the sun with their noses and cheeks red, others lying in the shade of some small tree, drinking coffee from brown plastic mugs.

  That suffocating anxiety.

  Maybe it was the heat squeezing his body, making him restless. Maybe it was the sweat dripping down his tired back.

  Maybe it was a little girl hopping on one foot with food on her face, her little feet kicking up the most horrific stench at the most horrific crime scene he’d ever seen—the rooms that enclosed her dead family.

  Ewert Grens liked walking slowly through the streets of Stockholm, always had, all the way back when Anni was at his side, squeezing his hand. Right now the erratic morning traffic honked and jostled forward beside him as he sped down the steep slope of Kronoberg Park, saw his reflection in the water from Sankt Eriks Bridge, exchanged Odenplan’s mumbling for the silence of Dala Street.

  Sixty-four and a half. Six months to go. Then someone would take his place in his office, make themselves at home there, open his door when someone knocked on it. Just as he’d taken the office from someone nobody remembered anymore. You exist for a time. Then you don’t. The police pension is one of the best, they say, and some of his fellow officers planned to walk out that unwieldy iron door the moment they turned sixty-one and never look back again.

  To let go of everything.

  Become nothing at all.

  He’d decided one day that the fears that plagued him were ugly and meaningless, decided he’d had enough of it. He’d wasted enough of his life bent under the weight what had already happened. And yet despite all that, lately he’d had a hard time sleeping, even on his corduroy sofa, whose overly soft cushions usually made him feel like he was being held, and therefore allowed him to rest.

  Because now here it was again. Fear. Because this was all he had. He didn’t want anything else, didn’t know anything else, didn’t even know anyone outside those walls—had never wanted to, never longed for another life.

  A few minutes more down the sidewalks of Vasastan where the buildings stood side by side, tightly packed and heavy, their large windows watching him. Until he came to the door marked 74, which he’d left so many years ago, but still remembered.

  That round stairwell, the uneven stairs, the elegant ceiling, the continually flowering wallpaper.

  And on the third floor, the same heavy front door awaited him. But this time with scratches around the lock, completely fresh, wood chips still hanging loose and not yet darkened.

  He paused there, eyes closed, breathing carefully—trying to catch those small thuds in his chest near his heart, the uneven and uneasy rhythm that reminded him of a five-year-old’s feet.

  “Hello?”

  A woman, blond, almost as tall as himself, somewhere between forty and fifty.

  “Ewert Grens, detective superintendent at the City Police. I’m here about your break-in.”

  Her eyes didn’t leave his—vigilant, almost hostile.

  “Your people already talked to me about this.”

  “That’s correct. But I . . .”

  “A woman, a little younger, she sounded younger, asked me questions, which I answered. I don’t understand—I’ve had a burglary before, not here but at my summerhouse, and the police didn’t do a damn thing even though the whole place was emptied out, and I called you many times. And now . . . you contact me twice when not a thing has been taken?”

  “Detective Mariana Hermansson spoke to you on the phone. But I wanted to take a look for myself.”

  Those eyes, watching him.

  “Well, in that case, I’d like to see your badge.”

  The inner pocket of his jacket, black leather case.


  ID card, metal badge. And just to be sure, he gave her his business card, with his title and telephone number and an email address he barely knew himself.

  “It says you’re a detective superintendent?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now I’m even more confused. A detective superintendent? Following up on a break-in . . .”

  She shrugged her shoulders, stepped back, waved him inside with one of her tan arms.

  “. . . that wasn’t even a burglary, just some damage, and all my belongings, though scattered about, were all still here?”

  That memory again.

  Demanding space, pushing everything away.

  In the hallway an antique chest of drawers and large mirror with a gold frame were replaced in his mind by a chair and a man with a newspaper in his lap and two bullet holes in his head.

  The living room with its pine dining table turned into a TV playing cartoons at full blast. And the empty, gleaming kitchen became one that was sticky with food, where a little girl climbed into her dead mother’s lap.

  Ewert Grens looked at the woman who’d hesitantly let him in, trying to concentrate on her mouth when she answered his questions—lips that turned into red candles on a birthday cake still sitting on a kitchen table, untouched. She told him what he already knew, what Hermansson had written down in her report. Someone broke in on a weekday sometime between eight thirty and eleven. Exterior door with clear scratches made with a hard metal tool, and the contents of the wardrobes and cabinets and drawers thrown onto the floor. But the jewelry box, a wallet with a good amount of cash in it, new computers, and expensive art hanging on the walls all remained untouched—even the thin layer of dust on the frames showed no fingerprints.

  Everything was left intact.

  Except for a small patch on the floor. She led him into one of the children’s bedrooms. Or what had once been one of the children’s rooms, long ago.

  “We use it as a guest room. When we moved in, it was clear it had belonged to a young person. That was . . . well, sixteen and a half years ago. We’d planned to use it as a child’s room someday too. But . . . well.”

  Grens sought the woman’s eyes and saw a flash of grief for a child that never was. He knew how that felt, and sometimes he grieved for it too. Things don’t always turn out like you plan.

  “And right here, Detective. This is the only place . . . there behind that chair, do you see? They pried up the floor a little bit.”

  He remembered how a bed used to stand right there, flush with the wall that had a window in it; the older daughter had been lying with her face turned in that direction. Now it was a sofa bed with blue and white stripes, and he was struck by a sudden and overwhelming desire to just lie down there and finish the sleep that had been interrupted.

  “You can see for yourself.”

