“So, Ameila . . . you’re still awake?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
He pointed to an armchair with a dozen colorful cushions on it; his leg and hip hurt, like always, and she gestured for him to sit.
“You shot two people. Saved the lives of twice as many. It’s natural not to be able to relax, let alone sleep.”
“Is that why I’m receiving this visit—in the middle of the night? Debriefing? If so, Superintendent, you can leave here with a clear conscience. They offered someone for me to talk to a couple of hours ago. A psychologist. But I told them no thanks.”
After their first few meetings, she’d reminded him of a modern version of Anni. Or a younger Hermansson. Someone who was a little smarter and braver than everyone else. And what she just said should have added to that impression.
“No. That’s not why I’m here. And I’m pretty sure you know that.”
But now he saw someone else. So much younger.
“Please sit down, Amelia.”
With stains on her dress and a cake with five candles waiting for her, singing Happy Birthday as if it were the most important task in the whole world.
“Opposite me, please.”
She shook her head.
“I’d rather stand.”
“You don’t need to be afraid. I came unarmed. I want to find a solution.”
“A solution?”
“Just you and me. We can take my car to Kronoberg jail. No big arrest, just you and me because we choose to trust each other.”
She had hidden her gun behind her back, stuffed it into her waistband. That’s how she got dressed while he was waiting in the stairwell.
“We’re not going anywhere.”
“You’re not gonna shoot me. I know that. Because we mean something to each other.”
She’d heard what he said. For a moment it lay there between them. Like a possibility. Until she shook his words off.
“I don’t want to shoot you. But I’ll do it if you force me to.”
“You won’t shoot me just like you couldn’t let the Hoffmann family die. Because after everything that’s happened, you know the difference. Between right and wrong.”
She laughed. Not scornfully or heartily. Emptily.
“Superintendent, there’s no such thing as right or wrong. All of that ended in an apartment seventeen years ago.”
Ewert Grens looked at the young woman.
And she looked at him.
And for the first time it didn’t feel strained or awkward.
“Now and then, Amelia . . . I’ve let people go. Despite being guilty of a crime. Because in some cases justice and the law are two different things. I considered doing that for you. But those I’ve allowed to go were victims who made the wrong decision at the last minute. You’re also a victim, my God, I know that. But you made your choice. You decided quite consciously to do what you did. To take other people’s lives. I can’t let you go. But if you put down the gun and come with me peacefully and quietly to the station, I will do everything in my power to make sure your crimes are seen in the only possible light. In light of what happened back then, long ago, when we first met.”
She paused in the hall, leaning against the door of the living room, listening to her three children breathe. They were sleeping. Safely. She’d been walking around Ewert’s large apartment since he left it in the middle of the night without explaining where he was going or why he looked so upset. Nor had she asked, it wasn’t her place, and she knew from those times when she’d seen a look like that on Piet’s face that it was useless.
She had stood on the balcony just as Grens usually did, and she understood why; there was a special kind of peace out there. She’d sat in his worn leather armchair in the small library, saw the portraits on the wall of two young police officers in their brand-new uniforms, Ewert and the woman who must have been Anni. But she couldn’t rest. And it didn’t matter. It was enough that the children were. As she headed into the kitchen to fill a kettle with water and make herself a cup of tea, her phone rang. The only voice she wanted to hear.
“Hello, my beloved wife.”
“Hello, my beloved husband.”
They could have hung up after that. It was enough, no more explanation was needed.
But while they both held their phones they started to weep. First Piet, then Zofia. Not violently—just a slow, shared crying.
They were alive. They were uninjured.
“Tomorrow, we’ll be together again, Zofia, we can hold each other.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I found a solution. With a very wise man down here. He got something from me, and I got my freedom from him. We promised each other we would never meet again. Never have to see each other again. Sometimes it’s that simple.”
They wept no more.
Peace, that’s what they felt.
A calm that a body truly allows inside.
Idon’t have any children.”
“Why?”
“Never worked out.”
Ewert Grens sat in an armchair surrounded by pillows with a gun pointed at his chest. And the only thing he could come up with to talk about was the daughter or son he never had, because that was the only thing that seemed natural.
“But there is one child I’ve thought about, who’s followed me, and who I’ve wondered about over the years—where she ended up, how she was doing.”
They looked at each other again. He’d been so sure she wouldn’t shoot. He wasn’t anymore. Her intense gaze was single-minded and defeated at the same time, though that was impossible, and somehow she stared straight through him in a way he’d never experienced before. No matter how long you live, no matter how many people you meet, there’s always something new.
“A little girl who hopped around her siblings’ bedrooms on one leg at a time. And who leaned her head on my shoulder when I carried her out.”
Her hand was just as steady, her gaze as sharp. She’d heard him, maybe even listened and understood, but she wasn’t letting it get close to her, not losing control for even a second.
