Box 21

by Anders Roslund

  It was so hard to imagine it, the place she had left as a girl of seventeen. She hadn’t hesitated for long when the two men had offered her a good, well-paid job only a boat trip away. All she was leaving behind was poverty, and little hope of change. Besides, she’d be back in a few months. She hadn’t discussed it with anyone, not even Janoz. She couldn’t remember why.

  She had been a different person then. Just three years ago, but it was another life, another time. Now she had lived more than her peers.

  Had he tried to find her? Wondered where she was? She saw Janoz, had kept an image of him in her mind that they had never managed to take away. They had penetrated her and they had spat at her, but they had never been able to get at what she had refused to let go of. Was he still there? Was he alive? What would he look like now?

  Ewert told her to come along to the cafeteria at the far end of the terminal and bought her a coffee and a sandwich. She thanked him and ate. He bought two newspapers as well. They settled down to read until it was time to go on board.

  The day was not over yet.

  Lena Nordwall was sitting at the kitchen table and staring at something or other. When you stared, it had to be at something.

  How long would it take? Two days? Three? One week? One year? Never?

  She didn’t need to understand. She didn’t need to. Not yet. Did she?

  Someone was sitting behind her. She sensed it now. Someone in the hall, at the bottom of the stairs. She turned; her daughter was looking at her, in silence.

  ‘How long have you been there?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Why aren’t you outside playing?’

  ‘’Cause it’s raining.’

  Their daughter was five years old. Her daughter was five years old. Her daughter. No matter how hard she searched, she wouldn’t find another adult in this house now. She was the only one, alone. The responsibility was hers. The future.

  ‘Mummy, how long will it be?’

  ‘How long will what be?’

  ‘How long will Daddy be dead for?’

  Her daughter’s name was Elin. Lena hadn’t noticed that she still had her wet, muddy wellie boots on. The little girl got up and walked to the kitchen table, leaving a trail of wet soil. Lena didn’t see it.

  ‘When will he come back home?’

  Elin sat down on the chair next to her mother. Lena noted this, but nothing else, nor did she really hear that Elin kept asking questions.

  ‘Won’t he come home, ever?’

  Her daughter reached out a hand and stroked her cheek; she could only just reach.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Your daddy is asleep.’

  ‘When will he wake up?’

  ‘He won’t wake up.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Her daughter sat there throwing questions at her. Each one made a physical impact; she was being bombarded with these things that crawled over her before boring into her skin, into her body. She stood up. No more attacking words. Enough. She shouted at the child, who was trying to understand.

  ‘Stop it! Stop asking questions!’

  ‘Why has he become dead?’

  ‘I can’t . . . it’s too much, can’t you see that? I can’t bear it!’

  She almost struck the child. The impulse was there – it came in an instant, as the questions crashed against her head. Up went her arm. She could have slapped her, but she didn’t. She never had. She burst into tears, sat down again and hugged her daughter close. Her daughter.

  Sven had laughed out loud as he walked back alone from the sad little restaurant to Kronoberg. It wasn’t the food, even though that was laughable, those small, fatty pieces of meat in slimy powder gravy. He had laughed at Ewert. He thought of his colleague marching round the table, kicking its legs and then stopping to curse the tape recorder and Lang’s threatening voice, until the waitress tiptoed over to ask him to calm down or she’d have to call the police.

  Sven had burst out laughing without thinking and two women walking towards him looked concerned. One of them mumbled something about alcohol and not being in control. He took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Ewert Grens was a lot of things, but at least he was never boring.

  Ewert was going to question Sljusareva, good. Sven Sundkvist felt sure that she had information that would help them understand more about the case. He decided to abandon the Lang case for the moment, concentrate on the hostage-taking instead, and walked faster, hurrying back to his office. The mortuary business made him feel deeply disturbed, and not just because it was all about death.

  There was something else, something incomprehensible. Grajauskas had been so driven and brutal. Medics held hostage with a gun to their heads, corpses blown apart, her demand for Nordwall, only to shoot him and then herself. All that without letting them know what it was she really wanted.

  Back at his desk he ran through the events again, scrutinising 5 June minute by minute, noting the exact time for each new development. He started at 12.15, when Lydia Grajauskas had been sitting on a sofa in the surgical ward watching the news, and ended at 16.10, when several people agreed that they had heard the sound of two gunshots in their earpieces. The two shots had been followed by one more. Then a great crash, when the Flying Squad men forced the door.

  He read the statements made by the hostages. The older man, Dr Ejder, and the four students seemed to have the same impression of Grajauskas. They described her as calm and careful to make sure she stayed in control at all times. Also, she had not hurt anyone, except Larsen who had attacked her. Their descriptions gave a good picture, but not what he needed most. Why had she acted like this?

  He went through the chain-of-custody list and the technical summary of the state of the mortuary at around 16.17, but no new angles came to mind. All very predictable, nothing he hadn’t expected.

  Except that.

  He read the two lines several times.

  A videotape had been found in her carrier bag. The cassette had no sleeve, but had been labelled in Cyrillic script.

