Box 21

by Anders Roslund

  Sven sat down in front of him, touched his chin, pulled his fingers through his blond fringe.

  ‘Look, Grens . . .’

  Ewert raised his finger.

  ‘Shush.’

  Another minute.

  And there are no exceptions to the rule.

  Yes, everybody’s somebody’s fool.

  Sven waited. Siw stopped singing. Ewert looked up.

  Suddenly Ewert spoke.

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘Look, it’s just a thought. Aspsĺs prison. And Hilding Oldéus. You know who I mean, that emaciated junkie. The one I’m about to question.’

  Ewert nodded. He knew exactly who Hilding Oldéus was.

  ‘We know Oldéus was inside at the same time as Lang,’ Sven went on. ‘And we know they got friendly, as friendly as anyone can get with a lunatic hard man like Lang. Hilding crawled to him, produced some home-brew early on; it had been hidden in a fire extinguisher. They were nearly put in the slammer at one point when a guard caught them at it, pissed out of their heads.’

  ‘Right. Hilding laid on the brew and Jochum gave him protection in return.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And what was your idea?’

  ‘After questioning Oldéus about the washing powder, then we’ll talk about Lang. Let him help us get him.’

  The music had stopped. No more Siw. Ewert looked around the room, though there wasn’t much to see. It was small and, apart from the cassette player and the tape rack, totally impersonal. Everything was regulation issue. Pale wood furniture, bits and pieces identical to the furnishings in the Inland Revenue offices on Göt Street and the National Insurance building in Gustavsberg. Impersonal or not, he spent more time in the room than anywhere else, from dawn to dusk, and later too. Quite often he didn’t go home at night, preferring to sleep on the sofa by the window. It was small in relation to his big body, but it didn’t matter. Oddly enough, he slept well here, much better than in his proper bed. Here he escaped the sleepless nights, the endless hours battling with the dark that plagued him in his own flat, where he could never find peace. Sometimes he didn’t go home for weeks on end, without understanding what kept him away.

  ‘Oldéus and Lang, eh? I don’t think so. They exist in parallel worlds. Oldéus is hooked on heroin. It’s all he wants. Lang is a criminal, not a junkie, even if he has pissed classified substances at Aspsĺs once or twice. And that’s that. They have nothing in common, not outside.’

  Sven shifted about in the visitor’s chair, then leaned back and sighed. Suddenly he seemed tired.

  Ewert looked intently at his friend.

  He recognised what it was: resignation, hopelessness.

  He thought about Oldéus. He had no time for people like that, small-time junkies who picked holes in their noses. Life was too short and there were too many idiots.

  ‘OK. What the fuck. One nutter more or less. We can always ask him about Lang. Can’t do any harm.’

  A shiny brand-new car crept towards the large gate in the grey wall. The kind of car that would smell of leather upholstery and pristine wooden dashboard if you opened one of the front doors.

  Jochum Lang spotted it as soon as he had passed through central security and started to cross the yard. He hadn’t talked to them and hadn’t asked for a car, but he understood all the same: they would be waiting outside, that was part of the deal.

  He nodded a greeting and the man at the wheel nodded in response.

  The engine ticked over while Jochum gave the finger to the security camera and pissed against the concrete wall. No hurry, the car was waiting and nothing disturbed his ritual. All the time in the world to finish having a piss, show the finger again and drop his trousers down, as the gate slowly swung shut behind him. Somehow, he wasn’t really free until he’d done it, pissed on the wall, shown the guards his arse. He knew it was childish and pointless, but with his freedom came the urge to prove that none of those bastards could humiliate him any more and that, after two years and four months, he was the one who’d do the humiliating.

  He walked over to the car, opened the passenger door and got in. They stared at each other in silence, without knowing why.

  Slobodan looked older. At thirty-five his long hair was already going grey at the temples, he’d grown a thin moustache that was also tinged with grey, and there were new wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

  Jochum tapped lightly on the windscreen.

  ‘New car. Traded up, I see.’