“Until I was a teenager, I had no real memories of my father. I couldn’t reach him. But you, Superintendent Grens, I could remember. Not your name or who you were, but just that you existed—I could always call to mind how you lifted me up, held me, protected me. Sometimes I wondered if you were real or just something I dreamed up. Maybe I was remembering wrong.”
So far she’d stood with her back to her small kitchen, now she moved toward the window, glanced out quickly and then back at Grens again.
“I see your reinforcements have arrived.”
“It doesn’t matter. What I said still applies—if you let me arrest you, here, just you and I will go to Kronoberg. No one gets hurt, no drama. And you won’t get the book thrown at you. Trust me just like you trusted me back then. You’re still young, Amelia, you have a long life ahead of you, when you’re released and all this is finally over, forever.”
“You know my name isn’t Amelia. You also know, Superintendent Grens, that this will never be over for me.”
Amelia who had once been Hannah who had once been Zana, was now just herself. It was as if he was meeting every version of her at the same time. A little girl who was reinventing herself. She’d been as clever as she was patient. Applying to the police academy, positioning herself in the right place to seek the answers she needed, then participating in the investigation of her own revenge and using every available scrap of information to stay ahead of them, whether it was stolen cell phones or technically advanced equipment hidden in the unit’s corridor.
“Seventy-two hours, Superintendent. That’s how long you could hold him without proof, and that’s how long you could stop me from finishing this. The same amount of time I—according to the autopsy records I’ve now read—lived with my d
ead family.”
A few days and a few nights.
He couldn’t even begin to imagine how that would have affected a child who had lost everything she knew.
“Amelia, I . . . or do you want me to call you Zana? Like back then? I can . . .”
“You were right at the time, Superintendent. The man you once arrested and were forced to release—that was the man who ordered the murders of my family and who took over my father’s business. He moved back to Albania and a town called Shkodër, close to the border of Montenegro, but you probably know that already. I tracked him down there. I did what you did, interrogated him, but I was better—there were no rules to restrain me. And I remember every word he said. Listen, little girl, this is how you do it. If you wanna go on like this, you have to learn. You go in and shoot the kids first. Then you tell the person you want answers from that they can make a new family. And then, whether you get your answers or not, you shoot them afterward. I remember how he looked at me while I held a gun to his head, his eyes were so alive while he tried to provoke me. That’s what you do—you don’t shoot from the top, you shoot from the bottom up. Like we did to your family. He knew he was going to die. So he described their deaths to me in graphic detail. It was like if he was taking my family away from me again, do you understand, Superintendent Grens?”
She glanced out the window again. And the whole time she kept her gun pointed at him. She opened the blinds even farther, pulled them up completely, the summer night would soon turn to dawn, the darkness to timid light. Grens tried to meet her eyes, to reach her, share something with her, it’s harder to kill someone once they’ve done that.
“If I’d solved the case then. Found the evidence I was missing. We wouldn’t have to be here today. You wouldn’t be standing there with a loaded weapon pointed at me, you wouldn’t have had to avenge your family’s murders.”
“He wanted me to shoot him. Quickly. For the same reason my mother spit in his face—she’d already figured out what he told me long after, she was going to die, no matter what.”
“Zana, I . . .”
“You’re right. You didn’t catch him then. But I never would have found him unless you, Superintendent, had found him first.”
She leaned back, pushing her back against the window. Then she cocked the gun with a slow, obvious movement.
And suddenly Grens understood.
She was doing the same thing.
Right now.
She was trying to provoke her own death.
“No!”
He was just about to stand up, run toward her, stand between her and the window, but she put her index finger on the trigger and started to squeeze.
“Sit down if you want to survive!”
She meant it.
He was sure of it now.
“Zana—I know what you’re doing.”
“Good. Then I want you to shoot me from the front, afterward. Two times. You know what the distance should be between forehead and temple. I want it to look exactly like my parents and siblings.”
“I won’t accept being forced to shoot you, please, listen, let me . . .”
“If you try to stop me then I’ll take your life first and then let them take mine.”
“I won’t allow you to die!”
“You should have thought of that before you prevented me from using Hoffmann to take over the Swedish arms market. Or from taking out Zaravic, the only one left besides me who was in my home that day. Being the only survivor is hell, Grens! And I’m finally going to finish what they probably should have finished back then—because I’ll never let you put me in a fucking prison or a fucking institution.”
Then she raised the gun.
With the same exaggerated slowness she’d used to cock it.
And fired.
Above him. Beside him. Ewert Grens saw that—but his reinforcements outside couldn’t. Even though he was rushing toward her. So they did what they were supposed to do—shot the perpetrator who was exposed in the window.
She fell forward, into his arms.
Ewert Grens held her lifeless body, gently stroked her still warm cheek.
Soon he would carry her out one more time.
And she would lean her heavy head against his shoulder.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anders Roslund has published ten novels as part of the successful writing duos Roslund & Hellström and Roslund & Thunberg. His books have been published in thirty languages and he is the recipient of numerous prestigious international awards. Knock Knock is his first solo novel.
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Knock Knock Page 40
