by Will Dean
I walk on.
Black liquorice snakes are being extruded through holes onto a conveyer belt and then cooled in a machine. It’s alive, humming like some giant cuboidal insect. I read signs like ‘Danger: Cooling Zone’ and ‘High Voltage’.
There are staff everywhere. They’re carrying clipboards in this part of the room, reading dials and making notes. In the central area, I see long tables of people elevated from everyone else. Most of them seem to be women but it’s hard to tell with these uniforms.
First, the cutters. They slice up narrow black snakes with a skill and speed I’d expect from a surgeon or a Michelin-star chef. With a scalpel-type blade, they cut the snake into small discs and then the discs fly along the conveyer to the stampers. Each one, there must be eight of them, each one pushes what looks like a stamp you’d expect a nineteenth-century earl to seal hot wax onto his documents with, they push that down into the liquorice to produce the famous ‘G’ enclosed in a circle on each disc. And now I realise what Holmqvist meant about mechanisation making a difference here. If I were a management consultant or a banker, which thank The Lord Baby Jesus Christ I am not, I’d look at this get-up and visually erase seventy per cent of the workforce, and then visually install three big machines, and then visually write myself a seven-figure pay cheque.
A stamper reaches behind her back with one gloved hand, while still stamping quick-fire, and passes me a liquorice coin. Black and soft. Warm. I take it and thank her and she whips her hand back to work. She has bright red hair under her hairnet; not ginger or strawberry blonde, but bright red like a sports car, dyed red, scarlet blood-red like a shiny murder apple.
On to the quality control area. Lines of people touch sweets with their gloved fingertips and throw misshapen ones into a bin. There are three women at one end who are randomly tasting samples.
Then there’s a packaging zone. Tubes and boxes and plastic packets, the big ones you get in Gavrik cinema on the three days a week it bothers to open. The packaged goods are loaded into crates and the forklifts arrange them on pallets and drive them out of the double doors into a covered loading bay, where the vintage trucks – I got to tell you, I would not be driving a Dinky Toy truck like that on these roads in February, but they do look nice – those trucks take them to stores all over the country.
I open the door with the cracked window and step through into the canteen. A hundred faces look up at me and then look straight back down to their coffees and their cardamom buns and then Janitor Andersson taps me firmly on the shoulder.
‘Come on,’ he says, holding me loosely by the arm, coughing and spluttering.
I shake him off. ‘You left me in there.’
‘Now I’m taking you to the old factory. Haven’t got all the time in the world.’
He marches out into the yard, me pulling off my hairnet which is stuck in the grip I use to keep my excuse for a ponytail in place. I drag off my shoe covers and place them all in a container by the door.
Janitor Andersson heads under the arch and takes a long key from the jailor’s ring hanging on his belt. He unlocks the door directly opposite the entrance to the canteen – the key’s as long as a meat skewer – and ushers me in.
‘All the good gear in this side, bit cramped now, no computer hocus-pocus; all good Swedish-made steel in here. The family asked me to show you so I am.’
The room’s the same size as the canteen the other side. Huge rusting vats sit rooted like redwood stumps here and there next to wooden desks and stacks of dusty conveyers.
‘The old offices and lockers,’ he says, pointing into the murk.
We walk through, a single bare light bulb buzzing and struggling to light the place. It’s freezing. Unheated. Dank and mouldy. I see desks with old-fashioned circular dial telephones and typewriters and filing cabinets and blotters.
‘All could be valuable one day, you never know,’ says Andersson. ‘Old man Grimberg – may he rest in peace, although I doubt he’ll ever get the chance – Gustav’s father I mean, not popular but he listened to me, asked my opinion, noticed I actually had a brain in my skull, he always saw this as museum potential, an attraction for passing tourists, you know the sort of thing.’
Tourists? Passing tourists? Seriously?
I walk over to the lockers. These are crammed three-high, hundreds in a small space with cracked mirrors on some of their doors and cracked mirrors on some of the walls.