  Slobodan looked pleased.

  ‘Sure thing. What do you think?’

  ‘Too flash.’

  ‘It’s not mine. It’s Mio’s.’

  ‘Last time you were driving one you’d just nicked. Started it up with a screwdriver. Suited you better.’

  The car moved off smoothly, just light pressure on the gas.

  Jochum Lang took the train ticket from his trouser pocket, tore it up and threw it out the window, shouting abuse loudly in a broad Uppsala dialect, roaring about what he thought of the prison service’s parting gifts, not fit to wipe the shit off your arse, and let the pieces blow away in the strong wind. Slobodan was talking on his mobile, which had been ringing for a while. He accelerated, leaving the gate and the high, grey wall behind them. Then, after a minute or two, the rain started up, the windscreen wipers going slowly at first, then faster.

  ‘I’m not picking you up because I wanted to. Mio asked me to do it.’

  ‘Ordered you.’

  ‘Whatever. He wants to see you as soon as.’

  Jochum was a big man, broad-shouldered, who took up a lot of car space. Shaved head, a scar from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. Some poor sod had tried to defend himself with a razor. Jochum talked with his hands, waving them about when he was upset.

  ‘Look, last time I did something for him, I ended up here.’

  They left the narrow prison drive and moved out on to a wider road that was quite busy already, people on the way to work.

  ‘You took the rap, sure. But we looked after you, and your family. Right?’

  Slobodan Dragovic turned to Jochum smiling, showing off poor-quality dental work, as he answered his phone, which was ringing again. Jochum stared silently straight ahead, absently following the wipers as they spread the water over the windscreen. Right enough. A total screw-up when he’d done a cash collection and that fucking witness who should’ve known better, who talked and pointed until the court passed a sentence. He followed the paths of the raindrops, thinking that he knew all the hazards, but shit happens, that’s true enough. Mio was always close at hand, watching him with borrowed eyes and ears every morning when he woke up and looked around his cell, looking out for him, looking out, that’s what they did.

  The gleaming new car gathered speed on its way through the landscape as it changed from rural to urban, and then through the northern suburbs, on towards central Stockholm.

  Suspects were questioned in a room below the custody cells.

  Wasn’t much of a room, really.

  Filthy walls, which had been white once, a heavily barred window at the far end, a worn pine table in the middle of the floor and four plain wooden chairs, straight out of some school canteen.

  Sven Sundkvist, interview leader (IL): Please remain seated. Hilding Oldéus (HO): Why the fuck are you picking up innocent people?

  IL: Mixing amphetamines with washing powder, you call that innocent?

  HO: Don’t know what you’re on about.

  IL: Crap drugs. Cut. So far we’ve got three users with corroded veins. They gave us your name.

  HO: What the fuck are you talking about?

  IL: And you were in possession.

  HO: Wasn’t mine.

  IL: We took the bags of white powder from you at the time of your arrest. All six were sent to the labs.

  HO: Weren’t fucking mine.

  IL: Twenty per cent amphetamine, twenty-two per cent Panadol Extra and fifty-eight per cent washing powder. Oldéus, sit down.

  Ewert Grens opened the door and went in. He had to pass t
hrough eight locked doors to get here, but hadn’t even noticed. His mind was on the reports, and he could still hear Sven’s voice reading aloud, ‘causing serious injury’, over and over in his head. And he saw the police van that hadn’t stopped in time, him holding her in his arms until the paramedics put her on a stretcher and carried her off, away from him.

  He was fighting Sven’s voice, trying to rid himself of the words, and looked up briefly into the harsh overhead light. Then he concentrated on the man sitting opposite Sven, noted his thin face and how a finger was scratching nervously at a wound on one nostril, the drops of blood trickling down towards his mouth and chin.

  IL: DSI Ewert Grens enters at oh nine twenty-two.

  HO: [inaudible]

  IL: What was that, Oldéus?

  HO: Wasn’t fucking mine.

  IL: Stop messing about. We know you sold cut speed on the Plain.