  They swapped newspapers. He bought them another cup of coffee and a portion of apple pie and custard each. She ate the pie with the same hearty appetite as the sandwich.

  Ewert observed the woman opposite him.

  She was pretty. Not that it mattered, but she was lovely to look at.

  She should have stayed at home. What a bloody waste. So young, so much ahead of her, and then . . . what? To be exploited every day by randy family men looking for a change from mowing the lawn. From their ageing wives and demanding kids.

  Such a terrible waste. He shook his head and waited until she had finished chewing and put her spoon down.

  He had brought it in his briefcase, and now he put it on the table.

  ‘Have you seen this before?’

  A blue notebook. She shrugged. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  He opened it to the first page and pushed it across the table so she could see it.

  ‘Do you understand what it says here?’

  Alena read a few lines and then looked up at him. ‘Where did you find this?’

  ‘Next to her bed in the hospital. The only thing that was hers. Seemed to be, anyway. Is it hers?’

  ‘It’s Lydia’s handwriting.’

  He explained that because it was in Lithuanian, no one had been able to translate the text during the hostage crisis, when she was still alive.

  While Bengt was alive, he thought. While his lie didn’t yet exist.

  Alena leafed through the book, then read the five pages of text and translated it for him. Everything.

  Everything that had happened barely twenty-four hours earlier.

  In detail.

  Grajauskas had planned and written down precisely what she later put into action. She had worked out how the weapons would be delivered, together with a ball of string and the video, and left in a toilet waste bin. That she would hit the guard over the head, walk to the mortuary, take hostages, blow up corpses. And demand the services of an interpreter called Bengt Nordwall.

 
Ewert listened. Now and then he swallowed. It was all there, in black and white. If only I had known. If only I had had this stuff translated. I would never have sent him down there. He would have been alive now.

  You would have lived!

  If only you hadn’t gone down there, you would be alive.

  You must have known!

  Why didn’t you say?

  You could have spoken to me. Or to her.

  If only you had admitted that you knew who she was. At least you could have given her that.

  Then you would still be alive.

  She never wanted to shoot you.

  She wanted confirmation that what had happened in those flats wasn’t her fault. That she had never chosen to wait around, ready to undress for all those men.

  Alena Sljusareva asked if she could keep the notebook. Ewert shook his head, grabbed the blue cover and put it away in his briefcase. He waited until twenty minutes before the departure time, then accompanied her to the exit. Alena had her ticket in her hand, showed it to a uniformed woman in the booth, then turned to him and thanked him. Ewert wished her a good trip.

  He left her in the queue of passengers and went over to a corner of the terminal building from where he had an overview of people arriving off the ferry, as well as those waiting to go on board. Leaning against a pillar, he tried to think about the other ongoing investigation, about Lang in his cell and Öhrström studying the faxed pictures. She would soon get some more. But his mind drifted, he was too preoccupied with the two women from Klaipeda. Absently he observed the strangers milling about, something he had always enjoyed doing. The arrivals walked with the sea still in their bodies. They all had somewhere to go, the ones with red cheeks and large duty-free bags full of spirits who had drunk, danced and flirted the night away before falling asleep alone in their cabins below deck. Others dressed in their best clothes had been saving for years for a week’s holiday in Sweden, on the other side of the Baltic. And there were a few who wore rumpled clothes and had no luggage at all, having left in a hurry just to get away. He studied them all – it was all he could bear to do right now – and forgot about time for a while.

  Alena Sljusareva would be on her way soon.

  Ewert was just about to walk away when he saw what was probably the last group of passengers coming off the ferry.

  He recognised him immediately.

  After all, it was less than two days since he had seen this man at Arlanda being given a dressing down by a plump little Lithuanian diplomat, and then manhandled through security flanked by two big lads there to see him off on the one-hour flight to Vilnius.

  Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp.

  He was wearing the same suit that he had been wearing when he was escorted up the steps to the plane, the shiny suit he had had on when he stood blocking the broken-down doorway on the fifth floor, having flogged Lydia Grajauskas unconscious two days earlier.

  And he wasn’t alone. Once through passport control, he waited for two young women, or rather girls, sixteen or seventeen years old. He held out his hand and they both gave him something they had ready for him. Ewert didn’t need to see any more to know what it was.

  Their passports.

  In debt already.

  A woman wearing a tracksuit with the hood pulled down over her head hurried forwards to meet the little group, keeping her back turned. Ewert watched her as she greeted the three arrivals and, as he believed was customary in the Baltic states, kissed them all, light little kisses on the cheek. Then she pointed towards the nearest exit and they followed her. None of them had much luggage.

  Ewert felt sick.

  Lydia Grajauskas had just shot herself in the temple. Alena Sljusareva had fled and was now only a short voyage from home. Both had been ruthlessly exploited for three years in flats with electronic locks. They had been threatened, abused and had to pretend they were turned on as they were going to pieces inside. And it only took twenty-four hours, twenty-four hours, before they had been replaced. A day and a night was all it took to find two young women who had no idea of what lay ahead, who would be trained to smile when they were spat at, so that those who traded money for sex could still count on one hundred and fifty thousand kronor per girl every month.