‘And that there’s the south furnace but it hasn’t been hot since before World War Two. Chimney walls are over a metre thick at the base.’
There are two doors the size of my truck doors, latched across.
‘Can I look inside?’
He steps over and heaves the latch up and pulls a door.
‘Don’t go right in, it’s not safe, vermin and all sorts with the sugar around this place, just take a look.’
I stick my neck inside and it’s like a small room, originally a coal or wood-burning furnace, with the circular chimney base even deeper inside.
We step away and something catches my eye. Something scuttling. A tiny mouse or an oversize beetle. It scurries behind an old stamping table and past a shiny black line.
A wet line.
There’s a dark trickle of blood flowing down into the floor drain.
12
‘Look,’ I say, pointing to the blood.
Andersson starts to say, ‘Come on, I’ve got pipes . . .’ and then he stops. His eyes open wider. We walk closer to the dark shiny line and step around the stamping table.
Cobwebs float in mid-air.
Something very bad has happened in this space. Something irreversible.
The room is freezing cold and it is silent.
We get to the far end of the table and there’s a pair of boots. My breath catches and I push myself to keep walking.
A man on the floor.
‘Mary, Mother of God,’ says Andersson under his breath.
I crouch down to the man but can’t see him clearly, the distant light bulb not up to the job.
I take his pulse. His skin is cold.
Nothing.
‘Get help,’ I say. ‘Call an ambulance.’
The dead man has a small puncture wound on the side of his neck. Not a slice, but a small cut. His neck is red with his own blood but it is not pumping out.
‘Go!’ I say, my voice returning to me. And Andersson goes.
The man’s eyes are black. No, wait, they’re covered. Each lid is eclipsed with a black disc. Two Grimberg Liquorice coins. But the lids aren’t closed. His eyes are wide open and the coins are sitting atop his own black pupils. My own eyes start to acclimatise to the murk. He looks terrified. Like a screaming dead man from a different era with a penny on each eye. Like the myth. Coins to pay his way across the river Styx to the underworld.
There’s a noise at my back.
‘Move aside,’ says Thord.
I step back making sure I don’t tread in the blood.
‘When did you find him?’ asks Thord, his fingers to the man’s neck.
‘A few minutes ago,’ I say. ‘He’s dead.’
Thord shines his torch at the man’s face but the batteries must be dying and the beam comes and goes.
‘Did you touch anything?’ he asks.
‘No.’
The liquorice eyes shine in the sporadic artificial light and I can see the capital ‘G’ on each coin and I can see the stoat features of this poor, scared man. His mouth is wide open like he’s in agony. He has small ears set back and he has tufty whiskers. It’s the man from the canteen. Attacked. Bled out. Murdered.
His shirt is soaking wet but it’s not bloody. The torch cuts out and we’re plunged into semi-darkness. I can hear Thord shaking it, but nothing. Then Janitor Andersson pulls out his phone and switches on the light. He moves closer to the body and Thord grunts his thanks.
The wound is as small as a hernia cut or a mole-removal incision. A neat slice, perhaps a centimetre long. But it is
deep. The killer found the artery or the vein – I’m not sure which is which – with all the skill of a cardiac surgeon. There’s a shiny line running away from this poor man and there’s something stuck in the wound itself. A tooth. It looks like there’s a sharpened tooth rammed into the flesh.
Was a dog involved in this attack? A killer and his dog? A wolf?
‘What the . . . ?’ says Thord, pulling on a pair of latex gloves.
I think he’s going to extract the tooth, but he moves his fingertips toward the man’s gaping mouth and I see what he’s really staring at. There’s a shining black mass between his teeth like he’s biting down on a black cooking-apple that’s far too big for his mouth. The janitor moves his phone torch closer. Must be a dozen or more liquorice coins rolled into a black mass, part-melted by the man’s saliva acids, grey dribble now running down his cold, still face. His jaw is locked as open as can be. He’s trapped in an eternal scream with black on his eyes and black in his mouth and an animal tooth lodged in his neck.