  HO: Know fucking everything, don’t you?

  IL: We arrested you there. With the bags full of washing powder.

  HO: Wasn’t fucking mine. Some guy handed it to me when I got there. What a cunt, passing on crap like that. I’ll sort him when I get out of here.

  Ewert Grens (eg): You’re going nowhere.

  HO: What? Fucking pig.

  IL: Plenty of people who’d like to get hold of you, Oldéus. And if just one customer who bought that shit off you reports it, we’ll charge you with attempted murder. That’s you inside for between six months and eight years.

  Hilding got up, walked jerkily about in the tight space, suddenly stopped and struck out with one arm, lowered it and walked on a few more steps, stopped again and started speaking incoherently. He rambled on, his head first shaking, then tossing from side to side. His thin body, that was screaming for heroin, that ate and spewed, was disintegrating as they watched.

  Ewert looked at Sven. They had seen all this before, of course, and knew he might sit down again and tell them all they wanted to know. Or he might lie down on the floor in the foetal position and shake himself unconscious.

  EG: Six months at least. Up to eight years. But you’re in luck. We’re in a good mood today. What if the impounded bags got lost?

  HO: What the fuck d’you mean, lost?

  EG: Well, there are things we’d like to hear more about. Tell us about a friend of yours called Lang. Jochum Lang. You know him.

  HO: Never heard of him.

  Hilding’s face was twitching violently. He grimaced, his eyes rolled back, his head turned this way and that. He scratched the wound. He was terrified. Jochum’s name clawed at his mind and he wanted to shake it off, dump it, he didn’t want it.

  Not here. He was about to protest when someone knocked on the door. A woman detective put her head in. Ewert couldn’t remember her name, but she was a summer locum, Skĺne dialect.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt. It’s for you, Superintendent. I think it’s important.’

  Ewert waved her inside.

  ‘Don’t worry. This is all going to hell anyway. This little smack head seems to be in a rush to get out and die.’

  Sven nodded when she glanced at him. She walked towards the table to stand behind Hilding. He got up, pointed at her, thrust his crotch at her lamely a few times.

  ‘Got yourself new pussy, Grens? Pig’s pussy, eh!’

  She swung around, slapped him hard with the flat of her hand.

  He lost his balance, stumbled forward holding both hands against his cheek, which flared bright red.

  ‘Fucking pig!’

  She stared at him.

  ‘Inspector Hermansson to you. Get out. Now.’

  Hilding, one hand covering his flushed cheek, kept swearing while Sven took a firm grip on his arm and escorted him out of the room.

  Surprised, Ewert glanced at Sven, then turned to his young female colleague.

  ‘You’re Inspector Hermansson?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She was young, maybe twenty-five, no doubt in her eyes. She showed nothing. Neither surprise nor anger, unfazed by being called ‘pig’s pussy’, unexcited by having dealt a violent blow to Hilding’s face.

  ‘Something important, you said?’

  ‘The central switchboard called. You’re needed at an address in the Atlas district. Völund Street. Number three.’

  Ewert took note and searched his memory; he’d been there before, not long ago.

  ‘It’s somewhere along the main railway line, isn’t it? St Erik’s Square area?’

  ‘That’s right. I checked it on the map.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  She had a sheet of paper in her hand, torn from a police notebook, and she looked at it quickly, didn’t want to make a mistake. Not in front of Ewert.

  ‘Our local colleagues have forced entry, following a report of serious physical abuse in a flat on the fifth floor.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s . . . quite urgent.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘There’s a problem.’

  It was one of the older properties in a good area and had been carefully restored. Each street door was flanked by well-kept lawns with small trees dotted about, despite the lack of room, and narrow borders glowed with red and yellow flowers.

  Ewert Grens got out of the car and scanned the long façade with its rows of windows. Turn-of-the-century building, the sort where you could hear your neighbours, their heavy steps in the kitchen, when they turned up the volume for the news, when they went out to put something in the rubbish chute. He looked at the windows with their expensive curtains. Flat after flat where people lived and died, only a breath away from their neighbours. But they never met, never knew anything about the person next door.