  The woman pushed away the sofa and a small side table and threw up a corner of the rug.

  Ewert Grens’s leg ached as he kneeled down on the wood floor. Hurt even more when he lay his heavy body down to get a closer look.

  A pried-up plank, split at three places, sharp splinters.

  Underneath sat a four-sided hole, almost a perfect square, cut into the concrete that formed someone else’s roof.

  He measured it with his fingers, guessing four by four centimeters.

  A void with no contents.

  Something had been lying here. For seventeen years. Something that was gone now.

  That damned heat.

  Ewert Grens exited a beautiful building out of a beautiful door, trying his best to make room for his ungainly body in the dense and slippery air. Twenty-seven degrees had just risen to twenty-eight and had its eye on twenty-nine. He took off his jacket, unbuttoned his shirt, and kept his stride short.

  He’d walked this way last time, too, carrying a child in his arms.

  Grens remembered and swallowed hard. It felt like that empty hole—four centimeters by four, missed by him and all of the crime scene technicians—was in his throat, pressing down on his stomach, a cavity, an empty box, a container that no longer contained what had been there for so long.

  The weather had been cooler then. Late autumn. He’d been wearing a different gray jacket, and she, after just a few steps, leaned her head against his shoulder, closed her eyes, and let days and nights of waiting for the dead to answer dissolve into sleep. A young police officer who’d been called to the crime scene followed him—this limping man with a child in his arms—in a patrol car, pulled up close, rolled down the side window, and asked Grens to stop, open the door to the back seat, and get in. Grens had mumbled something and kept walking. Oden Street, Sankt Eriks Street, Fleming Street. The child’s head rested heavier on his shoulder, her eyes still closed. So trusting, he’d thought, the kind of trust he could never feel, maybe that’s how it felt.

  Today he took the same path, walking toward the entrance to the Kronoberg Police Station, where a security guard in the glass cage nodded to the detective who always stayed late, long past when evening had turned to night, and the glow of most of the computer screens had been extinguished. The detective who usually slept in his office under a thin blanket on a brown corduroy sofa rather than going to the apartment where loneliness lived. Grens grabbed a cup of black coffee from the machine in the hall, squeezed in between the new copier and an old-fashioned fax. Then just seven steps to his office. He started the music just like always, his own mix tape. Siw Malmkvist began to sing for him again: “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool.” He sat down at his desk, twisting and turning his leg and upper body and still not finding a comfortable position, lay down on the sofa and kept spinning round and round.

  Maybe it was the heat chafing at him again.

  Maybe it was an empty box four centimeters long and four centimeters wide.

  He rose quickly and left his office.

  The dust was even more visible than usual in the hallway, and he pressed out another plastic mug of coffee, black, headed for the elevator and passed by her office, the woman who demanded answers, who saw straight through him.

  “Ewert?”

  He didn’t stop.

  “I don’t have time right now.”

  Mariana hurried into the hall, shouting after him while he pushed the elevator button.

  “Neither do I.”

  She walked closer.

  “But I want to know.”

  “You will. Later. Both you and Sven.”

  “A burglary? And nothing was stolen? And yet I can see on your face that . . .”

  “Mariana Hermansson?”

  “Yes?”

  “Later.”

  He turned around, the elevator had just arrived.

  “Four murders, Ewert?”

  She wasn’t giving up. The door opened, and he stepped in.

  “And now the same apartment? Same investigator? And after he visits the scene he seems visibly . . . yes, visibly, there’s no better word—upset?”

  They stared at each other.

  “Ewert? Talk to me.”

  He stood in the elevator and she stood outside.

  “I thought I’d only made one mistake. But clearly I made another.”

  “Mistake?”

  “I let the man who killed them go—I’ve always been convinced of that. But turns out I also missed a hole in the floor.”

  “Now you’ve lost me completely.”

  “And I don’t like it, Hermansson—I don’t like loose ends.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That right now this only concerns me.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Three floors down. Cooler. Darker. Just as dusty. Grens stepped out of the elevator and headed toward a gray door that was wider than all the others. The archive. Shelves and boxes and folders. And inside of them somewhere were h
is four decades among the criminals of Stockholm, investigations of perpetrators and victims, who transform each other’s lives forever. There was one shelf he used to avoid—turned his eyes away when he passed by it, made sure to look anywhere but there. An investigation concerning the woman who had been his whole world and who disappeared into herself after her head was crushed under the wheels of the police van he’d been driving. Nowadays he did look, sometimes even stopped there. Just as he dared to visit her grave now, the white cross with her name engraved on it; he even grabbed a watering can hanging from a nearby rusty faucet and watered a tall flowering bush he’d planted because he liked the name—love’s ear. She lay in that grave just as she lay in those brown archival boxes. Anni Grens written on a label on the cardboard. He ran his fingers gently over the black ink, wrote her name in the air. Then he kept going, deeper into the archives, past other shelves and other Annis.

  All the way to the back and the glass wall that stood there.

  He waited in front of a small hatch, which was raised just a centimeter by a man of his own age, staring at him through small round glasses.

  “I need to see a record from the witness protection program.”

  It was a file that only a few had the authority to see, which he had to apply for, get a receipt, and be registered in order to handle. The records were kept in a room with all the other sensitive documents stored on behalf of SÄPO, Interpol, and the witness protection program.

  “Ewert Grens? It’s been a while.”

  The archivist didn’t seem particularly happy to see him. They didn’t like each other. Never had.

  “The witness protection registry, like I said. An old investigation that was never closed. I’d like to check it out.”