Clouds of vapour hang in the air from Thord’s lips. His breathing quickens. He has an expression which says ‘this is over my pay grade’. He looks panicked.
‘Stand back, give me some space,’ he says.
Chief Björn arrives with the new cop. They both have torches and their torches are working. Björn looks at the scene and then he turns to his young colleague. ‘Keep everyone on the site, nobody comes in or goes out. Move everyone into the main factory and control the exits. I’ll join you as soon as I can.’ She nods but her face says ‘why is that man screaming?’ and ‘why is his jaw locked open?’ She leaves and she ushers me and the janitor to follow her and all of a sudden I want to flee this factory and this town and never look back.
13
After two hours trapped inside the modern factory waiting for the inappropriately small police force to search the building and tape up the scene, Janitor Andersson and I are instructed to give our statements to Chief Björn at the cop shop. Thord’s already sealed three-quarters of the site and he looks desperate for outside forces to arrive. The Chief is business-like but I can tell even he’s rattled. The exactness of the fatal wound, the dog tooth, the liquorice coins sitting atop the man’s still-open eyes. The fear on his face. And the fact that a cold-blooded murderer was walking among us. Is walking among us.
The victim’s name was Gunnarsson. Per Gunnarsson.
Björn takes my statement. He asks me what time I found Gunnarsson and if I saw anyone else around. He asks me about my whereabouts in the hours leading up to the discovery. He asks me if I disturbed the scene in any way. He asks me if I know who killed the victim.
On my way out of the station I ask the Chief a dozen of my own newspaper questions and he just glares at me and shuts the door in my face.
‘Still got them pipes to lag,’ says Janitor Andersson, coughing beside me. ‘Even with all this evil.’
‘Who would kill that man?’ I ask.
‘Gunnarsson? Plenty of folk. Anyone can kill, I’ll tell you that for nothing, anyone and everyone has it in them. And he wasn’t well liked.’
I look at him like ‘what?’ and realise that, even though my heart feels hard and tight in my chest, even though I want to run away from the dead body, still lying where we found it, still unmoved by the authorities, I need to question Andersson. I need to do my job.
‘I feel faint,’ I lie, as we approach the factory gates, three police cars parked blocking the entrance from vehicles. ‘I need coffee.’
‘Hotel’s open,’ he says.
‘You live under the factory. Could I come in for a cup? Five minutes?’
I turn my back on the factory and on dead Gunnarsson with his liquorice eyes, and it feels like I’m standing in front of some Eastern-bloc presidential palace, looking down on my subjects, one of them an unknown killer. I have Toytown laid out in front of me like some nightmare version of a kid’s roadmap rug.
We pass the new policewoman and she lets us through. Most of the site is closed off, but the new part of the factory has reopened.
‘How tall are you?’ Janitor Andersson asks, looking up at me.
‘Above average,’ I say.
‘Best watch yourself.’
The factory’s built on a granite hill. The hill isn’t level so on one side the builders had to create a slanting basement to even off the site. The basement is full height on the far left side, then it peters out like a wedge of cheese under the centre of the building.
‘Ain’t much, but you can come in,’ he says. ‘Police already searched it.’
There’s a kitchen with a kettle and a two-ring hob and a multipack of cocktail sticks and an old pine table with two chairs. Foil-wrapped pipes cling to the ceiling. A bunch of electrical cables snake from one side of the room to the other and there’s a fridge and an old TV and some patio furniture.
‘Will you feel safe down here?’ I say.
‘I got all the keys,’ he says, rattling his jailor’s ring. He’s wearing work gloves, the fitted thorn-proof rubber variety ICA sells in packs of ten. ‘Nobody’ll bother me. Say, why did Gunnarsson have them coins on his eyes? That the voodoo?’
‘No idea,’ I say.
‘Got a bedroom through there.’ He points to the low ceiling area. ‘I’ll be sleeping with a sharp Norrland knife under my pillow tonight for good measure. And through here’s my workshop.’
He leads me in and tells me the Grimberg kids used to play down here years ago. He says he feels like a protective uncle of sorts to young Karin.