  Sven Sundkvist, who had parked the car, joined him.

  ‘Völund Street. Looks expensive. Who can afford to live here?’ he muttered.

  Eight windows on the fifth floor. Violence had broken out behind one of them. Ewert compared them. They all looked the same, the same damn curtains, the same damn plants – different colours, different patterns, but still the same.

  He snorted in the general direction of the decorous façade.

  ‘I don’t like physical abuse cases anywhere, but it’s worse in this sort of place. Which is as a rule where they happen.’

  He looked around. An ambulance and two police cars with their chilly blue lights rotating. Maybe ten or so curious neighbours standing about near the parked cars, not crowding in on the place, decent enough to show a little proper respect, something that didn’t always happen. The street door was held open by a rope tied to a bicycle rack. Ewert and Sven walked along the flagged path and into the lobby. Large wrought-iron numerals set into the wall near the doorway said ‘1901’. So it was built at the turn of the century. Satisfied, Ewert nodded to himself and started to study the list of tenants’ names. Four of them on the fifth floor: Palm, Nygren, Johansson, Löfgren.

  Couldn’t be more Swedish. Only to be expected, given the kind of place it was.

  ‘Do you spot anybody familiar, Sven?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They don’t exactly put it on show.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘No idea.’

  Pretty poor lift, narrow with a folding grid gate, room for three, no more than 225 kilos. A uniformed policeman stood guard, an older man whom Ewert hadn’t seen around for a long time.

  I always forget how many idiots there are in the force, he thought. Like this one. If you don’t clap eyes on them day in and day out, these sad bastards fade from your mind.

  He smiled grimly while he observed the man.

  Legs well apart, the stance of a cop on the telly, a cop with an important mission, keeping an eye on things as the music builds up, with lots of long notes from the string section. He might even click his heels if you asked him a question, and he’d almost certainly spell words aloud when working on a report. In short, the sort who should be allowed to guard lifts, but not much else. That sort.

  The constable didn’t return Ewert’s smile, because he sensed the contempt. He deliberately addressed Sven when he
started on his account.

  ‘We were called about an hour ago, sir. An extremely drunk pimp. And a badly beaten prostitute.’

  ‘That so?’

  ‘Yes. Some neighbours phoned the police, but by then he’d already beaten her black and blue. She’s unconscious. She needs to go to hospital. And there’s one more in there. Another prostitute, by the look of her.’

  ‘Beaten up too?’

  ‘Don’t think so. He didn’t get round to her, I suppose.’

  Ewert listened in silence while Sven talked to the idiot guarding the lift, but eventually he couldn’t take it any more.

  ‘Alerted an hour ago! Exactly what are you waiting for?’

  ‘We aren’t allowed in. Apparently it’s Lithuanian . . .er, territory.’

  ‘What? When someone is being physically abused, you go straight in!’

  Five bloody flights. Ewert had a problem breathing, every step cost him. He should have used the lift, but his temper had flared up and he had run past that flaming imbecile on guard duty. He heard voices discussing the case above him, getting louder as he climbed. Two ambulance men and a paramedic seemed to be conducting a case conference on the fourth-floor landing. They exchanged brief nods as he passed them. Only one more flight.

  He was gasping for breath and out of the corner of his eye he saw that Sven was catching up with light steps. Ewert couldn’t give up now and forced his legs to move. They didn’t want to. He could hardly feel them.

  There were four doors on the top-floor landing. One of them had a gaping hole in the panel and was guarded by three uniformed men. He didn’t recognise any of them, but further back he saw the familiar face of Bengt Nordwall, in civvies like himself and Sven. Barely twenty-four hours had passed since Ewert and Bengt had met on that rain-sodden morning outside the happy family home where Ewert had been given breakfast and caring attention. It was rare for their paths to cross at work, and Ewert stared at his friend, feeling almost let down.