  In a couple of minutes, the ferry would pull away from the quay. He stayed where he was. They disappeared in the crowd, the hooded Baltic woman, Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp and the girls, barely old enough to have breasts, teenagers who had just given away their passports.

  There was nothing he could do, not now. Lydia and Alena had dared to question and fight back, but that was unusual. At least, it was the first time Ewert had heard about it. The two new girls were children, frail and scared. They would never dare to testify at this point, and that motherfucking pimp would deny everything.

  Consequently, no crime existed yet.

  Maybe it didn’t, but he was sure that he or a colleague would come across them. There was no telling where or when, but sooner or later they too would go straight to hell.

  As soon as Sven had seen the entry in the technical account – one videotape in a plastic bag with two sets of fingerprints, identified as Lydia Grajauskas’s and Alena Sljusareva’s – he put everything else to one side. First he looked for it in the forensic science department, where it should be.

  It wasn’t there.

  He asked the language experts, who might have taken an interest in the Cyrillic writing, and the night duty crew.

  It wasn’t there either.

  He also drew a blank in the impounded property store, which was the last of the likely places. Not there.

  His stomach was contracting again. A sense of unease that grew and intensified, turning into irritation, and then into anger, which wasn’t like him, and he hated it.

  He located the technician who had been first on the scene, good old Nils Krantz, who had been around for as long as Sven could remember, and well before that. Krantz was at work, a domestic violence case in a flat in Regering Street, but he took time off to speak to Sven on the phone. He described where they had found the video, what they had found with it, basically confirming what Sven already knew from the documentation.

  ‘Good, thanks. And what was on the tape?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, what was on the tape?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘That’s not my job. It’s up to you lot.’

  ‘That’s why I’m investigating it.’

  Sven hung on while Krantz talked to someone in the room for maybe half a minute.

  ‘Anything else you want to know?’

  ‘One more thing. Where is it now? The tape, I mean.’

  Krantz gave an exasperated laugh. ‘Don’t you lads ever speak to each other?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Ask Grens.’

  ‘Ewert?’

  ‘He wanted the tape. I handed it over to him after we had done the prints. You know, down in the mortuary.’

  Sven took a deep breath. Pain in his stomach, irritation. And definitely anger.

  He got up from his desk, went to Ewert’s office four doors down, and knocked.

  He knew that Ewert was interviewing Alena Sljusareva. He tried the door. It wasn’t locked.

  He went in and scanned the room. It was an odd feeling. He was there to pick up a scene-of-crime item, but in that instant was an intruder, entering unbidden and without permission. He couldn’t remember ever having been in Ewert’s office alone. Had anybody? He only had to look for a few seconds. He saw the video on the shelf behind Ewert’s desk, beside the old cassette player that filled the room with Siw Malmkvist. The label on the back was in Cyrillic script, which he couldn’t read.

  After putting on plastic gloves, he weighed the videotape in his hand, fingered it pointlessly. She had planned every move in detail, never hesitated, had a motive for every step she had taken towards her death. Sven flipped the video over, felt its smooth surface. This tape was not there by chance. There was a reason for it
. She had wanted to show them something.

  He left, closing the door carefully, and went along to the meeting room. He loaded the tape. He was sitting in the same chair where Ewert had been sitting the night before.

  But watching something different. Jonas, his son, used to call such an image the War of the Ants. A tape with a loud rushing noise and no picture, just a white flicker against a grey background.

  This was a tape that shouldn’t exist. It was unregistered, had no entry in the official lists, held no filmed images.

  That feeling in his stomach that had been unease earlier had now turned to anger, a sudden rage that made him sick.

  Ewert, what the hell are you up to?

  Alena was safely on board. The ferry had left the port and was negotiating the Stockholm archipelago on her way to the open sea. Her route crossed the Baltic Sea and ended in Klaipeda. Soon Alena would be home and would never look back.

  Ewert Grens waited for a taxi that never came. He swore and called back to find out why. The operator apologised, but she had no record of a taxi request for Grens from the ferry terminal to Berg Street. Should she register a request now? Ewert swore again, launched into a litany that included organisations and bureaucrats and clowns, demanded to know the operator’s name and altogether managed to be more offensive than he cared to remember afterwards.

  Then finally a cab turned up and he got in.

  He suddenly caught a glimpse of the house on the other side of the bay.

  Blood was pouring from her head.

  I leaned against the side of the van, holding her, and it never stopped pouring from her ears, her nose, her mouth.

  He missed her; he longed for her. The feeling was stronger now than it had been for years, and he didn’t want to wait until next Monday morning. He should tell the driver to go across Lidingö Bridge, past the Milles Museum and stop in the car park outside the nursing home. Ewert would run inside and stay with her. Just be there, together.

  But she wasn’t there, not the woman he missed and longed for. She hadn’t existed for twenty-five years.

  Lang, you took her from me.

  The afternoon traffic was growing heavy and the taxi slowed to a halt more than once. It took half an hour to get to Kronoberg, and by the time he had paid and got out of the car, he had cooled down.