There are bottles of motor oil and square cans of turpentine stacked in the corner. I look around and check the exits, check the corners. Duct tape. A length of blue nylon rope and a pair of bolt cutters and a fine bradawl screwdriver and a multipack of salt liquorice and a sawn-off length of steel pipe. There’s a blowtorch sitting atop a toolkit and it looks like a gun. I count six posters on the walls. They’re bygone adverts for exotic locations like the Grand Canyon and Mexico City and The Great Pyramids.
‘I ain’t never been,’ he says, noticing me looking. ‘Not yet anyways. Got eight grandkiddies and another on the way. I’ll find a way to take ’em all one day, God willing.’
The edges of the posters are curled and the paper’s mottled with mould spores. These are cold, moist posters of hot, dry places. There’s a framed photograph hanging from a nail. Janitor Andersson surrounded by his grandkids, a pet dog just out of shot. I can see the tip of its tail. The room is full height at one end and then tapers to about one metre at the far side but that’s not even the worst thing. The lower parts of the walls are wet with groundwater. The air is heavy with it.
‘Problems with damp?’ I ask.
‘What doesn’t mind, over, doesn’t matter,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘You know, you heard the old saying.’ He coughs into his elbow pit. ‘What you doesn’t mind, over, doesn’t matter. That’s how it goes.’
What?
I’m getting claustrophobic down here in this wet sloping room with no window so I turn to Andersson. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow. If you think of anything important about Gunnarsson, just let me know.’
He looks at me and tuts like this kind of thing, a suicide and a murder in the same week, is best kept out of newspapers. Best kept buried like poor Per Gunnarsson soon will be.
I photograph a team of crime-scene investigators putting on their white suits and entering the old factory. Anna-Britta calls for me from the canteen doorway.
‘Tuva.’
She ushers me inside and walks upstairs so I follow her. She opens the door to the Receiving Room, such a contrast from Andersson’s subterranean hellhole, and then she gestures for me to sit down.
‘I heard you found him.’
I nod.
‘I’m so sorry. Did you see anything strange just before? Anyone you didn’t recognise?’
‘Not that I can think of.’
‘This is all rather delicate as I’m sure you c
an imagine.’
‘Delicate?’ I ask. ‘A man lost his life.’
Anna-Britta bites her lip. ‘Two men.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. And I am.
‘Before we go on, Tuva, regardless of whether Gunnarsson was an accident or whether it was something more heinous, will you give me your word that you’ll keep the gruesome details out of your newspaper? Andersson told me all about the . . .’ she blinks and looks at my neck. ‘We need to contain the reputational damage is all. There are livelihoods at risk.’
‘First of all, this wasn’t an accident. Second of all, I need to report what happened. I can’t omit details.’
‘Can’t or won’t?’
‘I have a duty to my readers and to the victim, and you know this news will get out anyway.’
‘My staff won’t talk.’
I raise my eyebrows.
‘They will not talk,’ she says again.
‘Did you know Per Gunnarsson?’ I ask.
‘I can’t say.’
‘Can’t,’ I ask. ‘Or won’t?’
She sets her jaw.
‘Okay.’ I try to look conciliatory. ‘If I agree to treat this as sensitively as possible, to consider the factory and the town when I’m writing, to reassure locals that you’re still open for business, then you’ll answer my questions and allow me full access to the factory, including access to your private residence beyond that door.’
She stares at the residence door with its coat of arms moulded above the frame like it’s a whole other world back there. She shakes her head.
‘That’s our home, Tuva. It’s already been searched by the police, already been messed around with.’
‘I know. And I’ve interviewed hundreds of people for stories and I can only really write them, and do them justice, if I see their environment. I found a man dead under your home and it was no accident. He was killed.’
‘My husband would not like it.’
‘But you’re in charge now,’ I say, forcing a smile to soften my words.
‘I’m sorry, Tuva, I . . .’
A figure in black bursts into the room from the residence wearing a veil headband and she has a beauty spot painted above her lip.
